A figure of the antisemitic "alt-right," this influencer is thriving on social networks thanks to hateful and misogynistic rhetoric. Idolized by vengeful youth, he advocates for a white, Christian America. Enough to make Trump look like a moderate.
Civil war among the MAGA crowd! Between pro-Israel Trumpists and rabid antisemites, one man tips the scales toward the latter... Nick Fuentes, devout Catholic and unapologetic white supremacist. A kid with the look of a model student, neat haircut and smooth smile, who has become in just a few years one of the faces of hate. At only 27, he's already one of the most followed and most toxic political influencers of his generation.
Listen to this: "Jews run society, women should shut up, and Blacks should be imprisoned: we'd be living in paradise." Pure Fuentes. The excerpt was broadcast by conservative British journalist Piers Morgan to put his guest on the spot. Morgan stares at him, hoping for a backtrack, some discomfort. Fuentes smiles. "It's true. Everything I say in that video is true," he repeats. "Do you want to clarify?" Morgan asks. "No. It's the truth [...] I'm racist. I accept it. I'm not ashamed of it. Now what?" No shame, no filter. No attempt to mask the ideological violence. "Once you accept the label," he says, "it's like a spell being broken. They have nothing left to say. No more moral authority." There's his program: reverse shame, invert stigma, impose extremism as the norm, and abuse freedom to promote rage.
Heir to an isolationist, identitarian, and anti-liberal right embodied in the 1990s by Pat Buchanan, Fuentes pushes the playbook beyond what that conservative dinosaur would have dared. Traditional America? Not enough. Fuentes demands a white, homogeneous, Christian America. And he turns the age gap into a political argument: "Older conservatives don't understand young people at all." They no longer want a Trump softened by years: "We're going to completely change the party from within," he promises.
His career begins in the margins—and that's where he thrives. Fuentes founded the "Groypers," a community of young activists whose style he shapes with sarcasm, misogyny, racial theories, and dark humor fed by internet culture. He was at Charlottesville in 2017 during the supremacist rallies and then, as expected, near the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Turning Point USA—the major conservative student mobilization machine—eventually banned him for attacking its leader, Charlie Kirk, whom he deemed too moderate. After his assassination, there was even a moment when people thought the killer came from there.
It's to this extreme and uninhibited style that he owes his popularity: Fuentes is funny, quick, and simple. He talks like 15- to 25-year-olds, shares their references, and plays with their memes, their rhythms, and their obsessions. When other far-right activists seem rigid or doctrinaire, Fuentes has fun and entertains the crowd. He's "like us," say his fans. A man who knows how to shock but especially how to make people laugh. And it's this combination—humor and radicalism—that opens the door to something more powerful: a true parasocial relationship. Fuentes talks alone to the camera, but thousands of young people believe they know him, adore him, and support him. That's where his influence comes from.
With America First, his show broadcast on Rumble—a platform favored by the alt-right—he perfects this mechanism. He claims to have "seventy unpaid interns" tasked with cutting up his clips, which then proliferate on TikTok and X. Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter/X was a decisive moment: his account, restored after years of being banned, now exceeds one million followers. His show brings together nearly 50,000 viewers each evening. And his break with Donald Trump, accused of being "controlled by organized international Jewry," transformed him into a figure of the post-Trump right.
Politically, Fuentes embodies assumed chaos. He supported Russia before swearing he was "just very angry" at America after being banned from platforms; applauded Iranian strikes on Israel while claiming "the Muslim religion is a barbaric ideology"; demanded less military interventionism while calling for "regime change by force in Venezuela"; and devoted himself to "saving the white race," but refused to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine because "Ukrainians aren't white. " Better yet, he attacks in vitro fertilization... while being a product of it himself.
His obsessions, however, never change. On America First, he hammers that "Jewish elites control everything," that American politics is dictated by Israel, and that Republicans are "bought." And when he attacks J.D. Vance—who is nevertheless funded by Peter Thiel, patron of Rumble, his own platform—it's not about his program: it's because he married an Indian woman and has mixed-race children.
As a bubo indicates plague, Fuentes is a symptom. That of a Trumpist right seeking a younger, more radical, more brutal, and more uninhibited embodiment. The New York Times estimates that 30 to 40% of young Republican Party employees are sympathetic to his "theses." But he also captures a deeper fracture: after decades of progressive cultural dominance, an anti-system counter-movement rejects established norms—about women, minorities, and power—in favor of vengeful discourse. Yesterday, Trumpists accused "globalists" of being anti-white, anti-family, and Islamist. Today, their elected officials are in power. Their promises unfulfilled. The Epstein affair finished cracking the base. Part of the electorate finds itself more radical than Trump: a revolutionary discourse that Fuentes wants to herald.
He will probably never be elected: his ambition lies elsewhere. He wants to shift the American right and push the Overton window even further by making previously unthinkable ideas acceptable. And as long as tens of thousands of young men smile when he concludes, hilariously, that "Hitler didn't go hard enough on Poland," his influence, like a virus, will only spread.