Ali Breland writes:

Before each episode of America First With Nicholas J. Fuentes begins, a surreal mix of images and video clips runs, like a screen saver, for an unpredictable and seemingly eternal amount of time. Gentle plains of swaying grass, trickling streams, and the show’s logo flash across the screen. EDM kicks in. Psychedelic depictions of Christian imagery, including Jesus’s crucifixion, come and go. So do snippets of Fuentes talking about, among other things, borders, drag queens, and his faith. “We want this century to be the most Christian century in the history of planet Earth,” he says.

I’ve become intimately familiar with these clips. Recently, I spent five days as a regular Fuentes viewer. Across five episodes of the nightly broadcast, I watched the 27-year-old white-supremacist influencer speak into a microphone for just shy of 12 hours total. The show is scheduled to air live on Rumble at 9 p.m. central time, but it rarely begins on time. Throughout the week, the opening scenes played for at least two hours every night, bouncing from clip to clip at random, before Fuentes finally got started. I watched episodes the next morning, and the first time I tuned in, I endured the intro sequence for 30 minutes before fast-forwarding.

Since Fuentes appeared on Tucker Carlson’s podcast at the end of October, Republican leaders have started to ask themselves just how much sway he has over the party. Fuentes has built an army of fans, who call themselves “Groypers,” and his style of bigoted trolling has become the lingua franca of the young, ascendant right. Each episode I watched garnered at least 1 million views on Rumble. Fuentes has attracted attention for years, but as he’s quick to remind his audience, he’s operated from the fringes, pounding on the doors of mainstream conservatism and meeting fierce condemnation. Now Fuentes has momentum—and based on what I saw, he’s laying the groundwork to go even bigger.

Fuentes’s show is at the core of his political project. He first began livestreaming in 2017, when he was a freshman at Boston University, and basically hasn’t stopped since. (During the week I tuned in, Fuentes marked his 1,600th episode.) Each episode tends to unfurl in roughly the same way: Fuentes, wearing a suit and tie, sits behind a desk and spends an hour to 90 minutes monologuing about the news of the day. In the first episode I watched, Fuentes began with a riff on how President Donald Trump had recently declined to criticize Carlson’s decision to have Fuentes on his podcast. Within about 30 minutes, Fuentes had flipped to his favorite topic. Jews in America, he said, “are principally concerned, first and foremost, with the interest and the well-being and the welfare of their own community—of global Jewry.” He criticized prominent Jews, including the conservative-media figure Mark Levin and the right-wing megadonor Miriam Adelson.

Fuentes has said all kinds of terrible things over the years. On an episode of his show in March, he summarized his politics as “Jews are running society, women need to shut the fuck up, Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part, and we would live in paradise. It’s that simple.” But I noticed that, perhaps in a bid to not scare away the new viewers he’s attracted in recent months, he used slurs sparingly in the episodes I watched, and mostly avoided talking about non-Jewish minorities. He also went out of his way to claim that he’s “not a cruel guy.”

Fuentes couldn’t completely help himself, however. “I make fun of Muslims all the time,” he said in one episode. “I call them ‘towelheads.’ I say they rotate around a cube. I make fun of them, but I don’t hate them.” He added that he did think that Muslims should be remigrated, referencing the far-right desire to deport naturalized citizens whom they see as not having properly assimilated. [Continue reading…]