The internet has totally changed the way in which politics is conducted. As established in the first piece in our series, liberals have totally failed to grasp this fact. The right, however, are thriving in this new world. Future historians studying the role that fringe online ideas played in the US republic’s demise will be spoiled for choice. One episode in particular comes to mind: Tucker Carlson, a former primetime speaker at a Republican convention, inviting a white supremacist livestreamer, Nick Fuentes, on to his YouTube show in 2025 for a chat in which he talked about the influence of “organised Jewry” in the US.
Carlson spent years echoing white nationalist talking points on his Fox News show, but Fuentes’ style – combining Nazi salutes with cheeky grins – places him beyond the pale for broadcast television. However, under the logic of YouTube, the meeting of these two major influencers is almost inevitable. Platforms incentivise audience cross-pollination, which is why Fuentes routinely livestreams with figures such as Adin Ross and Andrew Tate, who are known more for their homophobia and misogyny than their thoughts on ethnostates.
Establishment politicians have denounced Carlson, but despite – or perhaps because of – the backlash, his subscriber account continues to climb steadily after hosting Fuentes, who was rewarded for his appearance with more than 100,000 new X followers. For every corporate advertiser that pulls out, another selling, say, seed-oil-free beef tallow crisps will find a new market of people looking to resist establishment corruption with something natural and authentic.
But this is not just about follower counts. It is also about harnessing online engagement and turning it into a worldview. If you can cultivate online engagement, you can create new political styles and advance even the most extreme political ideas, such as total remigration. Only a year ago, this call to deport anyone with a migrant background – potentially even naturalised citizens – was too toxic for far-right parties to embrace openly. Now, the US Department for Homeland Security posts calls for remigration on X, and Alice Weidel, leader of Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) – the second-largest party in the Bundestag – has incorporated remigration into the party’s official platform.
Reform UK – not so much a party as a corporation orbiting an influencer – understands the power of this politics well. When LBC’s Nick Ferrari recently tried to pin Nigel Farage down over Donald Trump’s dubious suggestion that paracetamol causes autism, Farage framed it as a question of national sovereignty, saying the important thing is not to cede ground to the World Health Organization, which “now seem to want to take some extraordinary powers that would allow them to lock us down in the future”. A large audience could interpret this as a reference to the “great reset” conspiracy, a vague conspiracy theory that encompasses the loss of civil liberties and the creation of a new economic system.
This theory remains a touchstone years after the pandemic because it joins the dots between the upheaval of lockdown and the political and economic instability that has followed. This is why Joe Rogan and Tate were quick to link Labour’s digital ID scheme to the “great reset”. Reactionary digital politics tells a compelling story: a nebulous they have gone too far and must be resisted. This niche online view then helps to shape a wider worldview that can influence voters during elections. Once ideas such as remigration or worries over the “great reset” find a mainstream audience, they exist alongside debates about cutting taxes and funding the NHS, and their extremist origins get buried.
As well as the ability to influence public opinion, there is also the chance of earning cold hard cash for enterprising posters. The since-deleted X account @EuropeInvasions helped spark the July 2024 riots with a post claiming the Southport attacker was a “Muslim immigrant”. The post was viewed nearly 7m times. Over the next month, the account’s relentlessly Islamophobic posts attracted almost 240m views. X’s ad revenue-sharing programme is opaque, but based on other users’ stated earnings, in August 2024 @EuropeInvasions would have earned roughly $2,000.
This convergence of monetary incentives with ideologically charged engagement produces a kind of ambient extremism in contemporary politics. Far-right ideas, memes and tropes that were once confined to the fringes of 4chan and Telegram now circulate as part of mainstream discourse, where they no longer stand out as extreme. In the span of a few weeks in the summer of 2024, Jordan Peterson interviewed Farage, Tommy Robinson and Elon Musk. Robinson’s rants about grooming gangs did the best numbers. Soon after, Musk began calling Starmer “two-tier Keir” adopting one of Robinson’s favoured phrases, which Reform also adopted.
Robinson’s blunt-force communication style wears thin, but the secret of his current success is his ability to tie his far-right project to the playfulness of meme culture and the self-help discourse of reactionary gurus such as Peterson. Musk welcoming him back to X has been a massive boon as well. As an influencer, he is in a far better position to shape British politics than he was as leader of the English Defence League. He can let the currents of the attention economy carry him along.
There are risks involved: as Trump has learned, as his QAnon posting comes back to bite him with the Jeffrey Epstein debacle, many can feed online attention, but none can control it. Nor can they satiate it. Robinson first claimed victory for Labour’s hardline asylum reforms and then described the home secretary as a “Pakistani” who has “welcomed the invaders”. Musk has suggested that there could be civil war in the UK. Scenes from the US of masked agents nabbing people off the streets – and even from daycare centres – and shooting civilians is a grim reminder that what starts online can end in real-life violence.
Robert Topinka is a reader in digital media and rhetoric at Birkbeck, University of London
