The New Yorker:

The rise of the white-nationalist streamer should worry us even more than it already does.

By Jay Caspian Kang

Nick Fuentes, a far-right streamer who first got national attention after he attended the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, has recently made another reëntry into the national discourse, after he was interviewed, late last month, by Tucker Carlson. From one point of view, Fuentes is simply the latest in an increasingly long line of internet-coded demagogues who have threatened to tear the Republican Party apart and take it in a darker, more bigoted direction. Much has already been written about Fuentes’s appearance on “The Tucker Carlson Show,” and what it signals about the state of the right. If someone as prominent and connected as Carlson was willing to platform Fuentes—a white nationalist, misogynist, and antisemite who has expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler and skepticism about the Holocaust—what does that mean for the future of the Republican Party?

These are certainly questions worth asking as the right mulls its potential post-Trump options, and they are being hashed out by those who hope to shape the movement’s future. (The influential Heritage Foundation, for instance, is currently at war with itself, after its president defended Carlson’s interview with Fuentes.) But there are other questions we need to ask, too. When we consider a figure like Fuentes, we have to grapple with his seemingly outsized popularity. Is he unearthing a population of young men who have always felt the way he does? Or is he someone whose clout actually depends on attention from those with wider audiences—from Carlson, yes, but also from people like me, in the national press? Put differently, is he simply the streaming era’s version of the largely inconsequential Richard Spencer, another white nationalist and avatar of the alt-right (the term already feels dated), who titillated the media more than a decade ago? And if Fuentes is truly managing to build a significant audience outside those mainstream channels, how is he doing so?

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