Posted on | April 19, 2026 | No Comments
‘Air quotes’ by Nick Fuentes
Where do I start in explaining my hatred of Nick Fuentes? That this preposterous Jew-hating homosexual has been elevated to podcast royalty — the Pied Piper of 21st-century neo-Nazism — is one of those phenomena that makes me despair for the future of humanity. And I honestly fail to see what it is that makes Fuentes so appealing to younger people, but then again, I don’t understand the appeal of Ariana Grande or Sabrina Carpenter, either. A couple of months ago, during an hour-long podcast with “Christian nationalist” Joel Webbon, Fuentes did a lengthy smear-job on J.D. Vance, disparaging him as a phony, etc. Two of Fuentes’ talking points are just ripped off directly from liberals — first, that his “real name” isn’t J.D. Vance, and second, YALE! YALE! YALE!
To explain the first point: Vance was born James Donald Bowman in Middletown, Ohio — a classic Rust Belt locale destroyed by the post-1973 collapse of the U.S. auto industry. His parents divorced before Vance reached kindergarten and, when his mother remarried, she changed her son’s name to John David Harmel — for her new husband, Bob Harmel, and also to erase J.D.’s father’s name. All of this must have been traumatic for young J.D. He and his half-sister were largely raised by his maternal grandparents, James and Bonnie Vance, in Breathitt County, Kentucky. In April 2013, at age 29, he changed his name to James David Vance, in tribute to his grandmother (“meemaw”) who he credits with helping him escape his parents’ troubled background of substance abuse and broken relationships. There is nothing phony about that.
On the second point, Fuentes harps on the fact that Vance got his law degree at Yale, but never once mentions Ohio State University, where Vance got his bachelor’s degree (summa cum laude) in 2009. Vance attended Ohio State on the G.I. Bill after serving four years in the Marine Corps. But because Ohio State alumni aren’t generally regarded as “elite,” Fuentes just leaves that out of the narrative altogether.
Vance’s background prior to his enrolling at Yale Law was the tale of a hard-luck kid who succeeded against the odds. During his first year at Yale, one of his professors urged him to write about his life, which she believed highlighted an important aspect of American life that gets too little attention, i.e., the fact that most white people don’t come from a background of “privilege.” There are plenty of white people who have experienced the kind of problems that affected J.D. Vance’s childhood — economic hardship, family dysfunction, etc. — and yet nobody in America’s leadership caste seems to give a damn about the problems of white folks in Middletown, Ohio, or Breathitt County, Kentucky. In fact, it seems that our leadership caste actively hates white people from places like that and does everything possible to ruin their lives.
That 400-word introduction is necessary background to a tweet that Sarah Palin posted on Friday:
*had to repost shorter
Wait for it… (and resist urge to cherry-pick confirmation bias selections of the commentary, otherwise I cue the haters in 3…2…1) pic.twitter.com/JJq9JRyqdG
— Sarah Palin (@SarahPalinUSA) April 17, 2026
WHAT? Why would Sarah Palin post a four-minute video clip from that Nick Fuentes/Joel Webbon podcast? So I forced myself to watch it — a painful experience, as I can’t stand listening to Fuentes — and about two minutes into it, he gets to the part that I think Palin wished to highlight. Fuentes mentions something I hadn’t known, namely that in 2010-2011, Vance (under the byline J.D. Hamel) wrote a handful of columns for David Frum’s website, FrumForum. These columns were mostly dull expressions of the kind of moderate RINO stuff that Frum was promoting as “conservatism that can win again.” Dear God, praising Jon Hunstman?
At any rate, Fuentes called attention to an article that Frum wrote for The Atlantic in 2022, “The J.D. Vance I Knew,” in which Frum explained that he saw Vance as someone who could bridge the chasm separating the populist grassroots and the GOP Establishment. Because it is my habit to ignore Frum (just as I habitually ignore Fuentes), I hadn’t known about this Frum-Vance connection. In trying to spin this as some kind of conspiracy, Fuentes says that Frum believed Vance could “deliver the rabble-rouser Tea Partiers back into the hands of the moderate Republican establishment. . . . Because there’s this crisis where you have the Tea Party and Sarah Palin, and the Republican base is like ‘xenophobic’ and ‘Islamophobic’ . . . [and] the establishment of the Republican Party is like William F. Buckley, they’re very elitist, they’re very wealthy, they represent the corporate interests. The base, they’re populist, they’re extremely conservative. . . [Frum] says Vance’s ‘biographical credibility’ is what will deliver them [to the establishment].”
Fuentes gets a lot of things wrong here — Frum was criticizing Vance after the latter had won the 2022 GOP Senate primary in Ohio, with Trump’s endorsement, by rejecting the kind of Frum-approved attitudes that Vance had previously espoused. Here’s the crucial paragraph:
Vance’s superpower in those days (circa 2017) was his biographical credibility as he spoke about Trump America to non-Trump America. In talks at forums like the Aspen Institute, in an essay for The Atlantic, across elite tables at venues like the investment bank Allen & Company’s Sun Valley media conference, Vance urged understanding of the people who had voted for Trump, even as he excoriated Trump himself as unfit, bigoted, authoritarian, fraudulent — a deceiver and exploiter of the people Vance spoke for.
Frum has never abandoned his #NeverTrump stance, and his criticism of Vance is for “going with the flow” of grassroots Republicans — siding with the actual voters, rather than with the Aspen Institute elites.
The reason I think Palin tweeted that video clip was because Fuentes mentioned her as the original heroine of the current populist movement among conservatives. Frum didn’t mention her in his piece about Vance, but Fuentes did. While Palin didn’t offer any explanation for why she posted the clip, I imagine she sees the same basic problem that any intelligent person who has looked at Republican politics for the past 20 years can see, the conflict of interests between the grassroots and the “elitist” party establishment that, as Fuentes says, “represent the corporate interests.” This is most obvious in regard to immigration, where the Chamber of Commerce crowd wants de facto open borders to obtain cheap foreign labor, while the grassroots wants mass deportation.
The truth is still the truth, even if the person saying it — Nick Fuentes or David Frum or Donald Trump — is someone you loathe. And as for J.D. Vance, why should I condemn or distrust him for having abandoned his earlier Frum-approved establishment beliefs, when I wish everyone else (including Frum) would do the same? We are supposed to be living under a representative government, and yet Frum seems to believe that people who disagree with him don’t deserve representation. The beauty of our system is that candidates either have to advocate policies supported by a majority of the electorate, or else they can’t get elected. Donald Trump has won Ohio three times in a row — 52% in 2016, 53% in 2020, 55% in 2024 — and if Vance wanted to be elected as a senator from Ohio, he had to reconcile himself to that pro-Trump majority. The fact that he is a former critic of the president — well, so was Marco Rubio, who is Vance’s chief rival for the 2028 nomination, at least according to the pundits.
“You go to war with the army you have,” as the saying goes. The most zealous Trump supporters are not likely to trust either Vance or Rubio or any other Republican as much as they trust Trump, but there will be a primary campaign, and whoever gets the GOP nomination, that’s our candidate. The same people who, like David Frum, refuse to support Trump despite the views of a majority of Republican voters, nevertheless expect the grassroots to shut up and fall in line when a worthless RINO gets the nomination. But why bring up Mitt Romney now, huh?
Those of us who side with the grassroots — the kind of heartland voters who fell in love at first sight with Sarah Palin back in 2008 — believe that this is not only morally right, but also that it is the best hope for defeating the Democratic Party. The problem with most of the GOP “elite” is that they don’t actually want to beat Democrats the way Democrats deserve to be beaten — thoroughly, completely, and permanently defeated.
We may never get to that Promised Land in my lifetime, dear brothers and sisters, but let me tell you: “I HAVE A DREAM!”
