Nick Fuentes is the man who in 2023 said this:

I think the Holocaust is exaggerated. I don’t hate Hitler. I think there’s a Jewish conspiracy. I believe in race realism.

And Fuentes celebrated the rising popularity of his message by proclaiming nearly half of the White House staff now are Nazis.

It’s important context for August 2025, when Glenn Greenwald called Nick Fuentes a “generational talent” with “really smart insights grounded not in sensationalism or blind ideology, but lots of reading, and thinking.”

Greenwald’s framing was erasure.

What he constructed for Fuentes was a martyrdom narrative of the Nazi persecuted for “questioning the power of the Jewish lobby.” The Hitler praise, the Holocaust denial, the stated desire for white nationalism was spun and reduced to “provocative rhetoric” and “rhetorical excess.”

This is known as fascist inversion: erase the ideology, present the aggressor as victim. Hitler didn’t run on “let’s murder your neighbor”; he ran on false victimhood. Greenwald runs this playbook for Fuentes.

Moreover, this is not defending someone’s right to speak. This is highly targeted, careful rehabilitation of Nazism to normalize it into power again.

Greenwald Covered Himself a Long Time

In 2017, after Charlottesville, Greenwald wrote an Intercept piece defending the ACLU’s representation of white supremacists.

He floated what appeared as a principled argument: odious speech can be defended as speech without endorsing it. He claimed state censorship backfires, so civil liberties must apply especially to those we despise.

He knew the distinction.

He articulated it explicitly.

Ten years prior in 2007, Greenwald wrote in Salon that he condemned use of “Nazi” and “Hitler” as political insults.

He claimed that calling out Nazism ran too much risk of error because it “trivializes Nazism and the Holocaust.” He had deployed a no true Scotsman fallacy: the label should require impossibly high proof to prevent application. A shred of doubt is all the Nazi would need to evade detection.

He knew that distinction too, and he weaponized it. He was gatekeeping the label to protect the people who should have been called out instead.

Same move with Fuentes.

The man says “I don’t hate Hitler” and “I believe in a Jewish conspiracy” and Greenwald says that’s not real Nazism, it’s just “provocative rhetoric” about “questioning the Jewish lobby.”

No true Nazi.

It’s the same operation, all the way from 2007 through Hale through Fuentes. Greenwald always has been in the business of trotting out impossibly high standards to prevent a Nazi getting labeled, while defending actual Nazis.

When he launders Nick Fuentes by erasing “I don’t hate Hitler” to create the narrative that he “questioned the Jewish lobby,” he does it again with full knowledge of what he’s doing and more openly than ever.

Early Fascism Warning

Quillette in 2015 published a piece titled “Glenn Greenwald: Fascism’s Fellow Traveller.” At the time, Greenwald was wrapping himself in ACLU-style camouflage. It was effective enough that calling him out for “fascist sympathy” was a tough sell to the liberal media embracing him.

Greenwald is never less than proud to acknowledge the considerable time he has spent as a litigator and writer defending the right of neo-Nazis to air their views.

Ten years later, however, that Quillette analysis reads like a job description.

The accusation that seemed shrill in 2015 became the clear endpoint by 2025. Not because someone was prophetic, but because terminal contrarianism has a logic of its own. When angry opposition to a certain “deep state” is your only fixed principle, you eventually find common cause with those inherently positioned against it.

Nazis hate intelligence, because it exposes the truth.

There’s also an even simpler explanation. Before the Snowden leaks, before the Guardian byline, before the civil liberties positioning, Greenwald spent five years as pro bono lawyer for white supremacist Matt Hale.

Five years.

Greenwald was a self-assigned defender of the leader of the World Church of the Creator, a militant hate organization with the stated goal of eliminating “mud races.” When one of Hale’s followers went on a shooting spree targeting minorities, Greenwald defended them and explained his motivation:

I find that the people behind these lawsuits are truly so odious and repugnant, that creates its own motivation for me.

The people behind those lawsuits, the people Greenwald wanted to fight, were the 1999 shooting victims and their families:

• Ricky Byrdsong, Black former Northwestern basketball coach, shot dead in front of his children
• Won-Joon Yoon, Korean graduate student, murdered
• Two Orthodox Jewish teenagers shot in Rogers Park
• Rev. Stephen Tracy Anderson, a Black pastor shot three times

A Nazi drove a light blue car through Chicago shooting at Blacks, Asians and Jews. Police said they weren’t sure the Skokie area shootings were a hate crime.

“At this point we’re not jumping to the conclusion that it’s a hate crime,” said Patrick T. Camden, a spokesman for the Chicago Police Department. “All of the elements appear to be there, but until we get the offender, we won’t know.”

No true Nazi.

Greenwald wasn’t just insulting the victims personally. He was actively opposing the right of these shooting victims to seek justice.

Greenwald even told the LA Times that civil rights groups suing white supremacist organizations into bankruptcy was “an abuse of the court system.”

How? Why? Isn’t that the whole point of the court system?

Matt Hale’s white supremacist gun violence to Nick Fuentes’ hate speech is the true and straight line. Everything in between appears as positioning.

Functioning Fascism

Whether Greenwald is a conscious operative, a useful mule, or simply someone whose authentic contrarianism was identified and cultivated, his output has been consistent in targeting: damage to US intelligence capabilities (Snowden), damage to US diplomatic relationships (the leaks that went far beyond domestic surveillance), and now damage to US-Israel alignment.

He seems to never criticize Russia for censorship, for example. Perhaps he hopes to retire there like Snowden.

The extreme American civil liberties framing confused many who saw activities that would otherwise be recognizable as proto-fascist. His appeal with a Guardian byline did work that a direct leak to the Russian media never could. And so in 2025 when it came time to rehabilitate and promote a Holocaust denier, Glenn was ready.

The Reveal

Greenwald didn’t change. He stopped hiding.

The cover pulled in an audience of mainstream liberals who needed civil liberties framing. That audience is gone now, or irrelevant to the Trump administration’s grip on the news. His current chase of viewers needs no pretense—Fuentes followers would be alienated by it anyway.

So the mask comes off.

A Holocaust denier becomes a martyred truth-teller. “I don’t hate Hitler” becomes “provocative rhetoric.” And the man who spent 2007 condemning the trivialization of Nazis by those trying to stop them, now trivializes actual Nazis to ensure they rise to power.

The 2015 Quillette profile turned out to be right.

Extreme right.

You don’t spend five years defending Nazis pro bono, call Nazi shooting victims “odious and repugnant,” fight to protect a Nazi whose follower murdered people in front of their children, and then twenty-five years later pivot to celebrate a Nazi and Holocaust denier as a “generational talent.” Greenwald is as he always was.