Over the weekend, America’s premier college Republican group, Turning Point USA (TPUSA), held their annual People’s Convention at Huntington Place (formerly known as Cobo Hall) in Detroit. The conference featured the regular carnival of horrors and right wing grift one would expect of founder Charlie Kirk and his organization. Some of the speakers included former President Donald Trump, Candace Owens, Donald Trump Jr., Dr. Ben Carson, Steve Bannon, Vivek, Ramaswamey, Rodger Stone, former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, and many other lesser known figureheads of the movement. The feeling outside of the convention hall was almost that of the Shakedown Street lot at a Grateful Dead concert, but instead of selling nitrous oxide balloons and hippie fan art, people were setting up stands of bootleg MAGA merchandise such as T-shirts, hats, pins, stickers, flags, cardboard cut outs of former President Trump, etc. Many of the people we encountered varied from casual attendees to online right-wing influencers, people running for local office, bizarre performance artists, and distinguished looking men in suits.
Elsewhere in the city, something even more sinister was brewing. The openly white supremacist America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC), founded by neo-nazi agitator Nick Fuentes, was holding their shadow conference at the Siren Hotel in downtown Detroit. Nick Fuentes has been a rising star of the neo-fascist movement in the United States for some years now, and his profile has lifted him into one of the leading voices of America’s openly white supremacist — openly antisemitic movement against mainstream conservative thought. On Friday, Fuentes made an attempt to crash the TPUSA conference before immediately being evicted and banned from the premises while the conference was going on. His supporters could be seen walking around the city between the convention hall and downtown area. They are made up almost entirely of white men in their early to mid 20s, wearing obnoxiously over sized suits and ties and sometimes a blue baseball cap that says “America First.”
The Murder City team spent a large part of the afternoon sleuthing around the downtown area trying to get information about AFPAC’s plans for the day. Eventually, we learned that Fuentes himself would address his followers from outside the TPUSA People’s Conference at approximately 7 PM. We went down there to see hundreds of his supporters (colloquially known as “groypers”, a play on the infamous Pepe the Frog meme used by far right Trump supporters during the 2016 Presidential election) amassing across the street from Huntington Place, outside the Wyndham Hotel. The crowd had a male to female ratio of about 40 to 1. The AFPAC attendees were overwhelmingly white men with maybe a dozen or so people of color overall. One black man standing next to us for most of the speech was wearing a black “Israel did 9-11” baseball hat.
After a slew of opening speakers, Fuentes finally made his appearance and walked with a security detail to the Wynham Hotel balcony up the stairs, directly across from the convention hall. He used a megaphone to address supporters and unleashed a myriad of grievances about the current state of America and the mainstream conservative movement. This was all happening as former President Trump was finishing his keynote speech inside the convention hall, and TPUSA convention attendees were letting out into the street.
The energy emanating from this rally is difficult for me to describe. As someone who has been to hundreds of different political rallies over the years, I can say for certain that I have never experienced such an atrocious atmosphere in all my years on the planet. It was a kind of spiritual sickness that drained the life-force out of me the longer it went on. I’m no stranger to the kinds of extremist ideas promoted by Fuentes, but seeing him in person and watching his supporters hang on every word as he launched into one reactionary tirade after another — it gave me a feeling that I hope to never experience ever again.
The speech was punctuated by crowd chants of “America First,” “Christ is King,” as well as boos at the mention of anything or anyone that could be considered remotely Jewish or unfavorable to AFPAC’s goals. In many respects, Fuentes’ manner of speaking reminds me a lot of former President Trump. He uses humor (if one can call it that) and leans heavily on cheap heat to elicit boos and crowd reaction. The difference is Fuentes is younger, angrier, and unlike former President Trump, Fuentes is a committed ideologue seeking power for reasons deeper than his own self aggrandizement.
As far as a content of the speech itself, Fuentes offered a laundry list of theocratic fascist talking points that many people familiar with the American fascist movement will recognize. Fuentes and his supporters are Catholic, and many of his ideas are born out of a fundamentalist interpretation of Catholicism. Religion plays a central factor in Fuentes’ world view. His political program would best be described as antisemitic, anti-muslim, anti-LGBT, anti-multiculturalism, anti-anything that isn’t completely dominated by straight white males in monogamous relationships with women — whose only purpose is to serve as barefoot, pregnant housewives. Fuentes is a shameless Holocaust denier and Hitler supporter, who openly uses the N-word on livestreams when discussing black people. Although some of that more hardened rhetoric was missing from this speech, as he claimed that, “We must love our enemies because that is what Christ commands us to do.” That being said, he pulled no punches when it came to his favorite, ubiquitous boogey-man: the Jewish people.
He praised Henry Ford as a brilliant industrialist who built Detroit and by extension the United States with the mass manufacturing of the automobile. Fuentes speaks of Ford’s political ambition to run for President of the United States in the 1920s, and says Ford’s political aspirations were thwarted because of a pamphlet he circulated in the early 1920s called the International Jew. The International Jew is an essential text of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists that outlines a vast, all-encompassing conspiracy by Jewish people to control the world. Henry Ford was an open Hitler supporter during his time. The two men shared a mutual appreciation for one another. Hitler was quoted as saying in 1923, “We look on Heinrich Ford as the leader of the growing fascist movement in America.” Fuentes says that Ford’s political hopes were dashed by “…an alien entity in our country.”
Fuentes goes on to praise Kanye West’s recent history of antisemitic comments and says he voted for West in the 2020 Presidential election. Fuentes also worked on West’s 2020 Presidential campaign. He goes on to criticize former President Trump, saying that he will withhold his support for Trump’s Presidential campaign until he commits to an isolationist foreign policy to avoid conflict with Iran, Russia, and cut off all military and financial aid to Israel. Fuentes’ views on Israel echo a lot of criticisms levied by left-wing, pro Palestine activists in America. The key difference is Fuentes’ criticism of Israel is apart of a larger tapestry of antisemitic belief, that views Jewish people as a monolithic cadre trying to destroy western civilization. He rounds out this section of the speech calling for a second American revolution from the “Jewish mafia.”
The final leg of Fuentes’ speech was spent drawing a distinction between his movement of groypers and the mainstream conservative movement represented by TPUSA. The crux of his grievances revolve around the fact that his mainstream contemporaries aren’t as brazen or openly white nationalist as he is. He believes that the mainstream conservative movement is too busy selling water bottles and t-shirts, instead of pushing a more “pure” or extremist idealogical framework meant to reshape American society as we currently understand it. Fuentes suggests that his movement is winning the “war of ideas” within the right-wing sphere of influence. He says, “They can kick me out of Turning Point USA for a thousand years — my ideas and my followers are already inside the building.”
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