The 27-year-old white supremacist radicalising MAGA

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:06Today, the fight for the American right.

0:15As a heads up, this episode contains strong and discriminatory language all the way through. How right-wing is too right-wing? It's a question you wonder how often Republicans have been asking themselves in the last decade. since Trump pushed their party to a harder, angrier, more populous place. The further right MAGA moves, the more extreme its fringe elements go. Until what was once unsayable about Muslims, Jews, immigrants, people of color, women, LGBTQ communities, it's all become normalized. It is incumbent on all adolescent young men that want to save this country, that want any future for your children, that want to preserve what your ancestors built, to get involved.

1:04I mean, you need to become a human Swiss army knife. Get in the gym, do tactical training, become hard to kill so you can protect yourself and your family. Learn the rules of the game. Nick Fuentes is a 27-year-old self-proclaimed white nationalist. He's radicalizing a generation of followers calling themselves Groypers, named after an obscure internet meme about a frog. The Gruyper army is like the extreme and increasingly violent arm of the political right. I thought that was MAGA. The Gruypers make MAGA look like Democrats. Five years ago, you might have dismissed Fuentes and his army of Gruypers as a subculture of terminally online young men.

1:44But Fuentes is making far-right ideology mainstream. He's dined with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago. He's been courted by Tucker Carlson. And he's been invited by Piers Morgan to appear on his show. Groypers are now inside the tent. They are remoulding MAGA and breaking apart the Republican Party. From The Guardian, I'm Narsin Iqbal. Today in Focus, how is a white supremacist reshaping American politics?

2:15Jay, Oliver Conroy, you're a reporter on political culture at The Guardian US, and you've recently written a really fascinating long read about the civil war breaking out within the Republican Party. about who and what it stands for and about the outsized influence of Nick Fuentes. So let's start with him. Can you tell me about who Fuentes is? Where does his story start? Nick Fuentes is a 27-year-old white nationalist far-right pundit who lives in Chicago and basically runs an online talk show five nights a week that he live streams and he has thousands of fans who call themselves Cruyffers. Good evening, everybody.

2:56You're watching America First. My name is Nicholas J. Fuentes. We have a great show for you tonight. Very excited to be back here with you tonight on Monday. Fuentes grew up in the Chicago area in a fairly middle class, relatively affluent suburb of Chicago. And his parents, he would frame as being not part of the American cultural elite. Neither of his parents attended a four-year college. His father is a supervisor, I believe, at a ball bearings factory, and his family are part of the Mexican American, hence his Hispanic surname. Fuentes first came to prominence around the time of Donald Trump's first election to the White House.

3:40Fuentes was a young college student at Boston University, who was noticed by his classmates because he wore a MAGA cap and because he gave an interview and he told the videographer that he was voting for Trump and the video clip went viral and he became a sort of campus political celebrity. A political organization at BU decided to host a debate between him and a left-wing student and they had a big huge multi-hour debate which I I think 400 students attended. Everyone here would be more than happy to excommunicate and ostracize me right out of this school. Twentis gave his point of view, which was certainly pretty right wing, but, you know, nothing that Donald Trump himself hadn't said.

4:25Fairly standard MAGA Republican views. So we will have our debate. We will talk about Trump and Hillary in the election. And I will answer all of your loaded questions and we'll play this little game. I'm going to make the case for Donald Trump because it needs to be heard because that's the only way that we're going to make America great again. And we're going to. And then not that long after that, he got a job at a startup conservative broadcaster that was forced to apologize after during a video segment on air, he called for the people who run CNN to be deported or hanged. Why not? Who runs the media?

5:04Globalists. Time to kill the globalists. I don't want to not watch CNN. I don't want CNN to go out of business. I want people that run CNN to be arrested and deported or hanged because this is deliberate, right? Yeah, that was sort of the first sign that he was not exactly who fellow conservatives maybe thought he was. Not long after that, a conservative social media account that was hoping to discredit him and sort of get him drummed out of mainstream conservatism leaked a candid hidden camera video clip in which he called interracial sex degenerate and also said that Jews were responsible for many of his problems in daily life.

5:47That video succeeded in getting Fuentes drummed out of the MAGA mainstream, but he soon found a new and in some ways more potent audience on the far right. And not that long after that, he was seen at the infamous Charlottesville Unite the Right rally.

6:08And after that, he dropped out of university and became a full time far right pundit. And now, at just 27 years old, Nick Fuentes seems to be a key figure in America's right wing. Where does he fit in the MAGA universe? us. Fuentes has taken a mantra that Donald Trump uttered early on in his political campaign for the White House, America first, and taken it to its sort of final logical extreme. If you're a young Gen Z conservative today, who is quite radical, and by many signs, many of them are quite radical, many of the things that would be totems for an older conservative, for you don't feel that way.

6:51For example, this sort of libertarian belief that the free market is sacrosanct and the government should never interfere in the economy, that the government shouldn't try to protect American workers using tariffs. These are all views that have fallen out of favor in part because of Donald Trump himself, right? He's extremely anti-immigration. He speaks about black people, brown people, Jews, other ethnic minorities in very nakedly inflammatory and racist terms. Americans should get interested in America. Why is every fucking movie about the Holocaust? Why is everybody so fucking obsessed with?

7:29That's the grand irony. It's projection. He's extremely misogynistic. The whites, the Christians, the Americans, they're out there begging for forgiveness, getting lectured by people like Megyn Kelly, getting lectured by the women. The women are. And he's also very, very fixated on talking about the US relationship with the state of Israel. But obviously, not really from a point of concern for Palestinian self-determination or something like that, though he does make occasional gestures in that direction. But because he views America's relationship with Israel, and what he calls organized Jewry, quote unquote, as being sort of at the heart of all of America's problems.

8:12So Nick Fuentes is a self-proclaimed white nationalist, and American conservatives don't seem too bothered about that, but they do seem concerned about his criticism of Israel. Can you explain why that is? Yeah, so for much of American recent political history, support for Israel has been kind of a reflexive default position for both the Democratic and Republican parties. And I say this as a lifelong supporter of Israel. We can say today that America is Israel's oldest and best friend in the world. America's commitment and my commitment to Israel and Israel's security is unshakable. And within the Republican Party in particular, it's been kind of the last true sacred cow.

9:00And there are many different reasons for that. But one of the biggest is that conservative evangelical Protestants are historically a very important voting bloc in the conservative movement and the Republican Party. And conservative American evangelicals tend to be extremely pro-Israel, in part because some of them hold a very controversial theological belief that they are basically biblically required to support the modern state of Israel. Now, that is a view that is kind of falling out of favor, the larger support for Israel. And it's exposed really deep generational and ideological divides in the conservative movement.

9:44And I think that Fuentes has realized that Israel is this wedge issue that he can use as a battering ram to sort of force the slightly more mainstream MAGA conservatives to choose sides.

10:07So from everything I've understood about him, he is unashamedly openly racist and anti-Semitic and he doesn't even seem to dance on a line because if you thought Charlie Kirk had a problematic worldview, just wait till you see who Fuentes claims as his heroes, including Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin. Now, however, these people have always existed, But how has Fuentes transitioned from the fringes to the right-wing mainstream? Fuentes has been able to elevate his profile a few different ways. One is that he understands online digital media very well. He's a digital native, is very comfortable in the kind of live streaming era.

10:49The other thing is he is a very good debater and talker, and he often mingles reasonable or anodyne points with very far right ones in ways that I think increases appeal. The third thing is that he basically has had a pretty simple, modest operandi for most of his career, which is that he attacks the Maga right from the further right. For example, the late Charlie Kirk was actually a foe of his. He often attacked Charlie Kirk because Kirk refused to engage with him and did not want to mainstream him. So he would have his followers known as Goypers heckle Charlie Kirk's events, particularly over his pro-Israel stance, but basically just in an effort to force them to engage with him.

11:34By the way, Charlie Kirk, who a week ago said, I'm open to a contrary opinion on Israel and Palestine. He's now doing damage control on their behalf. And one has to wonder, is he being paid by Israel? For Charlie Kirk to go on his show today and say there is no forced starvation. Here comes a rabbi to tell us why. Without a shadow of a doubt, he is being paid by them. Because his strategy is basically to critique the right from the far right in a way that either allows Groyperism into the tent, so to speak, or if people refuse to allow him into the tent, allows him to paint them as centrist sellouts who aren't really true conservatives.

12:17I want groipers to go to Yale, go to Stanford, go to Harvard, infiltrate the government. But I guess until very recently, Fuentes was on the political fringes. I mean, yes, a few years ago, he had dinner with Trump and bizarrely Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago. But Trump later claimed that he didn't know who Fuentes was. Fast forward a few years and Fuentes is a lot more famous. So much so that Tucker Carlson, formerly Fox News, now has his own very influential online show, invited him on. What happened? So Tucker Carlson had a two-hour interview, more than two-hour interview with Nick Fuentes recently that was very amicable, very friendly.

13:04Carlson has defended it as being an effort to to engage with somebody who had become too big to ignore, basically. In either event, it was not an interview where Carlson pushed back very much at all on Fuentes. But I was thinking about this conversation, which I'm sure I can't imagine in the ways that it will be distorted. But I do hope that people who want to learn what's happening and who you are will watch the whole thing. It's probably naive hope that it won't be reduced to whatever you're saying something naughty and me laughing and see they're both Nazis. I mean, you know that's going to happen, of course.

13:38But I'm willing to take that risk because I just think it's important to know you're clearly ascendant. You're enormously talented. You're more talented than I am, for sure, as a talker. In some ways, if you watch the interview, you would not necessarily know the true extent of how extreme Fuentes' beliefs are, even though he does. For example, at one point in the interview, he casually mentions that he admires Joseph Stalin, stuff like that sort of slips in. It's actually funny. It was December 18th. I remember it because that's an important date to me. And it's Joseph Stalin's birthday. I'm a fan.

14:14You're a fan of Stalin's? Oh, he's an admirer. Arguably, he perhaps dials down his extremism in that interview. But how did his critique of Israel expose his deeper anti-Semitism? In his interview, Fuentes described at length his criticisms of Israel, his criticisms of the U.S. relationship with Israel, and many of the criticisms were anodyne or sort of fairly common critiques, including ones that are often made by the left about Israel. But certain aspects of what Fuentes said, particularly his use of the phrase organized Jewry, left out at people, and also the fact that Carlson didn't really push back or sort of interrogate most of Fuentes' claims.

15:02And I absolutely agree with you. I would say, though, that the main challenge to that, a big challenge to that, is organized Jewry in America. I see Jewishness as the common denominator. And you're right. It's not all Jewish people feel the same way. No one would say that. But that does seem to be the common denominator. And I just feel like it needs to be called out explicitly. And I like what— God, it is incredible that Tucker Carlson didn't call him out on that. Oliver, from everything you've been following, how big a deal was this conversation? I mean, it was an absolute bombshell. It hit the conservative movement and the conservative media and caused immediate ripples.

15:41So as you all know, there's a massive right wing civil war currently ongoing, and it's really showing no signs of slowing down. If anything, it's speeding up. Americans hate Tucker Carlson's laundered anti-Americanism. Republicans think it's trash. Independents think it's trash. Democrats think it's trash. Americans are not anti-woman, anti-black, anti-Jew, anti-Indian, anti-Latino, anti-constitution, pro-Hitler nutjobs like Nick Fuentes. If you sit there with someone who says Adolf Hitler was very, very cool, and that their mission is to combat and defeat global Jewry, and you say nothing? then you are a coward and you are complicit in that view.

16:23Tucker Carlson's show is massive. I mean, it is probably the single most important and influential political podcast and certainly the most important conservative, non-traditional media platform outside of Fox News, right? Which is where Carlson used to be an anchor. And Fuentes is somebody who has been kept very deliberately at arm's length by the mainstream MAGA movement. There's been sort of an unofficial cordon static terror against talking to him or engaging with him. He's somebody that has called the vice president of the United States, J.D. Vance, a race traitor for marrying a non-white woman.

17:02But it's like, who is this guy really? Do we really expect that the guy who has an Indian wife and named their kid Vivek is going to support white identity? He has said that Hitler is cool. Hitler was a pedophile and kind of a pagan. It's like, well, he was also really cool. So, you know, time to grow up. We're not we're not children anymore. Am I right? Am I right? Am I right, boys? He is not somebody that most mainstream conservatives want anything to do with.

17:43So Oliver, there's this sensational appearance on Tucker Carlson, but there is one reaction that really seemed to catch your attention, and it came from a conservative organization called the Heritage Foundation. Can you tell me what the Heritage Foundation is and why does it matter so much? The Heritage Foundation is probably the single most prominent and politically influential right-of-center think tank in Washington, D.C. It's often described as kind of the brain of the conservative movement. Many of the people who work there go on to work for senators and congresspeople and so on and so forth.

18:21It's extremely influential, and it's also a fundraising juggernaut. It also has a famous one voice policy, meaning that the people who work there are allowed to argue about things internally, but any political positions presented publicly must be unanimous and dissent is not allowed. It's just a generally very powerful and influential organization within the American right. And so how does the foundation respond to the Fuentes appearance on Tucker Carlson? So after Carlson interviewed Fuentes, there was a lot of curiosity and speculation about what the Heritage Foundation would do if they would react, if at all.

18:59And the reason that there was all this speculation is because the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, is personal friends with Tucker Carlson. In addition, until recently, the Heritage Foundation often sponsored episodes of Carlson's show. You can go to heritage.org slash Tucker and contribute to this important work today. A lot depends on it. So there were personal and commercial ties between the two. And many people expected that the Heritage Foundation would either distance itself from Carlson or take the prudent course of saying nothing at all. And in fact, the president of the Heritage Foundation, he released this public video statement that not only did weigh in on the controversy, but defended Carlson for his decision to interview Fuentes and also basically argued that conservatives should feel no obligation to support the state of Israel.

19:58We will always defend truth. We will always defend America. And we will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else's agenda. That includes Tucker Carlson, the venomous coalition attacking him or sowing division. Their attempt to cancel him will fail. Most importantly, the American people expect us to be focusing on our political adversaries on the left, not attacking our friends on the right. Robert did in his statement say that anti-Semitism should be condemned, but his choice of words, including phrases like globalists and venomous coalition, struck some people as having sort of anti-Semitic connotations.

20:39And also more generally, many conservatives were just really appalled at the fact that he seemed to see no issue with the whole matter of Carlson interviewing Fuentes in the first place. Well, it felt more like an endorsement than not. Yes. It's an institution that for many years was associated with a certain kind of older Ronald Reagan conservatism that was all about free markets, hawkish foreign policy, support of Israel, so on and so forth, that has now kind of found itself caught between that older vision of conservatism and this new, very strident MAGA nationalism. and has often seemed as if it's not sure how to navigate these currents.

21:23So the Heritage Foundation took a position, namely in support of Carlson platforming Fuentes. How did that go down? So basically a civil war broke out inside the Heritage Foundation in the form of fighting on social media, anguished meetings, information leaks to journalists and so on and so forth. Roberts soon backtracked and issued a second statement that was more explicit in its condemnation of Fuentes. But the damage had been done and basically it turned into a rather messy and very public battle that was partly about Nick Fuentes, but also more generally about kind of the future of the conservative movement.

22:10Coming up, is Nick Fuentes the future of the Republican Party?

22:29Whatever you've explained what sounds almost like an insurgent movement taking on Republican MAGA establishment. And then where does that leave moderate conservatives? You know, the Republican old guard faithful to a vision of conservatism that is opposed to the extremely racist populist extremism of Fuentes and so on. Well, it leaves them in a difficult position because it's not clear how much popular support they enjoy anymore, either within the American public at large. America, like many other countries, has been moving in a very populist direction in recent years and hearing about how free markets are actually great.

23:06And the best way forward for American capitalism is to let banks do whatever they want, to put it in a crude and simplistic way. It's not a very popular message with American voters, and it's not a very popular message with many conservatives anymore, especially younger ones. Same thing with Israel. There's a very isolationist and nationalist wing of the MAGA movement that was really angry about Trump's decision to join Israel in the strikes on the Iranian nuclear facilities, for example. That was a hugely contentious issue within the right. And for those conservatives who are hoping to move the movement back in the direction of what you could call Reagan republicism, either because they agree with its tenets or simply because they're worried that the party is moving too far to the right, it's gotten too radical, it's going to be difficult for them to do because even they are very aware of the fact that they're a bit out of step with the zeitgeist.

24:06Do we know where President Trump fits in all of this, where he stands on all of it? Donald Trump has mostly avoided weighing in on this conservative civil war. The closest thing that he's done to sort of making comment on it is that he was recently asked by a reporter about Carlson's interview of Fuentes, and Trump gave a sort of vague response that basically said, well, you can't tell Carlson who to interview. We've had some great interviews with Tucker Carlson, but you can't tell him who to interview. I mean, if he wants to interview Nick Fuentes, I don't know much about him, but if he wants to do it, get the word out.

24:47Let him, you know, people have to decide. Ultimately, people have to decide. That's been the extent of his comment on it. And Vice President J.D. Vance has also seemed to be trying to keep himself out of the fray. Though he did post on social media that infighting is stupid, quote unquote. I wonder if it actually, this is bigger than Trump and Trumpism and whether it's Gwentes' movement and his generation are looking at a post-Trump future. Yes. So in many ways, this is bigger than Trump. And that's part of what makes it so explosive within the right. People on the right are acutely aware of the fact that Donald Trump won't be the leader of the Republican Party forever.

25:27They are acutely aware of the fact that he's in his second and final term of office, even if they make occasional hints that he might somehow violate the Constitution and stay for a third term of office. And that means that there's going to be a struggle over who his heir is. And many on the MAGA populist right, especially on the more radical end of it, are disappointed that Donald Trump didn't turn out to be everything that they wanted. and they're hoping that whoever succeeds him will be somebody who can sort of be a more disciplined, more ideologically coherent version of MAGA populism. This is much more than a controversy over Carlson's specific decision to interview Fuentes.