There are bad takes on the internet, there are strange takes, there are takes that make you pause and rub your forehead, and then there are takes so cosmically stupid, so unmoored from reality, so offensively deranged in their construction, that you genuinely have to question whether you’ve slipped into some alternate dimension. And that is exactly the sensation you get when you hear Irami Osei-Frimpong, also known as The Funky Academic, also known for supposedly being an educator on race, politics, and the lives of people of color, utter the phrase “Nick Fuentes is the white Fred Hampton,” in a video he titled “Nick Fuentes: White Fred Hampton. Hear Me Out!” The moment you see that title, your whole soul rejects it. Your brain says no. Your heart says no. The ancestors say no. Every neuron in your head that has even a passing familiarity with history screams, “Absolutely the fuck not.”
To call the comparison absurd doesn’t even begin to capture it. It is profoundly, irredeemably idiotic. It is a take so mashed, so derailed, so outrageously incoherent that it drips with disrespect for both historical truth and moral clarity. It is the rhetorical equivalent of comparing a housecat to a nuclear warhead, or claiming a rotting log is the “wooden Einstein,” or calling the Kool-Aid Man the “red Jesus.” It’s not controversial. It’s not provocative. It’s not deep. It’s just wrong. Categorically, structurally, historically, politically, morally, spiritually wrong.
Because here’s the thing: Nick Fuentes is an openly antisemitic, racist, authoritarian-loving extremist who proudly cozies up to fascist imagery and rhetoric. He is a man who quite literally advocates for white Christian male domination. He is a man who praises dictators, mocks civil rights, attacks interracial relationships, denies the Holocaust, and uses his platform to recruit people into far-right extremism. He is not subtle. He is not coded. He is not misunderstood. He is exactly what he presents himself as: a neo-Nazi-adjacent propagandist for white supremacy and patriarchal authoritarianism.
Fred Hampton, meanwhile, was a Black revolutionary who dedicated his life to building cross-racial solidarity, feeding children, providing free healthcare, educating the poor, organizing the working class, and challenging the violent machinery of the American state that sought to crush Black liberation. Hampton was assassinated in his own bed, alongside his pregnant partner, in a coordinated attack from the Chicago police and the FBI. He died fighting for justice, equality, and collective empowerment.
To compare these two men is not only wrong, it is a violent twisting of moral reality. They are not just different. They are not just opposites. They are galaxies apart, ideologically, morally, spiritually, historically. They could not be more incompatible if you engineered them in a lab for the purpose of being opposites. Fred Hampton fought white supremacy. Nick Fuentes is white supremacy. Fred Hampton fought fascist state power. Nick Fuentes wants to expand fascist state power. Fred Hampton believed in multiracial liberation. Nick Fuentes believes in explicitly racist hierarchy. Fred Hampton united oppressed people. Nick Fuentes actively encourages their oppression. To say they share similarities is like saying fire and water are basically the same because they’re both “warm sometimes.”
And the fact that this take came from Irami Osei-Frimpong, someone who drapes himself in the language of social theory and racial analysis, makes this entire situation exponentially more ridiculous. Because this isn’t just any random YouTuber trying to shock their audience. This is someone who spent years positioning himself as a commentator on the lived experiences of marginalized communities. Someone who has spoken at length about the dangers of white supremacy. Someone who has criticized the state for harming Black people. Someone who should, theoretically, understand the historical stakes, the moral stakes, the intellectual stakes of comparing a revolutionary Black liberation leader to a white nationalist extremist.
But then he turns around and says something so braindead, so intellectually bankrupt, so laughably unmoored from reality, that you genuinely have to pause and ask: What the hell happened? Did he hit his head? Did he get abducted by aliens and swapped with an interdimensional clone? Did a cosmic ray pass through his skull mid-stream? Did we all collectively slip into the Twilight Zone without noticing? Because the cognitive dissonance of hearing this from someone who claims to care about political clarity is overwhelming.
The title of the video alone — “Nick Fuentes: White Fred Hampton. Hear Me Out!” — is a red flag so massive that it might as well be draped across a continent. “Hear me out”? No. Absolutely not. The premise is already corrupt. The framing is already poisoned. I do not need to “hear out” an argument whose thesis is fundamentally detached from every fact in existence. When someone approaches you with a statement that is so deeply, structurally broken that the foundation has already crumbled, you do not owe them an intellectual engagement. Because you cannot build a coherent theory on a premise that is inherently false.
The insult to Fred Hampton’s legacy is staggering. Hampton was not just a charismatic leader. He was a brilliant political thinker, a strategist, a coalition-builder, a visionary who recognized the intertwined nature of capitalism, racism, and state violence. He helped create the Rainbow Coalition, bringing together Black, white Appalachian, Puerto Rican, and Latino groups to collectively challenge oppression. He built free breakfast programs, health clinics, education initiatives, and community survival programs that became templates for social welfare. His entire mission was about creating solidarity, empowerment, dignity, and liberation for oppressed people.
Nick Fuentes, on the other hand, sits behind a microphone spewing hate. He builds nothing. He serves no community. He offers no solidarity. He provides no programs. He risks nothing. He helps no one. He only divides, derails, radicalizes, and recruits vulnerable, angry people into an ideology that harms the most vulnerable among us. He is not a revolutionary thinker. He is not even a competent strategist. He is a glorified internet troll with fascist fantasies. The idea that he is somehow the “white equivalent” of someone who literally died resisting state violence is an abomination of logic.
Worse still, this comparison trivializes the profound danger that Nick Fuentes represents. White nationalist ideology is not just an edgy aesthetic. It is not just “a different point of view.” It is a violent, eliminationist worldview that has led to genocide, enslavement, segregation, lynching, mass incarceration, and systemic oppression for centuries. To frame a white nationalist as the “white version” of a Black liberation leader is to grant extremist ideology the veneer of revolutionary legitimacy. It blurs the distinction between liberation movements and oppressive movements. It suggests that extremism is somehow symmetrical, when in reality, one ideology is fighting against domination, and the other ideology is fighting to maintain and intensify domination.
As if comparing Nick Fuentes to Fred Hampton wasn’t already absurd enough, this take also lands in the same galaxy of stupidity as the ongoing trend of certain Republicans trying to claim that Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican. Let’s just pause for a second and acknowledge how utterly ridiculous that is. MLK was a radical, visionary civil rights leader, a critic of systemic oppression, and a man whose work challenged the very structures that many politicians, both historical and contemporary, seek to preserve. To take his legacy and try to weaponize it for partisan propaganda is not only historically dishonest, it’s braindead, disrespectful, and transparently manipulative. And yet, people do it, all the time, trying to draw neat little political lines through lives and ideologies that were never meant to be simplified into party labels.
The parallel is obvious: just as Fuentes has nothing in common with Fred Hampton, MLK had nothing in common with the conservative, often reactionary policies that some claim he “aligned with” because of the modern Republican Party. Both cases demonstrate the same kind of lazy, intellectually bankrupt reasoning, the same desire to cherry-pick history to make a provocative point, the same utter disregard for context, nuance, and truth. And just like the Fuentes-Hampton comparison, the MLK-Republican claim is offensive to the people who fought, lived, and died in the pursuit of justice. It reduces complex, morally and historically weighty figures into caricatures convenient for someone else’s ideological flex, and it insults anyone with even a shred of critical thinking.
Both examples — Fuentes as Hampton and MLK as Republican — highlight a cultural moment where outrage, virality, and “takes” are often valued above truth, clarity, and ethical responsibility. They reveal a willingness to bend history, distort facts, and erase context for the sake of shock, clicks, or contrarian appeal. And they make you wonder how we got to a place where thinking clearly about history, morality, and political philosophy feels like an endangered skill. Both are exercises in intellectual malpractice, and both deserve the same immediate, visceral rejection: no, absolutely not, and do not even attempt to explain why you think this makes sense.
And for Irami Osei-Frimpong — The Funky Academic, a man who built his platform on the rhetoric of anti-racism and anti-exploitation — to be the one blurring that line is not just irresponsible. It is alarming. It signals a complete collapse of analytical discipline, a surrender to the worst kind of contrarian impulse, the kind that confuses shock value with insight. This is not rigorous critique. This is not challenging orthodoxy. This is thoughtless provocation dressed up as radical analysis.
People like Irami often defend these kinds of takes by saying they are “forcing people to think.” But this kind of thinking does not illuminate anything. It confuses. It distorts. It muddies moral distinctions that should remain crystal clear. It suggests equivalencies where none exist. It wastes intellectual energy that could be spent actually analyzing the real threats facing marginalized people. And worst of all, it insults the intelligence of the very communities Irami claims to speak for. Because no Black person, no person of color, no activist, no historian, no political theorist worth their salt is going to look at Nick Fuentes and say, “Ah yes, that definitely reminds me of Fred Hampton.” The idea is lunacy.
If anything, what this video reveals is that some commentators have become so enamored with their own sense of provocative genius that they stop noticing when they’ve driven straight off a cliff. They become trapped in a bubble where they think that every contrarian take is profound simply because it is contrarian. They mistake shock for depth. They mistake confusion for complexity. And they mistake their own edginess for intellectual courage.
But the truth is simple: this comparison is a categorical failure. It is stupid. It is wrong. It is insulting. And it should never have been made. It dishonors the memory of a revolutionary who fought and died for justice. It whitewashes a man who advocates for oppression. And it reveals a disturbing lack of judgment from someone who claims to be an educator.
We do not need to “hear him out.” We do not need to entertain the premise. The premise is broken, the argument is broken, and the moral compass required to make such an argument is clearly broken too.
Some things are not just bad takes. Some things are not just disagreements. Some things are not just “different opinions.” Some things are simply wrong. Catastrophically, irreversibly wrong.
And this is one of them.