Why Republican Normies Will Bend the Knee to Groypers, by Richard Hanania. He concludes,
I agree that normies outnumber online extremists. But online extremists will still determine the future of the party, based on everything we’ve seen happen within the GOP over the last few decades.
There is scant to no evidence to suggest Trump and his successor will be compelled to bend the knee to so-called ‘online extremists’. Recall that the dissident-right overwhelmingly opposed the U.S. strikes on Iran and sought transparency on the Epstein situation. The strikes happened with no delay, and zero transparency on Epstein; just foot-dragging, as I correctly predicted on both. As further evidence of the irrelevance of the dissident-right, Trump’s approval rating did not fall following the strikes, nor was it hurt by Epstein. Nor has Trump’s outreach to moderate Silicon Valley tech centrists hurt his popularity either, offline or not.
So that tells you what you need to know. Richard Hanania has to be the most habitually wrong pundit ever. He was wrong about the tariffs too. I correctly predicted nothing bad would happen and to buy the dip in stocks. I think Hanania is trying yet another pivot where he attempts to ingratiate himself with the groypers by overselling what little influence they have. It is not going to work. The groypers still think he is a Zionist shill.
In terms of the electoral map, the dissident-right holds little sway. Trump’s successor risks losing more voters in those swing states by pivoting too far to the right. Trump was smart enough to play off of Republican voters’ natural distrust of elites and other authority figures, but without crossing into being ‘too extreme’. These occasional photos of ICE arrests are paraded as symbolic wins and are eaten up by the ‘normie MAGA base’. There is nothing that the groypers bring or offer. The same for the Curtis Yarvin-fringe as well, who is also left empty-handed. Neither of these people are that relevant despite their large followings online and media coverage.
Online sentiment is effective for compelling action, as I said last week, and vindicated by Cracker Barrel last week restoring their old logo after significant online backlash a couple weeks ago. But this bypasses the groypers or Yarvin fringes entirely. Such backlash is led by normies with large online brands/followings on Twitter, who are very strongly anti-woke, but don’t have strong opinions about ‘the Joos’, Iran, or Epstein. Trump is pandering to those people, not Fuentes, groypers or Yarvin. The followers of Fuentes, Yarvin and others does not factor into Trump’s decision making processes, nor his successor.
As I wrote last week, the groypers tend to thrive during periods of social unrest and instability–such as in 2020–2021, when Jan. 6, COVID, and the BLM riots all unfolded within the span of a single year. 2025 has been the opposite, with the tariff situation a snoozer, Iran and Russia folding at the slightest resistance, and the U.S. economy sleepwalking to some sort of AGI-utopia where the masses are placated by chatbots, and the biggest crisis is students using AI to cheat on homework. This is the perfect fertile ground for more of the status quo, not the rise of online-led dissent movement.