November 15, 2019 - 5:42pm
For some, it seems, you can never be Right-wing enough.
Last weekend, the President’s son, Don Junior, went to UCLA to promote his new book Triggered: How the Left thrives on hate and wants to silence us. Within 20 minutes, he was heckled off the stage, not by liberal students, but by a group of young Right-wing activists known as the Groyper Army — the latest subculture to grow out of the online Right.
Predominantly male, exclusively white and mostly under 22, Groypers have as their mascot an adapted version of Pepe, the original alt-Right icon. They are calling for a “significant inquiry” into what they call ‘Conservatism Inc’ (including movements such as Turning Point) which they feel has sold out to liberals.
Domestically, they are calling for a re-assertion of Christian values to counteract the ‘globohomo’ promotion of ‘degeneracy’ and blame the country’s economic woes on the liberation of women. Women should therefore return “back home“, says Groyper leader Nicholas Fuentes, a hyperactive 22-year-old who gives three-hour long sermons from the “studio” in his basement.
On foreign policy, the Groypers advocate for a ultra-protectionist, ‘America First’ approach to trade, aid (particularly Israel) and, most of all, immigration. Mass migration, they argue, has set America on a course of demographic replacement, which can only be reversed — or at least delayed — by closing the borders.
This notion of ‘demographic realism’ (as Groypers describe it) has invited accusations of white nationalism. Fuentes, a fluent speaker, would refute the label, but sharing platforms with prominent white nationalists such as Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor sends a clear enough message.
It is somehow perfectly 2019 that today’s ‘rebels’ are a group of hyper-reactionary boys yearning for a return to an era that they never lived through. And yet, you can’t help but feel that one explanation for their ‘traditionalist’ worldview lies more in a lack of interaction with the opposite sex than any particular vision of American cultural renaissance.
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