THE RED HAT IS THE RED FLAG:

The protestors call themselves the "groyper army," an allusion to the alt-right's appropriation of the cartoon character Pepe the Frog. They often wear MAGA-hats and profess to love Donald Trump while also worrying that his administration has been watered down by moderates. Like many far-right formations, the groyper army is a decentralized social network. Under the instruction of the far-right anti-Semitic radio host Nick Fuentes, the groyper army has taken to protesting events led by Republican groups like Turning Point USA (TPUSA) and leading right-wing luminaries like Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk, Jonah Goldberg, and Texas congressman Dan Crenshaw. [...]

At some conservative events, the groyper army can make up as much as a third of the audience. They love badgering Republicans for being insufficiently homophobic, anti-Semitic, or racist. After one Turning Point USA event, a conservative attendee told Vox reporter Jane Coaston, "I did not know there were this many racists out there."

Coaston sees the groyper army as offering an existential choice for the American right. "Basically, there are two paths," Coaston argues. She contrasts Dan Crenshaw with Nick Fuentes. Crenshaw stands for a Republican Party that is inclusive, while Fuentes wants a party that is restricted white Christian heterosexuals.

But to see this as a divide over "two paths" is to vastly overstate the differences between the groyper army and Trumpian Republicans. It's more accurate to see them as two branches of the same tree, both rooted in racism and authoritarianism.

Or to use a more dramatic metaphor, the Trumpian GOP is enacting the story of Mary Shelley's classic novel Frankenstein (1818). Like Victor Frankenstein, the Trumpists have brought to life a monster, the alt-right. Now that monster is turning on its creator.

The overlap between the Trumpian right and the groyper army can be seen in the simple fact that this March a chapter of Turning Points USA invited Nick Fuentes to speak at the University of Iowa. Beyond this incident, Turning Points USA itself has been rife with bigotry. The New Yorker reported in December of 2017 that Crystal Clanton, while working as TPUSA's national field director, texted a fellow employee saying, "i hate black people. Like f[***] them all . . . I hate blacks. End of story."

Clayton was replaced by Shialee Grooman and Troy Meeker. As Huffington Post reported in April 2018, both had a history of making racist comments as well, including use of the n-word. Huffington Post also quoted a source as saying that TPUSA Midwest regional manager Timon Prax "used the n-word with the hard R nonstop, made fun of black people and referred to them as slaves and made fun of the mentally disabled."

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