Fishback represents a new kind of candidate: a younger version of President Trump, who, like his MAGA role model, understands the value of clickbait, shock value, and information overload. Fishback, however, has even fewer limits, a shorter attention span, and a new crop of populist promises. He can also, due to his youth and novelty, be freshly anti-establishment and offer yet another Republican reboot. And he’s rarely out of the news cycle. Just this weekend, he captured headlines after an arson attempt at his Florida home. 

So far, Fishback’s visibility appears greater online than in real life. He’s polling at anywhere between 5% and 23% and has, as of Jan. 14, raised a paltry $19,000 for his campaign. The Right-tilting pollster Patriot Polling shows the highest overall support for Fishback and indicates that he is leading Donalds in the 18-29 age cohort. If you’ve encountered his “based” and “red-pilled” Zoomer-friendly messaging on X (formerly Twitter), that seems plausible. 

Fishback’s candidacy is, in some ways, a profound indictment of American politics as it is practiced in the opening decades of the 21st century: not just because he trades in racist invective and has ties to open anti-Semites — but because these antics mask a somewhat reasonable populist agenda. Indeed, until recently, Fishback came across as MAGA but not especially radical or unhinged; he has taken a far-Right direction only since deciding to run for governor. In other words, he has concluded that he can’t effectively challenge his party’s pro-business and pro-war orthodoxies without dabbling in online extremism. In his persona, populism and transgression have fully merged. 

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The gubernatorial hopeful, 31, is slender, energetic, and seizes upon every opportunity to refer to himself as a “fourth-generation Floridian” — presumably on his father’s side, since his mother is from Colombia. He’s originally from South Florida, currently lives in the Panhandle, and dropped out of Georgetown at 21 to start his own hedge fund. 

He first gained media attention last year on DOGE’s coattails, following his proposal that Elon Musk create “DOGE Dividends” — i.e., send money saved through gutting government programs directly to citizens as stimulus checks. Before that, he worked as a trader for Greenlight Capital, a New York-based hedge fund, and founded Azoria, an anti-DEI investment firm committed to “free thinking, excellence, and meritocracy,” which he launched at Mar-A-Lago in December 2024. In attendance was Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, who described Fishback as “truly one of the most articulate people I know.” 

Online, the candidate is better known for his controversies than his policies. Fishback associates with Groypers, and for weeks in December, the banner on his homepage on X showed him shaking the hand of a young man wearing Fuentes’s blue-and-white “America First” hat. The Never Trump Substack The Bulwark has anointed Fishback America’s “First Groyper Politician.” And Fuentes himself has good things to say about him, adding that he’d endorse him, but “I don’t want to hurt him.” 

Fishback doesn’t call himself a Groyper, but his racial edgelording is of a piece with Fuentes’s. In addition to his comments about Donalds, he has said Vivek Ramaswamy doesn’t know what a fork is. On Jan. 30, anti-Semitic provocateur Mo Khan posted an image of himself wearing a “Noticer” hoodie, as Fishback smiled, his hand on Khan’s shoulder. (On our depraved algorithms, to “notice” means to uncover the supposed “truth” that Jews run the world.) “Fishback for Florida,” the post’s caption read. A few days later, Fishback quote-tweeted a post about IKEA’s new $5, 20-inch-long hot dog, calling it “goyim nonsense.” (The online Right likes to suggest that unhealthy fast food is engineered by the Jews for non-Jews, often branding it “goyslop.”)

Fishback has also indulged in high-profile online feuds, like one with OnlyFans model Sophie Rain, and another with Ron DeSantis aide Christina Pushaw. Rain has criticized him for his proposed 50% sin tax on the pornographic platform’s creators. “Sophie, pay up. It’s time to give our public school teachers a raise,” Fishback fired back. In Pushaw’s case, Fishback released text messages that she says have ended her political career. She was providing informal advice to Fishback’s campaign, but they had a falling out. Fishback, Pushaw claims, started a rumor that the two were sleeping together; the candidate, in turn, showed that Pushaw had repeatedly called him in a desperate bid, apparently, for him to drop out of the governor’s race and endorse Lieutenant Governor Jay Collins instead. Speaking to the Miami Herald, he accused Pushaw of suffering from “Fishback Derangement Syndrome.” Pushaw wouldn’t speak to me on the record.

Controversy swirls around Fishback offline, as well. He has been accused of having a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old, an accusation that he denies, and of which he was exonerated in court. (The woman who alleges the abuse, Keinah Fort, did not respond to my request for comment.) His former employer, Greenlight Capital, is suing him. The New York-based hedge fund alleges that Fishback, who worked there from 2021 to 2023, misrepresented his title as “head of macro” to promote his own new firm Azoria, and spent more than $37,000 on “extravagant” personal expenses, while claiming inability to pay damages. (Fishback is countersuing). 

Yet all this is in contrast to a bold and sometimes even inspiring vision for Florida. Fishback refers to himself, above all, as an economic populist, and is much more vigilant about the excesses of the free market than the average Republican (and, today, perhaps even the average Democrat). He has vowed to visit every single Florida county, and also plans to visit every Waffle House in the state. 

On policy, he seeks to end Florida’s ever-expanding suburban sprawl, restore the state’s lush citrus groves, and prevent Blackstone and other private-equity firms from buying up homes and thus removing entry-level housing stock from the reach of first-time buyers. (This is a nationwide problem: in the second quarter of 2025, real estate investors had bought up a whopping third of single-family homes, and in many communities, private equity owns up to 20% of homes.) Incredibly rare for a politician on today’s Right wing, he’s an advocate of Amtrak, and one of his very first campaign promises was to bring the Sunset Limited back through the Panhandle and into Miami, a route suspended in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina two decades ago. He also seeks to institute paid maternity leave, and divest from Israel to provide payments to young couples instead. And he promises to prevent the construction of high-energy-consuming and space-occupying AI data centers, and ban foreigners from buying Florida properties — for the latter policy, he heeds the example of Liberal Party-governed Canada. 

I traveled from Gainesville, in Florida’s interior, to St. Augustine, on the coast, to attend a Fishback campaign event in mid-January. The four-lane highway between the two cities passes through tidal marshes and small towns with a single Dollar General, and not much else, on their main strip. As the landscape becomes more urban, it turns into a depressing and monotonous sprawl. This is the struggling Florida Fishback is talking to, the one that exists outside the enclaves of Disney World, Palm Beach, and Miami’s Design District. By contrast, the same weekend I was in the state, Trump was at Mar-A-Lago, attending a ceremony officially naming the strip stretching from the president’s exclusive club to the airport “President Donald J. Trump Boulevard,” in accordance with a bill the state legislature and Gov. DeSantis enacted in June.

Fishback’s St. Augustine event was at a supporter’s home in a middle-class planned community engulfed in the sprawl between I-95 and the city’s picturesque Spanish Colonial old town. The candidate wore a slick suit with an open-collar shirt, and the crowd was mostly middle-aged, intrigued by his more sensible policy proposals but skeptical of his online messaging. He gave a riled-up denunciation of establishment Republicans, which was received positively. On podcasts, Fishback has a notably calm, elevated delivery, whereas here, he was exhilarated and sometimes on the verge of shouting. He made some surprising points for a Republican and far-Right figure, celebrating Zohran Mamdani as a politician who focuses on affordability, for example. Fishback also mentioned that he is the only gubernatorial candidate who speaks fluent Spanish. Back on X, however, he criticizes the existence of Spanish-language media in the state. 

Following the campaign event, I sat down with him at a Starbucks a few minutes away, where he was joined by his father, his girlfriend Francesca Deckert, and a youthful campaign staff, some with visible outlines of nicotine-pouch tins in their pockets. (Deckert herself has been the source of plentiful controversy, and, per Laura Loomer’s digging, seems to have released risqué content under the name “Crypto Barbie.”)

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“To the extent that my policies are controversial,” Fishback tells me, “it’s because they’re upsetting a status quo that has been totally monopolized by establishment Democrats and Republicans.” He explains that his objection to Donalds, who has the endorsement of both Trump and Turning Point Action, is that his opponent wants to “increase dense urban housing,” a problem much more serious, Fishback thinks, than his own race-tinged remarks. On Sophie Rain, he claims not to be saying anything intentionally designed for rage-baiting, but adds, “It’s controversial in the current political and cultural climate to say that young women should aspire to be moms or nurses or lawyers and not aspire to sell photos of their body on the internet.” (Never mind those images that seem to show his own girlfriend, Deckert, sporting only two black nipple pasties.) 

Other comments, he asserts, were just joking around, as the old saw goes. “Vivek’s a friend,” he says, “I’ve known him for years.” (Indeed, in April 2023, he appeared amicably on Ramaswamy’s podcast.) He also mentions a recent friendly interaction with LaShonda Holloway, a black woman running for Congress and a Democrat with whom he agrees on affordability issues. She “didn’t seem too bothered. She had known about the comments [about Donalds]. She had known who I was.”

When I called Fishback out for his association with Fuentes, he denied familiarity with Fuentes’s most viral comments about women, blacks, and the Jews, and added, “I’m not going to allow people from a foreign country or from New York City to slander voters in my state because they watch Nick Fuentes.” 

The odds appear to be stacked against Fishback in Florida, a state with a large libertarian (“Florida Man”) and neocon (“Miami hawk”) contingent and an older population, unlikely to vote for a far-Right Zoomer-coded Millennial. The state is also swinging Democratic, at least in some places and in the short term. Miami just elected its first Democratic mayor in almost 30 years — in large part due to Latinos souring over the Trump administration’s immigration-enforcement policies. On the other hand, Fishback may not care too much about losing Miami and Boca Raton if it means he can get Gen Z and the working class out to polls elsewhere, just as Mamdani simply gave up large swaths of the Upper West Side, Upper East Side, and Tribeca. At around the same time in Mamdani’s campaign last year, the current New York mayor appeared the same or worse off than Fishback does today.

If we want to see the direction in which politics are trending, Fishback’s recent moves are telling. It might be expected that he’d swing to the center now that his name is out there, but instead, he has gone more unhinged. Speaking to a large crowd at the University of Central Florida on Feb. 4, Fishback said that “under no circumstances” would he even visit Israel, and referred to the holiest site in Judaism as “a stupid wall.” The students applauded. He also took a page from the MAHA playbook, arguing that the industrial food provided in public schools is unhealthy and sets students up for failure, and proposing that school cafeterias be run by local small businesses and serve local meat and produce. The crowd of teens and 20-somethings was silent — until he referred to the unhealthy food as “goyslop,” and then the students erupted, exuberantly. What united the crowd was not race, or even really gender (though most were male), but age.

Fishback, who obviously can be reasonable, has concluded that the path to victory is to traffick in irrationality. Love him or hate him, he’s determined, crazy, and, somehow, poised to have a shot. 

It’s difficult to grasp the appeal of Fuentes, a diminutive chauvinist virgin who has described himself as an “incel”, a “loser” and a “chud” — the latter, for those with jobs, is new-gen internet slang for a Right-wing prat. Yet somehow the man who coined the phrase “your body, my choice” has become a boyband-grade obsession for an army of alternative female yearners. If his fans in general are “Groypers”, a term related to the 4chan mascot Pepe the Frog, then these sighing women are his “Groypettes”.

Velvet Groypette is a typical case. They post images of Fuentes edited into album covers, or standing awkwardly at a nightclub with the looksmaxxing streamer Clavicular (the recent Avengers Assemble-style gathering in Miami also included Andrew and Tristan Tate; the group sang along to Kanye West’s song “Heil Hitler”). In their bio, they brag that they have been banned from TikTok three times. To them, Fuentes is Radiohead’s pitiable, misunderstood Creep, which is why one edit plays that song over a clip of our improbable matinee idol saying: “I am a bitchless, rizzless, hoeless, 5’9” chud incel who was over before it began … it’s over for me.” “I could save him,” writes one commenter; he is 2026’s Christian Slater in Heathers, a weirdo masochist who only sensitive girls truly see.

The Groypettes perform lovelorn victimhood, cosplaying as a battered girlfriend in a toxic relationship with this baddest of “bad boys”. The user Grippy Groypette, another exemplary specimen, hangs a pinkified American flag showing Fuentes doing the Nazi salute; “he could hit me and it would feel like a kiss,” reads the caption. “Me too girl me too,” writes a commenter. On Instagram, a user called Groypergirlies says “I’d let him ruin me”; Womenforfuentes takes the urge to self-sacrifice further, committing to a “baby groypling revolution” by churning out children for the cause.

It could, you might say, all be a canny ragebait device; what woman would engage with, let alone fantasize about, a man whose interests are so in opposition to her own? But the community is simply too large to be a trolling fad — if you search for X accounts with “Groypette” in the username, you can scroll and scroll. Besides, Andrew Tate, the OG slaphead king of the manosphere, never boasted a comparable league of female footsoldiers; Tate is massively more known and despised than Fuentes, only a recent inductee to the liberal mainstream’s fascist hall of fame. And if these women truly hope to be hit by a far-Right agitator, there is evidence suggesting Tate would know what he was doing. Nevertheless it is Nick who has been chosen as the “pretend bf” to this burgeoning subculture of troubled “foids” (women, to you and me). Why?

Perhaps it is because, unlike Tate, Fuentes’s violence is only hypothetical and therefore can be seen as romantic; so is his sexual life. Also unlike Tate, Fuentes is boyish, inaccessible and a little awkward. While both are undeniably camp, Tate does it in a hypersexual, dominating way, designed to impress other men; his moral universe is about status and money, and the women within it are only ever ciphers. Fuentes is obsessed with suffering and purity, civilization and destiny; his is a world which, in a very narrow way, leaves space for the perfect woman. Tate is a brutish warlord, and Fuentes a sad princeling. For a Tumblr princess, the choice is simple.

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The Groypette did not come out of thin air. A scour of TikTok, Instagram and X suggests the standard-issue Fuentes fangirl is either white or vaguely Latina, in her early twenties and terminally online; she listens to Lana, she bedrots compulsively, she takes photos of herself crying. She is, in other words, an inheritor of the other tortured female internet subcultures which have so obviously shaped her aesthetic and which have tightened their grip on isolated young women since Covid: the first is clearly ED Twitter, where eating-disorder girlies post thinspo (thin inspiration), list dizzyingly low current, starting and goal weights and competitively make themselves miserable and ill. It is no surprise that many of the self-identified Groypettes also have these stats in their bios, or the telling tag “edtwt”; martyrdom and attention-seeking suffering is native to both communities.

The other, perhaps even more obvious, progenitor is the Tumblr e-girl — a young woman seen on moody collages with long brown hair, hiding her face in adorable despair, taking a picture of her skinny legs and cigarette, and mournfully daydreaming about… herself. She is the grieving maiden of former times, dragged into the 21st century and given smudged eyeliner, bulimia and a phone addiction. And she is perfectly portrayed in another Velvet Groypette banger about the user’s grief in having to withstand Fuentes’s Christmas posting break. In this one, images of pretty girls crying and looking out of windows, clutching their silky hair or lying catatonic like Flaming June, are interspersed with Fuentes thirst traps.

For the Groypette, Fuentes’s beliefs and the broader America First movement are, ironically, secondary to her performative sadness. Where male fans of Fuentes crack sick jokes about the Jewish Times columnist Daniel Finkelstein’s family members “dying in the Holly”, the Groypette focuses mainly on her deathless love. Hitching herself to Fuentes’ bandwagon is less about ideology — these girls almost never post about his racial politics, for example, save from attention-seeking deployment of the n-word — than about recruiting Fuentes as the latest instrument for self-harm. Cutting herself, smoking, making herself sick and even showing off bruises is so aggressively woven into the DNA of the internet sadgirl; posing as the girl not only picked, but hit, by the anti-woman bogeyman of the day appears to have a perverse way of making otherwise unremarkable women feel special.

There is much to despise in the Groypette: she is craven, inauthentic and willing to sell other women down the river for a scrap of online attention. But, as a product of today’s balkanized youth culture, I understand her. If you were nerfed by Covid isolation, have a fragile sense of self and need male admiration to survive your own crushing mediocrity, then throwing yourself in with this band of countercultural “poasters” makes sense. The fact remains that nobody is as simpishly servile to a semi-attractive alt woman than a man who professes to despise her sex. Case in point: such men fill Groypette comment sections with admiring missives such as “the Groypettes might actually be crazier than the Groypers and that’s awesome honestly”; “I need a Groypette”; “WTF? I love women now.” If you’re looking for attention, this is a good place to start.

This thirst for alt-Right women explains why Amelia is probably filling your timelines this week. For the uninitiated, she is the purple-haired girl from a catastrophically misguided anti-far-Right, Prevent-funded video game called Pathways commissioned by Hull City Council for use in schools. Unfortunately, she’s become an instant cult heroine. In AI-generated fan renderings, Amelia burns pictures of Keir Starmer with cigs and tenderly pets British bulldogs; she leads the game’s male main character to brighter futures with fields of poppies, a sort of manic pixie doomer girl. In many ways, she is the platonic ideal of a Groypette: the Amelias of this strange new world aren’t bimboish “Staceys”, big-breasted blondes at the top of the sexual hierarchy; instead they are based noticers or, in plain English, they get the world’s depressing realities and are a salve, not salt, to the downtrodden man’s wounds. They might resemble the liberal e-girls with pronouns in their bios who normally deride the “incel”, but really they are meek, compliant and devoted — all the women, in other words, who have spurned him in real life given an ideology transplant.

For the Groypette, it’s win-win. She needn’t particularly engage with Fuentes’s ideas, or even meet up with any members of this oleaginous movement in real life; her mistreatment is only theoretical, and her proximity to something so overtly sinister is enough to make her feel important, with all the distinction of the not-so-secret self-harmer. All that remains is to wonder whether, when Nick Fuentes does step out with his own First Lady, all the glamour of groypettery will dissolve into a puddle of tears. His professed sexual loserdom seems to be part of his appeal; any woman he chooses would become by definition exceptional. Strange as this all may seem, it appears likely that if and when Fuentes stops being such a massive virgin, his female fanbase will revolt. There was a reason why John Lennon had to hide his marriage to Cynthia.

The fate of the Groypette is an alarm bell for the collapse of liberal feminism: though she has attached herself to a movement which is by definition disempowering, she sees it as a price worth paying for a sense of belonging, for devotion and meaning. An empty and cynical modern feminist credo which has robbed young women of the right to question transgenderism, prostitution, pornography and the consequences of mass immigration is losing ground, because of course it is. The worldview of the Groypette may be hopelessly ironic, nihilistic, racist, even suicidal — but for a small subset of women it is more enticing than the dreary bullshit-artistry of the progressive mainstream. That should worry us.

“Antisemitism, and all forms of ethnic hatred,” he says, “have no place in the conservative movement. Whether you’re attacking somebody because they’re white or because they’re black or because they’re Jewish, I think it’s disgusting.” If that were the end of it, Vance would be a typical politician of an earlier age, and we likely wouldn’t be sitting down for an interview in his library at the Naval Observatory in Washington.

Vance isn’t typical. About to take off for the Christmas vacation, America’s first millennial veep is dressed in a crisp button-down and fleece vest with dark denim. His getup strikes a sharp contrast with his old-timey surroundings, lined with leather-bound books by and about vice presidents. His own memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, is among the newer additions; a medieval-style painted crucifix stands out from the shelves.

More to the point, Vance is acutely sensitive to subterranean political and cultural shifts which until recently only registered on the seismometer known as the internet, but which are starting to remake the world aboveground. Fuentes — who has called Second Lady Usha Vance a “jeet” and labeled the vice president a race-traitor for marrying her — is but one jagged spike on the seismic wave. And to Vance, not even an especially pronounced one.

Says Vance: “I think that Nick Fuentes, his influence within Donald Trump’s administration, and within a whole host of institutions on the Right, is vastly overstated, and frankly, it’s overstated by people who want to avoid having a foreign-policy conversation about America’s relationship with Israel.” That is, the Hitler-praising Groyper king functions as a useful foil for pro-Israel hard-liners in the Right’s raucous internal debate over America’s alliance with the Jewish state.

The debate descended into out and out civil war last week at a gathering of Turning Point USA, the organization founded by the late Charlie Kirk, with Ben Shapiro denouncing the podcaster and Vance ally Tucker Carlson — and being denounced, in turn, by Steve Bannon and Megyn Kelly, representing the insurgent Israel-critical camp. The vice president tells me he hasn’t yet watched the dueling speeches but thinks it’s healthy for the debate to continue. In his own address to TPUSA Sunday, Vance glossed over the controversy, rejecting “purity tests.”

Tucker Carlson, for example, gets a robust defense from Vance. “Tucker’s a friend of mine,” he tells me. “And do I have disagreements with Tucker Carlson? Sure. I have disagreements with most of my friends, especially those who work in politics. You know this. Most people who know me know this. I’m [also] a very loyal person, and I am not going to get into the business of throwing friends under the bus.”

He goes on: “The idea that Tucker Carlson — who has one of the largest podcasts in the world, who has millions of listeners, who supported Donald Trump in the 2024 election, who supported me in the 2024 election — the idea that his views are somehow completely anathema to conservatism, that he has no place in the conservative movement, is frankly absurd. And I don’t think anybody actually believes it.”

What’s really afoot, he thinks, is “gatekeeping”, and people are “trying to settle their own ideological scores” — especially with respect to Washington’s policies in the Middle East.

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“I happen to believe that Israel is an important ally, and that there are certain things that we’re certainly going to work together on,” Vance says. “But we’re also going to have very substantive disagreements with Israel, and that’s OK. And we should be able to say, ‘We agree with Israel on that issue, and we disagree with Israel on this other issue.’ Having that conversation is, I think, much less comfortable for a lot of people, because they want to focus on Nick Fuentes.”  

Fuentes thus refracts — and, with his noxious rhetoric, distorts — a legitimate discontent. Says Vance: “99% of Republicans, and I think probably 97% of Democrats, do not hate Jewish people for being Jewish. What is actually happening is that there is a real backlash to a consensus view in American foreign policy. I think we ought to have that conversation and not try to shut it down. Most Americans are not antisemitic, they’re never going to be antisemitic, and I think we should focus on the real debate.”

What about Fuentes’s promotion of an overt white racial politics, complete with liberal use of the N-word? Is Vance worried by that stuff? Yes — but he believes there have been far worse offenders who got away with racial politics in recent years, because their version of it was aligned with elite prerogatives and progressive moral hierarchies.

“Let’s say you believe, as I do, that racism is bad, that we should judge people according to their deeds and not their ethnicity,” he later adds. “Is Nick Fuentes really the problem in this country? He’s a podcaster. He has a dedicated group of young fans, and some of them have been shitty to my friends and family” — not least, Mrs Vance. “Does that annoy me? Of course. But let’s keep some perspective. For the past five to 10 years, I’ve watched one-half of our political leadership go all in on the idea that discriminating against whites in college admissions and jobs is not just OK, but affirmatively good.”

He goes on: “If you believe racism is bad, Fuentes should occupy one second of your focus, and the people with actual political power who worked so hard to discriminate against white men should occupy many hours of it.”

Then, too, Right-wing racialism is, in large part, a reaction against bipartisan elites who for decades maintained a porous border, with the flow of newcomers surging to a flood under the Biden administration. “That necessarily leads to the destruction of social cohesion in the country that I love,” he says. “Ethnic rivalry and balkanization is the inevitable consequence of these things. You don’t have to think it’s a good thing. I certainly don’t, but it’s a predictable consequence.”

But wouldn’t Vance’s own children — Ewan, Vivek, and Mirabel — be treated with contempt in the Groypers’ ideal America? The difference, for Vance, is once more about possession of actual power to effectuate policy. “If you look at my kids — half white, half-South Asian — they were among the most discriminated against in the entire elite-college and jobs hierarchy under Joe Biden. And the Left explicitly promises to bring that hierarchy back if they ever again get power.”

Calling out some of his likely opponents in the 2028 contest, he adds, “It pisses me off that Fuentes calls my kids ‘jeet,’ and I appreciate that Ro Khanna would never do that. You know what pisses me off a million times more? That Ro Khanna, AOC, and Chris Murphy would deny them jobs and opportunities because they have the wrong skin color.” (Khanna, the Indian-American California lawmaker, has said he’d be “fine” with his kids being disadvantaged by race-based affirmative action.)

All of this raises a deeper question: who counts as a “true” American? For many on the hard Right, the fashionable answer is “Heritage Americans”. That category excludes anyone who arrived after the initial wave of Anglo settlement, sometimes defined as narrowly as the Mayflower and its descendants. This treats as lesser citizens not just recent arrivals from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, but also Ellis Islanders like Italians and Jews, possibly even the Scotch-Irish.

What does Vance make of Heritage Americanism? He worries it poses more questions than it answers. “Is a Heritage American somebody who’s from the late 17th century [or] the late 18th century?,” the vice president asks. He tries to strike a balance between credal nationalism — Americans are people who believe in American ideals like liberty and equal justice — and thicker notions of belonging, emphasizing shared language, culture, and history. Both, he says, have something to them.

The Heritage Americanists, he argues, grant too little to the credal aspect. “We take ourselves to be on a very unique national project,” he says, “a project that is very unusual compared to what the European nations were doing at the time, to what other nations in the world were doing at the time. We believe in the fundamental dignity and equality of every human being.”

Pure credal nationalists, meanwhile, forget that people are more than their abstract commitments: “Do I think that somebody who came to the United States 15 minutes ago has the same understanding of American culture and American identity as somebody whose family has been here for 10 generations? No. Of course, I don’t believe that, because human beings are complex, and part of knowing a culture isn’t just believing certain things, but actually living in a culture, absorbing it.”

Contra the Heritage Americanists, Vance believes that culture and identity are transmissible over time. “The racial nationalists — or anybody else who wants to say that it’s purely genetic or purely having some connection to the late-17th-century Mayflower descendants — what they ignore is that people can accumulate it over time. [It] doesn’t happen overnight, but the idea that we have to be a static nation of people who came or who are descendants of those who came on the Mayflower, I think that’s not consistent with American practice, either.”

I ask him if he’d countenance differing legal treatment for the Mayflower descendant versus the person who received his passport 15 minutes ago. “No, no!” he replies. “Whether you got your citizenship an hour ago, or you got your citizenship or your family got citizenship 10 generations ago, we have to treat all Americans equally.”

But: “I also think that we have to accept that if you overwhelm the country with too many new entrants — even if they believe the right things, even if they’re fundamentally good people — you do change the country in some profound way. . . . The problem with American immigration over the four years of the Biden administration, [was] that we let in too many people, too quickly. And if the numbers were much smaller, and we had tried to select for people who were much better at assimilating into American culture, I don’t think that everybody would be looking around and saying, ‘What the hell is going on?’ ”

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For a much longer span, of course, it was religion that defined Western identity, with Christendom encompassing a patchwork of nations otherwise at each other’s throats. Can faith still serve as a sort of moral glue today, in societies that are fast descending into what used to be called the “Blade Runner scenario”, after director Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi dystopia that portrays 21st-century Los Angeles as a city divided among polyglot ethnic formations arrayed tensely against each other?

“When I talk about America having some common culture,” Vance says, “I think Christianity is very much at the heart of that. With the exception of Jefferson and a couple of others, most of our Founding Fathers were devout Christians. . . . There’s a lot about Christianity that is very useful, even if you’re not a Christian. I think Christianity gives us a common moral language. You saw that in the Civil Rights Era, you saw that during the Civil War. It was one of the ways that we were able to actually come together as a nation, post-Civil War: that shared Christian identity.”

And yet, religion often clashes with contemporary politics. Vance’s own spiritual leader as a Roman Catholic, Pope Leo XIV, takes a much more universalist approach to questions of immigration and assimilation, and has reportedly deputized the US bishops to counter the Trump administration’s hawkish border policies. How does Vance reconcile his religious leader with his political positions?

While he welcomes the Vatican’s voice in international affairs, he thinks of its counsels as one moral lens that must be applied alongside other perspectives. The Bishop of Rome “is not going to be looking at an immigration policy with the same prudential lens that I have on.” The “dignity” of would-be migrants is part of it. So are “the wages of workers” and “the social cohesion of the United States of America.”

“Balkanization and ethnic hatred,” reflected in the rise of the likes of Fuentes & Co., are thus mostly symptoms, to Vance’s mind. Moralizing denunciation, in his telling, will do little to address the underlying disease. Critics will no doubt see his reluctance to draw brighter red lines as a political strategy: taking care of his Right flank ahead of a 2028 presidential campaign. 

He is certainly careful about whom to denounce and on which grounds. Still, I walk away from JD Vance’s home concluding that the position he espouses — the need to renegotiate questions of immigration and belonging to avoid a descent into even worse ethnic strife — is a sincerely held expression of his worldview. Whether it can be translated into a responsible politics will be the big test of the next few years.

UnHerd subscribers can read the full transcript of Sohrab Ahmari’s interview with JD Vance here.

First, though, I should probably declare an interest. At least twice in the past I have traveled to London, been put up in a hotel, got out of bed at some ungodly hour, and then been plonked on the breakfast TV sofa in front of Piers Morgan. Each time he shouted over me and the other hapless guest for approximately three minutes, before we were both dismissed. Suffice to say, then, that on hearing about this interview I was not entirely convinced of the man’s suitability to handle as tricky and multi-faceted a guest as Fuentes: a character both apparently vulnerable and intensely steely, as if the Diary of a Wimpy Kid character had got his hands on Mein Kampf.

Still, Morgan has his own channel now, I reasoned, and a one-to-one conversation rather than a chaotic multiplayer shouting match might be worth a watch. Though politically very different, in other ways Fuentes resembles a mini-Morgan, and for that reason alone, the meeting held interest. Each has a huge internet audience; each exerts tight control over his own channel; each trades on outrage to get clicks. They both seem misanthropic and easily wounded. I’ve already listened to the Red Scare ladies adopt a big sisterly tone towards Fuentes in order to coax out confidences, and watched Tucker Carlson do his kindly father impression. Might Morgan’s sterner parental stance uncover further aspects?

No, of course it didn’t — although it did underline the futility of the hairdryer format with someone who won’t play the game. The entire interview was an extended struggle session, apparently aimed at making Fuentes recant his past statements, or else break down in remorse. Accusations were repeated more and more vociferously by Morgan, until they had nowhere left to go; at which point the host would simply move robotically to the next charge on the autocue. By the middle of the proceedings, Fuentes looked incredulous. By the end, he looked totally bored.

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Morgan’s clunking setups could be detected from space. “At some stage in your family, there were immigrants who came to the US, is that correct?” was an early example, and you’re never going to guess where he was going with that one. When he eventually got to the point, Fuentes batted the move off easily enough: these days there is a different kind of immigrant arriving, and the US is a different kind of country. As usual, his interrogator had no real follow up.

At other times, Morgan managed to swerve open goalmouths in favor of pointlessly elaborate back-and-forths. “Just to be clear, you don’t like black people who play the victim and are rude. Is that your position?” he accurately summarized at one point. Clearly anticipating that his interviewer was about to make a “physician, heal thyself” kind of move, the notoriously rude white-victimhood-enjoyer laughed it off in advance: “I see where you are going with this.” But no; the actual bear trap being laboriously constructed for Fuentes was that he had been insufficiently rigorous in applying this principle to his friend Kanye West. “Your choice of friend is Ye, who is probably the number one black victimhood narcissist in America … do you understand the problem?” Morgan thundered. There then followed a bafflingly tangential discussion of whether West, in particular, was a nice person or not.

Morgan’s main weapon, though, was shame. It failed utterly. The tape would roll, and Fuentes would be shown footage of himself in the past saying some outrageous taboo-busting thing or other. Cut back to the present, and his English daddy would sternly ask him if he stood by it. Every single time, Fuentes simply asserted with a grin that he did. Did he really have an “opposition to world Jewry”? He did. Did he still think, as he once said, that “Hitler was kind of fucking cool?” “Yes, I do,” Fuentes replied. “And I’m tired of pretending he’s not, to be honest.”

The nadir of this approach came during a bonkers segment where Lord Finkelstein unexpectedly made an appearance on screen, introduced as Morgan’s friend. He was there to describe how his mother and numerous other close relatives had suffered terrible fates under Hitler and Stalin, and to ask Fuentes whether he would “rather be on team Mum than team Hitler”. Completely unsurprisingly, Fuentes openly mocked this appeal to his finer sensibilities from an unknown old British gent sitting in his large kitchen in a quarter-zip, lecturing a younger American generation about events they had been told about thousands of times already. “My generation is done with the pearl-clutching… I don’t even know who this person is, why is this person talking to me,” Fuentes said. He went on: “We’re tired of hearing about slavery, and the Holocaust, and Jim Crow, we are done hearing about that.”

That, then, is the nub of the matter. Fuentes and his feral supporters online simply don’t care. They weren’t there, they aren’t responsible for any of it anyway, and they are more concerned about other things. The more that their elders amp up their incredulity and disgust at this lack of compassion and decency, etc. etc., the more disassociated they get, and the more funny they think it all is. They have already seen the documentaries, been to the memorial sites, listened to the lectures, had their heartstrings plucked to breaking point.

Any parent has surely been in this position at least once: adopting a stern face, insisting this is extremely serious, why are you laughing, stop it at once! But the kids are not going to stop; they revel in their herd immunity to the socially prescribed response. Every trick you pull to pile on the emotional pressure will only be met with derision and increased resolve.

Since the interview aired, there have been various responses, and many of them seem to me to be wishful thinking. Aaron Bastani has said that, faced with Morgan’s ham-fisted probing, Fuentes “falls to pieces … He looks incredibly vulnerable.” I saw no such thing. Writing in the Times, Rob Henderson has argued that Fuentes’ appeal rests on constantly cycling through personas: sometimes ironic and jokey, sometimes serious, without people being able to pin him down. But in longer inquisitorial formats such as Morgan’s, he writes, “the contradictions pile up — and the audience he has cultivated will finally see what has been in plain sight all along”.

Yet the idea that Fuentes’ groyper following is going to be put off by some inconsistency in his various statements seems to me totally naïve. On the contrary, I think they will applaud him for his trickster slipperiness. I assume they are very much over playing the game according to the conventions of rational inquiry. Why should they follow them, when their opponents do not? With their recent race-based crusades, many supposed liberals threw the principles of truth, fairness, and interpretative charity out of the window. In that respect, Fuentes is just following their lead.

Ultimately, the most that Morgan’s encounter with Fuentes shows us is that the comforting ideal of a Big Television Interview, definitively sorting the good guys from the bad guys, is now impotent in a time of streaming. We can no longer console ourselves with the idea of an implacable inquisitor in a suit, calling some public figure to account on behalf of the imaginary Reasonable Viewer. The whole idea of an implicit Reasonable Viewer was based on an underlying consensus about basic values, which no longer exists. Instead, we have lots of groups of loyal partisans, and their pet figures getting rich off their clicks.

Equally, no interviewer has sufficient control over the means of visual production, and many guests have bigger reaches than their hosts. The discussion can never definitively end, because there is always the chance of another spicy comeback. Last time I looked, Morgan and Fuentes were trading post-interview blows on X. Fuentes was proclaiming “TOTAL GROYPER VICTORY” and Morgan was telling Fuentes that he really should get laid. David Frost must be turning in his grave.

So yes, everything is debatable, as Fuentes says; but nobody is actually debating. There can’t be debates where neither side is willing to play by the rules. I am afraid I have no quick answer as to how to make Fuentes’ white nationalism less appealing to masses of young men, but Morgan has shown us that old-school tactics have absolutely had their day.

Now, the most storied think tank in the history of modern conservatism has fallen.

On Thursday, Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage, took the side of Tucker Carlson in a dispute over the former Fox News host conducting an interview with Fuentes. Roberts declared, “We will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda” and vowed that Carlson would always be a friend of Heritage. Those criticizing Carlson’s interview with Fuentes were part of a “venomous coalition,” Roberts said, that is “sowing division.” While denouncing anti-Semitism and disavowing some of the things Fuentes has said, Roberts argued that he shouldn’t be canceled, but debated.

This was widely seen as a capitulation to the Groypers, coming down on their side over and against those who criticized Tucker’s interview and his more general descent into conspiratorial anti-Semitism. For his part, Fuentes applauded Roberts’s “courage in standing up for open discourse and defending Tucker against the Israel First Woke Right.”

For readers unfamiliar with the term, “Groyper” refers to the loose network of mostly young, male, hard-Right types who orbit around Fuentes, a live-streamer and social-media personality from suburban Chicago. Fuentes built his following through hours-long webcasts mixing irony and an ideology that is a combination of racial nationalism, Christian theocracy, and hostility toward feminism and immigration.

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His supporters call themselves “America First” and have traditionally been Donald Trump supporters. Yet the movement takes cues, above all, from Fuentes himself, who has regularly expressed contempt for JD Vance based on the fact that the vice president and MAGA heir apparent is married to a non-Christian brown woman. At one point, Fuentes asked, “Do we really expect that the guy who has an Indian wife and named their kid Vivek is going to support white identity?” He’s also taken a liking, ironically, to Gavin Newsom, seeing the “beautiful genetics” of the Democratic California governor and his family of four white children as more worthy of praise than Vance’s mixed-race progeny. Fuentes is also known for insights such as the idea that sleeping with women is gay.

This may all seem too absurd to take seriously. Some young people, it will be tempting to tell ourselves, cycle through nutty politics before burning out or settling into grownup conservative or liberal worldviews; there will always be a fringe. But Fuentes has a substantial following, 1 million and growing on X (formerly Twitter), and he increasingly sets the tone for the entire conservative media ecosystem.

One way to see the radicalization of the likes of Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Megyn Kelly is that they are adopting Fuentes-Lite positions on issues like immigration and vaccines. Fuentes has spin-offs and haters throughout the Right-wing influencer ecosystem, including British and Portuguese imitators. There are X personalities whose entire claim to fame revolves around hating him. Watch any event with a prominent conservative speaker these days, and you’ll find Groyper or Groyper-adjacent young men asking the questions that end up going viral on social media. It was indeed this kind of in-person pressure that, as Fuentes has bragged, got Kirk to turn against even legal immigration.

The fact that Heritage, too, has now fallen in line suggests that what we’re seeing is something much more ferocious and remarkable than even the most pessimistic critics of the online Right appreciated. It has led me to conclude that I’ve underestimated not only the pace and extent of the Groyperization of the Right, but also its potential to have a large and lasting effect on our political culture.

The comparison has been made to wokeness taking over the Left beginning in the mid-2010s, through many of the same mechanisms, primarily social-media mobbing of mainstream figures and institutions. But we must consider the possibility that we’re observing something much more capable than wokeness of remaking one side of the political spectrum and thus enduring as a long-term force in American society.

The Roberts statement was prompted by Fuentes sitting down for a friendly chat with Tucker Carlson. Previously, Carlson had expressed contempt for Fuentes, calling him a “weird little gay kid living in his basement in Chicago.” But then Fuentes appeared on a few other podcasts, and it became safe for Carlson to have him on. Carlson predictably forgot all other principles and objections as he did what comes naturally to him: chasing an audience. That’s how you become the top news podcaster in the country, which Carlson is, at least according to Spotify rankings.

If all you see of Carlson these days is a few clips of him saying outlandish things — like that he was attacked by a literal demon — you might think that he, too, has turned into some kind of fringe figure. On the contrary, there are few who are more mainstream within the MAGA movement. Days after Kirk was assassinated, Carlson was speaking with JD Vance about his legacy. He then went on to insinuate, at Kirk’s memorial, that the Jews may have killed him — just as people “eating hummus” in Jerusalem did to another hero 2,000 years ago — while attempting to maintain plausible deniability. Fuentes hilariously mocked the attempted spin, cutting through any supposedly non-invidious interpretation of Tucker’s words (Yes, Fuentes is very funny — unlike Tucker, who switches between brooding and manic laughter directed at things no one else finds funny.)

Tucker matters, perhaps more so than any other media personality on the right, with the possible exception of Fuentes himself. And after attacking Fuentes repeatedly, he deigned to invite him to his show. But how? How can Carlson call someone a gay federal infiltrator one minute and schmooze with him the next? The thing to understand with these people is that it’s all a show. They hit each other over the head with chairs one week, and then the next week team up together. The ultimate thing the audience wants, of course, is for their influencers to encourage people to vote for their kind of Republican — anti-immigration and aligned with MAGA views and aesthetics — even as they enjoy feuds and eccentricities outside of election season.

The same goes for the Vance-Fuentes relationship. I had also assumed that it would be going too far to expect that Fuentes would endorse Vance after attacking his wife on account of her race and religion. Now that seems silly. Of course, he will likely endorse Vance, or at least not go full Newsom. It’s fun for Groypers in 2025 to gush about Newsom’s beautiful white family and hint that they’re going to jump ship at the prospect of an Indian First Lady. But that’s just an angle to create a new storyline and keep the show exciting. Raise tensions, rant about how much Vance sucks, and then perhaps make a big show of allying when he denounces Indian immigration strongly enough in time for the 2028 primaries.

To wit, Vance was recently grilled at the University of Mississippi by a Groyper type about having a non-Christian wife. Already, the vice president feels the need to reassure his supporters that his wife wasn’t raised in a religious household, contrary to what she herself has previously said. While once talking positively about being in an interfaith marriage, he now knows that there is a not insubstantial portion of his base that finds Hinduism strange, if not downright demonic, and his wife has become a political liability.

The only thing that might stand in the way of Vance and Fuentes being on the same side in 2028 is Fuentes’s own cantankerousness. He has an independent streak — in October 2024 he said he wouldn’t vote for Trump — while Vance would abandon almost any previously cherished principle if it raised his chances of being president by a few percentage points on Polymarket.

We’re at the start of something, not the end of it. This is more like wokeness in 2014 than wokeness in 2022. And to make a comparison to wokeness might be underselling it. I would point to three factors that potentially make Groyperism stronger.

First, the appeal of wokeness was always largely astroturfed. The woke relied on censorship and nonstop propaganda from elite institutions. Relatively few Americans bought into the craziest ideas about race and gender. Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility may have sold more than a million copies, but Carlson has nearly five million subscribers on YouTube. I asked ChatGPT how many podcast downloads he gets per episode, and it came up with a figure somewhere in the range of 4 million to 8 million (8 million to 15 million, if you include video). Candace Owens is in the same ballpark. And these are actual fans, not people encouraged to buy a book for a class or h.r. seminar.

We’ve never seen numbers like this for anything affiliated with wokeness, which was a hysteria driven by individuals in the rarefied fields of journalism, academia, and activism. They were always outnumbered in the rest of the country, and relied on being able to control powerful institutions and the informational ecosystem.

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The second point is related: namely, that Right-wing radicalism taps into human nature in a way that wokeness never could. From a historical perspective, large numbers of young people wanting to experiment with a different gender is quite odd. Usually, males and females seek to portray and cultivate traits that are attractive to the opposite sex. Members of a majority group supporting discrimination against themselves is likewise unnatural, but this has always been core to DEI and the ideology of white guilt. One of the reasons that cancel culture was so intense was that proponents were always pushing against people’s preexisting inclinations; we were bound for a correction.

But racism, sexism, tribalism, homophobia, and religious fundamentalism are organic parts of our souls, and can dominate societies for centuries. While most Americans aren’t inclined toward a Groyper worldview, it does seem strong enough to take over one half of the political spectrum in a country with a great deal of education polarization. And while there were ballot-box backlashes against wokeness, the Right becoming more crudely populist has been associated with relatively high levels of electoral success.

Finally, the Right lacks the institutional guardrails to contain Groyperization. The culture of the Left is shaped by elite institutions, like universities and major media outlets, in addition to labor unions, professional associations, and nonprofits. During the Great Awokening, these institutions were often taken over by aggressive upstarts speaking the language of academic seminars, and their leaders would repeat the magic words demanded by identity-focused activists. At the same time, the institutional framework in which these battles took place allowed for pushback from within. The New York Times editorial board is capable, for example, of gently shifting away from trans extremism. Universities can adopt free-speech policies, as many have done, in response to both internal and external pressure.

In contrast, it is unclear in what format moderates on the right would take on the fringes. Individuals like Owens, Fuentes, and Carlson — in addition to countless lesser influencers — get their power directly from the audience and, as a result, place real pressure on politicians. There is no Groyper faculty senate where people can get together and vote to condemn anti-Semitism in the same way that leaders of the University of Michigan decided to take a step back from DEI. Robin DiAngelo is no longer cited in the media, and Ibram X. Kendi’s antiracist center was closed down. Without institutional support, their power and influence have waned. By contrast, the podcaster who reflects and shapes the minds of the most engaged GOP voters can’t in a similar way lose his place at the center of political discourse.

Could the Republican voter ultimately be a check on all this? Doubtful. Right-wing media’s political atmosphere should generally be taken as predictive of what the Right-wing electorate will do. The Republican base loves Trump and flocks to news sources like Owens, Carlson, and an increasingly conspiratorial and demon-obsessed Megyn Kelly. Thus, there is little reason to think the party’s core electorate will act as much of a moderating force.

One factor working in the opposite direction is that Groyperization has occurred among the relatively weak and disempowered. One could therefore argue that Left-wing identitarianism is naturally more influential. The truth of this consolation, however, has diminished over the last several years. Radicalized Republicans are appointing similarly radical people to top positions, and there’s relatively little educated elites can do about it.

Nonetheless, the ongoing elite status of the Left suggests that at least when Republicans don’t control the federal government, Groyperization will be less powerful. We won’t see something like Trump’s first term, in which the president was Right-wing but the political Left was so mobilized that the culture moved in the opposite direction from the one that the government was pushing. I have been accurately foreseeing the Groyperization of the Right for a while now, and when I have been wrong, it’s always been in the direction of underestimating how much the conservative coalition has changed, and how quickly things are shifting towards conspiratorial ethno-populism. At points, I assumed that there was still a Republican establishment that could exercise a positive influence on Trump and Trumpians — hence, my endorsement of him last year — and it turned out that this largely wasn’t the case.

If there is any hope of effective resistance against the direction of travel, it needs to come from a powerfully influential individual leader. It can’t be Trump, as it is as difficult to imagine him making coherent arguments as it is to imagine him taking a stand against his base for the greater good. By contrast, Vance, as the presumptive heir, is articulate and has been viciously attacked by the Groypers.

While he has denounced Fuentes in passing, the vice president is capable of making a much more passionate case against those he considers political enemies when motivated to do so. What is needed is something like a speech denouncing Groyperism, rather than a quick criticism followed by a pivot towards attacking the Left or the media. Up to this point, the vice president has never found it in his political interest to go after any substantial part of the conservative coalition. While he would clearly much rather avoid the energetic wrath of the Groypers, if things continue on their current path, they might leave him with no other choice.

Yet this particular animus — hostility to Indians and Indian-Americans — isn’t “just” an online shitposting phenomenon. It reflects the Right’s shifting reception of South Asians: from an affluent, hard-working minority to a group that takes your jobs and despoils your neighborhoods.

Conservative influencers and politicians have decided that Indian immigration is a problem. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently appeared on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show to say that too many Indians coming in as H-1Bs is a reason to be against the program. Ingraham herself warns that “any trade deal with India will require us to give them more visas.” Steve Bannon has similarly called for a complete halt to the H-1B program, saying “instead of stapling a green card to their diploma, staple an exit visa.” 

This is a strange development. Conservatives have long recited a litany of complaints about immigration, and none of them appears to apply to Indians. Conservatives worry about illegal immigration showing contempt for the law, or low-skilled new arrivals committing crimes or becoming dependent on welfare. There are often complaints about a failure of assimilation or the threat of terrorism from Muslim arrivals. But Indians are among the highest earning ethnic groups in the country. According to one study, they make up less than 2% of the population, but pay 5% to 6% of all federal income taxes. Their crime rate is negligible, and there is no history of them committing terrorist attacks or contributing to anti-Semitism. 

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This leaves the wages argument, which rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of economics. The idea that wages need to be protected from competition rests on what economists call the “lump-of-labor” fallacy, which assumes that there is only a set amount of work to be done. On the contrary, economists have found that new arrivals increase jobs by boosting aggregate demand, and can contribute to the expansion of an industry.

It is common for people to fall for economic fallacies, and this doesn’t always involve them having racist motivations. Yet the way this one is selectively applied to Indians suggests that the roots of such views lie elsewhere. For example, even if conservatives believe in the lump-of-labor fallacy, why do they then spend their time complaining about migrants who don’t work? 

Imagine someone waved a magic wand and a large share of the Latino immigrants whom conservatives have traditionally opposed suddenly started getting higher standardized test scores and became tech workers. Wouldn’t everyone agree that this is a desirable outcome? Conservatives are having it both ways: people who don’t work or are in low-wage jobs are harming the country because they use welfare; people in white-collar professions are harming Americans because they compete in the labor market. This is broadly an anti-human way of looking at the world, one which would suggest that public policy should be aimed at shrinking the population, and that there is basically no way any group of newcomers could ever make a contribution to the country. Heads we win, tails they lose.

Yet conservatives are usually not zero-sum thinkers in other contexts. They are mostly for higher birth rates, free markets, and economic growth. How to explain this discrepancy? What we are witnessing is the Groyperification of the GOP: its spiritual takeover by the followers of the admittedly racist and anti-Semitic online personality Nick Fuentes, who wields a vast influence on Zoomer men, especially. 

Anyone who has spent any time engaging in Right-wing circles online knows that there is a fanatical hatred of Indians, which erupted around Christmas in a long-running argument on H-1B immigration between Elon Musk and X personalities who had previously been in his camp. Memes about “street shitters” — the notion that Indians defecate in public — are a dime a dozen, and garner hundreds and sometimes thousands of likes. 

Due to this energy, mainstream-media figures, activists, and politicians on the Right are going where the most excited portion of the base is. Laura Ingraham wants viewers; Bannon is reportedly gearing up for his own presidential run; and Ron DeSantis wants to be covered favorably by figures like Ingraham when he runs for president again. The online Groyper in the comments section is at the bottom of this pyramid. His arguments might have to crawl out the gutter and be made presentable before they’re ready for Fox News or a presidential debate stage. But in the end, he gets what he wants. 

As someone who grew up familiar with the leading lights of the American conservative movement, it was particularly striking for me to hear people like Senator Eric Schmitt discussing immigration as a threat to future generations of Americans, for no other reason than that they compete for jobs. One of my first exposures to economics was reading the books of Thomas Sowell, the celebrated conservative intellectual, who eviscerated the anti-human philosophy of famed environmentalist Paul Ehrlich, a zero-sum thinker known for population-control arguments based on ecological considerations. Still today, tributes to Sowell and dunks on Ehrlich are regularly seen on X. Yet now, conservatives regularly reach for Ehrlich-type arguments to argue against Indian immigration. 

The best way to understand the development of anti-Indian attitudes is as part of the broader trend in which small but highly motivated extremist factions online end up shaping the conservative discourse. Groypers in particular are a relatively small group of activists, but they’ve proved capable of pushing around major figures in the movement.  

The New York Times just profiled Fuentes, noting that officials and advisers to the administration “would not be quoted for the record about Mr. Fuentes out of fear, they said, of inviting online attacks from him and his zealous followers.” There is a common understanding that this is where the energy of the party is, and anyone who is not a Groyper or white nationalist must tread carefully when discussing the movement. While open racial hate is still taboo in Republican circles, nobody with national ambitions can take a position in favor of high-skilled immigration at odds with the views of white nationalists.

This dynamic is crucial to understanding why Indians have become a target. The typical normie Republican doesn’t particularly dislike Indians. But the online Right does, and it produces an endless stream of propaganda reframing anti-Indian sentiment as economic populism — talking about wages and corporate power instead of openly expressing racial animus in the style of Fuentes and other white nationalist influencers. Regular Republicans encounter these ideas in Fox News clips or election-season talking points, without ever realizing their origins in online subcultures. 

The story of how opposition to Indian immigration became standard in Republican discourse is a microcosm of what has happened to the right more generally. 

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More typical GOP voters  may still think of themselves as simply conservative, patriotic, or skeptical of elites. But they are operating in a discourse increasingly structured by online extremists. The same way Ron Paul’s internet following fed into the Tea Party, how birtherism and fear of demographic change fed into Trumpism, or how conspiratorial thinking about Epstein and QAnon narratives bled into the GOP mainstream, the anti-Indian rhetoric reflects a fringe obsession metastasizing into national politics. Similarly, while the Covid vaccines were once championed by every major Republican politician and supported by the majority of the public, no ambitious Republican would dare say a positive word about them today.  

The process works because there simply isn’t much of an audience pushing in the other direction. The largest Right-wing influencers display some combination of adherence to the Trump Cult, hostility to outsiders that has roots in white-nationalist sympathies, and proneness towards conspiratorial thinking. Intellectuals and influencers partial to classical liberalism, technocracy, or old-school conservative principles have much less power. In the end, it’s all about the audience. The Right, increasingly the home of the distrustful, paranoid and less educated, without serious newspapers or intellectual influences, is drawn to racist and conspiratorial thinking, which is constantly being laundered through new arguments into the Republican mainstream.

Opposition to Indian immigration is a clarifying issue. When it comes to Chinese arrivals, there is at least a national-security concern one can point to which, if sometimes pretextual, isn’t completely devoid of reason and contrary to supposed conservative principles. With Indians, however, we confront a perfect group for testing whether conservative opposition to immigration has a rational basis or is ultimately rooted in the lowest forms of bigotry. 

If you think that Republican politics will go back to something close to normal after Trump, this issue also serves as a wakeup call. Pay attention to what goes on in the comments section on X, and what gets discussed on Nick Fuentes’s livestream. If you do, you’ll get a glimpse of the future of conservatism, and the kinds of rhetoric and policies Republican normies will be supporting before long.