I’m supposed to, though. Especially, the Nazi-ish poseur-boys and how they say they regard Jews, like me. Should I be gasping, “oooh oooh I’m so scared”?
The fierce intentions of the term, “groyper,” is diminished a lot by the sound of the word. If you were a furious, overgrown boyster with gripes about life, would you call yourself a “groyper”?
So, what is a “groyper”? Let us all offer deep thanks to The New Yorker journalist Antonia Hitchens who, in the April 13, 2026 edition, dug as deep as she could go into this…I don’t know what to call these things anymore, these things that display aspects of boy cults, that read like clumsy jigsaw puzzles for kids with lots of the very few pieces missing.
A cartoon frog who emerged several years ago on social media was maybe called Groyper. Not sure and don’t know why.
Groypers are kind of hard to put together in your head. They seem to have sects and those sects split and form new sects. I have a feeling that the self-commiserating collection which called themselves “incels,” i.e., “involuntary celibates,” has perhaps merged with the groyper group but I’m not sure. (I fully understood the profound political-philosophical gripe of the incels: they couldn’t get laid. Probably still can’t.)
Under the New Yorker category, The Political Scene, Antonio Hitchens’ article is entitled, “No Enemies to the Right: How the internet fringe infiltrated Republican politics.” Apparently, they have, although the word “infiltrated” gives them more agency than they need. To me, a better verb would be “flooded”; Republican politics, as described here, are as porous as a cheesecloth rag.
What I learned about the groyper, uh, culture, came through the many quotes Hitchens gathered from these characters. After one read, I went through the whole article with a blue highlighter (no political statement in the color: it was the only one I had).
Here are some quotes I highlighted:
“The world is just so tragically fucked up. You can’t look at it and not have a sense of humor…You open Twitter, and it’s just, like, ‘Oh, another political assassination, another mass shooting, another country getting bombed, the child rapists are still getting free, a Zionist mafia control our country…'”
“I wasn’t really animated by politics until Trump came along…I was like ‘Wow, America could be something great.'”
But Trump was Then; their Now god is Nick Fuentes (I did mention something about the fluidity of this group, didn’t I?), and the enemies are Republican conservatives.
“Basically, anytime there’s a Republican who countersignals white advocacy, or white people at all, we shit down their throat.”
You might think, “Great! They’ve turned against Trump!” Which they have, but a brilliant comment from Hitchens dampens your enthusiasm:
Attempting a coherent portrait of Groypers can feel a bit like trying to describe the plot of a Surrealist film, or a fantasy board game that takes place in its own universe.
“Nick [Fuentes] said that Trump’s going to simp for Israel…He’s not going to give us mass deportations. He’s not going to advance any of our interests except performatively, to appease us. And, sure enough, that’s exactly what happened…It’s just been one big letdown after another…There’s been a huge break now, where basically all the young conservatives are, like, ‘Trump is not our guy.'”
Groypers have also turned against the late Charlie Kirk’s TurningPoint group, with whom they have been grouping (groyping?), but not wholeheartedly. They are showing up at conferences but…
“We’re trying to unite super hard as a voting bloc and get every young conservative on board and just fuck the G.O.P. as hard as we can…We have literally nothing to live for–we’re ready to die…You watch these videos of Europe or America in the eighteen-hundreds or early nineteen-hundreds, and it’s beautiful…Everyone’s well dressed. There’s like, a tenderness and an innocence to it, and I feel like we’ve all been robbed of our innocence. All our buildings are these hideous rectangles.We’ve watched hundreds of hours of hardcore porn before we ever had our first kiss. Why the fuck did that happen? Do our G.O.P. leaders care?”
The groyper who said all that is surprisingly well educated but what he’s articulating doesn’t make any sense (videos from the eighteen-hundreds?). Nor is it truly, deeply groyper. As Groyper God Nick Fuentes said:
“There are basically two things that are going on. White genocide and Jewish subversion.”
Well, OK, then. This mission statement I get. Nothing to do with watching hardcore porn and not getting laid and tenderness and innocence and excellent haberdashery.
A groyper streamer from North Dakota (oy) has had debates with non-groypers about the Holodomor and, as Hitchens reports…”whether the Rothschild family influenced the Bible.” (Don’t allow this last one to seep too deeply into your brain.)
Regarding hardcorn porn, unlaid incels and unrelieved testosterone, you’ll be glad to hear there are Groypettes, who seem to be regarding these conferences as 21st century fern bars, meet ‘n’ greet opportunities. Groypers are wowed:
“It was a kind of shock for me personally, because it was the first time I had ever met a woman in my life who didn’t want to vote.”
Groypers have policies and purpose:
“I support national sovereignty, and Hitler was a nationalist…He was, like, ‘We have to take Germany back for Germans.’ And I feel like we should do that in America. We should take America back for our native population.”
What? They’re going to hand Manhattan back to the Lenapes and ship out? I’m confused. So are some groypers. Here’s one who talked to Hitchens at that conference:
“The feeling is, like, the entire system is corrupt, and we hate everyone.” Then he turned to a friend. “Does anybody know the end goal?”
Some other groyper leaders do:
“I want America to go back to, like, the thirteen colonies…Bring back sodomy laws, bring back Sabbath laws. Bring back all that kind of stuff.”
I passionately hope Antonia Hitchens is recovering from her powerful and exhausting journalistic work doing the almost impossible: laying out a cohesive and comprehensible story about incoherence and incomprehensibility. Just reading her great article three times almost did me in.