Meet the First Groyper Politician
James Fishback’s campaign may not be flashy but it sure is fashy.
WHITE NATIONALIST PODCASTER Nick Fuentes has had a breakout year, rattling the MAGA establishment and expanding his reach and presence on social media, where he has become seemingly ubiquitous. It’s felt almost inevitable that the “groyper” movement he leads would produce a political candidate. And now, they have.
James Fishback, an investor and Florida gubernatorial candidate with a comically checkered past and a massive personal debt to his former hedge-fund employer, is poised to become the first candidate running on an overtly groyper platform.1
Since I wrote about Fishback last month, he’s started to explicitly court the groyper movement—even placing a picture of himself shaking hands with a man in a Fuentes-style “America First” hat as his X profile background.
The groyper godfather has noticed. “He seems cool,” Fuentes said with admiration of Fishback last week, adding that he was reluctant to officially endorse Fishback out of fear that the association would hurt the candidate.
The love is mutual. Fishback appeared on far-right commentator Elijah Schaffer’s show and praised groypers as “incredibly informed and insightful.” At a University of Florida event, Fishback filmed a video with a Fuentes supporter, declaring that he was with the community “100 percent” and would “never disavow” them. On December 13, he released a video to, in his words, “clarify” his stance on the groypers. And then, in the classic Borat style, he dropped the façade.
“I want to clarify and apologize—for absolutely nothing!” Fishback said.
Fishback will almost certainly lose the gubernatorial primary to Donald Trump’s favorite candidate, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.). There’s a lot of evidence that Fishback can barely manage his own life as a private citizen, much less run a state. For one thing, he’s expected to be roughly $2 million in debt once the legal fees he owes his former employer are calculated.
Fishback’s ex-employer bought his seized Tesla at auction, and they’re eyeing his other possessions, according to court filings. And since I last wrote about Fishback, there have been other developments—most seriously, the unearthing of a court case that raises questions about whether he had sex with someone below the age of consent. (More on that in a moment.)
But even if Fishback loses, his campaign seems like an inflection point for the right: a case study in whether the groyper community is a real political constituency or just an online echo chamber. The fact that he’s even calculated that it’s worthwhile courting them is chilling on its own.
And the courtship itself has been quite revealing—I mean the one between Fishback and the groypers, not the one that may have been a crime. For example, Fishback has tried to turn his down-and-out financial status into a way to appeal to basement-dwelling groypers. Despite launching his own hedge fund and frequently appearing on Fox Business as an investment expert, Fishback claimed he doesn’t want to be rich.
“What Byron Donalds has alleged is 100 percent true: I’m not rich,” he said in a December 12 video. “I never have been, and I never aspire to be. He is right—I have student loan debt, credit card debt. My car was repossessed months ago because I couldn’t make the payments.”2
Fishback’s campaign is also racist, which the groypers, of course, love. He’s campaigning on a crackdown on H-1B visas and a near-ban on foreign students in Florida, saying the annual tuition for foreign students should be raised to $1 million. He’s repeatedly called Donalds, who is black, a “slave” to donors. This week, he put out a video playing on the “It’s okay to be white” slogan popular with white nationalists on 4chan.
And then there’s the Mussolini thing. On December 13, Fishback had his first viral hit of the race when he posted a video showing him walking on train tracks and vowing to make “the trains run on time”—just like the Italian dictator.
FISHBACK’S OPPONENTS HAVE NOT attacked him for his racist and fascistic impulses. Instead, they have seized on the allegation that he had a relationship with someone under the age of consent. On December 5, the website Florida Politics reported on a petition for a protective order Fishback’s ex-fiancée filed against him earlier this year. The woman said that they first met in 2021, when she was a 16-year-old high school sophomore and he was 26, and that they connected through his anti-woke high school debate organization. In the application for a protective order, she alleges they began a romantic relationship in 2022, when she was “still a minor.”
That relationship would likely be illegal in Florida, where the age of consent is 18. In her petition, the woman’s lawyer writes she “has reason to believe that she may have been a victim of a crime,” citing a Florida law related to “unlawful sexual activity with certain minors.” The woman also alleged in her petition that Fishback would grab his own hair and slap his own face in fits of anger.
The judge in the case denied the request for a restraining order, essentially arguing that Fishback’s manner was certainly “odd” and “a little obsessive-compulsive” but not threatening.
“The Court finds that is just the odd nature of [Fishback], which was apparent during the hearing,” the judge wrote.
The woman didn’t respond to my request for comment. And I wasn’t able to review the petition beyond images posted by Florida Politics, because the lawsuit isn’t on a public court docket.
But in an email to me, Fishback called the allegations that he had an illegal relationship with a high school student “completely false and unsubstantiated,” noting that they were dismissed and he was cleared of wrongdoing.
“If there were any credible criminal wrongdoing, there would have been a criminal investigation,” Fishback wrote. “There wasn’t. I have never been charged with, convicted of, or committed any crimes.”
Still, the case is dogging him. John Cardillo, a conservative Florida political commentator, has accused him of engaging in “demonic behavior” while with the high school debate group, and dubbed him “Epstein-Fishback.”
And yet, this may further ingratiate Fishback with the groyper community, given the history of other Fuentes associates facing weird sex allegations.
Indeed, the one potential place of friction that I think exists between Fishback and the groypers has nothing to do with his shady finances, accusations of unlawful sexual encounters, or fascistic tendencies. It’s that he was, until very recently, pro-Israel. That’s not a bad idea in a state with a sizable Jewish population. But for some groypers, it suggests he’s a cynical grifter chasing whatever is trendy.
Already, Fishback’s critics on the right resurfaced a picture of him talking to the ardently pro-Zionist journalist Bari Weiss. And Fishback’s connections to Weiss go deeper than one photo. He wrote for her website, the Free Press, and even schemed with a friend to send an anonymous email to the site urging them to hire him to write more, according to court filings I covered last month.
“They call him Fishback because he’s flipflopped more than a catfish on dry land,” grumbled Fuentes associate “Beardson Beardly.”
Fishback appears to have too much baggage to really compete with Donalds in the primary. But a run like this will, at a minimum, give him some name recognition in Florida politics. And it could serve as a template for copycat candidates with fewer personal issues. Certainly, they will take note that Fishback’s videos have made him a hit in the broader right-wing internet world outside of the groypers. Zack Hoyt, a Texas resident who is one of the most prominent video-game streamers in the world under the name “Asmongold,” endorsed Fishback in a video that has garnered over 700,000 views in three days.
“My man, who is this guy?!” Hoyt said, waggling his eyebrows in excitement as he watched a Fishback video, then chanting the right-wing compliment “Based! Based! Based!”
For Hoyt, Fishback was proof of a rising right-wing generation. He was especially thrilled by Fishback’s promise to deal with Florida’s homeless by offering them a choice between prison terms and mental health treatments at “Arkham Asylum”—the brutal, fictional home of deranged Batman villains like the Joker and Harley Quinn.
Hoyt urged his many fans to “vote for people like this.”
“We can do whatever the fuck we want,” Hoyt said.
If you want the background on why Fishback is in a (losing) legal battle against the company he used to work for, I detailed it all here.
In fact, Fishback’s car was seized because of his debts to his former employer, not because he couldn’t make the payments.
Not flashy but fashy! I literally laughed out loud until I remembered this is our reality and got sad. Good line, though, Will!
Hilarious. The 2 choices in the republican primary are Byron Donalds or a guy who pulls his own hair and slaps his face.