Is the white identitarian movement in America all that white? That is the question I have (unfortunately) been preoccupied with ever since October, when Tucker Carlson famously gave a softball interview to Nick Fuentes, a man partially of Mexican heritage who espouses, among other things, white nationalist views and ideology.
The backlash against Carlson’s interview reminded me of another, older incident in which a figure in the conservative mainstream played nice with Fuentes—indeed, one which further illustrates the surprising degree of diversity that exists on the racist far right. That incident involved the self-described “little brown woman with a big mouth,” Filipina American political commentator Michelle Malkin.
Malkin first allied herself with Fuentes in 2019, in the aftermath of what came to be known by Fuentes’ fans as the “Groyper War.” Battles in this proverbial war took place over the course of a college speaking tour organized by the late Charlie Kirk and involved followers of Fuentes, known as the groypers, confronting Kirk and other speakers about their stances on immigration, relations with Israel, and social conservatism. While Kirk denounced the groypers as white supremacists and antisemites, Malkin came to their defense. “Here’s my message to the new generation of America Firsters exposing the big lies of the anti-American open borders establishment and its controlled opposition operatives: If I was your mom, I’d be proud as hell,” Malkin declared, during a Young America’s Foundation-sponsored speech.
Although YAF promptly severed ties with Malkin over her support of, in their words, “holocaust deniers, white nationalists, street brawlers, [and] racists,” she was praised by Fuentes and his followers. She went on to give the keynote address at Fuentes’s inaugural America First Political Action Conference in 2020, by which point the groypers had welcomed her into their ranks and begun affectionately calling her “mommy.” Malkin’s speech marked a profoundly strange moment in far-right politics: An Asian woman with a deep golden-brown complexion had become a leader of a movement advocating for the drastic reduction of America’s nonwhite population.
Malkin hasn’t retained a significant presence within Fuentes’s political movement or public life generally, for that matter. Nevertheless, her metamorphosis from a darling of establishment conservative institutions—YAF, Fox News, the American Conservative Union, and so on—to a mother figure to groypers remains relevant insofar as it demonstrates both how and why the white identitarian movement is marked by significant nonwhite involvement at virtually every level. Moreover, the multiracialism of the groypers, broadly speaking, highlights the more fundamental reality that America is undergoing a racial realignment—such that an increasingly nativist and racist right wing will not necessarily be a whiter one.
Fuentes and Malkin are but two examples of individuals who hold or sympathize with white nationalist views despite being entirely or partially nonwhite. While it is impossible to say for sure just how many such people exist, it is safe to assume that nonwhites at least make up a sizable minority of Fuentes’s fan base. When asked during a recent interview with Candace Owens to describe the groypers, Fuentes stated that they are not just young white men but “other men too—some of them are Hispanic, some of them are black, some of them are Jewish, for that matter.” Subsequent conferences he hosted in 2021 and 2022 also included nonwhite speakers and special guests besides Malkin, such as African American political commentators Jon Miller and Jesse Lee Peterson.
In a 2022 report on Latino involvement in the white identitarian movement, in particular, researchers Ben Lorber and Natalie Li also note that “[w]ithin the largely online groyper fan base, Latinx-identified accounts like ‘Hispanic Groyper,’ ‘Venezuelan American Groyper,’ and ‘Latino Zoomer’ abound.” (The latter, as it turns out, was the online persona of a Fuentes fan named Alejandro Richard Velasquez Gomez, who was sentenced to five years in prison in 2024 for threatening to attack a Turning Point USA conference.) Lorber and Li further recall that on the election night livestream Fuentes hosted on November 3, 2020, three of the seven assembled white nationalist panelists were of partial Hispanic descent. Fuentes himself touched on the irony of the situation, joking, “Castizo futurism is real. America First is a Latino movement!” (The word “castizo” refers to an individual of predominantly European ancestry and a smaller proportion of indigenous American ancestry.)
How to explain these seemingly contradictory positions? Malkin’s explanation of her own beliefs suggests that some nonwhites in Fuentes’s movement believe America should be a predominantly white country. These individuals typically understand the cultures of America and the West to be inextricably linked to the populations who created them—namely, those of white European descent. While they believe that they themselves have assimilated to those cultures and adopted their traditions and values, they are skeptical or outright in denial of the fact that other nonwhites are capable of doing the same. In other words, they see themselves as lone exceptions to nonwhite backwardness, ethnocentricity, and cultural incompatibility.
Speaking at a November 2021 conference hosted by the white nationalist publication American Renaissance, Malkin listed off the Koch brothers, the Wall Street Journal, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and the Anti-Defamation League as a few examples of the many “anti-white” actors responsible for the “demographic mass murder” of America due to what she characterized as their promotion of immigration from non-European countries. She further declared that the answer to police brutality victim Rodney King’s famous question amid the 1992 Los Angeles riots, “Can we all just get along?” is a definitive no.
Later in that same speech, Malkin credited a “childhood that was filled with positive reverence and appreciation for Western civilization”—its literature and classical music, in particular—with making her immune to the “hogwash of anti-white propagandists.” She also noted that the mere fact that her own parents immigrated to the U.S. from a developing country did not obligate her to advocate for ruinous immigration policies “that have transformed large swathes of the only homeland I’ve ever known and loved into the very kind of third world hellhole that my parents didn’t want me to grow up in in the first place.” Here, Malkin clearly identifies herself with white people and their cultural output. However, she doesn’t seem to believe that her coethnics or anyone else of non-European descent, for that matter, could ever likewise carry on the national and civilizational legacies of America and the West. Thus, she is apparently forced to conclude that a very high degree of white racial stock is needed for America to recapture its authentic character and former greatness.
A second subset of nonwhite groypers may be drawn to Fuentes because they enjoy his racist tirades and adeptness at offending woke pieties. Racial prejudice, it hardly needs to be stated, is not unique to white people. Many Hispanics and Asians, for example, harbor racist attitudes about black people, and blacks and Hispanics often hold negative views of Jews. It is not difficult to see how rants in which Fuentes declares that “Jews are running society, women need to shut the f— up, blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part, and we would live in paradise!” could appeal especially to men of non-European backgrounds who do, in fact, agree with him on those fronts. Moreover, nonwhites by and large dislike political correctness. It would not be surprising, therefore, if a small minority of them relished Fuentes’ transgressions of our norms of acceptable speech.
Fuentes’ tirades and transgressive style also mean that for some groypers—white and nonwhite—their groyperism is less a coherent political ideology advocating for a white nation than it is, as Dispatch contributor Katherine Dee puts it, “a posture mixed with fandom that centers Nick Fuentes as the fan object.”
Fuentes’s fanbase and its ethnic composition are worth dissecting not because the group is particularly large, but because it is nevertheless a faction of the Trump-led Republican Party. As commentators like Richard Hanania and John Ganz have pointed out, the American right in recent years has been “groyperized”—that is, groypers and their rhetoric have infiltrated mainstream conservative institutions. The recent leaks of Young Republican chats, for example, are clear evidence that casual racism and antisemitism are common among rising GOP leaders. Mainstream conservatives have not yet begun declaring that America is a nation only for white people or condemning Jewish power, but, if the heretofore existing “firewall” against Fuentes collapses, some might start.
While one might assume that a more thoroughly groyperized Republican Party would be a party made up exclusively of white people, the current racial makeup of Fuentes’ following suggests otherwise. Fuentes’ politics, not to mention his provocative communication style, clearly have the potential to appeal to many Americans who are not of European descent. If the GOP adopts additional groyper-tinged rhetoric and political positions, it may very well become simultaneously more racist and more racially diverse than it has traditionally been.
Indeed, recent polling from the Manhattan Institute further supports this hypothesis. While the think tank’s national survey of 3,000 Americans who voted for Trump in 2024 did not discover an ascendant white nationalist wing of the Republican Party, it did find that about 30 percent of those voters were “younger, more racially diverse, and more likely to have voted for Democratic candidates in the recent past” than longstanding GOP voters. These “New Entrant Republicans” do not display much ideological consistency—while some are far-right, others are not conservative at all and hold more progressive views on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, traditional family values, and even immigration. They are, however, notably more racist and antisemitic, more likely to subscribe to various conspiracy theories, and more inclined to support political violence than their older counterparts. (Relatively greater antisemitism among younger Americans compared to their older peers has also been borne out by several other studies.) And it was by bringing this younger, browner, more disaffected set of voters into the Republican fold that Trump was able to assemble the most diverse winning coalition for the party in recent history.
A Republican leadership class made up of groypers would most likely energize and garner support from these more racially diverse “New Entrants” and risk sacrificing that of some older, whiter, traditional Republicans. Indeed, with Fuentes in mind, survey author Jesse Arm deems these party newcomers “the ostensible audience for much of the eccentricity that now preoccupies conservative politics.” While the entirety of this bloc of “younger men, often nonreligious, often alienated from institutions, steeped in Internet-fueled irony and grievance” may not agree with figures like Fuentes on every issue, we could reasonably expect that bloc to nevertheless back far-right ethnonationalists who appeal to its bigoted and conspiracist tendencies.
Still, such a movement seems liable to collapse under the weight of its own glaring contradictions. Fuentes himself acknowledges and even revels in these: In one episode of his show, he answers critics who tell him, “Your last name’s Fuentes. When the Nazis win, you’re getting the rope,” by responding in characteristic fashion: “No, you don’t understand. The Alt Right is a Latino movement. When we win, it will be the white skinheads who will be fed into the gas chambers of the Empire of Guadalupe Hidalgo.” At other times, he seems unable to decide whether his goal is to remake America into a white country, or to encourage the government to engage in a Singapore-style “active management of [racial] diversity.” Such moments lay bare the fundamental unseriousness of his politics.
The multiracialism of the groypers could even be grounds for optimism. That even racists are apparently able to put aside their differences and advocate for a common cause is surely a sign that the roadblocks our country faces on the path toward racial harmony are not nearly as insurmountable as some would have us believe. Indeed, the road ahead might just involve convincing Americans of different races that they would be better off uniting with one another not on the basis of shared prejudices, but on the basis of shared principles.
