Fuentes moved his show to a custom platform called Cozy TV that he built in collaboration with Alex Jones. More recently, he has found a welcoming home on Rumble, the alternative media platform that also hosts Donald Trump Jr.’s podcast and has been backed financially by both Peter Thiel and a venture capital fund cofounded by Vice President JD Vance.
Despite being suspended from most major social media platforms, last year Fuentes was reinstated on X by Musk, who wrote that he could stay on the platform “provided he does not violate the law, and let him be crushed by the comments and Community Notes.”
Rather than being crushed, Fuentes has seen his following skyrocket from 168,000 at the time his account was restored in May 2024, to almost 925,000 today.
“We Want Them to Have No Clue”
In a recent interview with Eric Orwoll, one of the founders of a whites-only community in Arkansas, Fuentes complained that for all that has happened since Trump came to power, there are very few groups who are operating right now in the “pro-white” sphere.
He listed Jared Taylor’s white nationalist American Renaissance conference, and VDare, a white nationalist group founded in 1999 by Peter Brimelow that has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Fuentes also mentioned his own show, and the antisemitic Culture Wars magazine.
But Fuentes believes that he and the Groyper army can change that.
Despite his growing influence within the GOP and the Trump administration, as well as his rapidly rising support among young white men in America, Fuentes has repeatedly said that in order for his movement to make an impact, it needs to operate in the shadows.
“No rallies, no protests, we don’t need to show everybody how many of us there are because the second that we do, they will identify, isolate, and destroy us,” Fuentes said on a recent livestream. “We want them to have no clue how many Groypers there are, where they are, who they are. We want them to be completely in the dark.”
Fuentes says that he travels the country constantly to meet his supporters, who have started different groups and organizations across the country—everything from campus groups to book clubs, all founded on the racist, antisemitic doctrine he preaches on his livestreams.
He described his movement as a “tech startup” and “a patchwork that eventually we’re going to knit together … over time,” adding that he saw Orwoll’s whites-only community in Arkansas as part of that network.
“There are certainly Groypers within the administration, and I believe [Fuentes] when he says that he has contacts within the administration, including probably pretty high up,” says Hannah Gais, an extremism researcher with the Southern Poverty Law Center.
There are signs that figures familiar with Fuentes’ movement play roles in the administration. Back in May, for example, Trump nominated Paul Ingrassia—who at one point allegedly grilled career FBI agents about their loyalty to Trump, according to a recent lawsuit—to head up the Office of Special Counsel. Ingrassia attended an impromptu rally in June 2024 after Fuentes had been denied entry to a Turning Point USA conference. Ingrassia later claimed to have been unaware of who was speaking at the rally; however, he wrote an X post at the time condemning the decision by Turning Point USA to eject Fuentes. It’s unclear at this point if a vote to confirm Ingrassia’s appointment will happen.
