In any case, Nicholas Joseph Fuentes presents as an alt-right radical-traditionalist Catholic white supremacist neo-Nazi and self-described incel, and he operates the America First livestream podcast, hosted by his own proprietary website after having been banned from most mainstream channels like youtube. He previously co-hosted the Nationalist Review podcast with fellow neo-Nazi James Allsup.
Some professed views
At the core of Fuentes’s persona is a deepseated frustration at what he believes is the end of America, expressed as hate against any trait, tendency, group or idea that he could perceive (or pretend to perceive) as being a part of a cause of its decline – and since he is rarely clear about what properties of past America he favors, any agent of change or non-change for anything at any level is a target. This includes not only Muslims (“[t]he First Amendment was not written for Muslims”, nor for “immigrants”), liberals, feminists and people of color, but any non-Catholic (“I want this country to have Catholic media, Catholic Hollywood, Catholic government. I want this to be a Catholic occupied government”) – Fuentes has indeed advocated for “the death penalty” for all non-Christians, and has repeatedly called for the murder of a large range of people, in particular “globalists” and “the people behind CNN”.
But his primary enemy is of course zeh Jews, who control and have ruined everything, including Star Wars. “Frankly, I’m getting pretty sick of world Jewry running the show,” says Fuentes, and frequently emphasizes that “we need to eradicate Jewish stranglehold over the United States of America” and that jewish people need to “die in the holy war”. Indeed, Fuentes is an unapologetic fan of Adolf Hitler (“ ‘Hitler was a pedophile and kind of a pagan.’ It’s like, well, he was also really fucking cool. … This guy’s awesome, this guy’s cool”) and has called for “total Aryan victory”. He is also a Holocaust denier, even though he rather explicitly thinks a Holocaust would be a good thing. And his perception of Hitler is … weird at best: after allegedly seeing a Black man littering, for instance, Fuentes stated that “It’s always Black people. … This is in my neighborhood. I’m supposed to be mad at Hitler? I’m supposed to be cross with Hitler? I want this guy dead. And I wish Hitler would kill him. I wish Hitler would have killed him, you know? … That guy should be KILLED! That guy should be killed for that. That guy should be dragged from his car and beaten to death by the public. … If I was in a room with Hitler and that guy, me and Hitler would team up and fuck that guy up! We would kill that guy! … And we’d high-five at the end”. That’s … not who or what Hitler was.
It is, perhaps, worth quoting a portion of Fuentes’s response to and interpretation of a June 2022 Biden speech; as Fuentes saw it, Biden “is saying ‘Look, I’m the big gay American empire, and I’m gonna kill all the enemies of liberalism’. That’s what he's saying. Biden is there saying, ‘This is global homo and I’m the puppet face of it. I’m the puppet face of world Jewry and global homo and we’re gonna crush all these fascists.’ The whole thing is just a lie. The whole thing is a sham. Biden is a puppet. The elections are fake. The social media companies are rigged. The elections are rigged. The news couldn’t be more Jewed-up; Jewed-up, moneyed-up, corporate, under the thumb of the Illuminati, whatever. It’s all real man. The devil is in charge of the world. Satan is in charge of America. […] Satan runs the Western world. When you talk about the West, when you talk about democracy, you’re talking about the devil. […] Fuck democracy. I stand with Jesus Christ.”
Fuentes does claim, rather adamantly, not to be a white supremacist, however, but rather a “Christian conservative” (he consider the term ‘white supremacist’ an “anti-white slur”). But he does think that Jim Crow “was better for [Black people] too” (note the ‘too’), focuses a lot on white genocide and Great Replacement conspiracy theories (here is his take on the Great Replacement), subscribes to the view that different races are not just biologically but spiritually different – he has apparently calculated his own “spiritual whiteness” to be 91% – and denounces “race-mixing” because “people should stick with their own kind”.
The rot he claims to have identified in the US has ruined everything; the military, for instance, has at present degenerated to become a “mercenary army of N-words and homosexuals” who are being trained “to obediently murder whites when the time comes”.
He is also proud of being a “sexist man” of the kind who claims that “we need to go back to burning women alive more”, and he has advocated for repealing women’s rights to engage in politics or have a career – indeed, he has argued that women should wear veils (he has defended Iran’s hijab rules), that he “would rather get taken out and shot in the head” than be treated as a female doctor, that men have the right to beat and rape their wives because the Bible gives them authority over women (the problem with marriage today is that women are “not afraid of getting hit, she’s not afraid of being killed, she’s not afraid of violence”), and that all women will go to Hell. He is also a self-declared proud incel (which is sort of a contradiction given the ‘in’ part), since “[i]f we’re really being honest, never having a girlfriend, never having sex with a woman really makes you more heterosexual because honestly, dating women is gay. [Men] having sex with women is gay” (his reasoning is related in more detail here for anyone interested).
His expressed views on things science are predictable. While initially supporting the Taliban’s prohibition on vaccines, he did not approve of their later change of course; Fuentes has referred to the coronavirus vaccine as “gene therapy” and linked it to the spread of AIDS. He has also vacillated a bit on his views on dinosaurs, having advocated both straight-up dino-denialsm (“I find it had to believe, about the dinosaurs”, and the idea of giant reptiles is “retarded. … Catholic Groypers are gonna come up, beat the shit out of you with a Bible”) and human–dinosaur coexistence (“it’s biblical, bro”). His views on climate change are in many ways similar; claiming that we’ll never run out of oil because “oil is infinite” and was put here by God for us to burn, Fuentes also asserted that we “need to burn oil so that we can create a stronger atmosphere to keep carbon inside the atmosphere. This is all scientific.”
In short, the America we according to Nick Fuentes have lost and that he is yearning for is one that is indistinguishable from ISIS’s Islamic State beyond some surface nomenclature – indeed Fuentes has explicitly said that he wishes we had “a Taliban rule in America”. His support for Trump leading up to 2024 was accordingly a bit back and forth, and he criticized Trump’s choice of running mate, for instance, because JD Vance “doesn’t value his racial identity”. When Trump won, Fuentes celebrated that “there will never, ever be a female president […] Glass ceiling? It’s a ceiling made of fucking bricks!”, and he was very happy for the actions taken by Trump and Elon Musk in the immediate wake of the inauguration, since what they are doing is “appealing to democracy as a very thin shield for oligarchy” (he’s sometimes sort of minimally perceptive on these sorts of things, which suggests that ‘loon’ is not an accurate epithet)
Activities and fans
Fuentes rose to prominence on the right after his participation in the alt-right Unite the Right rally in 2017 and would soon appear in all the places you’d suspect (such as InfoWars). He was of course present in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021 – Fuentes declared (while giving a Nazi salute) that “I am a Trump cultist” (later: “Forget the Constitution, I swear allegiance to Donald Trump ... Long live the rightful king of America”) – and his groyper army quickly became frontplayers in the subsequent Stop the Steal coalition. In 2022, he was hosted by Trump himself at a dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Fuentes’s fan and recurring collaborator Kanye West.
Indeed, Fuentes enjoys massive popularity – at the time of his 2021 Twitter ban (later reinstated), he had more than 125,000 followers, and the number of fans have grown exponentially since then – and frequently collaborates with influential wingnut and groyper-adjacent influencers, such as Pearl (who felt compelled to denounce him after the first time, claiming ignorance, but nevertheless continued to work with him afterwards). Fuentes and his groypers have also managed to largely take over college Republican spaces.
An indication of his popularity might be discerned through the attention given to his America First Political Action Conference, established as an alternative to a CPAC, which is – of course – not extreme enough for Fuentes and his ilk. The purpose of the conference is to normalize white nationalism, antisemitism and misogyny into the conservative movement. In addition to Fuentes himself e.g. praising Putin for his unprompted invasion of the Ukraine (while it was happening in 2022 – Fuentes has repeatedly praised “the Russian heroes of the special military operation”) and comparing Putin to Hitler (intended as praise), the 2022 version of the event attracted guests like Jared Taylor, Tim “Baked Alaska” Gionet, Milo Yiannopoulos, Gavin McInnes, Jaden McNeil, VDARE founder Peter Brimelow, and long-time Fuentes supporter Michelle Malkin; and speakers included people like Paul Gosar (who repeated the America First mantra “America First is inevitable” in his speech and who has enjoyed a long but occasionally shaky relationship with Fuentes, including planning fundraisers with him), Steve King, Idaho Lt. Gov Janice McGeachin, Andrew Torba, Vincent James Foxx, Joe Arpaio, Stew Peters, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Laura Loomer and Arizona state senator Wendy Rogers, who had earlier, in response to Fuentes’s compliments (any reasonable person would react to compliments from Fuentes with some serious self evaluation) tweeted “Thank you, Nick Fuentes. We love you” and in her speech praised the groypers for standing up to tyranny, and then advocated for executing her political opponents. There is a report from the 2024 version here; though somewhat more sparsely attended, the list of guests and speakers included natural allies like David Duke, white supremacist Kevin DeAnna, Jared Taylor (again), white supremacist Angelo John Gage (a.k.a. Lucas Gage), Irish neo-Nazi Keith Woods, Elijah Schaffer, Danish antivaccine activist and anti-semitic conspiracy theorist Anastasia Loupis, wingnut talkshow host Anthony Cumia, InfoWars foreign correspondent Dan Lyman, and former Turning Point USA leaders Evan Kilgore and Morgan Ariel.
Another Fuentes follower is Texas GOP ex-politician Jonathan Stickland, head of the Defend Texas Liberty PAC, a Christian nationalist group bankrolled by the Dominionist oil tycoons Tim Dunn and Dan & Farris Wilks; Stickland also owns a consulting firm for wingnut candidates called Pale Horse Strategies, whose social media coordinator Ella Maulding has praised Fuentes as “the greatest civil rights leader in history”. Stickland’s Fuentes association led to some rather tumultuous splits in the Texas GOP, with a large group of them refusing to disassociate themselves from Defend Texas Liberty (or from antisemitism for that matter).
In 2022, Fuentes also launched Cozy TV, a streaming network that would be explicitly “anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-Black, antisemitic”. It was quickly joined by several familiar wingnut figures, such as Stop the Steal organizer Ali Alexander, Laura Loomer (who, by the way, is Jewish, something that had previously led to some clashes with Fuentes) and Roger Stone with his show The Stone Zone. Some other declared supporters and/or close allies (beyond the ones mentioned above) include:
- Canadian white supremacist Faith Goldy
- “Kent State gun girl” Kaitlin Bennett
- Pizzagate provocateur-turned conservative commentator Jack Posobiec
- Lauren Witzke, who has referred to Fuentes as “our great and merciful leader” (one longs for the days when crackpot fundies would see Jesus merely in floorboards or pieces of toast, doesn’t one?)
- The Catholic extremist Church Militant network, in particular its activist wing, the Resistance network; though the association has caused some discontent in the ChurchMilitant, leaders like Michael Voris and Joe Gallagher have vigorously defended the association, and central members like anti-semitic and white nationalist reporter/producer Joseph Enders (“I support [Fuentes’s] efforts to put America First”) are committed groypers; indeed, the groypers have made significant inroads among younger Catholics in general, and are largely the force behind e.g. the emergence of a slew of self-declared “Charles Coughlin Roman Catholics”.
- former host of BlazeTV’s “The White House Brief” Jon Miller
- MAGA rapper Bryson Gray, the originator of the viral anti-Biden “Let’s Go Brandon” song
- professional rightwing troll Jonathan Lee Riches
- Chris Russo, founder and president of Texans for Strong Borders
- Wade Searle, Congressman Gosar’s digital director, and though it might be natural to suspect that Searle has been instrumental in maintaining a connection between Fuentes and Gosar, Searle was appointed after Gosar’s participation at Fuentes events
- Unite the Right organizer Jason Kessler
- Chris Nelson, leader of the Florida People’s Rights network
- American Greatness editor Pedro Gonzalez, who praises the groypers as having “chosen to be guided by a Christianity hammered free of the dross of the modern world” (Gonzalez isn’t widely praised for his cognitive capabilities or powers of discernment).
- Much of the group Young Republicans of Texas, such as their state level secretary Noah Coffee, President of the Parker County YR chapter and social media coordinator for the New Future Caucus Konner Earnest, and unapologetic Adolf Hitler fan Rylie Rae Ferguson
- Michigan political activist and 2023 St. Clair precinct GOP delegate Alex Roncelli
- Wrongthink Primetime show conspiracy theorist Anna Perez
For the 2022 midterms, the groypers felt powerful enough to launch their own political candidates, including Maryland House of Delegates candidate Shekinah Hollingsworth, West Virginia Congressional candidate Michael Sisco, and California Congressional candidate Nick Taurus; they were fortunately not at that time yet within anything resembling striking distance of success.
Lieutenants
Given the somewhat loose organizational structure of his groyper army, it is tricky to distinguish henchmen and fans, but among those you could reasonably be describe as the former, you’ll find at least (probably, and as per July 2024 – it’s hard to keep track since internal conflicts keep leading to substantial changes of guard):
- Rumble content creator, antivaccine activist and Andrew Tate associate Sneako, who claims to have had more than a million YouTube followers before his channel there was shut down.
- former MMA fighter Jake Shields
- white supremacist Lyndon Perry
- white nationalist Kai Schwemmer
- Social media performer John Doyle
- January 6 2021 Capitol stormer Christian Secour
- Canadian rightwing nationalist Tyler Russell
Several people have come and gone, and many have, over the years, distanced themselves from Fuentes, including Patrick Casey a longtime member and leader of the neo-Nazi group Identity Evropa and possibly something like a cofounder of the Groyper army; Jaden McNeil; and Simon Dickerman, who helped build America First’s online structure (Dickerman described America First as “a homosexual death cult”). It’s important to note that these people have distanced themselves from the person Fuentes and his inability to foment a real political movement, and not from his ideas.
Though he has been immensely influential, the defections are part of a general indication that Fuentes’s reach has contracted a bit over the last year or two. That would be because he has become sufficiently famous that elected politicians, candidates for office and people in power, like Donald Trump, Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene, can no longer pretend never to have heard about him when confronted with having shared a stage with him (though Gosar tried for years to promote Fuentes and his antics under that pretense). It is important to be aware that ignorance was always pretense here: these people – Trump, Gosar, Greene, and so on – supported and/or hosted Fuentes while being completely aware who he was and what he was standing for (no one in their right mind would reasonably suggest for instance that Trump would host a dinner at Mar-a-Lago with two people, Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, without knowing who they were); what matters at present is that plausible deniability is less of an option these days.
Diagnosis: Yes, he is a shitposting troll and little else. The instructive point is that Nick Fuentes is, in several ways, one of the most influential and powerful thinkers on the far right today.
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