Nick Fuentes, the notorious online white nationalist and white supremacist, recently came back into the spotlight after an interview with Tucker Carlson that caused a major rift on the MAGA right. Tom Joscelyn, former senior professional staffer on the J6 Committee, breaks it down for us.
Fuentes has been around for a while, and he’s been part of the MAGA movement for a while, including on January 6th when he was outside the US Capitol, inciting the crowd against Vice President Pence and even telling people they should ignore the barriers and ignore the cops, and that they were taking the Capitol.
Later on, he said that the the storming of the Capitol was “fucking awesome.” He was never charged with any crimes for January 6th, but several of his followers were charged and convicted, including some who actually did enter the Capitol that day. Fuentes didn’t. The next year, in 2022, Trump embraced Fuentes himself.
Trump invited Kanye West and Nick Fuentes to Mar-A-Lago for a dinner, and Trump claimed that he didn’t know who Kanye West’s guests were, didn’t know who Nick Fuentes was. Trump certainly should have known the crowd that he was inviting to Mar-A-Lago. This is not a new problem because Donald Trump invited these people into the MAGA coalition throughout his entire political run, going back to 2015.
This is the online crowd that he formed as part of his base, and he consistently appeals to them. And in fact, and once he was inaugurated for a second time as president, he issued sweeping commutations for all the January 6th convicts and defendants, including pardoning several of the Groypers —these are the followers of Nick Fuentes—for their actions on January 6th.
So this is going to be an ongoing issue, and the right has just begun to grapple with the ramifications of Donald Trump welcoming white nationalists into his coalition.
