James Fishback is trying to bring the neofascist politics of Nick Fuentes still further into the GOP mainstream—and the grievance-peddling podcaster is glad to oblige.
“Pretty soon, all winning Republican politicians will talk like this.”
That was Tucker Carlson’s enthusiastic distillation of the white-nationalist talking points offered up on his influential MAGA podcast by last Friday’s guest James Fishback, a 31-year-old upstart candidate in this year’s gubernatorial primary in Florida. Most observers still view Fishback as a long shot in a crowded field of hopefuls seeking to replace incumbent Governor Ron DeSantis, who’s stepping aside due to term limits. The front-runner, GOP Representative Byron Donalds, sports an endorsement by President Donald Trump and a massive war chest.
But Carlson granted Fishback a fawning, hour-long interview on his show for the same reason that, two months prior, Carlson had platformed white nationalist Nick Fuentes, a move that sent shock waves across the MAGA establishment. Fishback and Fuentes are prominent figures in an ascendant, Gen-Z America First wing of MAGA openly suspicious of Israel, economically populist and steeped in a white Christian nationalist worldview that scorns Jews, women, and nonwhite immigrants.
Five days before the Carlson interview, Fishback did a drive-by video with white nationalist influencer Ella Maulding. “James, what’s something that’s such a big issue in America that Republican politicians won’t talk about?” Maulding asked on the 24-second clip, which has now logged more than 760,000 views on X. Fishback doesn’t miss a beat: “The great replacement and white genocide. They’re both real, and I’m running for Florida governor to stop it.”
Maulding’s eyes flashed when Fishback intoned the magic words white genocide. “Let’s gooo,” she cheered. This exchange was designed to pander to Maulding’s fanbase of “groypers,” as Fuentes’ followers are known. Maulding is not shy about engaging in the other topics she says Republican politicians “won’t talk about.” Her account is riddled with attacks on the Talmud and claims that Jews are behind pedophilia, pornography and immigration. She has called Nick Fuentes “the greatest civil rights leader in history,” and once posted, “if antisemitism means not wanting my race genocided and overrun by third worlders, happily.”
If successful, Fishback’s candidacy could achieve the same mainstream acceptance on the right for the rhetoric of “white genocide” that Carlson and others have already engineered for the “great replacement,” the kindred belief that liberal elites are conspiring to “replace” white Americans through non-white immigration. For much of the MAGA mainstream, talk of white genocide is still a fringe phenomenon, conjuring the obsessions of an extremely online discourse fueled by accelerationist fantasies of white revolution, the racist invective of 4chan forums, and “race war” manifestos.
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But Fuentes, Fishback, and Carlson are looking to change that. Maulding’s video marks Fishback as a hard-right candidate willing to say the quiet part out loud, and appeals to a groyper constituency that feels emboldened, unashamed, and ready for power.
Fishback has distinguished himself in the 2026 midterm cycle as the first mainstream Republican candidate to court the groypers without pretense or apology. At his campaign events, many young men can be seen wearing Fuentes’s blue America First hats; at one rally, Fishback donned the hat himself. “This hat is not about hate,” he told his audience. “It’s about unapologetic love for Americans. I’m proud to wear this hat.”
When he came under fire, he refused to disavow his groyper fans. “I want to clarify and apologize for absolutely nothing,’” Fishback declared in a campaign video, saying that the groypers “have a real pulse for what is going on in the country.”
Fishback has also floated such defenses in the groypers’ own mediasphere. “Say what you want about Nick,” he said in a December interview on the streaming show of groyper leader Beardson Beardly. “Nick’s followers, as I have met them, are insanely smart, insightful and patriotic.” In 2022, the last prominent GOP candidate to flirt with the groypers, Washington state congressional hopeful Joe Kent, distanced himself from the movement when such dalliances were publicized. But now that pundits like Carlson have made space for Fuentes in the MAGA tent, figures like Fishback are emboldened to embrace the groypers as bearers of the true MAGA gospel.
The day before Carlson’s interview, Fishback appeared on The Backlash, a Youtube show run by white nationalists in northern Idaho. On their table the hosts displayed The Culture of Critique, an antisemitic tome by white nationalist theorist Kevin MacDonald. When asked if he would attend a Hanukkah celebration as Florida governor—a state with one of the largest Jewish populations in the country—Fishback responded that “I would never attend any other religious celebration or service other than that of my unapologetic Christian faith.” “Very based,” replied cohost Dave Reilly, who helped organize the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, before working as an operative at the far-right edge of Idaho politics. “I think it’s important to preserve the identity of heritage Americans,” Fishback told the hosts. “I think it’s important to not let us be replaced.” (“Heritage Americans” is another recent white nationalist coinage—a didactic, if completely incoherent, effort to elevate white American immigrants above their non-European counterparts.) Later in the show Reilly’s cohost Rebecca Hargraves, whose online moniker is ‘Blonde in the Belly of the Beast’, was unwrapping Christmas gifts from fans. “This looks a little Third Reichy!” she exclaimed, briefly showing a Nazi flag to the camera.
Fishback, a former hedge fund investor, gained notoriety in 2024 for launching Azoria Capital, which sought to exclude companies pursuing diversity initiatives from the S&P 500. The venture cemented his anti-DEI credentials within the MAGA business community. A self-styled DOGE adviser, he also floated a plan to create a federal “DOGE Dividend” that would direct 20 percent of the alleged savings realized by the government-slashing program to taxpayers. That proposal went nowhere—in part because the ballyhooed Elon Musk initiative’s impact on spending was negligible. Regardless, it remains unclear whether Fishback ever played an instrumental role at DOGE.
Fishback is riding an insurgent wave of MAGA populism toward a bid at leading the third-largest state in the country. With one-time presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis at its helm, the Florida governor’s mansion has emerged in recent years as a flagship for state-level strategy in the conservative movement, making Florida arguably the “testing ground for the future of the Republican Party,” as Fishback put it in an interview with former Infowars host Owen Shroyer last week. Florida has long been a bastion of pro-Israel politics. But as polling shows rising skepticism over US support for Israel across the MAGA base, especially among younger conservatives, Fishback is singing a different tune. He has slammed AIPAC as a foreign lobby and regularly attacks Randy Fine, Florida’s hard-right Zionist congressman, who called him a “weirdo groyper” in response. (Fine faces his own conservative Israel-critical challenger in this year’s primary, Aaron Baker, who has recently endorsed Fishback.)
Fishback has pledged to divest $385 million in Florida Israel Bonds, and redirect the funds into a statewide downpayment assistance program to help married couples buy their first home. “You’ve got my vote,” Carlson, who owns a property in Boca Grande, exclaimed upon hearing this proposal. “That’s all I needed to hear. Amen, Amen.”
Fishback has also slammed DeSantis-backed state statutes that codify the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism. Fishback’s denunciations echo widespread criticism, including from many on the left, that the measure will restrict freedom of speech by equating antisemitism with criticism of Israel. “You could actually be punished, fined, even expelled from a public college or university if you are so-called ‘convicted’ of antisemitism,” he told an interviewer. “To simply criticize Benjamin Netanyahu or to say that Israel is committing a genocide—how on earth is that anything other than protected speech?”
Byron Donalds, the GOP frontrunner for the race, is a staunch supporter of Israel. The Republican Jewish Coalition has attacked Fishback as “a radical fringe candidate,” and Israeli media has called him the “Republicans’ version of Zohran Mamdani.” Fishback claims that the pro-Israel Right views his race “as a proxy war” for control over the Republican Party and says that he welcomes the fight. But as is the case with many on the right, his hostility to foreign intervention remains selective. “It’s our hemisphere,” he proclaimed in response to Trump’s attack on Venezuela. “We own it.… we can do whatever the hell we want. We’re America.”
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White grievance has long been commonplace across the MAGA right. “The only systemic racism in America,” Fishback told Carlson, “is against white Christian men.” “I’m aware,” Carlson replied. But more than most, Fishback explicitly casts race war as the pivotal feature of political life. Fishback has defined “the great replacement” as “a coordinated effort by both the government and large multinational corporations to replace the founding stock, the heritage Americans in our country with cheap foreign slave labor.” Whereas many Republicans still speak euphemistically of replacement campaigns targeting a vague grouping of “voters” or “citizens,” Fishback doesn’t mince words: He means white Americans. He has framed the issue as existential, advising conservatives not to vote for any Republican “if they are unwilling to acknowledge that the great replacement is both real, is happening and it must be stopped,” as he said in last week’s interview with Shroyer.
He has come under fire for slamming Donalds, who is Black, as a “slave” to corporate and foreign interests, and borrowing from the Trumpian playbook, mocks the front-runner with nicknames like “AIPAC Shakur” (a term that, he took care to clarify to a chuckling Carlson, he would not have applied to Randy Fine, who is white). “There is a fork in the road,” he told one crowd, channeling recent groyper attacks on Indian American figures like Usha Vance and Kash Patel. “I told that to Vivek [Ramaswamy] and he said, ‘what’s a fork?’”
Fishback also appeals to Christian nationalist sentiments, pledging to close all abortion clinics in Florida and impose a total abortion ban, including in cases of rape and incest. “We are one people, united under a Christian God,” he told the same crowd. While Donalds wished supporters a Happy Kwanzaa and Happy Diwali, “Let me say right here, right now, Christ is King!” (“Christ is King” is another groyper-branded refrain, which came to national attention two years ago when hard-right provocateur Candace Owens tweeted it out at Ben Shapiro, her then-employer at The Daily Wire, in a fight over Israel’s war in Gaza.)
Fishback follows a familiar America First playbook, blending white Christian chauvinism and criticism of Israel with a pseudo-populist economic agenda. “I’m running…to make life more affordable for you and your family,” he announced in his campaign launch video. “The end for our society,” he told streamer Auron MacIntyre in December, “should be a free people, not a free market…I define America First not by the stock market going up, not by GDP going up, but how are average American citizens fairing economically?” Recognizing the salience of home ownership for young voters especially, he attacks the global asset management firm BlackRock, and Airbnb, for buying up Florida’s housing stock, and he supports a ban on the ownership of residential real estate by private equity or foreign investors. Taking aim at the state’s developers, he’s slammed large AI data centers for driving up electricity bills and harming the water supply. He’s also announced that “we [in Florida] do not want to be the financial capital of the world. We want to be the citrus capital again, the ag[ricultural] capital, the cattle capital, the tourism capital.”
But like other self-professed right populists Fishback endorses solutions, like the DOGE dividend or his proposal to abolish property taxes, that offer little more than nominal modifications to market-driven neoliberalism. Since he remains dogmatically hostile to resource redistribution or a social safety net, he draws battle lines not between labor and capital but between Florida families and the agenda of “globalist” corporations. The chief villains in this persecution fantasy are also immigrants—both legal and undocumented. Fishback’s cohort of America First propagandists attribute nearly all of Gen Z’s economic woes to cunning globalist-backed, immigrant-driven schemes to wrest away the material birthright of white America. These interests converge, Fishback and his allies argue, in measures like the H1‑B visa, offering residency and eventual citizenship to skilled workers in key industries such as tech. Eliminating the H1-B program, they contend, will protect not only the demographic dominance of the “founding stock” but also its beleaguered earning power.
Jewish pro-Israel MAGA pundits such as Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin stand as convenient targets representing what Fishback has called “country club establishment Republicans”—an ironic term, given that the overt antisemitism embraced by the groypers was used not too long ago to police the memberships of those same country clubs. Carlson and Fishback scoffed, paraphrasing Shapiro’s recent comments at AmFest, the annual conference held by Turning Point USA in December (itself a flashpoint in MAGA’s ongoing divide), that “I want [young] white men to stop complaining and get off the couch, because there are jobs that are available.” Florida workers deserve “an honest wage for an honest day’s work,” Fishback countered, “but they’ll take off on Sunday to praise our Christian Lord.” Shapiro’s “total disdain and loathing for white Christian men,” Carlson agreed, is “bristling with hostility.”
Many have noted that Fishback is a fairly recent convert to the hard-line America First cause. Pointing to bylines in the pro-Israel conservative outlet The Free Press and photos of Fishback appearing with the outlet’s editor, Bari Weiss, and promoting her book How to Fight Antisemitism, suspicious groypers have dismissed him as an opportunistic fairweather friend, and claimed that his campaign is a skinsuit engineered by the Jewish establishment to co-opt their cause. Some have even suggested that Fishback is a crypto-Jew himself.
But with candidates such as Fishback edging toward the mainstream, the groypers’ long-term strategy looks to be paying off. As the “right-wing flank of the Republican Party,” Fuentes told his followers in 2022, it’s the groypers’ job to “push the envelope”, dragging the party “kicking and screaming” to become “a truly reactionary party.” These days “there’s a lot more urgency,” he told his followers at the end of 2025, “and we want more than what we’re getting…. I’m willing to punish the GOP. I do believe the GOP needs to be burned to the fucking ground.” Regardless, it would have been unthinkable, just a short time ago, for a viable conservative candidate for major office to embrace groyper support, withstand pushback from whatever remains of the GOP mainstream, and be rewarded with a spot on the MAGA movement’s largest platform. The hard right has leveraged its infrastructure of online streamers and influencer networks to cement what may prove a durable political constituency, with influence spilling over into the electoral realm. Fuentes has successfully breached the MAGA gates, and it seems that groyper politics are here to stay.
Fishback is betting on young MAGA men to help translate his online buzz into real-world momentum. In December, he won a warm welcome at a “Florida First Town Hall,” organized by University of Florida College Republicans—a group whose members were expelled from the group chat of the school’s Turning Point USA chapter for supporting Tucker Carlson’s interview with Fuentes. The event promised to highlight a “new era of right wing politics and America First ideals.” Fishback has pledged to carry the crusade to more campuses across Florida. Spurred on by an energized young cadre, the right’s widening fault lines over central issues such as immigration, national identity, Israel may turn into a chasm. “The Republican Party is either going to go in the direction of America First working‑class populism,” Fishback said in another recent interview, “or it will cease to exist, and it should cease to exist.”
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