How did Adolf Hitler manage to successfully destroy German democracy? In his writings and speeches, Hitler comes across as deranged, paranoid, ignorant, buffoonish. And yet he successfully came to power through (mostly) democratic means, using his position to unleash the most systematic mass murder campaign in world history, and ultimately bringing ruin on his country and much of the rest of the continent. How could such a calamity happen? How did he convince people to support him? And how can we ensure that no such scenario ever plays out again?

Hitler did not come to power by promising to commit the Holocaust. As Ian Kershaw notes in his definitive biography of Hitler, in the crucial 1930 elections that multiplied the Nazis’ parliamentary representation by tenfold, Hitler campaigned not on promises to destroy the Jews, but on the idea that the other parties had failed the country, promising a sweeping program of national redemption: 

In the election campaign of 1930, Hitler seldom spoke explicitly of the Jews. The crude tirades of the early 1920s were missing altogether… The key theme now was the collapse of Germany under parliamentary democracy and party government into a divided people with separate and conflicting interests, which only the NSDAP could overcome by creating a new unity of the nation, transcending class, estate, and profession… Again and again he pilloried the Weimar system… for its failed promises on tax reductions, financial management, and employment. All parties were blamed… Democracy, pacifism, and internationalism had produced powerlessness and weakness—a great nation brought to its knees. It was time to clear out the rot. 

Hitler was no less of an antisemite, of course, and his identification of Jews as the chief culprit for everything wrong with Germany led almost inexorably to the conclusion that exterminating them was justified and necessary. But Hitler was politically savvy and capable of adjusting his pitch to fit particular moments. Mainstream publications sometimes foolishly assumed that his antisemitism was a bit of empty rhetoric designed to get votes, or saw him as a clown and failed to perceive the nature of the danger he presented. The lesson I take from this is that we must be more careful in our own time. When we see a neo-Nazi gathering steam, we must expose them and prevent them from taking power. We must be constantly vigilant, because the original Nazis were clever. They fashioned themselves into a mainstream political party, and they bided their time. They waited for just the right moment, a time of national despair and chaos, and then took advantage of it to unleash their diabolical program. Never again—one hopes.

Far-right influencer Nick Fuentes is a neo-Nazi. But you wouldn’t necessarily know that if you saw him on some of the popular podcasts he’s been on lately, with fairly mainstream shows hosting him for appearances that have garnered millions of views. The 27-year old Fuentes hosts a live show on Rumble and has seen his audience explode over the last year, after Elon Musk allowed him back on Twitter (“X”), where Fuentes contributes such comments as “If they aren’t talking about Jewish Power it’s because they’re in on it.” He now has nearly a million followers on the platform. Fuentes has been the subject of critical features in Wired, The Atlantic, and the New York Times, the latter of which sent a photographer to capture him looking moody in his studio.

The “Jewish Power” quote is one of Fuentes’ milder remarks. Fuentes is open about his love of Hitler. He has called Hitler “cool” and “awesome,” describing himself as “just like Hitler.” He gives the Sieg Heil salute. He has commented “They compare Putin to Hitler like it’s a bad thing.” Polish people have “the bad habit of hating Hitler all the time,” he says. Asked directly whether Hitler was bad, Fuentes refused to respond directly, saying that if Hitler was “bad,” Churchill and Roosevelt are also “bad.” (Some of the most popular YouTube comments: “I love Nick’s response. Not letting others manipulate his thoughts and words.” “Dude has guts.” “People act like Hitler opposed that group for no reason whatsoever.” “Nick makes such a good point. There's no other historical world leader they would ask this question about.”) After seeing a Black man litter in his neighborhood, Fuentes ranted:

 I'm supposed to be mad at Hitler? I'm supposed to be cross with Hitler? I want this guy dead. And I wish Hitler would kill him. I wish Hitler would have killed him, you know? ... That guy should be KILLED! That guy should be killed for that. That guy should be dragged from his car and beaten to death by the public. And I'm supposed to be mad at Hitler because of some fantastical Hollywood story about a gas chamber that looks like a shower? Give me a break. If I was in a room with Hitler and that guy, me and Hitler would team up and fuck that guy up! We would kill that guy! Hitler would hold him down and I would beat him to death... And we'd high-five at the end.

Fuentes is an outright Holocaust denier. “I don’t believe in the Holocaust,” he has said. With a big grin on his face, on a livestream, he responded to a supposedly hypothetical question from a viewer about how “six million cookies” could have been “baked” in so few ovens. As the “cookie” analogy steadily broke down, Fuentes began repeating classic Holocaust denial talking points, like the idea that the Red Cross said only 300,000 people died in concentration camps and there were no “high chimneys” in aerial photographs of Auschwitz:  

The math doesn’t quite seem to add up there. I don’t think you would get to six million. Maybe 200 to 300 thousand cookies? Maybe the Red Cookie Association said… maybe 200,000 to 300,000 cookies baked probably? In addition, you know, in this hypothetical, I imagine if you took aerial photographs over the kitchens, you would need to see certain smoke stacks to release the smoke from baking the cookies and the smoke stacks would project certain shadows, but I guess they’re not visible in the aerial photographs taken over the kitchens. Moreover, if you look at the soil texture it’s really not deep enough for mass cookie storage underground, and so there’s a lot of things. You know, in the cookie kitchen, they say that the ovens are wooden and they have windows on them and they’re not totally secure. And the ovens that they use—they actually did sort of an ad hoc use of that particular kind of an oven even though they made a perfectly good kind of ovens for a different purpose for delousing. I mean, you know, for something else. So none of it really adds up. It just kind of doesn’t really make sense, this crazy cookie analogy. You have to really be—that’s sort of an esoteric story… you wouldn’t understand that if you’re sort of just passing through, if you’re just a normie. So, six million cookies, uh-uh. I don’t buy it. It's all irony, I'm an irony bro, that's all irony, you know, I love and respect everyone, everything that the government says is true.

This final disavowal notwithstanding (“it’s all irony”), Fuentes has actually told his supporters directly, at a live rally, that they should keep their Holocaust denial and antisemitism somewhat quiet when speaking to others even if they talk about them openly amongst themselves: 

“We all have these beliefs. But you know the consequences for believing them and for talking about them. I actually don’t encourage you to go out there and tell everybody in mixed company, you know, don’t come home to your parents and say ‘Hey Mom, Dad, guess who runs America?’ Let’s not do that, okay. Maybe you can. Depends if your parents are cool. I came home from college, I told my parents, I said ‘Mom, dad, you will never guess what never happened.’ [laughter] You won’t believe it! It never happened! And they were like ‘who raised you’? I’m like ‘Mom, relax, okay. What are you, Jewish or something?’ … So then I worked on them… Here’s the thing. You gotta play it close to the vest…”

I am reminded here of Himmler’s Posen speeches (one of the most important internal Nazi admissions of the Holocaust), in which Himmler said “Amongst ourselves, for once, it shall be said quite openly, but all the same we will never speak about it in public,” namely “the extermination of the Jewish people.” (Pop quiz, who said it, Himmler or Fuentes? “All I want is revenge against my enemies and a total Aryan victory.” Answer here.)

Fuentes doesn’t play his anti-Jewish hatred that close to the vest, though. He produces videos with titles like “exposing the Jewish control matrix.” He has condemned the “bastardized Jewish subversion of the American creed,” which turned a “Christian” nation into a supposedly “Judeo-Christian” one. “Organized Jewry,” he says, operates like a “transnational gang.” He has said that “The Jews hate me. And do you know what else the Jews hate? Jesus Christ.” He has promised that “the enemies of Christ have no future in this world,” that “we will make them die in the holy war,” and “they will go down with their Satanic master.” Fuentes is a rabid Christian nationalist who has promised to purge the country of non-Christians, and the speech was given in front of a projection showing guns and bullets. 

It should come as no surprise that Fuentes is also a misogynist. He believes women shouldn’t go to college and that rape is “so not a big deal.” He said he could “totally” imagine murdering his (hypothetical) wife “‘cause I just get mad,” then insisting he was kidding but “women really do piss me off.” (If he does find anyone willing to marry him, he says he wants her to be sixteen years old.) He described his “ideal society” as one where birth control, “fornication,” and pornography are outlawed and women have no careers or vote. In his words: “It’s not enough to say, ‘we’re against trannies’ — you’ve got to be against women’s rights, too…. We want to go back to the Middle Ages.” He has said that society began to go awry when we stopped burning women alive: 

We need to go back to burning women alive. Like when they’re convicted of crimes obviously. Not-not random acts of violence. But remember that in medieval times I’ve said this on the show before. When women were witches, what happened to them? They were burned alive. Real phenomenon. And we stopped doing that and then everything went out of control. You know, we all said all that was such a horrible tragedy. We really need to stop burning these women alive for casting spells. And then guess what happened? They started casting their spells again. They started speaking in devilish tongues and casting spells. And now we have a totally fucked up society. Where the women are molesting your kids in primary schools, and woman are accusing you of rape or they’re raping you in some cases. Or they’re killing you. Uhm. And is Amber Heard one of these people who would not be sentenced to death for being a witch in medieval times? I mean she probably would be. Would the world not be better if these sort of spell casting witches receive something more than a promotion at work? I don’t know, I’m just saying. I’m just saying things seem to work out a little bit better when the witch question was answered…

Oh, of course, he’s a moderate, it’s only when they’re convicted of crimes, although the crime in question is witchcraft.

Fuentes is homophobic, condemning the “filthy anal sex” of gay men, but also appears to be a proud incel, saying that having sex with women is gay. (I guess that technically makes him a “volcel” since his celibacy appears to be voluntary.)

It goes on and on. Of course he also hates Muslims. And don’t get him started on Black people! “White people are every single bit justified in being racist,” he has said. He has said the Jim Crow era was better for Black people (“‘They had to drink out of a different water fountain,’ big fucking deal… Who cares?”) He has also said of Black people “they make me nervous.” I’m not surprised. Someone who openly uses the n-word might have reason to be nervous around Black people.  

Fuentes thinks America should be ruled by a “Catholic Taliban.” (His term.) Despite having once been a staunch supporter of Donald Trump (“I am a Trump cultist... I am a soldier for Donald Trump”) he is now savagely critical of Donald Trump, often for being too soft on immigrants. (He is disgusted by JD Vance’s biracial family, considering Vance complicit in the so-called Great Replacement. “You can’t make me go and vote for some fat ass with some mixed-race family,” he has said.) He also dislikes Trump’s support of Israel, not because Fuentes has any sympathy for Palestinians but because he thinks it’s an example of the Jews controlling the government. 

Fuentes’ neo-Nazi sympathies, hatred of women, violent antisemitism, and so on are on open display for all the world to see. He has summarized his ideology as “Jews are running society, women need to shut the fuck up, Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part, and we would live in paradise; it's that simple.” Yet even though Fuentes has been clear that he wants to see the “enemies of Christ” killed in a holy war, and been frank about his admiration of Hitler, he has been treated with kid gloves in plenty of venues, with people who should know better failing to tell their readers and listeners about Fuentes’ true beliefs. Patrick Bet-David, host of the hugely popular PBD Podcast, had Fuentes on, and while making clear that he disagreed with Fuentes, said Fuentes is “hated by many” who simply don’t “have a clue who the guy is.” Bet-David allowed Fuentes to present himself as simply a man with some Controversial Opinions who is constantly being canceled instead of listened to. “I hope you enjoy getting to know this individual,” Bet-David told his audience, but he didn’t help them “get to know” the fact that Fuentes is a neo-Nazi.

The traditionalist Catholic magazine Crisis also softened Fuentes’ Nazism, saying that while he has “baggage” and has said things that “no Catholic should defend,” his “attachment to Catholic doctrine appears genuine,” praising him because he “defends marriage with conviction, champions family without apology, and pushes back on the cultural war against Christian belief with a bluntness many bishops avoid.” The writer argued that:

He confronts what others dodge. He slams immigration policies that break working families. He denounces foreign wars that enrich contractors and bury children. He defends masculinity in a culture that mocks it… These are real grievances. He voices them loudly and unapologetically. Young men like myself feel targeted by the culture. They hear “toxic” attached to masculinity and “oppressive” glued to tradition. They see crime facts dismissed when they cut against the script. They watch their demographic blamed for everything while others are shielded. Fuentes meets their frustration with data and defiance, magnetic even when he wanders where Catholics cannot follow. He can be bold in truth yet brutal in tone. He critiques feminism with flashes of cruelty. He calls out crime with words that can veer into prejudice. He marries clarity with corrosion, forcing Catholics to sift the wheat from the weeds.

Now, I’d argue that this is massive understatement and elision. First, of course, I’d dispute the legitimacy of some of these “real grievances.” (The foreign wars are indeed bad, but young men are not “targeted by the culture,” even if they “feel” that way. Sorry, facts don’t care about your feelings!) But “wanders where Catholics cannot follow”? “Flashes” of cruelty? He says he wants to burn women as witches and “kill the globalists”! HE LOVES HITLER. How many times can I say this? THE MAN LOVES ADOLF HITLER. 

Some people don’t even seem to be aware of the full extent of Fuentes’ pro-Hitler, violent beliefs. Joe Rogan questioned whether Fuentes was a “Holocaust denier” or just “debates the numbers.” He’s clearly a denier (see above), but when asked about his Holocaust denial by the New York Times, Fuentes retreated to the position that he’s Just Asking Questions: “I’ve never taken a hard position… I’ve never done the deep dive into it, to tell you the truth.” (Well, maybe you should shut the fuck up about it!) Comedian Dave Smith just had Fuentes on his own podcast for a friendly discussion; turning to the “Jewish question,” Fuentes explained his theory that Jews are manipulating America, with only light pushback from Smith. In yet another friendly interview, Glenn Greenwald said to Fuentes that it’s easy for people to “demonize and attack you by taking these quotes that can sound not just very racist, but very almost Nazi-like and kind of an extermination rhetoric,” suggesting that Fuentes was in fact engaged in “ironic humor” and encouraging people to watch Fuentes’s show. But there is nothing ironic in Fuentes’s “holy war” speech to followers, in which he encourages them to keep their Holocaust denial close to the vest. It is a very sincere exhortation to his “soldiers for God” to “infiltrate the system” and create a fully Christianized country. I have no doubt that Fuentes’ ideal America is fully purged of Black people, Muslims, Jews, and atheists, with women kept as chattel and disciplined with violence. I believe this because it’s what Fuentes says when he’s talking to his audience.

One of the most frustrating findings from my dive into the New York Times coverage of Hitler’s rise was how naive the Times was about Hitler. The Times wrote in the 1920s that “several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded, and that he was merely using anti-Semitism as a bait to catch followers and keep them aroused, enthusiastic, and in line.” Oops! I am worried that Fuentes can pull off something like this, with credulous journalists assuming he’s being ironic when he says that Adolf Hitler was “fucking cool.” 

Fuentes alarms me because he really does seem a lot like Hitler. He’s easy to laugh at, but filled with consistent anger and a grandiose sense of historic destiny. He is, in his own way, charismatic. The stuff he says is deranged, but he says it with such conviction and self-assurance that plenty of credulous followers will swallow it. 

I don’t think Fuentes is a particularly likely candidate to become an American Führer, just because he is so personally repellent and aggressively uncool. He openly despises and belittles his own fans, the “groypers.” (They are named after a cartoon toad.) “I can barely contain my true feeling about you. My true animosity and hatred. Utter disdain,” he has said. Beyond that, there are other structural factors in his way: the U.S. is a much more diverse country than 1930s Germany was, meaning that he’d have to win without the support of a huge percentage of the population. The female 50 percent of the country, too, have no reason to support someone who wants to burn them as witches. Incels are, thank God, not a majority of this country, and I suspect the “Groyper Army” will largely stay in their parents’ basements. (That’s a cliche, but Fuentes literally broadcast out of his parents’ basement after dropping out of college.) Fuentes may end up being another George Lincoln Rockwell, the leader of the American Nazi Party, who remained marginal and then was assassinated by one of his own former followers. Many Americans are proud of this country’s history of fighting Nazism, and sympathy with Hitler is just about the only remaining political taboo. 

But even if he is kept from power—and we shouldn’t be certain of that, given that Hitler, too, was written off as a fringe idiot—Fuentes may succeed at making neo-Nazi beliefs more common in this country. Already, he has boasted that views that used to be fringe (such as open racism, which had been taboo for a few decades) are becoming more respectable on the right. “Think about how far we've come in a year and a half … how similar to me they all sound.” He elaborates: 

When I began my career in 2017, [...] I was considered radioactive in the American Right for my White Identitarian, race realist, ‘Jewish aware,’ counter-Zionist, authoritarian, traditional Catholic views ... In 2023, on almost every count, our previously radioactive views are pounding on the door of the political mainstream.

He has a plan, and has promised that “Slowly but surely, piece by piece, it is not unlikely that in 5, 10, 15 years, we have 10,000 hard-hitting Groypers in every corridor of power.” The plan is that “Bit by bit we start to break down these walls and we start to get back in … and then one day, we become the mainstream,” referring to right-wing organizations that have banned him and other white nationalists. 

He knows that accomplishing this will require him to burnish his image a little. It will require “changing our look and aesthetic to blend in[…] put on the American flag.” “We’re going to have to stop saying the n-word on the show,” he lamented recently. And when he does this, Fuentes can probably get the mainstream media eating out of his hands. I can already see the New York Times story: “A Chastened Fuentes Moderates His Tone.” I wrote critically in 2017 about how the mainstream media was covering neo-Nazis like Richard Spencer (anyone remember him?), writing long profiles that gave them plenty of space to air their noxious views even if the overall tone was critical. 

I also think Fuentes is poised to take advantage of a political opening created by the failure of the two major political parties. Fuentes has lamented the fact that “our kids and this generation is never going to own anything[…] Debt slavery. Never owning a house, never owning a car, never paying off their school. Never making an income to support a family. Not being able to have a family.” Here he sounds like Bernie Sanders for a minute, until you find out he thinks that the answer is mass deportation and stopping the Jewish cabal that rules the country. He draws from the Nazi playbook of combining superficial economic populism with scapegoating of minorities: “The Far Left is terrified of the Far Right because they know that if given the opportunity, the masses would prefer their ‘working class economic populism’ without black superpredators, third world immigrants, transgenders, and Jewish power.’” In fact, leftists would look at the issue differently, arguing that working-class economic populism prevents you from needing to blame “third world immigrants” and “Jewish power” for your problems, because it guarantees that everyone gets to live in an affordable country. 

Fuentes has also reaped benefits from Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Some of Fuentes’s tweets about Israel sound like they could have come from a leftist, e.g. “Just one day after Trump supposedly put Israel on notice for violating the ceasefire—today he is declaring that the United States will personally ‘save Netanyahu’ from being prosecuted by the Israeli courts. Imagine going to the mat for Trump every day and defending this.” I am sure there are plenty of people who have seen a Fuentes tweet critical of U.S. support for the bombing of Iran and clicked “follow,” not realizing they were also going to be served an endless stream of conspiratorial content about the “Jewish control matrix.” 

One of my core convictions about Nazis is that we must take the threat they pose very seriously indeed, and we must understand that their methods involve duplicity. We know that Fuentes wants to impose a racist, theocratic dictatorship on the country. We must approach all decisions about when to engage with him and cover him with the understanding that that is his mission. Watch his holy war speech to his followers. Do not be naive about him. Already, members of Congress have attended his events. Donald Trump has had dinner with him, supposedly without knowing who he was. An extremism researcher told WIRED that “Young Trump supporters listen to Nick Fuentes, and if they don’t listen to him, they listen to people who have been influenced by him.” Because the “groypers” keep their beliefs somewhat quiet, there may be some already in positions of power. 

We must take this stuff seriously. Please, none of this “he just has some controversial opinions” stuff. Don’t call him “America’s most canceled man” or something. (“America’s Next Top Racist”... really, Atlantic?) I have never been a proponent of “deplatforming,” because I think sometimes it is worth debating even the most odious people in order to expose them. But it’s unforgivable to overlook or set aside Fuentes’ neo-Nazism, violent misogyny, Holocaust denial, and plan for a dictatorial Catholic state inspired by Adolf Hitler. We should also give no credence to the idea that Fuentes is engaged in “irony” or edgy jokes when he says things like “your body, my choice, forever.” These supposed “jokes” are also, as far as we can tell, Fuentes’ actual beliefs. 

If Fuentes ever succeeds in the political project he is committed to, he will turn this country into a true fascist nightmare that makes Donald Trump and JD Vance look like social democrats. We have to take this shit seriously, keep people like this as pariahs, and thwart any effort to make them more mainstream or legitimate. Fighting them will require offering a powerful, inspiring alternative to far-right politics. Nazis fill political vacuums at moments of crisis. If the left can give people a movement worth believing in, based on humane values of solidarity and justice, slimy neo-Nazis like Fuentes will stand no chance of attaining political influence. On the other hand, in the absence of a credible, organized alternative, the far right “holy war” may just be getting started.