Dismiss the Groypers at your own peril

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I don’t know what you did on Friday night, but I spent about 90 minutes in the vice president’s study with him and the men you see above, talking geopolitics, Hungary, and the survival of Christianity in Europe, among other things. Of course I can’t be indiscreet about the discussion, but it was rich and vigorous. I’m really glad that JD got to experience the actual, living Viktor Orban in person, and to see for himself how wrong the propaganda is. They got on very, very well.

I was able to have a few minutes with the vice president before the PM and his team arrived. I shared with him my views about the threat that Nick Fuentes and Groyperism pose to the country, to the GOP, and to him personally. He listened to what I had to say. And that is all I can say about it, out of respect for his privacy.

It was an intense and busy long weekend for me in the capital city. I learned a hell of a lot about the new radicalism racing through the young Right there. What I’m going to say about it is to inform you. Nobody talked to me on the record. What I say is my impression of a number of conversations I had with people (conservatives) who are directly involved in this world. Every one of them is appalled by what’s happening (well, maybe not one of the guys, but he always plays his cards close to his vest), and all have serious doubts about the ability of the institutional Right to deal with it. It’s easier for me simply to do a mash-up of all the things I heard, rather than try to attribute them to people I can’t quote by name anyway. Remember, this is a diary, not a newspaper.

The claim that I first floated in this space last week, quoting a DC insider who said that in his estimation, “between 30 and 40 percent” of the Zoomers who work in official Republican Washington are fans of Nick Fuentes — that’s true. Was confirmed multiple times by Zoomers who live in that world.

If you think being Christian is some kind of vaccination against anti-Semitism, you’re wrong. Even young Christians — especially trad Catholics, I learned — are neck-deep in anti-Semitism. They even use it as a litmus test of who can and can’t join their informal social groups.

Not every DC Zoomercon who identifies with Fuentes agrees with everything he says, or the way he says it. What they like most of all is his rage, and willingness to violate taboos. I asked one astute Zoomer what the Groypers actually wanted (meaning, what were their demands). He said, “They don’t have any. They just want to tear everything down.”

Then he went on to explain in calm, rational detail why his generation is so utterly screwed. The problems are mostly economic and material, in his view (and this is something echoed by other conversations). They don’t have good career prospects, they’ll probably never be able to buy a home, many are heavily indebted with student loans that they were advised by authorities to take out, and the idea that they are likely to marry and start families seems increasingly remote.

Moreover, they grew up in a country that had lost its common culture. Many of these young men are fatherless. Most of them spent their youths being told that as whites, and especially as white males, they are what’s wrong with the world. Their own speech was policed with Stasi-like ruthlessness for racism and bigotry, while people on the Left routinely slandered whites, males, Christians, and heterosexuals — and were even rewarded for it.

F—k that, seems to be the reaction now. Fuentes is a living, breathing illustration of what Hannah Arendt meant when she spoke of people willing to revel in transgression such that they tear down the pillars of civilization, just for the fun of seeing those who had been gatekept away breaching containment.

ut after these last three days in Washington, I am more convinced than I have ever been that we are moving towards some kind of totalitarianism — or at best, authoritarianism. It could go either way, Left or Right. Said one source, “They [Groyper types] look at Mamdani’s success in New York, and think, ‘Why can’t we do that?’” — meaning, why can’t we try to get a true radical into power?

I talked to one MAGA Zoomer, a policy wonk who is a person of color. He is beside himself with frustration over the rise of Groyperism in his circles, and within the party. “These idiots don’t understand that they can’t win an election on a whites-only platform,” he said. “They’re delusional. There are a lot of immigrants and native-born members of ethnic groups who are natural Republicans, and whom Donald Trump won in 2024. Take Indians, for example — if you think they are going to stick with a movement whose leader [Fuentes] denounces Usha Vance as a ‘jeet,’ you’re crazy. But that’s how they think.”

Well, they do want to burn it all down, I was told. And I came away with the feeling that they are only tenuously dedicated to democratic politics. I told one very smart and decent Zoomercon who despises the anti-Semitic turn in his circles that I’ve been hearing that fascism — actual ideological fascism, not the media’s idea of anybody to the Right of Lindsey Graham — is gaining traction among young white British males.

He said, innocently, “So what’s wrong with fascism?” He meant it, not in a challenging way, but in a way that conveyed the sense of we have to think about this now. He talked about how the disintegration of our culture is accelerating, and liberal democracy seems impotent to stop it. He went on to explain that if he had to choose between living under left-wing authoritarianism or the right-wing version, then that wouldn’t be much of a choice. To be clear, he wants neither, but he fears that the disintegration of our culture is going to put us all in the position to have to reconcile ourselves to one or the other.

We talked about the Spanish Civil War, and how neutrality wasn’t a live option for the Spaniards back then. He brought up Gen. Pinochet in Chile. Not a good man, he said, acknowledging that Pinochet killed tens of thousands. But (said the young man) Pinochet saved his country from communism, and we know very well that communism’s historical record is far bloodier. That is true.

Let me emphasize here that my interlocutor was NOT cheering for fascism. As our conversation went on, I heard real despair — and well-informed despair — that democracy is going to hold in the West, because the conditions that make for a viable democracy are disappearing: the dissolution of a common culture, the collapse of religion in his generation, the material impoverishment of his generation, and so forth.

I tell you, it was dark. But I kept hearing this, over and over, and I concluded that it cannot be dismissed.

The inability of us older people — Boomers, Xers, and older Millennials — to comprehend the world through the eyes of Zoomers is a big, big problem. Another strong theme: while it’s important to take a clear stand against anti-Semitism in the ranks, there is no way to gatekeep our way out of this. You cannot simply point at the Zoomers and say, “Thou shalt not,” and expect it to work. The problems are too deep and complex, and anyway, they have learned to have no respect for authority.

Why should they? The institutions of our society, as they see it, have lied and lied and lied, and still lie. They still lie in many ways about race (e.g., refusing to be honest about black crime), they lied about Covid, they lied about males and females, and they forced the insanity of gender ideology on us all. The military lied about Iraq. The universities embraced and enforced ideologies of lies. The Catholic Church lied about sexual abuse, and the connection to the prevalence of sexually active gay priests honeycombing the institution. They lied about the benefits of mass migration and diversity. They lied about Trump and Russia. The political parties and their corporate allies lied about what globalism would mean for ordinary people.

The media have lied and do lie about most things. This past weekend, everybody was talking about the new report in Blaze media alleging that the mysterious January 6 pipe bomber was in fact a former Capitol police officer — the implications being that the whole event was orchestrated by the Deep State to discredit Donald Trump. Maybe mainstream media are busy trying to validate this reporting on their own. If The Blaze has this wrong, they’re going to be sued into oblivion, and so will other media who amplify a false charge. All I can tell you is that nobody in the MSM are talking about it as I write, even though it is an explosive story.

I could go on — boy, could I — but you get the idea. Trust in the system is gone. Hell, I share most of these conclusions myself!The difference is that I am not a nihilist; I don’t want to tear it all down, but rather reform it. There are no historical examples in which “tearing it all down” produced a better, more just, more functional order. The Zoomers don’t seem to have any knowledge of history, nor do they care about it.

They don’t even take Trump all that seriously, it appears. They see him as an out-of-touch Boomer whose value lies in how he can be used to achieve the system’s destruction. It has not escaped their notice that the ten months into Trump’s second term, the economy is still crap.

The recent opinion polls showing that by a large margin, most Americans (not only Zoomers) are down on the Trump administration’s handling of the economy — that reflects the good judgment of the American people, I’m sorry to say. If the Republicans don’t get their act together, and fast, they’re going to be shellacked in the 2026 midterms.

What about the Jews? This, to me, remains the most puzzling and sinister thing. Douglas Murray gave a talk over the weekend at a Prager U event, in which he reflected on the fact that lots of young conservatives notice that liberal secular Jews are disproportionately involved in organizations pushing mass migration, and draw anti-Semitic conclusions. Murray pointed out accurately that in Europe, by far the most prominent and influential advocates for open borders are the current pope and the previous one — yet few people blame Catholics for the problem. Why, then, do they all blame Jews?

I still don’t have the answer, but I at least came away from Washington convinced that the issue of anti-Semitism on the young Right is much deeper than I had guessed. A couple of people — both of whom reject anti-Semitism — spoke plainly about how a lot of this is reaction to how Jewish organizations like the ADL have policed speech critical of Israel, and of anything to do with Jews, so heavily over the decades that they have caused intense resentment among the Gentile Zoomercons. One man told me that for as long as he has been in politics, any criticism of Israel got you tagged as an anti-Semite, and that was a potential career-killer. So his generation has come to hate that, and to cease caring about the opinions of Jews.

An older friend — another despiser of anti-Semitism — said that we have to find a way to talk about the reality of Jewish influence in American life, for good and for ill. I took him to mean basically this: Jews really are disproportionately powerful in American life, and they are not shy about using that power to advance their own interests, and the interests of other groups they favor. The taboo against noticing that, and talking about what that might mean, is gone with the Zoomers. If we want to fight anti-Semitism, we have to face this seriously.

Human nature being what it is, once one notices these things, and speaks of them, it’s not far to leap to scapegoating, and then persecution. This recurs in many societies, though Jews have typically been the archetypal scapegoats.

The main points I want to leave you with, based on what I saw and heard in Washington, are these:

The Groyper thing is real. It is not a fringe movement, in that it really has infiltrated young conservative Washington networks to a significant degree.

Irrational hatred of Jews (and other races, but especially Jews) is a central core of it. This is evil. If postliberal conservatism requires making peace with antisemitism and race hatred, count me out.

It cannot be negotiated with, because it doesn’t have traditional demands. It wants to burn the whole system down. It really does.

At the same time, the gatekeepers of the Right aren’t going to be able to make it go away, because they have less power than ever. Dealing with this is going to require great skill and subtlety, and courage.

This malign movement didn’t just appear from nowhere. There are within it legitimate grievances. And, as I keep saying, it emerged in a culture that, per Hannah Arendt’s diagnosis, is primed to believe totalitarian things.

The Left got there first. This is not a case of “whatabout”; for almost two decades, left-wing radicals have marched through institutions and imposed illiberal, race-based leftist policies that openly intended to discriminate against whites, males, and anybody who dissented. You cannot understand the rise of the Groypers without understanding this first.


Conservatives like me had hoped that Trump’s anti-woke pushback would simply restore the meritocratic status quo. It turns out that the Zoomercons don’t want that. They want revenge.
This has the potential to destroy conservatism politically. In actual existing America, a white p

Anti-Semitism is spreading like a virus among religious conservatives of the Zoomer generation. They’re getting it through online influencers, but apparently their pastors and parents are either not fighting back, or have lost authority in the minds of these young people. This is irrational. For example, I heard from a number of Zoomercon Christians that Zoomer trad Catholics are making antisemitism part of their spirituality — this, despite the fact that the Catholic Church explicitly condemns it. The same phenomenon, I am hearing, exists among Zoomercon Orthodox and Protestants. Putting aside politics, this is total spiritual poison.

I anticipate that the liberal media is going to have a field day with this, in part to distract from the ugly fact that antisemitism is triumphant among Zoomer progressives, and that the new face of the Democratic Party is Zohran Mamdani, a woke young Millennial who has made a career of intense hostility to Israel, bordering on anti-Semitism, if not actual anti-Semitism (I believe he is anti-Semitic, but it’s arguable.)

Conservatives — Jewish, Christian, and agnostic — who support Israel are going to have to think very hard about how to proceed. Support for Israel has collapsed among the young, and it’s not coming back anytime soon. This is the political reality we have to deal with. We can’t wish it away, or cancel it away.

The intra-conservative fight is here, and we can’t avoid it. Nor should we, for the sake of party unity. [i]In The House Of Government[/i7, Yuri Slezkine said that the willingness of parents to indulge their radical children played a significant role in the eventual triumph of Bolshevism. Some of these parents comforted themselves with the thought that their adult kids would grow out of their revolutionary fervor. Others may have hated what their kids believed, but didn’t want to risk alienating them, so they stayed quiet, and passively supported them, hoping for the best. VP Vance said publicly last week that this conservative “infighting” is a pointless distraction. I told him personally, and respectfully, in a meeting last Friday that I disagree, and why. And I told him why I think all this is a direct threat to his political future. I stand with Gerard Baker of the WSJ:


This is why Mr. Vance’s breezy dismissal of the struggle to extirpate extremists from the right-wing coalition as “infighting” is a mistake. What he belittles as intramural squabbling is the difficult and necessary work of moral and political hygiene for the conservative movement—and the country. What we saw at Heritage last week wasn’t some distraction from more important work. It was the latest episode in the struggle of good against evil.

Interesting perspective, that he has, but scarey in factuality ....Do not think the USA will revover from Trumpism, very easily. Islamic immigrants messing with Traditional Xmas Events does not look good for the future of a One human, One people concept .

A whole suite/raft of social ills (domestic violence, drug and alcohol addiction, prejudice and discrimination) start at home. Don't blame Fuentes or trump, the roots are an underlying cultural problem.

Speaking of debunking anti Jewish tropes there is material for that thread in the parts of the article I did not quote.

Do you have any thoughts as to what might be good ways to try to fix this?

Unfortunately warnings should not be ignored because they come from flawed sources. The author as prominent paloconservative has access to what many young Republicans are thinking that goes way beyond the usual Fuentes is an Nazi and Carlson enabler.

Speaking of debunking anti Jewish tropes there is material for that thread in the parts of the article I did not quote.

The Groypers are the social media successors to the Christian Front in that they are they are a bigoted form of traditional Catholicism.