Nick Fuentes, the groypers and the return of fascist paranoia

A US university besieged by bigots. Its walls daubed with swastikas. Its Jewish fraternity hit with graffiti saying ‘Jews R Nazis’. Mobs assembling to ‘celebrate and praise’ the slaughter of Jews. Haters sowing an ‘anti-Jewish culture’. And in the wake of this rampage, shaken Jewish students left to ponder the state of both their campus and their country, as it dawns on them there are people who wish to ‘obliterate us’. Who was behind this sick, racist ambush of a seat of learning? Nick Fuentes, perhaps, and the Hitler-admiring creeps who hang on his every word? No – it was the keffiyeh classes.

All of this happened at the University of Pennsylvania in the months after Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October 2023. Anti-Zionist protesting fused with classic anti-Semitism, birthing new eruptions of an ancient hatred. It got so bad that the Office of Civil Rights in the US Department of Education filed a complaint against Penn alleging it had become a ‘hostile environment for Jewish students’. The pox-like spread of Jew hatred at Penn, and other universities, returned to my mind this week as I read outraged commentary about Fuentes and other ‘groypers’ who were seen bopping awkwardly to Ye’s ‘Heil Hitler’ at a club in Florida. To the guardians of right-think who make up America’s liberal establishment, this ‘groyper army’ is the new face of fascism; yet the unsettling truth, a truth they’ll never face, is that their own Ivy League kids have done worse.

The dancing groypers caused a storm online. The sight of tiny Nick Fuentes with plucked and preened bigots like the Tate brothers, blogger Myron Gaines and some foppish influencer called ‘Clavicular’ has generated both commentary and mockery. ‘Queers for Palestine’, said one wag on social media, which I enjoyed. Understandably, Jews in Miami were horrified by the sight of the fascist midget and his mates gurning as Ye raps his admiration for Adolf. The Jewish mayor of Miami Beach, Steve Meiner, said he was ‘disturbed and disgusted’ by these ‘twisted individuals’.

He speaks for many of us. Groyperism really is one of the vilest digital subcultures. You find yourself flitting between pity for these terminally online men who have substituted hating Jews for having a girlfriend and fury that they have reanimated the most low-IQ animus in human history. Fuentes is an open Jew-hater. ‘Jews run society’, he says. ‘Jews run the news’, he claims. Hitler is ‘fucking cool’, he squeals, no doubt getting the sexless dweebs who watch his nightly show chuckling into their XL cans of Monster Energy. He has denied the Holocaust. The numbers just ‘don’t add up’, he said.

One of the most grating things about groyperism is its sardonic style. Our tongues are in our cheeks, they say. ‘It’s just a song’, they said about grooving to ‘Heil Hitler’, like they say ‘It’s just trolling’ about their Holocaust banter. They lay a trap for their critics, so that anyone who calls them out comes off like a Boomer who doesn’t get the joke. That’s the fate that befell Piers Morgan when he had Fuentes on his show. It was like watching a man spar with a blancmange – a refugee from the last century of materialism and meaning going toe to toe with a child of the new century, where so many languish in voluntary digital prisons that they never have to give a second thought to society, or the impact their ideology might be having on it. Don’t you know nothing is real, Fuentes essentially said to Morgan?

Plausible deniability is the anti-Semites’ best friend. Fuentes does it with a smirk. ‘It’s just irony’, he says. There’s deniability on the other side, too, among those who fancy themselves as the implacable opposite of Fuentes and the phrenologist virgins who think he’s some kind of Mexican god come to save Jew-ruled America. The ‘left’ activist class that brought Jew hatred to Penn wears not a smirk, but a scowl. Their cry is not ‘It’s irony’ but ‘It’s politics’. Their Holocaust banter is less ‘It didn’t happen’ than ‘Something equally bad is happening in Gaza’. Their wail is not that ‘Jews run society’ but that Zionists do. Their disguise, if anything, is even less convincing than that worn by groypers – not trollery, but ‘anti-imperialism’.

I am continually struck by the common features of groyperism and keffiyehism. By what that curdled youth wing of America First shares in common with the ‘fat gay race communists’ they love to hate. Both are paranoically obsessed with Israel. There’s nothing funnier than when Nick Fuentes accuses the GOP, and even President Trump himself, of being ‘Israel First’ rather than America First. Because it is Fuentes who is ‘Israel First’. The tiny Jewish nation occupies his every thought. He sees it as the sinister puppet-master of the mighty American republic. In his eyes, it’s the great corrupting force of the 21st century. And of course it’s a genocidal entity.

Sound familiar? Israel likewise stalks the fever dreams and waking hours of the left. They might say ‘the Zionist lobby’ rather than ‘the Jewish lobby’ but the sentiment is the same – some large, ominous Jewish thing enjoys extraordinary leverage over the public life of the Western world. You couldn’t fit a Rizla between Fuentes’ frothing / ironic rants about the GOP’s slavish bowing to the Jewish entity and the ceaseless crying of the keffiyeh classes about how the Zionist lobby has America and Britain eating out of the palm of its clawed hands. Both pin the disorder of their societies, the disorder of their lives, on to a Jewish pox – be it the sneaky Jewish people (Fuentes) or the demonic Jewish State (the keffiyeh set).

Across the sun-starved groyper rabble, there is a venomous loathing for Israel. It murders children, they say. It lets the blood of innocents, they cry. It should be apparent to anyone with even a passing knowledge of history that these racist nerds are leaping on the ‘Palestine cause’ to launder their anti-Semitism and repackage it as anti-Zionism. This has been happening for some time. As the historian Benjamin Bland writes, after the Second World War the ‘extreme right’ had a serious problem: ‘The horrors of the Holocaust.’ It was hard to be a fascist once everyone knew what fascism had wrought. The ‘extreme right’ adopted two tactics for dealing with this shame. First, they denied the Holocaust had happened. Second, they embraced ‘anti-Zionism’ as a cover for their anti-Semitism. Anti-Zionism became, in Bland’s words, ‘a mask for… Nazi sympathies’.

And so it is today. The cult of ‘Palestinianism’ has licensed a resurgence of Jew hatred. Under the cover of the Palestine colours, neo-fascists have rehabilitated their anti-Semitism as ‘criticism’. And that licence was gifted to the groyper lowlifes by the left and the liberal establishment. It was their frantic, myopic and utterly mainstream obsession with the evils of the Jewish State that created a gateway for the deathly juveniles of the digital right to say: ‘And how about those Jews…’ When Ivy League campuses are overrun by activists calling Israel ‘the pigs of the Earth’, and when bourgeois protesters hit the streets to lament Israel’s bloodlust for dead children, and when you’re nobody in popular culture unless you genuflect to the new blood libel that says Israel is the new Nazi Germany, can we really be surprised by the vigor and confidence with which classic Jew-baiting has bubbled up from the sewer of groyperism?

There’s one important difference: groyperism is an intensely inward-looking movement, a lonely crowd of digital losers who titillate each other with their coded loathing, whereas keffiyehism is entirely outward. The groypers revel in being a closed club the world doesn’t understand, while the keffiyeh classes accrue virtue by manifesting their blind hatred for the Jewish State on the streets, on campuses, in politics, in institutions. The Jew paranoia of groypers is contained, to an extent, whereas the Jew State paranoia of the credentialled classes runs riot. Both are dangerous, though. Both speak to the tragic rebirth of paranoia about ‘Jewish influence’. Both blame Jews for Westerners’ own personal failures and cultural depression. Both echo the fascist imagination itself. Both must be challenged, even at the risk of being thought a humourless Boomer.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.