It was a little after 4:30 in the morning this past June when Andy O’Brian says he jolted awake to muffled banging on the door of his Los Angeles home. As he came face-to-face with close to a dozen LAPD officers, O’Brian had a hunch about who’d sent them and why. Moments later, one of the officers asked O’Brian: “Are you trying to kill a guy named Nick?”
The sheriffs that morning wouldn’t likely have known that the “Nick” in question was a reference to Nick Fuentes, the 28-year-old white supremacist streamer with some 1.2 million followers on X and one of the largest streaming audiences on the conservative news platform Rumble. They were even less likely to know that O’Brian, a longtime follower of Fuentes—or a “groyper,” as the faithful like to call themselves—says he was swatted because he recently questioned the streamer’s political tactics in a group chat.
“Usually the right fucks with people on the left,” O’Brian tells me on a phone call this past September. “But now the right is fucking with people on the right. Like, how do I explain to the cops that [they’d been called because] I’m not Nazi enough?”
In the world of anonymous online accounts that orbit Fuentes and share his radical “America First” political agenda, O’Brian was a central figure at just 21. Better known by his online handle, Chad Champion, he’d watched Fuentes’s streams from age 14, following him from platform to platform as he was continually banned. O’Brian started posting himself and grew into a far-right microcelebrity. He soon found himself welcomed into Fuentes’s small inner circle, the “groyper generals.”
But it’s not exactly clear where this so-called army is marching. With his increasingly massive following, Fuentes is positioned to be a kingmaker in conservative politics. He’s long spoken of remaking the Republican Party, and he seems to controls a loyal voting bloc populated by one of the most coveted demographics in electoral politics right now: young men. But the culture O’Brian describes to me doesn’t sound like a vanguard of white nationalism or anything close to a political organizing operation like the Democratic Socialists of America. Rather, it sounds like most online communities: transient spaces anchored by a celebrity-like figurehead, in this case Fuentes, who, according to O’Brian, was more concerned with gaming and earning money from his nightly streams than true politicking. (A recent report in The Washington Post estimated he earned nearly $900,000 from “superchat” donations between early 2025 and March 2026.) Each night, after Fuentes’s shows on Rumble ended, O’Brian says a select few would be invited to play Fortnite with the influencer.
