The Groyper who would be governor James Fishback blends trolling and populism

“Let’s not look too much into this,” James Fishback, a GOP primary candidate in the Florida gubernatorial race, tells me when I ask him about referring to his chief primary opponent, US Rep. Byron Donalds, who is black, as “a slave.” Fishback has also suggested that Donalds would turn the Sunshine State into “a Section 8 ghetto” and spelled Donalds’s first name “By’rone.” “I have in the past called Lindsey Graham a slave,” he adds. “I have called Mitt Romney a slave. I would call black or white a slave.”

Fishback represents a new kind of candidate: a younger version of President Trump, who, like his MAGA role model, understands the value of clickbait, shock value, and information overload. Fishback, however, has even fewer limits, a shorter attention span, and a new crop of populist promises. He can also, due to his youth and novelty, be freshly anti-establishment and offer yet another Republican reboot. And he’s rarely out of the news cycle. Just this weekend, he captured headlines after an arson attempt at his Florida home. 

So far, Fishback’s visibility appears greater online than in real life. He’s polling at anywhere between 5% and 23% and has, as of Jan. 14, raised a paltry $19,000 for his campaign. The Right-tilting pollster Patriot Polling shows the highest overall support for Fishback and indicates that he is leading Donalds in the 18-29 age cohort. If you’ve encountered his “based” and “red-pilled” Zoomer-friendly messaging on X (formerly Twitter), that seems plausible. 

Fishback’s candidacy is, in some ways, a profound indictment of American politics as it is practiced in the opening decades of the 21st century: not just because he trades in racist invective and has ties to open anti-Semites — but because these antics mask a somewhat reasonable populist agenda. Indeed, until recently, Fishback came across as MAGA but not especially radical or unhinged; he has taken a far-Right direction only since deciding to run for governor. In other words, he has concluded that he can’t effectively challenge his party’s pro-business and pro-war orthodoxies without dabbling in online extremism. In his persona, populism and transgression have fully merged. 

The gubernatorial hopeful, 31, is slender, energetic, and seizes upon every opportunity to refer to himself as a “fourth-generation Floridian” — presumably on his father’s side, since his mother is from Colombia. He’s originally from South Florida, currently lives in the Panhandle, and dropped out of Georgetown at 21 to start his own hedge fund. 

He first gained media attention last year on DOGE’s coattails, following his proposal that Elon Musk create “DOGE Dividends” — i.e., send money saved through gutting government programs directly to citizens as stimulus checks. Before that, he worked as a trader for Greenlight Capital, a New York-based hedge fund, and founded Azoria, an anti-DEI investment firm committed to “free thinking, excellence, and meritocracy,” which he launched at Mar-A-Lago in December 2024. In attendance was Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, who described Fishback as “truly one of the most articulate people I know.” 

Online, the candidate is better known for his controversies than his policies. Fishback associates with Groypers, and for weeks in December, the banner on his homepage on X showed him shaking the hand of a young man wearing Fuentes’s blue-and-white “America First” hat. The Never Trump Substack The Bulwark has anointed Fishback America’s “First Groyper Politician.” And Fuentes himself has good things to say about him, adding that he’d endorse him, but “I don’t want to hurt him.” 

Fishback doesn’t call himself a Groyper, but his racial edgelording is of a piece with Fuentes’s. In addition to his comments about Donalds, he has said Vivek Ramaswamy doesn’t know what a fork is. On Jan. 30, anti-Semitic provocateur Mo Khan posted an image of himself wearing a “Noticer” hoodie, as Fishback smiled, his hand on Khan’s shoulder. (On our depraved algorithms, to “notice” means to uncover the supposed “truth” that Jews run the world.) “Fishback for Florida,” the post’s caption read. A few days later, Fishback quote-tweeted a post about IKEA’s new $5, 20-inch-long hot dog, calling it “goyim nonsense.” (The online Right likes to suggest that unhealthy fast food is engineered by the Jews for non-Jews, often branding it “goyslop.”)

Fishback has also indulged in high-profile online feuds, like one with OnlyFans model Sophie Rain, and another with Ron DeSantis aide Christina Pushaw. Rain has criticized him for his proposed 50% sin tax on the pornographic platform’s creators. “Sophie, pay up. It’s time to give our public school teachers a raise,” Fishback fired back. In Pushaw’s case, Fishback released text messages that she says have ended her political career. She was providing informal advice to Fishback’s campaign, but they had a falling out. Fishback, Pushaw claims, started a rumor that the two were sleeping together; the candidate, in turn, showed that Pushaw had repeatedly called him in a desperate bid, apparently, for him to drop out of the governor’s race and endorse Lieutenant Governor Jay Collins instead. Speaking to the Miami Herald, he accused Pushaw of suffering from “Fishback Derangement Syndrome.” Pushaw wouldn’t speak to me on the record.

Controversy swirls around Fishback offline, as well. He has been accused of having a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old, an accusation that he denies, and of which he was exonerated in court. (The woman who alleges the abuse, Keinah Fort, did not respond to my request for comment.) His former employer, Greenlight Capital, is suing him. The New York-based hedge fund alleges that Fishback, who worked there from 2021 to 2023, misrepresented his title as “head of macro” to promote his own new firm Azoria, and spent more than $37,000 on “extravagant” personal expenses, whilst claiming inability to pay damages. (Fishback is countersuing). 

Yet all this is in contrast to a bold and sometimes even inspiring vision for Florida. Fishback refers to himself, above all, as an economic populist, and is much more vigilant about the excesses of the free market than the average Republican (and, today, perhaps even the average Democrat). He has vowed to visit every single Florida county, and also plans to visit every Waffle House in the state. 

On policy, he seeks to end Florida’s ever-expanding suburban sprawl, restore the state’s lush citrus groves, and prevent Blackstone and other private-equity firms from buying up homes and thus removing entry-level housing stock from the reach of first-time buyers. (This is a nationwide problem: in the second quarter of 2025, real estate investors had bought up a whopping third of single-family homes, and in many communities, private equity owns up to 20% of homes.) Incredibly rare for a politician on today’s Right wing, he’s an advocate of Amtrak, and one of his very first campaign promises was to bring the Sunset Limited back through the Panhandle and into Miami, a route suspended in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina two decades ago. He also seeks to institute paid maternity leave, and divest from Israel to provide payments to young couples instead. And he promises to prevent the construction of high-energy-consuming and space-occupying AI data centers, and ban foreigners from buying Florida properties — for the latter policy, he heeds the example of Liberal Party-governed Canada. 

I traveled from Gainesville, in Florida’s interior, to St. Augustine, on the coast, to attend a Fishback campaign event in mid-January. The four-lane highway between the two cities passes through tidal marshes and small towns with a single Dollar General, and not much else, on their main strip. As the landscape becomes more urban, it turns into a depressing and monotonous sprawl. This is the struggling Florida Fishback is talking to, the one that exists outside the enclaves of Disney World, Palm Beach, and Miami’s Design District. By contrast, the same weekend I was in the state, Trump was at Mar-A-Lago, attending a ceremony officially naming the strip stretching from the president’s exclusive club to the airport “President Donald J. Trump Boulevard,” in accordance with a bill the state legislature and Gov. DeSantis enacted in June.

Fishback’s St. Augustine event was at a supporter’s home in a middle-class planned community engulfed in the sprawl between I-95 and the city’s picturesque Spanish Colonial old town. The candidate wore a slick suit with an open-collar shirt, and the crowd was mostly middle-aged, intrigued by his more sensible policy proposals but skeptical of his online messaging. He gave a riled-up denunciation of establishment Republicans, which was received positively. On podcasts, Fishback has a notably calm, elevated delivery, whereas here, he was exhilarated and sometimes on the verge of shouting. He made some surprising points for a Republican and far-Right figure, celebrating Zohran Mamdani as a politician who focuses on affordability, for example. Fishback also mentioned that he is the only gubernatorial candidate who speaks fluent Spanish. Back on X, however, he criticizes the existence of Spanish-language media in the state. 

Following the campaign event, I sat down with him at a Starbucks a few minutes away, where he was joined by his father, his girlfriend Francesca Deckert, and a youthful campaign staff, some with visible outlines of nicotine-pouch tins in their pockets. (Deckert herself has been the source of plentiful controversy, and, per Laura Loomer’s digging, seems to have released risqué content under the name “Crypto Barbie.”)

“To the extent that my policies are controversial,” Fishback tells me, “it’s because they’re upsetting a status quo that has been totally monopolized by establishment Democrats and Republicans.” He explains that his objection to Donalds, who has the endorsement of both Trump and Turning Point Action, is that his opponent wants to “increase dense urban housing,” a problem much more serious, Fishback thinks, than his own race-tinged remarks. On Sophie Rain, he claims not to be saying anything intentionally designed for rage-baiting, but adds, “It’s controversial in the current political and cultural climate to say that young women should aspire to be moms or nurses or lawyers and not aspire to sell photos of their body on the internet.” (Never mind those images that seem to show his own girlfriend, Deckert, sporting only two black nipple pasties.) 

Other comments, he asserts, were just joking around, as the old saw goes. “Vivek’s a friend,” he says, “I’ve known him for years.” (Indeed, in April 2023, he appeared amicably on Ramaswamy’s podcast.) He also mentions a recent friendly interaction with LaShonda Holloway, a black woman running for Congress and a Democrat with whom he agrees on affordability issues. She “didn’t seem too bothered. She had known about the comments [about Donalds]. She had known who I was.”

When I called Fishback out for his association with Fuentes, he denied familiarity with Fuentes’s most viral comments about women, blacks, and the Jews, and added, “I’m not going to allow people from a foreign country or from New York City to slander voters in my state because they watch Nick Fuentes.” 

The odds appear to be stacked against Fishback in Florida, a state with a large libertarian (“Florida Man”) and neocon (“Miami hawk”) contingent and an older population, unlikely to vote for a far-Right Zoomer-coded Millennial. The state is also swinging Democratic, at least in some places and in the short term. Miami just elected its first Democratic mayor in almost 30 years — in large part due to Latinos souring over the Trump administration’s immigration-enforcement policies. On the other hand, Fishback may not care too much about losing Miami and Boca Raton if it means he can get Gen Z and the working class out to polls elsewhere, just as Mamdani simply gave up large swaths of the Upper West Side, Upper East Side, and Tribeca. At around the same time in Mamdani’s campaign last year, the current New York mayor appeared the same or worse off than Fishback does today.

If we want to see the direction in which politics are trending, Fishback’s recent moves are telling. It might be expected that he’d swing to the center now that his name is out there, but instead, he has gone more unhinged. Speaking to a large crowd at the University of Central Florida on Feb. 4, Fishback said that “under no circumstances” would he even visit Israel, and referred to the holiest site in Judaism as “a stupid wall.” The students applauded. He also took a page from the MAHA playbook, arguing that the industrial food provided in public schools is unhealthy and sets students up for failure, and proposing that school cafeterias be run by local small businesses and serve local meat and produce. The crowd of teens and 20-somethings was silent — until he referred to the unhealthy food as “goyslop,” and then the students erupted, exuberantly. What united the crowd was not race, or even really gender (though most were male), but age.

Fishback, who obviously can be reasonable, has concluded that the path to victory is to traffick in irrationality. Love him or hate him, he’s determined, crazy, and, somehow, poised to have a shot. 

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