When Michael Gove introduced me to Piers Morgan last week at the Spectator Christmas reception, Morgan seized my hand and beamed, ‘I know Jonathan. We’re old friends.’ This was generous of him, not least because it isn’t true. We’d met once before, briefly. But some months earlier I had written a critique of his YouTube show for The Spectator which, to judge by his response, he did not enjoy. He called me a ‘disingenuous twerp’ on X and blocked me there. He then wrote a piece in the magazine entitled, ‘In defence of Piers Morgan, by Piers Morgan’. I mention this not to litigate any grievance, but in the interest of full disclosure.
Fuentes thrives on provocation. His method is not to win the argument but to distort its shape. Over time, Morgan began to slip
What follows is not a personal attack. I don’t know Piers well enough to attack him. I only know his work. Which brings me to his now-viral interview with Nick Fuentes, Searching for the full interview online, I encountered it under the title: ‘’What a CROCK of S***!’ Piers Morgan vs Nick Fuentes | Full interview’. You have to admire the precision. Rarely do clickbait titles so perfectly describe the substance to which they are affixed. The exchange was a two-hour verbal trench war, lit occasionally by flares of moral outrage and rhetorical napalm, but mostly defined by the dank, heavy fog of mutual exasperation. I watched the entire thing at double speed, which is still less painful than the time I was obliged to binge the Harry and Meghan Netflix series for a short-lived foray into royal commentary. That, too, brought me into Piers’s orbit; he interviewed me for Fox News about some passing snub involving Prince Harry. He was markedly more composed then.
Both men are fluent in the dialect of the algorithm. Each depends on being noticed, and both elevate provocation into an ethos. Morgan produces content with a structure closely mirroring professional wrestling. Fuentes has amassed a significant following by mingling adolescent irony with overtly extremist rhetoric. One suspects that neither man is entirely serious, which would be a relief were the consequences not so grave.
Why did Morgan interview Fuentes anyway? Some will point to journalistic curiosity: the impulse to challenge noxious ideas in the public square. But for me it recalled the old courtly fashion of posing with a monkey. In sixteenth-century Europe, especially among the aristocracies of Italy, Spain and France, well-appointed men would commission portraits featuring small exotic primates. These small creatures, rare and expensive, served a clear function: they drew attention. Their strangeness, their mimicry, their implied cost. The joke was that men kept monkeys to draw the eye away from their face. It was an elegant misdirection: frame yourself beside something grotesque or absurd, and by contrast, you look charming, composed, even noble.
Fuentes, for those blissfully unaware, is a young American ideologue whose blend of white nationalism, Holocaust denial, and authoritarian posturing has made him a lodestar for a certain online demographic. Morgan’s choice to platform him is defensible in principle: not talking to Fuentes will not make him disappear. But the interview fell squarely into a predictable trap.
‘Do not answer a fool according to his folly,’ says the Book of Proverbs, ‘lest you be like him yourself.’ Morgan began, to his credit, by attempting to hold this line. He was firm but civil, confrontational without theatrics. But Fuentes thrives on provocation, and his method is not to win the argument but to distort its shape. Over time, Morgan began to slip. His tone sharpened, his voice rose, and in one particularly puerile moment he appeared to mock Fuentes for being a virgin. He then pressed him, with mounting irritation, on whether he had ever seen a tampon, as though this were a metric of political legitimacy.
It was around this moment that Fuentes calmly advised Morgan to calm down, and Morgan, recognising he had been thrown off balance, did. The fool had won the point. Proverbs 26:4, an ancient Hebrew maxim that also found its way into Christian teaching, warns not against rebuke, but against engaging in the fool’s own style. If you mimic his manner, the distinction between wisdom and folly collapses.
Fuentes is not a talented thinker, but he is a talented manipulator. As Piers said himself, he deploys a double persona: performatively reasonable in interviews, ferally unhinged on his own livestreams. He claims to disavow violence, then jokes about gas chambers. He flirts with denying the Holocaust while claiming that he simply ‘hasn’t made up his mind’ because he finds the topic uninteresting. He admits to being a racist, yet insists he is merely a racial realist. He praises Hitler and then, when challenged, presents himself as a misunderstood ironist. There is a word for this posture, but it is not subtlety.
What emerged most clearly was not a contest of ideas, but two performances pitched to different crowds who neither expected nor desired persuasion. Morgan’s audience, older and more mainstream, likely watched in horror, reassured that Fuentes was every bit as repugnant as advertised. Fuentes’s followers, by contrast, will have seen Morgan as a relic: a media-age patriarch wagging his finger at a generation that no longer seeks his approval. Each side heard exactly what it came for. No one was convinced. No one tried to be.
This is the central problem with debating extremists on camera: the debate itself becomes part of their strategy. Morgan seemed to believe that he might expose Fuentes with reason and good sense. But Fuentes does not deal in reason; he deals in spectacle. His project is not to persuade, but to erode the very possibility of persuasion. He does not want to be taken seriously. He wants to make seriousness itself look foolish.
And here lies the deeper irony. In striving to unmask the odious little toad before him, Morgan fell into the bog. One cannot climb into the pit and complain about the smell. Nor, it must be said, is it clear that such creatures are best met on live-streamed platforms designed to maximise controversy. If Fuentes deserves to be interrogated, and he does, it should be by someone who neither flatters his intellect nor fuels his theatre.
This was not that. This was something else. Something that begins with the ring of celebrity and ends with the thud of wasted breath. One left with no clearer picture of how to reach Fuentes’s millions of followers, nor how to draw the boundaries that might contain his ideas. But then, that may never have been the point. Everyone got what they came for, and in the end, I’m afraid, the click-bait title summed it up plainly enough. Sorry, old friend.
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