3 days ago
Conservative influencers accuse each other of not being racist enough
As President Trump's base begins to view him as a lame duck, a familiar dynamic is taking hold: Like gangs battling over physical turf, prominent Trump supporters are jockeying for a bigger slice of the MAGA influencer economy.
The problem? Without any institutional gatekeeping, the only way to rise is to drag someone else down. Think of crabs in a bucket, but everyone is livestreaming.
Enter Nick Fuentes: white nationalist, mascot to incels and professional radioactive embarrassment. You may remember him from that cursed Mar-a-Lago dinner with Trump and Kanye West — a meal that looked less like a political summit and more like the world's worst episode of 'Celebrity Rehab.'
Lately, Fuentes has been venting his spleen at Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Vice President JD Vance — the golden children of the 'new New Righ,' and, in at least one case, a possible 2028 Republican presidential contender.
Fuentes's tone is familiar: The bitter whine of a true believer watching the tourists cash in.
In a recent podcast with Owens, Carlson (my former boss at The Daily Caller) dismissed Fuentes as a 'weird little gay kid in his basement in Chicago.' (For what it's worth, Fuentes says he's not gay, just involuntarily celibate — a distinction that seems to matter a lot to him.)
Fuentes responded with his usual cocktail of resentment and delusional self-mythologizing. Tucker, he noted, is an heir to a TV dinner dynasty, a product of boarding schools and the offspring of a Reagan-era bureaucrat.
'Now he's going to be the spokesperson for all white America?' Fuentes scoffed. 'Now he's gonna roll up his sleeves [and act like], 'I just like to hunt and fish in my log cabin. I care about Klarna and credit card debt.''
Fuentes — never one to miss an opportunity for aggrieved autobiography — then proclaimed himself the real voice of disaffected white America. A 'precocious' college student, red-pilled by Trump, punished for asking the 'hard questions' about Israel years before Tucker and Owens got around to it.
Picture Joan of Arc, but with a ring light.
From there, the accusations flew: Carlson is allegedly a CIA brat (his father was a journalist and a diplomat, but that's the rumor they spread), a neocon plant (thanks to his stint at the Weekly Standard) and a phony populist who didn't 'discover' working-class politics until it polled well on YouTube.
Even Richard Spencer — an embittered former poster boy and has-been of the alt-right — weighed in, accusing Carlson and company of playing footsie with white nationalism without the courage to actually own it. It's an updated version of the Southern Strategy, he said — skip the racial slurs, just talk about welfare queens and school buses.
Owens got the Fuentes treatment, too. According to Fuentes, she parlayed her identity into a DEI sinecure at Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire, married rich and now thinks she's the voice of Middle America.
As for Vance, Fuentes dismissed him as a man who couldn't even marry a white, much less represent whites. 'He named his kid Vivek,' Fuentes said — as if naming a child something not pulled from a Confederate military roster was an act of betrayal.
Ordinarily, this would be dismissed as garden-variety internet bile — petty, performative and deeply online. But some of these figures under attack are poised to inherit the right, provided they can strike the balance between MAGA street cred and polished respectability — a line the 'original' racists don't want to allow them to walk.
The underlying grievance is that folks like Carlson, Owens and Vance aren't truly committed. They haven't suffered for the cause, haven't been canceled, deplatformed or disgraced. In other words, they haven't paid their dues.
To them — Fuentes leads a group of white nationalist activists called Groypers — Tucker is stealing material from the ideological underground. Owens is an opportunist who packaged her politics for maximum virality. Vance is a convert who doesn't practice what he preaches.
It's the old punk-rock grievance: we were here first, and now you're rich because you cleaned up a bit and added background vocals.
I'm left wondering — do they have a point?
To paraphrase a now-cliched expression: No, you do not, under any circumstances, 'gotta hand it to' Fuentes and Spencer. Still, there's a kind of logic that says authentically embracing the darkness is more 'honest' than winking at it.
The ideologies peddled by Fuentes and Spencer are repugnant. Their whining is not noble, and their martyrdom is not real.
But they have sniffed out a core truth about the MAGA movement: It is populated by rich kids cosplaying as working-class saviors (in between Fox News hits and Turning Point Action panels).
What offends the out-and-proud racists is the feeling that the populist right has been taken over by influencers with soft hands and trust funds, who pretend that they speak for the broken white working class.
But this isn't primarily a civil war over principles (as twisted as some of those principles may be) — it's brand warfare between the purists and the polished. The former are furious that the grift they helped build now belongs to better-looking influencers with more money and nicer lighting.
