How Marjorie Taylor Greene and Nick Fuentes Are Easing White Power into the GOP Mainstream

The America First Political Action Conference featured brazen and open rhetoric.

White nationalist Nick Fuentes speaks in New York City in November 2021.Rainmaker photos/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Late on Friday night, I watched a group of roughly 1,000 people, mostly young white American men, openly cheer for Black people to be jailed and for “radical solutions” to be deployed in the face of the great replacement white power conspiracy theory.

America is large enough to where you can easily gather a crowd who will believe almost anything. It’s harder for such a group to have a direct line to the powers that be who can help them enact their vision. This gathering, put together by white supremacist Nick Fuentes, did. Nine current and former elected officials spoke to his American First Political Action Conference over the weekend, including Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin (R-Idaho) and serving members of Congress Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), among others. 

It wasn’t the first such gathering—AFPAC has a history of, like it did here, throwing its own events in conjunction with the longstanding Conservative Political Action Conference. Nor did it host the most extreme sentiments I’ve seen in my reporting on the far-right. But in my experience, the event featured unprecedentedly brazen and openly racist rhetoric given the size of the platform and its proximity to actual GOP officials.

Amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and with the event happening late on Friday night, Fuentes’s gathering flew somewhat under the radar, despite the potential and dark direction it augurs for right politics in the U.S.—one even more rife with racist thought and rhetoric.

“Just because minorities are arrested and imprisoned at higher rates than white people doesn’t mean the criminal justice system is racist,” a grinning Vincent James, a white supremacist influencer who spoke just after Greene, told the crowd to applause. “That minority population may just so happen to commit the majority of crime,” he continued.

“If poverty is the main reason for violent crime, why isn’t there rampant looting of drug stores in Owsley County, Kentucky. or drive-by shootings in Hancock, Tennessee,” James asked. “How do these feeble-minded people explain the fact that Baltimore, Detroit, and St. Louis are far more dangerous than Rio de Janeiro; Durban, South Africa; or Mazatlán, Mexico. The reason we have more people in prison and more gun crime than any other developed nation isn’t because of white supremacy, it’s because those other developed nations that don’t have the people who commit most of the crime here.”

The places he cites reveals, if there was any doubt, that James is not so subtly being racist. Owsley County is 98.7 percent white. Hancock County is 96 percent white. But Baltimore and Detroit are among the Blackest large cities in the U.S., with a long history of being name-dropped by conservatives in racist ways. “We have an under incarceration problem,” he said to applause, and a “lock them up” chant.

“Lock them up, yes,” he responded with a smile. “And throw away the key!”

James knew exactly what he was saying and so did the AFPAC crowd: Black people do more crime and should be arrested in even higher numbers than they already are. He didn’t stop there, going on to extol “white western culture” while championing a thinly disguised version of the great replacement conspiracy, which posits that people in power, often at the behest of Jewish people, are working to eradicate whiteness in favor of minority cultures. “They want to replace you!” James yelled to the crowd, adding that “Western white culture is the majority culture.”

In his own addresss, Fuentes, the event’s organizer, made it clear that James and his views weren’t an aberration by praising Jared Taylor, head of the white supremacist organization American Renaissance, calling him his “personal hero.” He also compared Russian President Vladimir Putin to Hitler—and said that that was a “good thing.”

So far, the biggest fallout from the event have been some sharp questions directed at Greene and other politicians who participated. For her part, the Georgia lawmaker says she had no idea about Fuentes’ ideology before speaking. But as the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Michael Edison Hayden pointed out, that’s very unlikely. 

While I’ve seen Fuentes call black people the n-word and admit to being racist, he has tried (albeit often half-heartedly) to hide his most bigoted tendencies in public. If Friday is any indication, it seems he no longer cares—and many powerful figures on the right don’t seem to either.

WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

payment methods

WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate