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By Peter Wolfgang (
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) | Nov 08, 2025

The Right has blown up these last two weeks. You would think it would be because of the shellacking we took at the polls on Tuesday. But no. It’s because of Nick Fuentes.

Actually, that is not true. It was not Fuentes himself that caused the eruption. It was not even Tucker Carlson’s ridiculously softball interview of Fuentes. It was that video by Heritage Foundation leader Kevin Roberts, backing Tucker to the hilt, no questions asked.

As it happens, I woke up to the Fuentes interview in my YouTube algorithm in a hotel room in Washington, DC on October 28th, where I was a panelist at an event marking the 60th anniversary of Nostra Aetate, the Vatican II document that is the foundation of Catholic-Jewish friendship in the modern era. Had I written this column two weeks ago, or even a few days ago, it would be a very different column. Smacking Kevin Roberts around for defending the Tucker interview has become something of a sport these last few weeks and my commentary on it would have been indistinguishable from the ones you have probably already read.

Before we get to my change of mind, let’s stipulate a few things.

First, Nick Fuentes is, as Rod Dreher summarized it,

a short, weird livestreamer [who] is an open admirer of Hitler, a Holocaust denier, an antisemite, a misogynist (he has said that women want to be raped), and a white supremacist. These are not accusations leveled at him from the Left. He takes transgressive pleasure in saying these things.

Second, Tucker Carlson was wrong to platform Fuentes, and to not challenge him, for the reasons Ben Shapiro laid out in this brutal episode of his podcast.

Third, Kevin Roberts was wrong to attack critics of Tucker’s interview of Fuentes. This is where the rubber hits the road. As loathsome as Fuentes is, and as worrying as his growing popularity among the young is, no reasonable person considers Fuentes to be a legitimate voice of the Right. As Shapiro says, even Tucker Carlson’s popularity (among, well, people like me) is due mostly to his Fox News days. The farther away he gets from those days—and the more he platforms Holocaust-denying cranks—the more that popularity will be tested.