Groyperfication

The Untold Story of Our Time

I’m working on something long-ish on the “vibe shift” discourse that I’m hoping will come in lieu of the Sunday Reading, Watching supplement. But I just wanted to quickly remark again on what I think is an underreported key to understanding contemporary politics: an insidious phenomenon I’ve called “groyperfication.”

What’s a groyper? Basically, a subculture of online trolls with extreme right views who use the groyper cartoon (a fat toad, a kind of more sinister, repulsive Pepe the Frog) as an avatar, but now in many cases do not. It’s sort of the grassroots (or netroots) successor to what was once called “the alt-right.” Neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes calls his movement the Groyper Army, but he’s trying to set himself as tribune of a much larger and more fragmented public. One way to understand what’s happened to the American right in the past four years or so is groyperfication, the infiltration of groyper propaganda and ideas into mainstream and elite institutions. Or, the cancerous replication of groyper cells across the entire society. They reproduce memetically and mimetically, through imitation. For instance, this “DEI pilots” thing the administration is trying to pass off sounds like racist raving and it is, but as the writer Gaby del Valle points out it has been floating around groyper world for a long time:—

GOP staffs have become heavily groyperized over the past few years. As Will Stancil pointed out on Bluesky, there seems to be one in the executive office of the presidency:

Here’s the thing to understand: every single person under say, the age of 40 on the right is exposed to extremely high levels of groyper content every day in group chats, on their social media timelines, in discord chats, etc. Groyperism totally suffuses the cultural environment of the right. While mainstream media is still chasing after master figures and hidden intellectuals shaping elite consensus, the real story is that young righties look at the opinions and trends among the groypers as being far more interesting and important than respectable intellectuals. Many young righties in staff and media positions are essentially groypers or seek to emulate them as much as possible. For the right, they are both the avant garde and the masses. Groyperfication has created the kind of deformed democratic public sphere that

Henry Farrell

describes in his piece on the social media crisis. Like all publics, they are both something with real power and also something very amorphous and hard to pin down. They also want to provoke and troll, so it makes it hard to gauge their real influence. This all makes it an extremely difficult thing for the old-line media to understand and cover, but they need to try. If you’re an enterprising newspaper reporter: Enough stories about Curtis Yarvin, he’s behind the times: the real story is groyperfication.