A rising figure within Wyoming’s far right engages regularly with white supremacist and antisemitic content
Briefly a staffer for Harriet Hageman, Gabe Saint runs a right-wing campus group, has close connections with the Freedom Caucus, and helped craft UW’s new policy on free speech.
A young activist with deep ties to Wyoming’s far-right is secretly aligned with an extremist movement bent on mainstreaming white supremacist and antisemitic beliefs, a Laramie Reporter investigation reveals.
Gabe Saint, a student at the University of Wyoming, currently serves as a senator in ASUW — the university’s student government. He also recently joined Rep. Harriet Hageman’s Washington, D.C., office in an unspecified role — though he was likely let go after the Reporter reached out to the congresswoman’s staff for comment.
An analysis of posts liked by Saint’s personal X account over the span of one month shows that Saint follows and engages with a number of white supremacists, including the white supremacist organizer Nick Fuentes, and consistently likes explicitly antisemitic posts from Fuentes and others.
The posts highlighted below can be viewed in greater detail by clicking on the first image and using the arrows to scroll through the other images one by one.
In addition to these antisemitic posts, Saint has liked a mountain of other hateful and bigoted content, including posts that casually use “gay” as an insult, drop anti-gay slurs, regularly label political opponents “retards,” praise openly racist conduct, deride transgender people, make light of violence against women, celebrate Vladimir Putin and other authoritarian leaders, and explicitly call for Christian Nationalism and the establishment of a Catholic or otherwise Christian theocracy.
Saint is considered a student leader on the UW campus and has close connections to the state’s Freedom Caucus and other far-right figures.
Last year, Saint was heavily involved in the process to craft UW’s Statement of Principles, which outlines the university’s commitments to free speech, academic freedom and political neutrality. He served as the designated student representation for the working group that hammered out that statement.
Earlier this year, Saint ran for student body president, claiming to run on a campaign of “grace, unity and charity.” In an unprecedented move, the Freedom Caucus endorsed Saint for president, becoming the first state party or political faction to involve itself in a UW student election.
Reached for comment Tuesday, Freedom Caucus Chair Rep. John Bear (HD-31) issued this brief statement:
Members of the WYFC [Wyoming Freedom Caucus] were unaware of the “liked” posts on X until you sent them to us.
Bear did not address the antisemitic content of those posts.
Saint ultimately lost the presidential race to the current president Kameron Murfitt. But he was simultaneously elected to keep serving as a senator, meaning Saint continues to represent UW students in the student government.
Saint has described himself as a “normal guy” and “just an American, just a Christian” who hates “ideology,” and who wants to foster civil discourse on campus. But his online behavior shows that he is digitally embedded in a movement to normalize and promote white supremacist and antisemitic values in Republican and conservative circles.
The liked posts also shed new light on the posts he himself writes — statements, memes and other additions to conservative discourse that on their face seem no different than his other public statements but which now appear suspect in light of his persistent, bigoted online behavior.
Earlier this month, the platform formerly known as Twitter made likes private. The screenshots highlighted throughout this story were taken in the month leading up to that change.
Reached for comment Tuesday, Saint said he did not view his liked posts as problematic. He said he was not antisemitic.
“I think I like tweets from across the board,” he said. “I suppose I either find them funny or something, but I definitely don’t hate Jews. I spoke at a Jewish conference in LA supporting the Jewish people. I’ve been to Israel and I love Jews, no doubt about that.”
He viewed this story and its framing as unfair but did not deny having liked any of the antisemitic posts.
“I think lots of people like lots of things, and I think it’s funny you’re targeting me because you obviously don’t like me because I’m a conservative. And that’s what people like you do, which I understand,” he said. “Suppose it’ll be a good lesson that I have to be careful of liking memes and funny stuff on Twitter.”
Working for Hageman
Rep. Harriet Hageman’s office refuses to officially confirm that Saint worked for the congresswoman, but there is little reason to doubt that he did.
On May 27, Saint posted a photo in which he poses alongside Hageman. In the caption, he wrote: “So excited to be working for Congresswoman Harriet Hageman this summer! It’s an amazing opportunity to serve my state and people!”
On June 8, he posted another photo. This time, the photo is of Saint in Washington, D.C., wearing an ID badge, with the caption: “From the top of the Capitol!”
On Tuesday, when the Reporter called Hageman’s D.C. office, a man who sounded like Saint answered the phone before putting the Reporter on an indefinite hold. The Reporter was able to reach Hageman’s Cheyenne office and then sent an email to Campaign Coordinator William Shade, requesting comment. Hageman’s Chief of Staff Carly Miller responded later in the day:
“I am responding to your email below to inform you that Gabe Saint is not employed by any Hageman office, and we do not comment on personnel beyond that.”
Asked to confirm that Saint had worked for Hageman, as he had claimed to, Miller replied: “We don’t comment on personnel.”
Miller did not take the opportunity to address the antisemitic or white supremacist content of the posts liked by Saint, despite being asked about that content in the initial email.
The Groyper Army
Saint’s main connection to organized white supremacy appears to be through a faction known as the “Groyper Army.”
The Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism has published a ‘backgrounder’ on the Groypers and additional reports on the activities of its figurehead and founder Nick Fuentes. Morgan Moon, an investigative researcher with the Center on Extremism, has tracked this corner of the far-right for years.
“Back in 2017, [Fuentes] was actually a student at Boston College,” Moon said. “He started this livestream called America First with Nicholas Fuentes, and over the years, it created this kind of cult-like following, and he began referring to these fans and supporters as the ‘Groypers’ or the ‘Groyper Army.’”
Moon said Groypers are united in the bigoted belief that the U.S. ought to be preserved for white European-Americans.
“And they ultimately see themselves as the future of the conservative movement,” she said. “They believe that the current Republican Party, the current conservative movement, is not doing enough to deal with the demographic and cultural changes affecting the white population in the U.S. — whether that be immigration, abortion, feminism, LGBTQ+ rights — and ultimately they want to create a ‘true’ America First political party.”
The Groypers do not typically identify themselves as white supremacists, but simply as “Christian conservatives.” This is, according to the Center on Extremism, “a ploy to attract mainstream support and distract from the group’s fundamentally white supremacist ideology.”
But many have accidentally revealed their real views, and the ring leader himself is bad at hiding his own extreme beliefs.
“Fuentes is anything but coy about his views,” writes Cathy Young, in an article published by the libertarian Cato Institute detailing a dinner Fuentes attended with Donald Trump and Kanye West. “He has denounced civil rights as a ‘bastardized Jewish subversion of the American creed’ and asserted that ‘the Founders never intended for America to be a refugee camp for nonwhite people.’ In one repulsive video, he snickers and cackles his way through a Holocaust‐denying monologue.”
Fuentes attended the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017; he was also involved in the Stop the Steal movement that spread baseless conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election and spoke to crowds in Washington, D.C., on January 6 before rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol Building.
“Our Founding Fathers would get in the streets, and they would take this country back by force if necessary,” Fuentes told the crowd. “And that is what we must be prepared to do.”
Groypers were among those who stormed the capitol. One Groyper broke into Nancy Pelosi’s office, stole her laptop and attempted to pass that laptop to “unspecified Russian individuals.”
Gabe Saint follows several accounts identifying themselves with the Groyper Army, and interacts regularly with their posts and with posts from Fuentes himself.
Fuentes’ YouTube content was demonetized in 2020 and he was banned from YouTube, Reddit, Spotify, TikTok and various payment apps in the months following Jan. 6, 2021. He was banned from Twitter that December.
Fuentes was reinstated briefly in early 2023 following Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter but immediately began tweeting praise of Hitler and the Unabomber and was banned once more less than 24 hours after his reinstatement. Last month, Fuentes was again allowed to rejoin Twitter, now rebranded as X, despite renewed criticism, including from the Anti-Defamation League.
From Wyoming, Gabe Saint has signaled his support for Fuentes through his likes. He does not appear to follow the white supremacist leader directly.
Publicly, Saint has posted about his support for Candace Owens, a right-wing commentator who was fired from the Daily Wire for her “repeated embrace of antisemitic rhetoric.” In one such post about Owens, Saint laments that “cancel culture is only used against certain people who say and do certain things.”
Saint claimed he is not antisemitic during an interview with the Laramie Reporter Tuesday.
“I am not antisemitic; I’m America First,” he said. “I love Israel, but I don’t think America should be bending over to Israel. And I don’t see what’s wrong with that, but people would call that antisemitic, me saying that we should not support Israel. I don’t know what the big deal about that is.”
Saint paints his position as simply a criticism of the government in Jerusalem. But his liked posts contradict this. One post from Nick Fuentes liked by Saint reads: “I don’t merely oppose Israel’s current actions, I also reject Rabbinical Judaism and organized Jewish influence in general. ‘Anti-Zionism’ isn’t enough.”
Other antisemitic posts liked by Saint do no reference the state of Israel at all — their focus being squarely on Jewish people, beliefs or sacred texts. One such post (from an account identifying itself with the Groyper Army) simply reads: “Someone send me a Talmud so I can Piss on it.”
“I probably just thought that one was funny,” Saint said.
“Christ is King” and Christian Nationalism
In keeping with the cover line that Groypers are simply “Christian conservatives” promoting “traditional” values, Fuentes and his followers are fond of the phrase “Christ is King.”
The phrase itself predates the Groyper Army’s use of those words. But “Christ is King” has come to be used online in white supremacist circles as either antisemitic trolling or a dog whistle signaling one’s support for Christian Nationalism and often both.
Saint is fond of the phrase, liking posts that contain both “Christ is King” and antisemitic regurgitations, adding it as his own caption to a short video praising Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, and including it in his own bio:
Saint has even more explicitly endorsed Christian Nationalism by name by liking posts that encourage Christian Nationalist engagement.
But Christian Nationalism is a term that means different things to different people, said Marilyn Mayo, a senior researcher with the ADL’s Center on Extremism.
“For many people, they just substitute ‘Christian Nationalism’ for ‘Religious Right,’” Mayo said. “For others, they interpret Christian Nationalism as part of a more extreme movement; they associate it with American nationalism and MAGA extremism. And then there’s another group that takes it even further and says, ‘No, it’s part of the white supremacist movement.’”
As “Christian Nationalism” has come to be more widely discussed in American society and media, the definitions have proliferated. For this reason, Mayo is careful about using the term and said it’s important for journalists and others to explain what they mean by “Christian Nationalism.”
“People can call themselves whatever they want,” Mayo said. “But what’s really important is to show what they are really saying and thinking — through what they say, their rhetoric, and through their actions.”
Saint’s liked posts suggest that the desired end goal of his Christian Nationalism is a Catholic monarchy or some similarly conservative theocracy. The Franco video cited above is not an aberration. Saint regularly likes posts valorizing the iconography of the crusades and at least one post, from Fuentes himself, calling for the establishment of a Catholic monarchy.
Saint said he’s neither a Catholic nor a monarchist.
“I agree with the pro-Christian sentiment, but I don’t think we need a monarchy,” he said.
Saint added he is not sure if he would identify as a Christian Nationalist.
“I’m just a Christian dude, and I think Christian ideas are the best,” he said. “I think that America was founded with Christian ideals. I think John Jay in Federalist 2 made that perfectly clear. I don’t really know what the term ‘Christian Nationalism’ is. I’m just an American and a Christian.”
Saint further said he is a constitutional republican and — contradicting the posts he has liked — said non-Christians should be allowed within the country and should be allowed to participate in government. He had no direct justification for the Christian Nationalist posts referenced above.
“Like I’ve said a dozen times, people like all sorts of things,” he said.
Saint’s liked posts also betray a vision for a world in which Christian Nationalism has won. That world is both oppressive toward the LGBTQ+ community and authoritarian in its treatment of non-Christians.
Anti-trans rhetoric, anti-trans activity
Ahead of the ASUW election last month, in an interview with Wyoming Public Radio, Saint said his campaign was promoting “grace, unity and charity” and promised, should he be elected president, to foster a campus culture where all were welcomed and free to share their ideas.
“I don’t like ideology at all,” Saint told WPR. “I think people need to be practical and understand human beings are eternal and nuanced and have dignity and value.”
But the Christian Nationalist vision for America, as understood by Saint’s online behavior rather than his campaign slogan, is for a country where Christians are the favored citizens, where foreigners are expelled and where queer people are second-class citizens at best.
Additionally, there is a casual cruelty to many of the sentiments hearted by Saint. A great number of Saint’s liked posts are simply assertions that various public officials as well as some everyday citizens are “retarded” or “gay.” Several of these posts use an offensive slur for members of the LGBTQ+ community.
Saint stressed that these were posts he simply liked — that he didn’t author them himself and wouldn’t have.
“I didn’t tweet those,” he said. “So I probably just liked them because they probably made me giggle while I was laying around.”
Other posts liked by Saint advocate for homophobia by name and advance a belief that anti-LGBTQ+ Christians such as Saint are being persecuted by transgender people for simply speaking their mind.
One such post suggests that people like Saint are labeled a “transphobic piece of shit” for simply saying they “don’t care” when someone is trans. But Saint, with his own political activities in the real world, has moved far beyond “trying to live my life” as another post puts it.
Despite these liked posts implying that Saint is minding his own business when it comes to gender identity, he has been an active ally in the fight to roll back transgender rights in Wyoming.
Specifically, the student group Saint leads — UW’s local Turning Point USA chapter — has helped to build support for the anti-trans legislation that is now going into effect across the state.
Turning Point invited Riley Gaines to campus in October. Gaines, a former NCAA Division I swimmer who once tied for fifth place with a trans athlete, delivered a speech which misrepresented the science, discourse and rules surrounding transgender participation in women’s sports and took mean-spirited cheap shots at the appearance of individual trans people. Her speech promoted Christianity as an antidote to the “godlessness” underpinning calls for transgender acceptance and she invited to the stage, for a round of applause, the sorority sisters who were at the time suing their organization’s national leadership to remove a transgender sister.
During the Q-and-A that followed Gaines’ speech, Rep. Jeanette Ward (HD-57) asked the former swimmer to testify in favor of an anti-trans bill she planned to bring in the upcoming legislative session. Gaines said she would be there. That bill never got a committee hearing, but other anti-trans bills endorsed by Ward — including a ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth and a bill that will require school counselors to out queer children — were successful.
In the last two years, transgender rights in Wyoming — especially the privacy and healthcare rights of transgender youth — have been significantly curtailed by government action. And that government action was carried out by the same far-right figures Saint has claimed as friends, as well as the far-right figures who endorsed his bid for the ASUW presidency.
Saint has also liked a large quantity of anti-trans posts and memes, including one post that appears to own the term “transphobic” — a term Gaines scoffed at during her speech in October — and another post calling for “transgenderism” to be “eradicated” from public life.
Saint also appears to endorse the idea of banning or tearing down Pride flags, and has liked a post from Andrew Tate labelling Pride Month a “demonic brainwashing by pedophiles.” (Tate is currently facing sexual misconduct and human trafficking charges.)
Even as his allies have outlawed access to consensus-backed medicine for transgender youth in Wyoming, Saint’s liked posts complain about the continued visibility and acceptance of transgender and other queer people in society.
And when he encounters those suspicious of his intentions, Saint labels their concerns “ridiculous” and falls back on his campaign slogan, in which he claims to stand for “grace, unity and charity.”
Persecution and projection
Saint has interpreted the backlash he receives for his beliefs as persecution, enacted by those who allegedly hate him for being a white male Christian conservative.
In his April interview with WPR, Saint complained about other ASUW senators not making him feel welcome in student government and said it was “ridiculous” for those senators to have concerns about Turning Point, the right-wing student group that invited Riley Gaines to campus.
“People in ASUW were just saying, ‘Oh, we can’t have Turning Point here. All they do is spew hate and they’re not good for discourse,’” Saint recounted. “And I was like, that’s ridiculous … We’re just here trying to talk and we don’t attack anybody like that.”
Once again, Saint’s liked posts contradict his public claims. Asking whether Christians should tear down Pride flags, calling Joe Biden supporters “gay and retarded,” and insisting that non-Christians don’t belong in America are outside the bounds of what most people would consider civil discourse.
Saint’s insistence that Turning Point is “just here trying to talk” was suspect to a former student senator, Tanner Ewalt, who was quoted in the same WPR story.
“They [Turning Point] want a safe space on campus where they can say what they want, they can provoke outrage in other people, and then they can hide their hand and say, ‘Well, they’re throwing stones at us. I don’t know why,’” Ewalt said. “And they know what they’re doing.”
Ewalt wrote an opinion column for WyoFile decrying the Freedom Caucus’ endorsement of Saint in the student government election. Ewalt saw the endorsement, and Saint’s candidacy, as an attempt to mainstream extremist ideologies and viewed Saint’s insistence that he was “just here trying to talk” as a lie.
“Make no mistake, the Freedom Caucus is meddling in our student elections because they are ‘building a bench’ for tomorrow so that one day people who share their radical ideology will be running for the Wyoming Legislature and even U.S. Congress,” Ewalt writes. “They are grooming new politicians who will further their platform of defunding the government, the University of Wyoming, and installing institutions in their place that limit your freedoms and drive more youth out of our state, or worse, out of their lives.”
Rep. John Bear (HD-31), chair of the state Freedom Caucus, rejected Ewalt’s interpretation in his own interview with WPR, alleging that the university silences conservative voices like Saint’s.
But Saint’s online behavior, unreported until now, shows he has at least some fondness for authoritarian regimes that silence dissent and diversity.
White supremacy and the anti-democratic turn
In its extensive fact-check following Riley Gaines’ speech at UW, this publication noted that Gaines “traffic[s] in meme-ified fascist talking points,” citing her contempt for the weak, her celebration of machismo, and her insistence on an ahistorical cyclical view of human history in which weak and effeminate men lay the groundwork for societal collapse.
In a moment of cheek, this publication’s editor wrote:
No one is suggesting that Gaines has a secret 1488 tattoo or that she has extremely specific opinions about who runs the global banking system. No one is suggesting that she is a card-carrying white supremacist.
However, it now appears that the organizer of that speech is indeed a white supremacist — or at least is comfortable engaging with them online, liking their hateful antisemitic content, and signaling his support for their political ends.
Gabe Saint’s liked posts suggest that he believes “the Jews” have too much power, that their “narratives” control the media, and that America should be preserved for Christians.
This last point, that America does or ought to belong to Christians, appears to be the political end goal animating Saint’s voracious consumption of extreme content, though he denies this.
In the interview Tuesday, Saint said he did not support the message of the post above despite having liked it.
“I’ve like lots of things,” he said.
But that political end goal — a Christian America for Christians first — is certainly the goal of Saint’s hero Nick Fuentes, a man who promotes not only hatred of Jewish people, but a “Christ first” future in which America is forcibly returned to “Christian values.”
Saint has praised, via his liked posts but also via his own posts, authoritarian governments both past and present — especially those that enforce pro-Christian or anti-LGBTQ+ policies through violence and oppression. These include a post praising Vladimir Putin for “doing things that liberals can’t stomach,” another celebrating Georgia’s crackdown on LGBTQ+ rights, and a video, which Saint shared publicly, lionizing Francisco Franco, the Spanish dictator whose “White Terror” killed 30,000-50,000 people, including liberals, socialists, gay people and Jews.
“Let’s put an end to cowardice; let’s put an end to fear,” quotes the Franco video as Coolio’s “Gangster’s Paradise” plays in the background. “We will react manfully, gallantly, to those who trample the unity of the homeland, or insult the honor of the Spaniards … For the faith and for the fatherland! Flags high! Long live Christ the King.”
Like Franco, Saint does not appear to support democracy. In fact, he has posted that he doesn’t.
Saint identifies as a “constitutional republican,” a political designation that could be charitably interpreted as a preference for a form of representative government other than “democracy.”
But the terms “democracy” and “republic” are not necessarily in conflict and it should be noted that Franco, for whom Saint has signaled his fondness, was famously opposed to both. Franco overthrew a democratic government calling itself a republic in order to install himself as dictator.
But for this and any other post referenced above, a Groyper might claim they are “just joking.” This is a favored tactic of Fuentes and his followers, who often cloak their antisemitic and white supremacist ideas in a layer of irony or at least a post-hoc claim that their statements were simply edgy humor.
This is how modern far-right fascist movements normalize their bigoted ideas.
In the hateful memes Saint appears to love, antisemitic conspiracy theories, white supremacist beliefs and anti-LGBTQ+ cruelty are made playful. The memes, with irony and humor, foster an online community for the racists who make and share them. And, as memes rather than political manifestos, they bear just enough plausible deniability for those racists to claim — if the ADL or an investigative journalist comes calling — that they are “just joking.”
This is all in the service of normalizing hateful ideas and ultimately pursuing various racist, authoritarian, Christian Nationalist or fascist political ends.
“What normalization does is transform the morally extraordinary into the ordinary,” writes Jason Stanley in his book How Fascism Works. “It makes us able to tolerate what was once intolerable by making it seem as if this is the way things have always been.”
This is a point Saint appears to appreciate. He has liked a post from Turning Point USA’s main account stating: “We become what we normalize.”
Posted on the eve of Pride Month, this post might have been a reference to the “demonic brainwashing” some members of the far-right associate with LGBTQ+ visibility — but it is inadvertently a true statement about how white supremacist ideas take hold in mainstream culture.
In summary, in his more intentional public-facing statements, Saint speaks of “grace, unity and charity” while asserting “human beings are eternal and nuanced and have dignity and value.” His online behavior betrays a different outlook.
Saint’s liked posts paint an anti-democratic, theocratic vision for the future of the United States, fueled by racist, conspiratorial beliefs and an apparent love for casual cruelty against racial, ethnic and sexual minorities.
His various online connections, including his “mutuals” — those he follows and who follow him in return — show that Saint is tied into a network of online activists angling to normalize and promote antisemitism, to advance white supremacy, and to bring about the end of multicultural democracy in America.
Saint said he does not see the problematic nature of his online behavior and insists that he simply “likes lots of stuff on Twitter,” some of which is antisemitic, some of which is not. He said these posts don’t reflect his deeper political or ethical commitments; they just amused him.
Update: As of Wednesday morning, Saint appears to have deleted his personal X account.
His defense of just liking things he finds amusing is very telling, does he not realize how poorly that would reflect on him even if it were true? Most campus conservatives are really hurt by being unpopular or getting loudly disagreed with or publicly disliked, and they love to read this as a symptom of kinds of political repression and censorship. But maybe your "sense of humour" being casual cruelty, slurs, and complaining about gay people might have something to do with it?
Also it's pretty rich to see him talk about cancel culture when he and his organization facilitated a national media pile on towards a single transgender student (he even personally made an appearance on newsmax!). The campus conservatives whine about being repressed while being protected by the university and given extra access and consideration at every turn is really disgusting. You want to talk about getting silenced on campus? How about the constant intimidation and harassment Gabe and his ilk are actively perpetuating?
I would put $ on he’s still on x just not under his name.