The decades long erosion of true beliefs about God and man has left a God-shaped cultural vacuum that has been filling up with malignant ideologies. Those ideologies are no longer nibbling around the edges of a civilization once fit for human flourishing. Now, like ravaging beasts, those ideologies are devouring huge chunks of flesh from the body politic. And they’re attacking from both sides. Those who believe in principalities and powers might be able to discern the spiritual dimensions of this carnivory.
Conservatives have been understandably paying more attention to the threats from the left. Those kooks, perverts, and ravening beasts are more conspicuous. Looting, arson, theft, impediment to and attacks on law enforcement, and invasions of opposite sex bathrooms and locker rooms by people in drag tend to be noticed more than the ideological predations of rightwing “Groypers.”
Then there are the less visually conspicuous assaults on democratic principles by people like antisemitic Muslim Zohran Mamdani who appears more socially acceptable in his dapper attire, like the male doppelganger of AOC. His urbane comportment masks the radical policies that will grow government, impoverish citizens, and foment social divisions.
Zohran Mamdani’s recent victory speech—24 minutes of Mamdani shouting—exposed the cleaned-up anarchist leftists love to love. His theatrical speech act included syrupy clichés about setting suns, bruised fingers, calloused palms, and scarred knuckles that insufficiently masked his bitter core. That core was revealed when he rhetorically jabbed his uncalloused finger in the eye of his political rival Andrew Cuomo: “I wish Andrew Cuomo only the best in private life. But let tonight be the final time I utter his name.”
Mamdani’s extremism was revealed in the two figures he chose to quote: Eugene Debs, labor organizer and socialist, and Jawaharlal Nehru, another socialist.
As a far-left socialist appealing to the far-left fringes of his party, Mamdani promised free buses, free child-care, almost-free rent, and nearly free chickens in every pot direct from Big Brother’s grocery stores.
The inclusive Mamdani made clear whom he favors: It’s “Yemeni,” “Mexican,” “Senegalese,” “Uzbek,” “Trinidadian,” and “Ethiopian” New Yorkers. No mention of those unappealing people with the ghostly pallor.
He also included an allusion to recidivist criminal George Floyd who died from a massive drug overdose while resisting arrest for passing a bad check, saying as he died, “I can’t breathe,” which became the chant of anarchists in the 2020 summer of love and destruction. Mamdani said, “breathe this moment in. We have held our breath for longer than we know.”
Another deeply troubling character on the far left who is also a supporter of Mamdani is Hasan Piker, an anti-America, anti-Israel, antisemitic apologist for Islamism. Piker, who has 3 million followers on Twitch and 1.75 million YouTube subscribers has said,
~ “America deserved 9/11.”
~ “It doesn’t matter if rape happened on October 7th.”
~ “Kill them. Kill those motherfuckers. Murder those motherfuckers in the streets. Let the streets soak in their fucking red capitalist blood, dude.”
Tragically, for those of us on the right, we have the “Groypers”—the sociopolitical mirror image of leftist disciples of Mamdani and Piker—who are gnawing and clawing their way toward the center of culture.
For those who haven’t yet heard of Groypers, they are a growing group of largely disaffected, angry younger white men, fans of Nick Fuentes, a 27-year-old misogynistic, antisemitic white supremacist with over one million followers on X.
The term “Groyper” began on 4Chan, the controversial internet platform known for conspiracies and trolling.
The term was adopted by Nick Fuentes’ troubling (and troubled) followers in 2019.
Criticism of and urgent warnings about the growth of antisemitism and the Groyper movement are being issued by a number of conservative thinkers, including culture writer Rod Dreher and political pundit Ben Shapiro.
Fuentes has said,
~ “A lot of women want to be raped … there’s like a lot of women that really want a guy to beat the shit out of them, but part of it is they have to pretend that they don’t.”
~ “Enough with the Jim Crow stuff. Who cares? Who cares? They had to drink out of different drinking fountain—big fucking deal.”
~ The Holocaust has been “exaggerated.”
~ And he compared the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust to cookies baked in an oven.
Dreher has multiple times warned about the dangerous influence of Fuentes and his malicious band of Groypers:
For some time now, I’ve been hearing from conservative friends who teach in high schools and universities that antisemitism and white nationalism are on the rise among their white male students. More recently, conservatives in Washington, D.C., have been saying to me that the influence of neo-Nazi Holocaust-denying livestreamer Nick Fuentes has taken off among Gen Z Congressional and administration staffers. One older insider put the number of Fuentes fans and fellow travelers, so-called Groypers, in these Washington circles at “30 to 40 percent.” …
Last week, I went to Washington for a few days on business, and had a number of conversations with Zoomer conservatives about the issue. … Here’s the bad news: It’s worse than I thought. And nobody knows what to do about it.
I ran the “30 to 40 percent” claim past the conservative Zoomers I spoke to in D.C.; every one of them affirmed it. Christian faith, they explained, has not inoculated young men against antisemitism, which is now infused in the conversations of conservative Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox members of Gen Z. Two Christian Zoomers told me that antisemitism is sometimes used as a litmus test to join particular social groupings.
These zoomers clarified that their Fuentes fanboy peers don’t embrace all of Fuentes beliefs (small consolation). What resonates with them is his anger. Groypers, according to these zoomers, “just want to tear everything down.”
Dreher offers a dire warning from Hannah Arendt about the conditions that render a society vulnerable to totalitarianism:
- Mass loneliness and atomization.
- The embrace of transgressiveness for its own sake.
- A collapse of trust in hierarchies and institutions.
- A mania for ideology.
- Ceasing to care about the pursuit of truth, instead preferring narratives that suit one’s personal needs and preferences.
Sounds scarily familiar.
Dreher shared Arendt’s conviction that the “rise of antisemitism”—which is one of the views shared by both leftwing and rightwing extremism,
… is a reliable indicator of coming totalitarianism, because it trains people to think in simplistic, conspiratorial terms; it validates a preference for useful fiction over facts; and it legitimizes identifying entire categories of people as guilty, making their isolation, and even removal, morally legitimate.
In another essay, Dreher diagnosed the causes for the alienation and anger of young white men:
Many of these young men are fatherless. Most of them spent their youths being told that as whites, and especially as white males, they are what’s wrong with the world. Their own speech was policed with Stasi-like ruthlessness for racism and bigotry, while people on the Left routinely slandered whites, males, Christians, and heterosexuals — and were even rewarded for it.
…
The institutions of our society, as they see it, have lied and lied and lied, and still lie. They still lie in many ways about race (e.g., refusing to be honest about black crime), they lied about Covid, they lied about males and females, and they forced the insanity of gender ideology on us all. The military lied about Iraq. The universities embraced and enforced ideologies of lies. The Catholic Church lied about sexual abuse, and the connection to the prevalence of sexually active gay priests honeycombing the institution. They lied about the benefits of mass migration and diversity. They lied about Trump and Russia.
Dreher makes clear the implications of this attack from the truly evil Groyper-y far-right:
This has the potential to destroy conservatism politically. In actual existing America, a white nationalist party that demonizes non-whites who would otherwise be drawn to a conservative message will alienate those voters. Even if all whites voted for the white nationalist party, it still wouldn’t win. But very many whites, including white Christians, will want nothing to do with it.
We must battle the rise of the Groyper. Unfortunately, that will likely entail infighting.
I’ll conclude with this cultural mash-up: We’ve got clowns to the left of us, jokers to the right, and without true convictions and courage, the centre cannot hold.