The Illusory "Groyper"

It seems that Groyperism is very much a product of our times, something everywhere and nowhere at once.

“Groyper” himself, a variation of “Pepe the Frog,” a universal symbol of the American radical right.

Let’s continue the conversation on Nick Fuentes, his nascent political movement known as “Groyperism,” and whether it truly poses a risk of bringing fascism to America.

As I explained in my last essay on this topic, our friend Rod Dreher has been at the forefront of sounding the alarm on fascism coming to the United States. Central to his thesis is a staggering estimate, one which he garnered through private conversations, that anywhere from 30 to 40 percent of Republican congressional staffers in Washington, D.C. are Groypers. In other words, 30 to 40 percent of Republicans who support the political process in the capital are hard-line, extremist fascists.

Really, though? Just as if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is, sometimes, if something sounds too bad to be true, it also probably it is. For one, while Rod Dreher is a well-connected individual - certainly far more than I - he’s not exactly an insider, either.

Emily Jashinsky, who’s better-connected inside D.C. circles, pours cold water on this alarmingly high estimate through her own investigation:

One administration source stated the Groypers are a loud minority but not even in the double digits, and they don’t know a single person at the White House who would consider themselves one. A senior GOP source in the House of Representatives made a similar point, adding: “I haven’t seen any indication that the young people in this world are into Nick Fuentes, or are antisemitic.” That person added: “The majority of young people that work in Republican Washington are folks who went to SEC schools, follow college football obsessively, and recreated their frat rows in Navy Yard. The most offensive thing many of them listen to is probably Creed.”

A senior source in the conservative youth movement reiterated the administration source’s belief that a small minority of Fuentes-aligned individuals does exist, but it is not dominant. “The rising generation of conservative leaders in Washington are, overwhelmingly, not aligned with these ideas that conspire to scapegoat others for a lack of ambition or achievement,” said the source. “Whatever attempts to astroturf influence they may make, a few noisy individuals simply can’t be extrapolated to constitute a serious faction among Washington’s conservatives.”

And:

When I asked a Gen Z administration source about Dreher’s reporting that “two Christian Zoomers told me that antisemitism is sometimes used as a litmus test to join particular social groupings,” they rejected it flatly. “This is just false,” they said. “Antisemitism insofar as it exists on the majority of the young Right is a punchline. People are sceptical of Israel but that doesn’t mean they hate Jews. They hate being told what they’re allowed to think and find funny.”

Almost everyone I spoke with in Washington’s conservative circles was baffled by the claim that 30–40% of Gen Z staffers are Groypers. No one could imagine where that number came from. The most common guess was that someone had confused familiarity with Nick Fuentes for sympathy. In other words, perhaps 30–40% of young staffers know who Fuentes is, follow him for amusement, or treat his antics as a kind of dark political theater — but few, if any, take his ideology seriously. And even if one were trying to count those who laugh at Fuentes rather than with him, most agreed that 30–40% still seemed far too high.

I have neither the most robust social life nor do I discuss politics often with others. I’m certainly not part of a political circle anywhere on the planet. From what little I’ve seen and heard, however, I do see both sides of the story - young men are more willing to buck conventional wisdom and say things behind closed doors that’d get someone s**t-canned in public.

However, this is nothing new. This has always been who men, young men especially, are. It’s not necessarily a political thing, either. Liberal men can be very edgy or offensive too, they just think voting Democrat lets them get away with it. Women like to think they’re the rebels, but in reality, they’re the ones who uphold the status quo, while men are the ones who lead revolutions. Men are the ones more willing to do and say things that go against the times.

The other side of the story is that none of it means there’s a right-wing radicalization problem among young men. I’ve consistently argued that this is illusory and, until more recently, a left-wing fever dream. Political realist Scott Greer addressed the topic of young mens’ political leanings, saying that the Right has exaggerated the extent to which they’ve become right-wing radicals:

This change has made conservatives embrace an exaggerated image of Zoomer men. In their minds, the average Zoomer guy is into the traditional Latin Mass, intent on having a large family, eager for right-wing authoritarianism, extremely jacked, and fully aware of X political discourse. The favored image is that of a fully-suited bro rushing to get to mass, a G.K. Chesterton book in one hand and a Zyn container in the other, after he had just deadlifted at the gym. These BASED bros will also solve the libtard female Zoomer problem by winning them over and turning them into trad wives.

Think about how many people in your life, people you’ve encountered, even in passing, who fit this profile. As I said before, my social life isn’t the most robust, but I’ve still known very few people who match the description. Certainly, this image isn’t something a guy is likely to broadcast openly, but when you look at, for example, rates of religiosity among young men, it diminishes the likelihood a constituency for Fuentes exists in significant quantities.

Of course, Groyperism nor fascism are inherently faith-based in nature. Fuentes may call himself Catholic, and there may indeed some relationship between Catholicism and fascism (a connection we’ll need to explore in a separate piece), but fascism itself is an irreligious ideology at best, atheistic at worst. So many will cite this fact to show that one need not be religious to hold fascist beliefs.

The problem is that religiosity, being a Christian specifically, correlates with holding right-wing views, among Whites especially. Whites are more religious than most of the population, but this religiosity is concentrated among older Whites, not younger. Not only that, most young Whites, even males, hold liberal views. Allowing for the fact that many young White males may indeed follow Fuentes, the numbers simply don’t add up to suggest he’s winning the hearts and minds of the masses, even if only among young White males. Fuentes is similar to Andrew Tate, someone with an overinflated online profile that obscures the more modest reality of his popularity. Let’s also not forget that just because someone is popular today doesn’t mean they’ll be popular 10 years from now. Few things in this world are more impermanent than popularity, as Father Charles Coughlin discovered.

In a separate post, Scott Greer addresses the decline in religiosity among young Americans. He begins by saying:

One of the most dangerous things a right-wing writer can do is to cite a poll. The audience will often flip out at the mere sight of a survey reference. I regularly get hysteric responses whenever I write an article based on this data. Some right-wingers wail and gnash their teeth at this grave offense, demanding you never rely on polling again. They insist you rely solely on vibes and unverified anecdotes to back up your claims.

So true - the Right has a love-hate relationship with polling. Loves it when it fulfills their confirmation bias, hates it all other times. Greer, Kaiser Bauch, and I are likely the only people on the Right who trust polling, probably because we’ve all taken university-level courses on it and got in inside look into how it’s actually done (it’s very boring, I warn you).

But how do you know which polls are accurate and which aren’t? The scientific way is to examine the methodology, but who has time for that? Plus you need to know what you’re looking for. The more practical way is to look for consistency in data. If multiple polls by different pollsters shows patterns, the more likely there’s something to it.

Greer explains:

The Barna Group, an evangelical polling firm, released multiple surveys this year apparently proving a religious revival is underway. In an April poll, Barna claims 66 percent of Americans have made a personal commitment to Jesus Christ and it’s an important part of their lives. In a September poll, Barna reportedly found that Zoomers are more likely to attend church than Boomers. In an October poll, the firm alleged more men attend church weekly than women (43 percent of all American men versus 36 percent of all American women).

But:

While Barna claims 66 percent of Americans are deeply committed to the Christian faith, more reliable polling puts the number of self-professed Christians at roughly 62 percent. This was greeted earlier this year as good news by the faithful as it showed no further decline in Christian affiliation from previous surveys. The trend over the past 30 years has been a steady drop in Americans proclaiming themselves Christians. The latest figure showed it holding steady.

It must be remembered that the 62 percent includes many who don’t think religion is that important to their life. Gallup released a new poll demonstrating a massive drop in the number of Americans who say religion animates their existence. Just 49 percent of Americans say religion is important to their daily lives, which marks a 17 percent drop from 2015. This figure includes non-Christians as well. It’s unlikely Barna’s figure of 66 percent is accurate when only 62 percent of Americans say they’re Christian and a sizable number of them don’t place much importance on their faith.

The bottom line is that the foundation for Groyperism just isn’t there. Fuentes claims to be a devout Christian and a guy like that just isn’t going to appeal to someone who has no time for religion. The correlation between religiosity and holding conservative views is much too strong. Again, I’ll talk about this more separately, but in the U.S., the church has, for better and for worse, served as a gateway to conservative, right-wing political views. Liberals often wrongly accuse churches of being fascist indoctrination centers, but it’s also true there are churches and denominations out there which do attempt to instill just such beliefs into their congregations, something Rod Dreher himself has reported on many times.

Moreover, in Nazi Germany, Austria, and everywhere else fascism reigned, its adherents were mostly religious. This isn’t to say Christianity and fascism go hand in hand - they don’t - but it’s to say that if fascism were to take root in this country, it’d likely do so through the church. It’s why the Silver Legion, arguably the most serious fascist movement in U.S. history, fused the ideology with Christian thought, but that’s the only way it could be sold to the American masses.

To avoid being disingenuous, the evidence for or against the pervasiveness of Groyperism or Fuentes’ popularity isn’t strong in either direction. At the same time, we live in an era where there are increasingly no secrets. A person who thinks America isn’t a leftist country, for example, is being wishfully ignorant, because the amount of evidence demonstrating how widespread leftist beliefs are in our society is overwhelming. Leftism is literally inescapable. We also live in a country where true extremists, be it of the far-left or far-right variety, rather openly propagate their views. Again, there are few secrets left in our world. It seems that Groyperism is very much a product of our times, something everywhere and nowhere at once.

It’s easy to see groups like Patriot Front, a modern-day Silver Legion, as it were, marching in our streets and feel as though fascism is taking root in America. Much of this thinking is rooting in fear and loathing of our fellow Americans, however. In a society where everything is politicized, where everyone’s a stranger to one another, it’s easy to assume the worst of one another. This is a very bad thing for the country, but it doesn’t mean a repeat of the 1930s, either. It does mean Americans don’t really believe in anything anymore. It’s easy to think it means we’re vulnerable to extremist ideologies, and I can certainly see that argument.

At the same time, communism and fascism took hold of countries which were nowhere near as individualistic as America. If totalitarianism shows up here, it’ll look quite different from how it looked in Germany or Russia. Maybe we’re already living through it. And if we are, who knows? Maybe this is as bad as it gets. That’s wishful thinking on my part, but remember that there’s no real use in thinking it’s going to get much, much worse, at which point there won’t be anything left to say.

Fuentes Can’t Help The Right

As for someone like Tucker Carlson platforming Nick Fuentes, generally, I believe anyone ought to be allowed to platform anyone. Carlson, since he went independent, has made it clear he’s willing to give a forum to anyone, including many on the other side of the political divide, people who once upon a time might’ve wanted Carlson to quiet down. I think our discourse is made better, not worse, when a variety of voices can be heard, and it takes a special sort of individual to be able to talk to anyone all across the divide. Carlson should be commended, not condemned, for it.

The issue isn’t Carlson giving Fuentes air time. The issue is: what now? What’s the Right to do with Fuentes? What’s the country to do with him? This is where I think everyone needs to be very careful.

Lately, I’ve been listening to Brion McClanahan, a historian who hosts a YouTube show focusing on American history. He recently addressed the Carlson-Fuentes situation, defending the conversation taking place. In principle, I agree with his point, but I was troubled by two things he said. One, McClanahan claimed to not know who Nick Fuentes was, not very well, and to not have heard anything Fuentes ever said. I find this incredibly unlikely. I don’t want to accuse McClanahan of lying, but for a guy who’s as politically engaged as he, who makes a living paying close attention to politics, it just isn’t possible McClanahan doesn’t have at least some familiarity with Fuentes.

Two, McClanahan made the controversy entirely an issue of the fact Carlson chose to talk to Fuentes at all. But that’s not the issue. McClanahan said to the effect of “you want to get to know them, understand why they think the way they do.” Sure, but anyone who listens to Fuentes knows there’s not a whole lot of depth to what he says. Sure, he has some interesting things to say, everyone does. But Fuentes is neither a philosophical or practical thinker. He’s, to quote a friend, a wannabe shock-jock, except he isn’t even funny. Fuentes isn’t the guy you want fronting your political movement, ever.

Nor did Carlson really engage Fuentes at a particularly meaningful level. He never challenged him intellectually, make him elaborate on his views. This was far too casual of a conversation. That I agree with Rod Dreher on. I realize Carlson wasn’t looking for a debate, but you need to be willing to force a person to at least mildly defend their ideas for a worthwhile conversation to take place. Otherwise, you’re just platforming someone, giving them public legitimacy.

Fuentes is no enigma. It doesn’t take much sleuthing to learn what he’s all about, nor is he an especially deep thinker. What you see is what you get with him. Serious figures on the radical right, people like Julius Evola or Samuel Francis, are deep thinkers, people who’ve clearly studied much and given their ideas a lot of thought. Fuentes has no intellectual grounding whatsoever, and it shows.

Serious thinkers like Tucker Carlson and Brion McClanahan need to be a bit more discerning in judging who’s a worthwhile conversation partner. Nobody’s entitled to a forum, nobody’s entitled to an audience. Fuentes has both, anyway, and I personally don’t see any use in trying to bring him into the mainstream. You can’t listen to anything he says without doing so in secret. It gets that bad. Even Howard Stern wasn’t someone you listened to within an earshot of anyone else.

It’s possible McClanahan is at least tangentially aware of Fuentes’ views and isn’t troubled by them or even agrees with them. Look, Fuentes isn’t wrong about everything. I agree that Israel should have zero influence over U.S. politics, and I also agree with his views on race. Some of them, anyway. But don’t act like you have no clue what Fuentes believes just because you don’t listen to his show. I don’t listen to Fuentes’ show either and I’m well-aware of what his beliefs are, because it doesn’t take much work to find out, nor does Fuentes try to be discrete. He, along with the Groyper movement, is one of the most public faces of the far-right, probably the most serious attempt at mainstreaming the far-right. And Carlson helped him.

My belief Fuentes is simply not worth the bandwidth, especially not for a show with the prominence of Carlson’s. Again, I don’t criticize Carlson for bringing him on, but I think the value we got out of it was negligible. We didn’t learn anything useful, nor does it really change who Fuentes is. In fact, the entire Groyper movement, this new generation of Nazi-revisionists, what they all have in common is a complete and utter lack of seriousness. Most of them are radical individualists, synthesizing libertarian impulses in American politics with National Socialism.

As you might imagine, what comes out of it is utterly incoherent and retarded. On one hand, they want to be able to own as much property as they want, own as many guns as they want, and not have to pay a single dime towards social welfare. On the other hand, they want the state to exercise supreme authority, oppressing non-Whites, women and the Jews, as well as guarantee outcomes for all the right people. What all extremists seem to have in common is that they think they’ll either be the ones in charge or they believe they’ll never be subjects themselves.

Hitler was the furthest thing from a libertarian and Nazism is the furthest ideology from radical individualism. Yet apparently many out there believe American Hitler will be that man for them. We’re told not to take them nor Fuentes too seriously, but we should, because they expect to be taken seriously. A child who demands to be treated like an adult, for example, can only be humbled by forcing them to take on responsibilities and live up to them.

Substacker Dave Greene said in response to Rod Dreher’s moral panicking:

But that being said, Nick is also a supremely immature person. He is unnecessarily cruel and excessively combative. He has difficulty forming professional relationships, and the course of his online career has been marked by a series of broken friendships that he has sabotaged in pursuit of his personal brand. Nick’s content is so heavily irony-poisoned that it is hard to discern his sincere beliefs, and he frequently circulates intentionally bad takes to drive his own clout through manufactured controversy.

We’re on the same page there. But in the next paragraph, Greene overshoots his target:

But that being said. Nick is still not a Nazi. The clips of him praising Hitler are obvious jokes, easily recognizable as such by the most Boomer-brained viewer. Furthermore, even if Nick did believe that Hitler or Stalin had gotten a bad wrap, that didn’t take into account the context of their crimes; such heterodoxy still would not make him a National Socialist in any meaningful way.

Does it matter? People who are misunderstood, I’ve found, perpetuate that very misunderstanding of themselves. If Nick isn’t a Nazi, he sure tries very hard to convince people otherwise. Greene later goes on to say that the criticism of Fuentes is a form of right-wing gatekeeping, which it most certainly is, and is very necessary, because clearly, a totally un-serious person like Fuentes shouldn’t be part of any political movement, right? So what’s the problem here?

I know I’m starting to sound like I might contradict myself, so I’ll reiterate that I don’t think it was wrong, per se, for someone like Carlson to platform Fuentes. The question isn’t whether Carlson did right or wrong, it’s what do we do now with the information we have? Do we pretend like Fuentes isn’t what he’s always been this whole time? Or do we realize that Fuentes is an extremist looking for a wider audience and just not give it to him? That’s not gate-keeping. We have every right to deny someone an audience. We have no obligation to further entertain someone we think serves no use.

One more passage from Dave Greene:

And personally, Rod, I think you could make some valuable contributions to this conversation. However, regardless of your participation, one more thing needs to be made absolutely clear at this stage.

You are not going to gate-keep the right wing.

You aren’t going to veto the discussion of reality by pearl-clutching and making appeals to being “reasonable”, you aren’t going to restore the risk-averse conservativism of National Review by telling century-old horror stories about the ascendency of Adolf Hitler. You aren’t going to shut out critical conversations because you think their conclusions are distasteful.

I have to wonder if Greene even reads anything Rod Dreher writes. Dreher can be accused of many things, but one thing he cannot be accused of is being risk-averse. The guy has risked his professional credibility, maybe even his life, once or twice, to tell stories that need to be told. What has Greene done, exactly? I never even heard of him until I came across this Substack essay.

This sounds to me just plain old “No Enemies To The Right” talk here, which actually means that you need to tolerate those with more extreme views than you, while they reserve the right to not tolerate you. A big problem with the Right is this race to the bottom, to see who can “out-Hitler” the other. This means all sorts of nonsense is supposed to be regarded as valid, and your credibility is based on how far removed from reality you can become. They really do think this is a winning political platform.

The fact is, all successful political movements have to gate-keep on some level. Not all ideas are valid. If I’m doing research on evolution, I’m not going to include someone who thinks evolution affected everything except the way humans think. I’m most certainly going to gate-keep against anyone who threatens our credibility. That’s the real threat Fuentes poses: to credibility. We live in a world where the Right isn’t taken as seriously as the Left, and something like Groyperism won’t help at all.

Last word: I’ve said this many times before, but my own views are well outside the mainstream and I even agree with Fuentes on some things. When Fuentes is being serious, he can sometimes have something useful to say. I don’t think the problem is that the Right is gatekeeping or trying to be too hard to be respectable. The problem is that the Right has become too cynical and nihilistic, almost as much as the Left, to the point it’s not even interested in trying to win hearts and minds. If that’s the case, then every loss will be well-earned.

That’s all for this essay. It’s a little outside my lane, but given how big a discussion it’s become, I think it needed to be addressed in some measure. It’s your turn. Is Groyperism something you see as prevalent in your circles. How popular do you think Nick Fuentes really is? Does he pose a genuine threat of mainstreaming extremist ideologies? Or is his real threat that he’ll undermine the already lagging credibility of the Right?

Please tell us in the comments section.

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.

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