Article Type: Broadcast Recap
Original Broadcast: America First, Episode 1746
Broadcast Date: September 14, 2026
Watch: Episode 1746 on Rumble
Source Note: This recap is based on the original broadcast and its transcript. Quotations may be lightly edited for punctuation and readability without changing their meaning.
Episode Overview
Nick Fuentes opened Episode 1746 of America First by introducing the America First Foundation’s new congressional scorecard before turning to two of the night’s biggest stories: the backlash surrounding a viral image of South Asian students at a University of Texas football game and the Supreme Court’s decision blocking the Trump administration’s new mail-ballot rules before the midterms.
The September 14 broadcast tied all three subjects to the same criticism: Congress is filled with Republicans who use the America First label without voting for an America First agenda, conservatives will discuss immigration only up to the point where it becomes a question of identity, and the Trump administration continues to wait until the last minute to act on issues it has promised to solve for years.
America First Foundation Launches Congressional Scorecard
Fuentes began the broadcast with the official launch of the America First Scorecard, a project he said the foundation had spent roughly a year and a half developing.
The scorecard grades every sitting member of the House and Senate on immigration, trade, and foreign policy. Each lawmaker receives a grade in all three categories and an overall grade based on a weighted formula. Their profile also lists the legislation used in the evaluation, summarizes what each measure did, shows how the member voted, and marks whether that vote aligned with the foundation’s position.
“We analyzed every piece of legislation that they either sponsored, co-sponsored, drafted, or voted on,” Fuentes said, “and we evaluated how closely all of the representatives in Congress are to our America First agenda.”
He used Sen. Bernie Moreno’s profile to demonstrate the system. At launch, Moreno was the highest-rated member of Congress with an overall C-plus, receiving a B on immigration, an F on foreign policy, and a B on trade. Fuentes then pulled up the Secure America Act, which included $70 billion for immigration enforcement, as one example of a vote that contributed positively to Moreno’s immigration grade.
The fact that no member of Congress received an overall A or B was not a mistake, Fuentes argued. It reflected the condition of the Republican Party.
“We do not have an America First government,” he said. “We don’t have an America First Senate. We don’t have an America First House. The Republicans are not America First, and neither are the Democrats.”
Fuentes said the project was designed to avoid the weakness of single-issue scorecards. He pointed to Rep. Randy Fine as an example. Fine received a B on immigration, but Fuentes argued that his strongly pro-Israel foreign-policy record prevents him from being considered America First overall. He then made the reverse case with Rep. Thomas Massie, whose opposition to foreign aid and war with Iran aligns with the foundation on parts of foreign policy, but who received a C on immigration because of his positions on legal immigration and his past support for amnesty.
“It’s not enough to criticize Israel. It’s not enough to be against foreign aid,” Fuentes said. “We are trying to create a positive vision, which we are calling American nationalism, which we are calling America First.”
The foundation plans to publish several congressional profiles each day between now and the November election. Fuentes said the goal is to show voters exactly what Republican incumbents have supported rather than allowing them to campaign on the America First label alone.
He was also explicit about the electoral purpose of the project. Fuentes has encouraged his audience to consider voting for Democrats in the midterms as a way of punishing Republicans, and he said the scorecard supplies the voting record behind that argument.
“They’re going to tell you, you can’t vote Democrat because if you do, then we’re going to get America Last and open borders,” he said. “You’ll find, though, that voting for a Republican is not going to give you really that much of a better option.”
The Viral Image From the Texas–Ohio State Game
The featured story concerned a video from Texas’ 24–23 comeback victory over Ohio State. After Texas scored, the camera cut to a section of celebrating Longhorns fans who appeared to be predominantly South Asian. A screenshot spread across social media after Bo French, the Republican nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner, used it to argue that Americans were being displaced by foreigners.
French wrote that he had heard a recent UT graduation “looked like this” and said the situation was “far worse than anyone imagined.” His posts were condemned by Texas Republicans including Sen. John Cornyn and Gov. Greg Abbott. Abbott said the image showed Texans uniting behind their state and university.
Fuentes argued that the image captured something real about the public’s reaction to demographic change. He described seeing the crowd as a “visceral” experience and said the setting mattered: this was not a cricket match or a gathering associated with another culture, but a college football game at the University of Texas.
“This is not the America that we want to live in,” he said. “That’s not what we want to see when we go to Texas, not what we want to see when we go to the University of Texas or a football game.”
Fuentes did not frame the students’ behavior as the problem. In fact, he emphasized that they appeared fully engaged in the traditions surrounding the game. They wore Texas colors, made the Longhorn hand sign, celebrated the team, and even wore cowboy hats.
“They look pretty assimilated to me,” he said. “How much more assimilated can it get?”
“The problem is not that they’re criminals,” he said. “They appear to be law-abiding college students. The problem is not that they’re unassimilated. They’re wearing cowboy hats. They’re doing the Longhorn. They got the orange shirts on and everything.”
“The problem is racial,” he continued. “The problem is they’re not like us.”
Fuentes argued that mainstream conservatives are willing to discuss illegal immigration, crime, wages, and assimilation, but have no acceptable language for the fear that historic American populations are becoming minorities in places they once considered their own. He described the Texas crowd as a symbol of demographic replacement reaching beyond coastal cities and into institutions closely associated with the American interior.
“It’s no longer going to be just the major cities or the coasts,” he said. “It’s going to be everywhere. Every major city, every state, the midsize and the small cities and towns as well.”
Fuentes connected that change to both immigration and birthrates, arguing that the native population is having fewer children while the government and private sector continue bringing in foreign workers and students. He said the deeper fear is not simply losing political power but losing the ordinary sense of recognition and belonging that comes from living among people with a shared ancestry and culture.
“Very soon, we will be the minority,” he said. “You will go to a sporting event. You will send your kids to school. You will go to your job. You will go to a public park. You go to the beach, you go to the public pool, an airport—and everywhere you go, you will be in the minority.”
The monologue went further than an argument for reducing immigration. Fuentes said white Americans may eventually need to establish communities in which they can remain a majority and preserve their identity, calling that a possible starting point for reversing demographic change elsewhere.
“We’re going to have to create spaces in America that are not like this,” he said. “We’re going to have to create separate cities or separate settlements. We are going to have to do things to preserve and protect our way of life.”
He did not provide a specific legal program for accomplishing that or address how citizenship would affect who could be removed. Instead, he acknowledged that reversing the country’s existing demographics would be extremely difficult and would require legal arguments, electoral victories, and government power that the movement does not currently possess.
Fuentes then played part of Ben Shapiro’s response to the backlash. Shapiro defended the students and treated their participation in Texas football culture as evidence that a multiracial, assimilation-based America can work.
Fuentes argued that Shapiro’s reaction revealed a basic divide between white identity politics and mainstream conservatism. In his view, Jewish Americans have always understood themselves as a distinct religious and ethnic minority, so the decline of America’s white Christian majority does not represent the same loss for them.
“What difference does it make for Ben Shapiro if he’s in the stands with all white Christians versus if he’s in the stands with all Indians?” Fuentes asked. “When it goes from all white people to all Indians, it’s a loss for the white people. But the Jews experienced no such loss.”
Fuentes contrasted the schools, neighborhoods, religious institutions, and social networks available within Jewish communities with the absence of equivalent institutions organized explicitly for white Americans. His conclusion was that whites cannot expect other groups to defend their identity for them.
“We as a group have to take our own side,” he said. “We have to care about preserving it. We have to fight and defend it because it’s ours.”
Fuentes was not arguing that citizenship, legal status, or assimilation should settle who belongs. He was arguing that ancestry itself matters and that a historically white Texas would no longer remain recognizably Texas if its population were replaced, even by people who adopted its customs.
Supreme Court Blocks the New Mail-Ballot Rules
Fuentes next turned to the Supreme Court’s 7–2 decision blocking the Trump administration’s proposed Postal Service rules from taking effect before the 2026 midterms.
The rules grew out of a March executive order and would have required states to provide lists of voters approved to receive mail ballots. States would also have been required to use Postal Service-approved envelopes containing unique barcodes. The Postal Service could refuse to deliver ballots that did not comply.
The administration presented the plan as a safeguard against ineligible voters receiving absentee ballots. Opponents argued that it exceeded federal authority over state-run elections and could prevent legitimate voters from receiving ballots because states did not have enough time to rebuild their systems before November.
The Supreme Court left the lower-court block in place. The majority said the administration was unlikely to succeed on the merits of its appeal. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote separately that there was at least a fair prospect that the Postal Service possessed the necessary statutory authority, but said imposing the changes so close to the election would be “arbitrary and capricious.” Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented. Alito called the legal challenge a “Hail Mary pass” and argued that the administration was likely to win the case eventually.
Fuentes said he supported stronger controls on mail voting but was not certain that using the Postal Service in this manner was the best legal or practical solution.
“It seems a little bit cumbersome,” he said. “It seems cumbersome to maintain a giant database and then to have the post office making these decisions.”
His main criticism was directed at the administration for waiting until March 2026 to issue the order. Even Kavanaugh, he noted, suggested that the rules might have stood a better chance if states had received enough time to implement them.
“Maybe there’s another timeline where, had Trump implemented this executive order in January of 2025—in March of 2025, as opposed to March of 2026—maybe they would have had a chance,” Fuentes said.
He compared the ruling to the administration’s tariff setbacks. In both cases, he argued, Trump chose the quickest route instead of doing the legal and administrative work required to make the policy durable.
“It’s always too little, too late,” Fuentes said. “Day late, dollar short, always ad hoc.”
Fuentes Imagines a Different Second Trump Term
The court decision led into a longer indictment of Trump’s second term. Fuentes asked viewers to imagine what the political situation might look like if Trump had released the Epstein files immediately, avoided war with Iran, carried out mass deportations early, pursued tariffs under stronger legal authority, and issued his election order at the beginning of 2025.
“You would literally have every advantage going into the midterms,” he said.
Instead, Fuentes argued, Trump personally bears responsibility for the decisions now hurting Republicans. He rejected the idea that Netanyahu, Vice President JD Vance, the military, Democrats, or the courts forced Trump into war with Iran. He likewise blamed Trump and his own appointees for withholding the Epstein material and waiting to act on election rules.
Fuentes also noted that three Trump-appointed justices—Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and Neil Gorsuch—joined the majority that denied the administration’s request, while Alito and Thomas would have allowed the rules to take effect.
“Every step of the way, think about how different things could have been,” he said. “Trump could have done every single one of these things unilaterally. No one was standing in his way. But he didn’t.”
Fuentes said the excuses offered during Trump’s first term no longer apply. Trump returned to office after winning the popular vote and the Electoral College, with Republican majorities in Congress, a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, and four years to prepare personnel and policy.
“If you can’t do it with all that, then you can’t do it,” Fuentes said. “And if he can’t do it, you’re not the guy for the job.”
He closed the political portion of the show by returning to the same list of unmet promises that has driven much of his criticism of Trump: no completed border wall, no mass deportation program on the scale promised, no lasting tariff system, and no election-integrity measure in place before the midterms.
“We tolerated failure in the first term because we said, well, he doesn’t know any better. He’s never been a politician. He doesn’t have his own people,” Fuentes said. “What is the excuse now?”
Episode 1746 marked the public launch of a project intended to measure Congress against the America First movement’s stated priorities. It also showed the standard Fuentes intends to apply outside the scorecard.
On immigration, he rejected the idea that legality and assimilation alone answer the question of who belongs. On elections, he supported stronger safeguards while faulting Trump for introducing them too late. On Republican politics, he argued that party affiliation is meaningless when the voting record and policy results fail to match the label.
The scorecard gives that criticism a searchable record. Fuentes’ message to Republican voters was that they no longer have to rely on campaign speeches to know what their representatives supported—and that once the record is visible, very few of them can credibly claim to be America First.
Editorial Note: AF Observer independently produced this recap from the original broadcast. AF Observer is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or an official representative of America First or its creators.