Live by the hate, die by the hate.
- and -
Here's a woman working her ass off trying to convince women not to work their ass off. A woman at the center of providing for her family, telling women to stay home, have babies, and let the man do the providing.
A woman who fed her energy into a group that thrives on threats of violence, complaining about that group threatening her with violence.
This isn't irony - it's contradiction. And while contradiction can exist, it cannot prevail.
The boot you're licking will eventually come 'round to kick your ass.
She helped lead a far-right internet movement. Then it turned on her.
Inspired by female conservative influencers, Amy Dangerfield worked to become one of Nick Fuentes’s model “groypettes.” A vicious fight left her grappling with the dark side of far-right fame.
SARASOTA, Fla. — She’d done everything she thought men expected of women on the far right, so when the hatred came for Amy Dangerfield she felt so depressed she could barely stand.
She’d moved from Australia to the United States in 2017 with a dream of spreading her internet-inspired beliefs: that women had driven men to madness through rejection and disrespect; that society needed strong men to survive.
She’d worked to distinguish herself from the glut of women she thought had been conned by the poisonous promises of feminism, recording dozens of videos on their and her biological inferiorities as she fought to build a 100,000-subscriber YouTube page and a self-made career.
She’d even met a nice Christian man and after a few months of dating had gotten married, hosting a “spiritual ceremony,” as she called it, in a small chapel on the Las Vegas Strip. Within a few weeks, at age 30, she’d gotten pregnant, believing she could grow both a baby and a lifestyle brand simultaneously, two beautiful creations intertwined.
The long hours on camera had earned her and her husband the provisional low-six-figure income of a middle-class content creator. But it was the wedding that had made her go viral: In photos, she wore a white dress she bought from Macy’s for $80 and a blue “America First” hat, the emblem from the online show of Nick Fuentes, a far-right video streamer who has said that the Holocaust is “fake,” that most “Blacks need to be imprisoned” and that “women are made to be f---ed.”
It was a signal of her commitment to Fuentes’s digital fan base, the “groypers,” so named for the chubby, smug-faced cartoon frog and alt-right meme they use as avatars. It was a sign, also, of her new lifestyle as one of Fuentes’s most loyal female acolytes, known as the “groypettes.” In the first days of her marriage, she said, “Time to make some mini groyps,” in an X post viewed 1.8 million times.
When the groypers posted on X and Telegram that women belonged in breeding gulags or were too stupid to vote, she’d defended them, telling her own audience that the edgy jokes made “inconvenient truths more digestible” for a new generation of conservative men. When Fuentes said women made men “want to cut their heads off,” she’d defended that, too, calling it a natural reaction to the modern thinking that taught women to push men away.
“He shows a lot of respect for the women who are respectable,” she said in an interview.
For a time, she was celebrated. Fuentes toasted her wedding on a live stream — “This is a movement. This is a community,” he said — and called women like her his “strongest soldiers.” “It’s crazy,” Fuentes, 28, said during one of his near-nightly shows. “I have done nothing my whole life and career but attack women and have negative attitudes toward women, and it’s women that are really backing me up.”
Then, this spring, she tried to do something on her own. She organized a small political event in Ohio called America First United, believing she could help spin Fuentes’s online movement into offline activism. But within hours of the first panel, the groypers turned on her, labeling it a disloyal attempt to undermine Fuentes’s leadership.
To Fuentes, it was a coup. In messages to the roughly 100,000 subscribers of his Telegram channel, he intimated that she was part of a broad conspiracy to subvert him. “If all of these people are who they say they are,” he wrote, “why would they dedicate so much energy to knocking me off?”
She was stunned by how quickly her fellow believers condemned her. Faceless X accounts with groyper slogans in their profiles and names such as bakedGroyper and ZoomerZane posted doctored images and cartoons showing her weeping or being strangled. Others rushed into the comment sections of her YouTube videos and wedding photos to call her a traitor, whore or spy. The people she’d catered her life and career to now seemed eager to destroy them both.
“These people, they’re so vindictive, they’re so vicious,” Amy said one recent afternoon from the podcasting studio in her apartment, where she and her husband, Daniel DeBrincat, had hung a painting depicting Jesus cradling a modern man who held the hammer and nails of his crucifixion. One antagonist, she said, vowed to “continue harassing me ‘until I f---ing die.’”
Asked for comment on Amy’s experience, Fuentes responded with a crying-laughing emoji and said he believed some women supported him for the same reason they “like serial killers.”
“Women love problematic men,” he added. “I don’t even think it’s particularly ideological, it’s personal.”
Amy and other groypettes have played an increasingly visible role on the political battlefield of social media, working to give the movement’s message of contempt for women a veneer of cultural momentum. Some have gone viral on X and TikTok by posing in T-shirts from Fuentes’s online store or promising to try to please men by staying thin, and dozens of viewer donations have appeared on Fuentes’s live streams from fans identifying as groypettes. “Hey Nick! Single groypette mom here watching with my 8 year old tonight,” one had said in January.
Some, like Amy, have been inspired by a generation of Instagram traditional wives, or tradwives, who exploded in prominence by draping right-wing politics in influencer aesthetics, attacking the failures of a “feminized society” while building independent businesses and media brands. Amy said she believed the market for content urging women to choose their husbands over themselves was only growing: In a CNN poll this past spring asking Americans what would happen if men and women returned to 1950s gender roles, 60 percent of Republicans said the country would be better off.
But after pushing patriarchal politics for a frenetic audience of the young and hyper-online, Amy said she had become disillusioned. Success for women online, she said, seemed to require grinding through an ever-changing set of expectations from strangers she’d never met: Submit to her husband. Manage her home. Grow her family. Spread the message. All while dutifully denigrating her own kind.
She’d believed her fellow culture warriors had agreed with her on the basics: that women, though differently skilled from men, were still “meaning-seeking beings” who contributed value through their families, femininity and, sometimes, work. Yet all that these men seemed to care about, she said, was “putting women down.”
Lauren Southern, a former far-right influencer who was similarly attacked and has since disavowed her past views, writing a book about her experience called “This Is Not Real Life,” said in an interview that she understands why women like Amy join anti-feminist movements. Their rarity lends them status and a rush of adoration; for some, it’s a feeling of attention and economic promise they’ve never experienced before.
But it’s a “deal with the devil,” Southern said, because most women are held to impossible standards and eventually ripped apart. “I always tell these women,” she said, “you’ve got a shelf life of [maximum] three years in this movement before it eats you.”
‘Become warriors’
For as long as she could remember, Amy had believed that male-led families were what had made the Western world special, even if she hadn’t experienced one herself. Her father had died when she was 3, and she suffered a turbulent home life after her mom met another man. She left home and moved in with friends when she was 14.
“I recognized that it was hardening me, so I tried to do a lot … to bring my humanity and femininity back,” she said. She regularly wondered how different her life would have been with a “mom being able to be there during the day, not having to work, and a dad still being around as a protector and provider.”
She’d enjoyed debate club at her Catholic school and had wanted to become a lawyer. But she needed money, so she began working as a saleswoman, hawking time-shares and health products. She met a man and left her hometown in Queensland when she was 22 to move to Hawaii, where she started making YouTube videos to boost her sales.
The couple married and divorced within a year, leaving Amy alone in her early 20s on the island of Maui, working an unfulfilling job and spending her nights erasing her bleak expressions using the Facetune app, so in her selfies she could look happy. When local covid restrictions trapped her indoors, she retrenched further online, growing angrier at the ways that people in power kept intervening in her life.
“I’ve witnessed firsthand that people are not loyal to you, but their need of you, and as their needs change so too does their loyalty,” she wrote then in a Facebook post.
She followed a sales job to South Florida and, as she met new people, her videos shifted in tone. She shared increasingly somber views about her belief that society had entered the “height of the culture war.” Wearing muted dresses and turtlenecks, she talked into the camera about how men should be alpha males unbound by the hindrances of gender equality, and how women should be what the men needed them to be.
In 2023, she was invited into the Miami studio of the right-wing men’s podcast “Fresh & Fit.” Widely clipped and promoted on social media, the show had become a hit on the male-oriented internet fraternity known as the manosphere. Its simple formula consisted of bringing young women, mostly aspiring models and influencers, on to a panel with manosphere influencers such as Andrew Tate for raucous cultural debates in which the women were openly ridiculed.
Amy endeared herself to the hosts by saying she had taken the “red pill,” the far-right term for the belief that American society is biased against men. During one show, she said career-driven women often took on more masculine characteristics that made them less empathetic and caring as mothers and wives.
Her female co-panelists often disagreed, but the invites kept rolling in. The men, she said, seemed to like hearing a woman say what they already believed.
A friend that year told Amy to check out Nick Fuentes, saying the streamer, who had recently dined with then-former president Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort, had some lessons she needed to hear. She turned on his most recent three-hour podcast interview, where he said that feminists were a hate group and that the Holocaust was a “Jewish mafia” lie, and she couldn’t look away.
She started watching his streams when she was cooking dinner and late into the night, peering at the screen in the dark. She found him convincing and charismatic, as if he’d figured out the secret to keeping an audience transfixed. She’d been told grim things about Jews when she was a kid, by her Hungarian grandfather, but never like this, from someone her age.
Amy was invited on to a debate panel for a show in 2023 on the conservative podcasting network Valuetainment, where she sat next to Fuentes as he argued that women shouldn’t go to college. Offstage, when she pulled him aside to compliment his show, he gave her brisk advice: Get married and start pumping out babies as quickly as she could.
In 2024, Amy was hired by Valuetainment and began working long hours behind the camera helping manage its online talk shows. But she wanted more time on camera, too. At night she started recording her own shows, with names such as “Dangerous Conversations,” where she’d talk about how women had been trained to suppress their natural femininity and were biologically incompatible with stressful work, like voting.
Last year, Amy grew closer to her co-worker, Daniel, a devout Christian and video editor who said he’d been “in the YouTube game” since he was 8. After months of working together, they confessed that they liked each other in August; one month later, he proposed.
Amy had begun looking to Fuentes’s show for inspiration in her life and career, sending him on-screen donations (“God bless you Nick!”) and defending him in videos. So last year Amy and Daniel left Valuetainment and struck out on their own, hoping to build an independent brand in Fuentes’s mold.
Over the next few months, Amy’s YouTube following soared as the couple focused on frequent social media posts and video essays in which she decried ideas such as the “war on gender roles.” “Femininity is not weakness. Submission is not slavery,” she said into the camera, as a clip played from a 1950s TV commercial showing a doting housewife. “Needing a man is not shameful, it’s human.”
Some of Amy’s viewers called out the contradictions in building a public business urging women to disappear into domestic life. The tension is a common one for far-right women online, who often frame themselves as different from other women who haven’t seen through feminism’s lies, said Alex DiBranco, a researcher who studies modern misogynist movements.
“It gives them status and elevates them over the oppression they would otherwise face,” DiBranco said. “But one of the hypocrisies is that these women who are influencers, promoting these traditional ideologies, are essentially businesspeople. They have careers.”
As Amy’s following was growing, other prominent women on the right-wing internet were facing sudden periods of shunning and shame. Sarah Stock, a far-right blogger who cultivated an online image centered on her Catholic faith and chastity, vanished from social media in February after being accused of having an affair with a reactionary podcaster — a father of two who posted frequently about family values.
In an X post, Stock apologized for some “unwise decisions” but said that a lot of the online discussion about her was untrue. “Please pray. Logging off now,” she added. Her account, and much of the rest of her social media footprint, was later deleted. Stock did not respond to requests for comment.
Amy wasn’t worried, believing herself to be different. She was red-pilled, newly engaged and on the cusp of motherhood. And she believed she had a strategy to do it all: make the money and the family; be pregnant and podcast; elevate her husband but also, by demand of the creator economy, herself.
To Kathleen Blee, a sociologist who embedded with far-right groups during the 1990s and 2000s, the groypettes resemble the women she’d met in neo-Nazi circles, who had risen to positions of power within predominantly male movements that valorized female degradation.
Many saw their internal influence as a way to elevate themselves beyond other women who had not awoken to society’s hidden truths, and they helped bind the groups together by softening their rough edges, boosting recruitment and lending them a sense of widespread appeal, Blee said.
But after years of promoting women’s subjugation, many of them had become inured to their own experience of it. They found themselves absorbed in cultures that despised them, continually reminded of their perceived uselessness but “still expected to make lunch,” she said.
“Horrific things would happen to them, and they’d excuse them and rationalize them,” Blee added. “They’d say: We have to become warriors, and part of being a warrior is learning not just to inflict pain, but to take pain.”
Fuentes, in a text message, said in response, “So it’s an article about how my female fans are like women who were Neo Nazis? Imaginative.”
Amy had built a strong following on YouTube with her anti-feminist content.
‘Influencer’s dream’
In the first months after going independent, Amy and Daniel optimized their lives around the constant creation of content.
They moved to Florida’s gulf coast, near the headquarters of the right-wing video platform Rumble, where they met with a “creator success manager.” Using the more than $7,000 worth of cameras, lights and microphones that Daniel had accumulated from his freelance editing business, they converted an apartment bedroom into a podcast studio, hanging slatted-wood paneling and a sign that read, “Blessed Not Stressed.” And they took on an unpaid intern eager for on-the-job YouTube training — a University of Florida student who liked making science videos but believed they made no money, so had switched to influencer work.
Their first month, in January, had gone well, with two videos that got more than 200,000 views, including one about a “MAGA grocery store” where the urinals feature former vice president Kamala Harris’s face.
But to make a living, they needed to consistently produce viral hits. Fuentes had built an unusually lucrative business, pocketing what a Washington Post analysis found was hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from paying fans, but most of the money and viewership on the far right flowed to the very top performers. For the smaller creators streaming in Fuentes’s shadow, winning scraps of attention required a constant fight.
This spring, Amy and Daniel decided to try something new with their first offline event, a small gathering of political influencers and fringe congressional candidates they called the America First United conference. They struggled to land sponsors, recruiting only a small start-up called Uncensored AI. Daniel put most of the roughly $25,000 in expenses on his credit card, believing it could diversify their income and expand the fan base for Amy’s content.
The problems began almost immediately. Sound issues, which Daniel blamed on a “groyper-adjacent” audio crew, rendered an online stream of the conference barely watchable. The scenes that did get through revealed a sparsely filled room of disheveled young men in ill-fitting suits listening to diatribes about “Satanic Rothschilds.”
For a movement predicated on projecting strength and manliness, the event was, as some online began to call it, an “optical disaster.” During one of his streams, Fuentes appeared especially annoyed when discussing a New York Times article about the event, which seemed to suggest Fuentes acolytes like Amy might be able to “build ‘America First’ without” him. On his Telegram channel, Fuentes disavowed the conference as a “hostile takeover attempt” by “some slut from Australia.” A torrent of hate quickly followed.
In private group messages shared with Amy, the most avid Fuentes fans, known as “groyper generals,” laid into her as a treasonous fraud. She was kicked out of a 19-member group chat administered by Fuentes named “anorexic groypettes 2.0.”
The public attacks on X and YouTube were even worse. Anonymous accounts shared sketches and digitally altered photos showing Amy and Daniel being locked in prison or choked to death.
The couple called a lawyer and the police for help fighting the harassment, and Amy filed for, and was granted, a “protection against stalking” order against one person who she said had perpetrated the most “insane lies.” But the hate only seemed to grow. Accounts shared a blurry video of a woman having sex, saying it was Amy, while others flooded the comment sections of their wedding photos and LinkedIn profiles with rape threats and artificially generated porn.
In an attempt to defend herself, Amy posted an old selfie with Fuentes and said that anyone who claimed she could orchestrate a mutiny were giving her “way too much credit.” She and Daniel recorded some live streams to try to contain the damage, equating the attacks on her to “purity tests” and criticizing Fuentes’s cultlike control. Groypers used the clips to pummel them even more.
Amy texted Fuentes to say that she had “never intended to start an all-out war,” that the event had been “inspired” by his remarks and “was about unity, for f---’s sake,” according to messages she showed The Post. But Fuentes did not reply, except on his Telegram channel and Rumble streams, where he mocked her as “Amy Dangerslut” and insinuated that she was a pedophile.
Amy had developed tough skin over years of derogatory jokes being made at her expense; for conservative women, she said, it just came with the lifestyle. Even when she was in the “groypers’ good graces,” she’d said, “they would still call me a whore.”
But this felt different. The kinds of conspiracy theories she’d once amplified about elites were now being rewritten about her: that she was a spy for Israeli surveillance, or a federal infiltrator, or a rebel attempting revolt.
Her womanhood, what she had tried hardest to sanctify, was the biggest target. Anonymous accounts said she’d relied on sexual favors to get attention, which she vehemently denied. Some people pulled up photos of an old mentor and father figure she’d spent Christmases with, who had died of a stroke. They implied that she’d slept with him to get ahead.
Dennis Feitosa, a YouTuber who met Amy while running as an “America First” candidate for Congress earlier this year in California, and who attended the conference but ultimately lost his primary, said the blowback against her was “brutal” to watch.
Groypettes like Amy, he said, are part of a new generation of women who believe in the importance of traditional gender roles enough to tolerate the movement’s coarser sides. But those who put themselves in creative roles are often subject to the cruelest backlashes, he said.
“The lines of attack, once you’ve been on the internet long enough, you see them for what they are,” he said. “For men, it’s questioning their sexuality, their masculinity. With women, it’s reducing their femininity, their virtue. From a right-wing perspective, a woman’s purity is highly valued. That’s why we have all the memes about high body counts. It’s just how the internet works.”
Daniel told Amy that, for all the horrors she was facing, the moment was a marketing opportunity, the kind a man in her position would know how to seize.
“What we’ve gone through over the past month is a normal influencer’s dream: They want to be trending,” he said one recent workday, as Amy looked down at her podcasting desk, saying nothing. “A man that went through some sort of scandal like this would be able to harness the momentum to propel himself forward.”
The couple faced a torrent of hate online after far-right influencer Nick Fuentes suggested their American First United conference was a “hostile takeover event” of his movement.
‘Is this the pinnacle?’
One afternoon this summer, Daniel stepped out from their studio tapping at the calculator on his phone.
It had been 33 days since the conference and 20 days since Amy’s last video trying to defend it, and she could still barely stomach the idea of recording. After deleting X from her phone and joining a Christian women’s book club, she was only just starting to feel at peace again.
Daniel had said he would be patient, but he’d also set a goal for them of two long-form videos and three live streams a week. Every day he’d been crossing off the same question in his work journal: “Go live today?”
Daniel held up his calculator to show the number that they had been making off YouTube, which pays creators a share of the ad revenue their videos receive: about $10,000 a month before taxes. At the rate they were producing content, he said, they were rapidly plunging into debt.
They’d started working with an ad agency that could help them land deals with sponsors, who paid them about $2,000 per 60-second ad, but the agency had told them it’d been a slow month. Her biggest offer so far had come from a seller of male-enhancement pills, which she declined.
Their latest videos also weren’t hitting, he said: One, about feminism, had netted them about $500 after YouTube’s 45 percent cut. Another clip had made $145.
Since the conference, Amy had started wanting something different, more “artistic” and researched. She told Daniel that she wanted to try digging into “cultural issues through a lens of psychology and sociology” and had ideas for videos about why women loved true-crime stories and sexually explicit books.
But Daniel had told her that the only way for them to afford their expenses and to “bless other people” was to start posting daily videos of her “reacting to woke stuff: ‘The left did this, oh my gosh.’” The videos wouldn’t be scripted or produced how she liked them, he said, but they could record and edit three in an afternoon. He said he knew a creator who had made $70,000 in a month posting six reaction clips a day.
He had told her they had to make sacrifices in the kind of content she wanted to make, and that the more incendiary stuff always did better. Amy, looking at her hands in her lap, said the idea made her uncomfortable.
Daniel was adamant: This is what the market wanted. “You’d be comfortable in a house? You’d be comfortable going on vacation?” he told her. “Look at our lifestyle: Is this the pinnacle?”
Thirty minutes into the conversation, he was still talking, but she’d gone silent, until finally she said she needed a break and walked out the door. She walked alone to a sports bar for a salad and returned half an hour later, her eyes still pink with tears.
She didn’t record a live stream that night, only appearing on YouTube five days later, posting a video questioning whether a prominent women’s basketball player was a man.
The nine-minute clip performed terribly, earning fewer than 2,000 views, so they deleted it. Amy decided to take a break. She picked up a side job working on a business podcast and lay in bed reflecting on what had happened, trying to rekindle her passion to talk and be seen. After a few weeks, she started thinking of new video ideas, and she told herself she wanted to try to reach people again.
But by then, the groypers had moved on to new topics, and new groypettes. An OnlyFans model calling herself Ash had just gone viral by dancing in a cropped groypettes shirt in Instagram and TikTok videos viewed more than 2 million times. In another video, she wore a tank top labeled, “Submissive & Breedable.”
“hey @AmyDangerfield,” an X user called artisangroyper wrote in May, two weeks after the event. “This is what loyalty looks like.”
