Josh Shapiro is very lucky to be alive. The Pennsylvania governor and his family escaped an arson attack in the early hours of this morning. Parts of the governor’s mansion were badly charred, including an opulent room with a piano and a chandelier where Shapiro had hosted a Passover Seder just hours earlier. Things could have been much worse.
White House staffers, it seems, had better hope that they stay in Laura Loomer’s good graces. This week, Loomer—a far-right provocateur who has described herself as “pro–white nationalism” and Islam as a “cancer on humanity”—met with Donald Trump in the Oval Office. After she reportedly railed against National Security Council officials she believed were disloyal to the president, the White House fired six NSC staff members the next day.
Steve Bannon seems resigned to sharing power with the “tech bros,” as he calls them. Last week, when I spoke with President Donald Trump’s former chief strategist and continued ally, he was clear about his disagreements with Elon Musk and other Silicon Valley elites on the so-called tech right. “Nationalist populists,” Bannon’s self-identified political clan, “don’t trust these oligarchs,” he told me. But, he added, “we see the usefulness of working together on broad things.
J. D. Vance doesn’t look like himself. In recent days, memes have spread across social media in which the vice president’s face has been Photoshopped to give him cartoonishly chubby cheeks. He looks like a bearded baby or Humpty Dumpty. Sometimes, he is holding a lollipop and wearing a child’s baseball cap with a propeller affixed to the top.
Darren Beattie may not be a household name, but you are almost certainly familiar with his long-standing ideas and preoccupations. Beattie, a speechwriter whom Trump fired in 2018 and appointed to a top State Department job this week, is a fixture in far-right conspiracist circles.
In the hours after Donald Trump returned to power, Jacob Chansley, already in a celebrating mood, became exuberant. Chansley, who is also known as the QAnon Shaman, a nickname he earned for the horned costume he wore during the attack on the U.S. Capitol in 2021, did what any red-blooded MAGA American might have done in his situation. “I GOT A PARDON BABY!” Chansley posted on X last night.
Like any good entrepreneur who found early success in one market, Elon Musk is now starting to expand to others. Yesterday, Musk—the entrepreneur turned Donald Trump megadonor—hosted a livestream on X with Alice Weidel, the leader of Germany’s far-right political party, Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD.
“Only the AfD can save Germany, end of story,” Musk said during the 70-minute conversation, endorsing the party ahead of the country’s elections next month.
Elon Musk spent Christmas Day online, in the thick of a particularly venomous culture war, one that would lead him to later make the un-Christmas-like demand of his critics to “take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face.”
Donald Trump had ignited this war by appointing the venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan to be his senior AI-policy adviser.
Gavin McInnes, a co-founder of the Proud Boys, was extremely upset with me. He started listing things that I should feel (ashamed and terrible about myself) and that he wished would happen to me (trouble sleeping at night). “You should,” he told me gravely and slowly, as though he were about to give me some very important advice, “slit your wrists.”
The transgression I’d committed against him was being a journalist in his presence.
It is tempting to think of political extremists as those who have had their brain flambéed by a steady media diet of oddball podcasters, fringe YouTubers, and “do your own research” conspiracists. Dylann Roof, who killed nine people at a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, was known to hang out in white-supremacist forums.
Since Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and subsequently turned it into X, disaffected users have talked about leaving once and for all. Maybe they’d post some about how X has gotten worse to use, how it harbors white supremacists, how it pushes right-wing posts into their feed, or how distasteful they find the fact that Musk has cozied up to Donald Trump. Then they’d leave. Or at least some of them did.
Alex Jones looked different in the final hours of Infowars, as though he were ready for something new. Broadcasting from his Austin studio for the last time yesterday, Jones had shaved his head and ditched his standard shirt and blazer (no tie) in favor of a T-shirt with a massive red Infowars logo. For $49.99, you could buy the same shirt on his website.
Charlie Kirk took his seat underneath a tent that said Prove me wrong. I wedged myself into the crowd at the University of Montana, next to a cadre of middle-aged men wearing mesh hats. A student standing near me had on a hoodie that read Jesus Christ. It was late September, and several hundred of us were here to see the conservative movement’s youth whisperer.
The election is rigged. Democrats are already working to steal the election from Donald Trump, and the results are going to be illegitimate. That is, unless Trump wins. This is the message that has been percolating through segments of the online right. Over the past several weeks, conservative figures ranging from the fringe to the mainstream have been priming their audiences to declare fraud should the election not go their way.
One of Donald Trump’s signature rhetorical moves—and there are many—is wrapping his most heinous and controversial public statements in the faintest patina of ambiguity. Not enough to obscure his point. Not even enough to give actual plausible deniability. But enough for Trump and his followers to wave away their critics as hysterical.
In 2015, when Trump famously said that Mexican immigrants are criminals and rapists, he also said, “Some, I assume, are good people.
During last night’s debate, Donald Trump said some strange things, even by his own standards. He praised the Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán (using the antidemocratic term strongman approvingly); lamented that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are “eating the dogs”; and falsely suggested that Kamala Harris wants to do “transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.” This is not merely the stuff of normal Trumpian discourse.
Over the past 24 hours, the MAGA faithful have been busy sharing cat memes with one another. These are not the adorable “lolcats” that have circulated on the internet for well over a decade, but something darker. They reference a baseless and racist claim from Donald Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance, that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are eating people’s pets. Trump, the memes show, will protect America’s house cats from this supposed threat.
“Joe Biden sent the orders” was the first thing Representative Mike Collins of Georgia posted following the assassination attempt on Donald Trump yesterday. To clarify that he was not being hyperbolic, Collins followed up by saying that Biden should be charged with “inciting an assassination.
Alex Jones couldn’t help himself. On Friday, just before a federal judge was set to decide the fate of Infowars, his conspiracy-media empire, Jones spun up yet another conspiracy.
He was on his way into a Houston courthouse as part of the ongoing saga over lies he told about the Sandy Hook school shooting. After six years of litigation, Jones owes $1.5 billion in defamation damages.
The far-right publisher known as “Lomez” kept his identity private, and for good reason. His company, Passage Publishing, has printed books from a German nationalist, anti-democracy monarchists, and white supremacists promoting “human biodiversity.” On X, where he has more than 70,000 followers, Lomez has suggested that journalists be killed, praised Kyle Rittenhouse, and tweeted a homophobic slur on at least one occasion.
After a jury found Donald Trump guilty of 34 felony charges yesterday, Bronze Age Pervert, the alter ego of the edgelord influencer Costin Alamariu, retweeted one of his own posts from March. It is a movie clip depicting a scene of armed men storming buildings and gunning people down. In the text accompanying the post, Bronze Age Pervert jokes that the clip is real footage of a “well-planned neutralization operation” that will take place after Trump wins his reelection campaign.