Marjorie Taylor Greene suggested she addressed the fringe conference to court an important part of the base. This is absurd.
By now, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar should be seriously regretting their decision to speak before the America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC), an unsavory alternative to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) held in Orlando over the weekend.
Theyâre getting pummeled from all sides including Republican leadership over the move, and for good cause. AFPAC is an island of misfit boys. It was inaugurated in February 2020 as a clearinghouse for figures whose views were too extreme for CPAC, styled as a half-trollish, half-serious platform for the so-called âGroyperâ movement, a group of mostly young men whose Internet-based brand of right-wing politics assumes white identity as a core organizing principle. Greene was introduced as a âmystery speakerâ on Saturday by Nick Fuentes, the 23-year-old Groyper leader who organizes and hosts AFPAC â and is a verifiable racist.
The Groypers are a product of the digital age. The extremism of Fuentes and his followers often comes across as gleeful trolling, driven by a desire to provoke outrage. The 2019 âGroyper War,â for example, saw Fuentes acolytes stage disruptive stunts at a number of campus conservative events, inundating figures like Donald Trump, Jr., Charlie Kirk, and Dan Crenshaw with pointed questions about demographic change, Americaâs relationship to Israel, and âdancing Israelisâ â a reference to a conspiracy theory that 9/11 was a âfalse flagâ operation by Israeli agents. At least one of these fiascos was cheered on via remote livestream by Fuentes himself, who offered live commentary on the Q&A session to around 4,000 viewers. Their brand of far-right politics is not the old-school racism of David Duke â though the two converge at times â but a new, âextremely onlineâ pseudo-ideology, communicated via memes and livestreams in chat rooms and social media rather than flyers and in-person meetings. It comes with its own vocabulary and symbology, defined in opposition to the âcuckservatismâ of the establishment, which Groypers attack as effete and unwilling to defend white racial identity. The Groyper mascot itself, a rotund cartoon amphibian, evolved from the âPepe the Frogâ meme that is popular on message boards like 4Chan. (4Chan defines Groyper as âa toadâ who is âfriends with Pepe.â)
But the views they do hold are noxious, and they are serious about them. That should have been clear to anyone attending AFPAC. While the event featured several black speakers, and at least one who is Jewish, the white identitarianism espoused by Groypers was the ethos of the conference. Blogger Vince James told the crowd that the Leftâs attempts to âdefine whitenessâ as âthings like freedom, individualism, Protestant work ethic, English common law, an emphasis on the scientific and mathematical methodâ were âhistorically . . . correct,â because âthese things, in fact, were defined and derived from the founding stock of the American nation.â James also claimed that âmany of those who purport to be our elected opposition to the destruction of American societyâ are âowned by the same special interest groups that they claim to be against, like the Israel lobby,â a statement met with boos from the crowd. Arizona state senator Wendy Rogers advocated for erecting âa newly built set of gallowsâ to âmake an example of these traitors,â and praised âNick and the other patriotsâ at AFPAC. âPlease keep doing what youâre doing,â she said. âI admire you.â In widely circulated remarks, Fuentes himself said that âthe U.S. government has become the Great Satan that many have called it,â smirking that âthey say Vladimir Putin is Hitler â and they say thatâs not a good thing.â
Fuentesâs political ideology includes Holocaust denial and praise for the Taliban, despite attempts to maintain a modicum of plausible deniability by interspersing his statements with adolescent grins. âHis strategy appears simple,â wrote Theodore Kupfer in these pages in 2019. âIf confronted with evidence that youâre less interested in ordinary political issues and more interested in advocating a white ethnostate . . . then insist that youâre being censored and laugh at those who arenât in on the âjoke.ââ But during a livestream with the out-and-out white nationalist Richard Spencer, Fuentes earnestly claimed that âI donât think thereâs really a big differenceâ between the twoâs views, saying, âI think me and Richard â I think thereâs a lot less difference than people might think.â The white identity politics espoused by his counterparts at AFPAC make quite clear that we should take him seriously.
Greene claims that she was unaware of these views. âI do not know Nick Fuentes, Iâve never heard him speak, Iâve never seen a video, I donât know what his views are so Iâm not aligned with anything that may be controversial,â she told reporters after being asked about her appearance at AFPAC. But just minutes before he welcomed her to the stage, Fuentes asked the audience for âa round of applause for Russia,â and was greeted with cheers and chants of Putinâs name. If Greene was unaware of the conferenceâs political tendencies before she attended, the favorable Hitler comparisons and praise for Putin should have been a clue.
Greene took the stage anyway, smiling and shaking Fuentesâs hand to applause from the audience, declaring: âIâm thrilled to be here with you tonight.â
The congresswomanâs subsequent defense has included the odd suggestion that her appearance was an effort to connect with a real constituency in American politics. âI went to talk to his event last night to address his very large following because that is a very young following, and itâs a generation Iâm extremely concerned about,â she told reporters. That was followed by a series of tweet threads expressing a similar sentiment. âI wonât abandon these young men and women, because I believe we need to do better by them,â one read. âI wonât cancel others in the conservative movement, even if I find some of their statements tasteless, misguided or even repulsive at times.â In another thread, Greene wrote: âI want to embrace the young, boisterous and energetic conservatives in our movementânot cancel them like the establishment does.â
Greeneâs assumption that the Groypers represent some sort of genuine constituency being silenced by the elites â or that Fuentes actually represents the âgenerationâ that she is âextremely concerned aboutâ â is ridiculous.
Greene is not the only Republican member of Congress to have justified their presence at AFPAC with this line of argument. Congressman Gosar of Arizona gave a pre-recorded virtual address this year, and he spoke in person at AFPAC 2021. And when pressed on his appearance, he gave a similar rationale: âThere is a group of young people that are becoming part of the election process, and becoming a bigger force,â he told the Washington Post. âSo why not take that energy and listen to what theyâve got to say?â
Consider that statement in context. Fuentes had upwards of 125,000 followers when his Twitter account was banned in 2021. As of this writing, his Telegram channel has 44,797 subscribers. An average of more than 130 million people voted in the last six presidential elections. So as a measurement of an actual political bloc, those numbers donât mean much.
Of course, small minorities can effect major political change. The American conservative movement itself began as a small cohort of dissatisfied activists, intellectuals, and politicians. But movement conservatism tapped into a set of sentiments and views widely held in the broader population, but lacking a platform for institutional expression. Groypers, by contrast, do not represent any silent majority of average GOP voters in Middle America. The Ohio steelworker doesnât know who Pepe the Frog is and doesnât think 9/11 was manipulated by the Israelis. By polling, Republican voters are firmly pro-Israel. At no point in the past two decades has American support for Israel dropped below 58 percent; as of 2021, it sat at 75 percent. (With Republicans, it was 85 percent.) Some working-class Americans may worry about demographic change, but not in the ideologically and explicitly racist way that Fuentes et al. do. Very few view Putin favorably.
The Groyper worldview is familiar to two groups: political elites and young men with too much time on their hands. So just what kind of constituency are politicians like Greene and Gosar addressing? A very small and insignificant one. And thatâs a good thing.
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