Groypers believe that for decades America has prostrated itself to immigrants and foreign nations at the expense of its own languishing citizens. Israel and what Fuentes calls “organized Jewry” are often to blame. The conservative movement has become nothing more than “a glove, a tool of the Israel lobby,” he says. “They are building Israel as a superpower while they kill America.” For those already convinced of the existence of this cabal—G. had been insisting to me for months that Trump was controlled by Israel, and that his closest advisers were tied to Mossad—the latest news proved their gravest fears. Soon, the Times was reporting that Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had been “determined to keep the American president on the path to war,” and that the outcome was “even better” than he’d hoped. As Joel Webbon, a Christian-nationalist podcaster and a Groyper ally, put it, on X, “So we got ‘wokeness’ out of our military just in time to ensure that it’s exclusively the young White Christian men of America who get to go die in the desert for Israel.”
When Trump announced major combat operations in Iran, in a video from Mar-a-Lago, he informed the public that Americans would likely die. “That often happens in war,” he said. Several days later, back at the White House, he noted the first American casualties—six service members had been killed in an Iranian drone strike on a military base in Kuwait—then paused to admire the gold curtains next to him, musing about his plans to replace the East Wing of the White House, which he had demolished, with a gilded ballroom. “See that nice drape?” he said. “I picked those drapes in my first term. I always liked gold . . . I believe it’s gonna be the most beautiful ballroom anywhere in the world.”
Fuentes declared that Trump was a “scam artist,” that he was running an “illegitimate regime.” Cracks were forming in the MAGA coalition, and the Groypers saw an opening.
I’d first met G. several months earlier in Phoenix, at AmericaFest, the annual conference for the conservative activist group Turning Point. When I arrived in Arizona, young men in white “FREEDOM” T-shirts and black MAGA hats were streaming out of the airport. It was the weekend before Christmas, and pedicabs blasting “Jingle Bell Rock” shuttled visitors around downtown. G. drove from L.A. with a group of fellow-Groypers. In September, Charlie Kirk, Turning Point’s founder, had been assassinated by a gunman at Utah Valley University. AmericaFest sought to bring together factions of the right that were turning on one another in the aftermath of his death, and to anoint Trump’s successor by endorsing his Vice-President, J. D. Vance, for the Republican Presidential nomination in 2028. G. and his friends had come for a different reason. “We’re trying to unite super hard as a voting bloc and get every young conservative on board and just fuck the G.O.P. as hard as we can,” he told me. For a successful young professional attending a political conference, G. said things like “We have literally nothing to live for—we’re ready to die” a lot. His life, he claimed, was hopelessly compromised by the indignities of the modern world. “You watch these videos of Europe or America in the eighteen-hundreds or early nineteen-hundreds, and it’s beautiful,” he said. “Everyone’s well dressed. There’s, like, a tenderness and an innocence to it, and I feel like we’ve all been robbed of our innocence. All our buildings are these hideous rectangles. We’ve watched hundreds of hours of hardcore porn before we ever had our first kiss. Why the fuck did that happen? Do our G.O.P. leaders care?”
At Kirk’s memorial service, his widow, Erika, said that her husband’s aim had been to “save the lost boys of the West, the young men who feel like they have no direction, no purpose, no faith, and no reason to live—the men wasting their lives on distractions, and the men consumed with resentment, anger, and hate.” But G. and many others like him saw Turning Point’s methods—door-knocking to get out the vote, attending a road show of evangelical life-style events called the Make Heaven Crowded tour—as a series of pointless gimmicks.
After Kirk was killed, there was grand talk among Republican politicians of a revival of faith and tradition; young people inspired by Kirk’s devotion to Christ were to put down their phones, pick up their Bibles, and start families. Instead, the right devolved into a series of intramural spats, primarily over America’s support for Israel. “This is where the MAGA civil war starts—you’re either America First or pro-Israel,” a White House staffer told me. Prominent conservatives, such as Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, and Steve Bannon, had been arguing since the start of Trump’s second term that MAGA was being displaced by what some called MIGA—Make Israel Great Again. The President, this faction argued, was too cowed by hawkish interventionists like Mark Levin, a neoconservative commentator. Then it emerged that Kirk himself had started to have doubts about the U.S.-Israel relationship, prompting a bloom of online conspiracy theories. Candace Owens, a conservative podcaster and a former Kirk ally, devoted huge chunks of her show—one of the most popular in America—to “investigating” Kirk’s murder. She speculated that Netanyahu, Kirk’s widow, and the French Foreign Legion were all involved; she used open-source flight logs to suggest that military planes might have landed undetected in Utah. Some of her theories apparently came to her in vivid dreams. Before long, the notion that Israel had ordered Kirk’s assassination was so widely discussed that Netanyahu publicly denied involvement. As a senior Administration official put it to me, “Kirk’s corpse was given over to conspiratorial howling demon forces.”
