The racialist influencer Nick Fuentes has caused an uproar with his appearance on Tucker Carlson’s podcast. Fuentes, a 27-year-old live-streamer, has built a reputation as the most controversial voice on the right. He’s embraced seemingly every taboo: praising Hitler, disputing the Holocaust’s death toll, calling himself a “white nationalist,” musing about domestic violence, and opposing interracial marriage.
Carlson’s invitation has divided conservatives. Some suggest that Fuentes’s appearance on the podcast represented an unacceptable mainstreaming of his views. Others, most notably Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, argue that Fuentes must be debated instead of “canceled.”
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Both sides fail to understand the Nick Fuentes phenomenon. They take his statements seriously and engage with them in good faith. But Fuentes’s stated beliefs, while abhorrent, are not best parried by taking them at face value. Instead, the Right should consider him an actor in what postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard called “hyperreality”: a system in which the simulation of reality comes to replace reality itself.
Under conditions of hyperreality, symbols of past phenomena lose their original meaning. Emptied out, they then circulate through digital media, where they drive the discourse and, while purely derivative, still spark real emotional involvement. In this way, the hyperreal becomes “more real than real,” masking the true nature of reality.
We should understand Fuentes through this framework. He embraces taboos not because he has an authentic faith in Hitler or a deep-seated opposition to interracial marriage. He may well believe these things, of course, but that isn’t why he pushes them. Rather, he embraces taboos because doing so drives attention and creates a spectacle in digital media that benefits him.
The tone of his discourse is not authentic, serious, or reflective. It is ironic, cynical, and provocative. When Fuentes lauds Hitler and, in another interview, praises Stalin—irreconcilable ideological enemies—he is not expressing a comprehensible ideology that can be scrutinized in debate. He is engaging in a performance, which only becomes coherent when read as a demand for attention.
Unfortunately, both liberals and conservatives have played into the act. The Left, which for a decade has tried to push the narrative that conservatives are Nazis and that Donald Trump is the new Hitler, has finally found in Fuentes an avatar of right-wing fascism. They play along with Fuentes’s irony-laden, hyperreal Nazism because it is useful to them. They give him attention, print his name in prestige publications, and enter into a symbiotic relationship. The Left finally gets its Nazi—and Fuentes gets more attention.
In the recent controversy, the Right has also unwittingly reinforced Fuentes’s Nazi performance. Some conservatives have criticized Fuentes, Carlson, and Roberts by posting that “Nazis are bad.” That’s self-evidently correct—Nazism is monstrous. But leaning on that truism blurs the distinction between reality and hyperreality.
In the real world, Germany was denazified after 1945 and, apart from small pockets of skinheads and neo-Nazis, Nazism is a dead ideology. Fuentes is not a Nazi in a real historical sense, but a live-streamer who wields the still-charged symbol of Nazism to hijack the discourse and bait his opponents into a reaction. He may genuinely believe what he says—I doubt it—but, in either case, that is orthogonal to the point that he is using people’s horror at Nazism to serve his ends. Every time conservatives operate on his terms, they reinforce his taboo-breaking, making him stronger.
How, then, should conservatives approach a figure like Fuentes, reject right-wing racialism, and move forward constructively? The first prerequisite is simple: do not engage emotionally. The politics of hyperreality sustains itself to the extent that its symbols drive an automatic reaction, rather than careful analysis and reflection.
Railing against Nazis might provide a temporary satisfaction—being in the right usually does. But in the long run, this reaction feeds Nazism as a symbol, when it should be buried as one of the disasters of history, never to be resurrected.
Rather than engage in the surface-level debate, conservatives should seek the deeper ground of reality and deconstruct the “metapolitics,” or underlying rules, of this conflict. Conservatives should do this by treating Fuentes as an essentially fraudulent phenomenon. He is a manipulator who pretends to believe in every evil in order to drive clicks, cause chaos, and achieve celebrity, even as a villain.
The right-wing case against Fuentes should, therefore, focus on actions and outcomes. Fuentes divides the Right, taps into the left-wing fantasy about conservatives as Nazis, rails against President Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance, and does not lead young men toward a better life. The incentives for Fuentes and the incentives for the Right are completely opposed. If he wins, conservatives lose.
This is a major test for the Right, and one that it must win. Arguing within the “Nazism-versus-anti-Nazism” frame misses the point, even if one side is correct on the merits.
We need to rely on cool analysis instead of heated reaction. Instead of feeding the Fuentes phenomenon, we should point the public in a constructive direction and marginalize those who would sabotage the conservative cause.
Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
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