Are Young Republicans Too Based To Work For Congress?

The grownups are worried. In group chats and at happy hours, some GOP veterans fret about the rising generation of young staffers in their party. The recurring complaint: The pipeline that feeds young conservative talent into government jobs is defective — if not broken.

This isn’t just the standard middle-aged lament that the kids aren’t all right. It’s a criticism aimed at institutions like the Heritage Foundation that purport to identify and train the party’s future governing class. To conservative critics in and out of government, many of whom ascribe to more traditional, pre-MAGA Republican beliefs, some such institutions have spent the last decade selecting for rigid conformity to Trumpist ideology over more typical markers of expertise. Maybe that helps for enforcing the party line in the new GOP. But these critics fear a decline of merit and skill, along with a tolerance for darker ideologies that could cripple the party’s ability to govern in the long run.

Conversations with four senior Republican congressional staffers, as well as think tank scholars, Heritage expats, academics who study think tanks and up-and-coming young Republicans reflected a widening generational split and mutual distrust over the issue.

“Everyone knows what the problem is: The organizations that bring young staffers to Washington, D.C. have spent the last decade prioritizing blind ideological loyalty instead of competence or intelligence,” said a senior GOP congressional staffer, granted anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel issues. “We have a generation of rabid, incompetent idiots.”

Of specific concern are those labeled groypers — technically, followers of the self-described “White Identitarian” Gen Z streamer Nick Fuentes, though it’s also used as a catch-all term of abuse for young, anti-establishment right-wingers, akin to the usage of “neocon” in the other direction. Fuentes, who has millions of viewers and a deeply antisemitic and misogynistic worldview, gained celebrity among young conservatives as a pro-Trump internet personality and far-right campus agitator. He has since turned on the president for his handling of the Epstein files and his support of Israel and the war in Iran. (Fuentes did not respond to a request for comment.)

Prominent conservative commentators have alleged that groyperism is spreading among younger members of the GOP, including in government — a view seemingly backed by examples like the young Trump administration lawyer who admitted to a “Nazi streak” in text messages revealed by POLITICO. Others point to social-media posts from official government accounts that echo the language or memes of the online far right.

But there’s a difference between critiquing military aide to Israel or lamenting the death toll in the Gaza War and throwing around terms like “Zionist-Occupied Government,” as one young GOP operative I know tends to do. Polling shows that the overwhelming majority of young conservatives reject antisemitic views, though their support for Israel has dropped significantly from prior generations. They are also more skeptical of military intervention than their forebears — the oldest members of the Gen Z cohort were toddlers on 9/11 and grew up in an era of multi-decade, multi-trillion dollar wars, and found themselves unable to afford homes as they reached adulthood. Many come by their mistrust of GOP orthodoxy honestly.

For these young Republicans, their elders’ complaints about their generation don’t reflect genuine concerns over credentials and experience — they’re about winning a debate within the Republican Party. “From my experience working on the ground, there is not this mass groyper issue,” said Marty Bertao, the 21-year-old Berkeley senior who serves as president of the College Republicans of America. “My suspicion is that they’re counting as ‘groyper’ anyone who’s remotely anti-Israel.” Rachel Bovard, the VP of programs at the Conservative Partnership Institute, which also trains staff, posted that the “groyper” criticism is “gross & reprehensible — especially to do this to young Hill staff.”

If, as the adage goes, personnel is policy, the stakes are significantly higher than intergenerational trash talk, given the degree to which government staffers, across branches, effectively run the country. Student government types become interns become policy aides become senior advisers, chiefs of staff and even heads of agencies. If the conservative personnel pipeline is changing, Republican government will change with it.

“I think there is certainly a pipeline problem on the Republican side,” said E.J. Fagan, an associate professor at the University of Illinois Chicago and author of The Thinkers: The Rise of Partisan Think Tanks and the Polarization of American Politics. Even beyond foreign policy, Fagan said that “normie expertise” has been sidelined in favor of producing “chum for the conservative media machine,” at Heritage in particular. “You’re hiring a lot of people who don’t have the chops that they used to,” he said.

He pointed to E.J. Antoni, Heritage’s millennial chief economist, whom President Donald Trump briefly nominated to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That nomination was pulled after Antoni advocated pausing the bureau’s jobs report — Trump had said a downward revision was “RIGGED” to make him look bad — and following reports that Antoni ran a deleted X account that sexually insulted Kamala Harris and attacked gay people. “It used to be that figures like that” — with Antoni’s Heritage title — "were impressive in the policy world,” Fagan said. “That’s not the case anymore. ... I don’t envy the job of someone ... trying to find that next generation of staffers.” (Brian Phillips, the VP of communications at Heritage, wrote in an email that “EJ Antoni is a brilliant and well-respected economist whose analysis and insight is consistently sought by policymakers, other experts, and the media.”)

The worries about the talent pipeline are especially sharp in the Senate, which remains as much a redoubt of establishmentarianism as can be found in Trump’s Washington. Of the four congressional staffers interviewed, three senior GOP aides in the Senate offered a variety of views on the issue. One said that while plenty of institutions were still churning out serious, policy-minded young job candidates, communications staff now outnumber policy staff in certain House and Senate offices — a reflection, they said, of members prioritizing “clicks and clapbacks in the ‘way too online’ corner of X,” which “doesn’t advance the conservative agenda one bit.” Another said that, alongside the ideological concerns, it’s difficult to compete for qualified staff with a Republican-controlled administration that makes thousands of political appointments. A third pointed to a generation hooked on the conspiratorial musings of Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens: “Five, eight years from now, if we’re reliant on people with this view of the world, we’re in serious trouble.”

The Heritage Foundation offers a case study in how conservative talent cultivation has traditionally worked, and how it’s changed in the Trump era — including through the accommodation of viewpoints once considered fringe on the right. The institution was a major feeder organization for GOP staff jobs in D.C. for decades. A 2024 Legistorm analysis found that nearly a third of GOP congressional offices employed a Heritage alum, and the institution’s own marketing materials claim the Trump administration has adopted 64 percent of its policy ideas. The Heritage spokesperson said there are 290 Heritage alumni serving in the current Trump administration, as well as 235 “staff/intern/program” alumni working on the Hill.

This success is attributable in part to the institution’s pattern of reinventing itself along with the conservative movement — from betting hard on Ronald Reagan, to backing Tea Party candidates through its advocacy arm in the 2010s, to MAGA and Project 2025 and, potentially, the JD Vance era to come.

Luke Coffey, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, another conservative think tank, experienced the shift firsthand. “The Heritage I joined in 2012 was Reaganite,” he said. “The Heritage I left was more MAGA than Trump.” He said the emphasis on ideology had costs when it came to experience, citing an intern questionnaire that screened applicants for anti-abortion views. For an intern in the Middle East program, he said, “I wanted the guy or girl who studied abroad in Jordan and spoke intermediate Arabic and backpacked across Israel and believed in American leadership on the global stage. I didn’t really care where they stood on the pro-life or pro-choice debate.”

“The Heritage Foundation proudly seeks staff who share our mission and conservative values,” said the spokesperson. “We value colleagues who are passionate about our work and are committed to building an America where freedom, opportunity, prosperity, and civil society flourish.”

The triumph of ideology over experience in the second Trump administration extends far beyond hypothetical interns coming out of Heritage. “For my defense secretary, I want someone who, when there’s an attempted coup in Seoul, can WhatsApp his South Korean counterpart because they’ve known each other for 35 years,” Coffey said. Instead, he’s got Pete Hegseth, a former television personality who served as a junior officer in the Army National Guard.

Heritage, too, has had its brush with groyper controversy. When Tucker Carlson hosted a friendly interview with Fuentes last year, Heritage President Kevin Roberts defended the former Fox News host against “a venomous coalition attacking him,” prompting widespread condemnation and a staff exodus. Roberts expressed regret for his phrasing, which he attributed to a staffer. But an unidentified young woman at a Heritage town hall came to Roberts’ own defense, citing Gen Z’s “increased unfavorable view of Israel,” which she attributed not to antisemitism, but to Catholic views considering Christian Zionism to be “a modern heresy.”

The episode dealt a blow to Heritage’s reputation, but by then there were already newer organizations claiming pipeline share, including the America First Policy Institute and American Moment. The latter in particular focuses on youth and junior staffing, explicitly rejecting what it calls the previous “broken system” of elite credentialing — including requirements for a college degree — in its recruitment materials.

The anxiety over groyperism in the GOP talent pool corresponds to a rise in antisemitism across the political spectrum, including among young conservatives. A Yale Youth survey found “extremely conservative” young people the most likely to agree with antisemitic sentiments such as “Jews in the United States have too much power.” A Manhattan Institute poll found that a full 25 percent of Republicans under 50 self-identified as having antisemitic views, and 31 percent as holding racist ones. Pew has asked different questions about young voters’ opinions of “the Israeli people,” which have declined across the board since 2022, though a majority of Republicans still view them favorably, compared to a minority of Democrats. (On the separate question of attitudes toward the Israeli government, it’s certainly clear that elected Republicans are far more supportive than their Democratic counterparts.)

“A few of us are concerned about the bubbling antisemitism that we hear,” said the second senior GOP Senate staffer. “Obviously the left has this issue more than we do, but it’s not helpful.” That person noted that in hiring, it’s now “a flag” if a candidate graduated from a conservative college and specifies an interest in the Middle East. “It’s like, why, though?”

There are widely varying, and bitterly disputed, estimates of the true scale of groyperism in the GOP’s young D.C. professional class, from ubiquitous to negligible. One anonymous conservative, described only as “an older insider,” told the Free Press’s Rod Dreher that the term applies to 30 to 40 percent of “Gen Z congressional and administration staffers,” and sparking a furious intra-party debate online when he repeated the claim on a podcast this week. A Trump administration official told the New Yorker’s Antonia Hitchens the number was more like 75 percent. The first Hill aide interviewed for this article said that at least 50 percent of GOP congressional staff was groyper or groyper-adjacent.

Young conservatives dismiss these estimates as an establishment effort to smear their entire generation. “The young men we bring to DC are not Groypers,” Nick Solheim, the CEO of American Moment, wrote on X. (He declined to comment for this article.) “They think Nick Fuentes is a blackpiller and a charlatan. They want to see order restored in their country. They want mass deportations, no new wars, and the American worker and family uplifted.”

Regardless, the troubling anecdotes are legion: gas chamber jokes and ethnic slurs bandied about on Young Republican group chats leaked to POLITICO last fall; a New York Magazine report from just last week linking a former New York Young Republican treasurer to a social media account denigrating Jews, Black people, Muslims and gay people; a House campaign adviser fired for mocking a rape victim on X; the Ron DeSantis presidential campaign staffer axed for retweeting a video featuring a Nazi image, only to join the office of Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) and, eventually, the State Department, where he works today.

Many Republican electeds, as well as young conservatives, maintain that such politics remain on the fringe of their movement — and that it’s unfair to ascribe real political views based on group chat jokes — pointing to the left as a bigger source of the problem. But Sen. Ted Cruz said at a Faith and Freedom Coalition town hall last month that he’s “seen more antisemitism on the right in the last 18 months than any time in my life,” and that “it is spreading in particular among young people.” The concern has since been institutionalized: Cruz allies have launched an advocacy organization specifically to counter antisemitism on the right.

But other MAGA leaders have been careful not to alienate young conservatives, even the extremely online and groyper-curious segment. Vance hasn’t just expressed sympathy for those who oppose the Iran war, which is most of the American public (though it still enjoys majority Republican support, and nearly half of Republicans 18-29 approve of how Trump has handled it, per Pew). He has also dismissed the racist Young Republicans group chat as “edgy jokes,” condemning antisemitism while musing publicly that Jeffrey Epstein had ties to Israeli intelligence. If in fact Vance winds up leading the future GOP, all of this raises the question of who exactly he’s welcoming into the fold, and what exactly they’ll do with power once they get it. Vance’s office did not respond to a request for comment, though he has previously said Fuentes can “eat shit” for calling him a “race traitor” over Vance’s interracial marriage.

Hence the complaints of those Hill vets, who are looking at the future of their party — and the country — in the resumes coming over their offices’ transoms. More and more, they don’t like what they see.