Article Type: Interview Recap
Appearance Date: September 23, 2026
Source Note: This recap is based on the original appearance and its transcript. Quotations may be lightly edited for punctuation and readability without changing their meaning.
Nick Fuentes joined Alex Jones on September 23 for a brief appearance as Jones announced his return to the former Infowars studio. Fuentes congratulated Jones, then used it to argue that Trump was leaving the right exposed online and politically.
Fuentes called Jones’s return to the studio “a massive victory.” He described the Sandy Hook families’ lawsuit against Jones as a case intended to shut Infowars down. He said Jones’s experience fit a pattern in which people who helped build the Trump movement faced legal and financial pressure. Fuentes cited Andrew Tate’s imprisonment, the arrest of Clavicular, and his own claims of a subpoena, frozen funds and a place on a no-fly list.
Jones then brought up Fuentes’s decision to avoid romantic relationships because he feared accusations. Fuentes agreed that political opponents look for vulnerabilities involving women, taxes and money. Now, he said, speech itself had become another source of risk for broadcasters like Jones.
Jones raised the possibility that commentators could be investigated over foreign funding. Fuentes said he wanted the opposite approach from the administration: “They should be looking for opportunities at the DOJ and DHS and state and anywhere else” to help right-wingers and protect speech.
He also acknowledged two other criticisms of Trump. Fuentes said the Iran war “should not have happened” and referred to disappointing deportation numbers. Still, he called the lack of lasting speech protections his biggest disappointment. “Where is the solidification of free speech on the internet and in the country overall?” he asked.
Fuentes said Elon Musk’s ownership of X and the existence of Rumble offered only temporary protection. He said he had expected Trump to protect access to major digital platforms by law. In his view, the issue extended beyond posting or livestreaming. He described a progression from losing access to social media, to banking and payment services, to potentially being shut out of AI and other everyday tools. He said he knew people who had been banned from Claude and Grok and named Uber and Airbnb as other services whose loss could matter.
Jones picked up the AI point, warning that a few companies could control the technology. Fuentes said the public had little say in who built AI or wrote its rules. He divided the field into people he associated with faster AI development, including Sam Altman and Elon Musk, and what he called the effective altruists at Anthropic. He claimed the latter camp was gaining influence over nonprofits and government oversight and could establish rules that survived changes in administration.
Fuentes feared that people could be allowed to use AI while being denied the most capable versions if they held the wrong political views. Jones argued for open and decentralized AI. Fuentes agreed that access was the central fight: “It’s not just an arms race between, let’s say the United States and China,” he said, “but it’s also then an arms race between the people in the society and who’s gonna have access to this extremely powerful commodity and the ability to make money from it.”
Fuentes suggested that alarms over recent AI incidents could be used to shut out competitors. His fear was that a handful of firms would be the only ones able to sell powerful AI and use their own most advanced models.
He then brought the discussion back to Trump. Fuentes said the years from 2024 to 2028 could decide how AI develops, yet he saw the president paying more attention to names and appearances. He mocked Trump’s preference for “super intelligence” over artificial intelligence and asked why the president was not more engaged with either of the possibilities Fuentes saw: that advanced AI posed serious technical risks, or that warnings about those risks were helping a few firms secure control of it.
Jones turned to Trump’s polling and asked what might follow a Republican defeat. Fuentes cited two polls he said put Trump at 32 and 29 percent approval. He also referred to a report he believed came from The New York Times showing a large shift among Hispanic voters. Fuentes said that shift would be especially damaging for Republicans in Texas. He pointed to betting markets that he said projected Democrats winning roughly 255 House seats and 53 Senate seats, and predicted a “total bloodbath.”
Fuentes named Zohran Mamdani, Al-Sayed and James Talarico as examples of the Democrats he feared would gain power. He accused that wing of the party of “race communism” and claimed it would use taxes to transfer wealth from white Americans to immigrants.
But Fuentes blamed Trump for the opening he believed they would have. Trump was “politically toxic,” he said, and could pull down candidates associated with him. “He really just needs to kind of be politically destroyed in a way so that a space can be opened up in 28 for something fresh and something new that might even have a chance of winning.” Fuentes said he wanted Republicans to win the presidency in 2028. He worried that a Democrat would govern during a major advance in AI and seek revenge against the right for the Trump years. He predicted that more Republicans would abandon Trump after the midterms.
When Jones asked what should come next, Fuentes gave a firm answer about who should not lead it: “I would like to see somebody that isn’t J.D. Vance.”
Fuentes argued that, fairly or not, voters would treat the vice president as an owner of the administration’s record. He listed the Iran war, inflation and what he called the Epstein coverup as liabilities Vance would carry into a campaign. He also thought Vance would need Trump’s endorsement to win the Republican primary. If so, Vance could not put much distance between himself and the president while trying to secure that endorsement.
Fuentes predicted that Tucker Carlson and others discussing a new populist direction would ultimately back Vance. Fuentes did not want another candidate tied to Trump’s administration. He said he had other objections to Vance as well, but did not spell them out in this appearance or name a preferred candidate.
Jones asked whether the Iran war could continue and cause severe economic damage. Fuentes said oil reserves and private stocks were running down. He interpreted efforts to move oil through the Strait of Hormuz and Saudi Arabia’s East–West pipeline as signs of a worsening shortage. He also said there was talk of restricting diesel exports, and possibly oil exports more broadly, while Europe faced talk of energy rationing. He referred to gas stations in France that he believed were out of fuel.
He warned that empty pumps could set off panic buying. “People are gonna start to hoard gas. They’re gonna panic,” Fuentes said.
“This isn’t just like a normal downturn or energy crisis like the seventies. This is the real great reset right now.” He claimed BlackRock was happy about the turmoil. Jones then speculated that a global collapse could provide cover for a central bank digital currency. Fuentes responded by pointing to rising interest costs on government debt and falling tax receipts if growth slowed.
With the interview ending, Fuentes returned to the Republican Party’s future. “It cannot be Vance. It’s not gonna be Trump,” he said of its next wave. He wished Trump had less influence over right-wing politics, but drew a distinction on resignation: “I wouldn’t say he should resign,” he said, before adding that it “might even be necessary.” He also said he did not want Vance to become president. Fuentes said Trump was “dragging all of us to hell with him” and that the movement needed room for someone else to emerge.
Fuentes ended by making clear that his criticism of Trump did not mean he wanted Democrats to win. “We do have to defeat the left,” he said, but it had to be the nationalist right that won. He argued that it could no longer settle for what he called basic conservatism or an Israel first approach. He called for a movement independent of both tech industry leaders and the Israel lobby. Fuentes was clear about whom he wanted the movement to leave behind—Trump and Vance—but he did not name anyone to take their place.
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