Nick Fuentes, the supremacist seeking to divide the right

Nick Fuentes is a political commentator, streamer and self-proclaimed activist who for nearly a decade has been known for promoting white nationalism, antisemitism and a "truly reactionary" Republican Party.

Last month, during an interview with Tucker Carlson, Fuentes praised Joseph Stalin, condemned "organized Jewry," accusing this community of obstructing national unity and criticized pro-Israel conservatives.

Fuentes lashed out at figures such as Ben Shapiro and conservative media outlet The Daily Wire, accusing them of promoting the policies of Israel first. For his part, Tucker Carlson told Nick Fuentes that he despises Christian Zionists more than anyone else in the world, and called Christian Zionism a dangerous heresy within Christianity.

This provoked a withering reaction: sponsors such as Rocket Money dropped Tucker Carlson after being called out for "financing white supremacy," and prominent Republican Party figures, from Ted Cruz to House Speaker, Mike Johnson, have chosen to distance themselves from the anti-Semitic rhetoric of Carlson and Fuentes.

Since then, the anti-Semitic tropes of both have set off alarm bells within public opinion and within the ranks of the Republican Party. "It’s remarkable, and sad, watching Tucker turn into Nick Fuentes," Sen. Ted Cruz wrote on his X account.

Unite The Right, Fuentes' rise in extremist circles

In 2017, Fuentes was 18 years old and a freshman studying Political Science at Boston University, an institution he dropped out of after declaring that he had received death threats after attending the far-right, anti-Semitic rally known as Unite the Right held in August of that year in Charlottesville, Virginia.

"I suddenly got dozens of messages on Twitter and Facebook telling me to go and kill myself and that if they see me they will beat the sh– out of me. Stuff of that nature," Fuentes explained to Fox News. "At least 10 to 20 of them were death threats."

Unite the Right was a two-day rally to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, attended by neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan (KKK) members, armed militias, identitarians and alt-right figures, and which ended in violence with other extremist elements of Antifa, resulting in one fatality.

On August 11, a torchlight march was held at the University of Virginia where protesters shouted Nazi slogans such as "Jews will not replace us!" and "Blood and soil!" The next day, a neo-Nazi rammed his car into counter-demonstrators, killing activist Heather Heyer and injuring dozens.

Fuentes' participation in these demonstrations was small, but large in symbolism for his record, claiming he would unleash a "giant wave of white identity." His presence at these protests made it possible for the podcaster to become part of the alt-right network, which, at the time, was beginning to use YouTube as a political megaphone.

Nick Fuentes: "I'm just like Hitler"

In early 2017 Fuentes decided to launch his show America First with Nicholas J. Fuentes on YouTube, which would later become a platform for his followers, a group calling themselves the Groypers.

On his show, Fuentes has openly praised Adolf Hitler and promotes white supremacist and anti-Semitic ideas, often disguising his more extreme views with humor and satire, making use of the Irony Poisoning, a term often used by extremists on the Internet, as it allows them to claim they were joking when criticized for their rhetoric.

In 2022, during one of his shows, Fuentes became defensive, said "I'm just like Hitler" and insisted he didn't want a relationship: "All I want is revenge against my enemies and a total Aryan victory," he exclaimed.

Over the years, Fuentes went from being a simple influencer to becoming a media industry that spreads hate and division, even within the Republican Party. Fuentes and his Groypers are currently working to push conservatism and the MAGA into dangerous territory, marked by ideological extremism, intolerance and the erosion of democratic values.

The 'Groyper' Army battling Charlie Kirk

Nick Fuentes has a loyal following that calls itself the Groyper Army. It is a group of young far-right activists who disrupt conservative events to promote more extreme ideologies, and who organize the America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC), an annual gathering of white nationalists.

However, in a recent live broadcast the podcaster said, "We don’t need to show everybody how many of us there are because the second that we do, they will identify, isolate, and destroy us... We want them to have no clue how many Groypers there are, where they are, who they are. We want them to be completely in the dark."

In 2019, the Groypers stormed the Turning Point USA (TPUSA) podcast by asking controversial questions to personalities such as Ben Shapiro, Dan Crenshaw and Charlie Kirk on immigration, Israel and LGBT issues in conservatism.

For the past six years, Fuentes has similarly relentlessly attacked Charlie Kirk, focusing especially on his support for Israel, calling him a "false Christian" and asserting that the TPUSA founder "hates his country."

The term Groyper is sometimes used ironically or seen in internet meme subculture, but in political contexts it refers almost exclusively to this group of far-right activists. This self-styled "army" also spreads its slogans on the internet with the iconography of an obese frog, a distorted version of Pepe the Frog, the online comic strip created in 2005 by American artist Matt Furie.

An indoctrination empire that evades censorship

Expelled from YouTube, Twitch and PayPal, Fuentes finds refuge in Rumble. In 2024, Elon Musk reinstated him on X, invoking freedom of speech "as long as it doesn't break the law, and is squashed by community comments and notes."

Research conducted by Wired magazine claims that Fuentes' young followers are so convinced of his movement that they are willing to fund him and his ambitions.

In addition to what he raises from Super Chats, Fuentes also has a subscription service called America First Plus. For $15 a month, subscribers get access to the entire America First archive.

For $30 a month, you get the archive plus "search with artificial intelligence technology." Likewise there is a $100 per month tier that also gives access to a group chat that Fuentes is part of.

"Once we get 1,000, 5,000 of those guys, those are going to be the party officials, party apparatics as an analogy," Fuentes has said. "I'm kind of interested in inspiring those people, indoctrinating those people. They watch a show, they get the ideas, they get the inspiration, they kind of take a project into their own hands."