Operation Drumbeat

The Right is Loud but Hollow

On November 7th, the Wall Street Journal had a long article about the crack-up over antisemitism and Tucker-Fuentes at the Heritage Foundation. One detail in particular jumped out at me:

Employees working on Ukraine policy were asked to watch Carlson’s monologues, which were rife with conspiracy theories about the war, to delete past tweets in support of Ukraine aid and to write papers reflecting the new, more isolationist policy that Roberts had embraced, according to Luke Coffey, the former director of Heritage’s foreign policy center.

Putting aside for a moment the wisdom or morality of this policy shift, think for a moment what he’s asking subject matter experts to do: Stop studying their subjects and watch propaganda instead. This reinforces an impression of mine: the Republican Party and the right-wing apparatus in general have become totally dominated by propaganda and propagandists. Important roles that once would go to professionals or at least politicians now go to podcasters and talking heads. And not just in communications. Look at Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense, who comes from Fox News, and Don Bongino, Deputy Director of the FBI, who was a podcaster. The current civil war on the right is happening in large part because of a power vacuum after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. In some ways, Kirk was an old-style organizer and activist, but most of the country knew him for his YouTubing. And it is being fought out primarily among its public-facing stars: Carlson, Shapiro, Owens, Levin, etc. They command significant constituencies and, perhaps more importantly, audiences. Trump himself is showbiz and is particularly responsive to its tricks and charms.

You might be tempted to point out that Ronald Reagan was an actor or talk about Rush Limbaugh. Sure, but they were ensconced in a network that still included policy professionals and experienced technocrats. The Bushes were an old dynastic political family. Poppy Bush was a Cold War diplomat and bureaucrat. The right has always striven to create an alternate communications system to battle the influence of “liberal media,” and traditionally it’s not uncommon for a political movement to center itself on a magazine or a newspaper, but now sheer quantity has brought about a qualitative shift.

A recent investigation by Reuters documented the close relationship between the regime and a whole constellation of right-wing influencers seemingly on the outside. These “influencers”—we really should use the older term “agitator”—can even sic mobs on people: consider the Libs of TikTok account during the hysteria following Kirk’s death, painting targets for harassment and cancellation. These agitators can call in the state itself for support. In an episode highlighted by Reuters, the Libs of TikTok account libeled a black lawmaker in Connecticut. Then its calumnies were amplified by the Department of Justice and the ICE Twitter accounts. Here’s what happened next:

A stranger showed up at his home and howled through the intercom, Paris said in an interview. On August 17, an anonymous caller threatened to send other Trump supporters to his home and hack his phone, repeatedly lacing his rant with a racial slur.

“Dumb fucking, n-----!” the man shouted, according to a recording reviewed by Reuters. “You understand me, you little Connecticut n-----? Negro, you hear? … This content is being replicated and duplicated all across Christian networks. All across Trump supporters, MAGA supporters, and right-wing newspapers.”

In New York, the ICE raid on Senegalese handbag dealers on Canal Street was triggered by a MAGA influencer going down there and making a TikTok.

The issues that the administration tackles come directly out of this propaganda ecosystem: most normal people had not heard of “Tren de Aragua” before. Turns out it’s a major preoccupation of the right-wing media sphere. No puppet master is running the whole thing: it’s just a mutually reinforcing system of inputs and outputs that generates its own sense of reality. The term is a cliché, but it is a real echochamber!

On the one hand, this is extremely sinister. Propaganda as a first principle calls to mind a totalitarian state that creates a distorted, topsy-turvy world of enemies and threats based on paranoia and hysterical denunciation. But what happens when this totalitarian bubble is trying to govern a massive country, most of whose people don’t live inside of it? Well, the movement is, as they love to say about the libs, “out of touch.” Their politics are not connected to people’s real lives, but to a number of insane fantasies. Why wouldn’t antisemitism enter into it? It’s a natural progression.

The dominance of propaganda also underscores Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld’s thesis in their 2024 book The Hollow Parties, in which they argue that, in different ways, both major parties have been hollowed out of their traditional functions. Very crudely put, the Democrats are just a bunch of consultants and NGOs in a spoils system that does not discourage losing because there are always spoils in the next campaign, and the GOP is basically just a career opportunity for agitators and propagandists who are willing to dispense with shame and honor and peddle racist filth. Both systems involve major political weaknesses. And we just saw how they might be defeated: a grassroots campaign that actually hits the streets and mobilizes people. Commentators will try to quarantine Mamdani to weird New York, but the tactics can be employed anywhere and with many ideological inflections: encourage real civic engagement, create new clubs and activities; de-atomize and reintegrate people into a shared project. My hope for the Trump era was always that it would spark a civic and small-d democratic renaissance in response. As big institutions fail or cower, we’re seeing more and more of that.