You Love Him. He Just Fell for the Most Insidious Movement in America. Now What?

You Love Him. He Just Fell for the Most Insidious Movement in America. Now What?

Molly Olmstead

Fri, December 5, 2025 at 10:35 AM UTC

16 min read

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The day Charlie Kirk died, Taylor was at work when her brother Jake called her, laughing. He’d heard the news, and he was delighted. Not only did Jake revile Kirk, Jake viewed the killing as validation of his deeply antisemitic understanding of how the world worked. “The Jews,” Jake believed, had almost certainly had Kirk murdered because he had raised alarm about “Jewish dollars” reshaping American culture.

It wasn’t the first time Jake had shared these kinds of beliefs with Taylor. (Taylor and Jake are not their real names.) Jake, now 25, was once a standard build-the-wall Trump supporter, but during the pandemic, his politics shifted. He began sending Taylor Instagram memes with medieval Crusader imagery: Reject modernity, embrace tradition. It confused Taylor, given that the two had been raised as nondenominational Protestants in the kind of church where the pastor wore jeans and talked about the Dallas Cowboys. And as his late teens turned to early 20s, Jake decided he had been wrong to support President Trump and other Republicans, arguing they were shills for the U.S.-based Israel lobby. His memes, which he sent to his sister regularly, got more and more racist.

Jake had become a groyper.

Though terminology and political identity can be fluid in right-wing digital ecosystems, the term “groyper” can generally be applied to the edgy, misogynistic men who support the white nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes. Groypers are aggressively antisemitic; Fuentes, who is only 27, casts doubt on the scale of the Holocaust and has said he loves Hitler. These young men—they’re almost all boys, due to the extreme misogyny of the subculture—hate normal MAGA Republicans because they, in groypers’ assessment, refuse to stand up for white men and call out the Jewish forces ruining the country.

For a long time, among much of Washington’s political class, groypers were widely considered a fringe element, best ignored. Groypers have their own impenetrable language and in-jokes, and it’s nearly impossible to tell when they’re being edgy for laughs and when they’re being serious. Fuentes is a dweeby kid in an ill-fitting suit, with none of the congenial charms of Joe Rogan or masculine swagger of Andrew Tate. Fuentes and his followers were mostly not taken seriously as any kind of political force. That was particularly true as the groyper in chief made vile assertions—claiming that “a lot of women want to be raped” or that “Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part”—that seemed more trolling than movement-building.

That thinking continued even as they grew in number as followers of Fuentes’ streaming show, and it continued even after Fuentes dined with Trump in 2022. (Trump later said he hadn’t known who Fuentes was.) But in the second Trump era, Fuentes’ profile has slowly grown. He received a huge visibility boost from Kirk’s murder, which left a power vacuum in the fight for young conservative men. Fuentes’ big triumphant moment arrived in late October, when he was granted a friendly interview on Tucker Carlson’s show. Suddenly, it seemed like everyone was taking the groypers seriously as a political force. Fuentes declared the “Groyper War” won and his movement ready for its next phase.

But if groypers’ ascension was a shock to some in the upper echelons of politics, it wasn’t to the many parents, teachers, and others spending significant time around young men today. They’ve watched as untold numbers of young men have in recent years been radicalized. They’ve heard Fuentes’ rhetoric parroted in classrooms. They’ve listened to young men proudly spout racism that would have been the subject of social opprobrium a decade ago. Many of them have seen it happen up close, watching as their son, or brother, or boyfriend, or friend lost touch with reality and drifted into bigotry.

It leaves these loved ones with a set of difficult decisions: Do you keep someone like that in your life? And, if so, do you try to keep the peace by avoiding politics? Or do you fight to claw someone back from the extreme?

This last option is, by almost all accounts, the most challenging one. Experts in fighting hateful ideologies stress that prevention is the critical step, because once they are radicalized, young men are extremely difficult to bring back.

But for those who see no other option than to try to rescue their loved ones, they are battling the particular challenge of an ideology that has been amplified by algorithms and normalized by entire segments of the Republican Party—including by the president of the United States. It makes for a particularly unyielding problem.

Still, experts say that with the proper approach, there are ways to bring people back from the brink.

Amanda, an English teacher in central Florida, began to notice that some of her middle school students were taking a bit of a turn after the pandemic. A small number of boys, she realized, had come back to the classroom quoting the toxic manosphere influencer Andrew Tate, making quips about women being unintelligent or shallow, or only having value for sex. They realized that these comments got a rise out of the girls and drew guffaws from the other boys; Amanda saw them looking around the classroom for reactions after saying something particularly shocking. So they pushed it harder. They started doing Nazi salutes and drawing swastikas. One boy said that the United States should bring back slavery, but for undocumented immigrants.

Amanda was troubled by what she saw, but she didn’t believe these were hateful boys, deep down. Instead, she thought, they were too young to realize the seriousness of what they were saying. It was just funny to them, she said, at a superficial level. They relished getting a rise out of adults and the other kids. It wasn’t so different from the dead-baby jokes that were popular among millennials in an earlier internet era.

But Amanda became more concerned when she started teaching 10th grade a couple of years later. Some of her classes included the same boys she had taught in middle school, but the offensive rhetoric was no longer contained to them: It had exploded. “Back when I taught middle school, I could think of friend groups or certain kids that I knew were on those corners of the internet,” she said. “Now, it’s more generic—not most of my boys, but I’d say 40 to 50 percent engage in that kind of rhetoric.”

Worse, Amanda realized that even if these boys had once been joking, their beliefs now seemed sincere. She noticed that the high school boys, rather than just trying to get a laugh, were sharing Fuentes clips as they were developing their political beliefs, testing out ideas. The jokes had gradually desensitized them.

Experts say both of Amanda’s experiences are frighteningly common: More young men are being sucked into Fuentes-style bigotry. And many of them become that way after it starting out as joking. “The path from joking to dead serious gets carved out little by little,” said Pasha Dashtgard, the director of interventions at the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University.

Tracking how many “groypers” there are, and how their ranks are growing, is an impossible task. It’s not a formal organization, nor does it have defined boundaries. But here’s what we do know: In recent months, Fuentes has grown in his social media presence. He has more than 1 million followers on Elon Musk’s X, and clips of Fuentes’ show typically receive hundreds of thousands of views; his own posts on X regularly are seen by several million. People who follow edgy comedians now encounter Fuentes without needing to visit sketchy internet forums. It’s hard not to notice these ideas making rapid inroads into our politics. White nationalist memes of the kind that circulate in groyper chats are now being shared by the Department of Homeland Security.

Likewise, it’s difficult to know exactly why more young men are falling into this Nazi-inflected ideology. Each one is different. Content creators take advantage of that sentiment by creating videos, podcasts, and memes that stoke that sense of entitlement. Advanced algorithms from Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and other major platforms detect the kids’ interest in the edgy jokes and prod them further and further toward dark places. Far-right creators boost one another to create a sense of a kind of ersatz friend-group, encouraging viewers to develop parasocial relationships with them and their right-wing pals. Creators have been helped along in these efforts by the increasing lawlessness fostered by platforms cowed by Republicans’ “anti-censorship” campaigns. Elon Musk has allowed hate speech to proliferate on X. The result, according to experts, has been that it’s now a matter not of if, but when young people will encounter white supremacist content.

But it’s not just a matter of exposure. These views hold appeal to a lot of boys because they offer both validation of the anxieties and frustrations of the teenage years and simple answers to explain them. “That’s a powerful narrative—I’m suffering, and there’s someone to tell me it’s not my fault,” Dashtgard said. Rather than blame the systems that make it difficult to go to college or make a good living with a blue-collar job, blame women for being greedy or for competing in the workplace; blame immigrants for taking away jobs and driving down wages; and blame powerful Jews for molding a feminist, pro-immigrant, modern culture that keeps white men down.

And, crucially, at the time when students might have otherwise backed away from this particular form of grievance culture for fear of ostracization, it has been depicted, publicly, as mainstream politics by conservative media figures and elected officials. In the second Trump era’s national reactionary culture shift away from progressive ideals, white nationalism has been free to tear through adolescent internet culture.

Understanding where the appeal comes from can be the first step in getting them back.

Amanda saw the specific kind of comfort her students got from having these grievances. Amanda’s school is a predominantly white school in a rural district with high levels of poverty, and some of the students have no positive adult figures in their lives. The boys more often drawn to Fuentes tend to not have female friends or girlfriends or play team sports. One of the boys who said the most worryingly antisemitic things was periodically homeless and mocked for his smell. “It was almost giving him hope,” Amanda said of the boy’s bigotry. “It was just misdirected. It was like—‘This is who we can blame.’ ”

The most consistent piece of advice extremism experts give is to listen and ask, without judgment, what they get out of it.

“The real effective means of prevention is asking the question: ‘What is this doing for you?’ ” Dashtgard said. “Is it isolation? A lack of purpose or meaning? Is it trauma? Stigma around mental health or neurodivergence? That’s the job. That’s the real job.”

Dashtgard had some concrete pieces of advice for adults concerned with protecting young people: Keep an eye out for sudden changes (changes in dress, new kinds of friends, isolation, excessive time on the internet), for example. Familiarize yourself with far-right key words. Try to head off certain ideas, such as conspiracy theories about Jews, by educating kids about them before they encounter them organically. Try to teach young people how to spot hateful language, and explain how influencers manipulate their audiences for their own selfish aims. (Ask “Does Nick Fuentes even believe the things he’s saying?” Dashtgard said, suggesting one way of undermining the groyper appeal—“Or is he just doing it to be more famous or influential?”)

Experts also urged parents to be on the lookout for signs of bitterness around girls and dating. While feeling angry and depressed over romantic rejection is a common youthful experience, in the modern digital ecosystem, that resentment can serve as an entry point into radical online movements.

“The gender relations and insecurities are the first step and tend to be where a lot of these young men and boys are entering these conversations,” said Kallie Mitchell, the head of gender policy at the New Lines think tank. As she sees it, incels remained fixated on misogyny and animosity between the two sexes; men’s rights activists went on to focus on a twisted kind of male empowerment; and groypers moved on to antisemitism and racism. “They have different end points, but the starting point is largely related to issues with gender relations.”

Often, men will get there innocently enough. Dashtgard noted that if you Google “How to get a girlfriend,” the top hits will be “male supremacist bullshit.”

But ultimately, Dashtgard said, it comes down to figuring out what, at a basic and deeply personal level, is going wrong to make a teenager vulnerable.

Luckily, while adolescent boys are those most vulnerable to predation from hateful trolls, they’re also the most open to correction. So encouraging them to join a sports team, volunteer, or participate in community events can help with the underlying feelings of resentment or isolation. They are also the group most likely to be swayed by showing them different perspectives.

According to Lindsay Schubiner, the director of programs at the Western States Center, an organization that opposes bigoted groups, the key to having these conversations is to listen without showing scorn or judgment—while simultaneously reiterating your own values. Don’t bluntly disagree with any statements a groyper makes, as that can cause him to double down. Ask him with genuine curiosity to explain his beliefs, and guide him toward reflecting on how those beliefs might lead to real-world harm. Even with preternatural patience, most of the time, you should expect no progress.

“The bottom line is it’s incredibly difficult,” Schubiner said. “But maintaining the relationship is often the core of what allows people to leave those ideologies in their own time.”

“It’s on their timeline,” she added. “And that time might not actually ever come. But sometimes it does.”

Amanda tries to reach her groyper students by asking them to exercise empathy. She has them read books such as The Crucible and the Lord of the Flies to teach about the dangers of mass hysteria and group vilification. She has had them read Elie Wiesel’s “The Perils of Indifference” speech and materials from the Holocaust Museum to teach the consequences of hatred. In discussion, she resists expressing shock when the boys say outrageous things and instead asks them to explain why they believe what they do, without judgment, before gently pointing out inconsistencies.

And when that fails, when there are more hardened cases, she and the other teachers make plans to reach those kids directly. They invite students to join them in free periods or to pop in during lunch. (“Food was usually a good motivator to get them to come in and start talking,” Amanda said.) The boy who argued for the return of slavery wouldn’t listen to Amanda—he didn’t like women, she said—so she turned to a male teacher she knew he admired. That teacher would make sure to ask the student about his day every day in an effort to get him to open up and make him feel less isolated.

Amanda has seen some progress. Some of her students have let go of their most worrying beliefs. But she hasn’t seen miraculous changes.

The state isn’t helping her. Under Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida has rolled out new curricula that emphasize patriotism and conservative values. When teaching The Crucible, she can’t talk about McCarthyism, as Joe McCarthy is now supposed to be taught as a kind of American hero. The reading list has been shuffled, and Anne Frank’s diary now gets just one excerpt. Maus was removed. The Holocaust unit in history was moved from middle school to high school, making it easier for them to be convinced by Fuentes’ denialism. “Some of these events, where we could correct some of this crazy ideology, [are] no longer in the curriculum,” she said.

With her tools for teaching tolerance growing increasingly limited, she’s returning again and again to the most basic approach.

“Kids need to talk through stuff,” she said. “The biggest thing is to try not to challenge it, but to try to connect with students. Not to agree with them, but so that they can be open to new ideas and listen to something that’s not hateful.”

Taylor is not willing to give up on her brother. She has gone through periods of being no-contact in the past. Once, after Jake made a particularly upsetting homophobic remark about Taylor’s relationship with her wife, she punched him, and the two didn’t talk for a year. But Taylor found these periods painful. She is three years older than Jake, and she feels some responsibility to help him out of it. She believes he has no one else in his life who will.

It appears from Taylor’s point of view that no one has realized the extent of his views—or cares to challenge them, if they do. Taylor’s parents certainly don’t seem to understand the gravity of the situation. Her dad has told her to let it all roll off her, that her brother is only trying to bait her, for fun. They don’t seem to understand how much the internet can radicalize people.

Taylor does, though. “The scariest part to me is I don’t think he’s in the deep dark corners of the internet; I think he’s sharing Instagram memes with his college buddies,” she said. “I think you can find this stuff on the surface level by liking five Instagram posts, and then it feeds you the most racist shit imaginable.”

Taylor worries that because of the insidious power of this system, without intervention, Jake might just go deeper and deeper in. So she keeps trying. They talk about politics regularly. They argue. Occasionally, they find a point of connection when he rails against establishment Democrats—something she agrees with, as a leftist.

But she also comes out of these conversations feeling, at times, physically ill, as if she’s betrayed her own values by engaging with him. Other times, she worries that he might one day commit a hate crime. If that happened, would she be a bystander, guilty of enabling him by keeping him in her life? Or would she alternatively feel the moral weight of not having rescued him from his hate?

A couple of months ago, she deleted her social media, so she has lost track of Jake’s latest political fixations. It has been a reprieve for her mental health. But she still worries.

“It’s hard when he’s my only sibling, and I worry for him,” she said, “as much as I’m hurt by him.”

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