Any mystery over whom the far Right would ultimately blame for last week’s midterm defeat was settled last week by the Christian-nationalist pastor Joel Webbon. The villain, he declared, was not just President Trump, nor even the neoconservatives and Mideast hawks — but the Jews, all of them. Webbon’s opening remarks at the “Christ is King” conference outside Dallas were intended as a manifesto for the post-Trump hard Right. And that really meant, of course, an anti-Jewish diatribe.

“The Jews were the most stiff-necked, rebellious, unbelieving, wicked people to ever live in human history,” Webbon boomed. And, by his telling, Trump had fallen — or always was — in thrall to them. 

For a camp that has long defined itself by its allegiance to Trump and the wider MAGA movement, this turn against the president might seem strange. But the rupture has been nearly two years in the making, and last week’s midterm defeat was its culmination, not its beginning. To the far Right, the Republican defeat was a fitting electoral punishment for an administration that had lost its way a long time ago. Now, those same figures are seeking to launch a hostile takeover of the GOP, replacing MAGA with something harsher and more extreme.

“The problem with Trump is that he’s a 90s liberal milquetoast Democrat,” Webbon tells me. “He didn’t drain the swamp, he became the swamp. He hired the swamp.” Alongside the pastor himself, speakers at his conference include a Who’s Who of the Right-wing underworld: Alex Jones, James Fishback, Buckley Carlson (brother of Tucker), and many others. 

But Webbon and his conference matter much less to the far Right’s future than they would like to think. None of the names on the speaker list command the young audience that will decide where this movement goes. Its real power lies 800 miles north of Dallas.

Broadcasting nightly from a studio in suburban Chicago to his army of online followers, known as Groypers, is Nick Fuentes. He is, despite his Mexican heritage, the country’s foremost white nationalist, who first rose to prominence as an early supporter of Trump. But, in the last two years, he’s become one of the president’s biggest critics, describing the second Trump administration as a self-serving “criminal enterprise.”

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So fed up was Fuentes with Trump that he hailed the subsequent “blunami” as a “total Groyper victory,” having urged his followers to vote for Democrats in the midterms by way of punishing the GOP. Afterward, he said, “We could not have asked for a better outcome. It was an extinction-level event for MAGA and Donald Trump. It needed to be seismic to send a message.”

In another life, Fuentes might have had a fruitful career as a political analyst or even a comedian. His astute observations about the state of the GOP and US politics more broadly have earned him a grudging respect online. The healthy contempt he holds for his own followers has also produced some amusing clips. And he is, unquestionably, very funny. 

But his trollish provocations often bleed into outright race hatred. Fuentes regularly promotes conspiracy theories about Jewish control of American politics, has repeatedly denied or mocked the Holocaust, and has openly praised Hitler and Stalin. He is as comfortable using the N-word as most people are asking a stranger for the time.

These outrages have fueled, not diminished, his popularity. On Election Night, Fuentes ranked second only behind Hasan Piker in livestream viewership, attracting hundreds of thousands of views despite having no channel on Twitch or other mainstream platforms. Over a single stream, he can rake in thousands of dollars, thanking accounts with names such as “Rizzless chud,” “Donkeyteethfag,” and “Fuhrer Fuentes” for their donations.

For obvious reasons, there is no census or polling on the number of active Groypers in America. They maintain a Freemason-like secrecy to “hide their power level,” in part because they have enough self-awareness to recognize that most of their views sit well outside the mainstream, but also because these are predominantly young men who want to feel edgy and countercultural. A shadowy fraternal network of like-minded foot soldiers going to war with the establishment is a lot more transgressive than volunteering at a local GOP event with Mom and Dad.

Their rise has fueled a paranoia in GOP circles about how deep the Groyper infestation runs. Recently, Sen. Ted Cruz warned that the “Groyper problem was real,” explaining that he had struggled to fill a vacancy because half the applicants didn’t agree with his — singularly pro-Israel — Mideast politics. 

There are, of course, plenty of young Americans on the Right who are critical of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians or who simply want Washington to keep out of the Jewish state’s wars. That doesn’t make them Groypers. Still, those who know their way around the modern GOP will tell you that lots of lower-level staffers go beyond mere Israel criticism to embrace Groyperism, at least to some degree.

Earlier this year, the California Republican Party instructed its 58 county parties to refrain from supporting or endorsing candidates aligned with Fuentes or the Groyper movement. Meanwhile, conservative writer Rod Dreher has claimed that 30% to 40% of Gen-Z Republican congressional and administration staffers are followers of Fuentes or “fellow travelers.” 

This figure is likely exaggerated, but there’s little doubt that Fuentes’s ideas are spreading. As Kai Schwemmer, the political director for College Republicans of America, tells me, Fuentes’s “America First” message has struck a chord with many Zoomer conservatives on campus. Schwemmer points to the massive swing among young white men from the GOP to Democrats in the election, claiming that many young Republicans voted blue in protest. “Zoomers who swung Left didn’t do so because they became Democrats,” he says. “They did so because they are disaffected with Republican politics.”

This defeat has opened up a vacuum at the heart of the GOP, and the Groypers are determined to fill it. Their goal is to infiltrate Republican circles at every level, with colleges serving as a key pipeline. “Find your local chapter in Young Republicans or College Republicans,” Fuentes advised on a recent stream. “Show up, but don’t out yourself as a Groyper. Play it cool. Find your fellow Groypers and take over.” In doing so, they hope to — in the words of Fuentes — “demoralize” the GOP establishment and discredit JD Vance (a “manchurian candidate”), so that a dark-horse candidate can emerge.

One man vying to be that dark horse is James Fishback — a slick, bespectacled 31-year-old who has emerged as one of the key figures in the post-Trump America First movement. He first attracted widespread attention with an ultimately unsuccessful bid for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in Florida this year. Fluent in the idiom of the online Right, Fishback married an economically populist platform with a steady stream of anti-Semitic and racist dog whistles. Despite finishing third, he performed well in the state’s university precincts, which he has since parlayed into a nationwide college tour of America and a place on Pastor Webbon’s stage this week.

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Last month, Fishback declared his intention to run for president, despite being too young to hold the office under the Constitution. His proposed workaround is to get tapped as a vice-presidential nominee, serving until he turns 35 in 2030. This, even though a VP faces the same eligibility rules. In recent weeks, he has been road-testing a slogan that could easily pass for an America First manifesto. “MAGA is dead. Young voters want something new,” Fishback tells me. “They want to end the war, start mass deportations, and cut off Israel.”

Fishback, who is facing legal troubles over his earlier activities as a research analyst at a hedge fund, is a polarizing figure in the Groyper space. Some see him as the first explicitly America First candidate to take their ideas into the political arena. Others see him as a chancer, who just two years ago had expressed support for the Jewish state. Most, though, agree that he is inexperienced. “Fishback’s Florida result was actually even less than I had anticipated,” says Schwemmer. “He is an animating political figure, but he lacks executive capability.”

It would be easy to overstate the influence of the Groypers. As things stand, they can’t win over a national electorate. After all, they are largely creatures of the internet, with no institutional backing and no candidate around whom to coalesce (Fishback’s hopes notwithstanding). But the failings of the Trump presidency have supercharged a feeling among young conservatives that the Right has lost its way and abandoned white men. What began as disillusionment with the president has since congealed into anger, and many Zoomers on the Right are seeking a more radical, hard-edged alternative. 

That alternative may not emerge in 2028 or even 2032. But its ideas will very likely continue to pull Republican candidates to the Right, until the distinction between mainstream conservatism and the Groyper worldview becomes increasingly difficult to discern. The Groypers may not have a king — besides Christ, that is — but they could yet become kingmakers.

This week’s GOP midterm convention — the first of its kind in more than 40 years — was supposed to be the big reset for a party hemorrhaging public support amid an unpopular war, rising fuel prices, and a broader cost-of-living crisis. Against this grim backdrop, the gathering, which became known as Trumpapalooza, was a chance for the party to regroup, fire up the base, and wrest back control of a narrative that could derail its electoral hopes in November. 

It ended with the threat of eternal damnation (albeit a jokey one).

Trumpapalooza was meant to remind Republicans why they had put their faith in the president in the first place. But it had almost the opposite effect, drawing attention to just how different the man standing before them today was from the one they knew 10, or even two, years ago. He could still command a crowd with his impressions of Emmanuel Macron and his pronunciation of Lenin as “Len-een.” But beneath the cheers, it became clear that the populist fire that once drove the Trumpist insurgencies of 2016 and 2024 had greatly diminished, if not been extinguished altogether. Young conservatives, in particular, appeared to have all but abandoned the project, leaving behind a graying bunch.

Nearly everyone I spoke to at the convention acknowledged that a generational divide inside the party was emerging. Some dismissed it as a youthful rebellion, while others offered a bleaker diagnosis. They argued that Trump was the final string in the Republican bow, and once that snapped, there was no coming back. He was supposed to be the galvanizing force around which the entire movement was built. Now, he had become the very thing pulling it apart.

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Conventions are rarely known for attracting the young and hip. And Trumpapalooza was no different. Inside this jumbo-sized arena, where every doorway and entrance was festooned with some kind of Trump poster, it looked more like a Caribbean cruise holiday than a political convention. The vast majority of the crowd were retirees, dressed head to toe in their finest MAGA regalia: sequin jackets with “DJT” emblazoned on the back, star-spangled cowboy boots, and T-shirts with Trump’s Georgia mugshot on the front. There was no alcohol, but spirits were so high I thought something had been slipped into their drinks. It was like Glastonbury for boomercons.

On both days, the stadium was slow to fill and never reached full capacity. It did, however, grow lively as familiar faces took to the stage. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas got one of the biggest cheers of the convention when he declared that “Sharia law has no place in America” — a point that was echoed, again and again, by other speakers. Most focused on the twin threat of Islamo-communism, punctuated by a recorded message from Trump intoning, “America must never be a communist country,” between each speech. 

It was like a form of exposure therapy, repeated so many times that it felt more like a mantra than a message. Older attendees lapped it up, but the few young conservatives I spoke to were less impressed. “So far, all I’ve heard is communism, communism, communism, and that Iran must never have a nuclear weapon,” said one. “It’s like their brains have broken.” Another told me that he wasn’t even sure why he came. 

Part of their frustration stemmed from the president’s outright denial that anything was wrong. In his two keynote speeches, Trump struck a jubilant tone, celebrating “the most successful two years, financially and every other way, in the history of the presidency.” But it was clear that very few were buying into this narrative. Even Fox’s Laura Ingraham, a longtime supporter of the president, told Trump that he would be “cruising” if he hadn’t invaded Iran, adding that young men were feeling “demoralized.”

They have every reason to be. The same day Trump declared that Iran had been decimated, Tehran-backed Houthi forces seized a major Red Sea port, potentially giving the group greater control over a key oil-shipping route and threatening to destabilize already-shaky global energy markets. Core inflation also grew last month, further squeezing Americans’ finances at a time when gas and food prices were already rising. No one at the convention wanted to talk about these grim developments — it was a convention, not a town hall, after all — and this was about keeping up appearances. 

Still, it was a telling moment on the first day of the convention that young people appeared more interested in sideline remarks from Groyper-courting James Fishback, who lost the Florida Republican gubernatorial primary to Rep. Byron Donalds last month, than in any of the speeches taking place inside the stadium. As he wandered around the arena, greeting fans and even having a tête-à-tête with the far-Right firebrand Laura Loomer, Fishback was trailed by a phalanx of young Republicans hanging on his every word.

“Guys like James Fishback and Nick Fuentes are guys we have to consider,” Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief adviser, tells me. “Young people are telling older people that they don’t want to hear about legal immigration anymore because legal immigrants are stealing their jobs. They’re not hearing about mass deportations anymore, either. Young people are feeling the brunt of that. They don’t care about the Greater Israel project.” 

This may be an extreme position, but it reflects the anti-establishment sentiment coursing through the young Right and Left. Both camps share a deep hostility toward the party establishment and a desire for a far more radical policy program. One side wants no borders. The other wants a sealed border. One wants to abolish ICE. The other wants to deport millions. One wants to abolish the Senate. The other wants a CEO-monarch. The only point on which the two sides converge is Israel. 

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I asked Sean Spicer, Trump’s former press secretary, if he is concerned by this dynamic. He agreed that young voters had become more populist in the last few years, but it did not pose a major problem for the GOP. “Young voters are very transactional, and they’re not as motivated as seniors,” he says. “If they’re not going to vote Republican, I’d rather they just don’t vote. That’s not great, but it’s not the worst scenario.” 

The problem, though, is that the longer these issues are ignored by the GOP leadership, the more space they create for irresponsible actors to exploit them. Israel is the clearest example. In recent years, an overdue conversation about recalibrating US-Israeli relations has curdled into something far uglier on the Right, with the rise of figures such as Candace Owens, Fuentes, and Fishback. Yet this has prompted no soul-searching among party leaders, who refuse to countenance any kind of debate on the issue. Just last night, RFK Jr. randomly pivoted from health issues to praising the Jewish state as a “bulwark of democracy” and “America’s most critical frontline ally.” It was exactly the kind of rote statement that will be clipped, circulated, and mocked among Zoomer circles.

A little more than 40 years ago, V.S. Naipaul went to the Republican National Convention, also in Dallas. He bemoaned the quality of speeches, complaining that all contained “the same tone, the same personality (or absence of it), the same language: unallusive, cleansed, sterile; nerveless and dead; computer language, programmed sometimes to rise to passion, but getting no higher than copywriter’s glib,” he wrote. “As though, at the heart of this great, man-magnifying occasion, there was a hollow, a vacancy.” 

Today, that vacancy feels deeper than ever. As one young attendee succinctly put it to me: “It’s over, but we’re not allowed to say it’s over.”

Fishback represents a new kind of candidate: a younger version of President Trump, who, like his MAGA role model, understands the value of clickbait, shock value, and information overload. Fishback, however, has even fewer limits, a shorter attention span, and a new crop of populist promises. He can also, due to his youth and novelty, be freshly anti-establishment and offer yet another Republican reboot. And he’s rarely out of the news cycle. Just this weekend, he captured headlines after an arson attempt at his Florida home. 

So far, Fishback’s visibility appears greater online than in real life. He’s polling at anywhere between 5% and 23% and has, as of Jan. 14, raised a paltry $19,000 for his campaign. The Right-tilting pollster Patriot Polling shows the highest overall support for Fishback and indicates that he is leading Donalds in the 18-29 age cohort. If you’ve encountered his “based” and “red-pilled” Zoomer-friendly messaging on X (formerly Twitter), that seems plausible. 

Fishback’s candidacy is, in some ways, a profound indictment of American politics as it is practiced in the opening decades of the 21st century: not just because he trades in racist invective and has ties to open anti-Semites — but because these antics mask a somewhat reasonable populist agenda. Indeed, until recently, Fishback came across as MAGA but not especially radical or unhinged; he has taken a far-Right direction only since deciding to run for governor. In other words, he has concluded that he can’t effectively challenge his party’s pro-business and pro-war orthodoxies without dabbling in online extremism. In his persona, populism and transgression have fully merged. 

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The gubernatorial hopeful, 31, is slender, energetic, and seizes upon every opportunity to refer to himself as a “fourth-generation Floridian” — presumably on his father’s side, since his mother is from Colombia. He’s originally from South Florida, currently lives in the Panhandle, and dropped out of Georgetown at 21 to start his own hedge fund. 

He first gained media attention last year on DOGE’s coattails, following his proposal that Elon Musk create “DOGE Dividends” — i.e., send money saved through gutting government programs directly to citizens as stimulus checks. Before that, he worked as a trader for Greenlight Capital, a New York-based hedge fund, and founded Azoria, an anti-DEI investment firm committed to “free thinking, excellence, and meritocracy,” which he launched at Mar-A-Lago in December 2024. In attendance was Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, who described Fishback as “truly one of the most articulate people I know.” 

Online, the candidate is better known for his controversies than his policies. Fishback associates with Groypers, and for weeks in December, the banner on his homepage on X showed him shaking the hand of a young man wearing Fuentes’s blue-and-white “America First” hat. The Never Trump Substack The Bulwark has anointed Fishback America’s “First Groyper Politician.” And Fuentes himself has good things to say about him, adding that he’d endorse him, but “I don’t want to hurt him.” 

Fishback doesn’t call himself a Groyper, but his racial edgelording is of a piece with Fuentes’s. In addition to his comments about Donalds, he has said Vivek Ramaswamy doesn’t know what a fork is. On Jan. 30, anti-Semitic provocateur Mo Khan posted an image of himself wearing a “Noticer” hoodie, as Fishback smiled, his hand on Khan’s shoulder. (On our depraved algorithms, to “notice” means to uncover the supposed “truth” that Jews run the world.) “Fishback for Florida,” the post’s caption read. A few days later, Fishback quote-tweeted a post about IKEA’s new $5, 20-inch-long hot dog, calling it “goyim nonsense.” (The online Right likes to suggest that unhealthy fast food is engineered by the Jews for non-Jews, often branding it “goyslop.”)

Fishback has also indulged in high-profile online feuds, like one with OnlyFans model Sophie Rain, and another with Ron DeSantis aide Christina Pushaw. Rain has criticized him for his proposed 50% sin tax on the pornographic platform’s creators. “Sophie, pay up. It’s time to give our public school teachers a raise,” Fishback fired back. In Pushaw’s case, Fishback released text messages that she says have ended her political career. She was providing informal advice to Fishback’s campaign, but they had a falling out. Fishback, Pushaw claims, started a rumor that the two were sleeping together; the candidate, in turn, showed that Pushaw had repeatedly called him in a desperate bid, apparently, for him to drop out of the governor’s race and endorse Lieutenant Governor Jay Collins instead. Speaking to the Miami Herald, he accused Pushaw of suffering from “Fishback Derangement Syndrome.” Pushaw wouldn’t speak to me on the record.

Controversy swirls around Fishback offline, as well. He has been accused of having a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old, an accusation that he denies, and of which he was exonerated in court. (The woman who alleges the abuse, Keinah Fort, did not respond to my request for comment.) His former employer, Greenlight Capital, is suing him. The New York-based hedge fund alleges that Fishback, who worked there from 2021 to 2023, misrepresented his title as “head of macro” to promote his own new firm Azoria, and spent more than $37,000 on “extravagant” personal expenses, while claiming inability to pay damages. (Fishback is countersuing). 

Yet all this is in contrast to a bold and sometimes even inspiring vision for Florida. Fishback refers to himself, above all, as an economic populist, and is much more vigilant about the excesses of the free market than the average Republican (and, today, perhaps even the average Democrat). He has vowed to visit every single Florida county, and also plans to visit every Waffle House in the state. 

On policy, he seeks to end Florida’s ever-expanding suburban sprawl, restore the state’s lush citrus groves, and prevent Blackstone and other private-equity firms from buying up homes and thus removing entry-level housing stock from the reach of first-time buyers. (This is a nationwide problem: in the second quarter of 2025, real estate investors had bought up a whopping third of single-family homes, and in many communities, private equity owns up to 20% of homes.) Incredibly rare for a politician on today’s Right wing, he’s an advocate of Amtrak, and one of his very first campaign promises was to bring the Sunset Limited back through the Panhandle and into Miami, a route suspended in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina two decades ago. He also seeks to institute paid maternity leave, and divest from Israel to provide payments to young couples instead. And he promises to prevent the construction of high-energy-consuming and space-occupying AI data centers, and ban foreigners from buying Florida properties — for the latter policy, he heeds the example of Liberal Party-governed Canada. 

I traveled from Gainesville, in Florida’s interior, to St. Augustine, on the coast, to attend a Fishback campaign event in mid-January. The four-lane highway between the two cities passes through tidal marshes and small towns with a single Dollar General, and not much else, on their main strip. As the landscape becomes more urban, it turns into a depressing and monotonous sprawl. This is the struggling Florida Fishback is talking to, the one that exists outside the enclaves of Disney World, Palm Beach, and Miami’s Design District. By contrast, the same weekend I was in the state, Trump was at Mar-A-Lago, attending a ceremony officially naming the strip stretching from the president’s exclusive club to the airport “President Donald J. Trump Boulevard,” in accordance with a bill the state legislature and Gov. DeSantis enacted in June.

Fishback’s St. Augustine event was at a supporter’s home in a middle-class planned community engulfed in the sprawl between I-95 and the city’s picturesque Spanish Colonial old town. The candidate wore a slick suit with an open-collar shirt, and the crowd was mostly middle-aged, intrigued by his more sensible policy proposals but skeptical of his online messaging. He gave a riled-up denunciation of establishment Republicans, which was received positively. On podcasts, Fishback has a notably calm, elevated delivery, whereas here, he was exhilarated and sometimes on the verge of shouting. He made some surprising points for a Republican and far-Right figure, celebrating Zohran Mamdani as a politician who focuses on affordability, for example. Fishback also mentioned that he is the only gubernatorial candidate who speaks fluent Spanish. Back on X, however, he criticizes the existence of Spanish-language media in the state. 

Following the campaign event, I sat down with him at a Starbucks a few minutes away, where he was joined by his father, his girlfriend Francesca Deckert, and a youthful campaign staff, some with visible outlines of nicotine-pouch tins in their pockets. (Deckert herself has been the source of plentiful controversy, and, per Laura Loomer’s digging, seems to have released risqué content under the name “Crypto Barbie.”)

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“To the extent that my policies are controversial,” Fishback tells me, “it’s because they’re upsetting a status quo that has been totally monopolized by establishment Democrats and Republicans.” He explains that his objection to Donalds, who has the endorsement of both Trump and Turning Point Action, is that his opponent wants to “increase dense urban housing,” a problem much more serious, Fishback thinks, than his own race-tinged remarks. On Sophie Rain, he claims not to be saying anything intentionally designed for rage-baiting, but adds, “It’s controversial in the current political and cultural climate to say that young women should aspire to be moms or nurses or lawyers and not aspire to sell photos of their body on the internet.” (Never mind those images that seem to show his own girlfriend, Deckert, sporting only two black nipple pasties.) 

Other comments, he asserts, were just joking around, as the old saw goes. “Vivek’s a friend,” he says, “I’ve known him for years.” (Indeed, in April 2023, he appeared amicably on Ramaswamy’s podcast.) He also mentions a recent friendly interaction with LaShonda Holloway, a black woman running for Congress and a Democrat with whom he agrees on affordability issues. She “didn’t seem too bothered. She had known about the comments [about Donalds]. She had known who I was.”

When I called Fishback out for his association with Fuentes, he denied familiarity with Fuentes’s most viral comments about women, blacks, and the Jews, and added, “I’m not going to allow people from a foreign country or from New York City to slander voters in my state because they watch Nick Fuentes.” 

The odds appear to be stacked against Fishback in Florida, a state with a large libertarian (“Florida Man”) and neocon (“Miami hawk”) contingent and an older population, unlikely to vote for a far-Right Zoomer-coded Millennial. The state is also swinging Democratic, at least in some places and in the short term. Miami just elected its first Democratic mayor in almost 30 years — in large part due to Latinos souring over the Trump administration’s immigration-enforcement policies. On the other hand, Fishback may not care too much about losing Miami and Boca Raton if it means he can get Gen Z and the working class out to polls elsewhere, just as Mamdani simply gave up large swaths of the Upper West Side, Upper East Side, and Tribeca. At around the same time in Mamdani’s campaign last year, the current New York mayor appeared the same or worse off than Fishback does today.

If we want to see the direction in which politics are trending, Fishback’s recent moves are telling. It might be expected that he’d swing to the center now that his name is out there, but instead, he has gone more unhinged. Speaking to a large crowd at the University of Central Florida on Feb. 4, Fishback said that “under no circumstances” would he even visit Israel, and referred to the holiest site in Judaism as “a stupid wall.” The students applauded. He also took a page from the MAHA playbook, arguing that the industrial food provided in public schools is unhealthy and sets students up for failure, and proposing that school cafeterias be run by local small businesses and serve local meat and produce. The crowd of teens and 20-somethings was silent — until he referred to the unhealthy food as “goyslop,” and then the students erupted, exuberantly. What united the crowd was not race, or even really gender (though most were male), but age.

Fishback, who obviously can be reasonable, has concluded that the path to victory is to traffick in irrationality. Love him or hate him, he’s determined, crazy, and, somehow, poised to have a shot.