08.01.2026

Man of his times?

The ascendancy of a young, sexless neo-Nazi with legions of internet fans has caused a political crisis in the American right. What explains the rise of Nick Fuentes and his ‘Groypers’? Paul Demarty investigates

I t is a little over four months since the assassination of Charlie Kirk. In the days after, the American right seemed to have achieved unprecedented unity, as if gearing itself up for a generalised political purge of US government and civil society.

As I write, something like that kind of unity is observable, in the wake of the abduction of Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela. There is something for everyone: neocons, gusanos, right libertarians, racial chauvinists, religious zealots … and I suppose if you’re stupid enough to believe that Donald Trump can stop the flow of drugs into the US, you’re probably also stupid enough to believe that they are coming from Venezuela.

In between these two events, however, things have hardly been peaches and cream in the conservative movement; and at the centre of the problems has been a certain Nicholas J Fuentes - and, of course, the ghost of Kirk.

Groyper war

Fuentes is, it is fair to say, an odd bird. He is not an old-fashioned political operative, but a media figure; and he is not a bow-tied Fox News correspondent either. He is a ‘streamer’ - someone who builds his audience by interminably ranting at them live, over an internet video feed. The streaming platforms were largely built as an extension of the video games industry, Twitch being the most famous, allowing large audiences to watch players in action and listen to their running commentary; but political streaming is a big deal, both among rightists of the Fuentes stamp and leftists, of whom the best known is probably Hasan Piker.

As befits its origins as a gaming phenomenon, the audience for political streaming skews young and male. It is thus prone to a certain adolescent exuberance in its content. Fuentes first found fame as an influencer within the ‘incel’ community - “involuntary celibates”, who have constructed an elaborate identity structure around their failure to achieve carnal relations with women. The community is roughly divided between those who attempt to rectify this situation through cynical manipulation of what they take to be the basic relation between the sexes (what used to be called ‘pickup artistry’), and those who accept what they take to be their fate (the ‘black-pilled’).

Fuentes targeted the latter. He offered a deeply misogynistic account, according to which sex with women is inherently debasing and degrading for men. It is, he said memorably, even gayer than having sex with a man (not that he is in favour of that sort of thing either!). As time went on, more ingredients got added to the stew. Extreme white nationalism, traditionalist Catholicism, theocracy and, most infamously, a thoroughgoing anti-Semitism, up to and including holocaust denial and open admiration for Adolf Hitler.

This is a rather spicy mixture even by the standards of the Trumpified American right, and his supporters have traditionally been marginalised even from the edgier post-2016 scene. They have resisted such marginalisation ferociously, culminating in the so-called ‘Groyper War’ in 2019 (Fuentes’ fans call themselves ‘Groypers’, after a portly cartoon frog who serves as their mascot). When Charlie Kirk’s outfit, Turning Point USA, expelled Ashley St Clair for appearing in a photograph with Fuentes and other online-right oddballs, his supporters engaged in a prolonged campaign of disruption of TP USA events over several months. Fuentes and Kirk never buried the hatchet and, when the latter was murdered, there was much initial speculation that it could have been the work of a lone Groyper.

Shifting sands

Kirk’s shooting in Utah, however, began a series of events that would change the ideological balance of forces in this strange demimonde. Almost immediately, speculation began about the identity of the killer and, when Tyler Robinson was arrested, about the ‘real’ killer. In particular, rumours began to circulate that Kirk - in public, a down-the-line Zionist - had privately started to distance himself from the state of Israel.

Candace Owens - another far-right influencer increasingly in the grip of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories (and, frankly, perhaps of paranoid delusions) - began to retail an elaborate tale of Kirk’s assassination that involved the mainstream right, the intelligence agencies of Israel and France (she is involved in a court case with the Macrons over her allegations that Brigitte Macron is a transsexual), and even Kirk’s wife, Erica. Recently Owens has decided that there is, too, a communist cult involved, whose members communicate via coded references to bees. Although she has been somewhat marginalised in this milieu, she was close to Kirk, who seems to have been a good mediator and played an important role in cohering the different ideologues of the far right, Fuentes excepted.

Another figure hinting at Israeli involvement in Kirk’s death is Tucker Carlson, formerly the bow-tied Fox News guy par excellence, but today an independent operator. It is sometimes difficult to determine what this man’s real views are. (Despite being a public supporter of Trump, we know from documents released in the Dominion voting machines lawsuit that he privately holds him in contempt.) But he has positioned himself as the acceptable face of modern American white nationalism, and is noted for interviewing people outside the pale, such as pro-Nazi historian Darryl Cooper and, most sensationally, Vladimir Putin. He has also become a major and highly articulate critic of Israel.

On October 27, Carlson posted a two-hour-plus interview with Fuentes. This was a major breach in the cordon sanitaire around the Groypers, and moves were immediately afoot to put Carlson out to pasture. But these failed. He immediately received support from the Heritage Foundation, the spinal core of the conservative movement going back to the Reagan days. This caused an almighty ruckus, and followed on from the leak of a series of Telegram chat logs between members of the Young Republicans, including some elected officials, in which rather Fuentesian views of race and Hitler were expressed.

Taken together, these two events provided a picture of the drift of the American right. It is first of all clear from the Telegram leaks that the traditional organisations of the American right have absorbed many individuals fundamentally shaped by post-Trump, racist paleo-conservatism. For a long time, there was something of a bright line between the new Trump-focused organisations and stodgy old suit-and-tie outfits like the Young Republicans, but the latter’s New York chapter had already been effectively annexed by the new right, and the infection seems to have spread. If even the Heritage Foundation cannot take decisive action here, clearly the terrain has changed.

Secondly, it is clear that the question of Israel is a source of grievous division among the Republicans and further right, as it is among Democrats. Issue polling now finds drastically reduced support for Israel among Republican voters, sometimes with pluralities in favour of suspending such support. Among the white nationalist and paleocon circles served by Carlson and Fuentes, the exertions made by rightwing lawmakers in favour of a foreign state are a direct insult to the idea of ‘America first’ - such individuals are taken to be foreign agents of Israel or, for Fuentes, Owens and co, puppets of international Jewry. The effective truce between Democrat and Republican elites on foreign policy is cracking apart at the base on both sides.

Bush years

Underlying this confusion on the right is the disruptive effect the Trump ascendancy has had on its institutional structure. Though the George W Bush years saw drastic expansion of the power of the executive, that executive had more than one power centre, with representatives of neoconservatism, religious reaction and hyper-neoliberalism vying for influence. Long-standing operatives like Karl Rove and Dick Cheney could mediate between them, and between the executive as a whole and its donor base. Relatively centralised rightwing media and civil society institutions - most especially churches - could form a coherent phalanx around the executive.

On his way to the presidency, however, Trump drove a freight train right through all this stuff. Though he had, in his first term, plenty of establishment Republicans in his cabinet, remaining in place was a function of total loyalty to Trump as an individual. By the time of the 2024 primaries, such loyalty had become a prerequisite for any Republican seeking national office. The consequence was that Trump was completely unassailable in his own primary.

There was now a far more ‘Bonapartist’ structure in place: the big man at the top, supported by various institutions characterised by, again, absolute personal loyalty. Trump’s tendency to reward people in proportion to perceived loyalty, and his mercurial character (and plausible senescence), means that political shifts are often chaotic. The chokehold of traditional conservative media has been broken, though the alt-media operations are ultimately outlets for the same billionaire money as everyone else. At the base, Americans are more atomised than ever, and capillary mechanisms of political organisation are withering. (The typical religious profile of a 2024 Trump voter was a Christian who does not go to church.)

The result is inevitably a great confusion of ideas - some whimsical, some earnest, some callously malicious. Above all, though, they are spectacular and oddly untethered from reality; they come and go easily. Who, today, believes in Pizzagate? Who, this time next year, will remember Candace Owens’ bee cult?

Underlying this, ultimately, is the problem of relative US decline, which has played out in the usual fashion with deindustrialisation, rampant inequality between individuals and also between localities, and a series of attempts to reassert global military-strategic dominance with decidedly mixed results. The benefits of living in the ‘greatest country on earth’ are no longer obvious. Successive administrations have failed to disengage from the Middle East and Europe, pursuant to the long-heralded pivot to Asia. Trump’s national security strategy clearly paved the way for the Venezuelan escapade of last week, but the immediate consequence seems to be even greater overstretch.

Who can get this done, if not Trump? Even if he powers through the constitutional barriers to a third term, the man will die, eventually. What will come next? The generally chaotic state of the American political class looks unpropitious for some party of Young Turks to emerge, but someone will have to sit in the newly-gilded Oval Office in the end.

As far as Fuentes goes, it is notable that he fairly quickly expressed reservations about the Venezuela operation, telling his million-plus Twitter followers on January 3 that it “initially seemed like a solid operation to cleanly, bloodlessly and quickly remove Maduro from power last night”. But, he continued, “this new policy of ‘running Venezuela’ with US soldiers sounds like a massive over-commitment. I have zero confidence in nation-building. Big mistake.” Carlson is also cagey about the whole thing.

If things do go south in Caracas, then Trump and his outriders will face opposition from the right as well as the left. It would thus be wrong to take too much heart from the death of his ludicrous self-image as a ‘peace president’; the benefits of anti-war sentiment are not just going to land automatically in the lap of the left. Freed from the ties of loyalty to Trump, a more coherent far right could sell, once more, a programme of isolationism and internal purging - as has happened, from time to time, at least back to the ‘Know-Nothings’ of the 1850s.

Of course, should we actually end up with a president Fuentes or Carlson, they shall be driven by the same underlying social tectonics into foolish and destructive military adventures in due course. Only a socialist left - armed with an internationalist foreign policy opposed to its own state - has the potential to restrain, and ultimately destroy, the largest apparatus of murder ever assembled.