The Groypers Will Get Their Night of the Long Knives
Nick Fuentes is the Ernst Röhm of MAGA
Normally, I’d shy away from Nazi comparisons for being in bad taste. Unless you’re running industrial-scale death camps and invading every nearby country to build a racial empire, you’re probably not in the same league as Hitler. But lately, far from defending themselves from the accusation of Nazism, a growing number of right-wingers wear it as a red armband of honor. There’s podcaster Darryl Cooper, who tweeted his preference for the Nazi occupation of France over Parisian drag queens. There’s Paul Ingrassia, President Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of Special Counsel, who claimed to have “a Nazi streak.” There are the Young Republicans, whose group chat featured bon mots like “I love Hitler.” And, of course, there’s Nick Fuentes, leader of the terminally online Groypers and a guest on Tucker Carlson’s top-ranked podcast, who has likewise praised Hitler and called for “a total Aryan victory.”1 By my reckoning, if you openly admire the Nazis, then it’s fair game to compare you to one. Now, I wouldn’t go so far as to call Fuentes a modern-day Hitler. Say what you will about the Führer, but he achieved significant military success before leading his country to ruin. By contrast, Fuentes is a pure creature of the internet, whose “Groyper Wars” mainly consisted of trolling Charlie Kirk. Thus, instead of the most notorious Nazis, I’d liken Fuentes to the Ernst Röhm of MAGA. And like Röhm‘s SA, his Groyper Army is destined for a Night of the Long Knives.
Hitler, like most Groypers, had few meaningful human ties.2 Journalist John Gunther recalled a colleague who traveled with the Nazi leader during Germany’s 1932 electoral campaign, and observed that “Hitler never talked to a soul, not even to his secretaries, in the long hours in the air; never stirred; never smiled.” Nevertheless, the Führer went back a long way with Röhm. Both were disillusioned World War I veterans who joined the then-marginal German Workers’ Party (later to become the National Socialist Party) in 1919. Röhm participated in Hitler’s 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, was sentenced to prison alongside him, and led the SA, the Nazis’ original paramilitary wing, in beating up Communists and Jews. But in 1934, Hitler—now Germany’s duly appointed chancellor—ordered the execution of Röhm and other SA leaders after falsely accusing them of plotting a coup.3 This was before the death of Paul von Hindenburg, the then–German President, when Hitler’s position wasn’t fully secured. Röhm took the socialist part of National Socialism seriously, seeking a “second revolution” to displace the rich industrialists and landed nobility. Most threateningly, he refused to subordinate his private army to Germany’s official armed forces, which Hitler needed in order to launch his wars of conquest. Finally, Röhm was an openly gay lout with a taste for young men and viewed bourgeois morality with contempt.4 For all of these reasons, Röhm threatened Hitler’s path to absolute power, which required the cooperation—and ultimately co-option—of the German establishment. So Hitler had him killed.
In terms of personal achievement, it isn’t really fair to compare Fuentes to even Röhm. After all, unlike Röhm, a decorated war hero, Fuentes has never done anything for his country. Nor was he instrumental to the rise of MAGA, having instead parasitically capitalized on Trump’s success. Fuentes has never even held a real job, moving straight from Boston University dropout to edgelording livestreamer. But like Röhm and his SA hooligans, Fuentes has amassed an army of troglodytes eager to further radicalize an already-radical movement. In so doing, they threaten MAGA’s ability to consolidate control of the American establishment, which requires the cooperation, or at least acquiescence, of the average American—who is decidedly not a neo-Nazi. Consider also Gunther’s description of Röhm: “A brusque character, a man of limited imagination, who hated peace, loved disorder.” While useful in channeling the energies of the disaffected, Röhm, like Fuentes, was fundamentally a shit disturber, not a man who could build a new order. His execution was necessary to earn Nazism the respectability it needed to bring Germany to heel. Likewise, I expect MAGA’s next leader—probably JD Vance, whom, lest we forget, once compared Trump to Hitler—to bring out the long knives if he wants to secure the movement’s future.
Rather than a coherent ideology, Groyperism is the instinct to take any right-coded position to its most normie-baiting extreme. The right opposes DEI, so Fuentes openly espouses white supremacy. The right wants a greater role for Christianity in public life, so Fuentes says America should be a Catholic theocracy. The right defends traditional masculinity, so Fuentes bemoans women having the right to vote. His rank antisemitism, praise of Hitler, and Holocaust denial are on brand with his fetishistic compulsion to violate taboos. Of course, much of this is trolling, but it’s serious trolling. We’re living in an age when assassins engrave meme phrases on bullets. The Nazis—not known for their sense of humor—would’ve viewed the clownish Fuentes with contempt. But who can doubt that Fuentes would’ve jumped at the chance to don a swastika in the 1940s? Or today, for that matter. Richard Hanania argues that “the arc of conservatism bends towards Fuentes,” given the mass appeal of Groyperized influencers and the lack of institutional guardrails on the right. He compares Groyperization to early-stage wokeness, with the essential differences being “that Right-wing radicalism taps into human nature in a way that wokeness never could. . . . racism, sexism, tribalism, homophobia, and religious fundamentalism are organic parts of our souls, and can dominate societies for centuries.” Well, sure, but Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich lasted just 12 years. And Fuentes is no Hitler. He’s a bargain-basement Röhm.
As the term itself suggests, populists around the world have achieved electoral success by taking popular positions. In the West, they’ve capitalized on a broad discontentment with mass migration, wokeness, and globalization that mainstream politicians have failed to address. By contrast, there isn’t a silent majority secretly pining for Nazism, theocracy, or an incel-led war on women. On the contrary, two of Europe’s top populist politicians—Marine Le Pen in France and Giorgia Meloni in Italy—are women. Far from being a theocrat, Le Pen explicitly defends France’s official secularism from the encroachment of Islamic law into public life. Viktor Orbán’s Hungary champions Christian values, but is also the safest country in Europe for Jews. Perhaps because most of the continent actually experienced Nazi occupation, the European far right largely condemns Nazism.5 However disingenuous, it’s notable that Vladimir Putin justified the Russian invasion of Ukraine by appealing to “denazification.” That’s not because Russia is run by Zionists. It’s because Russians remember the Nazis as villains who invaded their country, sought to enslave them, and slaughtered millions of Slavs and Jews alike. Thus, although it’s a nice turn of phrase, there’s no inevitable arc that requires conservatism, or even populism, to bend toward Fuentes. Instead, populists are more likely to bend toward respectability, as in Le Pen’s dédiabolisation of the National Rally party, which included expelling her own pro-Vichy father.
In America’s 2024 presidential election, Trump didn’t make massive gains among non-white voters by running as an out-and-out racist. He did so by building a broad personality cult united by a shared hatred of progressive elites. White nationalists have their place in the movement, but as just one constituency among many. They get a refugee policy that favors white South Africans, just as tech bros get AI deregulation, Christians get Roe v. Wade overturned, and legacy Republicans get their beloved tax cuts. As long as you’re for Trump and against his enemies—who are, coincidentally, the nation’s enemies—then you’re doing your part to Make America Great Again. In that sense, MAGA is simply authoritarian civic nationalism. But the essence of Groyperism is to exclude and purify, both racially and politically. For example, Fuentes has said of Vance, “Do we really expect that the guy who has an Indian wife and named their kid Vivek is going to support white identity?” Fuentes, of course, has no wife and kids, and is himself a quarter Mexican. Perhaps he’ll revive the Nazi label “Honorary Aryan” to build a winning coalition that also includes himself. But still, I don’t see Fuentes, or any party defined by him, capturing America’s electorally vital non-psychotic middle.6
If Groyperization takes over the American right, it will be as poisonous for MAGA as wokeness has been for the left. In fact, it will probably be worse, since wokeness was based on shaming the majority, but also appealed to enough of them eager to “check their privilege” and “do the work.” By contrast, Groyperism is simply the reduction of the MAGA coalition to that small percentage of “Heritage Americans” whose ancestors arrived on the Mayflower, and who aren’t also disgusted by Nazism. MAGA’s heir needs to purge Fuentes’ digital SA if he seriously hopes to govern the country. But how? Hanania is right that there are no institutional gatekeepers anymore. Vance could issue a stern statement denouncing racism and antisemitism, and the Groypers would roast him with memes. Better to return to the example of Röhm, whose homosexuality proved so convenient to Hitler when sharpening the long knives. Fuentes is a self-declared “proud incel” who’s quipped both that “having sex with women is gay” and “a lot of women want to be raped.” His close ally Ali Alexander has been accused of grooming underage boys. No less a MAGA icon than Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene called for an FBI investigation and declared that “Nick Fuentes was in on it.” I’m sure there’s plenty more degeneracy here to uncover.7 The Epstein Files show the potency of pedophilia scandals for the right, while Fuentes’ broader sexual nihilism is abhorrent to Christians, family men, and normal people in general. Even Hitler was mature enough to realize that there are plenty of enemies on the right. I expect MAGA to reach the same conclusion.
Fuentes has also praised Stalin, because why not?
Hitler was also something of a proto-incel, which helps explain his appeal to Groypers. Per John Gunther: “He is totally uninterested in women from any personal sexual point of view. He thinks of them as housewives and mothers or potential mothers, to provide sons for the battlefield—other people’s sons. . . . Most of those German writers and observers best equipped to know think that Hitler is a virgin.”
Hitler also used the occasion to execute a number of other rivals. It might interest the ostensibly Catholic Fuentes to know that these included a number of anti-Nazi Catholics, notably Catholic Action leader Erich Klausener.
Hitler had known of and tolerated Röhm’s homosexuality for years. Nevertheless, it ran counter to the Nazis’ preferred image as agents of moral renewal against Weimar decadence. Ultimately, Röhm’s sexual proclivities—and those of other SA leaders—helped justify the political purge.
There are some exceptions, like Greece’s Golden Dawn, but Nazism—shockingly—is genuinely unpopular in countries where the mass graves are still fresh.
Tellingly, Fuentes supported (or rather, milked) Kanye West during the schizophrenic rapper’s quixotic 2024 bid for the White House.
A simple Truth Social post by Trump—“Pam: JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!! Thank you for your attention to this matter!”—would get the ball rolling.
The fact that the Groypers are gay just like the Brown Shirts were should give them pause. It won’t but it should.
Dear Ben Koan,
It’s both simple and difficult to diagnose what I’d call Nick Fuentes’ brand of Neo-Nazism. You’re right: it’s not the technocratic or pseudo-intellectual kind; it’s the Röhm type, the style of the Sturmabteilung (SA): direct confrontation, raw homosexual virility, emotional politics. The same actionism that defined Ernst Röhm’s movement; violence before theory. Röhm himself remains one of the most paradoxical figures in early National Socialism: a veteran who couldn’t return to peace, who lived as if the Great War had never ended. He wanted to turn the SA into a people’s army, the instrument of a “second revolution” that would make Nazism genuinely social; almost proletarian in tone. His homosexuality and his contempt for the old Prussian military elite only made him more subversive in Hitler’s eyes. The Night of the Long Knives wasn’t just a purge; it was the moment when that plebeian, chaotic, revolutionary Nazism, the Röhm Nazism, was extinguished, replaced by the cold bureaucratic totalitarianism of Himmler and Göring. Fuentes’ movement feels like a grotesque digital echo of that same spirit. He lacks Hitler’s pathological charisma, so does JD Vance, or Himmler’s bureaucratic intellect (no one has this in MAGA, maybe Only Elon Musk, who is more like Hess) ; what he does possess is the SA impulse: rage without analysis, viril homosexuality without substance, ideology reduced to posture. His so-called “groypers”, the ridiculous online stormtroopers of moral panic, act first and think never. And in that vacuum of thought, antisemitism becomes the only remaining system of meaning.
People forget that fascism wasn’t born antisemitic. Mussolini mocked Nazi racial theories until 1938 and counted Jews among his early supporters and was a freat denier of the jewish question. The antisemitic turn came later, under the gravitational pull of Hitler’s Germany. The Spanish Falange, the Romanian Iron Guard, even Action Française treated antisemitism as political currency imposed by Berlin. I will write about ot at some point. The European New Right is very similar to this early fascism that rejected antisemitism.
Greetings🌹