On Election Day last week, white nationalist Nick Fuentes urged his supporters on X to “get out and vote Democrat today.” The post racked up over 12 million views. Hours later, in the wake of the Democratic sweep, Fuentes took credit for the victory. “We did it again” he wrote on Telegram, later calling the phenomenon “the Groyper Effect,” a reference to the nickname given to his followers.
In recent days, Fuentes has claimed the election results are an opportunity for him and his allies on the far-right.
“Let the Democrats rule, see how that goes,” Fuentes said during a livestream last week. “There will come a time when the far left will terrorize people, and they’re going to push all of them into the arms of the right. Who’s going to fight the far left? Only the far-right. This is why we have to take over the right wing now.”
In another livestream last week, Fuentes added a warning to the GOP leadership: “It’s our party now … You need to cooperate with us… Groypers are open for business. It has [to] be America First—and if it’s not, we’ll do it again for the enemy.”
A WIRED review of comments from white supremacist, Christian nationalist, and other far-right groups in the wake of the midterm results shows much of the same. While the groups are uniformly attacking Trump’s failure to prioritize white, Christian American values, they also believe that this sudden shift to the left will result in a backlash that will see more people embrace far-right groups and ideologies.
“Many prominent figures in racist extremist movements have taken to declaring the MAGA movement dead since midterm elections, claiming that the results validate their previous criticisms of the Trump administration and opens new opportunities for their movements to push disaffected voters toward their ideological beliefs,” Jared Holt, senior researcher at Open Measures, tells WIRED.
While some of the Republican party’s extremist candidates were rejected during the elections last week, many did win their elections.
The Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights tracked 535 candidates running in statewide races who were members of at least one far-right Facebook group. The researchers found that of the 476 races that had been called by last Friday, 338 of those candidates were victorious, representing a 71 percent win rate (the vast majority of these races saw GOP incumbents retain their seats). In Florida, for example, 34-year-old citrus farmer Marshall Rawson, who attended the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, easily defeated his Democrat opponent in the state’s 10th District State House race.
Many states also passed ballot measures that could further far-right agendas, including anti-transgender rules, onerous voter ID laws, and anti-immigrant measures.
“Arizona, Colorado, Nebraska, and Washington approved bans on trans athletes in female sports, so girls in Washington State, for instance, will now have to go through a genital exam or pass a DNA test before they can participate in youth sports,” Devin Burghart, executive director with IREHR, said on Friday during a briefing with reporters.
The success of these ballot measures were celebrated by extremists groups as evidence that Americans wanted that the current GOP could not deliver.
The Proud Boys, the street-fighting group that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency operations made largely redundant in recent years, were optimistic following the losses. “The ultimate rebuke of the current Republican establishment was citizens voting them out of office then doing their job for them by passing ballot measures on issues the Republicans should have already handled,” the Cape Fear Proud Boys wrote in their Telegram channel.
“What this signals to me is even in those places where they lost, they’re getting 41-47 percent of the vote [so] there’s still a mass base to try to be mobilized,” Chuck Tanner, research director at IREHR, said during the briefing. “That’s the lesson that some of these groups are taking out of it, is that there’s still that mass base.”
And it is the existence of this base, extremist groups claim, leaves the Republican Party vulnerable to takeover from the inside.
“Now is the time, if you’re a nationalist, to start looking at moving on the Republican Party where you live,” Warren Balogh, a white supremacist from Pittsburgh who attended the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, wrote on his Telegram channel. “And by that I mean, organizing your guys and going in to do a hostile takeover.”
“This may be the best thing that has happened to the Republican party in a half-century,” the Cape Fear Proud Boys declared in a post on Telegram days after the election. “Now you will learn to placate us, or you will continue to fail. Understand this: You’re going to run people we like and you’re going to do what we say.”
But other extremists appear less inclined to wait until the next general election in 2028, preferring a more direct takeover.
“I’m not saying that we will win through democracy, I’m just saying we’ll win,” Joel Webbon, a Christian nationalist pastor said last week in a video posted online after the election. Webbon and fellow far-right pastors, as well as guest speaker and noted conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, are set to meet at a conference in Texas this week where attendees will discuss, in at least one talk, “battle plans” for “Christian nationalists on the right to be able to seize power.”
Experts WIRED spoke to said they have not yet seen any explicit calls for violence from the far-right groups they are tracking, but some figures are already looking ahead of January 3, when Congress is set to certify the midterm election results.
Far-right activist and pardoned January 6 rioter Jake Lang, however, is planning an event in DC on January 3. It is unclear how many people are planning to attend, but one of the Christian nationalist pastors listed by Lang as an official speaker has already said he won’t be speaking.
Lang, who spent last weekend disrupting a cat convention that he thought was a furry convention, did not respond to a request for comment.
The post ‘We Have to Take Over’: Far-Right Extremists Want to Seize Control of the GOP appeared first on Wired.
