Nick Fuentes: radical right-winger who became Kanye West’s right-hand man 

Fuentes has maintained his support for Trump. In November 2020 he directed his followers, who are called Groypers, to “storm every state capitol” until “President Trump is inaugurated for four more years”. He himself led a group of followers to the US Capitol during the 6 January insurrection, which he later declared to be “awesome”.

Trump is not the only potential 2024 presidential candidate that Fuentes has supported, however. Since Kanye West, the 45-year-old rapper now known as Ye, announced his own bid for the White House in late November, Fuentes and West have been spotted together on multiple occasions.

Most notably, they appeared on InfoWars, the far-right conspiracy show hosted by Alex Jones, “who owes hundreds of millions in damages to the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims”, said the LA Times.

Wearing a full-face balaclava on the show, West, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2016, said: “I see good things about Hitler also … this guy that invented highways, invented the very microphone that I use as a musician, you can’t say out loud that this person ever did anything good.”

Then in a separate video posted online by the rapper about the dinner he had with Trump and Fuentes, West said: “Trump is really impressed with Nick Fuentes”, describing him as a “loyalist”.

Is Fuentes dangerous?

Trump’s claims that he only dined with Fuentes because he didn’t know anything about him “have fallen short”, said The New York Times. In the immediate aftermath, Bill Cassidy, a Republican senator from Louisiana, wrote on Twitter: “President Trump hosting racist antisemites for dinner encourages other racist antisemites. These attitudes are immoral and should not be entertained. This is not the Republican Party.” Other Republicans including Susan Collins, a senator from Maine, denounced the dinner as well.

Even by rubbing shoulders with such high-profile public figures as West and Trump, Fuentes is “normalizing hate and ramping up the risk of violence in a country already experiencing a sharp increase in antisemitism”, said the Chicago Sun-Times.

For his part, Fuentes claims that his more extreme positions are simply ironic. But in doing so, he is “following a playbook popular among domestic extremists: using irony and claims of ‘just joking’ to spread their message, while deflecting criticism”, said NPR.

And often, the person who chooses to associate themselves with Fuentes is the one who gets criticised rather than Fuentes himself, misinformation expert Caroline Orr told Vice.

“It’s almost like the toxicity of Nick Fuentes rubs off on the person he associates with, rather than himself,” said Orr. “The person who he’s with ends up getting most of the negative energy and attention, and he kind of just waltzes away.” 

Certainly this is true of his association with West, Vice said. The rapper has seen his reputation plummet, while “searches for [Fuentes’s] name on Google have soared”.

Article source: https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/politics/958797/nick-fuentes-radical-right-winger-who-became-kanye-wests-right-hand-man