On Friday, July 22, Florida State Representative Anthony Sabatini introduced himself as a “Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon conservative” to a boisterous crowd assembled in a conference hall in Tampa for the launch event of American Virtue, the group for Gen Z right-wing nationalists that launched in 2021 as American Populist Union (APU). “I believe in you guys,” Sabatini professed. “This movement is gonna take over [the GOP] and make this country truly great again. It’s the people in this room, the conservative youth…who are truly going to save [the USA] from both parties, from the uniparty. So God bless the nationalist populist movement, God bless the United States, and God bless everybody in this room.”
From its beginnings, American Virtue has strained to distance itself from White nationalist Nick Fuentes and his Gen-Z America First/groyper movement. They have attempted this by toning down overtly racist, male supremacist, and antisemitic rhetoric in a bid for mainstream conservative respectability, even as they mimicked many aspects of groyper ideology and style. At the “State of the Movement” launch, however, multiple speakers and attendees held deep connections to the groypers. The event’s technical lead, Simon Dickerman, was a longtime White nationalist with close ties to alt-right figures such as Richard Spencer, Identity Evropa, and the 2017 Unite the Right rally, as well as to Fuentes and the groypers.
Read more at Political Research Associates.
Ben Lorber 
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