Nick Fuentes’s Show Banned Again by Spotify After Surging to #1 Podcast
Nick Fuentes’s show was briefly reinstated on Spotify this week and quickly surged to the number 1 trending show — but it didn’t last long. After just two days, the platform once again removed his program.
For those unfamiliar, Nick Fuentes is a young right-wing commentator popular among Gen Z and millennial audiences. A self-described right-wing reactionary, he advocates for a Catholic nation and is sharply critical of Israel and immigration.
Given those views, it’s not hard to see why Fuentes makes many people uncomfortable — not just on the left, but within the right as well.
Prominent conservative commentators such as Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Ben Shapiro have all criticized Fuentes over the years, accusing him of being anti-Semitic and racially divisive. Carlson even dismissed him as a “fed,” calling him “some gay dude in his basement.”
Fuentes has faced extensive censorship since emerging on the scene in 2017. His YouTube channel was permanently banned, he’s been denied service by multiple banks, and he’s become one of the most deplatformed political figures in America.
The reasoning behind these bans is usually to prevent “dangerous” or “unacceptable” viewpoints from reaching the public. But in practice, that strategy rarely works.
When someone is banned as extensively as Nick Fuentes, it doesn’t make their message disappear — it often has the opposite effect. In the short term, censorship might silence a voice, but in the long term, it tends to make people more curious about what’s being suppressed.
Today, Fuentes is arguably more popular than ever. He’s appeared on Patrick Bet-David’s PBD Podcast, done an in-depth interview with Glenn Greenwald, appeared on Dave Smith’s show (which became Smith’s most-viewed episode on YouTube), and even sat down with Candace Owens in what turned into a heated exchange.
Fuentes’s primary platform is now Rumble, where he regularly garners millions of views. The idea that deplatforming him from YouTube, Twitter, or even financial institutions would stop his message from spreading was always unrealistic.
People are drawn to taboo ideas. Even when they disagree, they often want to hear them.
Just look at President Trump. After the January 6 riots, he was banned from nearly every major social media platform — including Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Similar to Fuentes, several banks and companies also refused to associate with him. In many ways, Trump was effectively blacklisted. He even described the experience as a kind of “exile.”
But the censorship didn’t work. Four years later, he became president again. The evidence continues to show that, generally speaking, censoring controversial or taboo figures — whether political or cultural — rarely produces the outcome those enforcing the bans intend.
Us at the Right-Wing Populist are not fans of Fuentes — we have no issue with interracial marriage, something he’s openly criticized. But we oppose censorship even more strongly.
If Fuentes’s ideas are truly as extreme or wrong as his critics claim, then let them be challenged — and defeated — in the marketplace of ideas. If you lose that debate, perhaps his ideas aren’t as crazy as you thought.
