Though the groypers are informally led by Nick Fuentes, Dalton Clodfelter – who considers Fuentes his friend and mentor – is something of a rising star, representing Gen Z neo-fascism. Clodfelter joined Fuentes’s network, CozyTV (which was founded so that “anti-gay, anti-women, anti-Black, antisemitic” activists had a platform), in 2022 and quickly gained a substantial following, in particular for his “Ye is Right” channel on right-wing YouTube alternative Rumble. He and the groypers have for instance forged alliances with religious fundamentalist groups, such as the Church Militant.
Clodfelter openly advocates for an authoritarian (“the country would be better off if President Trump was a monarch”), fascist government. Though he appreciates free speech laws today, he wants ultimately to restrict the right to speak freely: “Once we take power I see no problem with silencing our opposition”: “Once we take control, we will identify our enemies [that would be Democrats, globalists and homosexuals] and we will stomp them into the dirt. They will not be able to return to power. We will rip them from their offices. We will rip them from their homes for being degenerate liars, degenerate, treasonous domestic terrorists, because that is what they are.” The terrorist/non-terrorist distinction is only one of the distinctions Clodfelter struggles with. Insofar as he is also, despite protestations, a white nationalist, we’ll leave it to readers to categorize his political outlook.
As for his “positive” view, “the United States Constitution clearly sucks and so does the Bill of Rights” and “we want to take back the country and reestablish a Christ-like nation, a nation where the national religion is Christian [e.g.“I don’t necessarily believe that you should be able to serve public office if you are not Christian”]. A nation where the national language is English. A nation where pornography is banned, homosexuality is banned, and transgenderism is banned. Where you will never see a college that isn’t a Christian college. […]. There should be no secular teaching in the schools.” Thing is, we suspect (as does Clodfelter) that there is a rather large number of wingnut fundies who agree with that sentiment, even if they’ll rarely say it explicitly. A sign of how depraved present society is, according to Clodfelter, is the fact that he can’t have a “normal life” in this society simply because he wants to make “edgy jokes” about loving Hitler, hating Jews, and saying the N-word. Exactly what his positive suggestion involves, is perhaps not completely clear, but at least“we need to take inspiration from China and from Russia.”
Clodfelter is also a proponent of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, firmly opposed to interracial marriage, and has declared that the US should always be run by “a white majority.” Meanwhile, “Black people should be growing up in a society that glorifies white people” so that they’ll learn to be more grateful: “They should be thanking whites for slavery, quite frankly.” (He has also asserted that “we must ban black people”). As for his question “Why do blacks commit more crime?” Clodfelter quickly produced his own answer: “Many reasons but I will tell you some of it has to do with Jews.” According to Clodfelter, “the two biggest issues in this country” are “Jews [and] Women”: “All other issues stem from these two problems.”
He has claimed that it was “evil” to give women the right to vote (the good/evil distinction is another distinction Clodfelter is unclear about) because they’re “dumber” than men and have no place outside the home. And of course he wants any rights recognized for the LGBTQ people to be taken away: “Make sodomy and homosexual relations and being trans illegal.” As for his views on race, Clodfelter has taken the MAGA phrase somewhat literally: “I love what this country once was, before the Civil Rights Movement.” That said, Clodfelter actually agrees that the America First movement is a cult, but nevertheless vows to “rape, kill, and die” for it.
He might, in the end, be most famous for his and co-host Canadian white supremacist Tyler Russell’s stunts involving barnstorming college campuses for events he calls: “Ye is right, change my mind”, setting up tables and inviting people to argue with them– although the planned college tour was canceled after less than one month after Clodfelter lost the funding for both the tour itself and the tour’s associated Rumble channel. Even most radical wingnut groups are still somewhat unnerved by the kind of open anti-semitism and Holocaust denial people like Clodfelter espouse (Clodfelter believes he was kicked out of CPAC just because “we love Hitler”), though that might change.
Diagnosis: A clown, and though he clearly has the horror movie trope clown as his model, he remains just a regular, albeit evil, clown. But there are lots of people out there apparently ready to think Clodfelter has something worth listening to – if only for the goal of sowing destruction and discord – and his following seems to be substantial even when you subtract the bots.
Hat-tip: Dailydot