The rise of the infinite fringe

The past decade of politics, to put it bluntly, has been batshit. The past week of politics has been batshit. Heck, the past week of everything in the world that has anything to do with political decisions — diplomacy, trade, manufacturing, having a 401k, owning a car or a computer or a phone or a T-shirt — has been batshit.

But if you were asked to use a word that was not a swear, and were given about five minutes to calm down, a good second choice would be “disintegrated.” There’s no clear answer, however, as to why — why it seems like people are living in their own separate realities; why our leaders seem to operate via conflicting conspiracy theories and obscure philosophies; why it feels like a screaming, ephemeral electronic blob called the internet is actually running the world instead of the people supposedly in charge of it.

There is an actual, human person at the center of it, and his name is Robert Welch — a right-wing figure more influential than Alex Jones, QAnon, and Ronald Reagan combined. His influence is so silent, though, that you won’t find his content online: no podcasts, no livestreams, no social media accounts; no Mar-a-Lago selfies on Instagram or X posts defending the latest malpractice in the Trump administration. You might even have a hard time finding an image of his face because Robert Welch has been dead for nearly 40 years. 

But he plays a critical role in modern American history, both for the story of his rise and the means of his decline. Back in 1958, during the height of the Red Scare, Welch, a wealthy candy magnate, joined forces with businessman Fred Koch (yes, the dad of those Kochs) to create the John Birch Society, a membership-only group meant to carry out their lifelong fight against communism in America. But unlike Joseph McCarthy, who razed Hollywood, or the House Un-American Activities Committee, which singled out federal employees, Welch thought that the most “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy” was actually President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The list of alleged White House Soviets soon grew to include Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, CIA director Allen Dulles, Chief Justice Earl Warren, Harry Truman, the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds (of course), Cornelius Vanderbilt, Charles de Gaulle, Woodrow Wilson, and so forth.

Despite being led by a man who thought the president was secretly a Soviet plant, the John Birch Society grew popular in the early 1960s — so popular, in fact, that it made up a significant portion of the growing American conservative movement. And none feared the Birchers more than William F. Buckley, the editor-in-chief of National Review, who was trying to mainstream this ideology inside the Republican Party along with presidential aspirant Barry Goldwater. Like his fellow ideologues, Buckley was terrified of the rise of communism and its attendant philosophies: socialism, moral relativism, and progressivism. (As he famously said, “A conservative is one who stands athwart history, yelling Stop.”) Like Welch, a onetime friend, he feared that liberals sympathetic to these ideas would bring Soviet elements into the federal government. But as he wrote to a friend, there was a difference between the paranoid “unreality” of the John Birch Society and the informed suspicion of “responsible conservatives.” And that posed an existential problem: if Birchers were too visibly associated with conservatism — if Birchers were the first thing voters thought of when they heard the word “conservatism” — the Republican Party, already in a civil war between Northern moderates and traditional Southern conservatives, would view Goldwater as a liability and his movement as just a bunch of kooks. 

Over the course of several years, Buckley ran a tireless campaign against the Birchers, both in his private conversations with Republican Party leaders, politicians, and writers and donors, and in dozens of editorials, columns, and essays in National Review, which, at the time, had over 44,000 subscribers. His anti-Bircherism was so thorough that he even spent time writing antagonistic letters back to subscribers who had canceled their publications over his stance. (He wrote a lot of letters: Birchers made up a large percentage of the Review’s readership, to say nothing of the Review’s donors.) The Birchers’ influence on the right slowly began to wane, relegating them to the edges of the party, nowhere close to influencing the agenda being rapidly adopted by the Republican mainstream. (Welch did himself no favors by writing an essay in 1966 declaring that communism was an Illuminati plot dating back to the time of ancient Sparta, alienating the slightly fringier right-wing magazines that still ran his work.) By the time Welch died in 1985, Ronald Reagan was president, the right-wing intelligentsia controlled the GOP, and the few thousand remaining Birchers were calling Earth Day a Leninist plot and claiming that chemical compounds extracted from apricot pits could cure cancer. Buckley, now the de facto intellectual voice of the Republican Party, was hailed as the ultimate conservative gatekeeper — a man who could successfully push right-wing nutjobs out of the Republican Party and cultivate a serious movement based on Values and Principles.

And that was the fate of poisonous conspiracy theories back then. If a ludicrous idea started building momentum, the ringleader and their affiliates would get pushed out of an organization, then another one, and another one, before being deemed so poisonous that society in general would exile them to some tract of rural land to farm beets and / or start a cult. If they were still interested in spreading their ideas, their options were limited to the physical media they could afford to purchase — a monthly pamphlet sent through the mail, a ham radio, or a sign on the side of the road. Barricaded from the tightly controlled mass communication networks of print distribution and broadcast signals that informed the nation and the leaders they chose, they were forever stuck on the fringes.

That was where “crazy” used to die.

For the next five decades, National Review maintained its power in the Republican Party as the arbiter of what was considered acceptable conservative thought. True, they’d gained new competitors over the years, whose dominance in nonphysical media could reach massive audiences faster than a magazine could go to print. Rush Limbaugh could rile millions of Americans listening to him on AM radio, Newt Gingrich could pontificate about Bill Clinton on C-SPAN, Matt Drudge could change the George W. Bush agenda with the right hyperlink, and Fox News could hyperventilate about Waco or jihad or Barack Obama for hours. But National Review was written by smart, serious people. This print magazine was for the thinkers who generated the ideas that the broadcasters could spread and the politicians could enact. And National Review was, by 2015, horrified at Donald Trump’s ascent in the Republican Party. 

“He is a populist, not a conservative,” Rich Lowry, now the editor of National Review, told Politico in January 2016. “Conservatism has always had a populist element, but it has been tethered to conservatism’s animating causes of liberty, limited government, and the Constitution.” Trump, in contrast, had neither faith nor ideology — he was a New Yorker who was pro-abortion, openly racist, and even worse, donated to the Clintons — and he lacked the rhetorical refinement and intellectual heft of the neocons. He could barely string a sentence together, neither in a 140-character tweet nor in one of his rambling speeches. But in nearly every major poll of Republican voters that month, he was in the lead, pulling double-digit numbers ahead of his nearest rival, Ted Cruz. This was an appalling trend that needed to be addressed. 

Lowry’s interview was to promote a special anti-Trump print issue with the aim to “plant the flag for conservatism” before the Iowa caucuses the following month. He’d gathered roughly two dozen famous and influential thinkers and pundits to blast Trump for his selfishness, boorishness, and political amorality. He made sure that they were intellectually diverse and from every medium, including the nascent right-wing internet: an evangelical leader from the Southern Baptist Convention, a libertarian scholar from the Cato Institute, Tea Party radio figures and activists, Breitbart writers, Fox News hosts, Reagan officials, and even other editors of competing conservative magazines, like Commentary and The Weekly Standard. It was a coalition of the right’s most influential thinkers, uniting in the most important conservative publication of the day — and if their intent had not been clear enough, the cover literally said “AGAINST TRUMP” in gilt gold letters.

Things didn’t turn out the way they’d hoped. Trump tweeted his way into the presidency by not giving a damn about which Republican gatekeeper was standing athwart his path to the White House, or whether “athwart” was even a word. Shortly afterward, a new series of right-wing websites and influence networks emerged online, bypassing Koch-approved editors and Fox News bookers, to challenge the establishment just as Trump had. Breitbart was poised to be the new Fox, Steve Bannon was about to be the populist whisperer in the White House and was openly ready to fight Reince Priebus, and Milo Yiannopoulos was about to become the next Ann Coulter. 

Naturally, every right-winger with any sort of pre-Trump sway and Buckleyesque aspirations kept making the case that the internet people were not real conservatives, invoking everyone from Reagan to Jesus Christ to prove their point. And naturally, the media entities of the new populist internet establishment started doing their own purges, firing and ostracising the figures who were too much, even for them. (See: Milo Yiannopoulos.) But it was in 2018, after Bannon got kicked out of Breitbart for undermining Trump, when a curious phenomenon began to take place: the people that the right-wing gatekeepers had tried to exile were simply not going away.  

Conservative online media would not exist without the early support of conservative billionaire donors. The Daily Caller was launched in 2010 with a $3 million donation from Foster Friess, Breitbart News received an $11 million endowment from Robert Mercer in 2011, and the preexisting conservative print publications and think tanks, already funded by donors, launched blogs, too. That largesse paid the salaries of hundreds, if not thousands, of bloggers and writers over the years (myself included), and elevated several voices to stardom — perhaps too much stardom for the billionaires to control. 

It started around the time Bannon got booted as chair of Breitbart in 2018. After he’d been let go from the White House, he’d gone back to the website with the aim of turning it into the go-to MAGA information source, relentlessly attacking the establishment normies around Trump (Jared Kushner was its avatar at the time), and ushering in a new age of nationalist populism. But Bannon got quoted in a book by journalist Michael Wolff, saying that Don Jr. was “treasonous [and] unpatriotic” for taking a meeting with a Russian lawyer promising dirt on Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump then blasted Bannon on Twitter for leaking to Wolff, calling him “Sloppy Steve” and claiming he “lost his mind.” For the crime of undercutting Trump, Breitbart’s primary investor, Rebekah Mercer, fired Bannon from Breitbart, and in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, accused Bannon of taking the website “in the wrong direction.” Mercer, broadly speaking, was a Tea Party libertarian, and Bannon was a vocal nationalist populist. So now that his megaphone was gone, Bannon was supposed to disappear.

But in November 2019, Bannon purchased a bunch of Panasonic cameras, set up four microphones on a table in his townhouse, launched a podcast, and began pumping out impeachment-related content for hours on end, six days a week.

Six years later, Bannon’s War Room is still recorded from that townhouse, available on livestream, radio, and wherever podcasts are available. It’s close enough to Capitol Hill that Republican members of Congress often run there right after taking a contentious vote, or simply just because. It is the perfect place for the MAGA members to explain, via a livestreamed conversation with Bannon, why they had taken whatever stand they had that day. And it is the perfect place for a moderate to receive Bannon’s validation and rebrand themselves as a true populist warrior in real time. (Hours after she voted to remove Kevin McCarthy as speaker in 2023, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), who’d tried to hold Trump accountable on January 6th, was on War Room, with then-Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) by her side.) Bannon did not need a fancy studio or a major investment to gain this influence, and arguably he still does not: he literally broadcasts War Room out of his basement.

Here’s a more recent example: Tucker Carlson’s firing from Fox in April 2023. Carlson was briefly my boss at The Daily Caller about 12 years ago, and though we parted ways both in our careers and political views, I found myself eventually reporting on the arc of his career: he was, for a time, the most influential man in the Republican Party, with 3 million-ish viewers a night on Fox and a million-plus YouTube views for his monologues. Trump would call him for advice, senators would wither in front of him, conspiracies would bloom from his guests. And then Fox abruptly pulled his show. The network’s rationale for firing him soon emerged in the news: Carlson allegedly sent disparaging texts about executives and coworkers, used inappropriate slurs to describe women, and even made comments about how “white people” should behave. And the strictness of his noncompete agreement with Fox was guaranteed to smother his influence. His contract stipulated that he could not sign a contract or work for a competitor or go on air until January 2025, well after the election ended. But Carlson still had access to his personal X account, which his contract with Fox had not accounted for. And judging from the people I talked to at the time, Carlson had absolutely no problem downgrading his production value. (Podcaster Dave Rubin recounted Carlson’s reaction to his first set, a home studio in his garage: “Holy fucking shit, you’re living the dream.”) 

Within days, Carlson published a video he filmed in his house on a lo-fi camera promising his 2.5 million followers on his personal X account — one that he launched back in 2009 when it was still Twitter, and ostensibly was not controlled by Fox News — that he’d be back soon. Within weeks, he was making exclusive videos for Elon Musk’s platform, a content creator participating in an ad share program. He was certainly not making $40 million, and possibly making no money at the time, but he was still talking, and people were still listening. Within months, he locked down a multimillion-dollar deal to launch his own streaming service with paywalled content. His free podcast frequently hits the top 20 of every podcast charting service. His allies are once again in the White House. And it was all accomplished in a house in rural Maine without the massive overhead and oversight that comes with being at a cable news network based in New York or DC.

But what if the exiled figure — or, in 2020 MAGA parlance, “cancel culture victim” — was not as previously famous as Bannon or Carlson and didn’t get kicked out of the White House or Fox News? Some lower tiers of influencers have survived getting kicked out of fringe-ier places: Candace Owens, who’d been hired by several conservative online media outlets but pushed out of both Turning Point USA and The Daily Wire for her stance on Israel, still has 5.6 million followers on Instagram alone. George Santos, the New York Republican who was pushed out of Congress for his serial lying, still draws heat on X by mocking the fashion sensibility of the reporters who cover him. (He also has a podcast.) Yiannopoulos, somehow canceled twice (first by Breitbart, then by the investors of the company he launched), is floating somewhere near Kanye West, who himself got pushed to the fringe after praising Adolf Hitler on Infowars yet still has some tether to the mainstream by virtue of being Kanye West. 

There’s a cruel irony in the fact that these influencers were cultivated by right-wing media outlets, funded by billionaires trying to bypass the mainstream gatekeepers, only to gain more influence after being expelled. And as Moore’s law makes consumer electronics cheaper, there’s nothing preventing this cycle from repeating:  if an affiliate with a nascent brand gets kicked out of that influencer’s circle for whatever reason, they could purchase a discounted iPhone, sign up for Starlink, and maybe chat with a different wealthy right-wing funder who might have an ideological and / or personal grudge against their previous financier. (In some cases, that new backer might be a secret Russian operative, but hey, money is money.) Maybe they could take a shortcut and purchase some bots from a broker to boost their number of followers and still maintain a degree of influence over a segment of their previous audience. And if they kick someone out of their circles, that person could repeat those steps, and so on, and so on. 

It is a fringe that is, in theory, infinite. 

I started chewing over the idea of an infinite fringe in 2020, several months into my tenure as a White House reporter for Politico. Initially, I’d made my beat about Washington outsiders: the populists, pundits, and billionaires who had more sway over Trump than the lawyers, lobbyists, and lawmakers inside the Beltway. This was a period when Trump would offhandedly tweet out something he’d seen on Fox or the internet, and despite the White House’s insistence that the posts weren’t meant to be taken seriously, it was still a statement from the president of the United States of America, and the government and stock markets and the international world order would be thrown sideways for weeks. 

I was locked indoors in March, glued to my computer, watching Trump suggest the strangest ways to treat the victims of a surging mystery disease — bleach, light rays, and chloroquine. That was a highly specific drug, and since it was simple back then to trace a Trump idea to whatever had aired on Fox News recently, it was easy to find the origin. Carlson, still on the air at the time, had interviewed the author of a Stanford University paper who’d suggested it might be a cure. There was one small problem, however: the paper was completely fabricated. Stanford had never been part of the study. One coauthor’s name was on it without permission. And Greg Rigano, the man whom Carlson had invited onto his show, had no medical credentials whatsoever. (He was, naturally, a small-time crypto investor.)

But how did Rigano, who had no clear attachments to the right wing or any previous television appearances, get Carlson’s attention in the first place? All I knew was that, on March 16th, Musk — known universally and considered a technological genius by many — tweeted Rigano’s paper on chloroquine, saying it was “maybe worth considering.” That post went viral with 12,000 retweets. But Musk had to have seen it somewhere prior. It was highly unlikely that he personally knew Rigano, so I went back further. Rigano’s coauthor, James Todaro, had tweeted the paper out on March 13th, calling it proof that chloroquine was a “treatment/prophylaxis” for coronavirus. That tweet had only 2,000 retweets, but he was followed by several MAGA influencers I’d followed for work. 

But I spotted an upset reply from a man with the handle Adrian Bye, barely noticed by the commentariat: “I told you both about Chloroquine and you didn’t even bother to mention me (or ‘like’ the tweet).”

I sent Bye a DM asking exactly when he had told Rigano and Todaro about chloroquine. And the answer stunned me. Bye told me that he’d never met Rigano in person. They didn’t even DM privately. In February, Bye had just been tweeting research papers that he’d found in scholastic databases in China, focusing on a handful suggesting that chloroquine could have some impact on keeping covid patients out of hospitals. He exchanged a few public tweets with Todaro about it. And on March 11th, Bye had his very first interaction with Rigano. “Any data on chloroquine’s effectiveness?” he’d asked Bye. Bye replied to that tweet with several links to some papers. Rigano tweeted back to him the next day: “Publishing a report tomorrow w/ eminent scientist, peer reviewed…thank u james and adrian. next level humans.” Three weeks later, Trump was at the White House briefing room, telling people to take chloroquine.

And what expertise did Bye have on chloroquine? None. He told me, “I’ve worked very hard researching the virus since January, looking for a potential solution. I used a decade of philosophy research, including 18 months living by a famous sacred mountain in Hubei Province, China (near Wuhan) to do this work in a very delicate area where lives are at stake.”

The hydroxychloroquine mania came from three random internet strangers LARPing as amateur epidemiologists on Twitter. This one conversation, in the corners of the internet, that got maybe less than a dozen likes, that happened to result in a more viral tweet that made it onto Crypto Twitter, that happened to get retweeted by Musk, that happened to make it onto Fox — it turned into a desperate hope for covid infectees, but it did not cure them.  

I watched this pattern play out over and over again throughout 2020 as everyone, journalists included, turned to social media as a proxy for events happening in real life: a fringe thing was said in the corners of the internet, powerful influencers gave it momentum, it ended up in front of decision-makers, and it leapt off the internet and crashed into the real world. Trump retweeting something with the hashtag #FireFauci led to a widespread distrust of vaccines. A random complaint about some Nevada polling station using Sharpies on their ballots led to the “Stop the Steal” protests. A random Substack offering a weirdly twisted yet legally weak interpretation of the Constitution to say that former Vice President Mike Pence could declare the election results were invalid on January 6th, led to, well, January 6th.

But from the very beginning, I found it curious that out of all the oddball cures floating around the internet at the time, including bleach and sunlight and herbal remedies, hydroxychloroquine ended up being the one that went mainstream. Because what if someone mentioned a different medicine on Fox News while Trump was watching? What if a Twitter thread about another drug had gone viral first? What if Bye had posted about a different cure that he found in Hubei? The fringe had grown infinite, but the ideas generated from its farthest reaches were constantly penetrating the mainstream, so long as it reached one particular man’s daily media consumption.

I fully believe that if Trump had not been kicked off of Twitter after the insurrection, the fringe would not have unraveled as quickly — or as deliberately — as it has. 

In the aftermath of the January 6th riots, I began reporting on what Trump and his inner circle planned on doing next with social media. Would they join a competitor like Parler? Would Trump start his own social network? For a while, he had a blog called “From the Desk of Donald Trump,” where he posted his statements hitting back at whatever made him angry that day. And 29 days later, it shut down, because frankly, it was an embarrassing mess of block quote rambling.

But I spoke to a Trump confidante after the blog’s failure. I was curious as to whether it was a setback in Trump’s ability to push a message out. And he pointed out that Trump didn’t need a blog: he was blasting email statements to reporters on a regular basis, who were obligated to share them on social media, because, well, it was a statement from the former president. Meanwhile, not only had Trump become president due to Twitter, but he’d spawned an entire network of online commentators on the platform who’d gained influence simply by getting a retweet from the president, as well as a fan base loyal enough to follow the uber-influencer wherever he’d go next.

Within months, Trump launched his own social media platform called Truth Social — coded by its own ideologically sympathetic programmers, hosted on servers that were not AWS or Google or anything possessed by big tech. (In fact, it was initially hosted on RightForge, a company that promised to “cancel-proof” conservative websites.) It was buggy and janky-looking on launch and hasn’t reached anywhere near the scale of the tech companies that deplatformed him. Trump only has 9.3 million followers on Truth Social, a fraction of the 86 million followers that he had on Twitter. But when Musk bought Twitter, turned it into X, and offered Trump his account back, along with those millions of followers, Trump shocked the political establishment by turning him down.

There were two reasons behind that decision, I learned at the time, informed by his deplatforming experience and his discussion with MAGA-friendly social media startups that tried to woo him to join their platforms. First, now that Trump lived on a platform he controlled outright, populated with an internet fandom he cultivated, his public presence would never be at the mercy of Musk’s guidelines or X’s bottom line — or any other gatekeepers, for that matter. Second, Trump, a jealous guardian of his personal brand, would have been providing X with free content guaranteed to draw engagement from millions of active users, from which only X would profit. It was far more lucrative to keep his followers on his own platform.

I could not begin to tell you which factor was more important, but does it matter? Trump ultimately got everything he wanted out of the venture: his fan base, his money, and his next presidency. 

During his research for his 2023 book on the Birchers, Matthew Dallek, a professor at George Washington University, pored through the Yale archive of Buckley’s papers and found something that shattered the narrative of their standoff: letters at the time between Buckley, Goldwater, and other National Review writers and editors revealed that their conundrum was getting rid of Robert Welch — and only Robert Welch — while keeping the rest of the Birchers in their fold. It was easier, they determined, to paint one prominent man as an avatar of “fringe” and “crazy” and excise him from their sober-minded brand than it was to convince hundreds of thousands of Birchers (who were also Goldwater voters) that they were actually the fringe ones. In fact, Buckley privately told Goldwater that the society had “some very good people” in it. 

My first takeaway was that I should have known that the right-wing summer camp version of the Buckley vs. Birchers fight was more complex than it initially seemed. But the second takeaway was that the fringe influencers have a real point, likely shaped from personal experience: elites exist everywhere, even inside groups that rose to challenge the other elites, and no matter the ideology, they will always have an interest in squelching ideas that challenge their elite-ness. They used to be good at it, as the Bircher incident demonstrated. But gatekeepers don’t work in an environment built on the belief that “information wants to be free,” and there is way, way too much constitutional power in the hands of one person who despises anyone trying to gatekeep him.

One could argue that Trump or Musk — now in charge of the agency literally pulling apart the federal bureaucracy based on obscure conspiracy theories about how the government works — don’t have to listen to every idea they get from some new right-wing influencer. But pure, uncut populism in the Year of Our Lord 2025 is based on the notion that all gatekeepers are bad, even the ones who could be ideological allies, and listening to anyone saying that perhaps this random influencer has a bad idea — for instance, internet troll Laura Loomer marching into the White House and demanding the firings of three National Security Council staffers — would be a definitionally anti-populist move. If you won your election by circumventing the gatekeepers who’d tried to silence you or prevent you from indulging your worst influences, you can’t go back on your word.

The events of the Trump sequel thus far — the assault on the legacy press by turning to podcasters, the purging of the federal government using redpilled programmers from Silicon Valley obsessed with Mencius Moldbug, the brawl between far-right factions whose own places on the infinite fringe split from each other long ago, the propaganda literally reposted from 4chan to Truth Social to justify cratering the world economy — prompted me to start thinking about a fringe in its most literal sense: the fraying edge of a piece of fabric. Remove one thread at the edge, and the fringe gets slightly longer; remove more threads, and the fabric’s surface starts to shrink. Pick at it for 10 years, pulling threads from wherever — at the edge, in the middle, maybe three-fourths away from the right-side border or five-sixths away from the left — and the structural integrity of the fabric weakens. Pull out certain threads that intersect at certain places, and a hole will emerge. Punch a hole in a weakened patch of the fabric, and the threads will snap. 

How long does it take before it all falls apart?