One of the Most Dangerous Interviews Ever in MAGA Media
Why Tucker Carlson platformed white supremacist Nick Fuentes.
Total Groyper Victory
TUCKER CARLSON INTERVIEWED white nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes on Monday, sitting politely as Fuentes criticized the power of “organized Jewry in America.” The right-wing internet has been in turmoil ever since.
Suddenly, nothing—including the racism, Holocaust denialism, and antisemitism Fuentes has championed—seems to be too hot for MAGA media to embrace.
That amounts to a catastrophe for more traditional conservative media figures. Breitbart’s Joel Pollak declared that the claims Fuentes made that Carlson left unchallenged amounted to “the foundation of Nazism.” The Daily Wire’s Andrew Klavan said that Carlson’s embrace of Fuentes would doom the right. Writer Rod Dreher wrote that Jewish friends had told him Fuentes is “the most dangerous man in America to Jews.”
None of those critics has a sliver of the audience and momentum that Fuentes enjoys—both of which will no doubt continue to grow now that Carlson has welcomed him as a reasonable figure worthy of his even larger platform. (Fuentes has 1 million followers on X; Carlson has 16.7 million.) And that’s precisely why anyone in the Republican party with a shred of principle left is sounding the alarm. Because, at the most fundamental level, Carlson has just accelerated the right’s already prominent tilt toward authoritarianism and hate.
Fuentes’s journey to these heights reveals a lot about the evolution of conservative media.
After his emergence in 2016 as a right-wing provocateur during his abortive freshman year at Boston University, Fuentes was briefly seen as the sort of put-upon campus conservative that Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire loves to embrace. He started a livestreaming show and by early 2017 he had been picked up by the Right Side Broadcasting Network. But his appearance at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in August 2017 and his criticisms of Jews got him booted off RSBN and effectively banished from respectable right-wing media.
After Fuentes relaunched his independent livestream show on YouTube, various factions from the right-wing media universe united to keep him and his growing “groyper” fanbase out. Turning Point USA banished contributor Ashley St. Clair just for being photographed with Fuentes in 2019. Fuentes and his crew were regularly ejected from TPUSA conferences and CPAC, forcing them to hold separate events on the sidelines.
But Fuentes also made a few smart strategic decisions to crawl his way back. In the post-Charlottesville world, the far-right was consumed with debates about “optics,” like whether white supremacists should adopt the suit-and-tie look of someone like Richard Spencer to make their arguments more palatable to the mainstream right, or whether they should retain the looks and violent behavior of neo-Nazi skinheads. Fuentes went with the “optics cucks.”
Fuentes also recognized the rising tide of angry young white men early, taking stances on issues like legal immigration that put him out ahead of Trump. And he’s kept a sense of humor that allowed him to go on more mainstream podcasts and build alliances with other far-right figures like Alex Jones.
Cracks eventually emerged in the walls keeping him out. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) spoke at one of Fuentes’s parties in 2022, for example. Later that year, Fuentes had dinner with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago—an incident the then-former president brushed off as unplanned and “quick and uneventful.”
Yet Carlson’s interview marks Fuentes’s greatest triumph to date. The proof is in the immediate reaction. Whereas St. Clair was banished from a TPUSA event for merely appearing with Fuentes in a photograph, Carlson is likely to remain firmly within TPUSA’s umbrella of acceptability even after platforming Fuentes, a man Kirk once called a “retarded idiot.” Carlson is set to appear at TPUSA’s major AmericaFest conference in Phoenix in December.
WHY WOULD CARLSON DO THE INTERVIEW? It’s a media sensation, of course, and he gets to swap audiences and clout with Fuentes. Plus, he gets to rattle the conservative establishment that fired him from Fox News. But personally, I think Carlson just wants to stay on friendly terms with the ferocious Fuentes. Better to keep peace with that energetic, vitriolic crew than to endure its wrath, much as Megyn Kelly decided with respect to Candace Owens.
Such a calculation marks a shift for Carlson. He and Fuentes had tangled as recently as August, after Fuentes pointed out Carlson’s father’s history of working for the CIA. Yet in his interview with Fuentes, Carlson agreed that they should let bygones be bygone: Neither of them, they agreed, were federal informants.1
Looming over all this, as with so much else these days, is Kirk’s legacy. Fuentes was, to put it mildly, an outspoken Kirk antagonist. “I took your baby, Turning Point USA, and I fucked it,” he said before Kirk’s murder. “And I’ve been fucking it. And that’s why it’s filled with groypers.”
Since Kirk’s assassination, Fuentes has seen his standing rise in conservative media, as millions of young conservatives became increasingly radicalized in his direction, led to believe that the ways of doing politics that Kirk represented and Fuentes opposed were insufficient.
No one would be less happy about Fuentes’s rising profile than Kirk himself. In the aftermath of the Carlson interview, longtime conservative pundit Dinesh D’Souza released text messages from the summer, in which Kirk chastised D’Souza for debating Fuentes in an InfoWars appearance.
“You are the first main steam [sic] voice to debate and give him a compliment,” Kirk wrote to D’Souza. “Which then makes him bigger and more powerful.”
But Carlson, ultimately, may have just accelerated an outcome that was bound to happen. White nationalism is clearly on the rise. And Nazi-curious figures are gaining more prominence. Trump nominee Paul Ingrassia recently withdrew from his Senate confirmation after Politico reported last month on text messages where he said he had a “Nazi streak.”
The right has no immune system against hatemongers and grifters. Few people in MAGA circles are willing to stand up to them—and the audiences likely wouldn’t support them if they did. Right-wing writer Richard Hanania, who knows plenty about this world, summed it up on X, writing that the contemporary right-wing media has no interest in arguments, leaving only charisma and appeals to identity.
“You wanted a culture where nobody was ever cancelled, where the only sin is lack of basedness or being a cuck, where if the media was opposed to someone, that’s all you needed to know and you would defend them,” Hanania tweeted. “You got it.”
A simple and profound insight: “The right has no immune system against hatemongers and grifters.”
America’s future keeps getting darker, more violent.
The tech bros need to be held accountable, and so do the Murdochs. They profit mightily off these perpetually online deviant hate merchants/consumers.