Until a month or two ago, Nicholas J. Fuentes was regarded by right-wing influencers as a mosquito-like interloper whose lifeblood was attention. Ignore his openly racist and sexist rants, their thinking went, and Mr. Fuentes would eventually flitter off into oblivion.
But today an entirely different consensus has emerged on the right. The footprint of the oratorically proficient late-night streaming show host has not dwindled in the least, with his tens if not hundreds of thousands of alienated young male conservatives followers known as Groypers, a nickname derived from an alt-right meme. If anything, his anti-Israel, anti-immigrant, anti-transgender and anti-civil-rights views seem to have gained new currency during the second Trump administration.
There is now growing alarm among leading conservatives about Mr. Fuentes, who routinely tests the cultlike devotion of his young male fans by savaging their patriarchal figure, President Trump, for not being right-wing enough. In the process, he has emerged as one of the loudest voices on the right to turn on the president.
“When I was a teenager, I thought he was a Caesar-like figure who was going to save Western civilization,” Mr. Fuentes, 27, said in an interview. “Now I view him as incompetent, corrupt and compromised.”
Specifically, he has criticized the president for showing solidarity with Israel over the war in Gaza, for refusing to release the Epstein files and for considering extending student visas to Chinese nationals. On Labor Day, Mr. Fuentes posted on social media, “Trump 2.0 has been a disappointment in literally every way but nobody wants to admit it.”
Asked to comment on Mr. Fuentes’s remarks, White House officials declined. Current and former members of the Trump administration as well as outside advisers would not be quoted for the record about Mr. Fuentes out of fear, they said, of inviting online attacks from him and his zealous followers. Three of them mentioned the sudden ubiquity of Fuentes-related clips circulating in their social media feeds.
Certain metrics attest to Mr. Fuentes’s surge. Since his X account was reinstated by Elon Musk 16 months ago, the number of his followers appears to have grown from roughly 140,000 to more than 750,000. His “America First” streaming show viewership on Rumble has quintupled to around 500,000.
“Fuentes represents the cutting edge of a right-wing racism that has surged over the past decade during the rise of Trump,” said Matt Dallek, a political historian and expert on right-wing movements at George Washington University. “And it’s clear that he’s becoming more prominent because these bigger influencers are now fighting with him.”
But Mr. Fuentes has yet to demonstrate that he can shape American politics on an electoral level. He said he is determined to thwart the presidential ambitions of Vice President JD Vance, who Mr. Fuentes described as “the end state of Trumpism, a complete fabrication who was created in a lab by Peter Thiel,” the Silicon Valley billionaire who bankrolled Mr. Vance’s 2022 campaign for Ohio’s open Senate seat.
Should Mr. Vance win the Republican nomination in 2028, Mr. Fuentes said he would urge his followers to “either stay home or vote for a protest candidate.”
Mr. Dallek said Mr. Fuentes’s animosity toward the vice president was telling. “He’s going after JD Vance at a time when Donald Trump is likely in the twilight of his political career,” Mr. Dallek said. “What we’re seeing is Fuentes, Carlson, Vance and others engaged in the battle to be the legitimate heir to Trumpism.”
Mr. Dallek was referring to Tucker Carlson, perhaps the pre-eminent media figure on the right, who unwittingly kicked off Mr. Fuentes’s coming-out party this summer. As a guest on Candace Owens’s podcast in July, Mr. Carlson wondered aloud how Mr. Fuentes, whom he described as “this weird little gay kid living in his basement in Chicago,” could wield any influence at all.
Mr. Carlson then supplied the answer: Mr. Fuentes, he said, “is really talented, legit,” but is also “clearly part of a campaign to discredit noncrazy right voices.”
Mr. Fuentes responded on his show to Mr. Carlson’s attacks with characteristic bombast. After denying that he is gay, Mr. Fuentes chided Mr. Carlson for being a trust-fund elitist. He embraced his own status as more than just a leader “of real disaffected white people. You want to talk about me and them? I am them!”
Mr. Fuentes was widely seen as having gotten the better of the exchange. In August, the former Trump White House adviser Stephen K. Bannon reposted on the conservative social media platform Gettr a comment by a fellow right-wing podcaster, Vincent Oshana, that Mr. Fuentes “is freaking on fire right now” and then added his own terse appraisal: “Reality.” That same month, Dave Smith, a comedian and libertarian podcaster who has been disparaged by Mr. Fuentes for being Jewish, said, “He’s been canceled by everyone and he’s bigger than ever.”
A similar sentiment was begrudgingly offered by the podcaster Jason Whitlock, a Black conservative who has frequently criticized Mr. Fuentes for his racist commentary. “Young men are listening to Nick Fuentes,” Mr. Whitlock lamented on his show in August, “and he’s reveling in that.”
In the interview for this article, Mr. Fuentes insisted that he remains “an underground figure.” Unlike prominent right-wing influencers like Mr. Bannon, Charlie Kirk and Laura Loomer, he has no ties to the Trump White House. He has been prohibited from attending the conservative movement’s highest-profile gatherings: Mr. Kirk’s Turning Point USA events and the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC.
He has been banned on YouTube since 2020, for violating the platform’s hate speech policy. For the same reason, his name cannot be displayed on TikTok, an inconvenience that some of his followers have circumnavigated by posting clips of “Nick Fuentz” and other permutations. He has not been able to obtain the blue check mark on his X account that would allow him to amass paid subscribers. Instead, Mr. Fuentes said, his income derives from tips paid by viewers of his streaming show, as well as from merchandise that he sells on his website.
A Lone Wolf
Mr. Fuentes has never seemed a likely candidate to lead a group built on the idea of white supremacy.
For one, his father, a vice president of a company that makes conveyor products, is half Mexican. Additionally, two individuals who knew him during his teenage years describe a lone wolf who was highly intelligent but also abrasive and condescending. Raised in La Grange Park, an upper-middle-class suburb of Chicago, he and his twin sister excelled in high school speech contests. A classmate recalls that as they began their senior year in the fall of 2015, Mr. Fuentes was an ardent supporter of the Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz, with views very much in the mainstream of conservative politics.
In August 2017, a radicalized Mr. Fuentes emerged. That month, the 18-year old soon-to-be Boston University dropout joined the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., chanting, “You will not replace us” and claiming that white Americans were being subjected to a “cultural genocide.” Several national media outlets, including Time and NBC, interviewed Mr. Fuentes in the wake of Charlottesville, and several of Mr. Fuentes’s critics have suggested that he consciously began to stake out his turf as the most outrageous voice on the right.
On his show, streamed by the pro-Trump Right Side Broadcasting Network, he said, “I want people that run CNN to be arrested and deported or hanged.”
Mr. Fuentes’s hateful rhetoric began to extend to Holocaust denialism. “Six million cookies? I’m not buying it,” he said in 2019 in comparing baked cookies to the six million Jews who were exterminated by the Nazis. He made some brazenly racist comments that year as well. Jim Crow, he said, “was better for them; it’s better for us.”
Leading conservatives distanced themselves from him.
Mr. Fuentes gained additional notoriety during the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, when he stood a few hundred yards from the building and hollered through a megaphone, “Never relent!” Though Mr. Fuentes himself did not enter the Capitol, five Groyper associates did and were subsequently indicted. The F.B.I. spent several months investigating Mr. Fuentes but never brought charges against him.
Others on the right took notice of his burgeoning following of young male conservatives and deduced that he must be onto something. Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona gave the keynote speech at Mr. Fuentes’s America First Political Action Conference in 2021. A year later, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia did the same, though she later expressed regret, claiming that she had been unaware of Mr. Fuentes’s racist beliefs.
Later in 2022, Mr. Fuentes accompanied the rapper and presidential aspirant Kanye West to Mar-a-Lago to have dinner with Mr. Trump. In the interview, Mr. Fuentes said that he had been working on policy papers for Mr. West, “who wanted us to rewrite the U.S. Constitution and to include in it Hitler’s most severe policies and also his most moderate policies.”
He was surprised to have been let into Mar-a-Lago “because of who I am” and recalled spending most of the evening “glazing” the former president with flattery and encouraging him to give only unscripted speeches. Still, the fact that Mr. Trump had dined with a notorious bigot created a firestorm. His former ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, condemned the meeting as “unacceptable.”
Mr. Trump, Mr. West later said, “is really impressed with Nick Fuentes.” The former president insisted that he had no idea who his young dinner guest was.
‘Cheap Rage Bait’
Several conservative critics of Mr. Fuentes interviewed for this article asserted that he was little more than an internet version of a carnival barker, thriving in an attention economy that rewards the most extreme statements. In the interview, Mr. Fuentes acknowledged some validity to this view.
He recalled his mocking comment on X about women, right after Mr. Trump’s victory last year: “Your body, my choice?” That remark, Mr. Fuentes said, “was just trolling; it was cheap rage bait.”
What about questioning the Holocaust? “I’ve never taken a hard position,” he said, adding, “I’ve never done the deep dive into it, to tell you the truth.”
Mr. Fuentes suggested that his most outlandish musings were “when I was 18, at the beginning of the Trump movement. But I’ve become more moderate.” He added, “I would say that I’ve definitely mellowed with age.”
A review of Mr. Fuentes’s recent remarks indicates otherwise. He said on his show in July that “Hitler had aura” and chided Polish people for having “this bad habit of hating Hitler all the time.” Last month on X, he characterized the Indian American in-laws of Vice President JD Vance as “Uber drivers and call center scammers.” He also said on his show in August that all Black people should be “ashamed” of crimes committed by others of their race, adding, “White people are every single bit justified in being racist.”
“Ultimately it doesn’t really matter whether all of this is a put-on by Fuentes,” said Nicole Hemmer, a history professor at Vanderbilt University who specializes in conservatism, the presidency and media. “For seven or eight years now, he’s been pushing a consistent message of a world order in which white men are on top and hold that position through antidemocratic means. He doesn’t have to have the audience of Tucker Carlson or Fox News to be playing an important role in moving the political culture in a more radical, illiberal and violent direction.”
Robert Draper is based in Washington and writes about domestic politics. He is the author of several books and has been a journalist for three decades.
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