Online provocateur Nick Fuentes, widely condemned for race-baiting and Jew-baiting, has built quite a following among disaffected young men. A furor has erupted among prominent conservatives over Fuentes’ followers and their tactic of disrupting right-wing events on campus with outrageous, offensive questions. Their goal? To “expose” conservative speakers of being sellouts, by Fuentes’ ethnonationalist standards.

Read Stream contributor Jason Jones’ account at CatholicVote of an event where Fuentes fans, who call themselves “Groypers,” used legitimate questions about self-styled gay conservatives as a means to publicize anti-Jewish conspiracy theorist E. Michael Jones. (Watch Jones debate Stream columnist Michael Brown on anti-Semitism here.)

As Jason Jones sums it up, E. Michael Jones (no relation) believes that “sexual deviance and other social ills are a method of political control deployed by Jews, and that therefore Jews are a tribe that must be politically suppressed.”

Two Jokers, Only One of Them in Gotham

Especially not Nick Fuentes. The guy has all the gravitas of a middle school class treasurer, all the warmth of a jilted suitor heckling the vows at a wedding. He reminds me, creepily, of The Joker on TV’s Gotham — who also led a cult of disgruntled, radical youth.

I’m hesitant to send you to watch Nick Fuentes’ videos. But sometimes you really have to stare something in the face to appreciate its moral qualities. While you may not heard of Fuentes, I guarantee you that young men at your church are already watching him, laughing guiltily, and forwarding his rants to their friends. With that in mind, here’s Fuentes’ PROFANITY-LACED rant on segregation. And here on video, also shocking, is Gotham’s Joker.

They’re too similar. Are we sure that playing this character isn’t Fuentes’ day job?

“Jim Crow Was Better”

But I think we can learn something from watching Fuentes in that first video. He drives us to think about the ugliness of Jim Crow and segregation, for one thing. What did it mean to keep black Americans from eating at the same tables as whites? To force them to use separate bathrooms? To play in different sports leagues? Attend different schools? Swim in separate public pools (if cities even provided them)? And then, when courts ruled to integrate the pools, to fill them with cement, as some Southern cities did?

What did it signify, especially, when states stepped on the most intimate private relationships, and punished interracial marriages with jail time? That’s not a law appropriate to different subgroups of fellow humans, common descendants of Adam. It’s a law that pretends we face instead a difference of species. And indeed the racist rhetoric used to defend such unjust laws commonly leaned on Darwinism, suggesting that non-whites were somehow “missing links” in the evolutionary process. (See the “human zoos” Darwinist popularizers set up, displaying non-white people as if they were lesser animals.)

You’re Not Fully Human

There were Constitutional problems, scholars agree, with Brown v. Board of Education. But its central holding was right: there is no such thing as “separate but equal.” Forcing people to remain separate is inherently to treat them as unequal. Especially since whites were perfectly free, if they wished, to use black facilities when they chose.

And of course, hovering in the background, enforcing segregation even where the law didn’t provide it, was the ever-present threat of violence. Of white-led race riots and lynchings, whose crimes all-white juries wouldn’t ever punish.

We urgently need as Christians to think about all these things, for more than moral reasons. We must reflect on them for a very practical purpose. Because we are starting to face something in important ways like Jim Crow at the hands of secular elites. Indeed we face something worse, an effort not to segregate but eliminate orthodox Christian believers.

My next column will show how the campaign against Chick-fil-A, and the company’s surrender despite massive Christian support, portends an ominous Jim Crow future for believers — right here in America.

This column has been updated. Stay tuned tomorrow for details on the left’s plan for squeezing Christian faith out of existence. 

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream, and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration.