Read the full transcript of Nick Fuentes’ interview on Jack Neel Podcast episode titled “How Nick Fuentes Became The Most Cancelled Man on Earth”, premiered November 24, 2025.
Welcome to the Jack Neal Podcast
JACK NEEL: Nicholas J. Fuentes, welcome to the Jack Neal podcast.
NICK FUENTES: Yeah, great to be with you.
JACK NEEL: Yeah, it’s a pleasure to have you here, man. Guys, we are in an undisclosed warehouse right now. A little sketchy in here, but we thought it looked cool.
So Nick, you’re banned on most social media platforms. You’re on a no-fly list, your bank accounts are frozen, you’re investigated by the FBI, and you even had someone try to come to your house to kill you. What exactly did you say that made you so dangerous?
The Origins of Being Cancelled
NICK FUENTES: Well, from the very beginning, the first thing that I said is that Israel is not our closest ally with the United States. And what is interesting is that so much has happened since that happened, which was about eight years ago.
And I guess it’s important to understand how these things take place, which is that, for example, somebody showed up to my house with a gun trying to kill me because I said that after the election, I said “your body, my choice,” which is a twist on “my body, my choice.” I got doxxed. But my address had been on the internet because the SPLC posted it. Southern Poverty Law Center—this is one of these liberal outfits. They posted a photo of my house on their website.
And this is, by the way, one of the richest nonprofits on the left. They’re up there with the ADL. They’re very wealthy, very powerful. It’s important to understand they put the address out there and crazy liberals, leftists got that, and they attacked my house because of something I said on Twitter.
But it’s important to know that I was targeted first by the SPLC, by the ADL. This is why my address is out there. This is why I was branded at one time a white supremacist and a white nationalist. And a lot of people don’t understand that. That is really the anatomy of how somebody is cancelled.
# How the Smear Campaign Works
You say something that is against, let’s say, the hegemonic left. You say something that is against the most powerful global special interests. And people don’t realize it works this way.
So for example, you’ll say Israel’s not our closest ally. And then a group like the ADL, which is a group—they’re called Anti-Defamation League, they’re against the defamation of Jewish people—a group like that will identify you as an enemy of their special interest, which is the Israel Lobby.
They will pay somebody not a significant amount of money, but they’ll pay somebody a full-time salary to then follow you around: how you make your money, what you do for a living, your family, your employers, employees, friends, associates. And they start to poke and look for ways that they can hurt you to persuade you to stop saying the things that you’re saying.
So in my case, from a very early age, I was not really controversial. When I got started, I didn’t really say anything that was that out there, but I was saying that Israel’s not our ally. So they put somebody on me. In this case, it was Jared Holt at Right Wing Watch. Right Wing Watch is a subsidiary of People for the American Way, which is a Soros-funded nonprofit.
So this guy would watch my show every night. He was paid to do this. It’s his job. And he was paid to look for every time I said anything controversial, anything that sounded controversial, any joke that sounded offensive. And his job was then to clip what sounded bad, post it on Twitter and say that represented that I’m a white nationalist, I’m an extremist neo-Christian fanatic.
And this has taken place over the course of 10 years, ever since I was 18 years old. This is what I have been subjected to. And after 10 years, you get a profile as all your worst clips, all the things that could sound bad, all those things have been compiled over your entire career. And then they make you out to be a fanatic, a nut job, a hateful person.
And so that’s how I got the reputation as a white nationalist, all the above. What they then do, of course, is they rile up their base. So the person that showed up at my house was a 23-year-old kid. I don’t actually know what his motivation was. The police never told me. I imagine he was maybe feeling bad about the election. He showed up at my house about a month after that.
Maybe he was upset about my tweet about abortion or feminism, but he was effectively sicked on me by these types of groups that built up that catalog of horrible things that engage in that reputational destruction. And so that’s just a little insight into how this sort of the anatomy of a smear, the anatomy of that kind of labeling and that kind of smear campaign.
The Invention of Cancel Culture
JACK NEEL: Who do you think invented cancel culture?
NICK FUENTES: Cancel culture has been around forever. I think it’s maybe a better way to say it is it’s character assassination. And we live in an open society. I don’t think there’s a lot of assassinations anymore, although that’s not really the case this year. Charlie Kirk was killed. They tried to kill Donald Trump.
But generally speaking, we don’t live in a very violent political order. So what they do now is they engage in reputational destruction, character assassination. If they don’t like what you’re saying, they go out there and they look for your worst moment, a bad joke, salacious personal scandal, and then they air that out to hurt your reputation and get you to apologize or stop saying what you’re saying.
And so I think that cancel culture has been around for a long time, but now the people that are using it the most, it is the billionaire political class, it is the oligarchs, effectively, because you look at the most powerful people that are running our country, they have blood on their hands.
These are some of the worst people in the world.
But billionaires are never cancelled. It’s always small-time political activists. It’s always rogue congressmen like Thomas Massie or Marjorie Taylor Greene. There’s an asymmetry, which is to say that it’s always media, money and power that are using reputational destruction against the weaker people, people typically that have very little influence or very little power. And they do that to silence dissent.
So cancel culture is something that is used mainly by the powerful.
Asymmetric Warfare and Protected Groups
JACK NEEL: It’s asymmetric warfare you noted on your stream last night. It led me to this logical conclusion that they kind of manufactured it in a way. “Oh, this is racist, this is homophobic, this is transphobic.” But really the only effect you get is when you say something antisemitic.
So are you conspiratorial to the point where you believe that the whole thing was manufactured just so no one could say anything that was considered antisemitic by their standards?
NICK FUENTES: I think it speaks to who wields the power in the country, because there’s that famous adage, which is to learn who rules over you, learn who you’re not allowed to criticize. That’s attributed to Voltaire. Voltaire didn’t say that. But nevertheless, it’s very true.
And it goes without saying, if you’re at your job, you can’t criticize your boss. You can’t ridicule or attack your boss. Why? Your boss has power over you. If you offend him, he’ll fire you.
Similarly, in the United States, for roughly the last 10 or 15 years, it was very acceptable to attack straight white men. Christians, they were the butt of every joke. You could make fun of Southerners, you could make fun of hillbillies with Southern accents, could make fun of white people for not having a culture, not being able to dance, attribute all the evils of the world to white people, or Christians for that matter.
You were not allowed to criticize racial and religious and ethnic minorities. We couldn’t criticize blacks, Hispanics, Asians, couldn’t talk about mass migration.
What has changed in the past year, though, is that it seems that some of the political correctness concerning the minorities has gone away. And in the past year, it seems now you’re able to talk a little bit more openly about, let’s say, black crime. People talk about black fatigue. You’re able to talk more about illegal immigration, which is largely a Hispanic issue. You’re able to talk about Indians in a derogatory way.
But what is interesting is that a year after the Trump revolution, in 2024, Trump gets back in. Political correctness seems to be dead. You look across the board. You can still criticize white people, and the left frequently does. Now you’re able to criticize non-white people and the racial ethnic minorities. But the one group you’re still not allowed to criticize is Jews.
If you’re called racist, that gets laughed off now. If you’re called anti-white, well, the left is pretty openly anti-white. But to this day, you still cannot be, so-called or in reality, antisemitic.
And if you’re following the logic, you can’t criticize the powerful, those that rule over you. That would seem to suggest that if you can’t criticize, maybe they’re the most powerful ethnic group in the United States of America. I think that’s logical.
The Speech and Debate Background
JACK NEEL: Nick, I do want to touch on that in a bit. First, I want to talk briefly about your backstory. I feel as though your interviews with Patrick Bet-David and Tucker kind of covered that fairly well. But some similarity that you and I have is you’re a fellow speech and debate kid, right?
You won four competitions in extemporaneous speaking in 2015, which is basically giving a political speech on the fly. Do you think being a debate kid kind of made you the speaker you are, or do you think you’ve kind of always had this interest?
NICK FUENTES: I always had this interest. I always loved politics ever since I was 12 or 11 years old. It was always my thing. I started to get into it really because I was just curious about the world. You sort of start to develop your consciousness around that age. You could say when you’re 10, 11, 12 years old, start to become aware.
And I just started to think about worldly things. I wanted to know about history, I wanted to know about politics. The 2012 election was coming up, and I was a very young boy, but I wanted to know what was happening. So I went all in and I read as much as I could. I really got into the libertarian stuff. I got into Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell.
And then in high school, I really did get into extemporaneous speaking. Speech team, Model UN.
JACK NEEL: Did you do that your senior year?
NICK FUENTES: I did it the whole time I was in high school.
JACK NEEL: Yeah, got it. I was curious. Did you ever—because it’s a fairly leftist activity—did you ever lose any competitions or get in beef with anyone over saying something controversial in that activity?
NICK FUENTES: Oh yeah, all the time. All the time. I’ll never forget. I was at sectionals or regionals. I think I won sectionals and maybe got to regionals my junior year and they gave us—one of the topics I got for extemporaneous speaking was about Obama. And in the speech I said Obama wasn’t born in America. And I think every judge ranked me in last place just because I said that.
JACK NEEL: That makes sense.
NICK FUENTES: It was very left-wing.
JACK NEEL: Yeah, I had a fairly similar experience with the activity. I did quite well, actually. I was a national champion in it. So that’s why I was so nerdy and went through your stuff and I was like, how was Nick in this activity? Because he’s a great speaker, but I can’t imagine him doing that well with libertarian or conservative beliefs.
Did you ever get kicked off the team or were they pretty cool with you overall?
NICK FUENTES: They were cool. The coaches knew that I was extremely conservative and they were very liberal, but they were pretty tolerant. Ironically, it was a bit more tolerant before Trump ran for office.
JACK NEEL: Ah, right, yeah, yeah.
NICK FUENTES: For some reason I think that things had been polarized at that point, but Trump just took it to another level. So as a libertarian conservative, they were fairly tolerant, and that was maybe a less radical viewpoint also. That was sort of before nationalism came to the center. But no, they were fairly tolerant.
The Organizational Chart of Power
JACK NEEL: I think you kind of hinted, who has the power to silence someone like you? But can you kind of give me an organizational chart of influence as you see it?
The Oligarchy System and How Power Really Works in America
NICK FUENTES: Sure. So I frequently talk about how the United States has an oligarchy, and maybe it’s important to understand how power works in America. When people think about power, they think about government, think about the president, they think about Congress, they think about elections and elected officials.
But I think anybody that spends any amount of time thinking about this situation understands that there’s a tremendous power of money in politics because an elected official like the president has to raise a billion dollars every four years. And who has the money to spend every four years? $50 million, $100 million, without actually a tangible or direct return on investment. Maybe it’s something qualitative, maybe it’s something hard to calculate. It’s not like, for example, buying a factory. Investing $100 million to buy influence is less tangible.
Well, the answer is simple. It’s billionaires. Billionaires have hundreds of millions of dollars to spend every four years. And you can go on Open Secrets and you can look at the top 10 individual contributors per cycle, and it’s fairly consistent. It’s people like Miriam Adelson. This cycle, it was Elon Musk, Tim Mellon, Reid Hoffman, a number of others.
And so you have to understand about politics that it’s a money system. Politics is controlled by money. And what does the money buy? Well, it buys favorable regulatory oversight. It buys favorable treatment in a particular jurisdiction, in a particular state, or from the federal government.
And so to create an organizational flowchart, I would say something like this: you’ve got Congress and the presidency. They actually have to answer to their billionaire donors. Where do billionaires come from? Billionaires come from industries like Silicon Valley, Wall Street. Where do those people come from? Somebody at Silicon Valley comes from Stanford University. Where are all the big Silicon Valley founders and entrepreneurs from? They all come from Stanford University, which is the premier college that’s in that area.
And so you understand that it’s an intelligentsia, academic, money and political system. And once you understand that we have a system that isn’t primarily about elections, then you maybe begin to understand how influence is actually exercised in the country.
AIPAC’s Strategy: Controlling the Bottlenecks
And I would say that for the most part people’s understanding of politics is basically correct. I think what they get wrong is they don’t see how particular groups or special interests will try to control the bottlenecks or particular choke points in the system.
So for example, a lot of people talk about AIPAC, American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and they say, well, when you look at the biggest contributors, the biggest lobbies in politics, AIPAC doesn’t tend to show up. Why is that? It’s how AIPAC operates. AIPAC doesn’t actually do a lot of direct giving to a particular politician, but what they do is they manage a number of different billionaires or high level millionaires and their political giving.
So they’ll find the candidate they like and if that person pledges allegiance to Israel, they’ll pick up the phone and they’ll call their group of donors and all those donors will give as individuals. This way it doesn’t show up on the paperwork. This is one of the ways it’s concealed and obfuscated.
Moreover, in the last cycle in 2024, AIPAC marshaled $100 million to spend. Now, in the grand scheme of things, that’s not a ton of money actually because billions of dollars are spent across all the different elections, Presidential election, congressional elections. But what did AIPAC do specifically? They singled out every congressman that voted against foreign aid last April, some progressives and one Republican, Thomas Massie.
They funneled $100 million, a lot of that money into those particular races. They funded primary candidates that would take the nomination from the incumbents. And so for example, in Massachusetts and other states you had progressive Democrats that took the nomination from an incumbent Democrat congressman.
And what they do by focusing on a handful of races, singling out, isolating the three or four congressmen and women that voted against, they make those people lose the election. What they do is create a chilling effect. They don’t have to spend millions of dollars in every race. If they spend it in three, everybody else gets the message, which is they could single you out, they could target you.
So a lot of people say it’s just not worth the trouble. And this is how you can have AIPAC rally resources in just a few districts, but send a message to all of Congress, which is, if you go against us, if you go against Israel, you will lose your seat.
So there’s this process of refinement. It’s not to say that everybody in Congress is necessarily being bribed to the tune of millions of dollars, but everybody knows the score, which is that in order to be in Congress, you have to pass that check. If you don’t, you might be dealing with $20 million from AIPAC funding a primary challenger in your district. And that’s just sort of one example of how they’ll take a bottleneck or a choke point. And a very determined, motivated, organized, powerful group can have an outsized and disproportionate amount of influence.
Why Politicians Want Power
JACK NEEL: Feels like a very Gen Z blunt question to ask, but why do they even want to be in Congress? Why does Trump even want to be president if he can’t really enact real change? Is it just a money motivation that they have access to?
NICK FUENTES: That’s sort of an interesting question because everybody assumes that corruption is all about money, right? A lot of people think that someone like Donald Trump or the politicians, they are there for their own personal enrichment. They’re getting paid off, the rich get richer. But I think it’s deeper than that. What they really are after is power. And somebody like Donald Trump or a congressperson, everybody wants to be the king of the hill. Everybody that’s in Congress or in the Senate, they want to be the president one day.
JACK NEEL: Is it implied power or is it actual power?
NICK FUENTES: It’s actual power. And there’s sort of a deal that’s made, which is they know that they don’t have absolute power. So, for example, Trump will need buy in from powerful factions in the country. How does he get to be the president? He’s going to need buy in from Wall Street, from Silicon Valley. He needs their backing, and there’s a trade off that’s made. I’ll scratch your back if you make me president. If I get to be king, I’ll give you favorable treatment.
So Trump is not going to have true absolute power, personal power over everything. But he might have personal power as president to reward his friends and punish his enemies. He’s going to be king of the hill for four or eight years. He’ll have his legacy. That’s a very powerful motivator that I don’t think people give enough serious consideration.
The Intelligence Agencies Problem
JACK NEEL: Nick, if you could make one government agency disappear overnight, which would it be?
NICK FUENTES: I would probably make the FBI disappear overnight. I would, to be honest. I would take a lot of the intelligence agencies. I’d take all of them put together and get rid of them overnight.
JACK NEEL: Why?
NICK FUENTES: Because every single one of them is completely infiltrated by foreign agents. And I think that the United States should have an intelligence service. And we need a federal law enforcement. So you need something like an FBI, you need something like a CIA. But the problem is that all of the federal law enforcement intelligence, which maybe have the most freedom of action, they have arguably the most raw power out of anybody in the country over generations, they have all been systematically infiltrated by various nation states.
A good example is our National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz. Now, this is not, strictly speaking, part of the intelligence apparatus, but it’s maybe the most egregious example in the national security state. Mike Waltz is the national security advisor. He creates the briefings and the plans and all of the memos for the President on national security. So anything concerning war, terrorism, proliferation of WMD, he creates that briefing, he informs the president.
Trump appointed Mike Waltz. Mike Waltz was fired three months after he got the job because he was texting Bibi Netanyahu, the prime Minister of Israel, on an encrypted Israeli messaging app. And they believe that he was actually working on behalf of Netanyahu to push the United States into a war with Iran.
So when you have that kind of corruption at the highest levels of the most important organs of the government, the national security state, you have to start from scratch. You don’t know who’s working for who. You have to fire everybody and then rebuild all of it with loyal Americans, people that it’s unambiguous. They’re working for the United States of America.
Why the GOP Fears Nick Fuentes
JACK NEEL: Senators Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell denounce you. Vice President J.D. Vance says that you’re a “total loser,” disavows you, and you’re not part of the MAGA movement. Do you think they’re embarrassed by you or do you think they’re afraid of you?
NICK FUENTES: They are afraid of what I represent, which is what has happened with MAGA. It started out as a revolutionary movement. What was the message of MAGA? It was America first, Americanism, not globalism. And deeper than that, Trump said, when I get elected in 2016, he said, “We are going to throw out all the super PACs, all the lobbyists, all the global banks, the global special interest.” People forget how radical that first campaign was.
And then immediately, once Trump won the election, all the interests came in. The Republican Party filled the White House with their personnel. The special interests, like Sheldon Adelson, like Ken Griffin from Citadel on Wall Street, all the interest poured in, and they gradually and slowly captured Trump, and they made the Trump movement serve the GOP and their special interests, such that by 2020, Trump was unrecognizable.
In 2016, he said, “We’re going to end foreign wars, we’re going to build a wall, we’re going to end free trade.” In 2020, he was bragging about moving Israel’s embassy to Jerusalem. Lowest black unemployment in history, cut the corporate tax rate by over 10%. It was a completely different campaign.
And what I represent, I not only represent the young people, but I represent the actual promise of the original Trump revolution. Realizing America first, Americanism, not globalism. And so you have people like Ted Cruz or JD Vance, they see MAGA as effectively a form of a Trojan horse. It looks like, and is dressed up like something new, something different, something unconventional that actually challenges power.
In reality, now that Trump has been elected the second time, it’s a true Trojan horse. What awaits inside the Trump movement is lobbyists. Inside of it is the corporate interest. That’s why Trump gets elected. He buries the Epstein files, he bombs Iran, he extends the corporate tax cuts.
If somebody like myself is able to have a platform, then we will expose how MAGA has been corrupted. And then potentially in 2028, we might get another crack at actually having a populist takeover. The GOP, they would be happy if people would pretend that Trump of 2024 is the same as Trump of 2016, so that it’s going to protect their grift. That’s why they don’t like me.
Can’t Be Bought, Can’t Be Blackmailed
JACK NEEL: Yeah. To be honest with you, Nick, I did some deep research on you because I kind of had the same suspicion that Tucker says he has about maybe you being a fed. But I asked pretty much the only person I would trust about this answer, and he said he’d had some conversations with you. I can’t dox him, but it’s a very wealthy fellow.
And he basically implied to me that you can’t be bought and you can’t be blackmailed in the same way that maybe someone like Trump could be. Which is a reason that I think your message is considered so dangerous is because they know they can’t really get to you. But as far as Trump, what do you think was the moment that he became compromised, or do you think he ever truly wanted a genuine MAGA?
The Trump Presidency and Political Pandering
NICK FUENTES: I think that Trump is not an ideological force. And if you pay very close attention to things that he says, it’s very clear that his skill set is in marketing and campaigning. He knows how to play to an audience. He knows how to give people what they want.
And I think what happened in 2016 is that he identified that there was a need that had to be filled, which is to say that the Republican base was very clear about what they wanted. They were mad about the cultural transformation of the country. That’s why they really didn’t like Obama.
So Trump came out with a message that said, we’re going to make America great again. We’re going to say Merry Christmas again. We’re going to take all the illegals and get them out, and we’re going to blame China for taking our jobs. He knew the message that people wanted to hear. He effectively pandered and is a true demagogue in that sense.
And then once he got elected, I’ll never forget, there was something very specific he said. In 2017, he did one of his first rallies after winning the presidency, and his audience started chanting “lock her up” about Hillary Clinton. And Trump, responding to the chant, said, “Well, that’s something that plays good before the election,” he said.
And in that, he gave away the whole game, which is, did he really want Hillary Clinton to face justice? No. There was never any intention to put Hillary Clinton in jail. He knew that saying that would help him win, saying that would endear him to the voters. Once he was elected, he realized that’s not going to be politically acceptable, that will not be tolerated by the system.
And so he wasn’t going to stand on business and actually fight for accountability, no matter what it cost him, politically speaking. He said, well, that’s inconvenient. Then I just won’t do it. And so he sort of gave away the game.
I think that from the beginning, it was always about him becoming president. And that’s why his politics have changed so much, so wildly over the years. Whether it was the nineties, the 2000s, 2010s, 2000s, you get a different Trump in every decade. So I think at the end of the day, it was always about him.
JACK NEEL: So you would assume that they kind of already had control over him, already had blackmail on him, and he kind of knew that.
NICK FUENTES: I don’t, because I’m not sure what’s…
JACK NEEL: In the Epstein files. I haven’t looked at it too closely. My editor was telling me something about Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, but yeah, kind of tell me about that. And if you think that Trump is guilty of that kind of thing.
The Epstein Files Cover-Up
NICK FUENTES: Maybe with Epstein, I’m skeptical that Trump actually did anything wrong. At least I was very skeptical because they, by they, I mean the Democrats have been showing the videos and pictures of Trump and Epstein for over a decade. And I really thought that if there was anything there, we would have seen it by now.
And there’s some truth to this argument that they did everything to stop him in 2016 and 2020 and 24. If there was anything really damning in the files, wouldn’t we see it by now?
JACK NEEL: Yeah, it’s like, well, why is this happening now? That’s my question.
NICK FUENTES: They charged him in New York, in Georgia, two federal indictments. If he did anything criminal, they would have brought it to light. That being said, Trump does not want the Epstein files to get out and he’s now involved in an active cover up because he came out with his Department of Justice in July and said there are no Epstein files. They don’t exist. There’s no emails, no letters, no personal effects. There’s nothing left, he said, other than the actual child material which would show indecent images or photos or videos of the underage girls being…
Well, we now know that was a lie because of course now Congress has compelled the DOJ to release the things they have. And we’ve seen that there’s tens of thousands of emails that are already out there. There’ll be tens of thousands of more documents. So now it begs the question, why did Trump lie? Why did the DOJ lie and say there were no files when they knew that the files existed?
It would seem to suggest that Trump is in the files. He knows he’s in the files and he’s worried about what is in them. Here’s another question. If what was in the files about Trump was innocuous, why would he be fighting so hard to keep it suppressed? It might be embarrassing. It might be politically harmful to him. At this point, it’s more politically harmful to cover it up. They had to shut down Congress a month early to keep that from coming out.
So the question now is, if there is nothing bad in the files about you, because we know you’re in them and we know you lied about that, why are you fighting so hard to prevent it from coming out. We almost have to draw a negative inference that there’s something in there that he doesn’t want to get out because it might be criminal or outrageous or deeply offensive to our conscience.
And I would say all you have to do is look at the timeline to consider who might be holding the cards there. Elon Musk, in I think it was June or May, went to the Oval Office for the last time and it didn’t go well. He left the meeting, went on Twitter and said Trump will not release the Epstein files because he knows he’s in them.
One week later, Israel attacked Iran. This is the war they’ve wanted for 20 years. Realistically, they wanted it for 45 years, and every president from Bush to Obama to Trump to Biden didn’t give it to them. Israel bombed Iran. A week later, Trump bombed Iran. The United States is effectively now in a state of war with Iran. This is what they wanted for half of a century.
After the war ends, Netanyahu visits the White House to celebrate that Israel and the United States destroyed Fordo, Iran’s nuclear complex. It was the day before that visit that the DOJ produced the memo saying the Epstein files would never be released because they don’t exist.
So it’s bookended from when the Epstein files are brought up as a threat against Trump to when they’re buried by the DOJ. With the war in Iran, and given that Epstein was potentially Israeli intelligence, I think all signs point to Tel Aviv or Jerusalem controlling those files.
JACK NEEL: Nick, I do want to ask, during deplatforming, you mentioned anxiety and insomnia. Is that something you experienced?
NICK FUENTES: Yes, absolutely.
JACK NEEL: What did rock bottom of that look like?
Rock Bottom: Complete Deplatforming
NICK FUENTES: Well, it wasn’t dramatic. I’m not a very emotional person. But for me, rock bottom was this. I go to the Capitol on January 6th, and I really had a great career. I had already been canceled twice, first by Daily Wire, then by Turning Point USA. At that point, I had been banned on YouTube and PayPal. So I was thoroughly canceled at this point.
In spite of that, I had almost 100,000 subs on DLive, which was PewDiePie’s live streaming platform. I was getting over 10,000 live viewers a night. I was making pretty good money. I was making about $50,000 a month as a completely canceled person. I had a live audience, subscriptions, a good income. I had a big following on Twitter.
The week after January 6, I got banned from DLive. I got banned from my bank that I was at, Bank of America. My checking account was shut down, my money was frozen, all my cash was frozen by the DOJ. I was put on a federal no fly list. I was banned by my payment processors, I was banned by DLive.
So I went from having a career in spite of being canceled, fighting so hard to emerge from that kind of culture, only to because of J6 two weeks later, not even having a website to stream from, having no income, being broke, having no cash. And then because I was effectively then a loser, because I was so thoroughly deplatformed, many of my friends began to turn on me.
And all the other people that were there on January 6, they feared that maybe they would be a subject of an investigation, maybe they would be deplatformed. So probably 80% of my inner circle completely abandoned me. And so rock bottom looks like that. Broke, no income, no platform, truly banned from everything. Betrayed by eight out of ten of my friends.
JACK NEEL: Was there a specific person that kind of cut you off, that hurt more than the others?
NICK FUENTES: No, at that point I was pretty desensitized.
JACK NEEL: Right.
NICK FUENTES: So no, not in particular.
The Uncanny Feeling of Modern Society
JACK NEEL: Nick, you’ve discussed an uncanny feeling about modern society. Why do you think everything feels off?
NICK FUENTES: Well, I think that everything feels off because we are, we’re not living the way that probably most of our ancestors lived. And I’m not a big trad guy or, you know, so much of what you see on the Internet now is this idea, something went wrong with modernity. We need to return. And so some people say we need a primal diet, we need an ancestral diet. Some say we need to return to the wilderness and get more in nature, be more environmental or something like that.
I think it’s social, I think it’s all social. Which is to say that we’re maybe the first generation that is completely atheistic. There’s no religion. I think that’s maybe unique in the history of mankind because even primitive humanity had animism, believed that gods were in the animals and in objects. Or you had pagan barbarians that had their pantheon of gods and then you had Christians and Muslims.
And so we’ve always been believers, we’ve always built idols or statues or shrines. This is the first generation that has no connection to the divine, the supernatural. There’s no sense that there’s anything beyond this plane of existence, beyond death even waiting for us. That’s one.
Two is that we have no social fabric either. You look at the families and when we think of what is traditional, we think of the nuclear family and even that is not very traditional. Two parents and their kids. What about grandparents? What about uncles and cousins and big families? Now if you’re lucky, you have two parents and maybe one sibling. That’s your family.
What’s your community? A lot of people don’t even know their neighbors. They don’t know their next door neighbors. They don’t have a ton in common with the people in their community. And so their social life might begin and end in high school. You’re raised by your parents, you go to school, you finish school, then you move into an apartment as a single man or woman and you go to work. That’s your life. This is a completely atomized existence.
So we’re not connected to the eternal, the transcendent God. We’re also not connected to each other in any meaningful way. People older than us, younger than us, we don’t have big families, we don’t have large communities or real society where people are rising and falling in connection with each other.
And so I think that what really defines the modern age is how alone we all are as individuals. And maybe this is a product of liberalism, maybe this is a product of the Enlightenment, the Reformation. But we are truly disconnected from maybe our biology, from our souls, and we’re disconnected from our families and everybody that coexists with us in time. And I think that’s made life very lonely and then therefore very dysfunctional for a lot of people.
JACK NEEL: I do want to clarify. You said this earlier, you hinted at it, but before we get into your actual views, because I feel like what you’ve been stating is more so just logical conclusions, observations. Why in your words, Nick, do you think young men trust your voice above everyone else’s? And why are you the voice for Gen Z men?
Authenticity in Politics
NICK FUENTES: I think people like me because I’m authentic. And authenticity ironically has become like a marketing term. Like I see TikToks where people say, how do you market yourself? You have to be authentic. And it’s like, well, isn’t there something like deeply ironic about that, that you’re like having to be self-consciously authentic to appeal and pander to people?
But I think that in particular in politics, everybody is so calculating and so fake and very careful about what they say and trying to appeal to everybody, pander to everybody, try so hard not to offend. And I think that especially after wokeness and we’re maybe getting on the other side of that, people look at me and they find a lot of the things I say offensive or outrageous or, you know, maybe they don’t like certain things about me, but what maybe they all can respect is that good, bad or ugly, there’s no pretense, there’s no facade, it’s just me.
And maybe there is an inherent credibility in that because if somebody is out there and you see this all the time, the apology videos, people, you know, they won’t even talk about politics for fear of offending one group or the other. They try to straddle the line and you get the sense that you’re not really getting that real person. You get the sense that the whole thing is sort of an elaborate performance.
And of course, why would we trust somebody that’s performing? It raises a natural question, which is what are they trying to achieve? Is it about fame, money, something like that? If they look at a guy that’s really willing to just say anything and everything, or maybe spitefully saying things to piss people off, they say, well, clearly this guy isn’t in it for the money or the fame or to climb a political career or any career ladder for that matter, this is somebody that people can relate to. So I think I’m a very relatable person.
Modern Threats to Society
JACK NEEL: I saw last night that you said you represent hope as well, which I found interesting. I think we’ll later get into what your hopes are for America and what you actually want to see changed. So what would you say is more dangerous to the West? TikTok, Fentanyl, OnlyFans?
NICK FUENTES: Well, what they all have in common is they’re all adaptive. People get on fentanyl and they use pornography and they use TikTok really all for the same reasons. Do people really like TikTok? If you doom scroll for three hours, which a lot of people do, and somebody stopped you and said, can you tell me the second to last TikTok that you watched and what it was about? Most people couldn’t tell you and they’ll watch hours and hours of this content. Why? Boredom. Boredom, monotony, which is truly painful meaninglessness.
I think people use pornography for really the same reason. Doom scrolling and the use of Internet pornography are kind of the same too. It’s the same kind of dopamine hit, the same kind of roulette feeling that you get flipping through TikTok or that you get looking through pornography. Sort of the same thing. I think a lot of people use pornography maybe because they’re bored.
I think the same is also true of all drugs, whether it’s fentanyl or even marijuana. It’s the same thing everybody is chasing. Everybody feels a sort of hollowness, lack of something. As far as what is the most dangerous, I mean, of course fentanyl is the most deadly.
I would say that the most poisonous, however, would be OnlyFans, because what OnlyFans does to the men that use it and the women that are involved in it, that are creating it, is it takes away their innocence, their soul. And if the solution to many of these problems of modernity is to rediscover each other, relationships with each other, a meaningful relationship with a wife, a husband, a meaningful relationship with God, OnlyFans is really the only thing that might permanently sever that relationship by debasing and degrading and humiliating people, because that’s really what that is.
And maybe taking away what makes love and sex special between human beings, what connects, how that connects us to each other. So I think that maybe OnlyFans is the most insidious because it’s the most damaging to the soul in a way that TikTok and fentanyl are not.
The Moral Crisis of Young Men
JACK NEEL: What’s the biggest moral challenge facing young men today?
NICK FUENTES: I would say the, you know, when you look at the young men, it’s such a sad state of affairs because there truly is just a general amorality, meaning that people don’t look at the world through a moral lens. If they have one, it’s some vague idea that the only sin is to hurt another person in like a direct way. So there’s this idea, as long as you aren’t hurting anybody, it’s fine.
And so people will act like complete hedonists and degenerates with drugs, with sex, they steal. They don’t have any kind of sense of obligation or responsibility. And I guess maybe that’s the biggest moral failing by itself. You know, there’s that famous line, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled is convincing the world he doesn’t exist. And it’s this idea that there is no evil, there is no such thing as right and wrong. And I think maybe that’s the primary problem.
Because if you think that if you go through life thinking that as long as I’m not hurting anybody else, I can smoke weed all day and I could be kind of a burnout and I could go and hook up with no consequences and be a degenerate, well then people are going to feel complete license to do that, whatever the variety of that sin is going to be.
So I think that people need to, in particular young men, they need to start to listen to their conscience and really be guided by, I think what we all know is right and wrong. You know, when we do these various things, we don’t feel good about it. Actually. I don’t think anybody smokes a bunch of weed and lives that lifestyle and really feels good about it deep down, you know, or a very sexually promiscuous lifestyle. I don’t think anyone really feels good about that. So I think that the young men have to start to listen to their conscience and return back to our church, which is the Christian church.
What’s Admirable About Gen Z
JACK NEEL: On the flip side, what’s something about Gen Z you genuinely admire?
NICK FUENTES: I think that Generation Z is there is a sense of a social consciousness that the boomers did not have. And even if it’s misguided, there’s still something redeeming about it. So take for example, Greta Thunberg. She gets clowned on by the right because she’s bleeding heart liberal. You know, she says, “How, how dare you? How absolutely dare you.”
But she is somebody who is thinking globally and socially. What about the climate? What about posterity? Will our children and grandchildren have ecology? Will they have a clean and beautiful environment? Are the resources we’re harvesting sustainable? They have this forward thinking, social, global consciousness about that, even about race issues.
And everyone knows where I stand on race, but even, you know, bleeding heart liberals, as far as race goes, there is this concern for how we’re going to get along as a society that I think that the boomers didn’t have. I think that the Gen Xers, the baby boomers, less so, the millennials, they’re a very selfish generation.
You know, you hear about boomers that are going to die and they say they’re not going to leave any inheritance to their children. They say, “I got kicked out at 18 so my kids can figure it out.” It’s like, is it really all about you? You want to either blow all your money or even if you don’t, you’re not going to give your kid an inheritance.
There are also people that really had no civic engagement either. You know, 80s and 90s were a big party, was a great time. Meanwhile, the country was becoming very corrupt. There was a lot of apathy about politics. So I think that’s maybe the one redeeming thing about Gen Z is they really are a socially conscious generation. They’re like anything else. There’s a virtue in that, even if it’s misguided.
Astrology and Modern Spirituality
JACK NEEL: Why do you think Gen Z women are obsessed with astrology?
NICK FUENTES: Oh, man, I don’t know. I mean, I’m the wrong guy to ask about women because I don’t really talk to women, right? But the astrology thing, to me, people are not taking it seriously enough because what astrology? First of all, astrology is real. If you’re a Catholic, if you’re a Christian, this is actually part of our tradition. Astrology is all over the Bible.
And the reason, as Catholics, we can’t engage in astrology is because there’s something real about it. And to engage in it is to attempt to thwart God’s plan, right? It’s to sort of say that we are masters of fate and if we can learn the secrets of the universe, we can control our destiny when God controls our destiny. And that’s why we appeal to God.
So astrology is real, and going by another word, you can call this witchcraft, paganism. And going back to the conversation about modernity, people know that atheism is false. And so what we’re getting is not really a society without God. It’s just a society with different gods.
And so now there’s a new age upon us where there is interest in the supernatural, there is interest in higher powers and maybe invisible forces, but without the guidance of the Church, because the church is out of fashion now, people are looking everywhere else and they’re so, they’re looking into political ideologies, Gnosticism, witchcraft, paganism. They’re looking into their tribal gods, you know, many of the white nationalists are really getting into like Apollo and Zeus and on the other side, on the left, they’re getting into witchcraft. And I think it needs to be basically eradicated from society. I think it’s very evil.
JACK NEEL: Do you think numerology is real as well? I do really, I do think I’ve looked into. It’s really fascinating. It feels like one of the people’s thing with astrology and numerology manifestation is that like, oh, it’s also general, like it’s not actually real, but like when I look into it, I don’t know, I see some very specific similarities that make it feel real.
And I’m Christian as well, so I know that it. I won’t ask you this, but just my personal belief is like, I do think that there’s something there, that if you do it in a way that it’s aligned with God, it’s probably okay. But do you not see it as aligned with God in general?
NICK FUENTES: No, I don’t think so.
JACK NEEL: Yeah, I mean it’s like Jesus didn’t do it, so it’s like exactly right.
Women’s Rights and Democracy
JACK NEEL: Do you think women should have fewer rights than men?
NICK FUENTES: Generally speaking, yes. And I don’t really love the rights. Rights is a very modern concept and I think it kind of, it’s ideological. So I believe in human rights. I think everybody should have human rights, which is to say we should be able to speak our minds, we should have the freedom of conscience. We have rights to not be abused by the government. We have a right to a trial, a hearing with the jury of our peers. To me these are all fine and well, but typically people are starting to conflate that with the privileges of influence in a democratic society.
So voting rights is the big one. We have a right to vote. Now this is treated like an absolute. But why does it really make sense that everyone has an absolute right to vote? Do children, does 5 year old have a right to vote? You’d say, well, obviously not. Well, why? Because a 5 year old doesn’t know enough. Because they’re not rational, because they’re not developed. Okay, so it’s not completely absolute. We have to draw some lines.
What about somebody that has mental problems? That person should, like a schizophrenic person, have a vote? Probably not. Maybe not. I would go further than that. When you look at the founders and the framers of the Constitution, there was only one office that was directly elected by anybody and that was the House of Representatives. The President was chosen by electors. And the electors actually made the decision. It wasn’t a vote. The Senate was chosen by the state legislatures.
So out of all the federal government, the Supreme Court, the president, the Senate, only the House was actually elected by voters. And who voted? Well, it was landowning, propertied white men. Now, I don’t know that I would go back to that, but the idea of it is that we don’t want to actually have mob rule. We don’t want to live in a society where it is just subjected to the passions of all the people put together.
Because if that happens, society might change too rapidly. Society might be given to the mood of the moment and do something rash that might undermine the foundations of society. And so when you look at something like voting rights, I don’t actually think it’s a good idea, let’s say, for a husband and wife to be voting against each other in an election. I think that kind of gets away from the society we want to have. Generally speaking, though, I do think that women should have rights in general.
JACK NEEL: Yeah, the word rights is very weird because it’s from a Christian perspective. It’s like, oh, you have the right to have an abortion. And Christians see that as murder. So it’s like you have the right to murder. I don’t know. It’s like not all rights are good for you necessarily. And there’s also the whole thing about, I think you had to serve in the military originally. That was like the original reason for a vote. Maybe not in America, but in other countries. Is that the case?
NICK FUENTES: Yeah, sure.
The Voting Age and Military Service
NICK FUENTES: Well, because, you know, there’s like a deep conversation about that. But the idea is if you’re going to be conscripted to fight in a regular army, in a standing army, then you should have a say over what your government does. That’s a big reason why they lowered the voting age to 18, because if you could be drafted, should be able to vote. But we just now have this universal suffrage. I think it’s a horrible situation.
JACK NEEL: Nick, why do you think dating women is gay?
Modern Dating Culture and Catholic Sexual Morality
NICK FUENTES: Well, here’s what I think is gay. It is gay to date women. Here’s what’s gay about it. What’s gay about it is that, you know, when I think about relations between men and women, it’s about sex. All of my views about men and women come down to the biological imperative, which is that when a man and woman reach the age of sexual maturity, they want to have sex.
According to Catholic sexual morality, the only way to have sex is within marriage. That’s what makes it moral. Because to have sex is to have kids. Unless there’s something wrong with you. To have sex is to have kids. Kids need a mother and a father that are going to stick together.
So the way that you build a stable society is to say the mother and the father are going to have to be together before they have kids and have sex. They’re going to have to be made one flesh. They’re going to have to. That’s their obligation to their children. That’s our obligation to God.
And so my view of sex in the United States is people should be getting married younger because what they’re doing now is they’re going out and they’re having a lot of hookups or having a lot of casual sex, which I don’t think anybody’s really, in the end, deeply satisfied with this arrangement.
So people reach the age of sexual maturity, they want to have sex, they go out and have lots of sex, and they wait maybe 5, 10, 15 years. They wait until they’re in their mid-20s, late 20s, 30s, before, when the women are past their prime in looks, they wait for men to really have all their ducks in a row. Then finally, now we want to have kids.
And what happens? Well, at that point, the women aren’t particularly fertile. Maybe they’re only going to have a couple of kids. And also at that point, maybe both of them have had a lot of sexual partners and they’ve become maybe bitter, cynical, set in their ways. They haven’t grown together. It makes it less likely they’ll stay together. This is a very dysfunctional situation.
And so my prescription for men and women is get married a lot younger when they reach that biological age of maturity and then they’re supposed to have kids. Then when the men and women are young and energetic, that’s when they’re having a big family and they can take care of a big family because they have energy. And then they grow together. They mature and grow into adults together, and they’re more likely to stay together.
The reason that dating is gay is because it’s sterile. There’s something very sterile about dating. Men are using condoms. What’s gayer than using a condom? You know, preventing your virile seed from impregnating a woman. Not to sound graphic, but that’s very gay. It’s gay for a woman to be on birth control and denying the creation of life.
It’s gay for men and women to be not married, but texting each other all day and watching Disney movies and cuddling together and playing this sort of game throughout college and then into early adulthood. Will they or won’t they? Am I going to get married? Maybe. Maybe we’ll live together.
I think the whole thing is just deeply unserious and just very kind of juvenile and immature. And I think that it kind of reflects arrested development. It’s like a stunted growth and maturity. So I think, you know, it’s not. I’m not saying that getting married to a woman’s gay. I’m saying that all of this nonsense that surrounds modern dating culture is extremely sterile and unserious and very feminine and very gay.
Marriage and Objectivity
JACK NEEL: Nick, do you think people would value your opinions on the nuclear family more if you’d consider starting one?
NICK FUENTES: Yes.
JACK NEEL: Yes, they would.
NICK FUENTES: Yes, they would. But it’s not even the nuclear family. To me, it’s just like the family. But yeah, and I get that all the time. That’s why I say, you know, take it with a grain of salt because I’m a single guy.
But I think, though, it actually makes me maybe more objective. Hear me out. Because a lot of people say, well, you’re not married. And this, that’s true. But what you tend to find, and I see this all the time, is the married guys or guys with a long term girlfriend, they’re afraid of their woman.
And so they know when they go on the podcast, they’re looking at themselves through their girlfriend’s eyes. And that’s why they go and they say things like, “a real man makes his wife happy.” It’s like, okay, she wanted you to say that, you know. I’m free. I don’t, you know, I can say things that offend women because I’m not. I don’t have to go back to my wife with her hands on her hip. Like, what did you just say on your show? And so maybe it makes me a little more objective.
JACK NEEL: Didn’t Tucker say, like, “happy wife, happy life” was a very good philosophy to live by?
NICK FUENTES: He said it unironically.
JACK NEEL: I couldn’t believe his wife was happy to hear that.
NICK FUENTES: Oh, yeah, she gave him head pats for that. She loved that.
Strange Messages and Manifestos
JACK NEEL: Nick, what’s the strangest DM or email you’ve ever received?
NICK FUENTES: Oh, I’ve got a lot. There’s a lot of crazy stuff I’ve gotten. I get the weirdest stuff I get is political manifestos. There’s a lot of crazy people in this country. People underestimate that. And when you become famous, especially in politics, the craziest people in the world all think you’re the captive audience.
And so I get packets of political manifestos, people talking about taking over the government, and all kinds of crazy stuff. I would say that’s maybe the most deranged. I’ve had a lot of schizophrenic people, and they think they know me in real life. They think that we’re like. I don’t even want to say specific details. Some people think they’re in a relationship with me, and we’re getting married. And I’m like, I have no idea who you are. So there’s a lot of weird people out there.
JACK NEEL: Yeah. I’m guessing you might have some stories that you haven’t shared online because you don’t want to encourage it.
NICK FUENTES: Yes.
Music and Artistic Preferences
JACK NEEL: Nick, who are your top five favorite artists?
NICK FUENTES: Well, I’m not a very artistic person. I wish I was more artistically inclined, but Ye has got to be my number one. Best music, best fashion, best everything. And then musical artists.
JACK NEEL: Only we can do music.
NICK FUENTES: Okay.
JACK NEEL: Or if you want to mention a certain Austrian painter, my favorite visual artist.
NICK FUENTES: I don’t know. I mean, I’m not into the visual arts. I mean, I guess I would say Ye would be number one. The music’s always a tougher. It’s a question that invites a lot of judgment because you want to sound cool. It’s like, if you have a bad playlist, people are like, you’re corny.
JACK NEEL: Do you listen to Bach or that kind of classical music?
NICK FUENTES: No, no.
JACK NEEL: 80s synth? Anything like that?
NICK FUENTES: No, that’s all LARP. That’s LARP. I listen to a lot of indie alternative, so I like. What is it? Vacations. You know them?
JACK NEEL: Yeah.
NICK FUENTES: And who’s the other one? Always indie group.
JACK NEEL: Robbie. You know that one?
NICK FUENTES: Yeah.
JACK NEEL: He’s big into the indie music.
NICK FUENTES: Yeah. Is that a girl or is that a band?
JACK NEEL: I think it’s a group.
NICK FUENTES: They’re great.
JACK NEEL: Yeah.
NICK FUENTES: Think they’re Scandinavian. Always Vacations. Provoker is one of my favorites. They’re kind of like a goth, darker indie. But I like all kinds of stuff. I mean, I was. I had a radio show in high school.
JACK NEEL: Yeah.
NICK FUENTES: And so I was always a music lover. I really love R&B, the classics, like Marvin Gaye and Teddy Pendergrass and the Temptations, Earth, Wind and Fire, stuff like that. I like a lot of the classic rock also, but I really have a big discography on my.
JACK NEEL: But Ye is the only rap artist, you would say, or.
NICK FUENTES: Well, I like a lot of the 90s stuff.
JACK NEEL: Yeah, yeah.
NICK FUENTES: Wu Tang Clan and Nas. I don’t like really anything after 2005.
JACK NEEL: Do you like Eminem?
NICK FUENTES: No, I hate Eminem. His music? Yeah, yeah.
One Word Descriptions
JACK NEEL: Interesting. So, Nick, give me one word to describe these people. Kamala Harris.
NICK FUENTES: Coconut. That was genius when she said that. I love that.
JACK NEEL: J.D. Vance.
NICK FUENTES: Fat Candice. Dumb.
JACK NEEL: Andrew Tate based. Ye.
NICK FUENTES: Genius.
JACK NEEL: Ben Shapiro. Jill Cookie. Cake.
NICK FUENTES: Sub Five. No, I’m kidding. I can’t do that to him. I can’t, I can’t. He’s a chat.
JACK NEEL: Vladimir Putin. Wise Xi Jinping. Wise Caesar Goat. Bibi Netanyahu. Evil Donald Trump.
NICK FUENTES: Narcissist.
JACK NEEL: Anyone else we missed? That’d be a good one.
NICK FUENTES: No, those are the big ones. Those are.
JACK NEEL: That’s a good list. Did you buy Trump Coin?
Trump Coin and Vaporware
NICK FUENTES: No. No. Did you?
JACK NEEL: Yeah, I actually made some good money on that, but I think I ended up losing a bit in the end. I was curious. This is very random, but from a game theory political view, was that a good move for him to, I don’t know, rug America? Do you think it made Gen Z happy? Do you think people are like, he’s based, the boomers didn’t care? What did you think of that whole thing? Because no one really talks about the fact that Trump made $8 billion off of.
NICK FUENTES: Yeah, that’s most of his net worth. His Trump coin.
JACK NEEL: Yeah.
NICK FUENTES: Which is. Well, it’s emblematic of what he is, which is vaporware, you know, and there’s something funny about that because when Trump ran in 2016, the Internet subculture that surrounded his campaign was Vaporwave. And it was Macintosh plus the song, which the genre was all those 80s songs, chopped and screwed, you know, slowed down, distorted.
And they called it Vaporwave because it resembles vaporware, which is these 80s late stage capitalist products that were advertised and seem great but never materialized. And it’s so interesting because in 2016, vapor wave was the aesthetic. It was the grid, the sun, you know, the synth wave. That all of that was called Vapor Wave and what Trump. And Trump obviously represented that because he was of the 80s. He was from the 80s.
He sort of like old school billionaire from when New York was the center of the world, representing Wall Street and maybe even more than Wall Street, building things, you know, brick and mortar. And what Trump turned out to be is the ultimate vaporware, you know, this promise of a return to the 80s that never materialized.
So there’s something very deep, philosophically about the whole thing. And then when Trump coin came around, it’s like, that is the best example of it. Is he a billionaire or is he a scam artist? So if his net worth is all built on a crypto rug pole that Howard Lutnick devised or something like that, then he’s kind of a fake. And at the end of the day, nobody cared. So maybe it was worth it for him. Maybe that’s just a law of the jungle. You do as much as you can get away with.
The Last Good Year in America
JACK NEEL: Yeah, I am fascinated by how little that is talked about still. But, Nick, what was the last good year in America?
NICK FUENTES: The last good year, probably. Oh, that’s a difficult question. I would say maybe times are pretty good. When I was growing up, a lot of people might set it way back in the past or decades in the past. I still believe that America was a great country up until very recently. I would argue maybe 2007 or 2008, maybe before Obama got elected. And the recession, I think that was probably the last great year.
JACK NEEL: That’s when the iPhone became popular, too, and everyone was getting iPods. But how about from a policy point of view?
The Unipolar Moment and America’s Squandered Victory
NICK FUENTES: From a policy point of view, maybe 2000. And here’s why you have to look at the 20th century in this way. You have these major wars in Europe, which is really one war. You have the rise of Germany, which is what creates World War I, World War II, and the United States rises to the occasion and becomes a superpower.
But then we’re locked in this contest with the Soviet Union, and basically the United States doesn’t know the end of war for 70 years because we get involved in World War I right away, we’re in World War II. Then we’re fighting on every continent in the Cold War.
What happens in 1991 on Christmas is the Soviet Union collapses, and with it the only, literally the only other world power, the only other great power in the world. Europe is hollowed out. China has not yet begun its rise. Japan arguably had a competitive economy, but no military or anything.
And so in 1991, you have what they now call the unipolar moment, which is that the United States enjoys more relative power, a bigger advantage over every other country put together, than maybe any country has in history. No other country has had that kind of preeminence.
And we made some mistakes in the 1990s. Maybe we were a little too aggressive in Yugoslavia. And there were some other mistakes. We didn’t catch the World Trade Center bombing and some other things, but times were pretty good in the 1990s. I think people remember that as a time when we had the luxury of not caring about politics, actually.
But what happens after 9/11 is that we begin to squander that advantage. Rather than take the peace dividend, which is we don’t have to fight the Soviet Union, we don’t have to build a giant nuclear arsenal, we don’t have to have a giant military anymore, rather than take this peace dividend and invest it into America, reinvest in our people, in our infrastructure, in our industry, we start to do the opposite.
And so we go to war in Afghanistan, then we go to war in Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of troops in the Middle East with a dozen strategic objectives. We’re going to topple Saddam, then we’re going to build a democracy, then we’re going to do… At the same time we bring China into the World Trade Organization. Literally right around that same time, I think it was the year 2000, and we start to send all the factories over to China.
Few years after NAFTA, we start to send all the factories to Mexico, Canada. And so this is the most heartbreaking thing in world history. We won, we won World War I, World War II, World War 3 with the Soviet Union. How many people died on the shores of Normandy? How many people died in the jungles of Vietnam? Fought so hard, sacrificed so much, stood up in the most paranoid time, Cuban Missile Crisis. We came out victorious.
And rather than enjoy the spoils of the war and guarantee a 1,000 year American Empire, we blew it. We gave it to China, we just gave it to them. We gave it to Mexico, we gave it to Israel.
And what inevitably happens 15 years later is Russia starts to rebuild China, the one billion man empire. And by the way, it’s an anomaly of history that China was so inferior compared to the West for the last 500 years. It was inevitable that China would come back in a big way now that we blew our advantage.
Now we find ourselves desperate, scrambling, trying to rebuild our country fast enough to prevent China from invading Taiwan. And it’s a big question mark. There’s a lot of uncertainty if we’ll even be a country in 50 years.
So go figure. You go from having more power, relative power, than any civilization in history, winning a century of nuclear war, only to blow it and then maybe lose 20 years later. That was the worst policy mistake of all time.
JACK NEEL: So you’d pinpoint it to 2001, 2000, 2001. I’m a bit surprised at your answer. I thought you might be inclined to say around the assassination of JFK, the formation of the CIA, the beginning of removing God from the US. Why do you prefer 2001 over that time period? Because I would guess that your key issue that you see is godlessness. Is that right?
Godlessness as a Global Problem
NICK FUENTES: I mean, to me that’s more of a global problem. Because it wasn’t really… This is truly a symptom of modernity. I think because of technological innovation, because of abundance and prosperity, it goes hand in hand. Every time there is an increase in the quality of life, I think people apostatize, people lose the faith.
Because it’s easier to have faith when you’re poor and miserable than when you’re rich and happy, when your belly’s full. Because it’s easier to distract yourself. And there’s less of an urgent need to explain suffering or meaninglessness. So to me, I don’t really diagnose that as a specifically American problem.
And here’s the other thing. America had an opportunity to be reborn. You could say in that moment America had the opportunity. That was a true inflection point where history was not, let’s say, predetermined. We could have gone anywhere from there. After the 1990s, you really could have had a moment where the country became stronger and fortified itself.
And maybe we could have fixed those problems even after 9/11. Look at the approval rating of George W. Bush after 9/11. It was 94%, higher than any president in history. Patriotism, togetherness was at an all time high. You could even argue that after 9/11 we could have come together and be reborn as a country.
But instead we doubled down on all of our worst impulses. More surveillance, more war, more suspicion, more corruption, more lies about Iraq, more opportunism. So I think that was really the mistake where we might have lost it forever.
JACK NEEL: What’s the darkest part of history that Catholic schools don’t teach you?
The Myth of the Noble Savage
NICK FUENTES: I can’t speak to Catholic school, but because honestly Catholic education is so poor. The Catholic catechism class… So I didn’t go to a Catholic school. But you get catechized, you go to a separate thing once a week. And I came out of that not knowing the difference between a Catholic and a Protestant. I mean it’s very poor in terms of religious education.
But in terms of what is left out, there’s this idea that the schools don’t teach the dark stuff about our history. I feel like that’s all we get. I feel like all we get is indoctrinated about America’s sins and the sins of colonialism and the sins of slavery and the sins of racism.
And that’s kind of American history class: slavery, then Holocaust, then racism, then we were Islamophobic after 9/11. Of course, there’s a much deeper and in my opinion, a better story about where we came from, where this civilization came from.
They want to talk about Columbus. What did Columbus discover when he got here? Human sacrifice, cannibalism, barbarism. So they want to say Columbus committed a genocide. Well, first of all, that was mostly done by disease, which could not be helped. The Colombian exchange.
But second of all, they don’t talk about… They have this myth of the noble savage. So we got here and everybody was hanging out, smoking tobacco, and we introduced violence to these societies. Or how about they talk about the Mexican cession, that America took all this land from Mexico.
Read about the Comanches. Read about what the Comanches did to the Texans in the middle of the 19th century. They went into towns of Texan settlers and they skinned people, they boiled them alive, they set them on fire. I mean, this was savagery that was unheard of in European civilization.
And I think that the world order that emerges from World War II is objectively, arguably the best, most peaceful, most humane world order that ever existed. And don’t get me wrong, it’s not to say that we’ve lived up to that. We’re hypocrites. And any moral standard makes a hypocrite out of a person.
But what emerges from that is the Atlantic Charter, international law. People have human rights. People should have a say in their government. Women should have rights. Prisoners have rights. There are certain things in war that can never be justified, like chemical weapons or genocide. All of that comes out of the world wars of the European powers.
Do you think that if China was the preeminent power, that we would have a society based on human rights? I don’t think so. And I think the same would be true of the Muslims or the barbarians in Latin America, the indigenous people that were here or anywhere else for that matter.
JACK NEEL: I guess if you could force every American to read one book, what would it be?
The Biography of George Washington
NICK FUENTES: If I could force an American to read one book, I would force every American to read the biography of George Washington by Henry Cabot Lodge. Because I think that people in America have no idea where we come from.
And I think the biggest problem is there’s such a lack of a sense of civic or personal responsibility. America was built by truly the finest men. People like George Washington, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton. These were bold, courageous, visionary, brilliant people.
And that is what is required for self government to work, for us to have a republic, a democracy, a free society. You don’t just get privileges, you actually have to have responsibilities. Which is to say America’s not about being able to smoke weed and carry a gun and get gay married and drive like a maniac.
America is supposed to be about we can choose our own destiny, but in order to do that we have to be prudent, we have to be virtuous, we have to be hard working, responsible, we have to be rightly guided. And those were the kinds of people that built this society that fought for our independence, that fought for our right to self determine, to determine our own course.
And they were truly great men. They were the best among us. So for the lowest common denominator, it would be good for them to get inspired about where we came from and what we need to be to keep what we have here.
On Segregation and Cultural Preservation
JACK NEEL: This brings me to another point, Nick. You’re a self proclaimed racist or racialist. Do you think America should bring back segregation?
NICK FUENTES: No, but what I would say is that people should have the right to live among their own people. And I think that’s a loaded question, which is a fair question. But what we are undergoing right now is the greatest sociological experiment in world history.
Which is to say that we all know that in 1965 America was a 90% white country. 90% white, 10% black and maybe a little bit in the middle. There was Hispanic, Asian. People really don’t understand that. It was 90% white and mostly Christian. And people can feel however they want about it.
Now we’re a 60% white country and in 10, 15 years we’re going to be a 50% white country. Now think about how much changes with that. These are people that came here largely through immigration. They speak different languages, they have different alphabets, they don’t even use the same letters. They come from different continents, they have different religions, different customs, holidays, heroes. They have a different sense of humor, they have a different look, everything about them is different.
And we’re basically being told that we have to accept this transformation. Your neighborhood, that was one way, that was a Christian white neighborhood, is now going to be 80% Indian neighborhood or now it’s going to be 80% Somali, or now it’s going to be 80% Mexican.
And now all the signs are going to be in Arabic. And now the mayoral candidate is going to be fighting with clan warfare with this other Somali people. And now you’re going to be celebrating Diwali in your subdivision instead of Christmas.
And people are starting to say, “Wait a second, this doesn’t feel like America. America’s apple pie and baseball and Merry Christmas and Marshall Fields.” We’re in Chicago after all. People are saying, “I don’t like that this is happening in my neighborhood. I want to go somewhere where it feels like America.”
But it turns out you can’t do that. Because if you want to set up shop in a neighborhood and say, “This is where it’s going to be white people and we’re going to have our white culture and our Christian culture,” that’s called segregation. That’s called white supremacy. That’s called white nationalism.
But I would say, how is it fair that you have entire neighborhoods called Little Haiti, Little Cuba, Little this, that the other? And they set up an ethnic enclave and they make it very comfortable for themselves. They have their parades, they have their… But if white people want to go in our own country, where our ancestors were… Not mine, but some people’s ancestors were here at Jamestown or they were here at the Virginia Colony. If they want to go and set up a neighborhood, they say, “Oh, that’s racist.”
I think people should be able to choose to live among people they’re with. I’m not a believer that people need to drink out of a separate water fountain because they’re racially inferior. But I believe that we should be able, as white people, to express our culture in our neighborhood the way that every other group of people seems to be able to now that we have a multiracial country.
JACK NEEL: So is there a policy that would ensure that? Or what would that look like?
The Civil Rights Act and Neighborhood Integration
NICK FUENTES: Logistically, I think that you, first of all, you have to get rid of the Civil Rights Act, because the Civil Rights Act would say that you cannot voluntarily self-segregate in that way. It would make it illegal. So you have to overturn elements of that.
And then the other thing is, there’s a lot of backdoor policies that literally aim to break up white neighborhoods. Like the Obama administration had a policy at HHS where they said that if a neighborhood was not diverse enough, they would bring in Section 8 housing. They would say, if your neighborhood is more than 50% white, we’re going to put Section 8 in your neighborhood. And what do you think Section 8 is going to attract? I mean, it’s like a deliberate war to make sure that there are no white neighborhoods.
And you know, that would be, it would be one thing if they were doing that to everybody, because at least you could argue that that’s fair. But they’re not. You know, in Chicago, Little Village is all Hispanics. Pilsen’s all Hispanics. Garfield Park is all black. But you go out to the suburbs where it’s white people and it’s nice. They want to bring in Section 8 and say, no, you can’t all live together as white people.
So our options are what? We’re going to live in the south side or we’re going to live in Little Mexico? It’s just, that’s not right. So anyway, I think they should just play by the same rules and reverse some of those policies.
JACK NEEL: Do you think you’d feel differently about this if you were raised in Saudi Arabia?
NICK FUENTES: As a white person or as an Arab?
JACK NEEL: An Arab, yeah.
Cultural Identity and Belonging
NICK FUENTES: Well, I mean, if the thing is, if you’re coming from a different culture, that’s sort of the point, right? You know, it’s like you’re not the same. And so somebody that’s coming from, let’s say, Saudi Arabia, why would I want to leave? You know, if I’m Saudi, I live in a country with all Arabs and all Muslims. They don’t even allow churches over there because it’s the Holy Land. It’s the land of the Prophet and the Hejaz. Forget about it.
You know, in Mecca, Medina, you’re never going to get a church, you’re never going to get a synagogue. You know, Osama bin Laden, part of the fatwa is because we had a military base in the Holy Land in Saudi Arabia. And that’s sort of the point, which is that if you’re born in India, you’re born in China, you have my sympathy. But if you’re born in these other countries, you get to, that’s your home.
We’re doing things the way we’ve done it for 3,000 years, since the Indus River Valley civilization. You know, we have our Chinese culture, we have our Indian culture. We could always go home. But if you’re born in America, you’re told, “This country’s for everybody. Oh, your neighborhood is being changed. Well, that’s the value of diversity.”
And it’s like, well, you have a home, you have a home, you have a place to return to. Where’s my home? My home is for everybody. My home is supposed to be here so everyone can have an opportunity and everybody can set up a homeless encampment.
You know, white people in Europe and the United States are saying, “Well, what about us? Do we get to have a country? Do we get to have a government, traditions?” So in some ways, you would feel badly being born in these other countries because you’re impoverished and there’s inequality and things like that. But at the same time, you still have a sense of belonging, a sense of home that white people increasingly don’t have.
JACK NEEL: It is interesting how white people often face backlash for going somewhere like Hawaii or going somewhere like, we think like Indonesia, Bali, like Thailand areas. They’re like, “You’re taking away the opportunities from them. You’re spending all this money being lavish.” But it’s not the same on the reversal. So do you think America should be a Christian nation?
NICK FUENTES: Yes.
JACK NEEL: What do you mean by that?
America as a Christian Nation
NICK FUENTES: I think that the, I don’t believe in a theocracy. I don’t think that the church should run the government. And as Catholics were also against that in the modern era, at least, because it wasn’t like that before. But I do believe that the legislators, the government, I think that it should be made up of all Christians, all professing Christians, and people that are guided by Christianity.
And the reason being is because how a society is governed reflects a form of morality. Why do we say you can’t kill? That’s a moral virtue. Why do we say you can’t steal, you can’t rape? That all reflects morality. That all reflects a position on morality. And you go to other countries, for instance, and it’s not the same.
You know, in India, honor killing is a huge deal. If your daughter dishonors the family, they kill her. That’s part of the culture in the Muslim world. You have religious laws that oppress women. I think it goes, and for me, I think it goes too far. I think it’s inhumane to tell women they have to wear a niqab everywhere. They have to cover themselves completely. The kind of abuse the women are treated with over there. But it reflects their morality, their tradition, their religion, creates their culture and ultimately their laws.
And so when we look at the United States, we love the United States. We love the idea of human rights and equality and liberty and all these things. All these things come from a Christian morality. All these things come from a Christian civilization.
When the United States was founded, I believe it was no fewer than 8 of the original colonies that had a state church. There was a church for that particular colony or that particular state. So people like to say, “Oh, well, you know, Thomas Jefferson was a deist.” Everybody in the colonies was Christian. Almost all the colonies had their own churches. It was founded, framed, pioneered, built by Christians.
And in fact, the civilization that spawned America was Christian also. England, Spain, France, Italy, all the explorers and colonists that ever set foot in America, they were all Christians. So, you know, people think that things are going to go the way they are without Christianity not understanding that Christianity is a fundamental pillar and how things got to be this good. So you take that away, it’s like pulling a leg out from under the table. The whole thing’s going to collapse. So it’s not a question of whether we should be. We should remain a Christian country.
JACK NEEL: So there’s no policy that you would adjust to make sure that America’s like a Christian nation. Only the members of, I don’t, not Parliament, but Congress in the presidency are Christians. Like, there’s no policy changes you’d make?
NICK FUENTES: I would make a policy change that you have to be Christian to be elected.
JACK NEEL: Do you think that kind of plays along the line of being meshing of church and state, though?
NICK FUENTES: No, I don’t think so. Because the establishment clause is really speaking about the church as an institution and saying that the church has this moral authority, the government has a civic authority. And it’s a question of is there a conflict of interest when the two institutions are merged?
In other words, are the priests going to be magistrates? Are the pastors going to be, are they going to have a sort of civic authority over us? And what kind of corruption does that create? Does the state corrupt the church? Does the church? So I think as long as you separate the institutions and just say you have to proclaim Christ to be elected, I don’t think there’s a problem there.
AI and Human Consciousness
JACK NEEL: Do you think AI is part of God’s plan for humanity, or do you think it’s man playing God?
NICK FUENTES: Well, the Catholic Church takes a position that technology is neutral. It’s how you use it. So there’s some Christian sects like the Amish, the Mennonites, who will say, “Well, technology is evil,” but we believe that it could be used for good or for evil. And I think that all of that, everything that happens, is part of God’s plan. So it’s happening. It’s part of it.
The concern is how our concept of AI might undermine our concept of what makes us human, you know, because what makes us rational is that we have memory, will and understanding. We possess that trinity of things. Our conception of the past is memory. You know, we don’t live in the past. We have memories of it. We have a will. We make decisions. We guide our own actions. And we have understanding because you truly contemplate the meaning of things, of our sensory experiences, and that’s what makes us rational as humans.
AI doesn’t have any of those things. It certainly has memory. It stores information. But does AI have will? Is it self-directed? Can it set itself in a direction and make a decision? I don’t think so. Does it have understanding? Does it truly comprehend the things that it’s saying? Let’s say for an LLM, no, it doesn’t really understand. If you understand what an LLM is, it’s prediction. It’s a statistical model.
And so I think what is called artificial intelligence is sort of a misnomer. It’s really like an advanced calculator. And I think that maybe what will wind up happening is that in our quest for sentient AI or an artificial general intelligence is we’ll find that whatever this is that we’re creating is fundamentally distinct from the human self, and it might actually teach us something about who we are and what makes us distinct.
So I think maybe the AI engineers, they might be in for a rude awakening when they realize that a genuine AI is literally impossible because it will never be ensouled or conscious in the way that a human being is.
Mass During COVID and the Priesthood
JACK NEEL: Nick, tell me if I have this right. You regularly went to underground Latin mass during COVID. Is that true?
NICK FUENTES: No, no, no.
JACK NEEL: It’s AI hallucinating on me. But did you go to mass during COVID?
NICK FUENTES: I did, yeah.
JACK NEEL: Got it. And like, how are they doing that? Was it not shut down?
NICK FUENTES: Well, they made some, I think in the early days, they didn’t have anything in place. It was five years ago, so I don’t really remember. I think at some point we came back and everybody was wearing masks. And the major change that they made is the sign of peace. So in the old days, when you did the sign of peace, you would shake hands with everybody. “Peace be with you.” And now you do like a wave. “Peace be with you.” Do a wave. And that’s the only real major change. They did masks, they did that. But overall it was basically the same.
JACK NEEL: Do you ever regret not becoming a priest?
NICK FUENTES: No, I don’t think I was up for that, no. Because I wanted to be a priest when I was very young. I used to tell my mom I wanted to be a priest when I was like a little kid, which I forgot about. She told me about this. She’s like, “You always wanted to be a priest,” but I don’t think that I have the discipline for that. Honestly, I think that that’s a vocation. You’re called to do that by God. And at a very early age I wanted to do it, but I think that I’m a little too, maybe undisciplined, eccentric to be able to live a life like that.
JACK NEEL: Because you’re a smart guy and you’re a moral guy, you definitely try to hold yourself from vices, but it seems as though you kind of put yourself in the situation where you kind of have to say inflammatory things that might not be morally aligned with you. Maybe they are, but something like being a priest or being a monk might align with you more. I don’t know. I’m just thinking about this.
NICK FUENTES: That’s an interesting thought. Yeah, because it’s true. I mean, when you’re in politics, you’re in the world, you’re dealing with the practical reality of power and flesh and human beings. And so it’s like anything you engage with it and it’s like the abyss. You stare into the abyss and it stares back into you.
And in a sense there’s something, maybe as a priest you’re insulated from these things. When you’re in the monastery, you don’t have to think about things in a practical way. You don’t have to think about those sorts of things because you’re focused on the moral law and you’re living in a sort of moral bubble, essentially.
JACK NEEL: Right.
NICK FUENTES: Not to say the priests don’t sin, of course, tons of that going on, obviously. But I guess I would consider myself, my vocation is I’m more of a warrior. There’s this idea of you’re a priest or a warrior as somebody that’s a true fighter. I think I just have the spirit that is driven to compete and fight and especially fight for justice in the world. And I don’t think it’s even possible to act in a completely priest-like way when you’re doing that. I try to do that, but I think it’s easier said than done.
JACK NEEL: If you had five minutes with Jesus Christ, what would you say to him?
Nick Fuentes on Meeting God and Prayer
NICK FUENTES: No, that’s a big question. Well, I would ask for forgiveness. I would ask for a pardon, certainly. But I don’t. I mean, I would ask about the secrets of the universe. I would want to know. You know, I would want him to tell me the whole plan. He’d probably have a better idea of what to say to me than I would have a question to ask him.
But I guess maybe more than anything, I would just beg for a pardon. I would beg for mercy and forgiveness. But I don’t know that I would ask him any kind of theological question. I would be more, I would be a much more humble approach. You know, if I could ask a historical figure, I’d have tons of questions. But someone like, you’re talking to God. It would be more like, please don’t send me to hell.
JACK NEEL: What do your prayers look like?
NICK FUENTES: Well, I mostly pray before I eat. I pray when I’m in danger. I pray when I drove here because I had to drive through the ghetto to get off at Independence Boulevard to get here. So I was praying then.
But mostly I just pray to set my intentions in alignment with God’s, because I think a lot about prayer. And when people think about prayer, they think about petition. They pray for something. God, do this for me. Give me the strength. Protect me from this. Give me this.
And I always thought about that. Is it that we didn’t pray to God enough, that we don’t live forever, that our family members die, that bad things happen to us? Because I don’t think anybody prays. People say, “Please, save my sick parents, please. You know, I don’t want to get hurt.” And then people die all the time.
So you say to yourself, did they not pray enough? Did the prayers not work? And I think that the real object of prayer is more a presence. Being in the presence of God and allowing maybe God to work on you, maybe opening your intentions and your will, sort of inviting God in and letting God guide your actions.
It’s really more about, people think about it in terms of God, help me in my life. It’s more like, God, guide my life. Use me for your purpose. That makes sense. Sort of setting the table in a different way. And so I sort of think about it that way. More like, let me say the right words to do your will. Let me do the right things to do your will. Give me more faith. Help me kind of develop as a person. Protect me from temptation. It’s usually things like that.
JACK NEEL: Do you have a journal that you write down your thoughts in?
NICK FUENTES: I do not.
JACK NEEL: No. Do you think there’s any significance to dreams?
NICK FUENTES: I do. I’m a huge believer in dreams.
The Prophetic Dream About Charlie Kirk
JACK NEEL: Have you ever had a dream that later became true?
NICK FUENTES: Yes. Yes. And it was disturbing. I had a dream in August of 2019, and it was so vivid that I talked about it on my live stream. And I said, I had a dream last night that I was at a Charlie Kirk event, a Turning Point USA event. And maybe I’m not going to tell it perfectly, it’s a long time ago, but I said it. And years later, somebody pulled the clip.
And I said, in the dream, my followers were asking Charlie questions and pressing him, and they were being thrown out of the event. And then a month later, at Charlie Kirk’s culture war tour in Colorado, two of my followers went up and pressed him about the Israel lobby and about legal immigration.
And it started the Groyper war, which was my followers followed him to every one of his events and asked him these questions and they were being thrown out and it became such a huge story. Eventually, Don Jr. was asked these questions at UCLA and it became a national story and really put my career on the map.
And when that happened, I had totally forgotten about that dream. I’d never made the connection. But like I said, about two or three years later, somebody went back and found that clip and said, two months before any of this happened, you dreamt it. And I talked about it on the show because it was that, it affected me that much. So I’ll never forget that. That was a very weird coincidence.
JACK NEEL: Does that happen a lot too?
NICK FUENTES: No, I think it was only that one time, yeah.
On Charlie Kirk
JACK NEEL: Because I remember Candace mentioning something, some text messages about Charlie’s dreams, maybe him knowing that he was going to die. I think someone said that those messages were fake. I’m unsure. But I guess if you had five minutes with Charlie Kirk, what might you ask him?
NICK FUENTES: I really had no interest in discussing with Charlie Kirk. You know, he, Charlie has become sort of a martyr now, but, and of course I don’t believe he deserved to die. I wish he was still alive. That being said, people forget what was Charlie Kirk’s business. He made $140 million per year at Turning Point USA. 140 million per year for a campus organization.
You don’t make that kind of money unless you are really taking money from everybody. Everybody will give it to you. Billionaires, Silicon Valley, special interest, India, I mean, you name it, they were taking money from everybody.
And there’s this debate about what Charlie Kirk’s real views really were about Israel, for example. And the pro Israel people say, Charlie was with us until he died. The anti Israel people say, no, he was changing his mind.
Now, how can both of these things be true? Because Charlie would tell people what they wanted to hear. He was everything to everybody. And so to the pro Israel crowd, he was pro Israel until September 10. To the anti Israel crowd, if he had been alive for a couple more months, he would have really stuck it to them.
And I think at the bottom, he didn’t really have many real convictions. Other than that, I do believe he was a sincere Christian and for that I respect him. I do believe that he was pro America and so I respect him for that. Outside of it, we had a very intense and vicious feud because he was entrenched in politics and I was the congenital outsider. So I really wouldn’t have much to say to him, to tell you the truth.
On Erica Kirk
JACK NEEL: I have to know. What do you think about Erica Kirk?
NICK FUENTES: Well, you know, I got a lot of flack for this. Yeah, I criticized Erica Kirk. But look, here’s the thing about Erica. Nobody wants to say anything about Erica Kirk because she’s a grieving widow. And so that’s just decency. Nobody wants to attack a young woman who lost her husband to a vicious public execution and now has two fatherless children.
That being said, nobody would be saying anything if she went home and grieved. But she didn’t do that. She immediately assumed control of Turning Point USA, which already was one of the most influential, powerful conservative nonprofits and for profit entities in the conservative movement, and which became far more powerful after Charlie died because of his apparent martyrdom.
So within 72 hours, she becomes Charlie’s successor. And now she’s in Washington D.C. it seems all the time with J.D. Vance, with Donald Trump, with all these other powerful people.
Now I’m going to tell you what I don’t like. I don’t like when people take tragedy or a sob story or something that’s emotionally impactful and they use it as cover. So you can’t ask questions or criticize. And I feel like that’s what is happening here.
Like I said, if she were a widow grieving, no one should or could say anything about her. It would be out of line. But we’re not talking about Erica Kirk, the grieving widow. We’re talking about Erica Kirk, the president of Turning Point USA and close personal friend of JD Vance, heir apparent of MAGA.
We can’t ask questions about who this person is. We can’t criticize or be skeptical of who she is because she cries. See, that I feel is manipulative and that I don’t like. So when people start to tell me, for emotional or moral reasons, you can’t ask that question, that’s when I get even more suspicious. So Erica Kirk, I don’t know her and that’s sort of the thing. Who really is she? I don’t think anybody knows, actually.
JACK NEEL: Not to force you to give a take on it without evidence, but what do you think could be happening with her?
NICK FUENTES: What I think, without knowing her, or knowing Charlie personally for that matter, I get the impression that their marriage was political. I think it was arranged. And this happens in elite circles. Charlie was an ambitious and increasingly very powerful, very young man.
Erica, from what I’m told, it was her desire to marry political royalty. She’s one of these people. I don’t know who her parents are, but she’s since been seen in music videos and reality shows. She was trying to make a name for herself.
And so you tend to find that among people who are rich and famous or influential, they don’t meet their wife at a coffee shop or on a dating app. They get set up by other people. This powerful man needs a wife. This young lady wants to marry a powerful man. They get set up. And I get the sense, and I’ve heard a rumor, that that was something like an arranged marriage.
Now, that doesn’t mean there’s inherently anything sinister going on there. And maybe they grew to love each other eventually, but it does speak to the fact that, you know, maybe everything about Charlie Kirk’s life was a fabrication. Him, Candace Owen said, it’s like the Truman Show. It was a created world.
Now, what Candace gets wrong, she thinks Charlie was a victim. I think he knew full well he gave himself fully to the political grift, and that comes with it. Fake talking points, fake friends, fake patrons, fake messaging. And, yeah, I mean, maybe even on some level, his family life was an artifice. It was sort of manufactured for public consumption.
Now, that’s me saying that from the outside, looking in, as someone speculating, but it looks to me like that was an arranged marriage. And if so, you have to wonder, does this woman have political ambitions? Because that’s what everybody’s thinking. This is your Kyle Rittenhouse. This is your, you know, whatever. This is your political victim, who is now going to give a political endorsement or maybe be a political contender in the future.
That’s what makes me a little skeptical. When she said this line about “the cries of this widow will echo like a battle cry.” And she goes up on the show a week after his death and says, “We have more business than ever. We’re going to keep fighting.” It’s like, okay, so now you’re a political figure. Oh, and also, I can’t criticize you because you were the victim of a tragedy. Something’s not right there.
On Charlie Kirk’s Murder
JACK NEEL: I was surprised, Nick, that maybe I hadn’t consumed enough of your content at this point in time when Charlie was murdered. But I think I tuned into the live stream that night, assuming that you were like, this is a setup. I think a lot of people tuned in thinking that would be the case. It seemed as though you were quick to vehemently deny it was any kind of paid person to kill Charlie. You were like, this is an actual person, like a crazy person that killed him. Why was that so quickly your stance, I guess?
The Charlie Kirk Assassination Analysis
NICK FUENTES: Well, because the big reason why I doubted there was any conspiracy is because Trump is in charge. So who would be conspiring? The FBI. It’s Trump’s FBI. Who would be conspiring? Trump’s intelligence agencies.
Trump was an ally of Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk was not a radical. He was not a disruptor. He was a reliable ally of the system. He was a reliable ally of Israel, a reliable ally of the Trump government, a reliable ally of all the special interests that power the Trump government. Like I said, Turning Point was bringing in $140 million per year because they were happy with Charlie’s work.
So if somebody like Tucker got killed, everybody would know who to blame. If somebody like Candace got killed, everybody know who to blame. Same thing with me. But the idea that Charlie Kirk was some kind of martyr for telling truth to power is so ridiculous, because he was the power. He was an ally and a pawn of the power.
Moreover, you look at the assassination, there were all sorts of doubts and questions that were raised in the early days. But when you really get down to it, this was not a sophisticated plot. The rooftop where Charlie was shot from, everybody had access to, no ladder required, no special equipment, freely accessible by anybody there. The event had no security perimeter, so they weren’t looking at tickets, they weren’t checking IDs, anything like this.
He got shot once in the neck, and then chaos. The guy turned himself in a couple days later. The idea that this was some kind of super sophisticated plot that required know-how and planning just isn’t true. They were lax. They did not do their due diligence. The idea that somebody walked up on that rooftop without encountering security, which was freely accessible to anybody, and took a shot, to me, that’s not crazy.
And I would say that we have a lot of that going on. Luigi Mangione. There was a school shooting the same day that Charlie Kirk got killed in Colorado. There was a school shooting by a transgender a couple weeks before that. So I think that the two flaws in the conspiracy thinking is one, the idea that Charlie was a target of the powerful, and two, that we don’t have a problem with left wing violence or crazy left wingers that want to kill right wingers. That’s very real.
So at the end of the day, I just didn’t see any compelling evidence for a conspiracy.
JACK NEEL: There was no benefit to there being a conspiracy, right?
NICK FUENTES: Yeah, there’s nothing tangible at all.
JACK NEEL: That’s interesting. I’ll say personally, I thought that the interview with him and Shapiro and he was like taking anti-Zionist views seemed to be fairly compelling at the time. But my thing with it was I was like, is Charlie really that influential, though? Like, I don’t know. Maybe in my circles he’s not super influential.
NICK FUENTES: Even that you got to understand, because people brought up that interview. So what happened that day, Tuesday, the day before September 10th, Israel bombed Qatar, which is a close ally of Trump and the Trump family and many people in the Trump cabinet, and it infuriated the White House. This was so out of line and so unprecedented for Israel to do this.
Charlie Kirk, to cover it, brought on Ben Shapiro and asked Ben Shapiro, “Hey, so do you think Israel is losing the PR battle?” And let Shapiro freely answer with no pushback. So people say that that was Charlie pushing. I think that Charlie was playing devil’s advocate. I think he was pushing the pro-Israel line by standing in for a skeptical Gen Z guy asking what that guy would ask so that Shapiro could make the case. And there’s a big difference between the two. I don’t think that he was fighting on that issue.
Lessons From Family
JACK NEEL: We went on a bit of a tangent there. But what’s one thing your mother taught you?
NICK FUENTES: Well, my mom taught me a lot, and my grandmother too. You know, my mom and my grandmother, they’re Italian, very old school, you’d say they’re grease balls, you know, and so they had kind of an old world sensibility.
I feel like a lot of white people, like real WASPy, like real whites…
JACK NEEL: Whoops.
NICK FUENTES: Real whites. They have this kind of like their parents went to college, their parents listen to Radiohead. Their parents saw Star Wars in the movies, they like comic books. And so they have this very like maybe hippie or liberal sensibility.
My parents were very old school, very like salt of the earth, maybe you could say hardcore. And I guess the biggest lesson that my mom taught me, of which there were many, the one that stands out is that you never have as many friends as you think you do.
You know, my mom, my grandma, they always used to say, “If you can count your friends on more than one hand, you better count again.” Because a lot of people like to say, “Oh, you know, I got this friend and that friend,” but how many of those people really have your best interest in mind? How many of those people are real friends?
They also used to say you spend your summers where you spend your winters. In other words, the people that are there with you when you’re riding high, when you’re successful, and everything’s going right, they’re not the same people that are with you when things are not going so well, when you need help, you know, when maybe you’re a liability. And you should share your triumphs with the people that are there for you when you’re down.
So I was really inculcated from a very early age with this kind of maybe wisdom about how people are, about loyalty, about what real friendship looks like. And I think that that informs all of my politics a lot. It’s about looking for your people, looking for who’s really your own kind. And that doesn’t necessarily mean your own race, necessarily, but it means taking your own side, looking out for your own best interest, looking out for yourself, your family, your friends, your allies.
That’s really what my whole politics is based on, on some level, is that politics of personal loyalty. I guess that’s the biggest thing that I was taught in a number of different ways.
The Burden of Leadership
JACK NEEL: You mentioned earlier in this interview losing 8 of 10 of your friends around the January 6th incident. You said there was no one in particular that stuck out as being a hard one to lose. Who’s that person that’s kind of been there with you for all of it that maybe you haven’t talked about? You don’t have to dox them, but…
NICK FUENTES: Well, there’s been many I’ve met, and that’s a lame answer.
JACK NEEL: But who’s the person you call when something really bad happens? I guess.
NICK FUENTES: Well, nobody, to be honest with you. I’m not really close to anybody like that. Unfortunately, when you’re someone like me, you can’t trust anybody. And the reason why is because when somebody really wants to hurt you or kill you and they know that they can’t get to you, they’ll go for the next best, which is the person you trust, the person you care about.
And maybe that person loves their family more than they want to protect you. And so you realize that if more than one person knows anything, it’s not a secret. And so that goes for any weaknesses, vulnerabilities. You just really can’t confide. And that’s, it’s sort of sad. That’s a luxury that people take for granted, that they can confide in people and get comfort. You know, they could get a sort of peace of mind.
But this is the struggle of any warrior, of a true leader. And not to sound self-aggrandizing in that way, but that’s really what it means to be, in my opinion, a man. When you are a man, you’re not contingent. People lean on you, you don’t lean on anybody. And at the highest level, which is politics, that’s maybe the highest level of human competition.
If you’re seeking a leadership position, if you want to be a leader, you have to be completely self-reliant. And you can’t actually have true friends in that way when you’re at the top in a political landscape. So I don’t really have anybody like that.
JACK NEEL: Even your family?
NICK FUENTES: Even my family. I mean, I confide in my mother and my father. I trust them, but I don’t want to burden them. You know, at a certain point when you’re a young man, you realize that your parents can’t solve all your problems and you actually have to worry more about them than about yourself. If I tell my parents about my troubles, it might be a burden on them. So you have to look out for them in the way that maybe one time they looked out for you.
The January 6th Investigation
JACK NEEL: On January 6th, a lot of people ended up in jail at the Capitol. This is a common conspiracy theory about you, by the way, that I have come to the conclusion is not true. We don’t have to talk about why you didn’t get in trouble for January 6th. I think if anyone really looked at the timeline of events, the things that Nick said, the case around it, it’s all very publicly available and I don’t want to bore everyone with the details of why he didn’t get in trouble.
But around the time you received a large bitcoin donation and you had this federal case, right? So did, and this is my conspiracy, did the federal government think that you were a crisis actor paid to incite violence?
NICK FUENTES: I think they did. It’s funny you say that, because I think that’s exactly what happened actually. And the story of January 6th is a long and complicated story, which is really unique to my situation because it does have to do with the bitcoin donation.
And basically in December of 2020, I got this huge bitcoin donation which when I received it, I had no idea who gave it to me. It was an anonymous donation. And so an anonymous person basically sent me one email and said, “I sent you some bitcoin,” and it was a quarter of a million dollars. And I replied and said, “Hey, let’s get on the phone. I appreciate the donation. Is there anything I could do?” And I never heard back.
Well, then January 6th happened and the government found out who this person was. That donation became a subject of an investigation and they determined that it was a French hacker who apparently left a suicide note. And in the note said that he was bequeathing his fortune to people that he thought were fighting for western civilization.
Now, I don’t know. That is what is reported. I assume that’s true because they did find that someone committed suicide the day I received the donation from the person who left the note. But what I think the government concluded is that this was a foreign operation, that I received a vast sum of money from maybe Russia or France or some other country to lead an attack on the government.
And I think that because it looked very suspicious, there was a huge amount in bitcoin right before the capital attack. And I think they saw that and assumed that this was some kind of foreign operation. And then their next move is lock up the money and prevent me from fleeing. So they put me on the no-fly list to prevent me from flying to another country. And I think they froze the money so that they could look into my situation.
JACK NEEL: Maybe wait in Chicago for you, right?
NICK FUENTES: Right. So I think that they launched that investigation with the assumption that they would find out that I was sponsored by a foreign government. And when they determined that that was not the case, I think they released me from the no-fly list, released the money and they stopped the investigation.
JACK NEEL: How did they determine that?
NICK FUENTES: Well, they investigated me thoroughly. There were no fewer than three US attorneys that were on the case. I’m sure they got… I got a letter, I think last year, five years after the fact, exactly five years, which said that the FBI had subpoenaed my communications from a telecom company.
So I think they went through my texts, I think they went through all my information and they just found that that wasn’t the case. I think Chainalysis, which is a US-backed crypto investigatory body, they looked into the recipients and who sent the money. And I think they found that story checked out. Maybe they looked at all my communications, they subpoenaed me in Congress, deposed me. And I think that, yeah, they just found that that wasn’t happening.
JACK NEEL: Do you think sometimes, though, it’s possible that influencers or very influential people make plea deals based on blackmail or accusations, to evade charges, to push certain narratives?
GOP Corruption and Blackmail Networks
NICK FUENTES: All the time. All the time. And it is. So it is really understated how much of that happens in the GOP. The GOP, more than there are even Jewish people, it’s a lot of gay men and it’s a lot of gay that goes on. And all you have to do is take a look at who runs some of the media outlets and who some of the donors are.
When you go to some of these events, that’s basically what they’re set up for. It’s basically set up so that rich gay millionaires and billionaires can hang out with high school, college age boys. That’s what much of it is for, so they can be groomed. It’s what it is. So that happens a lot. And of course there’s a lot of blackmail that goes with that territory.
And then of course there’s also a lot of federal informants. In any organized group, I don’t care who it is, any militia, any membership organization, they’re bound to be federal informants. And that’s been borne out in the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot. In 2020, 50% of the people involved in that were federal informants or assets. 50%, including many of the leaders of the group.
So in 2020, there’s this big story that an oath keeper aligned group was going to kidnap the governor or something like that. And the people that were throwing the pizza parties for the losers that signed up for it were the federal government. So that happens all over conservative and I think liberal politics too.
Platform Censorship and Free Speech
JACK NEEL: Nick, do you ever fear that your platform is not being censored to the same extent that it was a few years back to rally support for Zionism via implied antisemitism?
NICK FUENTES: No, because a lot of people thought that this year. Let’s be honest, free speech has largely returned to the Internet. And there is a lot of legitimate anti-Semitism out there now, like stuff that really does cross the line. And it’s all over acts and there’s generally Jewish or Israel critical content all over Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, in a way that there wasn’t even a year ago, two years ago.
And when I got brought back on Twitter and when my clips started to go viral, a lot of people said, are they allowing it because they have some ulterior motive? And I really was paranoid about that. I was trying to act a little more cautiously for that reason, especially this year.
But what you’re seeing now is they are throwing that in reverse. And now they bought TikTok to censor. They want to buy Twitter to censor. At the World Jewish Congress, its president, Ronald Lauder, called for anti-Semitism laws to be passed. So no, I think especially now, it’s quite the opposite. They want to shut it all down.
JACK NEEL: I was just shocked to see, I wasn’t allowed to post Andrew Tate on TikTok because his face is banned. Tristan’s not. I was shocked that your face hasn’t been completely AI banned from TikTok.
NICK FUENTES: At the very least, I think it is now.
JACK NEEL: It is.
NICK FUENTES: I think so.
JACK NEEL: I know your name. You can’t type it. You have to do some weird spelling. But I see some clips. I don’t know, they can get the side of your face. But what’s the one thing that you, Nick Fuentes, aren’t allowed to say?
Resisting Radicalization
NICK FUENTES: Well, if there’s any pressure for me to not say things at this point, I cannot signal anything against traditionalism or white racialism or what I mean by that is people expect me to be the far right firebrand. And so if you start to push temperance, caution, moderation, even just compassion, empathy, a lot of people in my audience get upset about it. I would say not most, but a very vocal minority. And I say it anyway. I say it all the time, and I make them very unhappy when I say certain things.
But you see how some movements tend to be captured by their most radical members. Because once you start to say that things are a conspiracy, once you start to say that we’re victims, we’re being mistreated, there’s a pull and a pressure to always go bigger, wider, more extreme, more intense, more angry, more cruel.
And the older that I get, and the longer that I do this, the more I try very hard to resist that impulse. Almost deliberately resist that. Because I think that my movement has very legitimate grievances. And I think as long as I’ve been doing this, it’s been motivated by a sense of justice and trying to set things straight. We want people to live better lives.
And I think that if you are a deeply flawed person, it’s easy to forget the reasons why you started doing something and to really get captured by bitterness and hatred and very negative emotions and maybe your worst impulses. So I try. That’s why I try to keep it focused on Christianity. I try to always bring it back to at the end of the day, it is about the cross.
JACK NEEL: I will say that did surprise me with your content as well. On the streams, it seemed like anytime one of your super chats was saying a bit of a crazy conspiracy, you’d be like, oh, shut the f* up. Instantly out of the window. But someone like Candace is like, that’s interesting. I haven’t heard of that before. But you’d instantly deny it. But is there any one thing that maybe you just think would get this whole podcast deleted?
The JD Vance Exposé
NICK FUENTES: No, I think that, well, I’ll tell you the things that really scare me. The things that I, it’s not that I won’t, because I’m really banned from everything. I think I’m as banned as a person can be right now. But the things that actually scare me are when you talk about the particular people, you start naming names, and when you start to tell people to take action in the real world, politically, that’s what they really don’t like.
So for example, I’ve never felt more, maybe, let’s say, anxious about a show than when I did my exposé on J.D. Vance and Tucker Carlson over the summer. Because even as I was doing the research about all their CIA connections and all the things they’re involved in, I talk about conspiracies on the show and I believe in a lot of them. But this was so real. I was like, shit, this is true. Everything that I’m putting down on the paper here is 100% true. Real corruption.
These extremely powerful people want JD Vance to be the president. And a lot is riding on that. A lot. A lot of money, a lot of power. And I knew doing that show that if I go in against JD Vance, I’m putting a big target on my back. If I go out and raise the flag and say we’re going to go to the Iowa caucus and try to deny J.D. Vance the nomination for president, I’m throwing a wrench into a very big plan of very powerful people, rich, connected to the CIA and big tech, and they’re not going to like that.
And it would not be expensive or impossible for them to kill me in the next two or three years. So that was the only time I really got freaked out because it’s real people with real names and real companies, very rich, with a very real plan that is pretty plain to see. And I know that if I expose that, they will not be happy. So that freaked me out a lot.
JACK NEEL: What is the plan with JD Vance?
The PayPal Mafia’s Master Plan
NICK FUENTES: Well, here’s a little sampling of what they have in mind. Trump gets shot in the ear in July 2024. Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson and Peter Thiel call Trump and they say you have to pick JD Vance or else the neocons might really kill you next year. Weird timing, weird thing to say. So Trump chooses J.D. Vance the following week at the RNC to be his vice president.
Very weird. Why? Because J.D. Vance is a freshman senator who is two years into his term. So he’s a private citizen. In 2022, he’s elected to the Senate. 2024, he’s the Vice President of the United States of America. How does a person rise so quickly? Well, the backing of little tech. These disruptive defense tech companies like Palantir, Anduril, OpenAI, X, Tesla, the PayPal mafia, this group of billionaires, he’s their guy. And they bought Trump. They fundraised for Trump to get Trump to pick him.
So Trump wins the election. J.D. Vance has to leave the Senate to run for Vice President. So this opens up a Senate seat in Ohio, and J.D. Vance was the senator there, so he’s got a lot of influence. Well, who do they want to run in Ohio now as the governor of the state? Vivek Ramaswamy.
Now, Vivek’s competition in the Republican Party, who was going to run for governor, I think it’s lieutenant governor, he was appointed to replace J.D. Vance in the Senate, you see. So J.D. Vance leaves the Ohio Senate seat to be VP. Trump and Vance, using their political capital, steer the lieutenant governor into that Senate seat to take him out of the running for governor. Now Vivek Ramaswamy has a clear shot.
Vivek Ramaswamy is a Yale Law School colleague of JD Vance’s. Vivek Ramaswamy was a big booster with little tech behind the Trump campaign. You know where Anduril is going to open up their drone company, their drone factories? In the state of Ohio. Anduril is run by Palmer Luckey, who is given a second chance by Peter Thiel. He’s tight with J.D. Vance. J.D. Vance steered Peter Thiel’s money into Anduril when he was working for Peter Thiel’s venture capital company. You see how all this works.
So Vance is VP, Vivek is going to be the governor of Ohio, and they’re going to give Anduril favorable jurisdiction to open up their big drone factory with the government contracts from the Department of War. And they’re going to do it in Ohio, where their guy is now running the state. This is how that kind of corruption works.
The AI Military Industrial Complex
Now, when J.D. Vance, well, this is their plan, when he becomes the President of the United States, they’re going to give, you think AI is at a productivity boom right now, wait until the US Military gets involved. The US Government is all in on the AI race against China. It’s going to change everything in the economy, everything in the defense sector. It’s going to change how wars are fought.
Who is going to be the beneficiary of all that investment, all those government contracts? It’s going to be whoever is friends with the President of the United States after the next election. So if J.D. Vance gets in, it’s going to be Palantir, Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, it’s going to be Anduril, Palmer Luckey, it’s going to be OpenAI, Sam Altman, it’s going to be Grok, Elon Musk, Tesla with their robots. That’s the end goal.
So it’s really one way you could look at it is a coup. This is their guy. They use Trump as a Trojan horse. Or maybe another analogy, they let J.D. Vance draft behind him, and then once Trump is discarded as a lame duck, they’ll anoint Vance and then he’s going to pour all these maybe trillions of dollars in value towards their companies, and they will become the new oligarchs of America. That’s the end game.
JACK NEEL: You don’t think Peter Thiel is the Antichrist?
NICK FUENTES: He might be. Who knows?
JACK NEEL: You don’t think Gavin will beat J.D. Vance?
The 2028 Election Landscape
NICK FUENTES: That’s the thing. I mean, they want Vance to be the nominee. At the end of the day, they are in a fight with other factions. The PayPal mafia, they’re not all powerful. They’re a faction. There’s no, some people believe in the grand conspiracy, where everything that happens is orchestrated and all the sides are illusory. They’re all secretly working together. And I don’t think that’s true. I think that the left is a faction. I think that the PayPal mafia is a faction. And the left will be fighting for Gavin Newsom and it’ll be a real competition.
I think that in 2024, if it is Gavin and Vance, it’ll be a close election because Vance, I think he might suffer from the same thing that Ron DeSantis did, which is that there’s an idea of J.D. Vance, just like there was an idea of Ron DeSantis. There’s a conceit. The conceit of Ron DeSantis is he’s like Trump without all the baggage. He’s like Trump, but he’s more presidential. He’s more of a policy wonk. He’s actually going to be a better governor, better president, but he’s able to govern better.
And I think the conceit behind Vance is he’s from Ohio, he’s from Appalachia, he’s got this story, but he made something of himself. And he’s going to appeal to the Trump base and the very far right, but he’s also smart. So he could appeal to the New York Times, college educated white people. That’s an idea, but it’s not tested.
And I think that once Vance goes out on a national stage, he might not be as popular as he is in Dime Square in New York City or in these places where he gets fluffed by his donors. I think it’ll be a different story, but he might be popular. Who knows?
JACK NEEL: Clav said that JD would lose to Gavin because Gavin mogs.
NICK FUENTES: He does mog. It’s true.
Democracy and the American Republic
JACK NEEL: Do you think America should get rid of democracy?
NICK FUENTES: I think we should, definitely. We have too much democracy. I mean, right now, getting back to the conversation before, the country is sort of like a lame conservative talking point. But it is true that America was founded as a republic, not a democracy.
And the idea behind that is we have some democratic processes like we have voting. So there’s something democratic about voting. But a democracy, strictly speaking, is mob rule. Whatever the majority votes for, that’s what we’re going to get. And there’s a democratic idea, which is that there’s something necessarily good about this. Like if a decision comes from the people, it’s good, it’s valid. And I don’t think that’s true.
I don’t think necessarily that the people are inherently better than the aristocracy or the monarchy because they’re still made up of human beings. And so there’s a democratic idea that says that the more vulgar, the more poor, the lower station that a person has, the more noble they are and the richer and more powerful that somebody is they’re evil and corrupt and greedy. And that’s sort of a communist idea. That’s like a communist idea that wealth is inherently evil or that power is inherently evil.
And it sounds correct. I would say it’s more apt to say that power tends to be corrupting rather than it’s inherently evil by itself. And so there’s a lot of rich people that are greedy. There’s also a lot of rich people that are very competent. How did they get rich? They’re very smart. They’re very good at what they do. They work hard. There’s nothing wrong with that.
And there’s a lot of poor people. They’re not poor because they’re unlucky. They’re poor because they don’t work hard. That’s not all poor people, but there’s a lot of poor people that, look, if you gave them cash payments, they would spend it on alcohol and lottery tickets. And there’s nothing good about that necessarily. They would mismanage the money.
I’m fundamentally against this democratic man, the democratic society, which says that the lower, the more universal, the poorer, the more unsophisticated, the more vulgar, the better. No, I disagree with that. And I think that the framers had it right when they said that the people, just like the landed aristocracy, just like the federal government, needs to be put in check.
And so that’s why we have a federal system. That’s why we have a republican system. That’s why we have a system where you have state governments that do one thing and a federal government that does another. That’s why you have one chamber that is elected by the people and one that is elected by the states and so on and so forth. So I think that we just have too much democracy. We should have less of that.
Violence and Government
JACK NEEL: So would you say, let me ask you this, you can cut it out if you want, but do you think violence is ever justified against the government if they don’t align with your political views?
NICK FUENTES: Well, I would say that violence never occurs against the government, it occurs against people. That’s always the rub, because people always like to say, “Well, we’re never going to vote our way out of this,” and things like that. But when you’re talking about violence, you’re talking about killing and who’s going to do the killing and who’s going to die?
And I think that we recognize that, well, first of all, as Christians, that murder is wrong. And so at what point does someone forfeit their life and who’s the judge of that? Like the United Healthcare CEO, people said, “Well, the healthcare industry is corrupt. So we’re judge, jury and executioner over every person that works in the healthcare industry or the executives or whoever the decision makers are.” Who made some kid the judge, jury and executioner of that man who was killed? Nobody. It’s not our right to take human life for that.
We say that a government is instituted and that’s a definition of sovereignty, is the ability to order people to kill and to be killed as the army or as the police. And we do this, we’re fighting in a war or sometimes the police have to do this to criminals. But there’s a process for this, there’s accountability. We have laws where there’s a social contract. We come together and have representatives who say these are going to be the laws and we’re going to hire law enforcement to enforce them. And you get a jury and a judge and there’s a process.
So I’m fundamentally against the vigilantism, I’m fundamentally against anarchism and I’m against the taking of human life by ordinary people like that. I don’t think we have any right to do that. So I’m not a violent revolutionary. I think it’s evil.
JACK NEEL: What’s the alternative?
NICK FUENTES: Well, I think the alternative is how the Christians evangelized the Roman Empire. The Christians, unlike Muslim assassins and the succession crises in the aftermath of Muhammad’s death, the Christians didn’t go and kill Caesar, they didn’t go and kill legionaries, they took the persecution, they accepted it. And 11 out of the 12 apostles were martyred. They were all murdered, many of them crucified like Christ.
And it was the witness of their voluntary persecution which is what won over people to their cause. So I think the alternative is a nonviolent approach like Gandhi, like Jesus. And that sounds corny when people say Gandhi, but I think there’s something to that. I’m not a person that believes that the ends justify the means where anything is licensed to get a certain outcome. I think if you forfeit your soul in the process, what was the end, what was the actual goal then? So I think the alternative is we have to have a nonviolent movement.
President Fuentes: Day One
JACK NEEL: So I guess the year is 2036. Nick Fuentes is elected President of the United States. What does day one look like in Nick Fuentes America?
NICK FUENTES: Oh, day one is going to be ugly. No, but look, I mean day one also…
JACK NEEL: I should have clarified. Would you run for President?
NICK FUENTES: Oh, maybe, I don’t know. I don’t think I could ever win because I’m too offensive, I’m too provocative. But assuming I did, and if I won’t, I would immediately… Here’s the role of the President. The President is the chief law enforcement officer of the country. That’s really the goal. The executive is to execute the laws that are passed by Congress.
And what is happening right now is of course the nation’s in open rebellion. We have a criminal, illegal alien population of maybe 40 million people we don’t even know. I mean, it could be 20, 30, 40, maybe 50 million illegal aliens here. And they all have to be returned at the minimum. Many of them, tens of millions of them have to be returned because they have no legal standing here.
Well, what happens when you try to do this? You see what’s happening in Broadview here in Illinois, you get riots, you get protests, you get the mayor and the governor resisting. You got to go in and arrest those people too. What else is happening in Chicago and New York and LA? Rampant crime, chaos, murder. There was a story last night somebody drove a stolen car through the window of a luxury store and did a grand theft in the store and got away. And this happens all the time in Chicago.
So if I were President on day one, I’m bringing the National Guard everywhere. I’m talking hundreds of thousands of National Guard in all the major cities and we are putting that sh on lockdown. It is going to be martial law. We are getting in the public transit, we are going to be in the city square, we’re going to be in the worst neighborhoods. We are going to be, if this is the case, it would be visible, it would be broken window policing.
Every crime is going to be punished. Littering, vandalism, graffiti, everything is going to be punished and many people are going to be deported. And the message would be, we have laws here, we don’t f* around. This is the United States. You have to follow the law and we’re no longer going to pander to criminals. If you’re a criminal, you’re going to jail.
We’re not going to have a society where peaceful, law abiding people are held hostage by opportunists and predators and violent people. It’s going to be the reverse. The violent people are going to be afraid to go in the streets. The violent people are going to see a law enforcement presence and they’re not going to want to go outside or drive down certain streets rather than the reverse where law abiding people are afraid to go into certain neighborhoods. I think that’s the first thing any president has to do.
Voting Rights and Eligibility
JACK NEEL: What rights would you take away from women?
NICK FUENTES: Well, I would just take away the right to vote for tons of people, women for sure. But also I’d raise the voting age to like 25 in general. I would probably take away the right to vote for, or maybe people that have no stake, no skin in the game.
Because here’s the thing, even the men, I look at a lot of men who are students and they’re 21 years old and their parents are paying for their apartment and they’ve never had a real job and they’re out there telling everybody this is the way the world has to be. Well, how do you know, if you don’t own property and you don’t know how the trains run?
Because if you, let’s say you even own your own home. You need to know a little bit about how the world works. You need to know about weather, you need to know about moisture. You need to know about basic things for how we have a human habitation. Property developers uniquely understand these things. Taxes and insurance and code and how money is made. They understand what makes the world go round.
An 18 year old that is renting an apartment and never had a real job and is basically their parents are paying for everything, they don’t have a car, they really have no way of knowing how the world works. And they also have no skin in the game. Whoever wins the election, it doesn’t really matter that much actually for them.
So I would say that we have to really seriously consider reworking who is eligible to vote based on who we would entrust that decision with, who we’d feel comfortable entrusting the decision of who should run our country with. And what comes to mind is people with children, people that own property, people that are of a certain age, people that have had military service, people that speak English. How about that? I mean there would be some requirements that’d be introduced.
Cabinet Appointments and Conspiracies
JACK NEEL: Who would you appoint to your cabinet?
NICK FUENTES: Oh, it wouldn’t be anybody in politics. I think we need like a throw all the bastards out mentality. I think they’re all corrupt, so nobody. I would probably solicit people from the country to run the government.
JACK NEEL: What’s the first thing you would ask the guys in suits about?
NICK FUENTES: Oh, aliens. Aliens. I would ask them about, I would ask them about JFK, but I think we basically know what happened there. I would ask them about all the spy stuff that goes on between us and the other countries. But to tell you the truth, I’m not a big conspiracy theorist.
I actually don’t believe there is some really shocking hidden truth. Some people are waiting to discover that we encountered aliens years ago. I don’t think that’s true. I think that what we see is what we get basically. And it doesn’t go much further beyond what’s in your imagination about what billionaires do.
JACK NEEL: Really?
NICK FUENTES: Yeah.
JACK NEEL: Well, I mean, I’m just thinking of some things that you’ve said. You’ve kind of pointed to the fact that the nation of Israel, Jewish people, et cetera. It’s kind of like a cabal and it’s very negative. And it’s about rebuilding the temple. There’s a lot of stuff here. It’s just… Do you not classify that as conspiratorial because there’s just evidence for it?
NICK FUENTES: Yeah, yeah, basically. I mean, that sounds like a…
JACK NEEL: Conspiracy to my Thanksgiving dinner.
NICK FUENTES: Well, that’s what I said. I mean, what is a conspiracy? Conspiracy is when people work together for some ulterior agenda or ulterior motive. And I think that happens in the world. But there’s a whole other category. I would say there’s conspiracies that powerful people work together for a hidden agenda.
And then I think there’s another category of conspiracy which is that reality isn’t as it seems. There’s conspiracies where there’s no evidence for them. And they say that there’s a fundamental deception about the nature of reality. So like aliens, that’s to me a different category to say that when Jewish people talk about the Third Temple, they’re doing that in the Israeli media, government ministers that talk openly about it.
When you say that humanity encountered extraterrestrial life and this has implications for hidden technology and things like that. That’s far fetched. Or chemtrails and nanotechnology, things like that. To me that’s just a domain of kookery. That’s just crazy talk. In my opinion.
World War II and the Soviet Question
JACK NEEL: That makes more sense. I have to interject this because I should have asked about it. Do you think the Axis power should have won?
NICK FUENTES: No. You know, I don’t think that should have won the war. But what I will say is it’s a little more complicated than people realize, because what inevitably happened after the Axis lost, the Axis loses, and now we’re in a war with the Soviet Union.
And what people ignore is that in the interwar period and even before, you had two ideologies, which was not just fascism or National Socialism, but Communism, and you also had two countries that upset the balance of power in Europe, because that’s really what the wars were about. It’s that Germany became by far and away the biggest and most powerful industrial country after unification, which upset the concert of Europe established after the Napoleonic Wars.
Some people know about this, but the same thing was happening in Russia. Russia, throughout the 1920s and 30s and 40s, was on a war footing. The reason they were starving Ukrainians is because they were requisitioning grain to finance industrialization. Why? To build amphibious tanks. Why did they need amphibious tanks? Because they wanted to invade England, which, of course means they wanted to invade the rest of Europe.
So what people maybe don’t realize is, yes, the Nazis built their war machine and they had designs on, they wanted to control Russia, they wanted to control Eastern Europe, but the Soviet Union wanted to control Western Europe. So this was sort of an inevitable conflict.
Now, was it the best idea for the United States to back the Soviet Union and for them to enslave half of Europe and to fight them for 50 years because they got the bomb in 1949? I think maybe the better outcome would have been to let Hitler fight the Soviet Union and let them fight each other to exhaustion. Would have that been maybe the better outcome?
So in terms of how it was handled, I think the biggest mistake of World War II is that we kicked out Hitler and we let in Stalin, we kicked out the Nazis, and we brought in the Bolsheviks. And I’m not sure the Bolsheviks were better than the Nazis. I mean, certainly they’re as bad. They might have been worse. So I would say that that was maybe the biggest miscalculation of the whole war.
Rapid Fire Questions
JACK NEEL: Would you make Bitcoin the US Currency?
NICK FUENTES: No. No. I believe in fiat money generally.
JACK NEEL: Would you make it legal tender?
NICK FUENTES: Probably not.
JACK NEEL: If you had to pick a national anthem for America, what song would you choose?
NICK FUENTES: Well, I really like “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” That’s probably like my favorite patriotic song. But the current national anthem, it’s not a great song, to be honest. You know what I mean? Like, it’s ours. I know, but like, is it the best song ever? I don’t think it’s the best American anthem.
JACK NEEL: Nothing from Ye’s discography. I think that’s how you say it.
NICK FUENTES: Yeah. Maybe nitrous. Maybe something off that. I don’t know.
JACK NEEL: There’s a few ones on there that could work. What’s a fear about the future that you rarely talk about publicly?
Nuclear War and the Future
NICK FUENTES: Well, I talk about all of it publicly. I guess my biggest fear is that probably nuclear war would be my biggest fear, because people really, that’s so generic, but do people think about the fact that we have nuclear weapons pointed at each other at all times?
We’ve been living in the nuclear age for 80 years, which in the grand scheme of things is not a long time, and there’s a handful of countries that have them. And I think the odds that we get in a nuclear war, it’s almost inevitable on a long enough timeline. And the question is just when?
As we transition to a multipolar world order, countries like China build their arsenal and countries like Russia rise up and push back on American empire. The odds that we get a nuclear conflict are probably greater than ever before. In some ways, some ways not. But in some ways, it might be the greatest risk ever.
So I’m really worried in the next 15, 20 years, there’s going to be another nuclear close call. And I wonder if our leaders are going to have the wherewithal to prevent it.
JACK NEEL: What’s the most important thing you hope people remember about you?
NICK FUENTES: Well, you know, in the end, everybody’s going to be forgotten, I guess, eventually. But I just don’t want people to remember me as the caricature that they create about me. You know, I guess I just want, it’s like anything. You want people to understand you, and I want people to understand that, you know, everything that I did was for America. It was for Christianity.
It wasn’t for hatred of other groups or, you know, whatever they say it was about ideological hatred or grifting. It’s out of a deep sense of, you know, it’s a longing for justice.
A Prayer for America
JACK NEEL: Yeah. Nick, I ask every guest at the end of the podcast, what’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received? But I’ll change it for you. If you could say a prayer for America, what would it look like?
NICK FUENTES: I would pray for, I guess I would pray for the people because it’s, I think about when Christ was going to his death on the cross. He didn’t condemn everybody. He didn’t say, “This isn’t fair.” He didn’t say, “I’m innocent.” He said, “Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they’re doing.”
And that’s how I feel about this country. I feel like the country is totally messed up. I think we have every right to be angry. Everybody has a right to be angry. Everybody has a right to be resentful about everything and everybody, about system, about the elites, about our parents, about, you know, how our inheritance was squandered.
But that mentality will not repair the nation. The nation has to be reborn. And the only way for the nation to be reborn is for people to be reborn. And to do that, they have to give themselves to God and say that we’re going to forgive the boomers, we’re going to forgive the people that are ruining the country.
We have to stand up as leaders, as Christians, putting God first, our conscience first, what we know is right. Tell the truth, be courageous, stand on business for the truth to the point of death. And I think that if the most talented and capable people take that obligation seriously and do that, if they’re reborn, I think the country can be reborn, they can lead the country to a better place.
But if we give in to our worst impulses, the bitterness, the anger, the sense of perhaps misplaced self-righteousness, the sense of aggrievement that we’ve been wronged, I think the country will collapse in very short order and it’ll be very ugly.
So I would pray for the humility to do the right thing. Time’s always right to do the right thing.
JACK NEEL: Amen. Beautiful, Nick. Thank you for coming on, man. Everyone, this is the Jack Neal podcast. This is your guest, Nick Fuentes.
NICK FUENTES: Thank you.
JACK NEEL: See you guys.
NICK FUENTES: Sweet. Yeah, yeah. Long table. Hey, thanks, man. Appreciate it.
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