Before each episode of America First With Nicholas J. Fuentes begins, a surreal mix of images and video clips runs, like a screen saver, for an unpredictable and seemingly eternal amount of time. Gentle plains of swaying grass, trickling streams, and the show’s logo flash across the screen. EDM kicks in. Psychedelic depictions of Christian imagery, including Jesus’s crucifixion, come and go. So do snippets of Fuentes talking about, among other things, borders, drag queens, and his faith. “We want this century to be the most Christian century in the history of planet Earth,” he says.

I’ve become intimately familiar with these clips. Recently, I spent five days as a regular Fuentes viewer. Across five episodes of the nightly broadcast, I watched the 27-year-old white-supremacist influencer speak into a microphone for just shy of 12 hours total. The show is scheduled to air live on Rumble at 9 p.m. central time, but it rarely begins on time. Throughout the week, the opening scenes played for at least two hours every night, bouncing from clip to clip at random, before Fuentes finally got started. I watched episodes the next morning, and the first time I tuned in, I endured the intro sequence for 30 minutes before fast-forwarding.

Since Fuentes appeared on Tucker Carlson’s podcast at the end of October, Republican leaders havestarted to ask themselves just how much sway he has over the party. Fuentes has built an army of fans, who call themselves “Groypers,” and his style of bigoted trolling has become the lingua franca of the young, ascendant right. Each episode I watched garnered at least 1 million views on Rumble. Fuentes has attracted attention for years, but as he’s quick to remind his audience, he’s operated from the fringes, pounding on the doors of mainstream conservatism and meeting fierce condemnation. Now Fuentes has momentum—and based on what I saw, he’s laying the groundwork to go even bigger.

Read: The Nick Fuentes spiral

Fuentes’s show is at the core of his political project. He first began livestreaming in 2017, when he was a freshman at Boston University, and basically hasn’t stopped since. (During the week I tuned in, Fuentes marked his 1,600th episode.) Each episode tends to unfurl in roughly the same way: Fuentes, wearing a suit and tie, sits behind a desk and spends an hour to 90 minutes monologuing about the news of the day. In the first episode I watched, Fuentes began with a riff on how President Donald Trump had recently declined to criticize Carlson’s decision to have Fuentes on his podcast. Within about 30 minutes, Fuentes had flipped to his favorite topic. Jews in America, he said, “are principally concerned, first and foremost, with the interest and the well-being and the welfare of their own community—of global Jewry.” He criticized prominent Jews, including the conservative-media figure Mark Levin and the right-wing megadonor Miriam Adelson.

Fuentes has said all kinds of terrible things over the years. On an episode of his show in March, he summarized his politics as “Jews are running society, women need to shut the fuck up, Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part, and we would live in paradise. It’s that simple.” But I noticed that, perhaps in a bid to not scare away the new viewers he’s attracted in recent months, he used slurs sparingly in the episodes I watched, and mostly avoided talking about non-Jewish minorities. He also went out of his way to claim that he’s “not a cruel guy.”

Read: America’s next top racist

Fuentes couldn’t completely help himself, however. “I make fun of Muslims all the time,” he said in one episode. “I call them ‘towelheads.’ I say they rotate around a cube. I make fun of them, but I don’t hate them.” He added that he did think that Muslims should be remigrated, referencing the far-right desire to deport naturalized citizens whom they see as not having properly assimilated.

Each episode, after finishing his monologue, Fuentes begins a second segment: a mailbag-esque “super chat” during which, for a minimum fee of $20, his fans can ask him questions. Fuentes’s financial situation is opaque, but he seems to bring in a significant amount of money from listener questions. I saw him receive sums as large as $1,000 from a single donor, identified only by the username Zion_Don, who donated on four of the five nights I watched. In one episode, Fuentes accidentally shared his screen with the audience, revealing that he had made at least $5,192 in the span of a few hours.

The chat is just one of his several revenue streams. Fuentes repeatedly encouraged his audience to buy merch, including a $40 T-shirt that displays his face on the back and WANGHAF on the front. “That stands for ‘White-ass nigga going hard as fuck,’ because that’s what we are,” Fuentes said with a grin. For $100 a month, his fans can also access a Telegram group with Fuentes in it.

None of this was a dramatic departure for Fuentes. At its core, *America First With Nicholas J. Fuentes *is very much the same show, with the same racist ideology, that has been amassing followers for Fuentes for years. But he is also clearly in a mode of building, refining. Seemingly intent on making the most of his new visibility, Fuentes spent much of the time that I watched him tripling down on his foremost message of disdain for Jewish people and soliciting the financial capital to do even more with his show.

After I finished the episodes, I reached out to the man who had just been hawking racist street wear at me for a week. Fuentes didn’t provide me with specifics of how much he makes from his livestream, and he denied that he’d changed his tune since going on Carlson’s podcast. “Haha oh so you watch the show finally and now you think i’m moderating???” he texted me. “That’s craaaaazy.” I asked him about his comments on Muslim remigration. “I dont see how that is hateful at all, genuinely,” he said. “These are complete foreigners who are intensely clannish, and basically were accepted into the country as an act of charity.”

Regardless of how much Fuentes wants to convince people that he’s fundamentally a nice guy, in all of the time I spent watching him, I came to understand the extent to which he has perfected a unique (and paradoxical) skill: He builds loyalty among his audience by attacking everyone. He targets not just minorities but also his biggest benefactors. Over the course of the episodes I watched, he denigrated Trump and his followers, accusing the MAGA movement of putting “Israel first.” Fuentes went after Carlson too, attacking him for his hypocrisy in encouraging young people to go to trade school even though Carlson’s own son works for Vice President J. D. Vance.

Fuentes doesn’t spare his fans. Often, when people paid him to answer a question, he would ruthlessly dunk on them. He called his fans “idiots” and “faggots.” In one episode, Fuentes laid into a father seeking recommendations for sufficiently anti-Semitic children’s shows. “Dude, like, isn’t that your job as a parent?” Fuentes said. “I’m astounded at the question.” Even when Fuentes is making fun of his own audience, his charisma makes it seem almost impossible that you specifically are the butt of the joke. He’s laughing with you at them.

Fuentes has been remarkably consistent about his aims and clear about what he wants his fans to do. As early as 2019, Fuentes spoke to his followers about infiltrating the right by blending in with the rest of the GOP. Fuentes and the Groypers are much more powerful than they were six years ago, but he seems to understand that he can’t overplay his hand. During the episodes I watched, he continued to speak about subterfuge: He encouraged a fan who claimed to have a prestigious legal internship to “lie about your beliefs.” He articulated this theory in full during one of the clips used in his intro: “It all means nothing if we don’t get our people in office, if we don’t get our people in government. That’s why I tell Groypers, ‘Don’t let them put your name on a list. Hide. Conceal your views,’” Fuentes explained. “Your job is to get into the Ivy League; your job is to get into these offices and do what you need to do, say what you need to say. Hold it close to the chest.”

Night after night, I watched Fuentes lay out his strategy for maintaining his momentum. “We have to start to build an institution,” he said during one episode. “It can’t just be about me and my personality and me carrying the show.” He said that he would bring back the America First Foundation, a nonprofit he founded in 2020 to raise money for the America First Political Action Conference, his far-right version of the Conservative Political Action Conference (both AFF and AFPAC appear to have been defunct since 2022). Fuentes also mentioned hiring people to work on “a number of new projects,” including a midterm-election guide for his supporters. Fuentes has already infiltrated the right. Now he’s trying to make his movement a permanent fixture of it.