Alt-right podcaster Nick Fuentes , host of his eponymous show America First is the leader of the “Groyper” movement, which consists largely of young, white, Christian men who believe that they have been wronged by the world, by the government, by women, by ethnic minorities, by Jewish people, and by many others.
In a recent conversation I had with a well-meaning friend, I learned just how far the rot of Nick Fuentes’ ideology has penetrated young men. Holocaust denial, a tenet of the Groyper worldview, has become so commonplace, especially among young men, that it is now somewhat normal to believe that less than 300,000 Jews were murdered during the Holocaust. And to be clear, claiming that 270,000 Jews were murdered, as opposed to the 6 million number that has been agreed upon by historians, scholars, and survivors, is to deny the sheer atrocity of the Holocaust and what it did to the Jewish people. There were approximately 9.5 million Jews living in Europe before World War II [1]. After the war, that number was less than 3.8 million [2]. If only 270,000 Jews died in the Holocaust, where did the rest of the over 5 million of them go?
The 6 million figure is supported by extensive evidence, including: Nazi documentation, testimonies and records from the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials, research from the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, camp records, mass grave discoveries, and analyses of pre-war populations, emigration data, and post-war survivor counts. Fuentes himself recently admitted on Piers Morgan’s show that he believes the commonly accepted figure, stating when asked, “I’m thinking, maybe 7 million. What’s the number, 7, 6 million? Something like that.” He later added, “It could even be higher. It’s at least 6 million. It could be 100 times that.” While that may be what he believes, in the same 2-hour interview, Fuentes proceeded to describe holocaust education as “propaganda” and a “political narrative” used to target Christianity. It is impossible to deny that that kind of rhetoric, the kind that actively pits Jews against Christians, leads to widespread Holocaust denial, even if Fuentes himself doesn’t actively deny it.
And that is the problem with the rhetoric of Nick Fuentes. It is impossible to ascertain what he actually believes, but by nature of his being willing to say anything to get clicks, he is recruiting predominantly young, white, Christian men into a movement that is either predicated on Fuentes lying to his audience or his actually being unabashedly hateful and ignorant. Either way, it is my opinion that we don’t owe Nick Fuentes or those like him the grace of discerning whether or not each individual thing they say is a farce or not. It is far too easy for people to hide behind the guise of comedy in order to say things that they wouldn’t have the gall to say otherwise, and Fuentes is not automatically washed of his sins because he laughs after he says something harmful.
Fuentes can say in a moment of personal clarity on Piers Morgan’s show, “He [A reporter at The Free Press] is right about the two personas, and I think that everybody understands this on some level. On my show I make jokes and I use rhetoric and I’m hyperbolic, because for a long time I had an audience that was small on these like dissident platforms.” But then proceeds to say that he stands by his statement that, “I want white kids, and I don’t want my white kids bringing home black people to marry. It’s racial for me. And call me racist, ‘oh very Christan of you’, I don’t give a fuck.” Someone who is willing to admit to being a racist on live TV certainly has audacity, but that audacity does not make him worth listening to.
For someone who claims that his Catholic faith is central to his life, Fuentes is quick to announce that he thinks only a “liberal ideologue” would believe that human beings are part of a brotherhood by nature of our being created in the image of God with the purpose of serving Him and knowing Him better. Instead, on Piers Morgan’s show, Fuentes said, “And I’m not a liberal ideologue that says that over time and with enough education we’re all going to see this great brotherhood where we’re colorblind and everybody’s the same.” And of course, he is technically correct that every person is unique, created to be who they are and no one else. However, from the book of Genesis we Christians get perhaps one of the most quoted lines of all time, where it is revealed that, “God created mankind in his image; in the image of God, he created them; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). All of mankind is created in the image of God, and in the eyes of God everyone shares the same dignity, the same immortal soul, and the same relation to the divine. In The Epistle of Paul, the Apostle to the Colossians, Saint Paul says, “[b]ut now you must put them all away: anger, fury, malice, slander, and obscene language out of your mouths” (Colossians 3:8). As professed Christians, we are directed not to expend energy being hateful and divisive, but rather we are called to put that all aside and step into the light where Christ is all and in all. Stating that, “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,” seems to violate that commandment. To be clear, I am not in the business of revealing private sins or attempting to say that I know what is in someone’s heart. All I know is what I can see, and as a Christian I must rebuke those that misuse the Word or The Lord’s message.
When asked about why he wouldn’t debate Fuentes, the late, conservative podcaster and organizer, Charlie Kirk, said, “I personally do not give a platform to bad faith actors… They can keep on yelling at how successful we are and our big events and well over a thousand employees, but there’s a lot of jealousy out there. We build, they complain. We succeed, we win, they blame the Jews.” And that is almost a perfect summation of how Fuentes and his devotees see the world. Everything is a conspiracy, nothing can be trusted, and many of the world’s problems can be attributed to a group whom Fuentes refers to as “perfidious Jews.” The issue with conspiracy theories is that they live in the dark. That is what Kirk was referring to when he called Fuentes a “bad faith” actor. Fuentes’s theories thrive on the absence of information because that absence is a feature, not a bug. Without any clear facts, conspiracy theorists, like Fuentes, can claim that crucial details are being systematically hidden by layers and layers of agencies and individuals, like the CIA, MI6, or very commonly, Mossad. It is an easy way to never be proven wrong, because Fuentes can always revert to Cartesian doubt, claiming that every layer of any given system or government has been corrupted by “the conspiracy” and we will therefore never know that he was right all along because that information is purposefully hidden from us. All major Conservative victories are subject to this unending scrutiny from Fuentes and company, including Kirk's own Turning Point USA. which has been extremely influential in the marked rise of conservatism among young Americans, yet continues to draw ire from commentators like Candace Owens and Fuentes.
During his speech at TPUSA’s 2025 AmericaFest in Arizona, conservative political commentator, and Daily Wire co-founder, Ben Shapiro made pointed attacks against many figures on the right, including Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Fuentes himself. Shapiro opened his speech by saying, “The conservative movement is also in danger from charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle, but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty, who offer nothing but bile and despair, who seek to undermine fundamental principles of conservatism by championing enervation and grievance.” As Shapiro pointed out, many major voices on the right are all too afraid to call out and disavow the rhetoric of people like Nick Fuentes out of a misguided notion that disallowing anyone from the movement amounts to cancel culture and censorship. There is a clear difference between the cancel culture that was promulgated by the left for multiple decades, and drawing a calculated moral line of who is “on our side” and who is not. As Shapiro went on to say, “Politics is about principle, and if you are willing to sacrifice basic truth and simple principle in favor of emotional solidarity, you have betrayed your fundamental duty to the American people.” Someone who says regularly on their show, as Fuentes does, that, “Hitler was awesome. Hitler was right”, does not share the principles that are the backbone of conservatism. Showing emotional solidarity with such a person betrays a deeper moral obligation – one that supersedes the desire to keep the coalition together. The coalition cannot survive if it rots from the inside out. As Shapiro put it, “We must also be honest about what people say and do, regardless of what that means coalitionally.”
The question of whether voices in the conservative movement are a net good is a question of if they are conducting themselves with integrity and how they treat those who share their space. When the radicals are at the gates, and those radicals take the shape of hatred filled race mongers, it is the mark of a failing coalition to let them in. To be a conservative means having respect for both natural truth and biblical norms, and putting aside grievance politics in favor of moral decency. If we must accept the rhetoric of people like Nick Fuentes as part of the movement in order to win, then this is a movement that has abandoned its principles and no longer deserves to win or call itself conservative.
End Notes:
[1] United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 2023. “Documenting Numbers of Victims of the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution.” Holocaust Encyclopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. September 26, 2023. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/documenting-numbers-of-victims-of-the-holocaust-and-nazi-persecution.
[2] United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 2019. “Remaining Jewish Population of Europe in 1945.” Holocaust Encyclopedia. 2019. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/remaining-jewish-population-of-europe-in-1945.