MAGA Influencers Cheered Trump’s Venezuela War. Their Audience Said ‘WTF?!’

Plus: How an irate clarinetist became a Justice Department cause célèbre.

(Composite / Photos: Shutterstock)

Venezuela is tearing right-wing media apart

White nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes is a self-proclaimed “America First” diehard. His fans wear blue “America First” hats. Amid the right’s 2025 crackup, he was positioned alongside Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene as a leader of the isolationist faction.

He has been quick to denounce every American military adventure in the Middle East as a war for Israel and a distraction from the “America First” ethos that Donald Trump has championed in his campaigns.

But when it comes to Trump’s decision to abduct Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, Fuentes isn’t such a dove after all. In the aftermath of the predawn Saturday raid, he has exulted in the prospect of the United States plundering Venezuela on behalf of oil companies.

“TAKE THE OIL,” Fuentes posted on social-media app Telegram on Saturday. “THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE IS OURS.”

Fuentes’s typically devoted fans, the so-called groypers, weren’t thrilled. His post has so far netted more than 5,500 thumbs-down reactions. Follow-up posts, where Fuentes argued that “America First” means aggressively policing the Western hemisphere and toppling governments for their resources, have received a similarly negative response.

Fuentes isn’t the only self-defined America Firster who has found something to love in Trump’s Venezuela operation and angered his fan base in the process. Since Maduro’s capture, right-wing media figures who have staked their careers on Trump have found themselves caught between the president and their audiences, who were apparently gullible enough to think the president’s talk about not bogging down the United States in foreign wars was real.

Consider Alex Jones, the right’s ultimate tin-foil hat–wearing opponent of deep-state globalists—a man who made his career in the 1990s ranting about armed government agents in black helicopters surveilling people through the walls of their homes. Instead of criticizing Trump’s decision to “run” Venezuela, Jones tied himself in knots after the raid to defend the president. In Jones’s telling, the Maduro abduction was not the kind of “neocon war” he typically opposes, but a throwback to American imperialism of the nineteenth century. In its targeting of the “globalist rules-based order” he hates, Jones found it downright patriotic.

“Thomas Jefferson would’ve gone to war with Venezuela!” Jones said.

Jones then posted a scene from the Amazon show Jack Ryan in which a literal CIA employee (John Krasinski’s eponymous Jack Ryan) explains to a lecture hall full of students why Venezuela is the United States’ greatest threat. Jones intended this clip to explain his point to his disappointed fans, whom he called “geopolitically illiterate.” (At one point in the clip, Ryan soberly intones, “You will not hear any of this on the news.”)

Sensing opportunity, a bevy of Jones wannabes have attacked him. Stew Peters, a much more antisemitic Jones clone, said his rival had been fueled by Zionist propaganda. Owen Shroyer, a Jones protégé who broke with him last year over the InfoWars founder’s support for Trump, said MAGA supporters had become “slop-eating sheeple.” Even Robert Barnes, a right-wing lawyer who represented Jones in his Sandy Hook lawsuits, tweeted that Jones had been “suckered into regime change support.”

The divide between right-wing media personalities and their audiences suggests the Venezuelan raid could pose political problems for Trump. Even as Trump celebrates the operation and suggests future raids in Mexico and Colombia, it seems like even hardcore MAGA fans aren’t buying what he’s selling. At the same time, Maduro’s capture has put Trump’s media supporters in a bind: defend Trump or appease their isolationist audiences.

Typically antiwar skater Tim Pool gushed over the “tons of free oil” America could soon enjoy. Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes said he was normally an “isolationist”—but a friend of his was once arrested in Venezuela, so what choice did the United States have but to topple Maduro?

Part of the challenge facing these MAGA influencers as they go about praising the Trump operation is that the administration has been all over the map as to what the mission actually is. With Trump and his top officials offering different outlines for the future of Venezuela—including whether the United States will run the country, or merely coerce it constantly—what hope does, say, Alex Jones have for successfully messaging the policy?

Still, I confess to being baffled by how Fuentes is playing this. Since last year, he has typically stayed away from doomed causes on the right, like Candace Owens’s suggestions that Israel killed Charlie Kirk.

On the other hand, perhaps it should be no surprise that someone who considers Adolf Hitler “cool” would want to engage in aggressive, ultimately self-defeating wars. Or maybe Fuentes’s long-standing irritation with his own fanbase has inspired him to provoke them.

That certainly seemed to be the case on Monday. Before the raid, Tucker Carlson—a frequent Fuentes foil—had claimed bizarrely that the United States could be targeting Maduro to “bring gay marriage to Venezuela” because “that’s what we stand for.” In a post on Monday about that claim, Fuentes said that his rival could only get an idea that dumb from groypers.

“Why is he pretending to be this stupid?” Fuentes asked on Telegram, before referencing his own enraged audience. “Is he emulating all of you?”

---

The right can’t get enough of this angry clarinetist

by Andrew Egger

This morning, as is her habit, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon was trawling X for right-wing grievances to litigate when she stumbled across a good one: a classical clarinetist claiming he’d been denied an orchestra job in Knoxville, Tennessee, over DEI. In a viral post on X, musician James Zimmermann said he had won a blind audition for principal clarinet at the Knoxville Symphony—only to get a call from the symphony’s CEO informing him he wasn’t getting the job. Zimmermann claimed it was over his “ousting from the Nashville Symphony six years ago for resisting DEI as the reason.” According to Zimmermann, the seat instead went to “an obvious DEI hire who’s still in college.”

Zimmermann is suing the symphony, casting it as a war against “these symphony CEOs who continue to put race and politics above merit and skill.” That was good enough for Dhillon, who pledged that her department was “on it.” She also reposted multiple posts from Zimmermann throughout the day.

Why a top DOJ official is involving herself in these disputes is a matter to chew on.¹ So too are the merits of Zimmermann’s case. Had he actually been denied a job because of the color of his skin, as his post kinda sorta suggests, he might have a case. But there’s a lot more going on in that phrase “my ousting . . . for resisting DEI” than meets the eye.

As it happens, Zimmermann has been written about extensively before—including in the conservative Washington Free Beacon, which profiled him sympathetically shortly after his 2020 firing. That firing, which took place not long after the death of George Floyd, involved a messy interpersonal meltdown between Zimmermann and two black musicians, which played out over more than a year. HR complaints were filed against Zimmermann, which may or may not have been deserved. (Read the whole thing; it’s a trip!) But the precipitating event of his firing seems to have been an email he sent that took things to, uh, another level:

At 1:15 a.m. on Feb. 21, 2020, Zimmermann sent an email that sources described as “manic.” Addressed to Carlo and cc’d to human resources, the five-page missive was disjointed, difficult to follow, and—in its choice of words—potentially minatory, referencing a brewing “war” with the prospect of “physical harm.” “I saw it as a cry for help,” said one of Zimmermann’s colleagues, who added that Zimmermann seemed concerned for his own safety. In a paragraph recounting Carlo’s comment about his dog, Zimmermann noted that his family owned a gun.

The clarinetist was placed on leave the next day, and armed guards were stationed outside the symphony. Less than a week later he was fired.

With this context, it’s not hard to piece together what likely happened here. Zimmermann did a blind audition for the Knoxville symphony, and played well enough to win the audition. When they learned who he was, however, the symphony suits presumably blanched at hiring him—not because he’s a white guy, but because he was fired from a nearby orchestra in an incident messy enough that his ex-employer decided to hire armed guards. Maybe that’s not the energy the Knoxville Symphony CEO wants in her orchestra—a hunch likely reaffirmed by Zimmermann’s subsequent decision to post her face, phone number, and email address online. Dhillon, who ostensibly has a full plate of very important Department of Justice responsibilities, also took the time to repost that information, too.

1. And now it’s not just the Justice Department that’s stepping in: On Monday afternoon, a high-ranking official in the State Department—Sarah B. Rogers, the under secretary of state for public diplomacy—tweeted about the story, defending blind auditions and saying that the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs “will not subsidize this kind of nonsense.” What that means in practice—maybe requiring any private entity the bureau interacts with to pledge to abide by the results of blind auditions?—is anybody’s guess.