Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, Jeffrey Epstein, and Pizzagate

Nick Fuentes and the Assassination of Charlie Kirk

Over the last few years I’ve begun spending a considerable amount of my time on some YouTube channels, notably those of Judge Andrew Napolitano, Nima Alkhorshid, and Prof. Glenn Diesen, as well as that of the Grayzone.

The videos they offer have been most useful for the many excellent guests regularly featured. These include leading academics such as Jeffrey Sachs and John Mearsheimer, former senior government officials such as Chas Freeman and Larry Wilkerson, former intelligence officers such as Ray McGovern and Jacques Baud, and a host of others. These knowledgeable experts may not necessarily always be correct in their analysis of world events, but they are certainly sincere and far more knowledgeable than the talking heads on the cable news channels that I had abandoned twenty years ago.

I occasionally watch other YouTube channels along similar lines. For example, Col. Danny Davis recently interviewed a British military officer with considerable personal expertise in naval and air operations. In an hour-long discussion, the guest convincingly argued that if President Donald Trump chose to attack Iran with the military assets that he had deployed to the Persian Gulf, those forces would have little chance of inflicting any substantial damage before they exhausted their munitions. Therefore, he was skeptical that any such order would be given, and despite widespread expectations to the contrary, no such attack has yet occurred.

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Meanwhile, a number of younger, right-wing podcasters had become extremely popular on the Internet, having audiences that were enormously larger than those of the channels that I followed, sometimes by a factor of five or ten. But I almost never watched any of them. Bushcraft 101: A Field... Canterbury, Dave Best Price: $10.37 Buy New $7.73 (as of 01:25 UTC - Details)

For example, prior to his assassination last September, I’d barely been aware of Charlie Kirk, and I’d been equally ignorant of his leading Jewish rival Ben Shapiro.

I’d been almost as unfamiliar with Nick Fuentes, another major right-wing rival to Kirk. His extremely sharp criticism of the powerful and pervasive but hidden influence of Jews and Israel in our society had gotten him banned from YouTube, forcing him to instead stream his daily show first on his own cozy.tv platform and then on Rumble once it became available. He seemed quite popular among some of our commenters, and over the years they’d mentioned that Fuentes had occasionally cited our website and my own American Pravda series as important sources of information, an endorsement that I’d greatly appreciated.

After Kirk’s death, I’d been surprised to discover that Kirk had become such an enormously popular figure among young conservatives that his killing had been a major political event. He had been protected by a professional security detail and shot by a distant sniper, so in many respects the closest historical parallel had been the assassination of JFK sixty-two years earlier.

The FBI claimed to have quickly caught the culprit, who turned out to be the sort of deranged lone gunman almost invariably blamed in these sorts of high-profile killings. But the evidence seemed extremely weak. Several independent analysts quickly highlighted some of the severe flaws in the case, and I noted some additional peculiarities in my own writing.

• The Assassination of Charlie Kirk
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • September 15, 2025 • 6,100 Words

But if the suspect arrested were merely a patsy and Kirk had died at the hands of a conspiracy, who had actually been responsible?

Kirk had spent his entire long career as a fervent supporter of Israel and Zionism but over the previous couple of months, there were indications that he had begun strongly shifting away from that position, instead supporting his close friend conservative media superstar Tucker Carlson, who had grown strongly critical of Israel and its American influence. As a result, Kirk had come under fierce attack from many hair-trigger pro-Israel partisans and major donors outraged over what they regarded as his growing apostasy.

So although there was not the slightest bit of solid evidence implicating Israel or its Mossad in killing Kirk, there was a mountain of circumstantial evidence that they might have had a strong motive to do so. And given Mossad’s absolutely unmatched record of high-level assassinations, that organization seemed the obvious suspect behind any such conspiratorial killing, as I explained in several articles.

Indeed, the case for Israel’s guilt was so strong that in the weeks that followed, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was forced to repeatedly release video statements denying that he had killed Kirk. Despite or perhaps because of such heated public denials, several of the highly reputable mainstream figures regularly interviewed by Napolitano strongly suggested Israel’s possible guilt, as did Carlson.

Indeed, a respectable mainstream journalist also noted that Netanyahu had issued his official public statement praising Kirk’s lifelong devotion to Israel very soon after his death, a statement released so quickly that it almost seemed to have been already prepared prior to Kirk’s sudden and unexpected demise.

I’d heard that Fuentes had long argued that the Mossad had played a central role in the JFK Assassination, the 9/11 Attacks, and numerous other sinister operations conducted on American soil. Yet oddly enough, I soon discovered that he vehemently rejected any such possible Israeli involvement in Kirk’s killing.

The world of young podcasters has long been marked by its bitter enmities. Two of the leading figures promoting a conspiratorial view of Kirk’s assassination and suggesting a possible Israeli role were Candace Owens and Max Blumenthal, both of whom Fuentes regarded as his personal enemies, and that might have helped to explain his extreme reluctance to align himself with their analysis. But other enemies of Fuentes such as Andrew Anglin ferociously attacked him for his views, claiming that he had been compromised. SAS Survival Handbook,... Wiseman, John 'Lofty' Best Price: $12.99 Buy New $12.49 (as of 01:15 UTC - Details)

Normally I would have disregarded all this bitter backbiting, so endemic to those ideological circles. But I noticed some rather surprising developments.

As one of our leading critics of Israel and Jews, Fuentes had naturally spent years being massively vilified and blacklisted by our overwhelmingly pro-Israel and Jewish mainstream media. Despite his considerable audience, his name was almost never mentioned in any respectable outlets and on the very rare occasions that it was, he was viciously smeared as a disgusting anti-Semitic White Supremacist Holocaust Denier, the heir-apparent to David Duke. Yet I’d discovered that all of this had suddenly begun to change in the weeks prior to Kirk’s killing.

As I wrote at the time:

However, in the wake of momentous political events, strange coincidences strike me as highly suspicious. I discovered that the day before Kirk was killed, the New York Times had published a major 2,100 word profile of Fuentes, the tone of which seemed far less hostile than I would have expected and indeed seemed to promote him as the rising new leader of right-wing youth. Fuentes had previously been fiercely demonized in nearly all past media coverage, which had made him one of the most vilified figures in America. But although this piece certainly included a long list of his extreme ideological transgressions, it also suggested that his beliefs might evolve over time as he matured, just as had already been the case in his views about Trump…

I’d think that the lead-time of this sort of journalistic project might be about a month or so, suggesting that it may have been put into the works just after the complete failure of the early August effort by Bill Ackman and others to bribe or browbeat Kirk into submission. So to take a very conspiratorial slant, perhaps some powerful individuals then concluded that there might soon be a new opening at the top for a youthful right-wing podcaster, and decided to audition Fuentes for that role.

Powerful Colombian drug cartels used to offer local officials the choice of plata o plomo—“silver or lead”—and these two options may have been implicitly extended to Kirk, with the decision he made sealing his fate. Then after his death, perhaps a similar sort of offer was extended to Fuentes as well, and mindful of his predecessor’s violent demise, he decided to take the other path.

• American Pravda: Israel, Charlie Kirk, and the 9/11 Attacks
  Charlie Kirk, Bill Ackman, Ben Shapiro, and Nick Fuentes
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • September 23, 2025 • 11,000 Words

The Nick Fuentes Story and His Political Views

Fuentes’ online audience quickly exploded in size in the wake of Kirk’s assassination. Moreover, although he had previously been boycotted by almost every other significant podcaster, his surprisingly respectful, even favorable profile in the Times now suddenly opened many of those doors to him. Thus, he quickly snared lengthy interviews with Patrick Bet-David, Glenn Greenwald, and Dave Smith, shows that together attracted more than 6 million views on YouTube.

Even bigger appearances soon followed. Tucker Carlson’s interview in late October drew some 7 million views, more than anything Carlson had ever gotten other than for his shows with Donald Trump, and with Russian President Vladimir Putin

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A December interview with British host Piers Morgan did nearly as well, getting 6 million views.

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And although Fuentes’ long and very friendly discussion with former Alt-Right leader Richard Spencer later that same month only attracted a small fraction of those huge audiences, some of the resulting clips gained quite a lot of attention on Twitter.

Taken together, these Fuentes appearances accumulated well over 20 million views during just a few weeks, while other interviews and video platforms must have added many millions more. This wave of public exposure vastly exceeded his regular audience on Rumble.

I’d grown curious about this youthful right-winger podcaster, so I watched all these shows. The total came to more than a dozen hours, probably at least twenty times more than all my previous exposure to Fuentes over the past decade, and I tried to draw some conclusions from that material.

Most of these interviews were largely introductory, so much of his discussion focused upon his personal background and his history in conservative circles. He explained that while still a teenager, he’d gained some notoriety for the controversial right-wing views he’d so effectively expressed and his success in debating liberals and leftists on his college campus. These achievements had brought him to the favorable attention of Ben Shapiro’s established conservative media organization.

But Fuentes then refused to trim his beliefs to conform to conservative orthodoxy on various issues including racial ones, and he was soon purged and blacklisted as a consequence. While still in his teens, he had been forced to relaunch his efforts as a lone, independent podcaster lacking any organizational support. Soon banned from YouTube and most other platforms, he very slowly rebuilt his audience from a miniscule base. The story he told sounded perfectly plausible to me.

In his interview with Piers Morgan, he’d emphatically denied that he’d ever questioned the reality of the Holocaust. But aside from that very understandable disclaimer, all his other statements to Morgan, Carlson, and everyone else seemed absolutely sincere, so my suspicions regarding the likelihood that he’d been co-opted or compromised were greatly diminished. I’m hardly a perfect judge of such things, so others who think differently should watch some of his interviews and decide for themselves. Forgotten Home Apothec... Dr. Nicole Apelian Check Amazon for Pricing.

He certainly seemed highly intelligent, and provided quite insightful views on many matters such as recent politics, political correctness, censorship, and issues dealing with Jews and Israel. But on the much less favorable side, I was very far from impressed with the opinions he expressed on most other important policy matters.

In that regard, his long and friendly December discussion with Richard Spencer was quite enlightening. Although he now admitted his mistake, Fuentes confirmed that he’d been wildly enthusiastic about President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff hikes, which I’d regarded as total economic lunacy. He also seemed to think that our deep involvement in the Ukraine war against Russia had proven surprisingly beneficial for America, while I and every expert whose opinion I respected considered it a total disaster for our national interests. And along with almost every other conservative and right-winger in America, he expressed views on immigration issues that I regarded as ridiculous and totally wrong-headed.

I was obviously disappointed to hear those positions, but hardly surprised. After all, Fuentes was a 27-year-old who had dropped out of college as a freshman. Although obviously very bright, he had then spent the decade that followed scrambling to stay afloat, producing hours of daily monologues as an independent right-wing podcaster and probably working entirely alone during most of those years. Banned from PayPal, credit cards, and other financial processing systems, he desperately sought to somehow raise the necessary donations to keep his show on the Internet. He had spent his entire existence in conservative or right-wing circles, so it was unreasonable to expect him to have acquired a broader understanding of some of those complex policy issues.

He’d occasionally mentioned that he’d learned much about certain topics by reading my own articles, probably those dealing with Jews, Israel, and certain controversial historical events such as World War II, the JFK Assassination, and the 9/11 Attacks. I found it unfortunate that he apparently hadn’t read or at least been swayed by my many articles on other matters, but given how busy he was and that my voluminous writings had totaled around 1.5 million words over the past half-dozen years, I was hardly surprised.

I think that Americans in their 20s are often described as constituting a post-literate generation, and during the dozen hours that I watched, I don’t think he’d mentioned a single book or major article that had ever influenced him. Instead, he and most equally youthful podcasters seem to draw most of their understanding of the issues they discuss from Tweets, video clips, podcast interviews and some occasional blogposts, but only very rarely from serious books or articles.

The sources of the information that they relied upon may be adequate for their reasonable comprehension of their favored topics such as political correctness, racial controversies, censorship, and the major foibles of the Biden and Trump Administrations. But that sort of haphazard material is totally inadequate for many other more complex matters, perhaps helping to explain why they generally avoid those or treat them very gingerly.

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