PARIS, (The Oklahoma Post) – September 15th, 2025
In December 2020, a French programmer made his last testament in Bitcoin: 13.5 BTC, valued at half a million dollars, dispatched to the accounts of American extremists. Nick Fuentes and his “Groyper Army” took the lion’s share, with others linked to the Goyim Defense League also receiving slices of the digital windfall. Weeks later, the donor was dead by his own hand, and the money trail became a grim parable of how borderless digital coins can bankroll hate.
Now, five years on, France is drawing a line.
Reuters reported on September 15 that France’s financial watchdog, the Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF), has warned it may go so far as to block crypto companies licensed elsewhere in the EU from operating domestically. The issue is “passporting”: under the EU’s landmark MiCA rules, a license granted by one member state allows a crypto firm to do business across all 27 nations. France fears this has created a marketplace for regulatory arbitrage, with firms shopping for the weakest overseer.
Marie-Anne Barbat-Layani, president of the AMF, called the threat to block passports the “atomic weapon.” Rarely used, and destabilizing to the principle of the EU single market, but a weapon France is willing to wield if oversight gaps persist.
The timing is not lost on observers. The French government knows well that extremist networks already exploited these very gaps. In 2020, one citizen’s final act poured fuel into America’s far-right underground. Investigators tracked the transfers but could not undo the damage. For French regulators, that episode was not academic it was a wake-up call.
Together with Italy’s Consob and Austria’s FMA, France is pressing to shift supervision of major crypto firms to ESMA, the European Securities and Markets Authority, headquartered in Paris. Central oversight, they argue, would better protect investors and close the loopholes extremists have used to launder ideology into currency.
Skeptics in the crypto industry warn of overreach, pointing to Malta’s early licensing regime and Luxembourg’s more recent approval of Coinbase under EU rules. Yet the counterpoint is stark: without tighter controls, another Bachelier could arise, moving fortunes in Bitcoin from a Paris apartment to an extremist bunker abroad.
For Americans, this story may seem distant another quarrel in Brussels over bureaucratic turf. But Oklahomans should recall: the Goyim Defense League’s propaganda has already surfaced here. Groypers sought city council seats in Enid. Sheriff’s departments and industrial giants have been accused of looking the other way. The money that crossed the Atlantic in Bitcoin helped animate a movement whose memes now infiltrate our own civic spaces.
At the heart of Fuentes’s American donor orbit stand the West Texas oil billionaires Tim Dunn and brothers Farris and Dan Wilks. Dunn made his fortune through CrownQuest Operating, a Midland-based oil and gas company, while the Wilks brothers rose from running a small masonry business to selling their hydraulic fracturing empire for billions. Both families are known as kingmakers in Texas politics, pouring millions into super PACs, think tanks, and primary challenges to push the state GOP further right. Their funding of Defend Texas Liberty PAC gave Fuentes a seat at the table, underscoring how regional oil wealth has become a national pipeline for extremist-adjacent causes.
2002–2011 – Brothers Farris and Dan Wilks, starting from a family masonry business in Cisco, Texas, pivot into hydraulic fracturing services. They sell their company, Frac Tech, in 2011 for over $3 billion, instantly becoming billionaires.
2010s – Both Dunn and the Wilks brothers funnel their wealth into political action committees, churches, and think tanks, financing hardline candidates in Texas and shaping Republican primaries. Their money cements reputations as “kingmakers” on the Texas right.
2020s – Their influence expands through the Defend Texas Liberty PAC, which bankrolls candidates aligned with far-right policies and Christian nationalism. In 2023, revelations that Nick Fuentes met with the PAC’s leader raised alarms about extremist access to billionaire-funded political networks.
Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond’s own history is not untouched by this web of influence. In Osage County, Drummond worked with Frac Tech, the hydraulic fracturing firm founded and formerly owned by the Wilks brothers to operate on his land. Those same Wilks brothers are now infamous as billionaire patrons of Defend Texas Liberty PAC, the very outfit that opened its doors to Nick Fuentes. Thus, a straight line can be traced: from Osage mineral rights to Texas oil fortunes, from fracturing wells to fractured politics. What may have begun as a business decision on the prairie now sits uncomfortably beside the financing of extremist causes that ripple across the Republic.
In December 2020, French programmer Laurent Bachelier transferred about 28.15 Bitcoin (roughly $520,000) to 22 addresses; around 13.5 BTC of that went directly to Nick Fuentes. Smaller amounts went to other far-right extremists, including figures tied to the Goyim Defense League. Within weeks, Bachelier was dead by suicide, leaving the donation as his final political statement. What looked like a European eccentricity would soon echo in American towns, including Oklahoma.
By January 2021, blockchain investigators had confirmed the donation’s path. The Anti-Defamation League and U.S. media warned that extremist groups had discovered how cryptocurrency could bypass banking laws. Oklahoma residents would later recognize the fruits of that financing when propaganda bearing GDL slogans surfaced in their own neighborhoods.
Through 2021 and 2022, Fuentes used the Bitcoin windfall to expand his “America First” streaming empire. The movement’s influence spilled offline, with some followers appearing at the January 6th Capitol riot. In Oklahoma, echoes of this radicalization emerged when Groypers and their allies began testing the waters of local politics most visibly in Enid, where Judd Blevins sought a city council seat and local debates reflected themes associated with the Groyper movement. Notably, investigators traced flows through Logan County, an Oklahoma thread that deserves its own story
In 2023, regulators in the United States and the European Union intensified their debates over crypto oversight. Watchdogs flagged extremist donation channels as national security risks. Meanwhile in Oklahoma, critics accused elements of local law enforcement and political organizations of turning a blind eye to the spread of extremist messaging, a permissive environment where outside money could amplify fringe voices.
MiCA was adopted in 2023, with its major provisions, including ‘passporting’, phasing in across 2024 and 2025. t introduced “passporting,” allowing a crypto license issued by one EU member state to apply across all twenty-seven nations. The same year, Oklahomans continued to witness cultural clashes in school board meetings and state politics, where themes borrowed from the Groyper lexicon anti-globalism, Christian nationalism, hostility toward “Conservative Inc.” filtered into mainstream debate.
On September 15, 2025, France’s markets watchdog (AMF) warned it may seek to block ‘passporting’ for some crypto firms licensed elsewhere in the EU and, with Italy and Austria, urged moving top-tier supervision to ESMA. France, joined by Italy and Austria, demanded that the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) assume central control to prevent regulatory shopping and close the very gaps extremists had once exploited. For Oklahoma, this distant regulatory quarrel is more than an abstraction. The French Bitcoin that once seeded extremist movements overseas has already found its way into the memes, campaigns, and local offices of our own state.
France’s “atomic weapon” is aimed at loopholes in finance. Yet its shadow reaches across the ocean, into our counties and councils. If Paris succeeds in curbing crypto’s lawless frontier, it will not only protect investors. It may, at last, close one of the doors through which hate was bankrolled in broad daylight.
If the Groypers and their fellow travelers are not indirectly tied to this cascade of events from a French programmer’s half-million-dollar Bitcoin bequest, to the spread of extremist propaganda, to France’s present “atomic weapon” threat against crypto firms, then it is surely one of history’s stranger coincidences. The same networks that thrive on digital anonymity and borderless finance have, time and again, found themselves at the center of regulatory storms. To dismiss the overlap as mere happenstance is to overlook the pattern: ideology, money, and technology intersecting in ways too pointed to ignore.
Often Imitated but Never Duplicated
In the end, it helps to remember the lineage: Identity Europa rebranded as American Identity Movement, bled members into Fuentes’s Groyper Army, and then set about policing the right from the right—heckling Turning Point USA and Charlie Kirk, and baiting campus events to pull younger conservatives further toward ethnic nationalism and Christian dominionism. That insurgent posture didn’t stop at Kirk; it eventually turned on Trump too. Having borrowed his grievance politics, Fuentes and the Groypers have spent the past few years casting Trump and MAGA figures as “Conservative Inc.”—insufficiently hardline, too compromised by donors, Israel, or federal power. For Oklahoma readers, that logic is what threads online extremism to the local stage: when aspiring politicians propped up by Koch, Frac Tec, like Judd Blevins, Corey Rink, Ryan Walters, Mike Fields, Gentner Drummond posture as purists while scorning the federal government, you’re seeing the same entryist playbook only now aimed at city halls and school boards.
As one recent explainer video lays out, the Kirk–Fuentes feud was never just about personalities; it was a struggle for the soul (and audience) of the post-2016 right. The host walks through how Fuentes built a meme-driven, donation-fueled media machine, absorbed recruits from Identity Europa/AIM, and used entryism to disrupt mainstream conservative events. He argues Groypers appropriate symbols (even “antifascist” motifs) to troll and recruit; that they monetize outrage via alternative streaming; and that after years of riding MAGA energy, they’ve pivoted to attacking Trump and his influencers as sellouts. The broader point is plain enough for those of us who back the presidency and the constitutional order: we support our president and our federal government, while this “Nick” faction, and its local imitators, thrives on tearing both down to build a smaller, harsher politics in their own image.
Writing By: King Shultz | Editing by Robbie Robertson
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