The parasite attacking the right wing

For the past few months, emerging right-wingers have been under attack by the same parasite that lethally ate away at the social democratic, labor, and traditional center-left parties. By way of example, the MAGA movement is being used as a host by supremacist identity groups to gain visibility and structure. But it is not alone: all over the world, the woke right—in order to survive—is acting like a parasite on movements that it may end up fracturing.

Broadly speaking, the alternative right is what emerged as a response to the lack of connection of the traditional right with social demands that could not be channeled by any spectrum of establishment politics. These demands have aspects in common and others specific to their locality, arising both from within traditional parties—as in the case of MAGA—and from new parties—as in the case of VOX, LLA, AfD, and so many others. These right-wingers are the ones in danger.

The civil war within MAGA

Returning to the parasite that has these emerging right-wingers in its sights, it is such a serious phenomenon that it is currently unleashing an in-fight within the ranks that brought Donald Trump to power, causing him to lose his focus and agenda, as well as eventually electoral support. Many politicians and MAGA influencers have positioned themselves on one side or the other of this civil war, and others are sadly juggling to look good with God and the devil, a strategy that has not been paying off.

Tensions erupted after Tucker Carlson affectionately interviewed Nick Fuentes, a podcaster with millions of followers and a self-confessed Stalin- and Hitler-admirer, among other disgusting details. Carlson got what he wanted: to be talked about, and aroused the need of many people to get away from his poisonous agenda that tainted, for example, the legacy of the Heritage Foundation. But the foundation's director, Kevin Roberts, released an unfortunate video with which he sought to save his friend Carlson from public scorn. Far from calming the waters, it unleashing a wave of criticism and distancing. Roberts tried to patch it up hours later, but the cataclysm had already reached the legendary foundation, which to this day continues to suffer from loss of donors, resignations, and reshuffles.

This scandal runs in parallel with two others: one of them is the leaking of a chat room in which prominent figures of the youth of the Republican Party rejoiced parroting all the ideological obscenities they had at hand, from committing vile acts against who thought differently to positions of commensurate racism and antisemitism. They left no imbecility to boast. This also unleashed criticism and raised alarm. But the most serious is the scandal that broke out within the right after the murder of Charlie Kirk.

A textbook woke leftist character murdered the founder of Turning Point USA. He confessed, and the family turned him in. It was the key moment to condemn how that nefarious ideology turns violent, but, instead, important MAGA members used this attack to spread conspiracy theories that Kirk had been murdered by the Mossad or that his wife was involved in or benefited from his death, and various derivative delusions. The MAGA movement was unable to shake off these opportunistic conspiracy theorists because they did not want to push away their "old friends" who were "getting it wrong," so they let these voices run rampant and dominate the debate.

The "there are no enemies on the right" fallacy

In all three cases—the Fuentes interview, the Kirk assassination theories, and the horror chat—the fear of leaving the MAGA movement prevented rooting out the problem. The slogan was "there are no enemies on the right," possibly believing that, since the left seems to buckle down and hold their own no matter what they do, the right would be successful in doing the same. Big mistake: after Roberts' video, it all blew up in their face.

By insisting that "there are no enemies on the right," the right is repeating the biggest mistake of the left: letting the woke parasite grow, that victimizing idea that transfers its frustrations to the responsibility of some kind of oppressor that attempts to undermine its utopia from the shadows. But condescension with these groups has done nothing but feed them, paving the way for the fanatics of the totalitarianism regimes of the last century who look for someone to blame for their failures and hate the free market, capitalism, and tolerance.

They don't want to fight the woke agenda: they want to simply switch roles and get revenge. The dumbest response to years of the gender/feminist narrative is to seek a supremacist revenge. The dumbest response to years of DEI policies and affirmative action on behalf of "non-whites," is to abet white identitarianism. The mechanism is the same, so obvious that it is frightening. Now, the parasitic identitarian thinking that believes the system is rigged against them is moving to the right. Those who think this is exaggerated, take a walk through the postulates of the Groyper Army, and you will understand the severity of the matter.

The Groypers are an inorganic group of activists who attack right-wing individuals and groups in the U.S. whom they regard as too moderate and not nationalistic enough. To them, Charlie Kirk was a fake "anti-white" conservative, and for this they used to attack him online or at his speeches. The Groypers blamed Kirk for not abiding by their virulently antisemitic, racist and homophobic stances, disguised as narratives about Christian, traditional and family values. The Groyper icon is a frog, "Pepe," seen in millions of memes, and its greatest exponent is, rightly, Nick Fuentes. This man, in his frenzied quest for attention and scandal, says things that would make Mao pale, and is now the idol of much of the youth of the U.S. and the world.

Fuentes summarized his platform as follows: "Jews are running society, women need to shut the f*** up, blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part, and we would live in paradise. ... White men need to run the household, they need to run the country, they need to run the companies. They just need to run everything, it's that simple. It's literally that simple." 

The root of the problem: Generational social trauma

Understanding the consumption of content like Fuentes' requires analyzing the many factors that are driving this propensity of young Westerners for identitarianism, victimhood, depression, and a lack of positive values and connections. Rivers of ink described how these factors enabled the rise of the woke left, and every day, surveys emerge showing a bleak picture for a significant percentage of the younger generation. This is a longstanding fact, but one that the COVID biennium, especially cruel to youth and children, catalyzed to alarming proportions. There is a serious problem of social trauma that is not restricted to the left or the right, and which, as it particularly afflicts those living in liberal democracies, confronts them with the way of life in which they grew up.

Taking advantage of the vulnerabilities of their audience, characters like Fuentes manage to empathize using pre-existing frustrations and insecurities, sowing reactionary defense mechanisms that function as an echo chamber, something very much like a cult. Fuentes himself is not interesting; he has no brilliant rhetoric or anything that makes him stand out. But what he represents is interesting: the paradigm of the triumph of provocation, the cult of attention and the victimhood justification of terror.

Philosopher Rod Dreher wrote on the subject these days, saying that 30-40% of young people working in Republican offices in Washington are Fuentes supporters. The American right seems to be radicalizing and fragmenting. The Groypers are an important part of their constituency and, more importantly, their party structure, and they are pushing to coopt MAGA.

Supposedly, sexism, antisemitism and racism were banished from the right-wing universe. For a long time, the left instituted that image of the right, but fortunately and thanks to the rise of emerging right-wing leaders, that didn't work. Tens of millions of new voters around the world ignored such smears and voted for these new movements. It would be a great achievement for the left that the right now validates their lies, and that thanks to the Groypers of the world, the vile caricature becomes a sad reality. To the woke right, it doesn't matter. On the contrary, in its infinite resentment it proliferates it.

The phenomenon does not attack MAGA alone. Days before the Milei government won the midterm election, a group of Hispano-American fundamentalist conservative influencers began a coordinated attack against him. The criticism was of the same tone as the Groypers against Kirk: that he wasn't radicalized enough, that he supported Israel, that he hadn't attacked homosexuals, etc. Their attacks in the midst of the campaign sought to take away the conservative vote that supported him in the presidential race. Milei has been very intelligent in these two years in neutralizing these groups, even within his own administration, demonstrating that they are as pernicious as they are marginal. For now, he has gotten the parasite off his back.

But one should not underestimate the tensions that are present among all the emerging right-wingers, because this is a powerful conflict. Interestingly, the arguments of all these groups coincide with those of the woke left: the preeminence of identitarianism, ethnicity or sex as a determining factor in the personality or performance of people; rewriting history to fit their fallacious narratives; Israel as the scapegoat for all evils; capitalism as the culprit for the lack of opportunity; and fundamentalism, Adanism or Luddism. In short, they want the same as their leftist cousins: to subsist off of structures to favor their side of victims and fanatics.

The dilemma of the emerging right

Totalitarian thinking is harmful, regardless of its ideological basis. While the woke left has lost strength, the conditions that gave rise to the movement are there, looking for people vulnerable to the siren song of binary, simplistic, Manichean and collectivist thinking. This is always the reason why identity politics is successful and this is how totalitarian movements spread.

The woke movement revealed to us the extent to which the political left was willing to endorse absurdity as long as it did not criticize their radicalized factions, even when the radicalization made them contradictory and destructive to their own followers. At one point, they got trapped and never managed to get out of the clamp again. It also happened that many progressives who did not agree with the woke radicalization were afraid to speak out. The right is not immune to this. It is easy to condemn the lies of our adversaries, but it is much harder to do so with our own.

If the emerging right has achieved triumphs, it is thanks to telling truths and upholding principles, not in spite of them. Abandoning all that to protect the parasite does not seem to be a winning strategy, but this is the dilemma that today moves the political party that governs the most important country in the world. This is how powerful the parasite that is attacking the right truly is.