MAGA’s Mask-Off Moment

What the Nick Fuentes fiasco reveals about modern conservatism

The last month has been a mask-off moment for modern conservatism. From the top, the MAGA movement is making room for racists, white nationalists, and even admirers of Adolf Hitler.

In mid-October, Politico reported on leaked group chats from Young Republican leaders across the country. The participants made bigoted comments about Black and gay Americans, “joked” about Nazis and death camps, and shared white-nationalist memes.

Initially, there was reassuring accountability. The New York and Kansas chapters of the Young Republicans dissolved. Several of the chat participants were axed from jobs in state politics. Yet from the top of MAGA-world, there was a different reaction — including a shrug from the Vice President of the United States.

J.D. Vance dismissed the hateful chats — produced by adults in their twenties and thirties — as juvenile hijinks, writing that he “refuse[d] to join the pearl clutching” over the messages, which included references to Black Americans as “the watermelon people,” antigay slurs, and “jokes” about sending political opponents to “gas chambers” or “showers” that “fit the Hitler aesthetic.” Vance elaborated in a podcast, insisting: “Kids do stupid things. Especially young boys. They tell edgy, offensive jokes.” Vance said he didn’t want America to be a “country where a kid telling a stupid joke — telling a very offensive, stupid joke — is cause to ruin their lives.”

If the Vice President meant to signal that Trump’s political movement can now make room for overt racists and angry edgelords, Tucker Carlson left no doubt. He threw open the flaps and attempted to march them in the MAGA tent when he welcomed Nick Fuentes onto his streaming show on October 27th, in an appearance that has since generated more than 17 million views.

Carlson, the former Fox News host, is a prominent ally of the president; he spoke at the GOP convention on the night Donald Trump was nominated in Milwaukee. Booted from Rupert Murdoch’s empire in 2023, Carlson now streams his show on Elon Musk’s X platform, where he has hosted the likes of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán.

Fuentes, for the uninitiated, is a notorious white nationalist and a Holocaust denier who has called for “total Aryan victory.“ He’s also the leader of the “Groyper” movement — a trollish subculture of extremely online, far-right young men who are steeped in memes, misogyny, Christian nationalism, and antisemitism. Fuentes has also espoused eliminationist rhetoric, once demanding the mass-execution of non-Christians and, in particular, those he called “perfidious Jews.”

Fuentes attended the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, and he played an active role in the events of January 6, though he faced no charges. He paints himself as part of the America First movement. But in the not-distant past, he was politically radioactive. Prior to Musk’s ownership of the platform, he was deplatformed from Twitter and other social media. Even Donald Trump distanced himself from Fuentes after the rapper Kanye West brought him to dinner at Mar a Lago in 2022. (Trump insisted Fuentes was West’s uninvited guest — someone whom Trump had “never met and knew nothing about.”)

At that time, Fuentes was a political adviser to West, who would soon embark on a wildly antisemitic media blitz. Both men appeared on camera with Alex Jones during an infamous InfoWars interview in which West declared: “I like Hitler.”

In fact, just two years ago, Fuentes sparked a major political scandal in Texas after reporters revealed he’d spent a day at the offices of a top Republican political action committee. The fallout led to the dissolution of that PAC and spurred the state GOP to pass a resolution declaring it will “not associate with individuals or groups which espouse anti-Semitism.” Everyone from top politicians to major donors denounced the meeting with the Groyper leader as a terrible “blunder.”

But 2025 is proving — in more grotesque turns by the day — that the old norms no longer apply.

Carlson invited Fuentes on his show for a two-hour, face-to-face interview. The Q&A was not contentious. Carlson did not hold Fuentes’ feet to the fire for his hateful rhetoric. Instead, he treated Fuentes with deep deference. “I want to understand what you believe,” Carlson said. “I just want to stand back and let you explain it.”

The host hadn’t been hoodwinked about his guest’s profile; Carlson spoke several times to Fuentes’ reputation as a “Nazi.” He even mocked, out loud, the imagined blowback from his own critics: “Everyone’s going to be like, You’re a Nazi, just like Fuentes.”

The host attempted to differentiate his own views from those of his guest. Carlson despises the U.S. relationship with Israel, and during the show he claimed that Republicans like Sen. Ted Cruz and Ambassador Mike Huckabee suffer from a Christian Zionist “brain virus.” Carlson cast his position as “reasonable” — in contrast to Fuentes, whom he said is “always banging on about, ‘The Jews. The Jews.’”

But Carlson did not challenge Fuentes when his guest proceeded to do just that — voicing antisemitic tropes about “organized Jewry in America” or hatefully alleging that Jewish people are “unassimilable.” Fuentes also did not cloak his racism: He declared himself “pro-white” and asserted “that white people have a special heritage here in America.” Carlson again offered no pushback. Only when Fuentes revealed he’s a big “fan” of the genocidal Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin did Carlson perk up — promising to “circle back” to that topic, though he never did.

The interview gave Fuentes a platform to sanewash his movement: “We don’t want to harm anybody. We don’t want to kill anybody. We just want to put America first,” Fuentes claimed, adding: “I’m not one of those haters.” Nevermind that later in the interview Fuentes demanded violence against ICE protesters in Chicago, calling on Trump to “crush the other side” in order to “remove hope from the equation.” Or that Fuentes insisted that society is out of whack because women have “a very high estimation of themselves” — a phenomenon Fuentes called “ho-flation.”

Ultimately, the former Fox host lavished Fuentes with praise and even characterized him as the future: “You’re enormously talented. You’re more talented than I am, for sure, as a talker,” Carslon said, telling Fuentes: “You’re clearly ascendant.”

The decision to not only platform, but puff up, Fuentes has created convulsions on the right. Sen. Cruz (R-Tex.) condemned Carlson directly, as did fellow Texan congressman Dan Crenshaw, who said: “I’m glad everyone else is also waking up now to how bad of a person he is.”

But other top conservatives leapt to defend Carlson — and by extension Fuentes — as participants in a “robust debate.” That includes Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation. (Once a paragon of establishment conservatism, Heritage is now-MAGA-aligned and helped forge Trump’s Project 2025 agenda.)

Roberts posted a video on X insisting that Carlson “always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation.” Declaring that conservatives can hold diverging views on Israel, Roberts inveighed against the “globalist class,” and claimed Carlson was the victim of a “venomous coalition” whose “attempt to cancel him will fail.”

Regarding Carlson’s Groyper guest, Roberts added: “I disagree with, and even abhor, things that Nick Fuentes says. But canceling him is not the answer either. When we disagree with a person’s thoughts and opinions,” he said, “we challenge those ideas and debate.”

The video spurred the head of the foundation’s National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism to quit in protest. Mark Goldfedder posted on X that he couldn’t work “under someone who thinks Nazis are worth debating.” His resignation letter ripped into Roberts for “attacking those who object” to Carlson “as somehow un-American or disloyal, in a video replete with antisemitic tropes and dog whistles.”

Amid this blowback, the Heritage president belatedly offered a catalog of the Fuentes views that he, in fact, finds abhorrent — including Fuentes’ “musings about rape… child marriage, and abusing his potential wife.” The long list only underscored how bankrupt it is to debate someone whom Roberts acknowledges is “fomenting Jew hatred” with “incitements” that are not only “immoral and un-Christian, they risk violence.”

On Wednesday, as the controversy widened, Roberts reportedly offered a mea culpa to Heritage staff, in particular for the “venomous coalition” line. “It was not my intention to use a trope,” he said. “I should have been better.”

Roberts then retreated to a familiar refuge stance for those who get singed by their encounters with Fuentes. He claimed ignorance: “I didn’t know much about this Fuentes guy,” Roberts said. “I still don’t, which underscores the mistake.”

In normal times, such a spectacle would offer Democrats an opportunity to draw the sharpest contrast — as the party of zero tolerance for Nazism.

Yet even as the Fuentes fiasco roils the GOP, Democrats have been vexed by a parallel scandal in their own ranks. A prominent, populist Senate candidate was exposed for sporting such a troubling tattoo that he needed to declare, publicly: “I’m not a secret Nazi.”

Graham Platner, 41, is a political newcomer. He’s a swarthy ex-Marine with a gravely voice, bristly facial hair, and an attractive profile as an oyster farmer. (Less attractive: He used to be a security contractor with Blackwater.) Platner is vying to take on Maine’s incumbent GOP senator Susan Collins in 2026, in a Democratic primary field that also features the state’s current governor Janet Mills, 77.

It’s not hard to understand why many Democrats gravitated to Platner as a figure who might help the party make inroads with the white working class, and young men more broadly. Platner’s platform includes a minimum tax for billionaires and Medicare for all. And he stormed out to an early lead in the polls with support from Bernie Sanders, while riding a bevy of media profiles casting him as the new, new thing.

But that was before shirtless pictures of Platner emerged with a tattoo on his chest resembling a Totenkopf — a Nazi era skull and crossbones symbol used by SS troops who guarded Hitler’s concentration camps. (Separately, Platner was exposed as an extremely problematic Reddit poster, whose comments included insulting Black Americans and making light of sexual assault.)

Under the old norms, Platner would be back shucking oysters by now. Numerous top staffers have fled the campaign. And his former political director, Genevieve McDonald, flamed him on social media as callow and unqualified, insisting a “U.S. Senate race is not the place to grow up.”

But despite being exposed as a proverbial “milkshake duck,” Platner is plowing on — confronting his controversy with a mix of annoyance and contrition.

Working the podcast circuit, Platner has claimed he was unaware of the Nazi connotations of the tattoo — which he got with military buddies in Croatia some 18 years ago after a bout of heavy drinking. Platner said he only learned it resembled an SS symbol when he was contacted about it by the New York Times in early October. (Platner’s characterization conflicts with reporting that, more than a decade ago, he described the tattoo to a drinking buddy as “my Totenkopf.”) The problematic tattoo has now been covered up, by an image Platner describes as “some kind of Celtic knot with a dog on it.”

At least for now, Plattner’s top backers are sticking with him. That includes not only Sanders, but more mainstream Senate Democrats like Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico — all of whom have argued, in effect, that Platner should get a pass for his mistakes, on account of his military service and experiences of PTSD.

For others, including those who worked closely with Platner, making that kind of exception is moral madness — in particular when it comes to challenging Collins for arguably the most important swing seat in the ‘26 Senate contest. As Platner’s former political director McDonald put it: “We should not be having a debate about Nazi symbolism tattooed on the potentially top ticket Democrat in Maine. The fact we are even willing to entertain it shows desperation within the Party and how far we have fallen from rational thought.”

Let’s not get it twisted. The Carlson/Fuentes scandal and the Plattner affair are not equivalent. But they do connect. Across the political spectrum, there is, in fact, a desperation to activate new troves of voters. And both MAGA Republicans and progressive Democrats are fishing for support among disaffected young men, who’ve grown up in a toxic online culture that can make even the most reprehensible ideas seem edgy or ironically appealing.

Perhaps there’s some good in the evolution of our political norms, of offering grace, instead of blanket condemnation, for youthful mistakes and even adult indiscretions. But some third rails were meant to hold — as protection from a race to the political bottom. And in an era of rising authoritarianism, saying ‘No’ to any hint of Nazism should be one of them.

Tim Dickinson is the Senior Political Writer for The Contrarian