Part of what separates Fuentes from his fellow-streamers is that he is capable of keeping his thoughts in a coherent, if odious, order. He once offered a trollish, occasionally captivating, and always grossly bigoted hour-long act; that has evolved into something more like a daily address, one that presents a code of behavior and a set of distinct ideas. As recently as a year ago, I’m not sure I could have told you what Fuentes thought about anything outside of his hatred of minorities, gays, and Jewish people. Today, he has developed a vile but discernible vision for the U.S.—something few of his predecessors in the role of far-right boogeyman have been able to do.
Fuentes’s narrative about the U.S.’s current state of affairs begins in a familiarly reprehensible place. Jewish oligarchs, he claims, have bought America, and now control every politician, media outlet, and lever of power. These same oligarchs, in Fuentes’s account, have launched a campaign to smother all criticism of Israel. As proof, Fuentes will point to TikTok, and theorize that big money in politics pushed legislation against that platform, precipitating its sale to Larry Ellison, an ardent supporter of Israel, who will now, Fuentes believes, change the app’s algorithms to suppress pro-Palestinian content. This same group of oligarchs, Fuentes argues, are behind mass migration to the U.S.—this is one of the main tropes of the “great replacement” theory, a racist conspiracy that seemed to motivate many of the young men who attended the rally in Charlottesville, years ago—and have impinged on the sovereignty and livelihoods of white men by pushing for open borders. Fuentes has always had awful things to say about Black people and immigrants, but his recent turn has basically cast them as pawns in the oligarchs’ game.
Crucially, Fuentes has become one of Donald Trump’s most ardent critics on the right. He repeatedly tells a story about a nation of young men in flyover country who believed that Trump would realize a new vision of America and who now have been betrayed. These young men, as Fuentes put it recently, are looking at China and the United Arab Emirates and asking why America couldn’t build “world wonders” and “peaceful” cities. Their interest in MAGA was both industrial and quasi-socialist: they believed that Trump would drain the swamp and bring new legislators to Washington, D.C., who would restore manufacturing jobs, and that America, a failing empire, would “draft” people like them, devastated by poverty and the opioid epidemic and general aimlessness, back to work. All that was a lie, Fuentes now says. Trump has been in or around the heart of political power for more than a decade, and, according to Fuentes, is a sellout who has been bought by the oligarchy. Only Fuentes is willing to put America first.
In the opening column for Fault Lines, in 2024, I wrote about the ideology of the internet, which, put simply, is “kill the mods.” If you want to get traction online, you have to rail against the moderators—who are, you might insist, being paid off to suppress your dangerous speech. Tucker Carlson, in his latest iteration, on Elon Musk’s X, has fully grasped this. Broadcasting online, rather than on Fox News, is a signal of integrity: Here I am at my most uncensored. This version of Carlson comes with an inherent defiance and an implied challenge to the mainstream media industry that made him a star: I can do this without all of you. Fuentes similarly understands that he cannot be censored out of existence. He has been banned from nearly every platform—he currently streams on something called Rumble—but he knows that his fans, whom he calls Groypers, will dutifully clip his most impassioned moments and spread them to the mainstream.
In the past, the hard right was constrained, in a way, by its fealty to Trump. What Fuentes has done is deem Trump a mod. It hardly needs to be said that Fuentes’s story about America relies on some of the oldest antisemitic tropes there are. But he has also crafted, in the past few months, a call to action, one that needs to be taken more seriously than anything promulgated by his predecessors in the alt-right, who were mostly meme-addicted losers trying to troll the media. Fuentes recently criticized a student in Mississippi who made national headlines by going up to Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool Sports, throwing some coins on the ground, and yelling, “Fuck the Jews.” The act was “rude,” Fuentes said, and not reflective of the behavior that he wants to promote; it would make his own antisemitic movement look bad. What he wants, essentially, is message control. He asked his followers to focus on their supposed winning arguments, such as the one about how Ellison’s purchase of TikTok will suppress free speech. Fuentes has also called for the Groypers to start preparing for the 2028 election so they can defeat J. D. Vance if and when he runs for President, because Fuentes considers him a tool of the oligarchy. Fuentes recently asked his followers, “Where do you see yourself in three years?” He added, “I want to see you guys in Iowa, I want to see you in New Hampshire, I want to see you in Nevada and South Carolina. I want to see you on Super Tuesday.” He told his online army that, even if they lose in 2028, they should get ready for 2032 and onward. “Look at Pat Buchanan,” he said. “He ran in 1992. He didn’t see his vision realized until 2016—twenty-four years later. Are you ready to go until 2040, until 2050?”
Right-wing agitators are typically cheap and quickly disposable. Milo Yiannopoulos, Richard Spencer, and the Twitter personality, podcaster, and self-published author Bronze Age Pervert—these men have largely come and gone, and though their influence can be detected in D.C., their demagoguery failed to become much more than a cloying desire to freak out the libs. Fuentes is something different, I believe, in large part because he seems to understand that all norms in political commentary have been destroyed and the game is now to position yourself in opposition to anything that even sniffs of the establishment. This is directly connected to the medium that has aided his rise, and it should worry us even more than it already does. After all, how do you stop something like this without turning off the internet? ♦
