What Exactly Is a Groyper?

If the avatar of the alt-right movement was Pepe the Frog, its equivalent for today’s far-right youths is a corpulent cartoon toad called Groyper. That character has become so associated with the antisemitic influencer Nick Fuentes and his legions of fanboys that its name now does double duty as a label for their online community.

In broad strokes, Groypers are aggrieved Gen Z men who spend too much time on the internet. Some self-identify as incels, short for involuntary celibates—those who despair of ever receiving the sexual attentions of a woman. Many claim the mantle of traditional Christianity, though without the imprimatur of any church.

Following their leader’s example, Groypers generally adopt an ironic posture and winking delivery intended to make onlookers feel unsure whether to be horrified by their unabashed racism and misogyny or to laugh it all off as performance art. Since transgressiveness is their main source of in-group social capital, a status competition has emerged to see who can be most inflammatory and offensive. Thus Fuentes has gleefully described Adolf Hitler as “really fucking cool” and once declared with a grin that “a lot of women want to be raped….There’s like a lot of women who really want a guy to beat the shit out of them, but also, they have to pretend that they don’t.”

In 2019, Fuentes launched what he called the Groyper War, dispatching his followers to attend Turning Point USA events and use the question-and-answer sessions to lambast the group’s celebrity founder, Charlie Kirk, for supporting Israel, tolerating homosexuality, and otherwise supposedly selling out conservatism. Before Kirk’s assassination, Fuentes frequently mocked him and boasted of having “impregnated” Turning Point with Fuentes’ ideas.

The influence and relevance of Groyperism to right-wing politics is increasingly hard to deny. “When I began my career in 2017, I was considered radioactive in the American Right for my White Identitarian, race realist, ‘Jewish aware,’ counter-Zionist, authoritarian, traditional Catholic views,” Fuentes wrote in 2023. Six years later, “on almost every count, our previously radioactive views are pounding on the door of the political mainstream.”

In October 2025, the former Fox News star Tucker Carlson posted a chummy two-hour conversation with Fuentes to his social media channels. Kevin Roberts, president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, defended the interview, sparking a dramatic revolt among the think tank’s donors and staff.

Fuentes responded with a video celebrating the fracas as evidence of the “ascendancy” of Groyperism. “I get recognized everywhere I go, and it’s all young guys high-fiving me, [saying] ‘Keep talking about the Jews!’” he said. “Infiltration is not a pipe dream. It’s not talk. It’s happening. We did it.”

The post What Exactly Is a Groyper? appeared first on Reason.com.