#293: Paul Nelson

April 7th every year is Paul Nelson day. The background is as follows: On April 6th 2004 Paul Nelson, an Intelligent Design creationist, presented his notion of “Ontogenetic Depth”. Ontogenetic depth is purportedly a way of objectively measuring the complexity of the developmental process in organisms with a number that described the distance from egg to adult, something that would – if he could give it – actually give Intelligent Design some predictive power (which it doesn’t have). The idea is silly, and what he didn’t give away was – predictably – how to calculate the number, how it actually accounts for the complexity of a network, or even how to obtain a number that was different for a rhododendron and an elephant. Instead, Nelson said he'd get back with the details “tomorrow”. Well, “tomorrow” would have been April 7, 2004. We are still waiting, and the incident has become rather symbolic for the scientific credibility of Intelligent Design Creationism as an actual scientific theory.

Here are some summaries of previous Paul Nelson days:

2006, 2008 (also here), 2009 (also here), and 2010.

Paul Nelson is a philosopher of science (apologist), young earth creationist and intelligent design advocate. He is a fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture and of the International Society for Complexity, Information and Design. He is admittedly known for some strokes of insight. In an interview in Touchstone Magazine he admitted that there is no scientific theory of intelligent design at the moment, thus directly contradicting the official Discovery Institute stance. He also admitted – in an article co-written with fellow young earth creationist John Mark Reynolds (in J.P. Moreland’s “Three Views on Creation and Evolution”) – that “[n]atural science at the moment seems to overwhelmingly point to an old cosmos. Though creationist scientists have suggested some evidence for a recent cosmos, none are widely accepted as true. It is safe to say that most recent creationists are motivated by religious concerns.” (That does not mean that Nelson is opposed to the wedge strategy; just that he may not be completely aware that he is contradicting it).

He is not always that honest (though one sometimes suspects non-malicious intent), and has been caught accusing “evolutionists” of breaking down over … Paley’s design argument (follow-up here). Seriously. Anyone appealing to Paley’s argument has, by definition, no clue about how evolution is supposed to work. Strawmen are expected, though, given the combination of cluelessness and confirmation bias.

Nelson was also involved in concocting “Explore Evolution”, the Discovery Institute’s new “science” textbook for highschools. He has produced no scientific findings.

Diagnosis: Mild-mannered but thoroughly confused ignoramus – the kind of guy who can sit through the most careful explanation of a phenomenon attentively, and still interpret it completely randomly as being evidence for whatever he wants to believe.

#340: Marcus Ross

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Marcus R. Ross is a vertebrate paleontologist and young Earth creationist, and has received some media coverage for the apparent conflict between his young earth creationism and his dissertation on tracking the diversity, biostratigraphy, and extinction of mosasaurs (short answer: he doesn’t believe his own work, which raises some questions concerning intellectual honesty to begin with). Larry Moran weighs in here. This one raises some important questions. How does Ross manage to compartmentalize to this extent? The answer explains why fire and brimstone fundie literalists are so fond of flakier-than-flaky postmodernism (see also here). Ross is currently an Assistant Professor of Geology in the Biology/Chemistry Department at Liberty University, and Assistant Director of the Center for Creation Studies. What kind of education is his students getting, one may wonder? Well, this is illuminating.

As a grad student, Ross was a fellow of the Discovery Institute and participated (with old earth creationist Fred Heeren) the infamous Kunming conference in China (which was notable for being secretly funded by the Discovery Institute to paint an aura of scientific legitimacy on intelligent design).

The best statement on the Ross situation, and what it shows, can be found here.

Ross, by the way, was the guy who presented the paper “ONTOGENETIC DEPTH AS A COMPLEXITY METRIC FOR THE CAMBRIAN EXPLOSION” with Paul Nelson back in the olden days (not yesterday).

Diagnosis: Probably one of the world’s most skilled mental compartmentalizers, Ross used his unique skill to attain a whiff of authority that he currently deploys ardently to make the world a worse place. Sad.

Update May 22, 2013: Note that Fred Heeren, mentioned in this entry, appears to have later renounced creationism altogether.

#1383: Wendell Bird

If you take a quick look at the courtcases involving creationism in public schools in the US, one name tends to pop up so often that it is hard to avoid giving him an entry in our Encyclopedia. Wendell Bird is an Atlanta-based attorney who concentrates primarily on litigation and in tax laws affecting exempt organizations. Now, of course any defendant deserves an attorney, and defending creationism in public schools is as such not itself an indication of lunacy, but Bird definitely seems to have a personal interest in the creationism-evolution debate, and that interest is not guided by reason, evidence or science.

Oh, what the heck. Bird is a former staff attorney for the Institute of Creation Research, for crying out loud, and the Discotute’s current strategies for getting creationism into public schools are really a continuation of Bird’s tactics from the 1980s (this timeline of creationism is illuminating). Bird is, in other words, among the founders of the Intelligent Design movement and its outreach strategies (no, Bird is not a scientist, but the Intelligent Design movement has, contrary to what they assert, never been about science but about getting their unscientific musings into public schools).

So, for instance, Bird defended Louisiana’s “equal time” law in the famous 1985 Edwards v. Aguillard, which was ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Court of Appeals and eventually by the U.S. Supreme Court (good resource here); during the case Bird, interestingly, pushed the “academic freedom” strategy hard, arguing that it is “a basic concept of fairness, teaching all the evidence” (never mind that the “evidence” procured in favor of creationism was not evidence for creationism in any case). He also took the familiar crackpot trick of quote-mining to new levels; apparently with the help of Paul Nelson, he assembled a massive 500-page brief that consisted almost entirely of thousands of quotes from authorities on every topic bearing on “creation science”, from astrophysics to biology to philosophy to religion. Given the obvious dishonesty involved, the brief failed to convince the judges, but Bird later turned his brief into a large, two-volume book, The Origin of Species Revisited.

It all began in the 1970s; in 1978, then Yale Law School student (under Robert Bork) Bird wrote an article arguing that the U.S. Constitution required the teaching of “scientific creationism” in public schools, an argument he further developed for the Institute for Creation Research to a resolution (authored by Bird) “concerning balanced presentation of alternate scientific theories of origins,” intended as a model for local school boards that wished to adopt a policy of teaching creationism. That strategy was then the basis for the defense in McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education, a case where Bird was the primary legal advisor for the anti-science rabble. But the resolution was also the model for all later creationist bills and “academic freedom” bills used to try to get religiously-motivated science denial taught as science in public schools (e.g. this one and these), and Bird’s defense deliberately tried to gloss over explicitly religious or Biblical language to make everything sound more scientifically acceptable – instead of God’s creation of species, he would talk about their “abrupt appearance” and explicit references to the Bible would be removed – the very same strategy pushed by religious fundamentalists under the heading “Intelligent Design” to this day.

In 2007 Bird led a notorious lawsuit against the University of California, brought on by some private Christian high schools (Association of Christian Schools International et al., or ACSI) against the U.C. because the U.C. doesn’t give credit for certain courses taught at these private schools (described in some detail here). The courses in question included “science” courses that used Bob Jones University textbooks full of fake fundamentalist pseudoscience. During the case Bird applied his usual tactics, including radical quote-mining (it’s pretty striking that an experienced attorney would fail to realize that quote-mining is an exceptionally bad idea in a court case, where the references usually will be checked) and – but of course – persecution complexes: By not treating denialist pseudoscience as equivalent to science, the U.C. is persecuting Christians, the way Bird sees things; also the fact that “[t]he senior reviewer is Buddhist, and the reviewer who handled religious school science courses and drafted most policies is Jewish …” is evidence of anti-Christian bias. Needless to say, perhaps, the ACSI lost, but their tactics still reveals a mindset that is pretty scary.

Diagnosis: One of the movers and shakers behind anti-science legislations in the US, and arguably one of the founders of the modern Intelligent Design movement. A scary and hugely influential figure, in other words.

#1713: Mark Hartwig

Mark Hartwig is a Fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture (CSC), and is known as one of the early organizers of the intelligent design creationist movement (apparently his own background is in educational psychology). At least he used to be managing editor of the (moribund) journal Origins Research and director of CSC’s Access Research Network (with Dennis Wagner, Stephen Meyer and Paul Nelson), which aims to bring creationism to the public, and on the advisory board of the IDEA center, which is … the same (though with an explicitly religious perspective). He was also the author of The Wedge (http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Wedge_Strategy) Update column and The Intelligent Design FAQ. He has not been involved in relevant research, of course, but intelligent design is about outreach, not science, evidence and research. Hartwig is notably also an employee of Focus on the Family.

Like most intelligent design creationists, Hartwig has worked hard to get creationism – or at least PRATT-style objections to evolution – into public schools and for instance defended the infamous Cobb county requirement that biology textbooks be equipped with a sticker telling students that “Evolution is a theory, not a fact.” According to Hartwig, the theory of evolution is uncertain, as shown by the fact that it is controversial. Of course, the controversy is a controversy among non-scientists, partially due to the obfuscatory efforts of the Discovery Institute; it is not scientifically controversial, but Hartwig pretends not to notice the difference (nor does he seem to understand the science of evolution or how scientific research and publication work). He was also involved in the rather complex creation of Of Pandas and People.

And like so many intelligent design advocates Hartwig likes to compare scientists to Nazis; here, for instance, he draws an analogy between “Darwinists” and the Nazi oppressors of Czechoslovakia. Apparently the “Darwinists” often resort to the oppressive tactic of criticism targeted at the creationists (and sometimes even ridicule when the creationist arguments are particularly daft, which they often are). To Hartwig, that shows that they are afraid, which is evidence that the theory of evolution is in trouble (“[w]ith the growing success of the Wedge, I’m sure we’re going to see a lot more of this stuff,” said Hartwig in 2004; the vindication of intelligent apparently continues to remain just around the corner). Of course, one suspects that if Darwinists had failed to criticize intelligent design and rather ignored it, that would have been taken as evidence against evolution as well. It’s tough to play when your opponents don’t know the rules.

Diagnosis: We haven’t really heard much from or about him the last couple of years, but Hartwig is, or at least used to be, a central character – if not the loudest or most colorful – in the religious fundamentalist anti-science movement.

#1461: Ed Chiarini

a.k.a. DallasGoldBug

Another tragedy, another slew of clinically insane conspiracy theorists claiming that it’s a “hoax”, a false flag operation arranged by the guv’mint for nebulous but nefarious purposes.

Ed Chiarini is a Texas moron who runs a conspiracy site – a “Dallasgoldbug production” – that seems to pass along any paranoia-fueled conspiracy hypothesis under the venerable investigative principle “If you hear hoofbeats, assume unicorns.” According to himself Chiarini is an “investigator” interested only in the truth and keeping the public from being duped by its government, and has a long history of JAQing off under the assumption that if a conspiracy theory is almost imaginable (apart from a few inconsistencies), then it needs to be investigated to establish that it must in fact be true. His site got some attention when it pushed the idea that the Gabrielle Gifford shootings never took place but was all a government hoax that used actors. It’s not only the Gifford shooting, of course; here’s a discussion of Chiarini’s particular brand of Sandy Hook trutherism.

Of course, most conspiracy theorists get tired of JAQing off in the long run of things, and at some point Chiarini decided to really go down the rabbit hole. His website WellAware1 is currently famous for pushing the idea that all news events are staged by actors: whether they’re mall employees, famous musicians, crime victims or politicians, they are actors hired by the guv’mint to manipulate our perception of reality and push forward some sort of actor-driven totalitarian agenda. The evidence consists of trying to find images of people who in some way physically resemble each other, claiming that they are the same person, and therefore actors. Alan Greenspan, for instance, is obviously the same person as Larry King – funny that the guv’mint thought they could get away with that one without anyone noticing. And Dave Chappelle is Tupac because of ear biometrics: Chappelle’s and Tupac’s ears are the exactly the same, “right down to the piercing;” and possibly because they’re both black and black people tend to all look the same to certain people. Meanwhile, Steve Carell is Boy George and Alice Cooper, Paul Newman is Don Juan Carlos of Spain, Roman Polanski is Imran Khan, Nelson Mandela is Morgan Freeman’s father (old, indistinguishable black people, you know) and Willow Smith is Malia Obama. At least he’s really got it in for David Icke, who is really the same person as a range of guv’mint officials and celebrities.

Critics are easily disposed of: Apparently criticism of Chiarini’s project is compelling evidence that the critic is paid by the guv’mint, so any criticism is, in reality, further evidence that he is right.

He is currently trying to get crowdfunding so he can go on working to release THE REAL TRUTH, and his GoFundMe page includes a video that tries to prove Columbine was staged with the aid of inanimate human dummies.

Meanwhile, the good people over at whale.to are of two minds about Chiarini; on the one hand they seem to like his approach to evidence; on the other they do suspect that Chiarini might himself be an actor and double agent (of course). When it comes to what they find compelling, I think none put it better than whale.to stalwart Don Bradley:

“The big truther shills out there are all network actors, scripted and coordinated from on high and from a single source: the CIA. They move players and create vast dramas keyed with witches sabbats, zodiacal shifts, and other calander points to create the maximum amount of magical expression in this dimension. Their goal is to create illusions believable enough to be mistaken for realities, that others will make their own and invest in emotionally, spiritually, and with time and effort. Once they’ve convinced these fake illusions are real enough, they then expect you to continue thinking and preceiving in their created box of lies.”

Yeah, that’s it, Don. Roughly.

Diagnosis: Though we would like to say otherwise, people like Chiarini are, in fact, not always entirely harmless, and victims of real tragedies have often experienced further harassment by delusional dingbats who take the insanity of people like Chiarini seriously. It is nevertheless hard not to point and laugh.

#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.