‘Boutique’ Republicans and The Right’s Nazi Problem

The catalyst for the collapse of establishment MAGA began on October 7th. However, the ingredients necessary for its fracture have been stewing in the Republican political machine for the better part of a decade. MAGA, their vitriolic ideology, and their destructive attachment to the state of Israel, I argue, now only have themselves to blame. 

A little over a month ago, Politico dropped an exclusive report that focused on leaked messages from a Young Republicans Telegram group chat, the content of which showed numerous high profile, young conservative activists from sub groups of the Young Republican National Federation – a 15,000-member political organisation for Republicans between 18 and 40 – to be throwing around racial slurs, ‘joking’ about rape, ‘the jews’, gas chambers, and loving Hitler. It was shocking.

But, was it, though? Was it shocking?

I won’t feign ignorance to the typical boisterous nonsense that almost always comes attached to the elite boys club that politics can be. “It’s just a joke” is the default line of defence. But this is different: it’s increasingly difficult not to see the momentum behind this growing extremist rhetoric on the right as less of a fringe offshoot and rather as a cataclysmically large schism within the party’s politics. 

There is one main issue: Israel, Jewishness, and how antisemitism is handled. Pulling away from the traditional MAGA faces like Ted Cruz, Ben Shapiro, and Mark Levin are an increasingly relevant, hodgepodge group of independent commentators and activists, including Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and, most importantly, Nick Fuentes, who speak for a growing number of conservative Americans who – among a host of things – reject the neo-con prioritisation of Israel and Jewish identity politics. 

Fuentes has the hot seat. He is, as John Ganz – a political writer – put it recently on the Ezra Klein show, the “most popular representative of Neo Nazism in America.” Attached to his anti-jew rhetoric are similarly vile views on women, immigrants, and white Christian nationalism. Fuentes serves as the mouthpiece for a fringe, online right-wing faction known as the “groypers” who, as Ezra Klein pointed out, constantly teeter on the edge of “oh, aren’t we just joking?” which make them incredibly difficult to pin down. Very online. Very meme-heavy. 

But these online pockets of bilge are where political momentum begins. In the same way that, over ten years ago, Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, and Jordan Peterson whipped up online fandoms and threw them in the direction of MAGA, Nick Fuentes is doing the exact same thing. Only this time it’s worse, and they have all the motion.  

Ganz has written: “every single person under, say, the age of 40 on the right is exposed to extremely high levels of groyper content every day on group chats, on their social media timelines” etc. “Groyperism totally suffuses the cultural environment of the right.” 

I recently sat down with an conservative activist and consultant – whom we’ll call Adam – who spent the last year in D.C working and speaking with representatives from Young Americans for Freedom, Turning Point USA, and the Leadership Institute, as well as informed GOP staffers. He made his first trip in an official capacity on behalf of a British Youth Conservative (YC) circle.   

‘Boutique’ Republicans. That’s what he called them – the growing undercurrent of young conservatives that he initially sensed to be engaged in “edge-maxxing” (or, extreme, hollow rhetoric for the sake of reaction) but that are now fully drinking the groyper kool-aid. When asked how many young republicans he would estimate to be groypers or groyper-adjacent, he responded: “I’m happy to say more than half of 15 to 25s.” 

But Adam needed to highlight that now, for many on the right, it’s not just extremism for the sake of it. Fuentes and the groyper-adjacents are experimenting with a narrative in which the right, for decades, has allowed them to engage. That is, shoo away any talk of “you can’t say this, you can’t say that.” Combined with upward pressure on edgy, attention seeking “jokes”, the groypers have realised they can force the right to ask: hold on, why can’t we talk about Israel? Why can’t we talk about “the Jews”? Or, as Adam pitched it to me: “Why, for the first time in their lives, is the right coming at them for identity politics?” As you can imagine, it is extremely difficult not to put Israel, AIPAC, and the Epstein files fiasco at the center of this narrative. 

As of late, fuel was poured on the flames when the president of The Heritage Foundation – the behemoth conservative think tank behind Project 2025 – defended Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Fuentes, stating the American people are not expecting them to be attacking their “friends on the right.” The backlash and the ensuing infighting has been corrosive.  

Tucker Carlson is arguably the right’s most prominent voice. He’s also a charlatan, and extremely adept at gauging sentiment. In the same way Carlson flipped from frustration and anger to outright support on the subject of Trump, he’s also flipped on Fuentes. Once the “weird little gay kid in his basement”, Fuentes is now Carlson’s next opportunity to ride the new sentiment wave, giving Fuentes – a literal self-proclaimed Hitler lover – not even a fraction of the scrutiny he gave Ted Cruz in the exact same interview setting. It was absolutely shameless. And when Megyn Kelly asked him why he didn’t push harder on Fuentes (watch here, 12:40 onward), he responded: “Do your own interview. You’re not my editor. Buzz off.” Oh, please.

So, does platforming a Neo Nazi invite condemnation? Absolutely. Are establishment MAGA like Cruz, Shapiro and Levin in any position to level such condemnation? Not in the slightest. 

Watch the same clip (11:33 onwards), where Carlson points out the issue with sitting congressman Randy Fine saying “we should kill them all” with regard to the Palestinians (this is the same gentlemen that called to ‘nuke’ Gaza). “That’s supposed to be cool? It’s not cool. And let’s just be honest, that is much worse than anything Nick Fuentes has said.” 

How do establishment MAGA, like Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin, who have remained adamant supporters of the Palestinian genocide, actually respond to that? They’re in an untenable position. They cannot gate-keep the conversation any longer. The groypers have realised you cannot cherry pick hate, those willing to go all the way will appear less hollow, and, terrifyingly, win.

Image: Flickr/Gage Skidmore

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