Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes and the Right’s ‘Groyper’ Problem
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Who is Nick Fuentes and why did his interview with Tucker Carlson cause a firestorm?
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If by the stroke of good fortune or just being a normal person, you had not heard of Nick Fuentes until this month, chances are you've heard of him now. Nick
Fuentes is odious and despicable. He's what I would call a racist racist.
Nick Fuentes has said a long list of very vile things.
Big time. He's a booger eating white supremacist Holocaust denier. The reason everybody's talking about Fuentes is Tucker Carlson, who is arguably at this point the most significant media figure on the American right, hosted Fuentes, a person he has feuded with in the past. For a very friendly two-hour chat about the problem of Israel, about the problem of American Jews and whether or not they fit in this country or their loyalties are elsewhere.
Putting aside the tribal interest for the corporate interest, that's absolutely the case. And that's the only way the country is going to stay
together. Exactly.
That's my concern. And 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.
It was the kind of conversation you would not have heard among mainstream figures on the American right in recent decades. But something has changed. What we are watching is a very old strain of the right vying for control of its future. This right goes back to Pat Buchanan. It goes back to Charles Lindbergh. The idea that the right should be an ethno-nationalist coalition, which doesn't have room for immigrants, very much does not have room maybe for Jews. that is really not comfortable with anyone who's not what they call a heritage American, who doesn't really bow at the altar of that politics and the primacy of white Christians as the people controlling this country. This has been a logic and an ideology that Trump has broken into the mainstream and that is now following itself to its full expression.
If you buy into this, well, it has a place it goes. And now we are seeing more figures on the American right truly going there. To talk about it, I want to bring on John Gans. Gans is sort of hard to describe. He's become a popular political theorist and historian. He writes the great sub-stack Unpopular Front. He wrote the book When the Clock Broke, which is about the politics of the 1990s and Pat Buchanan and David Duke and how they prefigured Trump. But he's somebody who has been tracking these ideas and the way they are taking hold on the right and where they come from in our country very, very closely. So I wanted to hear what he thought now that they were breaking this far out into the open. As always, my email, EzraKlencho at NYTimes.com.
John Ganz, welcome back to the show. Thanks so much for having me. So let's say that, blessedly, you've never heard of who Nick Fuentes is. Maybe you've just heard of him in the last few weeks. Right. Who is Nick Fuentes?
Nick Fuentes, I would say, is the most popular representative of neo-Nazism in America. Expand. Well, by his own story, he comes from a middle-class background in the suburbs of Chicago. He became interested in political activism. He was a fervent Trump supporter. Then he ran afoul, according to him, of some gatekeepers in the conservative movement, namely Ben Shapiro, who accused him of anti-Semitism when he asked questions about U.S. policy towards Israel. And then over the years, he assembled a following of other disaffected young men. He launched two campaigns that he called the Groyper Wars to basically pressure mainstream conservative figures to move rightward on issues to do with race and
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Who is Nick Fuentes and why did his interview with Tucker Carlson cause a firestorm?
0:00–11:13
2
What are Groypers and how did they emerge as a subculture on the right?
11:13–22:54
3
How does anti‑Semitism function as a unifying ideology for the far‑right?
22:54–34:10
4
What role does Tucker Carlson play in shaping today’s MAGA movement?
34:10–45:52
5
Why is the Heritage Foundation’s response to the Fuentes‑Carlson controversy significant?
45:52–56:00
6
How has the internet and attention‑economy changed right‑wing politics?
56:00–1:04:46
7
What does the future look like for the Republican Party and MAGA after 2024?
1:04:46–1:13:59
8
Which books does John Ganz recommend for understanding today’s right‑wing radicalization?
1:13:59–1:25:37