Sen. Ted Cruz stood before a Washington conference on antisemitism this month and delivered a warning that had nothing to do with college campuses or progressive boycotts. The threat he described was closer to home. Prejudice against Jewish people, Cruz said, has grown more "in the last 18 months on the right than at any point in my lifetime," and "it is gaining real purchase, especially with young people."
That admission, from a senior Republican senator, at an event dedicated to the problem, captures something the conservative movement can no longer wave away. A fringe current running through young right-of-center politics, animated by white-supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes and his self-styled "groyper" followers, has grown visible enough that state parties are issuing memos, chapter organizations are being disbanded, and elected officials are publicly drawing lines.
The question is whether the broader movement will draw those lines fast enough, and whether the online incentive structure that rewards bigotry with clicks will keep outrunning the adults in the room.
Late last year, Fuentes's young fans roamed a Turning Point USA national conference in Phoenix. Among them was Alec Beaton, a 23-year-old former precinct delegate and county Republican youth chair from Michigan who ran a small field office for Donald Trump's 2024 campaign. Beaton, as the Washington Post reported, described himself as a groyper and a Holocaust "revisionist."
At the conference, Beaton boasted about the movement's reach. "We influence the room," he said. "We have the power and influence to come in here, and they respect it." He claimed that half the people with conservative activist James O'Keefe at the event "were, like, us." O'Keefe, who recruited young volunteers for a conference stunt involving blond wigs, did not respond to a request for comment through his media organization.
Beaton also offered a window into the moral universe these young men inhabit. "We don't think Hitler is, like, the worst person ever," he said. He described praising Hitler as a way to "mess with people." An official straw poll of conference attendees found 87 percent viewed Israel as an ally, a number that suggests the groyper contingent remains a distinct minority. But minorities that are loud, organized, and willing to show up can punch well above their weight in party politics.
The conference floor was not the only venue. In Miami, a GOP student group chat leaked. At the University of Florida, a College Republicans chapter was disbanded by a statewide conservative group after allegations that students gave a Nazi salute. And this month, the College Republicans of America appointed a longtime fan of Fuentes as its political director.
These are not isolated incidents. They form a pattern that the California Republican Party moved to address directly, sending a memo last month to GOP leaders across the state. The memo warned that groypers were making their way into party positions and running for office, requiring a conscious effort to keep them out.
The language was blunt:
"A radical and divisive iteration of 'America First' ideology is growing within the ranks of the Right wing in American politics that is directly at odds with the core founding principles of the United States Constitution. The effects of this movement on our conservative American youth cannot be ignored."
John Park, the California party's vice chair, acknowledged he did not want to overstate the problem. But he was clear about the stakes: "This is one of those situations where silence is consent."
Nick Fuentes has been a known quantity for years. He rails against Israel, courts disaffected young men, and has summed up his worldview in terms no responsible party should tolerate: "Jews are running society, women need to shut the f--- up, Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part, and we would live in paradise." He has called Hitler "cool."
In 2022, Trump had dinner with Fuentes in an episode that caused an uproar. When asked last year about Tucker Carlson's decision to sit down with Fuentes, Trump demurred: "I don't know much about him." He added that Carlson should "get the word out. Let him. People have to decide."
White House spokesman Davis Ingle said Trump "has zero tolerance for anti-Semitism" and accused Democrats in Congress of "being taken over by anti-Semitic and anti-American radicals," pointing to lawmakers like Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib who have drawn rebukes from Republicans and some Democrats alike. Neither Omar's nor Tlaib's office responded to requests for comment.
The whataboutism has a shelf life. Left-wing antisemitism on campuses and in Congress is real and deserves every bit of scrutiny it gets. But pointing across the aisle does not answer the question of what Republicans intend to do about the poison in their own house. Internal fractures over party identity are already straining the GOP's thin margins, and tolerating extremists in the ranks only makes that problem worse.
Perhaps no figure better illustrates the danger of flirtation than James Fishback, a 31-year-old Republican making a long-shot bid for governor of Florida. Fishback has appeared on shows hosted by Tucker Carlson and podcaster Patrick Bet-David. He declared Fuentes followers "incredibly informed" and "very patriotic," calling them a "fascinating pulse about what's going on politically."
Fishback went further. He called Rep. Byron Donalds, the front-runner in a recent GOP primary poll with 31 percent support and Trump's endorsement, "By'rone," and said Donalds wanted to "turn Florida into a Section 8 ghetto." Fishback pulled just 6 percent in the same poll, behind even Florida's Republican lieutenant governor at 4 percent and a former statehouse speaker at 1 percent.
This month, Fishback traveled to Washington to address about 30 young people on the U.S. Capitol lawn, where he railed against the war with Iran. He opened with "Total sausage fest, guys" and insisted: "It's wrong for any party, Republican or Democrat, to try to disavow people."
Donalds did not ignore it. He wrote a retort to Fishback on X last month that cut to the core:
"You're no racist. You're no groyper. You're no anti-semite. You're what people hate about politics, performative slop."
Gabriel Groisman, a Republican consultant in Florida, said his calculus on ignoring Fishback had changed. "At the beginning, the thing to do was ignore it, you don't pay attention to every lunatic that runs," Groisman said. But now, he argued, "Everybody involved in Republican politics in Florida has an obligation to not just speak out against him, but also to draw clear lines... and say this is outside the bounds of what the party will even accept."
David Brog, founding president of the foundation behind the annual National Conservatism Conference, identified the structural problem. The migration of politics online, he said, has created a "perverse incentive structure."
"If you voice anti-Israel and antisemitic views, you get an instant reward in the form of clicks, likes and follows. This fuels the fallacy that the activist base of the party shares these views. So ambitious politicians and commentators trying to position themselves to lead 'America First' are misreading these digital leaves, and coming to some deeply flawed conclusions."
That diagnosis rings true. Algorithms reward provocation. Young men looking for community and purpose find figures like Fuentes, who package genuine grievances about elite failure and cultural drift inside a framework of racial hatred and conspiracy. The 87 percent of Turning Point conference-goers who view Israel as an ally are not the ones driving engagement metrics. The fringe is.
Arnie Hernandez, a Republican from California in his early 30s, offered a telling example. He followed Fuentes on X and said he did not agree with everything Fuentes said, but liked that Fuentes called out "Israel's influence on society." He compared the appeal to the allure of fictional villains: "People say... pirates are cool. But at the same time, they're like, you know, they were murderous savages. And the most interesting thing about villains, they have some sort of aura."
That is a young man rationalizing his way toward something ugly. And it is exactly the kind of drift that Cruz, Groisman, Park, and Brog are warning about.
Cruz acknowledged the generational split plainly. He said he was confident about the views of "folks in this room with some gray or salt-and-pepper in their hair." But in the college classroom? "I'm a lot less certain."
Turning Point USA declined to comment. A Turning Point chapter president resigned after a leak. The College Republicans of America elevated a Fuentes fan to a leadership post. The California GOP felt compelled to send a statewide memo. A University of Florida chapter was shut down over a Nazi salute allegation.
None of this means the Republican Party has been captured. It has not. The numbers show a clear majority of young conservatives reject this garbage. But majorities do not hold themselves, they require leaders willing to enforce standards, organizations willing to expel bad actors, and a culture that treats antisemitism and racism as disqualifying, not edgy.
The conservative movement has always stood for individual liberty, constitutional order, and the dignity of every citizen under law. Those principles are not negotiable, and they are not compatible with the ideology Fuentes peddles. The party that fails to police its own ranks forfeits the moral authority to police anyone else's.
