John Oliver on extremism and bigotry among Republicans: ‘This party is at a crossroads’

With just a week to go until the US midterm elections, John Oliver used the entirety of his latest Last Week Tonight episode to focus on a “worrying trend that’s been on the rise” within the Republican party, which has “found itself answering some uncomfortable questions about Nazi references”, from a New York congressional candidate posting a photo of his grandfather in his Nazi uniform to mega-donor Elon Musk’s infamous apparent Nazi salute at a Trump rally in 2025.

“Everything about that screams, ‘Nazi!’” Oliver said of Musk’s gesture. “Well, almost everything. To be fair to the Nazis, unlike Elon, they at least looked sharp in their suits.”

Across the board, “it does feel like the Republican party’s been getting way too comfortable with some, at best, Nazi-adjacent shit,” he added, pointing to other recent examples: Paul Ingrassia, Trump’s nominee to the office of special counsel until leaked group chat messages revealed he said: “I do have a Nazi streak in me from time to time, I will admit it.” And Brandon Herrera, a Republican congressional nominee in Texas, who posted a video of him and a friend goose-stepping to a Nazi marching song.

“Naked bigotry from prominent Republicans seems to be increasingly the norm,” said Oliver – from the Tennessee representative Andy Ogles posting that “Muslims don’t belong in American society,” to Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville posting “we must IMMEDIATELY BAN all ISLAM immigrants” in 2025. Just last month, Bo French, the Republican candidate for Texas’s railroad commissioner, reposted a clip of a racially diverse crowd of University of Texas students celebrating a football win. “Social media is exposing how many Americans have been displaced by foreigners,” he wrote. “It’s everywhere and far worse than any of us could imagine.”

Even Karl Rove, the architect of George W Bush’s presidential campaigns, lamented how the Republican party has been “infiltrated by people like Bo French. Nick Fuentes goes to Dallas and meets with a bunch of Republican leaders. This guy is a Nazi.”

Oliver argued that the rise in neo-Nazis owes in part to Israel’s war in Gaza and the US war in Iran, which has led to “a lot more appetite for discussion on our foreign policy in the Middle East and America’s relationship with Israel. Which is good and long overdue. But some on the far right have seized on this moment to elevate antisemitic conspiracy theories”, including Tucker Carlson’s “suspiciously cordial” podcast interview last year with Fuentes, a white nationalist neo-Nazi.

In the two-hour interview, Fuentes blamed America’s problems on the “organized Jewry” and claimed he was a “fan” of Joseph Stalin, among many other antisemitic tropes. The interview led to a splintering among Republican groups, including the pre-eminent conservative thinktank the Heritage Foundation, which initially stood by Carlson. The foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, defended Carlson as under attack from the “globalist class”, an antisemitic dog whistle he later walked back, claiming he didn’t know Fuentes because he doesn’t watch the news.

“It is one thing to say you don’t watch a lot of news if you’re a salesperson or an electrician or a doctor,” Oliver laughed. “It is quite another thing to say it as the president of the leading conservative thinktank in the country. It’s like George R R Martin saying, ‘I’m sorry I misspoke about medieval royal sibling fucking. I don’t consume a lot of incest fantasy.’ Brother, you are the main reason we know what that is.”

“And to be clear here, Nick Fuentes is famously a bigot,” he continued. “And while I admit he is also very much a troll, and you may have seen clips online of him where he comes across as an edgelord just trying to shock, it is worth seeing what he’s like when the mask fully comes off because it’s truly heinous.”

Oliver then played a clip from Fuentes’s podcast in which he claimed that “whites built everything” and “Jews are money-changers, bullshit artists, psychopaths, charlatans, grifters, manipulators … Why do you think they’re so obnoxious? Why do you think they’re so fucking obnoxious? They have no manners because they’re from the third world. They come from the literal ghetto.”

Fuentes’s naked bigotry “makes it all the more laughable that Tucker made such a show of offering Fuentes, a man who’s literally spent thousands of hours on the internet saying whatever he wants, the chance to finally say what he thinks”, said Oliver.

“And the worrying thing is, it’s not just Tucker. Fuentes has been inching closer and closer to mainstream Republicans over the years.” Oliver cited the example of Paul Gosar, the representative who gave the keynote speech at Fuentes’s America First Political Action conference in 2021, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who did the same the following year. Fuentes also controversially dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago on the invite of Kanye West, a month after the rapper tweeted, “I’m going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.”

Oliver underscored the Republicans’ “groyper problem”, with a Manhattan Institute analysis of the party finding that nearly four in 10 Republicans currently believe the Holocaust “was greatly exaggerated or did not happen as historians described”, including 54% of men under 50. Oliver also pointed to the leaked group chats of Young Republican groups around the country that included praise of Hitler and racial epithets.

“There are some who will say, ‘Calm down. This seems to be just a bunch of kids and shitty streamers. You can just ignore it,’” said Oliver, citing JD Vance’s defense of the group chat, that “kids do stupid things”. (Except, of course, these “kids” were in their 20s and 30s.)

But “the far-right fringe currently rising up in this party is not remotely new”, he added. “From the John Birch Society through Barry Goldwater and Pat Buchanan, the Republican party has always left its door ajar for bigots, cranks and conspiracy theorists. Have you ever listened to the Nixon tapes? They would do numbers on Rumble today.”

The point, Oliver continued, is that far-right views are on the rise in the Republican party. “Some of them are literally on the ballot in nine days in an election, by the way, where the single biggest campaign spender” – Elon Musk – “is, you know, of the Adolf-aloha wave.”

And “even if they all lose – and I hope they fucking do – the party that put them on the ballot still has to reckon with how it got to this point,” he added. “And while I’m sure mainstream Republicans will keep trying to dodge this issue, many are clearly betting that they’ll be able to make it through the midterms without having to take a principled stand that could lose them a single vote.”

Oliver concluded with a stark warning to the GOP: “This party is at a crossroads right now. Their current leader is by the standards of both the constitution and even the most generous cardiologist, on his way out. And the next iteration of this party is currently being decided amid a rising chorus of white nationalists, open neo-Nazis and bigots.”