Nick Fuentes. How the American right is irreversibly changing

Nicholas Joseph Fuentes will be one of the most important figures in American politics for the foreseeable future. Although he is completely unknown to most of the country, his name is already appearing in the mainstream media, and he will not be leaving it any time soon.

His opponents label him a white supremacist, anti-Semite, neo-Nazi, homosexual, secret service collaborator, or just a provocateur. The list of these "labels" is indeed wide-ranging, although each one of them defines the 27-year-old activist inadequately.

Public and media accusations of leaning towards the far right began to flow in Fuentes' direction as early as 2016, when he was one of the few Boston University students to endorse the then most controversial presidential candidate - Donald Trump.

The right-wing's departure from the right

However, his "own", i.e. the conservatives he initially claimed to be, later began to accuse him of anti-Semitism. This was because, after leaving university - from where he had, in his own words, been chased away by death threats - he began to question his senior colleagues at Turning Point USA about a kind of 'Israel question'.

He received death threats from students who disagreed with his presence at the Unite The Right demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, according to a Time magazine report. At the time, right-wing activists were protesting the removal of a statue of Southern General Robert E. Lee, who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War (1861-1865).

While still in high school in his native Chicago, he hosted a political talk show on the school's radio station, was involved in debate activities, and was a member (and once president) of the student council. Fuentes, who is descended from Mexican immigrants on his father's side and of Irish-Italian descent on his mother's side, turned from libertarianism to nationalism under Trump's influence.

He has stayed on to moderate the commentary show to this day, but in 2017 he renamed it America First, after one of Trump's campaign slogans. Unlike most of the president's supporters, who are united by the label "MAGA movement," he is a strict Catholic, boasting on several occasions that he has never had a relationship with a woman.

Anti-Semitism

With his entry into the political arena, Trump has drawn theories into the public discourse that could be described as controversial. One of these is the theory of racial realism, which was promoted by, among others, the discoverer of the structure of DNA, James Watson. The latter argued that IQ differences between whites and blacks were genetically determined, although he rejected segregation and racism as such.

At the same time, he was, in his own words, the target of "cancelling" by a kind of old guard of American conservatism - especially fans of funding Israel, such as the late Charlie Kirk or Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro. Virtually all of his commentary activities were "deplatformed," so he couldn't operate on platforms that live on advertising.

Since 2019, his most hardcore supporters have staged provocateur appearances at Turning Point events, which almost immediately became known as "groyper wars." The term "groyper" is what Fuentes' supporters use to describe themselves, and since this year, they have been going to appearances by Kirk or Shapiro, who have been asked about the pitfalls of legal immigration or the annual budget for Israel.

Indeed, later Trump supporters have taken up the argument over illegal migration, which Republicans say is a "crime in itself" - it is crossing the border without the country's permission.

Legal migration, according to the 'groypers', is responsible for 'changing the ethnic core of the American nation', openly admitting that it is white Anglo-Saxons whose ethnicity is supposedly the basis of their legal system.

The media attacks on Fuentes' person led him to extend his criticism of Israel - as a country that receives $3.8 billion annually with almost zero return - to the "Jewish oligarchy" that lobbies U.S. Representatives in collaboration with Israel.

This 'oligarchy' is supposed to be the successor to the New York Jewish mafia, founded in the 1920s by the mafioso Louis 'Lepke' Buchalter. Unlike the Italian Mafia headed by Al Capone, the Jewish branch of the self-styled National Crime Syndicate has not been the target of such a large-scale police response.

Such defined criticism has understandably led to Fuentes being branded an anti-Semite. It therefore went on to be disbanded, as a result of which, in February 2020, he organised a form of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) - an offshoot of which also operates in Hungary.

Fuentes named his conference after his show America First(AFPAC), and over the course of four years, several congressmen such as Paul Gosar of Arizona and Marjorie Taylor-Greene of Georgia have spoken at the conference. They, too, have in turn become the target of criticism for "social leprosy," i.e., contact with the aborted Fuentes.

In 2022, he and rapper Kanye West (now Ye) attended a dinner with Trump, who also later distanced himself from Fuentes.

Deduction

Fuentes regularly offers hints in his shows as to what is supposedly about to happen. It must be said, however, that some of them are accurate.

Well-known conservative talk show host Tucker Carlson comes from a family of newscasters; his father was the director of Dick Carlson's Voice of America. It was Fuentes who first broke the news that he was inseminating pro-Western propaganda from that post in collaboration with the CIA.

Tucker later admitted this fact, but accused Fuentes of also working with the intelligence community, earning him the label "fed." The latter comes from the term federal agent and is seen by some as an insult.

They first came face-to-face in an interview on Oct. 28. Although Fuentes did not admit it directly, it was clear that he knew about Carlson's father's "side job" because that was how all U.S. media with international reach operated during the Cold War.

Tucker explained to Fuentes at the outset why he had procrastinated so long in inviting him on the show. "I thought you were a fed," he said bluntly. "I thought you were a fed," the young man from Chicago responded. They laughed together, and Carlson used the phrase on promotional items.

The second example of correct deduction was Fuentes' failure to support Trump in last year's election. The commentator declared that if the Republican gets into the White House with the lineup he announced, a war with Iran will be unleashed.

He was referring in particular to well-known war hawks such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and former National Security Council chief Mike Waltz. The latter was ousted as ambassador to the UN after the Signalgate affair, but in another case was found to be secretly communicating with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

A year earlier, Fuentes had also claimed that the Republicans would win a majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, which indeed happened. His argument, however, was that it was "actually Hamas's fault."

The militant movement, with its October 2023 attack on southern Israel, caused Israeli public opinion to shift to the right. Jews in Israel and Jews in the Diaspora, however, are, in his view, "connected vessels," which has shifted the whole of Western society towards demands for border security and the protection of national identity.

Impact on youth

Generation Z, also known in the U.S. as Zoomers, has emerged in recent months as the most radical demographic cohort since at least the end of World War II. Intergenerational resentment and a sense of being victims of a scam called global capitalism led to Trump's second victory, the victory of a Muslim socialist in the New York elections, as well as protests in Bangladesh, Nepal and Mexico.

In Bangladesh, protests by young adults led to the overthrow of Prime Minister Hasina Wajid; in Nepal, they almost led to a constitutional change. In Mexico , they have shaken confidence in the left-wing government of President Claudia Sheinbaum - and have equally inclined towards anti-Semitic rhetoric.

Demonstrators spray-painted a derogatory term on the side entrance to the presidential palace in Mexico City, referring to Sheinbaum's Jewish origins.

Conservative commentator Rod Dreher recently pointed to developments in the US. The author of Don't Live a Lie, who emigrated to Budapest in 2022, commented on the empowerment of "groypers", citing a source.

"As I learned from a person familiar with the milieu, about 30 to 40 percent of the Republican Party staff in Washington DC under the age of 30 are groypers," the self-proclaimed "Christian Zionist" wrote on his blog.

Reach to the rest of the empire

As can be seen, a massive chasm is opening up within the American right under the second Trump administration. On one side stand the people who, in despair of unattainable ideals like owning their own homes, voted for Trump, Zohran Mamdani and support Fuentes. On the other side stand the heirs of the old Republican Party, who since the days of Ronald Reagan have championed the "world free market," legal immigration, and under Trump have just embraced the MAGA label.

What observers of these developments are less attuned to, however, is the fact that this divide runs across generations. Thus, Fuentes' supporters need only wait (crudely put) for the "extinction" of the previous generation - whom they accuse of applauding the mass export of jobs and the import of "legal migrants" anyway.

It should also be remembered that America has been behaving like a superpower, or even an empire, since the end of the First World War. In the orbit of this 'empire of the West', Slovakia also lies, for the prosaic reason of its membership of NATO and the EU.

In 2022, the documentary "What is a Woman?" was released in the United States, ending practically overnight the power of transgender activists, which they had held since around 2011. However, there are still parties in the European Parliament or in national parliaments that see the castration of minors as a solution to the problem of non-conformity.

Following the pattern of this phase shift, we only have to wait around ten to fifteen years before open Holocaust denial, the denigration of racially mixed people or calls for the deportation of millions of people arrive in Central Europe - all cleverly hidden under the guise of 'irony'.