Tucker Carlson slapped his nicotine-pouch container down on the table and got straight into it: “Nick Fuentes, thank you for doing this,” he said. “I want to understand what you believe, and I want to give you a chance, in a minute, to just lay it out.” The two were sitting in Carlson’s barn turned podcast studio at his home in Maine. In a more-than-two-hour-long episode of The Tucker Carlson Show that aired earlier this week, Carlson gave Fuentes, the 27-year-old white-nationalist influencer, access to one of the largest audiences he has ever had.
Although Fuentes has many dedicated fans, who call themselves “Groypers,” mainstream conservatives have long ignored him. Even as the Republican Party has come to embrace more extreme ideologies, he has been seen as too radioactive: Fuentes has praised Hitler on multiple occasions, likened “organized Jewry” to a “transnational gang,” and said that Chicago is “nigger hell”—in addition to many other racist and anti-Semitic statements. Just a few months ago, Carlson himself likened Fuentes to David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader, and accused Fuentes of being part of a campaign to say the most bigoted things possible to make the rest of the right look bad.
In the interview this week, Carlson was critical of Fuentes’s anti-Semitism. “It’s against my Christian faith,” he said, referring to Fuentes’s history of blaming Jewish people for political problems. “I just don’t believe that, and I never will, period.” Otherwise, the episode was notably friendly. Carlson largely focused on their shared beliefs—among them, opposing foreign intervention and racial diversity—and only lightly probed Fuentes at other points in their discussion. (Fuentes and Carlson did not respond to my requests for comment.)
The conversation seems to have marked a shift in the right’s attitudes about Fuentes. In the past several months, he has appeared on podcasts with Candace Owens and Dinesh D’Souza, but their conversations with Fuentes were much more critical than Carlson’s. The latest sit-down represents “the crumbling of the last kind of firewall on the right against Nick,” Ben Lorber, an analyst with Political Research Associates, a group that monitors the far right, told me.
Some conservatives, including writers for Breitbart News and The Daily Wire, have criticized Carlson’s softball interview. But many others are standing by Carlson. Yesterday, Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, posted a video statement defending Carlson from “the venomous coalition attacking him.” He continued: “I disagree with, and even abhor, things that Nick Fuentes says, but canceling him is not the answer either.” If Carlson can maintain support after talking to Fuentes, so can others.
In a 2021 episode of his livestreamed show, Fuentes said he wants to drag the Republican Party “kicking and screaming into the future, into the right wing, into a truly reactionary party.” His vision is coming true. Consider the leaked group chats of Young Republican leaders that were revealed by Politico earlier this month. The messages are full of the kind of anti-Semitic and racist jokes about the Holocaust and Black people that Fuentes has made as a livestreamer. Fuentes wasn’t directly referenced in the messages, though he claimed shortly after the leak that there are “Groypers in every department, every agency.” Vice President J. D. Vance called the messages “offensive jokes” and dismissed outrage over the texts as irrational “pearl clutching.” Fuentes celebrated the response on his livestream: “I never thought I’d see it ever, but Republicans are finally learning to play the whataboutism game, and I think that’s absolutely overdue.”
The gap between Fuentes and the rest of the right is narrower than it has ever been. The White House’s approach to social media now resembles the polemical, trolling, vicious manner of posting that Fuentes and his fans helped pioneer. On at least one occasion, Donald Trump has posted a meme created by a Groyper. “He’s a barometer and a whisperer of real segments of the MAGA base that people like Tucker can’t ignore,” Lorber said. Carlson said as much during the conversation this week: “I don’t think Fuentes is going away,” he told his audience. Other Republicans have tried to bring Fuentes down, Carlson said, “but now he’s bigger than ever. So it probably would just be worth hearing what Nick Fuentes thinks.”
The interview has more than 4 million views on YouTube; Fuentes’s own videos, which are posted on Rumble, typically do not get even one-tenth of that. If your introduction to Fuentes was solely via his interview with Carlson, you wouldn’t quite know how bigoted Fuentes’s views are. He elided significant parts of his racist history during their conversation, and Carlson did not press him on it. When Fuentes spoke of his political awakening as a college student, neither he nor Carlson mentioned a major reason Fuentes decided to drop out of Boston University: In 2017, he told a reporter that he’d received backlash and death threats after attending Unite the Right, the infamous white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Later in his interview with Carlson, Fuentes went as far as declaring that racial hatred on the right needs to be “called out” and that “there should be no harbor for cruelty, hatred, prejudice.”
He was soon back to making incendiary comments. During a lengthy back-and-forth in which he and Carlson found common ground on matters of gender, Fuentes said that “your wife ultimately is subordinate to you” and intimated that no-fault divorce gets in the way of relegating women to their supposed natural lower status. (“I’m a little sexist,” Carlson openly admitted at one point.)
Fuentes also gave some advice to Trump about the immigration crackdown in Chicago, where he lives. “Bring in the troops and say the federal government is supreme,” he said. “The immigration law is the law of the land. If you’re not on board with that, you’re going to jail.” Arrests aren’t enough; there must be a total autocratic military takeover of Illinois. For years now, Fuentes has been both an embarrassment to the right and an indicator of what’s brewing in the id of conservatism. Now that he has entered the fold of MAGA, his visions for a truly reactionary party are closer than ever to being realized.
