It’s understandable young people around the country are alienated from the political system. It’s difficult for them to get decent jobs, pay down college debt, form families and buy homes.
There’s a right way to deal with such problems through sensible engagement with the political process and working, for example, for deregulating the housing market. And there’s a wrong way, which is searching for some failed policy of the past. That could be the “democratic socialism” of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani on the left, or Nick Fuentes and his “Groyper” movement on the right.
Ahead of the June 2 primary, the Fuentes issue popped up in the race for California state treasurer. At the April 10-12 California Republican Party’s state convention in San Diego, state treasurer candidate David Serpa stood up and attacked the party leadership, as seen on a video he posted on his Facebook page.
Serpa blasted Shawn Steel, the former chairman of the state party and longtime GOP activist, for requiring the College Republicans, a section of the party, to endorse candidate Jennifer Hawks. However, although the convention also endorsed her, so did the right-wing American Independent Party.
He attacked Steel and Hawks for being “old Republicans.” Serpa, a former U.S. Marine and combat veteran of the Afghanistan war, pointed out he was 41 and graying, but was more concerned about the problems of youth. He also complained about there being no official camera at the convention.
Serpa’s video then included a clip of Fuentes calling on young people to vote Democratic because Trump “buried the Epstein files. There is no border wall. You didn’t deliver on mass deportations. You cut corporate tax rates for the rich by cutting Medicaid – again. No infrastructure bill. No middle-class tax cuts…. And now we’re in a regime change war with Iran.”
Actually, illegal border crossings have been reduced close to zero. ICE set a 2026 goal of 1 million deportations. Corporate tax cuts create jobs. Middle class taxes were cut. An April 8 AEI study found the Medicare “cuts” are reductions in fraud and abuse. And many conservative Republicans, such as myself, oppose the Iran War and want more Epstein files released.
The problem is Fuentes likes Hitler. On the Piers Morgan show, Fuentes admitted he said, “Hitler was very f—— cool.”
“I can say whatever I want, even if it’s that Nick Fuentes is a great American,” Serpa, who is talkative, told me. “And that he’s done more for this country from his parents’ basement than most of you have done in the last few decades that you’ve been involved in politics. And I would say that and I would stand by it.”
I’ll be blunt: My father, U.S. Army Capt. John C. Seiler Sr., fought Hitler in World War II. Pop invaded France shortly after D-Day, then occupied Germany. He remembered “bodies piled up like cordwood” and said he couldn’t get the stench of death out of his nostrils for 15 years. In the war, 405,399 Americans died, including some of Pop’s friends. Globally, 60-75 million died, including six million in Hitler’s Holocaust of the Jews. Hitler and Nazism are the opposite of what America needs today.
“He is a cancer on the right,” Steel texted me of Serpa. “He brushes and associates with the classic white supremacist/America First/Holocaust denying/and now anti-Trump and MAGA. He’s despicable.”
Praising Fuentes overshadows Serpa’s reform proposals for the actual treasurer’s job. He told me these include cutting state spending, auditing agencies, reducing taxes and fees, improving accounting, grading proposed bills and returning money to Californians. He doesn’t see that liking Fuentes is the obvious problem that can never be overcome.
And let’s keep Hitler dead in his bunker.
John Seiler is on the SCNG Editorial Board