At the age of 27, Adolf Hitler was a lance corporal in the List Regiment, wounded in the left thigh at the Somme when a shell exploded in his dug-out. After convalescence at the Red Cross hospital at Beelitz, near Berlin, he went to Munich where he encountered “anger, discontent, cursing, wherever you go” and noted that “nearly every clerk was a Jew”. In March 1917, he rejoined his regiment near Vimy in northern France. Sixteen years later, president Paul von Hindenburg appointed him chancellor of Germany.
Also aged 27 is Nick Fuentes, the US far right influencer and activist who thinks Hitler was “really fucking cool”; is one of the world’s most prominent Holocaust deniers (“I don’t care about Auschwitz”); and is poisonously antisemitic, racist and homophobic. To give you a further taste of his views: Fuentes has said that “I don’t want to live around black people. I just don’t. It would be irresponsible if I had a wife and kids to live near black people”; that “Jews are running society, women need to shut the fuck up, blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part, and we would live in paradise”; and that JD Vance is “a fat race-mixer who’s married to a jeet, who named his son Vivek” (“jeet” is a slur used to describe a person of South Asian ancestry).
As for Hitler’s extermination of 6 million Jews, Fuentes is both sceptical and furious. “What about the Holocaust? Dude – what about that? They are in power now.”
Why do you need to know about this despicable young man? Because, in spite of repeated attempts to cancel, debank and deplatform him, he refuses to go away and his army of followers is growing: the so-called “Groypers”, young, male, very online white extremists who take their collective name, obscurely, from a cartoon frog.
More to the point: in a podcast posted on October 27, Fuentes was interviewed by Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News presenter, whose show was the second most popular on Spotify this year (beaten only by The Joe Rogan Experience). This particular episode has already racked up 18 million views on X, 5.8 million on YouTube and many millions more via clips across all social media platforms.
It has also ignited civil war on the American right, where the kindling was already dry as a bone and the tinder packed in. Such is Carlson’s centrality to the MAGA world – his support for Vance as Donald Trump’s vice-presidential pick is said to have been vital – that his decision to devote more than two hours to an unabashed admirer of the Nazis has shaken the earth beneath the feet of US conservatives.
Last week, Ben Shapiro devoted an entire episode of his Daily Wire show to denouncing Carlson and his “ideological laundering” of extremists. In the New York Post, Douglas Murray accused him of seeking to give Fuentes “a veneer of reasonableness and respectability” – pointing out that, when he wants to, Carlson can be a “relentlessly hostile” interviewer; as he was in an exchange in June with senator Ted Cruz over US military involvement in Iran.
At the Republican Jewish Coalition conference in Las Vegas on November 1, Florida congressman Randy Fine held up a red “TUCKER IS NOT MAGA” sign and declared the podcaster “the most dangerous antisemite in America. He has chosen to take on the mantle of leader of a modern-day Hitler Youth.”
Yet the chorus of condemnation on the right was very far from universal. Matt Walsh, Shapiro’s colleague at the Daily Wire, refused to denounce Carlson, insisting upon the primacy of “loyalty”. Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation – the most influential US conservative think-tank and the home of the Project 2025 blueprint for Trump’s second term – rushed to Carlson’s defence, deploring “the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda” and the “venomous coalition” lined up against him.
So great was the outrage among Roberts’s own staff at this intervention – at least five members of his antisemitism task force have resigned in protest – that he was forced to walk back some of his comments. But he has conspicuously refused to cut ties with Carlson.
All of this might be waved away as a factional sideshow to the main event of Zohran Mamdani’s triumph in New York City last week, and the impressive performance by other Democrats in off-year races across the US. But it is more significant than that.
As Carlson himself said in a monologue on November 6: “This war is actually about what comes after Donald Trump. Does the Republican party, the party that now has power and a lot of money, revert to what it was before Trump? Or does it continue to evolve in the direction that Trump has steered it?”
The choice, he continued, is between a version of MAGA that empowers “neo-conservative foreign policy” – military interventionism dictated, as Carlson sees it, by Israel – and an authentic “America First” strategy, which “means very simply [that] the US government should act foremost on behalf of American citizens”.
This is indeed a doctrinal argument but one with potentially enormous real-world consequences. Trump has disappointed the most ardent isolationists; but they are emboldened by his renewal of US relations with Vladimir Putin, the withdrawal of American troops from continental Europe and his achievement in brokering a provisional ceasefire in the Gaza conflict.
In particular, the shrinking support for Israel in the US – not least among young voters – is interpreted by the “America First” caucus as a moment of historic opportunity. In their framing, the bombardment of Gaza was not only morally indefensible but strategically foolish. They hope to leverage opposition to Israel across the ideological spectrum into a broader case for US military disengagement from the world.
Fuentes has also seized upon the conflict in the Middle East as a means of finally achieving what he has always sought: a route to normalisation and a place in the political mainstream. To be clear: opposition to Israel’s actions after October 7 is not intrinsically antisemitic. But it is idle to deny that antisemitism is on the rise, or that many ritual condemnations of antisemitism are then followed by arguments that – in code or otherwise – amount to the same thing.
Fuentes knows that his views on race, sexuality and women are very far from the centre of gravity of US public opinion. So he has selected the unpopularity of Israel as the site of his initial pitch for more general interest and potential support.
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In his interview with Carlson, he was careful to dial back his usual explicit bigotry; limiting himself to attacks upon the Jewish state, “organised Jewry” and American Jews who were “putting the interests of themselves before the interests of their home country”.
This was as cunning as it was wicked. Fuentes knows that, in the wake of the Gaza conflict, antisemitism is, if not yet respectable, then certainly a prejudice that has many more quiet (and some noisy) takers than it once did.
The immediate backdrop to this is the assassination of Charlie Kirk in Utah on September 10. Kirk and Fuentes had long been sworn enemies, as the former defended his campaign organisation, Turning Point USA, against infiltration by the latter’s followers. “I took your baby, Turning Point USA,” Fuentes declared with glee, “and I fucked it. And I’ve been fucking it. And that’s why it’s filled with Groypers… We already own you”.
As I wrote after his memorial service in Arizona, Kirk’s death filled a narrative gap in MAGA’s story, enabling it to claim its first martyr and to deepen the movement’s enthusiasm for Christian nationalism. But it also created a vacancy.
Though Kirk’s widow, Erika, has succeeded him as the CEO and chair of TPUSA, Fuentes has made no attempt to conceal his plan to be the new leader of the young American right. Carlson, who nurtures presidential ambitions of his own, has given a significant boost to Fuentes’s strategy – which, until recently, would have seemed preposterous.
In a broader sense, the Carlson-Fuentes moment symbolises a much deeper and more sinister shift on the US right that is entangled with its approach to the Second World War and its legacy. The spiritual father of this revisionism is Pat Buchanan, now 87, a former adviser to Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, whose book, The Death of the West (2001), is one of MAGA’s founding texts.
Buchanan, who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 1992 and 1996, has argued that the Second World War was “unnecessary”, that Winston Churchill forced a global conflict against Hitler and that the result was the postwar empowerment of the Soviet bloc.
This contrarian position has enjoyed a resurgence in the digital era, thanks in part to Darryl Cooper, the podcaster ludicrously described by Carlson as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States”, who regards Churchill as the “chief villain” of the war; claims that Hitler’s forces did not plan to murder millions of Jews; and encourages the view that the conflict could have been avoided or ended much sooner.
This matters not only because it is a debased distortion of historical truth, but also because it is a project with powerful contemporary resonance. Just as the postwar international institutional and legal order has long been in jeopardy, so its moral and cultural legacy is now under attack.
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If Hitler and the Nazis were not uniquely evil, if the Holocaust did not mandate the foundation of Israel, if the most lethal war ever fought could have been limited or even prevented – well then, as psychologists say, anything is possible and nothing is safe. The assumptions that have underpinned democratic politics for 80 years are no longer secure.
On an episode of the Triggernometry podcast with Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster posted on Saturday, Shapiro warned his fellow conservatives against the “no enemies to the right” approach that many of them – including, so far, Vance – have embraced.
“I think they are incredibly fearful of the blowback and, again, I think they are way too online,” he said.
“I think they need to touch grass. I think that one of the things that happened in the online era is there is a substitution of the algorithm for how politicians actually used to talk with their constituents.”
This is sound advice. According to all the conventional rules of politics, Shapiro is obviously right that “if you hang out with Nazis, you will lose”. But do conventional rules apply in a world where there are no guard-rails and no gatekeepers? How sure are you, as ICE agents and the National Guard prowl the streets of American cities, gerrymandering proceeds apace
and senior Trump appointees move into military housing, that free and fair elections will continue in the republic?
In a 2022 documentary, Extreme and Online, the BBC’s Louis Theroux asked Fuentes, still looking like a teenager, if he would like to be president one day. “I would,” he replied. The idea seemed absurd then and is hard to envisage today. For a start, he will not be old enough to run until August 18, 2033. And, for all his success online and skill as a troll, he still, to say the least, lacks broad-spectrum charisma.
Yet it is false comfort to assume that politics a decade hence will be the same as it is now. Until late in 2016, it was orthodox to argue that Trump simply could not win; after the January 6 insurrection – at which Fuentes was present – it was taken as read that he was finished. And yet here he is, back in the Oval Office.
In the hypermodern world, most things are inconceivable – until they aren’t. Yes, the Democrats showed last week that US democracy is not dead. But that undoubted success marks a challenge to the MAGA supremacy rather than its termination.
It is always wise to listen when people tell you who they are and what they want. On this score, Fuentes is quite candid: “My end game is that I radicalise a hundred thousand brilliant young American men, and over the next 30 years they hide their power level, they conceal the fact that they love this show, and every single day they work to get richer, stronger, smarter, more powerful, more influential – and one day they’re running the country. One day, they’re in a position to change the course of history.”
This form of extremist digital entryism is undoubtedly a clear and present danger to the old analogue system
of politics. In the land of wolves which we now inhabit – of unrestrained populism, cruel nativism and increasing political violence – it is much more likely to prosper than discredited centrism, technocracy and liberal elitism.
Nick Fuentes is not Hitler. He is something new. If you are dismissive of his collaboration with Carlson, I envy your confidence. I no longer make assumptions about where the limit lies. MAGA stares into the abyss, contemplating a new and monstrous phase.
