The Groypers Are Losing

By Noah Rothman

Friday, November 07, 2025

 

Perhaps it was fatalism that led commentator Matt Yglesias to conclude that “the groypers are winning.” Maybe there was an element of self-satisfaction to it. But Yglesias’s assessment was at least comprehensible.

 

The fracas that Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts ignited last week, when he implicitly defended the presence of racists and antisemites in the Republican coalition by embracing the right-wing podcaster who never met an anti-American figure that he wouldn’t platform, had been a long time coming. Roberts likely concluded that there would be no serious consequences for such recklessness. But he was wrong.

 

The forces that Roberts’s abdication of responsibility awakened are formidable, and they’ve put the right’s most provocative elements on the back foot.

 

Those on the right who “know what time it is” have to be staring quizzically at their watches as they observe the reckoning Roberts faces, after he stood up for Tucker Carlson following his interview with the vile Nick Fuentes. The Heritage president’s defiant posture is gone. Instead, as our reporters chronicled, he has had to endure bitter recriminations from the conservative movement and even within his own building. His latest video, which represents a dramatic backtracking from the first, features Roberts effusively apologizing for daring to suggest that Carlson’s critics are representative of a “venomous coalition” that seeks to “sow division.”

 

But it’s not working. Stalwart fixtures in the conservative ecosystem — members in good standing within the Heritage Foundation’s fold — are abandoning him. And we’re not talking about those who can only muster a word of dissent if their names are not attached to it.

 

Heritage’s antisemitism task force looked like an exsanguinated shell of its former self, with prominent individuals and outside groups running for the exits, before it cut ties entirely with the outfit. It is now an independent entity. “We cannot allow the Conservative movement to be corrupted and destroyed by those consumed with attacking America’s Judeo-Christian heritage and values,” the outfit’s co-chairs wrote.

 

Heritage scholars, fearing no reprisal, are criticizing its leadership without resigning their posts — daring the institution’s leaders to make an example of them and, so far, calling their bluff. “By resigning, we would accomplish nothing,” wrote, for example, Heritage Foundation Senior Legal Fellow Amy Swearer. “We would only manage to hold the wrong person accountable for what, frankly, I can only characterize as an institutional series of horrible, terrible, no-good, very bad self-imposed injuries that we’ve seen.”

 

And the donors are getting cold feet. “I’m waiting to see how things play out,” said one prolific donor who contributes over $500,000 annually to the think tank, “but if Kevin remains as president we will not be giving to Heritage.”

 

What occasioned these blunt warnings? Likely, the degree of backlash from all quarters of the American right to the prospect of allowing a self-described racist and antisemite and his enablers a seat at the Republican table.

 

Obviously, we here at National Review came out strongly against groypers, as did the Wall Street Journal. So, too, has Ben Shapiro. Right-of-center influencers ranging from CNN fixture Scott Jennings to the Babylon Bee mocked and disparaged the vanguard of the incel revolution. So have powerful Republican lawmakers like Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, Mike Johnson, and John Thune, as well as those who seek to curry favor with the MAGA movement, including Florida politicians Rick Scott and Byron Donalds.

 

No one in this cohort achieved their status within mainstream Republican politics by failing to know which way the wind is blowing. They are driven by principle, of course, but they might calibrate their criticism if it jeopardized their influence over the evolution of center-right politics in America. But they’ve encountered no repercussions.

 

How could that be? So many of the signals the Republican political class has been sending over the last several years would lead any rational observer to conclude that the GOP welcomed unsavory elements into the coalition. When the GOP’s most toxic “just asking questions” types enjoy the glow of the limelight and warm receptions across the political spectrum, we can be forgiven for concluding that they know something we don’t.

 

Any such presumption would have been wrong.

 

Maybe because they bought into their own hype about their inevitable ascendency, even the groypers and their allies seem taken aback by the reaction, and they’ve been showing a lot of leg since. It’s a heartening development that casts the Democrats’ spinelessness in confronting the same threat in stark relief.

 

Democratic lawmakers, up to and including Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, bent over backward to flatter the pro-Hamas mobs that violently attacked Democratic headquarters and tore at the emergency fencing around the party’s nominating convention like a swarm of reanimated corpses. Within a week of last year’s Election Day, the Harris campaign was still doing its best to “validate protester concerns” and wield them like a weapon. Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for New York City mayor focused on the cost of living, but the candidate made time for retailing provocative lies about Israel.

 

Mainstream Democrats have trodden lightly because they have ample evidence that the antisemitic hordes within their party’s ranks have political potency. That’s no excuse for their cowardice, and the same confusion had reigned on the right. But the Republican politicians, center-right institutions, and conservative commentators who sought to arrest the rise of a racial anxiety that masquerades as a political philosophy did so courageously.

 

It turns out that there are no political consequences for condemning those who would go to war with the “Christian Zionists” who promote “organized Jewry in America.” Indeed, cultivating associations with what some might call a truly “venomous coalition” invites more obvious political risks than it does rewards.

 

The groypers haven’t definitively lost this epochal fight, but they are not winning it, either. Perhaps the battle has only just begun, but it has been joined. The stakes for the country could not be higher.