Editor’s Note: This is a guest commentary. The opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial board.
Right–wing talking heads are secretly influencing you.
In recent years, with attention spans getting shorter and shorter and apps like Instagram and TikTok becoming news propagators, short form content has taken over mainstream media. Instant engagement is key with this content, extremely short, captivating, videos right as they begin. Naturally, this has led to rage and clickbait content flourishing in these spaces.
Right–wing creators in the United States have dominated this area of the internet. They have their standard audience of conservatives in the United States, however, lately these creators have been garnering a larger audience for other reasons.
First, I have to talk about Nick Fuentes. Fuentes is a right–wing talking head extremist that grew to prominence during President Donald Trump’s first term from 2016 to 2020. He is an incredibly radicalized personality on the internet that promotes White supremacy and Christian nationalism.
Recently he has built up quite the audience online for edgy comedy videos on Instagram. Most of the videos are reposted clips from his livestreams where he makes jokes about politics in an extremely crude way. However, he makes these jokes where they do not seem to have any deeper meaning whatsoever even though when viewing these clips through the lens of Fuentes’ platform it is clear that it is promoting hate speech and bigoted rhetoric extremely subtly.
Right–wing talking heads have mastered this way with words where they can say something on surface level that seems mundane and agreeable, however when dissected thoughtfully it is clear that the subliminal messaging all ties to right–wing talking points.
For many years Tucker Carlson was the leading voice in Republican talking heads, and he perfected this art of subliminal messaging. Carlson was the face of the Fox News franchise, guiding the conservative focus points in news for many years until he left Fox in 2023, pivoting to online content.
Carlson pioneered the deeper messaging rhetoric we see in politics, since the early days in his career. A very interesting point that I often think about is when “former” White nationalist Derek Black was getting interviewed by Van Jones. Black stated that his family watches Carlson’s show once to get the news, and then a second time because he makes the White nationalist points better than they do. Mind you, Black’s father started Stormfront, the largest and oldest White supremacist website on the internet to date. So to say that a right-wing talking head makes your claims better than you, a confirmed White supremacist, is pretty alarming.
So, Carlson set the foundation and now radical figures like Fuentes are taking his place. And unfortunately it is not just Fuentes who is promoting this hate speech on the internet, there is an entire genre of content creators like Sneako, the Tate brothers and Clavicular to name a few that just spew outlandish rhetoric to farm engagement. The worst part is they pander to a young audience.
I mentioned how Fuentes garners an audience through humor. This humor panders significantly to the younger demographic, specifically college students and especially college men. There is a very real pipeline from getting videos of Fuentes’ crude humor and engaging with the algorithm. Then, the algorithm promotes more videos of other right–wing creators and their humor, and soon enough it is not humor anymore it is real right–wing news points and beliefs. The videos are viewed through a lighthearted lens of humor so they do not seem as serious, however, when these creators are calling politicians racial slurs and saying neo-Nazi rhetoric it becomes very serious, very fast.
The cycle needs to be broken. Do not fall into the rabbit hole of engaging with these online oppressors. They lose power when they do not have an audience. So do not contribute to their statistics and stop engaging.
Alec Aleva (He/Him) is a sophomore TPDM major at Ithaca College. Contact him at [email protected] via email.
