The vile videos pile up like coconuts in an island grove. Each conspiracist offers a more outlandish and hateful theory than the next, jostling to outdo a rival before a rival can outdo them.
Theories about how Jews killed Charlie Kirk, how Jews ran the slave business, how Jews had prior knowledge of 9/11 — you’re better off not knowing the rest. All patently bunk, disproved over and over. Of course, the very act of disproving a claim legitimizes it in the first place.
The MAGA movement is, in a word, cracking up — both splitting in two and sending some of its most prominent voices to Crazytown. On podcasts and YouTube shows every day, right-wing personalities — often the country’s most popular infotainers, the stars of the doomscroll era — break away from even mainstream MAGA-ism and widen the gap with those they’ve left behind.
They are forming sides — Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly and Candace Owens and Steve Bannon and Nick Fuentes on one end; Laura Loomer and Ben Shapiro and Alex Jones and Joe Rogan on the other. Keeping track of the beefs and alliances can dizzy up even the most alert student. This is the inevitable endpoint of information overload: With so many hours to fill and so little attention economy real estate to grab, political shock-jockery becomes the only trick to reach for. This is also, one perhaps must add, the inevitable endgame of a party that has allowed in provocateur bigots. White nationalism and other forms of hatred move like a stain: Once spilled, they spread across the carpet.
The rift went on full display after the assassination of Kirk. In life, he sought to invite debate between dissenting viewpoints. In death, he has become a vehicle for yelled derangement. Donald Trump refuses to step in; this fight concerns the future of the party, and he remains a man of the immediate present. And so the beefs wage on, the hosts unleashing theories and insults, aligning and then realigning until they all blur.
But don’t let the chaos lull you into dismissing this as just another pundit food fight. Real ideological battles lie at its core, and serious and unnerving questions persist about the kind of party Republicans want.
Does the GOP privilege whites? Does conservatism mean hate? Can any guardrails stop the wild careening of conspiracy theories? Observers trace the current fissures to Carlson hosting Fuentes on his podcast in October, chumming it up with the heil Hitler-spouting troll to his millions of followers. That’s true in the sense that the softball interview forced a choosing of sides. But it didn’t come out of nowhere.
Carlson a year earlier had hosted, and lauded, Darryl Cooper, known for various forms of Holocaust denial. A few months after that, Rogan hosted, and lauded, Ian Carroll, who proceeded to spew a host of sex-ring conspiracy theories about the Israeli government and a prominent Jewish person, dropping in references to the plans the “powerful Jewish people” are making (Rogan also hosted Cooper). And seven years before that, Kelly hosted, if didn’t laud, a Sandy Hook-denying Jones.
But the rift became impossible to ignore in the weeks following Carlson’s Fuentes move, when Kevin Roberts — president of the Heritage Foundation, of Project 2025 fame — joined Kelly in defending Carlson and attacking his critics, some of whom rather inconveniently also worked for Roberts and sat on his board. Those critics decamped for a rival, a (for now) less hateful think tank founded by former Vice President Mike Pence. In the meantime, Kelly also has lauded Fuentes, saying on Carlson’s show: “He’s absorbing, and he’s brilliant. And on a lot of things, there is value to be derived from that guy’s messaging.”
Not to be outdone, Owens has spent much of her recent airtime telling viewers that Jews are the source of all the world’s problems. Loomer struck back, Shapiro struck back, Jones struck back. You know things have gone bottom-up when Alex Jones becomes the voice of reason. It didn’t move Carlson and Kelly — they stuck with Owens.
How this all resolves depends on so many factors — global news events from Minneapolis to Tehran, the ongoing see-no-evil from the president and the cozying up by Vice President J.D. Vance to Carlson and Kelly, the limits to the conspiracy cravings of the American people. And it will in turn lead to many consequences, culminating in the 2028 Republican nominee and, even, the winner of the general election.
But that lies off in the distance. Until then, we can only bear the fallout. The ground will quake further, personalities will skirmish harder, hate will pour stronger. The feuds’ winners will shift weekly. Of course, with all of the likes and views, everyone involved can call themselves a victor. Only a citizenry prizing sanity and facts ends up the loser.
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The MAGA Moderates
lllustration By Neil Jamieson
1. Alex Jones
For years, the founder of InfoWars spouted one insane and damaging conspiracy theory after another, resulting in him being found liable for extensive defamation damages by a Connecticut court for his lies about the Sandy Hook massacre. Yet now he has … called out Candace Owens for baseless conspiracy theories? Jones may yet revert to being an irresponsible and inciting fiction-teller. But in the current moment, he has sided with the moderates.
FEUDING WITH Owens.
NOTABLE QUOTE (About Owens) “I don’t know what happened to you. Or maybe you were always a demon.”
2. Vivek Ramaswamy
He has flirted with the “great replacement theory” and once suggested on a presidential debate stage that Jan. 6 was an inside job. But the Fox Nation host, former Republican presidential candidate and current Ohio gubernatorial candidate has become, at least for now, a voice of relative sanity, taking aim at Nick Fuentes for his racist and antisemitic trolling.
FEUDING WITH Fuentes.
NOTABLE QUOTE “If you believe in normalizing hatred toward any ethnic group, toward whites, toward Blacks, toward Hispanics, toward Jews, toward Indians, you have no place in the future of the conservative movement, period.”
3. Erika Kirk
While the Turning Point USA leader decidedly could have fanned the flames of conspiracy theory after her husband, Charlie’s, murder in September — if anyone could be forgiven for indulging outlandish theories, it’s a grieving widow looking for answers — she has pointedly gone the other way, discouraging such theories and even going so far as to say people shouldn’t harbor hate for his assassin.
FEUDING WITH Candace Owens and other Kirk conspiracy theorists. “Stop. That’s it. That’s all I have to say,” she told Bari Weiss with steely eyes when the latter asked her what she’d say to Owens on the issue. TPUSA has also since sent a cease-and-desist letter to Owens alleging, according to Owens, that the influencer is “continuing to cause harm” to the organization.
NOTABLE QUOTE (Regarding her husband’s assassin) “I forgive him.”
4. Laura Loomer
The longtime conspiracy-theorist influencer and alleged Islamophobe has become (slightly) more restrained in her public pronouncements since becoming a key Trump II adviser. While she has been accused of getting people fired by the president, she has maintained a mostly moderate stance in the latest round of skirmishes.
NOTABLE QUOTE (About Owens) “I’m worried about her and her mind, and I’m really worried about the country and where this is going.”
5. Mark Levin
The veteran Fox host has increasingly become Trumpified but remains in the mold of the old-school national security Republicans and has largely refrained from wild conspiracizing.
FEUDING WITH Megyn Kelly and Jack Posobiec over Israel, Ben Shapiro and general ad hominem issues.
NOTABLE QUOTE “Megyn Kelly is a disgusting fraud and hateful propagandist. … She is Candace Owens.”
6. Ben Shapiro
The OG alt-right figure has come to seem moderate, if only because so many of his associates — including former staffer Candace Owens — have gone over the edge. He has been vocal in recent months about not engaging in Charlie Kirk assassination conspiracy theories, telling the Turning Point USA crowd to be wary of anyone who is.
FEUDING WITH Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson over Kirk, Israel and Nick Fuentes.
NOTABLE QUOTE “Building [Fuentes] up is an act of moral imbecility, and that is precisely what Tucker Carlson did [by having him on his show].”
7. Joe Rogan
While he’s decidedly skewed in a more far-right conspiracist direction in the past year by hosting Holocaust denier Darryl Cooper, antisemitic conspiracy theorist Ian Carroll and vaccine denialist Suzanne Humphries, the country’s podcaster-in-chief has also shown moderation on issues like Jimmy Kimmel (he stridently defended the comedian’s right to free speech), Trump’s callous post on Truth Social after Rob Reiner’s murder (“No justification for what he did that makes any sense in a compassionate society”) and the excesses of ICE’s anti-immigration crackdown.
NOTABLE QUOTE “Are we really going to be the Gestapo — ‘Where’s your papers?’ Is that what we’ve come to?”
The MAGA MANIACS
lllustration By Neil Jamieson
1. Steve Bannon
We’ve forgotten what he’s said about, well, anything.
FEUDING WITH Who remembers?
NOTABLE QUOTE ??
2. Candace Owens
She once worked for Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire, but those days are long gone. Owens regularly unspools vile antisemitic theories that would make Henry Ford blush. As with many in this camp, Donald Trump is a clear target — she has called him a “chronic disappointment,” choosing a lane where speaking out against Trump for not being hateful enough is more culturally beneficial than sucking up to him.
FEUDING WITH Erika Kirk, Ben Shapiro and many others on the other side of the line.
NOTABLE QUOTE “Wake up to who publishes these books and keeps us warring with one another. Christians versus Christians, right? Christians versus Muslims. … Wake up and learn the true history of slavery because that wasn’t exactly a white man’s sport. Jewish people were the ones who were trading with us.” (This has been repeatedly debunked by experts, who say that an estimated 98 percent of slave traders were not Jewish.)
3. Nick Fuentes
Where to even start with the most gleefully hateful personality in modern streaming and podcasting? Maybe with his popularity, which, while still not in the major leagues, is growing alarmingly. The groyper founder’s nightly America First video show on Rumble is now up to more than half a million viewers, a major jump over the 100,000 he had not long ago. Fuentes hasn’t changed his tune — just look at him proudly singing Kanye’s “Heil Hitler” song recently at a Miami nightclub while giving the Nazi salute.
FEUDING WITH Pretty much everyone, including Jews, women, LGBTQ people, people who don’t believe crazy theories about the Kirk assassination and anyone else he can offend for clicks. Also with J.D. Vance, who after Fuentes used a racist slur against his wife replied that Fuentes (and Jen Psaki) could “eat shit.” Vance has hardly distanced himself from the conspiracist camp, though: He responded to Shapiro’s condemnation of Megyn Kelly for not disavowing Candace Owens by saying that “President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in politics by running his supporters through endless self-defeating purity tests.”
NOTABLE QUOTE “We want this century to be the most Christian century in the history of planet Earth.”
4. Megyn Kelly
The former cable news host has been walking the line as someone cozy with Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, yet who (at least for now) does not seem to want to be groypered in with them. Amiable chats with Carlson — such as his recent stop on her live podcast tour in Westchester County — have revealed how close they are. “He’s back and he is bigger than ever,” Kelly said, introducing her former Fox News colleague. She also has praised Nick Fuentes — “There is value to be derived from that guy’s messaging” — and gone after Ben Shapiro for suggesting she should condemn Owens.
FEUDING WITH Shapiro and Mark Levin over Israel, involving a litany of personal insults.
NOTABLE QUOTE (To Shapiro’s wish that she condemn conspiracy theorists like Owens) “Fuck you.”
5. Tucker Carlson
Carlson long has played the just-asking-questions game on such topics as 9/11, on which he has baselessly intimated there was Israeli prior knowledge and brought up dual loyalty tropes about American Jews. But he took an even bigger turn in the fall when he invited the proudly racist and antisemitic Nick Fuentes onto his popular show for a friendly chat. “You should let people say what they think,” Carlson said in defense of his choice. The advocacy group StopAntisemitism gave Carlson the Antisemite of the Year Award for 2025 in response. “Carlson mainstreams antisemitism by platforming and praising Holocaust revisionists and Nazi apologists while hiding behind irony and plausible deniability,” the group said in a statement. Carlson also recently suggested the Trump invasion of Venezuela marked a covert attempt to bring gay marriage to the country as part of a “globo homo” agenda, though he did, to the surprise of some, criticize conservatives for not viewing ICE’s killing of Renée Good as a tragedy.
FEUDING WITH Ben Shapiro, and anyone who thinks Nick Fuentes shouldn’t have a platform.
NOTABLE QUOTE He won’t “deplatform and denounce” Candace Owens.
This story appeared in the Jan. 29 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
