The Eighth Front: How Influence Became the Real Battlefield

The strange case of Charlie Kirk, the sudden attacks on Tucker Carlson, and how influence networks keep the public looking the other way

Since October 10, the date of Charlie Kirk’s death, Nick Fuentes has appeared as a guest on several podcasts and shows, including Part of the Problem with Dave Smith, Offensively Accurate, Infowars with Alex Jones, The PBD Podcast with Patrick Bet-David, Raw Talk with Bradley Martyn, Fresh & Fit, The Nelk Boys show (a Kick stream/podcast), and Glenn Greenwald’s show/podcast.

What I find strange is the reaction Tucker Carlson is getting for hosting Nick on his show. Prominent figures like Ben Shapiro, Ted Cruz, Mitch McConnell, Mike Huckabee, Mark Levin, Bari Weiss, Josh Hammer, Randy Fine, and others are suddenly outraged that anyone would dare give Nick Fuentes a platform. The timing and uniformity of their outrage make it feel almost coordinated, and incredibly fake.

So the question is, if this really is a coordinated attack, why now? Why does there suddenly seem to be a campaign against Tucker Carlson for hosting Nick, when these same voices were silent during his appearances on those eight other shows? As I’ve mentioned in other posts, I strongly suspect Nick may have been an intelligence-agency asset who blew his cover by attacking dissident voices questioning the official “lone gunman” hypothesis. His earlier appearances were tolerated because he was, in a sense, doing damage control while attempting to discredit voices like Candace Owens.

But now that the news cycle has moved on, and few people are still thinking about the mysterious circumstances surrounding Charlie Kirk’s assassination or the flimsy “lone gunman” story, Nick Fuentes can safely return to being the media’s favorite boogeyman (instead of just some weirdo who probably ate lunch alone in high school cafeteria that no one listened to). The attacks on Nick seem to have the unintended (or maybe intended) effect of rallying parts of the dissident movement around him, people like Dave Smith and Tucker Carlson. I believe in forgiveness and redemption, but let’s be honest, the guy was an absolute jerk, and it’ll be a long time before I forget that.

What I really think is that there’s a hidden network of influencers embedded across every movement, left, right, libertarian, and everything in between. As Netanyahu recently told a group of influencers during his visit to the United States:

“We have to fight with weapons that apply to the battlefields in which we’re engaged in, and the most important ones are on social media.”
“We have to talk to Elon [Musk]. He’s not an enemy, but a friend.”
“If influence could be secured over TikTok and X, Israel would ‘get a lot.’”

On the domestic U.S. front, he referred to the “eighth front” as the “battle for truth,” (you know because he is fighting a seven front war against his neighbors :-P) meaning the information space itself. In plain terms, that’s what Israel calls hasbara, a slick euphemism for state-run propaganda, or less politely, coordinated information warfare.

Israel has poured massive resources into it. In 2025, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ hasbara wing received around $150 million for “public diplomacy,” more than twenty times its usual budget. In other words, American taxpayer money is funding their efforts to control the media.

Netanyahu apparently didn’t get the memo about avoiding the impression that Israel controls the media. There was a time when he would never say things like this out loud, essentially admitting to waging information warfare over social media and financing influence operations. Statements like that used to be reserved for private meetings in Hebrew, spoken only to party insiders and donors. Now he’s practically bragging about leveraging social media as a weapon.

And the irony is hard to miss. Our own government has spent years pressuring TikTok to sell because of alleged foreign influence from China, yet the company entrusted with handling TikTok’s U.S. data was Oracle, founded by Larry Ellison, one of Israel’s biggest private donors and a major benefactor of the IDF. Washington claimed it was protecting Americans from foreign control while quietly handing the keys to a billionaire with deep ties to another foreign military.

Anyway, back to the clearly coordinated attacks on Tucker Carlson. I think the purpose behind them is to memory-hole the entire Charlie Kirk episode, to shove a few news cycles through as fast as possible, to make the whole thing feel like distant history. Because otherwise, a curious podcaster or online researcher might start digging through old clips and posts, and realize that what seemed like random, authentic messages from supposed independent voices actually fit together a little too neatly, almost as if they were coordinated.

Finally, I think there was a deliberate calculation to expose Nick and let him be outed, that the situation was too dire not to. He said a lot of obvious false things that a quick google search could disprove. That calculation, I believe, was based on the idea that it’s better to muddy the waters early and fast enough, to squeeze in a few news cycles and steer the majority of public attention back to their usual divisive topics such as immigration.