Half the people we encountered after the shocking murder of the controversial right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk had no idea who Kirk was. Many were told about him by their children. You may have had no idea who Kirk was. But if you’ve been following news in recent weeks you’ve learned that he was one of the most consequential media figures in the US. We now live in very siloed information ecosystems where an ideological media figure who has the ear of the president of the United States can be unknown to huge chunks of the population.
As the old media world of newspapers and what are often called “mainstream” broadcasters has waned, something new has been happening online. In the past decade, social media has politicised hugely. This is partly because divisive content generates more “engagement”. As a consequence, there’s now a heady ferment of political influencers, all striving to be the next Charlie Kirk.
The biggest of these figures are on the right and are, by most Irish standards, far right. This is partly because if you wanted to say something beyond the pale, something that many people five years ago might consider racist, misogynistic or homophobic, then you need to go to an unmediated space. For a decade, right-wing figures have been building platforms away from the constraints of traditional media.
As these platforms have grown relative to traditional media, they have been dragging the political centre rightward. Their audiences are huge, dwarfing the audiences of traditional Irish news outlets or even the recently deposed then reinstated US late-night-television host Jimmy Kimmel. It’s no longer really accurate to describe traditional media institutions as “mainstream”.
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The difference with this new online “mainstream” is that somebody might be huge for you or your son or your grandmother online but no one else in your family will have heard of them as we consume increasingly personalised media.
Political figures online typically produce longform twitch-streams or YouTube videos which are then cut up into shorter, more hyperbolic, often out-of-context short videos for TikTok or Instagram. These are much more highly viewed. It’s a noisy space where social media stars are constantly responding to each other, mainstream reporting and the hot button culture war issues of the moment.
There are certain incentives underlying all this. What traffics best online is the angriest, weirdest and most divisive material. Posting incessantly is also encouraged, which is not a recipe for quality control or fact checking. Many of these figures also make a lot of money from endorsements. Several on the right are associated with crypto investment and health supplements.
A cynic might say some have veered rightward for the money. Formerly apolitical social media stars such as Jake and Logan Paul are now associated with the right. People who would see themselves as more apolitical, like the comedian Theo Von, who interviewed Donald Trump last year, have arguably been swept rightward due simply to the currents of the culture.
There are Irish and British influencers of the right and left but the biggest operate in conjunction with US political culture. A consequence of outsourcing our informational ecosystems to multinational corporations is the overwhelming gravity of that bigger political culture (hence a rise in Irish cranks concerned with their first amendment rights).
Another problem is that unlike traditional media, which is built around a culture of reported fact, this new wave of social media-oriented news is largely structured around opinion. These social media stars operate in a sea of conjecture and, in some cases, active disinformation and conspiracy theory. Because everyone here is wedded to establishing narrative rather than establishing facts, this becomes even more polarising.
Consequently, many of the new formats thrive on emotional conflict rather than clear-eyed investigation. Figures like Charlie Kirk and Steven Crowder on the right and Destiny on the left made their names by debating figures on the other side of the political spectrum. YouTube channels such as Jubilee have gone viral repeatedly with titles like “1 Progressive vs 20 Far Right Conservatives”. In more extreme forms manosphere influencers such as “Fit and Fresh” do their best to humiliate out-of-their-depth young women on camera. The centre of online news is the debate, not the report. In almost all cases influencers will recut and edit the snippets that make their side of any political argument look like it is winning.
So why is this important? This fractious and fractured reality constitutes news for huge numbers of people now and it comes wrapped in explicit emotional ideology. Political figures like JD Vance are terminally online. The far-right influencer Laura Loomer reportedly advised Donald Trump who to hire for his administration. Conspiracy theories about vaccines are now mainstream politics due to Robert F Kennedy jnr. Someone near you is certainly being influenced by this stuff and we are all, by osmosis, shifting our perception of the political centre.
Ben Shapiro
Shapiro is the besuited, Orthodox Jewish host of The Ben Shapiro Show. He’s also the founder of The Daily Wire network which hosts others such as Christian nationalist Matt Walsh. This has made him rich. He learned at the feet of Breitbart founder Andrew Breitbart and is an aficionado of Matthew Drudge who created the Drudge Report (there’s a whole lineage of right-wing influencers). He has a tendency to get het up about pop culture that he thinks is too woke. He has said offensive things about trans people, believes same-sex couples shouldn’t raise children and contends that Derek Chauvin, the killer of George Floyd, should not have been convicted of murder. There is currently an attempt in right-wing America to depict Shapiro and the late Kirk as moderates.
Nick Fuentes
They only appear like moderates next to figures such as Nick Fuentes. Fuentes is the self-styled leader of the “groypers”, terminally online nihilistic pranksters who have morphed into actual white nationalists. He has praised Hitler. He has also been a critic of Charlie Kirk over Kirk’s support for Israel and his being insufficiently far right for Fuentes. Fuentes had dinner with Donald Trump in 2022, after which Mike Pence, who had been Trump’s vice president, described Fuentes as “a white nationalist, an anti-Semite and a Holocaust denier”.
Candace Owens
Ten years ago, Candace Owens expressed her disdain for conservative republicans. Last week on X she described herself as a Christian nationalist. Owens said that she became conservative overnight in 2016 after she claimed, with scant evidence, that her personal details were shared online by progressives. In 2017 Charlie Kirk appointed her as director of urban engagement for his conservative non-profit Turning Point USA. Later she worked for Shapiro’s Daily Wire. However, her conspiracy theories, including her interest in Holocaust denial and vaccine scepticism, have persistently got her in trouble. Today she has more than 25 million social media followers across Instagram, X, YouTube and Facebook, and produces a podcast where she has the editorial freedom to peddle a range of conspiracy theories and make outlandish claims about political figures (she’s currently the subject of a defamation suit taken by Brigitte Macron).
Tradwives – Ballerina Farm and Nara Smith
Tradwives are women who claim to have rejected modern gender roles in favour of a belief that men and women have distinct biological roles, which for women means focusing on being a wife, mother and homemaker. The two biggest “tradwife” influencers are Nara Smith and Hannah Neeleman (known online as Ballerina Farm) who have 17 million and 23 million followers respectively across their platforms. These women promote an instagrammable version of a life they believe our female ancestors led (Neeleman, for instance, has given birth without painkillers). Unlike those ancestors, they promote their own products and have been paid large sums of money for brand deals with established names.
Fresh and Fit
The Fresh and Fit Podcast hosted by Amrou Fudl (known professionally as Myron Gaines) and Walter Weeks is a stalwart of the manosphere. The podcast, and others in the same style, claim to offer advice to young people on a range of topics from personal finance to fitness to dating. However, the hosts use the podcast as a conduit through which they promote an extremist and misogynistic ideology. The pair advocate for a return to a mythical past where women had fewer rights and strong men were in charge. Gaines even published a book called, Why Women Deserve Less. They have been accused of debating vulnerable women who sometimes appear drunk or high, in order to humiliate them.
Just Pearly Things
Unlike the tradwives, Hannah Pearl Davis does not curate her feed to promote a serenely happy existence. She has been referred to as the female Andrew Tate, primarily posting interviews with other right-wing influencers in her industrial-looking podcast studio. Davis holds many extreme views. She believes that women should not have the right to vote, that divorce should be illegal and that women who have been sexually assaulted or abused are unfairly depicted as victims. She has lent a sympathetic ear to white supremacist and anti-Semitic views. Davis’s success relies on a system of rage baiting, whereby short clips of her most extreme views are posted online, provoking a strong response from viewers.
Theo Von
Not all political content online comes from people who see themselves as political actors. Mulleted slow-talking Von is one of a wave of right-leaning, anti-woke comedians inspired by the world’s most successful podcaster, Joe Rogan. In the run-up to the last US presidential election he interviewed Donald Trump and later attended the inauguration. He has 8.5 million followers on Instagram and around half that again on YouTube. He presents himself as guilelessly ill-informed and is neither a hard-hitting interviewer nor a committed ideologue. More recently there’s been a backlash against the Rogan-affiliated comics with established comedians like Tim Heideker and Marc Maron lampooning them. Several commentators have talked hopefully about comedy interviewers such as the YouTuber Adam Friedland becoming a “Joe Rogan of the left”.
The left-wing ‘alternative’?
Adam Friedland
A Joe Rogan of the left? The comedian and YouTube interviewer is historically more a postmodern ironist (what the overly online call a “sh**poster”) than an idealogue, so we doubt it. He came up on the resolutely apolitical and terribly named Cumtown podcast but has also been associated with the now moribund Bernie Sanders-supporting but vaguely nihilistic “dirtbag left”. He appears to have been much more sincerely outspoken about his beliefs recently, rather than couching everything in apathetic irony.
Hasan Piker
It’s not all right-wing influencers. The bro-ish, bearded socialist nephew of Young Turks YouTuber Cenk Uyger, Piker is a combative debater with around five million followers across his Twitch and YouTube channels. He interviews political figures but also engages in marathon solo streams. He has feuded with another left-wing streamer, Destiny, who Piker would consider too pro-Israel and insufficiently left wing. A debate between Piker and the late Charlie Kirk had been planned in Dartmouth College last week.
Mehdi Hasan
Hasan is a left-wing British journalist with a more traditional media background who has made the move to the online space with his company Zeteo News (other examples of traditional media players who have taken this leap are Piers Morgan, Tucker Carlson and CNN’s Don Lemon). He’s largely on this list because he went viral after he debated 20 “far right conservatives” including at least one self-described “fascist” on the Jubilee YouTube channel – another popular example of how debate culture has completely taken over from actual reporting for digital natives.
