🌊 Who Is James Fishback?

And should the College Republicans have been booted off campus for a Nazi salute?

If you’re not on social media, you probably don’t know James Fishback. If you are, you may know him well. The Tucker Carlson-backed Florida gubernatorial candidate is, somehow, both a social media superstar and polling in the single digits.

His odds of becoming Florida’s next governor are slim – but with the buzz around him, you’d never know it.

Just last Wednesday, a record number of students packed the University of Florida’s Reitz Union Ballroom to see him speak. They lined up hours early and stuck around after for selfies and autographs.

“I have zero political experience,” Fishback told the students to applause. “I have zero years of going to the United States Congress, spending money that we don’t have, to buy weapons that we can’t afford, to give them to a country that is committing war crimes, known as Israel.”

“I lost track of how many times Florida Republican gubernatorial candidate James Fishback paused to let the audience clap,” the student newspaper’s correspondent in the room reported.

Over the next hour, Fishback worked through his greatest hits: Calling for a “hoe” tax on OnlyFans income, vowing to sell all of Florida’s Israeli bonds, labeling his (black) primary opponent Rep. Byron Donalds a “slave.”

“I call him a slave because he’s a slave,” Fishback said during the talk. “And if he wants me to stop calling him a slave, give back the $45M to AIPAC and Wall Street and the hedge fund billionaires. Until then, Byron Donalds, you’re a slave.”

The crowd loved it; Florida’s College Republicans said it was their most attended candidate event in history.

Then just two days later, the university banned the chapter.

The right-wing ideologies of Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson have been spreading like wildfire on social media, particularly among young conservative men. Fishback is the candidate attempting to bring them to life.

He wants an end to all immigration, claims that Israel controls America, and suggests that Jews are responsible for diluting the country’s white and Christian populations. As he recently told a crowd in St. Augustine, Florida, “I believe that American citizens have a right to exist in their country without being replaced, without being trafficked, and without being sent to war and distorted and converted by foreign powers.”

In today’s deep-dive, we examine Fishback’s rise, the clash on UF’s campus after his visit, and whether the firebrand stands a shot at becoming governor of the country’s third-most populous state.