Inside the Groyper Campaign: What James Fishback's Florida Flop Reveals

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Tim Rice** (0:32)
Hello, I'm Tim Rice. Welcome to another edition of Behind the Story. Joining me today is repeat guest, my friend and colleague, Daily Wire, managing editor, Dylan Houseman. Dylan, twice in two weeks, man.
I wouldn't have had you back right one after the other, if the story wasn't really worth it, but it really is. Thanks for being here.

**Dylan Houseman** (0:52)
Glad to be back, Tim. It is one of the burdens of writing regular bangers, is that sometimes you got to do the show twice in a row, but you know, that's just the burden I bear.

**Tim Rice** (1:03)
So speaking of the bangers, and you do write them so frequently, there are many, but this one in particular is titled, Here Lie the Groypers, a Dispatch from Podcastistan. And this one took you a little bit out of your comfort zone and out of the swamp.
Tell us first just broadly what the piece was about.

**Dylan Houseman** (1:27)
Yeah, we can start 30,000 feet above the swamps of Florida. I went from the swamps of DC to the swamps of Florida, literally down into Everglade-ish country. And people might recall that there was a governor election, a governor primary election last week in Florida. They might also recall that there was this fella named James Fishback who was running it for governor in the Republican primary. And the short version of who James Fishback is, is that he launched his campaign running very aggressively against Israel, running against APEC. At various times running against the Jews, more explicitly, he was really dog whistling with very specific terms, phrase and messaging towards the Nick Fuentes crowd. The Groypers is what they call themselves, hence the title of the piece. He started by there being goyslop, being fed to the kids at school cafeterias, which is obviously an anti-Semitic dog whistle. Is it even a dog whistle, actually, Tim, at that point? I guess it's more of a dog shout, anti-Semitic whistle.
Yeah, he ran this very online, targeted at these very young men, streamer, watching anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, anti-APAC folks, and gained a lot of attention on the internet as a result.
Over the course of his campaign, he kind of shifted somewhat. He still maintained a lot of that base, but he also started running in a more traditional kind of populist manner. I would say he was talking a lot about data centers. He lately started talking a lot about flock.
He wanted to return to old Florida, as he put it, very harsh on immigration, on H1B visas. So ran this kind of populist nationalist campaign, very much began with this anti-Israel, anti-APAC, anti-Jewish at times messaging that got all of the online kind of alt-right types really into him. So I wanted to go down to Florida to see how does this translate into the real world? This gets a ton of attention online. People are fighting on Twitter about it. They're fighting on Instagram about it. There's all these snipes back and forth between the various camps of the right and the online sphere. But most of these guys that have run for office this way, as basically online provocateurs try to just get attention by being racist and anti-Semitic on the Internet, most of them have flamed out completely when they actually run for anything. They don't really go anywhere. Fishback was a little different in the sense that he was running a real campaign. He wasn't able to raise much money, but he had some volunteers. He was doing a ton of campaign stops.
He got one on Tucker Carlson, people might remember, and got a big boost from that. He got backed by Nick Fuentes. He had the alternative media support fully in his corner. I was like, okay, to the extent that any of these people are serious in their attempts to run for office, Fishback, in a way, he's not a serious person as we can discuss more later. But in a way, he was running a more serious campaign than most of these other provocateurs. I wanted to go down there, talk to some of his supporters, go to some of his events. I actually ended up talking to him himself at one of his events, and observe what these people are about. Do they exist in real life? What do the Groypers look like outside their basements? That type of thing.