Fuentes Clash Exposes Deeper Struggle on The American Right

The latest episode of Makin Sense* used a recent Tucker Carlson interview with Nick Fuentes as a framework with which to look at a much bigger fight inside American conservatism. Fuentes is a far-right online agitator best known for explicitly ethnonationalist rhetoric, repeated antisemitic statements, and a self-styled role as a political shock figure.

*Makin Sense is the flagship podcast of The Common Sense. It airs every week featuring a panel of South Africans scattered from Washington to London, Germany and Johannesburg. The show features all the most important South African and global political and economic developments, providing insights that cannot be found anywhere else. To watch the show, click here.

The panel argued that Fuentes is not simply another loud voice on the fringe but a figure whose views are overtly hostile to core conservative ideas.

Panellist Richard Tren, the director of the Yorktown Foundation for Freedom, a think tank in Washington, said that giving Fuentes an uncritical platform blurred the line between mainstream conservatism and extremist currents and forced a choice between defending liberal democratic norms or drifting toward a harder post democratic right.

Tren agreed that Fuentes sits completely outside conservatism and should be regarded as hostile to it. He argued that Fuentes’s behaviour has nothing in common with any part of the conservative tradition and described him as someone defined by malice and trolling rather than ideas. Tren pointed listeners to Ben Shapiro’s detailed review of Fuentes’s own statements as evidence of how extreme and offensive his positions are, concluding that Fuentes does not belong in respectable political discourse or in any community that expects basic standards of conduct.

James Myburgh, who runs BRE-DE-RE, a think tank in Germany, described Fuentes as someone who operates like a classic agent provocateur, using deliberately shocking and offensive language in a way that can only be read as destructive. Because of this pattern of behaviour, Myburgh argued that conservatives should isolate him completely and treat him as someone who must be kept outside the movement’s boundaries.

Host Gabriel Makin, executive producer at The Common Sense, placed Fuentes in a broader ideological shift. He reminded listeners that the show had previously discussed the rise of a so called woke right but argued that Fuentes represents something darker, saying that: “to borrow a great phrase, communo-fascist is probably the most accurate descriptor.”

For the panel the Fuentes debate is therefore a strategic crossroads. Their conclusion was that drawing boundaries around what conservatism can and cannot include is not censorship but self-preservation.

Click here to watch.