THE WASHINGTON POST: Far-right provocateur Nick Fuentes is triggering a MAGA civil war

Four years ago, Nick Fuentes was unwelcome pretty much everywhere. The young far-right influencer was barred from nearly every social media platform and an array of payment processors, either for violating hate speech policies or for encouraging rioters to storm the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. A 2022 documentary by a sympathetic filmmaker called him “the most cancelled man in America.”

Now a person who once called Adolf Hitler “awesome” has more than 1 million followers on Elon Musk’s X. He recently recorded a cordial interview with Tucker Carlson that more than 5 million people have watched. And he finds himself a central figure in an online battle over the future of the American conservative movement.

The resurgence of the 27-year-old Fuentes, who has argued that immigrants and “organised Jewry” are conspiring to extinguish the white race, has set off bitter infighting among conservative influencers over whether he should be tolerated or denounced.

For President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement, which has decried what they say is the overzealous policing of speech, Fuentes’s newfound prominence presents a tough question: Is there such a thing as “too extreme” anymore?

Fuentes, whose followers call themselves “groypers” after a frog meme they have adopted, makes no bones about where he stands. In a March episode of his podcast, streamed on the conservative site Rumble, he boiled down some of his core views: “Jews are running society, women need to shut the [expletive] up, Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part, and we would live in paradise. It’s that simple.”

Fuentes’ Oct. 27 interview with Carlson, which has quickly become one of the former Fox News pundit’s all-time most-watched episodes on YouTube, sparked a backlash from prominent conservatives such as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and The Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro.

“No to the groypers,” Shapiro said in a widely shared X post. “No to cowards like Tucker Carlson, who normalise their trash.”

Other leading conservatives rushed to Carlson’s defence, including Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, who threw the Trump-aligned think tank into turmoil when he blasted the “globalist class” for criticising the segment.

Jewish groups, along with numerous Heritage staffers and conservative figures, said the phrase played on antisemitic conspiracy theories. (Roberts later backpedalled, calling Fuentes “an evil person.”)

Fuentes didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment this week.

The fallout is still resounding more than a week later as conservative media figures and influencers choose sides or try to heal a rift that they view as a threat to the cohesion of the Republican Party.

So far, top Trump administration officials are staying out of the fray over Fuentes, with whom Trump dined at Mar-a-Lago in 2022. In an X post Wednesday, Vance said “the infighting is stupid” and called on conservatives to “work together” to defeat Democrats.

The uproar is playing out in a conservative digital media sphere that has flourished by using video and audio to draw audiences that often rival those of mainstream news outlets. Influencers post video podcasts or monologues that are diced into shareable clips that ricochet across social media, triggering debate and rejoinders.

“He’s getting the time of day from people who six months ago would have turned and run the other direction from him,” said Jared Holt, a senior researcher at Open Measures, a platform for research on social media and online extremism.

Brett Cooper, a conservative actress and commentator, defended Carlson’s interview of Fuentes on her YouTube show in an episode she called “Did Tucker Carlson Break the Republican Party?” She accused Cruz of hypocrisy for calling Fuentes a nazi after criticizing liberals for overusing the term.

“You’re doing this out of blind rage because you’re so angry that the conservative base’s attitudes are rapidly changing, that Nick Fuentes is getting national attention,” Cooper said in a clip that racked up millions of views on X.

Cruz fired back: “I don’t know who this angry lady is, but she’s missing a key distinction: Fuentes CALLS HIMSELF a nazi.”

Fuentes has not in fact called himself a nazi, though he has more than once professed admiration for Hitler. In one 2018 interview, he said his politics could be described as white nationalist but that he prefers not to use that term.

For more than five years, the dominant face of the young right in America was Charlie Kirk. His organisation, Turning Point USA, staged events at college campuses around the country that doubled as fodder for viral social media clips.

Since he was killed onstage at a September event in Utah, other voices have been trying to fill the void.

Fuentes is one of them, despite a past that many on the right view as disqualifying.

Late in Trump’s first term, the suburban Chicagoan rose to prominence among a subculture of disaffected young men by attacking Kirk as too moderate. Fuentes’s followers hounded Kirk at his events with questions that seemed designed to bait him for not taking a harder line against immigration and homosexuality.

In 2020, Fuentes founded the America First Political Action Conference as an alternative to the Conservative Political Action Conference, a signature event on the Republican calendar.

With the attention came scrutiny from social media platforms such as YouTube and Instagram, which were increasingly cracking down on hate speech and false claims of electoral fraud surrounding the 2020 presidential election.

Fuentes joined the pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” movement and egged on protesters during the January 6, 2021, assault on the US Capitol by yelling through a bullhorn. By the time President Joe Biden took office, he was either banned or suspended from almost every platform except Twitter, which barred him a few months later.

That “de-platforming” dampened Fuentes’s reach, but he persisted, eventually finding a home alongside conspiracy theorists and antivaccine activists on the video site Rumble. He still had an audience, but mainstream conservatives found that they could ignore him.

Fuentes’s online rehabilitation began when Elon Musk reinstated him to X in May 2024 after an anonymous follower of Fuentes questioned Musk’s commitment to free speech.

“Very well, he will be reinstated, provided he does not violate the law,” Musk replied. “It is better to have anti whatever out in the open to be rebutted than grow simmering in the darkness.”

That was a misstep, said Daniel Kelley of the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish civil rights organisation.

“When you have bad actors like Fuentes on mainstream social platforms, you’re giving them a megaphone to spread hateful antisemitism, Holocaust denial and the like to many, many more people,” said Kelley, who directs the ADL’s Centre for Technology and Society. “More people hear the kinds of vitriol that Fuentes is engaging in, and that normalizes that kind of discourse.”

Fuentes’s views have been rebutted by many on X. But on social media, fuelling outrage is often a path to success, as each angry reply to a post can spur the site’s algorithm to show it to more people.

While “owning the libs” with edgy barbs online has long been part of the mainstream conservative playbook, Fuentes has made himself a thorn to Republicans by explicitly espousing xenophobia and white male supremacy.

Fuentes’ provocations play into the culture of feuds and takedowns that helps to power the increasingly video-based attention economy. And his raw, transgressive language comes across as “authenticity” to some of the disaffected young men who swung toward Trump in 2024, Holt said.

“There seems to be this idea floating around that Nick Fuentes’s fans, and fans of what he represents, are a portion of the MAGA base that is large enough that it has to be at the very least addressed,” if not catered to, he added.

Holt compared the dynamic to how Trump outflanked his Republican rivals in 2016 with his blunt, sometimes insulting talk about immigrants, women and Muslims.

While Fuentes has long backed Trump, he has positioned himself further to the right, criticizing the president in 2024 for welcoming “gays” and “Jews” into his administration and deriding Vice President JD Vance’s mixed-race family.

Carlson’s show was just one stop on a whirlwind podcast tour for Fuentes. In recent months, he has been a guest on programs hosted by the anti-establishment journalist Glenn Greenwald, the conservative businessman Patrick Bet-David, and the Red Scare show, once associated with the socialist far left but now more aligned with Trump.

Greenwald, a critic of Israel and US foreign policy who has often been a guest on Carlson’s show, suggested Thursday on X that the “GOP establishment” is only going after Fuentes because he doesn’t support Israel.

“Nobody spews more explicit racism than Laura Loomer. Yet she’s one of Trump’s closest confidants,” he said. “But, unlike Fuentes, she supports Israel, so it’s fine.”

Asked for comment, Loomer referred to her reply to Greenwald on X, where she said, “Islam isn’t a race. Nothing I say is racist. It is not ‘racist’ to call out the Islamification of Israel.”

Shapiro, the Jewish co-founder of The Daily Wire, has emerged as a leading voice on the right denouncing Fuentes.

“This is not about free speech or cancellation,” Shapiro said on his popular podcast. “Criticism of bad speech is in fact just a form of free speech.”

The ADL’s Kelley said Fuentes’s rise and the division it has sowed is “a case study in what happens when the major platforms backslide” on enforcing safety and speech rules.

Fuentes is still suspended from Meta’s Facebook, Google’s YouTube and several other platforms, but Kelley said those companies’ recent moves to loosen some speech restrictions have helped to erode the taboo against people like Fuentes.

YouTube, where more than 40 percent of Americans aged 18-29 regularly get news, according to Pew Research, said in September it plans to allow some previously banned creators to return to the platform. The company declined to say Friday whether Fuentes would be one of them.

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Drew Harwell contributed to this report.

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