The American political thesis is that robust debate allows the best ideas to rise on their merits and the weaker ideas to fail on their illuminated fallacies. Unfortunately, we must sometimes debate those with abhorrent viewpoints in order to win the contract in the marketplace of ideas.
Nick Fuentes is such a person. A white supremacist and Nazi sympathizer, Fuentes must be debated not because he has an innate right to be publicly debated (the First Amendment protects speakers against government censorship, but it does not require their access to the airwaves). Rather, Fuentes must be debated because his extremist views are rapidly growing in support among young men.
Some commentators, such as Fox News’s Mark Levin, argue that Fuentes should simply be deplatformed or “canceled.” That is to say, denied any engagement. These aspirations are understandable but misplaced. Fuentes has gained growing support not from his recent interview with Tucker Carlson, though that interview has plainly boosted his recognition, but from his own podcast. He didn’t need the cable news networks or Carlson to build up that podcast. And the plainest evidence that canceling Fuentes wouldn’t work is delivered by the fact that he built out his podcast from obscurity. Ignoring Fuentes, now, at the height of his fame, won’t weaken him. It will only reinforce Fuentes’s false contention that he is struggling courageously against an establishment that fears his truth.
While Carlson’s podcast interview technique has centered on conciliatory discussion, the putrid quality of Fuentes’s ideas means that he plainly requires more robust confrontation. Here are three examples of where and how that might be done.
Example 1, on the Holocaust
Fuentes has repeatedly discounted evidence of the Nazi Germany Holocaust, Adolf Hitler’s industrial murder machine against Jews, the physically and mentally disabled, Romani people, and other perceived undesirables. While Fuentes now says he accepts that the Holocaust happened, he has repeatedly questioned its scale and brutality.
His strategy here is to question the technical evidence of specific elements of the Nazi extermination machine, thus intending to draw skepticism against its broader whole. Questioning the death camp crematoriums used to disintegrate gassed victims, for example, Fuentes says, “These are small crematoriums; they fit like one person each. It’s just basic math.” He has also suggested that the history of the Holocaust is defined by “Atrocity propaganda” and has deflected its exigent moral questions into a broader discussion of Jewish political identity.
How to repudiate these arguments? Challenge Fuentes and his followers to visit Auschwitz and talk to survivors. If necessary, raise the funds to pay for them to go. Tell them to read about Anne Frank, a 15-year-old who spent time there before dying in another camp. As anyone who has been to Auschwitz will attest, there is a profoundly morose aura to this Polish death camp (one that utterly deconstructs the positive “aura” Fuentes has ascribed to Hitler). Auschwitz saw more than one million innocent people walk in and never walk out. But the specific counterpoints to Fuentes’s Holocaust denialism is clear: what about the evidence of destroyed gas chambers and crematoria? What about the witness testimonies by survivors and guards alike? What about the meticulous records of cattle trains that transported victims across Europe?
Moreover, at a basic level of masculinity, Fuentes and his Gen-Z supporters could be asked why they believe the Waffen-SS soldiers who dragged families out of ghettos of despair, shot many, and threw the rest into factories of death are inspiring? Why are they more inspiring than the Americans who smashed those Nazis apart to free nations and end the taking of innocent life?
Example 2, on Hitler
Fuentes previously praised Adolf Hitler with glee. He now simply insists Hitler must be judged more positively as a “product of his time and his moment.”
Judged solely by “math,” a metric Fuentes fondly likes to reference, Hitler’s 1,000-year empire was only 1.2% successful. It lasted from 1933 to 1945, or 988 years less than it was supposed to. And while Hitler’s recovery of the 1930s German economy was robust, as Adam Tooze has extensively documented, it relied upon grave authoritarianism, near-total disregard for future economic stability, and the unyielding pursuit of racist conquest.
Fuentes’s supporters should be challenged to ask why Hitler’s record for Germans, and the tens of millions of deaths and terrible misery he created, are markers of success. Challenging their claims of independent free spirit, they should also be asked whether they find cause in a regime that subordinated all viewpoints below the authority of one, his immorality aside, very flawed leader.
Example 3, on America
Fuentes says, “When I say the U.S. is the great Satan, I mean our military our state department, the government, our companies, our NGOs and multinational corporations, they’re spreading sin, they’re spreading decadence, they’re spreading liberalism, they’re spreading evil and death and destruction around the world. And so, in so far as Russia is opposed to the hegemony of the American regime, and I am opposed to the American regime then that sort-of makes us allies.”
Well, whose model has served whom better? Who lives better? American per capita GDP was $86,000 in 2024, and Russian per capita GDP was $14,900. America’s democracy endures sometimes tough social debates, such as that involving Fuentes. But Russia exists as an endemically corrupt kleptocracy in which anti-government figures such as Fuentes simply fly out of windows. History and data prove that the U.S., while flawed, has done more for the advancement of human well-being, peace, freedom, and prosperity since 1945 than any other country in history. In contrast, Russian glory now finds its match in the struggle of hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers to take a single town in a country far smaller and economically weaker than its own.
TRUMP’S MIDDLING EFFORT TO STRENGTHEN THE MILITARY
The basic point remains. Fuentes has a growing following. Ignoring him or seeking to “cancel” him will only fuel his rise. He does not deserve prime-time attention all the time, but he must be confronted directly on his ideas.
Truly tested in the crucible of American debate, those ideas will wither like those of David Duke.
