It’s tempting to think that young leftists who flock to streamer Hasan Piker and edgelords who listen to podcaster Nick Fuentes are two sides of the same coin.
Both are radical influencers who are pulling boys to the fanatical edges of their side of the political spectrum.
But, while Piker’s far-left fans swap radical ideas about socialism and Israel on message boards, echoing the streamer’s disturbing rhetoric, Fuentes’s fans seem to be up to something quite different.
The “groypers” — as they are known — who venerate Fuentes appear far more interested in posting the most offensive memes possible than engaging in actual political discourse. They are spraying an indiscriminate firehose of offense wherever they possibly can, in a cathartic rebellion against the politically correct culture they grew up in.
“You can call me a Nazi — you better be careful,” Fuentes recently warned on his podcast “Because if I’m a Nazi, then there’s millions of young people that are following a f—king Nazi, so you better be careful about those words.”
Fuentes’s influence is taking off online — and increasingly in real life, too. Over the weekend, “Nick Fuentes was right about Israel” was written in chalk on a bike path on Stanford University’s campus, according to StopAntisemitism. The school did not respond to a request for comment.
Fuentes is a holocaust denier who regularly espouses antisemitic views and advocates for an “America First” agenda that puts immediate domestic interests before all international conflicts.
Meanwhile, tweets like, “We have a leader. Fall in line,” referring to Fuentes, regularly get tens of thousands of likes on X.
“By using humor and presenting himself as a moral authority, he packages hateful ideas in ways that can seem normal, entertaining, or even principled,” Oren Segal of the ADL told The Post.
“Parents should know that his content can pull teens into spaces where antisemitism and bigotry are openly encouraged.”
The 27-year-old host of the “America First” show has a million followers on X and routinely gets hundreds of thousands of views on his show, which airs daily on Rumble (he was kicked off YouTube for hate speech in 2020). According to the New York Times, his views on the platform, where he now has he has 525,000 followers, have quintupled in just over a year.
He casually drops the n-word, has declared a “crusade” against women in politics, and publicly professed love for Hitler in an opening to a speech. His predominantly young male disciples are eating it all up.
Fuentes once commanded his followers in a pledge during his show, asking them to “raise your right hand, repeat after me: I will kill, rape and die for Nicholas J. Fuentes.”
His fans call themselves “groypers” in a reference to an alt-right meme of a cartoon toad. According to the ADL, they “believe they are fighting against demographic and cultural changes that are destroying the ‘true America’ — a white, Christian nation.”
The tweets and memes they share are almost as incoherent as they are offensive.
A Groyper account with more than 40,000 followers on X posted a photoshopped image of Donald Trump smiling at his phone while apparently listening to Nick Fuentes’s podcast. A speech bubble says, “Jews run society, women need to shut the f—k up, and blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part.”
Trump met Fuentes in 2022 when Kanye West brought him to a dinner with him, but there is no evidence the president has ever listened to his podcast.
While the picture is fake, the quote is one of Fuentes’s own. Why offend one group, when you can kill three birds with one stone?
A disturbed father wrote on X, “My son is 19. Yesterday I asked a group of friends if they ever heard of Nick.They all have [the aforementioned quote] memorized and repeated it like a mantra to me.”
In the online groyper world, the lower you go, the more praise you receive.
“Women are so cringe like how do you f—k up a suicide,” an account called Voluntary Conscript Groyper posted on X. “I swear I’ve seen more ‘failed suicides’ from women than real ones… It’s all attention bulls—t. If [you] were serious you would tie a noose around [your] neck and be done with it.”
Kids who grew up in an era of political correctness are stomping on every PC eggshell they can come up with, hiding behind anonymous avatars of frog cartoons as they unleash their pent up anger and one-up each other with how far they’re willing to go.
But how much of it is simply courting shock value, and how much is a reflection of what they’re actually thinking?
The same can be asked of Fuentes. Is he the same to politics as Andrew Tate is to women’s rights?
In a recent episode of his podcast, Ben Shapiro pulled some of Fuentes’s most shocking statements through the years.
He said of Black people under Jim Crow in one clip, “Who cares? Enough with the Jim Crow stuff. Who cares? ‘I had to drink out of a different water fountain.’ Big f—ing deal… It was better for them, better for us, better in general.”
In another he proclaimed, “A lot of women want to be raped… There’s a lot of women who really want a guy to beat the s—t out of them, but part of it is that they have to pretend that they don’t.”
And in a third clip, Fuentes declared, “White people are every single bit justified in being racist, every single bit justified, to the extent that it means going out of your way to avoid black people when you see them.”
Shapiro is a vocal opponent of Fuentes, particularly taking issue with his antisemitic views.
In an interview with Tucker Carlson in late October, Fuentes said, “As far as the Jews are concerned, you cannot actually divorce Israel and the neocons and all those things that you talk about from Jewishness: ethnicity, religion, identity.” He also called Jews “a stateless people” and described them as “unassimilable.”
His followers echo this antisemitism. A groyper account on X, Red Pill Media, responded to outrage over Carlson’s interview: “Jews are mad because 2 White Americans had a conversation about politics without their permission.” The post received 59,000 likes.
Another fan account posted a meme with over 22,000 likes captioned, “Which way, Western man,” positioning Shapiro as the “Israel First” option and Fuentes as “America First.”
The fact that anonymous teens are seduced by the nastiness is concerning enough, but there’s evidence that Fuentes’s influence is creeping into Republican politics via young staffers.
After the Heritage Foundation defended Carlson’s interview, internal messages at the conservative think tank showed staffers were outraged by the decision. One employee wrote, “Talking with some of the interns I think there are a growing number of them who actually agree [with him].”
Conservative writer Rod Dreher corroborated on his Substack, “I am told by someone in a position to know that something like 30 to 40 percent of DC GOP staffers under the age of 30 are Groypers.”
While Republican politicians like JD Vance and Ted Cruz have distanced themselves from the podcaster, his influence with the next generation of right-wingers keeps growing — and the backlash against him only looks to be giving him fuel.
In a world full of pearl-clutching teachers and suffocating wokeness, a grassroots ascendance of edge-lording kids was surely inevitable.
Until young people no longer feel like they can’t say what they really mean, some will resort to saying what they don’t really mean just to get a rise.
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