Recently, right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson publicly apologized for voting for President Trump in a New York Times interview. What is significant about this interview is that when he is asked about his interview with Nickolas J. Fuentes, Carlson cleverly dodged the question, stating that while he “wished he didn’t conduct the interview,” he felt “as if he did not imperil his soul,” and “he’s interviewed worse people than [Fuentes],” which he lists as the incumbent United States Ambassador to the State of Israel and a sitting US senator.
Why is this significant?
There’s an underlying reality here. Out of all the extremist trends in 21st-century America, whether it be the rise of Antifa during Trump’s first term (though it may be exaggerated) or the coalition behind the “unite the right” rally, none have concerned me more than the bigoted far-right Groyper movement.
The reason is due to a problem on the national level. But due to its rising popularity and its growing recognition among young conservatives, I’m concerned it may be possible that far-right extremism could grow here, at our school.
The Groyper Movement is a white-supremacist, anti-semitic, anti-LGBTQ, and anti-Muslim political movement rooted in “Paleoconservatism,” an anti-institutional, far-right faction of conservatism that claims to be led by commentator Nick Fuentes, an agitator infamous for his frequent racist statements. This includes Holocaust denial and praise of Adolf Hitler. His followers are known as “Groypers,” a reference to the iconic internet meme “Pepe the Frog,” a frog cartoon that used to be a popular meme, but over time turned into a hate symbol. The unseriousness of the symbol has caused many to write the Groyper movement off as a joke.
If one were to look on the surface, that conclusion could easily be reached. Fuentes’ Groyper movement seems obscure, limited to streaming platforms and Twitter debates. That was the case for a time.
But now Fuentes is significantly more popular, dangerous, and even respected by some prominent conservatives (or rather, people who call themselves “conservatives,” but abandon many conservative ideas, from economic liberalism to constitutionalism to emphasis on democracy).
One of those “conservatives,” former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson, interviewed Fuentes on October 27. During the interview, Carlson treated Fuentes seriously and respectfully, despite Fuentes’ racist and white nationalist attitudes. The YouTube video of the interview accumulated over 7 million views, Carlson’s third most popular on the platform (which is only significant because that’s third to a conspiracy theory about the CIA’s role in the 9/11 attacks and his own interview with Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, who he insists has “made Russia better”).
While Carlson isn’t exactly a mainstream figure on the right due to his radical and conspiratorial takes, he’s still somehow viewed favorably by 31% of Republicans, even though he invited Alexander Dugin (a neofascist and anti-democratic supporter of Joseph Stalin) and Fuentes onto his show. Carlson himself was recently interviewed by the New York Times. In it, he explained how he thought that a sitting US senator was more “morally repulsive” than Fuentes. Those people are not “less evil” than the US ambassador to Israel; it is clearly the opposite. This should be considered an embarrassment to our country’s inability to denounce radicals.
And because of that inability, Fuentes now has a follower count of over a million on X (formerly Twitter). To put this into perspective, one of the other most prominent right-wing extremist groups in America, the neofascist Proud Boys, has about three thousand members. That makes Fuentes’ Groyper movements one of the largest extremist groups in America; it is even starting to rival the Ku Klux Klan at its peak membership in the 1920s. We have to treat the movement and the threat it poses accordingly.
Can schools act as fertile grounds for extremism? One study from Frontiers suggests that students, above all, want their voices heard in their schools. When they don’t feel heard, that’s when they turn to extremism, particularly on the far right.
A recent survey conducted by our publication may be cause for concern. When MFS students were asked about the school’s biggest challenges, a whopping 23.3% listed “lack of student voice in decision-making.” At this age, teenagers want to have a voice. That is why I write for this publication.
So does this mean that the conditions exist for the far-right to infiltrate our school? It may not be guaranteed, but it is far from impossible that it can happen.
No matter your political orientation — socialist, liberal, centrist, conservative, or right-wing populist — we have to agree on this issue: even if the country may not be fully in agreement, Fuentes and his Groyper movement are fueled by bigotry and violate our school’s values, as well as any common beliefs of morality and ethics we share. Its growing popularity in the country is alarming, and its possibility to spread to our own school is even more so.
As a school community, it is therefore our duty not just to denounce and condemn right-wing radicalism, but to actively find ways to prevent and minimize it.
