How the Internet Fringe Infiltrated Republican Politics
This past summer, a man I’ll call G. helped train Grok, the A.I. chatbot on X, to praise Adolf Hitler. Elon Musk, who owns the company, had asked users to post divisive facts—information that was “politically incorrect but nonetheless factually true”—to show Grok what to think about the world. Soon, the bot was calling itself MechaHitler and recommending a second Holocaust, tailspinning into antisemitic tirades—“radical leftists spewing anti-white hate often have Ashkenazi Jewish surnames like Steinberg”—before being temporarily disabled. This is the type of side project that G. enjoys. Several years ago, while finishing a doctorate at U.C. Berkeley, he became, as he says, “chronically online,” and he is now steeped in the kind of deep-internet meme culture that can be difficult to parse in person. During our first meeting, G., who is in his early thirties and who wore a suit with a skinny tie, performed what appeared to be a Nazi salute, then took a sip of water, chuckling to himself. His pose is “both a joke and completely serious,” he said. “The world is just so tragically fucked up. You can’t look at it and not have a sense of humor.” This attitude was designed to prevent him from “black-pilling,” shorthand for spiralling into the belief that the future is doomed. “You open Twitter, and it’s just, like, ‘Oh, another political assassination, another mass shooting, another country getting bombed, the child rapists are still getting free, a Zionist mafia controls our country,’ ” he said.
Offline, G. maintains a simple routine. He wakes up early to exercise and surf in Santa Monica. He drinks bone broth and, to optimize his focus, avoids alcohol. Until recently, he kept a vegan diet—the same one he grew up with, in a swank, bohemian enclave in West Los Angeles. (His mother was against seed oils before that became a more widespread position.) By day, he works as an engineer at a prominent tech company; when he gets home, he trades on Polymarket, the online betting platform, placing wagers on election outcomes and on geopolitical events, such as which Ukrainian cities Russia will capture next. He often meets up with friends from work or college to watch Nick Fuentes, the white-nationalist shock jock, who, on a nightly streaming show, opines to an audience of several hundred thousand about the state of politics—along with the virtues of Hitler, the nuisance of women and minorities, and the truths the media conceal.
Followers of Fuentes are known as Groypers. They once constituted a tiny subculture of America’s young right; now they hope to overtake it. “I wasn’t really animated by politics until Trump came along,” G. told me. “I was, like, ‘Wow, America could be something great.’ ” Lately, Fuentes has supplanted Trump as the figure who most embodies that sense of promise. G. told me that all the conservative men he knew, and, increasingly, everyone he spent time with, were Groypers, too.
At work, G. periodically logs on to X to “fight the meme wars,” spewing a deliberately outrageous, often vulgar torrent of comments. A few years ago, this might have entailed mocking liberals and the pious narratives of the woke left. These days, Republicans are the target. “The message is always, like, ‘You’re a traitor,’ ” G. said. He and his friends pounce on anyone who identifies as conservative yet denies the existence of a so-called “great replacement,” the theory that liberal élites have conspired to flood white America and Europe with migrants from the Third World. The same goes for anyone who suggests that America is a country defined by shared creeds, not just Anglo-Saxon ancestry. “Basically, anytime there’s a Republican who counter-signals white advocacy, or white people at all, we shit down their throat,” he said.
G. detailed all this to me while drinking watermelon mocktails on the rooftop of a hotel near the beach. “My ancestors came here on the Mayflower,” he said. “They bled and died—committed genocides and fought wars. And what the fuck was the point of all that? So we could get replaced by Indians and Chinese people who don’t care about us? So we can get ruled by these insane leftists who care about nothing except getting generational revenge against whites, or be ruled by these psychopathic Zionist billionaires?” I was used to hearing him speak in this register.
Attempting a coherent portrait of Groypers can feel a bit like trying to describe the plot of a Surrealist film, or a fantasy board game that takes place in its own universe. They greet each other with the salutation “Christ is King”; they banter about their aspiration to re-create Agartha, a mythological Aryan kingdom supposedly situated somewhere in the earth’s core. Theirs is a would-be party of trolling, of “discourse porn and conspiracy theories on Adderall,” as one adherent told me. But they see their movement as a gathering storm about to break over American politics. Liberals may think of the Trump era as a tragedy of democratic backsliding and authoritarian malignancy; Groypers view it as a cynical pantomime of a nationalist takeover that never went far enough. Fuentes has become the gleeful narrator of this dashed dream, building a career in part by insisting that Trump’s pledge to put America first has curdled into a lie. “Nick said that Trump’s going to simp for Israel,” G. told me. “He’s totally going to cozy up to the donors. He’s not going to give us mass deportations. He’s not actually going to advance any of our interests except performatively, to appease us. And, sure enough, that’s exactly what happened.”
The Trump Administration, G. pointed out, had promised to support G.’s generation of Americans, the ones who didn’t yet own stock or a house. But all that had been offered, it seemed, were fifty-year mortgages that would make them “debt slaves,” and temporary jobs building data centers. Meanwhile, Trump appeared tens of thousands of times in the Epstein files, whose release, G. believed, he had stymied to protect a clique of élite friends. “It’s just been one big letdown after another,” G. told me. “There’s been a huge break now, where basically all the young conservatives are, like, ‘Trump is not our guy.’ ”
The war with Iran, launched in close coördination with Israel and with no input from Congress or the American public, confirmed the rupture. On February 28th, the day of the first strikes, Fuentes held an emergency broadcast. The entire conceit of MAGA, he said, “was supposed to be in opposition to the Iraq War, and to the legacy of the Iraq War, and all of the associated interventions.” The President was now doing exactly what he had disavowed. “It’s disturbing what it says about how our country works,” Fuentes said.
Groypers believe that for decades America has prostrated itself to immigrants and foreign nations at the expense of its own languishing citizens. Israel and what Fuentes calls “organized Jewry” are often to blame. The conservative movement has become nothing more than “a glove, a tool of the Israel lobby,” he says. “They are building Israel as a superpower while they kill America.” For those already convinced of the existence of this cabal—G. had been insisting to me for months that Trump was controlled by Israel, and that his closest advisers were tied to Mossad—the latest news proved their gravest fears. Soon, the Times was reporting that Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had been “determined to keep the American president on the path to war,” and that the outcome was “even better” than he’d hoped. As Joel Webbon, a Christian-nationalist podcaster and a Groyper ally, put it, on X, “So we got ‘wokeness’ out of our military just in time to ensure that it’s exclusively the young White Christian men of America who get to go die in the desert for Israel.”
When Trump announced major combat operations in Iran, in a video from Mar-a-Lago, he informed the public that Americans would likely die. “That often happens in war,” he said. Several days later, back at the White House, he noted the first American casualties—six service members had been killed in an Iranian drone strike on a military base in Kuwait—then paused to admire the gold curtains next to him, musing about his plans to replace the East Wing of the White House, which he had demolished, with a gilded ballroom. “See that nice drape?” he said. “I picked those drapes in my first term. I always liked gold . . . I believe it’s gonna be the most beautiful ballroom anywhere in the world.”
Fuentes declared that Trump was a “scam artist,” that he was running an “illegitimate regime.” Cracks were forming in the MAGA coalition, and the Groypers saw an opening.
I’d first met G. several months earlier in Phoenix, at AmericaFest, the annual conference for the conservative activist group Turning Point. When I arrived in Arizona, young men in white “FREEDOM” T-shirts and black MAGA hats were streaming out of the airport. It was the weekend before Christmas, and pedicabs blasting “Jingle Bell Rock” shuttled visitors around downtown. G. drove from L.A. with a group of fellow-Groypers. In September, Charlie Kirk, Turning Point’s founder, had been assassinated by a gunman at Utah Valley University. AmericaFest sought to bring together factions of the right that were turning on one another in the aftermath of his death, and to anoint Trump’s successor by endorsing his Vice-President, J. D. Vance, for the Republican Presidential nomination in 2028. G. and his friends had come for a different reason. “We’re trying to unite super hard as a voting bloc and get every young conservative on board and just fuck the G.O.P. as hard as we can,” he told me. For a successful young professional attending a political conference, G. said things like “We have literally nothing to live for—we’re ready to die” a lot. His life, he claimed, was hopelessly compromised by the indignities of the modern world. “You watch these videos of Europe or America in the eighteen-hundreds or early nineteen-hundreds, and it’s beautiful,” he said. “Everyone’s well dressed. There’s, like, a tenderness and an innocence to it, and I feel like we’ve all been robbed of our innocence. All our buildings are these hideous rectangles. We’ve watched hundreds of hours of hardcore porn before we ever had our first kiss. Why the fuck did that happen? Do our G.O.P. leaders care?”
At Kirk’s memorial service, his widow, Erika, said that her husband’s aim had been to “save the lost boys of the West, the young men who feel like they have no direction, no purpose, no faith, and no reason to live—the men wasting their lives on distractions, and the men consumed with resentment, anger, and hate.” But G. and many others like him saw Turning Point’s methods—door-knocking to get out the vote, attending a road show of evangelical life-style events called the Make Heaven Crowded tour—as a series of pointless gimmicks.
After Kirk was killed, there was grand talk among Republican politicians of a revival of faith and tradition; young people inspired by Kirk’s devotion to Christ were to put down their phones, pick up their Bibles, and start families. Instead, the right devolved into a series of intramural spats, primarily over America’s support for Israel. “This is where the MAGA civil war starts—you’re either America First or pro-Israel,” a White House staffer told me. Prominent conservatives, such as Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, and Steve Bannon, had been arguing since the start of Trump’s second term that MAGA was being displaced by what some called MIGA—Make Israel Great Again. The President, this faction argued, was too cowed by hawkish interventionists like Mark Levin, a neoconservative commentator. Then it emerged that Kirk himself had started to have doubts about the U.S.-Israel relationship, prompting a bloom of online conspiracy theories. Candace Owens, a conservative podcaster and a former Kirk ally, devoted huge chunks of her show—one of the most popular in America—to “investigating” Kirk’s murder. She speculated that Netanyahu, Kirk’s widow, and the French Foreign Legion were all involved; she used open-source flight logs to suggest that military planes might have landed undetected in Utah. Some of her theories apparently came to her in vivid dreams. Before long, the notion that Israel had ordered Kirk’s assassination was so widely discussed that Netanyahu publicly denied involvement. As a senior Administration official put it to me, “Kirk’s corpse was given over to conspiratorial howling demon forces.”
On the first night of AmericaFest, Ben Shapiro, of the conservative website the Daily Wire, attempted something of a normie reset. He took the stage to red, white, and blue strobe lights; the walk-on music was so loud that the floor shook. Shapiro, a critic of what he views as metastasizing antisemitism within the G.O.P., had started to call for “ideological border control.” Conservatism, he said, was about freedom, free markets, limited government, and truth. He chided the attendees for squandering the chance to unite around a common enemy—the left. (He insisted, for instance, that Kirk’s alleged killer was a “gay, trans-loving furry.”) He implored them to stop believing conspiracy theories. When he opened the floor for audience questions, it quickly became apparent that his directive hadn’t been heeded. “You cited during your speech ‘truth’ as the most important tenet of American conservatism,” Nicky Rudd, a college student, said. “Why, therefore, did you call ‘irrelevant’ the Israeli attack in 1967 on the U.S.S. Liberty?”
Followers of Fuentes had been asking this question at Turning Point events for years. The U.S.S. Liberty, an American naval-intelligence ship, was attacked by Israeli forces during the Six-Day War, fought between Israel and several Arab states. Thirty-four American service members were killed. Israel issued an apology, saying that it had mistaken the Liberty for an Egyptian warship. But to those who oppose the close relationship between the United States and Israel, the incident was not an accident from half a century ago but evidence that Israel can’t be trusted.
Kirk had built a reputation as an activist in part by showing up on college campuses to sell conservatism to NPR-loving liberals. To Fuentes, he was insufficiently radical. In 2019, Fuentes started to send his supporters to assail Kirk with views that had largely been confined to the fringes of the internet. Kirk was inundated with questions on matters such as demographic erasure and how a true conservative could back multiculturalism. Toward the end of his life, he, like many in the Republican Party, began to take up once verboten lines of argument: about forsaking long-held diplomatic alliances, “prowling Blacks” targeting white people, how “America was at its peak when we halted immigration for forty years.”
Fuentes needed a name for this group of acolytes who showed up at Kirk’s events. They united around a meme of a fat, sluglike frog with interlaced hands and a smug expression, which was known as a Groyper. (The Anti-Defamation League added the frog to its hate-symbol database.) As one AmericaFest attendee told me, of Groypers, “It’s like if Redditors finally had their own political party.” Last year, the Financial Times called them the “internet Stormtroopers of the American right.”
Groypers are repelled by the obsequiousness of pro-Trump influencers who are always willing to contort themselves to support the President’s latest actions. Groyperism is more political hobbyism than Republican politics. The movement’s heroes range from Charles Lindbergh—the isolationist antisemite who gave speeches on behalf of the America First Committee in an attempt to keep the U.S. out of the Second World War—to Lana Del Rey, the melancholy, Americana-inflected songwriter whom they revere because she married an alligator hunter and has said, of feminism, “I’m just not really that interested.” They despise most G.O.P. politicians. Vance, for instance, might seem to appeal—he is an internet dweller who speaks openly of a Christian nation for “heritage” Americans—but Groypers loathe him more than they do Trump. Fuentes recently told his followers that Vance, who is married to an Indian woman, is a “race traitor.” Other strikes against him: his Jewish chief of staff, his friendship with Peter Thiel. (Or, more simply, as Clavicular, a Groyper-adjacent influencer, recently posted, “You do not want a weak fattie as your president.”) One Groyper told me that someone with an average I.Q. simply couldn’t understand the nuances of the movement.
I asked a political consultant in Washington to summarize. “Groypers are about demographic change,” the consultant said. “It’s a sovereignty issue. It’s literally, like, ‘Who runs my fucking country? Why do all these people get access to my birthright—not just before me but that might be denied to me? Do I get a deal better than somebody who runs across a border?’ ” Fuentes offers a more concise gloss. “There are basically two things that are going on,” he said recently. “White genocide and Jewish subversion.”
At the convention, many attendees wore hats emblazoned with the letters “NJF”—Nicholas Joseph Fuentes—in place of the usual “DJT.” A podcaster called Myron Gaines, whose show has more than a million subscribers, roamed the floor wearing a sweatshirt with a Cookie Monster Holocaust meme. (“Let ’Em Cook,” it read.) “Charlie Kirk wasn’t a Nazi,” he has said. “I am. Now you guys are stuck with me.” He threw salutes and called a pregnant woman who tried to talk to him a “fat fucking Jew.” An older man referred to himself as a “Gramper.” A thirteen-year-old, who had come to the conference from Fresno with his father, told me, “Everything’s about Israel now.” Few of these people evinced any interest in Trump or in the lineup of Turning Point speakers. Instead, they stood around on the main floor debating among themselves. How many years until white people would become a minority? Was it O.K. for women to be priests?
They agreed that the Trump Administration was an incompetent betrayal. They had once been censored by the same Big Tech oligarchs who were now donating millions to the President’s East Wing ballroom and sitting on his advisory boards. The tariffs and DOGE were a joke. Jeb Baugh, a Groyper streamer from North Dakota, told me, “I hope the G.O.P. collapses and something new can be born.” He had voted for Trump in 2024, just after turning eighteen, but was already disillusioned. “When he was, like, ‘I’m banning immigration from the Third World,’ he banned it from countries which aren’t even bringing in the most immigrants,” Baugh said. He filmed himself debating non-Groypers—about, for example, the Holodomor famine, and whether the Rothschild family influenced the Bible—then posted clips on Instagram.
G. and his friends met up with a group of Groypettes—female Groypers, who were eager to undo the corruptions of feminism and return to older modes of gender relations. Several were looking for husbands and had a list of qualities they planned to inquire about. A question they’d ask was “Do you have authority?” G. told me, “It was kind of a shock for me personally, because it was the first time I had ever met a woman in my life who didn’t want to vote.” As one of the Groypettes, a young woman named Lauren Nash, who wore a gray shift dress, heels, and hoop earrings, put it, “Deep down, I’m, like, Yeah, women have caused a lot of problems.” To her, even the President’s most extreme policies were a disappointment. “The Administration will post TikTok videos of ICE raids, but it’s performative cruelty,” she said. Not enough actual deportations were happening. “We don’t want illegal immigrants to live in fear,” she went on. “We just want them gone.”
Nash said that she sometimes listened to Fuentes with her mother: “My mom is, like, ‘Trump is putting America first,’ and I’m, like, ‘I’m not sure.’ ” Baugh, too, emphasized the generational divide. “The older you get, it’s more MAGA,” he said. “They still support NATO and Israel.” Boomers are a frequent Groyper target, lambasted as avatars of a bumbling, aging affluence that gambled away social stability for cultural decline. As Baugh and I talked, a woman in a white pin-striped suit came up to introduce herself and ask for a photo. She whispered into his ear, confiding that she was also a Groyper. “Everyone I’ve met here is a Groyper,” he said. “Except Jewish people and one older gentleman.”
In November, the conservative writer Rod Dreher published an article on Substack about a recent weekend trip to D.C. He wrote that up to forty per cent of Gen Z staffers working in Republican politics appeared to be Groypers. Dreher, who had moved to Budapest in 2022, was accompanying Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian Prime Minister, to a meeting with Vance about, among other things, the survival of Christianity in Europe. Dreher warned the Vice-President that Groypers threatened the country, the Republican Party, and Vance’s own career. (Just before the trip Dreher wrote, “Groypers are now crawling en masse through the Overton Window, which our people have opened.”) He described nihilistic young men with no prospects who hoped to destroy everything. Many in the online pundit class balked at his article, casting it as anecdotal and credulous. A person close to the Administration told me, “The Groypers are to us as trans people are to the left—a small fraction of the Party that’s mentally ill, and then force the whole thing to look bad and lose elections.” Still, he went on, “Jewish donors call me and ask how worried they should be.”
When I asked an Administration official about Dreher’s estimate, he told me that, in terms of staffers who would come off to most people as Groypers—“very radical, very extreme Zoomers”—it was actually closer to seventy-five per cent. “They’re an incidental outgrowth of an underlying sociological phenomenon, which is the rightward drift of the silent majority,” he said. “It’s now developed into something further than the Trump movement.” During a recent focus group of twenty Gen Z Republicans conducted by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, a subset of participants were asked to share their thoughts on Hitler. “I support national sovereignty, and Hitler was a nationalist,” one said. “He was, like, ‘We have to take Germany back for Germans.’ And I feel like we should do that in America. We should take America back for our native population.” Only one responded with outright criticism. Carter Goldberg, a volunteer at AmericaFest, told me, “Young people that would normally be run-of-the-mill conservatives are debating the Holocaust.” Even those on the right who find Groypers idiotic actually echo many of their political positions. A second person close to the Administration said, “People who think they want to purge Groypers don’t realize that, to most people, they seem like Groypers themselves.”
Most conservatives seemed inclined to keep as many factions as possible united against the left, rather than to engage in what Vance, on the last day of AmericaFest, derided as “endless, self-defeating purity tests.” The common refrain was “no enemies to the right.” I’d noticed this in the summer, at the National Conservatism Conference, in D.C. Yoram Hazony, an Israeli-born political theorist and a leading proponent of nationalism in America, reminded attendees, “Nobody ever said that to be a good nat con you had to love Jews. Go take a look at our statement of principles. It’s not a requirement.”
Others on the right have tried to be less accommodating. Karys Rhea, a conservative activist and commentator, helped lead an “anti-Groyper training” at a Turning Point conference. Attendees role-played strategies for debunking what she calls “six-second histories,” which had recently populated the discourse on conservative social media: the Talmud says to persecute Christians; Churchill was the chief villain in the Second World War; Jews killed Charlie Kirk and Jesus. “We have to gatekeep,” she told me. “These people have gone outside the realm of conservatism.” But many in the MAGA movement recoil at such strictures. “There’s a huge aversion to anything that sounds like the moralistic language that was directed at us when we were a rising and a still marginal force,” the senior Administration official told me.
In January, a Times/Siena poll suggested that “the second Trump coalition has unraveled.” The data indicated that the President had lost the support of young, low-turnout voters—a key constituency in the political realignment that carried him to victory in 2024. It was unclear who they might turn to instead. Dreher thought the group was gravitating toward a generalized “f--k that,” as he put it on Substack, revelling “in transgression such that they tear down the pillars of civilization.” At AmericaFest, one college student told me,“The feeling is, like, the entire system is corrupt, and we hate everyone.” Then he turned to a friend. “Does anybody know the end goal?”
For some, the goal is to shape the country’s future by entering political institutions and changing them from within. As one Groyper put it, “Hide your true beliefs, gain power, gain influence, then, when the time is right, take power.” John, a Groyper from L.A., said that Fuentes wanted his followers to “make our opinions normalized.” He went on, “We’ll see an emergence of Groypers running the deep state, the private sector, and Congress.” A Trump staffer told me, “Radical Zoomers have given up on Trump—and they’ll run the Party in twenty years.” Kai Schwemmer, the newly elected political director of the College Republicans of America, is a longtime Fuentes ally.
I started to hear Trump described as a “moderating influence” on his own base. Late last year, in an interview on Fox, Laura Ingraham asked the President to respond to complaints from supporters that he had compromised on his principles. “Don’t forget, MAGA was my idea,” he snapped. “MAGA was nobody else’s idea. I know what MAGA wants better than anybody else.” But he couldn’t stop some members of his coalition from inching toward a realization that MAGA was “all a lie.” That was the conclusion of Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former congresswoman from Georgia—and one of Trump’s most devoted sycophants—who in January resigned from Congress after accusing him of abandoning “the common American man and woman” and caving to the “Political Industrial Complex.” Greene wasn’t a Groyper, but her grievances overlapped with theirs; her relationship with the President had cooled as he cut health-care benefits for the working class, lurched toward war with Iran, tried to bury the Epstein files, and continued to arm Israel in support of what Greene has called a genocide in Gaza.
Over coffee one morning, a White House staffer told me that she saw a similarity between Groyperism and Trump’s original appeal. “There was this thing called ‘the forgotten man and woman,’ and that is the white person who lives in the Midwest,” she said. Now there are people in this Administration “openly pushing not-America First positions.” (She said that she had cried when Greene announced her departure.) A Trump official told me, “I abhor Nick Fuentes, though I share his disappointment with how the Administration has gone.”
Kirk understood this feeling. Andrew Kolvet, one of his top advisers, said, “Behind the scenes, Charlie was waving the flag on all of this, like, ‘Guys, all the work we did in 2024—you bombing Iran is killing it. The way you handled Epstein is killing it.’ We can either show that our ideas work, and we have three years to do it, or you’re going to have a nation of renters who vote for Mamdani.” And then there was the graft—it was clear how rich the President and his billionaire friends were getting. After a recent visit to D.C., Mike Cernovich, an old hand among MAGA commentators, posted, “The talk of everyone was how overt the corruption was. It’s at levels you read about in history books. In nearly every department.” Trump had promised to break the system, but instead he was profiting from it. Kolvet said, “Trump is a boomer. He loves America the way he inherited it. He’s old-school, he loves being loved, he loves the system. He’s not the guy that’s going to abandon it.”
Fuentes had hoped that he would. “My problem with Trump is not that he’s Hitler,” he said recently. “My problem with Trump is that he is not Hitler.” Fuentes, who is twenty-seven years old, grew up in La Grange Park, a suburb of Chicago. (He declined to speak to me for this story.) In high school, he was the president of the student council and an active member of Model U.N. Every day, he listened to a political talk program hosted by Mark Levin. Ideologically, Levin is now a sworn enemy, but, at the time, Fuentes liked that he was “obnoxious and mean” to listeners who called in.
In 2013, after Barack Obama was elected President for the second time, the Republican establishment concluded that it would have to find a way to appeal to nonwhite voters if it wanted to win again. An alternative right, which opposed this concession to “demographic destiny,” created an “online space for transgressive fantasies, a counterculture that rejected the ideological constraints plaguing the real-life American right,” Scott Greer, a former Fuentes associate, told me. “We wanted something revolutionary to replace conservatism,” he writes in the forthcoming book “Whitepill: The Online Right and the Making of Trump’s America.” Some of those who disapproved of the G.O.P.’s new direction coalesced around a set of anonymous forums, message boards, and 4chan threads to discuss white identity. The revolution mostly consisted of posting, Greer writes, but “felt like it had civilizational stakes.”
When Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, the users of these sites, who shared his contempt for the modern Republican Party, got to work helping him win. The following year, Fuentes was a freshman at Boston University. Levin had been saying on his show that America was on track to become a minority-white country. This alarmed Fuentes. He started to wear a MAGA hat, and he took the pro-Trump side in a campus debate, during which he said that he wanted to “give a human face to the last dying breath of conservatism.” The debate was live-streamed, and drew so much attention that Fuentes landed his own show on Right Side Broadcasting Network, a pro-Trump streaming channel. Fuentes came of age in an ecosystem of edgelord posting and trolling in-jokes. One of his most popular early clips featured a Holocaust-denial riff about how many cookies could fit in an oven.
It wasn’t clear what any of this would look like offline, or how, exactly, it fit into Trump’s coalition. As Greer wrote, members of the alt-right “had earnestly convinced themselves that they’d won a presidential election with gas chamber memes.” In 2017, Richard Spencer, one of the leaders of the movement, helped organize a white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, marking the first significant real-world gathering of the online right in the Trump era. Fuentes decided to attend. “The rootless transnational elite knows that a tidal wave of white identity is coming,” he posted on Facebook. Rallygoers marched through town carrying tiki torches, chanting, “Jews will not replace us”; a twenty-year-old attendee plowed his car into a group of counter-protesters, killing a woman. The Trump staffer described the event as a disaster. “The alt-right got made legible to the American public in a way that didn’t seem like a weird internet thing anymore,” he said. “It’s actually just, like, here’s neo-Nazis marching on the street—this is like a Skokie neo-Nazi thing—and then they kill someone, and it’s right-wing terrorism. It goes totally off the rails, and in a lot of ways the Trump Presidency kind of fails at that moment, because all of the alt-right energy gets spent there and delegitimized.”
Fuentes was invigorated by the idea of the rally, but he was put off by some of what he encountered there: men with swastika tattoos and wraparound sunglasses, waving esoteric, Nazi-adjacent flags and talking about European identitarian movements. “All these people are, like, total freaks,” he said, in a BBC documentary. “They don’t like America. They’re not Christian. So what the hell are we really doing here?” He soon dropped out of college and started streaming from his parents’ basement. He told his supporters to “break away and form a new periphery,” made up of “people who are right on the white-nationalist issues but don’t have all the baggage, all the crazy stuff.” In 2020, he started a nonprofit called America First—its stated mission was to fight “immoral ideologies like zionism, nihilism, and liberal multiculturalism”—and opted for aesthetics that were more Model U.N. than Skokie. The idea, as Greer put it, was not “to march down the street in a mask and shields shouting weird slogans.” Fuentes and his followers were “going to get involved in politics, normal politics, even if their view of normal politics might be completely unrealistic.” In 2022, Fuentes dined with Trump and Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago, where he implored Trump to let the G.O.P. “crash and burn.” In 2024, he told his followers not to vote.
These days, Fuentes lives alone and rarely appears in public. For a time, he kept a pet rabbit named Edward. He sleeps for much of the day and wakes up in the evening, puts on a suit and tie, and streams for several hours. At the top of the show, he expounds on the latest news, such as Trump’s “total surrender” on immigration raids and failure to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minneapolis. (“Bro, do something,” he said. “You are the chief executive over this country and it is lawless.”) After the political opener, the show becomes more like “a big group in a locker room talking shit, like the gaming culture of teen-age boys screaming slurs online,” as one Groyper described it to me. Viewers can pay to ask a question in the “super chat”; the topics range from current events to what Fuentes orders at the fast-food chain Raising Cane’s. He has told followers he wants “R.K.D. loyalty”—rape, kill, or die for Nick Fuentes. Incoherence reigns. Lately, Fuentes has rhapsodized about Jeffrey Epstein and Obama.
Groyperism is as much about fandom and diablerie as a set of principles. “Why is Hitler cool? I’ll tell you why very simply,” Fuentes has said. “Because what Hitler represents is if white people didn’t give a fuck.” He recently did an interview with Piers Morgan, who played a clip of Daniel Finkelstein, the British author, describing his family’s experiences in the Holocaust: starvation, arrest, gas chambers. Did this make Fuentes, Morgan asked, want to reconsider his jokes on the subject? Fuentes was unmoved. “The thing is, my generation, we’re just done with the pearl-clutching,” he said. “This old British guy is saying, ‘Me mum got killed by Hitler.’ I don’t care. Does that guy care about America, about me and my country and my family?”
Fuentes and his ilk can be understood as the most recent expression of a long pattern on the American right. Each generation is accused of selling out true conservative principles in order to govern; a radical flank fantasizes about restoring the Party to those principles. Groypers imagine dragging Trump’s bastardized MAGA populism back to the isolationist Old Right. Fuentes says that Pat Buchanan should have been the face of MAGA. Buchanan, a speechwriter for Richard Nixon and then a communications director for Ronald Reagan, ran for President three times, between 1992 and 2000, on a platform referred to as paleoconservatism. The paleocons positioned themselves against what they saw as the Republican Party’s acquiescence to globalization, liberalism, and modernity. “The civil rights movement, the Great Society, immigration, the New Left . . . all these things were deeply regrettable to the paleos and had changed American society almost beyond recognition,” the author John Ganz writes in “When the Clock Broke,” his history of fringe American political figures.
For Buchanan, many of these problems could be traced to the Second World War. The horrors of the Holocaust created a new paradigm in which extreme nationalism was regarded as the ultimate danger. He worried that this aversion would sap the vitality from Western societies. “Having lost the will to rule, Western man seems to be losing the will to live,” he wrote, in “Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World.” (The book argues that America should have stayed out of the Second World War, which created a “Churchill cult” that justified foreign intervention by casting every adversary as a “new Hitler.”) In another book, “The Death of the West,” he warned that falling birth rates, the counterculture, and uncontrolled migration would lead to civilizational collapse. By the early two-thousands, the paleocons had been pushed to the margins. The Republican Party embraced neoconservatism; Buchanan and his cohort were the stewards of an ideology for cranks. Paul Gottfried, a paleocon philosopher, delivered an obituary for his own school of thought: “Only younger warriors can carry on our fight.”
Fuentes picked up the mantle, repackaging paleoconservatism for the streaming era. In 2022, he put on a political conference in Florida, where he hosted Peter Brimelow, a paleocon who had pitched an early version of the great-replacement theory. (Brimelow has called immigration to the West “Hitler’s revenge.”) In the nineties, William F. Buckley had tried to keep paleocons like Brimelow and Buchanan out of mainstream conservatism by banning such ideas from the pages of National Review. Fuentes helped make their concerns a mass online phenomenon.
For his followers, blaspheming the Holocaust and celebrating Hitler became a way to signal contempt for the political religion of postwar liberalism. G. and his friends also wanted to renounce many of America’s foundational moral events—the Civil Rights Act, the Nineteenth Amendment, and so on. “We literally live in a different concept of history,” he told me. Murray Rothbard, a libertarian economist who advised Buchanan, had articulated a similar imperative. Their movement, he said, would “repeal the twentieth century.”
G. told me that, in college, he became “traumatized by these horrific stories of colonialism, slavery, oppression, misogyny, on and on, all these historical grievances. It was like every single problem in the world was because of straight white men like me. I got really depressed.” After Elon Musk bought Twitter, “we were allowed to talk about everything,” G. said. “It all started to make sense.” Online and in podcasts, historical revisionism thrived. “It was entirely the algorithm,” he went on. “There were tons of very articulate anonymous accounts that were posting links to decently researched examples of Zionist influence in America. The algorithm funnelled me into accounts that were making hard, scathing criticisms of Judaism as an organized religion. At first, it was really disheartening to see. I was, like, ‘Man, the Trump movement is literally just descending into screeching Nazis now.’ I actually unfollowed and muted a number of these accounts.”
Then G. became convinced that they were right. “Now I help break it down to my friends,” he said. “ ‘Actually, here’s how literally all of open borders is just orchestrated by Jewish activists to make themselves feel safer.’ ” G. came to resent Israel, in part for being the kind of “ethnostate” that white America couldn’t have. He told me, “Almost everyone my age who’s a conservative now believes that 9/11 was done by Israel.” A recent survey conducted by the Manhattan Institute found that more than half of male Republican voters under fifty thought that the Holocaust was exaggerated or hadn’t happened as historians described. “Conspiratorial populism is the most popular element of online politics,” Greer told me. The animating idea, he said, is that some truth was “hidden from us, and now we’re doing a deep dive.”
The person close to the Administration compared this world view to the transgressive impulse of the punk movement. “It’s fun to participate in something rebellious,” he said. “Now ‘punk’ is: you can do racism and sexism and counterfactual history.” G. often sent me short video montages, which he called “nostalgia edits,” of California “back when it was majority white,” of London “before it was culturally eradicated,” of girls “vibing with medieval Gaelic hymns.” Many popular Groyper accounts post an endless stream of similar fare: Nazi parades set to electronic hype music; paeans to Third Reich governance. (“When Hitler is in charge you get a free house for having 4 kids. When jews are in charge the government steals your stuff to give it to foreigners.”) It doesn’t necessarily come from a place of true belief, at least not at first. In “Kill All Normies,” an ethnography of the online right, Angela Nagle describes “nerdish harassers and meme-making trolls whose dark humor and love of transgression for its own sake made it hard to know what political views were genuinely held and what were merely, as they used to say, for the lulz.” It was, she continues, about a “love of mocking the earnestness and moral self-flattery of what felt like a tired liberal intellectual conformity.” Then the shitposting and internet personas crept off the web and into the center of our politics.
Though Groypers complain that the Trump Administration is too timid, Washington lately feels awash in their ideas. At a restaurant frequented by G.O.P. staffers, a party for a new edition of “The Camp of the Saints,” a dystopian novel about Western civilization collapsing because of Third World migration, was on the calendar next to Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s end-of-year dinner. The Department of Labor posted a meme that used the same typeface as “Mein Kampf”; the Department of Homeland Security, in a recruitment ad for ICE, referred to the white-nationalist song “We’ll Have Our Home Again.” On CNN, Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s top advisers, browbeat Jake Tapper about how it was time to move on from “this whole period that happened after World War Two, where the West began apologizing and grovelling and begging and engaging in these mass-reparations schemes.”
At a holiday party, I was told that the “former Groyper generals” were on the second floor, where Administration officials had gathered by the bar. A white-identity-group leader turned podcaster was chatting with staffers from various government agencies and a former European Prime Minister. More than one person offered to give me Fuentes’s cellphone number. Politico had recently published text messages leaked from a Young Republicans group chat that contained quips about Hitler, gas chambers, slavery, and rape. I recognized a couple of the participants on the invite list for the party. When Vance weighed in on the chat, which had made headlines, he criticized not the participants but those who were “pearl clutching” about “edgy” jokes.
Greer told me that he had watched as establishment conservative institutions were conquered by the “pseudonymous world.” In 2018, after The Atlantic revealed that he wrote for one of Richard Spencer’s websites, “I was defenestrated from respectful conservatism,” he told me. “What I was saying under a pseudonym is now mainstream conservative thought.” He went on, “If Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and one of the most important conservative figures, is worrying about white genocide, what do you care if a twenty-eight-year-old writes the same thing for a conservative website?”
Whatever the critiques of Trump’s second term, the senior Administration official told me, “the one thing we unambiguously won is: Can you be kicked out of public life for believing things that feel true about race, and for being a transgressive internet poster? The answer is a resounding no.” The official described a personal ascent into politics which started with posting on online forums trafficking in shock humor, racism, and antisemitism.
The priorities of the online right are showing up not just in rhetoric but also in policy. The Justice Department’s civil-rights division is now focussed on combatting antiwhite discrimination and dismantling D.E.I. programs. The Administration has effectively ended refugee resettlement for everyone except white Afrikaners, based on a popular internet myth that they are the victims of a white genocide. One political appointee told me, “America is tied to being white. The Admin is mainstreaming that.” Trump called Somali Americans “garbage” in a Cabinet meeting. He said that the civil-rights movement resulted in white people being “very badly treated.” The Administration’s National Security Strategy warned that Europe had been brought to the edge of “civilizational erasure,” owing to, among other things, mass migration and “loss of national identities and self-confidence.” It sounded a lot like Buchanan.
The senior official said, “The Groypers enjoy this rebellious insurgent posture, but they’re in an environment where there’s really nothing creditable to be an insurgent against. It’s no longer forbidden by society to say that Blacks have low I.Q.s. The only thing left to rebel against from the right is the Jewish question, or why isn’t Trump literally shooting migrants on sight?” The official continued, “Maybe when you combine racism and conspiracism you get antisemitism, and racism and conspiracism were two of the things that were suppressed before. People like me let those out of the box.”
In November, in a Substack piece called “Groypers Are Just More Honest MAGAs,” Richard Hanania, a pundit who used to post in favor of eugenics on anonymous message boards, made the case that a commitment to “strong white identity and focus on whites being oppressed” has been stitched into the fabric of Trump’s movement. The “dislike of Jewish power and influence,” he argued, was the next phase. He didn’t perceive a meaningful separation between Groypers and the G.O.P., and saw no point in trying to disentangle them. “If you’re a conservative now who isn’t an ethnonationalist, you’re just completely outmatched,” he wrote, in another post. “Groyperization is the natural endpoint of what the entire Trump era has been about.”
Some Trump Administration officials contest this consolidation. Recently, I met Sarah Rogers, the Under-Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, for a cocktail at a speakeasy off Dupont Circle. Groypers, she told me, “are the gangrenous limb that we have to sever.” Before joining the Administration, Rogers practiced as a First Amendment lawyer whose clients included Charlie Kirk and Douglass Mackey, an alt-right meme poster who had been convicted of voter suppression, a charge that was later overturned. She told me that she had long advocated for an “uncensored internet,” which had finally been achieved. Now the challenge was to find a way to “deal with the conspira-slop contingent of our movement,” which threatened to spoil its hard-won gains. When a Groyper account on X suggested that Jewish people were responsible for contemporary German immigration policy, Rogers, using her official State Department account, dismissed the claim as nonsense. “Germany infamously retains very few Jews,” she wrote. It was Angela Merkel, the country’s centrist former Chancellor, who “imported barbarian rapist hordes.” She went on, “You’re dumb trash who prefer to promote conspiracy theories rather than ascribe Germans (or anyone else) agency over their countries’ future.”
In mid-February, Jeremy Carl, Trump’s pick for Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs, appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for a nomination hearing. Carl wrote a book, published in 2024, called “The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart,” and he was asked by the committee to explain some of his positions on the topic. The ranking member, Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat from New Hampshire, entered tweets of Carl’s into the record, alongside letters and op-eds opposing him, before reciting with horror some of the comments he’d made on podcasts over the years. “You’ve argued that the United States should be a white, Christian nation,” she said. “You’ve argued that feminism has led to a downfall in society.” Such hearings are often performatively theatrical, but this seemed like earnest moral outrage. Senator Jacky Rosen, a Democrat from Nevada, asked the room to remember the Second World War and why it had been fought. Her staff put up, in view of the C-SPAN cameras, a poster with a quote from Carl: “The Jews love to see themselves as oppressed.” She told him, “Words matter. Character matters. The world is watching.” Only one Republican, John Curtis, of Utah, publicly opposed Carl’s candidacy. Without Curtis, though, Carl wouldn’t have enough votes. He withdrew.
A Groyper I knew told me that he’d watched the hearing with interest. “It was a case study in what the new world order is, in how popular all of these Groyper-adjacent ideas are,” he said. “But the people in power are still very globalist, very anti-nationalist.” As the second person close to the Administration told me, “Well, the Senate’s run by Jews.”
Before the hearing, I had met Carl and his teen-age son for breakfast. Carl said, “What I’m constantly being told by the people trying to confirm me in a Republican Senate is, like, ‘Don’t go on X and say any of the things that our voters actually want.’ ” Carl told me that Trump was the dam, not the river—his function was to be a “stepping stone,” a transitional figure. His inheritor would truly get the movement going. Carl’s son cut in to say that he thought the revolution was only just beginning. “I want America to go back to, like, the thirteen colonies,” he said. “Bring back sodomy laws, bring back Sabbath laws. Bring back all that kind of stuff.”
His generation had a different framework for extremity. A few days later, I met Vish Burra, a Republican operative, at a Starbucks on Capitol Hill. He had been working as a producer for a TV show hosted by Matt Gaetz, the former congressman, but had just been fired for tweeting an A.I.-generated video depicting Jews as cockroaches. He laughed, unfazed. “It’s like Marty McFly, in ‘Back to the Future,’ ” he told me. “ ‘You guys might not be ready for this, but your kids are going to love it.’ ” He went on, “Trump is the trailblazer, the person who opens the door for the rest of us. He opened the door to this next generation coming to take over.”
Not long ago, I drove down a highway in coastal Florida, from Jacksonville to St. Augustine, listening to a live stream hosted by Webbon, the Christian-nationalist podcaster. His guest, a man named James Fishback, who is in his early thirties, summed up his hopes for the future of the conservative movement. There would be a “sin tax” on women who made pornography for the website OnlyFans, and there would be a “mental-health czar” for men who felt purposeless and oppressed. Any student from China hoping to attend college in America would pay a flat fee of a million dollars; abortion clinics would be burned down. Housing would be freed up by deporting some people and putting others in jail. “Foreign Third World slave laborers” working on H-1B visas would no longer take jobs intended for Americans who went to church on Sunday—the “foundational white stock” from whom the country was being stolen. Money divested from Israel would be given out as cash gifts so that newly married couples could buy homes. He planned to bring back public hangings and impose harsh penalties for adultery.
A few hours later, I met Fishback in the parking lot of an Applebee’s. He is running to be the Republican candidate for governor of Florida, and was getting ready for a campaign event. It was around the time the early birds came in for dinner; a few guys in “America First” hats lingered by the entrance. I stood with Fishback as he changed his shoes. The car was full of suitcases, and his father was sitting in the front seat, scrolling on his phone. “Liberty cannot be for everyone,” Fishback told me. He cleared his throat and spat into the bushes.
A crowd filled the restaurant patio, where the pop song “What About Us,” by Pink, played on the stereo: “What about us, what about all the broken happy-ever-afters?” Fishback started his stump speech by ad-libbing. “What about us?” he said. “Where’s the compassion for the people who built this country?” He said that white Christian men are the biggest victims of racism and globalization. “We are cucked to the point that we have to bend over,” he has told Tucker Carlson. “We can’t own anything. We can’t have jobs in our own country anymore.” Fishback knew how impatient his audience was with the current trajectory of the Trump Administration and the Republican Party. I was standing next to a wheel mechanic who said that this was the first political event he’d attended since January 6th. Like many others, he had discovered Fishback via Instagram reels, where Fishback joked about making the trains run on time, like Mussolini. There were calls from the crowd to denaturalize Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican gubernatorial candidate in Ohio, whom Fishback referred to as an “anchor baby.” (Ramaswamy was born in Ohio to noncitizen parents.) Detractors want to say, Fishback went on, “that I am a racist, that every single one of our supporters is a racist, for calling Byron Donalds a slave.” Shouts of “He is!” and “Oh, yeah!” rang out. Fishback had referred to Donalds, his opponent in the Republican primary, who is Black, as a slave because Donalds accepted money from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
Trump, as it happened, had endorsed Donalds for governor. Carlson had counter-endorsed Fishback as the true America First torchbearer. “It’s a proxy for 2028,” Fishback told me. His candidacy was having some hitches: his car had been repossessed by his former employer, to whom he owed hundreds of thousands of dollars. He had fabricated a role with DOGE and been accused of having an inappropriate relationship with a high-school student, which he denies. It wasn’t clear that he even met the state’s residency requirements. To his supporters, none of this mattered. There was a crown in the gutter for a candidate willing to admit, as he has, that MAGA was now merely a “fun slogan,” and who promised to prosecute people named in the Epstein files and to ban both private equity from the housing market and the construction of new data centers. “I will leave money on the table,” he said, “if it means protecting your way of life.”
He spoke fluently in the language of the very-online portion of the Party’s young base. Regarding marijuana legalization: “If you’re a seventeen-year-old jit smoking a blunt, pull up your pants and go to church.” He has promised that Florida school cafeterias would no longer serve “goyslop,” an antisemitic meme term for low-quality food supposedly forced on the masses by Jewish people. A Republican county commissioner asked a detailed question about a Florida development code. The crowd had no patience for her, even though she broadly agreed with Fishback’s stance on the issue. They shouted, “You sound like a robot! You don’t do anything! America is a sovereign nation!”
Fishback said that he was tired of hearing about white guilt and antisemitism. “One hundred and nine countries couldn’t be wrong!” one person yelled, referring to a white-supremacist trope about the number of countries Jews have supposedly been expelled from. The crowd cheered. “The next governor is going to be a Republican. You can put the Applebee’s mozzarella sticks and the three-dollar margarita on it,” Fishback said. “Sorry, it’s six dollars, happy hour has ended.” The calls from the crowd came swiftly: “Six million! Was it really six million?” Noah, a marketing executive in a gray suit, told me, “This is a new party, not like the old America First. We’re becoming more extreme. Fishback is the first one to hold Nick Fuentes’s values—the first one trying to implement them.”
At the time, Fishback had raised less than twenty-five thousand dollars; the following month, he was polling at less than one per cent with voters over the age of fifty-five. But with voters under thirty-five he was beating Donalds by a factor of four—an indication, perhaps, of one direction the post-Trump right might take. As Dennis Feitosa, a young Groyper-aligned candidate running for Congress in Southern California, told me, “There is a separation between where the Party is culturally and where the candidates are. The candidates still come from pre-podcast time.” In the weeks after we met, Fishback used his online dating profile to conduct voter outreach and sold T-shirts printed with the Groyper frog.
In St. Augustine, at the end of Fishback’s speech, I joined a long line of fans snaking through the restaurant to take photos and talk with him. A high schooler asked if he would come speak at her local Turning Point chapter. Her father shook his hand. A group of college students had come from Jacksonville. “The destiny of a nation is always with the youth,” one said. “We did everything right, and nothing worked out.” The Party just had to catch up to them now. His friend added, “If the Party wants to kick us out, we shall bail and have our own. They can kick us out and die.” ♦