Have a Happy Holocaust Denial Shabbos from Donald Trump and His Pals YEEZUS and Nick Fuentes!

[David Shasha]

Trump talks with white nationalist Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago dinner

By: Jonathan Swan, Zachary Basu

Former President Trump dined and conversed with white nationalist Nick Fuentes and rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, at his Mar-a-Lago resort on Tuesday night, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

Why it matters: Trump's direct engagement with a man labeled a "white supremacist" by the Justice Department, one week after declaring his 2024 candidacy, is likely to draw renewed outrage over the former president's embrace of extremists.

• Fuentes, who frequently promotes racist and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, had been spotted with Ye at Mar-a-Lago, but reports erroneously suggested he did not have dinner with the former president.

What they're saying: "Kanye West very much wanted to visit Mar-a-Lago. Our dinner meeting was intended to be Kanye and me only, but he arrived with a guest whom I had never met and knew nothing about," Trump said in a statement.

• A Trump spokesman did not provide comment on additional reporting about the dinner. Fuentes did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Behind the scenes: A source familiar with the dinner conversation told Axios that Trump "seemed very taken" with Fuentes, impressed that the 24-year-old was able to rattle off statistics and recall speeches dating back to his 2016 campaign.

• Paraphrasing the conversation, the source said Fuentes told the president he preferred him to be "authentic," and that Trump seemed scripted and unlike himself during his recent 2024 campaign announcement speech.
• Trump responded, “You like it better when I just speak off the cuff," the source said. Fuentes replied that he did, calling Trump an "amazing" president when he was unrestrained. "There was a lot of fawning back and forth," the source added.

Fuentes told Trump that he represented a side of Trump's base that was disappointed with his newly cautious approach, especially with what some far-right activists view as a lack of support for those charged in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.

• Trump didn't disagree with Fuentes, but said he has advisers who want him to read off teleprompters and be more "presidential." Notably, Trump referred to himself as a politician, which he has been loathe to do in the past.
• Fuentes also told Trump that he would crush potential 2024 Republican rivals in a primary, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Trump asked for Fuentes' opinion on other candidates as well.

Trump at one point turned to Ye and said, "I really like this guy. He gets me," according to the source.

• "To be honest, I don't believe the president knew who the hell [Fuentes] was," the source added.

Trump asked if Fuentes was on social media such as Truth Social, the former president's alternative to Twitter.

• Fuentes told Trump that he was on Truth Social but had been banned from the social media platform Gettr because Trump adviser Jason Miller, the CEO of the company, wasn't a fan of his.
• Trump asked whether it was because Fuentes was on the "fringe" of his supporter base, the source said. Fuentes acknowledged that he was, saying he's "one of those people who got banned from everything."

Driving the news: Ye, whose Twitter account was recently restored after being restricted for anti-Semitic comments, posted a video on Thursday night titled "Mar-a-Lago debrief."

• Ye claims in the video that Trump was "really impressed" with Fuentes because "unlike so many of the lawyers and so many people that he was left with on his 2020 campaign, he's actually a loyalist."
• A source familiar with the conversation told Axios Trump took a phone call during the dinner, and his demeanor toward Ye seemed to change when he got off the call. Trump made some nasty comments about Ye's ex-wife, Kim Kardashian, and told the rapper to pass them on.
• Ye, who has lost major sponsorships over his anti-Semitism and recent far-right associations, has said he wants to run for president in 2024. The rapper claims Trump started "screaming" at him at the dinner and told him he would lose — "most perturbed" by Ye asking Trump to be his running mate.

Between the lines: The Daily Beast reported Wednesday that Fuentes was not present at the Mar-a-Lago dinner with Ye, citing a source familiar with the matter.

• Ye tweeted out a screenshot of a group text with Fuentes on Thursday night in which a censored participant accuses a Trump adviser of being the source for the Daily Beast story.
• Disgraced far-right commentator Milo Yiannopoulos, who appears with Ye in his "Mar-a-Lago debrief" video, is also in the "YE24" group chat.

Flashback: Truth Social, Trump's social media platform, sparked backlash by verifying Fuentes' account in February.

• Fuentes first gained notoriety after attending the white supremacist "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville in 2017.
• Trump was heavily criticized at the time for his response to the racist violence.

From Axios, November 25, 2022

Republican Jewish Coalition Condemns Trump Meeting with ‘Virulent’ Antisemites Kanye West and Nick Fuentes

By: Andrew Bernard

The Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) on Friday condemned former President Donald Trump’s dinner at his Mar-a-Lago club on Tuesday with antisemitic rapper Kanye West and the holocaust-denying alt-right figure Nick Fuentes.

West, who now goes by the name Ye, posted on Twitter Thursday to describe the meeting. In a video labeled “Mar-a-Lago debrief,” that included the message “#Ye24”, indicating his intention to run for the Presidency, West said that Trump was “most perturbed” that West asked Trump to be his running mate for the Vice Presidency in 2024. Trump announced his own candidacy for re-election as President on 16 November.

In 2019, Fuentes used the “analogy” of “baked cookies” to dispute the number of Jews killed  in the Holocaust.

“How long would it take you to make 6 million? Hmm, I don’t know, it certainly wouldn’t be five years, right? The math doesn’t seem to add up…. I don’t think you’d result in 6 million, maybe 200,000-300,000 cookies,” he said. In 2021 he tweeted that the “next big frontier for populist and conservative inc to coopt [sic] is discussing Jewish Power. Somehow I don’t think they’ll broach that one!” At the AFPAC conference in February, Fuentes praised Vladimir Putin by highlighting how Putin’s critics compare him to Adolf Hitler. “And now they’re going on about Russia and ‘Vladimir Putin is Hitler’ and they say that’s not a good thing,” he said, before pausing, laughing, and saying that he “shouldn’t have said that” to laughter from the crowd.

West said that Trump was “really impressed” with Fuentes at the dinner. “So, Trump is really impressed with Nick Fuentes, and Nick Fuentes, unlike so many other lawyers and so many people that he was left with on his 2020 campaign, he’s actually a loyalist,” West says in the debrief. 

The Republican Jewish Coalition, which featured Trump as a keynote speaker by remote video at their leadership conference on 19 November, condemned the meeting without mentioning Trump by name. “We strongly condemn the virulent antisemitism of Kanye West and Nick Fuentes and call on all political leaders to reject their messages of hate and refuse to meet with them.”

Trump in a statement said that the dinner was intended to be between him and West and that he didn’t know who Fuentes was.

Fuentes, who was removed from YouTube in 2020 for hate speech, has been criticized by RJC in the past for his meetings with political leaders. In February, after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA-14) attended Fuentes’ America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC), they described Fuentes as a “Nazi-symapthizer.” “It is appalling and outrageous that a Member of Congress would share a platform with an individual who has actively spread antisemitic bile, mocked the Holocaust, and promoted dangerous anti-Israel conspiracy theories,” they said.

West for his part has been denounced by the American Jewish Committee (AJC), Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and other Jewish groups for a series of antisemitic statements that have come to light since October. “Although some have tried, there is no rationale, no explaining away Kanye West’s rants on social media for anything else than what they are: vicious antisemitic statements that pose a clear and present danger to every Jewish person,” said AJC’s CEO Ted Deutch in October.

In his twitter videos describing the Mar-a-Lago dinner with Trump, West said that his question to Trump “would be” why he didn’t free January 6 rioters when he had the chance to pardon them as President. It’s not clear if he raised the issue with the former President at the dinner.

From The Algemeiner, November 25, 2022

 

Nicholas J. Fuentes: Five Things to Know

By: ADL

 

https://www.adl.org/blog/nicholas-j-fuentes-five-things-to-know

1. Nicholas Fuentes is a white supremacist leader and organizer and podcaster who seeks to forge a white nationalist alternative to the mainstream GOP.

Nicholas Fuentes first gained widespread notoriety in 2017 when he left Boston University after he reported receiving “threats” tied to his attendance at the white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

He has since become a prominent white supremacist pundit and organizer who has united disparate groups within what was until recently known as the alt right. In 2017, Fuentes began hosting his livestream show America First with Nicholas J. Fuentes, which attracted a cult-like following. Fuentes refers to these supporters as “Groypers” or the “Groyper Army,” who see their bigoted views as necessary to preserve white, European-American identity and culture. They believe that the mainstream conservative movement is just as responsible as liberals and the left for destroying white America, and that Groypers are the true future of the conservative movement.

Fuentes seeks to carve out a space that deliberately and publicly challenges the mainstream conservative movement while doubling down on themes central to the white supremacist movement. Fuentes and his America First adherents vocally support the closure of the U.S. borders to immigrants, while opposing “liberal” values such as feminism and LGBTQ+ rights. Fuentes views these societal changes as the “bastardized Jewish subversion of the American creed. The Founders never intended for America to be a refugee camp for nonwhite people.”  He often uses his platform to further conspiracy theories about the impending destruction of the white race, also known as “white genocide.” In one Tweet, Fuentes stated, “Our civilization is being dismantled, our people are being genocided, and conservatives can’t think past what will play well with liberal media in the next election.”

His podcast, titled “America First,” was initially inspired by the speeches and platform of former President Donald Trump. However, Fuentes later adopted the term for his own purposes after distancing himself from the GOP platform to attract young conservatives. Fuentes and his followers angrily objected to the Trump administration’s embrace of Israel, as well as mainstream conservatives’ support for “globalism,” (a right-wing slur/theory about a cabal of elites who are controlling the world), “endless wars” and other issues they felt ran counter to a truly “America First” agenda.

In an effort to further distance himself from the mainstream GOP, Fuentes founded the America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC) in 2020. AFPAC ostensibly serves as a counterweight to the annual CPAC event held at the same time, which is largely attended by mainstream conservative activists and elected officials. In 2021, AFPAC  included a variety of right-wing pundits, including Michelle Malkin and Steve King, along with white supremacists like Vincent James Foxx of the Red Elephant. Speakers expressed contempt for the Republican Party, describing members as sell-outs willing to betray their constituents.

2) Nicholas Fuentes believes that he is working to defend against “leftist” cultural changes that are destroying the “true America:” a white, Christian nation. 

While Fuentes promotes white supremacist beliefs, he adamantly claims not to be a white supremacist, calling the term an “anti-white slur.” Rather, Fuentes positions himself as “Christian conservative” who opposes societal shifts – on immigration, abortion and more -- as nefarious efforts, led by the left, to fundamentally erode America’s Christian values. This cloaking of ideology is a ploy to attract mainstream support and distract from the group’s fundamentally white supremacist ideology.

Fuentes often pulls on themes prevalent in the white supremacist Great Replacement Theory, or what Fuentes calls “Great Replacement REALITY.” This idea focuses on the belief that native white Europeans are being replaced in their own countries by non-white immigrants from Africa and the Middle East, with the end result being the extinction of the white race.  Fuentes tweeted in June, “If you are a White male zoomer, remember that the people in power hate you and your unborn children and they will try to genocide you in your lifetime.” Fuentes attempts to streamline his extreme ideology by aligning himself with “Christianity” and “traditional” values. During his AFPAC keynote speech, Fuentes asserted that even though adherents of the America First movement are “sheep among the wolves and the snakes,” they will ultimately prevail as they “have the protection of God and Jesus.”

Fuentes rejects the mainstream Republican Party, claiming that many Groypers, including himself, were once strong Trump supporters but are now angry that the Republican Party is not doing enough to deal with demographic and cultural changes that affect the white population in the U.S. According to Fuentes, “the new Republican Party is the party of climate change, universal health care and black lives matter.” Fuentes and his followers often dress in suits and ties to project a “mainstream” conservative image, highlighting the Groyper’s central goal of disrupting and replacing the established GOP. Fuentes says his vision is to “redefine the right-wing by solidifying the political realignment that Donald Trump initiated in 2016” under the banner, slogan and principles of America First.

Like many other right-wing extremists, Fuentes often blankets his bigoted beliefs in sarcasm and ironic humor; he uses cartoonish memes and “just joking” banter, all while spreading white supremacist propaganda.  During an April taping of his show, Fuentes responded to an audience member’s question about how to respond to his wife “getting out of line,” saying, “Why don’t you give her a vicious and forceful backhanded slap with your knuckles right across her face – disrespectfully – and make it hurt?...Just kidding of course…just a joke…I would never lay a hand on a women, unless she had it coming.” Fuentes often uses terms like “culture” as substitutes for more divisive terms such as “race,” and promotes “American values” as a code for white culture and identity. Fuentes largely avoids blatant white supremacist language, and instead focuses on anti-establishment thinking targeting the GOP, mainstream media and “leftists.” This strategy, along with adoption of mainstream meme culture like Pepe the Frog, allows the America First movement to attract younger, mainstream conservatives, who are then exposed to the group’s extremist ideology. 

3) Fuentes has used his platforms to make numerous antisemitic and racist comments.  

Fuentes has made a number of racist and antisemitic comments under the guise of being provocative and ironic. For example, he has referred to Daily Wire columnist Matt Walsh as “shabbos goy race traitor” because he works for Jews (Ben Shapiro, a Jewish conservative, runs the Daily Wire). On a livestream episode, Fuentes “jokingly” denied the Holocaust and compared Jews burnt in concentration camps to cookies in an oven. On May 24, 2021, Fuentes participated in a debate on right-wing conspiracist Alex Jones’ InfoWars with Robert Barnes, a man described as a “constitutional lawyer” who has legally defended both Jones and Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse. During the debate, Fuentes made numerous antisemitic remarks, including, "I don’t see Jews as Europeans and I don’t see them as part of Western civilization, particularly because they are not Christians.” In April, Fuentes appeared to urge mainstream Republicans to champion an antisemitic focus on “Jewish control,” tweeting, “The next big frontier for populist and conservative inc [sic; this is the America First term for establishment GOPers] to coopt [sic] is discussing Jewish Power. Somehow I don’t think they’ll broach that one!” 

Fuentes asserts that “whites are under attack” and that minorities are changing the “texture of life” in America. Fuentes often speaks about the white supremacist ideas of “race realism,” a belief that one’s race governs traits such as behavior and intelligence – with non-whites being inferior to whites. For example, Fuentes tweeted, “Any serious person thinking about globalization and demographic changes should actually care a lot about racial differences in intelligence. But this subject doesn’t “interest” you because it’s not convenient for your trojan horse brand of kosher nationalism.”

Recently, Fuentes used the aftermath of the Derek Chauvin verdict as proof that minorities are “being put at the top of a racial caste system.” During the 2021 AFPAC, Fuentes remarked further on the rising civil rights movement championed by Black Lives Matter, stating “White people founded this country. This country wouldn’t exist without white people…people are done being bullied.” Fuentes has also made racist comments asserting that segregation and policies in the pre-civil rights-era American South “was better for them, it’s better for us, it’s better in general.”

Fuentes has repeatedly been suspended from a number of social media and video and audio sharing  platforms, including YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, TikTok, Spotify, Venmo, Stripe, Clubhouse as well as numerous others, for violating terms of policy with his hateful, bigoted rhetoric and imagery. Most recently, he was banned from his podcast streaming service, DLive, following his attendance at the pro-Trump rally on January 6, and now hosts his show on Alex Jones’ platform, Banned.Video. This move to a more fringe platform service may prompt Fuentes to produce even more extreme content.

 4) Fuentes promoted election fraud narratives and encouraged his adherents to participate in nationwide “Stop the Steal” protests.

Fuentes served as an organizer and speaker at many “Stop the Steal” protests leading up to the January 6 attack on the Capitol including protests in Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Washington, DC. Fuentes attended the Million MAGA March in November alongside fellow Groypers, where he addressed a crowd of American Firsters, stating, “We are not going to live as captives. This is our Republican Party. This is our country. USA!” In the days leading up to January 6, Fuentes continued to promote the myth of  election fraud. On January 4, Fuentes posted a video on DLive tacitly urging followers to kill state legislators, before he seemed to backpedal: “What can you and I do to state legislators besides kill them? Although, I’m not advising that, but I mean, what else are you going to do?” In the lead up to January 6, Fuentes received an estimated $250,000 (13.5 bitcoins) in donations, supporting his attendance at the rally in Washington, DC.

 

Fuentes and other members of America First were present at the Capitol on January 6, about which Fuentes said, “This is awesome...we have been beat up and betrayed and spit on and stepped on for decades. And to see the tables turned for once was a little bit refreshing.” Fuentes was seen that day giving a speech near the Capitol encouraging his followers to “keep moving towards the Capitol – it appears we are taking the Capitol back!” While Fuentes does not appear to have physically entered the Capitol building, individuals wearing America First merchandise appeared in videos and images inside the building. 

 

 

On January 6, 2021 America First supporters illegally climbed up a podium that had been set up for the 2021 Presidential Inauguration. There they raised an America First flag.

Since the attack on the Capitol, Fuentes claims that his bank account has been frozen, he has been placed on the federal no-fly list, and has been banned from Airbnb, Facebook and Instagram. Fuentes described these actions as “overt political persecution.” Due to this alleged ban, Fuentes was unable to attend the Big Tech Press Conference in Florida, an event he organized with a variety of right-wing pundit speakers including Michele Malkin and Laura Loomer. Although Fuentes links his no-fly status to the Capitol riot, Fuentes reportedly had an altercation on a December flight over the issue of mask mandates.

5) Fuentes has been embraced and praised by a spectrum of far right-wing fringe conservatives, providing him a larger platform for elevating the America First movement.  

Fuentes has been embraced by a variety of figures on the far-right, from fringe GOP figures to dedicated white supremacists. His success in attracting a sizeable attendance—as well as right wing-influencers and elected officials—to his events, like AFPAC and the Big Tech Conference in Florida, show the rallying effect of Fuentes and the America First movement. Right-wing pundit Michelle Malkin, who has recently embraced white supremacist rhetoric, has aligned herself with the America First movement, praising their “shared mission to end mass migration, restore law and order, and conserve and uphold actual conservative values.”

Fuentes has attracted the attention of elected officials, including U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona’s 4th congressional district. Fuentes claimed to be hosting a fundraiser and roundtable event in honor of Rep. Paul Gosar on July 2nd in Phoenix, Arizona. While Gosar has in the past participated in America First events, including the 2021 AFPAC, Gosar at this time claims to have had no prior knowledge of this fundraiser. Gosar has routinely appealed to the America First movement, tweeting in response to the outrage regarding his own appearance at the 2021 AFPAC, “Not sure why anyone is freaking out. I’ll say this: there are millions of Gen Z, Y and X conservatives. They believe in America First. They will not agree 100% on every issue. No group does. We will not let the left dictate our strategy, alliances and efforts. Ignore the left.” The upcoming event between Fuentes and Paul Gosar is part of Fuentes’ “White Boy Summer” road trip.

From ADL website, July 8, 2021