There was a time, not so long ago, when Nicholas J. Fuentes was gatekept. He was banned on most social media platforms. YouTube barred his livestreams. In 2021, the Justice Department briefly froze his bank account. The same year, he was placed on a no-fly list. Even erstwhile political allies on the right cut ties with the baby-faced podcaster and political activist.
Whatever you think of cancel culture (and I am no fan of it myself), Fuentes, who first emerged as a major figure in the weird online far-right during Trump’s first term, wasn’t exactly an edge case. He routinely drops the N-word in his livestreams, both with the hard er and the soft ga. He makes Holocaust jokes—his most notorious one is about how long it would take the Cookie Monster to bake 6 million cookies. And he has recently mused that Adolf Hitler had both “drip” and “aura.” For his transgressive racism, Fuentes built a loyal following of fellow shitposters who call themselves the Groypers.
Fuentes was also an enthusiastic supporter of the January 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol, even though he never actually entered the building. In his 2021 speech at the second annual convention for his America First PAC, Fuentes said: “When I was there in D.C., outside of the building, and I saw hundreds of thousands of patriots surrounding the U.S. Capitol building, and I saw the police retreating, and we heard that the politicians voting on the fraudulent election had scurried in their underground tunnels away from the Capitol, I said to myself, ‘This is awesome.’ ” Comments like that relegated Fuentes to the margins of political discourse, even in the era of the leading norm violator, Donald Trump.
But the stigma has recently melted away.
Fuentes is now on what Dasha Nekrasova called a “generational run” when he appeared on the popular podcast she co-hosts, Red Scare. It is far from the only major independent chat show that has welcomed Fuentes lately. In the last month, he has sat for interviews with Patrick Bet-David, Glenn Greenwald, and Dave Smith. He was featured in a viral video with the popular and once-canceled streamer Sneako, touring hot spots in Manhattan like Comedy Cellar, wearing a New York Giants jacket. As of press time, that post had more than 1.3 million views on X. Alex Jones now claims Fuentes will soon appear on Tucker Carlson’s show.
