The following is by James Soriano who does an excellent job of summarizing important points made by Dreher who, though prolix, is turning out good content on this and related topics.
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I link below a rambling essay by Rod Dreher on his visit to Washington, where he had a long conversation with VP Vance in the company of Hungary’s Viktor Orban on the future of Christianity in Europe and other things.
The essay goes into a long digression about the prevalence of Jews in certain walks of life, but at the end Dreher recapitulates the main points of his findings during his Washington visit.
I’ve shortened them and I would like to pass them along because they summarize the state of the civil war now raging in the ranks of conservatives. There is much to be pessimistic about.
1. The Groyper thing is real. It is not a fringe movement. It really has infiltrated young conservative networks.
2. Irrational hatred of Jews (and other races, but especially Jews) is a central core of it.
3. It cannot be negotiated with, because it doesn’t have traditional demands. It wants to burn the whole system down.
4. The gatekeepers of the Right can’t make it go away. They have less power than ever. Dealing with this is going to require great skill and subtlety, and courage.
5. This malign movement didn’t just appear from nowhere. There are within it legitimate grievances. It is primed to believe totalitarian things.
6. The Left got there first. Left-wing radicals have marched through institutions and imposed illiberal, race-based leftist policies. You cannot understand the rise of the Groypers without understanding this first.
7. Conservatives hoped Trump’s anti-woke pushback would restore the meritocratic status quo. The Zoomercons don’t want that. They want revenge.
8. This has the potential to destroy conservatism politically.
9. It poses the risk of wrecking the new, post-MAGA conservatism, whose natural heir is JD Vance.
10. Anti-Semitism is spreading like a virus among religious conservatives of the Zoomer generation. They’re getting it through online influencers. Their pastors and parents are not fighting back; they have lost authority. Some Zoomer trad Catholics are making antisemitism part of their spirituality — this, despite the fact that the Catholic Church explicitly condemns it. The same phenomenon exists among Zoomercon Orthodox and Protestants. This is spiritual poison.
11. The liberal media is going to have a field day with this to distract from the fact that antisemitism is triumphant among progressives. The new face of the Democratic Party is Zohran Mamdani.
12. Conservatives — Jewish, Christian, and agnostic — who support Israel are going to have to think very hard about how to proceed. Support for Israel has collapsed among the young, and it’s not coming back anytime soon.
13. The intra-conservative fight is here, and we can’t avoid it.
What I Saw And Heard In Washington
Thanks for posting this. I read the Dreher post a couple of days ago and have been stewing about this ever since. As you and Greer indicate this is a real force that will not fizzle out. Dealing effectively with it will require careful thought to develop the strategy and means to deal with and counteract the very real underlying grievances. Envy and revenge are powerful forces to overcome.
Bill,
Thank you for posting James’ lucid summary of Dreher’s insightful, but endless, meandering post on the Groyphers. Trudging through it yesterday morning, Capote’s rather too harsh comment on Kerouac’s prose came to mind, “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”
Dreher is certainly right in arguing that this is no passing phenomenon that will be shepherded off to obscurity by “the gatekeepers of the Right.” Since this is the case, it is crucial that we focus on the core beliefs of this worrisome political tendency. In this regard, I note that central to them are the falsehoods and gross distortions about the history of the Second World War proffered by “historian” Darrel Cooper, including, for instance, his claims regarding the timeline and blame for the escalation of the conflict in 1939, with Churchill and not Hitler as the villain; the characterization of Allied bombing as unprovoked and as terrorism; and that the mass killing in the East and the Holocaust were really unintended logistical failures. For your readers who wish to pursue this matter further, refutations of each of these fictions by reputable historians, such as Victor Davis Hanson, Andreas Koureas, Richard M. Langsworth, Andrew Roberts, and Richard Evans can easily be located through an Internet search. In closing, it is important to see that just as the Nazis relied on an illusory and deceitful history of Germany’s defeat in the First World War (“stab in the back” and so on), the Grophers have come up with their own specious rewriting of the past. This does not make their ideology any less dangerous, of course, since in the words of an old Italian saying, “La madre dei cretini é sempre incinta.”
Vito
Indeed, the mother of idiots is always pregnant.
I’d say we can blame so-called ‘liberals,’ i.e., leftists for the mothering of this right-wing Groyper aberration. Their “long march through the institutions” has led to the destruction of public and private education, the lowering of standards, the gutting of curricula, e.g. elimination of Civics courses. The four generations starting with the Boomers are poorly educated. They don’t know history. You Vito, are a Boomer too, but you just barely made the cut. 1946-1964.
By the way, the expression ‘college-educated’ has become a joke. Indoctrination in a grade-inflated leftist seminary does not count as education in any serious sense. Could AOC or Kamala or Jasmine Crockett coherently explain the Electoral College and its rationale.?
Tech developments play a large role too: internet venues in which the like-minded can find and reinforce one another in their aberrant views.
Even the brilliant Elon Musk has gone off the rails with his espousal of an absolute right to free speech. I don’t believe that this right is absolute. https://williamfvallicella.substack.com/p/free-speech-absolutism?utm_source=publication-search
I took another look at my summary of Dreher and decided that it could be an essay. I put some more work into it and The American Thinker website posted it today under, “Rod Dreher’s Check List on Groyperism.”
In my piece, I didn’t make any comments of my own, but I have two.
Both the Dems and the Republicans are being challenged by their fringes, but the debate is only on the Right. Many conservatives are alarmed by what they see among the Zoomers, but I don’t get the impression that many Dems are disturbed by the successes of farther left insurgents.
I used to think that anti-Semitism in the US finds was something that came from the left side of the spectrum. No more. It has spread and it seeks to make itself a respectable point of view. As Dreher would say, it is spiritual poison.
If anyone’s interested, here’s my summary on the American Thinker:
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/11/rod_dreher_s_checklist_on_groyperism.html
Your first comment is spot on: the debate is only on the Right. It is telling that 206 Democrats voted to keep the Schumer Shut Down in place. The irresponsible Dem bastards are lucky there wasn’t a major commercial aviation disaster because of the absentee traffic controllers!
Bill,
I was born in late 1945, in the final days of the Silent Generation (1928-45), missing the Boomer designation by 20 days. I am closing in on Methuselah.
Vito
You’ve got a ways to go, if M. lived to 969.
I won’t speculate whether you have more Boomer traits than Silent Gen traits. Just as chronological age and biological age do not coincide, neither do generational cohort-membership and the cultural-trait syndrome attached to a generational cohort.
Bill,
True.
Vito
Everyone,
As I’m a 35-year-old millennial and thus fairly plugged-in with the “manosphere,” I’ll say this tendency toward conspiracism and its natural sequel of anti-semitism is very real. I might have fallen prey to it in my 20s if I hadn’t been reading Bill’s and Ed Feser’s blogs that have
helped inoculate me against it. So thank you.
This is what I feared when earlier in the summer, after Trump bombed Iran, I wrote on one of your posts, Bill, that I thought the paleocons and Bunchananites were more of a threat to the right than the neocons are. They intone that no one should “punch to the right,” but that seems like a glib slogan and an excuse to punch everyone else in the MAGA tent for not being sufficiently to the right of their liking before crying foul and that they’re being “canceled” when what they’re doing is really sleazy and outrageous. To be clear, this debacle has roots in Charlie Kirk’s death when mere hours after he expired, you could see tweets on Twitter baselessly claiming that Ben Shapiro had Charlie Kirk killed to take over TurningPoint USA. This then evolved into Mossad “neutralizing” him because Kirk was becoming more “based” about Israel to the FBI covering it up and even insinuations that Erika Kirk and TurningPoint USA were involved. This nonsense was being fomented for next two months until Tucker had Fuentes on his show, which was the straw that broke the camel’s, especially after 2 years of rising anti-semitism since Oct. 7.
With that said, I’m not sure you all quite appreciate that zoomer angst here is generational and patricidal. They blame the boomers for their plight and view the hagiography about Churchill, WW2, the Holocaust as ideological myths used to justify the neo-liberal order that so oppresses them and has destroyed their prospects of enjoying the American Dream. Dismissing them as mere ignoramuses will just feed into this paranoia. Their concerns about Jewish influence and our relationship with Israel has to be handled, as well as their other grievances, with tact and addressed seriously for the sake of right-wing politics in the West.
As for Fuentes himself: I’ll share what Christopher Rufo and Carl Benjamin (he’s older than me, but we both are parts of this New Right) on the situation. The moral of the story is that you can’t just gatekeep what he represents out of right-wing politics. It will make him more appealing the more he’s treated as forbidden fruit because it seems all received wisdom of the last 80 years to 500 or even 2,000 years (depends if you’re talking to a
white nationalist neo-pagan) is suspect.
https://christopherrufo.com/p/what-everyone-misses-about-nick-fuentes
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NVnCvGdDFOw&t=69s&pp=ygUaY2FybCBiZW5qYW1pbiBuaWNrIGZ1ZW50ZXM%3D
Ben, I’m not as plugged in as you are so thanks for informing me of the ugly speculations you mention in your second paragraph. I am told that Candace Owens too has gone off the deep end. I haven’t read her recent stuff so I still have a high opinion of her from a few years back.
I do appreciate that Zoomer angst is generational. But patricidal too? I’ll take your word for it. To follow the discussions of these know-nothings would be a waste of my time. And surely they are, most of them, know-nothings who haven’t studied history. (I have read upwards of 50 books about Germany 1933-1945. ) And they seem incapable of critical thinking. Their narcissism and presentism is also appalling. Christopher Lasch’s *The Culture of Narcissism* stands up well after all these years, but the presentism of the know-nothings among the Zoomers insulates them from learning anything.
They do have a good reason to be angry, however: they were cheated by the ‘educational’ institutions they went through. This is why I said, above, that we can blame leftists [of the ’60s and earlier all the way back to Antonio Gramsci and on into the 19th cent] for the mothering of this right-wing Groyper aberration. The leftists’ “long march through the institutions” has led to the destruction of public and private education, the lowering of standards, the gutting of curricula, e.g. elimination of Civics courses.
When I read Tucker’s ‘softball interview’ of Fuentes, I found myself agreeing with some of what the latter said. One of the things he said is that criticizing Jews and/or Israel is not, by itself, antisemitic. I fully agree. Years ago, Pat Buchanan opined that the U.S. Congress was “Israeli-occupied territory.” (I quote from memory.) A lot of people at that time called Buchanan’s remark antisemitic. It was no such thing. The man was simply voicing an opinion. It was no more antisemitic than if I state that, in my opinion, many Jews are often obnoxious in discussions: they talk too fast and bury you in a tsunami of verbiage, not allowing you to get a word in edgewise. There is of course a cultural explanation for their behavior which, in part, excuses it. But there is nothing antisemitic in my opinion. I stand with the Jews and for the state of Israel. The Jews have made contributions to high culture out of all proportion to their numbers — which is part of the reason that Muslims hate them. The inferior always hate the superior.
Other related examples: I am on record as saying that the political judgment of men as a group is superior to that of women as a group. Is that a sexist thing to say? Not at all: it’s true. Or suppose I state the fact that blacks as a group are more criminally prone than whites as a group. There is nothing racist about that.
But I’m a fair and balanced, reasonable and sane, guy. So I do not infer from the political superiority of men over women that women should not be allowed the franchise, as some intelligent friends to my right think. I won’t name names, but they are free to pipe up here if they so desire.
Another thing Fuentes said that is true is that the Antifa thugs who interfere with ICE round-ups have to be decisively defeated with appropriately severe methods, otherwise the civil disruption will go on indefinitely. I think he used the word ‘smashed.’
The fundamental question here is a very difficult one: Are there some positions that ought not be discussed lest they be legitimized? If so, which positions? Mark Levin would say that the Groypers and their ideas should not be mentioned at all, lest they be legitimized, i.e., made to appear worthy of discussion. Others put more of an emphasis on open inquiry and free debate. Tucker Carlson would take that line.
Bill,
I’ve never been fond of Candace Owens, but, yes, she’s gone off the deep end and is probably the worst household name for this “noticing” and “just asking questions” demagoguery. Here’s an example for you if you’re curious: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/news/video-3536507/Candace-Owens-accuses-Trump-Admin-Charlie-Kirk-assassination.html. Mind you, Owens has been careless enough with her rhetoric that the Macrons saw fit to sue her for defamation concerning her claims that Brigitte is really a man. That’s the kind of content Owens is producing nowadays. She’s become a fully-fledged merchant of suspicion and innuendo in a time when social stability and institutional trust are plummeting.
I also share your observation that zoomers are narcissistic and presentist. They seem incapable of understanding the last 80 years and the figures in it on their own terms if they don’t fit neatly into narratives that are politically convenient for the present. And I agree: They have plausible reasons to be angry. Hell, I’m angry about my future life prospects and what’s in store for me. But my grandparents survived WW2 and the surrounding ethnic predations of the Nazis, Russians and Serbs, came to this country with basically nothing but the clothes on their backs and without knowing a word of English. Yet, they made a living for themselves and produced an American family out of it. Things now are far from great, but they could be worse, and even so, people can eventually thrive in spite of it. It would dishonor them for me to give into fatalism and Nietzschean ressentiment that is treated as virtuous now on the internet. There is always something you can be doing to improve your situation, and it probably involves not being chronically online, which the groypers and the New Right certainly are.
I listened to the entire interview between Tucker and Fuentes. My impression is that Fuentes was on his best behavior, but I think he is a bit of fabulist in how he, an earnest young conservative, was canceled by the Daily Wire for “just asking questions” about Israel and the US’s relationship during the first iteration of his show. I say this primarily because the first video of Fuentes I saw was him with a gaggle of his groypers ambushing Ben Shapiro and his family in Florida for a sort of gotcha moment several years ago, and I never felt compelled to go back. So I can’t say with confidence if he has moderated since then. Whatever happened between him and Ben Shapiro and his affiliates, Fuentes clearly held a grudge that seemed to go beyond beyond the norms of professional disagreement between podcasters, shock-jocks and political influencers.
To be fair, though, Tucker did substantially push back against Fuentes’ identity politics. To say he was a door mat is an oversimplification. I also wholeheartedly agreed with Fuentes’ take on porn and, yes, on immigration enforcement. What is the real Fuentes of today, though, I can’t definitively say. I would wager, knowing what I see on Substack every day and some choice clips of his show of late, that he’s probably far less manicured and tamed than that interview when it’s just him and his audience.
I’m not well-informed enough to know if Pat Buchanan is an anti-semite, but I don’t rule it out either. What I will contend is that there are enough of his followers who fixate on shadowy “Zionist,” “Israeli” or “Jewish” “control over American politics” to such a degree these last two years that they feel compelled to aggressively excise it at the risk of fracturing Trump’s coalition when rightwingers of all stripes are denounced uniformly as “Nazis” and “fascists,” which also seems to be the common motivation when the Charlie Kirks of the world are shot. As last week’s elections showed, MAGA’s political position is not so secure to recklessly alienate erstwhile allies, or at least co-belligerents, when significant sections of the left is more or less ok with all our brutal murders. So, I think it’s more than fair to question the prudence of forcing this confrontation now and conclude something ideological must be going on, which opens the possibility of it being anti-semitic. I agree that in principle criticizing Jews or the state of Israel itself does not make someone anti-semitic. But the intensity of and frequency by which they do it, the relative paucity of their reasons, and lack of consistency of applying them to everyone strike me that this is not merely a good-faith effort to reorient our foreign policy to be more to our interests. Maybe that’s because I think whatever is unhealthy about the US-Israel relations, it’s a relatively small issue upon which reasonable parties may disagree about if and to what extent we should recalibrate with the Israelis that is not too dissimilar to how Trump is renegotiating with NATO countries when it comes to the security of Europe. It’s not the immediate existential crisis that it’s treated as in the “manosphere” and the right-wing media ecosystem, where you’ll find sordid narratives about the Rothchilds, Churchill’s “financiers,” the Scofield Bible, dispensationalism and Christian Zionism, Epstein as Mossad asset, AIPAC, Trump being in thrall to Netanyahu, Christianity itself being a subversive and foreign semitic faith that is not native religion of the West, and various out-of-context videos that take the inherent devastation and horror of the urban Gaza war as tantamount proof of IDF “genocide” — basically Jewish omnipotence, omnipresence, and omnimalevolence.
That isn’t to to say Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro and others have responded wisely either, but this comes after the now seemingly forgotten Einsatzgruppen-style barbarism of Oct. 7, the illegal disruptions and intimidation of American Jews on campus, and a world that seemingly has lost the ability to think soberly about the Jews. They’re wrong to denounce this fever as idiotic and evil, though it is. I see no course but to largely let it run its course and strategically refute certain specious claims when the opportunity arises. This also means presenting an America-First and practical case why maintaining good relations with Israel, namely because it enables us, God-willing, to deter a hot conflict over Taiwan with the CCP. People’s memory is short. When our politics moves on, especially now that the Gaza War seems to be over (for now), I expect this fad of the digital mob to diminish in good time the same way that internet New Atheism did.
My comments on the Soriano list:
“1) The Groyper thing is real. It is not a fringe movement. It really has infiltrated young conservative networks.”
As I understand it,”Groypers” are followers of Fuentes.
Groypers constitute a fractional number of the disenfranchised (mostly white male) “Right”).
The article (unsurprisingly) misses the point. Entirely.
Fuentes is a Gatekeeper: he is bought-and-paid-for.
Groypers are apples, and the tree is nearby.
Those whom the Left are decrying , constitute the rising tide of politically, historically, and (to some extent) philosophically conversant youth, who are tired of living in the 2025 version of ’33 Weimar. And they revile the label, “Conservative”.
So-called “Conservatives” have conserved nothing. Except, perhaps, their senatorial and congressional sinecures.
“2) Irrational hatred of Jews (and other races, but especially Jews) is a central core of it.”
Category error: “Irrational” and “hatred” refer to domains as different as “length” and “color”.
But that is as may be: these guys don’t *hate* the jews – they just notice certain historical patterns, and then see those selfsame patterns being instantiated again, now. but, because the jews have a stranglehold on most of the mainstream media, “noticing” becomes “hate”.
“3) It cannot be negotiated with, because it doesn’t have traditional demands. It wants to burn the whole system down.”
The absence of self-awareness takes one’s breath away.
The putative “Left” has done nothing but force homosexuality, irreligion, transgenderism, pederasty, feminism, etc., down everyone’s throats, for decades. All opposition has been declared heretical, and many have been burned at the proverbial stake for it.
The “Right” hasn’t burned the system down: the Right is TRYING TO PUT THE FIRE OUT.
…and with that, I have said all I care to say.