How the Internet Made the Far-Right
To understand extremist politics, you have to understand online discourse.
When Politico published racist and antisemitic messages from a Young Republican group chat in October, the surprise was as much who was talking as what they said. These weren’t anons who’d been unmasked as political operatives. They were already inside the machine, joking that they “love Hitler”—under their government names, in writing, in an ostensibly professional space. Their tone was casual, the jokes lifted from an online dialect so pervasive that for the already terminally online, it hardly registered as shocking. Offensive, sure. Shocking? No.
That dialect—and it is a dialect—did not just suddenly materialize in 2016. It was forged during well over a decade of digital upheaval, as the wall between the Internet’s margins and its mainstream gave way. Its roots run back to early Bulletin Board Systems, listservs, and public library terminals; it threads through forums and blogs before finding a new home on imageboards.
The story, as it incarnates in its current form, begins with Gamergate, rises through the alt-right’s brief media reign, and settles in the pandemic years, when Twitter laid bare the id of American politics.
The first turning point came in 2014, when a breakup between a game developer, Zoë Quinn, and her ex-boyfriend Eron Gjoni spilled into public view and metastasized into Gamergate. The “torturously complex” sequence of events has famously been hard to tease apart—the original accusation made by Gjoni that Quinn had traded sexual favors for a positive review of her video game, Depression Quest, fell apart—but the general grievances of Gjoni’s blog post rerouted themselves into complaints about the presence of women in the gaming community and the perception of favorable treatment of those women. What Gamergate was depends on whom you ask and which side of the political aisle they’re on.
For many gamers, most of them young and male, it was about corruption and bias, as in the soon-to-be-widespread slogan, “ethics in games journalism.” For them, Gamergate became a kind of political awakening, an introduction to the understanding that the media lies, that journalists and women aren’t to be trusted, and, perhaps most importantly, that trolling works. To journalists and women in gaming, though, Gamergate was understood as something else entirely: a campaign of harassment, doxxing, and threats that exposed the machinery of online mobbing.
In practice, Gamergate was both a digital populist rebellion—a toxic one, to be sure—and a deluge of harassment and intimidation. I’ve even heard it likened, half-jokingly, to an “Arab Spring” for gamers—a too-flattering comparison, but one that reveals how many on the right still understand it. Those too young to witness Gamergate now treat it like others treat physical-world war stories: a mythic redpill origin tale about the moment the veil first lifted, and they understood how power really worked.
By 2016, that sensibility had found its next form.
The alt-right, for all the subsequent attempts to define it, was not a coherent ideological movement. It was a fragment—an expression—of a larger online ecosystem which included several discrete subcultures that eventually escaped containment. Taken together, the alt-right was characterized by a defiance aimed at both progressive culture and establishment conservatism. If it possessed any real throughline, it was the way it weaponized the language of the Internet: trolling and mockery.
Early claims that “conservative is the new punk rock” were apt in at least one way. Much of the movement’s aesthetic—Nazi imagery included—was designed to shock rather than to persuade. Yet, as time went on, it became clear that many within the movement weren’t being “ironic.” They believed it. They really were antisemitic. They really were white nationalists. It wasn’t a joke. Irony gave them cover, at least for a time. If a joke landed, it worked as propaganda. If it failed, it was “just trolling.”
In her excellent book about the alt-right, Black Pill, Elle Reeve calls this “visibility warfare”: each act of exposure fed the movement’s reach. Every denunciation bred new avatars, aesthetics, and offshoots—people who saw this alt-right thing and wanted to be a part of it, and created something in its shadow.
The alt-right’s real innovation was learning to weaponize a particularly Internet-native spectacle, to treat outrage as both recruitment and entertainment. It mutated and burrowed, like mold on bread.
Charlottesville was the breaking point.
In response to the removal of Confederate monuments in Virginia, far-right groups, including Klansmen and neo-Fascists, gathered in Charlottesville for the “Unite the Right rally.” At one march, white nationalists carried tiki torches and shouted “Jews will not replace us.” The chaotic weekend ended with one far-right marcher plowing his car into a crowd of counter-protestors, killing one and injuring 35. The rally’s violence (which was also from some leftist agitators, not only the right-wing protestors) and the ensuing lawsuits shattered the alt-right’s momentum, though it didn’t entirely extinguish its energy. Things changed, and, for the participants, the stakes rose. A spirit of paranoia replaced the humor.
And so, the people who once called themselves “alt-right” scattered. Some, like National Policy Institute Executive Director Evan McLaren, renounced the label altogether—claiming that he “was a right-winger until [he] grew up.” Richard Spencer, the media’s chosen face of the alt-right, re-emerged as a Democrat-voting writer and podcaster who champions an ideology he calls “Apolloism.” He’s among several figures who are now what you might call post-right: disgusted with what the alt-right, and the right at large, had become while occasionally still hanging onto some of their old white identitarianism.
Others rebranded or outgrew the label—situating themselves within a more respectable expression of conservatism. Their reasons were both cynical and sincere. Some were pushed into exile on Telegram, only to reappear on X after Elon Musk loosened moderation in 2023, an uncanny alt-right night of the living dead.
The online right, the broader ecosystem from which the alt-right emerged, was always a larger force. It had existed before the alt-right and would outlast it. It was and is sprawling, running from mainstream conservative entertainers to libertarians to neoreactionary bloggers like Curtis Yarvin to traditionalist Catholic sedevacantists to post-liberal intellectuals to ecofascists to out-and-out white nationalists. The alt-right—ultimately, a network of people, a scene, with Breitbart News as a highly-visible manifestation of an outlet influenced by their aesthetics—had simply been its loudest, most combustible node. The node that the media paid most attention to; the node that loved the media attention as much as the media loved paying attention to them. Between 2018 and 2020, new figures emerged who hadn’t been part of the original scene and found something in its defiance appealing.
Of the smaller subcultures that emerged from the alt-right’s collapse, the “dissident right” was the most self-consciously intellectual, the most aesthetically refined, and ultimately one of the most influential. It came out of forums, blogs, and “Frogtwitter”—a group chat that included many now-famous right-wing Internet personalities. In the wake of alt-right doxxings—mass “unmaskings” that revealed people’s legal names and cost many people their jobs—it treated anonymity as sacred. Don’t organize. No online romances, reciprocated or otherwise—lust is a security risk. Don’t become a “facef–”—online slang for someone who reveals their real identity and uses their real face. You’re not here to become a talking head on Fox News, are you? There were feds—federal agents or informants—everywhere, or so everyone thought.
As the subculture grew—attracting attention from people like the hosts of the popular podcast Red Scare—the paranoia began to dissipate, though not completely. The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat would eventually call it a “right-wing counterculture—an edgy, radical-seeming alternative to the status quo.”
Roger Ruin, a blogger who once moved in these circles and now writes retrospectively, describes this evolution as inevitable. The “Optics Wars,” he argues, forced the movement to shed its explicit neo-Nazism and reemerge in subtler, stylized forms—religious, populist, ironic. The tone of the alt-right endured even as the ideology fractured.
And then there was Twitter.
The platform had long blurred the line between the fringe and the professional world, and the pandemic made that mix complete. During lockdowns—when almost everyone was dangerously online—an expanding alternative media ecosystem fed on the energy of anonymous reactionaries who supplied memes, aesthetics, and ideas, while public commentators repackaged them for wider audiences.
Some anons attempted serious projects: translations, essays, philosophy. Others were provocateurs. Many were simply racists who were good at posting. Whatever their motives, they set the rhythm of online conservatism. The anons were funny, they drove engagement, and they created the impression of a living, energetic right-wing intellectual scene.
In the digital-native media market, they won the battle.
Those pursuing more “serious” work were often older—shaped by decades in the blogosphere and on forums—as opposed to the loudest edge cases that dominated public imagination. They were people with intellectual ambitions who didn’t fit neatly into any sanctioned ideological home (for good reason!), and who ended up developing their ideas online.
Many of them, above all, were Internet personalities. Sharing their work with anons instead of academics, they picked up the idiom of their surroundings: irreverent, ironic, performatively unserious, even when the ideas underneath were not. Some of those ideas—like “human biodiversity,” the argument that different races have inherently different physical and mental capabilities—sat far outside the mainstream. But the people advancing them were, in some cases, not stereotypical cranks, and readers could tell.
The boundaries between these circles and the mainstream right were porous. Journalists, think tankers, and academics lurked in the same spaces, borrowing language and aesthetics or engaging directly. The exchange was often stylistic, not ideological, though occasionally it was both. Recall the time Ron DeSantis campaign aide Nate Hochman retweeted a Sonnenrad (sun wheel)—a symbol associated with neo-Nazi groups—in a campaign video. It was a bizarre scene, to say the least. Hochman claimed ignorance—that he didn’t know what a Sonnenrad was. Many people rolled their eyes at this, “Sure.” It was at once too obscure and too obviously associated with Nazism to take what he said at face value.
But on the other hand, if you spend a lot of time on Twitter, you might be inclined to believe him—it’s just in the water there, with images and ideas drifting across discourse-lines. At any rate the Hochman Affair was paradigmatic of Twitter’s impact on politics. Irony, detachment, and a studied hostility to moral language became the lingua franca of conservatism itself. One has to wonder if an administration now posting AI-generated meme slop would have done so had they spent less time on Twitter. I tend to believe they wouldn’t.
The right isn’t alone in this, though.
A decade earlier, a different corner of the Internet had been shaping its own political sensibility (and it wasn’t the first time online subcultures spilled into real institutions). If Tumblr helped cultivate the identity politics that would later influence a generation of progressive journalists, activists, and academics, Twitter was doing something parallel on the right. The “ironic right” emerged as Twitter’s counterpart to Tumblr’s “social justice left.”
Conservatives noticed the engagement this style generated. Young aides, NGO staffers, Hill workers, and magazine writers started adopting the tone of anonymous posters because it performed well online and conferred cultural fluency. It had social cachet. Their favorite podcasters spoke in this language—maybe it got them invited to cool group chats. In some cases, the anons and the institutional actors were literally the same people.
A new circulation pattern developed: reactionary ideas moved through influencers, staffers, and journalists with the same ease that Tumblr’s identity politics once traveled through fan communities. What’s left isn’t a movement, just a mood; politics as vibe.
And now the landscape is shifting once more. As platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts have come to dominate online attention, the Internet is moving from text to short-form video. It’s about personality, not wit. Where text-based platforms rewarded clever wordplay, video platforms reward the ability to hold attention in seconds. Today, Governor Gavin Newsom mimics the way Trump tweets—he tries to signal he’s a poster. The official DHS account on X posts the most incomprehensibly juvenile and offensive memes—as in, to take one example of many, a Studio Ghibli-style image of a stony-faced white officer handcuffing a weeping Hispanic woman. Billionaires like Elon Musk long to be a “poster.” Tomorrow, they may long to be streamers and TikTokers—a style of posting that has been popular for years, but, now, seems to be competing in influence.
The style that built 4chan and early Twitter—dense with in-jokes, irony, and textual sophistication—no longer works as well in this new environment. What began as a joke became a shared language. It’s how people talk now. And now, things are changing again. The irony, as Reeve observes, is that the networked culture once expected to democratize speech has instead blurred sincerity and parody so thoroughly that it’s often impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins.
Katherine Dee is a tech correspondent at The Spectator and a columnist at Tablet. Her work has also appeared in GQ, Pirate Wires, UnHerd, The Free Press, and elsewhere. She hosts a weekly call-in show on her Internet-culture blog, default.blog.
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Well, OK, Ms. Dee. You've confirmed for me that the Internet has spawned a variety of toxic sludge, some of it sophomoric, some of it hate (disguised as intellectual wisdom), some of it purely trolling drivel and most of it useless in improving the common weal. Our current state of media environment is divided between two separate oceans of information. The one you discuss is the one developed over the past 36 years since Rush Limbaugh introduced malinformation for fun and huge profits. It metastasized into national AM talk radio, then Fox news and was force multiplied by the Internet. Millions of media illiterate voters swim in this ocean. You use the term "weaponize" in your post and indeed, the First Amendment has been weaponized and is being used against the democracy and the marginalized in our republic. There are solutions but it must be done by smart people of good intent.