Thread: The booing of Charlie Kirk, Don Jr, and Kimberly Guilfoyle by alt-right activists was the culmination of a month-long campaign that received no press attention.
It was organized by Nick Fuentes, a partially Hispanic former attendee of the "Unite the Right" march who has been rebuilding the alt-right under a Christian nationalist banner, realizing that this approach is more effective sell for GOP voters
Here's a longer version of what happened with Don Jr: thebulwark.com/the-alt-right-…
Fuentes has also been aided by many members of the original alt-right which splintered after Charlottesville into competing factions, mostly divided by tactical concerns.
The original leaders, who are very bitter about Fuentes's current trolling success, were more interested in the European fascist aesthetic but Fuentes and his allies realized this was not effective for "normie" Christian conservatives
Instead of pushing the swastika and fascist philosophers, Fuentes and his "groyper" army are fitting white nationalist views into a Christian supremacist framework. They've zeroed in on Charlie Kirk's TPUSA
Kirk isn't widely known, but his group is extremely well liked by the libertarian-oriented huge donors who dominate Republican political organizing. But only a tiny percentage of GOP voters are libertarians, making TPUSA a prime target
The purpose of TPUSA is to attempt to sell unpopular libertarian economic arguments to college students. It's a total waste of money because young people are even less interested than average Republicans.
Fuentes and his allies have focused on the "true conservative" vs "sell-out establishment Republican" narrative that has dominated GOP politics for 50 years
Republicans have utterly extinguished any sort of moderate tradition in the party so this means that the only way that any GOP pol ever gets power, esp after the Tea Party, is to claim that he/she is a truth-teller standing up to corrupt Washington
Fuentes fans have stacked college tour events organized by grift groups like TPUSA, Young Americans for Freedom, and overwhelmed the question and answer lines posing questions that expose how little the conservative establishment cares about social conservative ideas
Fuentes has been at pains to tell his followers to avoid anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in their questions but it hasn't always worked. Overall, though, several events have been disrupted with at least some degree of success
Questions have also focused on the fact that Republicans have basically no appeal to racial groups that are not white. In reality, this is because American conservative arguments implicitly assume a white Christian identity and that assumption is offputting to those who aren't
But because that reality is uncomfortable for conservatives to perceive and admit, they basically never do so. This has led to the emergence of a proto-white nationalism among some conservative figures like Laura Ingraham
Ingraham, and also Ann Coulter, are among several prominent conservative commentators who have blamed the Republican party's declining popularity to Americans solely on immigration
Last week, Ingraham blamed "demographic change" on why the GOP got wiped out in Virginia's elections mediamatters.org/laura-ingraham…
Another factor that's helped Fuentes is an emerging anger among non-racist social conservatives who have finally begun to realize that GOP elites place a significantly higher priority on plutocrat tax cuts than on stopping LGBT rights
National Review writer David French, who is a libertarian Christian, has been subjected to scathing attacks for his belief that Christians should realize that America is highly unlikely to ever vote to criminalize abortion or roll back same-sex marriage
The attacks on French presaged the "groyper" campaign by months and have been similar in spirit: Christian nationalists have finally realized that the GOP doesn't really care about their agenda
It's hard to see how Republican elites can resolve this, in part because many of them have made the same arguments as Fuentes and his acolytes
The most forthright solution would be for the GOP to abandon or scale back its anti-government agenda but the fat cat donors would never accept this
And the conservative establishment's 50 years of "true conservative" rhetoric has trained its base to automatically favor anyone claiming to be willing to stand up for far-right Christians
GOP elites have mostly blown off the emergence of the alt right with retorts about how small the movement is. And it's true that very few Americans openly advocate white nationalist beliefs. But it's also true that very few are hardcore conservatives
According to the gold standard Political Typology polling by @pewresearch , only 13% of Americans could be described as "core conservatives" who take the Paul Ryan line people-press.org/2017/10/24/pol… 
@pewresearch Sidenote: In addition to retooling their arguments to be Christian-oriented, the resurgent alt-right has also replaced Pepe the Frog with Groyper the Frog. slate.com/technology/201…
@pewresearch Besides the "true conservative" operant conditioning and the unpopularity of small-govt conservatism, the reemerging alt right's tactic of challenging GOP elites from the right also has put the elites in a rare space since they only have experience with being the most right wing
@pewresearch So Kirk, Rep. Dan Crenshaw, and others who have seen disruptions have no real practice in pushing back effectively against further-right disputations
@pewresearch I have been researching the reemergence of the alt right for the past several months and will be publishing extensively on the topic. In the meantime, please follow @TheoryChange and click through to my podcast theoryofchange.show
@pewresearch @TheoryChange One last point is that grifter conservatives like Charlie Kirk, Don Jr, Ben Shapiro and others like them have built their brand on "free speech" absolutism and by saying stupid and offensive things.
@pewresearch @TheoryChange Of course, they were never actually concerned about free speech. But the posture meant that anyone else who was more offensive and more brazen could displace them--provided they also adopted the "protect Christians" posture
@pewresearch @TheoryChange These grifter cons were making millions of dollars though so such concerns likely never entered into their minds. And now we're at the point where Don Jr tried to censor haters at an event for "Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us."
