The rise of Trumpism has been sustained by popular online personalities. These personalities fall into two broad categories . The first are the people who provide a platform for Donald Trump and members of his circle to spread their ideology. Joe Rogan, The Nelk Boys (eyeroll), Theo Von, Tucker Carlson, and other members of the mainstream ecosystem have reached out to the politically disaffected, portraying themselves as neutral and unbiased parties, and provided legitimization to right-wing individuals among their listeners. The second sphere comprises internet personalities who openly identify as conservative and have garnered huge followings among younger audiences. These people–Charlie Kirk, Candace Owens, Ben Shapiro, etc.—form the more obvious part of the conservative pipeline.
These figures espouse a more confrontational aspect of new American conservatism. For example, these specific figures have made their name in the conservative world by debating young liberals and then posting clips online of them crushing their youthful opponents, accumulating millions of views.
The most successful of these figures was undoubtedly Charlie Kirk. His organization , Turning Point, and his online clips drew more attention and influence than those of his peers. And now, Charlie Kirk is gone. It seems like his wife, Erika, is attempting to re-center the company around herself while simultaneously keeping Charlie Kirk’s image in the frame. However, it has not been proven yet that the organization can maintain its influence, and I am pessimistic that the company and Erika Kirk can keep the focus of conservatives, specifically young ones.
However, this isn’t a Charlie Kirk article. This is an article about the man who has garnered so much attention and whom I expect to take the reins of the online conservative movement.
In 2017, Nick Fuentes went to the infamous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. That same year, he left Boston University and started livestreaming. He named his stream America First. He hung out for about five years online as self-avowed white supremacist Trump supporter. During this time, Fuentes spread theories that were proudly antisemitic, anti-immigrant, pro-Christian nationalist—or just pro-white male wherever the opportunity arose. He got banned from Twitter (although Elon unbanned him a few months ago), YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitch. If it is a mainstream platform, Fuentes has been banned from it. Despite, or maybe because of, this exclusion from the establishment, Fuentes has gained a cult following, who call themselves Groypers, and Fuentes and his followers began to aggressively go after Charlie Kirk, whom they saw as an establishment conservative. During the 2020 election, Fuentes obviously supported the “stolen election” theory, and he was present at the January 6th insurrection, calling it “awesome,” although he did not actually enter the Capitol Building. However, several of his followers did and were arrested.
Then, in 2022, Kanye West and Nick Fuentes had dinner with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago. This moment is often glossed over, but it provided Fuentes coverage in the form of mainstream conservative outrage at his presence. Pretty much every single Conservative figure took it as an opportunity to dunk on him and many even criticized Trump directly for meeting with Fuentes, a self-proclaimed white supremacist
His five-year growth in influence positioned Fuentes well to make some noise during the 2024 election—and by “some noise,” I really mean some. Even though he claimed credit for the reinstatement of Corey Lewandowski as an advisor in the 2024 race, the only true achievement Fuentes could claim was that he got a comment out of J.D. Vance on his presence. Fuentes, who deeply hates Vance for a variety of reasons, said that Vance would not “support white identity” since Vance’s wife is Indian. Vance called Fuentes “a total loser.”
Provoking reactions like those have been, for much of Fuentes’s political career up to this point, a yardstick for success. As Robert Draper put it in The New York Times, Fuentes has often acted like “a mosquito-like interloper whose lifeblood was attention.” But Nick Fuentes has noticeably changed and grown over the past few months, in a way only made possible by the speed at which the internet moves. I pulled that quote from a New York Times article written in September—a ten-minute read framing Fuentes as a proud white nationalist whose former claim to fame was being ridiculed by every member of the political spectrum and having dinner with Kanye West and Donald Trump one time three years ago. This is a figure, and a person, who would not have sniffed the mainstream media in past eras, but right now, he is doing more than getting close to the mainstream media—he is pulling people to him.
Since his Twitter account was reinstated in May, Fuentes has increased his follower count by 600%, to now over 1,000,000 followers. There is a legion of his fans reposting his clips online, raking in millions and millions of views with regularity, and he is the fifth most watched streamer in the world..
All of that said, Nick Fuentes remains a relatively niche figure, and his opinions, while gaining popularity among the right wing, have not been proven to carry significant tangible influence. And maybe this unproven influence, combined with his off-the-wall statements, has given the impression to many individuals that he is an Alex Jones type of figure: A figurehead for crazy people, someone who can be written off without much thought. However, this take is flawed for four key reasons, despite Fuentes being a popular guest on Alex Jones’s show.
First, Nick Fuentes is much more charismatic than Alex Jones, or any conservative figure. If you watch a popular Alex Jones clip right now, your first takeaway would be “Why is he so red?” But your second takeaway would be “Oh, wow—this guy is genuinely rabid and weird.” Alex Jones can scream until his face turns red about school-shooting conspiracies (which he often does), but because of the way he presents his opinions and because of the straight-up insanity of what he is often saying, a substantial number of Americans are intrinsically put off by him.
Second, Nick Fuentes is an actualization of the alt-right movement. He is like 4chan come to life. People talk about Charlie Kirk being tapped into the world of young conservatives, but Nick Fuentes is really on another level, and this aspect of his influence cannot be understated. Nick Fuentes appeals to such a broad base of young men because he is incredibly racist, sexist, antisemitic, and homophobic—but under the guise of humor. He calls J.D. Vance’s wife slurs that originated from 4chan, for example, which his average fan can relate to and finds hilarious. And his daily stream gives him a more direct line to the online world than any other conservative figure. Every other conservative’s show feels like a slightly more modern version of the Rush Limbaugh Show, but when you watch Nick Fuentes’s stream, it feels much more personal. He stokes interaction, with many of these interactions permeating online, further fueling his presence.
Third, he has tapped into a resurgence of this alt-right Catholicism but in a way that is not entirely off-putting to many Americans. If you have had your eyes open in the last decade, you have seen the rise of this “Save the West” movement, centered around supposedly typical Western ideals like a strong Catholic Church, supporting the white race, and a deep-seated ethnocentrism. The people who support these ideas online and in person are usually either twelve years old, or what one would characterize as the dregs of society. These people say stuff like “We need another crusade,” or “Deus vult, brother!” While Nick Fuentes certainly still has quite a bit of that cringiness, it is mixed with a degree of self-awareness that gives him the ability to pull in a more mainstream audience.
Fourth, and this is part of the third one, Nick Fuentes is, in every sense of the word, anti-Israel and anti-Jewish. He has said many times in the past that he thinks Israel deliberately caused 9/11, he is explicitly against U.S. support of Israel in relation to Gaza, and he often positions the Jewish people as nonwhite and controlling everything, which is, according to his ideological framework, very bad. One of his tamer tweets on Larry Ellison to this effect read:
“Pro-Israel Jew Larry Ellison is in the process of buying TikTok, Paramount, and Warner Bros., and he just put Bari Weiss, an Israeli spy, in charge of CBS. The Jews lost control of the narrative, so now they are literally buying more of the media.”
Being anti-Jewish is not new, obviously. Again, Alex Jones has been extremely anti-Israel and anti-Jewish for as long as he has had a platform. But this is different. Nick’s brand of antisemitism is of a different strain. His is not screaming and raging; it is cloaked in humor and sarcasm, only becoming serious and emotionally charged when necessary. This whiplash effect—one where he makes not-wholly-unreasonable points online about the faults in an Israeli-American alliance before returning to saying something really gross about race or women or anything along those lines—validates both statements to some people. His stance on Israel, one that is becoming more popular in America as more and more people turn on the country the further right and left you go on the political spectrum, is a vehicle for him to spread his corrosive ideology.
Nick Fuentes is a very potent political force. For the alt-right movement, he is the perfect leader. Those four aspects, combined with an unrelenting aggressiveness targeted toward anything establishment, nonwhite, and not “American,” could make him a thorny presence in American politics for decades.
So yes, Nick Fuentes is worth paying attention to, not because he has anything groundbreaking to say, but because he could represent the future of the Republican Party and the conservative movement in America. Over the past nine years, Nick Fuentes has enjoyed an astonishing rise in popularity—one so astronomical that opposition by the mainstream has simply not mattered. Getting run out of college did not matter; getting banned from practically every single social-media site did not matter; and being continually castigated by every single popular conservative figure did not matter.
Nick Fuentes’s influence cannot yet be described as all-encompassing, to say the least, but he is the most charismatic conservative in America right now, and his reach will continue to grow as our political climate continues to intensify.
by Henry Beall
