A digital spiral gains momentum

In just the past few months, prominent figures on the “online right” have made a series of stunning moves. Podcaster Candace Owens claimed that the federal government and Turning Point USA are engaged in a cover-up in the Charlie Kirk assassination; she also claimed that the government perpetrated the trans shooter attack on a Catholic school in August. Tucker Carlson invited Hitler enthusiast Nick Fuentes onto his show for a friendly chat, and they agreed that the worst people in America are Christians who support Israel.

In 2020, I wrote in National Review that the racialist “alt-right” was dead. Led by figures such as Richard Spencer, the movement peaked at the 2016 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., where Spencer and his crew marched with tiki torches and chanted: “The Jews will not replace us!” The event ended when an attendee rammed his car into a crowd of counterprotestors, killing a woman. The entire spectacle, with its torchlit, toy-store Nuremburg vibe, fired up the progressive imagination.

In the aftermath of Charlottesville, the alt-right collapsed. A new iteration, which can be most accurately characterized as the “online right,” is back with a vengeance. Some prominent figures, such as Nick Fuentes (recently featured by the New York Times), were involved with the original alt-right. Others, such as Candace Owens (formerly of The Daily Wire), are new converts. Joining them are establishment figures who have embraced conspiratorial contrarianism, such as Tucker Carlson, fresh from his firing at Fox News.

The 2024 election of Donald Trump marked the first time progressives lost a major culture battle in a generation, with the Democrats’ being badly damaged by their embrace of transgender ideology. The woke left definitively overplayed their hand. But a substantial segment of the online right decided to press this advantage by lurching into World War II revisionism, 9/11 “inside job” conspiracy theories, and insidious, untethered fantasy frequently characterized by latent anti-Semitism.

It is tempting to dismiss these figures as a flash in the pan. The Alex Joneses of the world have always been with us. But the historical fantasies of Carlson, Owens, and a growing network of “influencers” producing a torrent of viral “content” are changing the face of conservatism. Comprehensive debunking by genuinely conservative historians such as Niall Ferguson and Victor Davis Hansen make little difference. Audiences aren’t reading. Social media may not be real life, but the impact these “influencers” have on the worldviews of real people is genuine and already measurably manifest in large-scale polls.

The rise of the “online right” is difficult to combat because it is primarily a technological development rather than an ideological one. The digital media economy has rendered words ephemeral. They are spewed out, disseminated, absorbed, and gone. Responding with reasoned, measured essays with citations, sources, and footnotes is ineffective, because the Candace Owens Experience roars on, and the millions she speaks to are not reading rebuttals of her sinister, addictive content.

Influencers reference long-debunked accounts or accusations; make assertions that have been proven false; engage in drive-by smears and vile insinuations to great effect. There is an obsessiveness with historical anecdotes without nuance or context; cherry-picked quotes are asserted to represent entire cultures or peoples; individuals are chosen as microcosmic examples of entire faith traditions. The audience laps it up. To effectively debunk just one of these longform tirades is nearly impossible.

A single case study illustrates the point. Candace Owens, in her crusade against the State of Israel, has claimed that Israel is a “safe haven for pedophiles” (even though Israel has an extradition treaty with the United States, and extradites criminals in a majority of cases). She has also cherry-picked stories of rabbinical sexual abuse and implied that they are broadly representative of Judaism, as well as insinuating that the Talmud justifies pedophilia. Owens believes that the world is run by a massive pedophile ring and that the world, and America in particular, is run by the State of Israel via a vast sexual blackmail conspiracy.

Using Owens’ tactics and journalistic standards, this narrative could be constructed about literally any state or institution, considering the grim reality that sexual abuse exists everywhere. Imagine if an anti-Catholic influencer decided to apply her standard of evidence and evidentiary cherry-picking but swapped out “Israel” for “the Vatican,” trawling through the hundreds of bone-chilling and frequently satanic abuse reports of the past several decades; highlighting hierarchy coverups; tracing the shuffling of predators from one parish to the next. Owens, a Catholic, would be rightly apoplectic to see her own tactics utilized this way. (One can almost hear her accusations of “literal demon possession.”)

Right-wing influencers of every stripe are being drawn into the algorithms and are creating their own orthodoxies out of heterodoxies. Collectively, they are “noticing” things about the Jews (or, more often, Israel) and scavenging through their own worldviews to find something that might attract the hordes on social media; throwing them the red meat, the baying they receive in response gets their blood up; they resolve to do it again. They join the spiral. The herd turns, then moves. The Overton window follows.

Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brain, might easily have been describing what the internet is doing to the Right:

As the [conservative] media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

As evangelical scholar Samuel D. James has noted, the internet itself is fundamentally “porn-shaped” in that it is “a tool for turning the world—whether ideas, relationships, experiences, etc.—into something we can control and consume at will.” Just as porn users will view increasingly extreme content to satisfy their addiction’s craving for novelty, something similar frequently unfolds in the world of political “content.” In short, the Candace show is the hardcore pornography of political commentary.

Western institutions, from governments to medical establishments, have suffered a devastating loss of credibility over the past five years. Many conservatives have rejoiced at the opportunities this represents, as the “smelly little orthodoxies” of the woke left are cleared away and the bizarre narratives imposed on us—such as the transgender phenomenon—collapse under the weight of their own ludicrousness. But the dangers have proven to be just as real.

The great risk of this moment for the conservative movement is that we will become distorted and deformed by the algorithmic machine, turned into cosplayers in a digital world rather than building communities and teaching the great Western canon, singing the old songs, and practicing the ancient faiths. That we will fall for the “conservatism” of the online right, which frequently consists of posting AI-generated “art” of six-fingered bearded woodsman with large families in a grotesque, computer-produced parody of 1950s nostalgia ads.

Worst of all, if the online right succeeds, it seems likely that our “traditionalism” will turn out to be just medieval prejudices with 21st century technology.