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Russell Crowe’s new film is about trying to suss out hidden fans of Hitler, but what happens when the person being questioned makes no attempt to hide? Toward the end of Piers Morgan’s live interview with Nick Fuentes last night, Morgan, in what seemed like a pre-prepared line, accused his guest of trying to “come across as a moderate” — just ten minutes after Fuentes called the old Bohemian corporal “very fucking cool.”
To that line, Morgan told Fuentes that “I think [Hitler] is very fucking a monster.”
Yet Fuentes burst out laughing in reply: “And that’s a clip! ‘I think he’s very fucking a monster?’ Do you hear yourself? Can we all grow up?”
The interview, which Morgan kept insisting was “not an ambush,” was very much a case of an old world meeting the new; a liberal tabloid operator meeting the wild and uncontrollable brain of a very right-wing internet live-streamer. Because it was a live stream, Fuentes naturally had the upper hand. But since it’s already been viewed millions of times, they both win, according to the laws of digital media. What connects the tabloid universe and the internet age is a desperate need for attention.
The two-hour show consisted mostly of Morgan playing clips from Nick Fuentes’s daily podcast and then asking the 27-year old Chicagoan to own up to them. These included, among other things, calls to avoid black people in everyday life, jibes about the Final Solution and various ungallant remarks about women. Each time Fuentes would happily assent to these. This carried on for some time, yet Piers never really thought to shift from this prosecutorial mode. After nearly two hours, Piers claimed that “we’re getting somewhere” in that he had gotten Fuentes to admit his racialist, misogynistic and Judeo-skeptical views. This is a little like reading Mein Kampf and crowing that Hitler had inadvertently shown his “true colors.” “You are the embodiment of misogyny” said Piers at one point; Fuentes naturally took that as a compliment.
Piers Morgan’s panels on his show are often a madhouse of various Mao-enthusiasts, Islamists, obscurantist clerics, anti-Semites and Alan Dershowitz. Yet throughout this interview with Fuentes, he feigned bafflement that anyone could hold such views.
The encounter was intriguing in another way. As a tabloid hack and editor, Piers Morgan made his career on the fringes of acceptable conduct and opinion. In 2023 the UK High Court said that there was “no doubt” that Piers had known about his staff’s practice of hacking into the phones of prominent people. What we saw here was one demagogic medium passing the torch to another – with live streamers like Fuentes now becoming the go-to source for smut, gossip and provocation. Piers Morgan tried to use the old Fleet Street toolkit against this upstart, including that classic tabloid tactic of trying to out him as a homosexual.
Piers, in a sort of homage to analog television, also played a pre-recorded message from the old Rupert Murdoch colleague and Tory peer Lord Finkelstein, who asked, given that the Hitler had killed much of the Finkelstein family, whether Fuentes was “on team Hitler or team Mum,” partly in order to plug his book Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad. “I don’t care,” said Fuentes.
Morgan wondered aloud whether Fuentes was simply hamming up his views for money or as an elaborate joke. The real shock for him is that it’s neither.
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