Trump's far-right embrace

Why it is important to know more about Nick Fuentes.

Donald Trump claimed he didn't know who Nick Fuentes was until he sat down to dinner with him and other guests at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate last week. But Fuentes is certainly well known to groups that track racist and anti-Semitic tendencies in American society.

While the Justice Department has described Fuentes in court documents as a white supremacist, this is just beginning to fully capture the range of incendiary views he expressed in denigrating black people, Jews, women, L.G.B.T.Q. Americans, Muslims and immigrants.

At 24, Fuentes became a far-right star for a slew of extremist statements that would have disqualified him from meeting anyone else. modern president. He used a racial slur for black people; called homosexuality "disgusting"; claimed that the Republican Party was “led by Jews, atheists and homosexuals”; said it would be better if women couldn't vote; compared himself to Hitler and hoped for “total Aryan victory”; said “the First Amendment was not written for Muslims”; and argued that Jim Crow segregation "was better for them, it's better for us, it's better in general."

Fuentes made himself first know in 2017 when he attended the ultra-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, after which Trump claimed there were "very good people on both sides" even as he denounced neo-Nazis. Fuentes dropped out of Boston University after he said he received threats over his attendance at the rally and began hosting a live show, "America First", the same year, building a subscriber audience called Groypers, named after a cartoon frog. /p>

He founded the America First Political Action Conference in 2020 and hosted far-right Republicans in the House, including Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Paul Gosar of Arizona. Fuentes rejects the term white supremacist because it is an "anti-white slur", but embraces the language of white racism and anti-Semitism and calls himself "reactionary" and "misogynist". /p>

Trump often claims not to know much about extremists whose support he accepts, as he did with former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, the Proud Boys and QAnon supporters. But even if it were true in this case, Fuentes was brought to dinner by Kanye West, the rapper now known as Ye, who was invited by Trump just as West was under fire for his own comments. anti-Semitic. And even after that, Trump didn't condemn Fuentes, leaving white nationalists to take the dinner as validation.

While news organizations are understandably reluctant to amplify the hateful statements, it's important to understand what we're talking about when we're talking about someone being welcomed to the table by a former president seeking to return to the White House. So here is a summary compiled with the help of my colleague Ian Prasad Philbrick from research conducted by the Anti-Defamation League, the Southern Poverty Law Center and other organizations and media. Fuentes did not respond to interview requests made through a lawyer.

Anti-Semitism and racism

Fuentes regularly invokes fears of "white genocide and echoes replacement theory, which holds that elites seek to "replace" white Americans with immigrants and other people of color. The theory has inspired a number of mass shootings in recent years, including at a Pittsburgh synagogue, a Walmart in El Paso, and a Buffalo supermarket.

"Our civilization is being dismantled, our people are being genocidal, and conservatives can't think beyond what will play well with liberal media in the next election,” Fuentes once tweeted. also said, "The Founders never intended America to be a refugee camp for non-whites." And on Alex Jones' Infowars last year, he said, "I don't see the Jews as Europeans and I don't see them as part of Western civilization, especially because they are not Christians."