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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   27087 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

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Can a Bannon-Groyper Alliance Derail Vance?

This was a fun article looking forward to 2028. Here are the main points:

  • JD Vance is the overwhelming favorite to win the R nomination in 2028. He has a >50% chance as of now, while the next nearest candidates are <10%.
  • However, the Groyper faction, i.e. people who associate with Nick Fuentes, is not happy with him.
  • Nick Fuentes is probably the second most important person to watch on the Republican side after Trump himself. He has a lot of "energy", and has the benefit of being extremely online. People keep making the mistake that the "real world" is more important than a small fringe of online crazies, and they keep getting proven wrong over and over and over (e.g. with woke, the alt right, gender identity on Tumblr). The arc of MAGA is long, but it bends towards Based.
  • The best case for Vance is one where he becomes the heir-apparent to the Trump cult through an explicit endorsement from Trump himself. If he plays his cards right in that case, then the 2028 R nomination could look like a coronation with Vance simply refusing to debate any challengers and sailing to victory without really having to make his case beyond generic Trumpy pablum.
  • The worst case for Vance goes something like this: he doesn't get Trump's endorsement, perhaps from his rivals spreading conspiracies that any faults of the Trump admin were from Vance being insufficiently loyal to Trump. If Trump is flattered by these ideas he could stay out of the fray, which means Vance would have to do a real campaign. Then, he could find himself under a pincer attack by Groypers slamming the fact he has an Indian wife and brown children, while Bannon attacks him in a conventional way for something like insufficient loyalty to Dear Leader. In this case, Vance could find himself in a similar spot to Jeb Bush -- a frontrunner with little "energy" who's mercilessly savaged from all sides until he has a few disappointing results and drops out.
  • Expect the Republican consensus on Israel to crack at least a little bit over the coming decades, again thanks to the Groypers.

I’m currently doubtful that Vance will be the GOP nominee in 2028, but that has nothing to due with the Groypers having any actual pull in the GOP (I’m sure Fuentes would certainly like to believe that they do), and everything to do with my growing certainty that Trump himself will run again in 2028, damn the legality of it- and that the MAGA base will line up to support him, regardless of what the Constitution says.

IDK what exactly his approach will be, but he has a lot of options- get some toady in Congress like Andy Ogles to promulgate some law that allows him to run again, bully the Supreme Court into finding some excuse to overturn the 22nd Amendment, claim the 2028 elections were rigged and that he’s obligated to stay in power as some kind of ‘caretaker’ figure, claim that since he was denied his rightful 2020 term by Crooked Joe Biden, he deserves to serve a third term…

Unless the 2026 midterms deliver a Congress actually capable of impeaching and removing him, I’m calling >90% odds that Trump doesn’t intend to leave the Presidency except in a coffin.

Fuentes is definitely becoming popular. Asmongold, at one point the most watched streamer in the world, reacted to his anti-Tucker video with 1.7 million views. The Tucker thing itself, Tucker being the most influential conservative, having to insult Fuentes while conceding his oratory gifts, is telling. That Fuentes ratios whoever he wants on Twitter.

Remember that his audience isn’t normies (who have a 30% chance of turning out to elections or whatever and doesn’t talk about politics). His audience has a 99% chance of turning out, and each one acts as an influence generator, influencing those around them with their views. So it’s not just number of viewers or number of supporters, because his viewers and supporters are all mini propagandists. Fuentes has captured the 2015 4chan Trump energy youth.

This reads “boo outgroup.” Fuentes isn’t popular and trying to claim otherwise is just a means to be able to paint the Republicans with Fuentes’ beliefs. It’s the same reason you uncritically believed the Seltzer poll despite all of the noted problems.

I don't have anything to add about Fuentes irrelevance besides what everyone else has already said, I wanted however to comment on this:

Expect the Republican consensus on Israel to crack at least a little bit over the coming decades, again thanks to the Groypers.

I think the opposite is more likely to happen. Yes, it's true that the boomer evangelical constituency will die off in the next decade and they were rabidly pro-israel. However the rest of the republican base is more or less indifferent to this question, the pockets of antisemitism are truly small. OTOH in the Democratic party Hassan (who is actually influent, unlike Fuentes) can go full anti-zionist and face no repercussions, anti-zionism and even anti-semitism make a lot of sense within the internal logic of progressivism (jews are a market dominating, overrepresented, minority, black people hate them because they screw over rappers and israel is the last colonialist project) and disliking palestinans makes a lot of sense on the right.

If europe didn't exists you'd maybe have a chance to keep muslims as a fargroup and push the "muslims are actually based" idea through, but I the european right is going to make available too many examples of muslims being non-based for that to be possible.

I think what's more likely to happen is that one of the democratic candidates will eventually break anti-zionist and then the republican party will either consolidate into pro-israel as a reflex or at best remain indifferent.

For your prediction to come true the relationship between israel and palestine needs to normalize and stay normal for a long time.

The Republican party is also benefiting tremendously from its pro-Israël stance- they get Jewish voters to take a step away from the dems, thé ‘antisemitism crackdowns’ only target lefties, etc.

with Vance simply refusing to debate any challengers

Vance did extremely well in the last set of debates. I would expect him to agree to debate challengers even if he is coronated. The challengers get to build their national presence, Vance gets to build momentum. When debating is one of your strengths you take the free airtime.

Nick Fuentes is probably the second most important person to watch on the Republican side after Trump himself.

This is an incredible assertion with little evidence supporting it. As far as I have seen Fuentes occupies the space of fairly ineffective troll. The man who one would consider to be his most obvious right leaning nemesis-Ben Shapiro, wields far more influence and power than he does, and the gap is not narrowing, Daily Wire is basically Fox News of 2000, but for today, and more. And they just ejected Candace Owens like dehydrated feces on a lunar flight without losing audience at all, in fact, most evidence shows them up post-Owens. Daily Wire has produced multiple popular podcasts, feature length movies and documentaries (some which would have shifted the culture significantly), and launched various brands that people seem to buy as luxuries.

OTOH, Nick Fuentes has done none of that, and survives mostly on the energy of people freaked out about him. If you are on the left or Left-adjacent Grey grey like Hanania, you might think this sort of freak out is what defines Trump. But that isn't true at all. What defines Trump is how much people actually like him. He's popular and cool. His base loves him. He is occasionally based, but really, is mostly moderate with vigor. His whole 2nd term has been him taking on a bunch of issues that Americans overwhelmingly support him on (often at 90/10, 80/20 numbers) and just saying loudly "lets do what the majority thinks is good" and then getting yelled at by the minority who happen to also hold positions of power in the media/DNC. Fuentes can kinda do the media freakout part, but he has none of the base appeal part, and, crucially, none of the picking good issues part.

I hate Hanania.

I hate Fuentes.

Uh, I don't really have much to contribute. I just wanted to say it.

/images/175632290050734.webp

Groypers are not a real faction in republican politics lol. I could speak with a dozen R voters off the street here in Texas and I doubt more than 1 even knows they exist.

About that.

I'm and pretty sure that for 99% of Republican primary voters, their opinion on Nick Fuentes is somewhere between "that wierd gay Mexican kid that hates the Jews?" and "literally who?"

Also polling was done recently and 6% of those polled had a favorable opinion of Fuentes, 33% had a negative view of him, and I presume the rest had no clue who he was: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Bj9_tUbMG1yCnME1rc7ggQF7qt8mmxetIfD7bQL167w/htmlview#gid=0

And, confirming my stereotypes for the median white nationalist, Fuentes has highest favorability amongst young black and hispanic men.

Hanania doesn't appreciate that groypers appear to be huge to him because 1. They personally, viscerally hate him in particular and will actively seek him out and engage with him as a matter of trolling. 2. Among the groypers are relatively more experienced, serious trolls with VPNs/multiple accounts/those who automate some aspects of their engagement.

Fuentes' audience of Americans able to vote probably maxes out around 200,000 or so.

People keep making the mistake that the "real world" is more important than a small fringe of online crazies, and they keep getting proven wrong over and over and over (e.g. with woke, the alt right, gender identity on Tumblr). The arc of MAGA is long, but it bends towards Based.

It's not though. The online-right has been calling for transparency on Epstein even if it hurts Trump, and opposed the airstrikes on Iran. The offline/mainstream-right do not care much as much about either or supported the strikes. After Trump attacked Iran, his approval rating did not fall.

People keep making the mistake that the "real world" is more important than a small fringe of online crazies, and they keep getting proven wrong over and over and over (e.g. with woke, the alt right, gender identity on Tumblr).

As Sagan pointed out, they laughed at the Wright Brothers but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. Fuentes is Bozo the Clown.

Fuentes is Bozo the Clown.

I thought overt racial hatred was a Bozo No-No....

Bozo the clown was not on the FBI payroll.

Was he?

"We can neither confirm nor deny any dealings with that individual."

I mean it's always possible, the FBI seems to try to recruit literally anyone with access to the far right.

I am not privy to that information.

Ask Betteridge.

People keep making the mistake that the "real world" is more important than a small fringe of online crazies, and they keep getting proven wrong over and over and over (e.g. with woke, the alt right, gender identity on Tumblr).

None of those things outweighed the political fundamentals. If they did, the last three elections would have looked very different.

The fringe gets to insert a few people into the back-bench. They get to influence decisions on the margin, and they get to put their message out in party channels. So you get a Gang of Four, you get Biden muttering something about gender studies. But kingmaking demands something more.

Come 2028, there’s going to be a Trump-shaped hole in the discourse. He’ll probably try to promote one of his kids for the spot; none of them have demonstrated the required charisma. That leaves Vance in a really strong position. For this Fuentes nonsense to see any success, they’d have to hijack whatever Trump wanted to do anyway. I don’t see that working out.

Trump will still have the Republican bully pulpit for the rest of his life, and who he chooses to back as a successor could be the deciding factor in the nomination contest. Regarding his children I think he will probably try to get one of them a VP slot so they can make a later go at the White House.

Precisely.

Whether or not that works out, Fuentes is going to have roughly zero impact on the candidate.

I think the uh, cosmopolitan financial executives will conveniently discover all those old media manipulation tricks that were so effective from 2012-2022 in the event that this comes close to happening. If nothing else, Vance will get an explicit endorsement if Trump's donors beg him enough.

Now at the tender age of 27, Fuentes won't be eligible to run in 2028, so when you say he's the most important person in the Republican camp to watch (after Trump), I take it to mean you think his endorsement of a politician could swing the primaries. Do you have anyone in mind? That is to say, a credible candidate (perhaps a sitting governor, senator or congressman) who Fuentes might plausibly endorse?

I think he meant not that he runs for office but that he forces Trump to change his mind as to who to endorse

Yes, that was my takeaway from the OP as well. My question is who might Fuentes endorse instead of Vance?

way too soon to know

That is to say, a credible candidate (perhaps a sitting governor, senator or congressman) who Fuentes might plausibly endorse?

Gavin Newsom?

I suppose I should have said a credible candidate seeking the Republican nomination.

A quick Google suggests that about 60% of Americans are "unsure" what they think of Nick Fuentes (...probably because they have no idea of who he is!) and another third of Americans dislike him. His favorability rating is barely above the lizardman constant, (and ironically is highest among blacks and Hispanics).

It might be correct that "you may not care about the online but the online cares about YOU" but that doesn't mean that just because Richard Hanania writes an article about a minor far-right streamer whose unfavorability is only dwarfed by his unfamiliarity that he is "the second most important person to watch on the Republican side."

Now, Hanania might be correct that Vance needs to worry about being flanked from the "populist right" but I don't think Fuentes is likely to be an effective threat.

Nick Fuentes is probably the second most important person to watch on the Republican side after Trump himself. He has a lot of "energy", and has the benefit of being extremely online. People keep making the mistake that the "real world" is more important than a small fringe of online crazies, and they keep getting proven wrong over and over and over (e.g. with woke, the alt right, gender identity on Tumblr). The arc of MAGA is long, but it bends towards Based.

I know very little about Fuentes himself, but the analysis here seems wrong. The alt-right, as best as I can tell, has had pretty much no impact in actual policy and very little in terms of national discourse around politics and ideology. Which is as expected from a small fringe of online crazies.

The "woke," and gender identity on Tumblr (subset or, at best, nearly fully overlapping set with "woke"), on the other hand, have obviously had immense and consequential influence in both, and this is due to the fact that they weren't a small fringe of online crazies. Rather, by the time this sort of argument was created to shut down the people trying to bring attention to the anti-liberalism of the ideology that would go on to evolve to something called "woke," ie around early 2010s, it had already been hegemonic in academia for at least a decade and nearly ubiquitous for multiple decades, with plenty of signs of mainstream journalism and mainstream entertainment getting bought in.

So things correctly labeled as a small fringe of online crazies had little impact on real world politics and the everyday life that it influences, while things incorrectly labeled as such did have big impact.

Maybe this Fuentes character's ideas will break into the mainstream over the next 3 years, but so far, him being just a big fish in a small, fringe, online, crazy pond doesn't make me think he's particularly worth paying attention to with respect to national politics.

Nick Fuentes is probably the second most important person to watch on the Republican side after Trump himself.

That's... quite a statement.

isn't there a sex tape of Destiny and Fuentes. wouldn't that kill any chance of Fuentes becoming mainstream in the Republican party.

Yeah. The median Republican is not a fan of the gays; even most of the ones that are pro-gay rights are pro gay rights on libertarian grounds rather than 'not thinking it's wrong' grounds.

As far as I understand that tape is fake and/or it's not Fuentes in the video. Even the geniuses at Kiwi Farms (who never let a salacious accusation go to waste) don't seem to think it's real.

And just for transparency reasons, my opinion of Fuentes any time he comes up amounts to roughly "Who gives a shit?"

Fuentes has a much younger audience, but even among media figures Bannon has a huge audience on his podcast, it’s just mostly boomers.

MAGA is indeed full of boomers.

I don't know a single internet personality that can claim the title of "second most important person to watch after Trump himself".

Rogan can be very influential if he chooses to be. I could see him hosting an informal Republican primary debate on his podcast that tips the scales.

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