Is the white identitarian movement in America all that white? That is the question I have (unfortunately) been preoccupied with ever since October, when Tucker Carlson famously gave a softball interview to Nick Fuentes, a man partially of Mexican heritage who espouses, among other things, white nationalist views and ideology.

The backlash against Carlson’s interview reminded me of another, older incident in which a figure in the conservative mainstream played nice with Fuentes—indeed, one which further illustrates the surprising degree of diversity that exists on the racist far right. That incident involved the self-described “little brown woman with a big mouth,” Filipina American political commentator Michelle Malkin.

Malkin first allied herself with Fuentes in 2019, in the aftermath of what came to be known by Fuentes’ fans as the “Groyper War.” Battles in this proverbial war took place over the course of a college speaking tour organized by the late Charlie Kirk and involved followers of Fuentes, known as the groypers, confronting Kirk and other speakers about their stances on immigration, relations with Israel, and social conservatism. While Kirk denounced the groypers as white supremacists and antisemites, Malkin came to their defense. “Here’s my message to the new generation of America Firsters exposing the big lies of the anti-American open borders establishment and its controlled opposition operatives: If I was your mom, I’d be proud as hell,” Malkin declared, during a Young America’s Foundation-sponsored speech.

{snip} Malkin’s speech marked a profoundly strange moment in far-right politics: An Asian woman with a deep golden-brown complexion had become a leader of a movement advocating for the drastic reduction of America’s nonwhite population.

Malkin hasn’t retained a significant presence within Fuentes’s political movement or public life generally, for that matter. Nevertheless, her metamorphosis from a darling of establishment conservative institutions—YAF, Fox News, the American Conservative Union, and so on—to a mother figure to groypers remains relevant insofar as it demonstrates both how and why the white identitarian movement is marked by significant nonwhite involvement at virtually every level. Moreover, the multiracialism of the groypers, broadly speaking, highlights the more fundamental reality that America is undergoing a racial realignment—such that an increasingly nativist and racist right wing will not necessarily be a whiter one.

Fuentes and Malkin are but two examples of individuals who hold or sympathize with white nationalist views despite being entirely or partially nonwhite. While it is impossible to say for sure just how many such people exist, it is safe to assume that nonwhites at least make up a sizable minority of Fuentes’s fan base. When asked during a recent interview with Candace Owens to describe the groypers, Fuentes stated that they are not just young white men but “other men too—some of them are Hispanic, some of them are black, some of them are Jewish, for that matter.” Subsequent conferences he hosted in 2021 and 2022 also included nonwhite speakers and special guests besides Malkin, such as African American political commentators Jon Miller and Jesse Lee Peterson.

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How to explain these seemingly contradictory positions? Malkin’s explanation of her own beliefs suggests that some nonwhites in Fuentes’s movement believe America should be a predominantly white country. These individuals typically understand the cultures of America and the West to be inextricably linked to the populations who created them—namely, those of white European descent. While they believe that they themselves have assimilated to those cultures and adopted their traditions and values, they are skeptical or outright in denial of the fact that other nonwhites are capable of doing the same. In other words, they see themselves as lone exceptions to nonwhite backwardness, ethnocentricity, and cultural incompatibility.

Speaking at a November 2021 conference hosted by the white nationalist publication American Renaissance, Malkin listed off the Koch brothers, the Wall Street Journal, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and the Anti-Defamation League as a few examples of the many “anti-white” actors responsible for the “demographic mass murder” of America due to what she characterized as their promotion of immigration from non-European countries. She further declared that the answer to police brutality victim Rodney King’s famous question amid the 1992 Los Angeles riots, “Can we all just get along?” is a definitive no.

Later in that same speech, Malkin credited a “childhood that was filled with positive reverence and appreciation for Western civilization”—its literature and classical music, in particular—with making her immune to the “hogwash of anti-white propagandists.” She also noted that the mere fact that her own parents immigrated to the U.S. from a developing country did not obligate her to advocate for ruinous immigration policies “that have transformed large swathes of the only homeland I’ve ever known and loved into the very kind of third world hellhole that my parents didn’t want me to grow up in in the first place.” Here, Malkin clearly identifies herself with white people and their cultural output. However, she doesn’t seem to believe that her coethnics or anyone else of non-European descent, for that matter, could ever likewise carry on the national and civilizational legacies of America and the West. Thus, she is apparently forced to conclude that a very high degree of white racial stock is needed for America to recapture its authentic character and former greatness.

A second subset of nonwhite groypers may be drawn to Fuentes because they enjoy his racist tirades and adeptness at offending woke pieties. Racial prejudice, it hardly needs to be stated, is not unique to white people. Many Hispanics and Asians, for example, harbor racist attitudes about black people, and blacks and Hispanics often hold negative views of Jews. {snip}

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