How the Media Normalized Nick Fuentes
Through the bullet hell of bad news that has been the past couple of months, something that chilled my blood while flying deftly under the radar for most people was a couple of weeks ago when Glenn Greenwald came out in support of Nick Fuentes.
I don’t have a lot of interest in Greenwald and most of what I know about him I learned from Eoin Higgins’ book about him, Owned. I know his influence, and so it’s particularly frightening to hear him reference Nick Fuentes as a peer. According to Greenwald, Fuentes’ media influence may be greater than, or even surpass, that of Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens.
The thing about Greenwald is that, besides the general rightward spiral, his politics are not something that can be easily pinned down. To him, everyone who is a peer he seems to sort of also consider his friend no matter what their ideology is. This is about as good a definition of “the elite” as I can come up with. To be a peer is to be someone of similar influence. It’s not a politics game, to him, so much as a power game. It doesn't matter if their schtick runs to the right of Ben Shapiro—if they pick their whiskey off the same shelf, they can be buddies with Glenn Greenwald.
The topic of discussion is that there is a three-way feud happening at the moment between Carlson, Owens, and Fuentes. I don’t know all of the specifics as I haven’t dived too deeply into it (I think I’d rather pull my fingernails out) but the point is that, stunningly, despite his close friendship with Tucker Carlson and his partiality to Owens, Greenwald favors Nick Fuentes in this fight. Because they are peers now, and because Greenwald will always back whoever has suffered the most from the dreaded “cancel culture.”
Nick Fuentes, you see, is just like any other kid in Woke America with a promising career ahead of him that got completely wiped out because he, like, misgendered a barista one time. He’s smart, he’s funny, he’s charismatic, but he made the crucial mistake of just being critical of Israel. Greenwald actually takes care to make this point as explicitly clear as he can: The only reason Nick Fuentes has a history of being banned from social media and shunned from the political mainstream is that he is critical of Israel.
So, I’ll just jump to the point, if you don’t know who Nick Fuentes is: He is a vicious, dedicated, explicit neo-Nazi. I’m not using “Nazi” in the colloquial sense that’s popular these days to speak of anyone to the right of Tom Hanks. I mean that he is probably the most prominent enthusiastically pro-Hitler personality in the United States right now, filling shoes previously worn by David Duke and Richard Spencer. He is critical of Israel in the sense that Osama bin Laden was critical of tall buildings.
Glenn Greenwald, who is Jewish, cannot afford to be this staggeringly ignorant about the risks of trying to launder this ideology into mainstream political discourse. If you want to take an Israel-critical position then it is extremely easy to find allies who don’t post shit like this every day.
So how the hell did this happen?
Greenwald is obviously not the first mainstream media figure to try to smuggle Fuentes into the national conversation. The story of his sudden rise, from gutter troll to the type of man Glenn Greenwald thinks he can respect as a peer, is oddly tied up with Candace Owens and Kanye West.
Owens’ own rise to the mainstream is just an earlier stage of this same rot. Her whole career has been a speedrun to radicalization. Having been a liberal only ten years ago, she pivoted to the right and then her brakes fell off. But Owens was batshit as a liberal, too, going on unhinged rants wishing death on Republicans and speculating about Trump’s penis size. Her turn to the right was more or less settling in with a crowd more inclined to accept that kind of behavior.
At some point she became friends with Kanye West, and the two of them went down a madness spiral together, and first Owens and then Kanye started warming up to Hitler. I know that Kanye is widely reported to be bipolar, and I won’t armchair diagnose Owens with anything, but suffice to say that these are two very unwell people.
In 2022, when Kanye decided he was going to officially run for president, he hired as his campaign manager a blast from the insufferable past named Milo Yiannopoulos, another white nationalist who doesn’t rise to the level of a “Nazi.” Milo, in turn, brought on board another obscure figure named Nick Fuentes.
I used to be more skeptical of the idea of deplatforming Nazis as a means of fighting them. It’s a huge trope of the Free Speech Absolutist crowd that you have to bring fringe ideologies into the open and debate them publicly in order to defeat them, and that deplatforming them actually works in their favor. The story of Kanye West, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Nick Fuentes is the best counterargument I’ve ever seen against this idea.
The problem is that Kanye West cannot be cancelled, not really. He is too powerful as a celebrity, and his mental illness makes people reticent about condemning him. When everyone decides they need to handle an extremist with kid gloves and pull punches against their beliefs, that person becomes a splinter. When you don’t remove a splinter it will introduce an infection.
Yiannopoulos, a top lieutenant of human sebaceous cyst Steve Bannon, was one of the biggest far-right media influencers associated with Donald Trump’s original 2016 campaign, and played no small role in getting him elected. He is also a rare example of the right cancelling one of their own, after he was caught on tape defending church molestation as a rite of passage for gay minors, a cancellation that obliterated his career so completely that he was relegated to selling religious paraphernalia on late night Catholic cable shopping networks.
Banned from Twitter and cut off from the MAGA media megaphone, he had no means through which to broadcast his insipid bullshit to the world anymore. And I will continue saying this for as long as furious reactionaries keep denying it: Denying someone a platform does not violate their freedom of speech. It merely relegates them to the same level of speech freedom that the vast majority of human beings are stuck with—the freedom to say whatever you want to your friends, family, and pets.
Only the steel-plated Trojan Horse of Kanye West could smuggle him back into our lives, and the same went for Nick Fuentes.
Barely anyone outside of the shittiest corners of the Chan-poisoned internet had ever heard of Fuentes when Kanye, accepting a personal invitation from Donald Trump, slipped his entourage into Mar-a-Lago one night and dined with the once and future president. It’s important to note that the media response to Trump breaking bread with an open white supremacist was vastly different just three years ago—it was a scandal that threatened to sink his campaign.
There was a real possibility that he would just go away again, because, just like Milo, he was banned from most mainstream social media, something which Glenn Greenwald and similar personalities consider a crime. His white knight was another man who, like Kanye, is too powerful to be cancelled no matter what he does—yet another rich guy who got his brain stuck in white supremacy quicksand.
Even so, Nick Fuentes is so thoroughly despicable that he was one of the last people who Elon Musk was willing to break out of Twitter jail, and he only did so after a lengthy lobbying campaign by legions of his fans—the so-called “groyper” army—who had also had their accounts restored in Musk’s broad act of clemency. He was actually too toxic for Elon Musk, and this wasn’t in the past when Musk was still pretending to be a Democrat. This was last year.
When Candace Owens drifted too far to the right for her colleagues at The Daily Wire—a serious thing to say when you’re talking about an outlet that employs Matt Walsh—and got fired for reasons that her allies were already laundering under the euphemism of “being critical of Israel,” Nick Fuentes knew that she was his meal ticket. Before he was allowed back on Twitter under his real name, he snuck on under an alt account he rebranded as “standace owens,” ostensibly a fan account, and started vying for her attention. Thousands of groypers, recently reinstated and algorithmically boosted by Musk’s project to force the public discourse to the far right, assisted his effort.
He eventually succeeded, and got an interview on Owens’ show. This is what kicked off the current feud—at the end of the day, no matter how far to the fringe right Candace has found herself, this was still a conversation between a white supremacist and a black women. It didn’t go very well.
Still, Fuentes isn’t what most people expect from a neo-Nazi. He doesn’t drag his knuckles and spit and gnash and grunt into the microphone. Not on such a respectable platform as the Candace show, at least. He comes across as charismatic, articulate, and dare I say clever. Not smart, but clever. His ideas haven’t changed from back when the media pilloried him as the gutter Nazi that he is, but the media’s views about him have changed. One of their own has told them that he is somebody important worth listening to.
Here's how the escalator works in a culture where status and influence are more important than values or ideology. So much of high-influence independent journalism in particular feels like some neutral airport lounge where Glenn Greenwald, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Matt Yglesias, Richard Hanania, Matt Taibbi, Cenk Uygur, Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, Jake Tapper and Alex Jones can all sit around sharing chili recipes. Someone like Nick Fuentes can be laundered into mainstream politics simply by winning the approval, one by one, of prominent media figures, each more publicly respected than the last.
Candace Owens smuggled him to her friend Tucker Carlson, who smuggled him to his friend Glenn Greenwald. Each step along the way, a more generally respected public figure gently urges the public to give his ideas a chance. You have permission to entertain the darker suspicions from your lizard brain that you had dismissed—rationally, you thought—about the Jews and black people and the gays. Who is next up this ladder of respectability to tell you that Nick Fuentes is somebody worth listening to? Joe Scarborough? Don Lemon? Fuckin’… Hot Ones?
In 2022, Alex Jones—another fringe lunatic the media managed to launder into the mainstream, interviewed Kanye on InfoWars. Kanye was present with Nick Fuentes, and Jones—again, pretty far right but not exactly a Nazi—pushed back fairly strongly on the pro-Hitler rhetoric. Today, in 2025, Fuentes is a regular guest on InfoWars. The escalator ratchets along, the media launders him upward.
Three years after the media universally slammed Trump for having dinner with Nick Fuentes, Trump is in power and there are groypers in the fucking federal government, both in the DOGE Department of Too Online Shitpost Kiddies and, more terrifyingly, the Department of Homeland Security.
To those in the non-Nazi media sphere who nevertheless thought it important that we bring neo-Nazi voices back into the mainstream to relitigate them once again… how is that going for us? Since we decided to bring fascism back to the bargaining table, are we living in a better world than we did when we responded to this in a different way?
On a completely different note, I’m writing a book about how reactionary geeks in the internet era tumbled down the fascism pipeline and set about smashing up the world out of hubris and spite, and how they worked their way into the deepest corridors of power. The working title is How Geeks Ate the World and I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop. Check it out here:
S Peter Davis
