The white nationalist Nick Fuentes said Thursday evening that he has been kicked out of CPAC.
“I just got kicked out of CPAC,” Mr Fuentes posted on the instant messaging platform Telegram, which has been described by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) as a “safe haven” for white supremacists.
The annual meeting of the top players in the conservative movement, which has tacked further and further right in recent years, began Thursday at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland.
In subsequent posts, Mr Fuentes asked people to wait for him by the elevators and referred to himself as “The Most Cancelled Man in America.”
Mr Fuentes was recently in national headlines when and the rapper Ye, formerly Kanye West, dined at Mar-a-Lago with former President Donald Trump. According to reporting by Axios, Mr Trump was “very taken” with Mr Fuentes and impressed with his knowledge of his political campaigns.
“I really like this guy,” Axios reported Mr Trump said to Ye. “He gets me.”
The dinner was too much for even a number of Mr Trump’s allies, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former ambassador to Israel David Friedman, and a number of Republican members of Congress, who condemned Mr Fuentes and Ye’s presence at Mar-a-Lago. Mr Trump later said he had not known who Mr Fuentes was and that he arrived alongside Ye.
In addition to his outspoken white nationalism, Mr Fuentes has made a number of antisemitic statements over the years. He denied the Holocaust in an extended metaphor in which he compared Jewish people being killed in concentration camps to cookies being baked in an oven and later claimed he was joking; has claimed that Jews are not Europeans because they’re not Christian; and said that the conservative movement should discuss “Jewish Power,” playing to the antisemitic trope of Jews secretly controlling levers of power.
“I am a child of survivors. I have become very frightened for my people,” Mort Klein, head of the Zionist Organization of America, said. “Donald Trump is not an antisemite. He loves Israel. He loves Jews. But he mainstreams, he legitimizes Jew hatred and Jew haters. And this scares me.”
Mr Fuentes has experience getting kicked out of things. He has been banned from a number of major social media platforms including YouTube, Twitter, and Reddit for violating policies against hate speech.
In 2020, Mr Fuentes launched his own political conference, the America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC). Two members of Congress, Reps Paul Gosar of Arizona and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, attended in 2021 and 2022 respectively.
Amid outrage at her attendance, Ms Greene said she was not aware of Mr Fuentes’s views.
Despite those high-profile connections and his facetime with the former president, Mr Fuentes bemoaned the treatment his movement gets in the nation’s capital and said he has postponed the fourth addition of AFPAC.
“Our venue for the rally got cancelled and they bounced us from the hotel,” Mr Fuentes posted on Thursday night. “This is a big part of why I postponed AFPAC IV— we get no play here in DC.”
