WIRED Roundup: Groypers Are Going Mainstream

In today’s episode, our host Zoë Schiffer is joined by WIRED’s senior politics writer Jake Lahut to run through five of the best stories we published this week—from Customs and Border Patrol’s efforts to collect Americans’ DNA to tech billionaire Larry Ellison’s shadowy influence on the White House. Then, Zoë and Jake discuss the surge in popularity of white nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes, who has leveraged the vacuum left behind by Charlie Kirk’s death to break into the mainstream.

You can follow Zoë Schiffer on Bluesky at @zoeschiffer and Jake Lahut on Bluesky at @jakelahut.writes.news. Write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com.

Mentioned in this episode:
Nick Fuentes’ Plan to Conquer America by David Gilbert
Larry Ellison Is a ‘Shadow President’ in Donald Trump’s America by David Cox
OpenAI Teams Up With Oracle and SoftBank to Build 5 New Stargate Data Centers by Zoë Schiffer, Will Knight, and Lauren Goode
DHS Has Been Collecting US Citizens’ DNA for Years by Dell Cameron
For One Glorious Morning, a Website Saved San Francisco From Parking Tickets by Reece Rogers

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Transcript

Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.

Zoë Schiffer: Welcome to WIRED’s Uncanny Valley. I’m Zoe Zoë Schiffer, WIRED’s director of business and industry. We’re bringing you five stories that you need to know about this week, including the meteoric rise of the once fringe, far-right influencer, Nick Fuentes. He is breaking into the mainstream off of the back of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I’m joined today by Senior Politics Writer, Jake Lahut. Jake, welcome back to Uncanny Valley.

Jake Lahut: Hey Zoë, great to be with you again.

Zoë Schiffer: So, we’re starting this week with some perhaps unsurprising but still deeply, deeply concerning national security news. According to a new analysis from Georgetown University, Customs and Border Patrol, CBP, has spent the last four years collecting the DNA of at least 2,000 people, many of whom are American citizens. They’re uploading this information to CODIS, which is the FBI’s nationwide investigation system, that’s been the preeminent tool for violent crime investigations for years. And experts say that the findings appear to point to the fact that the data collection program is operating outside the confines of statute and without a lot of oversight.

Jake Lahut: I’m genuinely surprised they don’t have all of our DNA in some form already, whether that’s 23 and Me or any of the other ways we could have been scraped all this time, but it doesn’t sound good.

Zoë Schiffer: Our colleague, Dell Cameron, reported that according to the findings, the 2,000 total files include people who’ve actually never been formally charged with a crime, and about 95 minors. There were also dozens of cases where CBP agents left the charges field blank in the paperwork. In other files analyzed by Georgetown, officers invoked civil penalties as the justification for taking the saliva swabs, which were how they were getting the DNA samples, that federal law typically reserves for criminal arrests.

Jake Lahut: Oh, and this is a recurring theme with Dell’s reporting, but it’s hard to separate a lot of this stuff from basic things we gave up in terms of personal liberties, the ability of law enforcement to collect all sorts of evidence after the war on terror. And suddenly, you end up in a situation like this, where it’s unclear what anyone can really do about it.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, I think that that’s the issue, is just we don’t exactly know what they’re doing with this information because it does appear, at least according to this report, to be taking place outside the confines of the statute and there isn’t a lot of oversight. And so we just don’t know, and I think that that’s the problem. Turning to the White House, President Trump appears to have a new favorite billionaire, and this headline comes from your reporting. You wrote this week about tech billionaire, Larry Ellison’s increasingly cozy relationship with President Trump. In your piece, one of your sources even refers to Ellison as the shadow president, which really stuck out to me because I feel like that’s a term we typically have reserved for Elon Musk. So, talk to me about how these two men got this close.

Jake Lahut: So, that’s the interesting thing about Ellison, is that he’s sort of been orbiting on the periphery of Trump world for a while. He used to be a really reliable supporter of Democrats. Now notably, even though he is a centibillionaire, he’s always actually been a little stingy as far as the donations go, of someone of his caliber. He’s not like Elon, pumping $300 million into a campaign. But his transformation starts around the Obama era, where the former president’s relationship with Bibi Netanyahu starts to deteriorate. Ellison is a very staunch supporter, not just of Israel and the Israeli government, but particularly the IDF and the Israeli military, and he starts to become a more reliable donor for Republicans. So, I have a source who knows the Ellison family telling me in this story that about 10 years ago, Larry Ellison was going around telling people that he wanted Marco Rubio to be president.

Zoë Schiffer: Oh, wow.

Jake Lahut: In the 2024 primary, he backs Tim Scott, which seemed like, OK, you’re supporting a rival of President Trump’s, that should make you persona non grata. Turns out, a lot of Trump advisors, and they were telling me this at the time during the campaign, they thought Larry Ellison supporting Tim Scott was actually basically a favor for them, and he was pledging a lot of money. How much of it actually ended up with Super PAC supporting Tim Scott, separate story. But essentially, Tim Scott was like an insurance policy in the event that the primary was closer and it got drawn out and people like Ron DeSantis and particularly Nikki Haley would’ve still been around, both Tim Scott and Nikki Haley are from South Carolina. So then he kind of comes in with the rest of the tech guys over the summer, and the difference with Ellison is that one, he kind of has eyes and ears everywhere, is what I hear from people who are familiar with how he operates. He doesn’t use donor advisors and a whole entourage to give him the lay of the land with politics. Instead, he likes to scout his own candidates, and he’s made some early bets on people who were in the Trump Administration. Most notably, he was an early donor and fundraised for Tulsi Gabbard back when she was a Democrat. Perhaps uncoincidentally, Larry Ellison owns 98% of the Hawaiian island of Lanai among other flashy purchases he has made. So at this point, with the Oracle server business, it allows him to fly a little under the radar because servers and software as a service, not really the most sexy business compared to a lot of these other guys who are around Trump. And then you add in his son, David, who is running the Skydance parent company of Paramount, which might also acquire Warner Brothers, Discovery. That means the Ellison family wouldn’t only be in control of CBS and all these entertainment properties, but also potentially CNN. And suddenly, when you zoom out, you’re looking at a family that has begun to consolidate in the areas of data and human attention in the way that a Gilded Age family like the Vanderbilts or the Rockefellers would’ve done for railroads and oil. So, it was a really fascinating piece to report on just in terms of how Ellison doesn’t even necessarily need to say things to Trump to make things happen. He’s just that well-connected, you know?

Zoë Schiffer: Speaking of Larry Ellison, I wanted to talk about his recent involvement in OpenAI’s massive new infrastructure plan. OpenAI announced this week at they’re building five new data centers in partnership with Oracle, or at least three of those data centers are in partnership with Oracle, and two are in partnership with SoftBank. The sites are expected to add as much as seven gigawatts to the capacity of OpenAI’s infrastructure initiative, which is called Stargate.

Jake Lahut: Which, I’m sorry, is that mega or giga?

Zoë Schiffer: It is giga, which is a comparison that I’ve made in my head, which I think makes it a little easier to understand even though it’s still completely impossible to wrap my head around. But it’s seven large-scale nuclear reactors.

Jake Lahut: OK.

Zoë Schiffer: This is the latest major ramp up in this AI infrastructure initiative that has come up under the Trump Administration. And it’s interesting because actually, a lot of these projects date back to the Biden Administration, but I think the AI CEOs did something pretty savvy, where when they saw where the election was heading, they said, “We’re going to hold some of this. We’re going to let Trump get out in front and take credit for it,” and that’s exactly what he did. Day two of his return to the White House, he’s up there with a number of people, including Larry Ellison and Sam Altman, and he’s touting the Stargate Initiative as a core infrastructure initiative that the Trump Administration is getting to essentially brag about.

Jake Lahut: And aside from the power consumption, I mean, these data centers have been very controversial where local communities are rallying against them, Meta had that $10 billion site in Louisiana where we’ve seen that. And where OpenAIs are being built, I’m wondering, how is that going down among the locals?

Zoë Schiffer: When I was heading out to Texas, I was like, how am I going to make this embargoed news a little more interesting? So I was looking up minutes from the recent city council meetings just being like, has anyone complained about this? And I was talking to one of our reporters, Molly Taft, who writes a lot about data centers, because I wasn’t seeing anything. I wasn’t seeing much pushback. And Molly said, “Look, in a lot of these kind of red states or Republican leaning areas, you’re not going to see a lot of pushback. They’re pretty excited about jobs.” It literally requires so much human labor to get these data centers up and running, that I think right now what we’re seeing is a lot of support from local politicians. We had a briefing after the media tour and Senator Ted Cruz was there, Abilene, which is where we were in Texas, the mayor was there, and they were really, really talking up the initiative.

Jake Lahut: Also, Molly Taft hive, stand up. They are my desk neighbor, an absolute gem of a reporter.

Zoë Schiffer: Yes, I completely agree. Let’s switch gears, like car gears, because we have one more story before we go to break, and it’s a fun one. It’s about parking tickets in San Francisco.

Jake Lahut: Oh, wow.

Zoë Schiffer: Well, there was a brief and beautiful moment early this week where San Francisco residents were relieved of the burden of parking cops on a Tuesday, after a website called “Find My Parking Cops” went absolutely viral. The website’s designer, Riley Walz, scraped publicly available parking ticket data to build a map of the locations of San Francisco’s parking enforcement agents, and they designed it to look like Find My, the app on your iPhone. According to reporting from our colleague, Reece Rogers, the project had a sad end. Just a few hours after Walz’s site went live, the City of San Francisco took down the data that he had been using to build the site, rendering it essentially, useless.

Jake Lahut: Well, you just got me all invested and excited and now wondering why can’t municipal governments fix potholes or do other stuff that quickly, you know?

Zoë Schiffer: For real. Coming up after the break, Jake and I discussed the white nationalist Nick Fuentes, who has leveraged Charlie Kirk’s assassination into what some on the right are calling a generational run. Welcome back to Uncanny Valley, I’m Zoë Schiffer. Here with me is Senior Politics Writer, Jake Lahut. And our main story today is about the white nationalist influencer, Nick Fuentes. Fuentes has been a prominent figure in the far right for years and years, particularly with his legion of extremely online super fans, known as Groypers. As the leader of the America First Movement, Fuentes was present at the Capitol on January 6th, as well as the Stop the Steal rallies promoting false claims about the 2020 presidential election. However, for years, he’s struggled to break into any tenable mainstream political positions since he first rose to prominence almost a decade ago. But as our colleague, David Gilbert, has reported, that’s all changing. Over the past few weeks, Fuentes has been extremely outspoken in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Some people have tried to claim that Tyler Robinson, the man accused of shooting Charlie Kirk, was himself a Groyper, something that Fuentes vehemently denies. But despite all of this, his popularity has exploded online in the past few weeks. His X following has grown by almost 175,000 since Kirk’s death, and he’s seen his following on the right wing social network, Rumble, increased by more than 100,000. On top of that, yesterday, Fuentes did an interview with a prominent conservative influencer, Patrick, Bet-David, that has netted almost two million views on YouTube alone. Jake, what can you tell us about Fuentes and his politics, just to set the stage here?

Jake Lahut: So, we’re talking about a very young guy born in 1998, hails from the Chicago suburbs. No real hard Scrabble origin story from everything we can tell and from David’s reporting, he comes from a pretty well off family. And then his origin story really begins at Boston University. I remember actually, when I was interning at Politico in the summer of 2017, I first heard about Nick Fuentes when was a student at BU. He ends up starting a live stream show basically out of his dorm, it ends up getting carried by a service that unfortunately I use quite a bit in this job, the Right Side Broadcasting network, which is a very, very Trump-y YouTube channel that carries his rallies in full, they make a lot of money off of my pillow ads and stuff. It’s a whole thing, and he was one of their real early hot prospects. To give you a look at a five-year span here, Fuentes really blows up with this live stream career. In 2017, he goes to Charlottesville, if you remember the Unite the Right Rally?

Zoë Schiffer: Right.

Jake Lahut: And he starts getting quoted in a bunch of places after that rally, and that’s really where he emerges his character. Fast-forward five years, he gets banned from pretty much every social media app you can imagine in the aftermath of January 6th. Though I should note, Fuentes was brought back in 2023, banned again, and then he was brought back to Twitter in 2024. He steadily, steadily starts gaining legitimate influence in Trump world, between essentially when Trump loses and when he’s in the wilderness period. So, there’s this famous incident where Nick Fuentes and Kanye West, who now goes by Ye, dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. And some fun inside backstory on that that I’ve heard from a couple of my Trump sources is that Trump had started running for President absurdly, early back in 2022, right? And he already had his campaign team in place. Susie Wiles, the now White House Chief of Staff, was the campaign manager, and she was already starting to make sure that not anyone and everyone could be coming up and getting FaceTime with Trump. She gets one day off around Thanksgiving, this is the one time she’s going to go spend time with her family, not be by Trump’s side at Mar-a-Lago or whichever one of his clubs he’s hanging out at, right? That one time, Nick Fuentes and Kanye get in.

Zoë Schiffer: Wow.

Jake Lahut: And it drives people crazy. So, you’ve really never seen Trump or anyone in any official capacity around him embrace Nick Fuentes, but he really does have a very good finger on the pulse of the base, especially the younger male elements of the base.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. What are his actual politics? What does he believe in?

Jake Lahut: We’re talking someone who is extremely anti-Israel, blatantly antisemitic. He’s one of these guys where a lot of his views come straight out of the 1800s. I mean, he’s against interracial marriage, he has extremely regressive views on the role of women in society. Also, I will note as a sidebar, he talks not infrequently on his show about his lack of a romantic life and stuff, so there’s very much kind of an incel element of the culture here and with the Groypers, his fan base. He’s even referred to himself as a proud incel. And then he says these things that he’ll sometimes later say he didn’t totally mean but are extremely incendiary and grab a lot of attention. Like in the aftermath of Trump winning in 2024, he posted out, “Your body, my choice,” to just really twist the knife in women and anyone who cares about abortion rights. So, that’s more or less the lay of the land and the cultural milieu that we’re working in here with a guy who I will say, if you’re a man under the age of 35, this dude is all over your vertical video feeds. He’s all over Instagram Reels, he’s all over TikTok, and he really integrates himself with all sorts of meme culture in a way that’s allowed him to, despite all these bans and everything, he’s kind of in every corner of the internet you could find if you’re a young lonely dude.

Zoë Schiffer: Why is this person who was on the fringes for so long seemingly ostracized by the core MAGA base, why are they breaking into the mainstream now?

Jake Lahut: Well, I think the first thing you have to understand in terms of how you build clout and political capital in Trump’s Republican party, is your sort of resume of cancellations. And he kind of has the ultimate card in this case. He’s gotten banned from pretty much every platform. This mirrors the appeal of Trump in a weird kind of backwards way, where in this landscape of grifters and people who are selling supplements and hucking all sorts of products, Nick Fuentes basically just gets money from donations when he is live-streaming, and he does not have these bigger ticket paid speaking events. Now, a lot of the reason for that is because he says horrific things about Jewish people and women and people of color, and take your non-white male group, he said something pretty horrendous about them. But he basically signals to the base that like, “Hey, I’m not bought and paid for. I’m speaking the truth.” And I think that his most recent surge that David was picking up on here, because he started reporting this piece well before the shooting of Charlie Kirk, where we can get into that in a little bit where Fuentes suddenly makes a moment of that, despite being a rival of Kirk’s. Nick Fuentes has also been one of the first movers to criticize Trump on a number of fronts in this second term.

Zoë Schiffer: Right. That was my question. I was like, I thought he was kind of anti-Trump or the headlines, I don’t know, it seemed like he wasn’t a total fan.

Jake Lahut: Yeah, so this is where it gets weird, because it’s like everything he stands for is stuff that people who vote who are in the hardcore ultra-MAGA base and who are especially in the white nationalism, white Christian nationalism camp. They love all this stuff and they don’t see any daylight between that and what Trump is pushing for, but Fuentes has basically been Trump’s skeptical, I would say, since the summer of 2024. He’s claimed that he got off the Trump train well before the election. But if you think about a lot of what earned Trump some cred with Republican voters in that 2016 primary, a lot of his most popular lines at the rallies and the big moments and the debates were not Trump going after Democrats, they were actually Trump going after the establishment of the Republican Party. And in a weird way now, because Trump is the establishment, Nick Fuentes has sort of seen the evergreen benefit of filling that role of being the person who’s like, “Hey, I’m not afraid to call it like it is, and yada yada.” And a lot of the time, that’s just been him saying super racist stuff but in other instances, it’s been him criticizing Trump. And Matt supercharges his engagement on the platforms where you’ve got his usual folks interacting with these posts, but then you’ve got your super online liberal people, that are like, “Oh man, the worst guy I know is making some points here.”

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, I guess that’s my larger question, which is just, is this where politics are heading? Is this a one-off or is this where the Republican Party is really truly going?

Jake Lahut: I think that we are going to see, in terms of the Gen Z and converging into Gen Alpha generation, I think we’re going to see more people who have experience with live-streaming in various sorts, have a bit of an advantage in these parties, whether it’s as candidates or just as the new big-time pundits of whatever sort. It’s kind of like getting in reps with talk radio in a way, but there’s also much more of a back-and-forth because with talk radio, you get a couple call-ins during the hour or whatever. With Fuentes, this is the thing to understand about a lot of the craziest stuff he said, is he’s reading this chat on his screen the whole time and the velocity of people commenting all sorts of messed up stuff is crazy. But he is constantly in dialogue with his edge Lord supporters, and that’s where there’s this weird communal aspect that he has that I think a Tucker Carlson or other far-right figures who maybe are folks listening are more familiar with, they don’t quite have that. It’s more than just a parasocial relationship with Fuentes’s followers. And that’s where David’s piece is really interesting, because it also gets into how Fuentes’s vision is for the Groypers to be this invisible network where they could be anywhere, it could be any guy around you who’s one of them and is willing to ride or die for the cause. And I think that this is just the nature of modern celebrity in a lot of ways, is the more hardcore and vicious your fans are, in a way, the more power you have online. And I think that if we take the politics out of it, Nick Fuentes is actually maybe not that unique in that respect, but he reaps all the benefits.

Zoë Schiffer: So, why has his response to Charlie Kirk’s assassination been so popular? What has his message been and why do you think it’s resonated so much?

Jake Lahut: Nick Fuentes is definitely much more hardcore on the, this is a Holy War, kind of response to Kirk dying and that this is all the fault of the left, and much more incendiary rhetoric piggybacking off of this tragic death. But what makes it even more interesting and kind of perverse is that Charlie Kirk was Nick Fuentes’s main rival. They were coming up at the same time. And for Fuentes, he’s so far on the right wing, even if we want to get a little nerdy here and talk about horseshoe theory or the far edges of ideology for both the left and the right start to converge and they’re actually closer to each other than they are to people who are more moderate or just down the line conservative or liberal. But someone like Fuentes, he saw Charlie Kirk as an establishment shill, and he would follow Charlie Kirk around and heckle him at events. But these guys very much were beefing, and I will add, it was mainly a one-sided beef from Fuentes at Kirk. So, it’s quite remarkable that he’s been able to juice his engagement, get hundreds of thousands more followers after Kirk’s assassination. And like we were talking about earlier, with just the way he plays the incentives on the algorithms, he found a way to make this work for him when you would’ve thought, if there’s ever a time for this guy to go quiet, it would’ve been after the assassination of this person he’s talked a ton of shit about, and when there was all this mostly baseless online speculation that the alleged shooter was a Groyper. And I think that when you look at the reporting that our colleagues McKenna and Megan have done about the meme culture and all that where there are all these voids people are trying to fill in online, I think that it’s indicative a little bit of the cultural influence of Groypers, for the fact that some of these poses, the suspects made in photos, mirrored ones that the Groypers love to share of basically their mascot Pepe the Frog, doing all sorts of poses and antics. And these have just become very embedded in a more general meme culture of your younger, more nihilistic gamer crowd. So, that’s where sometimes it can be hard to separate what’s a wink, wink, nudge, nudge, illusion to a Groyper, versus a meme that’s just become more or less mainstreamed. And we’ve just seen a heightened version of all of that with Nick Fuentes’s response to Charlie Kirk’s death.

Zoë Schiffer: Okey-dokey. Well, I’m going to go touch grass, take a deep breath, be outside.

Jake Lahut: Yeah, let’s go not touch a computer for a little bit.

Zoë Schiffer: Jake, thank you so much for coming onto Uncanny Valley today.

Jake Lahut: And thank you for the gifted subs on Twitch.

Zoë Schiffer: That’s our show for today. We’ll link to all the stories we spoke about in the show notes. Sam Eagan and Mark Leyda produced this episode. Amar Lal at Macro Sound mixed this episode. Kate Osborn is our executive producer. Condé Nast head of global audio is Chris Bannon. And Katie Drummond is WIRED’s global editorial director.