Last Tuesday, James Fishback, a 31-year-old running for governor in Florida, was speaking to a packed house.
The crowd was mostly male and very young; several attendees told me they were in high school. A few wore the “America First” baseball caps popular with followers of Nick Fuentes, the influential white nationalist troll.
Slight and bespectacled, Fishback has a geeky charisma and the verbal dexterity of a former competitive high school debater. His policies are a mishmash of extreme conservatism and economic progressivism; nationalism tinged with socialism, if you will. He believes that Florida’s gun laws are too strict, its abortion laws too lax and its public teacher pay too low. He’s called for a 50 percent sin tax on OnlyFans creators and $10,000
grants to high-performing high school graduates to buy homes or start businesses. Though he’s the son of an immigrant — his mother is Colombian — he wants a total immigration moratorium.
Most of all, Fishback has made contempt for Israel and its American lobby a centerpiece of his campaign, constantly reminding audiences how much America spends on Israel while its own needs are ignored. He often calls Byron Donalds, a Black Republican congressman who is the front-runner in the governor’s race, “AIPAC Shakur,” a play on Tupac Shakur. Appearing on Tucker Carlson’s show in January, Fishback described the “sexual, sadistic” pleasure that pro-Israel donors get in forcing America to “bend over” for a foreign country. Carlson endorsed him and wrote, “Pretty soon, all winning Republican politicians will talk like this.”
After Fishback’s hourlong speech, a young guy stood up to ask how he could trust the candidate to keep his promises, especially when it came to refusing money from AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Fishback claimed that three weeks prior, a donor had offered his PAC $500,000 if he would disavow Fuentes’s supporters. “I hung up the phone because I will never disavow patriotic Americans,” he shouted, to whoops and applause.
Fuentes’s ideology is a sneering, adolescent sort of Nazism. As he said on his podcast last year: “Jews are running society. Women need to shut the [expletive] up. Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part.” In Fishback, Fuentes’s followers — often known as groypers — have a candidate who is serious about representing them.
It turns out that there are a lot of Gen Z men who have been waiting for a candidate like Fishback to come along. The Jacksonville event was hosted by the Greater Intracoastal Republican Club, which regularly brings Republican candidates to speak. The group’s president, Laura Collins, seemed somewhat amazed by the turnout. “I was surprised to have so many young people,” she told me. “This is the most people that we’ve had for any candidate.”
But anyone concerned with the escalating extremism of the young right should be paying attention to his campaign and the enthusiastic crowds it’s drawing. More than any political candidate yet, Fishback has managed to bring the paranoid, transgressive, meme-drunk spirit of the right-wing internet into the real world. Chris Rufo, a conservative operative who played a major role in Ron DeSantis’s war on wokeness, is no fan of Fishback, but said that “he’s demonstrated a pretty sophisticated method for turning a campaign with no budget, a skeleton staff, into the most talked about campaign in Florida politics.”
Fishback is tapping into an increasingly radicalized generation of Republicans. In December, the conservative Manhattan Institute
found that 31 percent of Republicans under 50 identify their
ownviews as racist, and 25 percent say their views are antisemitic. For those over 50, it’s only 4 percent for each. The same survey showed that a majority of Republican men under 50 think that the Holocaust either didn’t happen or was exaggerated.
