Kristine Kasubienski’s donation appeared on viewers’ screens four hours into the live stream of Nick Fuentes, the far-right influencer she often called her second son.
“I pray DAILY for your safety,” she wrote one night last August, sending Fuentes a $50 digital gift. “I would become a Charles Bronson vigilante to anyone who harmed you. Keep up the fight.”
For seven years, Kasubienski had binged Fuentes’s near-nightly monologues from her home in Lorain, Ohio, watching as the college student from suburban Illinois grew into one of the most prominent torchbearers for an increasingly radicalized online right.
The 57-year-old Air Force veteran believed Fuentes’s furious talk about the dangers of a diversifying America and worried that it placed him in danger. On many nights, she sent paid messages, known as “superchats,” to tell him about her own moments of personal crisis and to encourage him, dipping into the little money she made serving chicken paprikash on a Polish food truck.
She doubted Fuentes was making much money — no more than $50,000 a year, said her son, Stephen Ryan, who watched Fuentes together with his mom on a 65-inch TV screen. “We were barely making it, but we wanted to help him because we saw what he was struggling with,” Ryan said in an interview.
But by the time of her prayer message, Fuentes was already generating a sizable income. Since the start of last year through the end of last month, roughly 11,000 donors have sent Fuentes nearly $900,000 in superchats, a Washington Post analysis found. The Post analyzed more than 1,400 hours of Fuentes’s streams, using artificial intelligence to tally the donations, which flicker on screen in real time.
Fuentes, 27, has been kicked off most mainstream social networks because of his viral provocations and extreme bigotry: He has said that Adolf Hitler is “awesome,” that most Black people should be imprisoned, that “organized Jewry” has corrupted society and that women should be locked in “breeding gulags” and serve only as “mothers, whores or nuns.”
But he has become an increasingly influential and disruptive force in the American conservative movement, thanks to a shadow economy of loyalists who cut and promote viral clips from his hours-long streams in pursuit of their own online clout.
Through his superchats, Fuentes has funneled that attention into a lucrative financial engine fueled by the handouts of hardcore fans. He said he also makes money selling swastika-imprinted T-shirts and $100-a-month subscriptions to a private chatroom, where he talks with devotees.
“We’re an invisible empire,” Fuentes replied to one donor’s message during a January stream. “We’re building a cadre of professionals, money people, bureaucrats, and we need them to all be waving the flag, but quietly, ideologically, loyally. … We’ve got to be underground.”
Fuentes’s superchat revenue throws a spotlight on the crisis now engulfing the American right, where some leaders fear a new blitz of agenda-setting online firebrands will alienate more moderate voters or empower a platform of racist and misogynistic rule.
His critics in the Republican Party have said they believed Fuentes’s popularity would fade as more Americans learned his repugnant views. But the superchats show he has instead found a still relatively small but die-hard audience eager to support him, extending him a financial incentive to build his following even more.
The funding also shows how fringe online platforms have helped create perpetual hate machines for the social media era, allowing provocateurs whose work is too controversial for mainstream platforms, or too noxious to advertise around, to reap the rewards of online outrage.
Fuentes frequently uses his streams to advertise his “America First Plus” chatroom membership club and merchandise store, where he sells $39.99 shirts depicting him holding a flaming katana and $69.99 sweatshirts modeled after one worn by Jeffrey Epstein. Fuentes has defended the late sex offender by saying age of consent is a “feminist artifact” that the “gynocracy” has used to stop men from pursuing teenage girls.
But he spends more time promoting viewer donations, which he reads out loud in a rapid-fire superchat segment at the end of each of his “America First” shows. He streams roughly four nights a week, sometimes for five straight hours, from his home studio in Illinois. His videos on Rumble, the alternative platform that hosts his broadcasts, have been viewed more than 100 million times.
Fuentes is largely supported by donations from a small cadre of sympathizers: Just 10 accounts were responsible for giving him a total of about $77,000, while the top 500 accounts provided almost half of his superchat income — more than $400,000, the Post analysis found. The rest comes from much smaller donors, most giving $30 or less.
Many of the donors are anonymous and use account names such as “antisemiticat” and “womanegocrusher9000” that reference edgy memes, profane language or inside jokes, making it difficult to verify the names or other details of the donors shown on Fuentes’s streams. Individual donors could have given money from multiple accounts, or multiple donors could have used the same username.
Megan Squire, a researcher who has studied online extremism at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said the growth of superchats and other “micropayments” has helped insulate influencers like Fuentes from the constraints that once made open racism a difficult business.
Some donors see their superchats as a form of participatory politics that will help spread their beliefs and show their loyalty, Squire said. Others just pay for the status symbol of seeing their message and username on-screen, she said, a way to prove oneself in an insular group brought together by their hatred of outsiders.
“Donating a superchat is the new showing up to a [Ku Klux] Klan meeting,” Squire said. “It’s a community builder, it shows you’re involved, and it’s a financial form of keyboard warrior-ing — a thing you can do for the cause.” Ryan, who sent Fuentes superchats alongside his mother, said he gave money not out of hatred but to support the streamer in his goal of sparking candid discussions about global events. Some of the angrier exchanges, he said, stemmed from listeners just being “a little more free with their speech.”
When The Post contacted Fuentes to discuss its findings, he did not dispute them and said, “Pocket watching is crazy,” using a slang term for looking at how much money someone has. In a series of text messages, he wrote, “I dont care about money, doing the show is cheap and i live in a piece of s— apartment building.”
His popularity, he said, stemmed not just from his political stances but from his community’s craving for emotional connection. “People are fanatical about my show because they relate to me and feel conflicted and misunderstood like I do,” he said. “I don’t think ‘hatred’ or even ideology animates them as much as a feeling that they aren’t totally alone. The message of my show is: be yourself.”
Fuentes has sometimes bragged about how successfully he’s translated online attention into wealth, saying in January to a superchat donor who encouraged him to take cooking classes: “I’m a famous millionaire, you think I’m gonna do that?” Cooking, he added, is a “little gay.”
Fuentes refers to traditional workers as “wage slaves” and said in response to one donor’s superchat last year that he was too rich to need a “real job.” “I’m providing information, I’m doing real cognitive work over here. … And you, I don’t know, you sell f—ing paperweights?” he said.
In his messages to The Post, he noted that the superchats brought their own kind of mental labor. “I am not free,” he said, “i am chained to the desk reading insipid slop.”
In the years since he began streaming from his parents’ basement, Fuentes has emerged as one of the far right’s most contentious agitators, most notably for his scathing criticism of President Donald Trump. Though he dined with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, in 2022, Fuentes now argues that the president “betrayed MAGA” by supporting Israel in a war with Iran and “blew it” by not working more aggressively to deport people of color.
Fuentes has told his fans, known as “groypers,” to vote against Trump-backed candidates in coming elections so that a more brutal “fascist” regime can bloom, saying last month in an X post that “the GOP must be purged and burned to the ground.”
Fuentes’s rise has alarmed GOP leaders who are concerned that the online ecosystem that rewards his views is here to stay. The California Republican Party sent state party officials a memo in February urging them to block candidates “who promote Fuentes and Groyper culture,” saying his ideology called for an America “modeled closely after Nazi Germany” that was alienating “to average Americans, to say the least.”
Trump said in January that he didn’t know Fuentes and that the MAGA movement does not welcome antisemites. Vice President JD Vance, whom Fuentes has disparaged in racist terms for marrying an Indian American woman, said in 2024 that Fuentes was a “total loser” who should be ignored until he goes away. The White House did not respond to requests for comment.
But Fuentes’s online following has only grown since then, giving him a surprising political reach. A video from the TikTok account “liberalgr0yper,” combining stirring music with a sound bite of Fuentes celebrating former president Joe Biden’s Iran policy, has been viewed more than 4 million times.
Fuentes’s digital infrastructure has helped him secure a level of political and cultural influence that would have a few years ago been unimaginable. Chicago Magazine in February named the white nationalist No. 7 on its list of the “50 most powerful Chicagoans,” just behind the city’s mayor. But he has argued that its real value has been in helping him develop a network of followers eager to shape American power in a post-Trump future.
“If I’m a Nazi, then there’s millions of young people that are following a f—ing Nazi,” he said on a stream last year. “There’s a million monsters then. … Because they love my show, and they agree with me way more than they agree with you. And they are pissed off. And they will follow me into battle.”
‘Saying everything I really feel’
When Kasubienski’s son started watching Fuentes in 2017, he remembers feeling like the streamer was a kindred spirit.
Living in Ohio on full-time disability, Ryan, now 36, spent so many hours at home immersed in the streamer’s show that he said he began thinking of Fuentes as a little brother. Where Ryan felt nervous, Fuentes seemed self-assured, and over time he began to believe the streamer was one of the only people being honest about the changes in the United States that everyone pretended they didn’t see.
Ryan said he didn’t agree with all of Fuentes’s views or those of his followers, but he believed the influencer was helping expose forbidden truths about the Holocaust and other fraught topics. Ryan said he believes Hitler was Jewish and that the Holocaust was “more of a Jewish-oriented Christian killing event.” He started giving Fuentes a few dollars here and there to show his support.
The heart of Fuentes’s message was that young men in the United States have gotten a rotten deal. In his telling, a nation of entitled baby boomers, like those leading the Republican Party, had poisoned American society with bad jobs, unbearable women and a racially diverse population intent on depriving White people of what they’re owed.
Fuentes was a charismatic messenger for these grievances, delivering them across live streams, X posts and short-video feeds with a casual charm that made him seem approachable and fun, Ryan said.
But he was also not afraid to turn dark when he needed to, evoking a righteous anger at the chaos and constant wars of this “fake world,” Ryan said. The blame, Fuentes said, laid in how the country had tolerated minorities and immigrants, championed Israel and given women the freedom to choose their own lifestyles.
“He was like a younger version of me, just much more hostile,” Ryan said. “I was like: ‘This guy’s saying everything I really feel, but try not to say out loud, because I don’t want to piss anyone off.’”
Growing up in the Chicago suburb of La Grange Park, Fuentes had shown an early, fervent interest in conservative debates. In an archived statement on the website of his high school, where he served as a student council president and secretary general of the Model United Nations, he called himself a “classical liberal and an Objectivist.” He wrote that his personal heroes included former German chancellor Otto von Bismarck and Richard M. Nixon and declared his life philosophy, “Hunt or be hunted.”
In his first year as an international relations and political science student at Boston University, he gained a small following for his pro-Trump YouTube channel, building on the skills he’d learned working on a high school TV show. In 2017, when he was 18, his profile grew further after he attended a white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Unite the Right, where a neo-Nazi rammed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing a woman named Heather Heyer and injuring dozens of other people. Fuentes went viral on social media for his posts in the rally’s aftermath, championing the rise of a “tidal wave of white identity” that elites “will not be able to stop.”
Fuentes dropped out of college shortly after, blaming online threats and the liberal climate on campus. He began working full-time on fiery anti-immigration speeches and posting right-wing content online. “He went from conservative values to very deep to the right,” Bill Allan, a supervisor of TV services at Fuentes’s high school, reportedly told the Chicago Tribune in 2017.
Fuentes has said his father is part Mexican and that his parents are “vaguely conservative, like boomers are,” but that they rejected some of his more extreme beliefs, including that “Hitler was right and the Holocaust didn’t happen,” as Fuentes said on one stream. He and his family remain close — they had just gotten dinner at a steakhouse near the mall, he told viewers last month — but they are not without their disagreements: Fuentes said his father last month asked him to reconsider selling a swastika-emblazoned T-shirt. “Dad, that’s the whole point. It’s edgy,” he said he replied. Fuentes’s parents did not respond to requests for comment.
Many viewers first got a taste of Fuentes’s edginess in 2019, when the then-YouTuber orchestrated a stunt known as the “groyper war.” He marshaled fans to attend the live events of more mainstream conservatives, like the late Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump Jr., and needle them with trolling and antisemitic questions in hopes of exposing their hypocrisy.
After YouTube banned Fuentes, he moved to the fringe streaming service DLive, where he continued his frequent broadcasts with titles like “ELECTION WAR.” In the 10 months before January 2021, donors on the site gave Fuentes more than $114,000, Squire’s research found.
Fuentes also earned money from other sources, including a December 2020 donation from a French computer programmer, who, shortly before dying by suicide, gave Fuentes a trove of bitcoin then worth more than $250,000, according to the cryptocurrency forensics firm Chainalysis.
Despite that funding, Fuentes characterized himself as a beleaguered young freedom fighter under constant attack, decrying what he said was the oppressive censorship of hate-speech rules as he leaped from one platform to the next. After he rallied outside the Capitol with a mob of Trump supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, Fuentes was banned by DLive and moved his videomaking to a self-created platform called Cozy.tv. He ultimately settled on Rumble, where he has since streamed more than 700 times and amassed 680,000 followers.
By 2021, Ryan had begun watching Fuentes with his mother in Ohio, who had worked as a cook in the Air Force and a cake decorator before starting her food truck. Kasubienski and her son were avid fans and loved discussing the jokes and storylines on Fuentes’s latest stream, said her friend Melissa Camp, who noted that she does not watch the streams.
Like her son, Kasubienski also started sending in superchats, and they both delighted in seeing their names on screen, Ryan said. Though the food truck brought in little income, Ryan said that his mom sent money to Fuentes dozens of times last year believing he desperately needed the cash.
Fuentes, however, was practically swimming in superchat funds. In 228 videos since Trump took office in January 2025, donors initiated more than 26,000 superchats totaling more than $896,000, The Post’s analysis found. Ryan called The Post’s findings “awesome” and said that he hoped Fuentes “can put that [money] to something good.”
Viewers on Fuentes’s Rumble stream are told they can pay for a superchat using a financial platform known as Entropy, which promotes itself to far-right influencers as a “safe haven for monetization.” The service says it charges a 15 percent fee, which suggests that Fuentes’s pretax, take-home pay just from superchats since the start of last year would have totaled roughly $760,000. (Fuentes’s membership site also offers a “paid chat” feature.)
Though Fuentes has pulled in a huge sum, it pales in comparison to what far-right radio host Alex Jones once made from selling merchandise like dietary supplements and survival gear online: $162 million in revenue between 2016 and 2018, court documents show. Fuentes has said he has ambitions to further expand, telling Jones on his show in January that it was a boom time for “conspiracy content, Israel-critical content” of the kind he had profited from.
DLive declined to comment. Rumble and Entropy did not respond to requests for comment. The platforms’ defenders have said they help provide a home for creators unfairly censored everywhere else.
Moments of political crisis or violence frequently boost Fuentes’s pay, the analysis shows, including when his superchat revenue spiked last summer amid wide-scale protests over the Trump administration’s immigration policy. The moment, Fuentes said on one stream, showed how close a “radicalizing” right was getting “to expressing their disdain in racial terms.”
Fuentes’s revenue soared again in October after he was interviewed by conservative podcaster Tucker Carlson, climbing from $60,000 in superchats the month before the interview to more than $100,000 the month after, the analysis shows.
Though some Republican politicians and influencers criticized Carlson for giving the streamer attention, the additional exposure paid off monetarily for Fuentes. His average monthly donations have gone up 10 percent since the appearance, the analysis found.
The interview, released shortly after Kirk’s killing, boosted Fuentes’s name recognition at a time when debates over MAGA’s future were heating up. Conservative commentator Megyn Kelly, who had previously called Fuentes “crazy” and “subversive, looking for attention,” told Carlson she nevertheless understood why people found his messaging valuable. “He’s very interesting and he’s very smart … [excusing] his thoughts on race and Jews and the Holocaust and all that, obviously,” she said.
In a live taping of her show in November, she added: “The left has been demonizing young boys, in particular White boys, for 15-plus years now. … They’re angry. And he’s giving a voice to it.” (Kelly, through a representative, declined an interview request.)
‘How the game is played’
As Fuentes’s profile and donations soared, Ryan and his mother continued to spend on superchats. Kasubienski became Fuentes’s most frequent donor last year, giving more than $1,700 across 116 videos, the Post analysis shows. Ryan said his mother believed she had given him roughly $5,000 over years of viewing, but that she would have given Fuentes her whole income if she could.
In Kasubienski’s superchats, she voiced support for Fuentes’s views on “unhinged blacks” and “men cucks” and said she was “addicted to [his] leadership and [fiery] stance.” Once a staunch Trump supporter, she told Fuentes that she had given away her Trump books and burned her MAGA hat out of disappointment, and that she hoped Fuentes would one day rule as a dictator.
In several messages, she expressed a maternal affection for the influencer she had never met. “Love you so much just like my own kid,” she said in one superchat. “I put my full faith behind you. Groyper 4 life,” read another.
Though Fuentes streams alone from a small studio in Berwyn, Illinois, he has often spoken about certain superchatters as part of a family and responded to them with encouraging comments. Fuentes has not shied away from personal confessions — he said recently he was having a “quarter-life crisis,” fueled in part by his friends now having less time to play video games — and said his movement is really about love.
When a user named Dallas sent Fuentes a $4,900 superchat in June, Fuentes responded that he “couldn’t do it without the viewer donations” and added: “We owe the show to you. God bless.”
But Fuentes and his followers also frequently speak in violent language, with his most devout fans often saying they would “rape, kill and die” for Fuentes, a loyalty pledge so common it is abbreviated as “RKD.” In January, Fuentes said the death of Renée Good, killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, was good because she was a “typical liberal idiot.” Later, while discussing the Trump administration’s clashes with protesters in the city, he said: “Please pull the trigger. Please kill them, Mr. President.” (Fuentes later said he didn’t wish for violence, just restored order.)
Fuentes’s fans have defended his most extreme remarks as transgressive jokes designed to illustrate deeper truths or to offend the moralistic scolds of the woke left. Dennis Feitosa, a 41-year-old YouTuber and Fuentes fan now running as a Republican House candidate for California’s 30th Congressional District, said his “shock jock” style comes from a “profound understanding of virality.”
“He understands how to say provocative things and then ground them in substance. … And I don’t think the boomers are caught up, or they see it in an unfavorable way, because they don’t understand how the game is played,” Feitosa said. Without a little edgy humor, he added, “you’re just depressing your audience all the time.” (Feitosa said he does not share all of Fuentes’s opinions but respects that he has been “very principled” in defending stances “that aren’t allowed to be communicated in the mainstream.”)
Superchat donors have routinely asked Fuentes for advice on how they should conduct themselves in what he has called “the year we are all ascending,” and some of them have claimed to be students in college or high school. When one user with a name featuring a racial slur told Fuentes in a superchat last February, “Hitler was right … Only God can save us now,” Fuentes responded with a slight smile, “Well, we can help, too.”
But Fuentes is just as well known for publicly hazing fans over what he contends are stupid remarks. When a user sent Fuentes $150 and suggested groypers should lead a “hostile takeover” of the Democrats, he rubbed his eyes and groaned, “That is so bad, but I appreciate the money, jacka–.”
In June, a superchat donor and self-described eighth grade history teacher asked Fuentes for tips on how to “red pill” students about the Holocaust, using a far-right slang phrase for convincing people that the genocide of millions was a hoax. “It’s not worth trying to red pill eighth-graders,” Fuentes replied. “I assure you they don’t care that much.”
Ryan said Fuentes “pays more attention to what’s being said depending on the dollar amount” and that viewers often strain his patience by giving too little money to begin with. “There’s realistically no way to talk to him unless you do pay,” Ryan said. “When somebody does donate repetitiously, he’s much nicer to them, because they’re literally funding his life.”
Some researchers are skeptical that Fuentes’s increasing visibility will translate into political power. Extremism researchers at Rutgers University’s Network Contagion Research Institute have argued that Fuentes is simply skilled at “algorithm hacking,” exaggerating his importance through viral rage-bait. And Jared Holt, a senior researcher at the influence-monitoring group Open Measures, said he suspects Fuentes has merely gotten better at building a digital fandom rather than developed real-world appeal.
“His successes have come through biting the heels of mainstream politics and grafting a certain amount of support off,” Holt said. “He hasn’t organized any real political action from his followers. His impact on politics seems to be largely indirect.”
But the parasocial loyalty of Fuentes’s fans may give him a tangible leverage that extends beyond political power, said Aidan Walker, a researcher who studies internet culture. Donors see Fuentes not just as an entertainer but a truth-teller, someone whose validation they’ll pay and perhaps fight to obtain.
The money “marks a commitment, like they’ve got skin in the game,” Walker said. “They see him as their representative. These people don’t have a platform themselves.”
In June, Kasubienski told Fuentes in a superchat that she had been diagnosed with Stage 3 pancreatic cancer. In her last superchat, 18 days before her death in January, she told Fuentes she missed him and had taken a trip to Florida knowing she had only a little bit of time left to live.
“No TV. Just seeing the beauty of world,” she wrote. “I pray daily for the safety of u & my groyper family. I luv u all. Will be home soon.”
After she died, Fuentes said she had been “a real salt-of-the-earth person” who proved his followers were not just “loser White men.”
Though Fuentes said on stream he would pay a visit to Ohio, Ryan said he has not heard from him yet, and all his attempts to contact him have gotten no response. (Fuentes did not respond when The Post asked whether he would visit.)
Ryan believes Fuentes will still come someday but suspects he has just been too busy leading his movement. He has considered reaching out again to ask about it, over superchat.
Razzan Nakhlawi, Hannah Knowles and Dylan Wells contributed to this report.
Methodology: The Washington Post analyzed 1,435 hours of Nick Fuentes’s live streams and videos preserved on Rumble, from January 2025 through the end of March 2026, to identify donations sent to Fuentes in the form of “superchats” displayed on screen. The Post took screenshots every 2 seconds for each video, then extracted on-screen text from the resulting 2.6 million frames with the artificial intelligence tool PaddleOCR to obtain donor usernames and amounts. Some donations may have been missed because of optical character recognition (OCR) errors or superchats shown for less than two seconds, but a manual review of four videos found the method to be more than 99 percent accurate.
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