Where speakers had a cheer for Putin, attacked the concept of diversity, and lauded ‘white men’…
Fuentes, an antisemite and racist who attended the deadly 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and who was recently subpoenaed for his involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, excitedly introduced Greene as the featured speaker from behind a lectern inside the Marriott Orlando World Center, according to a livestream of the event. (HuffPost was denied entrance to AFPAC.)
In her speech, Greene referred to the assembled AFPAC crowd — among them prominent right-wing extremists who have been photographed giving the Nazi salute and reciting the infamous “14 words,” a white supremacist slogan — as “canceled Americans.”
“You’ve been handed the responsibility to fight for our Constitution and stand for our freedoms, and stop the Democrats who are the communist party of the United States of America,” Greene said.
She also took time to attack transgender people, claiming Democrats have destroyed “gender” and “pronouns.”
Her speech was immediately followed by a series of virulently racist and homophobic diatribes from prominent extremists.
“They want to replace you,” said Vincent James Foxx, a former propagandist for the white supremacist street-fighting club Rise Above Movement. “Western white culture is the majority culture, to which even non-whites assimilate into today — and they’re better off for it.”
Then far-right podcaster Stew Peters called for the execution of Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, whom he falsely blamed for causing the coronavirus pandemic.
“Tony Fauci literally unleashed a bio weapon on the world. Why is this man running around free instead of hanging on the end of a noose somewhere?”
The crowd roared.
Fuentes, an advocate of turning America into a nation only for white Christians, is one of the leaders of the so-called “groyper” movement — along with the founder of American Identity Movement, a white nationalist group formerly known as Identity Ervopa — and Rogers is one of its emerging icons. The groyper movement is a collection of white nationalists who seek to normalize racism and make it a part of mainstream conservative political ideology.
AFPAC opened with Fuentes soliciting a round of applause from the crowd for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The white nationalists chanted in response, “Putin! Putin! Putin!”
In his closing speech, Fuentes said “the United States is the evil empire in the world.”
“Now, they’re going and saying, “‘Vladimir Putin is Adolf Hitler,’ as if that isn’t a good thing,” he said, before chuckling a rehearsed nervous laugh and adding, “Oops, I shouldn’t have said that.”