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What is the Groyper War? A Guide for Boomers

Why was Donald Trump Jr. prematurely escorted out of a book launch to boos from people wearing MAGA hats? Why did Ben Shapiro make a last minute change to his speech at Stanford to address the Alt-Right and a Holocaust Denying Cookie Analogy? Why are all these guys in MAGA hats asking Charlie Kirk’s Culture War asking aggressive questions like “…how does anal sex help us win the culture war?”

Enter the Groypers

“Groypers”, named after the derivative of the more well known Pepe the Frog Meme, are a loose coalition movement of dissident conservatives, which draws from paleoconservatives, Catholic populations, white identitarians, remnants of the Alt-Right, “new right”, and conservatives otherwise outside of the mainstream.


These individuals started attending large, usually live-streamed conservative speaking events in person, with a first showing on 10/24/19 at TPUSA/Charlie Kirk’s Culture War tour at UNH, and the most well known instance during the same tour at Ohio State University on 10/30/19. During the Question and Answer segments at the end of these talks, individuals of the group seek to heavily populate the Q&A line. They then question the speaker(s) about their grievances, which include opening up dialogue with right-wing individuals outside of the conservative mainstream, which they refer to as “Conservative, Inc.”, reducing immigration to preserve/reverse demographic proportions/trends, reducing the level of spending and military aid to Israel, and the political promotion of their perception of traditional Catholic values, mainly in regard to Family Values and homosexuality.

The goals of these questions are manifold, but include attempting to broaden the range of the accepted conservative movement to include views on the dissident right, to force the speakers to appear hypocritical or contradict their own standards, to create material for clips to be posted to social media, and to promote inquiry by others into their topics of choice.


In the beginning, hosts of these events were entirely unprepared for the barrage of hostile questions of the right, as it is signature of conservative speaking tours to DESTROY socialists and leftists who enter the arena, but it is quite uncommon to receive attacks from those who consider themselves allies of President Trump. Charlie Kirk, as well as Representative Dan Crenshaw, were repeatedly showered with boos after unsatisfactory answers to Groyper questions.

 

If you didn’t know any of this happened, you’re probably not alone, as media reporting has been either absent or inaccurate. However, this dissident right-wing movement is sending reverberations throughout the spectrum of conservative and right wing beliefs, and threatens to blow up the cautious libertarian-conservative alliance that we’ve grown used to in recent years. Most specifically, the current iteration of this movement has been ignited by fans of Nicholas J. Fuentes, host of his online show America First. 
Who?

Enter Nicholas J. Fuentes

Fuentes is a young 20-something avatar of Generation Z (Zoomer) culture. He live-streams Call of Duty, has very “high energy” and is clearly tapped in to meme culture, and much of his lexicon is indecipherable to anyone who is not a young Zoomer.
He also hosts an online political show called America First, almost always in his signature suit.
More concerning, he was present during the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, has appeared in various online videos with alt-right and White Nationalist aligned individuals, and rails against the Jews and demographic change on his show. 



Fuentes’ popularity and interaction has grown rapidly since the start of this movement. 

At the start, his concurrent live viewership numbered in the few thousands. On 11/11, Fuentes’ America First livestream broke a personal record and peaked at 12.5k concurrent viewers on YouTube. On 11/12, Fuentes reached another record, amassing 19.7k concurrent viewers on DLive during his stream of Charlie Kirk’s Culture War event at the University of Florida. This may well have been in part due to the fact that TPUSA has stopped streaming their own events due to the presence of Groypers overwhelming the Q&A’s. 

The three largest targets of Groypings have been Charlie Kirk, Dan Crenshaw, and Ben Shapiro. Shapiro has handled the groypers most consistently successfully, as evidenced by audience cheering in his favor, but has also faced the fewest live questioners, with his calculated preemptive speech at Stanford resulting in zero live questions from Groypers, and only facing two groypers at his second event on 11/13.  Therefore, Groypers detract from his success by claiming that he was only knocking down strawmen of their arguments in absentia. Crenshaw and Kirk have both had lesser, mixed success, with crowds at their events often overwhelmingly cheering in favor of the Groypers. Groypers have also made up the overwhelming majority of those in the Q&A lines at most of their events. TPUSA has stopped live-streaming their speaking events at the same time that these Groypings have started. Q&A was cancelled at Donald Trump Jr.’s book launch, hosted by TPUSA and Kirk. 

“Conservative, Inc.” Strikes Back
On 11/13, the Groypers were dealt a resounding one-two punch by their ideological opponents. First, two Groyper questioners at Ben Shapiro’s talk at Boston University were rhetorically routed by Shapiro to massive audience cheers. Then, a much more combative and energetic Charlie Kirk held his own against a barrage of hostile, but increasingly nervous, Groyper questioners, many of whom became visibly angry, and whose rhetoric failed to win over the crowd. Fuentes himself, over a live-stream of the event, admitted that this was a bad night for the Groypers, and blamed the failure on “WigNats”(White Nationalists who are too extreme and make the less extreme white nationalists look bad) or “plants” (TPUSA hires paid to pretend to be over the top white nationalists in an effort to make the movement look unhinged). 

Though this defeat was clear, it is unlikely that this movement is over, and Fuented indeed vowed to regroup and continue waging his war against “Conservative, Inc.” It will be up to the thought leaders of mainstream Conservatism to mount an effective counterattack, or choose to address the dissidents’ grievances in a more conciliatory manner. 

Watch for more Groypers, and more of Fuentes and his allies. It is not likely that we have seen the last of them. 

2 replies on “What is the Groyper War? A Guide for Boomers”

Hence the quotations around “high energy” haha. It’s an interesting theory that he might have ADHD.

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