The Conservative Old Guard Wakes Up and Smells the Groypers
Older Republicans and professional right-wingers are suddenly recognizing the GOP’s young-Nazi problem.
Sen. John Fetterman had an apparent health scare yesterday, falling during a walk near his home and being briefly hospitalized with injuries to his face. A spokesperson said that Fetterman felt lightheaded and fell due to a “ventricular fibrillation flare-up” and that doctors would “fine-tune his medication regimen.”
Fetterman famously suffered a stroke during his 2022 Senate campaign and has a history of heart problems—although the malady he was formerly diagnosed with was the much less serious atrial fibrillation. It’s not totally clear whether the spokesperson yesterday simply misspoke or whether Fetterman is now dealing with much more serious heart problems than previously known. Either way, we’re praying for his health today. Happy Friday.
Out of the Bottle
by Andrew Egger
In recent weeks, I’ve watched in fascination as many prominent professional conservatives have seemed to realize, in a sudden flash of horror, something that has seemed obvious to me for years: The GOP kids are not alright. For a significant and growing faction of the early-career operatives entering the party ranks, irony-drenched, nihilistic transgressiveness and theatrical bigotry aren’t just considered acceptable—they’re at the heart of politics.
For many, the light-bulb moment has been Tucker Carlson’s much-discussed interview this month with white nationalist livestreamer Nick Fuentes, and the bizarre initial decision of Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts to demand the right close ranks around the pair. Sen. Ted Cruz accused Carlson this month of spreading “a poison that is profoundly dangerous,” and said he sees more antisemitism on the right today “than I have in my entire life.” This week, the conservative writer Rod Dreher wrote a forceful denunciation of Fuentes’s “groyper” faction, calling it a “cancer growing fast within the conservative movement” that “will be a complete disaster for Republicans” if not stopped. Dreher cited a jaw-dropping estimate from a young friend in GOP politics: “Between 30 and 40 percent of Republican staffers under the age of 30 are followers of Fuentes.”
I don’t know if that number is precisely accurate.1 But Dreher is undeniably directionally correct: The problem is not a future problem. Fuentes and his ilk have established a professional-Washington beachhead. The groypers and their fellow travelers are already here.
It’s hard not to respond to realizations like this with exasperation. Oh, hey, you’re awake—glad you’ve decided to join us! But the more I’ve thought about it, the harder I’ve found it to blame guys like Dreher or Cruz for being slow on the uptake. I used to think professional conservatives’ willful blindness on this stuff was all down to Trump: He was an open bigot embraced and crowned by the party, so fighting bigotry elsewhere in the ranks had become too fraught and complicated to bother with.
But there’s a significant generational element here too. Some of this stuff really is just now dawning on older conservative thinkers and politicians. “Most representatives both locally and federally are older and don’t really understand what’s happening with the younger generations,” Mikale Olson, a young conservative writer who is decidedly anti-Fuentes and has been doing some political soul-searching, told me. “They’re not really online that much, and the younger generations aren’t speaking to them as much, so they’re kind of like deer in the headlights with this stuff.”
White nationalists and other perverse factions have long hovered on the fringes of GOP politics. But for a long time these older thinkers had—or thought they had—compelling reasons to believe that those elements were being kept out on the fringes. A decade ago, during the rise of what was then still called the alt-right, professional conservatism was still doing an okay job at least trying to police its ranks. Periodically some staffer or other at some organization or other would be fired after they were outed for holding secret Nazi views. Some looked at these stories and said, Sure is alarming that these people keep finding their way into the GOP pipeline. But the professional conservatives could say, not entirely without reason: But we’re kicking them back out again! The system works!
The nihilistic energy has only been growing ever since. But when Republicans were out of power in the Biden years, it was easy for professional conservatives to treat it less as an internal problem than as an indictment of the reigning lib culture—a backlash against the schoolmarmish You can’t say that pieties of woke culture.
But now here they all find themselves: Republicans are back in power, and the young nihilists have come along for the ride. And it’s suddenly dawning on everyone that Republicans themselves will need to do something about this. There have been some heartbreakingly feeble attempts at rearguard action. During the Heritage Foundation brouhaha, the think tank’s National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism sent a list of “recommendations” to Roberts for how they felt he should respond to this moment. It included a call to “hire a visiting fellow—one who shares mainstream conservative views on Israel, Jews, and Christian Zionists—who would help identify strategies and tools to win Gen Z and beyond.”
More power to them, I guess. But it all feels too little, too late. The groyper genie is out of the lamp now; no fresh-faced Gen-Z Heritage visiting fellow is going to stuff it back in. The antisemitism task force has since parted ways with Heritage; Kevin Roberts, meanwhile, is still there. Nick Fuentes and his cohorts are still pumping their sewage into the young Republican right. And the young Republican right is still tuning in.
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AROUND THE BULWARK
Kash Patel’s Girlfriend Is Driving MAGA Nuts... She’s litigious. They’re sexist. It’s a miasma of loathing, reports WILL SOMMER in False Flag.
Trump Kicks California Republicans Into the Abyss... As their districts disappear and their careers in Congress end, few admit to JOE PERTICONE in Press Pass that their own party is to blame.
Team Trump Can’t Get Its Epstein Story Straight... On the flagship pod, ALEX WAGNER joins TIM MILLER to talk about why The White House and Fox’s defense is not working, and Trump may be in the worst political shape he’s been in since the aftermath of January 6th.
Trump Is Falling Into the Same Trap That Ensnared Biden... Republicans learned nothing from how badly Dems bungled inflation, observes CATHERINE RAMPELL in Receipts.
Cheap Tricks... In R.F. Kuang’s new novel, two philosopher-magicians wander Hell to rescue their thesis supervisor. BILL COBERLY reviews Katabasis.
The Upside of The Lowdown... The FX show just ended its first (and maybe only) season, and ZANDY HARTIG has the highlights.
Quick Hits
PULTE STRIKES AGAIN: Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has carved himself out a substantial B-list role in Trump’s court politics by using his perch to (inappropriately) hunt through the housing records of Trump’s enemies, looking for pretexts to charge them with crimes. Lately, though, his good standing with MAGA has taken a few hits: He’s managed to make an enemy of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and he was the mastermind behind Trump’s endorsement this week of fifty-year-mortgages, a hilariously bad idea that went over like a lead balloon both inside and outside the White House.
How to get back on the horse? By going back to what you know works: offering Trump more of his enemies’ scalps. Yesterday, Pulte sent a criminal referral to the Justice Department against California Rep. Eric Swalwell, making the now-familiar accusation that Swalwell committed tax fraud by making false or misleading claims in loan documents.
Swalwell scoffed off the referral in a statement. “As the most vocal critic of Donald Trump over the last decade2 and as the only person who still has a surviving lawsuit against him, the only thing I am surprised about is that it took him this long to come after me,” he told NBC News, which first reported the story.
The congressman may have good reason to feel confident. After all, the comparable fraud case brought against New York Attorney General Letitia James is already running into all sorts of trouble.
MASK OFF: How bad are things getting out there in the mass-deportation streets? Even understated lawmakers like Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly—whom no one has ever accused of histrionics—are out here pleading for ICE agents to learn to refuse unlawful orders. Here he was speaking to journalist McKay Coppins on Coppins’s new podcast for the Deseret News:
KELLY: Don’t have bad interactions with people. Do the job in a respectful way and follow the law. By the way, you don’t have to follow unlawful orders. That’s true for the military. I think it’s true for federal law enforcement, too. Nobody can tell you to break the law. You can’t be told to violate people’s constitutional rights. People have to stand up and say, no, I’m not going to do that.
COPPINS: Would you like to see more of that among ICE agents?
KELLY: Yeah, of course I would. I’d like to see them wearing an ID, not wearing masks and telling Stephen Miller or Kristi Noem that we will follow the law and there are limits to what we will do.
Read the whole interview here.
PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM: The government shutdown is over. Time to brace for the next government shutdown. As Politico notes, congressional leaders have a whole host of thorny spending problems to solve before the next self-imposed funding cliff arrives at the end of January:
The bipartisan deal to end the funding lapse includes a long-term agreement on just three of the dozen bills lawmakers need to finish each year to keep cash flowing to federal programs. And those three measures are some of the easiest to rally around — including money for veterans programs, food aid, assistance for farmers and the operations of Congress itself.
Together, they represent only about 10 percent of the roughly $1.8 trillion Congress doles out each year to federal agencies. Under the deal, everything else is funded on a temporary basis through Jan. 30 at levels first set by Congress in March 2024, when Joe Biden was president.
That leaves behind major open decisions about the vast majority of discretionary dollars — including for the military and public health programs — along with the stickiest policy issues. It doesn’t help that House and Senate leaders still haven’t agreed on an overall total for fiscal 2026 spending, amid GOP divisions over how deeply to cut.
How many more of these shocks can the system take? And how long can their biggest policy driver—the Senate’s archaic legislative filibuster—last?
Cheap Shots
It seems high to me. Fuentes is popular, but he isn’t ubiquitous. Then again, the sort of young nihilistic bigotry he’s come to represent isn’t constrained to people who actively watch Fuentes’s content.
Not to kick a guy while he’s down—all solidarity to the Trump enemies Pulte has pretextually accused of crimes—but we can’t help noting that putting himself forward as America’s single most vocal Trump critic is pretty classic Swalwell.
I couldn’t disagree more. Of course the older professional GOP is to blame for the groyper movement. They surrendered their claim to sensible conservatism when they hitched their fate to Trump, the nihilist of nihilists.
I’m rapidly becoming exhausted with the TV talking heads on the right who defend the President unflinchingly, making excuses for him and his conduct at every turn in the name of raw political considerations. (“Really? Finally? Just now?”, you ask. Fair point.) Is there no moral fiber left in them anymore that recognizes that they would want a creepy predator jailed, fired, or publicly shamed immediately if he were to target their own children, thus the same principle should apply toward other such people too, regardless of political affiliation or ideology?
I wish these blowhard political hacks would at least apply the Pete Rose Rule to the situation – that it is okay to love and admire Pete Rose the baseball player who was one of the best ever to play the game, while acknowledging at the same time that Pete Rose the person was a pretty reprehensible lowlife who exhibited great moral failings off the field while engaging in a lot of very unsavory conduct toward others. (And sought every opportunity he could find to cash in on his name and celebrity -- again not unlike a certain President.)
It’s okay to admit that a person can be both things at the same time, and that one does not have to negate the other in an honest accounting. The truth needs to be told. If anyone has the phone number of Scott Jennings, among others who have attained worst offender status on the hypocrisy list, please send it along to me and I’m glad to enlighten him, and others, on this as they continue to shift the goalposts in favor of whatever suits the President’s and their own best interests at any point in time. Disgusting.