‘It’s Very Controversial, but I Love Nick Fuentes’

When I rode the escalator into the lobby of the Phoenix Convention Center on Thursday, one of the first things I saw was a two-story-tall picture of Charlie Kirk with his arm reaching out to the sky. The late co-founder of Turning Point USA was an inescapable presence at AmericaFest, the organization’s annual gathering. In the VIP area, a large screen played clips of Kirk on repeat. I watched people line up to get their picture taken next to a portrait of Kirk underneath a tent that read Prove Me Wrong on the front. It was a replica of the structure that Kirk toured the country with—and that he was sitting under when he was assassinated, in September. AmericaFest has long been one of the biggest events on the right, but this year, the conference saw a record turnout of roughly 30,000. When I asked attendees why they had decided to come, they invariably told me that they were there “because of Charlie.” Many of the most prominent influencers and politicians in MAGA world spoke at the event, including Vice President J. D. Vance, Donald Trump Jr., and Steve Bannon. Almost all invoked his memory onstage. When Speaker of the House Mike Johnson spoke of erecting a statue of Kirk in the United States Capitol, the crowd broke out into “Charlie” chants. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton compared Kirk to Jesus. But during my four days at AmericaFest, I noticed that something else was also casting a shadow over the conference. Everyone had come to unite around Kirk, but they kept fighting about Nick Fuentes. In the opening hours on the first night, Ben Shapiro took the stage and ripped into the prominent white-supremacist influencer. Fuentes, who did not attend the conference, is a “Hitler-apologist, Nazi-loving, anti-American piece of refuse,” Shapiro said. The crowd erupted in boos. At one point, I ran into the longtime GOP operative Roger Stone, who insisted that the debates over Fuentes and his staunch criticism of Israel were being inflated by the mainstream media. “I still haven’t seen any polling showing that it’s spilled over to voters,” he told me. The early MAGA influencer Mike Cernovich told me something similar: “If you ask most people here, ‘Do you think the war in Gaza is a genocide?,’ I think most of us are like, ‘I don’t really care,’” he said. Read: I watched 12 hours of Nick Fuentes Fuentes has tremendous sway over the young right, and his profile has risen to new heights since late October, when the former Fox News personality Tucker Carlson hosted him for a friendly podcast interview. Carlson “built Nick Fuentes up,” Shapiro said during his speech. “He ought to take responsibility for that.” When Shapiro finished his speech, attendees lined up to ask him questions. Shapiro was immediately challenged by a student from Baylor University named Nicky Rudd. He asked about the USS Liberty, an American spy ship that the Israeli military accidentally sunk in 1967. Fuentes often talks about...

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