Yet the event didn’t bring the American Right together. Rather, it triggered infighting that persists to this day. To understand why, we have to be willing to honestly reassess the legacy left behind by the departed. We must even speak ill of the dead (for if we don’t, as Christopher Hitchens asked, who will?). The truth is, Charlie Kirk helped build up the culture of conspiracism that would come to haunt his own death.

Initially, Trump administration figures like Stephen Miller and JD Vance pledged vengeance against the hard-Left militancy that inspired the murder, as well as investigations into whether anyone else was behind the deed. Yet soon, a different narrative emerged on social media and in the podcast realm. The conspiracy theories suggested that perhaps Tyler Robinson, the young man accused of murdering Kirk over his political views, wasn’t the killer at all. Maybe it was the Israelis or the Egyptian security apparatus; or Kirk’s own organization, Turning Point USA; or Kirk’s widow, Erika, who in the eyes of her critics seemed a little too eager to seek the spotlight in the aftermath.

The divisions marred even Kirk’s memorial service, which brought a reported 90,000 attendees to the State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz., and overflow venues in the area, on Sept. 21, 2025. Three speeches at the event captured a split that was already emerging on the Right.

First came Stephen Miller’s theme: vengeance. “You have no idea the dragon you have awakened,” the hard-line Trump consigliere thundered. “You have no idea how determined we will be to save this civilization.” Days later, Miller would vow to deploy all the resources of the federal government to go after the Left-wing networks he held responsible for Kirk’s death.

This was followed by the Christian message of forgiveness. Speaking through her tears, Erika announced that she forgave the young man who’d taken her husband’s life and left her children fatherless. It was a stirring piece of oratory, moving even to many nonbelievers and drawing a sharp contrast with Miller’s ferocious, almost-bloody rhetoric.

Finally, there was Tucker Carlson, who brought in the spirit of conspiracy. The former Fox News host eulogized Kirk by recounting the passion of Jesus. Carlson presented the biblical narrative as a story of powerful people in Jerusalem “sitting around eating hummus,” adding that “there’s always one guy with the bright idea, and I can just hear him say, ‘I’ve got an idea. Let me just kill him.’” 

While Carlson’s defenders tried to refute the notion that he was implying a Jewish hand in Kirk’s murder, even the arch-Groyper and unabashed Jew-hater Nick Fuentes was taken aback: “They say I’m the No. 1 antisemite. That was a little intense.” Carlson would, of course, go on to prove Fuentes correct and make a fool of his apologists, not for the first or last time.

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Over the following weeks and months, these three forces battled it out. Yet Miller’s promise to crack down on Left-wing activists was perhaps never realistic without evidence that Tyler Robinson had acted in concert with others — and no such evidence ever came to light. The only vengeance on offer was the firing of schoolteachers and grocery clerks for being disrespectful toward Kirk’s memory or insufficiently mournful over his death. As for forgiveness, it never really had a chance in today’s MAGA climate.

It was thus the conspiracy impulse that won the hearts and minds of Right-wing audiences. The day after Kirk’s memorial, podcast host Candace Owens opened her show by mocking Erika and declaring that her husband had been “betrayed” by some within TPUSA. Owens would soon release texts from Kirk complaining about pressure from Jewish donors. In February, Owens launched a docuseries titled Bride of Charlie, in which she questioned everything from Erika’s family background to her finances, and suggested she may have been involved in human trafficking. According to a Washington Examiner count, by April 2026, Owens had devoted no fewer than 84 podcast episodes to Kirk’s killing, weaving a web that included “‘German mystical Jews,’ the CIA and Mitt Romney, Egyptian planes, and, naturally, Jeffrey Epstein.”

Not to be outdone, Carlson declared in June that Kirk “was most likely murdered for his evolving views on Israel.” This came after months of Carlson’s platforming of people promoting similar ideas, including the anti-Semitic crank Ian Carroll.

Those who preferred vengeance came to express deep frustration about the turn toward conspiracy. In December, the conservative Media Research Center released a poll showing that only 24% of likely voters identified Kirk’s killer as Left-wing, a result attributable in part to public personalities like Owens and Carlson muddying the waters. 

Blake Neff, one of the current hosts of The Charlie Kirk Show, decried what was happening, charging figures like Owens with causing confusion about an issue that could have been a conservative slam-dunk. “They took something where a radical Leftist, for very legible, specific, Left-wing reasons, did something, and they have pivoted it to, ‘Actually, it was people in our own movement who did it, whom you should now distrust.’”

The far-Right writer and publisher Jonathan Keeperman, known online as l0m3z, had high hopes that something productive might come out of the tragedy of Kirk’s murder. On the day after the killing, Keeperman called for the creation of a Charlie Kirk National Park and a “Smithsonian exhibit on the Woke Era (2012–2024).” In addition to these symbolic steps, he demanded a legal crackdown against the political enemies of MAGA: “Laws will be written. Extremist organizations will be dismantled. Assets will be seized. Individuals and institutions that cultivated the conditions for this climate of violence will face criminal liability. These are necessary measures of statecraft that will in large part determine whether we get another Red reign of terror, or whether we emerge from this with our nation intact.”

The sweeping crackdown Keeperman envisioned never materialized, even though Trump did launch a federal initiative aimed at investigating and disrupting Left-wing networks and their funders. Keeperman lost the argument and later went on to vent anger at the Kirk truthers. In December, the conservative writer Scott Greer likewise lamented that Kirk’s death had “offered the promise of unifying the Right in a common cause against the Left” — an opportunity wasted by infighting over whether Tyler Robinson was actually responsible for the killing. 

Why did the conspiracists win? Sadly, Kirk himself, it must finally be said, contributed not a little to the atmosphere of epistemic madness and institutional mistrust that now suffocates rational thinking on the Right.

Tucker Carlson, after all, was a regular guest at TPUSA events. Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for TPUSA, relayed a hadith from the recently murdered Kirk: “Honestly, people telling me not to have Tucker makes me want to have Tucker” at the organization’s conferences. After Kirk’s death, Carlson guest-hosted an episode of the show alongside Neff and Kolvet, who would both later be hounded by conspiracy theorists. This was only two days before Carlson blamed “hummus eaters” for the assassination. Already at that point, Carlson had for years been pushing pro-Kremlin narratives and conspiracy theories like the claim that the Pentagon was operating secret bioweapons labs in Ukraine and the idea that Jan. 6 had been a false flag incited by federal agents.

Then, too, Kirk himself was a key promoter of the most significant political conspiracy theory of our generation: the idea that the 2020 election was stolen from President Trump. Unlike the conspiracy involving his own death, the #StoptheSteal nonsense Kirk promoted led to actual political violence and a coup attempt that could have proved catastrophic for US democracy had not a brave few — most notably, then-Vice President Mike Pence — acted against it.

In December 2020, Kirk condemned then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) for congratulating Joe Biden on his victory, comparing it to congratulating someone who had just robbed a bank. In the topsy-turvy fantasy world Kirk had created for his followers, Biden had obviously stolen the 2020 election.

Two days before Jan. 6, Kirk announced that Turning Point Action was “honored” to be “sending 80-plus buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president.” This tweet was later deleted. He also told his audience at the time there was “an almost guaranteed way Donald Trump serves four more years.” All it would take was for Pence to refuse to certify the results in the swing states that Trump had lost. As for those who might object on constitutional grounds, Kirk’s answer was to “make them sue.” 

When called before the Jan. 6 committee to discuss his role in challenging the 2020 election results, Charlie Kirk invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself. And it wasn’t simply election denial; under Kirk, TPUSA events and shows became gathering points for every kind of crank the Right produced, including anti-vaxxers like RFK Jr. In May 2021, TPUSA gave a show to Jack Posobiec, a man best known for having pushed Pizzagate — the theory that Hillary Clinton and her associates operated a child-sex-trafficking ring centered on a Washington, DC, pizza restaurant.

Kirk could at times be just as conspiratorial as Carlson or Owens, with the main difference being that his theories always had a reliable partisan tilt. He claimed that Biden had deliberately allowed the Afghan government to collapse in order to import more Democratic voters. He thus compressed the peaceful transition of power or the closing of a two-decade war into MAGA-friendly conspiracy theories. 

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Charlie Kirk spread election denial and other kinds of conspiracy theories for the same reasons that Owens and Carlson would later spread conspiracy theories about his death: money, relevance, and playing to the audience. It was only when his family and the remnants of TPUSA became the targets of the forces Kirk had helped unleash, that those left behind began denouncing others for taking advantage of the ignorant and the misinformed.

What are the broader lessons we can draw for the future of the conservative movement? The bad news is that the human-capital problem has gotten so serious, and the media environment so poisoned, that we can no longer expect a baseline of shared reality across the political spectrum. There will always be assassinations, wars, and shocking news events. And as with Covid, the 2020 election, the Ukraine war, and the death of Charlie Kirk, wide swaths of the Right — and, to be sure, some on the Left — will fall to conspiracism. 

But there is a silver lining. As figures like Greer and Keeperman have noticed, a more conspiratorial Right is a less effective one. Despite there never having been any evidence that Tyler Robinson was part of a wider network, there were demands from the moment of the shooting to indiscriminately round up Leftists, and there were certainly figures in the administration like Miller who seemed ready to implement such plans. Had the American Right remained united behind that project, the Kirk murder could have been the Trump administration’s opportunity to further turn the machinery of government against its enemies. Instead, the energy unleashed went into arguing about Egyptian planes flying around assassins. 

Still, the damage is extensive. For more than a decade, Kirk taught a young audience that institutions always lie, that the official story is a cover, and that anyone telling you to stop asking questions has something to hide — while making a special exception for Donald Trump. He was the filter between the leaders of MAGA and the movement’s raging id in cyberspace. Upon his death, the audience he had developed was still primed to suspect that it wasn’t being told the full truth, and hungry for a hidden explanation. 

The young activist’s very corpse became a prop that others in conservative media used in their fights to claim his audience. It’s a fitting postscript for the life of a man who helped make the Right safe for the very conspiracy theorists who would make a mockery of his death.

I thrilled to that haunting, mechanical roar. As a boy, I had been promised a future of technological marvels; here was their fulfillment. I thrilled also to images of missile stockpiles exploding and of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps headquarters vanishing in plumes of bilious smoke. I was happy to hear of Ayatollah Khamenei’s demise; and I enjoyed seeing the faces of  mullahs and Iranian military commanders crossed out by red Xs in US and Israeli online propaganda. 

There isn’t a little boy on the planet who doesn’t light up at the idea of killing the bad guys. Nor is there a man in whom something of that little boy — and his moral clarity — doesn’t live on. 

A vocal, politically diverse cohort of Americans, however, have betrayed that healthy impulse. When the ayatollah was killed, The New York Times wistfully played down his reign of terror, while the “globalize the intifada” crowd held vigils to mourn him. Rather than express relief at the regime’s decapitation, most elected Democrats have framed the joint Israeli-US campaign as an illegal, unprovoked act of aggression. Legacy media understated our successes and catastrophized missteps. The Economist, in an article headlined “Advantage Iran,” declares that “a month of bombing has achieved nothing.” Across social media, partisans of what Josh Hammer calls the “Retard Right” — dabblers in low-IQ anti-Semitic conspiracism, such as Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Nick Fuentes — reinforce this narrative. They boost pro-Iran propaganda that wildly overstates the success of Iranian missile attacks on American bases and Israeli cities, while minimizing the extent of the damage the campaign has wrought on Iran’s military.

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The prevailing tone has not been measured, morally serious criticism of our objectives (or lack thereof) or the means chosen to achieve them, but of glee at the prospect of Trump’s — and thus America’s — failure. For Democrats, that glee anticipates a bloodbath for the GOP in the November midterms, and a third round of impeachment theater in 2027. The Retard Right is eager to see the same thing, for a different reason: they want to punish Trump for being, in their fevered telling, Benjamin Netanyahu’s servant.

This trash discourse is stealing oxygen from the conversations that matter. 

I write this as a pacifist and a Christian, who has reluctantly come to adopt the theory of the just war — in a world sometimes so fallen that all of our options are tainted with evil, we must pursue what good we can, knowing that we will ask God’s forgiveness later. In such a situation, intransigent pacifism devolves into sentimental moralism. I believe this is where we find ourselves with Iran; as a consequence, my pacifism must yield to the calculus of just-war theory.

We’ve known for some time that Iran, if it so chooses, could in a few weeks enrich enough weapons-grade uranium for up to 16 compact nuclear warheads. But the stakes have been much higher than the publicly known. Last week, when the IRGC launched two intermediate-range ballistic missiles at Diego Garcia, an atoll in the Indian Ocean that houses a joint US-UK military base, the world learned that Iran is capable of striking London. And setting aside the specter of nuclear weapons, as a modern, industrialized country, Iran also possesses enough cesium-137 and cobalt-60 to make any number of dirty bombs, which could be packaged into missiles capable of striking most European capitals. As an erratic regime sworn to destroy the West, this makes it an imminent threat to NATO.

To pass just-war muster, among other criteria, a war must be pursued as a last resort. But as the theologian Oliver O’Donovan explains in The Just War Revisited, “the ‘last’ resort is bounded by the last practicable moment for effective action.” On Feb. 24, Reuters reported that Tehran was in the process of acquiring supersonic anti-ship missiles from China. Had it done so before Israel and the United States attacked, the cost of engagement would have soared astronomically. Although the Trump administration has done a poor job communicating this to the American people, it does appear that we chose to strike just as the window for effective action was set to close. 

Thus far, our actions have been very effective. The war with Iran has been more one-sided than perhaps any large-scale conflict in history, with America and Israel inflicting losses on the enemy in wild disproportion to what we’ve suffered ourselves. Khamenei and more than 40 of Iran’s top-ranking officials have been killed in air strikes, as have most of the Assembly of Experts tasked with selecting his successor. By destroying Iran’s navy and neutralizing up to 90% of its ballistic capabilities, Washington has already ended Tehran’s ability to project power in the Middle East, and we’re on track to scuttle what remains of the country’s nuclear ambitions. 

What’s more, China and Russia had outfitted Iran with their most advanced defense technology, hoping that their Iranian proxy would keep Uncle Sam indefinitely bogged down in the Middle East, and thus ill-equipped to fight on other fronts. But this technology has proved utterly useless against the US military, both in Iran and Venezuela, signaling to Beijing that its ambitions in the South China Sea could be much costlier than anticipated.

These are substantive gains, and perhaps the Trump administration — notwithstanding its inconsistent messaging — will judge them sufficient. But a more decisive victory involving regime change (or at least regime moderation) is conceivable. Were that to occur, America would have direct influence over one-seventh of China’s oil imports and the ability to impede its Belt and Road Initiative, giving us plenty of leverage to dissuade it from invading Taiwan. 

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It is conceivable — yet the public discourse fails to conceive of it. We fail to celebrate our military victories; we show no pride for our military capacities; and we barely honor the fighting spirit of the men and women who serve. When the war began, the Twelver Shia death cult that controls Iran had just murdered thousands of its own citizens for protesting the regime’s abuses — yet many among us identify America as the bad guy. 

My feelings are the opposite: while I mourn the loss of innocent lives and remain wary of the war becoming protracted — especially as President Trump weighs the possibility of sending in ground troops to secure Iran’s uranium — I am also optimistic. After nearly five decades of indulging the Iranian regime’s mayhem, we have dealt it a measure of justice, and thwarted its apocalyptic aspirations. And the geopolitical scales are rebalancing in a way that may yet produce justice on an even grander scale.

A nation’s character is judged by whether it is willing to sacrifice for what it deems to be a greater good, and whether it can take pride in its own strength and do the work necessary to maintain it. There is nothing virtuous about a weak man who chooses not to fight. His choice hardly counts as one. But a strong man trained in combat who chooses peace has exercised judgment of real moral weight. These are the qualities that I hope we rediscover, and learn to nurture in the coming months. While it may be hard to see today, amid the hysteria of its opponents, Trump’s Iran war may just bring about such a transformation.

A war is being waged against the Jewish diaspora. It is being waged with bombs, shootings, harassment and intimidation. The attacks, and the fear of them, are a small side plot in a great Middle Eastern War. Those two men charged in London had a plan to attack a sister synagogue I sporadically attend. I feel this myself, as I push my son’s pram past the policemen at the temple gate. Yet more than fear, I feel disappointment. For if ever me and my son, or any of us who pray here, were butchered by a gunman shouting “Free Palestine”, many Western activists would equivocate, contextualize, or even say it served us right. Never mind that us diaspora Jews have no single agreed view on Gaza, the West Bank, or Benjamin Netanyahu, let alone Iran.

I am reflective of this myself. In a small synagogue, I am, to the best of my knowledge, the only person who’s had any connection to British government policymaking regarding the wars in the Middle East. As a special adviser to David Lammy when he was foreign secretary, I advised him to sanction Israeli ministers, supported his decision to recognize Palestine as a state, and was involved in a futile attempt to persuade Iran and America to make a deal.

But I am under no illusions: if my family had happened to pray at the Manchester’s Heaton Park synagogue, where Jihad al-Shamie killed two worshippers and injured three others on our holiest day of the year, and if I had been among the fallen, I would have been “contextualized” by people who call themselves anti-Zionist. The obvious distinction — that criticism of Israel’s occupation or military conduct is legitimate, indeed necessary, but holding all Jews worldwide accountable for Israel’s actions is antisemitic and targeting them nothing less than murderous — is clearly breaking down.

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A line had been crossed where prominent, highly influential X accounts were unable to say, unequivocally, that targeting Jewish children in provincial Michigan was simply terrorism and utterly reprehensible.

The internet is now a front in this war on the diaspora. It has been since October 7. Israel has wrought destruction in Gaza, and the images are truly horrific. There is no denying that, and anyone who does so is wrong. But around them, a viral campaign has arisen, one which has moved well beyond criticism of the IDF. It has moved beyond a push for sanctions, beyond the desire for a two- or even one-state solution for peace. It has moved into a kind of annihilationist anti-Zionism that wishes to hurt Israel’s supporters wherever it can find them. And the place where this is most easily done is in the diaspora.

If you have spent any time on social media in the last two-and-a-half years you know this. You know about the explosive viral fame of the Hitler fan Nick Fuentes. Such is Fuentes’ popularity that the arch-conservative Rod Dreher has warned that at least a third of Republicans under 30 in DC are in thrall to him. Then there are the Talmud blood libels of Candace Owens, with an audience of 24 million across platforms, or Tucker Carlson, whose influence on the Republican base is such that Vice President Vance cannot bring himself to disavow him, despite the conspiracy theories he pushes out about Jewish groups to his equally huge audience.

You will have noticed, if you live online, the now ubiquitous semi-ironic Nazi-like language, from “The Goyim know” to “Goy-slop”, going mainstream. The nudge-nudge, wink-wink use of the term “the Epstein Class” by congressmen. Or the sudden omnipresence of the idea that America is a “colony of Israel”, riffs on which are now being pushed from the likes of Nassim Nicholas Taleb to Slavoj Žižek into their fandoms. Now that antisemitism goes viral with ease, you can spend your day scrolling through, non-stop denigration of Jewish history, from posts calling Hebrew a “fake language” to the claim that, according to spurious DNA evidence, Ashkenazim are “fake Jews.”

This kind of antisemitism has slipped into and radicalized anti-Israel protest and political movements across the West, in an age where the membrane between online hatred and real world violence is permeable. The culture war around the pickets outside Gail’s is reflective of something bigger. Instead of picketing its owners, Bain Capital, or any major private equity firm invested in the Israeli arms industry — which would hardly be unreasonable — anti-Zionist protestors have chosen to picket a bakery known to have an Israeli founder and stock Jewish-style challah bread.

Many in this movement are no longer pursuing accountability and action against the state of Israel — a ceasefire, sanctions, the ICC — all of which are all perfectly legitimate to push for. Instead, they are prosecuting a war on association, where any link, any sympathy, any connection to Israel, be it a founder or a baked good, is presented as immoral, even demonic. As Susan Abulhawa, a leading anti-Zionist, whose language proved too much even for Zohran Mamdani, put it on X: “I don’t give a shit if people collapse the distinction between Zionists and Jews.”

By effectively demanding total disavowal of the world’s only Jewish state, this campaign has ceased to merely be a rally for a free Palestine. Rather, it has become an offensive against the diaspora, from the high street bakery to the House of Lords. This poisoned discourse reached its nadir on 12 March, when a gunman arrived at a synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan, with the intention of massacring the 130 children there and at the school next door. But, I heard, the synagogue had the word “Israel” in its name. But the Jewish communal leadership had always supported Israel. But the Lebanese attacker — in fact known to be connected to Hezbollah — had lost family to Israeli bombs.

The Middle East war, of course, will end. Wars always do. The algorithm will move onto other things. And I do expect, when that happens, the intensity of the proxy diaspora war to slacken too. But I fear that now the seal has been broken. The effusion of Jew-hatred has reversed decades’ worth of declining antisemitism, as memories of the Holocaust fade, with large numbers of young Brits and Americans now dabbling in the taboo-busting “JQ.” This is online slang for asking the “Jewish Question” and exploring its florid antisemitic answers.

Their generation, then, is shaping up to be antisemitic. Over 25% of young Americans now hold unfavorable views of Jews; among older Americans, it’s just 5%. And in the UK, a fifth of students don’t want to houseshare with Jews.

There is evidence to suggest that the intensity of this spike, especially in the case of outright Holocaust deniers like Fuentes, may be driven by foreign powers using bot farms to rip into American cohesion. The war against the Diaspora is a tool of hostile actors in their wars on the West. The king of the “Groypers”, as his fans are known, has enjoyed a dramatically higher rate of early retweets of his X posts — this being the key to viral takeoff — than even Elon Musk. Yet, according to a 2025 report, 90% of the accounts boosting Fuentes’s early retweeters were fully anonymous, with roughly half of his retweeters coming from Pakistan, Nigeria, Malaysia and Indonesia. The tide may well, when the Democrats return, subside. But the ubiquity of online antisemitism will not.

There are the obvious reasons why. The wars in the Middle East will go on. The diaspora desperately needs them to stop but is powerless to stop them. They are neither Israeli citizens, nor are they listened to — with the exception of a few individuals. The bitter truth is that communities like mine are scorned by Netanyahu, who sees us as weaklings that he can ignore, destined to assimilate away. While at the same time, our lives will always be too connected to Israeli society, be it through family and spiritual ties, to ever be seen as not guilty in a radicalized anti-Zionist movement’s eyes.

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That won’t change, but the places where the Jewish diaspora lives have already done so. Cities like New York, London and Paris now have more Muslims, more Hispanics, fewer old men like Joe Biden with a war-era fondness for Jews. In both Europe and the United States, these growing minorities are more antisemitic. They are also younger, more likely to get their news online and watch foreign TV, be it Televisa or Al Jazeera. This is the mechanism by which imported prejudice gets stirred by the footage these wars export.

But a subtler change has taken place too. Every time our civilization evolves, antisemitism, like a mutating virus, changes with it: from a religious hatred in a world of faith to an ethnic hatred in a world of nation states. Each era seems to decide anew what it cannot abide about the Jews and what respect it will accord them. And every rupture in how we communicate, from the coming of the printing press to the dawn of the radio, seems to see society’s antibodies to this virus weaken.

Suspect for being too rootless and transnational in the twentieth century; now Jews are suspect for being too rooted and tribal in the twenty-first. The truth is that we no longer really live in what you could call Western civilization: an order based around historic nations, a culture based around print, a way of life still furrowed by the old faith, with a clearly defined attitude towards Jews.

Its successor is a globalized internet civilization that plays out in viral clips and has become unmoored from old certainties. This is a world where X mega-influencers like Iain Miles Cheong and Sneako are as much players as the Archbishop of Canterbury. Everything is being relitigated. This new civilization, since its litigation is occurring via ephemeral, emotive social media posts rather than by works of sustained thought, has an oral culture rather than a literary culture. By its nature, this culture rewards hatred and anger. Which, I fear as I push my pram, will not prove kind to the Jews.

Now, the most storied think tank in the history of modern conservatism has fallen.

On Thursday, Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage, took the side of Tucker Carlson in a dispute over the former Fox News host conducting an interview with Fuentes. Roberts declared, “We will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda” and vowed that Carlson would always be a friend of Heritage. Those criticizing Carlson’s interview with Fuentes were part of a “venomous coalition,” Roberts said, that is “sowing division.” While denouncing anti-Semitism and disavowing some of the things Fuentes has said, Roberts argued that he shouldn’t be canceled, but debated.

This was widely seen as a capitulation to the Groypers, coming down on their side over and against those who criticized Tucker’s interview and his more general descent into conspiratorial anti-Semitism. For his part, Fuentes applauded Roberts’s “courage in standing up for open discourse and defending Tucker against the Israel First Woke Right.”

For readers unfamiliar with the term, “Groyper” refers to the loose network of mostly young, male, hard-Right types who orbit around Fuentes, a live-streamer and social-media personality from suburban Chicago. Fuentes built his following through hours-long webcasts mixing irony and an ideology that is a combination of racial nationalism, Christian theocracy, and hostility toward feminism and immigration.

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His supporters call themselves “America First” and have traditionally been Donald Trump supporters. Yet the movement takes cues, above all, from Fuentes himself, who has regularly expressed contempt for JD Vance based on the fact that the vice president and MAGA heir apparent is married to a non-Christian brown woman. At one point, Fuentes asked, “Do we really expect that the guy who has an Indian wife and named their kid Vivek is going to support white identity?” He’s also taken a liking, ironically, to Gavin Newsom, seeing the “beautiful genetics” of the Democratic California governor and his family of four white children as more worthy of praise than Vance’s mixed-race progeny. Fuentes is also known for insights such as the idea that sleeping with women is gay.

This may all seem too absurd to take seriously. Some young people, it will be tempting to tell ourselves, cycle through nutty politics before burning out or settling into grownup conservative or liberal worldviews; there will always be a fringe. But Fuentes has a substantial following, 1 million and growing on X (formerly Twitter), and he increasingly sets the tone for the entire conservative media ecosystem.

One way to see the radicalization of the likes of Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Megyn Kelly is that they are adopting Fuentes-Lite positions on issues like immigration and vaccines. Fuentes has spin-offs and haters throughout the Right-wing influencer ecosystem, including British and Portuguese imitators. There are X personalities whose entire claim to fame revolves around hating him. Watch any event with a prominent conservative speaker these days, and you’ll find Groyper or Groyper-adjacent young men asking the questions that end up going viral on social media. It was indeed this kind of in-person pressure that, as Fuentes has bragged, got Kirk to turn against even legal immigration.

The fact that Heritage, too, has now fallen in line suggests that what we’re seeing is something much more ferocious and remarkable than even the most pessimistic critics of the online Right appreciated. It has led me to conclude that I’ve underestimated not only the pace and extent of the Groyperization of the Right, but also its potential to have a large and lasting effect on our political culture.

The comparison has been made to wokeness taking over the Left beginning in the mid-2010s, through many of the same mechanisms, primarily social-media mobbing of mainstream figures and institutions. But we must consider the possibility that we’re observing something much more capable than wokeness of remaking one side of the political spectrum and thus enduring as a long-term force in American society.

The Roberts statement was prompted by Fuentes sitting down for a friendly chat with Tucker Carlson. Previously, Carlson had expressed contempt for Fuentes, calling him a “weird little gay kid living in his basement in Chicago.” But then Fuentes appeared on a few other podcasts, and it became safe for Carlson to have him on. Carlson predictably forgot all other principles and objections as he did what comes naturally to him: chasing an audience. That’s how you become the top news podcaster in the country, which Carlson is, at least according to Spotify rankings.

If all you see of Carlson these days is a few clips of him saying outlandish things — like that he was attacked by a literal demon — you might think that he, too, has turned into some kind of fringe figure. On the contrary, there are few who are more mainstream within the MAGA movement. Days after Kirk was assassinated, Carlson was speaking with JD Vance about his legacy. He then went on to insinuate, at Kirk’s memorial, that the Jews may have killed him — just as people “eating hummus” in Jerusalem did to another hero 2,000 years ago — while attempting to maintain plausible deniability. Fuentes hilariously mocked the attempted spin, cutting through any supposedly non-invidious interpretation of Tucker’s words (Yes, Fuentes is very funny — unlike Tucker, who switches between brooding and manic laughter directed at things no one else finds funny.)

Tucker matters, perhaps more so than any other media personality on the right, with the possible exception of Fuentes himself. And after attacking Fuentes repeatedly, he deigned to invite him to his show. But how? How can Carlson call someone a gay federal infiltrator one minute and schmooze with him the next? The thing to understand with these people is that it’s all a show. They hit each other over the head with chairs one week, and then the next week team up together. The ultimate thing the audience wants, of course, is for their influencers to encourage people to vote for their kind of Republican — anti-immigration and aligned with MAGA views and aesthetics — even as they enjoy feuds and eccentricities outside of election season.

The same goes for the Vance-Fuentes relationship. I had also assumed that it would be going too far to expect that Fuentes would endorse Vance after attacking his wife on account of her race and religion. Now that seems silly. Of course, he will likely endorse Vance, or at least not go full Newsom. It’s fun for Groypers in 2025 to gush about Newsom’s beautiful white family and hint that they’re going to jump ship at the prospect of an Indian First Lady. But that’s just an angle to create a new storyline and keep the show exciting. Raise tensions, rant about how much Vance sucks, and then perhaps make a big show of allying when he denounces Indian immigration strongly enough in time for the 2028 primaries.

To wit, Vance was recently grilled at the University of Mississippi by a Groyper type about having a non-Christian wife. Already, the vice president feels the need to reassure his supporters that his wife wasn’t raised in a religious household, contrary to what she herself has previously said. While once talking positively about being in an interfaith marriage, he now knows that there is a not insubstantial portion of his base that finds Hinduism strange, if not downright demonic, and his wife has become a political liability.

The only thing that might stand in the way of Vance and Fuentes being on the same side in 2028 is Fuentes’s own cantankerousness. He has an independent streak — in October 2024 he said he wouldn’t vote for Trump — while Vance would abandon almost any previously cherished principle if it raised his chances of being president by a few percentage points on Polymarket.

We’re at the start of something, not the end of it. This is more like wokeness in 2014 than wokeness in 2022. And to make a comparison to wokeness might be underselling it. I would point to three factors that potentially make Groyperism stronger.

First, the appeal of wokeness was always largely astroturfed. The woke relied on censorship and nonstop propaganda from elite institutions. Relatively few Americans bought into the craziest ideas about race and gender. Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility may have sold more than a million copies, but Carlson has nearly five million subscribers on YouTube. I asked ChatGPT how many podcast downloads he gets per episode, and it came up with a figure somewhere in the range of 4 million to 8 million (8 million to 15 million, if you include video). Candace Owens is in the same ballpark. And these are actual fans, not people encouraged to buy a book for a class or h.r. seminar.

We’ve never seen numbers like this for anything affiliated with wokeness, which was a hysteria driven by individuals in the rarefied fields of journalism, academia, and activism. They were always outnumbered in the rest of the country, and relied on being able to control powerful institutions and the informational ecosystem.

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The second point is related: namely, that Right-wing radicalism taps into human nature in a way that wokeness never could. From a historical perspective, large numbers of young people wanting to experiment with a different gender is quite odd. Usually, males and females seek to portray and cultivate traits that are attractive to the opposite sex. Members of a majority group supporting discrimination against themselves is likewise unnatural, but this has always been core to DEI and the ideology of white guilt. One of the reasons that cancel culture was so intense was that proponents were always pushing against people’s preexisting inclinations; we were bound for a correction.

But racism, sexism, tribalism, homophobia, and religious fundamentalism are organic parts of our souls, and can dominate societies for centuries. While most Americans aren’t inclined toward a Groyper worldview, it does seem strong enough to take over one half of the political spectrum in a country with a great deal of education polarization. And while there were ballot-box backlashes against wokeness, the Right becoming more crudely populist has been associated with relatively high levels of electoral success.

Finally, the Right lacks the institutional guardrails to contain Groyperization. The culture of the Left is shaped by elite institutions, like universities and major media outlets, in addition to labor unions, professional associations, and nonprofits. During the Great Awokening, these institutions were often taken over by aggressive upstarts speaking the language of academic seminars, and their leaders would repeat the magic words demanded by identity-focused activists. At the same time, the institutional framework in which these battles took place allowed for pushback from within. The New York Times editorial board is capable, for example, of gently shifting away from trans extremism. Universities can adopt free-speech policies, as many have done, in response to both internal and external pressure.

In contrast, it is unclear in what format moderates on the right would take on the fringes. Individuals like Owens, Fuentes, and Carlson — in addition to countless lesser influencers — get their power directly from the audience and, as a result, place real pressure on politicians. There is no Groyper faculty senate where people can get together and vote to condemn anti-Semitism in the same way that leaders of the University of Michigan decided to take a step back from DEI. Robin DiAngelo is no longer cited in the media, and Ibram X. Kendi’s antiracist center was closed down. Without institutional support, their power and influence have waned. By contrast, the podcaster who reflects and shapes the minds of the most engaged GOP voters can’t in a similar way lose his place at the center of political discourse.

Could the Republican voter ultimately be a check on all this? Doubtful. Right-wing media’s political atmosphere should generally be taken as predictive of what the Right-wing electorate will do. The Republican base loves Trump and flocks to news sources like Owens, Carlson, and an increasingly conspiratorial and demon-obsessed Megyn Kelly. Thus, there is little reason to think the party’s core electorate will act as much of a moderating force.

One factor working in the opposite direction is that Groyperization has occurred among the relatively weak and disempowered. One could therefore argue that Left-wing identitarianism is naturally more influential. The truth of this consolation, however, has diminished over the last several years. Radicalized Republicans are appointing similarly radical people to top positions, and there’s relatively little educated elites can do about it.

Nonetheless, the ongoing elite status of the Left suggests that at least when Republicans don’t control the federal government, Groyperization will be less powerful. We won’t see something like Trump’s first term, in which the president was Right-wing but the political Left was so mobilized that the culture moved in the opposite direction from the one that the government was pushing. I have been accurately foreseeing the Groyperization of the Right for a while now, and when I have been wrong, it’s always been in the direction of underestimating how much the conservative coalition has changed, and how quickly things are shifting towards conspiratorial ethno-populism. At points, I assumed that there was still a Republican establishment that could exercise a positive influence on Trump and Trumpians — hence, my endorsement of him last year — and it turned out that this largely wasn’t the case.

If there is any hope of effective resistance against the direction of travel, it needs to come from a powerfully influential individual leader. It can’t be Trump, as it is as difficult to imagine him making coherent arguments as it is to imagine him taking a stand against his base for the greater good. By contrast, Vance, as the presumptive heir, is articulate and has been viciously attacked by the Groypers.

While he has denounced Fuentes in passing, the vice president is capable of making a much more passionate case against those he considers political enemies when motivated to do so. What is needed is something like a speech denouncing Groyperism, rather than a quick criticism followed by a pivot towards attacking the Left or the media. Up to this point, the vice president has never found it in his political interest to go after any substantial part of the conservative coalition. While he would clearly much rather avoid the energetic wrath of the Groypers, if things continue on their current path, they might leave him with no other choice.

In reality, Trogneux is Brigitte’s older brother. The pair grew up in Amiens, in the north of France, with four other siblings and a family confectionery business which, to this day, turns out two million macarons d’Amiens each year. Among other things, the city is known as the home of Jules Verne, father of science fiction. But as fantastical as Verne’s writerly imagination may have been, even he would have struggled to conceive of a scandal such as this.

Owens is not the first to have disliked Brigitte Macron. The first lady, as we all by now know, was a teacher at Emmanuel’s Jesuit school and 24 years his senior. The couple have always maintained that their relationship remained “within the bounds of the law” during this period; in 2007, they wed when Macron was 30 and Brigitte, having recently divorced the father of her existing three children, was 54. It is this sex configuration, rather than the inherent issue of the age gap, which is viewed with queasiness — after all, Donald and Melania Trump are also separated by 24 years. That Brigitte is the elder party, that the couple met when Emmanuel was a school pupil and that the couple are French — a country whose sexual reputation, to Britons at least, still has the whiff of adulterous libertinism — meant the Macrons would always be easy targets for prurient speculation.

Coupled with his reputation for soft-touch liberalism and unfashionable Europhilia, this new Napoleon was never destined to woo conservatives. A lovers’ tiff caught on camera in May, as Brigitte pushed Emmanuel’s face away when the couple disembarked a plane, turned social media’s unease into full-blown distrust. A conspiracy theory is born.

The origins of the Brigitte Macron “transvestigation” — a depressing internet coinage for when people’s appearances are scoured for evidence of transsexualism — began with two strange French ladies. Amandine Roy and Natacha Rey, respectively a “spiritual medium” and a self-described “independent investigative journalist”, posted a YouTube video speculating about Brigitte’s birth sex in December 2021. Rey’s suspicions followed the classic transvestigation route: she noticed that Brigitte’s body shape seemed unexpectedly masculine in photographs and invented an elaborate personal history from there. Within hours, the video had amassed half a million views. Last September, Roy and Rey were compelled to pay Brigitte and her brother €13,000 in damages. This month, the verdict was overturned — not because the court ruled that Brigitte was in fact Jean-Michel, but because the threshold of defamation was not met. This case is now in the highest appeals court in France; another, concerning alleged online harassment by 10 individuals, goes to trial in October. Separately, Owens faces her own lawsuit in Delaware.

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In the conspiracy world, Owens is a breath of fresh air; in a rogues’ gallery of gammons, she is a canny, outspoken young black woman. She became famous by hosting Q&As with university gender goblins, precisely and without compassion dismantling their luxury beliefs. In one such viral video, she responds to an appeal on behalf of the trans students who felt “victimized” by her views: “Life’s tough, get a helmet man. I’m too pregnant for this. Next question.”

But sex realism only had so much mileage, particularly as it returned to the mainstream. Now, the Brigitte conspiracy theory opens a convenient new frontier in Owens’s truth crusade, a perfect confluence of culture-war claims which have become important to her personal brand. First, liberals compulsively lie. Second, those same liberals are sexual deviants, weaponizing their grip over a sleeping public to further shadowy homosexual/paedophilic agendas. And third, the cult of transgenderism has compelled normal people to disbelieve the evidence of their own eyes. The first and third of these claims are difficult to dispute in the sense that all politicians necessarily lie, and that part of 2020s politicking has until now involved avoiding obvious truths about biological sex. The transvestigation reflex has not been helped by the fact that those who to the general public appear obviously male, like the Olympic boxer Imane Khelif, have been defended in the name of kindness as put-upon non-conforming females. Gender suspicion is a consequence of institutional dishonesty, and Brigitte — verifiably a woman, though a slightly gangly one — is collateral damage.

As for Owens’s second crusade — uncovering the sexual deviancy of elites — revelations about the late financier Jeffrey Epstein’s activities and the successful circulation of the conspiracy theory QAnon have created a constituency of American truthers who want to believe in the existence of a global paedophile ring at any cost, and are continually emboldened by, among other things, the reticence of their own president. Of course, a simpler explanation for the flourishing of such theories is the platforming, via social media, of commentators who are verifiably stupid. So it is that Owens has been able to claim, in the past, that the Moon landings were fake, that Bill Gates is a “vaccine criminal” and that Emmanuel Macron’s presidency is the result of a CIA mind-control experiment.

Owens’s claims may be deranged, but they are no more so than the various conspiracy theories which have to some extent always been part of life at the French court. Then, as now, the political wife is central: a figure of both fascination and anxiety. The inference behind the Brigitte conspiracy is that Emmanuel is an effete liberal man under the thumb of his powerful wife. Lady Macbeth asked the spirits to “unsex me here” to wield power behind the throne; conspiracy logic does the unsexing for Macron’s first lady. Internet weirdos hunching over images of the First Lady in a swimming costume, desperate to locate a spectral todger, may seem exceptionally prurient and cruel — but as Hilary Mantel demonstrated in her celebrated essays for the LRB, royal bodies (an elision you must forgive with republican France) have always been subject to vengeful, woman-hating scrutiny — just look at the lascivious fixation on Marie Antoinette’s bedchamber.

Conspiracy theories prior to, and to some extent responsible for, the revolution were transmitted via the libelles, pornographic pamphlets comprising anonymous vitriol familiar to those on social media today. Mantel describes them as “a pantomime mix of scenes of copulation and conspiracy, endless unbuttoning and tupping and frotting and plotting”. They catalogued, with slobbering glee, the dauphine’s apparent vices: incest, orgies, Swedes. In the hands of pamphleteers, workaday political crimes like naivety and venality become chaotic scenes of promiscuity and buggery. In the rationale of the libelles, these speculative leaps are perfectly coherent. So it is that in the modern culture wars, “citizen journalists” like Rey are compelled to morph suspicion of power into pornographic, defamatory flights of fancy. After all, what better proof that leaders are “not like us” than exposing them as a caste of depraved sex pests?

In an absence of lettres de cachets — the bulletproof decrees beloved by his kingly forebears — Macron and his wife must navigate global legal systems in order to put down whisperings of the First Lady’s little lad. It seems undignified to even engage with such tattle, but I have no doubt that the dismantling of Owens’s brand will be satisfying to watch, and so I too will be bringing out le popcorn. But letting this debacle pass without reflection on the timbre of modern political commentary would be a mistake; a return to the fervor of 1780s pamphleteers might just be a portent of an impending period of political chaos. We should be wary of the desecration of public discourse, symbolized by the sordid Owens-Macron saga. The perpetrators of our modern conspiracy theories may be a league of mouth-breathers, but they have big, credulous audiences. The real problem is that such gossip muddies, rather than clarifies, the waters of legitimate protest, and disenfranchises believers by plunging them into alternate realities which make them sound like idiots. There are many sensible reasons to criticize Macron: his wife’s awkward gait and dodgy blow-dry is not one of them. All eyes on Delaware, then — the entire world will see Owens in court.

For Farmer, this association has become a problem. He is the Christian deputy chairman of the Council for Christians and Jews. Meanwhile, his son’s wife is blaming Israel for the assassination of JFK; calling historical accounts of the Holocaust “bizarre propaganda”; and indulging in outright blood libel. (In a video, she claimed that “Catholics and Christians were going missing on Passover, then they would find bodies across Europe and they were able to trace them back to Jews.”)

Owens’s rhetoric is not new, but it has escalated since March, when she departed conservative outlet the Daily Wire after months of friction (and public spats with her Jewish co-host Ben Shapiro) over her alleged endorsement of antisemitic conspiracy theories. Not that the Daily Wire deserves much credit here: long before it hired her in 2021, her views were clear. At a 2018 event, Owens responded to a question about nationalism by saying: “Whenever we say nationalism, the first thing people think about, at least in America, is Hitler… If Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, OK, fine.” She later claimed the quote was taken out of context, though it’s striking she didn’t bother to mention the Holocaust.

All this is revealing in its own right. But if, like me, you’ve been aware of Owens since her emergence into public life eight years ago, it’s also shocking because of how far she’s come: a one-time doctrinaire progressive turned radical rightist. A decade ago, Owens was an obscure figure who ran a liberal political blog in the punchy, snarky style of Gawker as-was or the Daily Show. In a 2015 blog, she had celebrated the “good news” that the “Republican Tea Party… will eventually die off”. Another article (not by her) vaunted a mock investigation into Donald Trump’s penis size.

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None of this had won her much attention, though. Her first stint in the headlines came in 2016, aged 26, as the founder of an anti-online-bullying initiative called Social Autopsy. Like most such projects, this was broadly Left-coded. Anonymous abuse was associated with racism and misogyny, with the hate mills of anonymous image board 4chan and Gamergate (the broad collective of accounts that claimed to be mobilising for “ethics in games journalism”, but were in fact heavily focused on berating individual women in the games industry). It made sense that Owens — a black woman who had received a $37,500 settlement in 2008 over racist abuse she suffered as a high-schooler — would advocate against it.

But Social Autopsy was an odd and misconceived scheme from the outset. The idea, according to a promotional video Owens made, was to “attach [people’s] words to their places of employment, and anybody in the entire world can search for them”. In other words, it would have created an open-source doxxing database, and this was not a popular idea with anyone. Owens found herself criticised not only by the “trolls” she believed herself to be combatting, but also by the victims of online harassment who pointed out that attaching someone’s personal information to an accusation of trolling could be a very effective harassment tactic in itself.

This is where the Owens story really begins to take shape. As the backlash to her project spiralled into a classic online pile-on, she reacted in the self-destructive style of the classic social media victim: rather than take stock of the criticisms, or attempt to revamp her publicity strategy, she opted to feud with her opponents. And as she feuded, she began to discern a wider pattern: the abuse she was receiving (much of it racist and misogynistic) could, she believed, all be attributed to a network of secret accounts controlled by key anti-Gamergate figures seeking to protect their status as “professional victims”.

In Owens’s mind, the victims of the abuse were in fact the nefarious architects of it all. “I started piecing it together, and I was like, Oh my God, this is actually who these people are — this is crazy,” she told Jesse Singal, when he investigated the Social Autopsy furore for New York Magazine. Part of her supposed evidence was that one of the Gamergate victims who had criticised Social Autopsy had used the word “dox”. Owens had never encountered it before, and its appearance in subsequent abusive messages confirmed that they must all be coming from the same place.

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There is an obvious through-line here to Owens’s later antisemitism: the false victim who orchestrates their own alleged abuse in order to gain privilege is a clear analogue for the Jew who supposedly fabricates the Holocaust in order to win power over gentiles. In Owens’s philosophy, the afflicted are always suspect. Unless the afflicted in question is Candace Owens, in which case she is a brave and brilliant truth-teller: “I consider the constructs of our society thoroughly, and often. I think analytically. Randi and Zoe [two of her critics and supposed harassers] really banked on my being dumb,” she tweeted at one point during the firestorm.

This is how Owens went from anti-bullying campaigner to pro-Gamergate figurehead, and a particularly valuable one, given that her race and sex offered an instant riposte to claims that Gamergate was inherently bigoted. (Her Barbie-doll beauty, which made her irresistible to TV bookers, was also an asset.) The most likely explanation for the abuse remained the most obvious one: Gamergaters were as fearful of losing their anonymity as their targets were, and lashed out at Owens in the terms they were already accustomed to. Nonetheless, once she declared for their team, she was embraced, and guaranteed a speedy ascent through the alt-Right commentariat.

Her conversion was Damascene: “I became a conservative overnight… I realised that liberals were actually the racists. Liberals were actually the trolls,” she told conservative commentator Dave Rubin in 2017. She endorsed Trump, arrayed herself against Black Lives Matter, and rapidly became fluent in anti-trans talking points (in the Social Autopsy era, one of her main concerns had been anonymous accounts mocking Caitlyn Jenner).

The journey Owens has undertaken is baffling if you attempt to discern any ideological consistency in it. There is no shame in changing your mind — as Keynes reportedly said: “When my information changes, I alter my conclusions.” But in Owens’s case, her information did not change. Trump was the same candidate before her pile-on as he was after it; BLM had the same claims to justice, and the same frailties; Caitlyn Jenner continued to be a woman in exactly the same degree regardless of what was tweeted at Owens.

What changed was her understanding of where she could be most powerful. The liberal blogger space was saturated by 2016. Anyone as ambitious and articulate as Owens would need to look elsewhere to make her mark. Social Autopsy was her attempt to become an abuse entrepreneur; in the end, the fiasco she generated pointed her towards a whole new and unexpected arena in public life. Reinvented as a black conservative, she was suddenly elevated to the highest prominence. The more extreme she became, the more she was rewarded. In 2018, when she married George Farmer — director of the Right-wing campaign group Turning Point and former CEO of libertarian social network Parler — she became half of a radical-Right power couple.

The cancellation to zealot pipeline is well established. Jordan Peterson was a professor with some moderate reactionary opinions (and idiosyncratic takes on theology) before rough treatment from the left convinced him that his own personal hero’s journey was to tear the whole liberal edifice down. Kellie-Jay Keen was regular liberal feminist, chatting away in interviews about her sons’ gender-nonconforming interest in dolls in exchange for a plug for her upcoming clothing brand; her transformation into Posie Parker, gender critical Boudicca and scourge of boys in makeup in John Lewis ads, seems to have been spurred, in part, by her sense of having been slighted by a mythical class of “head girl feminists”.

These transformations have emotional benefits, as well as more tangible ones. They turn the experience of rejection or ostracism into proof of the individual’s particular importance as a martyr to their cause. They bring followers, attracted by the glamour of the self-styled crusader. And those followers bring commercial possibilities: there are books to be sold, merchandise to be shifted (buy a T-shirt for the cause!), monetised views to rack up. The more embattled you become, the more profit you can turn. An agitated base is an open-pocketed one.

None of which is to say that Owens was insincere when she claimed to be the victim of a vast liberal conspiracy: rampant egotism can lead a person into that kind of honest error. With the conservative organisations that made use of her, including the Daily Wire, it is harder to assume good faith. They always had access to Owens’s public statements. Clearly, her apologia for Hitler was acceptable to them. Only when she went so far that she became an undeniable liability did they choose to delegitimise her, and by then, she had already built her own platform and audience. She is ineradicable.

The internet is a radicalisation machine for a person like Owens. There are versions of her in any movement you choose to look at: the proud apostate, the sinner redeemed, the prodigal returned to whatever reality they endorse.

The temptation to succumb to that role is intense. Maybe you’ve felt it too: the raw pleasure of allowing yourself to become what the people who hate you say you are, so the people who hate them will love you more. The intoxicating pull of the role the internet has written for you in advance.

Not everyone falls. For those who do, the determining factor seems to have little to do with politics. The self-made extremist can be anyone from the “liberal mugged by reality” type to the Extinction Rebellion activist threatening to gridlock a city for the sake of environmental apocalypse. The specific beliefs are superficial; what they have is something deeper. Though their politics are very different, what they share is more important. A desire to be the hero. A longing for the validation of their audience. A willingness to shape themselves into whatever wins the most reaction. Feed that psychology into an attention economy, and strange monsters get made.