The far-right figure most feared by MAGA was reinstated on YouTube after years of censorship. Less than a day later, he was gone.
Nick Fuentes, a 27-year-old white nationalist and live-streamer, launched a new YouTube channel on Wednesday, shortly after the Google-owned platform announced it would begin allowing previously banned accounts to appeal for reinstatement.
The platform’s move to roll back Biden-era speech policies on vaccines and political misinformation was hailed by Republicans as a win for free expression.
But it wasn’t long before the platform began attracting once-fringe figures like Fuentes, whose original channel, America First with Nicholas J Fuentes, was banned in 2021 for repeated violations of the platform’s hate speech policy.
Fuentes channel, along with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ was removed hours after being reinstated.
A YouTube spokesperson wrote on X that the pilot program on terminations “is not yet open.”
“It’s still against our Community Guidelines for previously terminated users to use, possess or create other channels and we’ll terminate new channels from previously terminated users in accordance with these guidelines,” they wrote, adding that more information will be available soon.
That didn’t quell the immediate backlash from figures on the far-right.
“We want to break up Google, we don’t want to work with it,” Steve Bannon said on his podcast WarRoom Thursday morning. “Alex Jones and Nick Fuentes put up YouTube channels last night. Guess what? Taken down right away,” he continued. “It’s unbelievable.”
Failed presidential candidate and short-lived DOGE-head Vivek Ramaswamy also took to X to slam Fuentes’ suspension.
“Our country is at its best when we’re able to hear one another. Nick Fuentes & Jimmy Kimmel probably don’t like me, for different reasons,” he wrote. “I don’t care. It’s still un-American to muzzle the peaceful expression of opinions. And no, that’s not a legal point, it’s a cultural point.”
The MAGA mainstream, however, was notably silent.
Fuentes publicly turned on Trump ahead of the 2024 election, saying the campaign had been “hijacked by the same consultants, lobbyists, and donors that he defeated in 2016.”
Since then, he’s blasted the former president relentlessly. “It’s just getting embarrassing atp [at this point],” he wrote on X, reacting to a federal judge’s order to shut down the Trump-backed “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration detention facility in Florida.
And recently, a New York Times profile of Fuentes revealed that current and former members of the Trump administration, along with outside advisers, would not comment on the extremist influencer “out of fear.”
“[Fear] of inviting online attacks from him and his zealous followers… Three of them mentioned the sudden ubiquity of Fuentes-related clips circulating in their social media feeds,” the article noted.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
