Nick Fuentes’ Plan to Conquer America

White nationalist livestreamer Nick Fuentes finds it very difficult to hide his contempt for his own followers, known as Groypers—even when they are sending him money.

“Can you fuck off and kill yourself and die,” Fuentes muttered during a livestream on the alternative streaming platform Rumble earlier this month. The antisemitic, anti-trans, misogynistic, and racist influencer was responding to a follower who sent him a $10 Super Chat message, offering advice on how to treat the cold Fuentes was suffering from.

Groypers are a group of extremely loyal supporters of Fuentes’ white nationalist and Christian nationalist ideology, which he describes as “America First.” Their leader’s undisguised disdain for them, which at times edges into outright hatred and name-calling, is part of his appeal. Younger viewers in particular view his unvarnished responses and unwavering views on immigration, Israel, and Donald Trump (he’s against them all) as genuine and authentic, especially compared to what other right-wing influencers offer up.

Now, Fuentes is looking to leverage his rapidly growing audience, and a new level of influence among more mainstream figures in the GOP and MAGA movement, to build a nationwide secret society of sorts, which he believes will help bring his vision of an America dominated by white Christians to fruition.

“The country overall, I think, is closer to accepting our position than they were 10 years ago,” Fuentes said in a recent livestream. “I think we're kind of still waiting for that inflection point, and once that happens, I think it happens all very quickly.”

After a decade of livestreaming hate-filled diatribes in which he has said certain types of rape are “not a big deal,” denied the Holocaust, and compared himself to Hitler, Fuentes believes he, and the white nationalist movement generally, have very little to show for it.

But in the wake of the murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, things have been happening very quickly.

For the last six years, Fuentes had relentlessly attacked the Turning Point USA cofounder, focusing especially on his support for Israel. Fuentes also repeatedly called out Kirk’s unwillingness to debate him. In the aftermath of Kirk’s death, Fuentes struck a more conciliatory tone, urging followers not to pick up arms, but also repeated that he believes Kirk was “complicit in the Israeli capture of the right wing for a very long time.”

Rather than damaging Fuentes’ popularity, Kirk’s death has accelerated it. His X following has grown by almost 175,000 since Kirk’s death, and he has seen his following on Rumble increase by more than 100,000.

His livestream commemorating the death of Kirk was among his most watched by far, with over 2.5 million views. His livestream the following Monday discussing who was responsible for Kirk’s death also saw a higher-than-normal viewership. In the space of less than an hour, Fuentes earned over $5,500 from the top 50 Super Chat donations made by supporters, according to a review by WIRED.

Fuentes did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

“A Generational Run”

For years, Fuentes was viewed as a pariah by people within the Republican Party and the MAGA movement. “I don’t think anybody should be spending any time with Nick Fuentes,” then House minority leader Kevin McCarthy said in 2022, days after Trump had dined with the antisemitic musician and fashion mogul Ye and the America First leader at his Mar-a-Lago resort.

But over the course of the last year, coinciding with Elon Musk’s decision to reinstate Fuentes’ X account, his influence has skyrocketed, despite—or perhaps because of—his criticism of Trump’s failed campaign promises around the Epstein case and mass deportations, as well as his support for Israel.

“He is on a generational run. I don’t care what anyone says, he is on fire right now,” comedian Vincent Oshana said while appearing on the podcast of right-wing influencer Patrick Bet-David, who interviewed Trump last year. Fuentes has been praised—albeit usually with heavy caveats—by, among others, manosphere star Myron Gaines, right-wing commentator Dinesh D’Souza, and livestreamer Adin Ross, who hosted Trump during last year’s presidential campaign.

Fuentes has also been at the center of a very public fight with mainstream right-wing media figures Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. Carlson called Fuentes a “weird little gay kid in his basement” and suggested he was part of a deep-state plot to undermine real right-wing figures; most observers, especially his own supporters, concluded that Fuentes came out on top.

“Young Trump supporters listen to Nick Fuentes, and if they don’t listen to him, they listen to people who have been influenced by him,” says Michael Edison Hayden, an extremism researcher and author of the forthcoming book Strange People on the Hill, which follows a small town’s takeover by a white nationalist group. “He’s absolutely influential on immigration, on antisemitism and optics—whether establishment Republicans want to admit that or not.”

Born in 1998, Fuentes, grew up in a well-off suburb of Chicago. By the time he was 18, a freshman in Boston University, he was already livestreaming, launching what he would call America First with Nicholas J. Fuentes on YouTube. Having gained a cult following, in February 2017 Fuentes brought his show to the Trump-aligned Right Side Broadcasting Network.

The so-called alt-right of which he was a part, and Fuentes’ brand of edgy nihilism specifically, fell apart in the wake of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in August 2017. At the time, Fuentes wrote on Facebook that the event, which resulted in the death of antifascist activist Heather Heyer, would unleash a “tidal wave of white identity,” something that at the time didn’t happen.

Fuentes returned to YouTube before he was banned from the platform in 2020 for violating the company’s hate speech policies. He continued broadcasting his show on DLive, an alternative streaming platform, but was once again suspended indefinitely in 2021 after he was in attendance outside the Capitol on January 6, 2021, where he was captured on video speaking to supporters. One of the rioters inside the Capitol on that day was captured on video waving an America First flag.

Fuentes moved his show to a custom platform called Cozy TV that he built in collaboration with Alex Jones. More recently, he has found a welcoming home on Rumble, the alternative media platform that also hosts Donald Trump Jr.’s podcast and has been backed financially by both Peter Thiel and a venture capital fund cofounded by Vice President JD Vance.

Despite being suspended from most major social media platforms, last year Fuentes was reinstated on X by Musk, who wrote that he could stay on the platform “provided he does not violate the law, and let him be crushed by the comments and Community Notes.”

Rather than being crushed, Fuentes has seen his following skyrocket from 168,000 at the time his account was restored in May 2024, to almost 925,000 today.

“We Want Them to Have No Clue”

In a recent interview with Eric Orwoll, one of the founders of a whites-only community in Arkansas, Fuentes complained that for all that has happened since Trump came to power, there are very few groups who are operating right now in the “pro-white” sphere.

He listed Jared Taylor’s white nationalist American Renaissance conference, and VDare, a white nationalist group founded in 1999 by Peter Brimelow that has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Fuentes also mentioned his own show, and the antisemitic Culture Wars magazine.

But Fuentes believes that he and the Groyper army can change that.

Despite his growing influence within the GOP and the Trump administration, as well as his rapidly rising support among young white men in America, Fuentes has repeatedly said that in order for his movement to make an impact, it needs to operate in the shadows.

“No rallies, no protests, we don’t need to show everybody how many of us there are because the second that we do, they will identify, isolate, and destroy us,” Fuentes said on a recent livestream. “We want them to have no clue how many Groypers there are, where they are, who they are. We want them to be completely in the dark.”

Fuentes says that he travels the country constantly to meet his supporters, who have started different groups and organizations across the country—everything from campus groups to book clubs, all founded on the racist, antisemitic doctrine he preaches on his livestreams.

He described his movement as a “tech startup” and “a patchwork that eventually we're going to knit together … over time,” adding that he saw Orwoll’s whites-only community in Arkansas as part of that network.

“There are certainly Groypers within the administration, and I believe [Fuentes] when he says that he has contacts within the administration, including probably pretty high up,” says Hannah Gais, an extremism researcher with the Southern Poverty Law Center.

There are signs that figures familiar with Fuentes’ movement play roles in the administration. Back in May, for example, Trump nominated Paul Ingrassia—who at one point allegedly grilled career FBI agents about their loyalty to Trump, according to a recent lawsuit—to head up the Office of Special Counsel. Ingrassia attended an impromptu rally in June 2024 after Fuentes had been denied entry to a Turning Point USA conference. Ingrassia later claimed to have been unaware of who was speaking at the rally; however, he wrote an X post at the time condemning the decision by Turning Point USA to eject Fuentes. It’s unclear at this point if a vote to confirm Ingrassia’s appointment will happen.

Ingrassia and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.

On one livestream earlier this month, a young supporter told Fuentes that he was getting some of his friends into the movement and said it was “growing at an exponential rate,” adding that “you have the youth in this country sold on this movement.”

While this may be an exaggeration, Fuentes’ young supporters are sold to the point where they are willing to fund him and his ambitions.

In addition to what he raises with Super Chats, Fuentes also has a subscription service called America First Plus. For $15 a month subscribers get access to the full America First archive. Thirty dollars a month gets you the archive plus “AI powered search.” For the most dedicated Groypers, there is a $100-a-month tier that also gets you access to a group chat that Fuentes is part of.

In a recent video criticizing the people who are part of the group chat, Fuentes claims that he’s got 400 subscribers to the $100-a-month tier, which would amount to $50,000 a year.

Fuentes also earns money from his range of America First merchandise, including $40 baseball caps and $25 mugs.

“I'll be honest with you, I made a lot of money this summer,” Fuentes said recently. “And I got a lot of support this month, this year, lots of views, lots of followers.”

Those followers are helping to get the word out. Fuentes livestreams five times a week on Rumble, where his videos typically rack up hundreds of thousands of views. Clips from his shows are quickly spread by supporters on many other platforms, including X, Instagram, and TikTok, where they can quickly amass millions of views.

Fuentes’ disdain for many of his supporters appears to have no impact on his popularity, but the 27-year-old is clear that what he refers to as the “grug-level” supporters are not what is needed in order for his movement to take control. Instead, Fuentes speaks about attracting “elite human capital,” supporters who will then become part of an “officer class” of “super intelligent, entrepreneurial” people.

“Once we get 1,000, 5,000 of those guys, those are going to be the party officials, party apparatics as an analogy,” Fuentes said. “I'm kind of interested in inspiring those people, indoctrinating those people. They watch a show, they get the ideas, they get the inspiration, they kind of take a project into their own hands.”