#2878: Foster Gamble

Foster Gamble is the bank heir to the multinational and pharmaceutical company Procter & Gamble, a deranged conspiracy theorist, and a sovereign citizen-adjacent libertarian. Foster and his wife Kimberly laid out their worldview, to the extent that such a chaotic mess of delusions can be deemed a view of anything, in their 2011 pseudo-documentary Thrive, which basically put a good selection of conspiracy theories of the kind featured at whale and Red Ice Creations (up until that time) in a blender, including but certainly not limited to free energy suppression, UFO nonsense, New World Order conspiracies, anti-vaccine delusions and 9/11 trutherism, together with a lot of feel-good-style political critique, to produce what Gamble deems to be a “Global Domination Agenda” that the Gambles think control most of the world; then they topped it all with some self-help ramblings. According to its own tagline, “THRIVE is an unconventional documentary that lifts the veil on what’s REALLY going on in our world by following the money upstream – uncovering the global consolidation of power in nearly every aspect of our lives. Weaving together breakthroughs in science, consciousness and activism, THRIVE offers real solutions, empowering us with unprecedented and bold strategies for reclaiming our lives and our future.” (The solutions, as expected, consist mostly standard paranoid libertarian-moronic nonsense like eliminating the Federal Reserve, public schools, and taxes.) In real life, THRIVE is one of the most obvious reference points for discussions about the emergence of the conspirituality movement.

 

One key to Gamble’s rubbish is his take on crop circles. So, yes: according to Gamble, crop circles are indeed made by extraterrestrials visiting Earth (they are not), and the circles do contain mathematical, engineering and New Age-style waffly spiritual messages from the aliens. In particular, as Gamble sees it, aliens are trying to inform us about the “torus” shape, which is apparently the key to everything because it will give us free energy – we just have to defeat the evil Global Domination Agenda, who for some reason is opposed to free energy, first. Among the tools used by the Global Domination Agenda are, of course, vaccines, which are used “to hide toxins and endocrine disruptors, like mercury, squalene and more, and used to sicken and sterilize covertly”; climate change, which is a cover for introducing global taxation; and HAARP, which is used to cause earthquakes e.g. in Haiti or Chile for somewhat unclear reasons.

 

The movie also featured a number of celebrities from the New Age conspirituality and pseudoscience circuit such as David Icke, Steven Greer, Nassim Haramein and Vandana Shiva. In fact, several of the people interviewed for the film distanced themselves from the ideas it ended up pushing (here is John Robbins’s take) – even Deepak Chopra, no less, agreed that the ideas were “dangerously misguided”, and it is difficult to imagine a more damning condemnation of bullshit than Deepak Chopra recognizing it as bullshit.

 

The product has been summarized as “basically Zeitgeist 2.0 ... when you align all of the claims that this movie purports to be true, it is hard not to think it is some kind of joke.” Foster Gamble himself defended his views (and expanded upon them) in his paper Solutions / Liberty, which leaned heavily on quotes from Stefan Molyneux, supplemented with some quotes from Ayn Rand and Ron Paul. For more information and discussion of the ludicrous nonsense that is THRIVE, this is a decent resource.

 

Diagnosis: Lunatic nonsense, and yes it matters – superficially, THRIVE may look like it is genuinely motivated to address real-world problems, but it isn’t: Gamble’s focus isn’t the real world, but to battle the windmills of imaginary conspiracies he has deluded himself into thinking are the real sources of those problems. As such, nonsense like THRIVE doesn’t merely not help but actively harm any real effort to solve any of the issues facing us by diverting attention. Gamble is accordingly not only a moron, but a somewhat dangerous one.

 

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki

#2877: Sid Galloway

 

An old one, but still perhaps worth mentioning: Sid Galloway is a Louisiana-based retired education counselor and former zookeeper and a creationist lecturer with something called the Good Shepherd Initiative – he has also written articles for Answers in Genesis.

 

According to himself, he is merely “seeking to train my students to scientifically challenge all hypotheses, theories, and laws”, but that would, given what he is actually doing, be a misrepresentation: He does indeed try to challenge scientific hypotheses and theories, but the challenges themselves are certainly not scientific, as his six-hour lecture at the chapel at the Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge campus on why ‘the Bible is more rational than evolution’ amply illustrates. He quickly dismisses the “atheistic science” of the Big Bang, for instance, by pointing out that the “theory is that nothing somehow became something”, and “zero plus zero equals zero” (no, he hasn’t actually tried to grasp anything, of course). Evolution is just as easily dismissed, since mutations, the mechanism he argues “drives” evolution, don’t actually lead to evolution, but to devolution: “Mutations don’t add,” says Galloway: “Mutations take away.” (Again, bothering to try to understand how anything works – or even take a cursory look at basic biology – is not really Galloway’s schtick). And as evidence that mutations are slowly eroding humanity’s gene pool, Galloway just needs to point to the lengthy life-spans of people in the Old Testament. So there. And also evolution is racist: “If you read ‘Descent of Man’ [which we are willing to bet Galloway has not] it’s obscenely racist,” Galloway says: “At the core of Hitler’s belief was evolution.” It most certainly was not.

 

There is much more (six hours and 200 slides worth at least), but there is no point.

 

Diagnosis: Gibbering moron and fanatic who struggle to apprehend even the basic features of reality around him and don’t seem to care all that much about getting it right (as opposed to getting it Jesus the way he wants Jesus to be). The frightening thing, though, is that there is some evidence that Galloway has at some point been involved in teaching or advising students. We know that standards tend to be lax in Louisiana, but come on!

#2876: Matt Gaetz

We feel some pressure to provide an entry to this character, although Matt Gaetz isn’t clearly so much a loon, in our use of that category, as he is a disgusting abomination – a derangedly corrupt collection of character flaws. There is a brief and even-handed portrait of him here (and another one here, if one is needed). But we do need to at least mention him: Although his political career should be over (even Mat Staver thought Gaetz was morally “disqualified” for being Attorney General, though Todd Coconato and Mario Murillo praised him as “God’s choice”), we have been mistaken on that issue before. He is currently a pundit over at OAAN.

 

So, although it is easily overshadowed, underneath Gaetz’s repugnant actions and proclivities there is certainly something of a loon as well. In 2022, for instance, Gaetz suggested that Republicans should use their House majority to redeploy the Jan. 6 Committee – with Marjorie Taylor Greene as leader – to prove that the FBI and Antifa were behind the January 6 2021 riots. And in 2018, he went on Infowars to complain about being called a conspiracy theorist just for pushing conspiracy theories about the Obama administration – conspiracy theories aren’t conspiracy theories when they’re conspiracy theories about the mythical deep state. Here is a report on his rather unhinged rant about the 2023 Louisville shootings. (There’s a number of these kinds of things in Gaetz’s background, and we don’t attempt to be comprehensive.)

 

Diagnosis: We probably needed an entry for him even though most of his antics are more accurately described by other terms than ‘lunacy’. Gaetz is most notably for his complete lack of moral character, and we suspect that his supporters pay less attention to exactly what he says than they do to his character. 

#2875: Richard Gaeta et al.

Phoenix Interactive is (or was?) a company committed to the development of Bible-based computer games. They don’t – based on what we can find – seem to have accomplished much since their start-up, but the developers have a ready explanation for that: When their attempt to fund the development of the game Bible Chronicles: The Call of Abraham through a Kickstarter campaign failed, co-founder Richard Gaeta had the explanation ready: Satan. As opposed to the reason why the vast majority of such start-ups fail to secure funding, the reason they failed was not due to anything they did or failed to do, but because Satan was literally working to confound their plans: “I believe that, 100 percent,” said Gaeta, thus inadvertently helping to make a couple of alternative hypotheses that would explain their failure rather salient. His business partner Martin Bertram agreed: “It’s very tangible. From projects falling through and people that were lined up to help us make this a success falling through. Lots of factors raining down on us like fire and brimstone.” And as Ken Frech, apparently a ‘religious mentor’ to the project, points out, “if Satan is rallying some of his resources to forestall, delay, or kill this project, I think, this must be a perceived threat to his kingdom. I fully would expect something like this to have spiritual warfare. Look at the gospel accounts of demons and so forth. That’s reality. Many Americans don’t believe it anymore. That doesn’t change reality.” It isn’t, but the Phoenix Initiative group appears to have a rather tenuous grasp of the border between reality and delusional imagination.

 

Gaeta and Bertram also believes that the World is 6000 years old and created in seven days, just as described in the Bible – Gaeta scoffs at the notion that Bible stories are allegories and firmly believes that the stories surrounding Abraham in the Bible literally happened as described in the Book of Genesis. Bertram also dismisses the theory of evolution as “wrong”, but there is probably little point in asking ‘on what grounds’.

 

Gaeta has more recently been associated with something called Joshua Tree Entertainment, which we strongly suspect is engaged in similar projects.

 

Diagnosis: Well, they beat the Onion to a funny article, and did as good a job of it as the Onion would have done – there’s even a deeply sad undercurrent to their story that the Onion probably wouldn’t have managed to capture as well as they did.

#2874: Alan Gaby

Myers’ cocktail is (basically) an intravenous cocktail of various vitamins B, vitamin C, and minerals, originally created by naturopath Dr. John Myers and which remains popular with naturopaths and is often offered at so-called IV bars, which are apparently popular among certain conspirituality-oriented elements of New Age hipster culture. The current version was designed by Alan R. Gaby, who took over Myers’s practice, and Gaby touts it as something close to a panacea – as having beneficial effects on “asthma attacks, acute migraines, fatigue (including chronic fatigue syndrome), fibromyalgia, acute muscle spasm, upper respiratory tract infections, chronic sinusitis, and seasonal allergic rhinitis” as well as potentially for “congestive heart failure, angina, chronic urticaria, hyperthyroidism, dysmenorrhea”. Now, there is of course no evidence gathered by any real testing to suggest that it is efficacious for any of the conditions for which it is commonly marketed, but Gaby, of course, has a collection of judiciously selected anecdotes.

 

And Gaby has managed to position himself as something of anauthority (“expert”) within the holistic (or “integrative“) medicine circus in recent decades, and his writings on nutritional therapies – especially his gigantic tome Nutritional Medicine – remain extremely influential among naturopaths and related quacks. That, of course, is partially because Gaby has been a long-time faculty member at the most influential naturopathic ‘educational’ institution, Bastyr University, as well as president of the American Holistic Medical Association. Now, in fairness, Gaby has devoted quite a bit of energy to criticizing nonsense within his own field as well, but has an impressively sized blind spot for the stuff he himself supports: “mainstream medicine does not believe that vitamins and minerals and accessory food factors have therapeutic value. Conventional journals constantly put out biased review articles and biased editorials that lead to that conclusion. I don’t know what the motivation is,” says Gaby, refusing to consider the obvious candidates accuracy and correctness as potential motivations – accusing researchers of bias solely on the grounds that their studies don’t support the conclusions he wants their studies to support seems to constitute a large part of his career. And nutritional medicine, which Gaby practices, should of course not be confused with dietary recommendations from dieticians – nutritional medicine is mostly a matter of pushing supplements under the dangerous pseudo-religious myth of food as a substitute for medicine.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, Gaby is concerned about research fraud, and yes, he does reject much nonsense alternative medicine as the nonsense it is; but that makes his own nonsense all the more dangerous, as it might give his recommendations a misleading sheen of being reasonable. And one can only lament how much better the efforts and energy he has invested could have been spent if he cultivated a willingness to care for facts and accuracy across the board.  

 

#2873: Jason Fyk

Jason Fyk is a conspiracy theorist and social media … personality, most famous, presumably, for the quixotic and failed lawsuit he brought, apparently with the support of Dennis Prager, against Facebook after Facebook ruined his business by shutting down the pages he had painstakingly created that were dedicated (solely) to images and videos of people peeing, and which Fyk himself considered something of an ultimate battle for free speech rights.

 

But Fyk has been a recurring presence in conspiracy theory circles for a long time. He has been a frequent guest at InfoWars and NaturalNews and a speaker at events like the 2019 American Priority Conference, and he was an early promoter of QAnon conspiracy theories, frequently posting “Q” posts about things like “Hillary's 16 year genocide plan! They want to wipe out all but 500 million people on the earth. This isn’t a game or a bluff”. In March 2018, for instance, Fyk reposted a “Q” post calling the Parkland mass shooting “FAKE” and describing it as a “distraction” that was, as Q so eloquently put it, “organized & designed to DISTRACT” (presumably from the Satanic child trafficking ring of politicians and celebrities that Trump was working secretly and hard to dismantle) and which featured “ACTORS [who] are ACTING.”

 

Diagnosis: A relatively minor cog in the colorful and dangerous wingnut conspiracy theory machinery, perhaps, but he is somewhat well connected and keeps popping up together with more central figures in the movement. You should of course not listen to anything he has to say about anything, but not enough people (i.e. not everyone) appears to follow that piece of advice.

#2872: Kristi Funk

Kristi Funk is a breast cancer surgeon and founder of the Pink Lotus Breast Center in Beverly Hills who rose to fame for her surgical treatment of celebrities like Angelina Jolie. And although she is apparently a decent surgeon, Funk has a number of dangerous and false ideas about the causes of breast cancer, and she promptly used the spotlight on her after the Jolie situation to spread dangerous misinformation and pseudoscience on the issue, e.g. through her book Breasts: the Owner’s Manual.

 

As Funk sees it, dairy products cause breast cancer, whereas organic foods, berries and cruciferous vegetables reduce the risk – as does, apparently, switching to bar soap and filling your home with houseplants to “absorb toxins”. Needless to say, there is no evidence for any of these claims. For Funk, however, evidence has little to do with anything: Funk is an adherent of the contemporary fad pseudo-religious tenet that whatever is natural (i.e. what counts as natural according to her gut feeling and the target audiences of various glossy magazines) is good and blessed – and like all religions, hers needs an opposite pole and a set of sins associated with the opposition, i.e. stuff that can somewhat arbitrarily be classified as unnatural and which is accordingly impure and bad. Perhaps the most obvious illustration of the pseudo-religious nature of her ideas, is her support for the New Age religious ritual of detoxing as a means to maintain or improve one’s health.

 

Well, she does, in fact, cite real research, too, when making her claims. Unfortunately, she is rather judicious in her selections and disturbingly prone to using irrelevant studies or misrepresenting the results described in the research she cites. For instance, her claim that exercise, avoiding alcohol and smoking and adopting a whole-food plant-based diet may reduce breast cancer risk by 80%, is at best a wild exaggeration and her claims about the effects of dairy and meat on breast cancer risks directly contradict the studies that actually exist.

 

And her cancer center offers plenty of woo, including homeopathic remedies like Arnica Forte to supplement real medicine – their website proudly admits that “integrative medicine is not just a marketing slogan but rather the essence of what we practice”. It’s not merely a slogan, but it is all about marketing.

 

Diagnosis: No, not a particularly wild-eyed superquack, but her attempts to twist and filter scientific findings to support a particular pseudo-religious creed – and not the least her practice’s endorsement of woo – is definitely a matter of concern.

#2871: Joel Fuhrman

A former competitive figure skater and, admittedly, an MD – but one who has gone over to the dark side to practice functional and integrative medicine – Joel Fuhrman has managed to position himself as one of the most authoritative promoter of nutrition-related nonsense and pseudoscience in the US at present. Fuhrman is research director of the Nutritional Research Project of the National Health Association, and he has been a frequent guest on American radio and television shows – he even had his own  television special called ‘3-Steps To Incredible Health’ on PBS for a while, and he and Dr. Oz has a long history of mutual back-scratching. Fuhrman’s plant-based ‘nutritarian’ diet – a typical fad diet – is marketed as a way to improve health and lose weight, and, like the recommendations of so many nutritionists out there, he mixes facts and what is probably good advice with nonsense and pseudoscience; as a diet, nutritarianism is mostly harmless, and might even be a reasonable alternative for some. That doesn’t justify the pseudo-religious nonsense, pseudoscience and bullshit Fuhrman uses to market it, however.

 

Fuhrman has been in the business for a while. His first quack book, Fasting and Eating For Health, appeared in 1995, and promotes fasting and his own diet as something that is supposed to (but of course doesn’t) “relieve and even cure such maladies as psoriasis, high blood pressure, diabetes, hypoglycemia, sinusitis, and chronic fatigue.” His most popular book, however, is presumably Eat to Live, which lays out his idea of “toxic hunger”, the inaccurate idea that people are addicted to toxins that build up from nutrient-poor foods. Other titles include Super Immunity, The End of Dieting and The End of Heart Disease.

 

The central element of his ‘nutritarianism’ is nutrient density and his “Health Equation” H = N/C, i.e. that Healthy Life Expectancy equals Nutrition divided by Calories. Accordingly, Fuhrman (falsely) claims that “food choices are the most significant cause of disease and premature death” and that eating foods with lots of micronutrients can reduce not only the risk of obesity but of diseases such as cancer. It cannot. And since the entities in his equation cannot be quantified or the terms be precisely defined, Fuhrman’s ‘health equation’ is a “parlor trick” and not a serious principle for anything. Fuhrman, however, uses his own children as anecdotal evidence that his nutritarian diet will prevent health problems; as for cancer, his claim is that “the immediate impact is that cancer rates might decrease by half. But the long-term impact, over generations, if we get kids eating right, we could decrease cancer rates by 90 percent.” (You don’t need to ask where the numbers come from – Fuhrman has his own science, one that doesn’t need the input of naysaying scientists who fetishize truth, evidence or accountability.) Another common trick of Fuhrman’s is the popular one of incorrectly assuming that association studies show causation, which is a useful trick for finding apparent support for anything you want. His own diet has of course not been tested in controlled trials. There is a good rundown of his diet and its scientific foundations here.

 

Though it seems that his nutritarianism has evolved over time, at least Fuhrman’s version used to be a type of raw food faddism, and Furhman himself would take a pseudo-religious vitalistic view of food preparation, according to which cooking destroys and kills the living antioxidants, phytochemicals, and so – and no, don’t ask whether that’s actually the case: it’s a tenet of a baroque pseudoreglious system – and according to which processed food are “foods whose life has been taken out of them”. And the micronutrients you (mythically) miss out on in this manner, make you exposed to magical toxins that accumulate in your cells and that you need to “detoxify” through some religious ritual.

 

The core assumption, however, is the central lie of so many quacks and charlatans with something to sell you: that all disease is preventable if you just choose the right strategy. (And that strategy is, of course, hidden from you by the powers that be; fortunately, a few brave maverick doctors like Fuhrman are willing to let you in to the exclusive cult of the enlightened). You can read a discussion of that particular falsehood and its role in pseudomedicine here. One particularly pernicious consequence of the idea is that it puts the blame for getting sick on the victims of disease – that those who get sick chose their fate by failing to recognize the strategy of the enlightened.

 

Even more ominously, Fuhrman also suggests that healthy people don’t need antibiotics, and he has been caught trotting out alt-med type tropes against chemotherapy. He has even more than toyed with antivaccine nonsense, e.g. claiming (completely bonkers falsely) that shots aren’t “effective at all – it doesn’t work”.

 

Another important element of his ‘nutritarianism’ is his “Aggregate Nutrient Density Index” (ANDI), a ranking of foods based on micronutrients that has subsequently been adopted by the Whole Foods marketing department.  

 

Then there’s the grift – of course there’s a grift! Fuhrman sells his own line of nutrition-related products, and he also hosts his own ‘Weekend Immersions’ for which people pay up to a thousand bucks to be “immersed” in nutritarianism with a weekend of lectures, cooking and exercise classes and something akin to a religious awakening where converted nutritarians get up on stage to talk about the miracles associated with having nutritarianism in their lives and how they believe it helped them overcome rheumatoid arthritis and stage-four ovarian cancer or what have you. And like functional medicine advocates are wont to do, Fuhrman has hawked expensive and useless tests that are suitable for convincing people that they suffer from conditions they do not suffer from, such as iodine tests.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, there are a few sensible claims sprinkled on top, but Fuhrman’s nutritarianism is rotten from below the surface and to the core. Yet his ideas easily find traction in a culture where diet has become a pseudo-religious practice, and he is not afraid to fuel the trend. His influence can hardly be overestimated.

 

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki

#2870: Nick Fuentes

No, we don’t really want to give him too much attention ... Nick Fuentes is a shitpost troll – indeed, Nick Fuentes is something close to a Platonic idea of a shitpost troll, and paying him attention is probably exactly the wrong thing to do. On the other hand, Fuentes is a symptom of a certain current – the boogaloo, groyper post-truth shitposting culture – in modern society that is both hard and dangerous to overlook: Fuentes, who is the de facto leader of the Groyper Army, is explicitly campaigning to move the overton window (“I wanna be the furthest Right reactionary and drag everybody over”, says Fuentes) in order to normalize the erratic, pseudofascist behavior of the MAGA crowds (and to mainstream brazen white supremacism and anti-semitism), and does so by performing militant ideological extremism and utter nihilism at the same time; Fuentes is the bastard fascist offspring of (good and proper) GenX irony and naïve Millenial sincerity, nurtured by the fear, hate and paranoia of various far-right factions (religious right, conspiracy groups, nativists) to serve as a beacon luring these groups to the altright by explicitly formulating the ideas the groups were attracted to but remained reluctant to entertain. It is unclear, however, whether Fuentes’s ultimate goal is – if anything at all – anything other than to burn it all down, but that goal is apparently appealing to many religious fundies and wingnut conspiracy theorists. You can read a basic portrait of Nick Fuentes here: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nick_Fuentes and a more comprehensive one here, though this one is probably even more illuminating when it comes to Fuentes’s role and position on the right.

 

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):

 

-       Dalton Clodfelter

-       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.