Meet The Gen-Z White Supremacist Who Dined With Trump And Kanye West

Fuentes, 24, gained notoriety while still at Boston University in 2017 after saying he received death threats for attending the alt-right Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia—a white nationalist protest against the removal of Confederate statues that turned deadly when a driver deliberately rammed his vehicle into a group of counter-protesters, killing one person and injuring 35.

In 2020, Fuentes founded the America First Political Action Conference as a far-right alternative to the Conservative Political Action Coalition in an effort to distance himself from mainstream GOP, which he has criticized for its support of Israel and its “globalist” stance on America’s role in foreign affairs—attracting far-right members of Congress, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R.Ga.) and Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), to speak at its annual event.

Gosar later backed Fuentes after he met with him in June 2021, saying Republicans should appeal to young voters even if they don’t agree “100% on every issue.”

A staunch Trump supporter, Fuentes called on his followers (called Groypers) to “storm every state capitol” until “President Trump is inaugurated for four more years,” and went on to lead a group of followers to the U.S. Capitol during the January 6 insurrection, later calling the deadly riots “awesome” (Fuentes was subpoenaed one year later by the House committee investigating the insurrection).

Speaking at a far-right rally in February, Fuentes got a crowd to cheer for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, starting a “Putin” chant, and stating, “they say [Russian president] Vladimir Putin is Hitler”—Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt condemned the remarks as “disgusting.”

The Anti-Defamation League has accused Fuentes of promoting “numerous antisemitic and racist comments” on social media, including his support for the closure of the U.S.-Mexico border to immigrants, his belief that the white race is being weakened by “white genocide,” and his opposition of LGBTQ rights, which he referred to as the “bastardized Jewish subversion of the American creed,” arguing, “our civilization is being dismantled.”

Last December, Twitter became one of the last major social media outlets to suspend Fuentes’ account after “repeated violations” of the platform’s rules—following YouTube, Reddit, TikTok, Spotify, and the financial services platforms Venmo and Stripe.

Fuentes called the bans a “concerted effort by leftists, conservative inc gatekeepers and silicon valley censors to silence my show and the movement it has inspired.”