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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   27030 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 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.

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