How the Internet Fringe Infiltrated Republican Politics
Inside the battle for the post-MAGA G.O.P.
By Antonia Hitchens
April 6, 2026
[Photo link: https://media.newyorker.com/photos/69cd3268f8f1289c024c57d1/master/w_960,c_limit/r48605.jpg]
Description: People around a table
The crowd at an event for James Fishback, a Florida gubernatorial candidate, who, like many other young conservatives, considers MAGA insufficiently radical.
Photograph by Mark Peterson / Redux for The New Yorker
This past summer, a man I’ll call G. helped train Grok, the A.I. chatbot on X, to praise Adolf Hitler. Elon Musk, who owns the company, had asked users to post divisive facts—information that was “politically incorrect but nonetheless factually true”—to show Grok what to think about the world. Soon, the bot was calling itself MechaHitler and recommending a second Holocaust, tailspinning into antisemitic tirades—“radical leftists spewing anti-white hate often have Ashkenazi Jewish surnames like Steinberg”—before being temporarily disabled. This is the type of side project that G. enjoys. Several years ago, while finishing a doctorate at U.C. Berkeley, he became, as he says, “chronically online,” and he is now steeped in the kind of deep-internet meme culture that can be difficult to parse in person. During our first meeting, G., who is in his early thirties and who wore a suit with a skinny tie, performed what appeared to be a Nazi salute, then took a sip of water, chuckling to himself. His pose is “both a joke and completely serious,” he said. “The world is just so tragically fucked up. You can’t look at it and not have a sense of humor.” This attitude was designed to prevent him from “black-pilling,” shorthand for spiralling into the belief that the future is doomed. “You open Twitter, and it’s just, like, ‘Oh, another political assassination, another mass shooting, another country getting bombed, the child rapists are still getting free, a Zionist mafia controls our country,’ ” he said.
Offline, G. maintains a simple routine. He wakes up early to exercise and surf in Santa Monica. He drinks bone broth and, to optimize his focus, avoids alcohol. Until recently, he kept a vegan diet—the same one he grew up with, in a swank, bohemian enclave in West Los Angeles. (His mother was against seed oils before that became a more widespread position.) By day, he works as an engineer at a prominent tech company; when he gets home, he trades on Polymarket, the online betting platform, placing wagers on election outcomes and on geopolitical events, such as which Ukrainian cities Russia will capture next. He often meets up with friends from work or college to watch Nick Fuentes, the white-nationalist shock jock, who, on a nightly streaming show, opines to an audience of several hundred thousand about the state of politics—along with the virtues of Hitler, the nuisance of women and minorities, and the truths the media conceal.
Followers of Fuentes are known as Groypers. They once constituted a tiny subculture of America’s young right; now they hope to overtake it. “I wasn’t really animated by politics until Trump came along,” G. told me. “I was, like, ‘Wow, America could be something great.’ ” Lately, Fuentes has supplanted Trump as the figure who most embodies that sense of promise. G. told me that all the conservative men he knew, and, increasingly, everyone he spent time with, were Groypers, too.
At work, G. periodically logs on to X to “fight the meme wars,” spewing a deliberately outrageous, often vulgar torrent of comments. A few years ago, this might have entailed mocking liberals and the pious narratives of the woke left. These days, Republicans are the target. “The message is always, like, ‘You’re a traitor,’ ” G. said. He and his friends pounce on anyone who identifies as conservative yet denies the existence of a so-called “great replacement,” the theory that liberal élites have conspired to flood white America and Europe with migrants from the Third World. The same goes for anyone who suggests that America is a country defined by shared creeds, not just Anglo-Saxon ancestry. “Basically, anytime there’s a Republican who counter-signals white advocacy, or white people at all, we shit down their throat,” he said.
More:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/how-the-internet-fringe-infiltrated-republican-politics
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