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The day Charlie Kirk died, Taylor was at work when her brother Jake called her, laughing. He’d heard the news, and he was delighted. Not only did Jake revile Kirk, Jake viewed the killing as validation of his deeply antisemitic understanding of how the world worked. “The Jews,” Jake believed, had almost certainly had Kirk murdered because he had raised alarm about “Jewish dollars” reshaping American culture.

It wasn’t the first time Jake had shared these kinds of beliefs with Taylor. (Taylor and Jake are not their real names.) Jake, now 25, was once a standard build-the-wall Trump supporter, but during the pandemic, his politics shifted. He began sending Taylor Instagram memes with medieval Crusader imagery: Reject modernity, embrace tradition. It confused Taylor, given that the two had been raised as nondenominational Protestants in the kind of church where the pastor wore jeans and talked about the Dallas Cowboys. And as his late teens turned to early 20s, Jake decided he had been wrong to support President Trump and other Republicans, arguing they were shills for the U.S.-based Israel lobby. His memes, which he sent to his sister regularly, got more and more racist.

Jake had become a groyper.

Though terminology and political identity can be fluid in right-wing digital ecosystems, the term “groyper” can generally be applied to the edgy, misogynistic men who support the white nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes. Groypers are aggressively antisemitic; Fuentes, who is only 27, casts doubt on the scale of the Holocaust and has said he loves Hitler. These young men—they’re almost all boys, due to the extreme misogyny of the subculture—hate normal MAGA Republicans because they, in groypers’ assessment, refuse to stand up for white men and call out the Jewish forces ruining the country.

For a long time, among much of Washington’s political class, groypers were widely considered a fringe element, best ignored. Groypers have their own impenetrable language and in-jokes, and it’s nearly impossible to tell when they’re being edgy for laughs and when they’re being serious. Fuentes is a dweeby kid in an ill-fitting suit, with none of the congenial charms of Joe Rogan or masculine swagger of Andrew Tate. Fuentes and his followers were mostly not taken seriously as any kind of political force. That was particularly true as the groyper in chief made vile assertions—claiming that “a lot of women want to be raped” or that “Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part”—that seemed more trolling than movement-building.

That thinking continued even as they grew in number as followers of Fuentes’ streaming show, and it continued even after Fuentes dined with Trump in 2022. (Trump later said he hadn’t known who Fuentes was.) But in the second Trump era, Fuentes’ profile has slowly grown. He received a huge visibility boost from Kirk’s murder, which left a power vacuum in the fight for young conservative men. Fuentes’ big triumphant moment arrived in late October, when he was granted a friendly interview on Tucker Carlson’s show. Suddenly, it seemed like everyone was taking the groypers seriously as a political force. Fuentes declared the “Groyper War” won and his movement ready for its next phase.

But if groypers’ ascension was a shock to some in the upper echelons of politics, it wasn’t to the many parents, teachers, and others spending significant time around young men today. They’ve watched as untold numbers of young men have in recent years been radicalized. They’ve heard Fuentes’ rhetoric parroted in classrooms. They’ve listened to young men proudly spout racism that would have been the subject of social opprobrium a decade ago. Many of them have seen it happen up close, watching as their son, or brother, or boyfriend, or friend lost touch with reality and drifted into bigotry.

It leaves these loved ones with a set of difficult decisions: Do you keep someone like that in your life? And, if so, do you try to keep the peace by avoiding politics? Or do you fight to claw someone back from the extreme?

This last option is, by almost all accounts, the most challenging one. Experts in fighting hateful ideologies stress that prevention is the critical step, because once they are radicalized, young men are extremely difficult to bring back.

But for those who see no other option than to try to rescue their loved ones, they are........

© Slate