I have trouble understanding how anyone ever took these idiots seriously.
Understanding this requires seeing two things: The social media censorship regime that came into being after UTR/Charlottesville and how Nick and the AF message changed over the years.
For the first, the combination of the Optics Wars and the massive ramp-up of censorship especially on Youtube and Twitter essentially killed off a load of content creators both more radical and much more normie-friendly than Nick nearly all who went away completely, starved on alt-tech sites or retreated into hugboxes like TRS.
Remember, after Nick and James Allsup parted ways Nick was seething to a few hundred stream viewers with Beardson and Prince Hubris while Allsup was running a very approachable YT channel whose videos got high six figure view counts on the reg before Youtube just banned him because "lmao you want a reason peasant? the reason is fuck you that's why".
At the same time you had the Optics War instigated by Anglin and MPC to "clean up the movement and purge the cringe wignats" and all the attendant flaggotry and gayops while also a group of Theonomist Neoreactionaries around Dan DeCarlo were feeding info/dox to the press (cf. the Katie McHugh affair).
It was in this enviroment that Nick built his audience doing IBS, running the Groyper War and presenting himself as the face of "optical" right-wing activism constantly feuding with people like Patrick Little (who was the Lucas Gage of his time).
In short, for quite a long time Nick was unmolested by TPTB and had the chance to build his audience while everybody else was either banished into the shadow realm or retreated into obscurantism.
For the second, just like Scientology doesn't run around shouting about Xenu and Operating Thetan levels but gives out personality tests, Nick wasn't presenting as anything but a populist, non-interventionist, Christian traditionalist who is kinda JQ-woke (but not like those wignats who see Jews hiding under beds and inside strom drains).
Of course this was always a facade, anons were pointing at his lust for femboys and catboys back on 8ch/pol/ half an eternity ago and even back then he was affiliated with "ironic" pederastic anime accounts on Twitter. Of course back then he could sucessfully deflect by pretending people were falling for "screencaps forged by Vaush and his fans".
But as time went on, Nick has gotten more and more unhinged. From the open embrace of "political incelism" to laughing about the victims of a Black Nationalist terror attack to endorsing a Silicon Valley technocrat promising soporific universal gibs to endorsing a bisexual schizophrenic Black man to endorsing and getting coco-nutty with Kamala to weird Russia and China and Palestine shilling to literally instructing people at the J6 rally to tear down barriers and storm the capitol and getting away scott free to laughing and mocking his followers who did that and ended up in prison for it to to embracing a kind of cartoonish antisemitism Nick would constantly criticize in his "optical phase" and a dozen other things.
Nick isn't even doing motte-and-bailey anymore, it's just the motte (pedophilia, shilling for dems, Hollywood antisemitism). Other e-daddies who do online politics have deteriorated in similiar ways, cf. desTINY.