Deplatforming Nick Fuentes Won't Stop Antisemitism
The Tucker Carlson interview is an apt demonstration of what to do—and what not to do.
Nick Fuentes is a right-wing podcaster and provocateur who harbors antisemitic, racist, and explicitly white nationalist views. He has claimed that "Jews are running society" and "black people should be in prison for the most part." He is avowedly pro-Hitler and questions whether 6 million Jewish people really died in the Holocaust. He has stated his goals thusly: "All I want is revenge against my enemies and a total Aryan victory."
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One would hope to find Fuentes toiling in relative obscurity, known only to the most studious observers of weird internet subcultures. Unfortunately, Fuentes is shaping up to be the year's major conservative breakout star, well positioned to be one of the spiritual successors to Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist and organization leader who was murdered on September 10. Kirk himself despised Fuentes, of course, and worked with other leading conservative voices like Ben Shapiro to sideline and marginalize him. For Fuentes, the resentment was mutual, and his followers—the "groypers"—would harass staffers at Turning Point USA, Kirk's youth organization.
But in the wake of Kirk's death, efforts to gate-keep the conservative movement and ensure that Fuentes remains a marginal figure within it are clearly failing. This week, a major line was crossed: Tucker Carlson interviewed Fuentes on his show. The two-hour conversation has racked up 16 million views on X.
The background to all this is the increasing salience of the Israel issue, which now divides Republicans. Conservatives who are older, evangelical, and get their news from television—Fox News, Newsmax, etc.—tend to be very supportive of Israel, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and continued U.S. military support for that country's war on the terrorist group Hamas. Conservatives who are younger, Catholic, and get their news from independent podcasts tend to think America should be less involved in the Middle East, less financially supportive of Israel, and less tied to the Israeli government's wholesale destruction of Gaza, which has killed nearly 70,000 people. It is perfectly possible to associate with the latter camp while also rejecting antisemitism, racism, and Holocaust denial; in fact, I would argue that it is morally correct to do so. But Fuentes is clearly steering the right toward a wholesale embrace of bigotry.
Conservative critics of Fuentes and Carlson are understandably concerned about this. National Review assailed Carlson for conducting an overly friendly chat and failing to "challenge any of Fuentes's noxious views." Josh Hammer called for Carlson to be blackballed in addition to Fuentes. The Babylon Bee mocked Carlson relentlessly.
The problem for these conservatives is that their side is clearly losing: Fuentes is gaining influence. While conservative media organizations remain wholly opposed to Fuentes and his agenda, leading independent conservative media personalities like Carlson and Candace Owens are treating him seriously. (Fuentes and Owens have an on-again, off-again personal feud, so it's more complicated than that, even though she's clearly in sympathy with his antisemitic views. She is also a black woman, which means she belongs to two identity groups that Fuentes frequently condemns: black people and women.)
Here are three thoughts on this subject.
1. Deplatforming Fuentes will not work. In the olden days, when a handful of conservative media organizations ruled the roost, it would have been trivially easy to simply blackball Fuentes and ensure that he remained an obscure figure. This is no longer possible. The conservative media ecosystem, like the mainstream media ecosystem, is too wide open and freewheeling. No central entity directs it. Conservative magazines won't print Fuentes, and conservative TV channels won't invite him on—but he can appeal directly to the people via social media. Moreover, social media platforms themselves—X, YouTube, Facebook, etc.—have been explicitly discouraged by conservatives from doing any kind of effective gatekeeping, and have largely moved away from this type of content moderation.
Additionally, all the usual arguments against censorship apply here. Refusing to engage with Fuentes could make his arguments seem powerful, hypnotic, and ultimately more appealing. It appears as if opponents of Fuentes are afraid of a fair fight or lack the courage of their convictions. Younger conservative viewers might think some hidden or dangerous truth is being kept from them. In this way, deplatforming will backfire and guide the right toward the exact sort of conspiratorial thinking they are trying to stop.
In fact, it's fairly clear that attempts to deplatform Fuentes contributed to his own racial radicalization. In his interview with Carlson, Fuentes admitted that his racist, anti-immigrant, and antisemitic views became more extreme over time precisely because he was shut down by leading conservatives whenever he tried to raise more innocent questions about U.S. support for Israel. In his telling, conservatives like Shapiro and Dave Rubin—who prided themselves on opposing cancel culture and censorship, and wanting to openly debate controversial ideas—utterly refused to platform any sort of debate on U.S. foreign policy with respect to Israel. Their hypocrisy caused Fuentes to become more and more extreme.
We don't necessarily need to take Fuentes' word for this, of course. It's possible he secretly harbored awful prejudices all along. In any case, he's achieved escape velocity. He's in conservative discourse now, and pretending he doesn't exist won't make him go away.
2. Debating Fuentes could work if it's done correctly. The Carlson interview was, by Carlson standards, certainly soft. When Carlson wants to eviscerate someone, he's adept at doing so: See, for instance, Ted Cruz. He was more than capable of challenging a variety of points that Fuentes made; for instance, at one point Fuentes evinced an affection for Joseph Stalin, a communist and mass murderer who is despised by pretty much everyone on the right. Unfortunately, Carlson never followed up on that.
It is not true, however, that the interview was entirely friendly to Fuentes. At several points, Carlson explained that both his Christian faith and conservative beliefs compelled him to reject the kind of identitarianism, collectivism, and racism that Fuentes regularly practices. He correctly articulated the position that one can—and should, and must—oppose Israel's slaughter of innocent Gazans without blaming it on the Jews as a people.
It would have been additionally useful, however, for Carlson to scrutinize Fuentes' actual past statements, because Fuentes has not shied away from saying grossly ridiculous things about, for instance, the goodness of Hitler. (Dave Smith's recent interview with Fuentes was, if anything, even friendlier.)
Podcasters should not avoid Fuentes, but if they talk to him, they should actually grill him on the things he has said. For instance, when Carlson interviewed Cruz, he challenged the senator to state the population of Iran, the country that Cruz fervently desired for the U.S. to attack; Cruz's failure to even ballpark the number made it look like he didn't know what he was talking about. Apply this technique to Fuentes, too.
3. Opponents of antisemitism should want to minimize the Israel issue. I argued about this on X with Jane Coaston and others, and received furious pushback.
I mean, perhaps an even more unpopular opinion, but the most obvious way to reduce the influence of Nick Fuentes would be to end U.S. military aid to Israel! https://t.co/VoEpl3wZ4h
— Robby Soave (@robbysoave) October 29, 2025
Yet it seems obvious to me that the rise in antisemitism on both the right and left has something to do with Israel being a much more important news and policy topic in the last two years.
It's true that Fuentes would likely remain an antisemite even if American foreign policy exactly mirrored his preferences. And antisemitism, one of the world's oldest prejudices, will endure in the hearts and minds of all too many people, regardless of what happens. But it's extremely naive to think that Israel's actions, and the U.S.'s backing of them, are playing no role in increasing antisemitism. Frankly, that would be quite unusual. Just as anti-Muslim sentiments increased after 9/11 and anti-Japanese sentiments increased after Pearl Harbor, the images of dead and injured Palestinians that have flooded social media for the past two years have almost certainly damaged Israel's standing in the eyes of many. And the reputation of Israel, the home of the Jewish people, is inexorably tied to the Jewish people.
To be abundantly clear, this doesn't mean it's correct or fair to change one's feelings about an entire ethnic group because of a government's actions: Collective guilt and collective punishment are evil tendencies. Nor does it mean that the U.S. turning its back on Israel is necessarily good policy.
But Fuentes-ism is spreading and winning in part because Israel's standing with conservatives, in particular young conservatives, is falling. Everyone who aspires to swiftly stem the rising tide of antisemitism should hope for the decreased salience of Israel's wars as a focus of political discussion.
This Week on Free Media
I was joined by Amber Duke and Niall Stanage to discuss all the latest news, including the Fuentes interview. Watch on the Free Media YouTube channel.
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Last weekend, I rewatched my second-favorite film of all time: Zodiac. Still great!
