…can the real party be far behind? An excerpt:
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….
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…..
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"….
[O]n 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….
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'….
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….
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