America’s Next Top Racist
”But Fuentes has held on. After rebranding Twitter as X, Elon Musk reinstated his account last year. Major media figures on the right once tried to handle Fuentes’s encroachment into their spaces by basically pretending that he didn’t exist. They can no longer do that. In the past several weeks, he has weathered various attacks from a trio of high-profile right-wing figures, including Musk, Candace Owens, and Tucker Carlson. In a conversation with Owens on his show, Carlson called Fuentes a ‘weird little gay kid in his basement’ and tried to discredit him by intimating, without evidence, that he is an agent who is working to ‘discredit non-crazy right voices’ such as himself and Owens. ‘I think Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens view him as a competitor,’ Ben Lorber, an analyst with Political Research Associates, a group that monitors the far right, told me. ‘He’s almost outflanking them in a discourse they want to corner.’”