White supremacism has a new face in the US: a clean-cut 27-year-old with a vast social media following
Who is Nick Fuentes?
Fuentes is a 27-year-old activist and political commentator best known for his Christian nationalist and racist rhetoric. He first attracted attention as a teenager at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Since then, he has built up a large following as a social media influencer, particularly via his America First broadcasts, on which he airs white supremacist, antisemitic, misogynistic and authoritarian views. On an episode of his show in March, he summarised his politics as: “Jews are running society, women need to shut the fuck up, blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part, and we would live in paradise. It’s that simple.” He has also repeatedly described Hitler as “cool”.
Why is he significant?
Because he has become disturbingly influential. His X/Twitter account, which Elon Musk reinstated in 2024, has 1.2 million followers; this month each of his America First livestreams has attracted around a million views each. On 27 October, the former Fox News star Tucker Carlson broadcast a sympathetic two-hour interview, which was watched by more than 6.5 million people. Carlson did not challenge Fuentes’ views, which precipitated a major ruction inside the Republican Party and Donald Trump’s Maga movement. Rod Dreher, a conservative columnist, warned that the party has a neo-Nazi problem: between 30% and 40% of Republican staffers in Washington under the age of 30, Dreher said, are “Groypers”.
What is a Groyper?
Fuentes’ fanbase call themselves Groypers, or the “Groyper Army” after their logo: an unwholesome-looking cartoon toad named Groyper, a variant on the “Pepe the Frog” meme that became popular with far-right activists in 2015. More a loose-knit network of internet trolls than an organised movement, they see themselves as Maga’s edgy youth wing, and like to mock right-wing figures who are (relatively) more moderate. Unlike the Maga mainstream, they favour Catholic ultra-traditionalism or Eastern Orthodoxy over Evangelical Protestantism, and they oppose US support for Israel. But they’re so steeped in social media in-jokes, memes and irony that it’s hard to know what they really believe.
So what does Fuentes believe?
Being more outrageous than his competitors while suggesting it’s all a big game is a part of Fuentes’ act. As well as praising Hitler and Stalin, he has coined the slogan “Your body, my choice” to needle women concerned about abortion rights after Trump’s second election victory. His irony gives plausible deniability, and helps confuse mainstream critics – but there’s no reason to think he isn’t sincere about his positions: support for an ethnic and religious hierarchy with white Christian men at the top; a belief that Black people are inclined to criminality; opposition to legal as well as illegal immigration; vehement antifeminism; respect for authoritarianism; disdain for democracy. A former fan (and, in 2022, dinner guest) of Trump, Fuentes now says that “Trump 2.0 has been a disappointment in literally every way”, while Trump himself is “incompetent, corrupt and compromised”. He sees the vice president, J.D. Vance, as a corporate stooge and “a fat, gay race traitor” (Vance’s wife is of Indian descent). He has particularly criticised the administration for its support of Israel.
What are his views on Israel?
He rails against US backing and funding for Israel, questioning the mainstream rationale for the alliance, and suggesting that it serves the interests of Jewish elites rather than the US itself. His thinking often tips over into conspiratorial antisemitic tropes. Central to Fuentes’ thinking is the belief that “organised Jewry” exerts a disproportionate control over US political, financial and media institutions – in ways that harm “traditional America”. He has also said “Hitler was right. And the Holocaust didn’t happen.” Although he later claimed that this was a mere provocation, Fuentes has repeatedly said that the Holocaust is used to push a liberal, multicultural agenda – to “browbeat” whites and suppress white pride.
How is the Republican Party reacting?
Republican mainstays such as Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz have denounced Fuentes, and Carlson for giving him a platform. Senator Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, made clear his position by declaring: “I’m in the ‘Hitler sucks’ wing of the Republican Party.” Elsewhere, the situation has not been so clearcut. After Carlson’s interview, Kevin Roberts, the director of the Heritage Foundation, a prominent right-wing think-tank, put out a video describing Carlson’s critics as a “venomous coalition” of “the globalist class”. (“Globalists” is often used as code for “Jews”.) This led to resignations at the Heritage Foundation; Roberts eventually had to apologise. However, neither Trump nor Vance has ever condemned Fuentes; presumably because they share some of his beliefs and don’t want to alienate the Groypers.
What does Fuentes want?
Apart from attention and money – his influencing operation is carefully monetised, from paid-for questions to branded merchandise – he has said for years that he wants the Groypers to infiltrate the US establishment and the Republican Party, and to displace traditional conservatism with his brand of far-right white nationalism. “Your job is to get into the Ivy League,” he told his followers. “Your job is to get into these offices and do what you need to do, say what you need to say.” He advises them to hide their views: “Hold it close to the chest.” Fuentes generally demurs when he’s asked if he wants to be president himself. But as the Maga movement begins to contemplate the post-Trump future, there are likely to be opportunities for a white nationalist influencer with a large, fervent online fanbase.
The making of an extremist
Fuentes was born and raised in La Grange Park, Illinois. He describes his childhood, in a largely white suburb near Chicago, with a home-maker mother, a breadwinner father of Mexican heritage, and a strong Catholic ethos, as idyllic. He thinks women should stay at home, and shouldn’t have the right to vote. He told Piers Morgan recently that he had never had sex with a woman; he said he was not gay, “but I will say that women are very difficult to be around.” He studied politics at Boston University, but dropped out after his first year to become an activist. In 2019, Fuentes started to criticise the conservative activist Charlie Kirk, whom he saw as insufficiently right-wing and in the pay of corporate donors. (“Conservative Inc.” is his name for Kirk’s brand of activism.) Fuentes’ supporters often attended Kirk’s events to heckle, in a conflict later referred to as the “Groyper War”. In some ways, Fuentes’ livestream show harks back to a traditional format: he wears a suit, sits behind a desk, and talks rapidly and fluently about current affairs, in a thick Chicago accent. The difference, said Jay Caspian Kang in The New Yorker, is that he inhabits a post-Trump, “post-woke” world, in which “all norms in political commentary have been destroyed”.
