An open White nationalist leader within the America First/groyper movement, best known within the movement as Jake Lloyd, appears to be currently serving as deputy communications director for far-right Texas gubernatorial candidate Don Huffines.1 Huffines’ campaign has promoted virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy and is dragging the Texas GOP even further toward the Right. While the Huffines campaign doesn’t list staff on its website, Lloyd—who’s called for maintaining a White “supermajority” in the U.S. and founded a far-right chatroom where members called for “death to all minorities”—is advertised as serving in that role in at least three upcoming speaking events with the influential conservative organization True Texas Project, which strongly supports and regularly hosts events with Huffines’ campaign. In a December 2021 interview with the conservative outlet Current Revolt, the 24-year-old Lloyd wrote that he is currently “focused on electing real conservatives to the Texas government (Don Huffines for Governor btw).”
Lloyd’s Twitter bio also contains a link to Huffines’ campaign website and Twitter account, and several times has shared campaign materials and other pro-Huffines content. Lloyd’s name appears as Jake Lloyd Colglazier in more recent social media accounts, published interviews, events associated with the campaign, and other materials, suggesting an attempt to gain distance from his prior White nationalist activities conducted as Jake Lloyd. As of the time of publication, the Huffines campaign has not returned a request for comment.
During the Trump presidency, open White nationalists sought to influence mainstream politics by seeking positions within Republican Party infrastructure and conservative institutions, but gradually found these attempts at “entryism” rebuffed, as establishment conservatives learned to avoid association with the toxic Alt Right brand. In the post-Trump era, however, multiple GOP elected officials have embraced White nationalist Nick Fuentes, founder of the America First movement; leading conservatives like Fox News host Tucker Carlson have espoused White nationalist rhetoric; and the conservative movement, as a whole, is quickly radicalizing rightwards. In this changed environment, White nationalists like Lloyd may see a new chance to break into the political establishment.
“My Race Is Dying”
Lloyd’s career as an established far-right influencer began in 2017, when he was hired at Alex Jones’ conspiracist video channel Infowars, eventually becoming a host. As host, he regularly interviewed White nationalists—such as Fuentes, “Red Elephants” livestreamer Vincent James Foxx, and Faith Goldy, a commentator who lost her position with the far-right media outlet Rebel News after appearing on a podcast of the neonazi website Daily Stormer—lending these leaders longed-for visibility before Jones’ large nationwide audience. In 2018, Lloyd was also a regular contributor to a Discord discussion forum server, the “Nick Fuentes Server,” associated with the White nationalist group Identity Evropa, according to chat logs later leaked by the media collective Unicorn Riot.
On the forum, Lloyd debated the finer points of the fascist ideology of Third Positionism; recommended the use of semi-automatic rifles for “whenever the system collapses” (Lloyd claims to have enlisted in the Army at 17); and on one occasion, asked fellow members, “[I’m] hosting Infowars rn, what should I talk about[?]” Members repeatedly expressed “love” for Lloyd, calling him a “legend” and speculating whether he would “get fired [from Infowars] for being too redpilled.”
In the fall of 2019, Lloyd emerged among the top ranks of the America First/groyper movement, helping Fuentes lead the groypers into strategic public confrontations on college campuses with conservative leaders like Charlie Kirk, Ben Shapiro, and Donald Trump, Jr. Championing these “Groyper Wars” during an Infowars interview, Lloyd described himself as “heavily involved” with the series of stunts, which were designed to seed White nationalist ideas into conservative discourse and successfully landed the groyper movement in the conservative spotlight.
On December 20, 2019, basking in the movement’s newfound notoriety and momentum, Lloyd was one of three featured speakers, alongside Fuentes and Identity Evropa leader Patrick Casey, at the Groyper Leadership Summit, a suit-and-tie conference held down the street from Turning Point USA’s annual Student Action Summit in West Palm Beach, Florida. “I don’t know what victory looks like,” Lloyd told the assembled crowd, “but the conditions of that victory will be complete and total. ‘Conservative, Inc.’ and the greater political establishment of the United States will crumble at the hands of the groypers…history will remember the groypers and the movement that followed—flowed from America First, from AIM [the American Identity Movement, an aligned White nationalist group], from the greater groyper network at large.”
A Discord server established by Lloyd during this time, American Dissident, offers a window into his movement milieu. With the Alt Right’s characteristic brand of irony-tinged bigotry on full display, fans of Lloyd’s Youtube show, “American Dissident,” addressed each other as “my fellow fashy goyim,” celebrated “our Aryan bloodlines,” traded antisemitic remarks about foreskins, called for “death to all minorities,” and urged each other to “throw some romans [Nazi salutes] in the chat.” Lloyd repeatedly insisted that members practice what the groypers call “good optics,” downplaying the virulent core of their beliefs behind a respectable veneer.
As the energy from the Groyper Wars died down, Lloyd outlined his vision for the movement’s future in a January 2020 livestream entitled “What Is Our Ultimate Objective?” Warning that “the country is on a very dangerous course,” Lloyd explained that “we’re nearing the demographic cliff” in which, as changing demographics shrink Republicans’ voter base, conservatives will have a “potentially impossible time” getting elected or passing policy. While Lloyd said the most urgent task was preventing this “electoral winter”—invoking the phrase “demographic winter,” a forerunner to Great Replacement theory popularized by the Christian Right—he also explained that the groypers should remain focused on a deeper purpose. “The purpose of preventing [the demographic electoral winter],” Lloyd continued,
is so that we can restore the traditional American culture, to restore the prospects of existence for the historic people, the historic American nation. That’s cultural—and, when you say nation, it does include the element of shared lineage, shared history…we need to get into positions of authority, or within close proximity of positions of authority…we need to get into positions of institutional power so that we can enact policies that can prevent or stymie demographic change, so that we can continue to gain institutional power, so that we can restore historical America.
“What we’re concerned with,” Lloyd elaborated, “is restoring historical America, which does require restoring historical American culture—which means by and large maintaining a supermajority of the original stock of the United States, and maintaining a homogeneity.” For White nationalists like Lloyd, Fuentes, and other groypers who seek to modulate their views in terms palatable to larger audiences, phrases like “original stock,” “historic American nation,” “homogeneity,” and “shared lineage” are common buzzwords meant to denote the “White race” in the U.S. Towards the end of his livestream, Lloyd turned to his home state of Texas, in an aside that takes on disturbing resonance given his current role with the hardline anti-immigrant Huffines campaign. When he celebrated his Texan pride on Twitter, Lloyd complained, followers typically responded by reminding him, “‘too bad it’s already minority White.’…it’s like bro, can I tweet anything about my epic state being epic without you trying to remind me and bring me down with the fact that my race is dying?”
While Lloyd dialed back his groyper activism in 2020, he re-emerged on multiple occasions near the helm of the movement. On November 3, 2020, the night of the presidential election, Lloyd joined Fuentes and other core groyper leaders for a lengthy livestream, reacting together to the slow trickle of election returns. Later that month, Lloyd launched “The Jake Lloyd Show” on his Youtube channel, framing himself as a leader of the groyper movement. “All that you have as far as good content these days,” he lamented, “is America First. Am I wrong? I don’t think I’m wrong.” Listing himself alongside established leaders of the movement, he continued, “You have me, Nick, Jaden [McNeil], Vince [James Foxx], Steve Franssen, Beardson Beardly…”
Lloyd then took credit for the burgeoning alliance between Fuentes and Alex Jones at the helm of the Stop the Steal movement to reverse Trump’s electoral defeat, an alliance which, the movement hoped, would further expose Fuentes’ message to new audiences. “A lot of you guys weren’t trusting the plan when I had Nick on [Infowars] in 2018,” Lloyd proclaimed. “I am the puppet master!” “Great job Jakey!” Fuentes remarked affectionately in the chat room of the episode, “congrats on episode one!” On November 15, Lloyd spoke alongside Fuentes and other groyper leaders at the Million MAGA March in Washington, D.C.
Lloyd has since otherwise remained largely aloof from the groyper orbit, but his video streams continued to mirror the movement’s hard-edged misogyny, anti-Black racism, anti-LGBTQ bigotry, and more. Clips from Lloyd’s channel on the streaming site DLive, recorded throughout 2020 and 2021 and obtained by PRA,2 show the groyper leader celebrating domestic violence against women, declaring “I spit on George Floyd,” elaborating “White Genocide” conspiracy theories, breaking into cheerful song at videos of police shooting Black folks, and more.
“A Truly Reactionary Party”
While Huffines trails significantly behind incumbent Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott in projections for the upcoming March gubernatorial primary, close observers credit the Huffines campaign with dragging Abbott further rightward in recent months by outflanking him on issues ranging from a promised Texas border wall, to opposing gender-affirming care for transgender minors, and more. From this vantage point, Lloyd’s embrace of Huffines’ campaign can be seen as one application of the groyper movement’s broader strategy to accelerate the rightward drift of the conservative movement, in order to move White nationalism mainstream in the post-Trump era. The groypers “have to push the envelope,” Fuentes told followers on a May 2021 livestream. “We have got to be on the Right, dragging these people kicking and screaming into the future, into the right wing, into a truly reactionary party. And it’s incremental—we’re not gonna drag them all the way over—but if we can drag over the furthest part of the Right further to the Right…then we’re winning.”
The state of Texas, meanwhile, continues to be a focal point, both for the Biden administration’s Trumpian, restrictionist immigration policy on the one hand, and for the further mainstreaming of White nationalism on the Right, on the other. In September 2021, as the Biden administration forcibly deported thousands of Haitian immigrants at the Texas border, Tucker Carlson took the opportunity to move the Overton Window deeper into White nationalist territory, charging on his primetime Fox News show that Biden was promoting “an unrelenting stream of immigration” to “change the racial mix of the country.” Going beyond his previous allusions to the conspiracy theory, Carlson went on to cite it directly: “in political terms, this policy is called the ‘Great Replacement’: the replacement of legacy Americans.”
The Texas Democratic Party has charged that the Huffines campaign—with its fear mongering over an immigrant “invasion,” and its radical pledge to shut down all commercial trade with Mexico until it ends migrant border crossings—uses the “the exact same racist, hateful, anti-immigrant rhetoric behind the 2019 El Paso massacre” when White nationalist Patrick Crusius massacred 23 people, most of them Latinx, in a Walmart supermarket, citing fears of the “Great Replacement.”
Huffines’ hardline xenophobic rhetoric once sounded shocking—like his comments last June that, “when we lose Texas, we lose the free world. That means we lost civilization as we know it…time is not on our side.” But these things no longer seem so radical on a post-Trump Right increasingly defined by calls for a total immigration moratorium, and shot through with the rhetoric of civilizational decline. And it doesn’t sound unlike what you might hear at the White nationalist groyper rallies his own communications deputy used to lead.
Endnotes
[1] A campaign email is registered under Jacob Colglazier’s name, and a receptionist at campaign headquarters confirmed that Jacob Lloyd Colglazier is Deputy Communications Director when PRA called to confirm on January 14. As of the time of publication, the Huffines campaign has not returned a request for comment.
[2] For access to these videos, please contact Ben directly on Twitter @BenLorber8.