In recent days, like most of you, I have been following the Groyper Wars with growing interest.
It’s true that the movement is a little puerile and Zoomerish, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s also true that there is a lot of “anti-Jewish” sentiment involved (I am trying hard not to use the term “anti-Semitic,” which was sort of ruined when a largely European group of cultural Semites moved to the Middle East and started fighting racial Semites).
This anti-Jewish thing is a little more problematic of course, but, as long as you steer away from Nazi-esque idiocies of the sort that people like Richard Spencer and Greg Johnson like to indulge in, a reasonable case can be made for saying negative things about Jewish power too. Although the sad fate of the Alt-Right should be a warning as to what a slippery slope this can be.
The ground zero of the Groyper movement is Nick Fuentes, a slick, fast-talking, quick witted young Zoomer of partly Hispanic background who seems—at least so far—to have his head screwed on.
In recent days Fuentes has been orchestrating a revolution against Conservative Inc., which sometimes likes to use billionaire donor money to put on “free speech” and student outreach events.
Fuentes, in alliance with people like Patrick Casey of the American Identity Movement (formerly Identity Europa), has been weaponising his Groyper following to attend these events and ask awkward but quite legitimate questions on Conservatism Inc’s lax attitude to immigration, its promotion of homosexuality, and its support of Israeli interests.
Fuentes advises his followers to be assertive but not aggressive, to be polite and personable, but to resist being shunted aside, shut down, or otherwise ignored.
This is excellent strategy.
To use military metaphors, this is basically advancing—but not too far into dangerous enemy territory—and then setting up strong defensive positions and forcing the enemy to attack you. This is exactly where the Groyper Wars stand now, with Conservatism Inc shredding its free speech credibility with its own supporters (as opposed to donors) by attempting to stop Groypers asking perfectly fair questions. There are even accounts of anyone in a MAGA cap or holding a crucifix being filtered out of the queues to ask questions to the speakers at these events.
Also, there have been attempts to discredit Fuentes and the Groypers as “anti-Semitic,” “racist” “bigots,” and all the other made-up “shut-up” words that were deployed against the Alt-Right.
Sure, there is plenty of anti-Jewish feeling among the Groypers, and some of it, no doubt, is even of the nasty Nazi type. It would be hard to keep it out of such a decentralised movement. But Fuentes and Co., whatever their true feelings about the Jews—and I suspect these are mainly a mixture of mild irritation coupled with a desire to troll the false pieties of what they see as the Holocaust Cult—don’t even need to go there.
All they need to do, and are clearly doing, is to occupy perfectly reasonable “everyman” positions, like “Why does America even need to fund and fight the wars of another country?” and “So what if we don’t care about some old European historical event or get the facts and numbers wrong?”
The reason they can provoke such a potent response with such milquetoast critiques is because organised Jewish power in America—AIPAC, SPLC, ADL, etc.—has greatly over expanded to the point where it is at full stretch and therefore off balance. It has gone from an earlier, perfectly legitimate position of fighting against crude hatred of Jews in America to an illegitimate one of exerting undue and exaggerated influence on America’s culture and politics. In so doing it has allied and identified itself with other unpopular elitist tendencies, motivated by globalism and corporate greed.
Even if a sizable minority of Groypers are, in fact, secret Hitler fans, they are not doing anything wrong (yet) and are merely taking up positions that any normal person can see sense in. This is essentially “It’s OK to be White,” writ large. This is a perfectly legitimate slogan that is not discredited simply because the Left points out that Neo-Nazis also support it.
In this respect the Groypers are miles ahead of the old Alt-Right, which, defined by the snobbery and gay cliquism of its dominant personalities, tended to cast itself as a sniffy intellectual hierarchy looking down on the plebs and normies—and then idiotically rolled out the welcome mat for the most untermenschen Neo-Nazi types.
If organised Jewry is nervous or panicked by the Groyper phenomenon, they should take a step back and reconsider their own position. In particular, they should avoid overreacting and lashing out, as the nature of the conflict suggests that they have already advanced too far from their moral supply lines. Seeking to advance their influence even further over American society, as we see with their attempts to shut down BDS, could prove fatal, as it looks sure to provoke even deeper resentments and reactions against them. It also threatens to make Jews the public face of a lot of unpopular and unpleasant trends in the World that are not really their fault.
A wiser policy would be to remove organised Jewish power from those areas of American life where its influence simply does not belong, like micro-managing US foreign policy or trying to guilt-trip non-Germans for the Holocaust. Then, any future Groyper War would be purely between the Groypers and the globalist Big Business lobbies.
Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Affirmative Right and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying it here. He is also featured in Arktos's new collection A Fair Hearing: The Alt-Right in the Words of Its Members and Leaders.
It’s true that the movement is a little puerile and Zoomerish, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s also true that there is a lot of “anti-Jewish” sentiment involved (I am trying hard not to use the term “anti-Semitic,” which was sort of ruined when a largely European group of cultural Semites moved to the Middle East and started fighting racial Semites).
This anti-Jewish thing is a little more problematic of course, but, as long as you steer away from Nazi-esque idiocies of the sort that people like Richard Spencer and Greg Johnson like to indulge in, a reasonable case can be made for saying negative things about Jewish power too. Although the sad fate of the Alt-Right should be a warning as to what a slippery slope this can be.
The ground zero of the Groyper movement is Nick Fuentes, a slick, fast-talking, quick witted young Zoomer of partly Hispanic background who seems—at least so far—to have his head screwed on.
In recent days Fuentes has been orchestrating a revolution against Conservative Inc., which sometimes likes to use billionaire donor money to put on “free speech” and student outreach events.
Fuentes, in alliance with people like Patrick Casey of the American Identity Movement (formerly Identity Europa), has been weaponising his Groyper following to attend these events and ask awkward but quite legitimate questions on Conservatism Inc’s lax attitude to immigration, its promotion of homosexuality, and its support of Israeli interests.
Fuentes advises his followers to be assertive but not aggressive, to be polite and personable, but to resist being shunted aside, shut down, or otherwise ignored.
This is excellent strategy.
To use military metaphors, this is basically advancing—but not too far into dangerous enemy territory—and then setting up strong defensive positions and forcing the enemy to attack you. This is exactly where the Groyper Wars stand now, with Conservatism Inc shredding its free speech credibility with its own supporters (as opposed to donors) by attempting to stop Groypers asking perfectly fair questions. There are even accounts of anyone in a MAGA cap or holding a crucifix being filtered out of the queues to ask questions to the speakers at these events.
Also, there have been attempts to discredit Fuentes and the Groypers as “anti-Semitic,” “racist” “bigots,” and all the other made-up “shut-up” words that were deployed against the Alt-Right.
Sure, there is plenty of anti-Jewish feeling among the Groypers, and some of it, no doubt, is even of the nasty Nazi type. It would be hard to keep it out of such a decentralised movement. But Fuentes and Co., whatever their true feelings about the Jews—and I suspect these are mainly a mixture of mild irritation coupled with a desire to troll the false pieties of what they see as the Holocaust Cult—don’t even need to go there.
All they need to do, and are clearly doing, is to occupy perfectly reasonable “everyman” positions, like “Why does America even need to fund and fight the wars of another country?” and “So what if we don’t care about some old European historical event or get the facts and numbers wrong?”
The reason they can provoke such a potent response with such milquetoast critiques is because organised Jewish power in America—AIPAC, SPLC, ADL, etc.—has greatly over expanded to the point where it is at full stretch and therefore off balance. It has gone from an earlier, perfectly legitimate position of fighting against crude hatred of Jews in America to an illegitimate one of exerting undue and exaggerated influence on America’s culture and politics. In so doing it has allied and identified itself with other unpopular elitist tendencies, motivated by globalism and corporate greed.
Even if a sizable minority of Groypers are, in fact, secret Hitler fans, they are not doing anything wrong (yet) and are merely taking up positions that any normal person can see sense in. This is essentially “It’s OK to be White,” writ large. This is a perfectly legitimate slogan that is not discredited simply because the Left points out that Neo-Nazis also support it.
In this respect the Groypers are miles ahead of the old Alt-Right, which, defined by the snobbery and gay cliquism of its dominant personalities, tended to cast itself as a sniffy intellectual hierarchy looking down on the plebs and normies—and then idiotically rolled out the welcome mat for the most untermenschen Neo-Nazi types.
If organised Jewry is nervous or panicked by the Groyper phenomenon, they should take a step back and reconsider their own position. In particular, they should avoid overreacting and lashing out, as the nature of the conflict suggests that they have already advanced too far from their moral supply lines. Seeking to advance their influence even further over American society, as we see with their attempts to shut down BDS, could prove fatal, as it looks sure to provoke even deeper resentments and reactions against them. It also threatens to make Jews the public face of a lot of unpopular and unpleasant trends in the World that are not really their fault.
A wiser policy would be to remove organised Jewish power from those areas of American life where its influence simply does not belong, like micro-managing US foreign policy or trying to guilt-trip non-Germans for the Holocaust. Then, any future Groyper War would be purely between the Groypers and the globalist Big Business lobbies.
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Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Affirmative Right and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying it here. He is also featured in Arktos's new collection A Fair Hearing: The Alt-Right in the Words of Its Members and Leaders.
