Nick Fuentes is Not Racist
A statistically supported analysis
First I’d like to state that I am a fan of Nick and this is by no means a jab at him or the movement. It is also not an endorsement of this particular strategy or worldview. I am simply an observer who has decided to write a disinterested commentary about what it really means.
In the second part of the essay I will be making a general commentary about politics and what happens to the movement when it become mainstream and I will feature a discussion as to what it really means behind the paywall.
My original interest was sparked by this research article from Eric Kauffman alleging that America First is a civic nationalist movement.
Nick Fuentes is certainly temperamentally feels this way too. At least when he’s serious.
At the same time I should also say that it is pretty extreme for the rest of the American scene that just like Tucker Carlson would not even acknowledge race or touch upon the Jewish Question like Nick does every week. In this regard, Nick Fuentes is unique on the mainstream American scene. He talks about things others are afraid of talking and he talks about them intelligently.
But that being said, if over 75% of his audience truly have a civic-based conception of an American, the movement should probably not be called a White nationalist movement.
Nick himself doesn’t refer to himself a White nationalist anymore and has been making highly critical comments towards White Nationalists, distancing himself from them and concluding that they were delusional because the country is already multiracial.
Hard to disagree with Nick here. You can be pro-White and not buy into the Conservative goyslop or be anti-social. Like me, Nick Fuentes has a progressive soul. But that’s besides the point, as mentioned earlier, Nick and his audience have been undergoing an ideological evolution as part of their generational run.
In a poll that I conducted on Twitter, I asked two simple questions, whether or not someone was old or new follower of Nick Fuentes and whether or not they were White, politically right wing.
The results showed that:
New White Nick Fuentes followers outnumbered new non-White Nick Fuentes followers by 4.2 times whereas old White Nick Fuentes followers outnumbered old non-White Nick Fuentes followers by 4.6 times.
New and originally Right-Wing Nick Fuentes followers outnumbered new and originally Right-Wing Nick Fuentes followers by 2.8 times whereas old and originally Right-Wing Nick Fuentes followers outnumbered old and originally Right-Wing Nick Fuentes followers by 3.6 times.
That is to say that just like my previous article has established, the Groypers are not a brown movement, but as Nick’s audience grows the movement becomes diluted and this dilution is mostly ideological not-racial.
Eric Kauffman has essentially confirmed my analysis when you take a look at under 35 year olds.
Nick’s audience is not too White and it’s not too non-White. It’s about average.
Right now at least 7% of Americans are supportive of him which is at least 20 million people, whereas before 2022 let’s say, his supporters numbered only a few hundred thousand people.
There is Nick Fuentes, the core Groyper movement and the new followers who got redpilled by Hitler’s AI speeches. Nick Fuentes and core Groypers together probably accounts for around 5-20% of the entire America First movement whereas the overwhelmingly majority are new recruits don’t subscribe to White nationalism and often come from the left because Nick is funny and articulate. They just want to hear him speak more and they may agree with many of his positions, but as the data clearly shows there are many lines that they aren’t willing to cross.
For instance, up to 54% of his regular listeners could be described as antisemitic. This is higher than of any other show, but it certainly doesn’t pain a picture of a major boogey man that the Conservative establishment is trying to turn him into.
The Groypers don’t appear to be particularly hostile to Black people too. They like them significantly more than they like Jews. And of course, the Groypers have a degree of healthy in-group bias.
From personal experience and the recollection of other people, the movement was certainly way more radical before 2023 but with Nick’s total explosion in popularity after October 7th when he becomes the first main loud voice on the Right to criticize Israel intelligently, it is unsurprising that people from all over the political spectrum started tuning in. Here’s a typical (now deleted) comment written by a brown human capital:
Compare Nick’s performance to let’s say Candace Owens whose audience feels way warmer towards Israel despite believing Israel is literally Satan and peddling all kinds of weird conspiracy theories about it.
As I wrote in a previous Substack article, the core of the movement is visibly White, radical and generally loyal to Nick. The rest of the movement however, tends to be more non-White than previously, made up of new recruits and often coming from left leaning or a libertarian background. But let’s not overexaggerate this effect and the core compensates for it more than enough by being well educated movement, more politically active and literate than the Conservatives are which is why Groypers are 30-40% of the young Republican staffers in DC.
For the conservative establishment, this data is a double-edged sword.
On one hand, the moral panic surrounding Fuentes is largely overblown. The idea that he is commanding a massive, hidden army of hardcore neo-Nazis is statistically false. A significant portion of his audience tunes in because he is an articulate, entertaining, and fearless critic of establishment orthodoxies, not because they want to establish a White ethnostate. The fact that his audience is slightly more racist than the mainstream figures like Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens undercuts the caricature of the movement as uniquely and uniformly dangerous.
On the other hand, the establishment is right to be terrified of the competence of the core Groyper group. They are operating as a classic “vanguard.” In political theory, a vanguard doesn’t need the masses to agree with 100% of their radical ideology; they only need the masses to agree with the general direction and provide the numbers necessary to exert pressure. The influx of “brown human capital” and ex-leftists provides the sheer volume needed to legitimize the movement, while the educated, highly literate core handles the actual levers of institutional power. I will discuss this and other aspects in greater details behind the paywall.
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