What
Everyone Misses About Nick Fuentes
The
racialist influencer represents a spectacle that demands cool analysis rather
than emotional reaction.
Christopher
F. Rufo
Nov 05,
2025
https://christopherrufo.com/p/what-everyone-misses-about-nick-fuentes
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.
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.
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