Ali Breland at The Atlantic reports on the emerging leader of the young right wing:
AmericaFest has long been one of the biggest events on the right, but this year, the conference saw a record turnout of roughly 30,000. When I asked attendees why they had decided to come, they invariably told me that they were there “because of Charlie.”
[…]
But during my four days at AmericaFest, I noticed that something else was also casting a shadow over the conference. Everyone had come to unite around Kirk, but they kept fighting about Nick Fuentes. In the opening hours on the first night, Ben Shapiro took the stage and ripped into the prominent white-supremacist influencer. Fuentes, who did not attend the conference, is a “Hitler-apologist, Nazi-loving, anti-American piece of refuse,” Shapiro said. The crowd erupted in boos. At one point, I ran into the longtime GOP operative Roger Stone, who insisted that the debates over Fuentes and his staunch criticism of Israel were being inflated by the mainstream media. “I still haven’t seen any polling showing that it’s spilled over to voters,” he told me. The early MAGA influencer Mike Cernovich told me something similar: “If you ask most people here, ‘Do you think the war in Gaza is a genocide?,’ I think most of us are like, ‘I don’t really care,’” he said.
Fuentes has tremendous sway over the young right, and his profile has risen to new heights since late October, when the former Fox News personality Tucker Carlson hosted him for a friendly podcast interview. Carlson “built Nick Fuentes up,” Shapiro said during his speech. “He ought to take responsibility for that.”
When Shapiro finished his speech, attendees lined up to ask him questions. Shapiro was immediately challenged by a student from Baylor University named Nicky Rudd. He asked about the USS Liberty, an American spy ship that the Israeli military accidentally sank in 1967. Fuentes often talks about the incident on his nightly livestreams as part of his case against Israel and the Jewish people, peddling a conspiracy that the battleship was attacked on purpose. I tracked down Rudd after he finished questioning Shapiro. Rudd doesn’t agree with everything Fuentes says, he told me. But, he said, “to deny the influence of Nick Fuentes is to deny what millions of Americans are thinking.”
JD Vance had an opportunity to disavow this but he chose instead to sell some pablum about how they have a big tent and everybody needs to get along. He knows this is the future and he wants to lead it.
I have a feeling that they aren’t going to let him …