From our correspondent in the United States,
Dropped by Adidas, Balenciaga, Gap and Foot Locker after his anti-Semitic excesses, Kanye West chose to respond with one-upmanship. The one who now calls himself “Ye” has surrounded himself with two far-right figures for his 2024 presidential candidacy project. White supremacist Nick Fuentes, 24, came with him to dine at Donald Trump’s house during last, but also Milo Yiannopoulos, a former editor of the nationalist site Breitbart News and figure of the alt-right. Invited by YouTuber Tim Pool on Monday, the trio slammed the door in the middle of an interview. The reason ? The podcaster interrupted Ye in the middle of a tirade on “the Jews” present in “banks and the media”.
Donald Trump has come under fire from all quarters, including Mike Pence, for hosting Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago. The former American president claimed that it was Kanye West who brought the young nationalist with him, and that he did not “know him”.
Nick Fuentes, the white supremacy troll
He is only 24 years old but already has a hell of a CV of hate. He rose to prominence after his participation in the Charlottesville racist rally in 2017, and took the lead of the “Groypers”, supremacist trolls raised on 4chan memes, gathered under the banner of the frog Pepe the frog. In his America First podcast, Fuentes downplayed the scale of the Holocaust, comparing the time it took to kill Jews in the gas chambers to the time it took to bake “a round of 6 million cookies.” He has championed racial segregation, advocated violence against women – who he says shouldn’t have the right to vote – and attacked many prominent figures in the LGBTQ community.
On January 6, 2021, we see Nick Fuentes with a megaphone in front of the Capitol, but he did not, a priori, enter the building. A few weeks earlier, Fuentes had received $250,000 in bitcoins from a French Internet user who committed suicide, donating his fortune to several figures of the international ultra-right. Contacted at the time by 20 minuteshe had refused to answer and blocked our Twitter account.
Deplatformed by YouTube, Twitter and Meta, he turned to Telegram, where he has 45,000 subscribers, and collaborated with conspirator Alex Jones to launch the live-streaming platform Cozy.tv.
Milo Yiannopoulos, the return of the pariah
How did Nick Fuentes bond with Kanye West? It was the Briton Milo Yiannopoulos who presented them. The former Breitbart News got in touch with Kanye West via a producer from Alex Jones, he explained on the set of Tim Pool. When Ye hinted in a video that he would be a candidate in 2024 last Thursday, he introduced Yiannopoulos as his “campaign manager”.
For the former protege of Steve Bannon, it’s a return to the spotlight, five years after being “cancelled”. During Gamergate, he attacked “feminist sociopathic programmers”. In 2016, he was banned from Twitter, accusing him of participating in a mob campaign against black actress Leslie Jones. Radioactive after defending sexual relations between adults and 13-year-olds in the gay community, he resigned from Breitbart.
Today, Milo Yiannopoulos describes himself as “Catholic” and “ex-gay”, and defends conversion therapy. He made his political comeback this summer as an intern for the elected Marjorie Taylor Greene, before joining Kanye West. Who, we recall, had obtained a grand total of 66,365 votes in the presidential election of 2020.