The Fracturing of the Conservative Right: How to Stop It
President Trump built the largest, most diverse Republican coalition ever. Here's how to save it.
The American Right is in the middle of its most dangerous moment since 1964.
A loud and growing chorus -- led by Ben Shapiro, Mark Levin, and Florida state representative Randy Fine -- has declared open ideological war on Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and anyone who questions unlimited U.S. aid to Israel or dares interview Nick Fuentes.
Their weapon of choice is excommunication: public denunciations, donor pressure, and calls for primaries.
The goal is noble in their eyes -- defending Israel and marginalizing antisemites.
The result, however, is catastrophic.
Point 1: Splintering the coalition is electoral suicide
Donald Trump won in 2024 with the broadest Republican coalition in modern history: 74 million votes, the first GOP popular-vote majority since 1988, and massive gains among young men (up 18 points with under-30 males versus 2020, per AP VoteCast). Exit polls showed 41% of 18–29-year-old men backed Trump -- the highest Republican share ever recorded for that demographic.
That youth surge was powered by economic frustration, anti-war sentiment, and distrust of institutions. If the MAGA tent shrinks to exclude anyone skeptical of $20 billion annual foreign commitments while American cities crumble, the 2026 midterms become a Democrat massacre.
The Left -- currently led by AOC, Rashida Tlaib, Zohran Mamdani, and the DSA wing -- will not hesitate to exploit a divided Right. History is merciless: the GOP lost the House in 1964 after the Goldwater purists purged the Rockefeller wing. We cannot repeat that mistake when the stakes are infinitely higher.
Point 2: Jewish safety and the tragic irony of the purge
No group suffered more from real Nazis than the Jewish people. Six million murdered, an existential trauma that still echoes. When Nick Fuentes or anonymous X accounts traffic in tropes such as Jewish control of media and politics, the reflex to isolate and condemn is completely understandable.
Yet the cold strategic reality is this: handing Congress to a Democrat Party whose progressive caucus now contains open opponents of Israel’s existence will hurt Jews far more than a few thousand edgelords on the internet ever could. In 2025, 68% of House Democrats voted against a resolution simply condemning “from the river to the sea” rhetoric.
The ADL’s own 2024 audit showed antisemitic incidents in the U.S. spiking 337% after October 7 -- driven overwhelmingly by far-left and Islamist sources, not paleocon Twitter.
AOC’s squad grows stronger every cycle; MAGA’s pro-Israel record in government (Abraham Accords, Golan Heights recognition, moving the embassy) remains the strongest in history.
Throwing away that alliance simply to police speech on the margins is a tragic miscalculation of the actual threat vector.
Point 3: The excommunication campaign is failing -- spectacularly
Tucker Carlson’s subscriber base on his own network grew 28% in the three months after his Fuentes interview (Nov 2025 data, Tubulus Analytics).
The Fuentes conversation itself has 21 million views and counting.
Candace Owens’s daily YouTube show averaged 1.4 million viewers per episode in Q4 2025 -- higher than Shapiro’s peak daily numbers.
On X, posts containing “Ben Shapiro” + “excommunication” or “purge” generated 4.2 million impressions in the last 30 days; sentiment analysis shows 72% negative toward the tactic (Brandwatch, Nov 2025).
Marjorie Taylor Greene’s fundraising actually increased 34% after Trump called her a “traitor” over Ukraine/Israel aid votes (FEC filings).
Nick Fuentes’s Cozy.tv concurrent viewership is up 312% year-over-year -- precisely because every public denunciation drives curious zoomers straight to him.
In other words, the Streisand Effect is on steroids.
The more loudly Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin swing the “banhammer,” the more the targets grow. The excommunicators are burning their own cultural capital to feed their opponents’ rise.
Point 4: Conversation and facts beat cancellation every time
The MAGA base is not antisemitic; it is exhausted.
Young white men -- the demographic most receptive to Fuentes’s messaging -- face the worst economic prospects of any cohort since the Great Depression: real wages down 4% since 2021 for under-30 non-college males, student debt at $1.7 trillion, homeownership rates at 1930s levels.
Fuentes tells them “the system is rigged by a hostile elite that hates you.” That diagnosis lands because parts of it feel true. Where he goes wrong -- and where he must be called out -- is the scapegoat.
The villain is not “the Jews.”
The villain is a bipartisan ruling class that shipped their factories to China, addicted their cousins to fentanyl, and sent their brothers to die in forever wars while spending $150 billion in Ukraine and $20 billion in Gaza with no accountability.
Direct the righteous anger at the actual architects -- McConnell, Pelosi, the Davos set, the military-industrial complex -- and Fuentes’s appeal collapses. We win with truth, not with excommunication.
1. The pro-Trump, pro-MAGA path forward is clear and unifying: Reaffirm ironclad support for Israel’s right to exist and defend itself.
2. Demand transparency and debate on every foreign dollar -- because American citizens should come first.
3. Expose actual antisemites without alienating millions of patriotic young men who just want a future.
4. Keep the coalition big enough to win.
Heal the Divide, Stop the Authoritarian Left
The Left is organized, vicious, and growing.
They dream of a 2030 America where open anti-Israel voices like Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and their allies are fully in charge and “Zionist” is treated as a slur. We hand them that future only if we let understandable Jewish fear become a weapon that fractures the only political movement capable of stopping them.
President Trump built the largest, most diverse Republican coalition ever.
Let’s defend it with facts, love of country, and unbreakable resolve -- not with purges that repeat the disasters of the past.
The kids aren’t Nazis; they’re angry and broke. Give them hope, truth, and a mission inside the tent. That is how we save both America and a Jewish future in it.
Robert J. Hutchinson is the author of numerous books of popular history, including Searching for Jesus: New Discoveries in the Quest for Jesus of Nazareth (Thomas Nelson), The Dawn of Christianity (Thomas Nelson), The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible (Regnery) and When in Rome: A Journal of Life in Vatican City (Doubleday). Email him at: roberthutchinson@substack.com