Of course, it's naive to expect everyone to completely detach the words from the speaker (although maybe its a good idea) and it's normal for some to idolize (or idealize) a person from whom they get a certain amount of catharsis, but it seems to me there may be something else to Fuentes, perhaps it's the WAY he says things, the cadence of his speech, his facial expressions, that adds extra appeal.
Basically, I'm noticing a particular enthusiasm for Fuentes that goes beyond his actual words and that is not afforded to others who, arguably, present equally truthful information, and in some cases moreso.
I have not watched a lot of his content and never been a fan of his, but after watching some clips the best I can come up with as an explanation for his appeal is that he (like some other right-wing types that have a smaller platform but also attract many fans especially among young men) is more edgy, more daring in his takes, and more "brilliant" as in eloquent and swift of mind. In his Charlie Kirk take, he wasn't particularly edgy, but he sure communicated it very well, and reminded me a bit of Jordan Peterson in his heyday: for example, yes, what he said about death wasn't particularly unique, but he put it very well, using interesting analogies, and without too much Christian gloss, preaching the primacy of the immaterial world. Which resonates.
The others you brought up are different: Everybody likes Tucker, but he's tip-toeing around things a lot, and framing things in familiar liberal/mainstream terms, probably partly strategically and partly because it's his own journey from mainstream fox news guy to truth teller. Candace is awesome, but she's a woman, and so she sets a different tone and lacks the aggressive edginess of a young male firebrand. Plus, since she's black, she won't touch certain things like the race stuff. Iain Carrol is great too, but he lacks the brilliance, the rhetoric skill, the ultra-fast-paced thinking on steroids.
Basically, and from what I've seen with other "edgelord" types on the right, many of these people are
very bright, are into sacrificing every sacred cow there is with little care for going over the top, and have a knack for communicating in a straight-forward yet very intelligent way, while being well-versed in the complex layers of online/meme culture. This also means they can get lost in the mazes of their own brilliance and edginess, not seeing the forest for the trees and "straight-shooting while missing the mark by a mile", but it's just very appealing to bright young guys for whom the likes of Tucker and Candace just don't take it far enough, and don't speak their language.
At the end of the day, we've been through way too many iterations of "he's the real deal! He's the savior! She will change things!" and "He's a fed! He's a psyop! She's a plant!" We had these endless discussions about Alex Jones, Tucker, Jordan Peterson, David Icke, and countless others. Maybe we should just consider all these people as humans, agree with them on some things, disagree on others, observe their place in the discourse, instead of deifying or vilifying them. Some voices appeal more to some people than others, even though they might say similar things. All of this is fine, as long as we practice discernment and don't give up our mental capacity to create some distance between ourselves and these influencers, which opens up a space for our own critical thinking trying to make sense of things.
A key skill here, as always, is to resist the urge to "resolve" certain contradictions in our heads immediately to "release the pain" from that pressure, i.e. the drive to always resolve everything into a unified worldview. There might be things we are not sure about, and it's fine to keep them in your head, contradictions and all, and think about them every once in a while. Oftentimes, this results in true insights eventually. If we don't practice that, we risk accepting things just because someone said them, or reject things out of hand because they trigger those contradictions. All there is is lessons, which means the events unfolding in the world are lessons, as is the influencer landscape. It's all offers to learn and go beyond where we're currently at, carefully adjusting and fine-tuning our view of the world as we move along, as "the wave" unfolds.
