Nick Fuentes Has Officially Breached the MAGA Gates

By 2019, most leaders of the earlier alt-right, like Richard Spencer, had become toxic and untouchable in the conservative mainstream, their organizations, like Identity Evropa, decimated by doxxing, deplatforming, and lawsuits. The Groypers, by contrast, seemed clean-cut, savvy and optics-conscious, rebranding white Christian nationalism in the more palatable veneer of flag and cross. They were popping up in the ranks of Turning Point USA and campus Republican chapters, where Fuentes wisely cautioned them to “hide their power level” and push the organizations further rightward. Despite the many attempts to banish them, it seemed, the inheritors of Unite the Right had found a way back into the conservative tent, determined to transform it from within.

After their splashy debut, the Groypers further flexed their muscles in the leadup to January 6. Fuentes held Stop the Steal rallies at state capitols and arrived at the insurrection with a gaggle of followers, bellowing marching orders into a megaphone outside the Capitol gates while thousands of rioters, a few Groypers among them, stormed the barricades. Although this ultimately earned him a subpoena from the January 6th Committee, it failed to tarnish his reputation among the more extreme, fascist-curious members of the MAGAverse.

MAGA politicians like Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene spoke at his annual conferences that year and the next. Meanwhile, the right was radicalizing. Establishment conservatives like Carlson and Kirk began cautiously, then triumphantly embracing “great replacement” and Christian nationalist rhetoric, even as they avoided Fuentes directly. Many conservatives began arguing that their movement should hold “no enemies to the right”—the idea being that conservatives could no longer afford to expel radicals from their ranks, but must unite with them to crush the left.

During this time, Fuentes positioned the Groypers as a tugboat, sailing one wave ahead of the conservative mainstream, seeding radical ideas in its wake. “My job, and the job of the Groypers and America First, is to keep pushing further,” he told his followers in a May 2021 broadcast worth quoting at length.

We—because nobody else will—have to push the envelope. And we’re gonna get called names. We’re gonna get called racist, sexist, antisemitic, bigoted, whatever…and when the party is where we are two years later, we’re not gonna get the credit for the ideas that become popular…but that’s ok. That’s our job. We are the right-wing flank of the Republican Party, and if we didn’t exist, the Republican Party would be falling backwards all the time…So we have got to be on the Right, dragging these people kicking and stream—kicking and screaming into the future, into the right wing, into a truly reactionary party. And it’s incremental—we’re not gonna drag them all the way over—but if we can drag over the furthest part of the Right further to the Right…then we’re winning.

Still, despite the bravado, Fuentes’s movement was soon floundering. Like many radical rightists, Fuentes found himself banned from social media platforms like Twitter and YouTube that, at the time, prohibited hate speech and other bigoted content. He was forced to create his own streaming platform, Cozy TV, to host his content. His nightly viewer count dwindled, a common effect of deplatforming. At the same time, his public feuds with one-time allies, like former Identity Evropa leader Patrick Casey, left him increasingly isolated.

Eager to raise his profile and distinguish himself in a crowded field of rapidly radicalizing right-wing pundits, he eventually settled on open pro-Hitlerism. A spate of bizarre public appearances with Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) in late 2022, where the two praised Hitler during interviews on popular right-wing podcasts, brought him back into the headlines, but not, it seemed, in a good way. When news broke that Fuentes tagged along as Ye’s guest at an invited dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, the national media hyped the Groyper leader as an influential MAGA whisperer.

But the young activists staffing newly ascendant hardline MAGA groups like Republicans for National Renewal and American Moment dismissed his neo-Nazi antics as toxic and cringe. A new nationalist MAGA flank was emerging, led by movements like National Conservatism and figures like JD Vance, determined to take back power in 2024. This was the right-wing flank of the Republican Party that Fuentes needed to reach, but instead of inching closer, they recoiled from him. He lobbed fiery critiques and orchestrated public stunts challenging these new MAGA populists from the right, but nobody seemed to care. With increasingly extreme positions catering mostly to a loyal audience of basement-dwelling incels, Fuentes seemed to revel in his marginality. No longer the master mainstreamer, he seemed to be treading the same desultory path towards irrelevance carved out by the likes of Richard Spencer and David Duke before him.

Seizing the Moment

That changed after October 7. While much ink has been spilled tracing the tectonic shifts Israel’s genocidal annihilation of Gaza triggered in the liberal camp, the longer aftershock on the right may prove just as consequential. By this point, Fuentes’s core calling cards of white-Christian nationalism, ultra-misogyny, and anti-LGBTQ bigotry had gone mainstream on the right, but open antisemitism remained the last real firewall. Before 2023 had ended, however, cracks appeared there too. Charlie Kirk blamed “Jewish dollars” for funding “cultural Marxist ideas” at universities, while Elon Musk boosted a tweet claiming Jews possessed “dialectical hatred” against whites. No longer satiated by the conspiracism around George Soros and “globalists,” conservatives, it seemed, were sampling the harder stuff.

By now, it is common knowledge that Gen Z conservatives have soured on Israel. But while pundits often cite Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson as auguring this transformation, Fuentes, in fact, had peddled America First anti-Zionism long before it was cool, and in its undiluted, hardline antisemitic form. More than anything else, the right’s steady lurch towards Israel-skepticism has fueled Fuentes’s recent rise. And unlike on the left—where anti-Zionism is primarily motivated by solidarity with Palestinians and the demand for universal justice, and care is generally given to separate Judaism from Zionism—on the right it comes infused with hard-nosed revanchism, bristling with rage at a Jewish cabal which, it insists, has sold out American greatness in service of slavish devotion to Israel.

Sensing the changing winds, Fuentes branded himself a prophet outcast, an insurgent rebel against the “Israel First” neoconservative (read: Jewish) establishment, banished to exile for speaking truths long before latecomers like Tucker were ready to listen. He was aided in these efforts by Elon Musk’s decision to effectively end content moderation policies on X, which allowed Groypers to return to the platform in droves, followed eventually by Fuentes himself in May 2024. And since Trump took office, he has continued to ride the news cycle to his advantage. His noisy opposition to US involvement in Israel’s war on Iran in June 2025 won him new adherents. As fiery debates accelerated the split over Israel on the right, Fuentes distinguished himself by arguing that less radical non-interventionists like Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon remained too tepid, unwilling to tackle “Jewish power” head on.

After the murder of Kirk in September, all eyes were on Fuentes as speculation briefly surged that the suspect was a Groyper. Despite his longstanding bitter, often vitriolic rivalry with the TPUSA leader, Fuentes surprised and impressed gullible onlookers for decrying political violence and cautioning against the conspiracy theories that proliferated in MAGAland following the murder. His bid to appear moderate and reasonable paid off, with a large boost in X and Rumble followers and friendly appearances on a few prominent MAGA platforms. Meanwhile Carlson and Owens, likely sensing a threat from their right flank, roundly attacked Fuentes on their shows. But this backfired when Fuentes successfully punched back, casting his critics as establishment shills and emerging all the shinier from the closely watched scuffle.

Now, it’s hard even for his critics to deny which way the wind is blowing. Two days after Fuentes’s interview with Carlson,JD Vance was hit with questions during an appearance at a TPUSA event in Mississippi that seemed to recapitulate the 2019 Groyper Wars; to loud applause, several students asserted that Israel was “controlling” Trump and Judaism was “prosecuting” Christianity, and a defensive Vance ceded at least some of the ground. “When people say that Israel is somehow manipulating or controlling the President of the United States, they’re not controlling this President,” he said. Whether these students were themselves Groypers is irrelevant;Fuentes’s message had broken through to the future foot soldiers of the conservative movement.

Just a few days after that, however, Kevin Roberts was forced to backpedal after being hit by backlash from Heritage Foundation staff, board, donors, and other conservative leaders. He swiftly condemned Fuentes, maintaining only that the Groyper leader’s views, clearly resonating with young conservatives, must be challenged head-on in the marketplace of ideas. And yet, the fierce reaction from old-guard conservatives also helps bolster Fuentes’s insurgent brand. The fiery, acrimonious debates are polarizing the conservative movement exactly along the lines Fuentes has long intended. Once again, he is the “right-wing flank of the Republican Party,” as he hoped to be in 2021, dragging MAGA “kicking and screaming” into an even more reactionary future.

The Art of the Possible

In his relentless quest to “push the envelope” of American nationalism, Fuentes has long zigzagged between posturing as Trump’s most loyal, vanguard soldier and as MAGA’s fiercest, most bitter right-wing critic. Fuentes is unlikely to trade in his cherished outsider status for a seat at the establishment conservative table anytime soon. But Carlson and Roberts’s moves will deepen his influence across the jostling crowd of streamers, operatives, and administration officials that make up a chaotic and rapidly radicalizing MAGA ecosystem.

Sensing the opening, the Groyper leader has been attempting to sanitize his own history. In interviews with Carlson and others, he downplays his extensive back-catalogue of bare-knuckle bigotry as youthful exuberance. He ludicrously claims to hold no hatred in his heart, and cautions against those fringe, increasingly noisy voices on the internet who do. At the ripe old age of 27, he frames himself now as the wizened whisperer of alienated young men, counseling elders like Carlson on how to bring them back into the conservative tent.

On one of his September shows, he outlined a more pragmatic approach that, in truth, the left would do well to adopt as well:

If the constraints are that every show has to be fire and brimstone, pure resentment, rage, always more extreme, always more insane, always more resentful, you don’t want change. You just wanna feel validation, you wanna feel your resentment to be acknowledged and heard. Part of what I do is for that. But if that is not channeled in a productive and prudent way, on a long term timeline with tangible results, then what the fuck are we doing?…I’m not satisfied with just playing the greatest hits for the most radical 1% (of diehard fans). We’re trying to move the needle of an entire nation…I’m interested in the art of the possible, not the fantasies of people who just want to hear their grievances heard.

Before his death, Charlie Kirk had skillfully sought to mediate growing tensions between the restless, Israel-critical Gen-Z MAGA youth and their establishment elders, between the rowdy, Epstein-obsessed populists in Trump’s base and the legacy neoconservatives with closest access to Trump himself. In his absence, that role is vacant.Fuentes likely knows that that if he cleans up his act just enough, at least for a time, he can waltz into the conservative mainstream and command the floor. He might be right.

In 1991, conservative kingpin William F. Buckley Jr. established the rightward boundary line of the post–Cold War movement consensus by effectively excommunicating paleoconservatives like Pat Buchanan and Joe Sobran over their dalliances with Holocaust revisionism and Israel-critical antisemitism. Buchanan, in turn, fresh from a high-profile presidential bid, distanced himself from white nationalist David Duke, who won a surprising 55 percent of Louisiana’s white vote in the 1991 gubernatorial runoff election. But he also called on the GOP to imitate Duke’s success: “Take a hard look at Duke’s portfolio of winning issues; and expropriate those not in conflict with GOP principles,” he advised conservatives in a column.

Buckley’s postwar conservative consensus has now crumbled. Any pretense of distance between the mainstream and radical wings of MAGA is collapsing. With Fuentes’s embrace by Carlson—a Buchanan-like figure who positions himself as a waypoint between today’s right-wing radicals and the conservative establishment—the Overton window, as it’s popularly called, hasn’t merely shifted; it’s shattering. That it took right-wing anti-Zionism to break the glass should give progressives little reason to celebrate, as the right’s Israel-critics aren’t our allies. As Fuentes told Carlson on his show, they want to throw the left in prison, or worse—and their sympathy towards Palestinians, while sometimes heartfelt, is also selective and ultimately instrumental, furthering a Western chauvinist and deeply exclusionary agenda.

Liberals and progressives can still learn something from Carlson and Roberts, however: it doesn’t pay to shut out your radicals, and it won’t work. Millions of Americans, young and old, are fed up with bipartisan support for Israel, unprecedented inequality, and the other morbid symptoms of decaying Empire. The establishment has no answer for this widespread and mounting alienation, because the establishment is the cause. Only fresh, outsider ideas can meet this moment, and they’re popular. But while left-wing insurgents still struggle to get past our side’s gatekeepers onto larger platforms of influence, radicals like Fuentes are finding less resistance on the right. If we don’t want their answers to win the day, we don’t have much time left.

More from The Nation

In an exclusive interview with The Nation, Sanders says Mamdani can show Democrats how to campaign—and govern—for the working class.

John Nichols

To win back power, Democrats must organize themselves against oligarchy—and that means rejecting the latest shoddy centrist recommendations.

Aaron Regunberg

The president’s spectacular ineptitude frequently winds up benefiting those in power.

Rebecca Gordon

The extremist podcaster’s rise and rise is a sign that racists and antisemites are tired of being the junior partners in the Republican coalition.

Jeet Heer

My message to my fellow Jews in this city is: Don’t believe the lies you’re hearing.

Roni Zahavi-Brunner