Twitter has reinstated the account of Nick Fuentes, the prominent white supremacist who most recently made headlines for joining the antisemitic presidential campaign of rapper Ye, after a year-and-half exile from the platform.
The tech company reinstated Fuentes’ verified account Tuesday, making him the latest extremist figure permitted on the site since the beginning of billionaire Elon Musk’s chaotic tenure as CEO.
Twitter banned Fuentes in July 2021 for “repeated violations” of the rules, pushing him and his followers, many of whom call themselves “Groypers,” to alternative social media platforms like Telegram. Fuentes created another account in October 2022 when Musk took control of the company, but it swiftly banned that, too. Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Fuentes’ reinstatement.
Now that’s he’s officially back on Twitter, the 24-year-old — who rose to prominence in fascist circles after attending the deadly neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 — will have an even bigger megaphone to push his explicitly racist and antisemitic agenda.
Fuentes held a literal megaphone outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, where he reportedly could be heard encouraging his supporters to storm the building. Congress later subpoenaed Fuentes — who had been a major player in the “Stop the Steal” movement to keep Donald Trump in power after the then-president’s 2020 election loss — over his involvement in the insurrection.
In February 2022, Fuentes hosted a white supremacist conference in Florida where he praised Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and led his supporters in a chant supporting Russian President Vladimir Putin as the Kremlin’s bombs dropped on Ukraine. Another speaker called for Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former chief medical adviser to the White House, to be hanged. Far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) also spoke at the conference.
Although once an avid supporter of Trump, Fuentes has since become an adviser to the rival presidential campaign of Ye, the entertainer formerly known as Kanye West. Fuentes joined the campaign just as the Ye was facing backlash over a series of alarming antisemitic comments.
Ye and Fuentes dined with Trump at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago mansion last year. Later, the pair sat down for an interview on the show InfoWars with Alex Jones, the infamous conspiracy theorist. Ye praised Hitler during the interview.
Fuentes himself praised Hitler just last week, saying the genocidal fascist was “really fucking cool.”
Musk has recently allowed a slew of white supremacists and other far-right figures back on Twitter, including Andrew Anglin — the fugitive neo-Nazi founder of The Daily Stormer, a site that advocates gassing Jews.
