Transcript: Nick Fuentes on Part Of The Problem Podcast #1313

And both of us in the last five years have really pretty dramatically risen in stature, you know, whatever. Much bigger audiences, much more, you know, just bigger audiences, more big moments, more, you know, and so it just kind of seemed like a thing that should happen.

And also on top of that, we are both, you know, we, I don’t know exactly like, what percentage it would be, but I think we have a lot of overlap in our audience. Like, I hear a lot of people who are like, you know, “you two are the guys that I listened to.” And we both kind of had this weird thing where, so, like, after I had you on again, even though you were not nearly as big as you are now, but it was still, like, I got all this outrage. I was constantly asked to denounce you. And then given my personality, I was always like, f* you.

NICK FUENTES: I was denounced.

DAVE SMITH: You like, what? And then, of course, more recently, you know, when you were going on Candace’s show, I was a topic of conversation there, so. And as I said to you, when I first reached out to you about doing this, you were like, “well, yeah, I mean, everyone’s always asking you about me and everyone’s always asking me about you.” So really it seems like we probably should just be talking to each other.

And I kind of, in a weird way, and this is something where I just feel like I know this about you. When I first thought, I was like, oh, I think we should do this, and I think we should do it in person. And I think we should do a long. I knew that you were going to say yes. I just kinda knew, like, I knew you were going to be like, f*, yeah, let’s do it. So anyway, I appreciate that very much.

Two Sides of the Israel-Critical Movement

NICK FUENTES: Absolutely. Yeah, likewise. No, I feel the same way. I mean, and we both are from the Israel critical side and have been and kind of representing different factions, I think, because you obviously, your story is you were the Ron Paul revolution guy, libertarian, and you come at it from the perspective of the wars, that the neocons are pro Israel and they’re driving the foreign conflict.

And I come at it from the far right, Trump revolution. So it’s like a generational thing. It’s an ideological thing. And I’m also Catholic, you’re obviously Jewish, so there’s a religious element, an ideological element. And it’s interesting how in this moment when everyone is talking about these issues, we kind of represent maybe two different sides of that or like a nuanced difference in the Israel critical side.

So it is, I said yes, because I think it’s going to be just a really great conversation. I think that you’re super intelligent, know the relevant facts. So do I. We have some disagreements, but I think we agree on far more than we disagree about. But yeah. So I really just thought it’d be an excellent conversation.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, I think in many ways, particularly amongst young people, me and you in a sense represent the spectrum. It seems to be of almost like where young people are going, whereas, like, there is no pro Israel spectrum. It’s like, are you like a kind of non interventionist type or are you more of an identitarian non interventionist type?

NICK FUENTES: Right, right.

The Jordan Peterson Moment

DAVE SMITH: It’s not really. That kind of seems to be the thing. And you know, I was, I’ll tell you this, okay, I’m starting by making the pettiest of points, but it’s in service of making a real point. But so because, you know, it might come up like you’ve been doing a lot of big shows lately, you just did Patrick Bet David show, you did Glenn Greenwald show several others, and it may come off like that’s why I’m now having you on.

But just to be clear, as you will back up, I reached out to you before you had done those shows. And this is actually when I started thinking about it. It was when Jordan Peterson went on the Joe Rogan Experience, I believe, the last time he was on. And it was a couple days after I had debated Douglas Murray, which still to this day is the most viewed show I’ve ever done and might be for a very long time.

And it got like 5 million views on YouTube and then got another 10 on Spotify and then clips everywhere. I mean, we’ll see if we can beat it. But I don’t know about that. That was a high bar. But so there was this big thing, and it kind of became, you know, the topic of conversation for a little bit.

And so then Jordan Peterson comes in. And so I was real interested in that. Cause, you know, obviously he’s working at the Daily Wire now. And so it was like, I know this is going to come up. I’m kind of curious what his take on this is going to be. Now I bring this up literally. I’m not trying to trash Jordan Peterson. I respect Jordan Peterson. I think there’s many aspects of his work that were very valuable.

I mean, I have a baby brother around your age. Not a baby, but I still call him that. But I bought Jordan Peterson’s book for him. Like, I thought his work was great for young men. And obviously I don’t love so much the stuff he’s been doing lately, but. So Jordan Peterson comes on. I was curious what his take on the debate was going to be. I knew he was going to get asked. He kind of dodges it. He goes, “oh, everybody involved did a really good job.”

Which, first of all, no one on the face of the earth thinks everyone involved did a very good job. There are the ranges, insane Zionists who think Douglas Murray won, and everybody else, there’s no, nobody thinks he did a good job. And he did a good. But, okay, so he dodged that. And then he just goes on a thing about the groypers.

Now he mentions the groypers. He starts going off on psychopathy and who needs to be kept out and who can be allowed in. And okay, so first of all, it just, I mean, the obvious that to me, I was like, well, first off, if we’re talking about psychopaths in this context, that’s where we go to. There’s people who don’t like Jews. I mean, like, okay, maybe we’ll argue about this a little bit later. But like, okay, leaving that aside, that’s the cause. You know, there’s the destruction of a people.

I mean, like, Nikki Haley is signing bombs that are about to be dropped on human beings, and you want to have a conversation about who’s a psychopath. And then also I thought, like, to invoke you without mentioning your name, but to mention groypers, like, those are your fans, like, your fans. So just mention the guys that it’d be like if you were like, “yeah, there’s a real problem with people who listen to Dave Smith’s podcast.”

NICK FUENTES: Yeah.

DAVE SMITH: We’re like, well, then say. And so I just, I remember just kind of thinking like, that just seemed like really unfair here. You were not a participant in the thing. It wasn’t even like a question. And so it was like, kind of. And then just being me, I was like, my first thought was like, yo, Jordan Peterson should, if he’s going to say that he should sit down with Nick Fuentes.

And then I was like, you know what? I should sit down with Nick. Like, it’s been a while. And then it was something I just kind of kept thinking about. Anyway, it’s just a bit of a rant, but that really was what got me first thinking, like, we should do something again.

The Shifting Overton Window

NICK FUENTES: Yeah, well, in that debate, I think raised a lot of interesting questions, you know, because it is kind of, it is the thing of the moment, which is that there’s been this explosion of inquiry and conversation about Israel, about the Jews conspiracy surrounding that, the nature of it. You know, the big question I always get asked on my show is like, “what is it? What is this thing that’s going on?”

And the reason that this is happening is because the taboo has gone away. There’s a few things. There are simultaneously. The censorship around the topic has dissipated and the, and then I think right after the taboo went away, largely because of the war in Gaza, I think people were so outraged, it kind of blew the lid on that.

And now that kind of is the central question of the role that these personalities play in mediating that. Because I think there’s at this point a recognition by everybody on the whole planet. There’s no denial anymore. You know, nobody can avoid it. Even Netanyahu is doing damage control with Shapiro. I think that was yesterday that everybody is talking about this. Everyone’s furious. Everyone is, does not have that conventional pro Israel thing anymore.

And now I feel like there are people like a Peterson or a Shapiro or even a Charlie Kirk, which I’m sure we’ll get into that, are trying to kind of, they recognize that the reality has already changed. Yeah, but there’s some, they are in denial in a sense, trying to negotiate like what that’s going to look like. Cause they recognize the old consensus is gone, not coming back.

People are not going to be pro Israel like they were. The genie’s not going back in the, in the lamp, you know, the proverbial lamp. But they also recognize that is there a limiting principle to the conversation? Is there something outside the Overton window? And if you’ve lost all your credibility, how can you now step in and say, “okay, we were lying before, but now go no further?” And I think that’s, it’s an open question where it goes from here that everybody’s asking.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, I think that’s right. And I think there’s, you know, with a lot of those guys it was, I think there was just a moment that. And I didn’t plan on the Douglas Murray thing being that, you know, I’m in my, you know, I’m a libertarian, so I’m half autistic. Like I’m a day walker, which is why I’m the best libertarian, but I’m half that.

And so I just went, “oh dude, we’re going to debate the war in Gaza and the war in Ukraine. This is great. Like this is going to be a huge show. It’ll be.” And I did not expect it to become a referendum on experts and the new media partially just cuz it was such a bad strategy for Douglass. I mean it was, it was a way to avoid the debate that I think he thought he couldn’t win.

NICK FUENTES: Right.

The Hypocrisy of the “Free Speech” Advocates

DAVE SMITH: But it wasn’t, it was obviously not going to work out well. But one of the things that was kind of interesting in seeing all of these people, especially kind of why Jordan Peterson coming in was interesting cuz he is really to a lot of people, like he’s almost especially with young people who’s the core group who Israel’s losing? Well, this is a guy who really shaped a lot of young people’s minds.

And so if anybody was kind of position to be able to reel them back in, it might be him. And even that didn’t kind of work. And I think something fundamental to it was that it was like with all these guys with Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro, your whole calling card was “we have these conversations, we don’t shut voices out. You have to win the argument we’re against cancel culture.”

And then they’re like to watch them going on these tours of like “Rogan shouldn’t have Darrell Cooper on anymore.” And all this. You’re like, yeah, but come on, dude, now what are you. You just, you expose yourself for being exactly what you claim not to be. And that is something that people don’t get over easily.

The Authority of Institutions and Expert Opinion

NICK FUENTES: Right. Well, and no one’s really on their side on that, you know, because Douglas Murray, when he said, “Well, have you been to Gaza?” and all these other types, the appeal to authority, it’s like, in a way, this is just another chapter and kind of like a larger saga that goes back to Covid, Ukraine, Trump even, which is that, you know, we’re led to believe that these institutions are—they have the authority to tell us what’s going on and what to think and what’s acceptable.

And we know that they lied about all that, lied about the facts, the opinions. They were probably not even in good faith. And now they want to come out and tell us, well, you know, but like you said, we can’t have that conversation, or Darrell Cooper’s too far. You know, they’re doing the same thing to him that they did to you, where they said, “Well, you’re not a historian.”

And it’s like, okay, well, neither is really anybody. Does anybody have a, you know, the right to critically think, you know, or to read books or to offer an opinion? Or are we literally just going to be told, “This is what you’re allowed to think,” because, you know, we’re the experts.

DAVE SMITH: Well, it’s also the other thing, dude. I got in this—well, I guess not. I mean, you were doing your thing, I think, at the time, too. But for whatever reason, I got in, like, at—not really in. But I was doing shows at Fox News for a while. There were, like, a few particular hosts who were really good to me and had me on. It was really—was like Kennedy and, you know, she had a libertarian show there, so it made sense. And then Greg Gutfeld used to put me on, Tom Shillue used to put me on.

So it’s like, back even in the day, and then I’ve done a bunch of their shows since. And it’s like, one of the things that just bugs me about the whole conversation, too, is you’re like, look, I’m not saying there’s not a lot of garbage online, so I’m not, like, defending, you know, there’s dumb political commentators online. But when you’re talking about, like, the elite level or like, I’m just saying, objectively speaking, I used to do those panels. If you go back and look at any of the panels, I was out there somewhere. It’s just always me carving everybody up because they don’t know anything.

Like, it was, dude, me and you are compared to the old guard elite. Elite, elite level. Like, they maybe would occasionally get someone in there. You know, occasionally you’d have Pat Buchanan on a segment. You’d have someone who—like Ron Paul or someone who really knew what they were talking about. But, like, every day on cable news. So the idea of being like, “Well, you’re not an expert. Darryl Cooper’s not an expert.” Do you know what you’re hearing on cable news? Do you know how much more Darrell Cooper knows than 99.99% of people talking about the topic?

So there was something about that that really bugged me. But I also think, specifically with—oops, specifically with Jordan Peterson, I just thought it was like, dude, you’re talking about a young man. You know, you’re talking about a following of young people. I thought your whole thing was, like, sticking up for them, not calling them the tetrad of evil or something like that, and not, like, as if you’ve done something unforgivable that you—I thought, like, it just seems like, okay, so then if you’re saying that Nick Fuentes is leading these young men down the wrong path, well, then, okay, maybe they could use some Jordan Peterson in their life then.

NICK FUENTES: Right, right.

DAVE SMITH: Like what? Maybe you should take that. Maybe it’s really important. I thought you were supposed to speak up for the voiceless and get all emotional and all that. Like, where did all that sht go? All of a sudden? There’s one thing that’s, like, a subject you’re not allowed to talk about, and I just think that’s bullsht.

Jordan Peterson’s Response and Dehumanizing Language

NICK FUENTES: Yeah, well, in Jordan, he even took it a step further. I don’t know if you saw his tweets about me, but he called me a rat. He said, “Nick Fuentes is a rat.” And then he came back and amended it and said, “No, wait, he’s not a rat. Because rats are odious by their nature.” He said, “Nick chooses to be a rat. He’s lower than rat.”

And it’s like—and by the way, isn’t his also his whole thing, like, about totalitarianism and, like, dehumanizing people? And I said to him, I really was more just, like, astounded, like you said, because he is different than the others. That’s like, he’s always been different. Shapiro’s like an insane Zionist, like, operative of Israel. Whatever you want to say, but Peterson, like you said, he really was very influential for young men.

And I know that because I was one of them at one point, and I had close friends that loved his Bible lecture series. His podcast, Maps of Meaning, which was his original book, pulled a lot of—

DAVE SMITH: Young kids away from atheism major.

NICK FUENTES: Yeah. And towards Christianity and towards conservatism and all of it. And you’re right, his claim to fame was that he was supposed to be this, like, lodestar for the disaffected young men of the Trump generation. And who represents that more than me? I’m kind of like that archetypal guy leading those people.

And I agree. If he’s got some issue with me, first of all, why not just call me out? It’s this weird, like, thing that the left does where they say, “We don’t want to platform him. We don’t want to give him attention.” But, like, you say, what then happened to that whole deal where it’s like, it’s a free marketplace. We have to just talk or else we’ll fight. We have to, you know, have this marketplace. So there’s just layers of hypocrisy, and no one’s buying. Nobody’s buying into that nonsense. And it’s sad because I think he lost a lot of credibility.

The Hierarchy of Outrages: Bigotry vs. War

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, I completely agree. And I agree it’s sad, you know, and I think, and I’m not saying this again, to pick on Jordan Peterson. It’s just like, I think he’s an important figure. It’s an important topic, and, you know, it does. And this kind of goes to the heart of, you know, back in the—before I ever—we ever met, I mean, we just met in person for the first time. But before I ever had you on my show, I had had, like, I had talked to some of the alt right guys, like, had—I had Christopher Cantwell on my show, I think, a couple times, and I had Richard Spencer on, and I had like, some of those guys in there, and people at the time, it was like a, you know, it was a somewhat risky move.

It was still in the world where you’re like, we might get—I don’t want to get my channel banned and stuff like that. At least at the moment, that feels a little bit safer. But one of the reasons why I liked talking to those guys or one of the reasons why I did the shows with them was that, well, first of all, I did kind of find the ideas interesting, and I’m about, like, I’m interested in the ideas. That’s why we do these things, you know, that’s why we do what we do.

And there, there was also, I guess I’ve always thought there was like, from my perspective as like a libertarian and like a right wing libertarian, I think, and at least compare, you know, comparatively speaking. I always thought that there was this weird, like, I used to talk about this way back in the day when I, in like 2012. I was doing podcasts. No one was listening, but I was doing podcasts and I used to talk about this. This is like totally in the pre—you know, it was before wokeism really became a thing. And then of course before the reaction to wokeism became a thing.

But even back in like 2012, I used to always say that like, you know, the president of the United States could like drop a bomb on a third world country on a wedding and like kill 70 people. And then the same day he could say “the blacks” instead of “African Americans” and the latter would be a bigger scandal than the former. Like there’s something fundamentally wrong with that. Like that is a really, that’s a really sick thing about your society.

And there is this almost like, and I think has been for my entire lifetime, maybe before that, probably that there’s almost this unspoken cultural value that clearly is a left wing value that puts at the absolute top of the hierarchy of outrages: bigotry. Like bigotry is supposed to be up here at the absolute. That’s the worst thing in the world that you can be. When in fact, like that is just not my moral outlook on the world. You know, bigotry is something we all have in excess. I think it’s bad, but there’s much worse things than that.

And one of the things that I always found very interesting was that the alt right guys were really anti war. And this also for you and the groypers are very anti war. And so to me, in my world, like, war is really a much worse thing than racism. I’m not sure how there’s a counter argument to that. Although we treat it like war is just—that’s just policy and this is the worst thing you can do. And so I immediately rejected that.

And so, in fact, you know, with the Jordan Peterson thing, I’ll leave him alone after this. But you want to talk about psychopaths, like, sir, you were on record saying “give them hell.” That was your response. And you know, for the guy who talks about hell all the time—

NICK FUENTES: Yeah, right.

DAVE SMITH: You know, you don’t think hell really exists. It does. You haven’t met enough. Yeah, go to Gaza. Hell does exist. You said, “Give them hell,” and that’s exactly what they got. Like, so, you know, maybe examine yourself before you’re saying, “Oh, but he said a thing about the Jews, so he’s the dark tetrad.”

But then it just seemed to me on top of it. So that’s like, my worldview. Like, I don’t actually think bigotry is the worst thing. I think it can be bad, but I don’t think it’s the worst thing. But then even from, like, say, a liberal worldview, like, isn’t like, Daryl Davis, like, you’re the big hero story. And I’m not, like, claiming that that’s what I’m doing with you. It’s not. But, like, the idea of, like, you’re like, even the guy who you say is the famous guy who converted all the Klansmen, well, he did it by talking to him and being decent. Just be cool. That’s like rule number one, like, always.

And that always seems so obvious to me, particularly as a Jewish person, you know. But I just, like, as a Jew, I would say that, but—but that you’re just like, “Oh, there’s these people who hate Jews.” I was like, well, I should probably be cool because it’s kind of hard for people to hate someone who’s cool to them. And it’s just so weird to me that everybody else’s opinion is like, “No, this is the one thing that’s unacceptable. Bigotry. Anything.” Oh, the government just passed a law that says they can detain you without charges, whatever. But, like, no one’s being a bigot about it. Right? They’re doing it to whites and blacks equally. Like, okay, and then number two, like, what is this thing that we ought to shut people out of the conversation? It seems so counterproductive and stupid.

Words vs. Actions: The Modern Moral Paradigm

NICK FUENTES: Well, and it’s not even just bigotry in particular. It’s words. It’s not like you even have to do a bigoted thing. Like, you beat up a black person for being black and discriminate actively. It’s like, if you have said something that sounds racist, is racist, that is worse than murder, war, et cetera.

And, you know, that was kind of like a phenomenon this summer because I was so outspoken against the war in Gaza and the clips were going around on TikTok and Instagram, and a lot of liberals are saying, “Wait a second, even he is saying, this is evil. This is a guy we’re supposed to hate. You know, maybe the broken clock is right twice a day.”

And I was on my show reminding people, like, yeah, maybe I’m racist, maybe we disagree on issues of race, but I’m against murder, I’m against genocide. Isn’t—and like you said, is that not the actual moral paradigm, is like, killing, war, famine, are these things not the real evils? And maybe bigotry is somewhere further away from that and saying things that might be bigoted further even still from that. And we live in a society now where it seems like if you have ever uttered anything that’s bad, it haunts you.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah.

The Politics of Reputational Destruction

NICK FUENTES: You know, it’s like I look at my Wikipedia page and it’s like, he’s a racist, sexist, homophobe, Islamophobe. In 2018, he said this, in 2020, he said that. And I go on shows and in the news reports, they list things I have said. It’s like I do a talk show. I talk three hours a day for a living for 10 years. And sometimes it sounds controversial or provocative or offensive.

But doesn’t that kind of go with the territory of freedom of conscience? If we can think, should we not be able to speak? And if we speak, can we not be wrong? Can we not be funny? Can we not be insensitive or bombastic?

And I guess this gets to something about, because you think, well, society shouldn’t be this way. But why is it this way? People are hanged by their words, selectively. This is like, these are tools of reputational destruction. They don’t like where you’re pointed. So then they look for things that are going to hurt people’s feelings and say, oh, well, you shouldn’t listen to this guy because he said this. And I bet you don’t like how that sounds, huh?

Because when you look at, I brought this up on PBD, Ben Shapiro, in the year 2000, I think, wrote an article about ethnic cleansing. It said, “Transfer is not a dirty word.” And he’s arguing for literal ethnic cleansing. Now, I have never argued anything close to that. I’ve never made the argument that we should ethnically cleanse blacks from the United States. But if I did, I’d be hanged by that forever.

Is Shapiro? Why? And why not? He is not reminded of that every time he goes around, not because he apologized for it 20 years later, but because he has all the correct opinions. He’s not a target. He’s got backing. And so that kind of tells us that, and by the way, the same applies to all other kinds of scandals.

If we want to have an open society, and that’s ironic coming from me, but we do need that.

DAVE SMITH: Libertarian, Nick Fuentes.

NICK FUENTES: Yeah, sort of. It’s like you do need some level of tolerance, actually, to inoculate yourself from using reputational destruction for political control. Because that’s what I’ve come to realize about it.

The Ron Paul Newsletters and Selective Outrage

DAVE SMITH: Dude, you’re 100% right. I used to talk about this all the time because, you know, as you mentioned, I was a big Ron Paul supporter when he was running for president. And when he was running for president, which is looking back at it now in 2025 is so goddamn funny. But they’d always bring up the racist Ron Paul newsletters. The racist newsletters, which, by the way, if you look at that, it was so tame compared to anything.

I mean, it was literally like, I think one of the things was they said some, one guy in the newsletter said the LA riots only stopped because they needed their welfare check or something. Which is like, anyway, but so, and they would, Ron Paul, of all people, to try to paint him as a hater of some sort. Dude who does not have a hateful, it’s just like a Christian baby doctor who’s been married to the same woman for 60 something years.

And they would try to pull that up and then you’d notice, oh, okay. But look at the things Joe Biden has said in his day. Look at things Hillary Clinton has said. Look at all the, oh, no, they don’t ever get hit for that.

In fact, the greatest libertarian theorist of all time, Murray Rothbard, in one of his most controversial articles, and we talked about this, I think, the first time we podcasted together. But he wrote this thing about David Duke, and he was making the point how they’re like, well, why is it that they hate David Duke so much? And I go, oh, you say because he used to be in the Klan. And you go, well, Robert Byrd, the lion of the Senate, he used to be in the Klan. No one has a problem with that. And so you realize.

NICK FUENTES: Yes.

DAVE SMITH: Oh, this is, you make the rules so vague and so narrow that they apply to everyone. And then you choose who’s going to get hit and who always happens to get hit. Very coincidentally, the people who don’t support Israel in the permanent warfare state. Always. Always.

It’s even like with the woke right term, the definition they’re working off of is you awoken to something that makes you woke. And by the way, here’s a list of all the woke right people and they completely coincidentally happen to be all of the right wingers who don’t support Israel and don’t support the warfare state. That’s always what it is.

The one common, and that’s another, it’s a real problem of the kind of the racist thing being what you ruin people over. Because again, we’re all a little bit racist. People just don’t want to admit it. But that’s one thing growing up in New York City, you learn when you’re around different people. It’s not, racism isn’t something that belongs to old white men. It’s something that every group has. And actually minorities in this country are quite willing to be open about it.

NICK FUENTES: Yes.

DAVE SMITH: Which is something that is, you know, not discussed like liberal academia, but you go over to your Asian friend’s house and his dad will tell you exactly how black people are, how Latino people are, how white people are.

Anyway, so, you know, even when I was talking to those alt right guys back in the day, and part of the reason, and I never, you know, I did always find the conversations interesting though. I didn’t, I mean I always thought the, I always thought the ethnostate thing was just like a retarded non starter of, you know, you’re going to turn America into an, like what?

But I guess I want to say this the right way because I know people will judge me for saying this, but in some ways I kind of thought that the alt right and then in some ways the groypers, in a way they were the most honest expression of the Trump moment.

NICK FUENTES: Yeah.

The Honest Expression of the Trump Movement

DAVE SMITH: Because I think there’s through years of, you know, kind of political correctness, the post war consensus, like all of these things. It’s almost like the older generation was, there was an inability to just say it because it was perceived as racist in order to say so. There’s always code words. It’s like we have too much illegal immigration, we have too much of the, you know, we need.

And when really what the issue was about was that America was being transformed racially. I mean that it was being transformed from a majority white country, which it’s always been through its entire history and that’s being changed.

And it just seemed to me that it’s pretty obvious that any, you know, if you whatever, like the things the alt right guys all used to say, if you went to Italy and said, hey, we have some demographic projections, this place is going to be 90% French in a few years, isn’t that wonderful. I think most of them would go, no, it’s not wonderful, because we want this to be Italy.

And so, and you have this drastic change that was completely forced on the American. There was never a choice. There was never a referendum on, should America become a majority minority country? And that referendum wouldn’t have done too good in 1960. You know, like, if you had asked those, whenever the bill was. If you had asked those people, it would have been everybody, including all the black people, would have been like, no, you would have gotten 99% voting against it.

This happened against the will of the Americans. And during that, it’s not even like they’re like, hey, the people never asked for this, but we’re transforming your society anyway, but we’re going to be really cool about it. They didn’t even throw that last one in there. They went, you didn’t ask for this. It’s happening anyway. And f* you and everything you hold dear. And also, your son’s a girl on every level.

And I think that was guaranteed to create a pushback, and I think it’s crazy to not engage with that.

Make America Great Again: An Implicit White Identity Movement

NICK FUENTES: Yeah, absolutely. And I agree. That’s how I interpreted the Trump Revolution when I was 18 and Trump won the election. Well, and by we, I mean me and my followers at the time, or whoever I considered a fellow traveler, we viewed the Trump revolution as an implicit white identitarian movement. And that, that is what was loaded behind every slogan.

Make America great again. Okay, when was America great? Was it great 15 years ago? Or are you talking about the 80s? And what was America like in the 80s? You know, it was a different color, was a different flavor.

We’re going to say Merry Christmas again. Okay, what does that mean? Who doesn’t say Merry Christmas? Liberals. And all these people that practice different religions, Muslims and Jews for that matter. Although Trump was always pro Israel, and we saw Trump as basically just an implicit expression of that. And over time, would become more explicit as the changes became sort of ignorable, the demographic changes, the cultural changes.

And I do agree with your point, because as someone like myself, these were the conversations I was having as maybe a higher IQ. Obviously, I’m not just a resentful, angry white man who doesn’t like change. I was looking at this and saying, as you said before, it’s not maybe desirable that America changes. You recognize this is in progress. It is happening. It in some sense has happened.

And as maybe a young person, though, and being precocious and also impulsive and immature, I was trying to find the vocabulary and language to talk about these things. And I was interested in opinions on this and I did talk to people at the time who were willing to engage with me. They were few and far between and they would say, is it really practical, an ethno state, you know, and clearly there’s going to be diversity, but how are we going to live with that? How can we preserve some semblance of our way of life?

And I feel like if there was more of a recognition that we deserve that, that we deserve engagement, a conversation recognition, you know, that our grievances are valid, that it’s okay to not be okay with the things that are happening, maybe the movement would have taken a different direction or maybe it wouldn’t be so much rage and conflict and division.

But it’s like you said, people were told, this is the way it’s going to be. Your neighborhood is destroyed, it’s irreversibly changed. If you have a problem with that, it’s because you’re a bad person. If that makes you angry, we’re just going to take away your voice. And if you riot, then we’re just going to throw you in jail and ruin your life.

And it was just kind of like I said this on my show, doubling down, always doubling down, ignoring intolerance. I know that’s trite at this point, but ironically, you know, the proponents of tolerance were intolerant of anyone that wasn’t on board and anyone that didn’t look like the new American they wanted to make.

The Overton Window Shifts

And I think that in some sense, maybe my ascendancy in the past couple of years as well, and this is accompanied by, and maybe caused it, the Overton window moving to the right on everything, on race, on Israel, on crime, on immigration. Now that people are kind of banging on the door of the liberal elite saying get out, now they’re willing to have the conversation. Now they’re saying, all right, all right, all right, okay, maybe we could talk about turning some of this stuff back.

And I’ve said on my show, I just hope this is the moment when there’s introspection and we do talk and we find a resolution. Because my fear is that we blow right past that. And the worst elements with the worst impulses, because they are vindicated in some sense, are going to take control of this and it is going to be a lot of populist anger, real resentment, real rage, real hatred, cruelty. Because I think that’s a distinct possibility.

The Changing Landscape of Race Relations in America

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, I’m glad you say that. And I completely agree with you. And I do think it’s a moment that there should be introspection for everybody, like myself included, you and your audience included, and also those liberals. I mean, because it’s just, you know, like, and perhaps part of this perspective is just that I’m older than you. Not that I need to, like, play that as a card, but I just, my point of reference, like, I was born in the 1980s, and so I grew up. I was born in ’83. I grew up in the 80s and 90s, and this was a different country back then, you know.

And I think one of the things that’s been interesting, I’m really interested to get your point of view on this. One thing that’s been interesting for me about, say, like, the cultural transformation, the most recent one that we’ve lived through, with the woke insanity being rolled back and the censorship being rolled back, which are very related, I think. And I think there’s certain things you could point to that were, like, big moments.

Like, I think the Bud Light and the Target campaigns were, like, a big moment. Like, it was one of the first times that, like, big corporations got a black eye over this. And even if they gained that money back in their stock, it’s like you lose billions of dollars. That starts getting people thinking about this stuff. And then obviously, Elon buying Twitter and then just kind of Zuckerberg wanting to be cool or whatever. It is exactly the government pressure being taken off. I don’t know if we know exactly what it is, but, like, we’re.

But one of the things that’s been interesting is, like, I think from people, like, my perspective, being 42, is that I think a lot of us were like, oh, good. Like, we can go back to not having everything so racialized and having everything so, you know, like, just, you know, I just think that stuff’s not good. And then, you know, that is not at all what’s happened. And in fact, I think, you know, like, it’s been kicked into higher gear.

And one of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot with that is that, you know, it’s probably just from my perspective, being my age, it’s much easier for me to go, all right, let’s just go back to, like, what, the before time, before this woke insanity, things weren’t that crazy, at least culturally. Whereas I think your audience and part of mine, but more so your audience, which is younger, naturally, they lived through it in a different way than I ever did.

You know, and they’re, you know, you think about, like, that, what was the kid’s name? Sandman. Nicholas Sandman.

NICK FUENTES: Oh, yeah, Nicholas, the guy.

The Nicholas Sandman Case and Generational Divides

DAVE SMITH: They tried to ruin this kid’s life for the crime of being an angel. I mean, could not. Dude, Nick, man, I am lucky that there wasn’t social media or podcasting or any or like, sht when I was a kid. But I remember saying on that show, man, if me and my friends when we were teenagers, if those black Israelites, because we were just little fing hooligans from Brooklyn, like, we were like, if they had come up and started talking all that sht to us and the neighbor. “You guys are colonizers.” We would have immediately been like, “That’s right, btch. Yeah, we took your sht, didn’t we? Oh, yeah, you raped our women. Oh, and you didn’t do sht.”

Like, we would have just immediately started talking sh*t back to them. It would probably been a fight. This kid does nothing. Just a Catholic kid who’s, like, in there for a ride. So he just smiles. He just stands there and smiles. And they tried to ruin his life over that.

And I think, you know, for a lot of people that you talk to, you know, these are like, I’m not saying they were black people growing up in the Jim Crow south, but they really were. They really did come up under a system that was overtly bigoted against them, where it was like, hey, it is the law of the land that you will be denied opportunities. “We’re looking to put women and people of color and everything, except you, straight white man. We’re looking everything else.” Your university hates your guts. Hollywood hates your guts, the media, the political class.

And it’s a big ask after all of that, when you get, you know, the leg up to go, “Can you be cool now?” And so I understand where that’s a tough thing, you know, to ask. At the same time, I do think, as you mentioned, we’re not going to live in a white ethno State. The 1960, we can’t go back to 1965 and undo the Immigration Act. And this is going to be a multiracial society of some sort. And we ought to think about, like, okay, how do we move forward in a way that’s conducive to peace and prosperity, which is kind of what we all, on some level, want.

The Question of Power and Multiracialism

NICK FUENTES: Yeah, it’s a difficult question because I guess it comes down to multiracialism itself because we do live in different America. There was, I’m told, the consensus in the 90s and the early knots where people describe race relations as generally good. And you know, we could talk about why that is. I mean, people say that that’s only after there was this intense anti crime intervention, the crime bill and Giuliani and stop and frisk and all that, you know, but people say things are pretty good. But America was also a lot less diverse.

And so we’ve undergone this political transformation. And on the other side of it, we do have a much different America. And the question is now that we really do have like these large groups of different races in the country, can there be a brand new political order that’s based on understanding? And it comes down to the question of that in itself.

And to me, all these little things that they were talking about 20 years ago or 10 years ago, representation, microaggressions, opportunity, it’s really about power. That’s ultimately what it comes down to. It’s about who will predominate, who will be preeminent. When you’re talking about, for example, DEI, that’s saying we want the spots at Harvard because, you know, who is scouting Harvard talent? The biggest corporations, law firms. And we want to be in the law firms, we want to be on the boards of the biggest companies because we want power and we want power to help ourselves. We want that for black people, we want that for Hispanics, for Asians.

And so it does come down ultimately to power sharing and power sharing and even wealth sharing. It comes down to the distribution or allocation of resources. It’s contentious because whites are necessarily losing power. They used to have all of it and now they’re sharing it. Now they’re going to have half of it or a quarter of it.

And what’s more is if another group has power over you, there’s like an inherent suspicion because it’s like, well, this guy’s not really looking out for me because he doesn’t look like me and he didn’t come from where I came from and he’s not like me. And the problem with this is after there’s so much conflict, they, the non whites don’t trust whites and the whites are rightly skeptical of the non whites because the non whites seem to have license to hate whites. Non whites have like inherent distrust, basically like a veiled hatred and resentment. And they’re totally, they feel completely able to express that.

And so the fundamental question is, how now do the races share power in a way that isn’t contentious? How do we find an understanding? And I don’t know if that’s even possible because the concern from the alt right was always in particular in a democracy, in an open society, when politics gets racialized, it basically just becomes like a race war. It turns into like a soft form of a racial war.

And now they’re saying woke. Right. I think the reason they’re doing that and they want to just kind of get rid of identity politics and find a consensus is because they want for the whites now not to fight the non whites. They want a situation where, like you said, we’re going to have happy liberal whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, all living together. I just don’t know how possible that is at this point.

And that’s where people start to talk about, can we disintegrate? You know, we were forcibly integrated with immigration, and after Civil Rights act, can we now go our separate ways? I don’t know that that’s actually even a good thing, though. I don’t know if that’s even like a good answer. But I would say where it starts is just with honesty. Ultimately there’s got to be a recognition that there are legitimate grievances on both sides and there are illegitimate grievances.

DAVE SMITH: Right.

The Path Forward: Honesty and Consensus

NICK FUENTES: There are legitimate voices expressing those grievances. That actually, because I said this on the Charlie Kirk show after Charlie got shot, I think there was a real threat of like, war. I think there still is because left wingers are shooting people and blowing stuff up, and eventually a right winger is going to retaliate and then is it going to be like the 60s and 70s? That’s a question.

But I said on my show after Charlie died, the important thing is let’s get a new consensus of people that don’t want that, that don’t want war, that don’t want their opponents to die, that don’t want to murder each other. I said, I’m Christian, I don’t believe in murder. I don’t believe in revenge. I said, and not all people are Christian, and not all Christians believe that, actually.

And so I think moving forward, there needs to be an uncomfortable coming together of people that have grievances, legitimate grievances with each other, but who both want harmony, want to live in peace, don’t want bloodshed, leaders from both sides to come together. But I’m not optimistic. I think that the most cynical, calculating people rise to the top. They will incite and exploit the divisions and try to vie for control. And I think, you know, conflict is more likely than peace at this point.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, it’s very hard. It’s very hard to keep those because it’s so easy. It’s so easy. You know, and by the way, just because you mentioned it, and I did say this publicly a bunch, but I really did appreciate your episode after Charlie Clark. Thank you for that.

You know, I was on Piers Morgan debating that Brandon Tatum, the cop guy, and that was what he was. He said I was a terrible person for giving you credit for that show. And then his whole argument was like, he goes, “Nick is disingenuous. He doesn’t mean that.” And so I was just like, you know, whatever. I didn’t even, like, spend that much time on it and the thing. But it was just funny. It was like, in my head, I was like, wait, so in your worldview, like, Nick is this disingenuous? He’s the leading neo Nazi. It’s like, okay, so the leading neo Nazi is calling for peace. Like, is that not, can we at least acknowledge that’s preferable to, like, the other outcome?

But on the broader topic, you know, I agree with your assessment, unfortunately, that it’s kind of less likely that this has a positive outcome than a negative one. But I do think that, you know, I look at it like, like, I was born in 1983, which, you know, to me does not feel like that long ago. I still feel like you, man, except my knees. My knees really don’t feel like you.

But, you know, so I was born in 1983. This is 20 years. Less than 20 years. 19 years after the Civil Rights Act. Right. So it’s like, it kind of does make sense in a way that perhaps there was, like, a different outlook only 20 years after the Civil Rights act, and now it’s 2025. Like, this is actually quite a bit further than this is 60 years after the Civil Rights act now.

The Broken Gentleman’s Agreement

And I do think that, like, in order to move forward, the only way to do this would be to declare, man, I hate saying this word, but actual equality of some sense. Like, it would actually have to be like, look, nobody’s getting discriminated against under the law. Either nobody has a right to have their special, their group interest, their group, or everybody gets to do it.

I think the way it worked when I was a kid, it’s almost like there was a gentleman’s agreement, and there was a gentleman’s agreement where it was kind of like, look, we know, like, bad things happened to minorities in this country in the past, and so we’re not going to say, you know, like, some of the things that we obviously know, and we’ll even allow you to say a little bit about us that was kind of the gentleman’s agreement.

And at a certain point, it was like, the progressive left, particularly, just broke this gentleman’s agreement. And they were like, well, no, we’re going to say everything that we want to say. And then eventually, I feel like, you know, the young kind of like, okay, well, then screw it. So then there’s no gentleman’s agreement anymore.

NICK FUENTES: Right?

The Scott Adams Controversy and Racial Reality

DAVE SMITH: And, you know, part of… I remember, I’m sure you saw this when Scott Adams had that comment a couple years ago, I guess it was, that went super viral. Scott Adams, who unfortunately is, I think, very sick these days. Me and him have argued a few times on Twitter, but I was sad to hear that. But he said the thing. He was like, “My advice to white people is just don’t be around blacks. Like, just move away. Move to a different neighborhood where they’re not there.”

And I remember first hearing that and going, like, yo, that’s fed up, dude. And then, like, the second after, I went, “Oh, that’s fed up,” I went, “This is exactly what I did. That is exactly what I did.”

You know, I mean, I remember me and my wife were looking at the town that we ultimately moved to, and it’s just like, there was like a grading thing. You know, when you look at towns and they’re like, schools, A plus. Like, this A plus. This A plus. Crime, A plus. This A plus. And they go, diversity, D minus. And I was like, cool.

I mean, again, it’s not like I don’t care, but it’s like, those other things are important to me, and they do seem to be attached to this one. And so it’s like, I think in order to kind of put this fire out, you would have to just… There would have to be some type of system where it’s like, look, like white people are there. They can’t be discriminated against under the law, and they can’t be discriminated against in other ways either. And they have to also be allowed to say what they want to say.

Then, to your point, there are legitimate grievances that black people have. I mean, there is no… And I, this is my own bias, I guess, but much of it doing with government policy, almost everything that’s handed to them from the state is absolute garbage. And their schools are really bad, and there’s legitimate grievances there. I also think welfare has done enormous damage.

But you kind of can’t just blame all your problems on white people and racism. I mean, that actually is not really what’s holding black people back in this country. And I think we have to be honest about that if we don’t want things to go in an ugly direction.

Moving Beyond Wokeism and Racial Hatred

NICK FUENTES: Yeah, well, and you know, I would say that a lot of what occurred under wokeism, I don’t think it was all bad necessarily because I think that, you know, as I get older, I do recognize it’s sort of funny. Like when I was a teenager we were getting called racist for everything. Everything was racist, everything.

And I feel like a lot of people started out saying, “What? How’s that racist?” I remember used to like you said earlier, if you called them black and not African American, like 2012, that was the problem, or colored instead of person of color, whatever. And you’d say, “I don’t hate anybody for their race.”

I feel like people have kind of gone full circle and now 10 years later people are like, they actually hate non-white people and go, “Yeah, I’m racist, so what?” And I don’t know, I feel like maybe that’s a mistake in a sense. I mean, I’ve said I’m racist, but like actually genuinely harboring racial hatred is bad. I think it’s good as the society we move past that. I think it’s good as a society we move past a lot of prejudice.

And I think I agree that the new consensus just needs to be just like you said, that basic conception of fairness, equality. And I would, it really comes down to specificity with the language like everyone now talks about, are you racist? Are you not racist? I say, yeah, I’m a little racist. I think everyone’s a little racist. Yeah, we’re all little prejudiced and we all believe in stereotypes and what does that even really mean?

But do I believe in cruelty, hatred, violence? No. And I usually like to use those words because anyone who knows me, the number one racist, knows I’m not a cruel person, I’m not a hateful person, I’m not a violent person unless I’m put in a self defense situation in my front door, you know, because that is, you know, tends to happen, you know.

And I think that as a country we could survive being racist. We can’t survive like ontologically hating each other and not wanting the best for each other and wanting to kill and destroy each other. And that’s why I think it’s really important. It’s like I said after that show, we are going to need to fight. I do believe there is going to need to be like an intense political battle and people are going to need to choose what side they’re going to be on.

And what side I’m not on is the side where someone gets shot in the neck and you celebrate, or someone gets stabbed in the neck with a knife and you make excuses for it. Or even in Gaza, people are being blown to smithereens and you say, “Give them hell, they deserve it.” Whatever.

It’s like, we need to find a way where… And I’m Christian, of course, but we need to take most of the right and some of the left, even against the kind of nihilistic element on the far left, because I really believe they are the problem. I think they are driving a lot of the issues here.

The Limits of Free Speech and Moral Boundaries

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, well, I think there’s a lot of truth to that. And I do agree with you that there was something… You know, it really, it was one of those examples that really pushes you up to the limit of, like, speech versus inciting violence. But, like, there is something like what, dude, there was just a major political assassination. This is a dangerous moment for this country. And you’re just making a video about how great it was and that.

And I 100% agreed with your take. I think it was on Greenwald or Patrick Bet-David, one of those two shows where you were just like, “Yeah, they should get fired from their job.” And like, yeah, I mean, I’m sorry, there’s like, there is a level. And yes, you do have to, like, you have to work out your own hierarchy of moral outrages or whatever.

But again, it’s… Sometimes these things are somewhat arbitrary. I shouldn’t even say… I guess exactly where you draw the line feels kind of arbitrary, you know, in the same way, like, we all know, like, okay, a 6 year old can’t drive a car, but a 25 year old has to be able to. Like, I don’t know, there’s somewhere you got to draw the line.

And like, if a woman is getting fired for posting “All Lives Matter,” that’s insane. But like, if you’re getting fired for, it’s like, I don’t know. You know, I had a friend of mine, a buddy of mine who made a… He got fired from his job because he made a video singing Kanye West’s “Hail Hitler” song. And it was like, well, yeah, you…

NICK FUENTES: Know, I don’t know.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, a lot of employers are going to look at that and be like, “Yeah, dude, you can’t. I can’t abuse.” And that’s not nearly, nearly, nearly as bad as… as… as celebrating someone who just got murdered.

By the way, I know you’re friends with Kanye. Got to say, dude, I… Kanye’s album “College Dropout” spoke to my soul. It was the year I dropped out of college. He made this album, “College Dropout,” and I always loved… There’s this one really beautiful song on there called “Family Business,” and I heard it earlier today and, man, it hits different. After cousins, the whole story is about his cousin and I always thought it was such a nice song. But after cousins, you’re… This one has a whole different tone to it.

The Israel Obsession Problem

So I did… Okay, I want to… This is something else, because I text you. I wanted to talk about this. And so I wanted to kind of… Because this was another thing that I heard you bring up recently. And it’s one that’s part of particularly frustrates me. And whenever something particularly frustrates me, I’m always like, okay, yeah, and then I got to figure out why. Exactly.

I remember one time back in the day, Glenn Greenwald, this was when he broke the Snowden story, and he went on Lawrence O’Donnell’s show, and Lawrence O’Donnell said to him, he was like, “You know, Glenn, I’ve read all your reporting, and honestly, like, I just don’t care. Like, I got nothing to hide. Like, I don’t care if the government wants to look through my phone. I got nothing to hide.”

I remember Glenn was talking about it, and he was like… He was like, there was nothing about it that just made me so angry, and I kind of couldn’t figure out what it was. And then it dawned on me that it was like, well, yeah, obviously you have nothing to fear, Lawrence O’Donnell. It’s only the ones… It’s only the journalists who do real journalism who have anything to worry about, you know.

And there’s this dynamic that I see building up on the right. And I will… And again, these are not people who I have anything personally against, but, like, Matt Walsh, Tim Pool. Tim’s been very good to me. I consider him a friend. But they’ve all kind of taken this line of like, “I don’t care. I don’t care what’s going on with Israel. Like, why are you guys so obsessed? You know, why are you so…”

And there’s something so particularly enraging about it. And I think part of it is because I really genuinely believe, like, guys like me and you are like, we’d love to not talk about this.

NICK FUENTES: Right?

The Price of Opposition

DAVE SMITH: That’s kind of our whole argument. Our whole argument is that this shouldn’t be a thing we even have to talk about. But saying, why are you obsessed? It’s like in 2006, I’m sitting here and I go, look, I’m a non-interventionist, but why is everyone talking about Iraq? Why do you have that? Because that’s where we’re intervening.

So, like, how can you sit here and be like, I’m a non-interventionist? Like, you’re taking the correct policy position from my perspective, so I at least give you credit for that. But the thing is, we are intervening. We are currently being interventionists.

And also, like, if your whole thing is like, I want to focus on America, I don’t want to go fight other wars. Well, who’s pulling us into wars, right? It ain’t Lebanon. You know what I mean? Like, so, like, what. How do you. How. It just seems like cowardice to me.

Like, how do you get. And it does seem like that message is resonating with, like, some people as. I just think it’s profoundly unfair. Like, the whole thing, the whole point of all of this is that it is an American destruction of Gaza. This isn’t Israel doing it.

Netanyahu goes around and brags about what Israel can do. Israel can’t do sh*t. Israel can only do things because they have the full backing of the United States of America. So, like, sorry, if you’re in the world of talking about these things, you don’t get to pass on this one. You got to have an opinion.

The Rhetorical Cop-Out

NICK FUENTES: Yeah, I saw that too. And it’s become very popular over the past year and a half. I see a lot of the young men, they watch Matt Walsh, they watch this other stuff and they say, well, yeah, I just don’t really care about Israel that much. I care about America.

And I saw Matt Walsh say that on Tucker. He said, and you could tell that it is like a rhetorical innovation because let’s be honest, this is an issue that people like Matt Walsh don’t want to talk about because he works for Ben Shapiro and he knows, like, Candace Owens, if you drift too far on that subject, you lose your job. And he likes having a job.

So you get it. Now, this is an extremely contentious issue also, and it’s very topical. It’s in the news. And he knows the question’s coming. Are you pro-Israel? Are you anti-Israel? There’s people who feel very strongly about it and you could tell this is like a rhetorical device. It’s a cop out where you can say, I’m not pro-Israel, but I’m not anti-Israel, I just don’t care.

And that really pissed me off because it seems like you’re feigning ignorance. You’re either lying or you’re really ignorant. And the reason why is because, be that as it may, that you don’t care about Israel. We happen to be supporting their war and it’s actually hurting us. And there’s other things too. Obviously it’s a big subject. There’s a lot of this stuff going on.

And so people say, well, we’ll let them kill each other. If you’ve been paying attention, one side’s doing a lot more killing. We’re paying for it. We are, you know, on the hook for all of it. And you know, so when they say, well, all that stuff, we don’t care about it, whatever, be that as it may, it is going on and until it stops or changes, we can’t stop talking about it.

That’s what it’s like you said, we don’t want to be obsessed with it, but if you talk about it, you get canceled. We have to talk about getting canceled. We have talked about the thing in itself. And when that changes, similar on the same vein, people like Matt Walsh say, well, we should just end all foreign aid. It’s like, okay, but they get like all of it and it’s not ending anytime soon.

So you could sit there with your arms folded and say, well, I think we should end the foreign aid. But like, it’s not really a big issue. Well, then you’re in favor of the status quo. And that’s kind of the whole point is like, even if you’re recusing yourself or you’re complacent, if you’re doing anything other than actively opposing, you’re passively supporting the ongoing status quo. And that, that needs to be said, right?

The Political Cost

DAVE SMITH: And it just seems like, as you said, there’s a price tag to be paid for opposing Israel and you don’t wish to pay that price. I’m like, okay, I understand that. But your entire worldview, even down to the non-interventionist, clearly says you have to oppose this, but you don’t want to pay the price. And so you’ll just go like, oh, you guys are obsessed. You guys are obsessed with this issue.

It’s like, it’s a pretty relevant issue. And like, you know, and it’s a disaster for the Trump base, right? I mean, it’s like, just politically it’s a disaster for the Democrats also. It’s a huge part of the reason why they lost in 2024, and not just because their base was so against the thing, but because it really—

NICK FUENTES: Sucked.

DAVE SMITH: All the energy out of the room that they needed to be in opposition of Trump. They needed young people to be their shock troops like they were in 2016 and 2020. And all those young people were protesting the genocide, and they just weren’t going to turn around and be outraged by Tony Hinchcliffe, you know, doing a routine at Madison Square Garden after that. It’s just impossible.

So it was devastating to them, but they’re still going to support Israel no matter what. And now Donald Trump, you know, they say, oh, look, you know, they’re destroying the Trump coalition. And it’s like, well, we are kind of not budging on this one. So I don’t know what to say.

Like, you know, this is not, look, it’s not just, first of all, just for moral reasons, like, I’m not budging on an issue of genocide. I’m not doing that. But on top of that, just for sovereignty reasons, for the obvious, you know, I mean, look, at the very least, even if you don’t go nearly as far as me, let alone as far as you, Benjamin Netanyahu is a neocon at the very least, right?

Like, at the very least, he’s a guy who testified before Congress advocating we fight the war in Iraq, in Libya, and advocates we fight a regime change war in Iran. If that guy, if a guy with that track record was appointed as Secretary of State or as the Defense Secretary, every non-interventionist has to be against that guy. So how can you, you can’t be for him.

Like, it’s just. And I do think that, I mean, you know, I think there, there is like, they don’t want to pay the price of being an Israel critic, but I think there’s a new price that’s going to come from not, you know, taking a stand on this at all.

Creating Counter-Pressure

NICK FUENTES: I totally agree. And, and I have kind of made that my mission. You know, like, people hate the Groypers because the Groypers swarm on the Internet.

DAVE SMITH: They sure do, the bastards.

NICK FUENTES: Even among my good friends who happen to be Jewish, they swarm and they make people upset and they’re applying pressure. And that was something that I did very intentionally in 2022. I did my AFPAC3 conference. We invited Joe Kent who was running for Congress and he was America First. He’s from the intel community, anti-war, I think his wife tragically was killed in Syria and by all appearances seemed to be a good faith critic of the war machine.

We invited him to our conference, he didn’t show up. And then the next day, even though he wasn’t even there, he disavowed me and said I disavow Nick Fuentes. That’s not populism, he said, particularly his views on Israel.

And I said, see that’s the problem because, and this is going on to this day, whether it’s Kent, Trump, Biden, Charlie Kirk, if you go against Israel, they make you pay a heavy price. You know, AIPAC is coming in with the Berserkers. The ADL’s coming in like you’re going to pay, so what do you do? Hey, I got to get him off my back. I got to disavow you. I have to, I have to sign the letter. It’s easier. It’s the path of least resistance.

I said we have to create an opposing force and push in the other direction. We need people to know that if you go too in favor of Israel or condemn the Israel critical right, you’re going to pay a heavy price too. You’re going to get, and we don’t have money power, but we got people power.

You’re going to have somebody in your district asking you about Israel at every stop. You’re going to have stickers put up, we’re going to make a website, we’re going to do this. He lost by 2,000 votes. He lost by like less than 1%. Biggest upset in the midterms. Now maybe that was us, maybe it wasn’t, but you can’t know for sure. Now looking back, would he have made the same remark? Maybe not. Because he says it wasn’t worth it.

And I’m a big believer in we got to get serious. And this was the idea behind Groyper War 2. This was the idea behind the, what do they call them in Michigan in the Democratic primary they voted like no preference. We need to make it visible and known like yeah, AIPAC has the money, we have the votes and like you said, we can’t budge on that.

The Baggage Question

DAVE SMITH: Okay, so here’s where maybe I would slightly disagree with you, although I get, I get your point, I certainly get the point about like making there has to be a price tag also for this. But to be completely fair here, you also have painted yourself into this position where you’ve and look, I’m not like, being judgment.

First of all, as I said, this is something I think just as a society, we’re going to have to figure out going forward now that everybody’s online all the time, people can’t be ruined over what they said in their fing twenties. It’s just too crazy. It’s too crazy. Everybody says whatever. Anyone interesting has said crazy sht in their f*ing twenties.

That being said, it’s not disavowing you. It’s not just the anti-Israel sht. There’s also all the Nazi sht on top of it. And I don’t mean like, you’re a Nazi. I mean, okay, a lot of it might be sarcasm. A lot of it is that you kind of are the best at channeling, like, the energy of, like, talking sh*t on an Xbox controller.

Like, when I was a kid, we didn’t have those. Those, you know, you didn’t talk on video games. But we talked sht like that. Like, I know that energy and I’m fond of it, but I could see where, like, anybody who’s got to get anywhere in politics is like, listen, I have to, like, I can’t take all that baggage. So in other words, there is a difference between, say, disavowing just the anti-Israel position and disavowing like, all the extra sht on top of that. Does that make sense?

The Exception That Proves the Rule

NICK FUENTES: Yeah, and I get what you mean. But in that particular case, he went out of his way. Like, he wasn’t even associated with me. You know, we have. We did happen to be talking privately, but it wasn’t known. And my point is that it’s. So it’s this idea that disavowing is cheap. It’s the path of least resistance.

And maybe that might be a bad example. This is a little contentious, you’re right. But to signal allegiance to Israel, it’s easier to signal my allegiance because he said, in particular, I disavow Nick Fuentes and his views on Israel. If he said he’s too extreme, he’s a Hitler lover, that would have been one thing. Like you said, no politician can be forced to accept baggage like that trying to win in a purple district, but said his views on Israel.

An alarm bell went up and I said, no, this won’t do because. And in particular, the Mount Walsh faction. I’m sure he’s a good guy. I don’t hate him as a guy. He’s Catholic, he’s white, he’s very conservative. I’m sure he’s a nice guy, but he represents a faction of like quietists, where they’re going to go with the Israel controlled right to get where they need to go. And I think that that’s, that’s part, you know, name of the show. It’s part of the problem. That’s a big part of the problem.

But there needs to be a faction, sadly, that is dedicated to strictly, explicitly America First. Because like you said, I mean, what even motivated me is that tension where Trump said, no, the new doctrine’s America First, not small government conservatism, it’s this. And I said, yeah, but there’s one glaring exception to that, it seems.

And they’re trying to tell us, well, forget about it, except that’s the most important exception. That’s the exception that proves the rule. So that’s why I’m very insistent and militant on the right wing that people kind of make it known where they stand because it’s a betrayal.

The Douglas Murray Debate and Its Aftermath

DAVE SMITH: Well, I do. Well, I agree with that. I mean, I think that there’s got to be some type of pressure because otherwise it’s all going in the other direction, you know, and I agree with you and I try my best. Like even when I say with Jordan Peterson, I think that, I think Matt Walsh’s as silly as it is. I thought like the “What Is a Woman?” thing was really, you know, it did a lot of good for the culture. And so you try to give those people credit.

But at the same time, yeah, you’re right, I mean, this is a very big issue of national sovereignty and American interests. And you’re right, he’s quite willing to go along with it. And I do want to, you know, I’ll say that. And I swear I’m not just like saying this to preface it, but so there was, because I do want to talk a little bit about, you know, the stuff that we, because we kind of had a bit of a public feud and I don’t care about like feelings and stuff, but I want to talk about the issues.

But I will say this right, so when I did the Douglas Murray debate, you know, I had always, you know, I’ve been doing big shows for a few years now and I’m always taking the controversial issue of whatever the current thing is. And it’s not because I just want to be a contrarian. Like, I don’t know, it’s just always wrong. And it’s always like when it was the COVID lockdowns, I was against that. When it was the vaccine, I was against. When it was the Ukraine War, I was against that.

And I would go on, like, Rogan’s show right when it’s a white hot issue and be making the case against it. And so I’d get a lot of, like, pushback, but I was kind of, like, used to the level. But then after the Douglas Murray one, I mean, I really rose up on Israel’s most wanted list, and I was swarmed and what seemed to be kind of coordinated, but, you know, I don’t know.

But just all of a sudden, like, my Twitter experience changed. And it’s everybody with, you know, like, everyone with Hebrew letters in their name is furious at me and all this. And it was, I had never really been, like, I had never quite had that before.

NICK FUENTES: I had never quite had, like, a mob after me like that.

Personal Reflections on Backlash

DAVE SMITH: And here we are. This is happening. It’s this year. I’m 42. I was under no real concern, you know, like, at this point, it’s like the censorship regime seems to have been rolled back. Joe Rogan’s got my back, Tucker Carlson has my back. I’m kind of fine. Like, I never actually thought Douglas Murray was going to get me canceled, you know, so, like, I’m fine.

I’m 42, I got a great job, I’m making really good money. I got a hot wife, I got beautiful kids, and I’m Jewish. I’m as inoculated against, like, falling into this as you could be. I will tell you, man, like, there were moments where I just found myself, like, f, like, dude. It’s like by the time you’re having the most disingenuous, annoying, f, like, rabbi, like, just and doing, like, the dumbest thing ever, you know, they attack you, and then if you defend yourself, they go, “He doth protest too much.”

You know what I’m saying? You’re like, f* you. And it almost feels, in a way, like, it almost seems like that’s the point of their existence.

NICK FUENTES: Yes.

DAVE SMITH: You know, like, it almost seems like, Rabbi Shmuley, you’re like, what f character from Adolf Hitler’s play did you spring to life in and, like, become. And so, okay, so if I’m going to be completely honest, it’s like, I see that and then I go, well, let me try to put myself in the perspective of, like, when you were talking, it really hit home with me when you were talking Patrick Bet-David about Ben Shapiro quote tweeting you and, like, how fed up that is, dude.

To, like, go after someone says, you’re so young at the time, and, like, there is so, like, I understand, like, getting pushed to the level of like, f* the Jews. Like, I get it. And I understand why people, I’ve seen lots of people get, like, pushed to that.

The Question of Jewish Identity

And I would also say, in addition to that, one of the things that’s been kind of interesting to me is that there’s been one of the parts of the campaign against me since then which Douglas Murray himself penned in an op-ed for the New York Post. And every Zio bot or Zionist account on Twitter has said is that I’m not really Jewish.

Douglas Murray said in his article, he goes, “Dave Smith claims some Jewish ancestry,” which is just like, so bizarre. And then a bunch of these people are like, they’re like, well, he had one Jewish grandfather, but that doesn’t count because his mother wasn’t Jewish, so he’s not a Jew, which is like the weirdest goddamn thing.

And okay, so I’m starting this conversation with two pretty big concessions. But I mean both of them. And I will say that that did kind of open my eyes a little bit to go like, well, look, why is it that they want to take that away from me? You know? Like, why is it that they must first remove that or at least attempt to remove that?

And that is because there is a layer of added protection that you get. There is. It is. And look, part of this is natural. It is tougher to convince people that a black guy hates black people. Now, you could be a black guy, but it’s just like a lot less likely. You know, we all kind of giggle at what’s his name out in California, the “black face of white supremacy” type shit.

But I certainly would at least concede that there is at least a layer of protection to being a Jewish guy who criticizes Israel. And that that’s bullshit. Like, that’s bullshit. It shouldn’t be like that. Any American, I was even going to say any American taxpayer, but that’s stupid, too. Any American doesn’t even matter if you’re a net tax drug. You have freedom of speech and you can say what you want to.

And you can have opinions about a foreign government. You can have opinions about a people. Like, you have the right to have that. And so I will concede, number one, I understand where there’s a tendency to, like, kind of blame Jews. I also understand that there’s an unfair degree of protection that you get.

Addressing the Public Feud

However, I think you were also very unfair in the way you came at me and saying that the only reason I’m on these shows is because I’m a Jew or something. I mean, it seemed to me, and again, I say this like, I like you. I’ve always liked you. I say it seemed insane to come at me over that.

Is it like your issue, you said on Candace was that I didn’t deny the Holocaust or something, or that I wasn’t willing to question World War II, which I’ve been pretty famous for defending the biggest questioner of World War II. I think 40% of my interviews are just asking me about Daryl Cooper. And so I guess that I just wonder, like, what, what was it that you were trying to like? What was the beef? Or what was the disagreement?

Nick’s Perspective on Being Marginalized

NICK FUENTES: Well, the beef started, and it was about a year ago, so I don’t remember it exactly, but the beef started that, of course, the thing that is happening is that everybody’s now permitted to talk about it, Israel and the Jews. And everybody also knows that, and I know the world doesn’t revolve around me, but I famously got, like, martyred for that, in a sense.

And I’m not being dramatic. I mean, I lost PayPal, YouTube. I mean, they made it so that I could not have a career and I couldn’t make money, couldn’t have a bank account was part of that on some level. I mean, that had a lot to do with January 6th. But, I mean, being banned from PayPal is a pretty big deal, you know, and the rest of them, Venmo, I can’t get reimbursed if I buy a friend dinner or something like that and got blacklisted from all the circles, CPAC, all the shows, Republican Party, whatever.

And I recognize that it’s not only my criticism of Israel, but the way that I do it. But of course, that’s at the center of it, is that in principle, I’m against Jewish power, influence, the Israel lobby, et cetera.

And I guess the biggest anxiety or insecurity about this, which I’ve talked about on my show, and we talked about a little bit earlier, too, is this idea that now they’re going to step in to kind of mediate this conversation, and in other words, they’re going to try and draw a big red line that keeps me on the other side of it.

And not just me. I would describe, I’ll give you a concession because I think you’re being fair and you’re being honest, and I’m being honest. There’s a big insecurity. And by insecurity, I don’t mean, like, I’m not the prettiest girl at the ball. I mean, insecurity in the sense of there is this mass awakening. This is a moment where we can really get these issues into the conversation.

And someone like myself is in the Overton window, let’s say. And not just that I can have a career, but my ideas can really take off. And the biggest concern when this was happening and what it appeared to me to look like is that you and a few other more elevated Israel critics were going to kind of slam the door shut behind. They were going to kind of bring you in. And the reason they would bring you in is because you’re Jewish. And that’s part of it.

DAVE SMITH: Well, who would bring me in?

NICK FUENTES: You think like, you were on Joe Rogan.

DAVE SMITH: But I was on Rogan long before October 7th.

NICK FUENTES: But to talk about this.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, but I was always talking about this shit on Rogan. I mean, like, look, I mean, I may have not been as focused on it because f*, you know, this became the thing to be focused on. But all the stuff that I’m talking about and how, even how involved Israel was, I was talking about, you know, before that, like, Joe’s a friend of mine. He’s been having me on since 2016. I don’t think he had me on because I was Jewish.

The Media Circuit and Exclusion

NICK FUENTES: No, not that he brought you on. Like, hey, I need to invite a Jewish person. But it’s like, let’s be honest, you did the whole circuit. You did Tucker, Candace, Piers. I think you were on Tim Pool, Joe. These are all shows I was banned from. And, and what was, you got to look at it from my perspective, maybe to see my state of mind.

You know, last year when Candace got kicked out of Daily Wire, her live chat was lit up every day. “Bring on Nick. Bring on Nick.” And she was deliberately ignoring that and didn’t want me on. Now I was banned on YouTube, but I’m also more extreme now. The same is true of, like, Tucker. All the Tim Pool people have been trying to get me on his book.

DAVE SMITH: No, I’ve seen it. Yeah, right.

The Israel Lobby and Jewish Identity in American Politics

NICK FUENTES: And so, why am I not allowed on? Of course, it’s my view that I was canceled for this issue. And so to see you go onto the show, you know, people say it’s jealousy. Maybe there’s a little resentment there too, but it was a bigger concern that as a Jewish person, and also, by the way, not just that you’re Jewish, but as a libertarian, you come at it from a different place.

You’re a non-interventionist, a Ron Paul guy. And I even have this disagreement with Tucker on some level too. So it’s not just you. My big worry is that the conversation going to stop at “we need to end all these wars” and “the neocons are the problem.”

Because my critique goes further and it says that it actually does have to do with Jewish identity. Jewish identity is so powerful and so potent. Jews refuse to assimilate. They’re so powerful, they’re so tribalistic, they’re loyal to each other. Not all of them, but a lot of them. And that is actually where the Israel loyalty proceeds from.

It’s this anxiety: “We need Israel because what happens if it goes south here? We need to be powerful in America to prevent a majority from rising up against us.” And it’s kind of that identity issue which, you know, that’s why I’m open to talking to you or even somebody like a Bill Ackman or a Sean McGuire or a Shapiro and say, I recognize Jews are a part of America. They’ve always had, they always have been, and they’re some of the finest Americans, actually.

But people recognize it cannot go on this way where we have an open society, but they have this loyalty and kind of play by a different set of rules anyway. So my concern is that what it looked like to me is you’re being brought onto the shows and they know maybe that you’ll never go that far as a Jewish person or maybe even as libertarian.

And a big red line was being drawn and saying, “but you are still an anti-Semite. You are still banned on YouTube, you are banned on the shows. F* you. You’re all the way over here.” And that’s why I like you and I respect you and I think you’re brilliant and I didn’t mean to attack you as a guy, although maybe I crossed the line here and there.

But you did become a very central, and you do recognize, an influential figure in this big conversation. And I looked at you maybe as like, whether you intended to or not, as a mediating force or a mitigating force in the conversation. That’s where I came in.

Dave Smith Responds: Setting the Record Straight

DAVE SMITH: Okay, so a couple things on that. There’s a lot there that’s very interesting. So first of all, and I just tell you some information on this, right? So with Rogan, like, we’re good friends. I’ve also been on the show a bunch of times. About half the time I’ve been on, he asks me to come on. About the other half, I ask to come on.

I asked to come on the first time to talk about Israel. The last time I’d been on it was all about Ukraine and all about, you know, like, whatever else the story of the day was. And he had had a couple pro-Israel guys on, and I was just like, “Hey, Joe, can I come on and like, break this s* down? Because I like, know a lot about this, so I think it’ll be an interesting thing.” And he had me.

And then, you know, so it’s just with Rogan, it’s just not true that there was any… With Tucker, me and Tucker became friends from, he sent me, he reached out to me, got my number from Greg Gutfeld, I believe. And he reached out to me after I had been on and did a thing, breaking down the war in Ukraine. And he goes, “Dude, I think this is the best concise breakdown of the war in Ukraine ever.”

And then we just started texting regularly. And as soon, he never had me on the Fox News show, but as soon as he was off, he wanted to talk. But again, if you go back and look at the Tucker thing, at least back then, like, because this was earlier in the, you know, in the conflict, whatever you want to call it, I was the one who was bringing it up constantly.

Like, he was dancing a little bit. Like, I think he was still the thing. Like, “I don’t know if I want to go this close to the sun on this one.” Whereas I was like, “No, we are driving right to the sun, and that’s where we’re going.”

Candace, I mean, like, again, this is, we’re getting into like, what’s in people’s heads. She had already, she had me on Daily Wire, which, listen, whatever beef you… I will never stop being grateful to Candace Owens for just having me on at the Daily Wire. I just know that means Ben Shapiro so furious. And I love that so much. I think she did that partially for that reason.

But she also, at least what she said was she loved my Ukraine breakdown and wanted to talk more about that. And I think also part of that was, I’m pretty sure this is right, but I don’t think, I just think she was hearing a lot of this stuff for the first time from me. Like, she had just broken with Israel, and I think she had Norman Finkelstein on, but, you know, he had broken down like, you know, the conflict with the Palestinians and the UN Resolutions and stuff like that.

But I was the one telling her about the Clean Break strategy and all this, and it was like, new information, and so she was into that. And as far as like, the other show, you know, Tim Pool, all the, like, I just, I don’t actually think it’s correct that I was being brought on because I was Jewish. These were all relationships I had had.

I think I just wouldn’t shut up about this issue. And honest, I don’t think Tim Pool’s trying to bring me on to talk about this. Although not that he wouldn’t, but also I would just say personally, you know, which is, again, not the most important thing. But I understand you saying there’s a lot of people that close the door on you, but I’m not that guy. I’m the guy who had you on right after you got kicked off YouTube. And I also think like, I would… Anyway, that was certainly not what I was going to do.

Now, as far as the other stuff, which is a more interesting, broader conversation, I guess the counter to this would be that as we were saying before with the racial, like, racial hatred and things like that, it’s like the other way to look at it is that, yes, I am criticizing Israel, I am criticizing the Israeli lobby, and I am criticizing the most, what I see as the most relevant faction of that, which was the neoconservatives.

And I’m also very critical of the people supporting what Israel’s doing. But you are correct in the sense that I’m not saying it’s the Jews, which does certainly seem to be, you know, like, I mean, racialism is like catnip, man. Like, it’s like you saw it during Wokeism and you see it during this iteration. I mean, people love going into that.

But if I’m being completely honest, like, I don’t think that’s healthy for society, I don’t wish to cross that line. And let me say it like this. Because, and I apologize if I’m rambling.

NICK FUENTES: No, no, I’ll let you speak uninterrupted. I talk long too.

DAVE SMITH: So, yeah, we’re both long-winded, but…

NICK FUENTES: All right.

The Alex Jones Example: When Conspiracy Theories Target Regular People

DAVE SMITH: So Alex Jones, mutual friend of ours, you might be more friendly with him. I did a show once. He was very good to me, which I appreciated. And I don’t bring this up to bash Alex Jones at all. I’m just making a point. I keep saying that, but I’m bashing people anyway.

NICK FUENTES: Whatever.

DAVE SMITH: I guess I kind of am. But so Alex Jones, as you know, well, had 100,000 conspiracies. I mean, so many of them didn’t come true. You know, he gets a lot of credit for, and some of them did. So to his credit, like, some of them did. But, I mean, he had theories that were like, he was telling people that they were going to depopulate the Earth for a while. He said it was all about One World Government. He said it was all about…

I mean, like, even as far as him pointing at like, where he would constantly point at the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. And you were like, “That’s not even where the action is anymore, dude.” Like, he, like, he totally missed the Clean Break and was f*ing, was over here chasing all this other stuff that had nothing.

And like, whenever, you know, people get things wrong, it’s fine now. They used Sandy Hook as the excuse to silence him. Right. It was years after the Sandy Hook thing. He had had a million conspiracy. But why did they use that one? Why did that one resonate with people?

Well, the reason why they used that one and the reason why even people who like Alex Jones may have like, a little bit of a disgust impulse when they hear about that is because that one was unique to all his other conspiracies. Because every other conspiracy, the bad guys were the ATF. The bad guys were the Feds. The bad guys were, you know, like, if you blame the ATF for something and you turn out to be wrong, like, whatever, they deserve it anyway. It doesn’t really matter, right?

But in this case, the target was people. It was just regular people and regular people who had just lost their little children. It was like, “Jeez, you can’t miss on that one.”

And so I do think one of the things that concerns me with what you’re doing and I guess concerns me with the fact that I think you’re winning in a lot of ways. And I don’t, you know, but I do worry about this disaster there is that I do think so much of the energy you’re harnessing does get pointed at just regular people.

Like, just, you know, until the Jordan Peterson clip, when I first started realizing we were going to have to do this, I had kind of just been like, the reason I was like, “I don’t think I’ll do another podcast with Nick” was never because I didn’t like you. I always liked you when we talked. I always thought the conversations were really interesting as this one is.

This thing was just like an incentives issue almost. We’re like, “Well, I don’t know. Everyone on this side is going to lose their goddamn s. And then I have to answer a million questions about that, but f them.” So that’s not enough to get me to stop doing it, but then half your audience is just going to call me a f*ing Jew anyway. And so it’s like, what’s the point here?

And I think that, like, look, and I want to get into this more, but like, yeah, yeah, there are questions of Jewish identity. There are questions, obviously there’s a relationship there. But the fact is that, say, look, the worst thing in my lifetime that Israel’s done to the United States of America. I’m not sold on the 9/11 stuff. You know, there’s some questions there, but I think it’s far from as conclusive. I think people are way out over their skis saying they know for a fact Israel did 9/11. But that’s a topic for another day.

But was the war in Iraq. The war in Iraq is no question. Coleman Hughes can try to argue with me about this. There’s just no question that the neoconservatives and the Likud party and the whole Bush administration, you know, this was pushed in a direction. It’s not the only factor, but it is more than what made the difference.

Like the war does not happen without the neocons and without Netanyahu. It just doesn’t. And yet at the same time, Jewish Americans were either the best or one of the best groups on that issue. Jews opposed the war in Iraq way ahead of the general public. And like, right-wing Christians were like the worst group on that.

But again, my target isn’t them. My target isn’t the people. My target is like the people who propagandize them into believing that. And so if the thing is like, “Hey, I stopped short at like actually naming the Jews,” it’s like, “Well, yeah, because I don’t think that’s right and I don’t like…”

And we can get into more of this. But like, no, like, Barry the Dentist has nothing to do with any of this. And he, you know, like, and I think on some level maybe I’m wrong, but I also don’t think you’re really trying to gin up hatred toward that guy. And so maybe that’s why I stopped short of blaming the Jews. I think it’s sloppier and not as accurate.

The Identitarian Perspective vs. The Libertarian View

NICK FUENTES: Well, I’m glad you said that because I think it’s important just on a basic level to say that we don’t agree on everything. Like, we are distinct. And I wouldn’t even say it’s about further or closer. It’s just that we are coming at it from different places.

You believe it’s the neocons and it’s in particular the war party and Israel and how those interact. And me as an identitarian, I do think, I do look at the world through an identity-based lens that you’ve got whites, blacks, Jews, and they all have political interest. They identify as these groups, they group up based on them and then those groups have conflicting interests.

That’s what politics has become is like meeting out those interests. Like is it in the interest of white people to go to war in Iraq? No, but for Jews, yes, because they have this connection to Israel and same about all these other things. And so, you know, even getting back to our beef. Yeah, we could quibble about, you know, I don’t think there’s some conspiracy. I don’t think they got together and said, let’s invite Dave because you know he’s going to like maintain censorship and Jewish control. Like, I don’t believe that.

But I do believe that you clearly take the more moderate position or even I would say the more liberal position. As a libertarian, you’re like a lowercase L liberal in the sense that you think that it’s like you said, it’s not Jews in themselves or Jewish identity in itself. It is particular people in power in particularly the state that are doing these violent policies.

Whereas me, it is maybe more radical rejection of liberalism. And I think that, you know, maybe you’re informed by your Jewish identity or you’re just ideologically believe that it is a more moderate position and they platform that because that’s the version they want, that’s the version that is safer for a Tim Pool or whoever. That’s the version that the system is maybe comfortable with. That’s what they might be willing to accept. And they don’t want to take it to the place of the Jews for the reason, maybe for the good reason you described.

And by the way, I’ll give you another concession because I want to be objective. There are people that are legitimately hating Jews right now. Now I saw in Florida they’re pulling up on Jews with like water pistols and spraying them with water. And I got on my show and I said, f* that.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah. And I appreciate that.

NICK FUENTES: Yeah. Because I don’t believe in that. I’m not a piece of shit. If I saw Ben Shapiro on the street, I saw him on the street and I said, hey man, why did you do a speech? You need to say my name. I didn’t run up and try and fight him. Yeah. You know, and I don’t believe in—

DAVE SMITH: Attacking, made it out like you did.

NICK FUENTES: Yeah, right. Like I attacked his kids or something. Human shields. Right. He picked up his kid when he walked across street. It’s like, okay, but you know, like, I don’t believe in picking on random people. I’m not a cruel or hateful guy.

And you do see that. And that video bothered me in particular because if people start to think it’s okay to do that, you know, the ADL isn’t necessarily wrong about the idea that it is slippery. And they pull up on somebody with a water pistol. Okay, what if it’s a paintball gun next time? Is that really okay that people are going to be harassed and like shot at with a saw airsoft gun or a paintball gun? No, that’s bullshit. And that’s denying basic dignity, basic rights. That’s not Christian, that’s not American.

And there is an excess of that. And I agree that it should be sort of contained. But I think there’s a fine line between that and saying that it is a bigger issue than the neocons. Because, you know, when it comes to these influential Jews like Larry Ellison, let’s say he’s not religious, but he’s tight with Netanyahu. Jeffrey Epstein was tight with the left in Israel.

And to the extent that you’re right, Jews were the biggest critics of the Iraq war in many cases. Yeah, there’s liberal Jews, but they’re liberal because that’s a strategy for Jews to succeed. They have these debates, what is best for the Jews. And like Bret Stephens at the New York Times, he mentored Bari Weiss. He says, Trump—

DAVE SMITH: God, I hate him so much.

NICK FUENTES: I hate. Yeah, and he sucks. You know, he’s a neocon.

DAVE SMITH: Capes and porn. Yeah, I got in a big fight with him on Gutfeld’s show years ago. He was such a smarmy prick anyway, whatever.

NICK FUENTES: The worst. Yeah. But he, so he says in 2016 or 2017, he goes, “Trump is bad for the Jews because he is opposing the liberal values that have been so good to us as Jews.” And it’s like that sort of encapsulates when like the ADL, for example, gets criticized. They say, well, the ADL’s making Jews look bad. Or they’re going after people like Shapiro and protecting people like Ilhan Omar.

In other words, they’re attacking Jewish Zionists, but they’re not hard enough on the progressive left. And what I see there is still a distilled Jewish self interest, which is okay because we’re all people and we’re all advocating for the most for ourselves. But in America, we just need to do a better job of managing that. And I don’t, I think that the Jewish community’s out of control is basically it.

The Question of Evidence and Motivation

DAVE SMITH: Well, I would say so in kind of like in a similar sense to if, because me and you both, we’ve both been accused of getting the call over the last few weeks, which turns out was just us calling each other and being like, I don’t think there’s any evidence that Israel did this.

But like, so, okay, so when you come out on your show and you go, look, guys, I’m not seeing any evidence that Israel was behind the assassination of Charlie Kirk. And then people go, oh, it looks like Nick got the call. You’re like, okay, but like the much easier answer is that he just doesn’t see any evidence that Israel. Right. And like people, it’s like you’re jumping to a conclusion.

And I will say I think you might be guilty of doing a little bit of that too. When you go like, well look, they want the conversation controlled. It’s like, or an easier answer might just be that like, like they’ve seen your hits and they go, yeah, well, I don’t want to bring a guy who’s saying “Hitler has aura” on the show. Like, I’m open to, I do think what’s horrible, what’s happening to the Palestinians, but like, no, I don’t think we need to go like that.

So I think there’s like, probably, you know, look, dude, there’s, you make your bed, you were nobody. I don’t think that I know is denying that you were like horrendously mistreated when you were very young. But also since then, like, there’s an energy that you harness when you do that shit and you know what you’re doing with it, you know, and that’s not to say you’re being disingenuous. I don’t mean that at all.

I just mean like, you understand kind of like harnessing this radical energy of like, nah, dude, I’m staking out this position all the way over here. But it’s a double edged sword and that also sometimes can turn a lot of people off. Although, look, you’re moving the needle in a clear way. And so that is becoming more and more acceptable.

I guess my point is that I don’t know actually that it’s possible to do that without having the excesses of, you know, the water gun thing or perhaps much worse than. I mean, look, as we both figured out, man, I hate saying this out loud because it’s against our interest, but a lot of people are kind of dumb, man, and a lot of people can’t really follow the nuance of all of that stuff.

Jewish Culture and the Holocaust’s Shadow

But to the broader, like, kind of Jewish conversation, I mean, look, I’m not saying it’s like strictly the neocons, or I wouldn’t even say that. Like, obviously the neocons, the majority of whom were Jewish, it’s not just like, I’m not claiming, like, oh, they just happen to be Jewish. Like, their Jewish identity obviously plays a central role in why, you know, they feel the way they do.

And there’s no question that Jews, I think, and this is something I’ve, you know, spent a lot of time speaking out against because I just think it’s really, there’s a sickness in Jewish culture that I think is unhealthy. I think it’s part of it is fundamentally built into the religion that, like, it’s about past suffering, you know, is like, a big part of it.

But the Holocaust looms so large in particularly, like, my parents generation and up, I think not as much with the younger generation, but it looms so large. And there is this kind of, like, feeling of like, look, the Holocaust happened and then we created our own state so that it never happens again. And anything short of that means another Holocaust happening, you know, and it’s just, it’s not right. Like, it just doesn’t make any sense. There’s no reason to think.

And I’ve been saying this for years. I’m like, like, I’m a Jewish American. I’ve never had one obstacle put in my way because of my Jewishness. Like, never once, you know, I’ve had people say, literally, your fans saying shit on Twitter is the greatest struggle of my life for being Jewish, you know, I’ve had greater struggles, but not because I was Jewish.

And I think what’s appropriate when you, even if the story is like, oh, my God, you know, your grandparents were so horribly mistreated in Europe, and then you came to America, and now Jews are 2% of the population. They’re overwhelmingly successful. I think the attitude should be like, well, we’re really grateful to America. We really love this country, and we should have nothing but loyalty to it. You know, so, like, I’m against the fact there is something like that in Jewish culture.

But then again, I think it’s only reinforced by people, you know, like, when they see people who they perceive as being like, neo-Nazis to be, like, see, that’s proof. That’s proof that, in fact, there is this huge threat. And I think in some way it seems to me like it’s almost in some ways you and the Zionists have accepted a fundamental framework that I think a lot of the rest of us are trying to like push back on, which is that like to oppose Israel isn’t to oppose Jewish people. And that, that’s kind of stupid. This is an actual government now.

Also, I should add, like, all these things are complicated and intertwined. There is no question that part of the reason why Israel has become so dominant, like say the Mossad has become so dominant is because there was a diaspora. It was an advantage that almost no other intelligence agency had, that you had pockets of people who you could reach out and touch, who could at least somewhat reliably, if they were called to do something for Israel, would take that as like, okay, I’m in some way preventing another Holocaust. Like, that was a huge advantage for them.

And so like, again, I’m not saying like there’s not, there’s more complex and interesting questions, I guess. You know, again, I’m not trying to like big brother you or anything on this.

Moving Forward Responsibly

No, yeah, I guess it’s just like even that message that you were just sending of like, hey, we’re not trying to target, you know, people. I think like, if you are to win the day on this and we want to avoid something really bad happening that, you know, I think none of us want to see, I think stressing that is probably important.

And also, you know, it’s just like you see it. I mean, I know because you talk about it like the low IQ slop shit where it’s just kind of like, dude, this is, this is, okay, I know forever you weren’t allowed to touch that button. And so you’re touching the button because you weren’t allowed to. But a stupid point is like you’re allowed to touch it now.

NICK FUENTES: Yes.

DAVE SMITH: And it’s just not that impressive. It’s kind of like a silly argument. Although I will admit it’s quite funny.

NICK FUENTES: Well, yeah, I mean the edgelording even for me has lost its appeal. It just seems passé because 10 years ago you couldn’t say that stuff and that’s what made it provocative. And now you can say it, so. And also it’s been done for 10 years, so. Internet edgelord. Oh, you’ve never met someone like me before. It’s like we’ve all seen that.

But I would say that here, here’s how I would characterize the issue because I hear that a lot that the Zionists and the anti-Semites are sort of in the self reinforcing loop and I would say that, that how I would characterize the problem is that, you know, in some sense the Jews are rational, the neocons are rational, because what they’re saying is there’s kind of two answers to the Jewish question from the Jews, which is, we need to return to the land because only when we have another Jewish kingdom will we have sovereignty and be able to protect ourselves.

There’s another answer to the Jewish question, which is if we push liberal universalism, everyone will tolerate us. If we push religious tolerance and racial tolerance, then people see us as themselves or the greatest among the nations. These are two strategies, and they’re both rational. Because after the, by the way, there was anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany. Maybe that’s, I got the call to say that. But it’s true, you know, the way things are.

DAVE SMITH: Is that a controversial thing might be. I don’t know, not even the Holocaust, just anti-Semitism. They weren’t so fond of them, that’s for sure.

NICK FUENTES: But it’s like in Germany, but also in Russia, but also in America, there are quotas in the universities emerging from that time. It is like we say, the world’s made up of races. They have these interests. It’s in the Jewish interest to do these things.

So Soros takes up the cause of the Open Society Foundation. And Open Society is based on this philosophical premise, I think, from Bertrand Russell, which says we have tolerance and openness and egalitarianism. And the Likud Party or, you know, the Haganah, the security element in Israel, they work to get power.

And they say that to make the world safe for the Jews, we need Israel. To make Israel safe, we need control over everything west of the river. To do that, we need to destroy all our enemies in the region. Like, there is a rational chain of law. When they say Israel has a right to exist, they mean we can’t exist if we’re staring down the barrel of 10 countries that hate us. There’s a logic there.

And I would say that in some sense that’s a legitimate way to think. It’s legitimate interest. But I distinguish myself as a white person, as someone from Christendom, as an American. And I’m looking to disentangle the Jewish interest from the American interest and say that, you know, when you say it’s bad to say Hitler had aura, I disagree.

DAVE SMITH: Well, I’m not saying necessarily it’s bad, controversial. I’m saying that you understand that, like, that is going to be something that might make a lot of people go, oh, yeah, I don’t want to deal with that guy.

NICK FUENTES: But here’s where I would push back, in a sense, is, you know, as a white person, why is it that the Holocaust so toxic? It’s because, you know, Jews sort of made it that way. Like, we don’t look at the Holodomor the same way. We don’t look at China and, you know, all these arguments.

DAVE SMITH: Well, no, I think that’s a totally legitimate argument. It’s something I’ve been saying for years, too. The idea that Jews have a monopoly on World War II is insane. Or that anybody should prioritize past Jewish suffering over other sufferings. I mean, yeah, it’s a horrible thing happened. Sure, go ahead.

Hitler and Historical Narratives

NICK FUENTES: So when I say Hitler had aura, I’m trying to basically set a new paradigm where, you know, it’s like, as Americans and moreover, as white people, it’s like, that doesn’t have the same impact on us emotionally. Not necessarily. We only feel like that way because of movies, because of museums, because of propagandizing.

And, you know, so when I look at Larry Fink, Bill Ackman, David and Larry Ellison, I look at them as part of a corporate entity. Like, they’re not individuals that happen to be Jewish. They are the Jews. They’re organized. They work together. And as an American, I basically want to take power from them and give it back to Americans.

And that necessarily is going to make them weaker and more vulnerable as a community. And, you know, so when they say that’s antisemitic, it’s like, of course, everything that’s taking power from them to give it to us is going to inherently bolster the narrative that they’re becoming more vulnerable. But it’s a necessary part of getting power.

Translating Political Language

DAVE SMITH: I kind of get what you say. I used to say that as long as you translate the words right, that Hillary Clinton is telling the truth, you know, in a sense. Like, they’d be like, Hezbollah is a threat. And the truth is that Hezbollah is a threat to Israel’s ability to occupy southern Lebanon right now. They leave that part out of it, you know, or if they say Iran is a threat, it is. It’s a threat to the American empire.

Like, it’s a threat to, yes, this is so in that sense, you know, Hillary Clinton had the famous one where she said, I think it was that Vladimir Putin has put his troops right up on NATO’s doorstep.

NICK FUENTES: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

DAVE SMITH: Then it just shows you the mentality, but she’s not lying in a way. Right. So I would say this is how I look at it. I think that in the same sense that right wing Christians in America were convinced that it was in their interest to go overthrow Saddam Hussein because he was going to give the nukes he didn’t have off to the terrorists who weren’t friends with him or whatever the line exactly was, I think a very similar dynamic’s going on with Jews and Israelis.

I think that there really, if you look at the position Israel was in, say three years and a day ago, they have by far the most sophisticated, most advanced military in the Middle East. They have the support of all the most powerful governments in the world. They have a bunch of atomic weapons. Like they’re in a pretty good spot. They have now engendered so much hatred around the world that they’re probably in the most vulnerable spot they’ve ever been. They’ve done it to themselves.

So I think in a very similar sense, it’s really actually not in Jewish interest. And I think that’s kind of bearing out right now across the culture. This was terrible. This is the worst thing you could do if you cared about protecting Jews or not stoking up hatred against them.

And so I look at it more like even when you’re these guys like Bill Ackman or George Soros or people like that. But yeah, you’re pointing to people who are in the club. I mean, George Soros is essentially a wing of the CIA. I was literally just the other day, because I was looking up where I was doing an episode on General Wesley Clark in response to the latest hit piece on me from the Free Press today, or preceding it, I guess.

And I was like, I got to look up Sudan. That’s the one country on this list that I just haven’t read enough about. Like, I’ve read a little bit about it, but not nearly enough. Which is the, for people like me and you who read books, which by the way, does put you in the top 1% of political commentators already. But the thing is, you’re just always behind, you know. There’s just always 10 books you’re supposed to read that you haven’t read yet.

And you’re so aware of what you don’t know, you know, and then someone who knows absolutely nothing. It’s like you don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re like, I know. I don’t know what I’m talking about. I know, but you know nothing of what you’re talking about.

But anyway, so I was like, and I would literally just Google. I was like, so what? I know that they broke off, and I didn’t even know who was involved in it. I know the southern part of Sudan broke off and there was a civil war there. Let me sound like southern. So I just literally Google Sudan, secession, civil war, something like that. The first thing Google gives me is the George Soros Open Society. Why Southern Sudan needs their independence? And you’re like, oh, okay, here we go.

The Power Structure and Business Interests

But if you really, when you look at it, right, and this is true in the Israel lobby itself, it’s not all Jews. It is overwhelming large amount of Jews. And the neoconservatives were like 80% Jewish. I think that, you know, there were Catholics and even some Protestants in there. But even the neoconservatives, right, they were essentially all of George W. Bush’s men. You know, he had Jews all throughout his administration. They were neoconservatives.

But the boss was George W. Bush. Dick Cheney, I think, really was the boss. Rumsfeld, Condi Rice, Colin Powell. These are all non-Jews. It seems much more to me that there’s a big club, there’s a lot of Jews in there, and there’s non-Jews in there as well, and that they are screwing everybody over.

So it just seems to me to be more accurate and precise and not carry any of the baggage that makes people think you just are animated by racial hatred. And it’s just more precise to just be like, no, it’s this network of people.

And even when you’re looking at, you know, something like, it’s difficult and we are all guilty of this at some point of assuming the conclusion of starting the argument with the end result that we have. So even when you look at, okay, well, this Jew is pursuing this strategy, or this one is pursuing this strategy, the overwhelming majority of Jews are pursuing the same strategy that most people are pursuing, which is like, I want to raise my kids, I want to have decent healthcare, I want to have a decent life, I want to hang out with my buddy.

I don’t think they’re pursuing these great political strategies. I mean, no more so than anybody is who just, they have their predisposition to, I’m liberal or I’m conservative or I’m this. Certainly I would grant that Jews are probably less likely to go down a path of Jew hatred for obvious reasons, but I just don’t.

I think that it’s much more like there are these group of powerful people. They are, by the way, the entire machinery I think is actually, I don’t know if I want to say it’s more based on business than ideology, but business is a huge, huge factor in all of this. Right? Like it’s not as if the Zionists weren’t able to gain so much control of the American military machine because simply they tricked everybody or something. It’s because it was good for business.

You know, and you can watch this. I mean they went, all the neocons went and they made their independent relationships with the military industrial complex. Look at all those Bill Kristol think tanks. And you know who’s funding that think tank? Oh, look at that. Lockheed Martin. Ain’t that a coincidence?

And so in the same way that you know, there are say thinkers like John Rawls or John Maynard Keynes who are beloved figures in Washington, but it’s not because any of them read the books or care about the argument, it’s just that they prescribed more power for Washington D.C. and so Washington D.C. is like, you made an excellent point. You know, it’s not like anyone there was reading Hayek or something and then reading Rawls and going this guy’s arguments are superior. It’s just good for business, man. That’s a big part of it at least.

The Organized Minority

NICK FUENTES: Well, and I don’t disagree at all because that’s sort of the nature of institutions are self-perpetuating. You know, they’ll prescribe themselves bigger budgets and more missions and things. So I totally agree with that. That’s the professional managerial class they do. Right.

But where I would push back is saying that, you know, let’s say for example, Larry Ellison, Larry Ellison is second richest guy in the world. They’re buying the media. Him and his son are buying TikTok, they’re buying CBS. Who does he put in charge of CBS? Bari Weiss. Bari Weiss was helped by Hazony and Bret Stephens. It’s like that very clearly is a Jewish club and they’re cutting through society.

And yeah, they run another league, elite circles. And yeah, they have their accomplices that are not Jewish even. You know, look at the Trump administration. Trump brokered that deal. He’s a gentile, but he got money from Miriam Adelson and his grandchildren are Jewish because his son-in-law is Jewish. And it’s like, it’s almost like that exception doesn’t prove the rule.

You’re right about the Vulcans. You know, Condi and Bush and all them, they’re gentiles too. But it’s like it seems that society is always being pushed by this organized minority. Because you’re right, there are Rawlsian liberals that are white and there are, you know, evangelical Christians that are white, that are neocons.

But it just seems like the Jews being, because by definition they’re organized in a way that nobody else is. Like Bush is not organized as a white guy or even very much as a Christian. But you do have a World Zionist Congress. You do have a World Jewish Congress. You have the Conference of Major American Jewish Organizations.

I don’t even think people realize the extent to which Jews are organized in community centers, by Chabad, in university with their fraternities and in business in their localities. It’s like they’re extremely organized.

And as far as the average Jew is concerned, yeah, they’re not running the banks. I don’t think your average Jew is a spy, but I do think that your average Jewish is inherently distrusting of patriotism and nationalism. It’s like Sarah Silverman said when she saw her white boyfriend put an American flagpole on her lawn, she said it reminded her of Hitler.

How many Jews is that attitude prevalent? When they saw Trump, they thought the same thing. Fascism. They said it could not happen here. It’s sort of that same attitude.

And I think here is what I will concede. I think that we, me, by we I mean me. If my movement wants to have power and really put America first, it means we are going to have to sideline by definition Jews that put the Jewish nation first.

DAVE SMITH: And Christians too for that matter. I mean, I disagree.

NICK FUENTES: I think America—

The Evangelical Christian Factor

DAVE SMITH: Well, I’m saying Christians, I’m saying Christians who put Israel first. Oh yeah, which there are plenty of. And look, it’s a huge part of this because you talk about the organization. But I think that’s very true for evangelical Christians who are constantly having preachers tell them that this is your duty, to have this political outlook. There’s tens of millions of them in the country.

And look, you can always, again, you can always say, well that’s the Jews manipulating them. But again, it just seems like this is presuming the conclusion.

NICK FUENTES: Are we not being manipulated, though, in that way?

DAVE SMITH: Of course. Of course. No, I’m not denying that. I’m just saying it’s not just Jews at the top doing the manipulation.

NICK FUENTES: And I agree. But that’s where I have to come in as a Christian, white American and say we have to disentangle these things. And yeah, wake up the evangelicals and say, look, this is not. You’re American, you’re Christian. They are not Christian. They are not American. It is not in our interest. We have to take our own side.

DAVE SMITH: I think that there’s perhaps because you’re Christian and I’m Jewish, but when you’re talking about evangelical Christians, although not Catholics like yourself, you go, well, we got to wake them up and make them realize that. And I feel the same way about Jews in general. You got to wake them up and be like, yo, you’re not about to be Holocausted, and you don’t need to support this in order to avoid one.

And that’s much tougher to do when everybody on Twitter is saying, the Holocaust never happened, but if it did, it was good and it should happen again, or something like that. So that would be that.

The Charlie Kirk Situation

DAVE SMITH: Let’s do. I just always completely lose track of time on these things. Let’s talk about Charlie Kirk a little bit, because there was me and you both, as I mentioned, have gotten a bunch of heat for not immediately jumping to these conspiracy theories. Although, as I’ve said the whole time, I’m open to it. Like, show me what you got.

I do, though, think, and I’ve talked about this a bit on my show. I know you have on yours as well. I do think that the story of Charlie Kirk, though, and his relationship with Israel is really interesting. So aside from the conspiracy stuff, and I guess that my friend Candice, who, your dear friend, too, I’m a big fan.

NICK FUENTES: Yeah.

DAVE SMITH: She just last night released, evidently, some screenshots of a group chat where Charlie had said, you know, he was very frustrated with a Jewish donor who I guess had pulled some money from him. And he had said something about, I’m going to not be able to be a Israel supporter anymore.

Certainly doesn’t tell you anything pointing to his murder. But it does certainly show you that, if that’s true, and I’m assuming Candace isn’t posting a screenshot that’s made up. I think Candace has more integrity than that. So if that’s true, man, Josh Hammer and these guys have been being really dishonest about what really happened with Charlie Kirk.

And I will tell you this story. I don’t know if you’ve heard this before. I apologize to the fans because I have told them this before. But so my only experience where I debated Josh Hammer twice, I think I was telling you this outside and then we got distracted. But so the second time I debated him is at this Charlie Kirk event.

And the whole time Charlie Kirk was just like, look, I really want to keep this civil and not be a mudslinging thing. And I go, absolutely, no problem. I think I’m very much like you in that sense. I think we’re very similar, that we’re both kind of guys who actually really do care about the ideas and the issues. And if you approach us with let’s debate these, it will 100% of the time be a substantive conversation.

However, if you want to be vicious, we’re also okay with playing that game. And you’re like, I will be more vicious than you. I mean, maybe not you, but just about everybody else. You’re not going to, you know. And maybe I should be a little more mature than that at this age, but that is how I am.

But so I went, sure, no problem. So we go in the back, we’re in the green rooms, me and Charlie and his, I’m blanking on his name, but his guy, who’s the guy on his show now who’s kind of his right hand man.

NICK FUENTES: Andrew Colvin.

DAVE SMITH: Yes, yes, I believe that was him. So the three of us and we talked for a while and then Josh Hammer came in and we’re just talking, you know, everybody’s just being friendly and talking. We were kind of talking about every issue except Israel, you know. Because we’re about to go debate that. So we were talking about immigration and started talking about family stuff at one point, just everyone having a nice conversation and Charlie, you know, and it was like, okay, we’re going to go have this debate.

And I was not sure what I was walking into there. It was very, very interesting because half the crowd might have been your people. I mean, it was at a Charlie Kirk event. It was striking that it was, I mean, or it’s just my people. But I came out. The first thing Charlie says when I come out onto stage, he introduces me, he goes, oh, we got a lot of Dave Smith fans. He was kind of surprised that half the crowd was thrilled to see me there. And then 20% of them hated my f*ing guts. But it was 20% to half. It was clearly the majority. Because it’s young people, man, and that’s where they are right now.

Josh Hammer’s Duplicity

DAVE SMITH: But so Josh Hammer goes out there after this, and he has the first opening, and the final thing he says in his opening is that he’s disgusted to be sharing a stage with me. And I just thought there was something about that, that I was like, what a fing snake you are. This is the last communication I ever had with Charlie Kirk was me texting him what a fing snake that guy was after all that. And then Charlie just said something diplomatic back he goes, was like, it was aggressive or something like that.

But I just thought on a dude level. And I guess maybe this is part of the reason why me and you always kind of had a mutual respect and liked each other. There’s just something where you’re like, who does that? Yeah, who the f* does that? You’re so comfortable being duplicitous that you’d sit down, if I were about to go on a show with you right now and do this and be like, I’m disgusted that you’re across the table, I wouldn’t have had that 20 minutes of nice chit chat with. Yeah, I’m sorry. It would have been like, no, we’re doing it like that.

So anyway, I say all of that to just say, I don’t trust that guy one little bit. I’m curious, what do you make of the new revelations or this dynamic with Charlie Kirk? It’s a weird spot for you to be in being such a rival and an antagonist of a person, and then they’re killed in this horrible way. And so it’s a weird spot.

NICK FUENTES: Yeah.

DAVE SMITH: What are your thoughts on this latest?

Nick’s Perspective on the Evidence

NICK FUENTES: Well, you know, I agree with how you said it, which is, look, I mean, if someone other than Tyler Robinson killed Charlie Kirk, I’d of course be very interested in that, but I just don’t see evidence for that. And people are trying to. It’s like anything in hindsight. You can look at every person’s reaction in the crowd and say they’re a decoy or an operative, whatever. There’s really nothing hard or conclusive that proves anything other than that happened yet. And I’m open to possibilities.

What is interesting, but a different conversation may be related is the Israel thing. And I think very clearly, as you and Tucker and Candace and others and Max Blumenthal have said, there’s ample evidence that at the minimum there was something dynamic there. He was a pro Israel guy for many years now seems like that was in flux and a lot of the evidence has kind of been knocked out. Does Bill Ackman retreat? You know, Bill Ackman produced the texts and Charlie arranged the whole thing. And it was a forum where I’m sure disagreement was expressed, but it showed generally they were still aligned.

More interesting was his interview with Megyn Kelly.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah.

NICK FUENTES: Where clearly he platformed Tucker and you. And it seemed that supporting Israel was in contention, which they hate that that’s even on the table because it matters how you set the table. It doesn’t necessarily even matter what your position is. But they don’t want that to be up for debate. Do we support Israel? Not a question they want people to ask.

DAVE SMITH: Especially when you’re losing the debate. You know, I mean, that doesn’t help either.

NICK FUENTES: Yeah, especially when you get booed and, you know, killed in the debate. They don’t like that either. And so even that they were really pushing back on Charlie, threatening, I guess the new revelation is they took the money, they took the $2 million. It’s a pretty big organization, but that’s not a negligible chunk of change for Charlie in Turning Point USA.

And he goes in the group chat and assuming, like you said, that it’s authentic, you know, that is, I think, the most stark thing we’ve heard from him on the record where he says, “I have to leave the Israel camp.” And I would say that’s even different than what he said on Megyn Kelly. Because on Megyn Kelly said, oh, you’re going to call me an anti-Semite? He goes, he sort of stopped himself. He said, well, you’re going to lose me. That’s what he was going to. You’re not going to lose me. He goes, but I’m going to be deflated in that text. He says, I’m out.

And I would characterize that as I was his rival. And I’m very cynical about him. He was kind of caught between a rock and a hard place. He was really in the middle because like you said, it’s young people, they are Israel critical. And he had to go and defend the bullsh to them at the campus, in the arena, in the pit, you know, so it’s easy for them in the ivory tower to say, yeah, we love Israel’s still. He’s actually having to get the sh and 100 Groypers on the line saying, why do you still love Israel?

And I think that he recognized it, became a liability and started to try and accommodate everybody. Tucker and the other side, Candace and the other side, the Groypers, so to speak, or the Dave Smith people. And the other side. And the other side wasn’t having it. They said, you better get the f*ing line or we’re pulling the plug. And I think he defiantly said, I will not be bullied. I thought that was. It would have been interesting to see where that would have went, but sadly, we’ll never know.

Charlie Kirk’s Impossible Position

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, no, I completely agree. And I’ve always, you know, I kind of took. I took what he was saying in that thread a little differently than I guess some people did. I always thought the dynamic with Charlie Kirk was kind of that. That it was like, look, he’s the guy who has to keep the young people on board, and he’s, by definition, he has to be a big tent guy because he’s trying to win. You know, he’s in a different game than me and you are.

You know, there’s, it’s a whole different thing to be like, we’re in the business of telling the truth as we see it. We’re in the business of breaking down the ideas and how we view them. And as you said, at times, even stretching the Overton window and maybe even accepting that I’m going to be speaking to the remnant here, I’m going to be speaking to one group of people, but hopefully this group will move the broader conversation a very different thing.

To be doing a get out the vote campaign, you need everybody involved. And I think that he, I think Josh Hammer is not lying when he says he was doing everything to keep you out. That was the goal is like, we are going to cut the line here, but just with the new dynamics of where politics is now in this real revolution in media that we’ve, me and you have both been living through and being, you know, active participants in, it was like, okay, but you’re big enough at this point that, okay, cutting Nick Fuentes out and then everything else, the big tech, okay, you maybe could pull that off, but you’re asking Tucker and Megyn Kelly too.

And I think Charlie just realized the tent now is like, there’s no way this works. And so I almost took it when he was saying, I have to do this as going, I’m going to have no other choice to keep turning. And of course, this is the rock and the hard place, right, because you couldn’t be anti Israel and run an organization like Turning Point. But also you couldn’t be pro Israel and run an organization like Turning Point anymore because you need the kids and you need the donors. And so there’s this.

NICK FUENTES: This.

Trump’s Impossible Position

DAVE SMITH: And I think that it did seem that essentially his calculation, it seems to me, I’m speculating a little bit, but that his calculation was like, okay, well, I’ll have Tucker and I’ll let Dave do this debate. And then I can be seen as like, hey, look, I’m facilitating the conversation. I’ll do all this. But that was way too far for the bag. They were like, yo, what, are you kidding me?

Like, I mean, these are the people who, they thought when mom Donny say a million things about the guy, he’s probably going to be very bad for this city that we’re currently in right now. And also is just like very cringy and awful in a lot of ways. But the fact that he said, why this is coming up in a New York City mayoral debate, do you favor a one state solution or a two state solution? Like, what the hell does this have to do with New York City?

But he goes, I favor one state with equal rights for all. And they will went Adolf Hitler. Because you f*ing. Like that was supposed to be the God. Like, in what world is the bad guy, the guy who’s going, I think everyone should have equal rights. It’s just. But so to them, there is no distinction between any of us. You know what I mean? Like, it’s all kind of the same thing.

And yeah, I don’t know. It is very interesting because there’s something, you know, there’s something revealing about the fact that even say people like Megyn Kelly and Charlie Kirk will get this same type of treatment when they step out of line.

NICK FUENTES: Right, yeah. No, I totally agree. And people are, I think, misreading it a little bit. Like, he was this. It’s such an important point you made that we do something different. Because when we go on our shows, we say, I think I feel he didn’t really have that luxury.

DAVE SMITH: Right.

The Political Calculation

NICK FUENTES: Because he was not in the business actually of telling it like he sees it. He was in the business of it was more political, getting everybody to vote, keeping everybody happy, pushing directionally towards the right. And so when people say he was going to be this rebel, he had this epiphany. He just had to get it out. I don’t think that’s it.

I think like you said, he was put in an impossible situation because the underlying reality had changed the underlying political dynamic. The right wing youth are what they are and the donors are what they are. And as a matter of fact, I don’t think he left Israel. I think Israel left him. And that’s sort of what the text said. He said, they leave me with no choice. After they pulled the money, they said, we cannot tolerate, so we’re taking the money.

And he said, well, I’m not going to be held hostage by your money. I have to side with the ever growing tent of people that are either indifferent or critical or anti or whatever. And so that is how I read it.

And I agree, I mean, to the broader point, even the earlier conversation, Israel is in a lot of trouble, it seems. I was sort of skeptical, but this is very much in flux because it is the right wing youth. It’s Tucker, it’s Megyn Kelly, it’s Charlie Kirk, it’s France, it’s Portugal, it’s UK, it’s Canada. It’s like most of America.

And you know, I guess the question is, what’s on the other side of it if they win? Well, they will have unprecedented power. With Iran out of the picture, there’ll be an enormously powerful, maybe the regional power in the Middle East. If they lose or if they don’t get everything they want, then they might be in more peril than ever before.

And I guess the remaining thing is kind of where it goes from here with Trump, you know, because it’s so weird how everything, in a sense, I don’t believe that they killed Charlie Kirk. And yet his death, by revealing what it did, is going to play a big role in this conversation. Because like you said, it shows that the right wing is literally breaking up over this.

Like this issue is forcing this contradiction and that contradiction is splitting the right, which is the ruling party, in the middle of the UN meeting, in the middle of the peace deal that’s about to blow up. It’s like, I think when all is said and done, we look at this two year period, it will contribute to that larger conversation. And then, you know, where’s Trump going to go with this? Yeah, he’s a big cider.

The Twelve Day War

DAVE SMITH: Well, that’s right. And I thought it was so interesting, like the Twelve Day War as it’s been dubbed, which, you know, is we seem to be at halftime of. But there’s, you know, like, that was such an interesting dynamic because I’ve just never seen anything like that in politics before. And I’ve, you know, I’ve been paying attention to politics for almost 20 years now.

And I’ve read a lot about before that time that I was paying attention. And it would be on the level of if Barack Obama launched a war and Rachel Maddow and, you know what I mean, were like, hell, no, we are not supporting this. Or George W. Bush and Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity were both like, screw that. And you just never really seen a dynamic like that before where what can you do here? You’re actually kind of limited in your options.

And so, yeah, I mean, it’s. There’s just so much of this stuff is like, we’re just. We’re in a new experiment right now. We’ve never really had this level of uncontrolled, you know, media. And I just do think that support for the Israeli government, and not the existence of an Israeli government, but support for the current Israeli government and what they do was totally dependent on a controlled media environment. It simply can’t survive in an uncontrolled media environment.

And I do think that, you know, these young people, you’re talking to them, none of them get their news from the corporate media anymore. They are all listening to our shows. And it’s almost like no matter what corner of, say, the Internet media that you’re in, you’ve. I mean, you’ve just. Just see, the debates have happened so many times.

Like, Piers Morgan has hosted so many of these debates. I did one on Joe Rogan. There’s been on Lex Friedman on. I saw you debated Dinesh D’Souza on the. And every single time, it’s almost always the exact same thing. I mean, like, I watched your. I had seen clips of it, but I watched the full thing earlier today and such a one side, like, I mean, and by the way, Dinesh, his stock went up in my book just from, like, the way he handled it. You know, I thought, like, I appreciated that, but like, on the substance of it, you’re just. It’s not even fair, man.

It’s not like you’re like, one of these times I should have to switch and argue your side because it’s just too ridiculous. It’s so fing indefensible. And you got to sit here and pretend like it’s just, I’m sorry, you’re not going to. And so we’re just left in a situation now where, you know, the young people have just. They’ve all woken up to this s and there’s really no putting it away after that.

The Desperate Hour

NICK FUENTES: Yeah. And what’s, what’s sort of unnerving is like, you know, if they can’t put it back in the bottle, which you know they’re going to try and they are trying. That’s what this TikTok and CBS and even, you know, they’re not even taking it at CBS. Like everybody knows what that is. Everybody. I saw all the presenters on like 60 Minutes were leaking to the press how much they hate Bari Weiss and you know, they don’t want to go along with all this.

It’s like it becomes almost scary because Netanyahu has been in power for almost two decades. And in a sense it’s like this is sort of a modern situation. The war on terror, the Middle East, Netanyahu, the ascendancy of Likud, the neocons. This is like the past 25, 30 years and it seems to sort of be sunsetting.

Like Netanyahu, if this war ends for better, for worse, he’s going to be out. And he will not, whoever his successor is, will not be able to keep the coalition together as well as he did. So maybe their influence diminishes there. The media environment is not centralized anymore, so they don’t influence that.

In the last legs of whatever this period can be called, that this go for broke moment, what scares me is how desperate they’re going to get. And I think that’s where maybe it makes sense. They killed Charlie Kirk because there’s some recognition. They are that desperate like it is. That is a desperate hour for them when they’re losing absolutely everybody isolated, they’re not winning the debates.

They can’t win it with the soft power, censorship, suppression, the rest of it, do they then resort to total chaos, crisis, you know, these kinds of operations that, you know, because it’s sort of like the emperor has no clothes, like you said. In our lifetimes, we’ve never seen something like this. Can they lose? Will they tolerate losing? What does that actually look like? And I think that’s going to be resolved in the next like six months. So it’s going to be kind of freaky.

The Most Dangerous Time

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, it’s like the example I use is that they say like when a woman in an abusive relationship tries to leave the husband, that’s the most dangerous time. Like that’s when he might kill you is when you try to leave even though it’s the right thing to do. You know, it’s like that is the most dangerous time. And so you do. I mean, I think something we should all be kind of aware of is like, how do you manage that situation. Exactly.

And, you know, you always kind of want to, even in these really awful situations, you want to kind of leave the door open in a way. Like you want, you know, you have to find a way for Netanyahu to be able to declare victory or whatever and say, you know, save face, to stop kind of doing what he’s doing.

But it is, look, it’s. It’s like you said, there’s just no, you know, I remember thinking this when they were really trying to cancel Rogan during the COVID stuff because he was, like, heroically telling the truth about it. And I remember even thinking, you’re like, so what? Let’s say this works. You get Joe. What do you think all his listeners are going back to? Don Lemon, like, whether they take you out, they take me out, whatever. Do you think all the people we talk to or what’s their next step?

Like, it’s not like they’re going back into the matrix or whatever. Like, that’s not happening. And it is, I think, because I want to talk about Trump a little bit, too, and JD Vance like to talk about the kind of future of the Republicans a bit. But it is just this weekend, this past weekend, we lived through, like, a real interesting little moment where Donald Trump, in one more example, where he’s clearly frustrated with Netanyahu and you know, goes and finally says it, you know, after all this time, finally says Israel must stop bombing Gaza immediately.

They now, I don’t know. I know they’re claiming. So I was like, reading up the latest of this stuff. Like, Dave DeCamp is always the best guy to read for what the latest news on the ground is. And they’re claiming they’ve stopped some of the bombings, but they did. Still, there was a lot of offensives going on over the weekend. They killed something like 70 Palestinians on Saturday and then 40 on Sunday or something like that.

And so you’re like, okay, but I think I was saying this on my last episode. I think in a way, the more revealing thing is that, first of all, we likely assume Israel’s just going to continue doing what they’re doing, but even forget that we know for a fact that even if they did, nothing would change. Even if Donald Trump says, you must stop doing this now, nothing will change if they continue to do it.

And that, to me, is so obviously indefensible that, like, you have a country who is propping up another country and that this country’s commander in chief has zero influence over telling them to stop what they’re doing. They don’t even feel, you know, there was. I’m blanking on who it was, but it was someone high up in the government who said. They said, well, we have no ceasefire in place, essentially meaning we could keep doing this. We have not made a deal yet.

And it’s like, yeah, but the President of the United States told you to stop and you’re dependent on him, so stop. So that’s an outrage.

NICK FUENTES: Work.

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Opposite Trajectories on Trump

All right, let’s get back into the show more broadly speaking. So I find this to be kind of interesting. So you, me and you are actually opposite in terms of, I think you voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, not in 2024. I didn’t in 2016 and 2020, but did in 2024. Although I think we have a lot of the same critiques of him. We kind of saw that different.

But how do you, I think at this point, I think you’ve been very, what’s the word I’m looking for? I think you’ve been very unhampered about your criticism of Donald Trump. It seems to me like that’s the appropriate thing to do now.

I mean, I think there were a few things where, you know, I felt like when Donald Trump first got in or right after the election was won, I tried to lead this “No Pompeo” thing of being like, “No Pompeo,” because that was he had spoken at the last Trump rally. And so I was talking to Tucker and all these other guys. I go, I was like, dude, we should all go all in on this. Pompeo and Haley and all these awful people came out and then he signed that letter saying Pompeo and Haley won’t be in it.

And then I was like, okay, not enough. All the neocons got to be kept out now, you know, and then Donald Trump Jr. quote tweeted me and was like, “100% I’m on it,” blah, blah. And there was a moment there where I was like, f* it. Maybe, you know, I actually maybe want to believe.

I mean, and part of it, and I know, I mean, I’m a libertarian, so I know I’ve been through this, but I, you know, I know all the talking points and how nothing ever changed, there’s no government solutions and blah, blah, all this. But I was like, you know what? They did try to arrest this guy. They did try to do more than arrest this guy.

Maybe again, I’m not trying to jump to wild, but there were some things about that that really just don’t add up. I’m still very skeptical of the official story on that. But it’s like, maybe, maybe there’s actually something. But, you know, after continuing to bag Israel, the Epstein thing was a big one. The Iran thing was a death blow. It was just like, and at this point, it’s not like there’s another election coming up.

We already kind of know what the Trump thing is. We’ve gotten some small wins. I shouldn’t, the border control is a big win. I shouldn’t say that. That’s not a small thing. He really did turn that around. He deserves credit for that. But everything else, Nick, everything else has just been a disaster.

And so, I don’t know, I think we’re in a similar place where it’s like, no, f* this. I mean, you just can’t tell me that it’s we have to just blindly support this while our country’s still falling apart.

NICK FUENTES: Yeah. I mean, there’s just no argument anymore.

DAVE SMITH: In 2024, wouldn’t you guys just grab me a water? Sorry, go ahead.

The Case for 2024 and Its Collapse

NICK FUENTES: Yeah. No, in 2024, there was at least this argument to be made that maybe it would be different this time. And you said, you articulated the reasons why. They tried to kill him. You know, they impeached him, they charged him. So the question was, is it going to be different this time? Did he learn? Is there going to be better people? And I get that. So I didn’t begrudge people that did vote for him, but there were signs, you know.

Nikki Haley endorsed him and he said we were going to go to war with Iran, basically. He said they were going to bring in the H-1Bs and all this stuff. And, you know, and then they appointed the Cabinet within three weeks. Rubio for Secretary of State.

And I guess the interesting thing I have to say, beyond what is obvious, you know, which is that it’s kind of crashing and burning, is I look at a guy like Kurt Mills, you know, Kurt Mills, and, you know, he seems like he’s a good guy. He’s 100% on board, maybe more with you than me, but he knows irrelevant facts.

And I remember watching him during the negotiation between Trump and, or I should say Witkoff and Arachi or whoever it was on the Iranian side. And he would go on Steve Bannon every week and say, “Any day now, they’re going to make a deal and, you know, Netanyahu is going to be put in his place.”

And I’m thinking, have you ever seen anything in history? It never goes that way. And it never goes that way because, you said before, it’s sort of axiomatic. Trump is not willing to shut them down. He’s just not willing to resist them or go there. He doesn’t care enough, or whatever the reason is. It’s hard to know if it’s in his heart or in his mind, he won’t do it.

And then, you know, I think it was three days before we went to war, he goes, you know, “It’s not on radar that Trump is going to attack Iran. That’s not on radar.” It’s like, buddy, read the tea leaves. Of course he’s going to go and bomb Iran.

So, and I kind of get where you’re coming from about the Pompeo. I was even skeptical about the Pompeo thing. As I said, they got a list of these people they’re going to put in. And that’s why I’m a big believer in, this, it’s not even, people say, “Are you going to vote for a Democrat?” We got to think beyond that.

To me, it’s just about rejection. They set the table, and you can’t really choose what’s on the table, but you could choose whether to eat or not, whether you’re going to play the game. And so my bigger idea is just reject. And I what you said. It encapsulates it. It’s bullshit. No, thank you.

You know, you’re promising stuff, you know you’re not going to deliver when you put this stuff out there, the big, big, beautiful bill, $150 billion for border enforcement. They’re not deporting even a thousand people a day. It’s nothing.

And so I just look at these guys, Dan Caldwell crying on Tucker at Kurt Mills, all that kind of stuff. People saying, “We’re going to hold their feet to the fire, we’re going to pressure them.” And I’m like, aren’t you tired? We did that already. We did that in the first term. Because I was kind of in that place in the first term where it’s like, we’re going to control the personnel. We’re going to do this.

And I knew people in the admin. I knew people on the campaign that didn’t get hired because they were on the campaign, because the people in the admin were from the Rubio campaign or the Bush campaign. And it’s you know, we just need something that at the end of the day is what we want, not a compromise. I know that’s not how politics works, but we just need something that is promising and intends on delivering what we really care about. And Trump was never that in my opinion.

The Country Needed Ron Paul

DAVE SMITH: Yeah. No, I agree. And it’s, you know, it’s a shame in a way. A friend of mine, Scott Horton, always says the country needed Ron Paul and we got Donald Trump, which is kind of how I see it. Maybe you’d say more Pat Buchanan or someone that. But, you know, I think both of us would take either of those options if they were on the table.

But it is, you know, and I do think, I thought the Epstein one was a particular, it’s interesting how much that really was devastating for Donald Trump, and it was more than just the Epstein story. I think it was what that symbolized, what, that, you know, that it was right at the heart of his political raison d’être, which was draining the swamp. And it was like, come on, man, what’s a better example of the swamp than this?

NICK FUENTES: This?

The J.D. Vance Problem

DAVE SMITH: Oh, we won’t touch that. Okay. All right, then. So I guess we know how serious we are about this. And I got to say, I mean, I see nothing promising about J.D. Vance. I think my view of it seems to be that I do think that he’s maybe kind of sympathetic to, you know, my foreign policy views, and I think that he does seem to err more on that side, but I just don’t think he has anywhere near the stones to stand up to anyone.

I think he wants to be president more than he wants to care about that. And that right there is the, that’s the deal breaker, then. Okay, then, so you’re not. And again, to your point, I think, which I would just maybe modify. And I think you probably agree with this, too. It’s I’m not even against compromise, but there’s got to be a compromise. Yeah, there’s got to be a reasonable compromise.

I am willing to compromise on a few things, but the compromise can’t be, I have to bend over and grab my ankles. That’s not a reasonable compromise that I’m trying to sign up to. So it’s I just don’t, and I wonder, because there’s always two ways to look at this.

The conventional political thinking, the Charlie Kirk thinking would be well, any dissension here only helps the Democrats, right? So if we’re not all rallying around them, then we get the Democrats who are the worst biggest threat. But of course, I think our rejoinder to that would be that, well, no, not releasing the Epstein files is what gives the, or, and when I say file, you know, just not getting to the bottom of it. That’s what gives them that.

And what is J.D. Vance going to run on? I mean, how is he going to capture that energy that Donald Trump had of, we’re furious with this system. The system is so corrupt and so dishonest and so such a betrayal to every American that we want someone to go in there and be a wrecking ball against them. How is it even possible going to capture that energy right when there’s nobody’s believing it anymore?

Trump’s Evolution from 2016 to 2024

NICK FUENTES: Well, and with Trump, I feel like a lot of people just forgot really what he was. Because I feel like not a lot of people actually voted for him in 2016 that are around now. And you and I know, because we both, I mean, you’re around longer than me, but we were both around then. And I feel like there’s a lot of young people and maybe even big supporters of Trump now that weren’t really with him in ’16.

So what I’m trying to say is, for a lot of people that have amnesia, they think that he’s a Republican, he’s a conservative. Because that’s really what he’s become. That is what he was in ’20. That’s what he was in ’24. He’s against the radical left. He’s against the Democrats.

But in ’16, he started out fighting the Republican establishment, and he really ran as an independent. And I always go back to the proposition of Trump. This is my basis for not voting for him last year, which is not, “I’m better than the Democrats,” which is the minimum. You’re Republican. Well, he’s better than Kamala. Okay. Isn’t that a given? Like, shouldn’t you be?

It’s not that he’s a conservative or anything like that. He said, “The system is rigged and it’s broken. I will break it because I’m rich. I’m so rich, I don’t need to take their money. And if I don’t have to take their money, I can actually deliver real change because I don’t have to worry about upsetting them.”

That, in a nutshell, was the premise, and that was his appeal. He would go up on the stage and you watch this now and you’re like, where’s this guy? That famous clip where he goes, they’re booing him, and he goes, “That’s all donors in the audience. I don’t want their money. I don’t need their money.” And everyone resonated, right, left, and center, said, “Yeah, f* the system. That’s true. They’re bought off. That’s why nothing ever changes. He’s rich, they can’t buy him.” That was the idea.

Obviously wasn’t true then. Now in ’24, when he got $200 million from Tim Mellon and from Elon Musk and Ken Griffin and Marc Andreessen, the usual suspects. And with J.D. Vance, like you said, it’s just even worse. It’s disgusting that anyone’s even considering voting for him to me, because it’s like at least Trump had kind of a claim to be that guy because he was this bombastic billionaire from the private sector.

The Problem with J.D. Vance

Vance is your prototypical political artifact. Like a creation in a lab. Fake career, fake name, fake book, patrons in the CIA. He’s a nerd. He’s not even really that conservative. The fake conversion, maybe he’s a real convert, but it seems too convenient. He’s everything that Trump ran against. He’s like Jeb Bush. He was calling Trump a Nazi and voted for McMullen and was a Never Trumper.

So, and I’m not just unloading my case against him, but it’s like they could not be more different. So to your point, how are you going to sell that? I don’t know how any MAGA person is buying it, but I think they will.

DAVE SMITH: And there’s another thing where the vice presidency, the role, it’s an interesting job because there’s really not a job exactly. But it makes you kind of like, oh, you’re the next in line. But if you just remove that for a second, who would have ever thought J.D. Vance could carry a national election?

J.D. Vance is not Donald Trump. Donald Trump is the most famous human being who’s ever lived, who’s bombastic and charismatic and just owns a room like no other. Really has a unique gift in this way. Unfortunately, all of these gifts are only for marketing and promotion and running for office. It’s not like he has no governing ability at all.

But J.D. Vance doesn’t have that. He doesn’t have that factor. The Hitler aura as you would describe it. You know what I mean? But he just, and so it’s, you’re just looking at this and you go, so look, if you’re telling me that the radical left Democrats are the real threat, which granted they are, it’s like it seems like we’re staring at them having a chance now.

When Losing Actually Means Winning

I guess the only thing, and again, this is an interesting dynamic, one that I’ve never really seen before in my lifetime, is where you see when Donald Trump support plummets, it doesn’t seem to give any boost to the Democrats who are still kind of just in the tank. And I think part of that is just because they failed so miserably over the last few years.

But I do think, to your broader point, I’m not even saying 100% one way or the other, but it’s something that I think people who are dissidents, broadly speaking of this system and are in opposition to the current regime need to think about a lot. Because yeah, if our vote isn’t a given, our support isn’t a given, then it has to be worked for. And also that things aren’t always so clear.

You could say Kamala Harris would have been worse than Donald Trump. Now in this particular example, just on the border security, probably we’re better off, all things considered with Donald Trump. But at the same time, in a lot of ways I think you could argue for right wing America, it was better that Joe Biden won the 2020 election.

Like things improved in a way that you really could not have imagined them improving under Donald Trump. And I mean, culturally speaking, even after Donald Trump won in 2016, the culture didn’t swing to the right, the culture swung even further to the left. The culture only started swinging back to the right when Joe Biden was in.

It actually was easier when there was a brain dead president who represented the Democratic Party and we had the wins in Twitter and the stuff I was talking about with Target and Bud Light and all this stuff. And so it’s just not so, it’s not always so obvious. White men can’t jump. Sometimes when you win you actually lose and sometimes when you lose, you actually win.

Setting Reasonable Expectations

And so I just think that, I would hope, like, I hope maybe Thomas Massie will run and primary him or I would at least hope that there’s something that kind of gets the conversation over. Like no, actually how about we expect you to be this, we expect you to actually be good and nothing crazy.

I’m not even asking for, this is why I corrected you on the no compromise. I’ll compromise, okay, but don’t get us in another stupid war. Make policy dictated off what’s best for America. We have to do something about this debt problem. We have to at least attempt to tackle it, because we’re drowning in it. And the answer can’t just be continue to debase the currency. It’s destroying our country.

And don’t have a wide open border. I’m just like, so few things. If you could just be good on these few things, I’d be like, okay, I’ll hold my nose over the rest. But there’s got to be some way. And especially now with the new media landscape, with the amount of influence that me and you have right now, I don’t know, we’ve got some opportunities to say, hey, no, no, we’re not just going to go along with this. We ought to plant a flag at one reasonable point and go, we’re not bending on this.

The 2028 Opportunity

NICK FUENTES: Yeah, I totally agree. I think we need to throw our weight around and we’ll have a much better opportunity to do that, because in ’28, it’s an open field on both sides. In 2016, 2024, Trump was like the 10,000 pound gorilla in the room. Immovable. You, me, all of us put together, no one was going to knock him off that trajectory. Which is why maybe it was naive for me to withhold the vote outside of reasons in principle or for rhetoric.

But in ’28, we can shape the race because like you said, I don’t think Vance is a shoo-in at all. He’s not a national figure. Very good chance he goes away like DeSantis where it’s a failure to launch, a crash and burn situation, and then it’s wide open.

And I would say that people say that I’m like a Democrat or I wanted Kamala to win. And it’s like, you think I don’t know that Trump is better than Kamala? Everyone knows that. But I love what you said about these knock-on second order effects because you’re 100% right.

Biden winning and Trump getting banned from YouTube and all that, that’s probably why Elon bought Twitter. That maybe doesn’t happen in a universe where Trump won the 2020 election and all the other downstream effects that took place. Trump being president now is sweeter than it would have been from ’20 to ’24. And you could have never predicted that, like you said, that Biden winning would force the pendulum to swing in the other direction.

I think there was something true about Trump and Kamala in ’24. If Kamala inherited the war in Gaza and the Ukraine war, would we get something insanely radical in ’28, like a real reset, maybe? You can never know.

The Escalation Problem

What I would say, though, about ’28 and this is maybe new is, when you look at what Trump is doing, he’s creating a lot of tension right now. The ICE raids, the militarization of law enforcement, the war everywhere in Venezuela, Ukraine, Iran, the advance of AI and technology. It’s like, if a Democrat wins in ’29, I’m moving to another country.

Because whoever comes into power from the left is going to want blood, because they’re going to want vengeance for all, if they regroup. That’s sort of presumptuous. If they regroup and reorganize, they’re going to kill us.

Because in Chicago, I live right by where this is happening. They set up this detention facility. They’re rounding people up, putting hype edits of it on Twitter. It’s pissing liberals off. Liberals are going to the place protesting. The cops are beating the s* out of them and laughing and taunting them. More protesters come now. They’re ramming cars into ICE cars. The cops are shooting them. Now they’re bringing in DHS.

It’s like, we’ve gone so far up this escalation ladder in three months. And what I fear is that Trump is not going to finish the job. He’s not going to salt the earth and destroy Antifa. So all he’s doing is pissing these people off. And that means the violence is going to get worse. They’re going to organize. We’re going to get Mamdani for president in ’28 or something along that vein.

And that’s why I think it’s really important that a Republican does win, but it just can’t be Vance. So that’s kind of how I’m thinking about it, because they’re really barking up the wrong tree, in my opinion. They’re not, they’re signing checks they can’t cash.

The Window of Opportunity and the Threat of Censorship

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, I mean, I wouldn’t even close the door on Vance. I’m just like, he’s got to show me something. I got to see something that makes me go, okay, I can get on board with this at least, which I just haven’t seen. And I do worry about that a lot. I think it’s something that you should pay attention if you think about, say, the way the culture shifted over the last few years, which really is hard to overstate how crazy it is, dude.

Me and you talked five years ago. We were living in a different world. When me and you talked five years ago, it was not that long, and you could obviously see right now, looking at where the culture is, you’re like, oh, the woke progressives really overplayed their hand in a lot of ways. Right. And then there’s a lesson in there to be learned that things can change very quickly. And I do worry about that.

You worry about how far the Democrats went last time they were in power and what they might do again. It’s also important to know that there were a couple, for as much as I always say the American system is pretty broken and the Constitution is pretty destroyed, but there still are some things and I think people don’t appreciate enough the fact that two major ones that got shut down.

Number one was the OSHA vax mandate. Joe Biden had legislated that every company with 100 or more employees must fire anyone who doesn’t get this vaccine. This would have been a huge event and massive control of government, particularly, not explicitly targeting right wingers, but who the hell wasn’t getting the vax, you know.

And then the other one was the Ministry of Truth, which ended up getting shut down. Now both of these ended up getting struck down, but man, might we be living in a different world had they gone through. And so who knows what they would try to do again.

Also, as you talked about before, which is a broader theme, is that there is this, Netanyahu’s snapback about controlling the media and how he was just openly bragging. I really couldn’t believe he was openly bragging. I said on the show, I just go, I said, I think this video is supposed to be a secret recording where he’s talking in Hebrew. Is he actually just on camera saying this in English? Really?

But I do wonder, and I wonder how you think about this because this is something that concerns me particularly about you and the groypers and more broadly just the Twitter culture or what’s on social media. It does seem to me like I’m slow motion, almost watching this movie play out where it would have seemed impossible five years ago, six years ago, the second time you were on the podcast, you had just been kicked off YouTube.

It was just ramping up that, hey, you simply can’t do these things on YouTube. Even I’m going to put this up on YouTube. I guess we’ll test it. We’ll test where they’re at now. But I just think you’re doing other interviews that are up there. I figured, why not? I think it’s okay.

We’re in a, you can say things on Twitter now that you couldn’t have dreamed of saying. But now that the censorship regime has been rolled back and Nazi s* is just flooding in, it does seem to me like, man, this is setting up the pretext. It’s setting up the pretext for, hey, you guys wanted to have freedom of speech. Well, here’s what it actually looks like now. Can we all agree that this must be shut down?

And I’m not saying I know that’s going to happen, but it’s a real concern of mine. And I wonder what you think about all that.

NICK FUENTES: I totally agree. And the first time that that was clocking to me was when I think it was on Fresh and Fit. And I love Myron, and I like Fresh, too. But it was on their show where I think some ghetto black woman said, “F* the Jews,” and we love it. And it went super viral.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, I think I saw this.

NICK FUENTES: A little suspect seized up on that, and it’s like, and I didn’t say anything to him privately, but you can see where that’s going to go very in very short order, where there’s no shortage of stuff like that you can find that certain people are putting out there on a daily basis. And it’s not measured. It’s not nuanced. There’s no point. It’s just vulgar. It’s vulgar. It is hateful. It definitely probably crosses a line. It doesn’t serve the conversation.

It’s one thing to say Jewish identity, blah, blah, blah. It’s only to say, “F these people.” That’s different. And I 100% believe there’s going to be another censorship push and they’re going to use s like that to justify it.

So that’s why I’ve really tried, and I’m not the most disciplined person, but I’ve really been trying this year to be more restrained and measured. And the audience, they perceive everything as cucking. If you’re not sprinting towards the most vulgar, extreme, fanatical, they say that you got the call.

But it’s so important because there is a window of opportunity here. And you and I have been around long enough to recognize that. Because you’re right. It was a different country in 2015. Completely different country, and we don’t want to squander that. But then again, you wonder how much of it is even in our control. Will they do it anyway?

DAVE SMITH: No, no, I think that’s right.

NICK FUENTES: We should control what we can control.

Growing Audiences and Maintaining Discipline

DAVE SMITH: No, I think that’s right. And I think that, you know, it’s something for us to even always keep in mind, too, because it’s hard when you start growing. I know you’ve, I’m sure, experienced this, right? But it’s a different thing. When you have a show and it’s getting 10,000 views a show, you can kind of know your audience. You’re like, I know what my audience thinks.

When you’re getting 500,000 views in a show, it’s like if 50,000 people are furious at you, it’s like the whole lot. But actually, no, that’s not the whole lot. There’s a much bigger audience. And even as you’ve said, as you’ve been trying to, not moderate isn’t the word, but just be more careful or just be more mature, I guess, which is natural for all of us. I mean, I’m still a big child in a lot of ways, but you kind of realize that it’s like, well, as you’re doing that, actually your audience is growing. It’s not like you’re losing your audience. It’s not like they’re abandoning you.

I do just think that there is, even what you were saying with that, it goes, the problem with, who the hell cares what some ghetto black chick says on Myron show? You know, and I like Myron. I’ve done his show before. But who cares what one of these f*ing chicks says on my…

NICK FUENTES: There.

DAVE SMITH: But the reason to care is because that is the type of thing that will convince normal, reasonable people that, yeah, you know what? In fact, you’re right. This is too f*ing insane. They’re praising Adolf Hitler. This is too…

And so you just, I don’t know, in the same vein of these second and third order effects, it’s like, I just think people, you want to try to encourage people to be smart. You’re right. We can’t control what our audience says. And me and you have experienced that in the last couple weeks very, a very clear demonstration of that. And that’s good. Our audience shouldn’t just be taking our orders or anything, but we should exert influence where we can and go, hey, think about this. Just be smart and think about what you’re setting up here.

Because, of course, there’s no question that they’re thinking about plugging up this hole now. What they’re going to be able to do about it, who knows? You know, it does feel to me like maybe this thing’s gotten away from them, but it’s not like they don’t have a few tricks up their sleeves. And so we should, I mean, I think we should just think about these things and what the response to it might be, because they’re certainly planning. They’re very aware of this.

You know, that’s one of the things that was interesting about Netanyahu’s meeting there. So interesting that, I mean, I know you must have just been cackling, laughing, like, I was at this. But the fact that Netanyahu had to deny that he had Charlie Kirk murdered multiple times is like, they’re aware that things are different. You know what?

NICK FUENTES: I…

DAVE SMITH: It really is just so hard to imagine. Maybe because I’m a little older, it’s even more hard for me to imagine because it’s just like, yo, this is so, I mean, this is so unthinkable, so unthinkable when I was younger that this would be the case today, but it is, and they’ve got their eye on this as well. So we’re, like you said, we have an opportunity that feels almost like a trap.

NICK FUENTES: Yes.

DAVE SMITH: You know what I mean? You know, it just has that feeling like you’re like, wait a minute, this whole thing has been lifted and we’re all cool now? It’s like, wait, we all agree it’s retarded to trans kids. Everyone agrees. Okay, that’s kind of interesting. But at the same time, it does feel like, okay, the second act is coming or the next act is coming. And I worry about what that’s going to be.

Staying Vigilant and Avoiding Traps

NICK FUENTES: Yeah, I totally agree. You’re waiting for the next shoe to drop, you know, because we’ve experienced this suffocating political control that seems like they almost know every permutation of how things are going to end up. And now it’s like, so Mark Zuckerberg decided free speech is good now? I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that there is an ulterior motive.

And I think that I’m always just in favor of doing the thing that’s unpredictable because if to the extent that they have power, it’s because they can predict what will happen next or how we’ll behave. And so that’s why I try to just surprise people and do the thing they’re not expecting me to do.

Like if they bring me back on Twitter and maybe there’s an angle, it’s because they’re expecting me to be what they think I am, which is a troll or a hater or whatever. So maybe walk it back or be restrained or, you know, and I think that we really need to be intentional and cautious.

After Charlie died, I called up a lot of people that I know that are influencers and I was like, we just really need to be careful to not step into a trap. Because it seems like whenever there’s a crisis and you never think it’s going to happen, but when there’s a crisis, you get kind of riled up and you act in ways that are not smart, you know, and by you, I mean anyone does. Me, you, anyone. Because emotions are high, rationality goes out the window.

And it’s easy to forget all the hard fought lessons we’ve learned over the years that have produced bad results for us. So, you know, with all the violence, chaos, the uncertainty, unprecedented nature of where we are, we just have to be extremely cautious, vigilant, intentional about what we’re doing, what we’re saying. It just can’t be sloppy, you know, because if we’re sloppy, the thing about Netanyahu and them is they are really smart and they are catchy.

You think they don’t know. They know. Like you said, they know astutely, even to the extent that Matt Walsh says, “Let them kill each other,” that’s a brilliant innovation because they knew the pro Israel thing was losing. And you think they’re just going to keep pressing that button until it doesn’t work anymore? No, they switched up quick and said we can’t get them to support. We’ll get them to say this line about, well, we don’t want Muslims here. They reinvent all the time.

So the game is not over. That’s what people need to keep in mind. You run through the finish line, you run through first base, it isn’t over. And I like what you said. They always have something up their sleeve. So you can’t presume that we’re running away with it. We get careless, sloppy, do a victory celebration. It’s still in flux.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, absolutely. All right, so I wanted to ask you a little bit about this, because I think this is a topic that I find very fascinating, and I think you’re kind of uniquely a perfect example of this. But so 2019, you got your YouTube channel taken, and then was that around the same time you got kicked off everything else, or was it Twitter? When did you get kicked off of that? I know you ultimately got let back on, but there was a period where you were gone.

NICK FUENTES: I was banned from YouTube in February 2020, and then Twitter in July 2021.

The Impact of Deplatforming

DAVE SMITH: Okay. All right. So there’s a real interesting dynamic to me, and I watched this happen with people who I know, people I’m friendly with. Like, I knew Gavin McGinnis, a good example of somebody who got canceled off everything and really hurt him, really sidelined him. Stephan Molyneux kicked off everything, really sidelined him. Like, it’s almost like they’re not in the conversation anymore, at least the way that they were. Milo, a great example of that. Where he was really seemed like he was about to break through to mainstream success, and they squashed that.

And somewhere along the years, it seemed like that started backfiring. I thought Andrew Tate, I thought, was an interesting example. I had never heard of Andrew Tate until he got canceled from everything. And then that. And then all of a sudden, it was just, like, dominating the algorithm, and he was everywhere. And I think you were one of those guys, too.

So like, even, like, you got back on Twitter, and I’m sure that helped, but you were already kind of surging before, I think, if I’ve got that correct. And so was, like, was there a period. You’re out there in the unpersoned world, and was there a time where you were like, oh, this is actually working here in this world? And, like, what were you streaming on?

NICK FUENTES: I was on Cozy TV, which is my own site.

DAVE SMITH: Oh, you just made your own thing. Okay, cool. Yeah. Yeah. So I was like, I haven’t heard of that. But so that was. And did you start getting numbers there?

NICK FUENTES: No, no. I was languishing. It was tough. I mean, the thing about deplatforming is it works. When I got banned from everything, I was not getting great numbers. It was when I got back on Rumble that I really. That I got on Rumble in the first place.

DAVE SMITH: Rumble seems like it was a big deal in the. Because they were the first one who really started doing numbers.

NICK FUENTES: Yes. Yeah. And, you know, as a live streaming platform for a period, I was banned from all live streaming platforms from roughly 2021 until Rumble, I think, opened up live streaming to everybody, which maybe was like 2023 right around there. That was the wilderness. I literally could not stream my show unless I made a website with, which is very costly and time consuming.

And, you know, what helped was being prolific and having, like, a core of supporters. I do a show every day. There’s a parasocial relationship. They are. It’s a cult like following. But a lot of these guys, they either stop making content like Molyneux, they upload it to a platform that doesn’t work. Like, Bitchute was pretty rough in the early days, and Gavin put all his stuff behind a paywall. And that’s just, in my opinion, a bad business model, because it’s like you got to give out the free samples to get people to walk through the door.

DAVE SMITH: Right.

NICK FUENTES: And when it’s to pay to get in, you just. You don’t get the conversion.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah. You don’t get new listeners.

NICK FUENTES: Yeah, exactly. So I had a strategy where I said, I’m going to take a financial hit. Like, I made no money for two years, but I knew it’s like, if I keep people coming through the door, eventually things will change. Or I can still make a little money if it’s free and if it’s good. And that’s how I was able to just kind of, like, survive. But I’m still dependent on platform access.

The Streisand Effect and Trump’s Influence

DAVE SMITH: Yeah. But it does. Okay, fair enough. But it does just seem like, you know, like, whatever, if the goal was to shut you up, well, that certainly didn’t work out very well for them. And it does seem. I think there’s just something interesting about the fact that it seems at least like we were just saying we’re waiting for the other shoe to drop. But it seems, at least for the time being, that the cancel thing just stopped working and actually started, like, kind of injecting more life into the people who are getting canceled.

Like, I thought, like, obviously you’re saying these years were rough, but on net, I think you may have benefited from that. And maybe I’m wrong, because maybe if you were just on YouTube and Twitter this whole time, you lost out on a lot from that.

NICK FUENTES: So, like, maybe I’m wrong about that, but at the very least, it seems to have not worked or something like that.

DAVE SMITH: And I thought Andrew Tate and Alex Jones, too, were, like, kind of examples of that, where it was just like, ah, that’s not. You didn’t remove them from the conversation. They’re more like all three of you guys are more present than ever, whereas some of those other guys just like, never kind of got back to where they were. I guess Gavin is back on Twitter now, I think.

NICK FUENTES: Yeah, just last week. Yeah. Yeah. To me, it’s more, in my opinion, a function of your strategy and just kind of. It seems that the people that have survived the longest are the people with a show only because if you have a show, people know when to tune in. It is every day, you know, like Alex Jones does three hours every day and he’s on radio, which really helps. Yeah. I don’t think he ever got censored from there.

But I was never a believer in the Streisand effect thing because it’s like I can’t process credit cards for my business. They’re like, there’s no Streisand. If I can’t make money, you can’t have a bank account, you know, and all that stuff. So it really, in my opinion, was Trump got banned from everything. And I think venture capital and private equity, they do what they do best. And they looked at him like an undervalued asset and they came in and said, hmm, this guy’s banned from everything. We can actually upset Silicon Valley and the market there if we make censorship proof Rumble.

It’s like, if I’m banned on Twitter, no one’s going to build a new Twitter around me. But if Trump is banned on Twitter, he actually can build a Rumble, Truth Social around him. And in a way that, that explains to me 2024, because that is who came in, little tech, you know, it’s Andreessen Horowitz, it’s the Tiel Club, it’s Elon Musk. He was kind of like their guy commercially and politically. And then I think that the rising tide lifted all the boats.

That’s kind of how I interpret it, because we were headed towards, like, total annihilation of free speech. Like, my listener base shrunk dramatically when I was in the wilderness.

Free Speech and Censorship

DAVE SMITH: Yeah. Does it. Wasn’t it wild seeing, like, everybody flip out about the FCC chairman threatening Jimmy Kimmel? There’s a free speech. Free speech is finally at risk in America after, like the last five years. You’re like, really? Oh, really? Is that. Was this the one? Which, by the way, was a stupid thing for the FCC chair to say that totally. Like, talk about seizing defeat from the jaws of victory. Like, oh, okay, now you handed them a talking point.

NICK FUENTES: Point.

DAVE SMITH: This guy is dying in the wilderness. You know, this is a couple other things I want to talk about. I want to talk about censorship, and then I want to hit, like, Tucker, Candace, and some of that stuff. But so there, you know, there’s just been a lot of questions that are raised over the censorship stuff. And like I said, there’s some areas that I struggle with myself.

Like how exactly? I think I kind of landed about where you were on the Charlie Kirk thing. Like, look, like the government shouldn’t be involved. They’re not technically inciting violence, but, like, there really should be consequences for this. There should be some type of social consequences. And in fact, I’m a big believer in social consequences.

But what do you think, like, in terms of, you know, I think I heard you say something like, look, the right’s in power now. When the left gets back in power, they’re going to be censoring people. So maybe we should be doing things like that now. But, like, what do you mean by that? Or what? Like, do you think the FCC chair. I mean, you seem to agree with me when I said that. But, like, should the FCC chairman be threatening Jimmy Kimmel and people like that?

NICK FUENTES: No, I think that was just tactically dumb. But I agree. I do believe that we are in, like, a war, basically. We are in a race. And we know that because, like you said, under Biden, like, they were engaging in censorship. It was coming from the press office, was coming from I don’t know how many departments and agencies, but it was quite a few of them that they were giving orders, take this account, that post, take that down, the OSHA stuff.

And they wasted no time in doing that. Like, Biden got in, and it was just a whirlwind of January 6th censorship. Everything you can think of, a naked power grab. And I do believe that if Trump leaves office and a Democrat comes in, they’re going to do it again. And so I’m a big believer that the right wing needs to really disempower the left institutionally. Like, if they weren’t. If they were doing it under a different pretense, I would like what they’re doing at Harvard in Colombia. The problem is they’re doing.

DAVE SMITH: It’s not on behalf of America.

NICK FUENTES: Right. For some other reason, but it’s like, yeah, like, we should work to disorganize the left. We should work to go after their radicals like Antifa. We should put the pressure on them hard. We should put the pressure on the far left. We should put the pressure on their funding mechanisms, their stuff, because if we lose, they will do it to us indiscriminately. They have no qualms about it, and they’ll be more competent about it, and then they’ll make the country the way they want it to be. So, yeah, I’m a big believer in, like, we should use the levers of power. I don’t know about, like, censoring them on Twitter, let’s say, but institutionally, yeah, we should be playing to win.

Using Power and Dismantling Institutions

DAVE SMITH: Yeah. You know, I said on my show, and this is, you know, from my, my particular strain of libertarianism or whatever, but I was like, I basically said the same thing as you. I was like, look, I don’t find. I don’t view it as a free speech violation because, like, Jimmy Kimmel isn’t a person anymore. Like, you’re part of the regime. Like, once you. There is. And I know it’s a little bit of a gray area of where you draw the line when someone. I’m not going to say, hey, you pay your taxes, therefore you’re part of the regime.

But like, no, when you just become what Jimmy Kimmel is, you’re no longer a citizen expressing their views. It just. Tactically, it was such a blunder. The guy’s already done. We’re killing him already. So, like, what do we even do? Me and you get better numbers than these guys get. So, like, what are we? Why do we need to make them a free speech martyr? Like, it was just like, shit.

But I do think that, and it’s one of the great disappointments of the Trump administration is that, you know, for all that talk about, like, Project 2025 and how he’s going to be like, permanently, he’s going to overthrow democracy and all of this, it’s like, okay, well, that was never. But there should have been, like, this time. This time, like, conservative and right wing America should have been like, hey, we have to do something that, like, dismantles their mechanism.

And I do think, like, you know, look, again, all of government’s. All of college is a government program. The whole thing is a government program. All the. It’s like, yeah, we should be shutting down as much of this stuff as we can, just destroying it. So I don’t really think. And maybe this is where me and you disagree, but I never believe that right wingers are going to be able to capture and use these institutions. I think bureaucratic institutions are progressive by their very nature. They’re egalitarian by their very nature.

It’s like, yeah, but you can smash a lot of it, you know, or at least attempt to. Some attempt. I mean, maybe you get struck down by the courts, but, like, at least try. There seems to be no attempt to even be like, how do we make sure this doesn’t happen to our guys next time? And in fact, I think part of that’s because Trump doesn’t really even view them as his guys. Yeah, like, you know, Donald Trump, I thought one of them. And you were there on January 6th, so curious to ask you a little bit about that, but I thought one of the most disgusting things I ever saw Donald Trump do was when he threw the January 6th guys under the bus.

NICK FUENTES: Yes.

The January 6th Aftermath and Trump’s Betrayal

DAVE SMITH: Like days after it, or maybe the day after it, even. And okay, ultimately he pardoned them after letting them languish in prison for years. Okay, so you don’t get that much credit from me for that. But look, man, I never bought any of all the leftist claims about January 6th were always hyperbolic insanity. It wasn’t an insurrection and Donald Trump didn’t incite violence.

But at the same time, if you’re a leader and you told everybody that they just stole this election from me, and then you said you’re going to go there, and then your people did what would be reasonable to do if the election was stolen from them?

NICK FUENTES: Right.

DAVE SMITH: It is not the claim. Just like the Democrats were making the claim with Russia. It’s like, well, then we should be nuking Moscow. According to what you’re saying, we should be at war with them now. Well, according to what you’re saying Donald Trump, you should storm the Capitol. If that’s the case. If that’s the case.

And so he kind of led his people into this. And then literally, because at the end of the day, it does seem that really what motivates Donald Trump is his own ego, his own greatness. And if they were like, “you’re going to get impeached or removed, or you’re going to get this if you don’t go,” so, okay, fine. And then threw his own people under the bus. I thought that was disgusting.

NICK FUENTES: Yeah. And he had the full power to pardon them in the first place.

DAVE SMITH: Right there. Right there.

NICK FUENTES: Could have done it. He had three weeks to do it, or two weeks, I guess is what it was. And yeah, at least for me, I was almost charged with conspiracy. They were considering charges against me. That was in the New York Times. And other people obviously did go to jail.

And I was there because Trump told me to be. And by that I mean I was going to be at the speech. I was not going to be at the Capitol building. The speech was at the Ellipse. The Capitol was miles away. And Trump said, “we are going to the Capitol to make our voices heard.” I said, oh, well, Trump’s going to be there. I guess it’s cool. So I went there, and if I had been in jail and other people were, is that not his fault?

He saw no responsibility. And that is kind of his M.O. I mean, he throws a lot of people under the bus. He is, I think, motivated by vanity. And here’s the problem with that. If he’s not in it to win it, then he is creating, he’s activating the enemy with no intention of following through. Right. He got an office. He’s like, oh, I won. So it’s not that serious for him.

And he can pardon himself when this is all over and he’s rich, so he can go, but if the country turns upside down, we’re all going to be paying the price. And so that was my big beef with him, among others in 24 is like, look, you guys don’t understand. He did not learn his lesson. He never does. He hasn’t changed at all. If anything, he’s just more tired and cares less.

And as a consequence, it’s going to be just as inefficient as the first term. In which case, we’re going to, we shouldn’t even bother. In which case, we’re better off not poking the bear. Let’s just let Kamala catch the hot potato and forget about it, because he’s going to start something he can’t finish. That was kind of my problem.

The Reality of Government Power

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, in a weird way, it’s kind of true about the people who stormed the Capitol building, too. You’re like, yo, I don’t think you realize what you’re doing. I know you think this is funny. I know you think it’s funny. Oh, you fart on Nancy Pelosi’s desk. That’s really funny. Hey, you know what government is? It’s not your friend. You know what I mean?

These are the biggest, most powerful gangsters in all of the land. And they are going to crush you and lose no sleep over it. And I was, like I said before, I voted for Trump in 24. I didn’t vote for him in 2016, but I was rooting for him. I mean, the 2016 election day coverage will forever go down as just the greatest thing ever. The montages of MSNBC and the Young Turks and all this stuff was, which, but I guess I’m friends with the Young Turks now because we all, we’re all against the genocide or whatever, but at the time, it was just so amazing.

2020 that I wasn’t even rooting for him, because I really did feel exactly that. Especially, I was just so furious at him for the year that was 2020. I mean, my God, what a failure. In the moment of your life, you were in the seat of power and failed so hard and just instituted totalitarianism in the United States of America is the craziest sh*t ever.

And I did feel exactly like you felt. Which, if people can remember back, I mean, 2020 was such a crazy year with the mass riots and the streets and the censorship and the lockdowns and all of this. And I was just kind of like, what do we get for this?

NICK FUENTES: Right?

DAVE SMITH: We’re kicking a hornet’s nest. And without a plan associated with it, for top marginal tax cuts or something like that. What is the, and it just seems like what you get from Dick Cheney anyway. So it did just feel like that. And I think that’s a really wise observation that you never want to, it’s the same way I feel about January 6th. What are you doing? Are you overthrowing the US government right now? Cause if you are, you better f*ing be prepared to do that.

It is not wise to do that. Oh, you’re just doing it with no strategy. Oh, we’ll just take selfies inside. Okay.

NICK FUENTES: All right.

DAVE SMITH: That doesn’t, I don’t think you guys actually realize what you’re dealing with. And I think particularly in the United States of America, where we have this kind of, we’re a very, very wealthy country, and we have an enormous powerful government. The most powerful government in the history of the world. But generally speaking, if you don’t cross them, they’re fairly polite to you. You know what I mean?

It’s like, hey, you get your taxes. We’re taking half your money. You have that in on time to us. But as long as you do that within reason, you can kind of, and people get very comfortable and kind of are a bit removed from what the real nature of government is. And you don’t understand that. It’s like, look, man, John Brennan might seem fine when he’s on TV. But you cross that motherf*er and he will kill you and not lose a wink of sleep over it.

These are people who will launch wars on false pretenses. These are people who will back both sides of a war and just let the killing happen. And man, you really want to be careful about crossing them.

The Fed Accusations

Okay, so the January 6th stuff is where these accusations of you being a Fed have come from, which, full transparency here, I do not believe that you’re a Fed. I don’t f*ing know. Who the hell knows? Everybody, you’re a Fed. Everyone’s a Fed. I don’t know who’s a Fed and who’s not a Fed, but I know that this was something that Tucker had said, and I think you were very upset by this, and understandably so.

I think that that’s, it’s a particular type of accusation that is, it’s a very frustrating one, I think, in a way, because it’s kind of like, oh, you’re just, everything you said is undermined now. Right? I don’t have to deal with anything. And I think that, anyway, I understand why that upset you a lot, but I think from what I’ve heard, a lot of this comes from the January 6th stuff. And the accusation is that you were encouraging people to go into the Capitol. So what’s the deal with all that?

NICK FUENTES: Well, it even goes back to something else, which is the Joe Kent story, which I brought up before because I was at January 6th, and at January 6th, I got up there and I gave a speech, and in the speech, I gave speeches at all these events, by the way. I went to the Atlanta State Capitol, Harrisburg, Phoenix, Lansing, and even D.C. and I gave speeches at all the Governor’s mansion, state capitals in D.C. before.

And J6, we thought it was going to be the speech on the Ellipse, and then we were going to maybe do something at the actual Capitol building, although I wasn’t going to be there, but there were plans for there to be stages there. So like I said, I went to the speech. Trump said, go to the thing. We went to the thing, and somebody said, you got to give a speech. So I said, okay, find me a megaphone.

I get a megaphone, I jump up on a thing, and we’re like 500 feet from the Capitol. We’re not even near the building. We’re on the street next to the lawn. And in the speech, I said, “we’re taking the Capitol back. Keep moving, take down the barriers.” And then we left. We didn’t go in. I wasn’t even close to the building.

And this video had been out there for a long time. And people knew I was there and didn’t get charged. I got my money frozen, although I wasn’t public about that. I got on the no fly list. I went public with that, went public with the money later. There was never an accusation until about a year later. And then people started to create this story that I was leading people in and I didn’t get charged.

Now where it started with Tucker is with Joe Kent, because now, two years later, I make potentially Joe Kent lose the election. And Joe Kent was a close friend of Tucker’s. Joe Kent is in the CIA. And that is how we attacked him. We attacked him on that basis. And of course it was in self defense. He said that he disavowed me, condemns all my views. We’re keeping you out.

And I looked at him as very threatening because like we talked about before, he’s kind of boxing me out intentionally. So we made him lose. And it was a couple months after this. This is where I first got the inkling of it. Michelle Malkin, who’s a good friend of mine.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, I know Michelle. I’ve had her on the show before. She’s great.

NICK FUENTES: She’s amazing. And she’s married to a Jewish guy, so you can’t be mad at her.

DAVE SMITH: Good woman.

NICK FUENTES: And he’s great too, actually. He’s pretty based himself, but, so she communicates to me through a mutual friend that she gets this really weird call from Tucker. She says that Tucker never calls her. Sometimes she texts him and he’ll give her a thumbs up, but they don’t really talk, she says. But he calls her out of the blue, asking about me and asking about Kanye. “Did Nick make Kanye go crazy? Did Nick try to take Trump out at the Kanye dinner?”

DAVE SMITH: I don’t think anyone can hold you responsible for that.

NICK FUENTES: Yeah, you can blame me for a lot, but that’s.

DAVE SMITH: This one rests squarely on the shoulders of Pete Davidson. We all know that. We all know that. Get your family stolen by Pete Davidson, you’re going to lash out at him.

The Tucker Carlson Rivalry

NICK FUENTES: You gotta get radicalized. But so he’s calling her, asking about all this stuff and about J6. And she said it was very strange. Like it felt like he was reading from a script. He was asking these questions, and she just told me to be on alert.

Then I get a call from Anya Parampal, the wife of Max Blumenthal at Gray Zone. They’re doing a piece about me and she asked me about the Capitol and I tell her the story. I said I was 500ft away. I testified, I got subpoenaed by Congress. I said I testified under oath. I did not talk to law enforcement.

She publishes this three part hit piece about me saying that I’m basically what Tucker said, that I’m here to make America First look bad, that I’m a fed, that I made Joe Kent lose. The only reason I made Joe Kent lose is cause I’m a fed trying to whatever. And so I do a big stream reviewing the hit piece and debunking basically the whole thing.

Then I get a call from Bryson Gray, the MAGA rapper. Now he’s a Christian rapper, he’s working for a company called Influenceable, which they pay influencers to push social media campaigns. He goes, my wife just got a new campaign from Influenceable. They’re paying people money to post the link to this article with the hashtag Fed Fuentes.

And there’s like a whole spreadsheet. It’s that or a whole like readout. It said, the campaign is Fed Fuentes. Post the link to this article and say these things and you get paid. And someone posted it. This like, state representative in New York. I forget his name, long time ago. But he was the only one who had posted it.

I put them on blast. Influenceable calls me up. Please stop talking about us. We will take it down, we promise. Everyone’s trying to broker this big truce. That’s how, because I was pro Tucker, I was a big fan up until that point. And I said, huh? So clearly, because him and Blumenthal are tight, he was fishing because he knew Michelle for this story. Blumenthal’s wife wrote it.

And they, that was like a coordinated hit job in retaliation for their buddy Joe Kent who lost. And anyway, so that’s kind of where the rivalry started. And, and by the way, I know for a fact that at a recent dinner, Tucker, even before he talked s* about me in July, he was pushing that script to anyone who would listen to other E Celebrities, to students, saying, yeah, Nick is this gay kid, he’s trans and he’s a fed, and he’s here to make us look bad. So this was in private and he was kind of suggesting that on a show. And then he explicitly said it to some.

DAVE SMITH: Well, I guess he implied it with me because I heard people on Twitter saying this. It was, you know, which I think I don’t remember exactly the details of this, but I think you had said something that pissed me off. Whatever. It’s water under the bridge. But I think you had said something that pissed me off. And so I just didn’t respond to it. And just, like, the way people were coming at me was, like, a little disrespectful. So I was like, f* you. I don’t have to answer this.

But he said when I was on the show, something like, we were talking about Ray Epps. And then he was like, there’s someone else who was on camera. And he kind of put the words in my mouth. He went, as I’m sure you know. And I did not. Honestly, I did not even pick up on that until, like, people were showing me the clip of it. And I certainly never thought he was talking about you. And he never said anything to me about that.

But then, of course, right, I did see with Candace where he did explicitly say it. And I think, you know, I guess, I think, I guess maybe the thing about it is that, that it does seem, just on the surface of it, I’m not accusing you of being a Fed at all. Like, I don’t think you’re a Fed, but I guess just on the surface of if there’s a video of you advocating people go into the Capitol and the way they were just getting everybody.

And it does seem like, although you’re obviously a lot bigger now than you were then, you still would have been a pretty nice scalp to be on their mantle. You know what I mean? Like, it would just be like, oh, wouldn’t they go at you for that and try to find some charge or something like that. But is it the case that there’s just nothing to charge you with or what?

The January 6th Charges

NICK FUENTES: Yeah, there was nothing to charge me with. I mean, they looked at charging me, but I didn’t trespass. I wasn’t violent.

DAVE SMITH: And wouldn’t that be inciting?

NICK FUENTES: Yeah, but there, my lawyer told me, I’m protected by the First Amendment.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah.

NICK FUENTES: For that. Because it wasn’t like the language was such that it wouldn’t be. And also, no one else got charged with incitement. The charges were trespassing, conspiracy, all things that didn’t apply to me.

DAVE SMITH: Right. Okay. All right, fair enough. You know, I think maybe, you know, it’s like, and I think maybe this is partially why you get that rap, which I think is unfair. It’s unfair to call people Feds, you know, unless you really have f*ing detailed, like, I have the evidence, and I’m willing to show it. It’s just like, it’s an unfair accusation. I think, like, you know, when Ray Epps, well, by the way, do you think he was a Fed?

NICK FUENTES: I don’t know. To be honest, I’m skeptical, but it’s possible.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah.

NICK FUENTES: I always.

The Fed Accusation Problem

DAVE SMITH: I lean toward thinking he was. Just the way the Democrats were defending him seemed so bizarre to me. But anyway, so there’s that famous video I’m sure you’ve seen, everyone’s seen, where Ray Epps is in the crowd and he starts saying, we’re going to storm the Capitol. And everyone immediately around him starts screaming, fed.

Now, in that moment, they have no way of knowing that he’s a Fed. But it’s just like, dude, that’s what Feds do. That’s what Feds do. They come in here and do this. And I think the reason why you might get some of that is because in the same sense, I think there’s a certain feeling of, like, when people are opposing Israel and opposing the warfare state.

And then someone else goes over. It was like, no, and we got to attach that to Nazi s* or something like that. Not that you literally say that I’m using these terms loosely, but, like, there’s a feeling of almost like that. Like, just like with Ray Epps going, hey, come on, man. That’s what they’re trying to cast us as. Not as this.

And I think the other thing, and I want to preface this, because I really do, I am not, look, I’m 15 years your senior, and I do the same s, too. So I’m not like, you know, I had, there was one with Dave Rubin recently where Dave Rubin was just talking s about me on some show. Like, it was, I don’t know why my name came up. Someone asked him a question and mentioned me. And then he goes, I think Dave Smith’s a moron who doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and blah, blah, blah.

And so I just publicly challenged him to a debate. Now, truth be told, I don’t really want to debate Dave Rubin. Who the f* wants to? Like, what is this? But it’s just like, I don’t know. We’re in this game, and, like, what do you do when someone who has millions of followers is saying, I’m a moron and I don’t know what I’m talking about?

You’re weaponizing your audience against me, and I only have one tool in my toolkit, which is, I’ll debate you. I can’t fist fight you. You know, like, so it’s like, okay, so let’s have a debate, and we’ll see who’s a f*ing moron. And now I weaponize the audience back against you.

And they all, and he accepted, but then refused ever. You know, he’s like, a bunch of people have reached out, Patrick, but David tried to set it up. Charlie Kirk actually tried to set it up. That was, it was the bull. Charlie Kirk wanted me to come debate, and I said, how about Dave Rubin? Because I know he lives in Florida. And it was right when we were talking our s*. And then he was like, no answer.

But, so, like, I get, like, if someone attacks you, you feel the need to attack them back. It’s kind of the game we’re in. I do think, though, when you’re, you know, it leads easy to the perception when you’re kind of attacking me, attacking Tucker, attacking Candace, you go, well, what purpose are you really serving here? You know what I’m saying?

And it’s like, like, it seems like any voice that’s critical of Israel, you know what I’m saying? Like, you’re going after. And then it does make people say, like, do you get the point I’m making? It goes like, okay, so number one, you’re saying we gotta attach all this toxic baggage to our opposition of Israel. And then number two, anytime there’s a critic of Israel who’s resonating, it seems like you’re trying to take him down. You get what I’m saying?

Defending Against the Attacks

NICK FUENTES: I do. And from the outside looking in, I get it. But I would say that with Tucker, it started before all that. It started before he was ever criticizing Israel. This was in 2023, at the beginning of 2023, before October 7th. And, you know, Tucker never said anything negative about Israel up to that point, with the exception of one thing he did about the ADL.

And, you know, same thing with Candace. I mean, I supported Candace. Like, I supported Tucker to the hilt. I had an account called Standis Owens. I stan Candace Owens. And we were like, gassing her up during the whole thing. And all I ever said about Candace is that it felt like she was kind of blown smoke up my a about why she wouldn’t do the show with me. And I didn’t like that.

You know, after she gets all this clout, she’s clouted up. She then starts saying, it’s the Frank ESTs. It’s the frankest. And I said, yeah, that’s not true. Like, that’s nonsense. And, and even, even this year, she invites me on her show. And, and I asked her, I said, well, is it going to be a hit piece? She goes, no, I don’t set anybody up.

I get all dressed up, I fly down there, look into, you know, she extend the olive branch, I accept. And she’s me about drama from a year ago about you, about, are you racist? Are you anti Semitic, Why aren’t you married? All this kind of stuff. It wasn’t a friendly interview. I don’t even think it was cordial. I think it was basically, it was an attempted hit job.

And, you know, so, like with you, I mean, look, we have disagreements and, and here we are talking about him. And I think I said during my show, like, I like you and I respect you, but I also speak freely, and if I disagree, I say something.

And, you know, these other people gotta recognize, like Tucker and Candace, they’re more powerful than me. They have institutional backing. Tucker is from Fox. Candace is from Daily Wire. They never got censored from anything. Me, I never had any. They tried to throttle me in the crib. By they, I mean conservative lives from the time I was 18. And I’ve been banned from most things for five years.

So it just, to me, it’s like, a little unfair. It’s like when Ben Shapiro, quote, tweeted me with a thousand followers for.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, that’s something else. I mean, it’s similar.

NICK FUENTES: I mean, Tucker and Candace getting together and saying, oh, this guy’s like a fed. It’s like, yeah, well, you guys have millions and millions of followers that you accumulated serving the system that I was getting killed by for five years. So that’s why I feel like I have a special license to attack, because it’s punching up. But, you know, I don’t know what to make of Tucker and Candace. I would say, if I was being charitable, that there’s immense distrust on both sides.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah.

NICK FUENTES: And for obvious reasons, because I’m an unknown quantity on the outside who, you know, they probably don’t watch everything. They don’t know what’s happening down here. And on the other side, they are exiting the institutions. So from someone on the outside, it’s the like, are you CIA? Where are your loyalties? What do you really believe? Are you concealing what you really believe and to what extent?

And so, you know, I guess when I gave Tucker a black eye, so to speak, and kind of retaliated very strongly, maybe at the minimum, it made him just kind of respect what I represent. But I’m open to all possibilities making up with either of them.

The David Duke Problem

DAVE SMITH: Well, that’s good. I think it’s good to be open to that. You know, I remember, like, and I don’t know that this is true, right? Like, I don’t know if David Duke is a fan. I’ve never met David Duke. I don’t know him. But I remember he used in 2008 and 2012, he came out and endorsed Ron Paul for president. And then this was of course, used against Ron Paul.

And I remember just feeling like, I remember going, oh, you’re a fing fed. Because, like, if you’re not a fed, then fing don’t endorse Ron Paul. Like, what are you doing?

NICK FUENTES: Do you hate him?

The Reality of Being a Public Figure

Like, this would only make sense if you. And so I think there’s just something. And I’m saying, like, from the perspective of Tucker Carlson, who is in a different generation and a different time and a different. I think there might be something of that where it’s like, dude, this looks, you know what I’m saying, like, to me.

I also think, and this is something I’ve struggled with myself, maybe like a little bit of imposter syndrome or something, or just the fact that guys like me and you, it’s a little bit weird when you’re kind of like, you know, like, you’re grinding and you’re doing your job, you’re doing what you do. We do shows. And then like, you kind of look up all of a sudden and you’re like, oh, I’m like, kind of up here in this. You know what I mean?

Like, there’s a lot of people who are doing shows who aren’t like. And I think that, you know, like, I had this when I was debating Alex Berenson, who just is fing horrible. And I probably never should have done that. I got sucked at this. I’m embarrassed by it, you know. But I mean, you know, whatever. It’s just, it’s like the same thing I think you have sometimes with like, whereas, like, there’s got to be a price tag to this. Like, you can’t be allowed to just s talk me like this, you know, like, especially when and for whatever reason, there’s something about me, my personality.

But I’m much more offended by someone calling me a Holocaust denier than I am by someone being a Holocaust denier, if that makes sense. Because it’s just like a f*ing dirty trick to try to get me with. And there is, I mean, we didn’t get it. We could talk a little about the Holocaust if you want, before we end. But, like, there isn’t. Like, I do believe the Holocaust happened. I do have family who suffered in it.

I also, like I said before, don’t believe that that suffering should be like, that suffering should be imposed on everybody else. And I don’t think it makes sense that everyone ought to be going to our museum or something. Like, I find that to be weird, but to claim that I’m denying that is like a real f*ed up thing.

And in my mind I was like, you know, f it, you work for the New York Times, dude. You pinned this to your Twitter. Like, this accusation of me. But then I kind of noticed as we were debating that, like, in my mind I’m like, dude, you’re the fing New York Times guy. I’m some comedian. And he’s like, dude, you’re Dave Smith. I’m just Alex Baron. Like, he kind of had that. Like, he didn’t exactly say that, but I almost started to realize that it’s like, oh, yeah, I guess I kind of got to, like, recalibrate in a way.

Recalibrating Perceptions of Influence

DAVE SMITH: And I would just suggest, just humbly suggest that, like, while you view it as like, Tucker and Candace are up here and I’m just this guy down here. Even the guys at the top, as I’ve gotten to meet them, they’re also just people. And they also just like, even that when you’re like, when you’re talking s on your live stream, you’re like, I don’t know, I’m a fing kid in my basement talking s* on my live stream.

But actually, like, maybe they heard some of that s*, you know, and like, actually. And they look at it much more of like a parody relationship. Like, I know, like, I just know that you and I don’t. This is nothing that Tucker ever told me. I’m literally just speculating. But, like, you went at Tucker pretty hard. I remember after the 2020 election.

NICK FUENTES: Yeah.

DAVE SMITH: When he was basically saying, I have not seen any evidence that this thing was stolen. And to be fair, like, you know, you went at him in a pretty harsh way. And so I’m just saying things like that. Like, I think guys like me and you often feel like, well, who the f am I? I’m just some guy talking s. Whereas, like, people see more than you think and they are aware of it.

NICK FUENTES: Yeah. Just saying, well, and in, and I get that. But with Tucker in particular, the Fed, if he came out and said, I don’t like that kid, that’s different than saying he’s a Fed.

DAVE SMITH: Agree.

NICK FUENTES: And he said, I know that. And it’s like, but I’m me, and I know that’s not true. How can you know something that’s not true? Like, and people don’t have to believe me, but I know what I know, and Tucker knows what he knows. And I’ve been accused of being a.

The Price of Public Discourse

DAVE SMITH: Fake, said by several people that I’m here to ruin libertarianism, or I’m here to do all this. It’s an amusement. And of course, I’ve been accused of being on Qatar’s payroll, which is like, when do they start sending the money? I have no idea. I’m doing everything. Come on, guys.

So, yeah, no, I get. Look, and obviously that’s licensed for you to respond, more than license for you to respond. So I understand that I couldn’t. Like, obviously, I love Tucker and I love Candace. They’ve just both been very good to me. But I could never tell you, like, oh, you shouldn’t go back. And then, in fact, as I was watching it, I was like, well, this is going to go to work here. Because also, like, that’s kind of, you know, it’s, you’re brawling with a brawler if you try to do that.

And so obviously, I understand that that was going to be the response. I would, I guess, from my perspective, because, like, even what you’re saying with Candace, with the Frankists and stuff, like, you know, or the Bridget Macron stuff, you know, like, with a lot of this stuff, I try to be somewhat fair. Like, try not just dismiss a conspiracy because it sounds crazy. Because, like, hey, I know there’s lots of crazy conspiracies that are, in fact, true.

But at the same time, like I said to you before, it’s like, I’m just always 10 books behind. I’m always, there’s people I love reading them who have just put out books I still haven’t gotten to. Like, I still haven’t read Jim Bob Bovard’s new book, and I want to, but it’s just so much s to f. And you’re like, I can’t even follow you down this conspiracy rabbit hole to debunk it. You know what I mean? Like, I just can’t.

But I would say that, you know, me, personally, I would have, I would have rather Candace was just the chick who worked at Daily Wire and was like, I cannot support the slaughter of innocent people. Like, I loved, I loved that she was like, I just had a baby, and I’m sorry, I’m not going to support this s*. I thought it was so, and to have a Daily Wire employee take that stance at the Daily Wire, and then to find out that, in fact, feelings do care about your facts, you know, and that she got like, I just thought that was so valuable.

The Value of Important Voices

DAVE SMITH: And Tucker Carlson, to me, I mean, it’s, and I think you could appreciate this, too, right? If you just, like, remove yourself from it in your personal issue, it’s like, dude, our Bill O’Reilly is Tucker Carlson. That is so fing awesome. Like, that is so much better than having Bill O’Reilly. You know what I mean? And so, like, I think you would grant that. Like, that’s fing awesome. Like, it is. They are important voices.

I would just hope you would kind of, like all of us have to do to some degree is like, try our best to remove our own personal thing. Like, you slighted me and go, look, what are we trying to do here? I certainly think, as I was saying with the Jordan Peterson thing before, and I said this on a podcast at Ron Paul’s birthday party, someone was interviewing me. Clint Russell was asking me about, and I said, like, about you.

I was like, look, Douglas Murray might think I shouldn’t be on big shows. Like, other people might think you shouldn’t be on big shows, but you know what? You’re here. Like, there’s no more debate about this. Douglas Murray. It’s like, yeah, I’m as big as you without the institutional background, so you don’t get to say, I don’t get to be here.

And I think the same thing is true with you and the Groypers. It’s like, nobody’s being vanquished. We’re all here. And in fact, what needs to happen is not vanquishing people, but incorporating. And I think that Tucker and Candace and people like that, like, I just think all these voices are so important, and you know what I mean? I hope you would, like, kind of think about that.

The Reality of Being Attacked

NICK FUENTES: And I do. And I grant that on my show. All the, even throughout these feuds, I’ve said they’re both important and they’re pushing people in the right direction, but I think it’s totally the opposite. I think that, you know, like, with Candace in particular, she brought me out under false pretenses and then tried to vanquish, I think. I think that’s what that was. Or, or that was a way of putting me down or something, because I had just had my biggest show ever in the middle of the war.

She invites me out the next day, and her whole show is, you hate Jews for being Jewish. You’re a real racist. You’re the. And it wasn’t friendly. It was nasty. She was nasty to me. And then afterwards, she wouldn’t let it go. It didn’t play well at all. Because in the interview she goes, she goes, well, you got triggered. I said, I don’t think so. She goes, well, people are going to. And nobody agreed.

People were furious about the paywall. They’re pissed at the way she treated me. It was universally negative and she wouldn’t let it go. And then she got to come in and say, well, you lied. The reason people didn’t like it is because you lied about it. And it’s like, lady, you know, you got to take the L. You were out of pocket. It didn’t work. It backfired.

So I could coexist with her. I was willing to do it before, I’d even be willing to do it now. And the same is true at me, Tucker. And I think Tucker’s more rational. Maybe he’s a guy or something or, I don’t know why it helps, you know. But I could coexist with Tucker. It’s just there need, there needs to be a mutual understanding because I also represent a lot of people.

And then when they put me down, they’re not just putting me down, they’re putting down that whole right wing flank of the issue. And I don’t need everybody to agree with me. We can, we can. I love the disagreement. I love this conversation. We disagreed about some things here too.

It’s just when people say, you’re a Fed, you’re a racist, f you, you shouldn’t be allowed on the shows. You’re just an ahole. It’s like, I’m not an a*hole. I’ve been fighting for 10 years to say the stuff that many of these people just got around to saying last year. And that, that’s just so. Yeah, it’s like a little irritating when they do that to me, but I’m willing to be the bigger person.

Finding Common Ground Through Honest Dialogue

DAVE SMITH: Oh, it’s good. Well, look, I mean, I think it’s good. Look, dude, I mean, all of us are trying to figure out kind of now that we’re in this position, like how exactly to manage that. And I think, like, kind of as we were talking about before, it’s like we’re united in our opposition to a thing, but now we have, in a lot of ways, look, it’s been decentralized. It’s not like any one of us is exactly like the mainstream guy, but like, we’re the mainstream media now, you know, like, it’s us.

It’s like, I mean, honestly, like, there’s particularly, like, daytime shows, like, you’re lapping, like, me too, you know, so it’s an interesting thing.

All right, so maybe we could talk about this a little bit and really test my YouTube channel. What do you, because I think a lot of this, I remember when we first spoke, or one of the podcasts, when we first spoke, what the big controversy about you, that at least from what I heard from the other libertarians or whatever the world was, that you’re a Holocaust denier and that it was the cookie. There’s a clip where, like, a fan makes the Cookie Monster joke, and then you, like, read it, like, obviously laughing around and joking.

I remember people sending me this and going, this is clearly like, he’s joking around, at least to some degree. But then when you were criticizing me, you were talking about, like, me, not because my family was involved, not willing to check what is.

The Holocaust and Historical Debate

DAVE SMITH: Is your view simply, like, what we were saying before, that it’s like, look, this happened. It was awful. But, like, also, all of history doesn’t have to revolve around this. Also, it was in the context of a war where, like, 50 million people died and Europe was destroyed. So, like that. Or are you actually saying, like, this didn’t happen? The numbers are not. Because this now is much with the general, whatever you want to call, I hate using the word anti-Semitism because it’s not even a good word, but with the general kind of, like, hostility toward Jewish people.

This does seem to be something that’s, like, really catching fire. And I just think is completely wrong. Like, I think it’s like, Israel killed Charlie Kirk. It’s like, this just isn’t actually right. It’s not actually good history. And so anyway, I’m just curious what your thoughts are.

Well, I also, by the way, sorry, I’ll let you go. But I also do recognize, I remember thinking this the last time I had you on. There’s, like, this weird dynamic. I guess I feel a little freer now, but back then I kind of wanted to ask you about. But then I also realized that if you don’t, you’re not, you can’t even say it because we’ll all get f*ing nuked. So it’s like a weird conversation to have. But I am curious.

NICK FUENTES: For me, it was never really about the Holocaust in itself, because early on I watched a lot of documentaries, like the canon of Holocaust denial documentaries and essays and I found a lot of the arguments compelling. And then I saw that other people were pushing back on that. And I have good friends of mine who are like, you know, they’re fellow travelers, let’s say, and they adamantly insist it did happen. And they send me blog posts and things and at a certain point you sit down and say, so is this really about World War II historicity debate or historiographical debate?

And to me, I’m sort of missing the point. To me, the Holocaust is just like, it is just a central part of the Jewish identity story, which is that if the white people get too much power, they’re going to kill us all. If, and that means if we don’t have enough power, they’re going to kill us all. If they can critique us, they’re going to kill us all.

You know, it’s wrapped up, and this has been pointed out before, that more Jewish people think that the Holocaust is central to their identity than believe that believing in God is central to their identity. And that just tells you about what Jewish identity really is and how it’s political. And so to me, the, what matters more? I don’t know. I think it was exaggerated. I think it was embellished. I don’t know that 6 million exactly died, but I don’t know. I haven’t, I’m not an expert and I don’t really even care about being an expert. To me it’s more about, like you said, I don’t want this trauma imposed on me and for it to define our political order because that’s really the issue.

Identity and Historical Memory

DAVE SMITH: So that part I think is 100% reasonable. And in fact, as you said, that the Holocaust is more central to Jewish identity than God. It’s certainly true for non-religious Jews and even maybe for some religious Jews. Like, it is very central to Jewish identity and I think in unhealthy ways. And I think absolutely you’re right about this being kind of this, you know, it’s, it’s, I love when Daryl Cooper made this point, but it was such a perfect way to put it, but where he was like, look, the founding fathers are Martin Luther King.

And you know what I mean? Like, it’s not like. And he goes, you could test that out, like go desecrate a statue of George Washington and then go desecrate a statue of Martin Luther King and see what has more of the reaction. And it is like, it’s really like World War II and the Civil Rights movement have become like the American consciousness. You know, and I think the Holocaust and World War II being the same for Jews.

And of course, the story becomes this very ahistorical, weird version of it where it’s like the creation of Israel stopped the Holocaust or something like that, which is like, just not at all true. In fact, they had very similar goals, the Zionists and the Nazis, at first, which is why they, the Zionists wanted to do business with them. I think it was the Nazis’ anti-Semitism is the only reason why that didn’t happen.

But I do think it’s like, and I mean, I’ve been down this rabbit hole a bit, but it’s like, I really don’t actually think it’s that exaggerated. I mean, it’s probably about 6 million to the person, but, like, I think even David Irving, I think he put it at between 4 and 5, like, and that was like on the low end estimate. And even as four or five, it’s like, what are we even f*ing talking about here? It’s the same thing.

Navigating New Relevance and Identity

DAVE SMITH: So I think, like, and I guess in a way, because we’ve gone for a while now, so we can wrap up unless there’s anything that you wanted to bring up. But I do, I will say I appreciate that. I think, you know, and this isn’t, I’m not even saying like, you know, because I’m sure the, you know, part of the problem with this stuff, right, is that, at least from my perspective, is that when you’re Jewish, there is this kind of, not amongst you, I don’t think, but I think maybe some of your fans, not all of them, where there’s this kind of heads you lose, tails I win type thing where it’s like, okay, so like, if there’s a Jew who’s for Israel, they go, well, of course.

And then if there’s a Jew who’s against Israel, it’s like, well, they always control both sides of the, you know what I mean? No matter what you do, you’re like kind of in this position where you’re like, well, there’s nothing I could say here other than, yes, you should hate Jews. They’ll be like, okay, finally a good one, or whatever.

But I do think that, like, like we said before, we’re all kind of like figuring out this new world. We’re all kind of like dealing with our newfound relevance. You’re also, you know, like, how old are you?

NICK FUENTES: 27.

DAVE SMITH: 27. So you’re kind of like, you know, you’re approaching your late 20s. And where is that? And I do really appreciate you kind of like, like, I really appreciated on Patrick Bet-David, when you said, like, that you’re like, I’m not a racialist, I’m a Christian. And that it’s like, and that, not that you might have some racialist views, but, like, that being a Christian is first and foremost, like, the most important part of your identity. I would just really encourage that. I think, like, that’s what we need. I really think that’s like.

You know, I told you when I, we spoke on the phone when we first planned this, and I told you the video that I saw of you was like a clip that was going super viral, which you, I think, were touching on earlier today, where you were just like, where you were talking about how, like, a Christian just can’t support killing people like this. And you were like, and you even said you were like, look, I don’t want them living here, but, like, that we also can’t support killing them over there.

And I just thought there was something really powerful about that. It’s like, kind of, because it’s a, it’s a paradigm shattering thing where someone would look at this and go, like, wait. But I’ve been led to believe this is, like, the most horrible person and he’s the one who cares about this. And I kind of think, like, I would just hope that that’s, you know what I mean? Like, that you continue kind of to push that and all that stuff.

Closing Thoughts

DAVE SMITH: I will say I really, really appreciate you coming out and traveling for this. I know it took us, it’s hard. We’re both busy, and so it’s hard to schedule these things. Really, really enjoyed this conversation. I hope we do it again soon.

NICK FUENTES: Me too. Absolutely. And thanks for having me. And I will say, just to kind of close it off. You know what I love? I love honesty. I like people that care about the country. I love people. And I think as long as that’s the agreement, there won’t be violence, and we can talk and we can get along, and that’s really what it’s about. So I really, I enjoyed the conversation as well, so I’d be happy to do it again.

DAVE SMITH: All right, everybody, thank you for listening. Catch you next time.

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