Nick Fuentes and Christian White Nationalist “Holy War”

In an angry speech accompanied by an apocalyptic video montage, white nationalist Groyper leader Nick Fuentes called for a “Holy War” and “eradicating the Jewish stranglehold” over the country.

On July 16, Fuentes gathered his Groypers in a West Palm Beach, Florida, hotel ballroom for his first big event since his dinner with Donald Trump and whirlwind antisemitic tour with rap star Ye (former Kanye West) last December.

Fuentes’s Groypers grew out of an effort to force white nationalist ideas into and recruit out of the most prominent conservative group for young people, Turning Point USA. Like the first stunts that launched the Groypers, this year, Fuentes again held his “Fuentes Rally II” at the same time and city as the 2023 Turning Point Action Conference.

Fuentes preceded the rally with vague grandiose claims regarding event attendance.^[1] After the rally, Fuentes bragged that the event was organized in 2-3 weeks, had 500 attendees, and that tickets had sold out in just 4 hours.^[2] By contrast, one former Fuentes ally painted a very different picture, estimating no more than 36 cars and 144 people in attendance. ^[3] A video clip showing the crowd appeared to support this estimate.^[4]

While attendance was down at the Fuentes Rally, the bigotry of the presentation was highly elevated, even for the young white nationalist who’s made a career of spewing racism, misogyny, and antisemitism.

Nick Fuentes’ “Holy War” and Eradicating “Talmudic Jews”

At the “Fuentes Rally II,” Fuentes opened up with his endorsement of Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election, explaining, “This is what really got my support back. Donald Trump announced a week ago that if he gets elected again, he’s bringing the travel ban back even bigger than the first time.” (The “travel ban” is also known as the Muslim ban—a 2017 Trump executive order that banned travel from seven predominantly Muslim counties and suspended resettlement of Syrian refugees).

Fuentes tempered his support for Trump with criticism that the Trump administration had been too friendly to the LGBTQ and Jewish communities. He criticized Turning Point USA and “ConInc” for not fully embracing the Groypers’ message on “white genocide” and Jewish power. And, per usual, Fuentes unleashed a slew of misogynistic insults.

Since their emergence in 2019, the Groyper mobilization and then America First Foundation and its followers have clashed with and been kicked out of past Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and TPUSA events – the Groyper aim being to challenge these increasingly far-right organizations for leadership of a nationalist insurgency; garner recruits into white nationalist politics; and pile up Fuentes’ sycophants.

Fuentes believes Groypers have “already won the ideological battle.”^[5] In his speech, Fuentes detailed the terrain of his ideological battle: white nationalism emphasizing vicious antisemitism and deploying a genocidal language in asserting, “Number one, we need to eradicate the Jewish stranglehold over The United States of America.”

The crowd cheered and clapped in response.

Concern about “optics” is over. Fuentes intimated that 2024 would see him deploy a more openly racist and antisemitic framing than during the early emergence of the Groypers. Fuentes’ call for eradication was a reiteration of his recent declaration that “The other thing that’s gotta go from the public life at the highest level is this Talmudic Judaism…It’s gotta go!’”^[6]

The call to purge Jews from public life followed just days after Fuentes clarified on the Fresh & Fit podcast that he supported “most” of what Adolph Hitler did and asserted that the violence of the Holocaust had not happened.^[7]

Fuentes’ Hitler-fan-boy-self appeared when he asked his audience, “What did you think about when he (Kanye West) said he loves Hitler on InfoWars? Was that awesome?” The crowd whooped and hollered in agreement.^[8]

Fuentes also hacked up that other ingredient of white nationalism – biological determinism – something commonly referred to as “race realism” in the movement and, in Nick’s speech, the “reality of race.”

Fuentes mustered this long-discredited view to explain persistent racial disparities in society, stressing that “we’re different. We’re different people” and claiming that white people building Western society “doesn’t come from a creed, it doesn’t come from culture, it doesn’t come from ideas…it’s because of who we are. It’s in our DNA. It’s in our genetics…As a consequence, it is only white people that can continue a white society. Which is what we will have happen at any cost.”

These elements of white nationalist ideology are not disjointed moments of crass bigotry but integrated portions of an overall worldview. Attached to white nationalism and biological determinism, antisemitic conspiracism and the fabrication of a “white genocide” creates a radicalizing impulse by fantasizing about Jews as a demonic and racial ruling class bent on eliminating whites. In such a view, the government must be toppled and the conspirators “eradicated.”

For its part, Holocaust denial such as Fuentes’ has long been part and parcel of a tacit end-game of erasing German Nazi atrocities from the historical record in order to revive national socialism, and its white nationalist kin, as viable political alternatives.^[10]

Given this mix, Nick Fuentes’ brand of fascist white nationalism, in the end, shares much in common with national socialism, including its quest for authoritarian rule – something he drove home in 2020 by calling for Donald Trump to have the power to “rule by decree;” and in, 2022, cheering for a white uprising that topples Congress, installs Trump as a dictator and ends elections.^[11]

Setting such “ideas” in the context of anti-immigrant posturing entrenched in emerging presidential campaigns, Fuentes elaborated that “genocide against whites” is occurring through legal and illegal immigration – “a concerted effort to fill up, not just our own country but virtually every white country, with non-white immigrants.” Fuentes’s solution was to “build a giant wall. Build whatever you have to” to bring about an “immigration moratorium…for the rest of the century.”

Fuentes’ white nationalism, antisemitism, and appeals to the myth of white dispossession are also integrated with a type of Christian nationalism. Ultimately, the combination led to his call for a racialized Christian “Holy War.” Fuentes mythologized, “We live in a Christian world. We have to have Christian leaders.” He continued,

“[This is] not a race war, not a culture war, not a political war: This is a holy war…We have God on our side…We’re not soldiers for the Republican party. We’re not soldiers for the conservatives. We’re soldiers for God.”

Taking it further, Fuentes declared, “Because we are willing to die in the holy war, we will make them die in the holy war.”

New Recruits and Ongoing Enemies

Following the event, Fuentes appeared to receive an influx of new supporters, partially due to Elon Musk’s replying to an Ian Miles Chong tweet mentioning Fuentes. One viewer donated $50 to Fuentes’s July 21 livestream, saying:

“​​I found out about you from Elon Musks reply to Ians quote tweet. I joined your telegram channel and am still watching your videos, great to see someone so brave to speak up!”

For his bigotry, Fuentes’ America First episode following the Florida rally drew donations of $208, $310, $500, and $1000, including one fan writing,

“I’m allegedly the guy in the camo ye24 hat that ‘helped’ the Jewish heckler out of FRII His large nose colliding with the doors might be the first shot heard around the world in this Holy War.”^[12]

In addition to such recruits, Fuentes thanked social media influencers such as Sneako, Zherka, and Myron, who have “stepped up to tell the truth.” Nicolas “Nico” Kenn De Balinthazy, better known as internet personality “Sneako,” has publicly supported Fuentes. Sneako, a former Youtuber, migrated to platforms like Rumble after being banned from YouTube. Sneako was seen on the Fresh & Fit Podcast along with Fuentes on July 10 and a follow-up Cozy stream with Fuentes and Fresh & Fit host Myron Gaines on July 12. Sneako briefly spoke during Fuentes’s rally speech, declaring that “Nicholas J. Fuentes is going to be the future president of the United States of America” and repeating the white nationalist’s refrain, “America First is inevitable.”

Jon Zherka and Myron Gaines sat alongside Fuentes during his July Fresh & Fit appearances. Zherka offered several sexist remarks, and Gaines later supported Nick on his July 12 Cozy stream. Gaming and commentary streamer LeafyIsHere has also been a vocal supporter of Nick, allowing Nick to join livestreams, thereby expanding his reach.

Even as he worked on building such alliances, infighting continued in Groyper circles, and Fuentes continued his practice of attacking movement rivals. Former Cozy streamer, Ethan Ralph, was denied admission to Fuentes Rally II on Sunday night for allegedly being too intoxicated, with Nick calling Ralph a “drunk, high, sex-offender” in his July 21 livestream.²

Ralph posted several tweets bashing Fuentes and doxxing the location of the Florida event. Ralph, formerly a Cozy streamer, is currently banned from the platform. Jaden McNeil continued his feud with Fuentes, retweeting July 19th posts calling Fuentes a “crybaby.” These attacks even extended to Fuentes’s current allies such as Sneako, with McNeil, a fervent homophobe, tweeting calling Sneako an “open cuckold” who “also does gay porn.”

Fuente’s kick-off to election season portends a more openly bigoted round of Gropyer activism alongside intermittent calls for violence.

Rumbling with Rumble

In many ways, the Fuentes speech aimed more at an online audience than the small number assembled in West Palm Beach. The speech was livestreamed on Fuentes’ platform and the Peter Thiel-backed far-right video-streaming platform Rumble.^[13]

Rumble, however, removed the speech from their platform twice for allegedly inciting violence, something Fuentes admitted on Telegram. Rumble’s actions appeared spurred by the antisemite’s call for a Christian nationalist “Holy War” against his political enemies—specifically, from the tone of his speech and recent statements, Jews.^[14]

Fuentes denied Rumbles’ claims by reinforcing the Christian component of his white nationalism. “Within the context of the speech,” he claimed, “it is completely unambiguous that any reference to a Holy War was meant metaphorically in reference to spiritual life and politics. I laid out precisely our political goals which are to control immigration and appoint Christian leadership” [italics added].^[15]

The evidence suggests otherwise. Fuentes’s antisemitism and biological determinism, in fact, share more in common with the “RAHOWA,” or Racial Holy War, pushed by the neo-Nazi Church of the Creator than the religiously-constructed call of, say, some Christian Rightists to attack abortion providers.

And Nick Fuentes has his own violent history. On February 11, 2022, Fuentes details how he lost his position as General Secretary of his school’s UN Model club during his Junior year of high school. He said, “They took away my position as Secretary General because I hit some kid and this stupid b***h told on me.”^[16] At first, Fuentes couldn’t remember if he slapped or hit the student with his belt. But then he says, “I think that was it. I hit him with my belt.”^[17] Fuentes has gone on lengthy violent rants about killing female flight attendants.^[18] After his antisemitic tour with Ye, he threw his drink at hecklers in Los Angeles in December 2022.^[19] In March 2023, he got into a fight at CPAC.^[20]

The live online chat running during Fuentes’ speech was rife with violent rhetoric. There were many calls for “public executions” and “rape and murder” of the person running the audio for the Nick Fuentes Rally II. Some suggested that the audio person was Black or Jewish. One person said, “I hope the audio guy is tenryo so he gets his monkey ass executed for this.” Another one wrote, “KILL ALL PORNOGRAPHERS.” Others wrote, “kill ethan ralph.”^[21]

NOTES

[1] Nicholas J. Fuentes. Telegram. June 21 2023. https://t.me/nickjfuentes/11173.

[2] Fuentes, Nick. “America First Ep. 1190.” Cozy.tv, uploaded by AFF, July 21 2023, https://cozy.tv/nick/replays/2023-07-21.

[3]  THEDC. “Retard Fight: Ethan ‘Purest of LOLcows’ Ralph and Nick ‘Cumhunter’ Fuentes End Ersatz Homosexual Marriage,” The Daily Rake, July 17 2023, https://dailyrake.ca/2023/07/17/retard-fight-ethan-purest-of-lolcows-ralph-and-nick-cumhunter-fuentes-end-ersatz-homosexual-marriage/.

[4] Alex Rosen. Twitter. July 16, 2023. https://twitter.com/iFightForKids/status/1680763826336067589.

[5] Fuentes, Nick. “Nick Fuentes Rally II.” Cozy.tv, uploaded by AFF, 17 Jul. 2023, http://cozy.tv/aff.

[6] Nick Fuentes. Rally March 4, 2023. See Burghart, Devin. Twitter. March 6, 2023. https://twitter.com/dburghart/status/1632779587959803904.

[7] FreshandFit. Nick Fuentes Dops N-BOMB On 7 Black Women & THIS Happened! July 7, 2023. https://rumble.com/v2yrpaw-after-hours-w-nick-fuentes-and-girls.html.

[8] Fuentes, Nick. “Nick Fuentes Rally II.” Cozy.tv, uploaded by AFF, 17 Jul. 2023, http://cozy.tv/aff.

[9] Fuentes, Nick. “Nick Fuentes Rally II.” Cozy.tv, uploaded by AFF, 17 Jul. 2023, http://cozy.tv/aff.

[10] For more on Fuentes Holocaust denial, see Burghart, D., Tanner, C. (2020) From Alt-Right to Groyper: White Nationalists Rebrand for 2020 and Beyond. Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights. https://irehr.org/reports/alt-right-to-groyper/.

[11] Right Wing Watch. Twitter. September 22, 2022. https://twitter.com/RightWingWatch/status/1572963742018674690.

[12] Fuentes, Nick. “America First Ep. 1189.” Cozy.tv, uploaded by AFF, July 21 2023, https://cozy.tv/nick/replays/2023-07-20.

[13] Chapman, Lizette. “Peter Thiel-Backed Video Platform Rumble Starts Trading After SPAC Deal.” Bloomberg. September 19, 2022. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-19/peter-thiel-backed-rumble-heads-to-the-public-markets-via-spac-deal.

[14] Nicholas J. Fuentes. Telegram. July 19, 2023. https://t.me/nickjfuentes/11385.

[15] Nicholas J. Fuentes. Telegram. July 19 2023. https://t.me/nickjfuentes/11385.

[16] UZ’s Planet. Telegram. February 11, 2022. https://t.me/utahzoomer/640.

[17] UZ’s Planet. Telegram. February 11, 2022. https://t.me/utahzoomer/640.

[18] Lahut, Jake. The Real Reason Nick Fuentes Was Put on the No Fly List. Daily Beast. February 24, 2023. https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-real-reason-nick-fuentes-was-put-on-the-no-fly-list.

[19] Police Frequency. Telegram. December 5, 2022. https://t.me/police_frequency/82302.

[20] Retards of TikTok. Telegram. May 10, 2023. https://t.me/retardsoftiktok/13356.

[21] Fuentes, Nick. “Nick Fuentes Rally II.” Cozy.tv, uploaded by AFF, 17 Jul. 2023, http://cozy.tv/aff.