Nearly two hours into his YouTube livestream with white nationalist Nick Fuentes, Piers Morgan seemed to think that he had made a breakthrough. Towards the end of the December 8 interview, after Fuentes defended his history of Holocaust denial as a means to make a point about free speech, Morgan claimed victory.
“We are getting…a long way in this interview. You didn’t deny the Holocaust. You accepted there’s been a Holocaust of at least six million Jews.”
Fuentes, true to his reputation as a “troll”-like figure, couldn’t help but jest in the face of Morgan’s ignorant earnestness. “I’m a maximalist. I’m a Holocaust maximalist. I think it’s more.”
Morgan’s “breakthrough” was anything but. Fuentes is an established Holocaust denier. In March 2023, he said outright: “I think the Holocaust is exaggerated. I don’t hate Hitler. I think there’s a Jewish conspiracy.” Instead of challenging Fuentes on the deadly consequences of his ideology, Morgan mocked Fuentes as an “expert in women given you’ve never got laid,” focused on grilling Fuentes about whether his father is a racist for not wanting to eat “negro fare,” and later shouted so much that even Fuentes told him to “calm down.” Fuentes and the Groypers took Morgan’s jabs as an opportunity to “clip farm,” a common strategy by the extremist movement wherein they create a series of viral short “clips” (i.e., short videos) meant for distribution on social media.
Fuentes even declared a “TOTAL GROYPER VICTORY” following the interview.
Whether it was a generational divide or just uninformed journalism, the two-hour interview was yet one more example of how Nick Fuentes and his heinous beliefs have been propelled into the mainstream. Pundits like Piers Morgan fundamentally do not understand Fuentes’ brand of white nationalism — proliferating bigotry with humor, among other tactics. Instead of treating labels of bigotry as the finishing blow to the Groyper movement, Fuentes’ loyal followers who often mobilize on his behalf, mainstream media should have challenged him more thoroughly, or never have platformed him to begin with, thereby preventing the continued mainstreaming of his hateful beliefs to larger audiences.
Fuentes has spent the last decade building his reputation as a proud racist, misogynist, and admirer of genocidal dictators like Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. He attended the violent white supremacist Unite The Right (UTR) riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which people chanted “Jews will not replace us,” and later, the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection, when he called upon rioters to take over the Capitol building.
In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder on September 10, conservative influencers spent weeks sanitizing Fuentes’ image as a mainstream right-wing commentator. The phenomenon spread to traditional mainstream media sources, with the New York Times profiling Fuentes, GQ magazine publishing a puff-piece on why Fuentes appeals to women, and former Fox host Tucker Carlson lobbing softball questions at Fuentes in an explosive interview that rocked the Heritage Foundation, when its president backed Carlson’s friendly chat with a raging antisemite. In fact, Fuentes and his “Groyper” following are so enthused by the attention that they’ve dubbed his string of media appearances a “generational run,” a victory cry over an out-of-touch and often uncritical media. Fuentes now sits at over 1.1 million followers on X.
Behind his so-called lighthearted, and to some, charismatic veneer, Fuentes made sure to hint at his true white supremacist beliefs throughout the interview. Morgan, a veteran journalist of over 30 years and winner of Celebrity Apprentice, failed to properly challenge Fuentes, a 27-year-old livestreamer, on his claims of being a “race realist,” a eugenicist position associated with white supremacist organizations like American Renaissance, and his claims that there is an ongoing “genocide against whites.” At its worst, eugenics was used as justification by the Nazis for the murder of those deemed “impure” through implementing compulsory sterilization and euthanasia programs.
Fuentes’ comments on a “genocide against whites” refers to the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which falsely purports a Jewish-led effort to “replace” white people in Western countries with non-whites through immigration. Believers in the conspiracy theory have committed several acts of targeted mass violence, including the 2019 Christchurch, N.Z., mosque attacks, where the gunman murdered 51 Muslims whom he believed did not belong in the country. Attacks in the United States fueled by the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory include the 2019 mass shooting in El Paso, TX. (23 people murdered), the 2022 shooting at a Buffalo, NY., supermarket (10 people murdered), and the 2023 mass shooting in Allen, TX. (eight murdered). After the interview, Morgan claimed to hold people like Fuentes to “proper account for the incendiary things [he says], and let the audience judge accordingly,” and casually suggested Fuentes’ brazen and proud admission of racism discredits “all [his] other answers.”
Failure by the media to properly scrutinize Fuentes and the Groyper movement results in the continued normalization of far-right ideologies. The interview quickly went viral on X, with around 230,000 posts referencing it made. Morgan, facing criticism for his questions about Fuentes’ father, publicly replied to such a post by Identitarian Belgian activist Dries van Langenhove, saying “I don’t care about winning interviews, I care about informing viewers.“ Langenhove was one of the organizers of the 2025 Remigration Summit, a conference held in Italy about “remigration,” a policy authored by Austrian former neo-Nazi Martin Sellner proposing the ethnic cleansing of all non-whites from Europe (read GPAHE’s reporting on the Trump administration mirroring Sellner’s ethnic cleansing proposal here). Langenhove also spoke at the white supremacist American Renaissance conference (AmRen) in 2023.
Over 230,000 posts were made on X discussing Piers Morgan’s interview with Nick Fuentes. (Source: X).
There is no use in confronting Fuentes solely with his own bigoted rhetoric. He owns it. The responsibility of the mainstream media now in their reporting of the Groyper movement is to telegraph and resist America’s trajectory into accepting white supremacism as a legitimate political position, and to warn audiences of the violence that often accompanies it. Fuentes has made it clear he aspires for the movement to gain political power, and he claims “groypers are all over the government.” The more extremist voices are normalized in the mainstream, the more likely young people will be radicalized into Fuentes’ beliefs and the violence that accompanies the rhetoric will grow.
