The Overton Window that admits acceptable discourse on increasingly taboo subjects has been narrowing. Racism has concept crept to include moderate voices while the cultural Left, which privileges issues of identity over inequalities of class, now dominates a number of important and influential mainstream institutions, including academia, the media, and parts of the corporate world. The twentieth century shift from monoculturalism to multiculturalism is now often understood in quasi-religious terms, as if this development constitutes a unidirectional movement from darkness to enlightenment. However, the speed of this transition and the vertigo it can induce, especially among people with naturally conservative temperaments, has opened a black market for far-right figures to stoke resentment against the conjoined forces of post-civil rights liberalism, cosmopolitan universalism, and internationalist globalisation.
One such figure is 21 year-old Nicholas J. Fuentes, a self-described catholic paleoconservative and apparent ethnonationalist, who has steadily built an online army of predominantly young Gen Z's and Millennials calling themselves Groypers (a reference to Pepe the frog's obese cousin). Their sworn foes are not leftists but conservative (and generally Trump-sympathetic) organisations like Turning Point USA and the Daily Wire, which they feel have abandoned “true” conservatism and ceded cultural power to the Left. This antagonism boiled over at a series of recent speaking events held by mainstream conservative activists like Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk, which were disrupted Groypers barking conspiracist tropes about homosexuality, the influence of Israel, and the decline of white populations. “These are the forces we're harnessing: tribalism, populism, nationalism.” Fuentes has waxed bluntly. “This charade of liberalism, egalitarianism, democracy. It can only go on for so long.”
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