Last week, Rod Dreher caused a stir in Washington after claiming that an “older insider” had told him something alarming: between 30 and 40% of conservative Gen Z staffers on Capitol Hill and in the Trump administration are “Groypers,” followers of far-right streamer Nick Fuentes.
This figure was picked up in a New York Times article and has been rippling around the capital ever since. With great respect for Dreher, my own reporting tells a very different story.
Dreher first revealed this finding on his Substack before following it up in an essay for The Free Press. “It’s worse than I thought,” he wrote. “And nobody knows what to do about it. I ran the “30 to 40 percent” claim past the conservative Zoomers I spoke to in D.C.; every one of them affirmed it. Christian faith, they explained, has not inoculated young men against antisemitism, which is now infused in the conversations of conservative Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox members of Gen Z. Two Christian Zoomers told me that antisemitism is sometimes used as a litmus test to join particular social groupings.”
My background is in the conservative youth movement — first as a college student, then as a staff member at one of the right’s major student organisations, where I still serve on the board. From 2020 to 2024, I directed a journalism training programme for young conservatives in Washington, DC. That role meant — and still means — speaking at student conferences, taking endless coffee meetings, and hopping on Zoom calls with Gen Z students, many of whom now work on Capitol Hill or in the administration.
All that is to say: I’ve spent the last 14 years around young conservatives in Washington and the 30-40% figure seemed wildly incorrect as soon as I read it. It is, though, very important for people to have an accurate picture of the young Right because there are a number of Gen Z men falling under the sway of nihilism, bigotry, fascism or a combination of all three. My contention is that this number is high, but not nearly as high as 30-40%.
To find out if that was true, I spent the last few days working the phones, calling sources across the conservative world, from the White House to Capitol Hill to the nonprofit sphere, from Gen Z aides to millennial managers. Every single person I reached out to said that the 30-40% number is a significant overstatement. Nobody thought it was even close to that level.
One administration source stated the Groypers are a loud minority but not even in the double digits, and they don’t know a single person at the White House who would consider themselves one. A senior GOP source in the House of Representatives made a similar point, adding: “I haven’t seen any indication that the young people in this world are into Nick Fuentes, or are antisemitic.” That person added: “The majority of young people that work in Republican Washington are folks who went to SEC schools, follow college football obsessively, and recreated their frat rows in Navy Yard. The most offensive thing many of them listen to is probably Creed.”
A senior source in the conservative youth movement reiterated the administration source’s belief that a small minority of Fuentes-aligned individuals does exist, but it is not dominant. “The rising generation of conservative leaders in Washington are, overwhelmingly, not aligned with these ideas that conspire to scapegoat others for a lack of ambition or achievement,” said the source. “Whatever attempts to astroturf influence they may make, a few noisy individuals simply can’t be extrapolated to constitute a serious faction among Washington’s conservatives.”
Another senior Republican source put it this way: “GOP staffers in DC are more Fox News than Fuentes.” When I asked another senior House GOP source about the 30-40% number, they replied, “That is bullshit and I’ve met with probably more Gen Z for coffee than 90% of the others.”
A former Trump administration official agreed. “All this tells us is these people don’t actually have good relationships on Capitol Hill,” they said of the 30-40% claim. “Yes, young Republican staffers are frustrated by a focus on foreign affairs instead of domestic concerns like housing, inflation and jobs. But this is just another careless attack by people out of touch.” “None of these kids want to be Nick Fuentes,” the source added, describing Fuentes as a “weird, angry loner.”
When I asked a Gen Z administration source about Dreher’s reporting that “two Christian Zoomers told me that antisemitism is sometimes used as a litmus test to join particular social groupings,” they rejected it flatly. “This is just false,” they said. “Antisemitism insofar as it exists on the majority of the young Right is a punchline. People are sceptical of Israel but that doesn’t mean they hate Jews. They hate being told what they’re allowed to think and find funny.”
Almost everyone I spoke with in Washington’s conservative circles was baffled by the claim that 30–40% of Gen Z staffers are Groypers. No one could imagine where that number came from. The most common guess was that someone had confused familiarity with Nick Fuentes for sympathy. In other words, perhaps 30–40% of young staffers know who Fuentes is, follow him for amusement, or treat his antics as a kind of dark political theater — but few, if any, take his ideology seriously. And even if one were trying to count those who laugh at Fuentes rather than with him, most agreed that 30–40% still seemed far too high.
One source made a powerful point: Washington’s young conservatives were deeply shaken by the assassination of Charlie Kirk. They organised vigils within hours, gathered to mourn, and wept together. Until last week, the Heritage Foundation had even draped the side of its Capitol Hill building with a massive banner bearing Kirk’s image.
Kirk and Nick Fuentes, of course, were bitter ideological rivals, locked in combat for nearly a decade. If a third of Gen Z staffers truly identified as Groypers, such an outpouring of love and grief for Kirk would have been unthinkable.
This is not to minimise the real issue of young conservatives drifting toward the political fringes amid a climate of spiritual and economic dislocation. It is simply to set the record straight, according to well-placed sources in Washington’s professional Right, on an important question about where the movement is actually heading.
