Large tech platforms have played a crucial role in his rise. In late October, Tucker Carlson invited Nick Fuentes, a 27-year-old white-nationalist streamer, onto his popular podcast and Youtube show for a friendly interview. Fuentes has amassed a loyal following with hundreds of thousands of viewers who tune into the racist, misogynist, and antisemitic sentiments he voices in lucid monologues on his nightly show, America First. A talented broadcaster with a biting sense of humor and a combative persona, he’s tailor-made for the no-holds-barred environment of big-tech platforms—so long as he manages to stay on them. In 2021, he was booted from essentially every tech platform for hate speech, forcing him to start his own streaming service to host his show.Where did Fuentes come from? Why are old-guard conservative institutions and media stalwarts alike catering to him—or even cowering before him?The answer lies in how Fuentes has mastered the right-wing online swamps of the Trump era, and the increasingly porous boundaries between the extremely online right and the Republican establishment, explains Ben Lorber, an analyst at Political Research Associates, a group that monitors and studies the far right. “You can’t tell the story of Fuentes’s rise without telling the story of alternative tech platforms and transformations of large tech platforms,” Lorber says.As the Fuentes interview rippled across social media, conservative sites and prominent figures on the right including Senator Ted Cruz and Jewish commentator Ben Shapiro, asked: What, exactly, had Carlson been thinking by platforming a figure like Fuentes? Three days after the Carlson appearance, Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, the storied conservative think tank that produced the Project 2025 roadmap for the Trump administration, weighed in. “I disagree with, and even abhor, things Nick Fuentes says. But cancelling him is not the answer, either,” Roberts said in a video on X, in which he also defended the right of conservatives to criticize Israel as well as Carlson’s decision to host Fuentes. Carlson’s critics, Roberts added, were “globalists” and part of a “venomous coalition,” language that many decried as trafficking in antisemitic tropes.