They attacked me first.

When the interview first popped up in my podcast feed, all I could do was stop and take a big, deep breath.

Nick Fuentes on Tucker Carlson, I thought. Man. 

I’m a regular listener of Carlson’s podcast, so I knew that in a conversation with Candace Owens just a few weeks before, he described Fuentes as “a weird little gay kid living in his basement.” Fuentes was apparently perturbed, and he responded by lambasting Carlson as a fraudulent populist. These aren’t the kinds of attacks I’d mount against either Fuentes or Carlson, but I found some solace in the fact that someone as mainstream as Carlson — who has embraced plenty of unsavory characters over the years — still wouldn’t go as far as big-tenting someone like Fuentes.

In case you are unaware of his existence, Nick Fuentes is known for leading a group called “The Groypers” that holds genuinely radical, far-right views (they spent years attacking Charlie Kirk as too left). Fuentes dropped out of college to focus on media full time after attending the Unite the Right gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia (which turned deadly after an extremist rammed his car through a crowd of students). He was banned from the app then known as Twitter in 2021 for repeated racist and antisemitic comments (as well as by YouTube, Reddit, TikTok, Spotify, Venmo, Stripe, and Clubhouse). He referred to Judaism as a “Synagogue of Satan” during a speech at a “Stop the Steal” rally. He returned to Twitter/X in 2022, but Elon Musk banned him again after he said he’d go “DEFCON 3” on Jews, held a live chat where he praised Hitler, and said he was going to “go to war” with Jews. 

Then, after returning to X in 2024, he caused another controversy when he posted “Your body, my choice” after Donald Trump won the election. Fuentes isn’t merely “controversial” — he is persona non grata for most people on the right, and talking with him was a bridge too far even for people like Carlson, who have a high tolerance for public criticism.

That, obviously, has now changed. 

This story has a number of interesting threads, starting with the style of interview Carlson used. Many people wanted to see Fuentes held to account for his views and words. Regular listeners of Carlson’s show know what it sounds like when he digs his teeth in; he is one of the best combative interviewers in the game. Instead, for the most part, Carlson soft-balled Fuentes and let the most damning things he has said, or implied, pass without much of any pushback.

After the interview came out, a lot of people predictably — and justifiably — criticized Carlson. Ben Shapiro (whom Fuentes spent a lot of time attacking) did the best job of explaining just how insidious Carlson’s approach was, and did so without trying to “silence” or “cancel” Carlson — or “nuking him from space,” as Fuentes would call it. A former victim of Carlson’s confrontational interview style also summed it up nicely:

“If you sit there with someone who says Adolf Hitler was very, very cool and that their mission is to combat and defeat ‘global Jewry’ — and you say nothing — then you are a coward,” Sen. Ted Cruz said. 

I have to say, I agree.

Another thread, which many in the media seized upon, was the larger intraparty wars this interview has now set off on the right. MAGA is being held together right now by the person at the top, the most dominant personality in modern politics, but it’s not at all clear what happens post-Trump. A lot of the people in Trump’s camp genuinely hate each other, and their political and ideological differences run deep. Those people are jockeying for the future of the party right now, and I’m not sure who will come out ahead — or which version of the Republican Party emerges on the other side.

But neither of these storylines compelled me enough to cover the interview in Tangle. Instead, something different hooked me — something that made me feel like this was generating a controversy worth paying attention to.

Fuentes (who is a quarter Mexican) seems to have an outright hatred for most minority groups, and he often frames whiteness and Europeanness and masculinity as the core qualities of America worth defending. He talks about the Jews a lot — and rarely (never?) in a good way. He also has an open contempt for black people (framed almost always as criminals unfit for society) and women (a group definitively not equal to men, in his estimation, and too opinionated and assertive in today’s society). 

Here is a small collection of his quotables, just for the record:

• “Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part…”
• “Perfidious Jews” should be “given the death penalty.”
• “Your body, my choice. Forever.”
• “A lot of women want to be raped.”
• “I’m not living around blacks. Sorry.”
• “Women need to shut the fuck up.” 
• “I love Hitler.”
• “Nigger hell.” (His description of Chicago)

It’s so easy to focus on the “badness” of these views, but we already knew that Fuentes was a merchant of these kinds of opinions. Instead, what I learned about was Nick Fuentes the person — his background, his motivations. The how. 

How did Fuentes become who he is? How did he come to believe the things he does? Fuentes, obviously, wasn’t born a Jew-hating white nationalist who thinks it edgy and provocative to suggest most black people deserve prison time — he became that person. How did that happen? This, to me, is the story nobody ever talks about — the one that everyone seems to dance around for fear that exploring his evolution would somehow normalize or legitimize the views he holds now.

But this story is important, and it’s incredibly informative. Fuentes is not alone. His popularity is rising right now, and that rise is meaningful. His army of very online angry young men is growing. And his rising star’s trajectory has not slowed down as he’s been mocked or ostracized. Actually, the opposite has been true.

I knew from regularly listening to Carlson’s show that he engages his guests in particularly long conversations — especially the ones he isn’t openly antagonistic toward. It usually goes like this: 1) Ask about their childhood story, 2) ask about their formative moments, 3) connect those moments to who they are today, and 4) give lots of space for them to state their views unopposed. 

As I expected, Carlson spent the first half of the show repeating this structure. And, despite that half of the show being largely ignored, I actually found the story Fuentes told incredibly valuable — and quite revealing.

How Nick Fuentes became Nick Fuentes.