Here Lie The Groypers

“Yeah, I have feelings about that flag over there,” the young campaign volunteer said to me.

He gestured toward the white and blue Star of David banner perched above the front of the sanctuary of Turning Point Church of God in Clewiston, Florida, where it hung a mere 20 feet from the ‘Fishback for Florida’ lectern. Somehow, despite the proximity, neither the sign nor the Israeli flag had burst into flame.

Sitting in the front row of the church, we were chatting about politics and the movement he had joined. Up until that point, not one attendee at James Fishback’s “closing argument” speech on the eve of the election had brought up Israel, or the Jews, without me raising it.

Credit Dylan Housman

“Israel is a broken record, though. We’ve made our point, it’s time to talk about other things,” the volunteer dismissively said to me, explaining that everyone who cared deeply about that hot button had already decided which camp they were in.

There were just over a hundred people there – good turnout for Clewiston, a rural town of just over 7,000 people about an hour and a half from Fort Lauderdale. I had flown to Orlando, and then made the nearly three-hour drive to Hendry County, to see for myself what the “groyper” movement – we’ll shorthand them as followers of Nick Fuentes and his “America First” faction – looked like in real life.

There have been other groyper-inspired candidates for public office, but Fishback is perhaps this new creature in its purest form. He launched his campaign with inflammatory Twitter tirades about Israel and AIPAC, he secured endorsements from both Tucker Carlson and Fuentes, he frequently lobbed racist attacks against his opponent Byron Donalds. But the critical difference from other groyper grifters was the act of running a real campaign. He made dozens of stops in the closing days of the campaign alone, had a strong digital operation, an organized group of real volunteers and is a gifted communicator when he isn’t triggered into telling a black voter they should be lynched.

What he lacked in fundraising he made up for in an army of young men shitposting their way into social media semi-relevance. The ancient Vulcan proverb tells us Twitter is not real life. I wanted to put that to the test, and not just by reading a vote tally from my office in D.C.

The volunteer next to me said his main priorities were “family values” and affordability. In his early 20s, he was about to enter college, and said he had learned about Fishback via Instagram. I asked what his media diet was. He said he listened to Fuentes and Carlson, but since he liked to hear all sides, he sprinkled in the streamer Destiny – a professional Starcraft player turned political commentator. We laughed at the career move.

Two other young men sat by me in jeans and ballcaps, sparking memories of my cousins from rural South Carolina. They didn’t have anything to say about Israel or the Jews either. Their concerns were Flock cameras, data centers and reclaiming “the Florida I grew up in.”

The event, hosted by senior pastor Troy Ezell, opened with a group prayer before Fishback finally took the stage and spoke for roughly an hour. I had seen Fishback earlier in the parking lot when I arrived, looking somewhat distracted from afar. But he performed well on stage. It was a speech that the vast majority of Americans on the right could cheer for – small town Florida, the American dream, citrus, cattle, and sugar.

“The real test of the economy is if a 30-year-old can get married and buy a home,” he said, which made a lot of sense to me as a renting 28-year old getting married next year. He touted affordability, DOGEing Florida, banning abortion, and clamping down on migrant workers taking people’s jobs.

There was one mention of AIPAC, which was put side by side with CAIR, in the entire speech. There was one veiled reference to Israel in a section about foreign aid, and that was it. Some groyper.

After the speech ended, Fishback approached me. He struck me as quite slender in person, wearing a black suit with round-framed glasses that gave the 31-year-old a more boyish appearance. He was cordial, and greeted me warmly, if skeptically: “You’re from the Daily Wire?”

I asked him why he was talking about Israel and AIPAC less now than at the start of his campaign. He had tweeted about Israel 22 times in the month of March alone, but only three times in the final month before election day. He seemed increasingly reticent to play the hits that made him vertical video famous.

He rejected the premise. He promised he still planned to divest from Israel if he became governor, but also implied that it wasn’t forefront in his supporters’ minds: “This campaign is about the issues that matter to Floridians. I am still bothered by the fact that the Florida State Pension Fund lends the Israeli government $385 million a year, but the closing argument of this campaign is about the insurance crisis in our state, education, the development choices that we’re making, but I still stand by the fact that I think we need to divest from any foreign governments.”

I wondered if I had gotten my priors wrong. The people I had met were, by and large, not groypers. The speech was cookie-cutter populist. I came to Florida expecting the Mos Eisley cantina, not bespectacled blather. But I was reminded that I was dealing with the Jim Bakker of right-wing politics.

During his speech, Fishback said it “wasn’t personal” with Byron Donalds, whom he had falsely accused of being under federal investigation for sex-trafficking two weeks prior. I asked how the repeated racist attacks and inflammatory social media conduct could be anything but personal.

“My wife and I trade jokes and jabs together, it’s nothing personal between she and I. I have tremendous respect for Congressman Donalds… I wish them all the best.”

It had only been a month since he publicly asked why Donalds’ father “never calls” in a post about black parenthood. It had only been three months since Fishback’s curious wedding to his mystery wife, but he was more than happy to invoke her on the campaign trail.

As soon as my interview with Fishback ended, an outside advisor to the campaign approached me and said “the Israel stuff is dead.” When I asked what he meant, he explained he had been helping Fishback during the home stretch of the campaign and advised him to soften his rhetoric on Israel and Jews, because it was wrong to “attack a group of people.”

The advisor explained that he himself is a devout supporter of Israel for theological reasons, and he wouldn’t back any candidate who was anti-Israel. He said Fishback had been “taken out of context” earlier in the campaign, and that in reality, the candidate wasn’t particularly anti-Israel at all, much less antisemitic.

It was hard for me to square that with the candidate who had referred to kids’ cafeteria meals as “goyslop” on the campaign trail. But it was a common theme. When I spoke to Rev. Ezell, who was introduced to Fishback by his Gen Z son, he said he wanted a candidate who would “shake things up”. That he cared about immigration, data centers, and taxes. He liked Trump, and really liked Ron DeSantis, but Donalds was too much of a politician for him. I asked about Israel, and he too said he was supportive of the Jewish state, and seemed either unbothered or unaware of Fishback’s rhetoric about it.

Credit: Dylan Housman

I began to wonder if the groypers had simply not survived contact with reality. Perhaps the necessities of primary politics had swept them aside as a vulnerability for a candidate who actually wanted to win instead of get nutpicked by the Daily Beast. Perhaps they really were all humble Pakistani bot farmers after all.

Actually, no. The next night, I was in Tampa at the airport Hilton for the Fishback election night party. There weren’t any signs or staff there to direct me where to go. I wandered deep into the bowels of the hotel, following scattered 20-somethings in suits and dresses like a trail of breadcrumbs through the Backrooms until I found the ballroom where the gathering was taking place.

There were a couple of staffers at a table that seemed to be checking people in. I had no credentials to speak of, so I simply walked past them. I spotted a bar cart and got into line for a beverage before I would start working the room. It turned out to be a cash bar. I was devastated.

Credit Dylan Housman

I took my whiskey neat and began talking to the kids around me. A 16-year-old black girl who had phonebanked for the campaign said she was Christian and liked Fishback’s pro-life social media presence.

I asked if she thought he was racist.

“We all have our moments, but I don’t think he would talk to me so nicely if he were really racist,” she said.

Without realizing it, I had blasted back in time. The room had all the awkwardly sincere vibes of the Young Americans for Liberty and CPAC conferences I had attended as a college student a decade ago. Out of the 250 or so attendees there, the vast majority were under 30, and half would need their ID scanned if they wandered skittishly down to the hotel bar. Just like our graybeard forebears with the Ron Paul Revolution, most of these kids seemed to know Fishback wasn’t going to win. But they were sure the future would be “America First” in due course.

Here, there was more interest in Israel. Notably, it disproportionately came from kids who I had talked to from out of state, not the Floridians themselves. A cadre of true believers had made a pilgrimage to see their leader on his campaign’s night of nights. Their Mecca was the Hilton Tampa Airport Westshore.

Fuentes often stresses to his followers the importance of “hiding your power level,” and unlike the Clewiston event, I suspect I encountered this on election night. The young crowd did not seem particularly politically sophisticated, and yet they were savvy in a Gen Z, digital native type of way. One young man I spoke to very cordially asked me multiple times if I was recording (I was not), and kept glancing down at my hands until he settled into the conversation. He was no fan of Israel, but he also decried Islam and “third-world Duginism” while totally rejecting any notion of alliance with the far-Left, an idea bandied about by a number of podcasters in this world.

Fishback eventually spoke to the crowd that night, for a much shorter period of time. He conceded his loss, but said the movement he champions is just beginning. Unlike at Turning Point Church, the shots at AIPAC came earlier and more often this time around. The crowd erupted into a chant of “Christ is King.”

It was around this moment, with Fishback netting just over 10% of the vote for a third-place showing, that I realized the groypers had survived contact with literal reality, but not political reality. They are like youngsters of the past voting independent in the 2016 election, palling around with the other kids at the libertarian club in college, having late night discussions about how war and tariffs were bad, energized by every little bit of confirmation bias we could find that movement was going “our way,” just not quite yet. I know this because I was one of those. But even for all that talk, there was the underlying feeling that the movement was not, in fact, going our way. And once we were hit with political reality, most of us grew up and moved on.

“The online thing is real in the sense that it’s loud,” Polk County GOP Chairman Sam Romain told me the next morning. “It’s just not attached to anything. It doesn’t produce a volunteer, it doesn’t produce a check that clears, and it definitely doesn’t produce a grandmother in Lake Wales who marks your name.”

Yes, there is a darker element to this generation of starry-eyed radical right-wing youths. Our discussions of free trade and gun rights did not have the vile implications that the “Jewish Question” does. But the overall arc looks the same. Just like most of us Gary Johnson voters at the YAL conference ended up becoming conservatives once he crashed and burned, I imagine most of these kids will have their sharp edges whittled down by institutional conservatism as they are increasingly exposed to Big Boy Politics.

That’s not to say that some of the ideas may not last. But the dumbest, most extreme ones likely won’t, and the Based Rituals in hotel lobbies at conferences will get replaced by 9-5 jobs and pragmatism in due course.

Fishback’s strength is his smooth-talking chameleon-like charisma. He was anything to anybody during his campaign. A pro-life warrior to the young Christian girl, a God-fearing warrior for old Florida to the pastor, an anti-data center protector of farmland to the young blue-collar laborers, and a truth-teller about Jewish power to the antisemitic podcast listeners. The incongruence is a product of our evermore-siloed media environment.

Like Bakker, the televangelist superstar who was undone by allegations of sexual misconduct and a financial fraud conviction, the charm Fishback has in spades is undone by his erraticism. Just two years ago he was making staunchly pro-Israel arguments against liberals and writing for the Free Press. Then he tried to grift his way onto DOGE and join arms with the likes of Vivek Ramaswamy. This year, he ran a campaign targeting Jews and Indian immigrants.

He is an empty vessel who will say or do whatever the whims of the moment call for. Pulling that off if you’re disciplined with a clean record can make you a president. Doing it when you are facing lawsuits, have unpaid legal bills, lied about working for DOGE, were credibly accused of dating a 17-year-old, and hurl racial epithets at your opponents by the dozen gets you 10% of the vote in a gubernatorial primary.

And probably a podcast on Rumble, too.