Same Difference: A Disturbing Mashup Of Nazi Fuentes And Fox News

A bit about Fuentes, in case you’re not familiar.

According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Fuentes attended the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. His podcast America First has been the genesis of the alt-right movement, and his supporters are known as “Groypers” or the “Groyper Army.”

“Groypers believe they are working to defend against demographic and cultural changes that are destroying the “true America”—a white, Christian nation. [...] To Groypers, ‘America First’ means that the U.S. should close its borders, bar immigrants, oppose globalism and promote ‘traditional’ values like Christianity and oppose ‘liberal’ values such as feminism and LGBTQ+ rights,” ADL writes.

Since its founding in 1996, Fox News has been a mouthpiece for not only the Republican Party but, in the last decade or so, for some of the most toxic and blatantly bigoted media outlets to ever exist. Tucker Carlson’s show, specifically, has been the most egregious.

A recent Pew Research Center analysis found that Democrats and Republicans have moved further apart in the last 50 years than ever before. The shift toward the extreme right began in the mid-1990s, which aligns with the launch of Fox News.

Nicholas Confessore, a political and investigative reporter for The New York Times and a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine, has written extensively about Carlson and his racist content on Fox. Confessore says Carlson has shaped the MAGA movement and the Trump wave, telling NPR in an interview that Carlson’s “is the most racist show in the history of cable news.”

“The elements that he [Carlson] borrows and sands down from the far right are not just, you know, kind of isolated incidents on the show or things he pops into here and there. They are a constant theme, a drumbeat spanning hundreds of episodes of the show, hundreds of segments,” Confessore said.

Confessore says when he and his team from the Times began watching segments of Carlson’s, they found rhetoric that wasn’t just similar to that of white supremacists but nearly indistinguishable from them—and it was particularly ubiquitous when it came to the “great replacement theory.”

“Now, that is a direct borrowing of language and concepts from white nationalists and not just conservatives. I'm talking about people who are neo-Nazis, open nativists, white nationalists, people who get together in dark corners of the internet, mostly, and propound theories about how a cabal of elites - sometimes Jews, sometimes broader - are trying to replace Americans. Now, that theme hadn't just popped up on the show last April. A version of it has been present in 400-plus episodes of the show,” Confessore said.

According to Media Matters, after the infamous dinner with Trump, Kanye “Ye” West, and Fuentes, the only folks more silent than House GOP members was Fox News.

”The network devoted a mere seven minutes to the dinner from the time the story broke on Friday through the weekend and ignored it altogether on Monday. Notably, influential prime-time hosts Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham have not mentioned the story at all. Fox is signaling to the viewers who trust it above all other news sources that the story is not important,” Media Matters’ Matt Gertz writes.

That just about says it all.