Conservative Writer Says He Warned JD Vance About Nick Fuentes And His Grip On DC GOP Staffers

Nicole Hester/Ann Arbor News via AP, File

Veteran conservative commentator Rod Dreher wrote an article on his Substack this week titled, “What I Saw And Heard In Washington.”

Dreher’s account is meant to serve as a warning to the Republican Party about the rise of Nick Fuentes and his “Groyper Army” inside DC power circles and among the party’s young staffers.

To underscore the point, Dreher’s subtitle on his piece reads, “Groyperism’s Spread Among Generation Z Conservative Apparatchiks Is Real.”

He begins by recalling his 90-minute meeting with Vice President JD Vance alongside Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his staff. Dreher, who lives in Hungary, didn’t share any of the private details of the closed-door meeting, but did divulge that he spoke directly to Vance about the Groypers.

“I was able to have a few minutes with the vice president before the PM and his team arrived. I shared with him my views about the threat that Nick Fuentes and Groyperism pose to the country, to the GOP, and to him personally. He listened to what I had to say. And that is all I can say about it, out of respect for his privacy,” Dreher wrote.

Fuentes, an unabashed anti-Semite and white supremacist, has long gained a following among young men – the Groypers – who he has deployed to mainstream conservative events with the explicit intent of trying to infiltrate the GOP and move it toward embracing white nationalism.

Dreher wrote of Fuentes’s reach, “The claim that I first floated in this space last week, quoting a DC insider who said that in his estimation, ‘between 30 and 40 percent’ of the Zoomers who work in official Republican Washington are fans of Nick Fuentes — that’s true. Was confirmed multiple times by Zoomers who live in that world.” He added:

If you think being Christian is some kind of vaccination against anti-Semitism, you’re wrong. Even young Christians — especially trad Catholics, I learned — are neck-deep in anti-Semitism. They even use it as a litmus test of who can and can’t join their informal social groups.

Dreher’s lengthy article includes several quotes from unnamed staffers. “I talked to one MAGA Zoomer, a policy wonk who is a person of color. He is beside himself with frustration over the rise of Groyperism in his circles, and within the party,” he wrote, before quoting the MAGA Zoomer directly:

These idiots don’t understand that they can’t win an election on a whites-only platform. They’re delusional. There are a lot of immigrants and native-born members of ethnic groups who are natural Republicans, and whom Donald Trump won in 2024. Take Indians, for example — if you think they are going to stick with a movement whose leader [Fuentes] denounces Usha Vance as a ‘jeet,’ you’re crazy. But that’s how they think.

Fuentes’s rising profile on the right culminated in an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show last month. The appearance led to an all-out battle within the MAGA movement as critics swiftly condemned Carlson, while his supporters supported him.

Dreher ended his post with a list of 13 takeaways from his time in DC. The first being, “The Groyper thing is real. It is not a fringe movement, in that it really has infiltrated young conservative Washington networks to a significant degree.”

He followed that up by making clear, “Irrational hatred of Jews (and other races, but especially Jews) is a central core of it. This is evil. If postliberal conservatism requires making peace with antisemitism and race hatred, count me out.”

Read Dreher’s full account here.