‘Men Win Again’: Who is far-right influencer Nick Fuentes?

Trump’s election victory was met with a barrage of online discourse; his supporters celebrated his second electoral win and his opponents solemnly braced themselves for what the next four years may bring. In mere hours after his victory, out of the online woodwork emerged right-wing political commentators, high on success. Of note, was white nationalist Nicholas J. Fuentes. Late in the evening of election night, Fuentes tweeted the words ‘Your body, my choice. Forever.’ On November 8^th, the phrase was mentioned 12,238 times across X, Reddit and YouTube, as well as various forums, the post gaining over 35 million views. Female TikTok users had their comment sections flooded with the phrase and many schools sent letters home to warn parents of male students repeating it in class. The pro-choice phrase ‘my body, my choice’, used to express bodily autonomy over abortion issues, was twisted into a five-word tweet which set the stage for an onslaught of extremist misogyny.

26-year-old Fuentes is a White Nationalist, Catholic, and antisemitic self-proclaimed incel, whose rise to fame began when he left college to pursue politics. An attendee of the Charlottesville ‘Unite the Right’ rally, his controversial far-right ideas attracted viewers to his YouTube show ‘America First’ founded in 2017, whereby Fuentes would discuss US politics, spiked with racism, antisemitism and misogyny. In 2020, Fuentes’ YouTube channel was banned for violating hate speech policy, and his content was demonetised by Google. ‘America First’ now runs on Rumble, a blockchain streaming site, and Fuentes is highly active on Telegram and X. In the same year, Fuentes was rejected from CPAC and the republican party as a whole, considered too extreme to be involved in Republican politics. His responded by creating a rival conference known as ‘AFPAC’ (America First Political Action Conference), though only after claiming that CPAC ‘sucked’ and was ‘gay’ in a documentary by the BBC.

Misogyny

Anyone who knew of Fuentes prior to the post-election period would be saddened, but by no means shocked, by his words; his history of misogyny is dense. In a 2022 interview, Fuentes explained his reasoning for keeping women out of the inner circles of the America First movement: ‘When women get involved in this political dissident movements, they tend to be a disaster… they tend to crack under the pressure and… create friction within the group.’ Outside of what is disturbing, but familiar, territory for misogyny in the far-right, Fuentes’ commentary on being ‘the straightest guy’ is also startling. Hi identifies as an ‘asexual incel’ (involuntary celibate), which is the ‘straightest’ thing to be because the desire for feminine physical affection and the ‘need to spend time with a woman’ is ‘gay’. Fast forward to his election night live-stream speech, and he sneers into the camera ‘Hey bitch, we control your bodies… Men win again… we will keep [women] down forever, you will never control your own bodies.’ This was flanked by comments in his livestream in late November that women generally are ‘whores, disrespectful and bossy’. Fuentes’ open misogyny and frequent homophobia is a core aspect of the rhetoric he pushes both at conferences and online.

Antisemitism and Anti-Immigration

Fuentes’ ideology does not stop at misogyny. He is pervasively antisemitic and a Holocaust denier,  frequently referencing the ‘Jewish elites’ and advocating for killing ‘globalists’ (read Jews). For Fuentes, White Christianity is the true American religion, and should be reflected demographically, meaning Jews should not be welcome in the west. He has maintained that the US should be a Christian theocracy, deferring to the Vatican; when Roe V Wade was overturned, he described it as the beginning of a ‘Catholic Taliban Rule – in a good way’. This is because it not only caused obvious damage to the pro-choice movement, but set a precedent which could mean that banning gay marriage and contraceptives are ‘back on the menu’ in US politics.

In a 2023 livestream, he said that ‘perfidious jews… when we take power, they need to be given the death penalty, straight up… they must be absolutely annihilated.’ In the same year, Fuentes began a rally speech with ‘I love you, and I love Hitler’. Fuentes’ deeply entrenched antisemitism exists within a network of antisemitic conspiracy and far-right ideology rooted in Nazism, ranging from the reinforcement of harmful stereotypes and holocaust denial all the way to open calls for the killing and conversion of Jews. Of all his ideological factors, Fuentes’ antisemitism, in juxtaposition to his aggressive Christian nationalism, is the most prominent aspect; he has called repeatedly for violence against Jewish people, amongst other perceived ‘out groups’.

Finally, essential to Fuentes’ ideology is his focus on immigration. Arguing that there should be no immigration into the US, even legal forms, he has made a variety of racist and anti-immigrant comments while livestreaming, including: ‘We take them out of countries like the Middle East, and how do they repay us? They rape our children.’ Fuentes has regularly engaged with Great Replacement rhetoric, claiming that ‘the people who are coming to replace us in our country… they want to kill you, they want to see you dead.’ He has even made comments (which he disputed as ‘jokes’) where he compared mixed race relationships to bestiality. Fuentes’ anti-immigration rhetoric links strongly with his antisemitic/Christian nationalist views, as he envisions his American utopia as solely white and solely Christian, resting on traditional family structures in which women find few freedoms.

Conclusion – Political Significance

As Fuentes rises in fame, it is tempting to argue that while extreme in ideology, he has relatively little influence in mainstream politics. However, despite his rejection by the republican party, attendees to AFPAC have included former Iowa congressman Steve King and sitting congressman Paul Gozar as a speaker, as well as elected officials Marjorie Taylor Greene, Wendy Rogers and Janice McGeachin. In 2024, when the conference was rescheduled, former leader of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke, was present. The fact that US officials attended AFPAC indicates that Fuentes has had some success in his desire to move the American Overton Window further right, meaning his extreme politics is managing to make its way into the mainstream sphere of political discourse. Ultimately, Fuentes’ surge in popularity post-election is only additional evidence for his incremental shift into the mainstream discourse, while his ideology remains equally potent. His racist, antisemitic and misogynist ideology is emerging into mainstream media through a slow, but persistent, breakdown of political norms.