Nick Fuentes: radical right-winger who became Kanye West’s right-hand man 

Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist working on disgraced rapper Kanye West’s 2024 presidential campaign, was filmed getting into a food fight with fellow customers at a Hollywood burger restaurant.

Fuentes was seen throwing a drink over fellow diners on Saturday, according to video shared on social media. The food fight started when a couple reportedly threw ketchup at Fuentes, “splashing him with the condiment”, the celebrity gossip website TMZ reported. And “that’s when Nick lost it, tossing his drink at them”.

Fuentes, a Holocaust denier, made headlines for more substantial reasons recently when he attended a dinner with West and Donald Trump at the former US president’s Florida mansion Mar-a-Lago.

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Before the meeting, “most Americans had never heard of Nick Fuentes”, said Yahoo! News. Now, “the 24-year-old’s name and laundry list of bigoted beliefs have been the subject of countless mainstream news articles, cable news segments and late-night talk show monologues”.

Who is Nick Fuentes?

Born in August 1998, Fuentes grew up in La Grange Park, Illinois, and went to Lyons Township High School, where he was president of the student council.

While studying at Boston University he released a video setting out his case for voting for Donald Trump in the upcoming 2016 presidential elections.

The video went viral, and the comment sections soon “spiralled out of control”, said Vice. There were threats to “beat him up”, fellow student Alec Dakin told the news site, but there was also a group of “4chan-type people” who rallied to his defence with threats of their own, Dakin said.

In 2017 Fuentes claimed he received more death threats for attending the white nationalist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Six months later, at the age of just 18, he had launched his own online show in which, among other things, he has railed against the “barbaric ideology” of Islam and called for the “globalists” at CNN to be “hanged”, Vice said.

Since then his star has risen further in alt-right circles. In 2020, Fuentes founded the America First Political Action Conference “as a far-right alternative to the Conservative Political Action Coalition in an effort to distance himself from mainstream GOP [Republican Party]”, said Forbes. The event has attracted far-right members of the US Congress, including the controversial Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, both of whom have spoken at the conference.

Fuentes has maintained his support for Trump. In November 2020 he directed his followers, who are called Groypers, to “storm every state capitol” until “President Trump is inaugurated for four more years”. He himself led a group of followers to the US Capitol during the 6 January insurrection, which he later declared to be “awesome”.

Trump is not the only potential 2024 presidential candidate that Fuentes has supported, however. Since Kanye West, the 45-year-old rapper now known as Ye, announced his own bid for the White House in late November, Fuentes and West have been spotted together on multiple occasions.

Most notably, they appeared on InfoWars, the far-right conspiracy show hosted by Alex Jones, “who owes hundreds of millions in damages to the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims”, said the LA Times.

Wearing a full-face balaclava on the show, West, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2016, said: “I see good things about Hitler also ... this guy that invented highways, invented the very microphone that I use as a musician, you can’t say out loud that this person ever did anything good.”

Then in a separate video posted online by the rapper about the dinner he had with Trump and Fuentes, West said: “Trump is really impressed with Nick Fuentes”, describing him as a “loyalist”.

Is Fuentes dangerous?

Trump’s claims that he only dined with Fuentes because he didn’t know anything about him “have fallen short”, said The New York Times. In the immediate aftermath, Bill Cassidy, a Republican senator from Louisiana, wrote on Twitter: “President Trump hosting racist antisemites for dinner encourages other racist antisemites. These attitudes are immoral and should not be entertained. This is not the Republican Party.” Other Republicans including Susan Collins, a senator from Maine, denounced the dinner as well.

Even by rubbing shoulders with such high-profile public figures as West and Trump, Fuentes is “normalizing hate and ramping up the risk of violence in a country already experiencing a sharp increase in antisemitism”, said the Chicago Sun-Times.

For his part, Fuentes claims that his more extreme positions are simply ironic. But in doing so, he is “following a playbook popular among domestic extremists: using irony and claims of ‘just joking’ to spread their message, while deflecting criticism”, said NPR.

And often, the person who chooses to associate themselves with Fuentes is the one who gets criticised rather than Fuentes himself, misinformation expert Caroline Orr told Vice.

“It’s almost like the toxicity of Nick Fuentes rubs off on the person he associates with, rather than himself,” said Orr. “The person who he’s with ends up getting most of the negative energy and attention, and he kind of just waltzes away.”

Certainly this is true of his association with West, Vice said. The rapper has seen his reputation plummet, while “searches for [Fuentes’s] name on Google have soared”.