Warning: This blog contains offensive language
With the ascension of so many Democratic Socialists; such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Briahna Joy Gray, and Zohran Mandani; Gen Zers in the Democrat Party have announced how they want their party to appear in the post-Trump era.
But where will Gen Z take the MAGA movement once Trump’s second term comes to an end? Will it continue on seamlessly under a chosen successor? Will it warp into something unrecognizable? Or will it simply fracture into several pieces?
The challenge of holding MAGA together post-Trump becomes especially daunting when one considers that it is a movement that not only bridges ideologies - incorporating voters ranging from former Bernie Bros to mainstream conservatives - but generations as well. And what works for one generation will not necessarily work for another. For example, according to exit polls after the last presidential election, support for Trump dropped 20% from Baby Boomer voters (45 - 64) to Gen Z (18 - 29).
A peek at the ratings for Fox News, which was so important to both of Trump’s electoral wins, also tells the story. Although the ratings for the right-leaning network are strong, the median age for its viewers is 69. According to Pew, only 28% of Gen Z get their news from Fox, and while 76% of Republicans ages 65 and older say they trust Fox, only 41% of Gen Z Republicans agree.
Take also as an example one of Trump’s most loyal and influential supporters, Mark Levin. Levin is a traditional conservative with a great legal mind. He’s popular on radio and television, his books are bestsellers, and he has nearly 5 million followers on X.
Yet Levin is a poor choice to influence Gen Z. Levin - like most prominent conservative acolytes such as Victor Davis Hanson, Thomas Sowell, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, and Glenn Beck - is over 60. Also, though his radio audience is massive, Gen Z prefers podcasts. Furthermore, he’s a Trump sycophant who gushes over Trump the way girls gush about Taylor Swift, making him the sort of insider who will not risk losing White House dinner invitations by talking about Epstein or anything else that might reflect poorly on this president.
Worse of all to Gen Z is Levin’s devotion to Israel, which fits his audience but puts him at further at odds with the younger Republicans who are markedly more anti-Israel than their elders.
Much of Gen Z’s unwillingness to support Israel to the degree older folks do is because many are isolationist, having been raised in the shadow of two unpopular wars. Much of it is the result of the perception that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza. Some argue that Israel is trying to push the U.S. into a war with Iran. There may be more to their disdain for Israel than those reasons, however. One can not dismiss the rise of white nationalism in Gen Z or how that impacts how Gen Z’s view of the Jewish state.
According to The Nation,
On high school and college campuses across the country, many young right-wingers are outflanking their MAGA elders in enthusiastic embrace of radically antidemocratic, exclusionary, and bigoted politics. To be sure, most of Gen Z leans liberal. But those who buck the trend cling proudly to their dissident status, doubling down in uncompromising reassertion of the race, gender, and other hierarchies their peers are set on dismantling
The primary leader of many of these “young right-wingers” is not some prominent Republican politician, Fox News host, or conservative academic. It is not President Trump, Vice-President Vance, Governor DeSantis, Mark Levin, or Ben Shapiro. It is a 27-year-old livestreamer who Tucker Carlson called a “weird little gay kid in his basement in Chicago,” Candace Owens calls “a pathological liar,” and Glenn Greenwald praises as “generational talent.”
The person about whom this is referencing is Nick Fuentes, an extremely articulate and popular influencer who uses his large social media platforms - 250K followers on Rumble, 740K followers on X - to promote racism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism.
He is the leader of a dedicated band of white supremacists who call themselves Groypers. One suspects it is these Groypers - named after the Pepe the Frog meme - who dominate the comment section in support of Fuentes on anything that feature their hero. If one reads Groyper posts one will see the acronyms RKD and TND mentioned frequently. ‘RKD” means “rape, kill, die” - as in the loyalty pledge ‘I will RKD for Nick Fuentes.” “TND” simply means “Total Nigger Death.”
The rise of Nick Fuentes portends badly for the future of the MAGA movement. Fuentes has been openly disparaging of both Trump and MAGA. He has even flirted with voting for a progressive - assuming of course the progressive is not a minority, not a woman, and not Jewish.
Trump’s running mate JD Vance is a favorite target of Fuentes. True, there are legitimate reasons to question Vance’s meteoric rise from a Peter Thiel protege to a never-Trumper senator to Trump’s heir apparent. Fuentes to his credit raises these points. But it never takes long for Fuentes to mention the real reason for his contempt for the vice-president.
Here he encourages his followers not to vote Republican if Vance is the nominee. Fuentes compares Vance to California governor Gavin Newsom, the presumptive 2028 Democratic presidential nominee:
At the end of the day who do they (the GOP) field? They field some fat dumbass dork with a brown family. And the Democrats are mogging us. The Democrats can put up an actual white guy with a white family. Why can’t we? I thought we were the party of Patrick Bateman memes and aesthetics and bodybuilders and physique and all the rest of it. Our candidate’s a fat guy with a brown family. The Democrats are fielding a handsome white sociopath with a beautiful white family. Something has gone terribly wrong.“
Fuentes also tweeted “Jeet First Lady? I hope I never see the day”
I did not know what a “jeet” was until I heard Fuentes refer to the Usha Vance Lady as one, but once I saw that it was a word used by him and the Groypers I assumed it was a racial slur used against Indians or South Asians. Sure enough that is exactly what it is.
Like other racists, Fuentes understands that it often to his advantage to mask his race hate. When the subject is African Americans, Fuentes, like other racists, resorts to blaming his disdain on an exaggerated fear of Black crime:
It must suck being one of the good Black people and your race is synonymous with doing something badly. Like if your doing a contracting job you say “Hey, don’t nigger that up,” it means do it really poorly, like you don’t give a shit …
I think Black people are not irredeemable Nobody hates Black people for being Black. If there are people like that I think that's exceedingly rare, and I don’t consider myself one of them. The reason why people have negative attitudes against Black people is because most people’s intersections with them are negative. …
It is true that Black people are - in this day and age unfortunately seem to have very low moral character. It’s not even just the violence although the violence is pretty striking. If you live your life and you know that you are going to be mugged by Black people it kind of colors your opinion or your perception of Black people, wouldn't you say?
If 99% of the carjacking and stabbings and shootings that you see in Chicago are by Black people, when you’re walking down the street late at night guess what you’re looking for - Black people. And you equate that with danger. …
I’m not a bad person. It just seems that every time I encounter you people, for the most part, it’s negative. And sometimes extremely negative, like I could get a gun in my face.
If Black people were super well-behaved we’d be racist in the other direction.
Fuentes fails to mention that he despite his protestations about Blacks, he actually lives in Berwyn, Illinois; a nice suburb with very few Blacks. Fuentes does not live in “nigger hell,” as he calls Chicago.
Fuentes also fails to mention that 60 - 65% of violent crimes against whites like himself are committed by other whites In fact one can easily see from the images released to the public that the would-be assassin who came to Fuentes’ home to kill him was also white.
Fuentes has often denied being a racist as he does here to interviewer Warren Smith But while speaking to Candace Owens, a Black woman, he says “I am a racist.” Furthermore, when Owens essentially asks Fuentes if he believes Blacks are born bad or if the become bad due to circumstances, he argues for the intrinsic inferiority of Blacks.
Well, you know, I think it is more nature than people would like to believe. You know, there's this classic tension of ‘is it nature, is it nurture, is it cultural or is intrinsic? Is it racial?’ And I've always been on the latter side of this among conservatives. Conservatives like to say it’s all culture. Black America is the way it is because of hip-hop music and the Great Society and that kind of stuff. And I think the uncomfortable reality is a big part of it is intrinsic.
So intrinsically inferior are Blacks in Fuentes’ view that he has on more than one occasion falsely claimed that Africans did not possess written language or even the wheel until being introduced to these by Europeans.
The oddest thing about Fuentes’ rise as a white supremacist is that neither he nor his supporters are purely white. His father is half-Mexican, making him the product of either his paternal grandmother or grandfather being a “race-mixer,” as he called JD Vance.
And one of the earliest prominent Groyper supporters is conservative writer Michelle Malkin, an Asian woman married to a Jew. How does she reconcile whatever political agreements she may have with Fuentes with his racism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism?
However Fuente’ strangest bedfellows are the Black Conservatives who are loudly embracing Fuentes’ message. When Fuentes went viral recently for a video in which he portrayed Blacks as lawless immoral thugs, claiming that “you know that everybody thinks if we snapped our fingers and you all disappeared tomorrow, everybody thinks our quality of life would go up,” some Black conservatives rushed to Youtube to amplify his comments.
The Hodgetwins for example used their enormous platform to tell their audience that the inexcusable examples of bad behavior one so easily finds on social media are “genetic” and “hardwired in out DNA.”
Sadly for them, the affection these Black conservative pundits feel toward Fuentes is not always reciprocated. Here he critiques Jason Whitlock and Black conservative commentators in general:
Hey, by the way, you are a token. Hey Jason, you’re a token. You are in conservative media as a Black guy who can confer upon white people the dignity of not being called a ‘racist’ for having their views. That's why you get paid and I don’t. Because I didn't have the privilege of being born Black. I was born white. So there’s a limit on what I can say without being penalized in the so-called ‘free market space of ideas.’ And everybody knows it, Everybody knows it. Everybody knows it. And everybody is sick of it, especially in the conservative space that Blacks have had it easy.
To Fuentes, only the right-leaning Black influencers who explicitly endorse him and his anti-Black rhetoric, such as Myron Gaines and the Hodgetwins, are worthy. The rest are all “Uncle Tom token Blacks.”
I’m kind of done with all the Uncle Toms. In a way I’m done with all the Uncle Toms. I’m done with Jason Whitlock. I’m done with Candace Owens. I’m done with all the Uncle Tom token Blacks. You’re not that smart. You’re not even that conservative. You built your career on a grift that is now dead. You were hired when diversity quotas were a thing. You were hired when white guilt was a thing. I don’t feel white guilt. I never have. DEI is over. So now you’re done. You need to be fired. Like you’re done.
Nick Fuentes denied being a racist to Warren Smith in the interview mentioned earlier.. He also denied being anti-Semitic, arguing that antisemitism is a “made-up word,” despite him repeating the trope that “we have too much Jewish power in America.”
Yet on his own live stream he says this:
There is an occult element at the highest levels of society, and specifically among the Jews. So many of the people who are perpetrating the lies and the destruction on the country they are evildoers. They are people that worship false godsthey arepeopkethat practice magic or rituals or whatever. And more than anything those people need to be when we take power they need to be given the death penalty. Straight up. … This is God’s country. This is Jesus’s country. This is not the domain of atheists or devil-worshippers or perfidious jews. This is Christ country.
Ali Breland recently wrote in The Atlantic, “In 2023, I reported thatconservative organizations at roughly 30 college campuses across the country had been taken over by students aligned with Groypers. Such groups have long helped breedthe next generation of Republican staffers. By infiltrating them, Fuentes is shaping the future of the right. Even if his popularity starts to wane, his politics aren’t going away for a long time.”
I’m optimistic however that Nick Fuentes and his Groyper army are not the future of MAGA or the GOP, but we are in an interesting time. People are condemning Netanyahu and defending Putin. People are condemning Churchill and defending Hitler. A white former porn actor is building a settlement in Arkansas that excludes Blacks, Jews, and homosexuals. People donated over $800,000 to the GoFundMe of a woman who yelled “nigger” at an autistic 5-year-old Black child who stole her applesauce. Hate crimes are on the rise. And X is increasingly reading like a recruitment letter for the KKK. So much of this is coming from right-leaning, white Gen Z men.
If ever the conditions were ripe for the rise of someone like Nick Fuentes and the Groypers, it’s now.