On Thursday, Elon Musk vowed to reinstate the “X” account of Nick Fuentes, a notorious white nationalist, and has now made good on his promise.
Fuentes gained infamy when he attended the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017 and has compiled an extensive dossier of extremist activity since then. Fuentes’s “America First” movement, dubbed the “Groypers,” is built on racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and misogyny. Fuentes regularly makes news for his calls to upend American democracy with Christian Nationalist-fueled violence. But there is one aspect of Fuentes’s career that deserves ongoing scrutiny, especially as Donald Trump vies for the presidency once again: Fuentes incited people prior to and during the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection. And he used Twitter, now known as “X,” as well as other social media platforms, to do it. Now that Fuentes’s X account has been restored, will Musk allow him to do so once again?