Sen. John Fetterman had an apparent health scare yesterday, falling during a walk near his home and being briefly hospitalized with injuries to his face. A spokesperson said that Fetterman felt lightheaded and fell due to a “ventricular fibrillation flare-up” and that doctors would “fine-tune his medication regimen.”

Fetterman famously suffered a stroke during his 2022 Senate campaign and has a history of heart problems—although the malady he was formerly diagnosed with was the much less serious atrial fibrillation. It’s not totally clear whether the spokesperson yesterday simply misspoke or whether Fetterman is now dealing with much more serious heart problems than previously known. Either way, we’re praying for his health today. Happy Friday.

Out of the Bottle

by Andrew Egger

In recent weeks, I’ve watched in fascination as many prominent professional conservatives have seemed to realize, in a sudden flash of horror, something that has seemed obvious to me for years: The GOP kids are not alright. For a significant and growing faction of the early-career operatives entering the party ranks, irony-drenched, nihilistic transgressiveness and theatrical bigotry aren’t just considered acceptable—they’re at the heart of politics.

For many, the light-bulb moment has been Tucker Carlson’s much-discussed interview this month with white nationalist livestreamer Nick Fuentes, and the bizarre initial decision of Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts to demand the right close ranks around the pair. Sen. Ted Cruz accused Carlson this month of spreading “a poison that is profoundly dangerous,” and said he sees more antisemitism on the right today “than I have in my entire life.” This week, the conservative writer Rod Dreher wrote a forceful denunciation of Fuentes’s “groyper” faction, calling it a “cancer growing fast within the conservative movement” that “will be a complete disaster for Republicans” if not stopped. Dreher cited a jaw-dropping estimate from a young friend in GOP politics: “Between 30 and 40 percent of Republican staffers under the age of 30 are followers of Fuentes.”

I don’t know if that number is precisely accurate.¹ But Dreher is undeniably directionally correct: The problem is not a future problem. Fuentes and his ilk have established a professional-Washington beachhead. The groypers and their fellow travelers are already here.

It’s hard not to respond to realizations like this with exasperation. Oh, hey, you’re awake—glad you’ve decided to join us! But the more I’ve thought about it, the harder I’ve found it to blame guys like Dreher or Cruz for being slow on the uptake. I used to think professional conservatives’ willful blindness on this stuff was all down to Trump: He was an open bigot embraced and crowned by the party, so fighting bigotry elsewhere in the ranks had become too fraught and complicated to bother with.

But there’s a significant generational element here too. Some of this stuff really is just now dawning on older conservative thinkers and politicians. “Most representatives both locally and federally are older and don’t really understand what’s happening with the younger generations,” Mikale Olson, a young conservative writer who is decidedly anti-Fuentes and has been doing some political soul-searching, told me. “They’re not really online that much, and the younger generations aren’t speaking to them as much, so they’re kind of like deer in the headlights with this stuff.”

White nationalists and other perverse factions have long hovered on the fringes of GOP politics. But for a long time these older thinkers had—or thought they had—compelling reasons to believe that those elements were being kept out on the fringes. A decade ago, during the rise of what was then still called the alt-right, professional conservatism was still doing an okay job at least trying to police its ranks. Periodically some staffer or other at some organization or other would be fired after they were outed for holding secret Nazi views. Some looked at these stories and said, Sure is alarming that these people keep finding their way into the GOP pipeline. But the professional conservatives could say, not entirely without reason: But we’re kicking them back out again! The system works!

The nihilistic energy has only been growing ever since. But when Republicans were out of power in the Biden years, it was easy for professional conservatives to treat it less as an internal problem than as an indictment of the reigning lib culture—a backlash against the schoolmarmish You can’t say that pieties of woke culture.