President Donald Trump wants larger nonprofits and academic institutions investigated for the “egregious” use of DEI.
Elon Musk is trying to purge the federal workforce, and accusing nonprofits and the media of corruption in conspiratorial and factually inaccurate ways.
Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist who deeply influenced the administration’s hiring, has cited grand theories of how Trump could smash the power of “managerial” elites.
And 25-year-old administration official Marko Elez, who’d made racist online comments and initially resigned, will be rehired, Musk has said.
All this and more from Trump’s first four weeks back in office show that his new administration is profoundly influenced by what might be called the online right: perpetually plugged-in posters who’ve become united by their desire to combat and defeat “woke” progressives.
Complaints about the liberal leanings of various institutions — the media, nonprofits, the civil service, academia — are nothing new for Republicans, or for Trump.
But the new Trump administration — and, specifically, very online officials like Vice President JD Vance, Stephen Miller, and Musk — isn’t just complaining. Officials are now trying to use the tools of government against these institutions, in hopes of taking progressives’ power away and establishing cultural dominance for conservatives.
This reflects the theories, beliefs, and obsessions that have become widespread among the online right, who’ve spent years seething over the Great Awokening, coming up with explanations for why it happened and how it can be reversed.
Now these very online people’s fixations are becoming the policy of the United States government. For instance, Trump’s anti-DEI executive orders bear the stamp of online right opinion influencers Chris Rufo and Richard Hanania.
So while Trump’s first administration was heavily influenced by traditional Republican figures, his second one is far more influenced by a burgeoning new establishment — a very online one.
What unites the online right: attacking the woke and smashing their power
The online right can be said to span different classes and subcultures; its members include no-names like Elez and billionaires like Musk.
But they’re essentially a team forged in combat against progressives. They’ve spent years seething over the “Great Awokening” — the leftward move of the culture around race, gender, and sexuality in the mid-to-late 2010s, which many feel chilled their speech, endangered their careers, or advanced ideas and policies they believed to be wrong and harmful.
The online right’s roots go back years, to Gamergate and the alt-right, though in the 2010s such subcultures were viewed as somewhat disreputable even by Republicans. Few prominent figures openly associated themselves with them, and Trump relied on traditional Republicans for most of his appointees.
But the backlash to progressive governance and cultural power that occurred under Biden’s presidency swelled their ranks — spurring prominent people like Vance, Musk, and Andreessen to openly break with the mainstream consensus. (When Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he trashed its previous leaders as censorious wokes and reinvented the site as X, making it a more welcoming home for the right.)
What drew people to the online right was resentment of progressive power, as well as a desire to figure out where that power comes from and how it could be broken.
And many arrived at a roughly similar worldview: the idea that “woke” progressives gained their power by dominating many elite institutions in American life — academia, media, the culture industries, nonprofits, the civil service, and so on.
Some cite more highbrow or middlebrow versions of this theory — for instance, James Burnham’s writings about the managerial class, or Curtis Yarvin’s “Cathedral” — while others rely on more instinctive and inchoate resentments.
But they know who the enemy is. And that helps explain much of the agenda Trump is putting into place — for instance, dismantling the civil service, threatening investigations against nonprofits, and slashing how much federal research money can go to universities’ “indirect costs.”
To the online right, these are progressive power bases that should be attacked and destroyed, or else wokeness will rise again. They believe that by, for instance, canceling contracts to nonprofit organizations and threatening funding for universities, they are winning their war against the left.
The online right views Marko Elez’s racist posts as forgivable — and the media’s reporting of them as unforgivable
The online right also knows who its allies are. That became quite clear in the saga of Marko Elez, the official on Musk’s DOGE team who had, months prior, made various racist posts, including “I was racist before it was cool,” “Normalize Indian hate,” and “I would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth.”
Past administrations (including Trump’s first one) would have seen him as an obvious embarrassment. Initially, this administration appeared to have done the same, spurring him to resign.
But to those swimming in the soup of the online right, Elez was engaged in the practice of trolly “shitposting” – writing bigoted things online that can be either genuine or ironic or both. Many young rightists have embraced this culture in recent years, and reporters have become adept at digging up the offensive things they’ve written and getting them in trouble.
That latter part, Vice President Vance wrote on X, was the real problem. “I obviously disagree with some of Elez’s posts, but I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life,” he wrote. But, he added: “We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever.”
Indeed, Vance is immersed enough in online right culture that knows full well that the young right’s online ranks are full of racist shitposters. But, in that culture, they are part of the team — valued allies in the struggle against this greater enemy, the media (which to them is of course part of the woke progressive deep state blob).
“The Left has defined the terms of social annihilation for the past decade,” Rufo wrote on X. “The Right does not have to delegate social authority to malicious left-wing journalists.”
In other words, firing Elez for racist posts would be playing the media’s game, and giving the media a win. And that can’t be stomached.
It is far from clear to me that all of Trump’s new voters — many of whom were people of color — were embracing a newfound tolerance of open racism. But if the online right keeps setting the new rules, we’ll find out whether that’s the case.
