The Case for Gatekeeping: Extremism and the Republican Electoral Coalition

Then-candidate and former President Trump speaks at a rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City on October 27, 2024. Via Kenny Holston/The New York Times.

By Nathan Spencer ‘28

Despite an electoral and popular vote victory, the Republican party is deeply, gravely fractured. For years, right-leaning commentators have appealed to principles of free speech and expression to push back on what they see as an overly censorious left-wing ruling class. These complaints were not entirely without merit, but still, Republicans seem to have bitten off more “free speech” than they can chew. Political parties, generally, tend to try and shed their more radical fringes in an attempt to appeal to moderate voters who typically decide elections. In service of this goal, they necessarily draw lines, explicit and implicit, that differentiate permissible and impermissible speech.

Yet, today, the Republican sphere is nearly devoid of such lines, and the lines that do exist are largely imaginary. Collectively, the right seems to be stuck in the view that, so long as speech is free, it is free of consequence. No view could be more profoundly hostile to the truth.

It is perhaps all too easy to look at an event like Trump’s October Madison Square Garden rally and dismiss the distasteful rhetoric as an aberration—unfortunate jokes made by an edgy comedian, as the Trump campaign suggested—but this view ignores a disconcerting pattern on the right. For years, particularly in the ideological chaos of Trump’s 2020 loss (and subsequent efforts to retain power), more extreme views have become only more common to see on the right.

One of the most visible instances of this phenomenon occurred in 2022, when Trump invited rapper Ye (following a rash of antisemitic statements by Ye), who brought along his apparent friend, Nick Fuentes, a virulently racist white nationalist streamer. Following the obvious outrage at a current presidential candidate dining with such figures, including criticism from an assortment of Republicans, Trump claimed that he had been duped by Ye—that Fuentes was never intended to be invited, and that Trump knew nothing of him. Even if we take this claim at face value, it speaks volumes about the type of company such a candidate is willing to keep. After all, it was Trump’s guest who invited Fuentes. 

This dinner was not the MAGA-right’s first run in with Fuentes or his followers. In 2021, both Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Paul Gosar (R-AZ) had attended a conference organized by Fuentes. Gosar’s response was simply to claim that isolating this group would, somehow, be unproductive. He would appear by video at the conference next year by video—later claiming that this was a mix-up by staff. Once again, condemnation came—with little formal consequences, given that both already lacked committee seats. 

Yet today, both Greene and Gosar remain representatives. Even if this was a mere staff mix-up, such a mix-up ought to prompt reconsideration of the types of staffers attracted to such officials—this was, after all, a group Gosar had faced large backlash for speaking at the year prior. One would assume such a mistake would be rather easy to avoid.

A similar incident came in 2023 when Nate Hochman, former writer at the National Review and then-speechwriter for the DeSantis campaign, created what might qualify as one of the most genuinely odd political ads ever constructed—one that ended in a Nazi symbol, widely used by white-nationalist groups today. Desantis’ campaign fired Hochman and refused to comment further on the matter.

This ought to be profoundly disturbing. Regardless of whether or not Hochman knew, as he denies, the significance of the symbol, normal people simply do not “accidentally” integrate Nazi imagery into a political ad. Hochman, clearly, was moving in circles where this symbol is used—he got it from somewhere, after all—and those circles seem likely to be populated by honest-to-goodness neo-Nazis. The fact that a member of the ostensibly mainstream conservative movement was so immersed in this discourse is not cause for simple concern but for a deep soul-searching by those conservatives who rightly find this sort of thing profoundly abhorrent.

Hochman, though, is one of many symptoms. Nowadays, the mass-activist class of the conservative movement—people like Charlie Kirk and Tucker Carlson—have begun to promote Steve Sailer, a self-proclaimed “noticer” (read: believer in the inherent inferiority of minority groups, particularly Black Americans), as well as a host of other, frequently anonymous, bloggers (e.g., Daniel Schmitt) promoting roughly the same concepts. Under DeSantis, New College of Florida took it upon itself to invite Sailer to give a lecture. This case has nothing to do with a student group’s right to invite controversial speakers—a NCF spokesman clarified to the Guardian that this was, in fact, an event explicitly organized by the school.

Also worth mentioning is the infiltration of deeply radical philosophies, like the anti-democratic monarchism of Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug) into the donor class of the right, perhaps epitomized by Peter Theil. Or Costin Alamariu (aka Bronze Age Pervert)’s 4chan-inflected Nietzschean screeds against racial equality; or Stephen Wolfe (a former postdoc at Princeton’s own James Madison Program)’s racist vision of radical christian nationalism.

There are many, many more examples—far more than fall within the scope of this article. This problem is not new, but it seems to grow exponentially each year. It might be easy for the casual observer to simply remark on the historically multiracial nature of the coalition that secured the Republican electoral victory. This fact, however, does not itself remedy the issues here raised. Rather, it provides an inflection point. Republicans, at some point, will have to address these issues. Else, they will continue to grow into the fabric of the party, corrupting it more than they already have and rendering it toxic for normal views. 

But, some might protest, these are just fringe figures, and every party, at some point, has struggled with its own fringe. The Democratic party is by no means innocent here. Yet, as Jonathan Chait notes in Intelligencer, the Democratic party maintains a relatively antagonistic relationship with the antisemitic portion of its leftward flank, and this mutually combative generally halts the spread of such ideas. But if left undisturbed, these fringe movements will metastasize. The Republican party (and broader conservative movement) is already beginning to reap the firstfruits of this infection—from top campaign staff for the President-elect, to right-leaning intellectuals, to members of Congress. If conservatives do not confront this problem, it will, eventually, determine policy. A choice to allow a view within a political coalition is not a neutral one—it essentially signals that that issue is up for debate, that reasonable people of good morals and in good faith can differ on the problem in question.

Expanding the realm of “acceptable viewpoints” to neo-Nazi adjacent ideology will, in time, result in the proliferation of neo-Nazi policy. Of course, with such proliferation, the Republican party will likely find it much harder to hold on to the coalition it has managed to cobble together. Yet, nevertheless, damage will, assuredly, be done. These things start small, insidiously. We let them by because, as the adage goes, they did not come for us. Conservatives must not fall for this trap. This is not a question of sabotaging “your own side”—such issues are transcendent of partisanship, striking at basic questions of morality. If Republicans still have faith in our common American traditions—traditions with which such bigoted extremism is wholly incompatible—then they must begin to fight back. An exasperated head-shaking is not enough—such views must be aggressively called out, and shown the door. If they are not, then they will grow and metastasize. And in so doing, they will kill everything Republicans once claimed they stood for.