Will Sommer and Andrew Egger at The Bulwark:

Venezuela is tearing right-wing media apart

White nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes is a self-proclaimed “America First” diehard. His fans wear blue “America First” hats. Amid the right’s 2025 crackup, he was positioned alongside Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene as a leader of the isolationist faction.

He has been quick to denounce every American military adventure in the Middle East as a war for Israel and a distraction from the “America First” ethos that Donald Trump has championed in his campaigns. But when it comes to Trump’s decision to abduct Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, Fuentes isn’t such a dove after all. In the aftermath of the predawn Saturday raid, he has exulted in the prospect of the United States plundering Venezuela on behalf of oil companies. “TAKE THE OIL,” Fuentes posted on social-media app Telegram on Saturday. “THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE IS OURS.” Fuentes’s typically devoted fans, the so-called groypers, weren’t thrilled. His post has so far netted more than 5,500 thumbs-down reactions. Follow-up posts, where Fuentes argued that “America First” means aggressively policing the Western hemisphere and toppling governments for their resources, have received a similarly negative response.

Fuentes isn’t the only self-defined America Firster who has found something to love in Trump’s Venezuela operation and angered his fan base in the process. Since Maduro’s capture, right-wing media figures who have staked their careers on Trump have found themselves caught between the president and their audiences, who were apparently gullible enough to think the president’s talk about not bogging down the United States in foreign wars was real.

Consider Alex Jones, the right’s ultimate tin-foil hat–wearing opponent of deep-state globalists—a man who made his career in the 1990s ranting about armed government agents in black helicopters surveilling people through the walls of their homes. Instead of criticizing Trump’s decision to “run” Venezuela, Jones tied himself in knots after the raid to defend the president. In Jones’s telling, the Maduro abduction was not the kind of “neocon war” he typically opposes, but a throwback to American imperialism of the nineteenth century. In its targeting of the “globalist rules-based order” he hates, Jones found it downright patriotic.

“Thomas Jefferson would’ve gone to war with Venezuela!” Jones said.

Jones then posted a scene from the Amazon show Jack Ryan in which a literal CIA employee (John Krasinski’s eponymous Jack Ryan) explains to a lecture hall full of students why Venezuela is the United States’ greatest threat. Jones intended this clip to explain his point to his disappointed fans, whom he called “geopolitically illiterate.” (At one point in the clip, Ryan soberly intones, “You will not hear any of this on the news.”) Sensing opportunity, a bevy of Jones wannabes have attacked him. Stew Peters, a much more antisemitic Jones clone, said his rival had been fueled by Zionist propaganda. Owen Shroyer, a Jones protégé who broke with him last year over the InfoWars founder’s support for Trump, said MAGA supporters had become “slop-eating sheeple.” Even Robert Barnes, a right-wing lawyer who represented Jones in his Sandy Hook lawsuits, tweeted that Jones had been “suckered into regime change support.”

The divide between right-wing media personalities and their audiences suggests the Venezuelan raid could pose political problems for Trump. Even as Trump celebrates the operation and suggests future raids in Mexico and Colombia, it seems like even hardcore MAGA fans aren’t buying what he’s selling. At the same time, Maduro’s capture has put Trump’s media supporters in a bind: defend Trump or appease their isolationist audiences. Typically antiwar skater Tim Pool gushed over the “tons of free oil” America could soon enjoy. Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes said he was normally an “isolationist”—but a friend of his was once arrested in Venezuela, so what choice did the United States have but to topple Maduro?

Be hypocritical.

Be the Fascist they think you are.