White Nationalist Nick Fuentes Had the #1 Podcast on Spotify Before It Got Taken Down

Nicole Hester/Ann Arbor News via AP, File

Nick Fuentes, the highly controversial white nationalist influencer, topped Spotify’s trending chart this week for a brief moment before the platform took down his podcast.

Fuentes addressed the controversy on a recent episode of his show while answering messages from his fans. “Hooray for problems, says f*ck Spotify, am I right?” Fuentes began, reading a message.

“Yeah, what’s going on, man? I guess I was number one for like a day, but I didn’t even start that channel. That’s not even my channel. Someone else just started uploading my show,” he continued, adding:

I didn’t even do it. Honest to God, it wasn’t me. It wasn’t even an intern. Some random guy just started downloading my show, and it went number one immediately, and then they banned it.

Spotify released a statement on the incident amid speculation that the streaming giant had banned Fuentes altogether.

“In 2020, we removed this show for repeated violations of our Platform Rules,” a Spotify spokesperson told The New York Post on Wednesday, following Fuentes’s Tuesday surge on the platform.

“Our policies are focused on content that violates our guidelines, not on creators themselves. Consequently, while this specific show and the attempts to re-upload it by multiple users are not permitted, the podcaster in question is not banned and still appears as a guest on other shows,” added Spotify, making clear Fuentes can still appear as a guest on other podcasts on the platform. Fuentes, who has long been considered too extreme and hateful for mainstream MAGA, has been rising in popularity in recent months, scoring major sit-downs with podcasters like Glenn Greenwald, Patrick Bet-David, and Dave Smith.

Past deplatforming of Fuentes for hate speech has now led many to embrace him, particularly as anti-woke sentiment permeates much of the right. Fuentes was deplatformed from YouTube, Twitter, and other platforms in recent years over his explicit anti-Semitism, as well as his repeated calls for limiting the rights of women, minorities, and the LGBTQ community. His regular use of violent rhetoric has also caused alarm. “All I want is revenge against my enemies and a total Aryan victory,” Fuentes said, for example, in 2022.

Fuentes also called for a “dictatorship” to get rid of “the Jewish media” that has made Americans “evil” by making various things popular.

“Sodomy is popular, you know, being gay is popular, being a feminist is popular, sex out of wedlock is popular, contraceptives are, that’s all popular. That’s not to say it’s good; that’s not to say I like that. Popular means that people support it, which they do. And, uh, and it sucks and it is what it is, but that’s why we need — dictatorship. That’s unironically why we need to get rid of all that,” he ranted, adding:

We need to take control of the media or take control of the government and force the people to believe what we believe or force them to play by our rules and reshape the society.

In the past, Fuentes has called for the execution of non-Christians and promised to kill for Trump.