The American conservative world is in turmoil. For days, a heated debate regarding the figure of Nick Fuentes has been going on in right-wing circles. A supremacist close to the far-right world, Fuentes was a guest on former Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s podcast, an event that created a major dispute in the MAGA world, also thanks to more than 4 million views. An event that the liberal Atlantic magazine labeled with a warning, writing that “the firewall around Nick Fuentes is crumbling,” was understood to be a security perimeter erected by far-right groups around someone deemed too extremist.
Who is Nick Fuentes
But why did this “firewall” collapse? To understand this we need to start with who Fuentes really is. As the New York Times nicely summarized, he was a 27-year-old, young, racist, anti-Semitic white nationalist. For years Fuentes was kept at a distance from America’s far right, but not only that. As explained in a 2022 documentary, the young influencer was “the most canceled person in America”, as at some point almost all social or online payment platforms had banned him.
The reason for the cancellation lies in Fuentes’ extreme position. This is the case of tweets in which he calls Adolf Hitler “fantastic”, or accusations that immigrants and “organized Jews” conspired to exterminate the white race. In March, in an episode of his podcast, he attacked everyone: “the Jews who rule society, the women who should be silent, the black people who should mostly be in prison.”
Le Groyper vs. Charlie Kirk
Over time, Fuentes has created a niche following called Groypers, fueled by deep internet communities, memes and shitposting typical of online subcultures close to the alt right. The Groyper family are the same people who in the early stages of the investigation were indicated as being responsible for the death of Charlie Kirk, the activist who was murdered last September 10 in Utah. It’s no coincidence that Fuentes has always been harshly critical of Kirk. In 2019 he and his followers launched what went down in history as Groyper warcampaign against Turning Point USA on college campuses, with protests against Kirk himself or other figures from the far-right galaxy, including a protest against Donald Trump Jr. on the UCLA campus in November 2019.
Risk of civil war on the right
For the past 10 years, Fuentes has lived in a kind of ideological ghetto. In 2017, thanks to his participation in the Unite the Right supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia which ended in clashes with Antifa, the young activist was forced to leave Boston University and take refuge in blogs and online communities. In 2022, somewhat surprisingly, he reappeared in the media at a dinner with Donald Trump and rapper Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago, only to be “dumped” by Trump who then disassociated himself, saying he was unaware of Fuentes’ position.
In the past week, events hosted by Carlson have sparked divisions in the American conservative world. From the institutional side, words of blame came from senators Ted Cruz of Texas, Josh Hawley of Missouri and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, as well as House Speaker Mike Johnson. In the world of right-wing commentators, criticism of Ben Shapiro, the founder of the Daily Wire, was harsh: “No to grouches, No to cowards like Tucker Carlson, who think their trash is mediocre.”
Not for traders.
Not for cowards like Tucker Carlson, who take their trash for granted.
Not for those who fight for it.
Not to demoralize.
No to bigotry and anti-meritocracy nonsense.
No to anti-Americanism.
NO. pic.twitter.com/71TModtGWq— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) November 3, 2025
However, not everyone distanced themselves from Fuentes and especially from Carlson. This happened to Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, the think tank also responsible for the 2025 Project that helped institutionalize Trump’s political institutional proposals. Roberts defended the hosts by talking about attacks carried out by the “globalist class”. His defense caused an uproar at Heritage with analysts and staff threatening to resign en masse, so much so that the president himself was forced to partially resign, branding Fuentes a “bad guy.”
J.D. Vance’s problem
For now the Trump administration has pulled out of the fray; Vice President J.D. Vance limited himself to a very modest post on X in which he dismissed the dispute as “stupid” and called on conservatives to “work together.” However, Fuentes himself has attacked Vance several times, especially regarding his marriage to Usha. As the Times recalled, he criticized her for “mixing the races” and frequently mocked her for giving one of her children an Indian name.
In addition to the ugly accusations against the family, Fuentes specifically warned Vance about his 2028 candidacy, saying that “persecution” against him was ripe. “If he finds us guilty, we will move to Iowa (referring to the first state to hold primaries), I swear we will move to Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina, one primary after another.”
Kirk’s death was a void that needed to be filled
This fight around Fuentes is part of a transformative moment for the American right. Tyler Robinson’s death of Charlie Kirk has opened a void that many conservative voices are seeking to fill, with Fuentes leading the charge. After a “ban” in 2020 with the inauguration of the Trump administration, the young activist returned to the mainstream world in May 2024 when Elon Musk restored his profile. Since then, also thanks to an algorithm that rewards high engagement (regardless of positive or negative reactions), Fuentes has taken an extremist position.
After Trump’s victory in 2016 and thanks to the spread of movements like Turning Point USA, the practice was called “has lib“, or shaming liberals, has become part of the burden of mainstream conservatives, but Fuentes has taken it to a new level with xenophobic positions close to the world of white supremacy, so much so that he and his Groypers frequently attack Kirk’s debates as too moderate.
The one hosted by Carlson is part of a broader tour that Fuentes is taking among the most listened to podcasts by America’s far right, the same podcasts that made a crucial contribution to the election of Donald Trump by winning the vote of much of America’s young world.
Israeli Knot
As anti-establishment journalist Glenn Greenwald noted, one of the issues surrounding Fuentes is Israel. Republicans were angry with him, he wrote in X, because he did not support Israel. The risk of civil war in the MAGA world actually involves not only a shift to the right towards positions that could alienate moderate groups, but also the anti-Semitic variable. Despite unconditional support for Israel from a Trumpian White House, the ranks of conservatives showing intolerance towards Tel Aviv and finding points of aggregation in people like Fuentes continues to grow.
The arrogance that Republicans attack Nick Fuentes for his principled commitment to expelling racists is a joke.
No one expressed racism more explicitly than Laura Loomer. But he is one of Trump’s closest confidants.
But, unlike Fuentes, he supports Israel, so it doesn’t matter. https://t.co/e2MNg4aiI8
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 6, 2025
Right group response
Beyond the risk of division in the MAGA world, what does Fuentes think? According to the Atlantic, the wall erected by right-wing groups around Groypers is crumbling, and some of Fuentes’ more extremist demands are starting to take hold, such as a chat of young republicans discovered by Politico a few weeks ago and in which racist and anti-Semitic jokes about the Holocaust appeared, identical to comments Fuentes himself made on stream. And it is no coincidence that the same activists commented on the story by saying that there are Groypers in every department and every State agency.”
What is certain is that at least in terms of language, the new White House winked at the world of the online far-right and the Fuentes movement, so much so that on at least one occasion they used the cruder MEME,
namely Pepe the Frog. Of course, this is not enough to suggest that the Trump administration is close to Fuentes, but it is a warning to the rest of the MAGA world that is not reflected in the activist’s position.
