Tonight, the third GOP presidential primary debate will take place in Miami. The event is sponsored by the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) at a time when antisemitic incidents in the US, according to the Anti-Defamation League, have risen by nearly 400 percent since the Israel-Hamas war erupted last month.
While the Republican National Committee (RNC) has partnered with NBC to broadcast the debate on TV, the event will also be livestreamed for the third time on Rumble, the YouTube alternative that is home to what the Southern Poverty Law Center says is one of America’s most notorious white nationalists, Nick Fuentes.
For the past month, Fuentes has used the Israel-Hamas conflict to push antisemitic hate speech and Holocaust denial conspiracies on his Rumble channel, racking up hundreds of thousands of views. Fuentes has hailed Rumble for reviving his audience, which has gained thousands of followers since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7.
“I think the show is bigger than it’s been in a really long time,” Fuentes told his more than 40,000 viewers last week during one of his frequent livestreams on the platform. “If you look at the viewership on Rumble, it’s crazy. I’ve been getting really good viewership on Rumble like I haven’t since I was on YouTube … The replays have been insane.”
Fuentes is a white nationalist leader of the Groyper movement. He attended the neo-Nazi Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, has openly praised Hitler, and repeatedly denied the Holocaust. He has also had dinner with former president Donald Trump.
Fuentes’ YouTube account was terminated in 2020 as Google demonetized it, and he initially struggled to retain his audience on a number of other platforms, including DLive and his own Cozy.tv streaming service. Fuentes joined Rumble in March 2021, and he was initially critical of the platform’s failure to promote his videos. He claims he was briefly suspended from the platform in July after posting the livestream of a rally where he called for a “holy war” against non-Christians. Now, less than four months later, he claims his channel is flourishing.
Since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in early October, Fuentes has used his channel on Rumble, which has 42,600 followers, to spread antisemitic conspiracies, claiming in one video that the Israeli government had created the Hamas attack as “atrocity propaganda” to advance “Jewish interests.”
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