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.
