This fall saw much of the right-wing media ecosystem consumed with a battle over whether the conservative movement should embrace white nationalist Nick Fuentes and his followers. That it is even a question whether Fuentes, who has been called “the most popular representative of neo-Nazism in America,” should be welcomed by the party is a grim commentary on the current media landscape.

But it’s where we find ourselves as we wrap up 2025, thanks to the perverse incentives of the online attention economy, as well as the right's continued embrace of extremism as the fractured MAGA coalition jockeys for power in a second Trump term and beyond. Fuentes is a radical with misinformed ideas, but it's his embodiment of the MAGA movement's cynical embrace of extremism in service of political power that makes him our 2025 Misinformer of the Year.

Fuentes has fearmongered about a supposed “Jewish stranglehold” over the United States and “a genocide against whites.” He has argued that most Black people should be in prison; claimed that “Jews run everything and they worship the devil” and that “it's not just the Zionists,” even “the ones that … aren't too fond of Israel;” and suggested putting “all the towel heads” and ”all the tiny hats" on “a big luxury cruise ship or a giant Boeing 737 Max” to ”send them all right back to the Middle East." He has also said that he would like to take away women’s right to vote and claimed that “women don't age like wine, they age like milk. They don’t age like wine. That's not how their hormones work. … I gotta find my 16-year-old wife, probably when I turn 30.”

While people calling each other Nazis is as old as the internet, Fuentes’ pro-Hitler rhetoric and Holocaust denial are uniting people from the left and the right over the view that he’s exhibiting Nazi behavior.

Quickly, some background on the terminology for those unfamiliar. Groypers are “a group of extremely loyal supporters of Fuentes’ white nationalist and Christian nationalist ideology, which he describes as ‘America First.’” Fuentes’ rise is due largely to this following of groypers. The “groyper” name is based on a meme – a version of the Pepe the Frog image that became the group’s mascot around 2017. This group has been engaged in what’s known as the “groyper war,” working to infiltrate other right-wing institutions and convert them to Fuentes’ even more hard-line approach.

The most notable target of the so-called “groyper war” has been Turning Point USA, the organization led by the late Charlie Kirk that brought right-wing politics to school campuses. Fuentes has claimed over the years that “groypers” have successfully infiltrated Turning Point, and some observers agree. In June, close Fuentes watcher Will Sommer wrote a piece titled “How the Groypers Won” explaining that Kirk, facing constant pressure from Fuentes and the groypers, completely changed course on immigration, going from calling for tens of millions of new legal immigrants to advocating for more restrictions. Israel was a particular lightning rod here as well, with Fuentes and others like him taking advantage of those reacting to the horrific scenes coming out of Gaza. (I’d recommend John Ganz’ discussion with Ezra Klein for more on antisemitism and Fuentes.)

As Sommer noted, Fuentes has also managed to get “some of the Republicans’ leading thinkers” to adopt “his ideas” as well. With a contingent of the right already on board with “America First” economic and foreign policy that Trump himself also championed, the GOP was primed for some of Fuentes' more extreme positions.

After Trump announced widespread tariffs last spring, Fuentes celebrated what he called an “America First trade policy” that is “by far and away Trump's most solid issue, the most solid pillar in the America First pantheon.” The current push by Republicans to ban dual citizenship is something Fuentes has long called for, and Trump’s calls for “remigration” echo Fuentes, who says Trump’s national security policy is “an explicit acknowledgement of white genocide.” Essentially, the “great replacement theory” has moved from white nationalist circles like Fuentes’ to mainstream Republican politics.

All of this combusted when Tucker Carlson made the entirely unsurprising decision to interview Fuentes on his streaming show. Carlson had made his Fox News show “a clearinghouse for antisemitic tropes, white nationalist talking points, and fringe-right bigots,” and things had not improved since he left Fox. Fuentes had also credited Carlson with being “brave” and “courageous” and “pulling the conversation further to the right on cultural identity and social issues all the time to a massive audience” while on Fox News. Carlson even said after the interview that Fuentes’ message is that the conservative establishment is lying to its own supporters — and that Fuentes is right about that. It’s hard not to read Carlson’s words as anything but sympathetic to the “groyper war.”

The interview sparked backlash in some of the more traditional right-wing media spaces. The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro pointedly criticized Carlson in an episode dedicated entirely to the dispute, calling him “a terrible friend” to Kirk for hosting Fuentes. Fox’s Mark Levin said he’s “fighting like hell against the Tucker Carlsons and the Fuenteses and the Bannons and the others” who he claimed are “dancing with Hitler and Stalin and bigots and racists and segregationists.” Radio host Eric Metaxas said that the interview was “sick” and “despicable.” This is to say nothing of how things exploded even further thanks to a video of the Heritage Foundation’s Kevin Roberts defending Carlson.

One reason this interview roiled right-wing media is that there is no center of gravity in right-wing politics the way there used to be. Rush Limbaugh has been gone for years. Before his tragic assassination, Kirk was clearly a key figure uniting right-wing media and even vetting potential Trump administration staffers. He seemed in line to become the “titular head of the Republican Party,” as Limbaugh used to refer to himself. Now, without Kirk to help mediate intra-right wing disputes, right-wing media and right-wing politics in general have turned into a tinderbox.

The effort by right-wing influencers to combat Fuentes’ rising salience in right-wing politics in recent months is particularly feeble. A significant reason for this is because, as Ilya Somin has argued, “right-wing antisemitism is a predictable outgrowth of nationalism. A movement that exalts ethnic particularism and sees the world in zero-sum terms is highly likely to turn antisemitic over time.” And indeed it is the pro-Trump media voices who are having the most difficult time pushing back.

Sean Hannity called Trump supporters who praise Hitler “insane.” His colleague Mark Levin has ranted about Fuentes, saying that “Neo-Nazis, Klansmen, racists, bigots” are “not worth platforming.” (Other right-wing media figures are making similar comments.) Dinesh D’Souza argued with a straight face that Republicans should spurn Fuentes because “I've argued for a long time that Nazism, which means national socialism, is on the left.” Such “characteristically lazy” arguments appear to be failing.

Right-wing influencers’ attempts at gatekeeping when it comes to Fuentes aren’t gaining purchase in part because these same pundits have spent years telling their audience to ignore the sorts of arguments they are now making. (They are also failing in part because Fuentes’ stated ideas are not that far from their own.)

Fox News has hosted a guest with a history of making antisemitic remarks on its comedy show. Fox figures have downplayed or dismissed the presence of swastikas at right-wing events. Right-wing media have championed hard-line anti-immigrant politics for over a decade now. And right-wing figures have teamed up with and elevated people with dubious records of honesty, like Alex Jones.

Many right-wing figures also have made sure their audience knows criticism they don’t agree with is “cancel culture” (even if the reason they don’t agree is because they don’t understand it) and must be rejected at all times. And MAGA figures have validated internet conspiracy theories, even if they have direct ties to the subject of the theories.

When Fuentes first made national news — for marching at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville — then-Fox host and now Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said of the rally, “There's a reason those people were out there.” In 2021, Fox News even edited criticism of Fuentes out of a news article. (Fuentes thanked them.)

Perhaps most importantly, the MAGA project is organized to create content for the fringes and by the fringes. The influencers and the administration work in concert to “discredit Trump’s rivals and amplify his administration’s talking points and false claims, blurring boundaries between official messaging and private-sector news and opinion.”

Whatever the intent of all of this, few have benefited the way Nick Fuentes has.

Where Trump was skilled at exploiting television for gain, Fuentes is skilled at exploiting the internet for gain. Fuentes has managed to combine this understanding with anti-establishment messaging that resonates with an audience that already had an appetite for it.

Jay Caspian Kang concluded an essay he wrote for The New Yorker about Fuentes by distinguishing him from those like Milo Yiannopoulos and Richard Spencer who treaded similar ground previously. He wrote that Fuentes “seems to understand that all norms in political commentary have been destroyed and the game is now to position yourself in opposition to anything that even sniffs of the establishment.”

He added: “This is directly connected to the medium that has aided his rise, and it should worry us even more than it already does. After all, how do you stop something like this without turning off the internet?”

During their annual joint livestream, Spencer credited Fuentes with “a tremendous change” and a “sea change when it comes to young conservatives,” claiming “I think you caused a lot of it. I think you're riding the wave of other things that you didn't cause, but that you're almost like a representative of this."

Fuentes’ recent podcast tour is instructive. Skipping over legacy right-wing media spaces like Fox News and Newsmax, he appeared on a number of right-leaning online shows this year, including some that aren’t ostensibly political. This list includes the shows of Patrick Bet-David, Glenn Greenwald, Russell Brand, and Piers Morgan. And of course, there was the interview with Carlson, which Fuentes subsequently called “so friendly.”

Fuentes has also appeared with streamers like Adin Ross, Sneako, and the Nelk Boys, giving him a chance to regale an audience of often young men with friendly banter. More are likely coming, as Asmongold, a streamer with one of the largest and fastest-growing channels on YouTube in 2025, has said he’ll eventually collaborate with Fuentes. And Asmongold has been blunt about why, saying: “Nick brings in views. ... That's why he gets invited.”

He’s correct on that. Fuentes does bring in numbers for these shows.

According to a Media Matters analysis, Fuentes has appeared on at least 20 right-wing and right-leaning online shows since July, and his appearances on these shows have garnered at least 28.4 million views on YouTube, Rumble, and Kick.

For some of these shows, including The Tucker Carlson Show, PBD Podcast, Raw Talk, and Dave Smith's Part of the Problem, the videos with Fuentes are among their most viewed. On Carlson's channel, the interview with Fuentes is one of the top five most viewed videos. And just hours after Piers Morgan livestreamed a contentious interview with Fuentes, the video had already jumped to the fifth most-viewed livestream on Morgan's channel, and it has since become the most-viewed livestream.

Some voices on the right see this happening and demand harsher questions to Fuentes in the interviews or claim that Fuentes is somehow hiding his noxious views when he’s on other podcasts and that hosts need to call him on it. But they seem to misunderstand the medium and the incentives involved.

Fuentes is truly of the internet; he knows that the real currency is attention, at all costs. A harsh interview now may well lead to a soft interview later. It’s all part of the wash. For Fuentes' part, the new attention from right-leaning shows is paying off.

Fuentes’ popularity appears to be accelerating. Search mentions of Nick Fuentes have been spiking in the country. Since early June, Fuentes has added nearly 450,000 followers on his Rumble channel, a roughly 300% increase from 150,000 followers in June to nearly 600,000.

There are good-faith skeptics in terms of Fuentes’ popularity. Some have pointed out that his engagement may be inauthentic and the volume of social mentions of Fuentes is underwhelming. I have no reason to doubt their findings, but in my view it is missing the forest for the trees. President Donald Trump reportedly hired actors to cheer for him in Trump Tower when he launched his first presidential campaign. The fake supporters didn’t stop him from winning two elections. Fuentes similarly benefits even if the support is fake. In this media environment, the appearance of support is often more important than the support itself.

Fuentes is in other ways a completely different sort of figure than Trump. Whereas Trump loves to talk about how much he loves his followers, Fuentes appears to hate many of his — or at least has no problem bickering with those among them that he doesn't find useful.

Part of what makes Fuentes who he is is his political vision and dedication. He’s not firstly concerned with increasing the number of views of his streaming show or becoming the most mentioned host on social media. He’s focused on maintaining his movement and growing as a political force.

There are some questioning whether Fuentes is “filling the void” after Kirk’s death, but I don’t think that’s quite right, at least in the way that Kirk did. Filling the void would mean trying to advance the interests of the GOP establishment by meditating between various factions. That does not seem like the type of power Fuentes has much interest in, at least for now. (Though he is notably among the various figures on the right criticizing Candace Owens’ conspiracy theories about Kirk’s murder.)

Instead, he’s mostly taking advantage of the power vacuum to get more supporters for himself and advance his political vision. And to do that, he needs to keep waging war on the Republican elites and the right-wing establishment to which he says Trump and his MAGA media allies have largely capitulated. As Eamon Whalen wrote, “Kirk said it was his life’s mission to smooth the divisions within the conservative movement. Fuentes wants to inflame them."

Fuentes launched a “Groyper War Two” aimed at Donald Trump and JD Vance in the midst of the 2024 campaign. Initially dismissed as something of a failure, it instead put Fuentes at the front of the line on the right as Trump’s second term headed toward lame duck territory — after all, most of the competitors in that sort of space had tied their fortunes to Trump’s. David Gilbert wrote in WIRED that “his influence has skyrocketed, despite—or perhaps because of—his criticism of Trump’s failed campaign promises around the Epstein case and mass deportations, as well as his support for Israel."

The current fragmented right-wing ecosystem will bring all the potential audience Fuentes could ever want right to him. He just needs to be there, as the alternative to whoever people perceive to be the right-wing establishment.

Fuentes himself says as much. In a recent stream, he argued:

Fuentes realizes that by keeping the hard line, he will remain the center of gravity to this group. And that will keep him and his political project on track.

And to be clear, this is a political project, not just a streaming effort. Caspian Kang writes in his New Yorker piece:

As Trump’s polling inches lower and lower — and he gets older and older — this analysis only becomes more salient.

You can see this in how some politicians and right-wing institutions seem to be afraid of confronting Fuentes because they need the support of groypers. Trump, who infamously dined with Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago in 2022, defended Carlson following the Fuentes interview, and Vice President JD Vance allegedly pointed to the downside of attacking Fuentes — even after Fuentes attacked Vance’s wife. Fuentes has taken victory laps over Vance’s reluctance, calling it the “groyper squeeze."

Fuentes is not going away. It’s not even clear that there’s anywhere to go. If he did have a sudden and complete change of heart, renounced politics, and moved to the other side of the globe tomorrow, it would be all too easy for someone to take his place. The playbook isn’t that difficult to learn, and there’s clearly at least some people ready to follow his lead. We’re already seeing “Nick Fuentes clones” popping up in right-wing media.

There’s no shortage of people discussing their experiences with the rising number of groypers on college campuses, and polling and anecdotal reports support the notion that the group is growing.

Yale University’s fall 2025 youth poll found “extremely conservative” voters are more likely than those of other ideologies to agree with statements commonly considered antisemitic.

A Manhattan Institute poll found that “nearly four in ten” current GOP voters “believe the Holocaust was greatly exaggerated or did not happen as historians describe” and that “younger men are especially likely to hold this view.”

Right-wing writer Rod Dreher has claimed “something like 30 to 40 percent of DC GOP staffers under the age of 30 are Groypers.” His numbers are impossible to fact-check, and others on the right have disagreed with them, some vociferously. Fuentes, for his part, has made similarly sweeping claims. He also admits that the uncertainty is a tactical advantage, saying, “We want them to have no clue how many Groypers there are, where they are, who they are. We want them to be completely in the dark.”

Paul Ingrassia, nominated to a key position by the White House before his nomination was withdrawn following a scandal regarding a comment about his “Nazi streak” and then subsequently given another position, was spotted in 2024 at a Fuentes rally.

Joe Kent, currently the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, confessed in 2022 that he previously had a strategic phone call with Fuentes but claimed no further association. Kent’s confession reportedly came after Fuentes had bragged about the call on a livestream.

Fuentes has ties to other influential people on the right as well.

The sheer volume of right-wing figures sounding the alarm about Fuentes also underscores that there is some truth to Dreher’s claim of big numbers of groypers among young Washington staffers. As Ben Burgis noted in reference to the “father of American Nazis,” back in the day “no one was arguing about whether the percentage of young Eisenhower staffers who were fans of George Lincoln Rockwell was in the single or double digits.”

This is headed nowhere good. The redistricting dance that has gone on will only make lower-turnout primaries more important and arguably make it easier to get more Fuentes allies into Congress. (You may recall when the QAnon conspiracy theory and election denial infiltrated MAGA and the GOP.)

In a recent episode, Fuentes called on America First candidates to run for office and pressure Republicans, saying, “What if they voted as a block, and they were not loyal to the Republican Party, they were not loyal to Trump, they were not loyal to Israel? … What if the Electoral College comes down 269-269? You’re going to need every electoral vote that you can get. What if an America First spoiler candidate runs in a presidential election and maybe they win two or three of those states? … We’re looking to fundamentally replace the GOP." Sommer points to a Florida gubernatorial candidate running on “an overtly groyper platform.” Fuentes has said the candidate “seems cool.”

Fuentes has also said that he sees his role as shaping people who find him and inspiring what comes next:

There appears to be at least some audience for what they would create. Jeffrey Epstein associate Steve Bannon talked on his podcast with a pollster who said young MAGA voters are looking for “their Franco” — referring to Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. We’ve seen similar sentiments in right-wing media before. One right-wing streamer made a positive remark about Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet while interviewing Fuentes. On Fox News, host Jesse Watters said last year that you have to be a dictator to get things done in Washington, D.C. And in 2021, a radio host told Tucker Carlson that the right would pick a “fascist” within the next two decades to take “drastic measures.” Earlier this year while discussing Trump’s military parade, Fuentes gave what he called a “Roman salute” and said, “We need a real dictator.”

Should that disastrous moment come, Fuentes is unlikely to be that dictator. Indeed, some are pointing out that in such a scenario, Fuentes would essentially be a useful idiot. But in the meantime, he’s priming the pump and giving that audience targets to lash out at. 

Some may say that Fuentes is straightforward about his positions — after all, he is very clear in his racism, antisemitism, misogyny, and so on. We at Media Matters believe that this is bigotry and that it falls under the umbrella of misinformation, but the reason Fuentes was chosen as 2025's Misinformer of the Year goes further.

Fuentes’ core message is that Trump is presenting a watered-down version of what should be done to the country, and that the only true way to benefit America is through even more repression, even more hate, even more division, and by putting cowards like him in positions of absolute power. In an era filled with lies, Fuentes' idea that these retrograde beliefs will somehow lead to a utopian version of America stands out.

It might be the biggest lie of them all.