Never Been Kissed

Meet the incel Fuentes fans who love him for hating women.

- By Kristen Doerer

In october 2021, Nick Fuentes launched his own streaming platform, Cozy.tv. After being kicked off every major communications service, from YouTube to Twitter, he promised it would be censorship-free-and explicitly bigoted. "We are anti-gay, anti-woman, antiBlack, anti-Semitic," he boasted in one of his videos a couple months later.

Fuentes' base has always mostly been made of young white men who believe they have lost their rightful place in the United States. He weaponizes their insecurities, as Amanda Marcotte wrote in Salon, "convincing them that the cure for the entirely normal mix of emotions they're feeling can be found in embracing a fascist movement."

Racism and misogyny cross-pollinate in the chatrooms that accompany Fuentes' broadcasts. As always, the n-word litters his fans' conversation, but, more and more, so do anti-women slurs like "foid" and "holes." That trend has unfolded as Fuentes seems to have made more of a point over the past year of reaching receptive men by bashing women, in part by personally identifying with the "incel" subculture. The term is short for "involuntary celibate," and has become inextricably associated with misogynist men who not only blame women for their problems, but believe women owe them sex.