When "A Warning Against the Unmooring of the American Right" was published this past Friday, many readers reached out asking me to elaborate—to name names, to point directly to the people and patterns I had in mind. That’s a fair request.
In the piece, I deliberately kept my focus broad. My goal was to describe a sickness I believed most of us could already sense: the slow drift of some voices on the Right from principle toward paranoia. But clarity matters, and since Charlie Kirk’s assassination just over five weeks ago, those currents have begun to take on sharper contours.
Let me make clear what some readers may have misunderstood: this is not a critique of MAGA or of President Trump. I do not consider him “far Right.” I supported him in 2024 and believe his presidency has thus far been a success. His Supreme Court appointments during his first term were excellent. His foreign policy has been a massive improvement over that of his predecessor—and, in my view, over that of any other president of the 21st century. And his immigration policy has been incredibly effective. My concern lies to the right of Trump—in the growing fringe that increasingly dominates the online conversation and are the antithesis of what it means to be “Right” (perhaps we ought to call them… “wrong”).
On the day my column was published, The Daily Wire hosts Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Andrew Klavan, and Michael J. Knowles uploaded a conversation discussing the New York Young Republicans group-chat controversy and the broader dialogue now unfolding on the Right. In it, Shapiro said: “There are things that get said on the Right that are really, really, really ugly, and pretending those away doesn’t make them go away. I think that they’re rising. I think that they’re getting more common. I know my death threats from that side are getting more common. I know that I have more security because of that, and it’s not just from the Left.”
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I am proud to call myself a conservative. Yet pride in one’s political tradition also requires an honest accounting of its problems and potential pitfalls. Shapiro also made clear, in the same conversation, that hatred and extremism remain more institutionalized on the Left. This is true. But our movement isn’t immune from such a fate. Certain factions—the conspiratorial Right and a cluster of identitarian and nihilist offshoots such as the Groyper movement and parts of the manosphere where antisemitism and racial resentment too often fester—are doing real harm to both the moral credibility and the electoral future of conservatism. They are loud, visible, and increasingly influential.
The conspiratorial Right is perhaps best embodied by Candace Owens, whose commentary in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s death has turned a generational tragedy into macabre theater. She has implied, without credible evidence, that Israel may have been behind his assassination. She cited the flight of an Egyptian Air Force plane as supposed proof of foul play, but it turned out the plane had departed Utah much earlier. She has trafficked in other baseless claims as well, notably an obsession with the “real identity” of France’s First Lady, whom she claims is secretly a man. She has also suggested that Turning Point USA (and by extension, the widowed Erika Kirk) cannot be trusted, among other crackpotteries. Such behavior is not courageous inquiry but rather a pathological suspicion of reality itself.
Nick Fuentes and his self-described “groypers” represent a separate, though related, danger. Characterized by an affinity for frog memes and adolescent nihilism, they’ve blended 19th-century nativism with 21st-century internet rage bait. Fuentes has openly praised Jim Crow-era segregation. When referring to Ukrainians (and presumably, my own Polish wife and children as well) on a live stream, he said: “Slav monkeys are not white.” Recently, he went so far as to say, “There’s groypers in every department,” suggesting we are being infiltrated by his like-minds. This sentiment alone should alarm all genuine conservatives and put us on notice.
Then there is the growing, Right-adjacent manosphere—figures like Andrew Tate, Dan Bilzerian, Jake Shields, and Myron Gaines—whose hedonistic and supposedly masculine personas blur the line between self-“help” and moral decay. Gaines, for instance, posted the following on October 15th (the typos are his own): “Yeah we like Hitler. No one gives a f**k what you woke jews think anymore. Bro was a revolutionary leader and saved germany. The jews declared war on Germany first.” Dinesh D’Souza rightly called him out for this, saying: “I note with some dismay that I cannot easily tell if this guy is part of the Ilhan-Mamdani gang on the Left or the Tucker-Candace gang on the Right. It’s like Orwell says in ‘Animal Farm,’ in the end the pigs and the humans are indistinguishable.” The overlap between this manosphere culture and the identitarian Right is real, and it’s producing a toxic blend of virulent antisemitism, cynicism, and chauvinism that corrodes everything conservatism ought to stand for.
Jackson Hinkle, a supposed “MAGA communist” who puts the moron in oxymoron, belongs to this same incoherent constellation. While attempting to fuse far-right populism with Marxist rhetoric, he has promoted numerous conspiracies (including about Kirk’s death), praised Hamas and Hezbollah as “armed resistance,” and celebrated Iran’s missile attacks on Israel. The New York Times reported his following on X grew from 417,000 to 2.5 million in the six months following the October 7th attacks—it now stands at 3.6 million.
This problem isn’t confined to known personalities—it seeps deep into their growing audiences. In the replies and reposts beneath figures like Owens, Gaines, and Fuentes, one sees a pattern: reflexive antisemitism, blind rage, and a belief that absolutely everything is a lie. It’s a worldview that thrives on outrage and feeds on distrust. These followers—many young, many male—are not all beyond saving, but they are being catechized daily in ignorant paranoia.
Even the Politico story this week about the New York Young Republicans’ vile group chat fits this wider picture. As Matt Walsh observed in a discussion with Shapiro, the piece seems less a revelation than a distraction—a way to shift attention from the Left’s open celebration of political violence since Kirk’s assassination. Fundamentally, I agree. However, the fact of the matter is that these messages were unseemly and may be indicative of a more widespread issue than we would care to admit.
I understand that many conservatives who follow these figures are not, themselves, extremists. Owens can be charismatic; Fuentes can be persuasive to the disillusioned; Tate, Gaines, and others may speak to a crisis of masculinity that our culture too often ignores. But charisma doesn’t equal wisdom, and frustration doesn’t excuse moral abandonment. Whatever their motives—be they sincere, cynical, or performative—the pattern is unmistakable: the more we indulge this, the less conservative we become.
Free speech must remain sacrosanct, but discernment must accompany it. We cannot silence every “dangerous” voice, nor should we try. What we can do is refuse to elevate them and decline to interpret their noise as signal. The Left’s institutional decay began when its loudest fringe started to become its public face (e.g. Mamdani). We must not repeat this mistake. If the far Right ever gains the same foothold within our ranks, it will not be the Left that destroys conservatism, but conservatism’s own negligence.
Readers were right to ask for names and evidence, and I hope this is at least somewhat clarifying. Some omissions are unavoidable—perhaps certain former Fox News hosts, among others. But the essential point is that poisonous ideas often metastasize and define those who fail to confront them.
And conservatism cannot afford to mirror the madness it was intended to restrain.
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