A fight for the soul of the center-right existed prior to the September 2025 murder of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. As soon as the November 2024 election was decided, the clock began ticking towards January 20, 2029, the day that an 83-year-old Donald Trump will no longer be president. Even before the Trump family moved back into the White House last January, contenders to succeed the MAGA leader and control the conventional conservative movement that he co-opted began jostling for influence. Charlie Kirk quickly shot up the leaderboard in this contest, and his assassination has caused the once-simmering back burner battle to boil over.
Back in early 2024, I analyzed right-wing factional infighting through the prism of books and manifestoes put out by “Freedom Conservatives,” “National Conservatives,” and “Postliberals.” With Trump’s subsequent return to office, those factions are now playing with a lot more to lose.
More infamously, there are the “groypers,” fans of the belligerent nihilist podcaster Nick Fuentes, best known for his anti-Jewish, anti-woman, and anti-minority rants. Groypers exist, but how many of them are there, and who are they?
Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, a committed national conservative, embroiled himself and his institution in a run of bad PR when he defended controversial commentator Tucker Carlson’s softball interview of Fuentes. Roberts’s factional opponents both inside and outside Heritage piled on with glee, opening themselves to charges of aiding and abetting an organized left that is rapidly finding its feet in advance of the 2026 midterm elections.
Events, dear boy, events
Charlie Kirk was a signer of the National Conservative Statement of Principles, but did not appear in my original piece. While his Turning Point USA organization was large, it had not proven itself as a force outside the very specific market of separating conservative donors from their money by promising to win over the kids.
That changed in November 2024, when the group was credited with driving Republican turnout in Arizona (Kirk’s home state), which President Trump returned to his column by an unexpectedly comfortable margin of almost six percentage points. After Kirk’s assassination, outsiders such as myself were treated to even more evidence that Kirk was more important than he appeared. He was “connective tissue” between and among various right-of-center factions, being friendly with most and charitable to all. Those who worked with him, like CRC fellow Kali Fontanilla, already knew this. Those of us who didn’t only learned it through its sudden and horrifying destruction.
Utah authorities allege Kirk’s murder was committed by Tyler Robinson, an apparently online-radicalized man with connections to esoteric sexual-interest communities who allegedly thought Kirk hated transgender people. Robinson’s alleged romantic partner, Lance Twiggs, whom the government does not allege had foreknowledge of the Kirk attack, is transgender. Robinson is still awaiting trial on capital charges.
The discourse abhors a vacuum
With Kirk’s murder, the role of “Tribune to the Young Men” among conservative commentators became vacant. And the immediate candidate to take it could not have been more different than Kirk. Where Kirk was a partisan Republican of a Trump-aligned sort, the challenger called on his podcast listeners to vote for Kamala Harris in 2024. Where Kirk was a pro-Israel and pro-Jewish voice (though not averse to fraternal correction of the Israeli government), the challenger unleashes flagrantly antisemitic rants. And while Kirk was alive, the challenger had little positive to say about him.
Nick Fuentes, the belligerent podcaster offering his young (white) male audience a steady diet of dopamine hits with his anti-woman, anti-ethnic-minority, and anti-Jewish rants, leads (claims to lead?) the most befuddling of right-wing factions: The “groypers,” who exist largely as internet trolls pushing the spirit of Fuentes’s rants.
How many “groypers” are there, and how important are they? Nobody knows!
On the one hand, Budapest-based national-conservative writer Rod Dreher suggested nearly half of D.C. conservative staffers were groypers or groyper-curious after a visit to Washington. On the other hand, the Network Contagion Research Institute analyzed Fuentes’s Twitter posts and found evidence that they have been boosted by likely foreign-origin “low-cost amplification clusters and engagement farms that foreign actors often use to manufacture virality, distort platform metrics, and manipulate recommendation systems.”
Whether the number of Fuentes acolytes is as large as Dreher suggested, this raises concerns about “entryism” by extremists into conservative spaces, especially professional ones. Washington, D.C. policy and especially legislative staff work is set up precisely to select for ultra-ideological lunatics. As Russ Greene of Stand Together has argued, staff pay is too low and the D.C. cost of living is too high for anyone other than radical ideologues or members of the Heir Force to move to Washington to be staffers.
Since radical ideologues are disproportionally interested in Washington work unless pay and other benefits increase, conservative institutions and Republican staffs must be extremely wary of radicals seeding themselves into an institution for the purposes of taking it over for their own purposes.
One (very confused) voice
Some prominent right-of-center figures act like the “groypers” are a faction with which the mainstream right and supporters of President Trump must “unite.” Tucker Carlson, who has gone on an ideological journey since his dismissal from Fox News, invited Fuentes on his talk show for a softball interview.
That would have been troublesome enough, but then Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts elected to step in it. Roberts had already directly aligned Heritage with the National Conservatives in a speech at the 2022 National Conservatism Conference, saying, “I come not to invite national conservatives to join our conservative movement, but to acknowledge the plain truth that Heritage is already part of yours.” He had also tied Heritage to Carlson with a promotional deal.
That is the backdrop for the internet video heard ‘round the conservative movement. In late October following the Carlson interview of Fuentes, Roberts put out on behalf of Heritage a videotaped statement denouncing a “venomous coalition” of Carlson’s critics.
That would have been controversial enough, but the Heritage Foundation has a very particular internal practice that made it even more controversial: its so-called “one voice policy,” under which “Heritage employees always publicly advocate for a single, unified position.” People both inside and outside Heritage raised the obvious follow-up question: Were Heritage staff, and with them the conservative institutional movement that frequently adopts the Heritage line, bound to support Carlson’s turn to virulent anti-Israel politics or Fuentes’s antisemitism?
The short answer proved to be a tepid “No,” that only was revealed after days of public turmoil and the resignations of Heritage board member Robert P. George and scholar Chris DeMuth, among others. Roberts survived the controversy, but at a hit to Heritage’s reputation. Indeed, the Heritage Foundation’s purpose and role is now subject to question, especially with its “one voice” pretension despite its leadership’s commitment to the national-conservative factional interest. This is in many ways an inversion of the error of former Heritage president Kay Coles James, who sometimes appeared to work in the factional interest of the Old Establishment.
Roberts’s behavior should not be charged to national conservatives as a whole. DeMuth, for one, is a prominent figure in the Edmund Burke Foundation that hosts the National Conservatism Conferences. Spencer Klavan, an editor with the self-consciously national conservative Claremont Institute, proffered a reasonable theory for why Roberts stepped in it, writing:
What led him into [his videotaped statement], though, was an instinct to defend allies from public denunciation by default. That is an instinct that developed gradually and for good reasons on the Right, to stave off years of bad-faith attacks. Now, after long and painful experience, many conservatives are primed to side with anyone who claims to be the victim of a witch hunt.
Klavan’s entire piece is worth reading. It addresses the appeal of Fuentes’s purported and yet false claim to be speaking unspeakable truths to young men who have been told to silence themselves on numerous controversial topics.
Pouncing
As Roberts’s continued leadership of the Heritage Foundation was effectively confirmed by George’s resignation from the board, a piece by the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Henry Olsen charged Heritage with supporting discrimination against women, at least in theory. (Olsen is also a proponent of statist economics who has previously had research funded by Pierre Omidyar’s philanthropies.)
The substance of the claim was that Heritage had hired Scott Yenor, a social-conservative scholar of family policy formerly of the Claremont Institute.[i] Yenor has argued, among other plainly radical things, that employers should be permitted to engage in “hiring only male heads of households.” Olsen asked whether that position and others that Yenor has taken that would economically preference men over women were now the “one voice” position (that policy again), which a Heritage spokesperson denied.
But as controversial as Olsen’s argument was where he made it: Laurene Powell Jobs’s The Atlantic, an increasingly partisan-Democratic magazine. Airing political dirty laundry in public is always dangerous, as the opposition can opportunistically seize on it to smear the entire movement as its worst elements. Even more dangerous is airing political dirty laundry on the opposition’s turf, where opportunists can frame and mold a story to cause maximum trouble on one’s own side.
Especially when a position like Yenor’s apparent rejection of antidiscrimination protections for working women is highly controversial, one’s own side will typically host debate on it on its own turf. To cross the floor to the other side’s turf to air a controversial-on-one’s-own-side political debate reeks of appealing for the opposition to intervene—dirty pool in a factional debate.
In the words of Animal House: “Only we can do that to our pledges.”
President Donald Trump, the personality who has held the right’s divided factions together, is increasingly a lame duck as the 22nd Amendment binds him to leave office in 2029. As a result, right fights have reached a new intensity—an intensity likely to increase if, as American political history and public opinion polls suggest is highly likely, the Republican Party has a bad 2026 midterm election. Factions will blame each other for promoting bad policies and insufficient loyalty to the cause. And with the internet having destroyed all boundary rails managing conflict, the already extremely personal infighting may even get worse. Hang on.
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[i] I discussed an essay of his on education policy in the 2024 series; I was unconvinced by his argument that I should have learned to skin a buffalo instead of whatever it was I learned in school.
