(RNS) — Until this month, official Washington could still claim to know little about Nick Fuentes, the 27-year-old Christian nationalist whose livestreamed talk show, “America First,” draws half a million viewers and who has a million followers on X. Many of them are fans who call themselves “Groypers” and have been known to do Fuentes’ bidding, most notably on Jan. 6, 2021, when a boisterous group of young supporters gathered near the White House chanting, “Christ is king!”
Fuentes was also on hand that day, and a year later was subpoenaed by the House of Representatives’ Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. There is no evidence he entered the building during the attack, but the committee cited his “promoting unsupported claims about the election, including at the November 14th, 2020 Million MAGA March in Washington, D.C. and the December 12th, 2020 Stop the Steal rallies.” (He did not comply with the subpoena.)
Ten months afterward, in November 2022, Fuentes sat at a Mar-a-Lago dinner with then-former President Donald Trump in the company of Ye, the musician formerly known as Kanye West.
On Sunday (Nov. 16), wading into a controversy caused by Fuentes’ appearance on Tucker Carlson’s podcast, Trump — back in office again — said he “didn’t know much about” Fuentes but defended Carlson’s right to interview him, without specifically mentioning the imbroglio Fuentes caused by airing his concerns about “organized Jewry in America” and U.S. policy toward Israel. Carlson either didn’t object to or signaled his agreement with much of what Fu …