As Trump’s political future gets shakier, his influencer ecosystem is eating itself alive. The MAGA movement — once defined by its outsider energy and unified hatred of the establishment — is now stuck in a petty, performative war over who gets to be the most racist, the most extreme, and the most canceled.
In classic fashion, no one is more eager to start that fight than Nick Fuentes — white nationalist, incel mascot, and perennial liability. He’s best remembered for that infamous Mar-a-Lago dinner with Trump and Kanye West, a meet-up that felt more like a failed “Celebrity Rehab” reboot than a political summit.
Lately, Fuentes has been lashing out at MAGA’s A-list: Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Senator JD Vance. His gripe? They’re not racist enough — or at least, not racist out loud.
He sees them as posers, tourists cashing in on a movement he thinks he helped create. And he’s not subtle about it.
During a recent appearance on Owens’ podcast, Carlson called Fuentes a “weird little gay kid in his basement in Chicago.” (For the record, Fuentes insists he’s not gay — just involuntarily celibate. That distinction seems very important to him.)
In response, Fuentes unloaded a rant that sounded like a bitter fanfic: Tucker is a silver spoon elitist, raised in prep schools, the son of a Reagan-era bureaucrat, and heir to a frozen dinner fortune.
“Now he’s going to be the spokesperson for all white America?” Fuentes sneered. “Now he’s gonna roll up his sleeves [and act like], ‘I just like to hunt and fish in my log cabin. I care about Klarna and credit card debt.’”
Fuentes then did what he does best — turned the conversation into a martyr monologue. He cast himself as the true voice of disaffected white America, a “precocious” student who got red-pilled early and punished for asking the “hard questions” about Israel — way before Tucker or Owens ever dared.
From there, it spiraled. Carlson, Fuentes claimed, is a “CIA brat” (a rumor helped along by Tucker’s dad being a diplomat), a neocon sellout thanks to his time at The Weekly Standard, and a fake populist who only started caring about working-class politics once it tested well on YouTube.
Even Richard Spencer — yes, that Richard Spencer — chimed in, accusing Carlson and the rest of flirting with white nationalism while being too cowardly to own it. He called it a reboot of the Southern Strategy: drop the slurs, keep the dog whistles.
Candace Owens didn’t escape the Fuentes fire either. According to him, she cashed in on her identity to land a “DEI sinecure” at Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire, married a wealthy Brit, and now cosplays as the voice of red-state America.
As for JD Vance? Fuentes wrote him off entirely: “He named his kid Vivek,” he said — as if giving your child a non-Confederate name amounts to cultural betrayal. And since Vance’s wife isn’t white, Fuentes doesn’t think he’s qualified to represent white people at all.
None of this would matter if these weren’t people with real political clout. Carlson still commands a huge audience. Owens has loyal fans and a massive platform. Vance is in the Senate and potentially on a 2028 ticket. And yet, here they are being dragged for not being sufficiently racist by the fringe influencers they once tried to keep at arm’s length.
What’s really going on isn’t some ideological fight over purity or principle — it’s brand warfare. The OG racists are pissed that the newer, shinier influencers are now profiting off the MAGA identity they helped define.
Fuentes and his fellow “Groypers” see themselves as the ones who bled for the cause — banned, deplatformed, and vilified. Meanwhile, Tucker and friends are making money off safer, sanitized versions of the same message, with cleaner logos and better lighting.
It’s punk rock vs. pop — except instead of arguing about selling out to MTV, they’re arguing about who hates immigrants more.
And yes, the ideologies here are toxic. Fuentes and Spencer aren’t noble, and their “suffering” is mostly self-inflicted. But their resentment points to a real split inside MAGA: a movement caught between the openly vile and the professionally polished.
In the end, it’s not about who’s right — it’s about who is the real racist.
