A former Kansas State student who left the university and became the “right-hand guy” for the head of a white nationalist organization has stepped down as the treasurer of its foundation as its leader remains under federal investigation in connection with the Capitol insurrection.
Jaden McNeil, whose offensive tweets in 2020 about the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer propelled the school into the national spotlight, announced his move on the online messaging app Telegram. He said he would no longer be an officer of the America First Foundation, the nonprofit arm of far-right livestreamer Nick Fuentes’ America First organization.
McNeil’s resignation doesn’t mean that he’s disavowed the white nationalist movement, said Devin Burghart, the executive director of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights who has spent decades monitoring extremist groups.
“He’s probably going to try to do like a lot of these other characters — move back into mainstream Republican politics,” Burghart said, an arena that Fuentes and his followers refer to as “Con Inc.”
“He’s going to try to distance himself from Fuentes, and he’s going to try to find his way back into some semblance of Conservative Inc.”
Burghart said the split shows that the reverberations from Jan. 6 are still being felt across the far-right movement.
“It was the initial shock of January 6 that caused the fault lines,” he said. “And now we’re seeing them finally playing out. You have a kind of interpersonal clash of egos about a group of narcissistic characters who also have financial investments in this type of activity. And that all came to a head.”
McNeil stunned many America First supporters by going on a YouTube livestream show for nearly four hours Friday to talk about why he was leaving. He said he was on the America First Foundation board with conservative commentator Michelle Malkin, a vocal supporter of the group whom members often call “Mommy.”
McNeil said he was the foundation treasurer for the most part in name only and knew little about its finances.
“It was basically just Nick handling everything, him and his assistant,” McNeil said. “…I was basically hands-off.
“I just wanted to put it out there publicly like I have nothing to do with this because I don’t know what the (expletive deleted) is going on behind the scenes there. Nick didn’t tell me a lot of things that were going on behind the scenes while using my name.”
During the rambling conversation laden with profanity and anti-gay slurs, McNeil said the government had released $500,000 that it had frozen in Fuentes’ bank account but that Fuentes hadn’t told donors and was still using the issue to raise money.
McNeil also said he was the person who made the contact to get Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona to speak at last year’s America First Political Action Conference, an appearance that drew sharp criticism from many congressional colleagues.
McNeil said Gosar didn’t return to speak at this year’s conference in February — he sent a short video clip — because he realized that Fuentes was “a total (expletive deleted)-up.” And a former America First employee who appeared on the livestream with McNeil said that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who was the “surprise” keynote speaker at the 2022 conference, only came because “she didn’t know where in the hell she was.”
Greene responded to criticism about her appearance at the conference in a Feb. 26 tweet: “I am not going to play the guilt by association game in which you demand every conservative should justify anything ever said by anyone they’ve ever shared a room with.”
The drama has created a schism in the America First organization, with Fuentes’ loyalists — also known as Groypers — calling McNeil a traitor and McNeil’s supporters saying Fuentes has become a control freak who is burning the political bridges he created.
Fuentes responded on his America First livestream Tuesday night, saying he had fired McNeil and the former employee who was on Friday’s show with McNeil. Fuentes said he and McNeil had been best friends, but the relationship fell apart when McNeil got a girlfriend and then had no time for him or anyone else — including, Fuentes said, a donor who recently gave McNeil $100,000.
“After that stream, I was personally destroyed,” Fuentes said of McNeil’s comments Friday. “I was just gutted.” He said McNeil allowed himself to be used by those who invited him on the show.
Bank account frozen, House investigation
Observers are wondering what, if any, damage the discord could do to America First and Fuentes, whose actions have come under intense scrutiny in the past year.
In January 2021, the government froze his bank account as part of an investigation into reports that he received $250,000 in bitcoin from a French computer programmer a month before the insurrection. The FBI is reportedly looking into whether the money was linked to the Capitol riot or used to fund other illegal acts.
On January 19, Fuentes and a former America First leader, Patrick Casey, were subpoenaed by the House Select Committee investigating the Capitol attack. Fuentes was involved in multiple rallies promoting unsupported claims about the presidential election, including the “Stop the Steal” event on Jan. 6. While he did not enter the Capitol, he and McNeil were rallying followers on the grounds that day, and at least one America First member who allegedly stormed the Senate chamber faces felony charges that include civil disorder and assaulting, resisting or impeding officers.
Fuentes said on his show Tuesday night that he is cooperating with the House Select Committee. He participated in a deposition, he said, and is working on the committee’s document request.
“The last thing that I have heard from the Department of Justice is that my assets, and me, remain a target of the Department of Justice and of the FBI,” he said.
“And I think if anybody were to scrutinize the claims that have been made legally or otherwise, I think that very quickly, the people that are accusing me would reveal that they really have no understanding of what transpired last January when my money was frozen, or anything that has gone on since then.”
He said he’s had to spend $150,000 in legal fees since the investigation began. But he denied misusing any funds from the America First Foundation.
“The AFF is rapidly becoming a million-dollar organization,” he said. “I have never taken one cent from the Foundation.”
Throughout Fuentes’ nearly five-hour show on Tuesday, supporters posted a constant stream of comments, the majority of them bashing McNeil, and many sent donations. At one point, the program had more than 10,000 viewers.
“Death to traitors,” one follower said. “I do solemnly swear to destroy Nick Fuentes’ enemies,” said another.
McNeil said on Friday’s livestream that he wasn’t planning to go public about why he left but changed his mind because Fuentes had been attacking him.
“He’s threatened me, he’s doxxing my biggest donor, he’s threatening to dox other people through his little proxy of minions,” he said.
McNeil, who was a political science major at K-State, hasn’t been enrolled at the university since the fall semester of 2020. He said he was involved in campus politics at K-State and was chapter president of Turning Point USA, a nonprofit that advocates for conservative values on high school and college campuses, when he met Fuentes at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2019. He started watching Fuentes’ show, he said, and got “red-pilled” — a phrase that means being enlightened to an unsettling truth.
“It is, a lot of the stuff, the truth, the right thing, you know, Christian, right-wing — those are things that I am — and I wanted to push these policies and make a difference…I was willing to sacrifice everything for America First, for this movement. I was there for everything. I was his right-hand guy.”
But he said things deteriorated to the point “where I just was like, I want nothing to do with this.”
Fuentes told a much different story.
He said he tried to protect McNeil, defending him during the George Floyd controversy and telling him to stay with Turning Point USA and remain in college, but McNeil wanted to join America First.
McNeil posted on Telegram on April 30 about his decision to leave: “I would like to share that I have resigned from my position as Treasurer of The America First Foundation. I look forward to continuing to advocate for our leaders to put America First, and wish everyone at AFF the best in their future endeavors to the same end.”
He followed up later that day, saying, “I resigned on my own, nobody ever mentioned it or asked me for a letter.”
That unleashed a torrent of speculation about why he quit, building up to McNeil’s hours-long appearance Friday on the Kino Casino livestream on YouTube. The program has had more than 140,000 views and about 2,000 comments.
Burghart said conflicts like this aren’t new within the white nationalist scene. Egos and money often derail their efforts, he said.
“But I think those tensions were increased dramatically by stakes getting heightened after January 6,” he said. “When you had the subpoenas come down, when you had a bunch of arrests going on, when you had Fuentes’ money temporarily seized. All of those things created a dynamic inside the movement, where it was going to be challenging for them.”
Monetizing bigotry
Those who monitor the far-right movement say the issue also highlights how these “streaming influencers” have monetized their bigotry and created a venue through which they can reach many more young people.
McNeil is a serious gamer, livestreaming regularly on video-streaming platforms, playing video games throughout the night with supporters. Many send him money as they play games like Fortnite and Minecraft. Players sometimes spew and post racist comments and often call each other a form of the N-word. In one recent session, they drew racist caricatures of Jewish people. During another, they joked about George Floyd.
The streaming has become so popular that some white nationalists are making a living at it.
Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch, through research submitted by Megan Squire, a professor of computer science at Elon University, determined that McNeil received more than $63,000 in donations on the streaming platform DLive between spring 2020 and March 2021, making him one of its top earners during that period.
Most recently, McNeil had been livestreaming on Cozy.TV, a platform that Fuentes created after the Capitol riot. But McNeil said in a Telegram post at 1:23 a.m. Saturday that he’d been kicked off the site.
“LOL. They signed me out of Cozy and changed my account credentials,” he said.
Last year, McNeil also received a $20,832 forgivable loan through the government’s Paycheck Protection Program, according to Hatewatch’s review of a federal loan database constructed by ProPublica. The program was intended to support small businesses and self-employed workers through the COVID-19 pandemic.
McNeil applied for the federal funding under the category “independent artists, writers and performers,” and records show the loan was approved on May 27, 2021.
McNeil didn’t have to repay it. As of Feb. 15, the records show, the loan was forgiven.
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