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.”

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.

…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.

…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. Read more»

Christopher Rufo | “What Everyone Misses About Nick Fuentes” | November 5, 2025

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