Jews are running society, women need to shut the fuck up, Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part, and we would live in paradise, it’s that simple. It’s literally that simple. — Nick Fuentes, Rumble, March 28, 2025
In 2016, Nick Fuentes was exactly what Republican recruiters dream of: an 18-year-old Catholic honor student and conservative true believer headed to Boston University. By 2022, he was dining at Mar-a-Lago with Donald Trump as one of America’s most influential young white nationalists.
His transformation reveals a vulnerability in the digital ecosystem: unmoderated platforms have become breeding grounds for extremism. Fuentes didn’t fade into obscurity when mainstream platforms enforced content policies — he migrated to spaces specifically designed to welcome him, where he found not isolation but amplification and monetization.
Little Nicky
The Illinois teen was student council president at Lyons Township High School, wrote for the school newspaper, and participated in Model United Nations.
While classmates consumed Snapchat and played Call of Duty, Fuentes spent his time devouring Thomas Sowell and Milton Friedman, absorbing economic theory. Teachers remember a sharp student who always had opinions at the ready, and clear political ambitions. Boston University accepted him for fall 2017. Then came Charlottesville.
Uniting the Right
Days before he became a BU freshman, Fuentes drove to Virginia for the Unite the Right rally — the largest white nationalist event in years. He didn’t want to miss what promised to be a historic gathering.
Friday night brought hundreds of men with tiki torches marching through the University of Virginia campus, their chant echoing off brick buildings: “Jews will not replace us.” It was a chilling spectacle of far-right muscle.
Saturday delivered chaos: street fights, smoke bombs, tear gas. Then 20-year-old James Alex Fields Jr. drove his Dodge Challenger into counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer, 32, and wounding dozens. For the far right — and for Fuentes — it was a watershed moment.
Fuentes found his inbox exploding. Death threats poured in after someone recognized him in crowd footage. Ugly messages piled up. Specific threats that could make any 18-year-old tremble. Fuentes, then still denying he was racist, left BU forever.
Banned and Radicalized
Before Charlottesville, Fuentes had landed what seemed like a jackpot for a teenage conservative: his own show, America First, on Right Side Broadcasting Network, a pro-Trump outlet.
From his parents’ basement in suburban Chicago, a nerdy teenage Fuentes built his audience night after night, inflammatory takes reverberating through the family home. Kassy Dillon had made Nick Fuentes happen after he caught her eye at a debate where Fuentes called multiculturalism a “cancer.” Impressed by his suit-and-tie presentation and brash personality, she connected him with RSBN, where he talked about killing the globalists at CNN and held forth on the barbarism of Islam.
A leaked recording emerged of Fuentes declaring white people who have sex with Black people are “degenerates.” His comments caused outrage — and quadrupled his viewership. It also got him fired from RSBN. Former allies informed on him and social media platforms began nuking his accounts.
Fuentes was banned from Twitch and Reddit, followed by YouTube in February 2020 for hate speech violations. He also lost access to Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Clubhouse, along with streaming platforms DLive and Spotify, and financial services including Venmo and Stripe. Twitter banned him in July 2021, though Elon Musk reinstated his account in 2024, and YouTube briefly allowed him back in September 2025 before banning him again within hours. Fuentes boasts of being “the most canceled man on the internet.”
But each platform removal simply redirected Fuentes toward spaces built to accommodate extremism. Telegram became his organizing hub — a private communications network where he could coordinate operations without oversight. Most importantly, he found Rumble, a video platform that welcomes the radical right (Vice President JD Vance is an investor in Rumble) and functions as a refuge for content too toxic for mainstream platforms.
Fuentes absorbed the lesson: broach certain topics in conservative media and face exile. Instead of backing down, Fuentes decided the entire conservative movement was fraudulent and committed himself to exposing it. Each rejection had pushed him further from the mainstream and deeper into extremism.
The Groyper Wars
In 2019, Fuentes launched his breakthrough tactic: the first “Groyper War.” His target wasn’t Democrats or liberals but Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA — conservatives Fuentes deemed sellouts.
The method was simple and juvenile. Fuentes’s followers — “Groypers,” named for their cartoon frog mascot — infiltrated Turning Point events on college campuses. During Q&A sessions, they deployed carefully prepared questions designed to expose Kirk as stupid or hypocritical.
“Why does TPUSA support mass immigration when it hurts American workers?” “Why should conservatives care more about Israel than America?” These weren’t random confrontations but coordinated operations, planned and filmed for maximum viral impact.
Kirk struggled. Videos of him fumbling answers spread rapidly. Fuentes had discovered how to hijack conservative platforms and weaponize them against more mainstream conservatives.
Creating Counter-Institutions
By 2020, Fuentes was ready to build his own institutional power. If CPAC represented mainstream conservatism, he would create something “pure” — the America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC).
The first AFPAC drew around 100 people. But each year brought larger crowds. By 2022, now promoted heavily on Telegram and monetized through platforms that didn’t scrutinize content attracted hundreds who were drawn by his identity as a self-proclaimed “incel” — involuntarily celibate — representing a misogynistic subculture that blames women for romantic failure while fueling broader attacks on feminism and women’s rights.
AFPAC looked deliberately different from CPAC: no corporate sponsors, no polished politicians delivering safe speeches. Instead, actual power brokers appeared — congressional Representatives Paul Gosar (AZ), former Iowa representative Steve King, and Marjoie Taylor Greene (GA), who later claimed that she wasn’t aware of Fuentes’ views and that she wanted to address the audience of white supremacists because “we’re going to focus on people, not labels,” she said. “We’re going to focus on protecting the nuclear family, our border, our jobs, and our children.”
Dinner With Donald
November 2022 at Mar-a-Lago marked Fuentes’s apex. Fuentes reveled in his fortune, dining with Kanye West and Donald Trump. Five years after Charlottesville destroyed his mainstream path, Fuentes savored his view from the top.
Trump later claimed ignorance about who Fuentes was — stating he was just some random guy Kanye brought to dinner, someone he “had never met and knew nothing about.” Yet Fuentes had adamantly supported “Stop the Steal,” wore a VIP pass to Trump’s January 6 speech, and addressed insurrectionists outside the Capitol. Former speaker of the house Kevin McCarthy proclaimed, “I don’t think anybody should be spending any time with Nick Fuentes. He has no place in this Republican Party.”
The dinner proved Fuentes had penetrated conservative circles. By 2022, his followers had taken control of conservative student organizations at approximately 30 college campuses nationwide. His show, America First with Nicholas J. Fuentes, which he began in 2017, continues on Rumble where he currently has nearly 400,000 followers and a viewership ranging from the hundreds of thousands to millions per episode. Unlike other white nationalist leaders who fade after brief notoriety, Fuentes has built genuine institutional power.
Turning on Trump
Success bred impatience. By 2024, even Trump failed to satisfy Fuentes, who watched the former president surround himself with what he considered the same Republican establishment types who had always frustrated him. In August 2024, Fuentes declared Groyper War 2 had begun—this time targeting Trump himself.
Fuentes deployed the same playbook he used against Charlie Kirk, but with higher stakes: coordinated harassment, memes, threats to stay home on election day. His complaint was specific: “Trump’s campaign has been hijacked by the same consultants, lobbyists, and donors that he defeated in 2016,” Fuentes announced.
Fuentes’ antisemitism came out in the open. He began broadcasting his bigotry with impunity. “I think the Holocaust is exaggerated. I don’t hate Hitler. I think there’s a Jewish conspiracy. I believe in race realism,” he livestreamed in 2023.
He also progressed from attacking Republicans for insufficient conservatism, to attacking conservative organizations for insufficient nationalism, to attacking Trump — whose “America First” slogan he’d appropriated — for insufficient extremism. By July 2025, Fuentes was calling Trump a “scam artist.”
The landscape shifted dramatically on September 10, 2025, when Charlie Kirk — the same figure Fuentes had targeted during the 2019 Groyper Wars — was assassinated while speaking at Utah Valley University. Kirk’s death would create a power vacuum in far-right media and offer Fuentes an unexpected path back toward mainstream acceptance.
The Open Door
Banned from mainstream platforms, Fuentes found an entire ecosystem waiting: alternative platforms that welcome extremism with audiences already primed for radicalization and an infrastructure built to monetize it all. He didn’t have to create the space for white nationalism — he just had to move in.
What began in his parents’ basement now reaches millions. Yet the real measure of Fuentes’s influence isn’t his follower count. It’s that the big, dark door he kicked open has stayed wide open, and others are walking through.
In His Own Words
Holocaust Denial & Antisemitism
“Six million cookies? I’m not buying it.” — Fuentes comparing the six million Jewish Holocaust victims to cookies. 2019.
“I think the Holocaust is exaggerated. I don’t hate Hitler. I think there’s a Jewish conspiracy. I believe in race realism.” — March 2023 livestream.
“One of the primary things they all have in common, many of them, is that they’re Jewish.” — July 19, 2023.
“Perfidious Jews should be executed.” — Podcast, December 8, 2023.
“They will sit and call themselves ‘radical Zionists’ and scream about Israel’s right to exist and sell drones to kill Palestinian children, but they will hear nothing about race essentialism, exclusion of non-Christians or homosexuals, genuine anti-feminism, or white nationalism.” — X, February 15, 2025.
“They can have a civil conversation with a bisexual cuck Democrat who promotes violence and deplatforming against American patriots. But if you say ‘Christ is King’ too loudly or don’t bow down and worship Israel, then you are considered an absolute enemy.” — X, July 14, 2024.
Racism
“I’m not living around Blacks. Sorry. I want white kids and I don’t want my white kids bringing home black people to marry. It’s racial for me. Call me racist. ‘Oh, very Christian of you.’ I don’t give a fuck.” — Podcast, September 9, 2025
“Just another in a long list of excuses. Leftists blame it on racism & poverty. Conservatives blame it on culture & godlessness. Blacks create the same ‘culture’ from LA to Baltimore, from Haiti to London, from Sudan to South Africa. From prehistory to now. It’s race.” — X, April 7, 2025.
“When black adolescents commit crime, liberals say we have to explore ‘root causes’ such as gibsmedat. When a mass shooting occurs, it’s unthinkable to do anything other than ban all firearms immediately.” — In a September 4, 2024 X post, Fuentes mocked liberal explanations for Black crime with derogatory terms.
“I’m sick of hearing about this Black minority in America, because that’s what they are. They were a cheap labor source when the country was founded. They were slaves. And then from the time they were freed until now they’ve been a small, you can call it racial but really it’s sort of like an ethnic thing, there are — you have white Americans and Black Americans. And they have been an ethnic enclave minority ever since.” — Rumble, June 19, 2023.
“This is a European, historically European, white, Christian, Western nation, and all of this Black independence day, Black national anthem, Black pride flag, BLM, all that is about, is about the third world recolonization of America. It’s about basically undoing European settlement, reclaiming America for the third world, the so-called indigenous, the brown people, and their drums and their other things, that’s what this is about. Their tribal garb, and their wooden flutes, … their wooden masks, … their pyramids, and their bows and arrows and spears. That’s all this is about.” — Ibid.
White Nationalism & Supremacy
“Fuck you & get over yourselves… It’s time for White people to look out for White people.” — America First podcast, May 9, 2025.
“Six years ago, they said it was racist to say that we should have a whites-only immigration policy or that we should have an immigration policy that is intended to sustain our white demographics. … Now, here we are in 2025, both of them say no more nonwhites, no more third-worlders, deport them all.” — America First podcast, June 9, 2025.
“This is totally disingenuous. Non-Christians always weaponizing Christianity against whites. Where in Catholic doctrine does it say that the civilization which evangelized the world & served as custodian of the Church for almost 2,000 years should be snuffed out by immigration?” — X, June 27, 2024.
“We need to remain majority White.” — X, August 13, 2025.
“White people need to restore the Roman Empire like the Jews restored Israel.” — X, June 4, 2025.
Misogyny
“Women lose again! Your body, OUR CHOICE [laughing emoji] that ceiling is made out of BRICK!” — X, November 5, 2024.
“It’s time for men to tell women SHUT UP. Your job is to be patient, obedient & submissive. Feminism must be eradicated from our society.” — Podcast, March 28, 2025.
“If I’m 30 and she’s 16, 14-year age difference. When I’m 50, she’ll be 36. When I’m 40, she’ll be 26. Then now we’re talking here, now we’re cooking with gas… Women don’t age like wine. They age like milk.” — Fuentes explaining the benefits of marrying children, America First podcast, July 2023.
“Women are willing to destroy the economy, open the borders, and plunge the world into a nuclear war… As long as they get to have their abortions. Sick and cruel.” — X, October 31, 2024.
“It’s not enough to say, ‘We’re against Trannies,’ you’ve got to be against women’s rights, too… We want to go back to 1099. We want to go back to the Middle Ages.” — X, July 14, 2022.
