Nick Fuentes Has Officially Breached the MAGA Gates | The Nation

For The Nation, I wrote about Nick Fuentes’ half-decade march into the conservative mainstream, and how the right’s crisis over US support for Israel has provided the white nationalist with the opening he needs to be welcomed into the MAGA fold. Read it here.

“Of course, in many ways it’s surprising that Fuentes’s red-carpet welcome took this long. In fits and starts, with plenty of misses and plenty of luck along the way, he has been clawing his way toward the top for years. He has done this not primarily through building a mass base or taking over conservative institutions but through what the alt-right called “metapolitics”—seeding radical ideas in culture until a moment of crisis provides an opening for wider dissemination. Now the right’s crisis over US support for Israel, after two years of genocidal annihilation in Gaza, has provided him the opening he needs…

Liberals and progressives can still learn something from Carlson and Roberts, however: It doesn’t pay to shut out your radicals, and it won’t work. Millions of Americans, young and old, are fed up with bipartisan support for Israel, unprecedented inequality, and the other morbid symptoms of decaying empire. The establishment has no answer for this widespread and mounting alienation, because the establishment is the cause. Only fresh, outsider ideas can meet this moment, and they’re popular. But while left-wing insurgents still struggle to get past our side’s gatekeepers onto larger platforms of influence, radicals like Fuentes are finding less resistance on the right. If we don’t want their answers to win the day, we don’t have much time left.”