Followers of a 21-year-old white nationalist have been trolling Republicans at speaking events for three weeks after rallying together through the charismatic leader’s popular YouTube channel, podcast and presence on other corners of the Internet.
As a result of Big If True’s reporting, Apple Podcasts has removed Nicholas Fuentes’ show, America First, and Reddit banned a group devoted to Fuentes and the show. Fuentes is a Holocaust denier who claims to support Christian values, while promoting fervently racist and homophobic views.
For an idea of where Fuentes lies on the political spectrum, look no further than an episode of his show from this week, where he described fellow white nationalist Richard Spencer as “essentially a liberal.”
Despite claims from YouTube that the company has spearheaded the removal of white supremacist content this year, Fuentes’ channel, which has about 58,700 subscribers, shows that the policy has only been partially implemented.
In response to a request for comment, a member of the press team for Google, YouTube’s parent company, asked for a URL of the video mentioned earlier so they could “look into” it. Google didn’t respond to several additional follow-up emails seeking comment, and his show is still available on YouTube.
Apple, which distributes Fuentes’ show through Apple Podcasts, didn’t respond to several emails seeking comment on why the show is appropriate for the platform. As of Friday, the show was no longer available on Apple Podcasts.
New terms, same message
Fuentes’ online following has grown since June, when The Daily Dot reported that he had 44,000 Twitter followers. Now he has about 63,300.
Fuentes’ supporters call themselves Nickers and Groypers, a term that originated in 2015 on 4chan and is connected to the Pepe the Frog meme appropriated by white nationalists in recent years.
Reddit banned a group called Nicker Nation for posting violent content in August, the same month when a subreddit called AFwithNJF (America First with Nicholas J. Fuentes) appeared on the site.
On Thursday, Big If True requested an interview with Reddit on whether or not the subreddit meets the site’s community standards, as well as clarification on Reddit’s policies on white supremacist content.
Reddit did not respond to that email or others seeking comment, but by Friday, AFwithNJF was also banned.
According to the site, the subreddit broke a rule barring groups from “creating or repurposing a sub to reconstitute or serve the same objective as a previously banned or quarantined subreddit.”
IRL trolling
For about three weeks, Fuentes has encouraged his followers to attend speaking events for Republicans they’ve labeled “Conservative Inc.,” and invade question-and-answer sessions with comments that are absurd, confrontational, racist, anti-Semitic and anti-LGBT.
These performances, dubbed the “Groyper Wars,” have received support from other white nationalists, like Patrick Casey of Identity Evropa and Andrew Anglin, who wrote in The Daily Stormer, “All of the energy from 2015-16 is coming back around to us, as we are once again at war with the conservative establishment.”
During an event with Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk and conservative Rob Smith, a handful of Fuentes supporters, including Casey, asked a series of racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic questions. One commenter told Kirk to Google “dancing Israelis,” a reference to an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.
Fuentes uses his show as a call to action. During an episode first streamed on Monday, Fuentes spoke for a solid two and a half hours, pausing once, only briefly, to try to remember the name of a Kanye West song.
During the episode, which also appeared on Apple Podcasts, Fuentes urged his audience to attend events for Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas), Kirk, conservative writer Matt Walsh and others. The host described the approach as “a sincere inquiry into Conservative Inc. and their ruling principles.”
The episode was partly an instructional video on what to ask, how to ask it and how to handle responses at these events. He encouraged his followers to stream the incidents online, to cause a scene if they are not allowed to attend or ask questions, and to refuse to move if asked.
“Make them bring the police over,” Fuentes said. “Make them bring a security person over.”
Fuentes has particular enthusiasm for targeting Kirk, who he claimed wasn’t conservative, patriotic or Christian. He criticized Kirk’s views on immigration and the LGBT community, and later suggested, with no evidence whatsoever, that Turning Point covered up a sexual scandal and supports pedophilia.
During the episode, Fuentes expressed racist and anti-Semitic ideas, with a peppering of gay slurs.
Casey, Fuentes and others have also criticized Turning Point USA for firing “brand ambassador” Ashley St. Clair for taking a group photo with Fuentes.
Splinter from Spencer and alt-right white nationalism
Fuentes’ views are a mass of contradictions. Although he claims to be of Mexican descent, he is fervently against immigration and anyone who isn’t white. A Catholic, Fuentes considers his movement a Christian one, yet he continuously espouses views that directly contradict the tenets of the religion.
While attending high school in La Grange Park, a Chicago suburb, Fuentes participated in speech, model UN and started his first show, which aired a handful of times at Lyons Township High School.
While attending Boston University, Fuentes started a show on the Right Side Broadcasting Network, a pro-Trump media company. In 2017, he used the platform to call for CNN employees to be deported or hanged, in addition to sharing anti-Muslim comments. His show eventually left the Right Side network, migrating to YouTube and Apple Podcasts.
Fuentes attended the Unite the Right rally, a gathering of white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. The event ended with the death of Heather Heyer and dozens of injuries after a Nazi sympathizer drove a car into a crowd of counter-protesters.
Fuentes blamed Heyer’s death on the left.
After the Unite the Right rally, Fuentes told The Boston Globe that he received 15 death threats. He left Boston University and returned to La Grange Park, according to The Chicago Tribune.
This week, far-right figure Milo Yiannopoulos posted audio of Spencer making hostile, racist and anti-Semitic comments after the rally. In response to the tape, Fuentes claimed Spencer hates Christianity and the United States, is irrelevant, toxic and “essentially a liberal.”
William Nardi, a New York-based conservative writer for National Review, encountered Fuentes while attending college at nearby University of Massachusetts in Boston. In a piece for Vice last year, Nardi mentioned a leaked video from 2017 that showed Fuentes making racist comments about interracial relationships. Instead of slowing Fuentes, the video caused his following to quadruple, Nardi wrote.
Nardi, who compared Fuentes’ charismatic personality to that of Adolf Hitler, told Big If True he believes Fuentes “should be de-platformed in every possible way,” including removal from YouTube.
“What Nick Fuentes is trying to do with the Groyper Wars … is he’s trying to pull Turning Point USA into what he thinks is a more authentic direction for conservatism, which is getting to racism and just bigotry in general,” Nardi said. “And then the crazy thing is the gaslighting that he does to try and make it sound like these ideas that he’s accepted so vigorously are not racist or they’re not inherently anti-Semitic.”
In one example, Fuentes used an elaborate metaphor involving cookies to deny the Holocaust existed.
“All of these young people are angry and hurt and wounded, whether it’s because of things they’ve faced in their own lives that have boiled over into their careers in politics, or whether that’s because of how politics has exacerbated those wounds,” Nardi said. “So, he’s wrangling them together.”
Contact Big If True editor Mollie Bryant at 405-990-0988 or bryant@bigiftrue.org. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.
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