The Invaders

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, December 05, 2025

 

Something smelled fishy after news broke yesterday that the FBI at last had arrested a suspect in the January 6 pipe-bomb whodunnit and neither of its top two officials immediately hopped onto social media to grandstand about it.

 

If ever there were a moment for Kash Patel and Dan Bongino to take a victory lap, that should have been it. Not only was cracking the case a feather in their professional caps, it satisfied a longstanding outcry by MAGA voters to get to the bottom of that suspiciously unsolved crime. Since 2021, many of them have been convinced by the garbage media they consume that the bomb plot was a “deep state” conspiracy to distract Republicans in Congress from trying to stop the supposed stealing of the 2020 election.

 

One of the people who convinced them was, of course, Dan Bongino.

 

So when an arrest was made and neither he nor Patel rushed to Twitter to say I told you so, one sensed that a major letdown was brewing. The first shoe dropped yesterday afternoon: The suspect, a 30-year-old man from Virginia named Brian Cole, is to all appearances a lone-wolf wacko, not a deep-cover FBI assassin.

 

Then, on Friday morning, the other shoe fell. According to CNN and NBC News, Cole has told FBI agents that he shares Donald Trump’s belief that the 2020 election was rigged.

 

Not every belief is a motive, of course. We may yet learn that the suspect had some inscrutably nutty reason to plant bombs outside Republican and Democratic party headquarters unrelated to his suspicions that Congress was about to bless electoral theft. But the Occam’s razor theory is obvious: Cole was radicalized by the right’s conspiratorial narrative of a stolen Trump victory and acted on it. It wasn’t the “deep state” that drove him to madness, it was the madness of MAGA itself.

 

There are a number of interesting angles to all of this, one of which has to do with the clemency that the president granted to the January 6 insurrectionists on his first day back in office. As the New York Times noted yesterday, Trump’s sweeping proclamation covered all defendants accused or convicted of “offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.” Does that mean Brian Cole is … off the hook?

 

Another is watching Patel and Bongino once again forced to transform themselves from paranoid scourges of “the system” to awkward champions of its integrity. Nothing would ever top the comedy of them having to assure MAGA that Jeffrey Epstein really did kill himself, I thought—until yesterday, when Patel said of the bombing suspect’s arrest with no hint of self-awareness, “When you attack American citizens, when you attack our institutions of legislation, when you attack our nation’s Capitol, you attack the very being of our way of life."

 

Fifteen hundred pardoned insurrectionists, an American president, and millions upon millions of Republican voters disagree, Kash. As do you, I assume, or else you wouldn’t have helped produce the creepy “Justice for All” hymn sung by January 6 convicts that was so popular on the populist vaudeville circuit.

 

What most piqued my curiosity about Cole was his demographic profile, though, in light of the new Manhattan Institute survey of right-wing opinion that made waves earlier this week. The pipe-bomb suspect is young, nonwhite, and conspiratorial, three traits that haven’t traditionally been associated with the GOP—but increasingly are.

 

Coincidentally or not, he fits the description of a “New Entrant” Republican.

 

New Entrants.

 

Broadly speaking, the current GOP coalition consists of two groups, according to the Manhattan Institute report. Roughly two-thirds of the party are “Core Republicans,” loyalists who’ve been voting for Team Red since Trump’s first run in 2016 or earlier. But a sizable minority of 29 percent are “New Entrants,” people who voted Republican for president for the first time only recently.

 

Those groups have very different beliefs.

 

Not about everything. Both strongly support Trump, both favor “peace through strength,” both want to deport illegal immigrants, both overwhelmingly think Western society is too “feminine.” But on practically everything else, the latecomers to the party are conspicuously distinct. And not in a good way: “The … New Entrant bloc is more likely to express tolerance for racist or antisemitic speech, more likely to support political violence, more conspiratorial, and—on core policy questions—considerably more liberal than the party’s traditional base.”

 

One of the splashiest results came when respondents were asked about common conspiracy theories involving six topics: the 2020 election, the September 11 attacks, the moon landing, the Holocaust, whether vaccines cause autism, and whether COVID leaked from a lab. Among Core Republicans, just 11 percent believe in at least five of those six. Among New Entrants, 34 percent do.

 

The gap was even wider on the question of whether political violence is sometimes justified. Core Republicans split 20-80; New Entrants split … 54-46. The newbies are also far more prone to hold prejudiced opinions (or to admit it, at least). Fully 32 percent cop to expressing racist views versus 8 percent in the Core Republican group.

 

Reading that might lead you to assume that New Entrants are a horde of Bircher-type radical reactionaries galvanized by Trump’s ascendance in the GOP. Not so. They’re actually more likely than Core Republicans to support increasing high-skilled immigration and less likely to favor deporting illegals; banning diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives; and fighting for “traditional values.” They’re far more liberal on whether children should be eligible to receive transgender medical procedures, with 49 percent opposed to the practice versus 83 percent of Core Republicans. And they’re much more likely to favor raising taxes over cutting spending, splitting 48-47 on that question compared to 26-71 among longtime party stalwarts.

 

All told, compared to traditional conservatives, they’re a considerably better bet to be kooks, bigots, and, er, progressive. They’re also “younger, more racially diverse, and more likely to have voted for Democratic candidates in the recent past,” in the Manhattan Institute’s words.

 

How do we make sense of a cohort like that?

 

Usurpers.

 

I think the “New Entrants” group is probably three (at least) separate groups in one.

 

One is what we might call affordability voters. These are people who supported the GOP for the first time in the 2024 election because they were crushed by inflation, believed Trump would restore the cost of living circa 2019, and resolved to set aside all of their other policy disagreements with the right toward that end. That’s a big, broad group with a big, broad spectrum of views, from mainstream liberal Democrats to fringe cranks. Go figure that it would prove to be more heterodox about all sorts of issues than dogmatic conservatives are.

 

And go figure that it would be quicker than those conservatives to turn against the GOP for having failed this year to restore the 2019 cost of living. Per the Manhattan Institute poll, 70 percent of Core Republicans will “definitely” vote for the party in next year’s midterms but just 56 percent of New Entrants say the same.

 

A second group is what we might call Kennedy Democrats. These are left-leaning countercultural types who, for various reasons, preferred Team Blue until recently. For an example, look no further than Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who spent his adult life as a member of his father’s party and ran for its presidential nomination briefly last year before going independent, dropping out, and allying with Trump. On balance, RFK seems to prefer liberal policies, but the prospect of having a federal government run by cranks like him proved too tantalizing for him to resist.

 

Millions of other left-wing conspiracy theorists may have felt the same way. For decades the GOP was a symbol of the staid, status-quo American establishment, but by 2024 Trump’s renegade party was the more countercultural of the two. In elevating people like Kennedy, Patel, and Bongino, it didn’t just tolerate kooky paranoiacs who challenged conventional wisdom, it empowered them. That still might not have been enough to pry Kennedy-esque voters loose from the Democratic Party last year had Biden’s economic record been a strong one, but it wasn’t. Ultimately they were seduced by a rare chance to put lunatics in charge of the asylum.

 

The third group is kids, young adults who voted in a presidential election for the first time in 2020 or 2024. Not all New Entrants are converts from the Democratic Party, after all; some are new because they’ve only just aged into the electorate. They grew up during the Trump era, have been weaned on presidential demagoguery and “based” racism in online chud-space, and are now registering those views at the ballot box. With people like them in the newcomer cohort, it’s the opposite of surprising that New Entrants are much more likely than Core Republicans to tolerate prejudice in the right’s coalition, per the Manhattan Institute.

 

It also stands to reason that they’d be less tethered to conservative economic orthodoxy than longtime Republicans are. They’re populists, so they’re instinctively amenable to soaking the rich. Many are nationalists, so they should be more willing to consider redistributive arguments about “the common good.” They’ve watched Trump experiment repeatedly with socialist policies and seen his heir apparent, J.D. Vance, praise far-left politicians like Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani after partnering with Elizabeth Warren in the Senate.

 

That’s not to say that all young voters who backed Trump last fall are right-wing Nick Fuentes groupies. There may be a quasi-Kennedy effect happening here too, in which certain left-leaning bigots ended up voting Republican in 2024 for bottom-line affordability reasons or because they suspected the GOP would be more hospitable to their outré views. (Recall that hostility to Israel motivated some traditionally Democratic voters, weirdly, to support Trump over Kamala Harris.) But the right’s problem here is obviously considerably more homegrown and alarming than the scenario in which the GOP has simply been overrun by surly progressive interlopers.

 

What is to be done about these multifarious New Entrants who’ve invaded the party and are now in the process of “colonizing” it, to borrow Noah Rothman’s term?

 

A crisis of authority.

 

Not a lot, I fear. For two reasons.

 

The first is that the Manhattan Institute’s analysis perfectly reflects the dilemma of the Republican hostage crisis that I’ve prattled on about many times before. In a 50-50 country, where neither party can afford to alienate any part of its coalition because every election is supposedly Flight 93, which group does it make more sense for GOP leaders to cater to policy-wise?

 

The Core Republicans, partisan zombies who’ve been loyally pulling the lever for Team Red for decades in the belief that anything is preferable to being governed by Democrats? Or the New Entrants, who seem to prefer Democratic policies in many respects and might require strong inducements to stick with the GOP, especially after Trump rides off into the sunset?

 

The question answers itself. Republicans can either meet the New Entrants where they are, supplying the kookery, race-baiting, and liberal social policies that various elements of the group favor, or they can frantically try to slap together a new coalition before 2028 with no assurances of success.

 

The second reason has to do with the crisis of authority on the right. “If the Republican Party insists on being the Republican Party, it should summon the gumption to persuade the converts to the Trump movement of the virtues of Republicanism,” Rothman wrote in his National Review piece on the New Entrant problem. That’s a fine idea—but who, precisely, is willing and able to do that?

 

Trump? He cares nothing for the virtues of Republicanism except insofar as they mirror the anti-virtues of Trumpism. The president can’t even rouse himself to say an unkind word about Fuentes when given the opportunity. What his voters believe is of no interest to him as long as they believe in him.

 

Conservative think tanks? Don’t make me laugh.

 

Right-wing media? That’s even more laughable. When Bongino appeared on Fox News last night, Sean Hannity asked him how he reconciled his belief before joining the FBI that the January 6 bomb plot was a government conspiracy with his belief now that Brian Cole did the deed. “Listen, I was paid in the past, Sean, for my opinions,” Bongino replied with shocking candor. “That’s clear, and one day I’ll be back in that space. But that’s not what I’m paid for now.”

 

No one in populist media is being, or will be, paid to promote the virtues of Republicanism. If you want to make big money, you’re better off accusing the staff of Charlie Kirk’s organization of conspiring in his murder or calling the prime minister of Israel the “main enemy” of Western civilization. Exactly the sort of thing, in other words, that New Entrants are clamoring for.

 

Which brings us back to the heir apparent. As Trump’s likely successor as leader of the party, J.D. Vance could theoretically wield real influence in getting newcomers to the party to embrace the virtues of Republicanism. But why would he?

 

A postliberal coalition.

 

The New Entrants are exactly the sort of faction that a next-gen postliberal rock star like the vice president should want to cultivate. They’re more socially liberal than him, it’s safe to say, but their leftish economic tilt and suspicions toward minorities and institutions make them a natural constituency for a nationalist keen to knock over norms that have traditionally governed his party and the country. In fact, Vance is something of a New Entrant himself—not to the GOP, perhaps, but certainly to the MAGA-fied incarnation of it.

 

Remember that J.D. is the guy who mainstreamed the vicious online smear about Haitian migrants in Ohio capturing their neighbors’ pets and eating them. He’s tailor-made for the ugly new wing of his party.

 

And he knows it. Several times recently he’s been given a chance to confront antisemitism on the right—which is considerably more common among younger New Entrants to the party than among Core Republicans—and has ducked each time.

 

When an audience member at a recent Turning Point USA event casually claimed during a Q&A that Jews “openly support the prosecution” of Christians, Vance ignored it. Then, last month, he dodged when asked about the uproar over Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and the Heritage Foundation. He conceded that “debates” over the right’s Overton window should happen but pivoted quickly to ye olde subject-changing “no enemies to the right” defense. “Focus on the enemy—have our debates—but focus on the enemy so that we can win victories that matter for the American people,” he urged the audience.

 

This week NBC News gave him another shot at preaching the virtues of Republicanism. It’s anti-American and anti-Christian to judge someone based on their immutable characteristics, Vance allowed, but “when I talk to young conservatives, I don’t see some simmering antisemitism that’s exploding. … Do I think that the Republican Party is substantially more antisemitic than it was 10 or 15 years ago? Absolutely not.”

 

I’m tempted to say that he’s kidding himself, but really he’s trying to kid everyone else. The electoral math is what it is: The antisemitic contingent of the GOP may be big enough to create headaches for him in a primary and disproportionately includes the sort of countercultural New Entrants who should otherwise be primed to warm up to a statist Republican like Vance. The Great Postliberal Hope will antagonize his party’s invaders only as much as he absolutely needs to in order to protect his viability with swing voters in a general election and not an iota more.

 

Because, in the end, J.D. Vance has no margin for error. Millions of high-turnout college graduates have moved left during the past decade while millions of lower-turnout working-class voters have moved right. That’s a good trade for the GOP if those working-class voters keep showing up in presidential elections and a very, very bad one if they prove to be devoted to Donald Trump personally, not to the Republican Party. Forget about them staying home in 2028: Given their economic preferences, some could plausibly switch back and turn out for Democrats in the next presidential race.

 

Vance needs them. He’ll have to find a way to keep them happy. In a hostage crisis full of moral cowards, the captors hold all the cards.