Nick Fuentes Is the GOP’s Latest Frankenstein Monster

If you are in the mood for post-Halloween goosebumps, you could watch Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein, the latest cinematic adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic 1818 gothic novel. Alternatively, you could read up on the latest infighting over bigotry in the Republican Party.

The effect of the two experiences is remarkably similar. Shelley had originally written the book as a lark while vacationing in Geneva with her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and some friends (including Lord Byron). The group loved literary competitions, one of which led Percy Shelley to compose a timeless poem, “Ozymandias,” in 10 minutes. Not to be outdone, Mary Shelley, prompted by a competition to craft the best horror story, created her equally undying masterpiece.

Shelley was only 18 when she started writing her tale of Victor Frankenstein, the mad scientist who defies the laws of nature by stitching together dismembered parts of corpses to create new life. The work’s immortality lies in the perennial truth at its heart: The modern world has had many Victor Frankensteins who have unleashed monsters they could not control.

That brings me to the GOP in 2025. The party is grappling with its own Frankenstein monster, in the form of 27-year-old podcaster Nick Fuentes.

To say Fuentes is a bigot would be an understatement. He’s a Holocaust denier, a proud antisemite, and an avowed white nationalist. He is also someone with a massive following on the right. Indeed, in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Fuentes might well be the most popular influencer among young right-wing Americans. Fuentes’s fans, known as “Groypers,” are a loud presence in Republican circles, helping push groups such as Kirk’s Turning Points USA to become more overtly white nationalist.

Last Monday, Tucker Carlson, himself someone who has long flirted with white supremacists, interviewed Fuentes on his online show. It reached an enormous audience, with at least 15 million views on X and nearly 5 million views on YouTube.

The Carlson interview caused a firestorm on the right. While it was criticized by figures such as Senator Mitch McConnell and Senator Ted Cruz, there was a much more equivocal response by Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, perhaps the preeminent GOP think tank and the progenitor of the Project 2025 agenda which has guided the Trump administration. As The New York Times notes, Roberts “defended Mr. Carlson in a video statement, saying that his critics were ‘sowing division’ and that he would ‘always be a close friend’ to the conservative think tank.” Roberts also attacked the “globalist class” and “venomous coalition” which he claimed were serving “someone else’s agenda.” In the context of the debate over Fuentes, these words are clearly laced with antisemitic innuendo. (Roberts later reassigned some Heritage staffers in the wake of a backlash to his comments.)

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Domenic Green both expressed anxiety about the mainstreaming of bigotry and tried to minimize the issue. According to Green, “The right has a racism problem. This doesn’t mean that the Trump voter coalition is full of racists. Rather, the racism is concentrated in a faction of MAGA’s online leadership.”

Green’s argument amounts to claiming that right-wing racists are a few bad apples ruining an otherwise healthy movement. This is demonstrably false.

As it happens, Fuentes offered a more accurate and perceptive account of the relationship between the mainstream right and white nationalism in his interview with Carlson. Fuentes revealed that as a teenager he was a big fan of the right-wing radio host and Fox News mainstay Mark Levin. Fuentes added,

I’ll never forget one show. He goes live and he says, America is becoming a majority non-white country. Does anybody think that’s a good idea? I was thinking to myself, yeah, that actually doesn’t sound so good. I didn’t really even think that America is becoming a majority a minority like that.

Probing this story, Carlson asked, with gobsmacked faux-bewilderment, “Wait, so you were radicalized on race by Mark Levin?” Fuentes responded, “He planted the seed, at least.”

Of course, now Levin and Fuentes are bitter foes, divided on the issue of Israel. Fuentes rejects the American alliance with Israel both on antisemitic and nationalist grounds, seeing it as inconsistent with America First.

On his show, Fuentes said of Levin, Josh Hammer, and Laura Loomer (all Jewish right-wingers who support Israel): “You will never be American. Why don’t you unlikable, despicable pieces of shit get the fuck out of America and go to Israel.” For his part, Levin has called for Carlson and Fuentes to be canceled and de-platformed.

Levin can lambast Fuentes all he wants, but that doesn’t lessen he fact that he is the Victor Frankenstein who helped create this monster. Nor is Levin alone: Going back to the “Southern strategy” developed by right-wing political operatives in the 1960s, the right has had many Victor Frankensteins: figures such as Kevin Phillips, Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, and Steve Bannon. They’ve all worked diligently in their labs to meld together strands of racist resentment and xenophobic nationalism in order to create a beast that could win an election.

Lee Atwater explained the strategy in a notorious 1981 interview:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

Atwater flourished in the golden age of dog-whistle politics, when racism still needed to be partly disguised by lofty verbiage. But we’re living in a more vulgar and less subtle era. It turned out that the “abstract” language of “states’ rights” no longer worked to control the Monster. The Monster had a life of its own and wanted to scream out the forbidden racial slurs, to give vent to the raw bigotry that is the heart of this politics. This rejection of abstraction explains why Nick Fuentes is a rising star on the right.

Donald Trump has also been central in the process of awakening the Monster. His political success has been based on his understanding that dog-whistles won’t cut it anymore. The monster needs to hear loud appeals to bigotry, like the lie that Barack Obama was not born in America and the promise to protect America from “Mexican rapists.”

As young as Nick Fuentes is, he has been intertwined with Trump for nearly a decade. In 2017, Fuentes was an attendee at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where neo-Nazis and Klansmen marched to the slogan “Jews will not replace us.” Trump was notoriously reluctant to defend the event, saying there were “very fine people on both sides” of the rally and the protest against it. In 2022, Trump dined with Fuentes and the equally antisemitic musician Kanye West. That year, PBS asked 57 Republican lawmakers if they disapproved of Trump’s meeting with Fuentes. Most refused to respond to the query, including members of Congress such as Mike Johnson (now the speaker of the House), Steve Scalise, Elise Stefanik, Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, Chuck Grassley, Josh Hawley, Rand Paul, and Mike Lee. In 2024, JD Vance said he liked the fact that Trump is willing to “talk to anybody,” including Fuentes.

Fuentes has a keen sense of his opponents’ weaknesses, so he has lately taken to bullying Vance, especially for having an Indian American Hindu wife, Usha Vance. On a recent episode of his program, Fuentes referred to Vance as “literally a fat, gay, race traitor who married a jееt [sic].” Responding to Groyper complaints about his wife, Vance has made the false claim she is “agnostic” (his earlier accounts emphasized her piety) and also expressed the hope that she could convert to Catholicism.

Vance had a previous spat with Fuentes in August 2024, where he made a carefully guarded disavowal on Meet the Press. Vance said Fuentes was

A total loser. Certainly, I disavow him. But if you ask me what I care more about, is it a person attacking me personally, or is it government policy that discriminates based on race? That’s what I really worry about is bad government policy that harms people based on their immutable characteristics. Look, a lot of losers are going to attack me and attack my family.

This supposed disavowal is a classic case of Vance plumping himself as a tough guy while being a coward. Vance, weasel that he is, frames the dispute with Fuentes as merely a personal matter of someone criticizing his family (as if the attacks weren’t based on a racism that isn’t just personal but has political and social importance). Then he claims that this personal dispute is less important than right-wing unity against the real foe, affirmative action (which he cast as racism). This appeal to right-wing unity in the larger battle against anti-racism is also the underlying logic of his stout defense last month of Republican officials who had been caught spreading racist, misogynist, and homophobic messages on a group chat.

Vance’s unwillingness to fight Groypers and other young Republican racists is rooted in simple cold calculation. In his bones, Vance knows that Fuentes and his followers are the future of the Republican. To win the presidential nomination in 2028, Vance will have to have the racists on board.

Victor Frankenstein discovered that the Monster, hideous as he was, was hard to destroy. How can a maker kill his creation? As the Monster grew in terrifying power, his maker learned to cower in fear, just as Vance now trembles.