MAGA Republicans often attack others on the right for, as they see it, failing to live up to purity tests. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky), for example, has a very right-wing resumé yet is being vilified as a RINO (Republican In Name Only) and accused of being “woke” by other Republicans after voting “no” on President Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill.” Massie, his MAGA detractors say, deserves to be voted out of office for not being MAGA enough.
Never Trump conservative Matt K. Lewis examines the MAGA movement’s ugly infighting in his August 8 column for The Hill.
Lewis notes that white nationalist Nick Fuentes is angrily attacking some far-right MAGA Republicans for being, as he sees it, impure. But Lewis’ column is about more than Fuentes — it’s about MAGA eating its own in its quest for purity.
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“Lately, Fuentes has been venting his spleen at Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Vice President JD Vance — the golden children of the ‘new New Right,’ and, in at least one case, a possible 2028 Republican presidential contender,” Lewis explains. “Fuentes’ tone is familiar: The bitter whine of a true believer watching the tourists cash in.”
Lewis continues, “In a recent podcast with Owens, Carlson, my former boss at The Daily Caller, dismissed Fuentes as a ‘weird little gay kid in his basement in Chicago.’ For what it’s worth, Fuentes says he’s not gay, just involuntarily celibate — a distinction that seems to matter a lot to him.”
In addition to being an incel, Fuentes prides himself on being openly racist. When Trump picked JD Vance as his running mate in 2024, Fuentes accused him of betraying the white race by marrying an Indian-American woman.
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Lewis notes that Fuentes responded to criticism from Carlson by attacking him “with his usual cocktail of resentment and delusional self-mythologizing.”
“Fuentes — never one to miss an opportunity for aggrieved autobiography — then proclaimed himself the real voice of disaffected white America,” Lewis observes. “A ‘precocious’ college student, red-pilled by Trump, punished for asking the ‘hard questions’ about Israel years before Tucker and Owens got around to it…. As for Vance, Fuentes dismissed him as a man who couldn’t even marry a white woman, much less represent whites…. What offends the out-and-proud racists is the feeling that the populist right has been taken over by influencers with soft hands and trust funds, who pretend that they speak for the broken white working class.”
Lewis continues, “But this isn’t primarily a civil war over principles, as twisted as some of those principles may be — it’s brand warfare between the purists and the polished. The former are furious that the grift they helped build now belongs to better-looking influencers with more money and nicer lighting.”
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Matt K. Lewis’ full column for The Hill is available at this link.