“Everything’s debateable” — so Nick Fuentes told Piers Morgan this week, during a two-hour interview on Morgan’s channel. Technically speaking, the influential far-Right streamer was correct, though what his observation had to do with the interaction unfolding on screen at the time was unclear. For Morgan versus Fuentes was not a debate at all, but rather a dramatic reenactment of a classic family conflict: a pompously outraged father trying to carpet an unrepentant delinquent teen. Entirely in keeping with the effectiveness of boomer parenting styles generally, I’m sorry to report that the kid had the upper hand throughout.
First, though, I should probably declare an interest. At least twice in the past I have travelled to London, been put up in a hotel, got out of bed at some ungodly hour, and then been plonked on the breakfast TV sofa in front of Piers Morgan. Each time he shouted over me and the other hapless guest for approximately three minutes, before we were both dismissed. Suffice to say, then, that on hearing about this interview I was not entirely convinced of the man’s suitability to handle as tricky and multi-faceted a guest as Fuentes: a character both apparently vulnerable and intensely steely, as if the Diary of a Wimpy Kid character had got his hands on Mein Kampf.
Still, Morgan has his own channel now, I reasoned, and a one-to-one conversation rather than a chaotic multiplayer shouting match might be worth a watch. Though politically very different, in other ways Fuentes resembles a mini-Morgan, and for that reason alone, the meeting held interest. Each has a huge internet audience; each exerts tight control over his own channel; each trades on outrage to get clicks. They both seem misanthropic and easily wounded. I’ve already listened to the Red Scare ladies adopt a big sisterly tone towards Fuentes in order to coax out confidences, and watched Tucker Carlson do his kindly father impression. Might Morgan’s sterner parental stance uncover further aspects?
No, of course it didn’t — although it did underline the futility of the hairdryer format with someone who won’t play the game. The entire interview was an extended struggle session, apparently aimed at making Fuentes recant his past statements, or else break down in remorse. Accusations were repeated more and more vociferously by Morgan, until they had nowhere left to go; at which point the host would simply move robotically to the next charge on the autocue. By the middle of the proceedings, Fuentes looked incredulous. By the end, he looked totally bored.
Morgan’s clunking setups could be detected from space. “At some stage in your family, there were immigrants who came to the US, is that correct?” was an early example, and you’re never going to guess where he was going with that one. When he eventually got to the point, Fuentes batted the move off easily enough: these days there is a different kind of immigrant arriving, and the US is a different kind of country. As usual, his interrogator had no real follow up.
At other times, Morgan managed to swerve open goalmouths in favour of pointlessly elaborate back-and-forths. “Just to be clear, you don’t like black people who play the victim and are rude. Is that your position?” he accurately summarised at one point. Clearly anticipating that his interviewer was about to make a “physician, heal thyself” kind of move, the notoriously rude white-victimhood-enjoyer laughed it off in advance: “I see where you are going with this.” But no; the actual bear trap being laboriously constructed for Fuentes was that he had been insufficiently rigorous in applying this principle to his friend Kanye West. “Your choice of friend is Ye, who is probably the number one black victimhood narcissist in America … do you understand the problem?” Morgan thundered. There then followed a bafflingly tangential discussion of whether West, in particular, was a nice person or not.
Morgan’s main weapon, though, was shame. It failed utterly. The tape would roll, and Fuentes would be shown footage of himself in the past saying some outrageous taboo-busting thing or other. Cut back to the present, and his English daddy would sternly ask him if he stood by it. Every single time, Fuentes simply asserted with a grin that he did. Did he really have an “opposition to world Jewry”? He did. Did he still think, as he once said, that “Hitler was kind of fucking cool?” “Yes, I do,” Fuentes replied. “And I’m tired of pretending he’s not, to be honest.”
The nadir of this approach came during a bonkers segment where Lord Finkelstein unexpectedly made an appearance on screen, introduced as Morgan’s friend. He was there to describe how his mother and numerous other close relatives had suffered terrible fates under Hitler and Stalin, and to ask Fuentes whether he would “rather be on team Mum than team Hitler”. Completely unsurprisingly, Fuentes openly mocked this appeal to his finer sensibilities from an unknown old British gent sitting in his large kitchen in a quarter-zip, lecturing a younger American generation about events they had been told about thousands of times already. “My generation is done with the pearl-clutching… I don’t even know who this person is, why is this person talking to me,” Fuentes said. He went on: “We’re tired of hearing about slavery, and the Holocaust, and Jim Crow, we are done hearing about that.”
That, then, is the nub of the matter. Fuentes and his feral supporters online simply don’t care. They weren’t there, they aren’t responsible for any of it anyway, and they are more concerned about other things. The more that their elders amp up their incredulity and disgust at this lack of compassion and decency, etc. etc., the more disassociated they get, and the more funny they think it all is. They have already seen the documentaries, been to the memorial sites, listened to the lectures, had their heartstrings plucked to breaking point.
“Morgan’s main weapon was shame. It failed utterly.”
Any parent has surely been in this position at least once: adopting a stern face, insisting this is extremely serious, why are you laughing, stop it at once! But the kids are not going to stop; they revel in their herd immunity to the socially prescribed response. Every trick you pull to pile on the emotional pressure will only be met with derision and increased resolve.
Since the interview aired, there have been various responses, and many of them seem to me to be wishful thinking. Aaron Bastani has said that, faced with Morgan’s ham-fisted probing, Fuentes “falls to pieces … He looks incredibly vulnerable.” I saw no such thing. Writing in the Times, Rob Henderson has argued that Fuentes’ appeal rests on constantly cycling through personas: sometimes ironic and jokey, sometimes serious, without people being able to pin him down. But in longer inquisitorial formats such as Morgan’s, he writes, “the contradictions pile up — and the audience he has cultivated will finally see what has been in plain sight all along”.
Yet the idea that Fuentes’ groyper following is going to be put off by some inconsistency in his various statements seems to me totally naïve. On the contrary, I think they will applaud him for his trickster slipperiness. I assume they are very much over playing the game according to the conventions of rational inquiry. Why should they follow them, when their opponents do not? With their recent race-based crusades, many supposed liberals threw the principles of truth, fairness, and interpretative charity out of the window. In that respect, Fuentes is just following their lead.
Ultimately, the most that Morgan’s encounter with Fuentes shows us is that the comforting ideal of a Big Television Interview, definitively sorting the good guys from the bad guys, is now impotent in a time of streaming. We can no longer console ourselves with the idea of an implacable inquisitor in a suit, calling some public figure to account on behalf of the imaginary Reasonable Viewer. The whole idea of an implicit Reasonable Viewer was based on an underlying consensus about basic values, which no longer exists. Instead, we have lots of groups of loyal partisans, and their pet figures getting rich off their clicks.
Equally, no interviewer has sufficient control over the means of visual production, and many guests have bigger reaches than their hosts. The discussion can never definitively end, because there is always the chance of another spicy comeback. Last time I looked, Morgan and Fuentes were trading post-interview blows on X. Fuentes was proclaiming “TOTAL GROYPER VICTORY” and Morgan was telling Fuentes that he really should get laid. David Frost must be turning in his grave.
So yes, everything is debatable, as Fuentes says; but nobody is actually debating. There can’t be debates where neither side is willing to play by the rules. I am afraid I have no quick answer as to how to make Fuentes’ white nationalism less appealing to masses of young men, but Morgan has shown us that old-school tactics have absolutely had their day.
