In 2016, liberals took the position that Hillary had a 99% of winning. At least subconsciously, wishful thinking seems to have been their bias -- "it can't happen here." Now, in 2026, liberal institutions seem to have woken up to the threat of right-wing populism, and prefer to highlight it (and maybe even exaggerate it).
Even if Fishback has much less than a 10% chance of winning, it is still a better strategy to exaggerate the threat than to ignore it. If you can do this while wearing a smile and enjoying yourself, all the better.
Where "exaggeration" becomes harmful is when it is hysterical. We've all seen the tiktoks of liberals screaming and crying, which is not a winning message. Smugly proclaiming "I told you so" is much more attractive than having a mental breakdown.
The more that we draw attention to Fishback, the more Republican donors are to sit out or flip sides. The more moderate GOP donors we can peel off, the larger the war chest becomes for moderate Democrats. It's a win-win.
When you point out that Fishback is extreme, the net effect is not to make moderate conservatives into extremists -- its to make them more sympathetic to Democrats. This is because moderation is largely a product of personality traits, and individuals would rather switch coalitions than remain "ideologically loyal" to a brand. This will be even more true once the GOP loses its charismatic figurehead in Trump (we already noticed a split in the GOP flare up with the death of the great uniter, Charlie Kirk).
Counterpoint: it's an attention economy and we've had ample demonstration that negative attention counts too. Sometimes counts more - no better way to woo the ingroup than drawing fire from the outgroup. The more you draw attention to Fishback the more attention he gets.
Yes, but... I think a lot of the concern about drawing attention to these guys comes from a prior era when the MSM still controlled attention. If the NYT and WaPo (and Richard) ignore guys like Fishback they'll just get bigger on podcasts and TikTok until they win an election.
What "liberals?" The mainstream is dominated by advocates of central planning, statism and government involvement in every aspect of our lives. Where are these liberals everyone keeps mentioning?
In the USA, 'liberal' usually refers to people on the left who do not advocate socialism. People like yourself who advocate small government tend to be referred to as 'libertarians'.
This is a big confusion between Americans and Europeans.
That's like saying, "in the USA, people think that one plus one equals something other than two." This represents a complete lack of understanding of the subject on even the most basic level.
This is the whole issue. We have a historic crisis of expertise in the field of politics.
One underrated variable in Groyperization are autistic men. Most liberal feminists and liberals do not like autistic men. Women have an abnormal drive to not date them, their literalism is not compatible at all with liberal culture, and they are one of the few 'marginalized groups' that liberals like to mock and bully. The disgust runs deep. In comparison, right-wing Groyper circles are very autistic friendly. Their socially transgressive humor and lack of speech norms is autism friendly. Socially awkward and unsuccessful men are welcomed warmly by these groups. Even the dislike towards women, who are by far the more anti-autism of the two sexes, is autism friendly: the misogyny prevents too many women from joining these groups, which keeps the groups friendly towards autistic men.
This is a bigger problem than it seems. If autistic men were not in these social groups, the Groyper movement would be too low human capital to do anything. There would likely be no Groyper movement at all. You would maybe get Andrew Tate like politicians telling constituents to work out and to be more manly, but this would be the extent of it. The current state of the Groyper movement is illustrative of this: the movement is currently spearheaded by Nick Fuentes, who is clearly more intelligent than the people in his orbit, and who is the type of man that at least seems like he has some autism spectrum style traits.
In a broader sense, the way you fight Groyperization is by creating alternate social spaces catered to young autistic men. Ideally these social spaces should be maximally disagreeable, involve humor that transgresses social norms, and value reasoning based on 'facts and logic'. If the Groyper movement lost its autistic male coalition, it would become a movement of exclusively dumb people and quickly degrade.
Very good comment. I think the problem is our binary political culture means, since they have no place on the left (especially with women becoming the most important bloc over there), the autistic guys all go to the right.
The rationalist community has some of the traits you claim: it does value reasoning based on 'facts and logic', and is somewhat disagreeable. There isn't a lot of transgressive humor, though, and it's failed to gain a significant popular following (though a lot of elite people do follow them at least peripherally). It does have a heck of a lot of autistic men, though.
I don't know if not wanting to date autistic men is that abnormal.
Most autists aren't Einstein geniuses or temporarily embarrassed Bill Gates-es.
If an autistic man is so socially unskilled that he can't get or keep a job then he's failing at securing and providing resources, a universal expectation for males.
You can parse it like this. I view it more simply: most women value social skill and social attunement more than most men, and autistic people are very bad at this, so most women do not like autistic men (or autistic women) very much.
Interesting theory. Is the "autistic male" segment more influential than it has been historically? Perhaps due to increased rates of autism diagnosis, or the fact that the internet gives these guys a megaphone when they would otherwise be staring at their shoes?
Anyways Richard has been engaging with Groyperism under the assumption that it's transparently stupid. But your view suggests it is actually important to refute it on the merits using "facts and logic" to deprive it of its critical autistic male support. On the other hand, what if taking the autistic males out just makes it even stupider?
I think large sections of the internet are by and large hostile to intelligent men with poor social skills. Therefore, intelligent men with poor social skills cluster to the corner of the internet that is not hostile to them. If different internet communities formed that also thought that being a socially maladjusted smart person was cool, like the Groypers do, I think these men would leave the low IQ arguments of the Groypers in favor of this new community.
The Groypers without this subset of intelligent men with poor social skills would be too stupid to be 'Groypers' anymore. They would become a community of people like Sneako and Myron Gaines. These types of influencers are literally too stupid to think of policy proposals at all. They lack the intelligence to even follow political news in the first place in the way a Fuentes does.
The only reason why the 'incel' and the 'Groyper' communities took off in the first place is because they were communities where average-to-above-average-intelligence men with terrible social skills could be high status without having to significantly improve their social skills. There is always a subset of genius men who have terrible social skills, so despite seeming like a minor thing, appealing to this crowd has big political stakes.
"being a socially maladjusted smart person was cool, like the Groypers do"
Interesting, wasn't aware that the Groypers believed that.
If you believe that socially maladjusted smart guys are essential to the Groypers... why aren't these socially maladjusted smart guys able to lead the flock more effectively? Why aren't they able to delete the dumbest aspects of the Groyper platform and replace them with smart stuff?
I've been reading Richard as trying to drive a wedge between old school conservatives and the youth populist rightoids. Maybe a better way to think about it is, he is trying to shame the Nick Fuentes types for embarrassing themselves and acting below their IQ.
Perhaps we need to explain the foundations of western civilization from the ground up in a way that a brilliant but brainfried autistic man can understand, in order to enlist him (and by extension, his less-bright groyper followers) in bolstering those foundations.
There is something weird about smart, socially maladjusted weirdos being the antisemitic ones, when stereotypically it is Jews who are smart and socially maladjusted. Shouldn't these 4chan wackos be natural Jew allies? Is this wave of antisemitism really similar to past waves?
Remember this, Groyper guys: Hitler was a dishonor to the White Race. If Hitler won, he would've depopulated your beloved White homeland (Poland): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost Never Forget.
I think part of it is there's a sort of 'competing for the same niche' aspect to it--Jews have been very effective at producing big-brained 'theories of everything', for both good and ill, at least as far back as Marxism (and if you cite Christianity much further). They also played a big role in cultural Marxism (Adorno, etc.) and feminism (Friedan, Steinem, etc.) and the early civil rights movement. And part of coming to groyperism is rejecting those theories and getting into other weird stuff like Evola. As an analogy, two bears will fight over territory but an eagle has no beef with a bear--they're living in different environments. The groypers are sort of competing with the Jews for the meaning-forming aspects of life, I think.
Hitler was absolutely the worst thing to happen to the white race. He started the biggest war in human history, fought mostly between white people, ended European dominance over the world, and gave it a degree of racial and cultural guilt that it never recovered from. (The Chinese have no problems making movies that celebrate Chinese history.) However, it's more the Jewish element of post-WW2 liberalism that these guys are reacting against, and that was a reaction against Hitler, so Hitler looks attractive to them.
We are protective of Jews and Israel because Jews have high IQs and contribute disproportionately to innovation and society. Autistic guys can't read social subtext so in many cases they literally do not understand this. To them, the support of Jews and Israel seems completely arbitrary.
I mean, that might be your reason, and it makes sense from a eugenic-technophile point of view. But as far as I can tell it had to do with post-WW2 antifascism (everyone was angry at the Nazis for starting a really, really big war) getting naturally ladled into preference for their principal victims. It's been 80 years and WW2 is about as salient as the Thirty Years' War for a lot of people so it just seems pointless.
“Byrone” is funny, you’ve got to admit. It’s like calling him an N without actually calling him an N and also making fun of blacks and their creative naming conventions and everyone else’s cowardly and empty conventions on talking about race.
The humor aspect of the Groypers is underappreciated. Now that the left has the control of culture they've rapidly turned into the uptight side and it's left to the right to make edgy, provocative jokes.
I can remember a friend telling me back in 2016 that democracy will survive Donald Trump after he won the first time. I told her when you don’t hold egregious grifters to any standards of decency (or democracy), you normalize the grift and the ante gets amped up. The next gen will be worse. And here we have it.
Since then, the strategy is to minimize any critique of Trump or call critics “hysterical.” (Thoughtful critics read multiple sources and don’t rely on right wing or left wing echo chambers. Sounding an alarm bell when there’s a fire is not hysteria. It’s good sense. If you dive into the timeline of events that led to the Holocaust, you see that none of the stuff is new).
If recent events are any indicator, the right will continue to worsen, show no amount of self examination and project all of their worst impulses onto the left. Until they grow up, they’ll continue fall into the same pit as the left of refusing to learn from their excesses.
I’m wondering if it will take a third party to create something fresh, new and suited for these remarkable times. I don’t have much hope that we have the courage or moral fiber to save ourselves as unless I’m missing something, it’s not a terribly self reflective electorate. But humans have surprised us before so who knows?
Your second-to-last sentence captures the real divide. Fishback is skeptical of Israel and economically statist, which is the direction younger voters are moving, regardless of party. The education and consumption of low-quality information argument you use to explain his appeal doesn't follow from the evidence you mention. There is more going on than a low-information environment if Fishback gets 80% of the support of the UF College Republicans, while less-credentialed older Republicans back the establishment-supported candidates. The variable that actually predicts Fishback support across every data point you present is age, not education or media literacy. A conservative at UF backing Fishback is not meaningfully different from a progressive at Columbia or NYU backing Mamdani, and information deficits alone do not explain either. Educated voters across generations seem willing to overlook candidate deficits when the candidate aligns with their demographic's priorities. You can call this populism, but that doesn't explain why non-populist candidates with serious character or rhetorical disqualifications, like Jay Jones with his violent, deranged texts or James Talarico with his insane tweet about white-skinned people having a racist virus, also win statewide races without condemnation from their party establishments. Affective polarization across age and ideology fits the pattern you're describing better than an education-driven decline in candidate standards.
Right. Israel's had way too much influence on American policy for the past 50 years or so, and when nobody can afford to buy a house or start a family more inequality's not a winning position.
This is exaggerated. He went down in odds when he started being included in polls because he was polling so badly (not at all like Trump, who was always polling pretty well). It's not impossible he turns this around, surprises happen, but I don't see a reason to buy at 10%. This seems like a desperate attempt to deflect by going "see the right has Mamdani too".
True, but he does have buzz, and does seem representative of Trump-like candidates who might be the future of the party. He's not going to be president tomorrow.
Okay but the fact that a guy with buzz who seems representative of Trump like candidates is doing badly in the polls should make you update in the other direction.
I’m a young Republican in Colorado and I see some of the same trends, though the bigger problem right now are brain-rotted Facebook boomers who aren’t racist but are very conspiratorial. Many moderate/libertarian Republicans are too lazy to participate in politics, so the crazies win by default. If you’re a moderate/libertarian Republican in Colorado who wants to get involved, DM me and I’ll tell you how. If you don’t want to run for office there are many ways to participate and push back against the crazies.
Seems like you're inflating this guy to say I told you so. From your own numbers, we should expect him to get less than 10% of the vote in the election.
"And if the alternative to Groyperism is a more 'moderate' right-wing populism that hates markets anyway, wants to keep all the brown people out, and just refuses to scapegoat Jews like it does every other minority group, then Fishback can perhaps play a role in running the GOP into the ground and helping something better emerge after it goes through a necessary rebuilding."
I'd be careful about accelerationism. Hitler also played a role in running Germany into the ground so it could undergo necessary rebuilding, but the cost was rather high. (Yes, I'm making a Hitler comparison. It's fair game with politicians who take Nazi-adjacent positions.)
Ironically I think the 'moderate' right-wing populism might do some good. We've gone too far towards pure free-marketry and probably need some redistribution, and if shutting the gates to immigration lets the current batch assimilate...well...not a bad thing.
I would like to see more analysis of what has happened to the Republican Party in red southern states.
A lot of commentators act like “the future of the Republican Party” is a fate set primarily by swingy or moderate states, while states where the party is most entrenched tend to be skipped over.
I guess Florida is a mostly red state these days, but it’s also a unique enough place that the sort of Republicans it elects strike me as likely to be cultural outliers. Who are the young Republicans in Alabama most excited about? They’re the sort of voters who will be producing most Republican politicians.
As the US has become less and less White I think it's shifted away from "race mixing is destroying the White race's purity" and more towards "selective race mixing can increase the number of Whites." Look up the Redemption of Ham by Modesto Brocos.
But where do you see "good epistemological practices and knowledge-producing institutions" in the mainstream? All of our mainstream professors and experts are anti-capitalism and anti-fossil fuels, etc. Easily as disconnected from reality as any MAGA character.
As vox Day once said, Pinker is so wrong that the opposite is closer to the truth. Harris is even dumber than Dickie Dawkins, and all of the “Four Horsemen” of atheism have beend handed their hand via Vox DAy’s “The Irrational Atheist”.
Sam Harris doesn't "believe" in free will. Pinker spends days staring at data that shows capitalism = good and still can't bring himself to support capitalism. These people are no smarter than the average MAGA cultist.
But if the people you're referencing, which are mainstream voices, spreading mainstream ideas, were intelligent, then we wouldn't be in the situation we're in, would we?
I applaud RH's calling it right here, but in fairness, I predicted the descent of the Republican Party (my former party) into pure bigotry over a deacde ago when I had a profound realization that a seeming plurality of Republicans in my life believed in Birtherism as gospel.
From Birtherism, it's only a few steps more to Trump worship, and then only a few steps more from that to Jew-hating* fascism. I have been voting consistently blue since 2016.
*In other spaces some may note that I have become extremely critical of Israel as of late, but this is criticism of the current Netanyahu-led government, not the existence of Israel itself or Jews collectively. I have always deplored and opposed antisemitism.
“Conservatives don’t read real news, and neither do young people. So young conservatives represent a place on the Venn diagram where you will find some of the most poorly-informed voters out there. They are the perfect demographic to be taken in by grifters.”
My own feeling on this for a long time has been that young people have a salient stereotype that is explanatory for their political ignorance, but realistically older people are not any better when you look out into the wild.
I am curious of your thoughts on this finding by Pew Research that seems to support this idea; Tucker has one of the oldest audiences (by average age) in all of conservative media.
We already saw the GOP grifter phenomenon in NC in 2024, when nutjob Mark Robinson (the lt. gov) won the Republican nomination for governor with outrageous bigoted statements. He lost the election to a Jewish moderate Democrat, Josh Stein, in a landslide. It remains to be seen whether NC Republicans learned their lesson. Robinson is acting like he wants to run again.
In 2016, liberals took the position that Hillary had a 99% of winning. At least subconsciously, wishful thinking seems to have been their bias -- "it can't happen here." Now, in 2026, liberal institutions seem to have woken up to the threat of right-wing populism, and prefer to highlight it (and maybe even exaggerate it).
Even if Fishback has much less than a 10% chance of winning, it is still a better strategy to exaggerate the threat than to ignore it. If you can do this while wearing a smile and enjoying yourself, all the better.
Where "exaggeration" becomes harmful is when it is hysterical. We've all seen the tiktoks of liberals screaming and crying, which is not a winning message. Smugly proclaiming "I told you so" is much more attractive than having a mental breakdown.
The more that we draw attention to Fishback, the more Republican donors are to sit out or flip sides. The more moderate GOP donors we can peel off, the larger the war chest becomes for moderate Democrats. It's a win-win.
When you point out that Fishback is extreme, the net effect is not to make moderate conservatives into extremists -- its to make them more sympathetic to Democrats. This is because moderation is largely a product of personality traits, and individuals would rather switch coalitions than remain "ideologically loyal" to a brand. This will be even more true once the GOP loses its charismatic figurehead in Trump (we already noticed a split in the GOP flare up with the death of the great uniter, Charlie Kirk).
Counterpoint: it's an attention economy and we've had ample demonstration that negative attention counts too. Sometimes counts more - no better way to woo the ingroup than drawing fire from the outgroup. The more you draw attention to Fishback the more attention he gets.
Yes, but... I think a lot of the concern about drawing attention to these guys comes from a prior era when the MSM still controlled attention. If the NYT and WaPo (and Richard) ignore guys like Fishback they'll just get bigger on podcasts and TikTok until they win an election.
What "liberals?" The mainstream is dominated by advocates of central planning, statism and government involvement in every aspect of our lives. Where are these liberals everyone keeps mentioning?
In the USA, 'liberal' usually refers to people on the left who do not advocate socialism. People like yourself who advocate small government tend to be referred to as 'libertarians'.
This is a big confusion between Americans and Europeans.
That's like saying, "in the USA, people think that one plus one equals something other than two." This represents a complete lack of understanding of the subject on even the most basic level.
This is the whole issue. We have a historic crisis of expertise in the field of politics.
Well, this is certainly depressing.
Richard Hanania: the liberal press we always needed.
Reading that Fishback represents the future of American conservatism was a pretty depressing way to start my day.
One underrated variable in Groyperization are autistic men. Most liberal feminists and liberals do not like autistic men. Women have an abnormal drive to not date them, their literalism is not compatible at all with liberal culture, and they are one of the few 'marginalized groups' that liberals like to mock and bully. The disgust runs deep. In comparison, right-wing Groyper circles are very autistic friendly. Their socially transgressive humor and lack of speech norms is autism friendly. Socially awkward and unsuccessful men are welcomed warmly by these groups. Even the dislike towards women, who are by far the more anti-autism of the two sexes, is autism friendly: the misogyny prevents too many women from joining these groups, which keeps the groups friendly towards autistic men.
This is a bigger problem than it seems. If autistic men were not in these social groups, the Groyper movement would be too low human capital to do anything. There would likely be no Groyper movement at all. You would maybe get Andrew Tate like politicians telling constituents to work out and to be more manly, but this would be the extent of it. The current state of the Groyper movement is illustrative of this: the movement is currently spearheaded by Nick Fuentes, who is clearly more intelligent than the people in his orbit, and who is the type of man that at least seems like he has some autism spectrum style traits.
In a broader sense, the way you fight Groyperization is by creating alternate social spaces catered to young autistic men. Ideally these social spaces should be maximally disagreeable, involve humor that transgresses social norms, and value reasoning based on 'facts and logic'. If the Groyper movement lost its autistic male coalition, it would become a movement of exclusively dumb people and quickly degrade.
Very good comment. I think the problem is our binary political culture means, since they have no place on the left (especially with women becoming the most important bloc over there), the autistic guys all go to the right.
The rationalist community has some of the traits you claim: it does value reasoning based on 'facts and logic', and is somewhat disagreeable. There isn't a lot of transgressive humor, though, and it's failed to gain a significant popular following (though a lot of elite people do follow them at least peripherally). It does have a heck of a lot of autistic men, though.
I don't know if not wanting to date autistic men is that abnormal.
Most autists aren't Einstein geniuses or temporarily embarrassed Bill Gates-es.
If an autistic man is so socially unskilled that he can't get or keep a job then he's failing at securing and providing resources, a universal expectation for males.
You can parse it like this. I view it more simply: most women value social skill and social attunement more than most men, and autistic people are very bad at this, so most women do not like autistic men (or autistic women) very much.
Interesting theory. Is the "autistic male" segment more influential than it has been historically? Perhaps due to increased rates of autism diagnosis, or the fact that the internet gives these guys a megaphone when they would otherwise be staring at their shoes?
Anyways Richard has been engaging with Groyperism under the assumption that it's transparently stupid. But your view suggests it is actually important to refute it on the merits using "facts and logic" to deprive it of its critical autistic male support. On the other hand, what if taking the autistic males out just makes it even stupider?
I think large sections of the internet are by and large hostile to intelligent men with poor social skills. Therefore, intelligent men with poor social skills cluster to the corner of the internet that is not hostile to them. If different internet communities formed that also thought that being a socially maladjusted smart person was cool, like the Groypers do, I think these men would leave the low IQ arguments of the Groypers in favor of this new community.
The Groypers without this subset of intelligent men with poor social skills would be too stupid to be 'Groypers' anymore. They would become a community of people like Sneako and Myron Gaines. These types of influencers are literally too stupid to think of policy proposals at all. They lack the intelligence to even follow political news in the first place in the way a Fuentes does.
The only reason why the 'incel' and the 'Groyper' communities took off in the first place is because they were communities where average-to-above-average-intelligence men with terrible social skills could be high status without having to significantly improve their social skills. There is always a subset of genius men who have terrible social skills, so despite seeming like a minor thing, appealing to this crowd has big political stakes.
"being a socially maladjusted smart person was cool, like the Groypers do"
Interesting, wasn't aware that the Groypers believed that.
If you believe that socially maladjusted smart guys are essential to the Groypers... why aren't these socially maladjusted smart guys able to lead the flock more effectively? Why aren't they able to delete the dumbest aspects of the Groyper platform and replace them with smart stuff?
I've been reading Richard as trying to drive a wedge between old school conservatives and the youth populist rightoids. Maybe a better way to think about it is, he is trying to shame the Nick Fuentes types for embarrassing themselves and acting below their IQ.
Perhaps we need to explain the foundations of western civilization from the ground up in a way that a brilliant but brainfried autistic man can understand, in order to enlist him (and by extension, his less-bright groyper followers) in bolstering those foundations.
There is something weird about smart, socially maladjusted weirdos being the antisemitic ones, when stereotypically it is Jews who are smart and socially maladjusted. Shouldn't these 4chan wackos be natural Jew allies? Is this wave of antisemitism really similar to past waves?
Remember this, Groyper guys: Hitler was a dishonor to the White Race. If Hitler won, he would've depopulated your beloved White homeland (Poland): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost Never Forget.
I've thought about that quite a bit.
I think part of it is there's a sort of 'competing for the same niche' aspect to it--Jews have been very effective at producing big-brained 'theories of everything', for both good and ill, at least as far back as Marxism (and if you cite Christianity much further). They also played a big role in cultural Marxism (Adorno, etc.) and feminism (Friedan, Steinem, etc.) and the early civil rights movement. And part of coming to groyperism is rejecting those theories and getting into other weird stuff like Evola. As an analogy, two bears will fight over territory but an eagle has no beef with a bear--they're living in different environments. The groypers are sort of competing with the Jews for the meaning-forming aspects of life, I think.
Hitler was absolutely the worst thing to happen to the white race. He started the biggest war in human history, fought mostly between white people, ended European dominance over the world, and gave it a degree of racial and cultural guilt that it never recovered from. (The Chinese have no problems making movies that celebrate Chinese history.) However, it's more the Jewish element of post-WW2 liberalism that these guys are reacting against, and that was a reaction against Hitler, so Hitler looks attractive to them.
We are protective of Jews and Israel because Jews have high IQs and contribute disproportionately to innovation and society. Autistic guys can't read social subtext so in many cases they literally do not understand this. To them, the support of Jews and Israel seems completely arbitrary.
I mean, that might be your reason, and it makes sense from a eugenic-technophile point of view. But as far as I can tell it had to do with post-WW2 antifascism (everyone was angry at the Nazis for starting a really, really big war) getting naturally ladled into preference for their principal victims. It's been 80 years and WW2 is about as salient as the Thirty Years' War for a lot of people so it just seems pointless.
“Byrone” is funny, you’ve got to admit. It’s like calling him an N without actually calling him an N and also making fun of blacks and their creative naming conventions and everyone else’s cowardly and empty conventions on talking about race.
It’s incredibly funny if you’re retarded.
Piss piss so dour
coming from a politician? No, no thank you. Honestly we should ban jokes in politics
I would love to see a politician who never even attempts to crack a joke. MAGA seems obsessed with being seen as funny on X.
The name Tyrone originated in Ireland, btw
The humor aspect of the Groypers is underappreciated. Now that the left has the control of culture they've rapidly turned into the uptight side and it's left to the right to make edgy, provocative jokes.
I can remember a friend telling me back in 2016 that democracy will survive Donald Trump after he won the first time. I told her when you don’t hold egregious grifters to any standards of decency (or democracy), you normalize the grift and the ante gets amped up. The next gen will be worse. And here we have it.
Since then, the strategy is to minimize any critique of Trump or call critics “hysterical.” (Thoughtful critics read multiple sources and don’t rely on right wing or left wing echo chambers. Sounding an alarm bell when there’s a fire is not hysteria. It’s good sense. If you dive into the timeline of events that led to the Holocaust, you see that none of the stuff is new).
If recent events are any indicator, the right will continue to worsen, show no amount of self examination and project all of their worst impulses onto the left. Until they grow up, they’ll continue fall into the same pit as the left of refusing to learn from their excesses.
I’m wondering if it will take a third party to create something fresh, new and suited for these remarkable times. I don’t have much hope that we have the courage or moral fiber to save ourselves as unless I’m missing something, it’s not a terribly self reflective electorate. But humans have surprised us before so who knows?
Your second-to-last sentence captures the real divide. Fishback is skeptical of Israel and economically statist, which is the direction younger voters are moving, regardless of party. The education and consumption of low-quality information argument you use to explain his appeal doesn't follow from the evidence you mention. There is more going on than a low-information environment if Fishback gets 80% of the support of the UF College Republicans, while less-credentialed older Republicans back the establishment-supported candidates. The variable that actually predicts Fishback support across every data point you present is age, not education or media literacy. A conservative at UF backing Fishback is not meaningfully different from a progressive at Columbia or NYU backing Mamdani, and information deficits alone do not explain either. Educated voters across generations seem willing to overlook candidate deficits when the candidate aligns with their demographic's priorities. You can call this populism, but that doesn't explain why non-populist candidates with serious character or rhetorical disqualifications, like Jay Jones with his violent, deranged texts or James Talarico with his insane tweet about white-skinned people having a racist virus, also win statewide races without condemnation from their party establishments. Affective polarization across age and ideology fits the pattern you're describing better than an education-driven decline in candidate standards.
Right. Israel's had way too much influence on American policy for the past 50 years or so, and when nobody can afford to buy a house or start a family more inequality's not a winning position.
This is exaggerated. He went down in odds when he started being included in polls because he was polling so badly (not at all like Trump, who was always polling pretty well). It's not impossible he turns this around, surprises happen, but I don't see a reason to buy at 10%. This seems like a desperate attempt to deflect by going "see the right has Mamdani too".
True, but he does have buzz, and does seem representative of Trump-like candidates who might be the future of the party. He's not going to be president tomorrow.
Okay but the fact that a guy with buzz who seems representative of Trump like candidates is doing badly in the polls should make you update in the other direction.
Adjust for lack of previous name recognition, scandals, and upstart status... and no Trump endorsement of course. That's a big one.
I’m a young Republican in Colorado and I see some of the same trends, though the bigger problem right now are brain-rotted Facebook boomers who aren’t racist but are very conspiratorial. Many moderate/libertarian Republicans are too lazy to participate in politics, so the crazies win by default. If you’re a moderate/libertarian Republican in Colorado who wants to get involved, DM me and I’ll tell you how. If you don’t want to run for office there are many ways to participate and push back against the crazies.
Seems like you're inflating this guy to say I told you so. From your own numbers, we should expect him to get less than 10% of the vote in the election.
"And if the alternative to Groyperism is a more 'moderate' right-wing populism that hates markets anyway, wants to keep all the brown people out, and just refuses to scapegoat Jews like it does every other minority group, then Fishback can perhaps play a role in running the GOP into the ground and helping something better emerge after it goes through a necessary rebuilding."
I'd be careful about accelerationism. Hitler also played a role in running Germany into the ground so it could undergo necessary rebuilding, but the cost was rather high. (Yes, I'm making a Hitler comparison. It's fair game with politicians who take Nazi-adjacent positions.)
Ironically I think the 'moderate' right-wing populism might do some good. We've gone too far towards pure free-marketry and probably need some redistribution, and if shutting the gates to immigration lets the current batch assimilate...well...not a bad thing.
I would like to see more analysis of what has happened to the Republican Party in red southern states.
A lot of commentators act like “the future of the Republican Party” is a fate set primarily by swingy or moderate states, while states where the party is most entrenched tend to be skipped over.
I guess Florida is a mostly red state these days, but it’s also a unique enough place that the sort of Republicans it elects strike me as likely to be cultural outliers. Who are the young Republicans in Alabama most excited about? They’re the sort of voters who will be producing most Republican politicians.
James Fishback is mixed race. Yet so many White MAGA guys support these mixed race people as long as they hate Jews
As the US has become less and less White I think it's shifted away from "race mixing is destroying the White race's purity" and more towards "selective race mixing can increase the number of Whites." Look up the Redemption of Ham by Modesto Brocos.
But where do you see "good epistemological practices and knowledge-producing institutions" in the mainstream? All of our mainstream professors and experts are anti-capitalism and anti-fossil fuels, etc. Easily as disconnected from reality as any MAGA character.
Steven Pinker? Sam harris? Mike Israetel? You can't be serious. Not everyone on the left is smart, but every exceptionally smart person is on the left
As vox Day once said, Pinker is so wrong that the opposite is closer to the truth. Harris is even dumber than Dickie Dawkins, and all of the “Four Horsemen” of atheism have beend handed their hand via Vox DAy’s “The Irrational Atheist”.
Chris Langan is anti-left and his IQ is 195-210:
https://ctmucommunity.org/wiki/Chris_Langan_FAQ#What_about_rumors_that_Chris_Langan_cheated_on_his_IQ_test.3F
Vox Day’s IQ is 150, he is a Christian and of the Right. So your claim is false.
Sam Harris doesn't "believe" in free will. Pinker spends days staring at data that shows capitalism = good and still can't bring himself to support capitalism. These people are no smarter than the average MAGA cultist.
Oh, you're not particularly intelligent, I see.
But if the people you're referencing, which are mainstream voices, spreading mainstream ideas, were intelligent, then we wouldn't be in the situation we're in, would we?
Oh your right no one in the world is intelligent because of bad outcomes, I don't think this platform is a good fit for you
Harris wants to shoot religious people dead. He is insane.
I applaud RH's calling it right here, but in fairness, I predicted the descent of the Republican Party (my former party) into pure bigotry over a deacde ago when I had a profound realization that a seeming plurality of Republicans in my life believed in Birtherism as gospel.
From Birtherism, it's only a few steps more to Trump worship, and then only a few steps more from that to Jew-hating* fascism. I have been voting consistently blue since 2016.
*In other spaces some may note that I have become extremely critical of Israel as of late, but this is criticism of the current Netanyahu-led government, not the existence of Israel itself or Jews collectively. I have always deplored and opposed antisemitism.
“Conservatives don’t read real news, and neither do young people. So young conservatives represent a place on the Venn diagram where you will find some of the most poorly-informed voters out there. They are the perfect demographic to be taken in by grifters.”
My own feeling on this for a long time has been that young people have a salient stereotype that is explanatory for their political ignorance, but realistically older people are not any better when you look out into the wild.
I am curious of your thoughts on this finding by Pew Research that seems to support this idea; Tucker has one of the oldest audiences (by average age) in all of conservative media.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/28/how-the-audiences-of-30-major-news-sources-differ-by-age/
We already saw the GOP grifter phenomenon in NC in 2024, when nutjob Mark Robinson (the lt. gov) won the Republican nomination for governor with outrageous bigoted statements. He lost the election to a Jewish moderate Democrat, Josh Stein, in a landslide. It remains to be seen whether NC Republicans learned their lesson. Robinson is acting like he wants to run again.