Piers Morgan didn’t expose Nick Fuentes. He helped him

There is a viewpoint, when it comes to extremism, that sunlight is the best disinfectant. Expose horrific ideas to the glare of public scrutiny and criticism, the argument goes, and they will be exposed for what they truly are.

The opposing belief is that exposing such ideas to a larger audience merely enables them to grow their reach. Continuing with disinfectant analogies, opening a toxic waste site to the general public won’t magically neutralise its harmful effects, it will just lead to more people getting sick.

Last week, Piers Morgan hosted Nick Fuentes, a far-right white supremacist with a rabidly vicious online following, on his show. This is far from the first time Piers Morgan has featured a guest who has exhibited highly repulsive views – but it was perhaps the first time he had invited someone on who generally proudly describes themselves as an antisemite rather than denying it.

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People I greatly respect – including Daniel Finkelstein, in his latest Times column – have argued that inviting Fuentes to appear was the right thing to do.  As Finkelstein wrote, Fuentes has more than a million followers online, and that “if you shut your eyes, it won’t go away… social media has changed political communications profoundly”.

The media landscape has shifted significantly in the last 20 years, that’s certainly true. What is less clear, at least to me, is whether inviting Fuentes onto the show demonstrates a sufficient grasp of how that world has changed. For me this is less to do with Piers Morgan, who appears to me to be someone who would invite a gibbon eating its own faeces onto his show if the ratings promised to be strong enough (and of course, the Fuentes interview video now has millions of views). It is to do with well-meaning people who understand that the world has changed but perhaps do not see the full extent of that shift, and may not understand Gen Z.

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Piers Morgan appears to be someone who would invite a gibbon eating its own faeces onto his show if the ratings promised to be strong enough

The first thing to consider is that we are now living in the streaming age, in which almost all traditional understandings of how hatred works – including alliances between different groups by virtue of being hated by the same people – are now meaningless.

For example, during Morgan’s show, Fuentes said that all black people should be in jail. But the fact Fuentes is a white supremacist and an antisemite – not exactly a secret – has not stopped him from regularly appearing on shows hosted by black (Myron Gaines) and Jewish (Adin Ross) streamers. The common denominator is obnoxious behaviour. Nothing is taboo, and almost any comment, no matter how seriously delivered it appears to be, can be and is dismissed as a joke – a style which had its birth in the 2000s “Lulzposting” era of 4chan, the site which more than any other was the incubation chamber for the 21st century’s online far right.

Most of such ‘jokey’ content, of course, is anything but. Fuentes, who is 27, will no doubt have enjoyed the Daily Stormer, which in the 2010s was one of the world’s most prominent Neo-Nazi websites. The website had a “style guide” which had a “prime directive – always blame the Jews for everything”. But it advised posters to write in a way “that should come across as half joking…the undoctrinated [sic] should not be able to tell if we are joking or not.”

I doubt Morgan cares – he’s got the video views, now it will be on to chase the next ambulance

For the avoidance of doubt, the writer of the style guide, likely the site’s founder, Andrew Anglin, added: “This is obviously a ploy and I actually do want to gas k*kes.” Fuentes’ entire style, consciously or not, is a video version of the Daily Stormer style guide.

If you ask “groypers” – the numerous, largely anonymous online supporters of Fuentes – about their views, assuming you can get past the hideous abuse, you find that some genuinely believe him, while others at least claim that they follow him because they are deeply dissatisfied with the current state of the world and identify with what they see as his iconoclastic behaviour.

Neither group will have been moved in the slightest by the Piers Morgan appearance. A sixty-year-old lecturing their hero on the facts of life exactly encapsulates what they despise. They will see all the times Fuentes delivers his mocking answers for their benefit (asked whether he thought six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, he said it could be “one hundred times more than that”) and they will not care about the times when Fuentes may have appeared flustered. And then they go online and claim that Morgan’s wife wants to cheat on him and mock Danny Finkelstein’s parents, referring to them as “lampshades” and “bars of soap”.

Again, I doubt Morgan cares – he’s got the video views, now it will be on to chase the next ambulance – but I urge others who believe it was right to have Fuentes on his show to understand – truly understand – what you are dealing with here.

You aren’t forcing them to play your game, you’re allowing yourself to be co-opted into theirs. There are ways to fight back against people like Fuentes. Inviting him to have a chat isn’t one of them.