Efforts to rebrand white nationalists as the Alt-Right ended on the streets of Charlottesville.

 

On August 11, 2017, an unsanctioned, late-night march through the campus of the University of Virginia, saw a mass of a few hundred Tiki-torch-brandishing participants chant “Jews will not replace us!” and “white lives matter” as they encircled a Confederate monument.

The next day, the “Unite the Right” rally brought together even more angry white nationalists, assault rifle-toting militia members, Confederate Battle flag wielding neo-confederates, and others to Charlottesville. The event came to a deadly end when a white nationalist Unite the Right participant murdered a protestor by driving his car into a crowd of demonstrators.

Following the murder of antifascist activist Heather Heyer on the streets of Charlottesville, the Alt-Right was thrust out of the faint torchlight glow into the blinding glare of the national spotlight. Post-Charlottesville scrutiny lead to websites taken down, participants losing their jobs, and serious internal movement friction. As recriminations for the failure of the Unite the Right rally bounced throughout the dark corners of white nationalism, to the public the term Alt-Right became synonymous with murderous white nationalist rage.

In response to the stigma of recent violence and the accompanying bad press, the term Alt-Right was largely abandoned by movement leaders. Due to legal and organizational problems, some white nationalist leaders, like Spencer, are still laying low.

But as 2020 begins, two activists who participated in the Unite the Right rally are attempting to rebrand white nationalists under a new banner of “groypers” – an attempt to unite “America First conservatives, Christians, anti-globalists and nationalists” – many of the same terms that have gained political ascendancy during the Trump presidency.

Nick Fuentes, a prolific young YouTuber best known for his “America First” podcast, and Patrick Casey of the American Identity Movement (former Identity Evropa) joined league in late 2019 to kick-off the “Groyper Wars” – a mobilization seeking to push a base of conservatives and Trump supporters in a white nationalist direction.

Like the “alt-right” before it, the “groyper” mobilization is not a new social movement, but rather a flashpoint in the latest mainstreaming strategy deployed by white nationalists. If the “alt-right” strategy most associated with Richard Spencer sought to pull disaffected reactionaries and misogynists outside the Republican Party into the white nationalist fold, the “groyper war” is aimed at pressing Donald Trump and Trump-backing conservatives to adopt the core issues and political framings of white nationalists in the lead-up to the 2020 election and beyond. Setting its most persistent sights on the reactionary conservative group Turning Point USA – an organization close to the Trump Administration – the effort is also aimed at driving a wedge between the Trump camp and such organizations.

There is good reason to believe that the “groypers” are attempting to take advantage of the space afforded by Donald Trump’s framing of his own presidency and administration, dating back to his 2016 electoral campaign.[1]

In addition to the “groyper” approach of pushing white nationalist themes through bold confrontations with conservatives, there is growing interest in “entryism” – gaining a place in more mainstream organizations by moderating one’s appearance and expressed values in order to further movement goals.

Following a Groyper Leadership Summit in late 2019, other aims of this dangerous new formation came into relief. At the Summit, American Identity Movement leader Patrick Casey articulated the idea of targeting the Republic Party in an effort to “move beyond Trumpism” in favor of a candidate that can “carry the mantle of nationalism” in 2024.

While the “groypers” stress their “conservative” credentials, at other times they refer to themselves as “populist.” Patrick Casey’s American Identity Movement, in fact, brands itself as both nationalist and populist.[2] Neither is novel in white nationalist history. Willis Carto, the white nationalist who led the mainstreaming cause across the 1970s, 80s and 90s, attempted to mobilize around and under a conservative banner before forming the Populist Party in 1984 – the group’s first national chair being Mississippi Klan leader Robert Weems. These vacillations also mirror those of longtime national socialist David Duke, who ran briefly, and unsuccessfully, as a Democrat and Populist in 1988 before gaining a Louisiana state senate seat as a Republican in 1989. Neither Carto, Duke, Fuentes nor Casey, however, are conservatives or populists. They are white nationalists bent on a recreating the United States in the vision of a racist nightmare.

To put their plan in motion, “groypers” have returned to campus activism. Just one month after the Groyper Summit, ex-Turning Point USA Kansas State University chapter leader Jaden McNeil, who became an active participant in “groyper” activity, announced the formation of a new group, America First Students. Fuentes and Casey quickly promoted the effort, setting in motion a plan to build on the significant American Identity Movement campus activism to create space for white nationalism under an “America First” nationalist banner.

Things move fast in the “groyper” space. On January 28, Nick Fuentes announced another next step in the “groypers” racist trek – an America First Political Action Conference slated for February 28 in Washington D.C. The event is planned to coincide with the conservative establishment’s huge spectacle, CPAC 2020, an event from which Fuentes was ejected last year.

In this report, we look at the “groypers” as a political force, and as a marketing and organizing strategy. We delve into “entryism” as an emerging strategic turn for a segment of the white nationalist movement. We examine the white nationalist lineages of key organizers and the ideas behind it. And we look at the trends pointing to where these efforts are heading in 2020 and beyond.

Each of the three event speakers, Nick Fuentes, Patrick Casey and Jake Lloyd took their turns at a podium, sandwiched between banners bearing an American flag and the moniker “America First” – the name of Fuentes’ podcast. While their speeches rehashed the main elements of “groyper” rebranding and described plans for the future, some of the biggest applause came when Nick Fuentes declared that “the word racist…is an anti-white slur” and that calling people “theocrats” was an “anti-Christian slur.”[26]

Jake Lloyd, Patrick Casey and Nick Fuentes at the Groyper Leadership Summit.

Jake Lloyd, an active participant in online “groyper” activity, paid tribute to Patrick Casey’s American Identity Movement during his presentation, as having done “a lot of the heavy lifting when it came to the organization of the event.” This was rooted in the on-the-ground fact that Casey had spent much of 2018 at the helm of a national organization, Identity Evropa – turning its infrastructure into the American Identity Movement.[27]Alongside other attendees, America First Student’s leader Jaden McNeil was also present, according to Fuentes.[28]

Patrick Casey made clear in his own presentation that he envisioned extending this brand of activism beyond the upcoming 2020 election. “At this point,” he told attendees, “it’s less a battle about what happens in 2020 and a battle for what happens after Trump.” He continued that, “The only chance for America to be saved is if populism is able to move beyond Trumpism – is if someone comes along in 2024 that can carry the mantle of nationalism, strikes down globalism, and is able to get elected and actually make things happen once he gets in office.”[29]

Casey also made clear that for the foreseeable future, one prong of their effort would focus on the Republican Party – a target distinct from the initial thrust of the “alt-right” strategy of attempting to bring disparate reactionaries operating outside the party into the white nationalist fold. Casey stressed that, “We’re not going to see any change on the national level from anyone outside of the Republican Party. It’s gonna be someone like Donald Trump who comes along and acts contra the will of the GOP establishment.”[30]

Fuentes indicated that a shift in renaming the mobilization might be on the horizon, stating of the “groyper” moniker that “maybe it’s time to retire that, it’s a little silly.” Just three weeks after the Groyper Leadership Summit, in an appearance on Patrick Casey’s Restoring Order podcast, Fuentes declared that “phase one” of the groyper war had come to a “clean conclusion.”[31]

By late January 2020, the new direction came into relief. Former Kansas State University TPUSA leader and fellow “groyper,” Jaden McNeil announced the formation of the America First Students.

Fuentes, Casey and Lloyd quickly promoted the group — making clear that the steps forward would likely build on the college campus networks built by Patrick Casey through Identity Evropa and the American Identity Movement.

Drawing from those successes, Patrick Casey and Nicholas Fuentes are now promoting America First Students (AFS), a new campus group at Kansas State University (KSU), with an apparent eye to going national.

America First Students is led by Jaden McNeil, the former President of the Kansas State University (KSU) chapter of Turning Point USA. McNeil and multiple TPUSA officers left the KSU chapter in October 2019.

In an October 31 post, McNeil explained that he was departing because “TPUSA constantly cedes cultural ground to the Left” on issues such as LGBT rights; TPUSA’s “focusing primarily on economics;” and because “TPUSA’s immigration position favors the elites who care more about profit than hard working Americans.”[36] McNeil also cited TPUSA’s “culture of censorship” as exhibited in its expulsion of a “brand ambassador” after she was photographed with Nick Fuentes.

Though McNeil lacks the same lengthy paper-trail of explicit white nationalism as that of Fuentes or Casey, he has already signaled his affinity with such ideas.

After leaving TPUSA Jaden McNeil quickly joined league with Fuentes and Casey, recirculating their posts on “groyper” events, including the December 20 “Groyper Leadership Summit” in Florida. All three speakers at the leadership summit – Nick Fuentes, Patrick Casey and Jake Lloyd – quickly distributed McNeil’s announcement of America First Students and praised his efforts. So would Michelle Malkin, the conservative pundit fired from the Young America Foundation in November 2019, after standing by her support for Nick Fuentes and other racists.[37]

The day before announcing the formation of America First Students – and on the national holiday celebrating the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. – Jaden McNeil would post tweets lashing out at the civil rights leader:

A January 21, 2020 post announcing the formation of America First Students echoed “groyper” themes. McNeil announced AFS as “a campus conservative organization defined by our support for closed borders, traditional families, the American worker, and Christian values.” He continued that “Conservatism Inc. has brainwashed many students into believing that globalist policies – particularly free trade and mass immigration – constitute conservatism, when clearly they do not.” AFS, he explained, would “advocate for…the broader goal of defending America against globalism, affirming the vision laid out by President Trump in his inaugural address.”[38]

In a December 10, 2019 post, lead “gropyer” Nick Fuentes had framed his own efforts in markedly similar terms: “We are not the Alt-Right – AR was a racialist, atheist, post-American, revolutionary and transnational movement. American First is a traditionalist, Christian, conservative, reformist, American Nationalist Movement.”[39]

The America First Students Twitter account quickly announced that “we’re going to focus on the Kansas State AFS chapter before branching out to other campuses.”[40] On January 28 the group held its first “informational meeting” at KSU.[41]

This apparent effort to institutionalize the momentum of the “groyper” mobilization was quickly met with a congratulatory tweet from Fuentes that read, “Congratulations to @McNeilJaden on the launch of America First Students at Kansas State! This project has amazing potential to rally American Nationalist and real conservatives on campus after the Groyper War. I am very excited to see what comes next for AFS this year!”[42]

Fuentes displayed his conditional support for Trump in a July 15, 2019 post:

Some people have been…pointing out that Trump being funny or based on twitter isn’t a substitute for action but I take issue with this thinking. While intangible, Trump’s rhetoric is extremely important!!!…The problem is that he just has to be more consistent. Like right before the midterms he started throwing around the word ‘nationalist’ but dropped it right after the election…Hopefully once the campaign really gets underway he’ll go epic mode again.[43]

Fuentes also made clear that Trump’s racist rhetoric, while not the cause of white nationalism, gives encouragement to racists.  It is viewed as cultural material useful in building their movement.  For instance on October 11, 2019, Fuentes responded to the President’s statement that Joe Biden was a “good vice president because he understood how to kiss Barack Obama’s ass” by adding, “Donald Trump epicly[sic] exploiting racial consciousness.”[44]

As we will see later in this report, the effort to raise “racial consciousness” may, in part, be influenced by paleoconservative thought.

In part, the Fuentes strategy is intended to drive a wedge between Turning Point USA and the Trump networks. Leading up to the TPUSA event with Donald Trump Jr., on November 10 Fuentes urged supporters planning to attend to “COOL IT WITH ISRAEL.” The “name of the game tomorrow is to expose Kirk in front of Don Jr.,” he continued, and “Trumps are tight with Israel.” The “optimal strategy,” he argued is to, “ask Kirk questions that expose his ‘never Trump’ past,” including asking about “old tweets where he viciously attacks Trump. I will post some here.” Other proposed questions included stressing that “Kirk is a radical globalist on immigration,” asking why “he didn’t support Trump in the primary,” as well as how he “doesn’t align with Trump on the issues.” He also stressed that those attending these events should wear “MAGA” hats because “it would be foolish for TPUSA to profile based on that.”[45]

On October 29 and 30, Fuentes circulated a set of strategies from the Columbia Bugle blog suggesting the use of MAGA hats and other tactics to put Charlie Kirk on the defensive: “Idea for next group of people asking questions to Charlie Kirk: Wear MAGA hats. It will be awful optics for him if he’s calling young college students wearing MAGA hats ‘racists.’ Even the boomers won’t like that.”[46]

Fuentes also circulated a Columbia Bugle post outlining a “Plan for next events”:

[47]

Is It White Nationalism?

 

Despite efforts to brand their campaign as America First, conservative, Christian and nationalist, the “groyper” mobilization has clear roots in white nationalism. While this is dealt with in greater detail in subsequent sections of this report, a couple examples demonstrate this now.

In a late 2019 video, lead “groyper” Nick Fuentes made his own thoughts on American nationalism and white nationalism clear:

In a way I think it’s almost redundant to say that you’re a white nationalist. We know that the word nation almost implicitly talks about ethnicity and biology…So I think if I call myself a nationalist, it’s almost implicit in that word that its, well, you know America does a heritage of being a European Country.[48]

Fuentes unabashedly refers to himself as a nationalist which, redundantly he argues, makes him a white nationalist.

In an America First podcast apparently from November 2019, Fuentes went further, writing that,

If antifa were marching down the streets and they were waving the banner of Benito Mussolini or Francisco Franco, I’d be joining them, frankly. If antifa was waving the banner of Falangism, if they were waving the banner of Franco, and they were saying ‘Catholic fascism now,’ I would join them… Yes, take over the country. Storm D.C. Take over the capital. Raise the banner of Mussolini and Franco, and, you know, some notable others, right. Oswald Mosely, that would be a great thing.[49]

Oswald Mosely was head of the WWII-era British Union of Fascists. Falangism refers to the Spanish fascist movement that emerged in the 1930s. Francisco Franco was the Spanish general and dictator who ruled Spain from 1939 to 1975, gaining support from Adolph Hitler and Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini during the Spanish Civil War.

Patrick Casey took a similar approach in a July 2018 interview with white nationalist podcaster Brittany Pettibone:

We don’t believe America needs to be 100.00 percent white, but we do think that America isn’t going to be America if there isn’t a European-America super-majority. So when it comes to policies and so forth we’re concerned with reversing these trends. We want to end immigration for the time being. And in the future we would like to have immigration policies that favor high-skilled immigrants from, you know, Europe, Canada, Australia and so forth. And we also do want to have programs of re-migration wherein people who feel more of a connection to another part of the world, another race, another culture, even another religion in the case of Islam can return to their native homelands essentially.[50]

The claim that “America isn’t going to be America if there isn’t a European-America super-majority” is an expression of white nationalism.  Proponent’s support either maintaining a white super-majority (white supremacy) or pressing for a whites-only homeland.

In a more pessimistic moment, Casey argued at a 2019 conference of the white nationalist think-tank, American Renaissance, that America may be hurling towards a collapse into “ethno-states”:

If present trends continue, America is not going to hold up. America is not going to remain a cohesive nation. I think eventually there’s going to be so much conflict, on various levels, so much turmoil, that there could be some kind of collapse of the federal government, and that would lead to, you know, as in the case of Yugoslavia, ethno-states, right.[51]

Yes, it is white nationalism.

Gauging the Size of the Online Groyper Army

In addition to the strength of American Identity Movement networks upon which the next phase of the “groyper” mobilization will likely draw, key leaders promoting the “groyper war” have built up moderate social media followings.

The Table below lists the social media presence of key active online promoters of the “groyper” mobilization on Telegram (members) and Twitter. The Telegram figures represent individuals that have actually joined the online group, whereas the Twitter numbers represent those who follow a given page. Much of the actual organizing has taken place on Telegram, giving weight to the possibility that membership there indicates a deeper form of engagement.

Fuentes led the way with some 13,913 members of his Telegram account. Vincent James came in at second with 8,523 Telegram members, American Identity Movement leader Patrick Casey at 5,886 with others coming in between 1,695 (American Identity Movement) and Steven Franssen (3,367). America First Students leader Jaden McNeil had 2,296 members on his Telegram page.[52]

On Twitter, Nick Fuentes boasts some 83,332 followers. The Columbia Bugle has over 120,000 followers, with others falling below the 13,390 followers of America First Students leader Jaden McNeil.[53]

In addition to this online support, as of January 27, Fuentes had more than 28,000 subscribers to his YouTube page and more than 22,000 to his “America First” show.[54]

The groypers and America First Students might gain another tier of exposure from those outside the white nationalist movement who have defended and/or promoted the mobilization. This includes, for instance, conservative pundit Michelle Malkin, anti-Muslim and misogynist reactionary Milo Yiannopoulos and anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ Infowars.

Michelle Malkin lost a position with Young America’s Foundation after her defense of Fuentes and circulated the America First Students announced formation, tweeting, “A grass-roots youth movement from the heartland, not the Beltway. A true, fresh alternative to donor class talking points GOP. Contgrats @McNeilJaden @AmFirstStudents – America needs you.”[55]

As of January 27 Malkin boasted 2,185,822 Twitter followers and 3,983 Telegram members.[56]

 

Social Media Following of Key Groypers and Supporters

 

“Groyper” Activists/Group	Telegram (members)	Twitter (Followers)
Nick Fuentes	13,913	83,322
Patrick Casey	5,886	Suspended from Twitter
American Identity Movement	1,695	No longer on Twitter
Jake Lloyd	2,103	7,641
The Columbia Bugle	3,012	123,790
Jaden McNeil	2,296	13,390
Steven Franssen	3,367	9,681
Vincent James	8,532	Not on twitter
America First Students	Not on Telegram	3,716
Michelle Malkin	3,983	2,185,822

Other White Nationalists on the Groyper War

Nicholas Fuentes may deceptively deny association with white nationalism, but prominent white nationalists know better.  Many have jumped quickly into the fray to offer praise, while others mostly-friendly criticism of the “groyper” effort.

Counter-Currents, the white nationalist online publishing outfit led by Greg Johnson, ran several articles on the “groyper” mobilization. One Counter-Current’s author, Thomas Steuben, claimed to have taken part in the November 10 “groyper” mobilization at UCLA.[57] Steuben boasted that, “We dominated them” [Charlie Kirk and TPUSA] and “That day the aristocrats of the soul, the natural aristocracy that the Founding Fathers envisioned as the proper leaders of this country, dominated through sheer will-to-power the pseudo-elites who presume to rule.” Steuben also displayed his anti-Semitism, commenting on the “thoroughly Jewish nonsense” taught at UCLA.[58]

In an article titled “We Want the Groyper War,” Counter-Current’s writer Robert Hampton wrote of the effort that, “This is the kind of real-world action American identitarians should engage in,” in part because “it…positions ourselves as the True Right against the Phony Right and exposes their hypocrisy and failure to defend the historic American nation.” The “historic American nation” is a euphemism for white people.[59] Hampton continued that the “groyper” effort was “much better than hosting a rally using the discredited symbols of the Old Right and needlessly brawling with antifa.”[60]

Another Counter-Currents writer, Nicholas R. Jeevly, declared of the “groyper” campaign that “Conservative Inc. has been getting what it deserves good and hard since late October.”[61] In another article, Jeevly offered that “groypers” sometimes don’t do as well in confrontation with Kirk for lack of preparation, offering that they need more rehearsal and steps to deal with stage fright.”[62]

Travis LeBlanc, another writer for Counter-Currents, addressed those in the movement for apparently criticizing Fuentes and company for not more openly espousing white nationalism and Holocaust denial, or for Fuentes’ Catholicism, among other things.[63] While he noted that the “groypers” have not fared well in some of their confrontations with Charlie Kirk, he defended the overall effort for attempting to build a larger base for the white nationalist cause:

There does seem to be a subset of people who were not receptive to what the ‘Alt Right” (broadly speaking) was doing but are attracted to Fuentes’ brand of Dissident Rightism. For them, the Alt Right was too hot, and Conservative Inc was too cold, but Fuentes seems to be the Goldilocks: just right. People like Milo, Alex Jones, and Michelle Malkin, people who would never want to be associated with the Spencerian Alt Right, are willing to go to bat for Nick Fuentes…One of the reasons Fuentes was able to pull off the Groyper War is because he’s created a brand that normal people are comfortable publicly identifying with… You have to (sic) some people out there hammering away at the basics (race and IQ, Jewish power, interracial crime)…There’s not much sense doing the whole ‘Hitler was really the good guy’ unless people understand the JQ [Jewish Question-ed]. And there’s no point getting into the JQ with someone if they don’t understand race realism, because without race realism, the JQ is just an issue of assimilation…There is a place for the purist and the no-holds-barred approach, but that place is not at the front lines. By ‘the front lines’ I mean engaging with the media and/or the public in IRL settings as Fuentes and Jared Taylor do.[64]

Leblanc added that in real terms, “to do something like the Groyper War, all you need is about a dozen hardcore fans in or around every major city.” In the end he concluded, “Fuentes…is trying to build a coalition and reach new audiences. That requires some networking and diplomacy. Even Hitler made alliances with moderates on his way to power.”

Longtime national socialist David Duke advertised a radio show by declaring that, “The Groyper Army is on the march, and Charlie Kirk’s TPUSA is being exposed as the controlled opposition it is.”[65]

American Renaissance circulated an article by Matthew Boose of American Greatness offering that the Fuentes and company “should be applauded for challenging Conservatism, Inc. and its bankrupt ideology.”[66]

Brad Griffin of Occidental Dissent, and the Public Relations “chief” for the League of the South, penned an article titled, “Groyper Assault on Charlie Cuck Exposes Conservatism, Inc.” Mostly consisting of criticizing conservative critics of the “groypers,” Griffin (aka Hunter Wallace) declared, “I’m loving this.”[67]

Conversely, at Taki’s Magazine – the venue where white nationalist Richard Spencer helped birth the “alt-right” strategy – David Cole argued that the “groypers” have gone down a wrong path by attacking potential allies who oppose immigration, but not for the demographic reasons obsessed over by white nationalists.[68] “Chasing Charlie Kirk off a stage is no victory,” he wrote, but might scare off the “middle-of-the roaders in sanctuary cities who don’t care about demographics per se, but who are repulsed by catch-and-release and noncooperation with ICE.”[69]

“The groyper thing,” Cole wrote, “is going to burn out fairly soon.”

Entryism and the Mainstreaming of White Nationalism

Looking beyond the “groyper” approach of pushing white nationalist themes through bold confrontations with conservatives, another mainstreaming strategy is gaining steam in white nationalist movement circles.  Known as “entryism,” its focus is on finding a place in more mainstream conservative organizations by moderating one’s appearance and expressed values in order to further movement goals.

Fuentes has argued that unlike the openly national socialist Traditionalist Worker Party, “we were going to try to appeal to normal people” in the quest to “present ourselves as the alternative to the establishment.” Complaining that he gets criticized for associating with “establishment conservatives,” he argued that it may be positive if movement figures can be “seen as normalized” or an “extension of the establishment.” In the face of deplatforming, he argued that, “If we could slip somebody in, even if they’re pretending to be, you know establishment, or mitigating or moderating their views a little bit, there might be some value in that.”[70]

Alex Witoslawski, editor of America First Media (AFM) – the venue Fuentes once owned with James Allsup – elaborated on this approach in a March 2018 article titled “Entryism – How to Infiltrate the Mainstream.” Witoslawski’s entryism emerged from having been “outed,” fired and “blacklisted from working in mainstream politics” and seeing others in the movement get deplatformed.  Witoslawski calls for “using the resources of our enemies” by “infiltrating, permeating, and taking over the Republican Party and other grassroots conservative organizations.” Doing so, he continued, “will give us an outsized voice in local, state, and even federal races.” [71]

To carry this out, Witoslawski advocates that activists “infiltrate your local Republican Party, preferably with a small group of likeminded friends and confidants.”  He urges, “find out how to become a precinct delegate;” and then run for a committee position and have your confidants vote for one another.  Once established as a delegate, “you will have some amount of power over how your local Republican Party spends its money” and can use that to show movement-related videos, stress “various problems with immigration from the third world, or…diversity” and oppose politicians that support pro-immigrant policies.[72]

The Daily Groyper blog, an active participant in the “groyper” mobilization, also took up this issue, writing that “if we want to keep our careers and not be blocked from participating in polite society, we need to blend in.” The “OkieGropyer” counsels that activists carry this out by dressing in a respectable manner; connecting with your target audience values; introducing “nationalist” ideas slowly; and using humor, such as “Getting someone to laugh at a meme that is making fun of minorities.”[73]

Paleoconservatives, the “Alt-Right” and the “Groypers”

Nick Fuentes emphatically denies that his “groyper war” has a relationship to white nationalism or the “alt-right.” In a December 10 post, Fuentes wrote that, “We are not the Alt-Right – AR was a racialist, atheist, post-American, revolutionary and transnational movement. America First is a traditionalist, Christian, conservative, reformist, American Nationalist Movement.”[74]

To bolster his efforts at denial, Fuentes attacked Richard Spencer, the white nationalist most associated with the moniker “alt-right.” In early November when a recording surfaced of Spencer spewing crass anti-Semitism and anti-black racism, Fuentes jumped on the opportunity:

Regarding the Richard Spencer recording, I’ve actually heard that audio before a few times. It’s also not the first clip like that I’ve heard from him. I was on the receiving end of a similar drunken rant. The content of the recording speaks for itself and stuff like that is what differentiates Richard Spencer and the Alt Right from me and America First…

Of course I don’t like Richard personally or politically…he is, a delusional, angry narcissist and an unironic hater. We’ve never considered each other within the same ‘movement’ and we don’t now. It just seems like a big diversion from the Groyper War which is productive and attacking the real problem. Like yeah Richard Spencer is a retarded idiot uhhh what else is new? The guy is irrelevant anyway…Maybe it’s a good thing bc [because] it will demonstrate to people who aren’t in the know that there is a lot of distance between us and Spencer, even though everyone in our scene knows that already.[75]

Despite such attacks, Spencer and Fuentes’ efforts share much in common – in addition to being rooted in white nationalism. Both, for instance, are behind attempts to reframe white nationalism so as to reach a broader audience.  For Spencer’s “alt-right” effort, that means targeting disparate reactionary and misogynist elements outside the GOP.  While Fuentes reaches out to potential supporters of Turning Point USA, an organization close to the Trump base.

In the past, Fuentes sounded less conflictual. In an undated video, Fuentes said regarding Richard Spencer, “I think there’s some overlap, maybe we disagree about how long America has to go, or what the solution is, but generally we agree on the problem.”[76]

Both efforts share another commonality – deriving direct mentorship and inspiration from leading proponents of paleoconservatism. Emerging in earnest in the 1980s, paleoconservatives are movement intellectuals who opposed neoconservative foreign policy interventionism as well as libertarian views that focused too much on “free market” ideas for their liking. In addition to sporting a more isolationist foreign policy, paleoconservatives aligned with the “traditionalist” wing of the conservative movement, keeping alive in those circles a politics oriented toward maintaining the dominance of what they see as the ethnic/racial core of American and European societies – that is, of whites and Europeans.

The “alt-right” strategy grew out of Spencer’s mentorship by paleoconservative Paul Gottfried. In a 2008 speech at the H.L. Mencken Club, Gottfried stated, “And when I speak about the post paleos, it goes without saying that I’m referring to a growing communion beyond this organization. It is one that now includes Takimag, VDARE.com, and other websites that are willing to engage sensitive, timely subjects.”[77]

The speech would be reprinted at Taki’s Magazine where Spencer served as executive editor. According to an article in the New Yorker, Spencer was credited with making up the headline for the article, “The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right.”[78] Gottfried would insist that he and Spencer co-created the term “alt-right” in an interview with Tablet.[79]

In an interview with Nick Fuentes for the Cotto-Gottfried podcast that the elder paleoconservative produces with San Francisco Review of Books editor-in-chief Joseph Ford Cotto, Gottfried responded, “You’re right, I am one of the co-inventors of the term alternative right.”[80]

Paul Gottfried is a co-founder of the H.L. Mencken club, an organizational gathering place for discredited conservatives, assorted libertarians, academic racists and white nationalists.[81] In addition to inspiring the “alt-right,” Gottfried has written for VDARE, defended “scientific racism,” referred to Confederate General Robert E. Lee as a “gallant Southern leader,” and defended the legacy of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.

Lest it be unclear the direction that Paul Gottfried was headed, during the discussion on the Cotto/Gottfried podcast, the elder paleoconservative appeared to pine for the emergence of fascist violence:

There is no vision on the right. Of course, there is no right to speak of, unless you want to say white nationalists are the right, or uh, I don’t know, some alt-right group. The conservative movement is not part of the right. It is mostly where the left was 10 or 20 years ago… There is no force of resistance. You contrast this, for instance, with the situation in Italy after World War I – you know, when the socialists go on strike, take over buildings, what is the reaction – it’s the squadriste fasciste…fascist squadrons emerge, they beat them back and they take over the government. I’m not saying these are nice people, but there is a reaction there that’s taking place. We don’t have a reaction…There really is no reaction here and in most of western Europe.[82]

The “squadriste fasciste” refers to the black-shirted paramilitary and street-fighting units formed during the rise of Benito Mussolini’s movement. These units were dedicated to violence and the murder of socialists and other perceived enemies of Italian fascism. Recall that Fuentes had declared his own positive response to the banner of fascist figures like Benito Mussolini and Oswald Mosely”.[83]

Gottfried continued to counsel “groypers” as their mobilization unfolded. On December 5, 2019 in Intellectual Takeout, following a “groyper” mobilization at Ohio State University, Gottfried offered “advice not as a total outsider but as someone whom Groypers say they have read and learned from.”[84] Gottfried wrote that “Groypers don’t always ask questions very well,” stating that he “would like to see them ask more incisive questions, even if it comes at the expense of being provocative.”[85] Gottfried’s offered example focused on Israel.

Other paleoconservatives have also influenced Fuentes and company.  On the topic of demographic and cultural change in the U.S., on September 16, 2019 Fuentes posted that it is, “Not about values, culture, assimilation, ideas political parties – you can’t make sense of it without race. Buchanan said race is not everything, but *it isn’t nothing*”[86] Jake Lloyd, a speaker at the December 20 “Groyper Leadership Summit” in Florida would reiterate Buchanan’s influence, stating of the “American Nationalist movement” that:

American nationalism as it exists now wasn’t really a thing…It existed, but in very niche circles, you had Pat Buchanan and other key people who were pushing these ideas back then, kind of John the Baptist-type figures, voices crying out in the wilderness…that were our forerunners and we stand on the shoulders of giants.[87]

Buchanan’s work, including Death of the West, became canon for racist reactionary groups like the Proud Boys in recent years.

Another paleoconservative influence on “groypers” is Sam Francis. On September 28, Fuentes recirculated an article from the white nationalist American Renaissance titled, “Sam Francis, the Prophet.”[88] The article, by Gregory Hood, references American Renaissance founder Jared Taylor’s “salute” to Francis as the “premier philosopher of white racial consciousness.” It also recounts Francis’ criticism of the Southern Baptist Convention for apologizing for slavery; and refers to Francis as “the prophet of our time and the guide for our future.”[89]

On December 10, Fuentes circulated a Telegram post from Patrick Casey stating, “Sam Francis was a great man.”[90] At the December “groyper” summit, Casey declared that Francis’ book Ethnopolitics: Immigration, Race, and the American Political Future, “is a must read for anyone interested in demographics and the effect that it’s happening (sic) on our political institutions.”[91]

The Gregory Hood article also argues that “Francis was also right to note that conservative voters didn’t believe in Conservatism Inc.” Fuentes and company cast groups like Turning Point USA by the same name, even declaring in a November 3, 2019 Telegram post that part of the “groyper” goal is to be “coopted” by “conservative inc.” – that is, to have a broader conservative movement adopt core issues and frames of white nationalism.[92]

Before his death in 2005, Sam Francis – a white nationalist in his own right – was a leading and influential movement advocate of a cultural approach to racial politics. Francis and wealthy publisher William Regnery II founded the National Policy Institute (NPI) in order to “to elevate the consciousness of whites, ensure our biological and cultural continuity, and protect our civil rights.”[93] Richard Spencer would later assume the helm of NPI, where he continues to serve as President and “Creative Director” of the troubled organization.

For Sam Francis, writing in American Renaissance in 1995, whites were in their present condition because they had:

conceptually surrendered their will and identity…[and] race is necessary, because no other race or people seems able to replicate or adopt the concepts on which white civilization is based — the conceptual surrender will not be remedied, and white civilization, the whole conceptual corpus, will die with the race.[94]

In a video posted in October 2019 at the Cotto/Gottried podcast YouTube page, an interview with Fuentes and Gottfried further sheds light on the paleo-white-ist link at work in the “groyper” mobilization. On his own origins as a movement leader, Fuentes described that he had supported Rand Paul and been a libertarian before he “migrated toward” being a “constitutionalist” and supporting Ted Cruz “for a minute.”[95]

“Ultimately,” he continued, “I came around to Donald Trump, became much more nationalistic, paleoconservative, closer to where I am now.”[96]

The Cotto-Gottfried-Fuentes discussion of the “alt-right” strategy associated with Richard Spencer also sheds light on another issue at work in the “groyper” mobilization – namely, grappling with what to call the movement for the sake of branding and expanding the reach of white-ist ideas. Cotto posed that the “alt-right” started as a “vibrant grand coalition” from libertarian to those opposed to “social justice warriors,” and including neo-Nazis.  However, after “hail gate” – when Richard Spencer was captured on video offering an imitation of a Nazi “seig heil” salute at a 2016 NPI conference in Washington D.C. – he continued that the “alt-right” became “hardcore” and “disdained Nick for being too moderate.” Charlottesville, Cotto concludes, was the “nail in the coffin” and today the “alt-right” is “pretty much dead and buried.”[97]

The exchange that followed between Fuentes and Gottfried illuminated the common “alt-right”-“groyper”-paleoconservative aim of developing a new term for a making the white-ist political project palatable for a larger audience:

Fuentes: “Yeah, it’s unfortunate, because I love the name alternative right…At least in 2016 the vernacular definition of alt-right was an alternative to the establishment, and it was like you said, anybody from libertarian and all the way out to the right, you know Milo Yiannopoulis, Mike Cernovich, they even said that ostensibly Donald Trump was an alt-right figure. But you are right, then after the hail-gate, and then ultimately culminating in Charlottesville, it became associated, with, like you said, with this very narrow fringe of, you know…really led by Richard Spencer, this sort of weird, Yockean, vision of an ethnostate…But yeah, really as a movement it is dead. I think …the more moderate people, the libertarian, the general category, they branched off a long time ago.  This happened around, like you said, hail-gate and the Deploraball, and really after Charlottesville, this is when I think a lot of the, I think myself, Jared Taylor, many others decided that the ‘alt-right’ label carried a lot more baggage than it was worth. Now, it is the equivalent to neo-Nazi…We can thank Richard Spencer for making ‘alt-right’ the contemporary and much more credible pejorative…But I would agree, the term is probably dead on arrival. We need something else.” (italics added)

Gottfried:, “You’re right, I am one of the co-inventors of the term alternative right. And I invented it because I thought the word paleoconservative…had become so obsolete that we weren’t going to use it any longer. But what has happened is that since the left has gone after alternative…the alt right, or alternative right…many people on the right, who are to the right of the conservative movement, which keeps moving to the left, decided that paleonconservative wasn’t a bad term after all. However, this is not going to save us because the leftist media had begun to take the position that paleoconservative is another word for ‘alt-right’, which is another word for neo-Nazi, so… they are going after paleoconservative as well. In other leftist narratives, paleoconservatism is the beginning of Richard Spencerism – that you sort of move from one to the other. So, we’re not necessarily going to be safe by describing ourselves as paleoconservatives any longer.”

Fuentes: “And also, I think, you know paleoconservative is just too long. And my generation doesn’t even know what it means. I described myself recently as a paleoconservative… I don’t know what it’s going to be, but we’ve got to find something fresh, crisp. It’s a shame the alt-right went away, because I really thought that it was mimetic, it was well thought out, but yeah, I think you’re right, paleoconservative, alt-right, these terms just don’t work anymore.”

At the December 20 Groyper Leadership Summit, Fuentes declared that it may be time to retire the term “groyper” because “it’s a little silly.” Three weeks after the Groyper Leadership Summit Fuentes would declare that “phase one” of the groyper war had come to a “clean conclusion.”[98]

As we saw at the outset, Nick Fuentes is currently taking a wet spaghetti approach to the issue of labeling the movement – throwing out names like “America First …traditionalist, Christian, conservative, reformist, [and] American Nationalist Movement” to see what sticks to the conservative wall.

The goal, however, remains the same for many paleoconservatives and white nationalists alike – continue the project of moving a white-centered politics from the margins and deeper into the mainstream.

Nick Fuentes, a 21-year-old from suburban Chicago, began his far-right activism during high school and continued it briefly at Boston College. He started his broadcasting career at 14, when he joined his high school radio station. At 17, he launched the short-lived “Nicholas J. Fuentes Show” which failed after seven episodes by April 2016. He described this as his “libertarian phase.”[99]

In a 2016 autobiographical blog post entitled “The Villain America Needs,” a 17 year-old Fuentes outlined his early radicalization:

I was born 3 years before the World Trade Center fell; 5 years before Saddam Hussein fell; 10 years before the election of a fifth columnist to the Presidency; and 18 years before the stakes of a Presidential election were raised to the fate of a civilization.

My timely birth allowed me to watch on the nightly news the spoils of the American experiment squandered for one final time before the dying gasp of a once exceptional people as the free world and economic abundance of Ronald Reagan was inherited by the lizard people. To understand how far the country has come from the virgin constitutional republic born of the Revolution to the corrupt, unitary technocracy of a new Statist century. From George Washington to George W. Bush.  Everyone knows the country is going to hell and if you don’t then you’re a liberal apologist arguing why the change your President promised you is all that it was cracked up to be.

My generation is the generation of hopelessness. They don’t see it that way because Buzzfeed can use upbeat stock background music, punchy graphics, and a self-righteous punk weakling to dress up cultural suicide as egalitarianism. But we know better. With George W. Bush we got a neoconservative Utopian who could not wage the culture war and when center right Dubya collapsed in 2008 we got a communist Islamist sympathizer whose entire candidacy and governance was wholly founded on the ignorance of the masses and a media that would just plain lie night after night.[100]

An early supporter of Rand Paul and a onetime self-described libertarian, Fuentes later “migrated toward” being a “constitutionalist” and supporting Ted Cruz “for a minute.”[101] “Ultimately,” Fuentes explains, “I came around to Donald Trump, became much more nationalistic, paleoconservative, closer to where I am now.”[102]

While attending Boston University, he hooked up with the Right Side Broadcasting Network, a group famous for broadcasting crowds at Trump rallies. From February to May 2017, he broadcast his late-night show out of a friend’s dorm room. That friend, Fuentes recalled, was a “Duginist” – a follower of Russian fascist Aleksandr Dugin.[103] The show was canceled for lack of interest, but brought back at the end of May, lasting until Charlottesville.

During this period, Fuentes described his “evolution to a real America First nationalism” and a transition to a “hard nationalist position.” According to Fuentes, he became a “true dissident right personality” after Charlottesville.[104]

Fuentes activism led him to participate in the now-infamous 2017 white nationalists/national socialist/militia rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.[105] Following Charlottesville, Fuentes tweets were recirculated by Identity Evropa in numerous instances.[106] Elsewhere, he claimed that he left the college in 2017 because of “open hostility towards myself and fellow conservatives.”[107]

Another of the early indicators of his path onto the white nationalist pipeline was his co-founding of America First Media and co-hosting of the “Nationalist Review” with James Allsup, a program billed as a “weekly podcast about American nationalism, traditionalism, and alternative right-wing politics.”

James Allsup is a 24-year-old white nationalist from Washington State, and an early adopter of the “entryism” strategy who was briefly elected to a local GOP position. Like Fuentes, Allsup was also a participant in the now-infamous Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally. In early 2018, Allsup announced that he joined Casey’s white nationalist group, Identity Evropa. Though Fuentes and Allsup had a public falling out in January 2018, it was over personal, rather than ideological, reasons.

Reminiscing about his partnership with Allsup, Fuentes told his YouTube followers:

[O]ur idea was that we were going to have a general partnership. We were gonna create a sort of America First Network because we saw some of the mistakes made at Charlottesville. We decided that we did not want to be Alt-Right. We did not want to be, you know, this previous generation. We didn’t want all that ‘Heil Gate’ kind of tomfoolery and shenanigans. So we said we’re gonna rebrand is this America first optical paleoconservative new movement and we were gonna bring on new talent and so on.[108]

Fuentes added:

This is a time when we tried to make it a big tent movement, but I think me and James simply had disagreements. If you remember this is a time of great conflict. This was in the immediate aftermath of Charlottesville and the question was how does the dissident right proceed because certainly a lot of people that were not Alt-Right got lumped into the Charlottesville rally, or got lumped in with the Alt-Right in the aftermath of that rally…I think a lot of people are confused about the nature of the rally. After that, I think the entire dissident right coalition–alt-lite, alt-right–was very confused about what the direction would be moving forward.

This is where I think I determined what direction I was going to take. Fighting, feuding with people on the alt-right, people on the alt-lite, with everybody. I earned a reputation as a bridge burner, as somebody who couldn’t get along with anybody–an entryist–somebody who arrived on the scene and started to want to call the shots.

But through a conflict called ‘the optics war’ and through another conflict called ‘the thought wars’ I think I determined that what the future was for the show would be an unapologetically paleoconservative, America first, dissident right, brand, with good optics, of course, good presentation, persuasive rhetoric, tactical and strategic persuasion rhetoric. Optics things like this presentation and also no women allowed.[109]

Fuentes described the period between January 2018 and February 2019 as his “independent” period, followed by the rise of his America First enterprise launch at CPAC 2019. It is under the America First moniker that he helped launch the “groyper wars.”

Today, Nick Fuentes denies that he is a white nationalist. When white nationalist Richard Spencer was caught on tape spewing bigotry against Jews and African-Americans, Fuentes declared that the “audio speaks for itself what kind of person he [Spencer] is, a delusional, angry narcissist and an unironic hater. We’ve never considered each other within the same ‘movement’ and we don’t now.”[110]

In a December 10 post, Fuentes, who built his own brand in the movement as the host of the America First with Nick Fuentes podcast, wrote of his movement that, “We are not the Alt-Right – AR was a racialist, atheist, post-American, revolutionary and transnational movement. American First is a traditionalist, Christian, conservative, reformist, American Nationalist Movement.”[111]

Fuente’s attempt to deny any affinity with white nationalism is little more than the latest effort at white nationalist mainstreaming. Rather than conservative and traditionalist, Fuentes has expressed support for white nationalism in numerous ways:  backed biological determinism, espoused anti-Semitism, flirted with Holocaust denial, expressed a crass and vulgar misogyny and anti-LGBTQ bigotry, declared that the First Amendment does not apply to Muslims, declared that people of Mexican descent should leave the country if they don’t want to be shot, and made clear that he yearns to be part of an explicitly fascist movement.

Nick Fuentes and White Nationalism

Nick Fuentes emphatically denies that he is a white nationalist. But his own writings and words show this denial to be empty.

The white nationalist movement of the current period emerged from the white supremacist movement of the 1970s and 1980s, as Leonard Zeskind documents in his book Blood and Politics: The White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream.[112] As pre-civil rights era white supremacists lost the struggle for civil rights with the overthrow of Jim Crow segregation, many began building an ideology around the idea that whites had been dispossessed from their “rightful” place atop American society. Arguing that a very real white race and nation exists in the country, they organized to reshape American political, economic and social institutions to reflect that. The effort to foster and mobilize white racial consciousness in some portion of the American (or European) public lays at the heart of this ideology.

As Zeskind described, while “some white nationalists might still wish to rule over people of color in ways reminiscent of Jim Crow segregation,” increasingly these activists “want to carve out a new territory free entirely of black people, Jews and a host of others they regard as undesirable.” Such aims run the gamut from the southern secessionist aims of the League of the South, to the Northwest Front’s quest for a white “homeland” in the Pacific Northwest, to the desire of old-guard national socialists like David Duke to make all of America such a white nation.

Though he may deny it for strategic purposes at present, Nick Fuentes’ has repeatedly made his white nationalism clear. On August 5, 2019, in response to an individual stating that “White Nationalism is domestic terrorism and has no place in American,” Fuentes shot back:

White nationalism literally is what America was founded upon…America was in theory and in practice a ‘White Nation’ from the 17^th century until 60 years ago… What Scott is talking about is a bastardized Jewish subversion of ‘the American creed.’ Founders never intended for America to be a refugee camp for nonwhite people… Of course I’m not a White Nationalist. I’m a campus conservative. Just saying that the history is overwhelmingly against Scott’s rhetoric. [113]

Here Fuentes also expressed the anti-Semitism that often accompanies white nationalism. While one strain of white nationalism overtly rejects anti-Semitism, and invites racist Jews to join, most varieties place Jews behind a plot to destroy the white race. As Fuentes states, it is “the bastardized Jewish subversion of ‘the American creed’.”[114]

As a retort to another post stating that “White nationalism is fundamentally racist and un-American,” Fuentes responded on September 29, 2019 that:

If you use the term ‘racist’ as a pejorative or even as a valid term you are a fucking retard…‘White nationalism is unAmerican’ bitch do i [sic] really have to pull up the first like FIFTEEN immigration acts you lying Guy…i’m[sic] not a WN FWIW but this is just ignorant…RACIAL CONSCIOUSNESS IS RISING [capital in original].[115]

Elsewhere, in an undated video Fuentes made explicit that white and nationalist are inseparable in his vision of the American context:

In a way I think it’s almost redundant to say that you’re a white nationalist. We know that the word nation almost implicitly talks about ethnicity and biology…So I think if I call myself a nationalist, it’s almost implicit in that word that it’s, well, you know America does have a heritage of being a European Country.[116]

At the time he also stated that with regard to white nationalist and anti-Semite Richard Spencer, “I think there’s some overlap, maybe we disagree about how long America has to go, or what the solution is, but generally we agree on the problem.”[117]

In a September 16, 2019 Telegram post, Fuentes made clear his belief that racial identity lay at the heart of national identity, that African-Americans are different than a “plain American,” and that Jews and blacks are involved in fostering “demographic change” aimed at “the redefinition of America according to the experience of the colored person as compared to the white man”:

[T]he transformation in America is being accelerated and distorted by demographic change. Putting the reverend doctor rapist Martin Luther King Jr and rosa parks (sic) at the beginning of a new American revolutionary story in the Civil Rights era could be seen in one context as elevating egalitarianism over liberty in the so-called ‘pantheon of American values.’…Alternatively, what we are witnessing is the redefinition of America according to the experience of the colored person as compared to the white man…An African American has always been an ‘American,’ certainly but he has always been different than a plain America…And we all know that racial identity of the nation is always more salient than the political or ideological identity…Might be an important question to ask which side do you think resonates with the Jews who came in when my ancestors did?…Does their experience resonate more with the dominant group, the White Man or the aggrieved and oppressed ‘negro’? Might be kind of relevant considering the disproportionate manner in which they contribute to political campaigns and control media and Hollywood, don’t you think? Hey who founded the NAACP anyway?[118]

Nick Fuentes may deny it, but he has expressed the key tenets of white nationalism.

Nick Fuentes and Anti-Semitism

As previously mentioned, most white nationalists are also anti-Semitic. Nick Fuentes is no exception. As described above, Fuentes views Jews as subverting the “American Creed” and involved with blacks in changing American demographics through their control of the media and Hollywood – long-standing elements of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

Nick Fuentes’ Telegram feed is also littered with anti-Semitic slurs and tropes. The efforts of “groypers” to press the issue of U.S.-Israeli relations in confrontations with Turning Point USA emerges as little more than an attempt to press anti-Semitic themes into the conservative movement. For instance, just one day after creating his account, on June 19, 2019 Fuentes deployed the pejorative “Ziocon” to signal the anti-Semitic trope of Jews holding dual loyalty to the U.S. and Israel:

In a July 10, 2019 Telegram post boasting that his America First podcast is for “high iq aristocrats” and not “stupid dumb animals who complain,” Fuentes wrote that “If i (sic) wanted ppl [people] like this to watch my show i (sic) would have sold out to Zionist Jews and made the big bucks.” He continued, “How about a little gratitude for singlehandedly saving the White Race huh.”[119]

In an August 5 post attacking right-wing blogger Matt Walsh, Fuentes combined his anti-Semitism with his also ubiquitous use of anti-LGBTQ slurs:

He went on to call Walsh a “Shabbos goy traitor.”

In a July 13, 2019 post attacking Owen Benjamin, an anti-Semite in his own right who has espoused tenets of Holocaust denial, Fuentes cast his own racial Identity in opposition to Benjamin by stressing that while Benjamin is “Schizoid,” “Jewish,” of “Hollywood origins,” and “not Catholic,” that he (Fuentes) is “Honorable,” “Catholic” and “Pro White, Identitarian.”[120]

It is common for white nationalists to see their own identity bound up with opposition to Jews. Identitarianism refers to a reframing of white nationalism stressing that whiteness or European ethnicity should be central to national identity and, as a corollary, restricting non-white immigration should be carried out to maintain a central place for whites in these societies.

Fuentes also blames the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 on Israel:

On September 2, 2019, Fuentes posted a photo of himself with Patrick Casey, writing in the caption, “Why’s my Uber driver look like he’s about to tell me about who owns the media.”[121] In addition to the above reference to Jews controlling the media and Hollywood, Fuentes wrote on September 12, 2019 that, “Math, unlike the Jewish media, does not lie.”[122]

On September 11, 2019, Fuentes recirculated a post stating, “The Bible is full of examples of men with intense personal, Western auras. And so was our lore before the Jews consolidated all the publication and distribution companies within the first 20-230 years of arriving to America.”[123]

As with many movement anti-Semites, Nick Fuentes has also flirted with Holocaust denial. In response to an apparent question asked during his America First podcast, Fuentes employed an analogy of Cookie Monster being unable to bake 6 million cookies given limitations in his infrastructure.[124] The analogy is an obvious reference to the Holocaust, with 6 million cookies referencing the 6 million Jews murdered in the Nazi genocide. Fuentes concludes, “So, none of it really adds up…So six million cookies, eh, eh, I don’t buy it.”

Fuentes fully embraced Holocaust denial, when he regurgitated the scurrilous lie downplaying the extermination of more than six million Jews in the Holocaust. A smirking Fuentes “joked” in a video about Adolf Hitler of “the two hundred to three hundred-thousand Jews that he killed during the Holocaust,” adding that “that’s a joke of course, we all know the number was closer, probably, to at least a billion.”[125]

Fuentes on Biological Determinism

Nick Fuentes is also a proponent of biological determinism, the racist notion that genetic differences between so-called “races” determine such characteristics as intelligence. Biological determinism can inform at least two political orientations. On the one hand, because biological determinists view race as a genetically fixed characteristic, it can be used to justify opposition to social programs designed to address racial inequality.

On the other hand, when a biologically-constructed enemy race is deemed an existential threat to the proponent’s race (e.g., the white nation), it can provide a framework for genocide. As such it was a cornerstone of the ideology of WWII-era German Nazis.

At the very least, Nick Fuentes couples his biological determinism to the idea that intervention to address inequality will not succeed. Fuentes “thoughts” on the topic surfaced in an August 19, 2019 Telegram post responding to former U.S. Representative (R-TX) and then-presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke describing his belief that racial inequality remains a problem in America. In this post, Fuentes uses the term “race realism,” describing it as “a necessary part our program.” The term “race realism” is a hardly veiled euphemism for biological determinism deployed by groups such as the white nationalist American Renaissance. Fuentes also deploys the term “human biodiversity,” another movement term for biological determinism:

The implication [of O’Rourke’s statement] is obvious, all other things being equal, the only causal factor to blame for these disparities is institutional bias or discrimination…Republicans and libertarians try to get around this by saying the difference is cultural. I find this basically unconvincing. We know that we cannot hold ‘all things equal’ when evaluating disparities between races because all races are not interchangeable…For example do black children get disciplined at a higher rate than white children because of racism, some retarded nonsense about welfare, or because of biological differences between groups[?]…If the answer is simply human biodiversity then we can make the proper accommodations for each group to live in an environment conducive to their nature…What’s really important to understand is that the crisis in ‘race relations’ in the country basically amounts to black failure…The problem is that if race realism is true, probably no policy will ever succeed in closing these gaps. Meanwhile the nonwhite population is getting emboldened and impatient and larger in numbers…So look, in short, a lot of people ask why race realism is a necessary part our program because they don’t think it’s a compelling argument against immigration. Often the argument goes ‘mass immigration from Latin America is low IQ’ so then the rebuttal is well obviously IQ alone is not a sufficient qualification because you could get mass high IQ immigration from Asia. Well that’s just it though, it’s not only about IQ and it’s really less about immigration. IQ is a nice complement to arguments against immigration but not really the main event. Race Realism is really about having the right paradigm to explain racial disparities in a multiracial country or in a globalized world…Black people have been in North America for 4000 years and still don’t truly share the same culture as European Americans. In fact if anything they are diverging further from our culture in the last half century as they have become more autonomous…My ancestors came here at the turn of the last century from Italy, Ireland and Mexico and I am more assimilated into anglo American culture than blacks who have been here since the founding. What does that tell you?…Bitches be like ‘b-b-but white people isn’t even a real race!’ Shut the fuck up idiot…Shut up bitch, Evropa is rising.[126]

As Fuentes made clear, his appeals to biological determinism are in sharp relief by proclaiming that “Evropa is rising.” That is an assertion that white consciousness is growing.

Fuentes, Anti-Black Racism, Demographic Change and Jim Crow Segregation

Fuentes also cast African-Americans as a threat to whites through “demographic change” and implied that Jews were behind an effort to cause the “redefinition of America according to the experience of colored persons as compared to the white man.” On September 16, 2019 he wrote:

[T]he transformation in America is being accelerated and distorted by demographic change. Putting the reverend doctor rapist Martin Luther King Jr and rosa parks (sic) at the beginning of new American revolutionary story in the Civil Rights era could be seen in one context as elevating egalitarianism over liberty in the so-called ‘pantheon of American values.’…Alternatively, what we are witnessing is the redefinition of America according to the experience of the colored person as compared to the white man…An African American has always been an ‘American,’ certainly but he has always been different than a plain American…And we all know that racial identity of the nation is always more salient than the political or ideological identity…Might be an important question to ask which side do you think resonates with the Jews who came in when my ancestors did?…Does their experience resonate more with the dominant group, the White Man or the aggrieved and oppressed ‘negro’? Might be kind of relevant considering the disproportionate manner in which they contribute to political campaigns and control media and Hollywood, don’t you think? Hey who founded the NAACP anyway?[127]

Here again, Fuentes stresses his core white nationalism by stating that, “we all know that racial identity of the nation is always more salient than the political or ideological identity.”

In keeping with his white nationalist ideas and endorsement of biological determinism, Fuentes offered the following about Jim Crow segregation in an undated video posted to YouTube in November 2019:

It was better for them [African Americans] too, number one. But number two, who cares? Who cares? You know enough with the Jim Crow stuff. Who cares? Oh, they had to drink out of a different water fountain. Big fucking deal. Oh no, they had to go to a different school. Their water fountain in that famous picture was worse. Who cares? Grow up. Drink out of the fucking water fountain…Even if it was bad, who cares? Who cares? It’s better in general. We all agree. It was better for them. It’s better for us, better in general.[128]

Fuentes on Immigration

Also in keeping with his white nationalist and biological determinist ideology, Fuentes has made clear that his concerns about immigration are rooted in racism.  Fuentes’ viewpoint was on full display in his response to Trump administration racism as found in the president’s July 2019 “tweet” declaring that Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) should “go back” to the “crime infested places from which they came.” All four are U.S. citizens and women of color. Trump’s tweet and continued rhetoric produced its logical conclusion when a crowd of his followers in Greenville, North Carolina began chanting “send them back.”[129]

In response to a post critical of targeting of Rep. Ilhan Omar with this chant because she is a citizen, Fuentes made clear that his hostility is directed at non-white immigrants in a July 17, 2019 post:

Send her the fuck back to Somalia…I’m totally white-pilled by this latest Trump controversy. It reminds me of the reaction to the ‘drugs crime and rapists’ comment as this announcement or the Muslim ban…Let ‘send them back’ become the new chant …How abt [about] Ilhan Omar is an uppity foreigner who wags her finger at real Americans and she should get the fuck out of America…Pretentions dumb bitch condescending to and lecturing conservatives. Calling us racist…my grandparents fought in WWII…Is that racist??? Maybe it is. So what. We are importing ungrateful people who couldn’t make their own countries work by the millions and they do nothing but denigrate our ancestors and history with both their hands out…this is what Trumpism should look like btw time to kick it up a notch. Enough with all this abt ‘they have to come here legally.’ Ilhan Omar came legally, and she sucks. These frankly NONWHITE foreigners come in here and they bully white America with all this ‘racist’ bs. White people built this country and the newcomers should show a little respect. Nobody wants to say that but we all know it’s true.[130]

Fuentes made clear that a core white nationalism undergirds his anti-immigrant politics, writing on Telegram on September 2, 2019, that “An English/Germanic country can basically assimilate other Europeans like Italians and Slavs. A European country cannot assimilate Asians, American Indians, and Africans.”[131]

Fuentes wrote on September 9, 2019 that “Xenophobia is completely natural…Imagine growing up in a classroom full of Ashok’s and the like. It’s totally alienating. That’s the future for white children…This is demographic and cultural imperialism…Foreigners come here, make us uncomfortable, and then loudly proclaim that our home belongs to them. If this happened in another country, it would be an international incident.”[132]

At the December 2019 “Groyper Leadership Summit” in Florida, Fuentes espoused the view that immigrants bring disease and crime to the country and are threatening the destruction of America through demographic change. He again makes clear that it is non-white immigration doing this. Claiming that “Los Angeles is the future” and the “epicenter of what it [America] will look like in the future,” he rambled:

It’s [Los Angeles] obviously demographically, the future of America. It’s oriented towards the east, or rather the orient, as opposed to Europe. So in a lot of ways Los Angeles is the future…And what is Los Angeles like. Why is Los Angeles bad. Well it’s bad because there’s shit in the streets…there’s garbage everywhere. It’s because medieval diseases are coming back, like tuberculosis, like typhoid, things like this. We see that California and more specifically Los Angeles are unrecognizable – and not unrecognizable again necessarily because they’re in this condition, but because they simply don’t look that same – culturally, demographically. If you’re a white person and you go to Los Angeles, you’re a minority. if you go to a shopping mall, if you walk down a street, you are a minority. These are the problems; these are the ways in which the country’s going to hell. That is how it’s happening. Rather, that is what the collapse looks like. That is what the downturn, that is what final sort of end of America looks like.[133]

He continues that the situation of Los Angeles was:

Driven first by demographics…You had mass immigration to California, from Asian and Latin America, you had different people from different countries come into ours, and they changed the texture of life, and that changed how politics worked. And it changed the policies…We’ve had 60 million immigrants come in since 1965, legal and illegal…60 million immigrants came from foreign countries that don’t work, in Asia and Latin America. They vote democratic. They bring with them their standards of living. Their culture, their mannerisms…Really, it’s a fringe position that after 60 years of unfettered, mass migration, 60 million in 60 years, that we turn off the spigot. That we stop the flow of foreigners into the country. They come with drugs and crime and their diseases and everything else, that’s abnormal. It’s abnormal to see drag queen story hours and chemical castrations and to be repulsed to your core at that…It’s abnormal…to hear Charlie Kirk say ‘god bless Israel’, god bless a foreign country. And go to conferences funded by Zionists and foreigners. That’s abnormal to oppose all that stuff. Of course it’s not.[134]

The idea of demographic replacement has been a motivating factor in a number of mass killings by white nationalists, including the murders at two New Zealand mosques in March 2019, and the August 2019 murder of 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. In response to the El Paso murders, in a video posted to YouTube in November 2019, Fuentes expressed the vile view that Mexicans should return to Mexico if they don’t want to be killed:

I think the easiest way for Mexicans to not get shot and killed in Walmart is for them to not fucking be here, okay…What’s the easiest way to not get killed by all these crazy gringos, all these crazy white people who are killing people. Maybe get the fuck out! Right. Maybe get out. Go back over the border. It’s very close to El Paso.[135]

Fuentes’ crass disregard for the lives for the Mexican-Americans and Mexican nationals murdered that day is part and parcel of his white nationalism.

Fuentes on Women – Misogynist Fervor

Fuentes also demonstrates the crass misogyny that became readily visible both inside and outside the white nationalist movement during the rise of the “alt-right” strategy. In response to an article in which Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez communicated to children that “no matter what the president says, this country belongs to you,” Fuentes shot back with misogynist fervor. On July 16, 2019, he posted, “Look at this idiot” and, “Get women out of politics.”[136]

Later that day, he posted, “Rhetorical question. Seeing women who are overly political is just gross. It’s so transparent what’s going on,” and added: “With few exceptions women are incapable of making political content that isn’t cringe.”[137] On October 18, 2019 Fuentes posted, “my ideology is fuck women.”[138]

 

Nick Fuentes on Muslims and the First Amendment

 

As reported at Huffpost, Fuentes has also declared that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution does not apply to Muslims:

The First Amendment was not written for Muslims, by the way. It wasn’t written for a barbaric ideology that wanted to come over and kill us. It was written for Calvinists. It was written for Lutherans and Catholics, not for Salafists, not for Wahhabists, not for the Saudi royal family. Don’t think the founders had that one in mind. And it also was intended for citizens, not for immigrants.[139]

Fuentes Defends Slurs

Befitting the depth of his racist and misogynist views, Fuentes bemoans constraints on using racist slurs and making jokes about rape. In a September 4, 2019 Telegram post he wrote:

“Next time people accurse Trump or somebody else on the Right of racism,” he wrote on July 15, 2019: “Instead of saying ‘no he’s not’ or ‘you’re the real racist?’ – Try ‘so what?’”[140]

Nick Fuentes on Fascism

Finally, and not the least disconcerting, Nick Fuentes demonstrates that white nationalists are among the most consistent and persistent proponents of actual fascism in American politics. For instance, in an undated video, Fuentes expressed his open desire to belong to a fascist movement:

If antifa were marching down the streets and they were waving the banner of Benito Mussolini or Francisco Franco, I’d be joining them, frankly. If antifa was waving the banner of Falangism, if they were waving the banner of Franco, and they were saying ‘Catholic fascism now,’ I would join them. I would become a part of antifa. I would welcome antifa. Yes, take over the country. Storm D.C. Take over the capital. Raise the banner of Mussolini and Franco, and, you know, some notable others, right. Oswald Mosely, that would be a great thing.[141]

Falangism refers to the Spanish fascist movement that emerged in the 1930. Francisco Franco was the Spanish general and dictator who ruled Spain from 1939 to 1975, gaining the support of both Adolph Hitler and Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini during the Spanish Civil War. Oswald Mosely was head of the WWII-era British Union of Fascists.

In keeping with such views, in an August 27, 2019 post, Fuentes compared his own “groyper” mobilization to fascism, Hitler’s brownshirts and the Taliban:

“Nickers” is the nickname Fuentes gives to his supporters. The brownshirts, or Sturmabteilung (SA), were a German Nazi paramilitary organization known for rampant political violence and murder. The “bundle of sticks,” or “fasces,” is a well-known symbol used by Benito Mussolini’s National Fascist Party and other fascist organizations.

In keeping with his fascist proclivities, Fuentes supports the use of authoritarian measures to build Donald Trump’s border wall, writing on August 28, 2019: “Literally just build the wall no matter what…We should honestly just ignore the laws and the courts and just implement a good immigration policy. If Trump had the right advisors/personnel this would be possible.”[142]

Also in the vein of fascism, as reported by the Huffpost, Fuentes called for murdering members of the media, “Who runs the media? Globalists. Time to kill the globalists. I don’t want to not watch CNN. I don’t want CNN to go out of business. I don’t want CNN to be more honest. I want people that run CNN to be arrested and deported or hanged because this is deliberate.”[143]

In March 2019, leader Patrick Casey tweeted out a press release stating that “Identity Evropa is no more” and announcing, “it is my pleasure to announce the formation of a new organization: American Identity Movement.” Casey who had led Identity Evropa since early 2018, stressed that the “this is a new organization rather than a rebrand, but that “AIM will remain committed to the cause we have all dedicated ourselves to; defending America against globalism.”[144]

About a month after announcing the “new” organization, the American Identity Movement (AmerIM) tweeted that, “Increasingly, the term ‘white nationalist’ is used to smear anyone right of center who opposes mass immigration.”[145]

Despite such efforts at rebranding, white nationalism is a thing. Many groups far to the right of center that oppose immigration – from the Tea Party to paramilitary groups like Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters – are not white nationalists. Identity Evropa, and its AmerIM spawn, however, are white nationalists.

As noted previously, American Identity Movement and its predecessor Identity Evropa has been one of the most prolific centers of white nationalist activity in the United States. IREHR has documented 1,156 different actions by group activists since 2017.[146]

Identity Evropa: White Nationalism for a New Era

 

Identity Evropa was formed in 2016 by Nathan Damigo, an Iraq war veteran who became politicized after reading David Duke’s book, My Awakening. Duke’s 1998 screed marked his return to open anti-Semitism, redubbed a concern over “Jewish Supremacism” in the veteran national socialist’s latest effort to rebrand his quest for a whites-only nation-state. Damigo was exposed to the book while serving a sentence for the armed robbery of an Arab cab driver.

Damigo honed his activist skills by helping to form the National Youth Front as the youth wing of the white nationalist American Freedom Party. He also began the campus activism that would define Identity Evropa, staging protests at Arizona State University against a class titled “U.S. Race Theory & the Problem of Whiteness.”[147] Befitting the early influence by David Duke, Identity Evropa would accept only those of “European, non-Semitic heritage.” The American Identity Movement would continue this practice, according to Discord chats obtained and released by Unicorn Riot.[148]

Nathan Damigo made the Evropa’s white nationalism clear in a 2017 interview:

America was founded as a white country — as a country for people of European heritage. And in 1965 they passed the Harts-Cellar Act and the people who passed that said, ‘this is going to change the demographic makeup of the country, this is not going to increase the amount of immigration every year,’ — all of it was bogus … even here in California [not only] are we a minority, but they are actively trying to disenfranchise us from the institutions that our ancestors created.[149]

The Harts-Cellar Act, also known as the Immigration Act of 1965, abolished the “national origins” quotas in previous federal immigration laws that had allotted some 70 percent of slots to northern Europeans.

Damigo’s statement embodies the defining elements of white nationalism as an ideology – that a country, in this case the United States, was created by and for white people. Also implied in the attack on the Hart-Cellar Act (see below), this country’s institutions and policies should be changed to favor white people.

Modern white nationalism’s origins lay in the post-Civil Rights period. Many American white supremacists (those who sought to maintain white domination of political, economic and cultural institutions) came to see themselves as a “dispossessed nation” within their respective countries – sometimes referring to their situation as “demographic replacement,” or even “white genocide.”

Civic nationalism, mentioned in the re-tweet by the white nationalist group VDARE, refers to a national identity built around a commitment to a set of shared ideals. It is frequently used as a contrast to nationalisms built on ethnicity or race.

Sometimes white nationalists argue that it may not be too late to save the country. For instance, by overturning the 1965 Immigration Act (Hart-Cellar Act) and deporting present immigrants in order to maintain a white majority might be attained. That would keep the “white nation” atop American society – a position common to classic formulations of white supremacy. [150]

Alternatively, white nationalists argue that the country should be remade as a whites-only ethno-state. Variations on this theme exist, such as the League of the South’s long-standing argument that a white nation should be created in the American south; the Northwest Front’s argument for a white ethno-state in the Pacific Northwest; or national socialist David Duke’s call to retake the country as a whole. Many such groups also hold tightly to anti-Semitic politics, casting Jews as a malevolent force who have taken over the country and seek to destroy the “white race.” Such beliefs give the movement a revolutionary character. If the country has been taken over by Jews, and they are attempting to destroy whites through policies such as non-racist immigration policies, or affirmative action, or inter-racial marriage, the government needs to be overthrown.

On March 6, 2017, the Identity Evropa Twitter account declared, “While the SPLC and the ADL may smear us as ‘White supremacists’, this is not the case. We are ethno-pluralists: We believe that all ethnic groups should have somewhere in the world to call home—a place wherein they can fully express themselves and enjoy self-determination.”[151]

The idea of “ethno-pluralism” mentioned in the Identity Evropa tweet derives from the European New Right. The European New Right (ENR) had its origin in the response of French right-wing intellectuals to the country’s 1968 student uprising and a general strike, among other things. Alain de Benoist and 39 others formed the Research Group for the Study of European Civilization (GRECE) to “revive and redefine certain political and cultural ideas which had been discredited since 1945 and their supposed association with the fascist movements of that era,” in the words of John B. Morgan IV, then editor-in-chief of Arktos, the main English-language publisher of European New Right screed. Since its beginnings, the ENR has spread across Europe.[152]

Ethno-pluralism took its place among the “revived and redefined” ideas as an effort re-articulate some form of racial and/or ethnic nationalism. While New Rightists might argue that states be reconfigured into federations, or some form of regionalism, ethnic or racial separation would be the rule within a given ethnic or racial group’s area. That is, ethno-pluralism articulated a way for an essentially ethnic or racial nationalist vision to sound like pluralism. The idea would also have a built-in international component to its nationalism – with voices even calling for some form of transnational governance amongst a body of European countries.

Guided by such ideas, Identity Evropa focused on campus activism. The group occupied a place in the broader movement through alliances with white nationalist Richard Spencer of the National Policy Institute and others.

Nathan Damigo gained a prominent place in the movement after he was videoed punching a 95-pound female anti-fascist in the face at a May 2017 rally in Berkeley, California.[153] In July 2017, Damigo and a crew from Identity Evropa appeared at the national conference of American Renaissance, the “high-brow” white nationalist organization led by Jared Taylor.

Identity Evropa Members at 2017 American Renaissance Conference (Damigo is in the front row, third from left)

Damigo and Identity Evropa played a lead role in organizing the August 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Damigo and Eliot Kline (aka Eli Mosley) of Identity Evropa worked closely with lead organizer Jason Kessler. Other participating national socialist groups included: Vanguard America, Traditionalist Worker Party and Daily Stormer, the white nationalist League of the South and Klan groups such as the Loyal White Knights and East Coast Knights, according to documents filed in lawsuits against event leaders. During the course of organizing, Mosley referred to himself as “command soldier major of the ‘alt-right’.”[154]

A few months before Charlottesville 2017, Mosley had expressed a common corollary of white nationalism – the dehumanization of Jews and people of color and fantasies of racist violence:

I work in HR firing niggers and spics all day. Before that, I was in the army and I got to kill Muslims for fun. I’m not sure which one was better: watching niggers and spics cry because they can’t feed their little mud children or watching Muslims brains spray on the wall. Honestly both probably suck compared to listening to a kike’s scream while in the oven.[155]

Kline, who had apparently taken to using the name Mosley to honor WWII-era British fascist Oswald Mosley, would step down from Identity Evropa not long before a February 2018 New York Times expose revealed that he had lied about being deployed to Iraq. White nationalist Richard Spencer wrote that, “These allegations are disturbing, and if they are shown to be true, would lead us to reconsider our relationship with Eli… he has been an important collaborator and friend for almost a year.”[156]

Across late 2017, in the period immediately after the United the Right rally, Nicholas Fuentes’s tweets on issues such as the ethno-state and demographics were circulated by Identity Evropa on numerous occasions:

Patrick Casey, the American Identity Movement and “Racial Idealism”

By early 2018, Patrick Casey had taken the reigns of Identity Evropa. Casey would continue the group’s efforts to target college campuses for recruitment. He would also continue its commitment to white nationalism. As the Southern Poverty Law Center documented, in a July 2018 interview, Casey would describe that:

We don’t believe America needs to be 100.00 percent white, but we do think that America isn’t going to be America if there isn’t a European-American super-majority. So when it comes to policies and so forth we’re concerned with reversing these trends. We want to end immigration for the time being. And in the future we would like to have immigration policies that favor high-skilled immigrants from, you know, Europe, Canada, Australia and so forth. And we also do want to have programs of re-migration wherein people who feel more of a connection to another part of the world, another race, another culture, even another religion in the case of Islam can return to their native homelands essentially.[157]

Casey here sounds like a classic white supremacist – pining for immigration policies that would maintain a “European-American” supermajority to assure that America remains America. At the 2019 American Renaissance conference, he raised the specter of the “ethno-state”[158]

Across this period, Identity Evropa stressed its adherence to “identitarianism, a term also borrowed from the European New Right and which, again, demonstrates the group’s core nationalist equation of white/Europeanness with a homeland as well as the international elements of the movement. Beneath a photo of the French youth group Generation Identitaire, Identity Evropa praises Metapedia’s “excellent article on Identitarianism.” Metapedia is an online “encyclopedia” for ethnic and racial nationalists and other assorted far-rightists.

Ethnic and racial nationalist Metapedia’s “excellent” definition of Identitarianism states:

Identitarianism rests on the assumption that ethnic-cultural factors have a central role in human welfare and the functioning of society. Man is viewed as a combination of inherited and environmentally acquired traits, and the need of ethnic Europeans to defend and develop themselves as distinct peoples is emphasized. Accordingly, identitarians oppose large-scale extra-European immigration to Europe, regardless of its possible economic utility. This standpoint has caused it to be viewed as racist…

Identitarians claim to view the nation-state through a pragmatic lense and points out that it is only one of several possible historical forms of organization for ethnic groups and peoples. Many identitarian theoreticians, such as Guillaume Faye, have championed a federalist imperial ideal, where hundreds of local and regional communities, with a high degree of autonomy, would be organized into a “Eurasian” confederation, the latter working to defend the peoples and interests of Europe as a totality on a global scale…

What policies an Identitarian government would put into practice is partly speculative and also depends much on the aims of leaders of particular, local Identitarian movements. While all Identitarians share in common a certain set of beliefs and goals, hypothetically different Identitarian states in different countries would have different economic policies and different ways of dealing with non-white immigrants based on what is most practical for their situation. For example, countries with only a small amount of unacceptable immigrants could use a quick deportation program, while those with a very large amount would likely combine communitarian/regionalist policies with a slow deportation program due to the political impracticality of fast deportation in such a situation. [Italics added]. [159]

As this passage makes clear, whether aggregated at the national, regional, or local level, “Identitarians” see their over-riding mission as “dealing with non-white immigrants” in a manner to affect their removal from areas of European/white governance – even if envisioned in some form of pan-European context. The definition also cites Guillame Faye, one of the more openly racist of the European New Right “theorists.”

An examination of tweets issued by the American Identity Movement makes clear that, even as the group attempts to present a non-racist public face, it adheres to white nationalism. For instance, the group explicitly equates white with American. In this meme, a decreasing white population across time in Newark, New Jersey begs, for AmerIM adherents, the question of “Where Have All the Americans Gone?”

Other posts by the group depict “Americans” being “demographically displaced” by “immigrants from non-Western countries;” equate a future projected white minority as “rendering Texas alien and unrecognizable”; bemoan the “great replacement;” assail diversity as a “sick agenda;” and oppose “globalism” as a plot to “erase the American nation via mass immigration.” All of these add up to equating Americanness with whiteness and linking an ethnically and racially diverse country with the end of America:

Lest the American Identity Movement’s commitment to racism be unclear at this point, Patrick Casey’s presentation at the 2019 conference of the white nationalist American Renaissance drives the point home. After the event, Casey tweeted, “After nearly 12 hours on the road, I’ve arrived home safe and sound. AmRen 2019 was a resounding success: AIM had close to 40 members in attendance (including two speakers) & we signed up dozens of attendees as well. Thanks again to Jared Taylor & the rest of the AmRen team!”[160]

The most telling parts of Casey’s America Renaissance appearance, however, came following his speech when he was asked a question by veteran racist Sam Dickson:

Your organization is really a very splendid thing. The most encouraging thing I’ve seen, maybe in my lifetime. As you know though, I was unhappy with the change from Identity Evropa to using American. The famous Rabbi Stephen Wise once remarked in the 1930s, explaining to Jews where their primary loyalty had to be, that we have been Jews for 2500 years, we’ve been Americans for 200 years, and I think we really need to think about that…Do you see any problems with nationalism? I see problems… I define myself as a racial idealist, not a nationalist. And I have far more in common with an Irish Catholic in Dublin or a Scottish Presbyterian in Edinburgh than I do with an American in south Atlanta whose is not of my religion and not of my race. I just think that nationalism has caused so many of our problems – World War I, World War II. We have to go back to something like existed in medieval Christendom where you do have individual nations, but we see an overarching unity. Do you see any problems, or are you… tending toward civic nationalism?[Italics added] [161]

Casey responded,

First, I want to thank Sam Dickson for the support that he has given, not just financially, but morally, intellectually and so forth. [applause] We’re not civic nationalists….we are very explicit about being Identitarians. And I think Identitarian is a term that could be, perhaps, somewhat comparable to the term that Sam prefers, which is racial idealist…So yeah, we’re never going to start talking about how American is just an idea, ‘any one can be American,’ no we are absolutely in defense of the historical American nation. And what does that refer to. That refers to us, it doesn’t refer to someone from, you know, the Middle East who came here last week, right. I think we all get that…It’s really the America question. That’s really what we’re getting at here. So, whether or not American can be salvaged is part of that…I mean I think if present trends continue, America is not going to hold up. America is not going to remain a cohesive nation. I think eventually there is going to be so much conflict, on various levels, so much turmoil, that there could be some kind of collapse of the federal government, and that would lead to, you know, as in the case of Yugoslavia, ethno-states, right. But that could happen in hundreds of years…At this point in time, our people, largely, even many of our people who are Identitarians, they still identify with their identity as an American, just as their grandfathers and great grandfathers did as well. Because to be white is to have a racial identity, but to be German is to have a national identity, an ethnic identity. And for us to say that we are just white, and that we do not have that national, or ethnic, identity, is I think to kind of remove an important piece of the puzzle. [Italics added] [162]

The implications of Patrick Casey’s equation of “identitarianism” with Sam Dickson’s “racial idealism,” become clear if we understand more about Dixon. As IREHR’s Leonard Zeskind recounts in Blood and Politics, Dickson is a Georgia-based attorney with a long history of working closely with the racist movement’s most nefarious characters.

Dickson, who once argued that slavery could have continued in the United States until eliminated by technology “given responsible leadership and good will on both sides,” became a fixture at events held by the Holocaust denying Institute for Historical Review. While Dixon admitted the German Nazis did persecute Jews, he also once stated that “to the extent to which six million of them were killed, is something I do not know.” Dickson added that people keep talking about the Holocaust in order to “intimidate, psychologically bully people of European extraction, to create in us a sense that we are an especially guilty people.”[163]

That is Sam Dickson’s “racial idealism.” In the words of Patrick Casey, Dickson’s ideology “could be, perhaps, somewhat comparable to” identitarianism.

That is white nationalism.

And, that is the American Identity Movement.

Conclusion

 

From day one, the “groypers” have been as slippery as the toad for which they are named–an ever-changing effort to obfuscate their ideology and keep white nationalism germane inside MAGA world and the GOP. Fuentes and Casey have already indicated future directions and new mobilizations. Absent concrete organization or an easily-identifiable constituency, the “groyper” insurgency moves fast.

Whether the formation of new student groups, further interventions into the conservative establishment, or other forms of “entryism,” those concerned with defending human rights should be on high alert for this new generation of white nationalist activism.

White nationalists are already thinking about 2024 and beyond, we should be doing the same.

This new mobilization requires new anti-fascist approaches on new terrain—online and on campus. It requires further efforts to document the white nationalism of participants, mapping “groyper” influence, and identifying the latest hot spots of activity.

One important new way to keep track of the latest developments inside the “groyper wars” and other white nationalist hotspots is to download Trepper: the Anti-Bigotry App.

Available for download now for both iPhone and Android users, Trepper provides instant updates about new threats nearby. Drawing on more than four decades of experience, Trepper also provides a toolkit for taking action and making sure communities are safe and secure. It provides a database of symbols of bigotry, including many of the latest memes. Trepper even allows for users to document bigotry as it happens. Users can video the latest white nationalist activity and securely submit it to our team, to help alert others.

As in all cases of white nationalist mobilization, people of goodwill must come together to make clear that these noxious ideologies and activities are not welcome on campuses, nor in genuinely conservative circles. Students on campuses, the main target of recruitment for these young activists, stand on the front lines in this battle. Nothing less than multi-racial democracy is a stake.

Notes

[1] There is voluminous evidence of Donald Trump’s deployment of these frames to characterize his own campaign, presidency and administration. For instance:

In his January 2017 inaugural address, Donald Trump stated, ““From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first… “We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies and destroying our jobs.” Trump has consistently referred to his own cause as “America First.” See Sanger, David E.   New York Times. January 20, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/20/us/politics/trump-resurrects-dark-definition-of-america-first-vision.html

At a 2018 event in Houston, Texas, Donald Trump declared “A globalist is a person that wants the globe to do well, frankly, not caring about our country so much…You know what I am? I’m a nationalist, O.K.? Nationalist. Use that word, use that word.” Baker, Peter. With Echoes of the ‘30s, Trump Resurrects a Hardline Version of ‘America First.’ New York Times. October 22, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/22/us/politics/trump-immigrant-caravan-migrants.html.

Donald Trump has repeatedly cast his cause as allied with Christianity. During his 2016 campaign, Trump declared, “We are going to protect Christianity…Christianity, it’s under siege. I’m a Protestant. I’m very proud of it. Presbyterian to be exact.” C-Span. “Presidential Candidate Donald Trump at Liberty University.” See C-Span. January 18, 2016. https://www.c-span.org/video/?403331-1/donald-trump-remarks- liberty-university. He has continued to make direct appeals to Christian evangelicals during his presidency. See Pulliam, Bailey, Sarah and Julie Zauzmer. Trump to the National Prayer Breakfast: ‘I will never let you down. I can say that. Never.’ The Washington Post. February 7, 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2019/02/06/national-prayer-breakfast-trump-is-likely-play-white-evangelicals-fears/.

At the March 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland, Donald Trump continued to brand himself a conservative, stating, “it’s wonderful to be back with so many great patriots, old friends, and brave young conservatives…I was probably more of a conservative than a Republican.” See Trump, Donald. Remarks by President Trump at the 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference. The White House. March 3, 2019. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-2019-conservative-political-action-conference/.

[2] American Identity Movement. Our Principles. Accessed January 29, 2020. https://www.americanidentitymovement.com/principles/.

[3] Coaston, Jane. Why alt-right trolls shouted down Donald Trump Jr. Vox. November 11, 2019. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/11/11/20948317/alt-right-donald-trump-jr-conservative-tpusa-yaf-racism-antisemitism; Gumbel, Andrew. Donald Trump Jr. caught in the middle of far-right insurgency. The Guardian. November 12, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/12/trump-jr-why-far-right-jeering-president-son-explained; Freidersdorg, Conor. Why the Trolls Booed at Don Jr.’s Event. The Atlantic. November 13, 2019; https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/don-trump-jr-booed/601807/.

[4] Coaston, Jane. Why alt-right trolls shouted down Donald Trump Jr. Vox. November 11, 2019. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/11/11/20948317/alt-right-donald-trump-jr-conservative-tpusa-yaf-racism-antisemitism.; Campeas, Ron. Meet the ‘groyper army,’ a movement that wants conservatives to be racist and anti-Semitic. Jewish Telegraph Agency. December 6, 2019. https://www.jta.org/2019/12/06/politics/the-groyper-army-wants-conservatives-to-be-racist-and-anti-semitic; Kuper, Theodore. Why Donald Trump Jr. Was Heckled by ‘America First Nationalists.’ National Review. November 14, 2019. https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/why-donald-trump-jr-was-heckled-by-america-first-nationalists/; A, Julian. The conservative insurgence. Medium. November 7, 2019. https://medium.com/@julkothegu/the-conservative-insurgence-b6dc87fe848.

[5] Ibid.

[6]Nick Fuentes. Telegram on November 4, 2019.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Following normal convention, American Identity Movement would be designated as “AIM.” However, this author could not bring himself to use the same acronym for a white nationalist group as is used by the American Indian Movement.

[9]Patrick Casey. Telegram on October 22, 2019.

[10] This description of the Falkirk project is drawn from multiple right-wing articles describing its formation. For instance, Brody, David. Powerful Duo Start New Venture: Judeo-Christian Principles Take on Secularism, Socialism. CBN News. December 2, 2019; and Parke, Caleb. Kirk, Falwell, Launch Liberty University think tank to fight attacks on Judeo-Christian values. Fox News. December 2, 2019.

[11] See, for instance: Lopez G., Cristina. A short history of Turning Point USA’s racism. Media Matters. May 10, 2019. https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/short-history-turning-point-usas-racism; and Anti-Defamation League. Turning Point USA. https://www.adl.org/resources/backgrounders/turning-point-usa.

[12] Dunphy, James. A White Nationalist Praises Charlie Kirk & Offers Constructive Criticism. Counter-Currents. June 13, 2018.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Charlie Kirk. Twitter. April 14, 2019.

[15] Dunphy, James. A White Nationalist Praises Charlie Kirk & Offers Constructive Criticism. Counter-Currents. June 13, 2018.

[16] Examples can be seen here: Magee, Ny. Candace Owens quits Turning Point USA after members demand she resigns. The Grio. May 7, 2019. https://thegrio.com/2019/05/07/candace-owens-quits-turning-point-usa-after-members-demand-she-resign/; Barnes, Luke. Former Turing Point USA star apologizes for racist remarks. ThinkProgress. May 23, 2019. https://thinkprogress.org/former-tpusa-turning-point-usa-kyle-kashuv-apologizes-racist-remarks-48cc0f30f710/; It’s Going Down. “We’re Gonna Run the Country! White Power! F**k N*****s”: Turning Point USA Leader Caught on Racist Rant.  May 9, 2019. https://itsgoingdown.org/were-gonna-run-the-country-white-power-fk-ns-turning-point-usa-leader-gives-alt-right-hand-sign-while-caught-on-racist-rant/.

[17] See Holt, Jared. “TPUSA Cuts Ties with ‘Brand Ambassador’ Photographed with White Nationalists”. Right-Wing Watch. September 30, 2019.

[18] Fuentes, Nick. Twitter. September 30, 2019. https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/tpusa-cuts-ties-with-brand-ambassador-photographed-with-white-nationalists/.

[19] See Shuham, Matt. Michelle Malkin Dropped by Conservative Campus Org After Praising Internet Racist. Talking Points Memo. November 18, 2019.   https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/michelle-malkin-dropped-by-conservative-campus-org-after-praising-internet-racist.

[20] Fuentes, Nick. Telegram. December 2, 2019; Fuentes, Nick. Telegram December 3, 2019.

[21] Fuentes, Nick. Telegram. December 2, 2019; Fuentes, Nick. Telegram December 3, 2019.

[22] Casey, Patrick. Telegram. December 28, 2019.

[23] Fuentes, Nick. Telegram. December 23, 2019. Re-post of Patrick Casey post.

[24] Fuentes, Nick. Telegram. December 19, 2019.

[25] Casey, Patrick. The Groyper Leadership Summit. Restoring Order. January 5, 2020. On this podcast, Casey and Fuentes would use the expulsion from the SAS event to display their anti-Semitism, comparing their removal to the Nazi genocide against Jews. The following exchange illustrates this:

Patrick Casey: “Would you say that, being in that situation, did you feel like the Jews during, uh, World War II, I remember you making a comment along those lines on stream, perhaps tongue in cheek?”…

Nick Fuentes: “In think on stream I said, yeah… who else was being marked badges and being… forced around different places, physically removed from places?…It’s not a good look for Charlie Kirk. It resembles something that might have happened a long time ago.”

[26] America First with Nick Fuentes. Groyper Leadership Summit. December 20, 2019.

[27] American First. The Groyper Leadership Summit. December 20, 2019.

[28] Casey, Patrick. The Groyper Leadership Summit. Restoring Order. January 5, 2020.

[29] America First. The Groyper Leadership Summit. December 20, 2019.

[30] Ibid.

[31] Casey, Patrick. The Groyper Leadership Summit. Restoring Order.  YouTube. January 5, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCxUvIvE_SI.

[32] See Zeskind, Leonard. 2009. Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream. New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, p.36.

[33] Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights and Kitsap Showing Up for Racial Justice. Threats to a Welcoming Kitsap. Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights. December 5, 2019. http://tremololabs.com/2019/12/05/threats-to-a-welcoming-kitsap/.

[34] Anti-Defamation League. White Supremacists Continue to Spread Hate on American Campuses. June 27, 2019. https://www.adl.org/blog/white-supremacists-continue-to-spread-hate-on-american-campuses

[35] American Identity Movement. Telegram. https://t.me/AIM_America; American Identity Movement. Twitter. https://twitter.com/aim_america?lang=en.

[36] McNeil, Jaden. Telegram. October 31, 2019.

[37] See Shuham, Matt. Michelle Malkin Dropped by Conservative Campus Org After Praising Internet Racist. Talking Points Memo. November 18, 2019.   https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/michelle-malkin-dropped-by-conservative-campus-org-after-praising-internet-racist.

[38] McNeil, Jaden. Telegram. January 21, 2020.

[39] Fuentes, Nick. Telegram. December 30, 2019.

[40] America First Students. Twitter.  January 21, 2020.

[41] Carey, Sam. Twitter. January 28, 2019; Tesoriero, Jack. Twitter. January 28, 2019; America First Students. Twitter. January 28, 2019.

[42] McNeil, Jaden. Twitter. January 21, 2020.

[43] Fuentes, Nick. Telegram. July 15, 2019.

[44] Fuentes, Nick. Telegram. October 11, 2019.

[45] Fuentes, Nick. Telegram. November 10, 2019.

[46] Fuentes, Nick. Telegram. October 29, 2019.

[47] Fuentes, Nick. Telegram. October 30, 2019.

[48] Murray Patrick. Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer. YouTube. November 14, 2019.    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sCYSS_XUCU&feature=youtu.be.

[49] See Benny Johnson. Twitter. November 19, 2019. https://twitter.com/bennyjohnson/status/1196606504637521920

[50] Patrick Casey in an interview with Brittany Pettibone, January 16, 2018. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/identity-evropa.

[51] Casey, Patrick. Woke Capitalism: An Unholy Alliance. American Renaissance. May 31, 2019.

[52] These figures were taken January 27, 2020 from the Telegram accounts of each of these individuals/groups.

[53] These figures were taken January 28, 2020 from the Twitter accounts of each of these individuals/groups.

[54] Fuentes, Nicholas. YouTube. Accessed January 27, 2019.

[55] Malkin, Michelle. Twitter. January 21, 2019. Retweeted by Jaden McNeil. McNeil, Jaden. Twitter. January 21, 2019.

[56] Malkin, Michelle. Telegram. Accessed January 27, 2019; Malkin, Michelle. Twitter. Accessed January 27, 2019.

[57] Steuben, Thomas. Groyer War UCLA. Counter-Currents. November 13, 2019.

[58] Ibid.

[59] Hampton, Robert. We Want the Groyper War. Counter-Currents. November 5, 2019.

[60] Ibid.

[61] Jeevly, Nicholas R. Groyping Don Jr. Counter-Currents. November 12, 2019.

[62] Jeevly, Nicholas R. Groypin’ Ain’t Easy. Counter-Currents. November 14, 2019.

[63] Leblanc, Travis. Nick Fuentes & Our Xenus. Counter-Currents. January 2, 2010.

[64] Ibid.

[65] DavidDuke.com. Dr. Duke & Mark Collett – Expose the Lies of TPUSA and Anti-White Pro-White ‘Conservatives’ – Plus Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself. DavidDuke.com. November 15, 2019.

[66] Bose, Matthew. What Is Conservatism, Inc. Actually Conserving? American Renaissance. November 21, 2019.

[67] Griffin, Brad. Groyper Assault on Charlie Cuck Exposes Conservatism, Inc. Occidental Dissent. October 30, 2019.

[68] Cole, David. The Groypers of Wrath. Taki’s Magazine. November 26, 2019.

[69] Ibid.

[70] Cotto-Gottfried. Young, politically active … and anti-left: Nick Fuentes on America’s right-wing youth. YouTube. October 5, 2019.

[71] Witoslawski, Alex. On Entryism – How to Infiltrate the Mainstream. America First Media. March 4, 2018.

[72] Ibid.

[73] OkieGropyer. Optics for Dummies. The Daily Groyper. January 29, 2020.

[74] Fuentes, Nick. Telegram. December 10, 2019.

[75] Fuentes, Nick. Telegram. November 3, 2019. See also Wilson, Jason. White supremacist Richard Spencer makes racist slurs on tape leaked by rival. The Guardian. November 4, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/04/white-supremacist-richard-spencer-racist-slurs-tape-milo-yiannopoulos.

[76] Murray, Patrick. Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer. YouTube. November 14, 2019.    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sCYSS_XUCU&feature=youtu.be.

[77] Gottfried, Paul. “The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right.” Taki’s Magazine. December 1, 2008.

[78] Marantz, Andrew. “The Alt-Right Branding War Has Torn the Movement in Two.” The New Yorker. July 6, 2017. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-alt-right-branding-war-has-torn-the-movement-in-two.

[79] Siegel, Jacob. “The Alt-Right’s Jewish Godfather.” Tablet. November 29, 2016. https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/218712/spencer-gottfried-alt-right.

[80] Cotto/Gottfried Show. “Young, politically active…and anti-left: Nick Fuentes on America’s right-wing youth.” October 5, 2019.

[81] Burghart, Devin. “Who is Paul Gottfried?” Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights. November 6, 2015. http://tremololabs.com/2015/11/06/who-is-paul-gottfried/.

[82] Cotto-Gottfried. Young, politically active … and anti-left: Nick Fuentes on America’s right-wing youth. October 5, 2019. YouTube.

[83] See Benny Johnson. Twitter. https://twitter.com/bennyjohnson/status/1196606504637521920

[84] Gottfried, Paul. “The Groypers are Asking the Wrong Questions”. Intellectual Takeout. December 5, 2019.

[85] Ibid.

[86] Fuentes, Nick. Telegram. September 16, 2019.

[87] American First. The Groyper Leadership Summit. December 20, 2019.

[88] Gregory Hood. Sam Francis, the Prophet. American Renaissance. September 27, 2019.  

[89] Ibid.

[90] Fuentes, Nick. Telegram. December 10, 2019.

[91] American First. The Groyper Leadership Summit. December 20, 2019.

[92] Fuentes, Nick. Telegram. November 2019.

[93] Burghart, Devin. “Who is Richard Spencer?” Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights. June 27, 2014. http://tremololabs.com/2014/06/27/who-is-richard-spencer/.

[94] Francis, Samuel. “Prospects for Racial and Cultural Survival.” American Renaissance. March 1995.

[95] Cotto/Gottfried. “Young, politically active … and anti-left: Nick Fuentes on America’s right-wing youth.” YouTube. October 5, 2019.

[96] Ibid.

[97] Ibid.

[98] Casey, Patrick. The Groyper Leadership Summit. Restoring Order.  YouTube. January 5, 2020.

[99] Fuentes, Nick. “America First 500^th Episode Special”, America First with Nicholas J Fuentes. YouTube. November 15, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRXq-9wbIxs.

[100] Fuentes, Nicholas J. “The Villain America Needs” nicholasjfuentes.com, July 18, 2016, accessed at https://web.archive.org/web/20170623075323/http://www.nicholasjfuentes.com/home/archives/07-2016.

[101] Cotto/Gottfried. Young, politically active … and anti-left: Nick Fuentes on America’s right-wing youth. October 5, 2019.

[102] Coaston, Jane. Why alt-right trolls shouted down Donald Trump Jr. Vox. November 11, 2019. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/11/11/20948317/alt-right-donald-trump-jr-conservative-tpusa-yaf-racism-antisemitism.

[103] “America First 500^th Episode Special”, America First with Nicholas J Fuentes. YouTube. November 15, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRXq-9wbIxs.

[104] Ibid.

[105] Anderson, Nick. “Far-right agitators roil the conservative movement on college campuses in battle to define Trumpism.” Washington Post. November 16, 2019.   https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/far-right-agitators-roil-the-conservative-movement-on-college-campuses-in-battle-to-define-trumpism/2019/11/16/a757d88a-0723-11ea-b17d-8b867891d39d_story.html

[106] Identity Evropa. Twitter. September 26, 2017; Identity Evropa. Twitter. September 16, 2017.

[107] For background on Fuentes see Turi, Gabrielle. Nicholas Fuentes on his time at BU: ‘I live rent free in the minds of the phony people that derided me.’ The Tab. 2 Years Ago (undated). https://thetab.com/us/bu/2017/08/18/nicholas-fuentes-boston-university-charlottesville-12891; Manion, Annemarie. Area teen rallied in Charlottesville, got death threats, now planning move to ‘solidly red’ Alabama. Chicago Tribune. August 18, 2017. https://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/western-springs/ct-dlg-lt-grad-death-threats-tl-0824-20170818-story.html; Chicago Antifa. Nick Fuentes, the Zoomer Nazi, Living in Lagrange Park, IL. November 11, 2019. https://antifascistchicago.noblogs.org/post/2019/11/04/nick-fuentes/.

[108] Fuentes, Nick. “America First 500^th Episode Special”, America First with Nicholas J Fuentes. YouTube. November 15, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRXq-9wbIxs.

[109] Ibid.

[110] Fuentes, Nick. Telegram. November 3, 2019.

[111] Fuentes, Nick. Telegram. December 10, 2019.

[112] Zeskind, Leonard. 2009. Blood and Politics: White Nationalism from the Margins to the Mainstream. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

[113] Fuentes, Nick. Telegram. August 5, 2019.

[114] Ibid.

[115] Fuentes, Nick. Telegram. September 2019.

[116] Murray Patrick. Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer. YouTube. November 14, 2019.    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sCYSS_XUCU&feature=youtu.be.

[117] Murray Patrick. Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer. YouTube. November 14, 2019.    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sCYSS_XUCU&feature=youtu.be.

[118] Fuentes, Nick. Telegram. September 16, 2019.

[119] Fuentes, Nick. Telegram. July 10, 2019.

[120] For more on Owen Benjamin, see Hold, Jared. “Owen Benjamin’s Rhetoric is Growing More Extreme.” Right-Wing Watch. March 18, 2019. https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/owen-benjamins-rhetoric-is-growing-more-extreme/.

[121] Fuentes, Nick. Telegram. September 2, 2019.

[122] Fuentes, Nick. Telegram. September 12, 2019

[123] Fuentes, Nick. Telegram. September 11, 2019.

[124] Intergalactic Lebensraum. Nicholas J Fuentes: The Cookie Question. YouTube. January 11, 2019. The full from the video goes as such: “Max says if I take one hour to cook a batch of cookies, and Cookie Monster has 15 ovens, working 24 hours a day every day for 5 years, how long does it take Cookie Monster to make 6 million batches of cookies. I don’t know, that’s a good question. [Laughing] …Oh, no, no [Laughing]. It doesn’t really sound correct to me, wait a second…It certainly wouldn’t be 5 years, right. The math doesn’t seem to add up there…And in addition, you know, in this hypothetical, I imagine, that if you took aerial photographs over the kitchens, you would need to see certain smokestacks to release the smoke from baking the cookies, and the smoke stacks would project certain shadows, but I guess they’re not visible in the aerial photographs taken over the kitchens. Moreover, if you look at the soil texture, its really not deep enough for mass cookie storage underground. And so there’s a lot of things, you know, in the cookie kitchens they say that the ovens are, uh, wooden and they have windows on them, and they’re not totally secure. And the ovens that they use, they actually did sort of an ad hoc use of that particular kind of oven – even though they made a perfectly good design of ovens for a different purpose, for delousing, I mean, you know, for something else. So, none of it really adds up, I don’t know, it just kind of doesn’t really make sense, this crazy cookie analogy…So six million cookies, eh, eh, I don’t buy it.”

[125] Nick Fuentes on Hitler, YouTube, February 25, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1Y3CDkLBK0&feature=youtu.be&t=277.

[126] Fuentes, Nick. Telegram. August 19, 2019.

[127] Fuentes, Nick. Telegram. September 16, 2019.

[128] Murray, Patrick. Nick Fuentes on Jim Crow, El Paso Shooting. YouTube. November 14, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHgm-7nW0Y0.

[129] Fritze, John. Trump slams ‘the squad’ during North Carolina rally as crowd chants ‘send her back.’ USA Today. Jly 18, 2019.https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2019/07/17/donald-trump-rally-greenville-n-c-amid-fury-over-squad-tweets/1749987001/.

[130] Fuentes, Nick. Telegram. July 17, 2019.

[131] Fuentes, Nick. Telegram. September 2, 2019.

[132] Fuentes, Nick. Telegram. September 9, 2019.

[133] America First with Nick Fuentes. Dlive. December 20, 2019.

[134] Ibid.

[135] Murray, Patrick. Nick Fuentes on Jim Crow, El Paso Shooting. YouTube. November 14, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHgm-7nW0Y0.

[136] Fuentes, Nick. Telegram. July 16, 2019.

[137] Fuentes, Nick. Telegram. July 16, 2019.

[138] Fuentes, Nick. Telegram. October 18, 2019.

[139] Moye, Davin. Right-Wing Broadcaster Calls for Killing of ‘Globalists at CNN’. Huffpost. April 25, 2017. https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/nick-fuentes-kill-globalists-at-cnn_n_58fe7e95e4b00fa7de16ed9e?guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly9kdWNrZHVja2dvLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAARRplRbFiDEHrPTl4855O0duEonMCnF7WixuQ1yfAsXyuON-6aMIxdxuSFwDxjEPEQpHIBkMfC6qZiJdeJri9rIl4M9pGgE9y5RrVbwJH9aV3mMQg4KVHYRDsuymH3o2GTb7Ratm6y4ZS_GvLk8LZzLL-5TwFKtC537bwLfEX2I&guccounter=2.

[140] Fuentes, Nick. Telegram. July 15, 2019.

[141] See Benny Johnson. Twitter. November 19, 2019. https://twitter.com/bennyjohnson/status/1196606504637521920

[142] Fuentes, Nick. Telegram. August 28, 2019.

[143] Moye, Davin. Right-Wing Broadcaster Calls for Killing of ‘Globalists at CNN’. Huffpost. April 25, 2017. https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/nick-fuentes-kill-globalists-at-cnn_n_58fe7e95e4b00fa7de16ed9e?guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly9kdWNrZHVja2dvLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAARRplRbFiDEHrPTl4855O0duEonMCnF7WixuQ1yfAsXyuON-6aMIxdxuSFwDxjEPEQpHIBkMfC6qZiJdeJri9rIl4M9pGgE9y5RrVbwJH9aV3mMQg4KVHYRDsuymH3o2GTb7Ratm6y4ZS_GvLk8LZzLL-5TwFKtC537bwLfEX2I&guccounter=2.

[144] See Patrick Casey. The Birth of AIM. March 14, 2019. https://t.co/LEzXMwJgHZ; and Patrick Casey. Press Release. March 8, 2019.

[145] American Identity Movement. Twitter. April 2, 2019.

[146] American Identity Movement. Telegram. https://t.me/AIM_America; American Identity Movement. Twitter. https://twitter.com/aim_america?lang=en.

[147] Southern Poverty Law Center. “Identity Evropa.” https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/identity-evropa.

[148] Schiano, Chris. “Americans of European Heritage Exclusively: Identity Evropa Front Group Meetings Leaked. Unicorn Riot. April 27,2019. https://unicornriot.ninja/2019/americans-of-european-heritage-exclusively-identity-evropa-front-group-meetings-leaked/.

[149] Southern Poverty Law Center. “Identity Evropa.” https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/identity-evropa.

[150] Identity Evropa. Twitter. September 10, 2017.

[151]Identity Evropa. Twitter. March 6, 2017.

[152] Benoist, Alain and Charles Champetier. 2012. Manifesto for a European Renaissance. London: Arktos.

[153] Bauer, Shane. I met the white nationalist who “falcon punched” a 95-pound female protestor. Mother Jones. May 9, 2017. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/05/nathan-damigo-punching-woman-berkeley-white-nationalism/.

[154] For a detailed account of Damigo and Mosley’s involvement in the 2017 Charlottesville event, see  Sines v. Kessler. Unites States District Court for the Western District of Virgina. Complaint. October 12, 2017. https://www.integrityfirstforamerica.org/sites/default/files/As-Filed-Complaint.pdf; and City of Charlottesville v. Pennsylvania Lightfoot Milita et al. In the Circuit Court for the City of Charlottesville. October 12, 2017. https://www.law.georgetown.edu/icap/wp-content/uploads/sites/32/2018/02/lawsuit-charlottesville.pdf.

[155] Eli Mosley on The War Room, March 20, 2017. Southern Poverty Law Center. “Identity Evropa.” https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/identity-evropa.

[156] Richard Spencer and Evan McLaren. “A Statement on Eli Mosley.” National Policy Institute. February 5, 2018.

[157] Patrick Casey in an interview with Brittany Pettibone, January 16, 2018. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/identity-evropa

[158] Casey, Patrick. “Woke Capital: An Unholy Alliance.” Speech at American Renaissance Conference on May 31, 2019.

[159] Metapedia. Identitarianism. Accessed January 31, 2020.

[160] American Identity Movement. Twitter. Retweet of a May 20, 2019 tweet by Patrick Casey.

[161] Casey, Patrick. Woke Capital: An Unholy Alliance. Speech at American Renaissance Conference on May 31, 2019.

[162] Ibid.

[163] Zeskind, Leonard. 2009. Blood and Politics: The History of The White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream. New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, p.252-253.

Dickson would go on to speak at meetings of the white nationalist Council of Conservative Citizens, meet with French Front National leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, and, at a 2002 “unity conference” held after David Duke’s release from prison for mail fraud and tax evasion, express his sense that “Our race needs a homeland where we can be by ourselves” and unpopulated by Muslims, Jews, “Negroes” and other people of color.