James Fishback Captures Gen Z Conservatives, Sets Sights on Winning Florida | Vanity Fair

His Black opponent will be sent back to the “ghetto.” “Goyslop,” an antisemitic slang term for junk food, will be banned from school cafeterias. “These hoes”—OnlyFans creators—will “owe taxes.”

The provocations of 31-year-old Florida gubernatorial candidate James Fishback’s campaign promises are cartoonish—and he is running against a Donald Trump–backed Republican congressman, Byron Donalds, who is far outpolling him in the primary race to replace Governor Ron DeSantis—but they have helped him make significant inroads with a who’s who of the rising faces of the young and far-right. As Tucker Carlson’s show put it after his interview with Fishback in January, “Pretty soon, all winning Republicans will talk just like him.”

Fishback has won the endorsement of Andrew Tate, the accused rapist and sex trafficker who, at 39 years old, represents an elder statesman in the fraught, sprawling ecosystem of new media made by and for young men. (Tate has denied any wrongdoing.) Nick Fuentes, the prominent white nationalist streamer, has called Fishback “really smart” and praised his social media savvy. The candidate has captured the most extreme attitudinal aspects of the Gen Z online right, and a leading Miami livestreaming personality has referred to his home state simply as “Fishback Florida.”

Fishback has made college campuses a staple of his long-shot campaign, engaging fans of the online personalities who have embraced him.

“We’ve broken into the mainstream,” Fishback said in a recent interview, citing “people who have told me, who are in their late 20s, early 30s, that I’m going to be the first person they ever vote for.”

Peter Schorsch, the publisher of local outlet Florida Politics, sees Fishback in a state tradition. “If you keep making a copy of a copy on a copy machine, eventually it becomes so blurred, you don’t even know what the original looked like,” he tells me. “And what Fishback is is the copy of the copy of the copy of the copy of Florida Man.”

Schorsch thinks that Fishback has succeeded, at least, in sucking up the oxygen in the campaign, if only in the manner of a car wreck. He attributes the candidate’s relative stature in part to the makeup of the Florida Republican primary electorate—“there is just a block of it, I’d say 20%, that is inherently racist”—but acknowledges that Fishback had demonstrated at least one real strength.

A former high school debater among a University of Tampa crowd.

“He sees where the puck is going,” Schorsch says.

Fishback tells Vanity Fair that his plan is to increase under-35 turnout by five times in the Republican primary, “because the denominator is so freaking low to begin with.” He is running on a platform of affordability and hardline immigration restriction, appealing to a broad sense of decline and degradation among young men in particular. He credits his breakthrough to meeting people where they were. Fuentes has offered Fishback’s more positive poll results as proof of the strength of his own following, the Groypers, while declining to endorse him in an effort to stanch the candidate’s toxicity. While Fishback rejects the label he’s received as the first Groyper candidate, he could see the advantages of the association. “A lot of the people who watch Nick Fuentes,” Fishback says, “that may be the only political personality they follow.”

Even by the rowdy standards of Florida politics, Fishback entered the race with an uncommon amount of baggage. After he dropped out of Georgetown University, he took a short-lived detour to Wall Street, which culminated in a dispute with his hedge fund employer. He ultimately admitted to sharing confidential information and was left with a $229,000-and-counting legal bill, and the repossession of his Tesla. A Florida school district cut ties with him after a woman who had been a student in a high-school debate program he was running accused him of initiating a romantic relationship with her when she was 17 and he was 27. (The woman filed for an order of protection last year and was denied. Fishback has denied any wrongdoing, saying, “I have never been arrested, charged, or convicted of any crime.”)

A pivot to Denny’s: Fishback had launched a statewide tour of Waffle Houses but claims the franchise has now banned his campaign.

As he’s gained traction in a constellation of online spaces where racial slurs flow freely, Fishback has ratcheted up his most incendiary stunts. He recently posted a video of himself shooting a gun along with a demand that Donalds join him to prove that he is “actually black.” Fishback has brushed off accusations of racism, and tells me, “When they call me an antisemite for saying I want to divest taxpayer money from Israel, that just bolsters my base.”

According to Fishback, in February, an arsonist tried to burn down his home, where his staff was working. Posting a video of himself hoisting an AR-15 above his head on the porch, he announced that if anyone attacked his staff or volunteers, instead of waiting for the police, “We will shoot you dead.”

Donalds, having raised $45 million to Fishback’s $19,000 as of January, has thus far largely steered clear of the fray, but when he did respond to a provocation on X in February, he offered a vexing view of the landscape by calling into question Fishback’s bigot bona fides.

“You’re no racist,” Donalds wrote. “You’re no groyper. You’re no anti-semite.”

Fuentes fans partly echo the sentiment. The ones I spoke with seem to think of Fishback less as a true believer than an intriguing avatar of their language and worldview.

“Obviously you’re going to hear some people who are going to say, ‘Oh, well, he’s just pandering,’” Coty, a martial arts enthusiast who asked to be identified by only his first name, says. “At the end of the day, if he’s pushing a message that I agree with, I’d prefer they pander to me.”

Nick Fuentes’s “America First” hat has emerged as a rival to its totemic red counterpart.

A 30-something construction project manager in Texoma, the interstate region straddling Texas and Oklahoma—a disillusioned Barack Obama voter who goes online by “Texoma Groyper”—says, “it’s encouraging to see candidates like that start to pander to us.”

As long as Fuentes boosts Fishback, he says, he and the Groypers will too: “A lot of these streamers do help form the political and moral opinions of a lot of people.” (After Fuentes announced last week that he was now voting Democrat this year—a swerve that reflected his opposition to Trump’s war in Iran, as well as his tendency to continually stake out new political ground—Texoma Groyper reached out to say that “Groyper support of Fishback may be coming to an end.” He continues to see the candidate as an ally, though, following further praise from Fuentes.)

The Groypers are Fuentes supporters above all, hewing to his opposition to multiculturalism; another I spoke with says that “Groyper-curious” or “Groyper-adjacent” might be a more apt descriptor for Fishback. He hasn’t shied away from the association, claiming on one occasion that he hung up on a donor who asked him to disavow Fuentes’s supporters, and signing a poster of the streamer bearing one of his trademark phrases that refers to a racial slur. When I mention the typical image of Fuentes supporters as basement-dwellers to Fishback, he pushes back. “I don’t think it’s a fair characterization of the men who watch Nick Fuentes because a lot of them are well-spoken,” he says. “A lot of them may live with their parents because they’re 17 or 18 years old.”

Fuentes has called Fishback “really smart” and praised his social media savvy.

In January, Fishback made a campaign appearance on a video call with two Fuentes affiliates, Clavicular and Sneako, who nodded along gamely as he discussed his proposal for a 50% so-called sin tax on OnlyFans creators. The two men, 20 and 27, are among the leading personalities in a set of young, gonzo livestreamers that has recently exploded into mainstream consciousness.

A fan page on X announced in February that California governor Gavin Newsom, whom Clavicular prefers to Vice President JD Vance owing to his good looks, had acknowledged the streamer and his signature self-improvement patois. “Looksmaxxing,” “bonesmashing,” and his related theories of physical attractiveness have been newly decoded in national press coverage and trickled all the way up to the White House’s AI and crypto czar. Sneako, a regular companion of the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, attended Trump’s inaugural festivities last year and smoked cigars with Eric Adams at Gracie Mansion during the final stretch of the mayor’s term. For fans of this world, it all compounded a level of personal investment that is traditionally reserved for reality television, and Fishback had now joined the cast.

When we spoke, Fishback reasoned that the appeal of the streamers who have embraced him had to do with their authenticity, a go-to buzzword in diagnoses of the president’s successful 2024 campaign. “You see behind the curtain,” Fishback says. “You see them getting in and out of a car. You see them having dinner. You see some of the bad and ugly stuff that might happen behind the scenes.”

Where Trump had courted a raucous crew of comedian-podcasters, Fishback is seeking out an online milieu that makes them look tame. In December, he rose to Clavicular’s defense, declaring that the streamer “did nothing wrong” after a surreal and troubling Miami livestream during which he appeared to run a person over with his Tesla Cybertruck. A former high school debate standout who favors a snappy suede jacket, Fishback can scan as an academic interloper, but his easy presence among this crowd functioned as something of an imprimatur. He tells me he felt comfortable during another recent stream with Sneako, saying, “I’m a 31-year-old who grew up in South Florida who was a freestyle rapper in high school.”

In a series of interviews with Vanity Fair last year, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles offered a term for “the people that are sort of new to our world” whom she saw as the bloc of voters disproportionately powering interest in the Jeffrey Epstein story: “the Joe Rogan listeners.” Among a new wave of outsider media figures, Fuentes in particular has proven to be a more enduring and ubiquitous force than commonly expected. Chicago magazine recently ranked him as the city’s seventh most powerful figure, just below the mayor, and he has been one of Trump’s loudest critics on the right. Increasingly, Fuentes is in conversation with the class of comedians and podcasters, including Shane Gillis and Theo Von, who broke through establishment doors with Netflix and Spotify deals. During a December conversation with Gillis, Rogan said he admired Fuentes’s sense of humor and “very high verbal IQ,” and suggested that “he could probably win [a presidential election] in a few years”; some betting odds now have Fishback as the favorite to appear on The Joe Rogan Experience this year, a couple of spots ahead of Sam Altman.

The running joke among Fishback’s online detractors is that he is running for governor not of Florida, but of Kick, Rumble, or some other platform where white nationalist humor has real purchase among young men. He emphasizes that it is not just the far edge of the livestreaming set that he wants to reach—he had been getting the word out at Waffle Houses and on local and national news networks—though he notes, “I haven’t turned on the TV in over two years.” (Fishback claimed this month that his campaign has now been banned from Waffle House. He soon held an event at a Tampa Denny’s instead, which prompted Fuentes to remark on his show, “he’s a phenomenon…that Denny’s was packed.”)

In January, the largest names in this new-media corner—Fuentes, the Tate brothers, Sneako, Clavicular, and two other affiliated personalities—assembled at a Miami nightclub as a DJ played the Ye song “Heil Hitler,” with some in the group chanting along and raising Nazi salutes. The spectacle comported with the prevailing views of this ensemble’s antisemitism, but its sheer brazenness catapulted them to a new level of mainstream notoriety.

Fishback doubled down. In a livestream with Sneako last month, as the two men crossed the street against the light, he predicted, “The headline will read tomorrow, Florida gubernatorial candidate breaks the law with Hitler sympathizer.” It was a cheap spin on a cheap troll, but he had a point about the kind of press coverage the jarring novelty of his candidacy would receive. Later that day, as Fishback recorded a podcast interview with another of the Miami crew, as well as several of the OnlyFans creators whom he is seeking to tax, he described CNN and The New York Times as “fake news,” having been interviewed by reporters from those same outlets hours earlier.

“I understand that knee-jerk skepticism that ‘he’s another social media guy,’” Fishback says, describing the low-hanging criticism of himself. He promises that “in the unlikely event that I don’t win,” he wouldn’t start a podcast, and he took the sense that his campaign was “too online” as a compliment insofar as it could translate to on-the-ground momentum. As he saw it, he had located an untapped vein of influence.

Clavicular’s viewers “are not exactly politically obsessed people,” Fishback points out, invoking some of the streamer’s vernacular. “I mean, his own phrasing is, politics is ‘jester’”—foolish, wasteful.

As he continued his conversation with Sneako last month, Fishback came up with a proposal: they could serve together, governor and lieutenant governor. This too, Fishback joked, would make for a good headline the next day, but Sneako had a more urgent concern about their prospective inauguration.

“Can I stream it?”

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