Nick Fuentes Is Not Just Another Alt-Right Boogeyman
Nick Fuentes, a far-right streamer who first got national attention after he attended the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, has recently made another reëntry into the national discourse, after he was interviewed, late last month, by Tucker Carlson. From one point of view, Fuentes is simply the latest in an increasingly long line of internet-coded demagogues who have threatened to tear the Republican Party apart and take it in a darker, more bigoted direction. Much has already been written about Fuentes’s appearance on “The Tucker Carlson Show,” and what it signals about the state of the right. If someone as prominent and connected as Carlson was willing to platform Fuentes—a white nationalist, misogynist, and antisemite who has expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler and skepticism about the Holocaust—what does that mean for the future of the Republican Party?
These are certainly questions worth asking as the right mulls its potential post-Trump options, and they are being hashed out by those who hope to shape the movement’s future. (The influential Heritage Foundation, for instance, is currently at war with itself, after its president defended Carlson’s interview with Fuentes.) But there are other questions we need to ask, too. When we consider a figure like Fuentes, we have to grapple with his seemingly outsized popularity. Is he unearthing a population of young men who have always felt the way he does? Or is he someone whose clout actually depends on attention from those with wider audiences—from Carlson, yes, but also from people like me, in the national press? Put differently, is he simply the streaming era’s version of the largely inconsequential Richard Spencer, another white nationalist and avatar of the alt-right (the term already feels dated), who titillated the media more than a decade ago? And if Fuentes is truly managing to build a significant audience outside those mainstream channels, how is he doing so?
When it comes to broadcasting, each medium demands a particular set of talents, even if what we see, as viewers, looks more or less the same. At a very basic level, what Fuentes does in his videos isn’t that different from what Jon Stewart does on “The Daily Show,” what Sean Hannity does on “The Sean Hannity Show,” or, for that matter, what Walter Cronkite did on “CBS Evening News.” These are all men in suits behind desks talking into a camera about what’s happening in America. Cronkite was appointment viewing in a media environment that had only three major news networks. He was genuinely talking to the nation, and that demanded both gravitas and dispassion. Cable news, with its twenty-four-hour schedule and abundance of competition, required a new type of showman, one who could stand out amid the endless sameness of CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and so on. Hannity, Carlson, Bill O’Reilly, Keith Olbermann, and Rachel Maddow became the masters of this form in large part by repeating partisan talking points with a touch more energy and style than the rest, leavened by an occasional well-timed, passionate outburst. You were rarely going to hear anything terribly unexpected on their shows, nor were you likely to pick up the pulse of where either party was headed in the future. In some respects, these programs had more in common with “The Oprah Winfrey Show” than with the early iterations of broadcast news. Here was a person you could watch every day who would reassure you that your life and your opinions had meaning. Their rants might have offended traditionalists who preferred the old days of stern journalism, but there was a warmth to their performances. Here I am, they seemed to say, fighting the good fight for you.
In the past few years, political streamers such as Fuentes—or Dean Withers, say, a shaggy-haired, twenty-one-year-old liberal who typically argues with Trump supporters—have cultivated more specific but sometimes larger audiences by doing away with the warmth and the reassurances of their cable-news predecessors. Instead, they wade directly into video combat. Withers came to prominence, in part, by debating the late Charlie Kirk, who made a name for himself by challenging everyone, including his fellow-conservatives, to debates. The liberal streamer known as Destiny is also constantly debating seemingly anyone who will submit to two hours of free-flowing on-camera argument, from campus activists to the historian Norman Finkelstein. All these viral debate streamers are similar to one another, even if they come from opposite sides of the aisle. They are overwhelmingly men, they talk very fast, and they mostly seek out easy wins against those whom they can back into a corner.
The practice of debating other content creators goes back at least to the early days of YouTuber “beef,” in the late two-thousands, when creators would use the platform’s “video response feature” to call out other YouTubers with big followings, thereby creating a network effect—the fans of that other creator would now be aware of this combative upstart. Streaming now allows for multiple hosts to appear together, as if they were on a big, unpleasant Zoom call, and so political creators can now feed off these network effects by bickering with one another in real time. The chat function on streaming platforms, which allows viewers to submit questions or to spam slurs or cryptocurrency advice, creates an easy Q. & A. feature: a streamer can sit back and answer questions for hours without having to plan. These tactics drive considerable engagement, but they tend to be insular and parochial—largely indecipherable to normies and the old.
Fuentes has done his share of debate-mongering and engagement-baiting, and he still spends a good portion of each show slouched in his chair, answering questions from his chat with a tone of contempt. But his recent prominence owes something to a kind of formal synthesis—one that almost certainly would have gained traction with or without Carlson’s help. Unlike the leftist streamer Hasan Piker, who usually wears tank tops and streams in bad lighting from a messy room, Fuentes presents himself as a throwback. He generally wears a suit, uses warm lighting, and sits at an empty desk. In his viral clips, he scrunches his face and screams in a thick Chicago accent. (He sounds like a recurring character on “Roseanne”—maybe one of Darlene’s most regrettable dates.) Although his register only really hits two notes (angry or annoyed), he is uncannily precise with his language, even when it is profane or bigoted.
He also, it must be said, has a kind of comic talent that has surely contributed to his popularity. Imagine if Andy Rooney was extremely racist, even more theatrically grumpy, and did edgy, Al Bundy-esque bits about how every right-winger who believes in “ancestral diets” needs to commit suicide, or how A.I.-powered sex robots promise a future in which every lonely male who is already addicted to pornography no longer has to deal with real women. This, Fuentes says in his segment, will force women back into “mending clothes” and learning to cook. Then, with a smirk, he adds, “You know what they’re going to do? Male sex robots. That’s why we have to cut their welfare. Then they can’t afford one.” He goes on to claim that he’s just joking, of course, but the gross underlying assumptions get through—and, within the rant, there is a glimmer of actual insight about the coming A.I. industry, which Fuentes says will only be profitable in two spheres, weapons and pornography.
Through his nightly rants, Fuentes defines his movement: disaffected young white men who have fallen into all the traps of the modern predatory economy, but who regard themselves as more serious than the terminally online “rightoids” who go on about Western civilization and meat-based diets or spend all day freaking out about trans people. (These distinctions are blurry and conditional; Fuentes also seems to hate his followers—he’s at his funniest when insulting them.) In a recent episode, while talking about more traditional conservatives who warn young men not to embrace white nationalism, Fuentes said, “These kumbaya boomers, we reject your ideology. We are going back to history.” He went on to say that this old style of conservatism, which stressed race-blind thinking and warned against white identity politics, was “bullshit,” and ended by saying, “Your country-club conservatism, maybe that works out in Martha’s Vineyard. Maybe it works where you people live, but it doesn’t work out here in the streets.”
Part of what separates Fuentes from his fellow-streamers is that he is capable of keeping his thoughts in a coherent, if odious, order. He once offered a trollish, occasionally captivating, and always grossly bigoted hour-long act; that has evolved into something more like a daily address, one that presents a code of behavior and a set of distinct ideas. As recently as a year ago, I’m not sure I could have told you what Fuentes thought about anything outside of his hatred of minorities, gays, and Jewish people. Today, he has developed a vile but discernible vision for the U.S.—something few of his predecessors in the role of far-right boogeyman have been able to do.
Fuentes’s narrative about the U.S.’s current state of affairs begins in a familiarly reprehensible place. Jewish oligarchs, he claims, have bought America, and now control every politician, media outlet, and lever of power. These same oligarchs, in Fuentes’s account, have launched a campaign to smother all criticism of Israel. As proof, Fuentes will point to TikTok, and theorize that big money in politics pushed legislation against that platform, precipitating its sale to Larry Ellison, an ardent supporter of Israel, who will now, Fuentes believes, change the app’s algorithms to suppress pro-Palestinian content. This same group of oligarchs, Fuentes argues, are behind mass migration to the U.S.—this is one of the main tropes of the “great replacement” theory, a racist conspiracy that seemed to motivate many of the young men who attended the rally in Charlottesville, years ago—and have impinged on the sovereignty and livelihoods of white men by pushing for open borders. Fuentes has always had awful things to say about Black people and immigrants, but his recent turn has basically cast them as pawns in the oligarchs’ game.
Crucially, Fuentes has become one of Donald Trump’s most ardent critics on the right. He repeatedly tells a story about a nation of young men in flyover country who believed that Trump would realize a new vision of America and who now have been betrayed. These young men, as Fuentes put it recently, are looking at China and the United Arab Emirates and asking why America couldn’t build “world wonders” and “peaceful” cities. Their interest in MAGA was both industrial and quasi-socialist: they believed that Trump would drain the swamp and bring new legislators to Washington, D.C., who would restore manufacturing jobs, and that America, a failing empire, would “draft” people like them, devastated by poverty and the opioid epidemic and general aimlessness, back to work. All that was a lie, Fuentes now says. Trump has been in or around the heart of political power for more than a decade, and, according to Fuentes, is a sellout who has been bought by the oligarchy. Only Fuentes is willing to put America first.
In the opening column for Fault Lines, in 2024, I wrote about the ideology of the internet, which, put simply, is “kill the mods.” If you want to get traction online, you have to rail against the moderators—who are, you might insist, being paid off to suppress your dangerous speech. Tucker Carlson, in his latest iteration, on Elon Musk’s X, has fully grasped this. Broadcasting online, rather than on Fox News, is a signal of integrity: Here I am at my most uncensored. This version of Carlson comes with an inherent defiance and an implied challenge to the mainstream media industry that made him a star: I can do this without all of you. Fuentes similarly understands that he cannot be censored out of existence. He has been banned from nearly every platform—he currently streams on something called Rumble—but he knows that his fans, whom he calls Groypers, will dutifully clip his most impassioned moments and spread them to the mainstream.
In the past, the hard right was constrained, in a way, by its fealty to Trump. What Fuentes has done is deem Trump a mod. It hardly needs to be said that Fuentes’s story about America relies on some of the oldest antisemitic tropes there are. But he has also crafted, in the past few months, a call to action, one that needs to be taken more seriously than anything promulgated by his predecessors in the alt-right, who were mostly meme-addicted losers trying to troll the media. Fuentes recently criticized a student in Mississippi who made national headlines by going up to Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool Sports, throwing some coins on the ground, and yelling, “Fuck the Jews.” The act was “rude,” Fuentes said, and not reflective of the behavior that he wants to promote; it would make his own antisemitic movement look bad. What he wants, essentially, is message control. He asked his followers to focus on their supposed winning arguments, such as the one about how Ellison’s purchase of TikTok will suppress free speech. Fuentes has also called for the Groypers to start preparing for the 2028 election so they can defeat J. D. Vance if and when he runs for President, because Fuentes considers him a tool of the oligarchy. Fuentes recently asked his followers, “Where do you see yourself in three years?” He added, “I want to see you guys in Iowa, I want to see you in New Hampshire, I want to see you in Nevada and South Carolina. I want to see you on Super Tuesday.” He told his online army that, even if they lose in 2028, they should get ready for 2032 and onward. “Look at Pat Buchanan,” he said. “He ran in 1992. He didn’t see his vision realized until 2016—twenty-four years later. Are you ready to go until 2040, until 2050?”
Right-wing agitators are typically cheap and quickly disposable. Milo Yiannopoulos, Richard Spencer, and the Twitter personality, podcaster, and self-published author Bronze Age Pervert—these men have largely come and gone, and though their influence can be detected in D.C., their demagoguery failed to become much more than a cloying desire to freak out the libs. Fuentes is something different, I believe, in large part because he seems to understand that all norms in political commentary have been destroyed and the game is now to position yourself in opposition to anything that even sniffs of the establishment. This is directly connected to the medium that has aided his rise, and it should worry us even more than it already does. After all, how do you stop something like this without turning off the internet? ♦
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