The Conservative Old Guard Wakes Up and Smells the GroypersOlder Republicans and professional right-wingers are suddenly recognizing the GOP’s young-Nazi problem.
Sen. John Fetterman had an apparent health scare yesterday, falling during a walk near his home and being briefly hospitalized with injuries to his face. A spokesperson said that Fetterman felt lightheaded and fell due to a “ventricular fibrillation flare-up” and that doctors would “fine-tune his medication regimen.” Fetterman famously suffered a stroke during his 2022 Senate campaign and has a history of heart problems—although the malady he was formerly diagnosed with was the much less serious atrial fibrillation. It’s not totally clear whether the spokesperson yesterday simply misspoke or whether Fetterman is now dealing with much more serious heart problems than previously known. Either way, we’re praying for his health today. Happy Friday.
Out of the Bottleby Andrew Egger In recent weeks, I’ve watched in fascination as many prominent professional conservatives have seemed to realize, in a sudden flash of horror, something that has seemed obvious to me for years: The GOP kids are not alright. For a significant and growing faction of the early-career operatives entering the party ranks, irony-drenched, nihilistic transgressiveness and theatrical bigotry aren’t just considered acceptable—they’re at the heart of politics. For many, the light-bulb moment has been Tucker Carlson’s much-discussed interview this month with white nationalist livestreamer Nick Fuentes, and the bizarre initial decision of Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts to demand the right close ranks around the pair. Sen. Ted Cruz accused Carlson this month of spreading “a poison that is profoundly dangerous,” and said he sees more antisemitism on the right today “than I have in my entire life.” This week, the conservative writer Rod Dreher wrote a forceful denunciation of Fuentes’s “groyper” faction, calling it a “cancer growing fast within the conservative movement” that “will be a complete disaster for Republicans” if not stopped. Dreher cited a jaw-dropping estimate from a young friend in GOP politics: “Between 30 and 40 percent of Republican staffers under the age of 30 are followers of Fuentes.” I don’t know if that number is precisely accurate.¹ But Dreher is undeniably directionally correct: The problem is not a future problem. Fuentes and his ilk have established a professional-Washington beachhead. The groypers and their fellow travelers are already here. It’s hard not to respond to realizations like this with exasperation. Oh, hey, you’re awake—glad you’ve decided to join us! But the more I’ve thought about it, the harder I’ve found it to blame guys like Dreher or Cruz for being slow on the uptake. I used to think professional conservatives’ willful blindness on this stuff was all down to Trump: He was an open bigot embraced and crowned by the party, so fighting bigotry elsewhere in the ranks had become too fraught and complicated to bother with. But there’s a significant generational element here too. Some of this stuff really is just now dawning on older conservative thinkers and politicians. “Most representatives both locally and federally are older and don’t really understand what’s happening with the younger generations,” Mikale Olson, a young conservative writer who is decidedly anti-Fuentes and has been doing some political soul-searching, told me. “They’re not really online that much, and the younger generations aren’t speaking to them as much, so they’re kind of like deer in the headlights with this stuff.” White nationalists and other perverse factions have long hovered on the fringes of GOP politics. But for a long time these older thinkers had—or thought they had—compelling reasons to believe that those elements were being kept out on the fringes. A decade ago, during the rise of what was then still called the alt-right, professional conservatism was still doing an okay job at least trying to police its ranks. Periodically some staffer or other at some organization or other would be fired after they were outed for holding secret Nazi views. Some looked at these stories and said, Sure is alarming that these people keep finding their way into the GOP pipeline. But the professional conservatives could say, not entirely without reason: But we’re kicking them back out again! The system works! The nihilistic energy has only been growing ever since. But when Republicans were out of power in the Biden years, it was easy for professional conservatives to treat it less as an internal problem than as an indictment of the reigning lib culture—a backlash against the schoolmarmish You can’t say that pieties of woke culture. But now here they all find themselves: Republicans are back in power, and the young nihilists have come along for the ride. And it’s suddenly dawning on everyone that Republicans themselves will need to do something about this. There have been some heartbreakingly feeble attempts at rearguard action. During the Heritage Foundation brouhaha, the think tank’s National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism sent a list of “recommendations” to Roberts for how they felt he should respond to this moment. It included a call to “hire a visiting fellow—one who shares mainstream conservative views on Israel, Jews, and Christian Zionists—who would help identify strategies and tools to win Gen Z and beyond.” More power to them, I guess. But it all feels too little, too late. The groyper genie is out of the lamp now; no fresh-faced Gen-Z Heritage visiting fellow is going to stuff it back in. The antisemitism task force has since parted ways with Heritage; Kevin Roberts, meanwhile, is still there. Nick Fuentes and his cohorts are still pumping their sewage into the young Republican right. And the young Republican right is still tuning in.
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Quick HitsPULTE STRIKES AGAIN: Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has carved himself out a substantial B-list role in Trump’s court politics by using his perch to (inappropriately) hunt through the housing records of Trump’s enemies, looking for pretexts to charge them with crimes. Lately, though, his good standing with MAGA has taken a few hits: He’s managed to make an enemy of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and he was the mastermind behind Trump’s endorsement this week of fifty-year-mortgages, a hilariously bad idea that went over like a lead balloon both inside and outside the White House. How to get back on the horse? By going back to what you know works: offering Trump more of his enemies’ scalps. Yesterday, Pulte sent a criminal referral to the Justice Department against California Rep. Eric Swalwell, making the now-familiar accusation that Swalwell committed tax fraud by making false or misleading claims in loan documents. Swalwell scoffed off the referral in a statement. “As the most vocal critic of Donald Trump over the last decade² and as the only person who still has a surviving lawsuit against him, the only thing I am surprised about is that it took him this long to come after me,” he told NBC News, which first reported the story. The congressman may have good reason to feel confident. After all, the comparable fraud case brought against New York Attorney General Letitia James is already running into all sorts of trouble. MASK OFF: How bad are things getting out there in the mass-deportation streets? Even understated lawmakers like Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly—whom no one has ever accused of histrionics—are out here pleading for ICE agents to learn to refuse unlawful orders. Here he was speaking to journalist McKay Coppins on Coppins’s new podcast for the Deseret News:
Read the whole interview here. PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM: The government shutdown is over. Time to brace for the next government shutdown. As Politico notes, congressional leaders have a whole host of thorny spending problems to solve before the next self-imposed funding cliff arrives at the end of January:
How many more of these shocks can the system take? And how long can their biggest policy driver—the Senate’s archaic legislative filibuster—last? Cheap Shots
1 It seems high to me. Fuentes is popular, but he isn’t ubiquitous. Then again, the sort of young nihilistic bigotry he’s come to represent isn’t constrained to people who actively watch Fuentes’s content. 2 Not to kick a guy while he’s down—all solidarity to the Trump enemies Pulte has pretextually accused of crimes—but we can’t help noting that putting himself forward as America’s single most vocal Trump critic is pretty classic Swalwell. You’re a free subscriber to The Bulwark—the largest pro-democracy news and analysis bundle on Substack. For unfettered access to all our newsletters and to access ad-free and member-only shows, become a paying subscriber.We’re going to send you a lot of content—newsletters and alerts for shows so you can read and watch on your schedule. Don’t care for so much email? You can update your personal email preferences as often as you like. To update the list of newsletter or alerts you received from The Bulwark, click here. Having trouble with something related to your account? Check out our constantly-updated FAQ, which likely has an answer for you.
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