Who’s Mainstreaming Whom?

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, October 29, 2025

 

I’m never sure how to react to right-wingers who’ve awakened very belatedly to the moral and intellectual corrosion wrought by populism on their faction.

 

My instinct is to sneer at them. At best, they’re tremendously stupid. At worst, they’re tremendously selfish, having blinded themselves willfully to the vices of illiberalism until the moment they realized that the leopards intend to eat their faces too.

 

But it’s a bad instinct. Fear of being without a political tribe kept these people aligned with the rotten MAGA right for a decade; if we want to encourage them to leave, telling them up front that they won’t be welcome in any other tribe is a funny way of doing it.

 

I thought of that last night as I watched two Trump-friendly, old-school conservatives respond with horror to Tucker Carlson’s predictably chummy interview with white supremacist Nick Fuentes.

 

One of them, Dinesh D’Souza, somehow only recently figured out that Indian Americans aren’t welcome in a revanchist movement of feral nationalists. On Tuesday an alarmed D’Souza flagged the Carlson-Fuentes interview as further proof of the right getting comfortable with bigotry, noting that the late Charlie Kirk once scolded him privately for deigning to debate “vermin” like Fuentes. “One can only imagine what Charlie would say about Tucker’s butt-licking interview,” D’Souza observed.

 

Indeed, I can imagine what Charlie would say. He would say nothing—publicly, at least.

 

It’s true that Kirk was an enemy of Fuentes and his legion of so-called groypers, but it’s also true that he had begun to drift toward some of their positions before his death, including skepticism of Israel. It’s clever of D’Souza to try to leverage the moral authority that Kirk’s martyrdom granted him, but the hard truth about Charlie is that he saw where the grassroots right was headed and was tiptoeing in that direction to protect his audience share. His calculus was the same as any right-wing influencer’s: My listeners demand illiberalism, so either I’ll supply it or someone else will.

 

Kirk wouldn’t have dared anger his supporters by antagonizing Carlson or Fuentes. To the end of his life, in fact, and to the consternation of his Israel-supporting fans, he insisted on inviting Tucker to speak at Turning Point USA events. Charlie would not have won a war for young hearts and minds against the right’s sleaziest elements and he knew it, so he made sure not to fight one.

 

The other conservative to find himself shocked, shocked that gambling is going on here is Rod Dreher, a man so enamored of Orbánist authoritarianism that he moved to Hungary to be closer to it. Yesterday he posted an essay about antisemitism rising on the right that overflowed with bafflement and exasperation at how, precisely, it had come to this. Why did Carlson give Fuentes a platform, and why did he handle him with kid gloves in doing so? Why has Tucker’s buddy and nationalist protégé, J.D. Vance, not condemned the interview forcefully? “The time to find your courage, fellow conservatives and Christians, and speak out against this stuff, is NOW,” Dreher righteously declared, 10 years too late.

 

The line that grabbed me, though, was this: “Carlson has, by this squishy-soft interview, introduced Fuentes into the right-wing mainstream.” Oh?

 

Are we sure it isn’t the other way around?

 

The mainstream.

 

I appreciate how frank D’Souza and especially Dreher are in treating Tucker Carlson, of all people, as representative of the “mainstream” right.

 

They’re not wrong! Tucker may have lost his perch on cable news, but that’s a dying medium anyway. In his new milieu, the Wild, Wild West of podcasting, he’s No. 3 in the country on Spotify—not among “news” podcasts or “political” podcasts but among all podcasts. On YouTube, as I write this, his interview with Fuentes has been viewed 3.2 million times and counting.

 

This is a guy who drools about Vladimir Putin’s allegedly phenomenal popularity and casually chatters about Israeli involvement in 9/11. Last month he questioned whether Hamas should properly be described as a jihadist organization. All you need to know to understand how deeply conservatives like Dreher and D’Souza have compromised their integrity is that they were comfortable (or comfortable enough) having someone like Tucker as a gatekeeper of the right’s Overton window—right up until he let Nick Fuentes through the door.

 

In a movement of, by, and for demagogues, it seems silly to me to draw lines about what is and isn’t too demagogic. Especially given how much of an appetite there is on the right for Fuentes’ type of demagoguery.

 

If you didn’t know better, you’d come away from reading D’Souza and Dreher thinking that Carlson had plucked some random Nazi apologist from obscurity and handed him a megaphone. And while it’s true that Tucker isn’t above that, it’s also true that that’s not what happened here: Fuentes has 1 million followers on Twitter, draws half a million viewers for his livestreams on Rumble, and dined with the president at Mar-a-Lago three years ago along with their mutual friend, Kanye “Heil Hitler” West.

 

As Richard Hanania noted, Fuentes accomplished all of that without a scintilla of the promotional support that Charlie Kirk and Tucker Carlson regularly received for years from major right-wing figures and institutions. He’s a true popular phenomenon who’s grown even more popular since his nemesis Kirk was murdered. As the media navel-gazes about who’ll fill the vacuum as the grassroots right’s new most influential young populist, consider the possibility that it’s already been filled. Between Fuentes and Kirk, it ain’t Charlie whom those young Republican chuds in Washington sound like in their group texts.

 

So I think the answer to one of Dreher’s questions is clear enough: Carlson invited Fuentes on his show because he wants Fuentes to further mainstream him among the GOP’s growing groyper wing. As far as Tucker has gone already in pandering to racists, he still tends to frame his provocations in quasi-intellectual just-asking-questions terms, pulling his punches by not resorting to the sort of forthright bigotry that Fuentes’ audience clamors for. That may have left him with the same dilemma that Kirk faced, wondering how to satisfy a right-wing audience whose addiction to populism is leading it toward harder and harder ideological drugs.

 

Kirk’s solution was to turn himself into “Fuentes lite” by, for example, attacking the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. Carlson is already past that point, so his solution is to hug Fuentes himself. If, as a rich well-educated WASP, he’s still too wedded to “respectability” to feel comfortable giving the groyper-ized right the raw prejudice it demands, he can at least appease them by making nice with their hero, a guy who isn’t similarly wedded.

 

And although he’d never admit it, Tucker might even quietly share Kirk’s fear that, if forced to battle Fuentes eventually in a war for right-wing opinion, he wouldn’t win. Sure, Carlson has a larger audience—for now—but he must realize that modern populism is a nihilist movement that measures political authority by how gleeful one’s antagonism is towards conventional ideas of civic propriety. (Which is why there are no enemies to the right in MAGA, only to the left.) Not even Tucker can top Nick Fuentes in that metric; he will not out-indecent a groyper. So, rather than risk losing a war to him at some point, he’s signing a truce.

 

Consider it a sort of populist Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Or Ribbentrop-Ribbentrop, I suppose.

 

Vance's gambit.

 

Which brings us to Dreher’s second question, poignant in its earnestness. Why, oh why, hasn’t our very respectable vice president denounced Carlson’s interview with Fuentes?

 

“I think somebody normal and patriotic like J.D. Vance could easily win without the Groyper brigades,” Dreher writes at one point in his essay. “But if he does not distance himself from them at some point, it’s going to cost him.”

 

Is it? I think the opposite is closer to the truth, and I think J.D. Vance would agree with me.

 

Vance plainly lives in terror of alienating right-wing racists, which is why he’s forever going out of his way to make excuses for them. Anytime some Republican apparatchik is caught wheezing about Indians or Hitler in a text chain, the VP leaps into action to insist that it shouldn’t be held against them. That’s not because Vance himself is racist but rather the opposite: As Fuentes likes to remind his listeners, the vice president is married to one of those Indian Americans that the feral nationalists of the right detest, so he’s doing what little he can to “atone” for it.

 

Vance long ago abandoned whatever moral scruples he had for the sake of gaining political power, and he’s not about to sabotage his 2028 frontrunner status now by recovering them. Like Tucker Carlson, I suspect, he understands that Fuentes types now comprise a sizable enough chunk of the Republican base that making enemies of them could imperil him in a presidential primary or even a general election, should they boycott the race.

 

It could even create an opening in the next primary for some Fuentes-esque demagogue to enter the race, attacking him from the right and weakening his chances at the presidency. The groypers are simply too mainstream to be Sister-Souljah-ed without Vance sustaining real political damage from doing so. And he knows it.

 

In fact, I’m half-convinced by commentator Bobby Miller’s theory that Carlson’s interview with Fuentes was a ploy encouraged by Vance in hopes of getting Fuentes and his fans to warm up to him. Tucker and the VP are buddies, don’t forget: Carlson promoted him on his Fox News show as an exciting new voice of nationalism before he got elected to the Senate, then pushed for him to be added to the ticket last year, and is tight enough with him now that his son works in Vance’s press shop. Vance is Tucker’s conduit to influence over the government and his claim to political “respectability,” no matter how outre his views get.

 

So maybe the two of them undertook to launch a charm offensive toward Fuentes. The friendlier Fuentes becomes with Carlson, they may have reasoned, the less inclined he’ll be to attack Vance as a race traitor whose marriage makes him unfit to lead a nationalist movement bent on restoring the cultural dominance of white Christians. Why, if Fuentes plays ball, perhaps he’ll even be rewarded someday with one of those now-familiar vice presidential tweetstorms excusing his bigotry as no big deal.

 

Why Dreher doesn’t understand this, I don’t know. I can only assume it’s because he’s an intellectual, for the eyes of nationalist intellectuals are forever burning brightly for J.D. Vance. Educated postliberals are embarrassed by Donald Trump’s boorishness and ignorance and yearn for an intelligent leader, leading many of them to place a halo on the very intelligent Vance. At least, that’s the only way I know how to explain why Dreher would describe a guy as “normal and patriotic” who says he wouldn’t have certified Joe Biden’s victory on January 6 and wants Trump to defy Supreme Court rulings.

 

Mark my words: If J.D. Vance ends up convinced that he needs to do an interview with Fuentes to lock down the Republican nomination in 2028, he’ll do one. No moral qualm will stop him.

 

What did you think would happen?

 

And so here’s my own question for Dreher and D’Souza and the many other conservative fellow travelers of Trump’s GOP who looked the other way at the right’s metastasizing postliberalism for 10 years, only to find that they’re now in league with bigots: What did you think would happen, exactly?

 

Where else could an autocratic personality cult that treats ruthlessness as a cardinal virtue have ended up?

 

Here’s something I wrote nearly two years ago on the 4Chan-ization of the GOP:

 

No nationalist movement will remain sympathetic to Israel or to Jews long-term. It can’t. Nationalism is a form of tribalism in which one tribe, usually the traditionally dominant one, asserts that it rightly defines the identity of the nation and should properly govern it. Accordingly, it’s obsessed with “outsiders” infiltrating and weakening its hold on power.

 

…

 

A tribe consumed with purifying the nation by purging alien elements who threaten its dominance will never fully reconcile itself to Jews. Familiar antisemitic critiques will creep in: Jews are too distinct and insular a tribe in their own right to ever assimilate into another. And they’re waaaaay too influential in the nation’s culture and industry given their meager numbers. Why should the dominant tribe tolerate them having such a prominent role in a country that belongs to its rightful rulers? If they’re “real Americans,” why are they so defensive on Israel’s behalf? Why is our government so supportive of that country, anyway?

 

You can apply the same logic there about tribalism and interlopers to Indian-Americans. What did y’all think would happen?

 

What did you think would happen in a movement that’s as proudly and aggressively anti-intellectual as MAGA is? “A frightening thought: What if there are no gatekeepers at all anymore?” Dreher worried at one point in his essay. “What if anybody can say anything, and … not risk political exile or irrelevance?” But that’s the point of populism, I thought—clearing away the many institutional obstacles that historically prevented the average joe, in all of his kooky and prejudiced glory, from exerting real influence over politics and culture.

 

Many of them have been cleared away since 2015. How’s that working out?

 

“You wanted a movement without elites, without people who read, without academics or journalists,” Hanania scolded the Drehers and D’Souzas on Tuesday. “You wanted a culture where nobody was ever cancelled, where the only sin is lack of basedness or being a cuck, where if the media was opposed to someone, that’s all you needed to know and you would defend them. You’ve gotten it.” Of course a culture like that was destined to end up hostile to a faction as intellectual as American Jews, he concluded.

 

What sort of culture did conservatives think Trump-led populism would create?

 

If it makes you feel better to believe that a politics of Jew-bashing shouldn’t properly be described as right-wing, have at it, but enough self-identified right-wingers seem to disagree that the entire Republican political class has kept its lips zipped about Carlson’s interview with Fuentes. Besides, ethnonationalism assuredly is a hallmark of right-wing politics overseas—and Trumpism is all about making America European again.

 

Take it from a Never Trumper: Shouting “This isn’t right-wing” will not shame people into behaving more responsibly, especially if those people belong to a revolutionary populist movement unbound by principle and intoxicated by a fantasy of what the country looked like in that vague, distant age when America was supposedly “great.” Carlson and Fuentes have a very particular vision of that, and it’s appealing enough to enough Republicans to have given them larger audiences than any traditionally conservative media outlet I can think of.

 

So the next time one of them is platformed by a more “mainstream” right-wing entity, ask yourself: Who’s mainstreaming whom?