Never Vancers’ Disgraceful Groyper Gambit

After 11 frustrating years of losing intramural conservative debates, the pre-MAGA, Never-Trump Washington Right has finally found an opponent worthy of its intellectual firepower: imaginary congressional staff assistants.

That’s the cringey truth behind Politico Magazine’s recent “exposé“: “GOP Staffers Say the Party Has a Groyper Problem.” Nothing in the article’s 2,300 words remotely supports the headline’s assertion, let alone the bizarre anti-JD Vance smear campaign orchestrated in its wake.

The real story here isn’t about young conservatives at all, but the vindictiveness of self-important policy wonks they no longer listen to.

For the 99% of Americans blessedly ignorant of the term, “groyper” refers to the antisemitic, misogynistic, white-identitarian followers of Gen-Z internet performance artist Nick Fuentes. The corporate media and the establishment Right have desperately tried to link the odious Fuentes to Donald Trump’s MAGA movement. But both sides refuse to cooperate.

Fuentes hates Trump for being too friendly to Israel. He hates Vance because his wife Usha is of Indian descent and his children are biracial. The feeling is mutual. Trump and Vance have both publicly rejected antisemitism. Vance has gone further, telling off Fuentes directly and declaring that antisemitism and ethnic hatred have no place in the conservative movement.

As someone who works with congressional and administration staff every week, I know firsthand that the mutual disdain between MAGA patriots and groyper losers is reflected in hiring decisions on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. (The only groyper I have ever encountered couldn’t get a job in Donald Trump’s Washington.) Even the article that ignited last week’s moral panic acknowledged that the “true scale” of the groyper problem could be “negligible.”

So where did Politico get the idea that “the GOP’s young D.C. professional class” is crawling with “groypers”? According to the article, from four sources: an “anonymous conservative,” an anonymous “senior GOP congressional staffer,” a college professor with no apparent connection to Capitol Hill or the Trump administration, and a former Heritage Foundation scholar angry that the famously pro-life institution wants their interns to be pro-life. If that seems thin evidence to smear an entire generation of honest, idealistic conservative professionals as bigots, wait ’til you see how they try to square the circle.

Among Politico’s “GOP Staffers” who allege this “groyper problem,” you see, a “groyper” doesn’t have to be an actual antisemitic, white nationalist Fuentesite freak. No, the term “is also used as a catch-all term of abuse for young, anti-establishment” conservatives. To Washington’s Establishment and some on the libertarian Right, dissatisfaction with Republican elites’ 21st-century economic, foreign, and domestic policy failures — a dissatisfaction shared by roughly 90% of the American people — makes someone a racist, antisemitic monster.

There is no polite rebuttal to this disgraceful rhetorical gambit other than to say: thank God Donald Trump kicked these people to the curb.

Of course, that’s what this is really about.

Within hours of the Politico article’s publication, social media trolls were tying the GOP’s phantom “groyper problem” to Vice President Vance, whom they hate almost as much as real groypers do. Trump’s victory and Vance’s ascendance have fundamentally changed the Right over the last decade. One of those changes has been the marginalization of once-influential policy “experts.”

The Groyper Gambit is an attempt by the old corporate-globalist-neoconservative GOP to win back the party they fumbled — not by persuading dissenters but by declaring dissent to be illegitimate.

James Lindsay, once-feted anti-woke academic, called Vance-aligned conservatives “little sh*ts” and blamed a phantom “Groyper infestation of D.C.” on Vance directly. Phil Magness of the libertarian Independent Institute accused a conservative law student of being “groyper curious” because he was Catholic and a Vance supporter.

This is the tell. Critics of JD Vance would rather traffic in outrageous labels – “groyper,” “socialist,” “authoritarian” – than debate the underlying issues, because those issues are broadly supported and politically potent. Arguing against them on the merits is a losing proposition. Pathologizing the people who hold them is easier.

Robust policy and political disagreement within the Right is fine and to be expected. Turning differences of degree into existential accusations, or dismissing ideas like stronger antitrust enforcement as “socialism,” is absurd and deliberate. You can dislike and disagree with JD Vance all you want. Suggesting he is a groyper is simply a lie – and a cowardly one, at that.

The crux of the controversy is that Vance’s pro-family, “common good” conservatism and vital-interest-oriented foreign policy are popular. They are shared, in one form or another, by every young national star in the GOP, from Secretary of State Marco Rubio to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. They are also enthusiastically supported by almost every young Republican staffer in Washington.

And with good reason. Patriotic young conservatives who came of age in the Trump Era spent 18 years in schools run by woke-era DEI Marxists. They know the New Left hates America as much as groypers hate Vance. They came to Washington, D.C. to save the country and to build a new Republican Party that understands the stakes of the fight, and how to win it.

Yes, conservative staffers today are different. They know the old GOP dispensation’s ideas, leaders, and policy wonks had their chance, failed, and are not up to the task ahead.

The young professionals I work with every day are decent, principled, patriotic public servants. They make me optimistic about the future of the Right — never more so than when contrasted with the gutter behavior of the bitter “grownups” who smear them for clicks.

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Rachel Bovard is Vice President of Programs at Conservative Partnership Institute.