The New Yorker:

The pundit’s contrarianism has swerved into openly racist and antisemitic tropes. What does his rise mean for the future of MAGA media?

By Jason Zengerle

In October, a few days before Halloween, Tucker Carlson invited Nick Fuentes to his home in rural Maine. For months, the two right-wing media stars had been savaging each other on their respective platforms. On “The Tucker Carlson Show,” one of the top-ranked conservative political podcasts in the country, Carlson had called Fuentes a “weird little gay kid in his basement” and suggested that he was being used as a pawn by sinister, possibly government-controlled forces. “I have noticed that his targets are all people who are sincere, non-crazy, non-hateful opponents of neocon politics,” Carlson said. “He is clearly part of a campaign to discredit non-crazy right voices.”

Fuentes, on his late-night streaming show, “America First,” which averages about five hundred thousand viewers on Rumble, had alleged that it was Carlson, in fact, who was the deep-state agent, unspooling a baroque conspiracy theory in which Carlson has worked as a C.I.A. asset since college. “Everybody’s calling everybody else a Fed, but I think this one’s pretty cut-and-dry,” Fuentes said. “Who’s the C.I.A. cutout? Who’s the poseur? Who is America? I am America!” Addressing Carlson, he added, “You disgust me. But, seriously, you are filth.”

The reasons for the mutual animus weren’t entirely clear. At twenty-seven, Fuentes was arguably America’s most prominent white nationalist—someone who was forthright about, and seemingly proud of, his bigotry. Summing up his core political beliefs last year, he said, “Jews are running society. Women need to shut the fuck up. Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part. And we would live in paradise. It’s that simple.” On another occasion, he said, “We have to go a little bit further than to say something’s up with the Zionists or Israel. It’s not Israel. It is the Jews.” 

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