Who Is Nick Fuentes, and Why Is a US Rep Buddying Up to the Segregationist, Holocaust-Denying Gen Z Influencer?

Arizona’s Paul Gosar may or may not be holding a fundraiser with Fuentes.

Nick Fuentes stands between Alex Jones and Ali Alexander during a November 2020 "Stop the Steal" rally at the Governor's Mansion in Georgia.(Photo by Zach Roberts/NurPhoto via AP)

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Nick Fuentes, a 22-year-old far-right influencer, is pretty open about being a white supremacist, an antisemite, a racist, a fascist, etc. Sitting U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) evidently has no problem with any of that. A flyer made the rounds on Monday inviting people to “Please join Nick Fuentes and America First for a Fundraiser Event with Congressman Paul Gosar,” with details about date, time, and location to come on Thursday.  

Whether this event is actually happening now seems unclear. Gosar seemed to defend (and thus confirm) his participation in the fundraiser in a tweet on Monday, characterizing it as a normal bit of big-tent politics:

 

But on Tuesday he told a CNN reporter he wasn’t sure “what’s going on.” He added cryptically, “There’s no fundraiser that I know of on Friday,” though no one had suggested there would be a fundraiser on Friday. 

We do know that Gosar has palled around with Fuentes before. He attended AFPAC, the influencer’s more extreme version of the Conservative Political Action Committee conference, as the Arizona Republic points out. Gosar also has a problematic rap sheet of his own, consisting of conspiracy theories alleging that the January 6 Capitol siege and the Unite the Right white power rally in Charlottesville were both left-wing false-flag operations. He was communicating with far-right “Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander in the lead-up to the insurrection. 

As for Fuentes himself, we dug up a few quotes from his livestreamed show in which he makes it very clear who he is and what he believes and what he means by “America First.” If you’re wondering what sort of creature Paul Gosar apparently wants to hang out with—and what sort of creature apparently wants to hang out with Paul Gosar—keep reading.

1. Nick Fuentes thinks being a colonizer is cool and that white people have the best racial slurs.

As if we’re ever going to hold an L for being white…Colonizer is my favorite. We did colonize the Earth. What’s the own? “You colonized the earth. You enslaved my people.” Ah, you got me, damn. We suck for that. That’s not epic and demonstrative of how smart and powerful we are. How retarded.

I’ve got a racial slur for you. I don’t even have to say it. It would annihilate you. Blacks are eternally coping for the n-word. We can drop that anybody and they would stand no chance. Good luck coming back from that. We have all the best ones. White people wield the best racial slurs.

2. Nick Fuentes likes to dispute the Holocaust.

[Reading a viewer question] “If I take one hour to cook a batch of cookies and Cookie Monster has 15 ovens working 24 hours a day, every day for five years, how long does it take Cookie Monster to make 6 million batches of cookies.” 

That’s a good question. That doesn’t sound correct me…The math doesn’t seem to add up there.

3. Sometimes Nick Fuentes has to cut himself off during his clips to make sure he doesn’t say the n-word on camera. 

They probably called into the lobby, these fucking—I almost just said the n-word right there. Whatever, faggot leftists, nice try. These Blacks at the counter, they’re fucking up my opsec.

4. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has control of the military, which is good because that means he can overrule Brazil’s Congress and “do whatever [he] wants.” Nick Fuentes wants Trump to have that power in America. 

Bolsonaro. We need something like that in America. Hopefully, he can show Trump how it’s done. What’s cool about him is that he has control of the military…You’ve got 55 percent of the vote and the military. You can do whatever you want. Screw the Congress…Maybe Trump can learn from that a little. 

5. One day “we’re going to separate everybody” to stop the dirty “mixing” and “restore the integrity of our nationals. 

It’s a tough world but we’re going to get it all straightened out. we’re going to separate everybody…There’s a lot of mixing going on, but we’ll restore the integrity of our nations one day.

6. When white people are no longer the majority in America, the country will get worse. Nick Fuentes realizes that this is maybe a white nationalist or white supremacist belief, but, to him, that’s okay. 

Is that going to be an improvement? Does anybody believe that for five seconds, that the country getting less white and becoming non-majority white—does anybody think that will be an improvement? I know people will say that’s racist. I know people will say that’s white nationalist or white supremist [sic], but they can’t say it’s wrong.

7. Marriages between different races are upsetting to Nick Fuentes. 

We love people. We want people to be happy. We want people to do well. We want marriages to last long. We want children to be happy and not on drugs, and that’s why we opposed mixed marriages.

8. Segregation was good, actually. 

[Jim Crow] was better for [Black people] too…”They had to drink out of a different water fountain,” big fucking deal. “Oh no, they had to go to different schools. Their water fountain in that famous picture was worse.” Who cares? Grow up, drink out of the fucking water fountain. It’s water, it’s the same. Even it was bad, who cares. We all agree, it’s better for them, it’s better for us. It’s better in general. 

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We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

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