NY Times: “Last week, James Fishback, a 31-year-old running for governor in Florida, was speaking to a packed house at the Queens Harbour Yacht and Country Club in Jacksonville. Every one of the room’s almost 100 seats was taken, and people were standing several rows deep around the perimeter, with more listening from the lobby outside. The crowd was mostly male and very young; several attendees told me they were in high school. A few wore the “America First” baseball caps popular with followers of Nick Fuentes, the influential white nationalist troll…
Fuentes’s ideology is a sneering, adolescent sort of Nazism. As he said on his podcast last year: “Jews are running society. Women need to shut the [expletive] up. Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part.” In Fishback, Fuentes’s followers — often known as groypers — have a candidate who is serious about representing them.
….But anyone concerned with the escalating extremism of the young right should be paying attention to his campaign and the enthusiastic crowds it’s drawing. More than any political candidate yet, Fishback has managed to bring the paranoid, transgressive, meme-drunk spirit of the right-wing internet into the real world. Chris Rufo, a conservative operative who played a major role in Ron DeSantis’s war on wokeness, is no fan of Fishback, but said that “he’s demonstrated a pretty sophisticated method for turning a campaign with no budget, a skeleton staff, into the most talked about campaign in Florida politics.””