Kanye West is leaning into the antisemitism—bringing white nationalist Nicholas Fuentes onto his informal 2024 presidential campaign, where he joins far-right troll Milo Yiannopoulos.
The team-up comes just days after Ye, as he is known to his fans, brought Fuentes to dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, sparking an uproar and leading Trump to claim he did not know who Fuentes was.
West and Fuentes were spotted together at a Miami airport last week. Then, on Saturday evening, Fuentes placed his nightly web show on hiatus and announced he is working with West, who has been ostracized by much of the mainstream since he went on a series of antisemitic rants.
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“My last super chat ever because the next cash I send will be your paycheck,” Yiannopoulos said in an online message to Fuentes, who read it aloud during the show. “And see you at the office on Monday, brother!”
“I have been speaking with Ye and working with him,” Fuentes added.
But it seems like Fuentes may have already annoyed his new boss. On Sunday evening, West blamed Fuentes for a tweet that took aim at conservative Jewish commentator Ben Shapiro for his publication, Daily Wire, renting email lists to the campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
“If Nick keeps tweeting from my account the only platform I’ll have left is Truth Social,” West said of Fuentes, who is a longtime foe of Shapiro.
Fuentes didn’t return The Daily Beast’s request for comment, and Yiannopoulos offered a series of nonsensical questions. West—who ran a haphazard 2020 presidential campaign that blew through $6 million and only earned him 60,000 votes—could not be reached for comment.
Fuentes is a longtime fixture of the most extreme far-right and the face of the racist groypers. On the day of the deadly Unite the Right rally, he wrote on Facebook that “a tidal wave of white identity is coming.” Often cloaking his views in what he thinks passes for comedy, he is a Holocaust denier who once used a cookie-baking metaphor to describe the extermination of Jewish people and has suggested Hitler wasn’t so bad.
Yiannapoulos—a former congressional intern for Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and editor at the right-wing news site Breitbart—has repeatedly spewed racism and verbally attacked LGBTQ people while insisting he had turned himself into an “ex-gay.”
In recent years, he’s run afoul of the far-right after threatening to kill the dog of fellow right-wing activists over unpaid debts. He once trolled a Jewish journalist online with neo-Nazi symbolism and appeared on stage with white supremacist Richard Spencer while the latter was making a Nazi salute.
