‘Online Right’ sparks a civil war within the Republican Party, extending beyond the MAGA movement

The most interesting analysis of the Republican electoral defeat was offered by David O. Sacks, former White House advisor on artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies and a leading member of the PayPal Mafia: “A political party that is internally divided cannot hold,” said Sacks whilst speaking on the All-In Podcast, adding immediately afterwards that “the war in Iran cost us the support of the entire podcast ecosystem”. The entrepreneur then mentioned the names of Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Theo Von and Megyn Kelly. Sacks was partly spot on: the war in Iran was the watershed moment that fractured the support for Trump and his administration amongst the ‘Podcast Right’. Both Donald Trump and J. D. Vance had been very generous towards podcasters during the election campaign, and it is not hard to see why: the MAGA movement has always championed the need to bypass traditional media, which are prejudicially regarded as hostile to Trump and his entourage. But the war in Iran has also squandered other sources of support: those of the ‘Online Right’.

Once the election results had been confirmed, the digital landscape was swept by an electronic civil war: all the leading figures of the digital right – who had long been the focus of attention amongst younger voters – turned on one another, accusing each other of failing to denounce, with sufficient conviction, the mistake of attacking Iran. The most sensational case is that of Bronze Age Pervert (Bap), real name Costin Alamariu, a ‘digital persona’ who has blended radical conservatism with eugenics, traditionalism, bodybuilding and militant ‘manosphere’ machismo: over the years, Bap has also attracted the interest of key figures within the MAGA movement, including Michael Anton, editor of the National Security Strategy at the Claremont Institute. He has become so popular that his book, Bronze Age Mindset, is regarded as essential reading for the very young staff members at the Trump White House.

Bap was one of the first and fiercest critics of the decision to bomb Iran. He subsequently turned his criticism toward the broader constellation of MAGA influencers who populate X under pseudonyms, from Captive Dreamer to Fugitive Caesar. Bap also condemned the Republican organisations that have sought to provide a structured framework for the ecosystem of podcasts and figures from the ‘Online Right’, such as the company Influenceable and its spokesperson Ella Maulding. In 2023, Maulding organised an event in Fort Worth, Texas, to coordinate all the ‘zoomer’ influencers linked to the online right. The idea, explains Bap, was the American version of a Hungarian experiment known as ‘Megafon’. The results, Bap writes on X, are disheartening and pathetic. He also has words for Elon Musk and the think tanks. Yoram Hazony’s national-conservatives and his Edmund Burke Foundation are accused of embracing positions of Zionist nationalism and of pushing Trump into Israel’s arms. The Heritage Foundation, similarly, is considered too pro-Israeli. This latter accusation is rather curious, given that yet another internal power struggle has erupted at the heart of the think tank behind Project 2025: hence the ousting of Robert Rector, one of the most prestigious figures at the conservative think tank, accused of having previously attacked the Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, who is deemed too closely linked to Tucker Carlson – now considered unfit for company due to his anti-Semitism and Third Worldism.

These internal ‘purges’ also appear to be a way of covering their backs on the right, given that Heritage is experiencing a mass exodus of members to American Ascent, a radical organisation founded by John Roberts’s former chief of staff, Ryan Neuhaus, whose motto is: ‘Old ideas are for old people’. The shift from the right towards the far right seems consistent with the narrative so dear to Vance: the elections were lost not because policies were too right-wing, but because they were not right-wing enough. The promotion of Stephen Miller, a standard-bearer of uncompromising MAGA maximalism, to the role of chief of staff, along with a series of statements posted on X by Pete Hegseth and MAGA influencers such as Benny Johnson – “‘patriots in control’ – a phrase traceable to QAnon’s lexicon – seem to confirm this and have led what remains of the ‘Online Right’ to speak of a ‘Führerbunker’ phase: besieged, paranoid, embittered, hurtling towards political apocalypse. ‘There will be no Republican Party left by 2028,’ moderate Republicans comment with horror.