Opinion | The Radicalization of the Young Right

As Hochman clearly recognized, these days, young reactionaries find their inspiration not in the adolescent superman fantasies of Ayn Rand but in the nihilistic Joker energy of 4chan. His own politics, as he described them on “Know Your Enemy,” were forged almost entirely in reaction to “wokeness,” and, as he told The New Republic, he sees contemporary America as so far gone that there’s little worth conserving. The sort of right-wing sentiment he’s tapped into, with its histrionic loathing of bourgeois liberalism and deep cultural pessimism, has in the past been a precursor to fascism. There’s a reason the scholar Fritz Stern titled his 1961 study of the intellectual currents that gave rise to Nazism “The Politics of Cultural Despair.”

The “conservative revolutionaries” that Stern wrote about “thought that this world had been destroyed by evil hands; consequently, they firmly believed in a conspiratorial view of history and society.” Their villain, wrote Stern, “usually was the Jew, who more and more frequently came to be depicted as the very incarnation of modernity.”

Several examples from just the last two months show a similar sort of thinking percolating among some of today’s young conservative revolutionaries. Last week, Media Matters for America reported that Matteo Cina, a Fox News staff member and former writer for Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, wrote on TikTok that it’s “hard to talk about the Holocaust and rising antisemitism without discussing Jewish presence in banking.”

Both Breitbart and, on Monday, the right-wing Washington Free Beacon have reported on the unabashed antisemitism of the high-profile pro-DeSantis influencer Pedro Gonzalez. In private chats, Gonzalez described his growing radicalization against “subversive” Jews and his admiration for the white nationalist Nick Fuentes, who is perhaps best known for shepherding Kanye West into his pro-Hitler era. (Gonzalez has since renounced his former “performative bigotry,” and blamed the internecine feud between Trump loyalists and DeSantis supporters for the Breitbart story.)

Two weeks ago, a 26-year-old anti-feminist TikTok star named Hannah Pearl Davis released an acoustic song titled, “Why Can’t We Talk About the Jews?” (She deleted it after a backlash.) College Republicans United, a hard-right college Republican faction, was scheduled to have Fuentes headline its national convention last weekend, though Fuentes pulled out because of security concerns.