The atmosphere was warm and friendly as two prominent Right-wing figures exchanged smiles across a gleaming dining table. Over the course of more than two hours, they took turns bolstering each other’s self-esteem, finding joy in their shared perspectives.

Both individuals, they asserted, were simply misunderstood reasonable voices whose sensible opinions had been misconstrued by their detractors.

These two were Tucker Carlson, a widely-followed podcast host, and Nick Fuentes, a self-identified white nationalist commentator. The repercussions from their recent tête-à-tête have sent ripples through America’s ruling party, and the controversy shows no signs of abating.

Carlson, with a background as a CNN and Fox News presenter, stands as a titan in U.S. conservative circles. His podcast ranks among the most popular in the nation, and he commands an audience of nearly 17 million followers on X. In stark contrast, Fuentes is a figure notorious for his Nazi sympathies, racism, anti-Semitism, and misogyny.

Their discussion, which has amassed over six million views online, has sparked a fierce internal conflict within the Republican Party. The debate centers on whether Fuentes and his supporters—primarily disenchanted young white men who identify as Groypers (a term derived from a controversial internet meme)—should be embraced by the party, which has historically kept them at a distance.

Some analysts suggest that the party is struggling to maintain its appeal, particularly among younger voters, and can no longer ignore the existence of Fuentes, at 27, and his fervent followers.

Anyone who has wondered if the Republican Party could get any more extreme than it has under Donald Trump and his Maga cronies has their answer right there in Fuentes and his Groyper groupies.

A Holocaust Denier who leads an ‘America First Foundation’ that insists the US is under attack by a ‘hostile foreign elite’, Fuentes says he wants a country that is white, ‘traditionalist’ and Christian.

Self-proclaimed white nationalist pundit Nick Fuentes speaking on The Tucker Carlson Show

Fuentes’s followers are mostly disaffected young white men who call themselves Groypers

But there is little that seems Christian about Fuentes’s endless tide of vitriol and hatred. He has described Hitler as ‘awesome’, insists many women want to be raped and has vowed to ‘make Jews die in the holy war’.

Tirelessly and gleefully offensive, Fuentes delivers each new gobbet of bile with a giggle, as if he’s only joking. He clearly isn’t, such as when, a smile plastered all over his face, he whimsically compared the six million Jews killed by the Nazis to ‘cookies’ baked in an oven.

He’s also denied the atrocities of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, dismissing it as ‘all a lie’.

Fuentes – who claims to be a proud ‘incel’, or involuntarily celibate – knows that his willingness to break any taboo, occasionally even humorously, is his chief attraction to his fans.

He once suggested that ‘we need to go back to burning women alive’ and says he hates feminists.

A November 2024 post on X in which he quipped ‘Your Body, my choice. Forever’ has attracted more than 100 million views.

Not, he insists, that he’s interested in sex. Although he has admitted fantasising about marrying a 16-year-old, Fuentes has urged his flock to follow his example and abstain completely from any sexual activity. ‘I have no interest in sex at all,’ he said in June. ‘I am interested in a total Aryan victory and that is what gets me off.’

Observers say the smirking Fuentes exerts a hold over Groypers that is almost cult-like.

Fuentes knows that his willingness to break any taboo, occasionally even humorously, is his chief attraction to his fans

Some conservatives say they’d dearly love the Trump administration to squash Fuentes, but it has remained almost entirely silent, while Vance last week weakly called on Republicans to unite as ‘in-fighting is stupid’

In a March episode of his podcast – streamed on Rumble, a conservative version of YouTube, and regularly attracting hundreds of thousands of views – he summarised his views: ‘Jews are running society, women need to shut the f*** up, blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part, and we would live in paradise. It’s that simple.’

It’s also simple to understand why he’s been shunned – until now. Apart from a notorious evening in 2022 when controversial rapper Kanye West – who’s also been accused of anti-Semitism – took Fuentes along with him to dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago (Trump later insisted he’d had no idea who he was), most conservatives have previously treated Fuentes and his poisonous views as beyond the pale.

He was also banned from most social media platforms and boasted of being ‘the most cancelled man in America’.

But Elon Musk last year allowed him back on X, and with his views and priorities not a million miles from those of the Maga crowd now in the ascendant, Fuentes – who boasts a million followers on Musk’s social media platform – has suddenly found conservative podcasters such as Carlson prepared to give him airtime.

Fuentes was, naturally, on his best behaviour for Carlson who, despite increasingly championing risible conspiracy theories and fawning over truly objectionable interviewees (such as Vladimir Putin in a notoriously sycophantic interview last year), remains an influential figure with many conservatives. And Carlson has plenty of time for Israel-bashers. Despite only three months ago describing Fuentes as a ‘weird little gay kid in his basement’, Carlson treated him with kid gloves – even when he said he was a ‘fan’ of Stalin and kept using the sort of language such as ‘world Jewry’ which sounded like it was borrowed from Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.

‘[Fuentes] is an accomplished demagogue and strives to find big-audience platforms to mainstream his views by sophistry, playing the victim, and toning down his extremist views for an hour or so,’ historian Victor Davis Hanson, a Fellow of the Hoover Institution think tank and one of America’s most respected conservative commentators, told the Daily Mail.

The Carlson chat, Prof Hanson added, had allowed Fuentes to force the Maga movement to ‘either reject or defend him’ while ‘exaggerating his importance to absurd lengths’.

The deep divisions that the interview caused among Republicans were swiftly illustrated when Kevin Roberts, president of the Trump-aligned Heritage Foundation think tank faced a rebellion by his own staff after he publicly defended Carlson. Faced with resignations that included his own chief of staff, Roberts apologised for his ‘mistake’.

Fuentes filming with Louis Theroux for his Forbidden America documentary, which explored the impact of the internet and social media on controversial corners of American society

On one side of this civil war are those – a heavy majority of Republicans, insist party insiders – who are appalled by Fuentes and his pals and want them permanently consigned to the outer darkness of US politics.

They clearly include veteran senator Lindsey Graham who sarcastically quipped ‘I’m in the ‘Hitler sucks’ wing of the Republican Party’, and Senate colleague Ted Cruz who says the Groyper phenomenon presents an ‘existential crisis in our party and in our country’.

Opposing them are the Groypers themselves and those on the wilder shores of Maga-world who see Trump as not nearly radical enough in creating the white, Christian and aggressively nationalistic country they crave.

The America First Foundation, which Fuentes set up in 2020, says it fights for ‘the role of God in society and upholding the principles of nationalism, Christianity and traditionalism’.

They’re part of a growing faction within US conservatism that critics have dubbed the ‘Woke Right’, because they share the same obsessions – in particular the cancel culture and aggressive intolerance of anyone who disagrees with them – as the woke Left-wingers they supposedly despise.

Rod Dreher, a conservative commentator and friend of Vice President J D Vance, says he’s been reliably informed that between 30 to 40 per cent of Republican Party staff under the age of 30 and working in Washington DC are Groypers.

Last month, the leak of a private online group chat among young Republicans in New York revealed them sharing anti-Semitic and racist slurs, and joking about ‘gas chambers’. It suggests Dreher’s estimate may not be wildly inaccurate.

And then there’s a middle ground in the civil war – Republicans who find Fuentes and his cronies distasteful but for various reasons won’t publicly condemn them.

This camp, say insiders, includes both President Trump and Vice President Vance. The latter has particular reason to loathe Fuentes given he’s attacked Vance as a ‘fat guy who’s married to a jeet’ – a jeet being a derogatory term for a person of South Asian ancestry. (Vance’s wife, Usha, is an Indian-American Hindu).

Some conservatives say they’d dearly love the Trump administration to squash Fuentes, but it has remained almost entirely silent, while Vance last week weakly called on Republicans to unite as ‘in-fighting is stupid’.

Some suspect Team Trump fears the electoral consequences of making new enemies on the Right when they already have enough on the Left – especially when Trump’s approval rating stands at less than 43 per cent.

Republicans ‘see that Democrats don’t disown the worst among themselves… so shrug as to why they alone should divide themselves’, said Prof Hanson.

He also identified more practical reasons for the Republican silence, namely the Groypers’ reputation for getting very nasty with critics.

‘Some officials think the Fuentes crowd is a bit rabid and have no desire to be bird-dogged [watched closely] by mobs of online fanatics and so keep quiet rather than arouse them,’ he said. And that, he believes, is risky as it is ‘historically the sort of appeasement that empowers dangerous extremists’.

Fuentes himself last week became the latest person to interpret Vance’s silence as rooted in a fear that upsetting the Groypers will severely damage his chances of winning the 2028 presidential election.

He crowed that the Vice President ‘has to pander to us’ and was ‘getting squeezed’ between his donors, who loathe the Groypers, and a movement that – Fuentes threatened – would turn out in force to stop Vance getting the 2028 Republican nomination.

Fuentes, who was born and raised in Illinois – and has a father, ironically for a white nationalist, who is half-Mexican – first gained attention when he went to a notorious 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and later dropped out of Boston University, claiming he’d consequently received death threats.

He recalls coming home from university and telling his appalled parents: ‘Hitler was awesome, Hitler was right, the Holocaust didn’t happen… they were so not cool about it.’

He started to build a career as a pundit who didn’t seem to care what he said or worry about staying ‘on message’ with Trump, whose presidential ambitions Fuentes insists he didn’t initially support – one of the main reasons was Trump’s unqualified support for Israel.

However, he and his supporters took part in Trump’s ‘Rally to Save America’ to protest against Joe Biden’s election victory at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Fuentes reportedly didn’t enter the building but urged his followers to ‘keep moving’ towards it.

Some who’ve tracked the rise of the Groypers claim they shouldn’t be taken too seriously, dismissing them as an almost entirely online movement that – when not playing video games – likes to exploit the anonymity offered by the internet.

They seem less interested in advancing any kind of ideology, it’s said, than getting a transgressive thrill from hurling poisonous and racist abuse.

But political violence is rising in the US as the divisions have become more rancorous.

Meanwhile, some of the worst mass shootings that have rocked the country have been carried out by just these sort of socially-alienated internet obsessives.

Groypers often express their support for their leader online by using the acronym ‘RKD4NJF’.

Chillingly, it stands for ‘rape, kill and die for Nicholas Joseph Fuentes’.