By Jay Sophalkalyan
Monday, March 30, 2026
Over the past decade, the woke left insisted that
everything was taboo. The Founding Fathers were recast as villains. The
Constitution was treated as a relic of oppression. Even ordinary civic
rituals—the Fourth of July, patriotism, the language of merit—fell under
suspicion. Eventually, many Americans grew weary of the constant denunciations,
and a backlash was inevitable.
Backlash movements, however, rarely stop at restoring
balance. In the vacuum created by the waning of the woke moment, some voices on
the right have embraced the opposite impulse. If the left once declared that
everything was forbidden, the right now behaves as if nothing is. Words once
understood as plainly degrading are deployed for shock value. Historical
horrors become material for irony or provocation. Even ideas that once sat far
outside respectable political discourse—Holocaust revisionism, racial nationalism,
open misogyny—are occasionally waved around as if transgression itself were a
virtue. It is a pendulum swing into another form of cultural decay.
The most troubling place where this shift is visible is
within the ecosystem of right-wing youth political organizations, which are
increasingly shaped by online subcommunities—part meme factory, part grievance
forum. The language, humor, and sensibilities emerging from these spaces were
never designed for persuasion or governance. They thrive on provocation, irony,
and the thrill of violating social norms.
Consider this, for instance. On March 8, the College
Republicans at my alma mater, New York University, posted the following
message for International Women’s Day:
Happy International Women’s Day
to all the right wing foids and e-girls out there! Obviously women being
involved in politics has kinda been a disaster for us. You guys reallyyyy like
voting Democrat. But shoutout to the real ones holding it down for us, love u.
The term foid, a crude contraction of “female
humanoid,” originates in the lexicon of incel forums on platforms such as 4chan
and Reddit, where it is deployed explicitly as a way of stripping women of
personhood. The irony is that the post tries to flatter conservative women
while speaking in a dialect borrowed from communities that openly demean the
entire female sex.
This is not an isolated incident. About a month ago, the
president of NYU College Republicans, Ryan Leonard, met up with
Clavicular, the online alias of Braden Eric Peters. Clavicular is an influencer
who rose to prominence through the “looksmaxxing” manosphere community on
platforms like Kick and TikTok. In his content, women are frequently described as “targets,” or
“slayables”—terms drawn from the same corners of the internet that treat
relationships as a competitive game rather than a human bond. In September
2025, Leonard also hosted Nicolas Kenn De Balinthazy—better known online as Sneako—as
part of an official NYU College Republicans event. Among other things, Sneako
has promoted conspiracy theories about Jewish influence in
politics and media, and has flirted with rhetoric praising figures such as
Hitler or treating Nazism as a subject for provocative commentary.
The point is not that a student political club must limit
itself to speakers who fit comfortably within polite, mainstream consensus.
Political organizations should—and often do—host controversial figures. Yet
controversy alone does not confer seriousness. There remains a meaningful
distinction between inviting thinkers who challenge prevailing orthodoxies and
elevating personalities whose primary currency is provocation.
What these choices reveal is that the cultural reference
points of the American right no longer lie in conservative intellectual
traditions or political theory grounded in argument and debate. Instead, they
stem from a loose constellation of streamers, influencers, and online
commentators whose audiences are predominantly young men navigating an internet
grievance culture organized around attention—earned through spectacle and the
continual escalation of rhetorical transgression.
Furthermore, figures from these spaces are increasingly
finding their way into positions of influence within youth political
organizations themselves. A recent example is Kai
Schwemmer, who was appointed political director of College Republicans of
America in early March. The organization serves as a national umbrella group
that charters and supports College Republican chapters on campuses across the
country.
Schwemmer developed an online following as a streamer who
was once closely tied to the “America First” and groyper movement associated
with white nationalist provocateur Nick Fuentes. Schwemmer appeared in a 2021 video
promoting Fuentes’ “White Boy Summer” tour and was later featured as a “special guest” at Fuentes’ 2022 America First Political
Action Conference. Schwemmer’s appointment immediately drew criticism from
observers across the political spectrum—including many within the broader
conservative movement—who
raised concerns about the message his elevation sends about the direction of
right-wing youth politics.
To be fair, the controversy surrounding Schwemmer’s
comments and affiliations dates back to when he was 18 and 19 years old. In
response to the criticism, he wrote
on X: “My comments in high school and as a teenager should not be taken to
accurately reflect my views or demeanor now. I condemn all forms of hatred,
including antisemitism, obviously. I’m not a groyper. … In the past, I’ve
spoken in ways that were unnecessarily crass or demeaning. I’m conscious of
that fact, and since returning from my service as a missionary, I have made
adjustments to become a better disciple of Christ.”
That explanation may very well be sincere. People do
mature, and political movements should allow space for personal growth.
However, the issue here is not merely one individual’s past statements. The
real question is why the pipeline of youth conservative politics so often draws
from these digital fringe circles in the first place.
When the pool of rising leaders is molded chiefly by
internet notoriety rather than intellectual rigor and institutional judgment,
the result is performative transgression, conspiratorial thinking, and a
constant appetite for outrage. In that sense, the Schwemmer controversy is less
a scandal than a symptom of currents that have begun to surface with unsettling
regularity across right-wing youth political organizations.
In October 2025, Politico reported on a cache of private text messages from leaders of the Young
Republicans, an organization for Republican Party members between the ages of
18 and 40. The messages, exchanged over seven months, revealed a torrent of
racist and hateful remarks circulating in a group chat of roughly a dozen Gen Z
and millennial Republicans.
Defenders of the Young Republicans were quick to frame
the scandal as little more than youthful mischief. The vice president of the
United States, J.D. Vance, struck such a note while appearing on the Charlie
Kirk Show. “The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young
boys,” he remarked. “They tell edgy, offensive jokes. That’s what kids do. And
I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid
joke—a very offensive, stupid joke—is cause to ruin their lives.”
But many of the individuals involved were not teenagers
testing the boundaries of humor. They were adults—some in their late 20s or
30s—holding leadership positions in Republican politics. Peter Giunta, the former president of the New York State
Young Republicans and a vocal supporter of Donald Trump, was among the most
active participants in the group chat. At the time the messages were sent, he
was serving as chief of staff to New York Assemblyman Mike Reilly. In the
thread, Giunta wrote, “I Love Hitler,” and in another message remarked, “If
your pilot is a she and she looks ten shades darker than someone from Sicily,
just end it there. Scream the no no word.”
Other participants contributed similar remarks. William
Hendrix, the vice chair of the Kansas Young Republicans, used variations of a
racial slur more than a dozen times in the chat. Bobby Walker, who at the time
held the position of vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans,
referred to rape as “epic.”
What makes this episode significant is that the behavior
occurred among individuals entrusted with leadership positions in organizations
tasked with cultivating the next generation of conservative activists. A great
number of figures on the right tend to dismiss campus political organizations
as frivolous sideshows. Yet historically, they have been training grounds for
future leadership.
President Calvin Coolidge, for example, was an active member of the
College Republican Club while attending Amherst College from 1891 to 1895. Former House Speaker Paul Ryan was likewise deeply involved
in College Republican politics during his time at Miami University in Ohio, and
his early political engagement included working as an intern with the College
Republican National Committee and later working as an aide to a U.S. senator.
Even former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton began her political life within the
Republican fold. During her freshman year at Wellesley College in 1965, she
served as president of the Wellesley Young Republicans, though she later
changed her political affiliation. Correlation is not causation. Many members
of the College Republicans and Young Republicans never enter public life. But
these organizations have long functioned as launchpads for those who do.
Seen in this light, what may appear today as juvenile
behavior should not be dismissed so easily. The cultural norms that take root
within youth political organizations often become the habits and assumptions
later carried into positions of real political influence within the governing
class.
According to the conservative writer Rod Dreher, a Washington insider—speaking
anecdotally—estimated that “between 30 and 40 percent” of Gen Z staffers
working in official Republican circles are admirers of Nick Fuentes. There is
no hard data to substantiate the claim, but Dreher noted that this impression
surfaced repeatedly among young conservatives living inside that world. Not
every Zoomer who identifies with Fuentes agrees with all of his views, or even
with the way he expresses them. What draws them, Dreher suggests, is his anger,
his theatrical defiance, and his willingness to violate taboos.
When one perceptive young conservative was asked what the
groyper movement actually wants, his answer was telling: “They don’t have any
demands. They just want to tear everything down.”
Whatever many on the left may wish to believe, this
phenomenon cannot be reduced to white supremacy or sexism alone. Some of the
ideology’s most visible agitators do
not even fit those categories. Among them are figures such as Kanye
West—whose song “Heil Hitler” has circulated within this coalition—alongside Myron
Gaines, a Sudanese-American podcast host who has engaged in Holocaust
denial and Nazi apologetics, and Amy Dangerfield, a female cultural commentator
who has argued for repealing the 19th Amendment.
The deeper question, then, is why these circles hold such
appeal for young Americans in the first place. In earlier generations, young
conservatives often found community in churches, local associations, and civic
organizations. Today, by contrast, many encounter politics for the first time
through digital communities, where identity tends to form around shared
grievances and a style of adversarial humor.
For a number of young men, the surrounding cultural
landscape has felt inhospitable from the very beginning. Their formative years
unfolded alongside the rise of a highly moralized strain of identity politics that permeated schools, media, and online
discourse. Frequently, they encountered slogans declaring that “men are trash,”
heard ordinary male competitiveness described as “toxic masculinity,” and
absorbed the message that masculinity itself was implicated in society’s injustices.
Women have unquestionably faced real disadvantages, yet 16-year-old boys can
hardly be expected to accept being cast as inheritors of guilt for problems
they neither caused nor had any meaningful role in sustaining.
At the same time, traditional markers of masculine success—stable careers, marriage,
family formation—have grown more difficult to attain. Online culture magnifies
these pressures by turning social life into a constant ranking system of
attention, attractiveness, and dominance. In such an environment, grievance-oriented
communities offer something emotionally potent: a narrative that explains
humiliation while promising the restoration of dignity and status.
Meanwhile, for some women disillusioned with modern
dating culture or frustrated with progressive gender politics, that narrative
can carry its own appeal. It offers the reassurance of clearly defined roles
and social order—an image of stability that can feel comforting amid a cultural
atmosphere many experience as confusing.
That search for belonging intersects with another,
quieter development: the fading of historical memory. As British podcaster
Konstantin Kisin has observed, “Every generation … only really learns what to
do, how to think and which pitfalls to avoid from the two preceding generations
with which it has direct contact. We don’t learn lessons from history so much
as we learn them from our parents and grandparents.”
For many younger Americans, the defining political
traumas of the 20th century exist only as distant abstractions. The
catastrophes that once gave words like fascism their moral gravity—world
war, genocide, and the fall of democratic societies—no longer occupy the
cultural imagination with the same immediacy. Without deeply ingrained taboos,
the allure of strongman politics can take on a strangely novel quality: an aesthetic
of defiance that promises order, purpose, and decisive action in a political
world many experience as chaotic and humiliating.
Many observers hope that the American right’s
intellectual class—its think tanks, public intellectuals, and political
leaders—will eventually correct the movement’s trajectory before its fringe
elements consume it from within.
In an ideal world, a figure like J.D. Vance could have
played that role. A millennial conservative, Vance’s own story suggests a model
of personal discipline and moral seriousness. As he recounts in Hillbilly Elegy, he grew up amid the social decay of
a fractured family and a struggling Appalachian community. He might easily have
succumbed to the same nihilism that overtook many of this rising generation on
the right were it not for the stabilizing influence of his grandmother, the
discipline instilled by the United States Marine Corps, the intellectual
formation he received in law school, and the personal grounding provided by his
wife, Usha Vance, as well as his religious faith.
Vance could have decisively repudiated the
groyper-adjacent corners of the movement. He could have drawn a clear boundary,
the way Barry Goldwater rejected the excesses of the religious right associated
with the Moral Majority, or Ronald Reagan repeatedly dismissed the conspiratorial politics of the John Birch
Society.
But Vance appears too focused on his political future to risk alienating a considerable segment
of the young Republican base. And while commentators like Ben Shapiro have
recently become more vocal in criticizing these radical tendencies, the
traditional gatekeeping structures that once constrained those tendencies have
eroded. Think tanks and allied media organizations that once disciplined fringe
behavior before it could metastasize into the mainstream no longer play that
role with the same consistency.
In some cases, they have even shown a troubling degree of
tolerance for—if not outright sympathy toward—these more extreme factions. The
extent of that shift was underscored when Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation,
publicly defended Tucker Carlson after he effectively sanitized and elevated
Nick Fuentes’ ideas for a mass audience rather than subjecting them to
sustained scrutiny. Roberts described Carlson as a “close friend” of Heritage
and suggested that engaging Fuentes in this way should not be treated as beyond
the pale.
That breakdown in the traditional gatekeeping structures
has only accelerated the emergence of alternative prestige systems on social
media, in which notoriety itself becomes currency. A young activist can build a
substantial following online and then convert that visibility into a measure of
institutional authority. In other words, even if figures like Vance and Shapiro
were to speak out forcefully against the radical right, there is little reason
to believe their words would meaningfully rein it in.
Nevertheless, the story of conservatism in America has
never been written solely by its loudest voices. Beneath the noise of TikTok
outrage exists a far larger constituency. They are parents, churchgoers, small
business owners, students, and professionals who gravitate toward conservatism
because they believe it offers a philosophy of stability, responsibility, and
ordered liberty. This is the self-silencing majority.
Silence, though, carries consequences of its own, and
history offers ample testimony to this fact. The revolutionary fervor of the
woke left began to exhaust itself because movements animated mainly by
denunciation and disruption rarely survive contact with the practical demands
of governing. The groyper subculture that is
now gaining visibility on the right may well follow a similar trajectory.
But even if it ultimately collapses beneath the weight of its own
contradictions, the damage it leaves behind could linger for years.
That danger is why silence from the broader conservative
public cannot be the default response. If we allow conservative youth
institutions to fall captive to internet nihilism, we will gradually forfeit
the credibility required to lead anything beyond an online audience. At their
best, these institutions function as crucibles of civic responsibility. They
connect politics to the everyday work of community life: organizing volunteer
efforts, supporting local charities, strengthening churches and civic associations,
and helping young people navigate the practical challenges of adulthood. These
works provide moral and social foundations far more promising than
authoritarian aesthetics, racial grievance politics, or the theatrical cruelty
that has become fashionable in certain darker precincts of the internet.
That is because conservatism has never been a creed of
destruction. It has been a tradition devoted to preserving the institutions
that make freedom possible: the rule of law, constitutional government, civil
society. Its greatest thinkers—from Edmund Burke to Russell Kirk—understood that liberty endures only when
citizens exercise discipline over their passions and humility before the
lessons of history.
If this generation of conservatives intends to carry this
inheritance forward, we must decide whether we want to build institutions or
merely burn them for entertainment.
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