This past October, Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson drew a certain amount of criticism, even from his own side, for hosting noted piece of inhuman excrement Nick Fuentes on his show. Of course, things go the way they go on that side of the political spectrum, and now Fuentes’s dance card is getting more and more full by the day, both with new interview opportunities and with refusals to pointedly disavow him and his beliefs.
This week, Fuentes will not only appear on Infowars with Alex Jones, where he’s been a frequent guest for some time now, but on Louder with Crowder and Piers Morgan Uncensored as well. Isn’t that fun?
On top of that, in an appearance this weekend on a talk show helmed by former Biggest Loser host Jillian Michaels (who can believe someone who was horrible to fat people for a living is a total wingnut?), Donald Trump Jr. refused to denounce Fuentes when given the opportunity.
Michaels, you may recall, was on Team Anti during the Right’s Great Fuentes Debate last month, though she dutifully blamed his ascendence on the Left for having been mean to Charlie Kirk.
From the Michaels show:
“You’re starting to see some of the things in the alt-right fringe — the Nick Fuentes and the young Republican group chat — that is racist, and that is scary, and sexist to an alarming degree with someone like Nick Fuentes. And I’m wondering, you’re seeing this kind of fracture the left, I’m seeing people who are more moderate become alarmed. And people on the right are like, ‘Yeah, yeah, whatever, not a big deal.’”
“I’m here to tell you it’s a big deal. And I think it’s a big deal because all of those people that your dad invited in — Tulsi, Kennedy, myself, inadvertently, right? All of these more-, Rogan, all of these more moderate people who fled the crazy on the left are alarmed if the right doesn’t disavow the Nick Fuenteses,” she continued.
None of those other people she named, by the way, has said word one about Nick Fuentes. Also, they didn’t so much “flee the crazy on the Left,” as they were, themselves, too crazy for the Left. It was apparent from the get-go that the “alt-right fringe” was delighted and emboldened by Trump, so this is nowhere near a new development. If they weren’t alarmed 10 years ago, they’re not going to be alarmed now.
DeploraBall Guests Told Not To Heil Hitler, And No Dirty Dancing Either
Michaels continued:
“I’m wondering if you see it as a problem for the right in the midterms and in 2028. Because I think if this continues without it being fully condemned aggressively, I think you get Gavin Newsom for president. And I know what that looks like, and it’s scary stuff.”
Yes, because the real fear with not condemning people who talk about how great they think Hitler was is that Gavin Newsom, an actual moderate, might become President.
Junior’s response was to go on a definitely-not-coke-addled rant about cancel culture and how he doesn’t want to say anything negative about Fuentes because people will hear him for themselves and decide if they want to listen to him or not.
“I think we have to have conversations, even conversations we don’t want to hear, or even conversations we think may be disgusting,” he said, after going on about how unfair it was that he didn’t get retweets sometimes, “And listen and then people will make up their own minds and they’ll sort of, you know, the way I look at it, you kind of vote with your wallet. You walk away from that and you figure it out on your own.”
Yeah, except that when you have those conversations with those people, you bring those ideas into the realm of acceptability and Republicans know this. They want to make these ideas acceptable because they know that people who hold such views are going to vote for them. They’re not going to have a two-hour interview with someone who believes in, say, universal healthcare, because they don’t want their constituents to understand what that’s actually about.
Duh.
“I’m just deeply concerned,” Michaels pressed, “that if there’s a guy who says, ‘women want to be raped’ and somebody does not say, ‘this is not who we are as a party. This is not conservatism. We find him repulsive.’ It’s … I’m telling you, it’s not (mumble mumble).”
Well, Jillian, I hate to break it to you, but it very literally is who they are as a party. In fact, I’ve maintained forever that the thing that won Trump the election in his first term was the “grab them by the pussy” rant.
Trump Didn’t Win In Spite Of The Access Hollywood Tape. He Won Because Of It.
In fact, I would bet good money that Republicans could pass a resolution stating that women like being raped and Jillian Michaels would still vote for them.
Junior’s response to this was that, unlike the Left, the Right has many diverse viewpoints, claiming “we still have that discourse, we have those disagreements and we move on.”
While the idea that we don’t have a whole lot of disagreements is patently absurd, I do think it’s fair to say that we could probably all unite behind “women don’t want to be raped,” “the Holocaust happened,” and “Hitler was bad.” And as much as we may fight about healthcare, foreign policy and other issues, I do think we could also all probably agree that “it’s bad to stab someone in the face for no reason,” that “Ted Bundy was not a fabulous humanitarian” and other relatively obvious moral stances.
As mentioned, Fuentes is set to appear on Louder With Crowder this week. According to Fuentes, he was previously “banned” from the show by a producer who reportedly said they should invite everyone but him. Somehow I doubt that Fuentes’s comments about rape were an issue for Crowder, who has a history of domestic violence and himself once said, “It’s always the blue haired would-be lesbian feminist who claimed they’re raped. As far as I know, not one Victoria Secret model has been raped.”
For what it’s worth, Victoria’s Secret model Karen Mulder quite famously came out and said she had been raped by multiple men throughout her career as a model, including Prince Albert of Monaco. The first person to come forward as having been raped by Bill Cosby was Playboy model Victoria Valentino, and several models including “World’s First Supermodel” Janice Dickinson, came forward later. Beverly Johnson also accused Cosby of raping her.
But yeah, I don’t think that Crowder is going to be too bothered by Fuentes’s statements about rape.
Piers Morgan, I will say, might. In fact, while I hate to say it because I can’t stand him for a lot of reasons, there have been many times when he has been significantly better at holding shitty people from the Right accountable for their words and actions than a lot of other journalists. That being said, interviewing Fuentes for two hours, regardless of how it goes, brings his bullshit into the realm of “reasonable debate,” and thus will help him more than hurt him.
For his own part, Fuentes is now trying to claim that he’s not actually all that extreme and that the perception that he is a racist, antisemitic misogynist white supremacist is due to campaigns against him by sites like Right Wing Watch, which literally does nothing other than quote him directly.
Via Right Wing Watch:
“I was not really controversial when I got started,” Fuentes insisted. “I didn’t really say anything that was that out there, but I was saying that Israel is not our ally, so they put somebody on me. In this case, it was Jared Holt at Right Wing Watch. Right Wing Watch is a subsidiary of People For the American Way, which is a [George] Soros-funded nonprofit. So, this guy would watch my show every night—he was paid to do this, it’s his job—and he was paid to look for every time I said anything controversial—anything that sounded controversial, any joke that sounded offensive—and his job was then to clip what sounded bad, post it on Twitter, and say that represented that I’m a white nationalist, I’m an extremist, neo-Nazi, Christian fanatic.”
For what it’s worth, no, he was most certainly not just criticizing Israel out of humanitarian concerns or anything like that — he was literally praising Hitler on a regular basis and saying horrific things about Jewish people that had absolutely nothing to do with Israel or any kind of foreign policy issues. I know there are a whole lot of people out there who like to pretend that there is not a difference between these things now, but I’d like to think that most are capable of parsing that one out, especially now.
“And this has taken place over the course of 10 years,” Fuentes continued. “Ever since I was 18 years old, this is what I have been subjected to. And after 10 years, you get a profile as all your worst clips, all the things that could sound bad, all those things have been compiled over your entire career and then they make you out to be a fanatic, a nut job, a hateful person. And so that’s how I got the reputation as a white supremacist, white nationalist, all of the above.”
I have been writing on the internet and occasionally appearing on podcasts and livestreams and what have you for over 10 years as well. But you can search and search and search and you will not find one instance in which I said or wrote anything akin to “We love Hitler in a Christian way, you freak. Not in a gay way. In like an awesome way, OK? In like a ‘we love Trump’ way, you fucking liberal.” or “Women lose again! Your body, OUR CHOICE. that ceiling is made out of BRICK!,” or “I totally see myself accidentally killing my wife ’cause I just get mad,” or “’They had to drink out of a different water fountain,’ big fucking deal,” about Jim Crow laws. “‘Oh no, they had to go to different schools. Their water fountain in that famous picture was worse.’ Who cares? Grow up, drink out of the fucking water fountain. It’s water, it’s the same. Even it was bad, who cares. We all agree, it’s better for them, it’s better for us. It’s better in general.”
Incredible, right? Not one sentiment even close to any of that. Why? Because I’m not a crazed neo-Nazi white supremacist or a misogynist, and those are only things you say if you are one. It’s not that hard.
The fact is, the Right doesn’t want to fully condemn Fuentes because they want the votes he brings in — and he knows this and brags about it. They know they need that incel vote, that angry 18 to 35 white male vote. They need it and want it a lot more than they need the Jillian Michaels’s vote, which they can count on getting anyway. It’s also pretty likely that Don Junior and others agree with most of the things he says, anyway. (Or at least those things don’t bother them all that much.)
In another lifetime, I might have thought to myself, “In a way, this is good, because it will repulse people so deeply that they’ll vote against Republicans as a result.” I am no longer quite so naïve about people’s threshold for repulsive behavior. We do have to worry about this effort to normalize people like Fuentes, and we have to at least make it as unpleasant and awkward for the Right to do so as humanly possible — and we should use it to mobilize our own voters. It’s up to us to keep it from spreading, because we’re sure as hell not getting any help from anywhere else.
OPEN THREAD.
[Mediaite / Right Wing Watch]
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