What a fucking piece of work.
Whatever else may be said about him, one fact cannot be denied: Nicholas J. Fuentes, the 27-year-old racialist influencer, is on the run of his life.
That’s a remarkable shift from 2017, when Fuentes was a little-known university freshman who hosted a little-watched political talk show. Over time, he developed a fanatical, cultlike following known as the “Groypers.” His digital following soon crossed over into the real world: first, with his involvement in the 2017 Unite the Right rally; then, with his long-running feud with conservative activist Charlie Kirk; and finally, with his role in “Stop the Steal,” which culminated outside the U.S. Capitol on January 6.
Fuentes has cultivated a reputation as the most provocative and controversial figure on the Right. He has done this by embracing taboos, praising Hitler, and opposing interracial marriage. In turn, he has ridden a wave of spectacle and outrage to new heights, with an appearance on The Tucker Carlson Show, and garnering frequent coverage in outlets such as the New York Times and The Atlantic.
Attempting to undercut his growing influence, the media and Fuentes’s right-leaning critics both tend to focus on Fuentes’s record of offensive remarks. Take Fuentes’s appearance on Piers Morgan Uncensored. During the two-hour interview, Morgan played a litany of clips from Fuentes’s talk show, highlighting bigoted comments he’s made over the years.
But this line of attack merely plays into Fuentes’s hands. As one of us has previously noted, Fuentes is best understood as an actor in what postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard called “hyperreality.” Under conditions of hyperreality, symbols of past phenomena lose their meaning and circulate as hollowed-out images through the digital landscape, where they drive discourse and spark emotional reactions.
This is the framework through which Fuentes, with his professed admiration for Hitler and Stalin, and his embrace of anti-Semitism, should be understood. Above all, he is engaged in a performative demand for attention, cynically harnessing transgression to drive clicks, sow chaos, and gain notoriety.
By contrast, this City Journal investigation—which draws on livestreams, a review of public records, and interviews with key associates—focuses not on Fuentes’s words but on his actions. (Fuentes did not return a detailed request for comment for this article.) It looks beneath the spectacle of outrage and the self-mythology he has curated and reveals a shocking heap of human wreckage that has accumulated within Fuentes’s political universe: betrayal, pedophilia, suicide, murder.
Welcome to the freak world of Nicholas J. Fuentes.
Nicholas Joseph Fuentes was born in Chicago in 1998. He grew up in the suburb of La Grange Park. In high school, he served as student council president. After graduation, he briefly attended Boston University before dropping out. Fuentes then moved back to the Chicago area, where, every weeknight, he livestreams his talk show, America First with Nicholas J. Fuentes.
With a greenscreen backdrop, Fuentes sits behind a wooden desk, typically in a suit and tie, pontificating on political and cultural events. Frequently, he launches into expletive- and slur-laced rants. Fuentes presents himself as a dissident truthteller in a world of lies; the ringmaster of a revitalized Right; and a spokesman for young, patriotic men sold out by the elites.
The reality behind the scenes, however, is quite different from this public-facing mythology. The world that has surrounded Fuentes over the past decade is one of paranoia, intrigue, drama, and betrayals. Several of his associates have broken from his movement over the years, spilling dirt on his operation in the process, with allegations and counter-allegations following in the wake of their apostasy. At the same time, Fuentes has developed a fanatical, cultlike following, with many Groypers—at his insistence—swearing a public oath to “rape, kill, and die for Nicholas J. Fuentes.”
……..One question has dogged Fuentes for years: How does he make his money and finance his political operation? During his livestreams, fans must pay a minimum of $20 to pose questions during his Q+A sessions. He has solicited donations and hawks America First merchandise and subscriptions to his $100-a-month private Telegram channel.
Fuentes’s largest known donor to date was a French computer programmer and cryptocurrency millionaire named Laurent Bachelier. In December 2020, as right-wing factions were organizing the “Stop the Steal” protest in Washington, D.C., Bachelier transferred roughly $522,000 in Bitcoin to a network of white nationalist and neo-Nazi activists. The largest recipient, by far, was Fuentes, who received roughly $250,000. Hours after initiating the Bitcoin transfers, Bachelier committed suicide at the age of 35.
Within three months, Bachelier’s donation to Fuentes had effectively doubled in value due to a significant spike in the price of Bitcoin.
After January 6, Fuentes’s finances appear to have been briefly imperiled. The Gray Zone, an investigative outlet edited by hard-left journalist Max Blumenthal, published a purported letter that the Department of Justice sent Fuentes, stating that the DOJ had frozen accounts belonging to Fuentes on January 23, 2021. By the summer of 2021, however, the purported letter claimed DOJ had withdrawn its request to freeze the account.
In spite of this, Fuentes allegedly continued to claim publicly that his funds remained frozen. That narrative unraveled when Jaden McNeil, a former close associate and the treasurer of Fuentes’s nonprofit, said on a livestream that Fuentes had regained access to the funds, a claim corroborated by the Gray Zone’s purported records.
“He’s had that [money] back from the feds for almost a year,” McNeil said on the livestream, accusing Fuentes of using the story to raise money while, at the same time, purchasing an expensive car. “He’s a total liar.”
Over the years, Fuentes has also sought money from at least one prominent right-wing benefactor, according to sources familiar with the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. One former associate claims that in January 2022, Fuentes was scouting real estate in Tampa Bay, where he was considering moving his political operation. During the trip, the associate claims, Fuentes drove four hours to Miami to meet a then-employee of Peter Thiel, the right-wing venture capitalist who has financially backed Republican causes, including the campaigns of President Donald Trump and then-Senate candidate J. D. Vance.
Armed with a presentation, Fuentes pitched Thiel’s employee on providing funding for his show and political operation, according to multiple sources familiar with the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Thiel, one source claimed, never replied to Fuentes’s request.
Soon after, Fuentes began launching a series of public attacks not only on Thiel, whom he called “the CIA,” but also on Trump and Vance. Fuentes also now bemoans the influence of Thiel funding in right-wing circles, despite having allegedly sought out the very Thiel funding he condemns. Multiple former Fuentes associates who spoke to City Journal claim that the Thiel story is telling, as it reveals Fuentes’s true motivations: not political grievances, but personal ones.
Conversations with multiple former associates paint a picture of Fuentes’s positions as not rooted in principle, but shifting with his perceptions of personal advantage and what he perceives as threats to his ego.
“[There’s an] extraordinary gap between the way he describes himself and presents himself to his followers . . . and his real life,” said former Fuentes ally Milo Yiannopoulos. “He’s somebody who doesn’t believe in anything at all.”
……..Fuentes’s own comments on sexual topics are equally disturbing. He has stated that convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was “cool as f***”; has expressed skepticism about age of consent laws; and indicated he wants to marry a 16-year-old girl when he turns 30. For the Groypers, the transgression of political and sexual taboos is part of Fuentes’s appeal. The more furious the denunciations of Fuentes—racist, sexist, pedophile, Nazi—the deeper his audience digs in…….
From one perspective, we might be tempted to dismiss Fuentes as a hyperreal spectacle. His Groyper movement relates to politics the same way pornography relates to sex: stripped of meaning, flattened into an image, sensationalized for personal gain.
But hyperreality does not mean unreal, and, like pornography, it can often intrude on reality in ugly and unexpected ways. Conservatives who care about the future of the movement should understand that Fuentes is corrosive. Despite his self-mythology as the most right-wing pundit in America, he is, in a real sense, a tool of the Left. Progressive activists have spent the past decade pushing the narrative that conservatives are Nazis and Donald Trump is Hitler. In Fuentes, they have finally found their man.
The spectacle moreover is not only politically corrosive, but personally corrosive to its participants. At heart, the Fuentes phenomenon is not about ideas, or ideology, or power; it is about an angry, broken young man leading other angry, broken young men down a digital trail that ends in ruin.
Fuentes might laugh about his command for his followers to “rape, kill, and die for Nicholas J. Fuentes,” explaining it away as irony or a morbid joke. But it was only a matter of time before one of his followers, lost in the cult atmosphere of the Groyper movement and unable distinguish reality from hyperreality, would take it seriously.
That is precisely what happened last January, when a black teenager named Solomon Henderson walked into Antioch High School, outside Nashville, with a 9mm pistol and fired 10 rounds into the cafeteria, killing a 16-year-old girl and injuring another student, before turning the gun on himself.
The purported manifesto Henderson left behind—a copy of which found online corresponded to contemporary news descriptions—revealed a fascination with mass shooters, including the neo-Nazi Anders Breivik, who killed dozens of children in Norway in 2011; and a pastiche of radical ideologies lifted from internet forums and imageboards. At the logical level, these ideologies, especially when set against Henderson’s racial identity, seem to make little sense. But in the freak world, populated by a rainbow of nihilists, a black teenager, drunk on the hyperreal spectacle, can murder a young girl in a school cafeteria while calling himself an “Involuntary Nigger” and a “Groyper Incel.”
In the manifesto, Henderson asked himself, “Is there a particular groups [sic] or people that radicalized you the most?” He weaves one answer into the subsequent list of irony-laden names—once in plain lettering, and later, in all caps: NICK FUENTES.
Fuentes is a bloviating cesspool of pathological depravity. I watched him once out of morbid curiosity and came away with the urge to take a shower. He’s an attention whore with a fan base of like-minded degenerates.