Five days a week, thousands of fans gather online to watch Nick Fuentes hold court about the dangers of non-white immigration, feminism and “organized Jewry”. Usually dressed in a dark suit and tie, he lectures to his far-right followers, known as “Groypers”, about what he argues is the insufficient radicalism of Donald Trump’s Republican party and what he describes as the perfidies of the state of Israel and its American supporters.
Fuentes’s fixation with Israel is not rooted in concern about the war in Gaza but a belief, in his telling, that Jews are responsible for most of society’s problems. Fuentes, who is 27 and lives in Illinois, has called Adolf Hitler “really fucking cool” and compared the Holocaust to the baking of cookies.
Despite that – and despite having said that the Republican vice-president, JD Vance, is a “race traitor” for marrying an Indian American woman – Fuentes has ascended in recent weeks from the influential but unacknowledged outer dark of the American right to a position within striking distance of the mainstream Republican party. He has been interviewed on several major platforms in rapid succession, culminating in a friendly, two-hour chat last month on Tucker Carlson’s popular online talkshow. He and Carlson discussed a variety of subjects, including their shared dislike of Christian Zionists. Fuentes also said, casually, that he was a fan of Joseph Stalin.
