I know critiquing Chris Rufo is a waste of time, but since Baudrillard is in the name of my Substack I can’t let this absolute trash reading of him and “hyperreality” stand. Rufo gets maybe halfway to using the concept correctly and then stops. Let me be explicit and use a direct quote from Rufo:

“Rather than engage in the surface-level debate, conservatives should seek the deeper ground of reality and deconstruct the “metapolitics,” or underlying rules, of this conflict. Conservatives should do this by treating Fuentes as an essentially fraudulent phenomenon. He is a manipulator who pretends to believe in every evil in order to drive clicks, cause chaos, and achieve celebrity, even as a villain.”

The better reading would be that we need the obvious fraud of Nick Fuentes, to make us believe mainstream politics are real. Fuentes simply makes the transparent grifting and attention seeking obvious. That was Baudrillard’s point about Disneyland. We need this Mickey Mouse version of our society, an obvious fabrication, to make it seem like the world we are going back to afterwards is somehow more real. It isn’t and it never was. Everywhere is Disneyland. On that same note, all politics are an essentially fraudulent phenomenon, trying to resurrect some kind of authentic connection with genuine politics is the exact opposite of the spirit of the texts of Baudrillard.