During an interview with Piers Morgan aired on Monday, the white nationalist streamer and former Mar-a-Lago dinner guest Nick Fuentes defended calling Hitler “f***ing cool.”
Morgan pressed Fuentes about the past comments, playing him a video statement from author Danny Finkelstein, whose family was persecuted during the Holocaust, and asked him why he had praise for the “most genocidal monster of the last 150 years.”
“My generation, we’re just done with the pearl clutching,” Fuentes said during a heated back and forth, in which he frequently smirked as Morgan criticized him.
“He murdered 12 million people,” Morgan continued. “What is very f***ing cool about that?”
“The edits. It’s just cool. The uniforms. The parades,” Fuentes responded. “It’s cool. As a guy, you look at World War II, and it’s fascinating.”
As the conversation continued, Fuentes claimed “no one is in favor of genocide,” then insisted his views on the matter are “not that deep,” before claiming that white Americans have been “browbeaten” with stories about the Holocaust to keep them from being “too white and too proud and too Christian.”
Fuentes and his highly-online, right-wing “groyper” ideological contemporaries have been at the center of a heated discussion in Republican political circles, given the broadcaster’s large following among young conservatives, and, as he claims, from officials “in every department” of government.
Tucker Carlson’s recent chummy interview with Fuentes prompted something of a MAGA civil war, with prominent conservatives such as Ben Shapiro attacking Carlson, while the right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation rallied to his defense.
President Donald Trump, for his part, declined to criticize the interview, saying people can’t tell Carlson who to interview and that he didn’t know much about Fuentes, despite once notoriously eating dinner with him and antisemitic rapper Ye at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
Separately, a series of leaked Telegram messages from a group of leaders in a Young Republicans club captured the individuals praising Hitler.
While Vice President JD Vance dismissed outrage over those messages as “pearl clutching,” even Laura Loomer, an influential right-wing conspiracy theorist and self-proclaimed “proud Islamophobe,” wrote on social media last month that the GOP “has a Nazi problem.”
During a recent radio broadcast, Fox News anchor Sean Hannity sounded a similar note, calling on the MAGA movement to dismiss Nazi sympathizers in the ranks, in remarks that could be read as a denunciation of Fuentes.
“If you hear somebody that's racist, that's probably a good indication that they're not worth your time,” Hannity said. “If somebody's a white nationalist, they're probably not worth your time. If they praise Adolf Hitler, they're probably not somebody that's worth your time.”
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