For the past few weeks, conservatives have been having a heated and divisive debate about antisemitism and the sorts of characters that can or cannot be part of the Republican Party. At the center of this argument is a 27-year-old white supremacist and far-right political influencer who hosts an online show called America First with Nicholas J. Fuentes.
On his show, Fuentes shares Christian nationalist, misogynistic, and antisemitic takes with hundreds of thousands of viewers. And it’s because of his audience — which has grown since the death of fellow far-right commentator Charlie Kirk — that longtime conservative talk show host Tucker Carlson decided to sit down with him for a friendly conversation.
The backlash came immediately, partially because of recent instances in which Republican officials have been associated with Nazi beliefs and symbols, including the leaked messages of young GOP leaders making jokes about gas chambers, and an American flag merged with a swastika hanging inside the Capitol Hill office of Rep. Dave Taylor (R-OH). But the controversy also rippled out because “[Fuentes] has become incredibly more powerful, and he knows it too. So he’s able to leverage that to get people to pay attention to him,” Wired’s disinformation and online extremism reporter David Gilbert told Today, Explained co-host Noel King.
Can Fuentes really sway how young conservatives think and vote? Gilbert, who has been watching Fuentes intensely, says yes. He spoke with King to explain Fuentes’s allure to young men and to help frame Fuentes within the modern GOP.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
What is the tenor of Nick Fuentes’s show, for people who have only a passing awareness of him?
It’s pretty well structured. He typically talks about one or two of the biggest stories of the day in his world, at least for a couple of hours. And it’s just him talking straight to camera. He’s not talking from a script; he’s not talking from a teleprompter. But he’s incredibly good at speaking off the cuff. He covers a lot of the infighting within the right-wing media. He talks about immigration quite a lot. He obviously talks about the Trump administration quite a lot.
But I suppose one of the main, or the main topic he talks about — and it typically comes back to this every single time — is a deeply antisemitic worldview that he has, that he blames Israel and the Jewish people for all the ills of society.
So there are different strands here: There’s the anti-Israel sentiment; there’s the antisemitic sentiment; there’s the anti-immigrant sentiment. How would you describe his worldview? What does he represent?
He has a pretty hateful worldview. I think what really is surprising of what we’ve seen most recently — where his profile has risen and he has kind of been embraced by more mainstream members of the right — is the fact that they’re kind of ignoring the fact that he has espoused support for Hitler in the past, that he has talked about raping women as not being that problematic.
He has these really hateful views about the world, where he feels as if he, as a white male Christian (he’s a Catholic) is being attacked, and that his homeland is under attack from all these various [forces], whether it’s feminism or the woke mob, as he calls it — “the woke mind virus.” He believes that he is the one that is under attack, that white males and especially white Christian males, have been sidelined in their own country. And that’s kind of at the crux of what he believes […]
He didn’t vote for Donald Trump in the election. He didn’t tell his followers to vote, because he felt that Trump was just not being “America First” enough. In terms of JD Vance, it’s even worse. He thinks Vance has let down American men by not marrying a white Christian woman. He has said that if JD Vance decides that he is going to run in 2028, which looks like he will, and if the GOP nominates him, then Fuentes will unleash a campaign using his supporters to undermine that candidacy.
In the past couple of years, there has been a cohort of young conservative men and women who have varying relationships with one another, and feuds and alliances and whatnot.
Talk to me about where Fuentes fits in this spectrum of right-wing personalities and what his relationships with them are like.
It’s really interesting, and it’s not something that is the same as it was five, six, seven years ago, when he was coming up after Unite the Right. When he began getting noticed, he was viewed as this kind of an outlier, this fringe figure who was not really taken with any level of seriousness. And so he was not really being discussed in the same terms as figures like Charlie Kirk, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens.
More recently, those same figures have had to pay attention to him because his audience has grown, especially in the last six months. [Fuentes] has become incredibly more powerful — and he knows it, too. So he’s able to leverage that to get people to pay attention to him.
We saw, obviously, Tucker Carlson interviewed him recently, which is the most high-profile interview he’s had to date. But we’ve seen figures like Alex Jones, Candace Owens — they’ve all had him on their podcasts. And they have varying levels of arguments between themselves.
His main antagonist and the person he fought with most was Charlie Kirk, dating back to 2019, when they began what Fuentes labeled the Groyper War — “Groypers” being the name for the people who support Nick Fuentes.
So what he did then was, when Charlie Kirk was going around to colleges, speaking and debating with people, he would get his supporters to go there and question Charlie Kirk about his support for Israel, question him on immigration, question him on the things that Fuentes believed Charlie Kirk was not being questioned enough about, and where he felt he could be attacked because he wasn’t being conservative enough; he wasn’t being “America First” enough.
Tucker Carlson said [that] he was just talking to Nick Fuentes, and that he doesn’t necessarily agree with all the things he said. But at the same time, he’s engaging with him. And I think for Fuentes, that is the win. That’s what he wants. He wants people to be able to see him.
Why do so many people who seem to disagree with him still invite him on and still talk to him? There is something I assume that they are getting as well. What is this about?
I think people like Tucker Carlson are afraid of being left behind. Because they clearly understand that Fuentes has tapped into something. His audience is this young, white male audience that is incredibly powerful, and people don’t want to miss out. So by Tucker Carlson interviewing him, Tucker Carlson gets a little bit of that aura that Fuentes projects to his supporters.
I think that’s the main reason, is that they know Fuentes will drive engagement. If you look at the numbers on Tucker’s video, it’s huge compared to the others that were posted for the last couple of weeks.
What makes Fuentes so successful?
I think the fact that he openly talks about the fact that he isn’t in a relationship, hasn’t really ever had a relationship with a woman, is one of them [his audience] — is one of the people he speaks to: These young men who may be struggling to find their identity in the US, who may be struggling to get a job, struggling to find a house, struggling to find a relationship or a community of friends. Fuentes tapped into that.
There’s been an evolution of Nick Fuentes in the last six months, where he has seen his star rise. He has gained a huge amount of followers online; way more people are watching his show every night. Now he’s earning a huge amount of money from that show. And he is in a position now that I don’t think he even believed he would be back, we’ll say, in 2020, when he was kicked off of YouTube and every other platform.
He’s in a position now where he can enforce change, I think, within the Republican Party from the inside. He’s smart enough to do it by not creating an organization where people can be identified as members of the Nick Fuentes fan club. He tells his followers: Don’t identify yourself as Groypers. Do it under the radar. Become a member of your local Republican Party, influence people from the inside, not from the outside.
It’s very hard to verify this completely, but he says he’s got supporters within the administration. He has got supporters all across the country who are infiltrating local political parties. He is, from the ground up, going to try and influence how the Republican Party acts over the next 10 years. And he’s doing it really smartly and in a really dangerous way that it’s very, very hard for anyone to know what’s happening.
