In 2017, my best friend, then a junior at Boston University, started sending me screenshots from a private Facebook page for BU students. The posts were ridiculing a student who had attended the white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville and had apparently been bullied into dropping out of college. I remember, in particular, a crudely animated video of that student set to Lorde's recently released "Liability." The online jeers toward the student weren't very nice, but then again, neither is racism.
That student's name was Nick Fuentes, and I didn't think of him again until he made headlines late last year for meeting with former President Trump and the artist formerly known as Kanye West. It turns out that Fuentes had wielded the attention from the Unite the Right rally to elevate his status as an openly racist far-right politician.
In a new feature for Mother Jones, my colleague Ali Breland explains how Fuentes went from exiled college student to Mar-a-Lago guest by tapping into Gen Z's economic anxieties. "Fuentes’ power comes from layering on a generational critique that taps into young people’s apprehension that their prospects are dimming," Ali writes. "By combining class and economic precarity with white nationalism, Fuentes makes racism even more persuasive to a certain kind of person."
Don't miss Ali's eye-opening investigation into the rise of nativist politics among a cohort of young people who mix anti-capitalism with unabashed bigotry.
—Abigail Weinberg
