\n<\/p>\n
Before each episode of America First With Nicholas J. Fuentes<\/em> begins, a surreal mix of images and video clips runs, like a screen saver, for an unpredictable and seemingly eternal amount of time. Gentle plains of swaying grass, trickling streams, and the show\u2019s logo flash across the screen. EDM kicks in. Psychedelic depictions of Christian imagery, including Jesus\u2019s crucifixion, come and go. So do snippets of Fuentes talking about, among other things, borders, drag queens, and his faith. \u201cWe want this century to be the most Christian century in the history of planet Earth,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve become intimately familiar with these clips. Recently, I spent five days as a regular Fuentes viewer. Across five episodes of the nightly broadcast, I watched the 27-year-old white-supremacist influencer speak into a microphone for just shy of 12 hours total. The show is scheduled to air live on Rumble at 9 p.m. central time, but it rarely begins on time. Throughout the week, the opening scenes played for at least two hours every night, bouncing from clip to clip at random, before Fuentes finally got started. I watched episodes the next morning, and the first time I tuned in, I endured the intro sequence for 30 minutes before fast-forwarding.<\/p>\n Since Fuentes appeared on Tucker Carlson\u2019s podcast at the end of October, Republican leaders have started to ask themselves just how much sway he has over the party. Fuentes has built an army of fans, who call themselves \u201cGroypers,\u201d and his style of bigoted trolling has become the lingua franca of the young, ascendant right. Each episode I watched garnered at least 1 million views on Rumble. Fuentes has attracted attention for years, but as he\u2019s quick to remind his audience, he\u2019s operated from the fringes, pounding on the doors of mainstream conservatism and meeting fierce condemnation. Now Fuentes has momentum\u2014and based on what I saw, he\u2019s laying the groundwork to go even bigger.<\/p>\n Fuentes\u2019s show is at the core of his political project. He first began livestreaming in 2017, when he was a freshman at Boston University, and basically hasn\u2019t stopped since. (During the week I tuned in, Fuentes marked his 1,600th episode.) Each episode tends to unfurl in roughly the same way: Fuentes, wearing a suit and tie, sits behind a desk and spends an hour to 90 minutes monologuing about the news of the day. In the first episode I watched, Fuentes began with a riff on how President Donald Trump had recently declined to criticize Carlson\u2019s decision to have Fuentes on his podcast. Within about 30 minutes, Fuentes had flipped to his favorite topic. Jews in America, he said, \u201care principally concerned, first and foremost, with the interest and the well-being and the welfare of their own community\u2014of global Jewry.\u201d He criticized prominent Jews, including the conservative-media figure Mark Levin and the right-wing megadonor Miriam Adelson.<\/p>\n Fuentes has said all kinds of terrible things over the years. On an episode of his show in March, he summarized his politics as \u201cJews 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\u2019s that simple.\u201d But I noticed that, perhaps in a bid to not scare away the new viewers he\u2019s attracted in recent months, he used slurs sparingly in the episodes I watched, and mostly avoided talking about non-Jewish minorities. He also went out of his way to claim that he\u2019s \u201cnot a cruel guy.\u201d<\/p>\n Fuentes couldn\u2019t completely help himself, however. \u201cI make fun of Muslims all the time,\u201d he said in one episode. \u201cI call them \u2018towelheads.\u2019 I say they rotate around a cube. I make fun of them, but I don\u2019t hate them.\u201d He added that he did think that Muslims should be remigrated, referencing the far-right desire to deport naturalized citizens whom they see as not having properly assimilated.<\/p>\n Each episode, after finishing his monologue, Fuentes begins a second segment: a mailbag-esque \u201csuper chat\u201d during which, for a minimum fee of $20, his fans can ask him questions. Fuentes\u2019s financial situation is opaque, but he seems to bring in a significant amount of money from listener questions. I saw him receive sums as large as $1,000 from a single donor, identified only by the username Zion_Don, who donated on four of the five nights I watched. In one episode, Fuentes accidentally shared his screen with the audience, revealing that he had made at least $5,192 in the span of a few hours.<\/p>\n The chat is just one of his several revenue streams. Fuentes repeatedly encouraged his audience to buy merch, including a $40 T-shirt that displays his face on the back and WANGHAF<\/span> on the front. \u201cThat stands for \u2018White-ass nigga going hard as fuck,\u2019 because that\u2019s what we are,\u201d Fuentes said with a grin. For $100 a month, his fans can also access a Telegram group with Fuentes in it.<\/p>\n None of this was a dramatic departure for Fuentes. At its core, America First With Nicholas J. Fuentes <\/em>is very much the same show, with the same racist ideology, that has been amassing followers for Fuentes for years. But he is also clearly in a mode of building, refining. Seemingly intent on making the most of his new visibility, Fuentes spent much of the time that I watched him tripling down on his foremost message of disdain for Jewish people and soliciting the financial capital to do even more with his show.<\/p>\n After I finished the episodes, I reached out to the man who had just been hawking racist street wear at me for a week. Fuentes didn\u2019t provide me with specifics of how much he makes from his livestream, and he denied that he\u2019d changed his tune since going on Carlson\u2019s podcast. \u201cHaha oh so you watch the show finally and now you think i\u2019m moderating???\u201d he texted me. \u201cThat\u2019s craaaaazy.\u201d I asked him about his comments on Muslim remigration. \u201cI dont see how that is hateful at all, genuinely,\u201d he said. \u201cThese are complete foreigners who are intensely clannish, and basically were accepted into the country as an act of charity.\u201d<\/p>\n Regardless of how much Fuentes wants to convince people that he\u2019s fundamentally a nice guy, in all of the time I spent watching him, I came to understand the extent to which he has perfected a unique (and paradoxical) skill: He builds loyalty among his audience by attacking everyone. He targets not just minorities but also his biggest benefactors. Over the course of the episodes I watched, he denigrated Trump and his followers, accusing the MAGA movement of putting \u201cIsrael first.\u201d Fuentes went after Carlson too, attacking him for his hypocrisy in encouraging young people to go to trade school even though Carlson\u2019s own son works for Vice President J. D. Vance.<\/p>\n Fuentes doesn\u2019t spare his fans. Often, when people paid him to answer a question, he would ruthlessly dunk on them. He called his fans \u201cidiots\u201d and \u201cfaggots.\u201d In one episode, Fuentes laid into a father seeking recommendations for sufficiently anti-Semitic children\u2019s shows. \u201cDude, like, isn\u2019t that your job as a parent?\u201d Fuentes said. \u201cI\u2019m astounded at the question.\u201d Even when Fuentes is making fun of his own audience, his charisma makes it seem almost impossible that you specifically are the butt of the joke. He\u2019s laughing with you<\/em> at them<\/em>.<\/p>\n Fuentes has been remarkably consistent about his aims and clear about what he wants his fans to do. As early as 2019, Fuentes spoke to his followers about infiltrating the right by blending in with the rest of the GOP. Fuentes and the Groypers are much more powerful than they were six years ago, but he seems to understand that he can\u2019t overplay his hand. During the episodes I watched, he continued to speak about subterfuge: He encouraged a fan who claimed to have a prestigious legal internship to \u201clie about your beliefs.\u201d He articulated this theory in full during one of the clips used in his intro: \u201cIt all means nothing if we don\u2019t get our people in office, if we don\u2019t get our people in government. That\u2019s why I tell Groypers, \u2018Don\u2019t let them put your name on a list. Hide. Conceal your views,\u2019\u201d Fuentes explained. \u201cYour job is to get into the Ivy League; your job is to get into these offices and do what you need to do, say what you need to say. Hold it close to the chest.\u201d<\/p>\n Night after night, I watched Fuentes lay out his strategy for maintaining his momentum. \u201cWe have to start to build an institution,\u201d he said during one episode. \u201cIt can\u2019t just be about me and my personality and me carrying the show.\u201d He said that he would bring back the America First Foundation, a nonprofit he founded in 2020 to raise money for the America First Political Action Conference, his far-right version of the Conservative Political Action Conference (both AFF and AFPAC appear to have been defunct since 2022). Fuentes also mentioned hiring people to work on \u201ca number of new projects,\u201d including a midterm-election guide for his supporters. Fuentes has already infiltrated the right. Now he\u2019s trying to make his movement a permanent fixture of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Before each episode of America First With Nicholas J. Fuentes begins, a surreal mix of images and video clips runs, like a screen saver, for an unpredictable and seemingly eternal amount of time. Gentle plains of swaying grass, trickling streams, and the show\u2019s logo flash across the screen. EDM kicks in. Psychedelic depictions of Christian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":37287,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[18450,1927,5130,20644],"class_list":{"0":"post-37286","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-fuentes","9":"tag-hours","10":"tag-nick","11":"tag-watched"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37286"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37286\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/37287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}