Support for rightwing parties in the U.S. and Europe is more driven by culture than economics. Personal finances isn’t a big predictor of such support.
“Right-wing populism is a strange bird, an ideology that’s not grounded in any enduring economic or philosophical principles. It mainly entails using the government to address a variety of ill-formed social, nationalistic, and cultural grievances. Former British politician David Gauke was spot on when he says that populism amounts to little more than “a willingness by politicians to say what they think the public wants to hear.”
That’s why President-elect Donald Trump’s recent appointments reflect a mish-mash of conflicting opinions. Many conservatives were, for instance, shocked by his selection of Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R–Ore.) as Labor Secretary given that her pro-union positions aren’t different from those advocated by President Joe Biden.”
“Loomer has been a quasi-journalist on the fringe right for about a decade, with a penchant for saying things that make even hardened MAGA types recoil. She is a self-described “proud Islamophobe” who has cheered the deaths of migrants and called for Muslims to be banned from driving for ride-hail apps. She ran for Congress twice, in 2020 and 2022, and failed both times. More recently, Loomer has called Kamala Harris a “drug-using prostitute” and warned that, if she wins, “the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center.”
Despite all of this, Trump has long displayed a soft spot for Loomer. He endorsed her House bid in 2020 and, in 2023, tried to offer her a spot on his campaign — only to back down after aides revolted. Undeterred, he hosted her at Mar-a-Lago afterward, repeatedly boosted her content on Truth Social, and traveled with her on the 2024 campaign trail.
It’s not clear what Trump gets out of this relationship. But his ties to Loomer have become a major controversy since the 9/11 event, with some of the former president’s closest allies speaking publicly against Loomer.
“The history of this person is just really toxic,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told the HuffPost. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) — who claimed a Jewish family was using space lasers to start wildfires! — thinks Loomer is a bridge too far, calling Loomer’s tweet about Harris and curry “appalling and extremely racist.” (Loomer responded by accusing Greene of sleeping with a “Zangief cosplayer.”)
It’s hard to take these condemnations all that seriously. Trump and his vice presidential pick have spent this week pushing a nasty conspiracy theory about Haitian immigrants stealing and eating people’s pets that appears to have inspired real-world hate crimes. If you’re worried about racism and conspiracy theorizing, maybe take a look at the top of the ticket.
But what makes Loomer different from Trump is that she has literally no filter. She says the quiet part out loud, every single time. The more time Trump spends with her, the harder it is to deny that his thinly veiled bigotry is anything but the genuine article. And that, for the Republican Party, is a very big problem indeed.”
“Modern neopatriarchy begins from the opposite fear; the concern is not communist collectivism, but liberal individualism.
The neopatriarchs believe we live in an age where people prioritize self-actualization and fulfillment above all else. Young adults, they argue, live in extended adolescence, lost in some combination of video games, drugs, and casual sex; as they age, raw hedonism is replaced by single-minded foci on money and career. According to neopatriarchs, this liberal social model fails men and women alike, funneling them toward a spiritually empty existence that all but guarantees disappointment and depression, and it fails society by discouraging the production of children who are quite literally required if the country is to have a future. (Immigration, needless to say, is not seen as an acceptable solution.)
The solution, for neopatriarchs, is to return to the past. Men need to rediscover the old John Wayne vision of masculinity, making traditional male gender markers (including acting as fatherly provider) into defining aspects of their identity. The state should play a role in encouraging this reversion, primarily by changing policy to cultivate “masculine” virtues and incentivizing marriage and child-rearing.
In his recent book Manhood, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley urges men to embrace strength and stoicism as routes for self-improvement, calling on them to take on the roles of “warrior” and “builder” in their everyday lives. The psychologist Jordan Peterson has long dispensed similar advice, helping turn him into a conservative guru. In his forthcoming book Dawn’s Early Light, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts argues that contraceptive technologies “break the most basic functioning elements of civilization” by liberating individuals to have consequence-free sex out of wedlock. Vance, who wrote the forward to Roberts’s book, has mused about eliminating no-fault divorce for similar neopatriarchal reasons.
Neopatriarchy can be distinguished from straight-up patriarchy primarily through its treatment of women. Unlike some Christian fundamentalists or alt-right scribblers, neopatriarchs do not assert that women are obligated to be homemakers as a result of divine commandment or natural law. All they insist on explicitly is that women have lots of children, and that choosing to focus primarily on raising said children is no worse than having a career.
It’s obvious why liberals and leftists would have problems taking this seriously. If Americans are supposed to be having more kids, and American men are supposed to be more traditionally masculine, then who’s supposed to be doing the work of raising all of these kids? The answer, of course, is wives (as it’s certainly not immigrants). Neopatrarichy may not explicitly call for a reversal of the feminist revolution, but that’s basically what it’s going for.”
“An FBI investigation found evidence that the media outlet RT, previously called Russia Today, which is run by the Russian government, “secretly plant[ed] and financ[ed]” a Tennessee content creation company; the indictment describes Tenet in all but name. The company is then alleged to have stealthily spread pro-Russian, anti-democracy propaganda to millions of people across the internet, primarily via YouTube, TikTok, and other major social media platforms.”
…
“According to the indictment, the pair, who worked on digital projects for the outlet, used shell companies in the Middle East and Africa to secretly provide nearly $10 million to the company believed to be Tenet between October 2023 and August 2024, while directing it to spread anti-US and anti-Ukraine messaging. Per the indictment, the RT staffers “covertly fund[ed] and direct[ed]” Tenet and its content, including personally editing and posting content themselves and directing what others posted.”
…
“The associated influencers who have responded to the news have all claimed they knew nothing of Tenet’s Russian affiliations. “Should these allegations prove true, I as well as the other personalities and commentators were deceived and are victims,” Pool tweeted Wednesday.”
…
“two of the pundits entered into contracts of between $400,000-$500,000 a month to create video content for the fake Grigoriann. Most of the $10 million in funding that Tenet received went to creator studios, including, per the indictment, “$8.7 million to the production companies of Commentator-I, Commentator-2, and Commentator-3 alone.””
…
“The Russians not only contracted the most prominent influencers to create content for them through their fake financier, at various points they directly edited the footage submitted to them. One Tenet staffer identified as a “producer” in the indictment protested, when asked to post a video promoting a US influencer’s visit to a Russian grocery store, that it felt like “shilling.” He was ordered to post the content anyway. The Russians would also request that creators make specific content, including, for example, videos about a terrorist attack in Moscow.
The sad part of all this, however, is that this kind of content has become so mundane across the conservative internet that it’s nearly impossible to distinguish what comes directly from the Russian government and what originates from the influencers they employed. After all, while the six figures who were contracted with Tenet might have been unaware of or unbothered about who was paying them, they raised no objections to the content itself. (In fact, the only objection noted in the indictment is a complaint one of the podcasters raised that Grigoriann’s bio was suspect because he mentioned a focus on “social justice.”)
That, perhaps, speaks to how effective Russia’s disinformation war has really been. The indictment claimed that from November 2023 to August 2024, Tenet network members created over 2,000 videos among them, which generated 16 million views for Tenet and its Russian benefactors. At the time the scandal broke, Tenet Media’s YouTube channel had a not-insignificant 300,000 subscribers.
That’s not a shabby number by any means, but it pales beside the larger, unquantifiable scale of influence itself.”
“The refugee crisis heightened the stakes for culturally conservative voters, forcing them to choose between centrist parties that were more welcoming to migrants and potentially antidemocratic extremists who opposed it. Many of them chose the latter, prioritizing preserving the traditional white-dominant society over protecting their democracy.
Across Europe, far-right parties started to reap electoral dividends. In Hungary in particular, the surge in power of anti-immigrant politics allowed a government that had already moved in an authoritarian direction to push a new and potent propaganda line, harnessing the reactionary spirit to consolidate its hold on power.
Similar events took place outside Europe. Post-Cold War Israel went through multidecade struggles over its ethnoreligious identity and occupation of Palestinian land, ultimately creating conditions for the reactionary spirit to spread from a small handful of extremists to a significant portion of the population. In India, the reactionary right’s rise began with a staged crisis designed to bring out the Hindu majority’s unease with India’s vision of equality.”