Whose Courage Is It? The Fascoids Who Want a Tougher America—and a Bigger Daddy

“We are not meant to live in shame and weakness and disgrace,” Richard Spencer told a Washington crowd in November 2016. The white nationalist who popularized “alt-right” was explicit: “Within the very blood in our veins as children of the sun lies the potential for greatness.” America, he said, “was until this past generation a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity. It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us.” The speech ended with “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!” and Nazi-style salutes. The Atlantic

Nick Fuentes pushed a racial version of American exceptionalism. In one clip he declared that white people are responsible for American exceptionalism: “White people invented our battleships, White people got us to the moon and White people invented flying.” In another he said, “What made White people exceptional, is that they cared about the truth. They discover the secrets of the universe… It wasn’t just low IQ antipathy for the other.” Clip 1 Clip 2

Nearby sits Bronze Age Pervert. He mocks the organizers, but Bronze Age Mindset gave the softness complaint its most florid form: modern life is “the communal life of the longhouse with its young men dominated and broken by the old and sclerotic, by the matriarchs.” Briggs

The story is always the same. America has gone soft. Its men have been broken. Its heritage has been stolen. The solution is blood, a strongman, and a purge.

These big government fascoid influencers Spencer and Fuentes put identity over the individual, openly reject constitutional limits (dictatorship, forcing belief), and sell a story of national decline that ends in purification and rebirth. BAP shares the mood and the appetite for military rule.

Most people who want tougher men, more celebration of heritage, or less social decay are not in this camp. Wanting young men to have examples of courage does not require racial ownership of the country. The fascoid move is the narrower one: turn those desires into a blood claim, then hand the remedy to a strongman.

The Remedy Is Daddy

Fuentes, in a 2022 livestream: “That’s why we need a dictatorship… We need to take control of the media or take control of the government and force the people to believe what we believe or force them to play by our rules and reshape the society.” Right Wing Watch

He repeated it in March 2026: he wanted “some kind of political outfit to be created that will eventually take over this country and then run it like a dictatorship and fix it.” He complained that Trump had never used a crisis “as his Reichstag fire.” Media Matters

BAP’s version is military. Michael Anton, reviewing the book for the Claremont Review of Books, noted that BAP “says that ‘life appears at its peak…in the military state’ and calls military rule inevitable in the West.” Claremont Review of Books

The complaint is that men have become soft, managed, and dependent. The cure is a ruler who will choose what you see, what you hear, and what you are allowed to believe. Apparently he really wants a nanny state. Just a nanny state with a uniform and a riding crop. A man who needs a dictator to make his neighbors share his values has not escaped dependency. He has just picked a possessive daddy.

Government that secures a person’s rights is doing its basic job. What Fuentes describes is the reverse: a state that seizes the media and forces belief. One protects free people. The other exists to raise submissive ones.

Heritage Sorted by Blood

Spencer took the Preamble’s “ourselves and our posterity” and turned it into a racial property deed. The greatness, he said, is “within the very blood in our veins.”

Follow that and courage is sorted by ancestry before anyone looks at what was done. These people are not wrong that America has a heroic history. They are wrong about who is allowed to claim it.

Here is the challenge to anyone who accepts the racial deed. You wanted American stories of defiance. People broke out of slavery. Your framework checks their skin color before deciding whether their courage belongs to you.

Test it against Americans who defied a system of organized violence backed by law.

What Defiance Looked Like

Robert Smalls. Around 3 a.m. on May 13, 1862, the 23-year-old enslaved pilot and his fellow crewmen fired the boilers of the Confederate transport Planter. They stopped at a Charleston wharf to pick up their families. Then they steamed past Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie, Smalls wearing the captain’s hat and giving the right signals, and handed the ship to the U.S. Navy blockade. Sixteen people went free. Smalls later piloted Union vessels, was wounded aboard the ironclad Keokuk, bought the house of the man who had enslaved him, and in 1875 took a seat in Congress. That is American toughness: nerve, competence, and a refusal to wait for permission. NPS

Frederick Douglass was a teenager when he was sent to Edward Covey, a farmer with “a very high reputation for breaking young slaves.” In August 1834, after months of beatings, he fought back. “You have seen how a man was made a slave,” he wrote; “you shall see how a slave was made a man.” They fought “for nearly two hours.” Afterward Covey “never laid the weight of his finger upon me in anger.” Douglass resolved that “however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact.” He escaped for good in 1838. Narrative NPS chronology

Ellen and William Craft escaped from Macon, Georgia, in December 1848. Ellen, light-skinned, posed as an ailing white planter traveling with “his” slave. She put her right arm in a sling to avoid signing registers, wrapped her face in a poultice, wore green spectacles, and pretended to be deaf when a family friend sat beside her on the train. At Baltimore, the last major slave port before Pennsylvania, an official nearly stopped them. They held their nerve until he let them pass. William said they had heard that the Declaration says “all men are created equal,” so they “felt perfectly justified” in “running a thousand miles” to obtain those rights. Craft narrative

Harriet Tubman escaped in 1849, then went back. She made about 13 trips into Maryland, led about 70 people out directly, and said she never lost a passenger. In June 1863 she served as a scout and guide for the Union’s Combahee River Raid. More than 700 people were freed. NPS NPS bio

The Creole. In November 1841, 135 enslaved people were being shipped from Virginia to the New Orleans market. About 19 of them, led by Madison Washington, seized the ship. It was violent. A slave trader’s agent was killed, the captain was wounded, and some rebels threatened to kill every white person aboard. Then Washington stopped the killing. The captain’s wife and children were kept unharmed, and the ship was sailed to Nassau. Under British law, more than 120 people walked free. Historical account

Two of the most audacious feats belong to women. Courage we haven’t seen from fascoid influencers. Most of it did not depend on violence. It took planning, nerve, endurance, wit, and allies. Even the armed revolt is remembered for a leader who knew when to stop.

None of these people asked a dictator to fix the culture first.

Inheritance You Can Choose

History does not hand out inherited glory or inherited guilt. Individuals earn credit. A white American today did not sail the Planter and did not hold the whip. What every American gets is a choice about whom to imitate.

Douglass understood that. On July 5, 1852, he told a Rochester audience, “I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men too,” in the same speech in which he told them the holiday “is yours, not mine.” He could honor the Founders and indict slavery in one breath because he claimed their principles as his own. Douglass speech

Anton noted that BAP “even goes so far as to deny that the American Founders meant a word of their rhetoric,” and that one cannot find in the book “any principled reason… to reject or object to tyranny. Or to slavery.” Claremont Review of Books The Crafts took the Declaration more seriously than its would-be heirs do.

Lincoln called this the “electric cord.” In 1858, he was talking about European immigrants. Americans with no blood tie to the Founders could claim the Declaration “as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote” it. Douglass and the Crafts had already claimed it more fully. Lincoln speech

The Django Problem

Some people dismiss any emphasis on how bad slavery was, or any interest in slave resistance, as Hollywood influence—Django Unchained, Roots, 12 Years a Slave. The claim is that the people making those arguments are just repeating movie tropes rather than history.

Spike Lee called Django disrespectful: “American Slavery Was Not A Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It Was A Holocaust.” Adolph Reed Jr. argued that the film reduced slavery to spectacle and leaned on its German bounty hunter rather than enslaved people’s own action. Historians told Slate they knew of no evidence that slaves were forced to fight to the death. Spike Lee Reed Slate

The historical record is clearer than the movies. Real Americans like Douglass, Smalls, Tubman, the Crafts, and Madison Washington freed themselves and others with real plans and real nerve. Dismissing the actual record as “Hollywood” is a way to avoid the substance. Dislike Tarantino’s version. Tell a better one. But if you insist these Americans are not part of your heritage, you are volunteering to leave their stories to somebody else.

What Our Children Could Inherit

In failing to embrace the defiant history of the American slaves, the white nationalist and fascoid right rob themselves and their children of some of the most badass aura available. They make American heritage weaker and more dependent.

Every generation hands down a set of heroes. It can be a small set, sorted by ancestry and guarded by resentment, with a strongman at the end promising to force everyone to believe the right things. Or it can be the whole American story: Washington crossing the Delaware and Smalls slipping past Sumter, the signers in Philadelphia and Ellen Craft in green spectacles on a Baltimore platform, Douglass praising the Founders and calling America to account in the same speech.

That second inheritance is bigger and tougher. It does not ask a child what blood runs in his veins. It asks what he will do when someone tells him to stay in his place. It teaches that you do not need a dictator to make you brave. Americans with every reason to despair planned their own escapes, carried others with them, found allies where they could, and walked toward freedom anyway.

The fascoids say they want an America worthy of its past. They can have one. They just have to stop demanding its pedigree.

Don’t compromise. Strategize.