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Home » Why Is Nick Fuentes So Popular? Nikki Haley’s Son on Tucker Carlson Show (Transcript)

Why Is Nick Fuentes So Popular? Nikki Haley’s Son on Tucker Carlson Show (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of The Tucker Carlson Show episode titled “Why Is Nick Fuentes So Popular? Nikki Haley’s Son Explains”, November 19, 2025.

The Real Lesson Behind the Fuentes Controversy

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, it looks like all the screaming about Nick Fuentes on the internet is finally dying down a little bit. It couldn’t go on forever, though it seemed like it might. And that’s a good thing because, after all, there’s a lot else going on in the world, some of it important. And watching people day after day stand up to basically make the same point—”I’m a good person, unlike him!”—not that interesting or edifying or even really informative. And we definitely learned that there are quite a few professional conservatives who are not that conservative in any sense that really matters.

Some of them are fraudulent or sad or kind of stuck in nonprofit jobs because they can’t get another, and your sympathy goes out to them. But listening to them talk day after day really didn’t teach us anything.

But it doesn’t mean that there aren’t lessons to be learned. In fact, there’s one really important lesson, and this was really the reason to interview Nick Fuentes in the first place. And the lesson is that a lot of young men in America, mostly white but not exclusively, listen to Nick Fuentes really carefully.

And the lesson that our professional betters in Washington have drawn over the past few weeks is that means they are as bad as Nick Fuentes. They are Nazis too!

But of course, they are not Nazis by and large. They are just American young people. And so the question is—and it is a pressing question if you care about the future of the country—why have they been listening to Nick Fuentes? Sincerely, like what is this? Why aren’t they listening to somebody from the Heritage Foundation or the Daily Wire?

Why do they believe Nick Fuentes more than they believe the people who think they ought to have a monopoly on the attention of young conservatives? That is a really important question. And what does it say not simply about their attitudes, but about the problems they face, the society they grew up in, the future they imagined for themselves?

What does it say about all of that, that Fuentes is so popular among young men? After all, young men really are kind of the basis of our hope for continuing as a country.

Understanding the Next Generation

So if they’re off in some direction that you don’t understand, it’s probably incumbent on you to try to understand it to the extent you can. You know, it’s hard to understand other people’s motives, and it’s even harder when they’re in a different generation. But making a good faith effort to figure out what is this—well, that’s on us.

Us being, you know, everyone with a job who’s not in that generation. All the beneficiaries of a stronger, more cohesive America, the America we grew up in, which doesn’t exist anymore.

It’s our responsibility to look at newer generations and say, “What’s going on with them? Can we help in any way?” If we care about our country, we care about our own families, our children and grandchildren, we probably want to do that. And it’s probably not enough to call them names. It doesn’t work for one thing. It just makes whatever we claim to dislike even stronger.

There’s one lesson of the Trump 2015 announcement and everything that’s happened since then, the last ten years. It’s that. And the lesson obviously is that when every power center in the country declares war on you, you become a power center. It doesn’t destroy you, it makes you stronger. Certainly true for Donald Trump.

Would he have become president in 2016 and 2024 if all the cool kids hadn’t denounced him as a Nazi? Probably not. Would he have been reelected if the FBI hadn’t raided Mar-a-Lago and gone through his wife’s underwear drawer? We can debate it, but maybe not. Maybe this would be the Ron DeSantis presidency.

Probably. So attacking people, particularly when you attack them ad hominem, when you don’t try to deconstruct or rebut the arguments they’re making, just calling them names—Nazi—that’s counterproductive every single time. You expose yourself as hysterical and shallow, and you elevate them in the minds of everybody else.

“They’re important enough to be yelled at by every trustee at the Heritage Foundation or whatever. They must be important.”

The Moral Imperative to Listen

So, again, it doesn’t work, but it’s also on a deeper level kind of immoral. It’s immoral to dismiss the concerns of your countrymen as beneath consideration. “I don’t have to listen to you because you like some guy who has got ugly views.”

By the way, it is not a defense of all of Fuentes’ views. We interviewed him on the show and said it is totally immoral to hate Jews as a group because it’s totally immoral to hate any group. Period. That’s always wrong.

But it doesn’t mean that everything Fuentes says is wrong. It’s not wrong. And more to the point, what he says on the air and his huge popularity, which has only increased the more these people scream at him, says a lot about the people who are listening and their legitimate concerns and the factors in our society, in America and in the West, that gave rise to their attitudes.

Like, how did this happen? Let’s for once, in the last twenty years, look back and ask ourselves an honest question. How did this happen?

Let’s do what we didn’t do when we withdrew from Afghanistan or declared a truce in Iraq, carted away the rubble from 9/11. We never asked how did this happen, and no one was ever held responsible for allowing it to happen or the bad decisions that made it happen. Not one person.

And so, of course, inevitably, disasters followed disasters because if you never take the time to take responsibility for what you’ve done or even understand it, you’re apt to repeat it.