In the days since comedian Tony Hinchcliffe insulted Puerto Rico at Donald Trump's rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City on Sunday by calling it “a floating island of trash,” evidence is mounting that this could be the rare gaffe that really counts. The Puerto Rican community across the country is angry — and they happen to make up a large portion of the electorate in all-important Pennsylvania.

All of which begs the question: What was the Trump team thinking? Why, Why Would they give an insult comic a platform to take shots at Puerto Ricans, Palestinians, Jews and blacks?

The obvious answer is that the people running Trump's campaign find this kind of “edgy” humor funny. Trump's team reviewed and approved most of his sentence in advance and made one joke they thought was too much (calling Vice President Kamala Harris a “c*nt”). Although they insist that the Puerto Rico line was ad-libbed, the fact remains that it knew who Hinchcliffe was when they placed him there.

But there is a deeper truth here. The increasing tolerance of overt racism in the Republican Party – often portrayed as a “joke” – reflects the influence of an energetic and transgressive far-right youth movement in the party. And while this movement is giving the Trump right some vitality, it is also helping to make it (even) more toxic for ordinary Americans.

Historian David Austin Walsh recently coined a memorable term to describe this group's growing influence: “the Groyperfication of the GOP.”

The term refers to the so-called Groyper movement, a loose group of young neo-Nazi internet trolls led by expert Nick Fuentes. Groypers, the heirs of the 2010s alt-right, want to push the boundaries of mainstream discourse to the right one racist meme at a time. They are obsessed with supposedly forbidden topics like Holocaust denial or the supposed connection between race and IQ, which they want to integrate into mainstream Republican discourse.

Walsh finds that these Groyper-affiliated ideas have real appeal among both young Republican staffers and the intellectual elite of the conservative movement. At this point, there is little doubt that this is the case: Fuentes famously dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2022; Since then, he has been linked to Republican Hill staffers and major donors. Elon Musk has personally restored Fuentes' previously suspended account on X/Twitter, where he currently has over 400,000 followers.

There is a certain joy in transgression—a thrill in the counterculture feeling—that drives the online right's pro-Trump activism. But the way they transgress is toxic (and rightly so). Exploring Groyperesque ideas about black genetic inferiority, for example, feels like an exciting transgression only for a small group of “college-educated and intellectually sophisticated men,” as Walsh puts it. What these young white right-wingers find clever or funny most other Americans find abhorrent – which causes them to miss how someone like Hinchcliffe would behave among normal people.

Walsh compares this to the left’s well-documented “Latinx problem.” The term, until recently widely used by elite Democrats, was an attempt to move the Spanish language toward gender neutrality. According to one study, some Latinos found “Latinx” so alienating that its spread may well have driven some into the arms of Trump – reflecting a disconnect between the ideological goals of elite Democrats, including elite Latinos, and the views of ordinary people voters reflect on the world.

But I would argue that the so-called “dirty left” of the late 2010s is an even more direct comparison.

Similar to the Groypers, the dirty socialists wanted to bring about social change through provocative humor and online aggression that bordered on harassment. The “posting-to-practice pipeline,” as they called it, actually helped increase the prominence of socialism in American politics—winning converts among progressives in Brooklyn and a whole host of young professional Democrats. Except when the dirty left tried to throw its political weight behind it and aggressively campaign for Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democratic primaries, they became a liability—and seemingly cost him support among both the elite and the voter base the base.

Today, the dirt faction has minimal influence on the Democratic Party or American politics in general. After October 7, 2023, some of the media personalities in the Dirtbag universe apologized for and even outright endorsed Hamas' violence – a position that has almost no support among the general American population and condemned even by the most left-leaning elected Democrats becomes .

In both cases, the Groypers and the Scumbag, there was an energetic and radical youth faction that managed to be wildly successful in its own niche – but proved to be a political liability outside of its insular niche. Nevertheless, the two parties dealt with the two factions very differently.

The extremist flank of the Democrats are indeed extremists: they only speak for a fringe of relevant party actors. As a result, the scumbags faced real backlash when they tried to establish themselves as a major player in a party primary.

But in the Republican Party, extremes are now mainstream. Trump is the undisputed leader of the party, and the groyper-like Tucker Carlson is its chief ideologue. There is no internal resistance to ideological extremism among the party's youth, as it has already gained the upper hand.

Increasingly, what is popular with the party's radicals is what the party chooses to do. No one is in a position to tell young right-wingers that what they find exciting is electoral poison; that making tasteless jokes is not a punkish transgression, but rather creepy, disgusting anti-social behavior. In fact, racist comedy has become so normalized that it is now at the top of the list at a closing argument rally.

And if the warning signs prove true for Puerto Rican voters, the end result of this radicalization could be electoral defeat.

This story was adapted from the On the Right newsletter. New issues appear every Wednesday. Register here.