Not Finance Related At All-My Nick Fuentes Article

Hey guys, two articles in one day. So here at Duke there is this group called The Lemur , and they write very cool articles at Duke. The Duke Chronicle is sort of boring, and they write about very administrative issues. The Lemur is cool because it’s just smart people writing about stuff they find interesting, even though many of the articles/people are quite pretentious. Anyway, this is the third (and hopefully final) draft of my upcoming article on Nick Fuentes that will be published shortly. Obviously the prestigious Pax Romana is about public equities, and my interest in them, but it has also just been a forum for my writing for years now. So I just wanted to share this on here too, thanks!

“The rise of Trumpism has been sustained by popular online personalities. The most successful of these figures was undoubtedly Charlie Kirk. His organization, Turning Point, and his online clips specifically drew far more attention and influence than any of his peers. But 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. The group was built on giving a voice to young, male issues, and now it is being led by a woman, who, despite all of her media appearances, is nowhere near as charming as her late husband.

But, this certainly is not a Charlie Kirk article. Instead, this is an article about Nick Fuentes, a man who represents the next stage of conservatism in America, the Ultra Instinct to Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, and Candace Owen’s Super Saiyan.

Nick Fuentes breaks the mold, as he represents a third category, not operating within the conservative status quo that has formed over the last decade. Before very recent appearances, Nick Fuentes had never appeared on mainstream podcasts to modulate his message and appeal to a wider audience, instead growing his audience organically or through fights online with the aforementioned figures, with the latter becoming more and more popular.

For example, a recent two hour long interview on The Tucker Carlson Show, spurred reports from Politico and WAPO of growing division in the GOP, as conservatives take sides on the Nick Fuentes issue. Do you fall on the mainstream side; the side with Ben Shapiro and JD Vance, supporting Israel and standing for very Trumpian policies. Or, do you fall on the Nick Fuentes (now maybe Tucker Carlson) side; the ascendant side with a growing number of supporters and footholds within the party, supporting explicitly anti-Israeli messaging and a return to “America first.”

To fully understand this issue, you have to understand where Nick Fuentes comes from, this bedeviling issue for the Republican Party.

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 a 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 for stuff like comparing the concentration camp gassings to baking cookies in the oven, saying multiple times that Israel did 9/11, and then praising Hitler repeatedly. If there is a mainstream platform, Fuentes has been banished from it for his statements. Despite, or maybe because of, this exclusion from the establishment, Fuentes has gained a cult following, who call themselves Groypers.

The number of Groypers is growing too. Since his Twitter account was reinstated in May, Fuentes has increased his follower count by 600%, to now over 1,120,000 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.

Fuentes and his Groypers 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. Fuentes appealed to a group Kirk was not appealing to in that Fuentes was willing to say anything. There were no limits on where he would go, and compared to Fuentes, Kirk looked corporate to many Groypers.

Then, in 2022, Kanye West and Nick Fuentes had dinner with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago (Fuentes was Ye’s campaign manager for his 2024 Presidential campaign). 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.

The thing is, all the rebuke from mainstream conservatives, Trumpers, the ADL, none of it mattered. To the Groypers and others of the alt-right persuasion, this was just the mainstream recoiling from something they feared. They all knew who Fuentes was, so the opinions of 80-year-old Senators like Lindsey Graham or “Jew-run” (their words) like the ADL just did not matter.

His growth in influence from 2017-2022, bookended by a white supremacist rally and a dinner with Ye and Donald Trump, positioned Fuentes well to make some noise during the 2024 election in his characteristically insane way—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 has 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 proudly 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.

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. The extremeness of his positions allow him to operate from a place of safety, a place someone as moderate (with that term used lightly) as Charlie Kirk could not. The people that want to believe him–young white males who believe society has been weaponized against them—listen, and those not in that group are effectively powerless as his barrage of claims persists inevitably.

I say this is the end-case of Trumpism because this is the Trump playbook. Trump was so immune to criticism in 2016 because he was everywhere, saying crazy things at a rate too fast for the media to keep up. There is so much to criticize that the focus of the media and American people cannot stay on one thing for too long. Fuentes is just taking that to the extreme.

One day he’s calling J.D. Vance’s wife slurs that originated from 4chan, getting millions of views as the clip spreads through Instagram, and then the next day he’s calling Matt Walsh some truly insane things (if you are a student have probably seen his admittedly funny, if aggressive Matt Walsh impersonation). 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. Clips of his interactions with viewers (usually through donations, also his primary source of income) are some of his most popular, 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 have historically been twelve year olds with too much internet access, 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. Fuentes pulls in the Neo-Nazi and the JD Vance, the guy who converted who wants to save the West, and the guy who converted to Catholicism in 2019 because it was “really old.”

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 society, especially among conservative white men, is a vehicle for him to spread his corrosive ideology.

And I think this is a very critical part of Nick Fuentes’s appeal-call this point 4.5 I guess. This growing anti-semetic mindset has a ton of appeal to so many people across the political spectrum. Obviously you have the white-supremacists disliking Jewish people, a group that has existed for about as long as Western thought has. These people hate the Jewish people because they think they are not European/Christians, totally incompatible with “Western Civilization.” Then you have young liberals angry about Israel’s actions/genocide/war/military operation/whatever term you want in Gaza. This group is righteously incensed about Israel’s actions, about Israel’s deep ties to some pretty crappy American politicians (shoutout Ted “leading defender of Israel” Cruz), and the status-quo of supporting Israel in general. Then, you have young men, a very politically volatile group who are, and I can say this free from criticism as a young man, very easily swayed by political figures pinning society’s perceived failure of them on other groups. And finally, you have everyone else from every age bracket (but usually younger) that is angry at Israel, or that has been listening to anything Tucker Carlson has been saying since 2023, or that is just angry about society in some way and is finding a man with views they sympathize towards on an emotional level.

To all these people, Nick Fuentes has points that make sense. They make sense enough to ignore the holes in his arguments, make sense enough to wonder if maybe our American political system needs to be re-worked, and enough to keep watching and showing their friends. These people all come together to form a substantial, albeit temperamental, coalition.

Nick Fuentes is a very potent political figure. For the alt-right movement, he is the perfect leader. Those aspects, combined with an unrelenting aggressiveness targeted toward anything establishment, nonwhite, and not “American,” make Nick Fuentes worth paying attention to, not because he has anything totally revolutionary to say, but because he represents the future of the Republican Party and the conservative movement in America. JD Vance can criticize Nick Fuentes as much as he wants, but just as the establishment conservatives paved the way for Trump with their Tea Party, so to have the mainstream conservatives once again planted the seeds for change within their party by dabbling in the extremes. One dinner with Donald Trump, one comment that receives backlash, one interview with Tucker Carlson, it is all building again.

Over the past nine years, Nick Fuentes has enjoyed a grinding rise in popularity—one where rebukes by the mainstream, defined by anything slightly more central than him, have not mattered. Nick Fuentes is not going away, not being snuffed out by Ben Shapiro. Nick Fuentes is the future of American conservatism whether that is popular with current leadership or not.”