During an interview with Piers Morgan that aired Monday, white nationalist streamer and former Mar-a-Lago dinner guest Nick Fuentes defended calling Hitler “damn cool.”
Morgan pressed Fuentes about the past comments, playing a video statement from author Danny Finkelstein, whose family was persecuted during the Holocaust, and asking him why he was praising the “most genocidal monster of the last 150 years.”
“My generation, we’re just done clutching the pearl,” Fuentes said during a heated back-and-forth exchange, during which he frequently grinned when Morgan criticized him.
“He killed twelve million people,” Morgan continued. “What’s fucking cool about that?”
“The montages. It’s just cool. The uniforms. The parades,” Fuentes replied. “It’s cool. As a man you look at World War II, and it’s fascinating.”
As the conversation continued, Fuentes claimed that “no one is in favor of genocide,” then emphasized that his views on the issue are “not that deep,” before claiming that white Americans are “baffled” by stories of the Holocaust to avoid becoming “too white, too proud and too Christian.”
Fuentes and his highly online, right-wing “groyper” ideological contemporaries have been at the center of a heated debate in Republican political circles, given the broadcaster’s large following among young conservatives and, as he claims, among officials “in every department” of the government.
Tucker Carlson’s recent friendly interview with Fuentes sparked something of a MAGA civil war, with prominent conservatives like Ben Shapiro attacking Carlson while right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation rallied to his defense.
President Donald Trump, in turn, declined to criticize the interview, saying people can’t tell Carlson who to interview and that he didn’t know much about Fuentes, despite once notoriously having dinner with him and anti-Semitic rapper Ye at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
In addition, a series of leaked Telegram messages from a group of leaders in a Young Republicans club captured individuals praising Hitler.
While Vice President J.D. Vance dismissed the outrage over these reports as “pearl-grabbing,” even Laura Loomer, an influential right-wing conspiracy theorist and self-described “proud Islamophobe,” wrote on social media last month that the Republican Party “has a Nazi problem.”
During a recent radio broadcast, Fox News host Sean Hannity sounded a similar tonecalling on the MAGA movement to dismiss Nazi sympathizers from its ranks, in comments that could be read as an indictment of Fuentes.
“If you hear someone being racist, that’s probably a good indication that he or she isn’t worth your time,” says Hannity said. “If someone is a white nationalist, he or she is probably not worth your time. If they praise Adolf Hitler, he or she is probably not worth your time.”
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