Student Of Mexican Heritage Flees Boston University Because Of Far-Right Views

Nicholas J. Fuentes, a Boston University student, felt compelled to join the rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, protesting the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee this past weekend. Fuentes also feels compelled to leave school this September.

Fuentes is leaving Boston University in part because of death threats, and in part, because he doesn’t feel his ideology is welcome on campus.

“Physically I didn’t feel safe on campus,” said Fuentes, 18, to International Business Times in a phone interview Thursday.

Fuentes said he received between 10 and 20 death threats over the past few months, many from fellow students. One threat as seen by IBT read, “We are going to kill you instead of reasoning with you.”

The threats on campus started after Fuentes tweeted, “Multiculturalism is a cancer,” as a freshman last year. Fuentes, paradoxically, is of Mexican heritage. His tweets are now all deleted.

“Multiculturalism means that you don’t have a dominant culture in a country. It’s really sort of this paradox where... the left believes people should be coming here and should be assimilating, but at the same time they want multiculturalism,” said Fuentes.

Fuentes said that multiculturalism and the lack of a Northern European, Anglo-Saxon, American monoculture will bring the U.S. down

Fuentes, who is from a suburb of Chicago, entered into a campus debate last November before the election to argue for Trump. He said the threats continued after the debate. Fuentes, a huge Trump supporter, also has a YouTube talk show named after the president’s main policy goal, “America First.”

Fuentes is against the current U.S. immigration policies, and that’s why he was in Charlottesville.

“I wanted to go there to demonstrate against mass immigration. It’s an issue that nobody talks about. It doesn’t get any media attention,” said Fuentes. “I think the purpose of this rally was two-fold, I mean the slogan of the rally was, ‘You will not replace us,’ and that refers to the demographic displacement of white people in European and Western countries and also to the cultural genocide of white and European people.”

He argued his family immigrated to the U.S. before the 20th century, making comparisons to his family and current immigration “apples and oranges.” The problem he has with immigration today is a number of people entering the country. When his family came to the U.S., it was under a stricter immigration policy that allowed immigrants to assimilate more to the U.S., he argued. People in circumstances like his family’s should be grandfathered in.

“The people that come from Mexico now don’t integrate. They don’t learn the language. They don’t adopt our values. There’s corruption … like the president said, they bring drugs, they bring crime,” said Fuentes.

Fuentes said he is not for a white “ethno-state,” but that he is a “preservationist.” He wants the U.S. to return to pre-1965 levels of immigration. The Hart-Celler Act of 1965 abolished immigration quotas in the U.S. and opened immigration to more people. Fuentes thinks the country should return to the early 20th century when it was over 80 percent white.

The Charlottesville rally, dubbed "Unite the Right," Friday and Saturday contained a large contingent of neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan and white supremacists. It ended in violence when Heather Heyer, 32, was struck and killed by a car that plowed into a group of counterprotesters. The car was driven by a man with alleged ties to white supremacy.

Despite large chants like, “Jews will not replace us,” Fuentes said the number of extremists at the rally has been over hyped. Fuentes claimed there were at most 10, and that some of the people could be federal agents or people chanting ironically. Fuentes condemns neo-Nazis and white supremacist groups, but can see how these groups exist.

“You know, you push white people, on the left, for 20-30 years and I don’t think anybody should be surprised that you get some pretty ugly strains of white identity,” said Fuentes. “How long have white people been discriminated against with affirmative action we’ve been spoken down to by the media by the president for years and years.”

Fuentes was studying Political Science at Boston University. But after Saturday's rally, he is taking a semester off and will head to Alabama’s Auburn University in the spring.

Other universities have seen conservative and alt-right thinkers and speakers meet condemnation and even violence. Alt-right speaker Milo Yiannopoulos was prevented from speaking at the University of California, Berkeley, in January when violence marred the campus. Anne Coulter, a right-wing commentator, was also forced to skip speaking at the University. Protests at Middlebury College in March disrupted author Charles Murray from speaking.

As summer turns to fall, divisions wrought over the summer and election may come again to roost in dorm rooms and quads.

Boston University and Auburn University did not return requests for comment.