If you want to know where Republican politics is heading, look at the memes. Since the start of its second term, the Trump administration and its G.O.P. surrogates have been crashing out online.
Like an unhinged Zoomer, they’ve relentlessly posted sadistic memes about policy decisions in the style of social media trends. A highlight reel of ICE arrests set to “Ice Ice Baby.” An A.S.M.R.-style video that features people in shackles boarding a deportation flight. An image of a woman being arrested, but rendered in the style of a Hayao Miyazaki movie. The vice president has threatened his critics with deportation via a GIF image. One Republican congressman even suggested that an undocumented migrant be thrown out of a helicopter, “Pinochet” style. When faced with criticism over one such taunting post, Kaelan Dorr, a White House press aide, announced: “The arrests will continue. The memes will continue.”
It’s safe to say that President Trump and the Republican Party are deploying a new form of political propaganda, updating a dark art for the platform era. But it’s also a signal that a new kind of political style is enveloping conservatism — one that is ruthless, inflammatory and designed for maximum viral reach.
It’s a style of politics that has been honed by the party’s young, extremist fringes for years. With Mr. Trump’s blessing, or indifference perhaps, this faction is emerging as one of the most influential forces in the party. These radicalized conservatives, some of whom are working as junior staffers and political operatives across the G.O.P., are showing us the future of conservatism, one demented post at a time.
Mr. Trump’s 2024 campaign built a coalition of internet-adjacent figures, from the tech elite to podcasters, streamers, gamers, anti-woke comedians, influencers and beyond. His big tent is reflective of the so-called fusionism being attempted by the conservative movement. Curtis Yarvin, one of the new right’s leading voices, has described this ecosystem as the “very online soup” from which the Trump administration is largely taking direction.
The key ingredient to this online soup is extremism: from nativism to racial science, to casual neo-Nazism and textbook misogyny. Presented to followers via livestreams, memes and X posts, this deluge of far-right content has been called “slopulism” — a vibes-based politics designed for social media and born from social media. These vibes, of course, are harsh. They’re anti-democratic. And they’re increasingly being embodied in the presence of figures staffing the second Trump administration.
In May, an NPR report identified three administration officials with clear ties to alleged neo-Nazis, holocaust deniers or misogynist trolls. There are now a half-dozen confirmed cases of Trump staffers either linked to far-right extremists or those pushing extremist views, among them Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, and Kingsley Wilson, the Defense Department press secretary.
This tally does not include staff members who were part of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, who have been connected to social media accounts that appear to have an appetite, among other things, for scientific racism. Marko Elez, a former DOGE staffer, was linked to an X account that posted, “I just want a eugenic immigration policy, is that too much to ask.”
And then there’s the case of Paul Ingrassia, the Trump staffer nominated to lead the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, who may be the best example of a conduit between the online right and the White House. Mr. Ingrassia, 30, a former far-right podcaster, has been an outspoken supporter of one of the online right’s most visible figures, Nick Fuentes.
Mr. Fuentes, 26, is a white supremacist, Hitler fan and vocal antisemite. A far-right influencer who hosts a weeknight streaming show called “America First,” he is the face of the groyper movement, a young and almost exclusively online faction of white nationalists. (The term references their mascot, which looks like a more menacing version of Pepe the Frog — a far-right hate symbol.) You might recall Mr. Fuentes as the white nationalist who dined with Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2022 and who advised Kanye West on his stunt campaign for president in 2020.
Of the various factions jockeying for influence in the MAGA tent, Mr. Fuentes’s radical youth wing might be the one most responsible for the trolling style infecting conservatism. Caleb Brock, the 24-year-old director of digital strategy for U.S. Representative Ro Khanna, a Democrat, put it to me this way: “The groyper style is the Republican playbook right now.”
Mr. Brock is someone closely attuned to the radical digital appetites of young conservatives. “Republicans are letting these young men run wild. This is a generation trained in this kind of content for the past 10 years,” he told me. “It’s an absolutely easy thing to shoot off a deranged tweet. All it takes is five minutes, and it’ll get something like five million views.”
The groyper movement isn’t a highly developed force, as you might be gathering. Some people would argue that the members are little more than annoying provocateurs. But on an internet powered by visceral reactions and rage-baiting, the groyper style of online politics — reactive, cruel, nihilistic, openly racist — is becoming the norm for young conservatives. As the leftist streamer Hasan Piker observed recently on his Twitch stream: “If you’re under the age of 35, and you find yourself in the right-wing media landscape, you’re either an apolitical kind of guy … or you’re tapped in and you have an ideology that centers entirely around groyper, neo-Nazi politics.”
It’s a politics better understood as white nationalism rebranded for digital natives. The groypers’ demands aren’t exactly new additions to the nativist canon. But they do reflect a generational shift in attitudes that departs from neoconservative orthodoxy. In addition to their bigotry toward nonwhite, nonheterosexual and nonmale social groups, the groypers are agitating for closed borders, a break in the U.S. relationship with Israel, the cessation of foreign wars and a return to “Christian values.”
In many ways, it’s a political agenda not unlike Steve Bannon’s populist nationalism, a similarly nativist approach mixed with resentment of tech and corporate elites. But unlike mainstream conservatism (or liberalism for that matter), Mr. Fuentes’s pitch is centered around the disillusionment and anxiety that many young Americans, especially men, are facing. As figures in both parties play down, or ignore, the concerns of these men, Mr. Fuentes offers a twisted, and it has to be said, engaging alternative. I spoke with one young Republican, affiliated with a prominent G.O.P. organization, who wanted to remain anonymous out of fear of professional reprisal, who explained it as a kind of revolt. “Young people are frustrated by the vapidness of our media,” he said. “They want to challenge authority and talk about controversial things. Groyper content is catchy, it’s funny, and it’s meant to inspire emotion.”
To accomplish their agenda, the groypers have decided mostly to antagonize mainstream, established conservatives in an effort to push them toward their nativist positions. Often you’ll see them bully notable online political figures, usually with larger followings, from live streamers to political influencers, such as Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk to conservative elites such as JD Vance, Vivek Ramaswamy, Mr. Musk and even President Trump. From afar, groyper alliances that seem solid one day can appear to fizzle out the next. After Mr. Trump proposed an amnesty for immigrants working in restaurants, in hotels and on farms, Mr. Fuentes tweeted that the proposal was akin to “Spitting in the face of the plan trusters.”
Out in the real world, groypers have resorted to viral stunts, like arriving uninvited to Conservative Political Action Conferences across the country. Using the banner of “America First,” they’ve even hosted their own alternative political action conferences, attended by far-right Republicans such as Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar. Mr. Fuentes and his groypers have made appearances at flashpoint moments for the far right, notably the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., and the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol.
Jared Holt, a senior researcher on extremism at the Institute of Strategic Dialogue, told me that the entertainment of it all has been primary to Mr. Fuentes’s rise. Mr. Holt has followed Mr. Fuentes and the groypers since 2017, watching along as their “dusty venomous ideology” evolved into digestible content for Gen Z. “It’s entertaining and fun to watch for certain audiences and younger men,” Mr. Holt said. “It’s not dissimilar to how podcasters and Twitch streamers do their content. He does what other successful influencers do.”
In many ways, the groyper movement is a natural outgrowth of the internet’s breeding grounds for toxic posting: Discord servers, YouTube comment threads and message boards such as 4chan. Erik Balsbaugh, a co-founder of Progressive Victory, focuses on engaging these kinds of online communities, specifically the young men who flock to them. He told me that the daily experience of the average teenager on the internet is a lot like the online right’s digital ecosystem: “It’s all conflict. It’s all debate. It’s all an argument. That’s what gets engagement.”
The environment Mr. Balsbaugh describes is one where teenagers spend their days trolling fellow gamers over “woke” characters or dropping Hitler references like “HH” in Twitch streams. In these corners of the internet, groyper memes and “manosphere” streams are just a click away. Destroying fellow posters, destroying “libs” in the chat, trying to feel powerful — this is the end goal for the average teen in these spaces. “To these far-right kids, it’s all a game. They’re laughing about it. This is how you win. Winning is the end goal. It’s everything for them,” Mr. Balsbaugh said.
Mr. Fuentes’s end goal has been unambiguous. He wants to “red-pill” the Republican Party, turning it into an unflinching ethnonationalist party. His strategy hinges largely on recruiting Gen Z conservatives from college campuses and conservative youth movements, like Mr. Kirk’s Turning Point USA. In a 2023 profile of Mr. Fuentes in Mother Jones, the reporter Ali Breland identified some 30 college campuses with America First-adjacent political groups.
Still, America First and the groypers are far from fielding viable candidates in G.O.P. politics. Mr. Fuentes is quick to claim political wins and overstate the influence of his anonymous army on the right; reporting about the groypers is often spun as positive PR by groyper accounts. But while their influence is real, it’s also something subtle and difficult to quantify. It’s the slow work of turning a repellent system of beliefs into something palatable or unobjectionable.
Examples of this might include the Nazi-like salutes performed by Mr. Musk and Mr. Bannon earlier this year. Or Mr. Trump’s Oval Office lecture on “white genocide” to the South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, a fixation of the conspiracist right.
The clearest measure of groyper influence on political messaging, at present, might be the mainstreaming of a strident anti-immigration stance. As the Los Angeles protests against ICE turned into a national story, prominent conservatives like Mr. Kirk; Matt Walsh, a podcaster affiliated with The Daily Wire; and Jack Posobiec, a conservative activist, posted similar messages on X that the Trump administration should ban all “third world” immigration, “illegal or legal.” The posts shared language nearly identical to one of Mr. Fuentes’s most viewed tweets, from August, which read, “NO MORE IMMIGRATION — ILLEGAL OR LEGAL.”
For this story, I spoke to several self-described groypers, who’ve followed Mr. Fuentes’s streams and accounts for years to get a better understanding of this dynamic. Some are still active in Republican politics, while others are former staffers with campaign experience or time served in Washington. All were reluctant to be identified by their full names out of fear of professional reprisal for associating with Mr. Fuentes’s ideas.
Clayton, a former legislative aide and devout listener of Mr. Fuentes, confirmed that groypers were embedded throughout the capital. “There are more of them around than people think,” he said. “But it’s not exactly something you can be associated with, and have confidence that your employer isn’t going to fire you.”
He said that some Gen Z staffers, distrustful of traditional media and bored by most conservative content, were highly receptive to the groyper message. “People know something is wrong, but they don’t really know anyone who agrees with them,” Clayton told me. “Then Nick comes up on their feed and says it.”
Group chats with Hill staffers, he told me, were places to push the message with edgy memes and occasional “Nick content.” He described a kind of underground movement, disconnected in the real world, but busy spreading the ideology via links and direct messages, shaping opinions largely out of view from the older generation of Republican leadership.
When talking to a groyper, one is likely to hear the words “demographic change” or the idea that white Americans are slowly being displaced by nonwhite foreigners. Don, a 25-year-old groyper living in New York City, first came across Mr. Fuentes back in 2017, on YouTube. Like most groypers, he thinks demographic change will destroy America.
Mainstream conservatism, which he describes as “old and stale,” would rather peddle culture war distractions than tackle the subjects he sees as front and center for young conservatives. Older conservatives are “disconnected,” he said. “The world they talk about doesn’t exist anymore. Only young people know what the new world is like,” he said.
Don told me that most groypers shared a sense that their concerns were not taken seriously. Indeed, all of the groypers I spoke with echoed anxieties about issues such as the cost of housing, a perceived decline in moral values and the persistence of foreign wars at the cost of domestic quality of life, in addition to their nativist obsessions.
But the Trump administration’s embrace of the trolling style, to them, signals a change. It’s something of an acknowledgment. Even if the White House isn’t fully on board with the groypers’ key issues, they seem to think their strategy is effective.
“The future of the G.O.P. is being built on Twitter and TikTok,” Clayton told me. “That’s the content people are consuming. Memes are how you do politics now. This is how you reach people,” he said. “Intellectualism doesn’t have a place anymore. We’re pushing for real change through memes and jokes.”
But can political values become normalized through memes? Those I spoke with hope so. Jeremy, a 26-year-old from Baltimore who worked on a handful of Republican campaigns after college, said: “For someone who is 10 or 12, it makes the message easier to digest. Now, they’re finding this message because of memes the president is posting.”
Others, like Don, see the “shock humor” of groyper content as a kind of irony-poisoned bonding ritual for a generation with bleak prospects. If they won’t be taken seriously, then the only alternative is to use inflammatory rhetoric to let people know they’re not alone, that “they’re not crazy for thinking these things,” he told me.
What the groyper coalition amounts to is not unlike what MAGA is for an older generation of conservatives, a political fandom. It is a loose, inchoate movement built around the authority of a charismatic leader (Mr. Fuentes) and has many of the same qualities of the “parasocial relationship” that can develop between a media figure and his following.
Their persistence, and steady influence, brings to mind a similar schism revealed by the MAGA movement: specifically, the rejection of elite institutions and elite thought. While the model of conservative influence was once the bowtie-wearing Heritage Foundation set, today it appears to be streamers, steadily churning out content, night after night, on platforms like Twitch and Rumble, who are starting to steer the direction of the party.
Much attention has been given to the far-right bloggers Bronze Age Pervert and Curtis Yarvin, who both like to draw on classical antiquity to make heady political arguments about Western values and the efficacy of popular democracy. The Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank, was designated, in this newspaper, “a nerve center” of the American right. And while these established commentators are certainly influential to the party elite, or those who aspire to be, it’s unclear if they have any influence over the young radicals entering into conservative politics.
Still, some political operatives see the groyper movement as a small, self-mythologizing faction of online obsessives hellbent on drumming up attention and little else. Christopher Rufo, a conservative best known for his antiwoke crusading, is one such critic. Mr. Rufo believes that this segment of “conspiracists and racialists,” as he described them to me, has mistaken rage-bait posting for actual politics.
“It’s better to think of it as a marketing strategy which optimizes for negative attention,” he told me. “They understand that in our era of polarized digital politics, nothing draws more attention than a negative news swarm.”
Mr. Rufo, a millennial in his 40s, cited his own success spearheading the conservative attack on critical race theory and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives. Since 2021, more than half of U.S. states have proposed legislation limiting or banning such policies and curriculums. This kind of advocacy, he suggested, requires “self-discipline,” something he thinks the groypers lack. Political influencers, like Mr. Fuentes, would rather surface “pseudo-issues,” such as opposition to interracial marriage, than “genuine national questions.” The goal is only to drive attention, clicks and, ultimately, profit. “My sense is that it’s all a cynical postmodern pose,” Mr. Rufo added. “I think of it as discourse pollution.”
Other young Republicans I spoke with voiced similar criticisms. The president of the Miami Young Republicans, a 32-year-old named Tony Figueroa, dismissed Mr. Fuentes and the groypers as attention seekers distracting voters from the party’s economic message. “They aren’t the future of the party,” said Mr. Figeuroa, a first-generation American with Cuban parents.
He seemed to think of this online moment as a strange deviation in the conservative legacy. “Obscure nationalist memes are abnormal,” he said. “We should go back to decency. People want to live normal lives. Trump eventually won’t be president, so what happens to MAGA afterward?”
Mr. Trump’s re-election in 2024 may have obliterated the remaining limits on acceptable political discourse within the G.O.P. His virtuosic ability to rant and provoke online, along with the party’s willingness to build electoral coalitions with the most fringe voices on the right, was, by all strategic measures, an electoral winner. Largely because of this, it appears the incentives for party leadership to punish or condemn speech that embraces the poisonous fixations of extreme flanks have vanished.
Once upon a time, or as recently as Mr. Trump’s first presidency, pushing theories about “demographic change” could derail a political career. They would trigger party condemnation or relegate a person to the fringes. In 2019, when Representative Steve King grumbled about how the label “white supremacist” was somehow “offensive,” he was stripped of his committee assignments by the Republican congressional leadership and defeated in the following year’s primary election.
Today, this kind of moral clarity (a bare minimum response, to be certain) no longer seems to exist on the right. When pressed about this new normal, Republican operatives shrug it off. “Five years ago, the groyper stuff would’ve dropped jaws onto the floor, sure,” said one young Republican communications consultant who requested anonymity for professional reasons. “Now, people see it just as something to ignore. Even if it’s racist underneath the surface, people don’t really care anymore. They know that humor is the intention.”
The G.O.P. has fully committed itself to a style of politics that imitates the mannerisms of its radical young flanks, so the only constant we can expect from it in the post-Trump era is permission. Permission for anyone in its coalition, but especially for its young, white and male constituency to defy social norms, float racial conspiracy theories, denigrate foreign cultures — to celebrate gruesome fantasies of barbarism, even permission to threaten select groups.
Permissiveness, after all, is the one tangible political reward the right can deliver to young Americans (and its more radicalized voters beyond them). In place of concrete policy that could benefit this cohort, such as affordable housing, health care or the promise of economic security, the Republican Party is wagering that it can continue to win elections with the help of a coalition with increasing numbers of Gen Z conservatives gripped by fatalism, obsessed with racial grievance and motivated by resentment.
We shouldn’t count on the Democrats to swoop in with a fix anytime soon. Historically, they’ve exhibited a smug indifference toward the concerns of young voters and the online cultures that shape their opinions. The most obvious example being Vice President Kamala Harris’s blundering 2024 campaign. Rather than attempt to engage the so-called manosphere and reach its mass audience of young men in the weeks leading up to the election, Ms. Harris’s team fumbled on the internet’s most crucial battleground spaces, YouTube and TikTok. Free to dominate this messaging vacuum, Mr. Trump had eye-popping support among white men under the age of 30 — earning the votes of roughly six in 10 — while eating into the Democrats’ margins with young Black and Latino men.
It’s clear that Democrats have yet to comprehend what Republicans have internalized: Conflict itself is the high-voltage current that powers online engagement and amplifies messages. There has been a flurry of post-election scrambling by Democratic strategists and consultants to counter the problem of the Republicans’ digital clout. These suggestions have fixated, somewhat predictably, on shortsighted technocratic fixes, like a $20 million research project to analyze the language of young men, and the development of left-leaning influencer networks approved by the party.
Is all of this just a Trump phenomenon? The latest chapter in right-wing politics as entertainment? Or a first look at the slop era of politics? Past the MAGA moment, it’s hard to imagine a sudden de-radicalization of young conservatives coming of age online. De-escalating in the meme era of politics is effectively giving in. As we’ve seen in the short window where platforms and politics have combined, the only direction to sustain attention and status is to go further and harder.
For figures like Mr. Fuentes, pushing an increasingly extreme agenda is the only option to grow influence and monetization. But Mr. Fuentes’s movement is a tenuous one. It faces obvious constraints, such as the G.O.P.’s unshakable alliance with Israel. The MAGA rift over the decision to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities in June exposed the party’s ideological and generational divide. Mr. Fuentes, along with Tucker Carlson and Mr. Bannon, lost out to the Fox News neocons. But this rift appears to be far from resolved. Junior staffers in the administration might be openly questioning Israel’s influence, as New York magazine recently reported, but the president has little time for podcasts and livestreams.
It’s tempting to dismiss all of this as a problem limited to the Republican Party. But its embrace of online politics, and its refusal to police the discourse, also means this antagonism could come to infect American politics as a whole. The writer Max Read has suggested that social media platforms like X are sites of “elite coordination,” where journalists, politicians, business leaders and researchers go to understand public attitudes and gather information. A mediasphere overflowing with racist and reactionary slop promises to pervert this understanding.
This echoes the warning made by the German social theorist Jürgen Habermas, who first proposed the idea of a “public sphere” decades ago. He argued that the public sphere, and the norms it establishes, is essential to democratic lawmaking. He argued, however, that it could become “distorted” or “deformed” by bad actors and unethical discourses, such as the racist attitudes promoted by the online right. As a result, “illegitimate” forms of democratic rule, reflecting the twisted desires of just a few, can be produced.
It’s arguable that this moment is one such period of illegitimate rule, where unpopular policies, like mass deportation, are presented as popular will. Since mid-March, coincidentally around the same period the White House began its meme campaign, Mr. Trump’s approval rating on immigration, initially one of his most popular positions, has cratered by 19 points, according to a recent YouGov poll. But one wouldn’t know that support for Trump’s immigration policies had fallen while browsing through the online right’s daily discourses.
Like a runaway train, the Republican Party is barreling toward a future where posting is politics — or, the purest function of politics. It’s a grim, ugly and barren place. The future of the party is coming of age in this place, and its members are slowly being stripped of empathy. The current radicalization mechanisms of social media, where far-right extremist ideologies are not only common but sources of profit and power for their peddlers, will have to be dismantled and reconfigured. Above all, our national politics will finally have to acknowledge the growing discontent of young Americans. Don’t expect things to change much until then. As one groyper I spoke with cautioned, “Until morale improves, the posting will continue.”
Nathan Taylor Pemberton writes about extremism and American politics.
Illustration by Ricardo Tomás.
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