In the eyes of Nick Fuentes, Vice President J. D. Vance can’t possibly be the future of the Republican Party. “Vance is not going to be a racist,” Fuentes said during a livestream last week. “You can’t make me go and vote for some fatass with some mixed-race family.” Fuentes, a 27-year-old influencer with more than 730,000 followers on X, showed his audience a photo of Vance with his Indian American wife and biracial kids in front of the Taj Mahal. “How would he possibly ever say that there is an ethnic basis for American identity?” Fuentes asked, referring to a far-right dream of turning America into a white ethno-state. “There’s not even an ethnic basis for his family.”
Vance is only one of Fuentes’s many targets. America also has a problem with “organized Jewry,” he said on another livestream earlier this month. “It’s like a transnational gang.” Fuentes, who is a quarter Mexican, has at times used his background to claim that he is not a white supremacist. His unabashed racism suggests otherwise. Earlier this year, in yet another stream, Fuentes described Chicago as “nigger hell.” He then laughed and added: “I just came up with that, just now. Isn’t that good?” Fuentes has also said that Hitler was “really fucking cool” and posited that “we need to go back to burning women alive.” (Fuentes did not respond to multiple requests for an interview.)
This is shocking rhetoric even in 2025, when the far right has embraced race science and the federal government could be mistaken for pursuing the aims of the Proud Boys. Popular MAGA figures rarely engage in Fuentes-grade bigotry. Consider Laura Loomer, the influencer and Donald Trump confidante: She has called Kamala Harris a “DEI Shaniqua” and described Indian immigrants as “third world invaders,” but even she stops short of the vile slurs and Hitler praise expressed by Fuentes.
His approach is working. Fuentes is among the most popular streamers on Rumble, a right-wing platform similar to YouTube; his videos regularly rack up hundreds of thousands of views. He’s gained more than 100,000 new followers on X since late June. The White House now posts on X in a gleefully cruel style that seems inspired by Fuentes’s followers, who call themselves “Groypers”—in fact, at the end of May, Trump posted a meme of himself that was first posted by a Groyper account. At least one Fuentes supporter, Paul Ingrassia, works in the administration as a liaison to the Department of Homeland Security. Ingrassia, who didn’t respond to an interview request, has also been nominated to lead the U.S. Office of Special Counsel. No matter how far Fuentes pushes his bigotry, his influence continues to rise.
Fuentes has been saying awful things into a camera since he was a teenager. He started his show, America First, as a freshman at Boston University in 2017. That April, he spoke about it being “time to kill” the “globalists” who run CNN. In August 2017, after attending the far right’s fatal Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Fuentes dropped out of college. National news outlets covered his departure as a case of a student being driven off campus by death threats for his political opinions. At the time, Fuentes denied being a white nationalist and a racist to The Boston Globe.
Fuentes began to develop his platform, dabbling in extreme rhetoric—how he believes that Jim Crow segregation was “better for us” and that “multiculturalism is a cancer”—while sharing more familiar right-wing political views. (For example, Fuentes talks about how Christianity informs his politics, and his desire to see the GOP accrue more power.) By 2019, he had garnered a following of mostly young, disaffected men, who trolled his adversaries online and occasionally in the physical world too. That year, Groypers heckled Donald Trump Jr., Charlie Kirk, and Representative Dan Crenshaw at events across the country with homophobic and anti-Semitic comments. In 2022, he hosted a political conference that featured two GOP members of Congress: Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar. Later that year, Kanye West (who now goes by “Ye”) brought him along to a dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
Facing backlash from the public and leaders in their own party, Greene and Gosar eventually distanced themselves from Fuentes, and Trump posted on Truth Social that he “knew nothing about” Fuentes before meeting him. Fuentes was booted off Facebook, YouTube, and—for a time—Twitter. It seemed that he would follow the same arc as other popular white supremacists: Richard Spencer, for example, gained a lot of influence as a white supremacist in the early Trump years, but he has virtually faded out of the public spotlight. Trump disavowed Spencer’s movement soon after winning the presidency in 2016; the next year, Spencer was kicked out of CPAC.
But Fuentes has held on. After rebranding Twitter as X, Elon Musk reinstated his account last year. Major media figures on the right once tried to handle Fuentes’s encroachment into their spaces by basically pretending that he didn’t exist. They can no longer do that. In the past several weeks, he has weathered various attacks from a trio of high-profile right-wing figures, including Musk, Candace Owens, and Tucker Carlson. In a conversation with Owens on his show, Carlson called Fuentes a “weird little gay kid in his basement” and tried to discredit him by intimating, without evidence, that he is an agent who is working to “discredit non-crazy right voices” such as himself and Owens. “I think Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens view him as a competitor,” Ben Lorber, an analyst with Political Research Associates, a group that monitors the far right, told me. “He’s almost outflanking them in a discourse they want to corner.”
The secret to Fuentes’s success may be that he shares the politics of many far-right Trump supporters but doesn’t position himself as a MAGA personality. He is not limited by the party line—or by the desires of wealthy Republican donors. He doesn’t champion capitalism. He doesn’t try to obfuscate his positions on the role of women in society and what rights they should have; he is very open about being a misogynist. (“Your body, my choice. Forever,” he posted on Election Night in November; that post has now been viewed more than 102 million times.) If Trump veers into territory Fuentes disagrees with, then Fuentes simply disagrees publicly. He offers a consistency that other right-wingers cannot.
For instance, in June, many MAGA figures adjusted their own position after Trump attacked Iran. At the time, Charlie Kirk wrote on Facebook that he was open to America supporting regime change in Iran; a few months earlier, he’d posted on X that, under Trump, “America has a golden opportunity to pull away from Middle East quagmires for good.” By contrast, Fuentes criticized Trump directly: “So delicious watching people defend Trump for the past week because ‘he isn’t doing regime change,’ only for him to immediately start advocating regime change the day after bombing Iran,” he wrote on X. When the Trump administration refused to release the Jeffrey Epstein files, lots of pro-Trump figures were unhappy but did not directly attack the president. “I’m going to trust my friends in the government to do what needs to be done,” Kirk said at the time. Fuentes took a different approach: “Let us never forget that one year ago today, our President Donald Trump was spared from sudden death by God,” he posted on X. “Trump took a bullet so that he could live to cover up Epstein’s pedophile island and to bomb Iran for Israel.”
Fuentes has also endured because, compared with other white supremacists, he is better at connecting to a broader audience. His rhetoric is deplorable, but evidently, many people want to hear it—particularly those who are part of his core audience: Gen Z men. (Based on my own reporting, his in-person events are nearly universally attended by young white men.) One of his recurring points is that the future, especially for young people, is grim. “It’s the idea that our kids and this generation is never going to own anything,” he said during a livestream in 2022. “Debt slavery. Never owning a house, never owning a car, never paying off their school. Never making an income to support a family. Not being able to have a family.”
The answer, he argues, is mass deportations and stopping a supposed Jewish cabal that is looking out for its own interests. Fuentes gives young men a clearly articulated road map as to how being prolifically racist will improve the quality of their life. By contrast, Spencer evinced bad political instincts. He once told a crowd at Auburn University, a college-football powerhouse, that he would ban football if he could, because it makes white people sympathetic to Black people.
Perhaps Fuentes will eventually face the same fate as Spencer: He operates in a narrow lane between mainstream influencer and niche white supremacist. But the longer he sticks around, the more opportunities he will get to influence young men. In 2023, I reported that conservative organizations at roughly 30 college campuses across the country had been taken over by students aligned with Groypers. Such groups have long helped breed the next generation of Republican staffers. By infiltrating them, Fuentes is shaping the future of the right. Even if his popularity starts to wane, his politics aren’t going away for a long time.
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