Kanye’s 2024 Brain Trust Booted From Twitter (Again)
The Twitter accounts of Stop the Steal organizer Ali Alexander and white nationalist Nick Fuentes were suspended from the platform on Wednesday. The pair have been advising Kanye West, now known as Ye, as the rapper weighs his 2024 presidential campaign amid a torrent of antisemitism. Alexander and Fuentes now join their political hero in rare company, as right wingers who have been reinstated to Elon Musk’s Twitter only to promptly get re-banned.
Fuentes was suspended from the platform less than 24 hours after having a previous permanent ban lifted from his account. The far-right streamer celebrated his return on Tuesday by posting a chart highlighting Jewish executives at prominent companies. The chart, which played into antisemitic tropes claiming Jewish people control the world through prominent industry positions, was titled “Who Controls Your Mind? 2023.” In the few hours his account was active, Fuentes also held a live Twitter Spaces event where he repeated similar tropes and shouted “We love Hitler…bitch!”
The reason Fuentes’ account was unbanned has not yet been made clear, but his brief return follows a pattern of amnesty granted to reactionary and extremist figures by Musk, who took over the social media company in October. On his Telegram account, Fuentes has launched an appeal to his followers to “nicely” petition Musk and Head of Trust and Safety Ella Irwin to have him reinstated.
Alexander — who organized the Stop the Steal campaign to promote the Big Lie that Donald Trump was robbed of reelection — was banned from Twitter after the protests he helped organize on Jan. 6, 2021 bubbled over into a bloody insurrection. Alexander said he was reinstated to Twitter earlier this month after speaking directly to Musk.
“I’m suspended? They suspended Nick and me?” Alexander wrote on his Telegram account Wednesday. He claimed that “this was a manually triggered suspension by some employee.” “They’re afraid of Ye…They’re afraid of me organizing so rogue employees and mass reporters are doing the mostest. I rebuke them in the name of Jesus Christ. Give me my account back, now!”
Alexander had been on a media blitz since getting his Twitter account back, bragging on a series of podcasts about his and Fuentes’ connections to Ye. He told one podcaster that he and Fuentes had been in Florida with Ye when the rapper posted an image of a swastika intertwined with a Star of David — borrowed from a UFO cult known as the Raelians — that got the rapper booted once again from Twitter.
“I’m sitting diagonal to him,” Alexander recalled. “He says, ‘What do you think?’ And I look at what looks like the Jewish Star of David, and a swastika. And I said, ‘Ye, don’t Please don’t.’ And what he will say to me is like, ‘Ali, you’re a handler.’ Or, ‘You’re boring.’” Despite advising against the tweet, Alexander still defended Ye. “He never did anything hateful,” Alexander protested of Ye, who had recently told Jews it was time to “forgive Hitler.”
Fuentes appeared with Ye on Alex Jones’ InfoWars broadcast in December, where the rapper praised Hitler, lauded the Nazis, and downplayed the severity of the Holocaust. (On a separate podcast, Alexander bragged that he’d been the one to secure a bottle of Yoo-Hoo as a prop for a joke Ye made on Jones’ show denigrating Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu.) Ye and Fuentes had recently dined with former President Trump at Mar-a-Lago alongside alt-right commentator Milo Yiannopoulos.
Previously banned far-right personalities reinstated under Musk’s new management ran to defend the pair. Far-right streamer Anthime Gionet, known online as “Baked Alaska,” called for Fuentes and Alexander to be reinstated. Gionet is currently awaiting the beginning of a two-month prison sentence for his action in the Capitol on Jan. 6.
While the future of Ye’s campaign remains uncertain, fringe far-right figures like Fuentes and Alexander have grasped onto Ye’s imploding stardom in order to claw their way back to mainstream conservative relevancy. The willing gullibility of Twitter’s new executives only paves the way for them to do so.
