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.