JTA — Another conservative media personality with links to mainstream culture has interviewed Nick Fuentes, the avowed white nationalist and antisemite whose rising popularity and recent chummy interview with Tucker Carlson has fractured the Republican Party.
The British commentator Piers Morgan hosted Fuentes on his YouTube show “Piers Morgan Uncensored” Monday, for a two-hour chat. Morgan, who considers himself a free-speech absolutist, told viewers he decided to interview Fuentes in order to understand his views better.
“It doesn’t make a lot of sense to spend all this time talking about Nick Fuentes, but not actually to Nick Fuentes,” Morgan said at the top of his YouTube show. He told his guest, “People are talking about you in a more mainstream environment than you may be used to.”
It was the same justification that Carlson gave for hosting Fuentes on his own show, an interview that was soon defended by the head of an influential conservative think tank and has led to a splintering between those who want to expel Fuentes and his followers, and the rest of the GOP.
Morgan’s Fuentes sit-down came the same day that Sen. Chuck Schumer introduced a resolution rejecting Fuentes and his rhetoric that drew support from Senate Democrats as well as a range of Jewish groups. The resolution also condemned Carlson for not pushing back on Fuentes when he hosted the streamer.
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In his interview, Morgan took a decidedly more contentious stance.
Morgan is a prominent tabloid TV personality, former CNN anchor and onetime Donald Trump admirer who leans into lurid exchanges with controversial guests and who morphed from a supporter of Israel after the bloody Hamas-led invasion of October 7, 2023, into a vocal critic of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. In the interview, he frequently sought to push Fuentes on his views about Jews, Hitler and the Holocaust.
“It’s your lack of humanity and compassion for people about things like the Holocaust, about slavery, it’s that that people find so contemptible,” Morgan told Fuentes. “And I don’t understand why you need to do that.”
He appeared to move the needle on Fuentes when his guest agreed with Morgan that 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust — a fact Fuentes has regularly questioned on his own show.
“I’m open to believing the official narrative,” Fuentes told Morgan, claiming he was mostly interested in opposing Holocaust denial laws of the kind that have been passed in some European countries.
“In many countries, it’s not even legal to talk about it. And that’s really where my interest in the Holocaust begins and sort of ends, to tell you the truth,” Fuentes said. “Can you imagine if in the United States they said, ‘The number of Palestinians killed in Gaza is 100,000, and if you don’t say that, you’re going to jail.’” (On this issue, the two men found some common ground, as Morgan also said he opposes Holocaust denial laws.)
Fuentes, who earlier had insisted, “I don’t hate any Jews,” also offered, “I really think that every death is a tragedy.” Yet he didn’t maintain an aura of decency for long, doubling down on his past comments that Hitler “was really f—king cool,” as Morgan grew increasingly indignant.
“You think Hitler was really f–king cool?” Morgan asked Fuentes. “Yes, and I’m tired of pretending he’s not,” Fuentes responded — paraphrasing a scene from the movie “Joker,” a popular text for young right-wing men, in which an unapologetic Joker is interviewed by a talk-show host about his homicidal activities.
Calling Morgan “a boomer,” Fuentes offered insight into some of the reasons behind his popularity: a new generation of young people who have no connection to the Holocaust and aren’t interested in memorializing it. What’s left, he said, is a broader sense among Gen Z that Jews and Israelis weaponize the memory of the Holocaust to their “political benefit.”
“Just play that, antisemitism and Holocaust, you can do whatever you want and defend all your actions,” he said, over objections from Morgan. “That’s the part people are getting upset with.”
Though he is a staunch Israel opponent, Fuentes told Morgan that his own hyper-nationalist vision of America — one in which white Christianity would reassert its dominance and immigrants would be expelled — sees some kinship in modern-day Israel.
“In Israel, they have my politics,” he said. “If they had their way, it would only be Jewish people.”
Morgan later took to social media to deem the interview a job well done.
“I urge you to watch it in full, to understand the Fuentes phenomenon,” the anchor wrote on X, “and see him held to proper account.”
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