One of the Most Dangerous Interviews Ever in MAGA Media
By: Will Sommer
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
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 greatesttriumph 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."
1
The CIA issue is so touchy for Carlson that he recently threatened to fight a student at a TPUSA event after the student brought it up.
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Carlson and Fuentes, two of the right wing's most prominent thought leaders. Trump's boys.
As the antisemitism continues to increase in America, I wonder if it will soon emulate 1930s Germany and head towards a Kristallnacht.
It's not just happening in America.
Can it (Kristallnacht) happen here? Unlikely, but the only answer is to remain vigilant, confront and oppose potential perpetrators, and remain actively involved in the political process.
I'd be more concerned about intifada than Kristallnacht. There are far, far more Muslims who support intifada in the US than NAZIs.
That's ridiculous and you have no proof of it being the case.
I know it's happening almost everywhere - certainly in Canada and there is anti-Israel bias in the news media in China.
The Jewish population in the state of Michigan has been declining since the turn of the 21st century. There are no Jews living in Dearborn, MI, now. The Jewish population in Chicago has declined as the Muslim population has increased.
These correlations do not necessary represent a cause/effect relationship. But when the correlations are consistent across the Rust Belt, it does raise questions.
The issue is your allegation, without proof, that there is, apparently, a vast number of Muslims in the United States who would support an intifada.
And yet, Trump has not written an 'easy' executive order to outlaw these extremities and bigots which it chooses to 'pal around' and partner with for voting power. You can bet the GOP will not do anything to assist correcting the record, because it counts on bigots, separatists, and racists to aid the party in the mid-terms..
Trump is only interested in outlawing nonexistent left wing groups and ending legitimate funding for his law abiding opposition.
In America, we have this thing we refer to as "The 1st Amendment", which guarantees our freedom to think whatever we want.
So executive orders "outlawing these extremities" aren't actually 'easy'. Or legal.
Did Trump or did he not write an executive order with intent to label Antifa a domestic terrorist group? He did it. Whether he will be able to enforce it on the federal level or not he made his intentions to outlaw Antifa clearly known and evident. My comment points out that if the Trump Administration is not simply a "bunch" of hypocrites arbitrarily labeling this one a 'winner' and that one a 'loser' —he should treat all the same where merited. Hopefully, that clears up the point!
Do you have a problem with this?
Wait.......I though Antifa didn't exist, so what's the worry? He could put out an EO for QAnon as a terrorist organizations and the people on the right wouldn't give a shit.
Do I have a problem with outlawing ideas and speech. 200%
Do I have a problem calling people terrorists when they have a long established history of ideological violence? Not at all.
Not sure why you think Antifa does not exist. . . what do you know about Antifa? Please elaborate on that.
Then agree that the GOP should toss the White nationalists out of the party (and hope they vote republican anyway), and agree to an executive order making the group: Outlawed.
Antifa, as an organization, does not exist. There is no Antifa leadership, there is no charter or membership you can join. All a person or group of people have to do is go out protesting and fascism and they become "Antifa". Though to be more specific in how conservatives mean it's those who are Anti-fascists that use violence or vandalism to confront fascists which they're not supposed to do.
I know.
I wanted "Goose—" to explain how he meant that to 'us.' And if we get 'real' - Antifa is any collection of individuals that protest (and "act up" over) Trump Administration policies in public!
Was it? Was it really?
It seems like this one might have been more dangerous. It just feels like the interview where there is an actual murder is the more dangerous one.
I'm not sure being pissed off about murder is "radical".
Both Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes are white nationalists. It is only slightly out of the ordinary that Carlson would give voice to a blatant racist and anti-semite. Fuentes could be Carlson's little brother.
I have thought a lot of things about Tucker Carlson (during and since his MSNBC/FOX days), but him joining up with and openly with white nationalists surprises me (a little bit more).