All
politics is digital politics
The far
right
How the
right won the internet
Robert
Topinka
In the
second part of our series on digital politics, we look at how online
provocateurs have advanced extreme political ideas – and watched them seep into
the mainstream
Robert Topinka is a reader in digital media
and rhetoric at Birkbeck, University of London
Sat 31
Jan 2026 09.00 CET
The
internet has totally changed the way in which politics is conducted. As
established in the first piece in our series, liberals have totally failed to
grasp this fact. The right, however, are thriving in this new world. Future
historians studying the role that fringe online ideas played in the US
republic’s demise will be spoiled for choice. One episode in particular comes
to mind: Tucker Carlson, a former primetime speaker at a Republican convention,
inviting a white supremacist livestreamer, Nick Fuentes, on to his YouTube show
in 2025 for a chat in which he talked about the influence of “organised Jewry”
in the US.
Carlson
spent years echoing white nationalist talking points on his Fox News show, but
Fuentes’ style – combining Nazi salutes with cheeky grins – places him beyond
the pale for broadcast television. However, under the logic of YouTube, the
meeting of these two major influencers is almost inevitable. Platforms
incentivise audience cross-pollination, which is why Fuentes routinely
livestreams with figures such as Adin Ross and Andrew Tate, who are known more
for their homophobia and misogyny than their thoughts on ethnostates.
Establishment
politicians have denounced Carlson, but despite – or perhaps because of – the
backlash, his subscriber account continues to climb steadily after hosting
Fuentes, who was rewarded for his appearance with more than 100,000 new X
followers. For every corporate advertiser that pulls out, another selling, say,
seed-oil-free beef tallow crisps will find a new market of people looking to
resist establishment corruption with something natural and authentic.
But this
is not just about follower counts. It is also about harnessing online
engagement and turning it into a worldview. If you can cultivate online
engagement, you can create new political styles and advance even the most
extreme political ideas, such as total remigration. Only a year ago, this call
to deport anyone with a migrant background – potentially even naturalised
citizens – was too toxic for far-right parties to embrace openly. Now, the US
Department for Homeland Security posts calls for remigration on X, and Alice
Weidel, leader of Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) – the second-largest party
in the Bundestag – has incorporated remigration into the party’s official
platform.
Reform UK
– not so much a party as a corporation orbiting an influencer – understands the
power of this politics well. When LBC’s Nick Ferrari recently tried to pin
Nigel Farage down over Donald Trump’s dubious suggestion that paracetamol
causes autism, Farage framed it as a question of national sovereignty, saying
the important thing is not to cede ground to the World Health Organization,
which “now seem to want to take some extraordinary powers that would allow them
to lock us down in the future”. A large audience could interpret this as a
reference to the “great reset” conspiracy, a vague conspiracy theory that
encompasses the loss of civil liberties and the creation of a new economic
system.
This
theory remains a touchstone years after the pandemic because it joins the dots
between the upheaval of lockdown and the political and economic instability
that has followed. This is why Joe Rogan and Tate were quick to link Labour’s
digital ID scheme to the “great reset”. Reactionary digital politics tells a
compelling story: a nebulous they have gone too far and must be resisted. This
niche online view then helps to shape a wider worldview that can influence
voters during elections. Once ideas such as remigration or worries over the
“great reset” find a mainstream audience, they exist alongside debates about
cutting taxes and funding the NHS, and their extremist origins get buried.
As well
as the ability to influence public opinion, there is also the chance of earning
cold hard cash for enterprising posters. The since-deleted X account
@EuropeInvasions helped spark the July 2024 riots with a post claiming the
Southport attacker was a “Muslim immigrant”. The post was viewed nearly 7m
times. Over the next month, the account’s relentlessly Islamophobic posts
attracted almost 240m views. X’s ad revenue-sharing programme is opaque, but
based on other users’ stated earnings, in August 2024 @EuropeInvasions would
have earned roughly $2,000.
This
convergence of monetary incentives with ideologically charged engagement
produces a kind of ambient extremism in contemporary politics. Far-right ideas,
memes and tropes that were once confined to the fringes of 4chan and Telegram
now circulate as part of mainstream discourse, where they no longer stand out
as extreme. In the span of a few weeks in the summer of 2024, Jordan Peterson
interviewed Farage, Tommy Robinson and Elon Musk. Robinson’s rants about
grooming gangs did the best numbers. Soon after, Musk began calling Starmer
“two-tier Keir” adopting one of Robinson’s favoured phrases, which Reform also
adopted.
Robinson’s
blunt-force communication style wears thin, but the secret of his current
success is his ability to tie his far-right project to the playfulness of meme
culture and the self-help discourse of reactionary gurus such as Peterson. Musk
welcoming him back to X has been a massive boon as well. As an influencer, he
is in a far better position to shape British politics than he was as leader of
the English Defence League. He can let the currents of the attention economy
carry him along.
There are
risks involved: as Trump has learned, as his QAnon posting comes back to bite
him with the Jeffrey Epstein debacle, many can feed online attention, but none
can control it. Nor can they satiate it. Robinson first claimed victory for
Labour’s hardline asylum reforms and then described the home secretary as a
“Pakistani” who has “welcomed the invaders”. Musk has suggested that there
could be civil war in the UK. Scenes from the US of masked agents nabbing
people off the streets – and even from daycare centres – and shooting civilians
is a grim reminder that what starts online can end in real-life violence.
Robert
Topinka is a reader in digital media and rhetoric at Birkbeck, University of
London
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