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.’”