The call warning of a dangerous tide of extremism in Donald Trump’s Washington is coming from inside the house — the vice president’s house.
And this alarm bell that things are going way too far didn’t come from some liberal or Never Trump conservative. It came from a member of the entourage of Hungary’s right-wing prime minister, Viktor Orbán.
Rod Dreher is an American writer who moved to Budapest in 2022 after becoming enamored with Orbán’s brand of right-wing populism. On Monday, he published a lengthy essay on his Substack “diary” describing a sitdown he had with Orbán and JD Vance on Nov. 7 “in the vice president’s study.” According to Dreher, his time with Vance also included a discussion of “Groyperism” and what he described as the “new radicalism racing through the young” in Washington D.C. during this second Trump era.
“The Groyper thing is real,” Dreher later wrote in his post describing the meeting.. “It is not a fringe movement, in that it really has infiltrated young conservative Washington networks to a significant degree.”
Groypers are followers of the neo-Nazi livestreamer Nick Fuentes. For the past several years, the movement of largely Generation Z extremists has been at the heart of a schism between the explicitly anti-Semitic alt-right and more mainstream MAGA Republicans. Dreher described taking his concerns about this to Vance in a private exchange before Orbán arrived.
“I shared with him my views about the threat that Nick Fuentes and Groyperism pose to the country, to the GOP, and to him personally,” Dreher said of his conversation with Vance, adding, “He listened to what I had to say. And that is all I can say about it, out of respect for his privacy.”
The White House did not respond to TPM’s requests for comment on this story.
In his Substack post, Dreher suggested his message to Vance was based on extensive conversations he had with other conservatives during his trip to Washington. He specifically quoted one “DC insider who said that in his estimation, ‘between 30 and 40 percent’ of the Zoomers who work in official Republican Washington are fans of Nick Fuentes.”
“Nobody talked to me on the record. What I say is my impression of a number of conversations I had with people (conservatives) who are directly involved in this world. Every one of them is appalled by what’s happening,” Dreher wrote.
Along with his alarm at the anti-Semitism espoused by Fuentes, who has openly praised Adolf Hitler, Dreher suggested the Zoomer streamer and his acolytes could be pushing the country towards fascism.
“After these last three days in Washington, I am more convinced than I have ever been that we are moving towards some kind of totalitarianism — or at best, authoritarianism,” said Dreher.
The claim that more than a third of young GOP staffers are at least sympathetic to Fuentes isn’t entirely shocking. Recent years have seen numerous indications that this new brand of neo-Nazism and white nationalism has increasingly taken hold in the right-wing establishment.
Among many other things, in 2023, TPM published a piece revealing an aide to Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) was a prominent Fuentes follower. The staffer in question, Wade Searle,remained on Gosar’s team and has since gone on to work for a far-right news site that is among the members of the new, hand-picked Pentagon press corps. Since the beginning of Trump’s second term, the social media output of the Department of Homeland Security has been rife with themes and imagery popular among online white nationalists. Members of extremist groups have posted about signing up based on these DHS recruitment drives. In 2022, Trump had dinner with Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago. And late last month, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson had Fuentes on his podcast, kicking off the current internecine right wing feuding about what is too extreme even for MAGA..
So, what’s notable about Dreher’s post isn’t the idea that Groypers are ascendant in the MAGA era. The remarkable thing here is the fact this message to Vance came from fairly far out on the right.
Dreher is perhaps most famous for his 2018 book — The Benedict Option — in which he pitched the idea that conservative Christians should form their own separatist communities due to their concerns about modern, secular values and the increasing acceptance of the LGBTQ community. In a 2022 essay where Dreher discussed the fact his father had been a Klansman, he described himself as a “race liberal” while also asserting “black people and white people really were very different in terms of culture,” including what he called a “sexual code” among African-Americans that includes teenage motherhood and absentee fathers. In the very essay where he decried the rising tide of Groyperism in D.C., Dreher repeatedly empathized with the roots of these young extremists’ anger and declared that, while anti-Semitism is misguided, Europe has been overwhelmed by a “Muslim mob.”
“Here in Europe, it’s not Jews that make public life in so many European big cities unbearable,” Dreher wrote. “In fact, they were the first ones to experience the special pleasure of Islamic harassment and persecution — an experience that is now far more general.”
And, of course, the very figures Dreher holds out as positive political leaders and potential solutions to the Groyper surge have their own brand of extremism.
In his essay, Dreher described his personal relationship with Vance and called the vice president the “natural heir” to “the new, post-MAGA conservatism.” Dreher suggested part of his motivation in warning Vance was a concern that the vice president would be “tarred with the evil of anti-Semitism and race hatred.” In a follow-up piece for Bari Weiss’ The Free Press, Dreher expanded on this idea of Vance as some kind of antidote to Groyperism. He also made the overwrought claim that New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani is a left-wing analogue to Fuentes.
Yet this entire exchange between Dreher and Vance came just about two weeks after the vice president went off on a podcast rant suggesting it’s “totally reasonable and acceptable” for people not to want to live near those from a “different culture.” That position, which has been described as “segregationist,” isn’t exactly, as Dreher might say, “race liberal.” And, last month, after chats from Young Republicans groups leaked showing the GOP leaders making racist jokes, mocking gas chambers, and at one point flatly declaring “I love Hitler,” Vance brushed off the incident and defended the adults involved as “kids” who were simply telling “edgy, offensive jokes.”
According to Dreher, the other guests for the sitdown in the vice president’s study were Orbán, one of the Hungarian prime minister’s closest advisers, and Gladden Pappin, another American conservative who made the move to Budapest and has become a vocal backer of the government there. The fact that an Orbán associate and booster would be so worried about Fuentes and an authoritarian future for America adds another layer of irony to the story, and shows that the concerns Dreher has about Groyperism don’t necessarily extend to all forms of bigotry and totalitarianism. Orbán has been described by Human Rights Watch as “authoritarian” for his efforts to eliminate majority rule as well as his crackdowns on media and civil society. The Hungarian leader has also expressly stated he wants to prevent his country from becoming “mixed race.”
Dreher did not respond to emails from TPM asking why he is worried about Fuentes’ brand of bigotry and authoritarianism and not Vance’s, Orbán’s, or his own.
This whole episode, much like the meltdown inside the Heritage Foundation after Carlson’s Groyper podcast, helps put a fine point on the split within MAGAworld right now. With Trump’s masked federal agents and troops targeting minorities in the streets, it is beyond clear that many strains of racism and authoritarianism aren’t too extreme for the GOP. However, for some of them at least, virulent anti-Semitism is a bridge too far.
Either way, one thing is abundantly clear: In Washington during this second Trump era, Groyperism and extremism have taken root. The right wingers ringing alarm bells about hatred and authoritarianism are telling on themselves.
