No Stable Sense of Self

The contradictory personas that fuel Nick Fuentes' appeal

On Monday, the hard-right political commentator Nick Fuentes appeared on Piers Morgan’s YouTube programme Uncensored. Introducing Fuentes, Morgan told his viewers: “The reason you’re hearing about him is because he’s popular.”

That’s an understatement. Over the past several months, culminating in an interview with Tucker Carlson in November, Fuentes has become one of the most visible figures in the online right. He has more than a million followers on X and a devoted audience of young men — nicknamed Groypers — who parrot his racist, antisemitic and misogynistic ideas, interspersed with rhetoric about “traditional values”.

Carlson pulled punches during his interview with Fuentes, and was rightly criticised for it — so Morgan vowed to press him harder. During the conversation, which has already been viewed more than two million times on YouTube, Fuentes openly embraced his racist and misogynistic beliefs, while playing coy about his antisemitism in ways familiar to anyone who has followed his rise.

But what the interview did demonstrate is the method he has used to fuel his influence.

Fuentes survives on contradiction. His constant shape-shifting is the very thing that has allowed him to build such a large audience.

The 27-year-old has clearly made an effort to craft a slick style, wearing a suit and tie and speaking in short lines designed to be clipped and shared online. He is fluent and quick, and unlike many members of his generation, he speaks in full sentences, with no discourse markers such as “like,” “um,” or “you know”.

But he also wants to be cool — and this creates a problem for him. Racism, despite the best efforts of online figures like Fuentes, is scorned by most Americans as an ugly, crude and low-status view. That is the image Fuentes is trying to escape, even as he promotes the ideas that produce it. At one point during his interview with Morgan, Fuentes said that he thinks Hitler is cool, and that “I’m tired of pretending he’s not”.

But when Morgan pressed him, Fuentes attempted to resolve the contradiction by saying “everyone is racist”.

And so, Fuentes works hard to show that he is not a low-status racist, but a sophisticated one who is both aware of crime statistics yet remains tolerant in his personal life. He tells his viewers to avoid black people but insists that he has black and Jewish friends and fans. He brings up that his best friend in first grade was black, and that his parents ran a company where they taught people how to shoot guns where “most of the clients were black”.

The moral charge of racism does not bother him. The suggestion that he belongs to a lower rank of backwards bigots does.

He showed this pattern in small moments throughout the interview. Morgan pressed Fuentes on a story he has told about his father, who said that chain restaurants like Applebee’s and Olive Garden were “black fare”. Fuentes called it a “new low” and acted offended at the idea that his father might be racist. Yet he also proudly describes himself as racist. So which is it for Fuentes — is racism bad or good? Why is the label acceptable for him but unacceptable for his father?

His stance seems to be: “I’m not a racist and it’s good that I am”.

When questioned, Fuentes said that many of his most extreme lines are jokes or memes. He said he is often “hyperbolic”. He said he plays “devil’s advocate for the fun of it”. He said these moments are for a small in-group of fans who understand the insider humour. But seconds later he said that he could never run for office because he is a “truth teller”. He claims to offend people because he says what others are afraid to say. This creates another contradiction. He wants the benefits of both identities — the funny, jocular host and the brave truth teller — without the costs of either.

He also cast himself to Morgan as the one real person in American politics. “Everyone else is performative,” he said. “I am real.” But nothing in the interview suggested a single stable self. His roles changed to fit the moment.

For example, he presented himself as a defender of “family values” and “Christian values”, proclaiming that men and women are equal before God. But he went on to say that women should not have equal rights under the law. The interview did not show a consistent worldview. It showed a man who switches frames in order to protect his image to his followers.

Another revealing moment came when Morgan asked Fuentes a simple question: how many Jews does he believe were murdered in the Holocaust? Fuentes smirked and said “seven million” or “eight million” or “maybe more, we are learning all the time”. But when Morgan asked if he accepted the figure of six million deaths, Fuentes replied that it could be “one hundred times more than that”.

This was, of course, a dog whistle to Fuentes’ Groyper fans. Many of his listeners deny the reality of the Holocaust or claim the numbers are fabricated. His response was meant to excite that audience while still giving him an escape hatch in the interview. Fuentes could say that he accepted the numbers, and he could also hint that the numbers are suspect. It was another use of his two-persona strategy.

Overall, Fuentes’ latest interview will not change the minds of his closest followers. But it exposed the tension at the centre of his appeal.

Fuentes’s act depends on constant motion. As long as he can switch personas faster than interviewers can pin him down, the performance will continue to work online. But the Morgan interview showed the limits of that strategy. In longer formats, the contradictions pile up — and the audience he has cultivated will finally see what has been in plain sight all along.

Beneath the glib performance is a childish young man who doesn’t adhere to the very ideology he tells his audience to embrace.

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This article was originally published in the Times of London under the title “Nick Fuentes unwittingly revealed the trick to his fame. It will be his undoing.”