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Donald Trump’s second term has been defined by a symbiotic relationship with right-wing influencers, podcasters, and self-labeled journalists. Joe Rogan helped his reelection campaign reach young male voters. A week after Trump returned to office, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, designated seats for “new media” in the press briefing room. Less than a year later, the corridors of Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon belong to right-wing reporters and podcasters, following the exodus of legacy media. A MAGA influencer’s video triggered an immigration crackdown in Minneapolis.
Trump and his creator crew have risen together. And as the president’s policies have grown more outlandish, so have those who purport to cover them. In January, clips of several right-wing influencers dancing to Ye’s “Heil Hitler” in a Miami nightclub suddenly went viral. The cast of characters that night included Andrew and Tristan Tate, right-wing internet stars and self-described misogynists; Nick Fuentes, a white-nationalist online streamer; and Braden Peters, a twenty-year-old online streamer who goes by the name Clavicular. In the weeks since, Clavicular has become ubiquitous. He walked the runway at Fashion Week, appeared as a guest on The Adam Friedland Show, and was profiled by the New York Times.
I reached out to Ali Breland, a staff writer for The Atlantic who has been covering the far-right corners of the internet for almost a decade, to discuss this increasingly influential digital bubble. He told me that he sees this level of interconnectedness between the fringes and the mainstream as a recent but “concerning” trend. The administration is not just emboldening the far right, he said; the far right is inspiring Trump’s politics. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
ILN: A few weeks ago, I couldn’t escape a video of the Tate brothers, Nick Fuentes, and other influencers I was unfamiliar with dancing to Ye’s “Heil Hitler” song, which made me really confused about the current state of the far right. What were your thoughts seeing that video?
AB: I was a little bit surprised, because these characters don’t often link up. But it made sense—these kinds of worlds have been melding for a while. They’re influential for people who are young and disposed to like various levels of being right-wing. Everyone, on some level, is political.
You have someone like Andrew Tate, who is more in the “manosphere”—he’s been engaging with the Trump administration, but his primary function is not to change electoral politics. Whereas Nick Fuentes’s explicit goal is to influence the political right, and he’s stated that several times.
What about Clavicular, who has since become an internet star in his own right?
Like many of these guys, he’s a symptom of something that already exists. In incel communities, “looksmaxxing” [the ambition to maximize masculine beauty] has been around for almost a decade. The Cut had a whole story about it in 2022. Clavicular is the end point of these things, and while he’s worth examining, I think he’s more like a flash in the pan. Nick Fuentes is also a symptom, but I think he has much more agency than Clavicular.
So how does he fit into this picture of the far right?
The logical reason is that incels are typically part of the right-wing ecosystem. It could also be that Clavicular, who personally said that he wasn’t all that political, is being operationalized by these right wing figures for their own political agenda.
You say that Clavicular is not a crucial character, yet he’s received a lot of mainstream media attention. What did you think about his coverage?
My armchair media critic perspective is that if any weird phenomenon goes viral enough, it can become a story. Clavicular seems to be an example of that. I do think that the profiles of him were useful, but I would definitely cover him as part of a shift that is going on amongst younger men. I’ve seen looksmaxxing creep into other corners of life: I personally know younger people who are chewing tough gums to strengthen their cheekbones. He is symptomatic of the nihilistic stream of slop that is going viral now.
How do you weed out which of these characters are actually worth looking into?
I try to figure out who has a hard resonance beyond simply having a lot of online engagement. I think the most important thing is to figure out who is making inroads with people in power. Fuentes is someone I’ve been following for a long time because I’ve heard rumblings that young staffers in the administration are paying attention to him.
Much of the language that was once reserved for the far right has now been internalized by the government. We’ve seen official accounts posting weird penguin memes and responding to individual tweets with personal insults. How do you see the interplay between the far-right internet bubble and the Trump administration?
If it were just a couple memes that seem to be pulled from this world, you could call it coincidental, but the things that keep recurring are a lot like far-right imagery. When I see that over and over again, it makes me think that there are people within the administration who spend a lot of time in these spaces and try to speak to the same audience.
You’ve covered the far-right corners of the internet all throughout the Trump era. What has changed the most in terms of the work you do, the figures and communities you write about?
When I started doing this, around 2017, there used to be a dichotomy. There was a radical fringe that was influencing the mainstream, but it was distinct; and then there was the mainstream establishment that excited various fringe, online groups because they saw the potential for their ideas to be carried out. These things are no longer distinct. The white-supremacist groups are no longer excited about the potential; they’re excited about their ideas actually being carried out.
Another example of this is Charlie Kirk. As long as I’ve been covering this beat, Charlie Kirk was prominent to varying degrees. He was mostly a libertarian, he was okay with gay people, and he only talked about white identity politics in a negative manner. Fast-forward to 2022, and Charlie Kirk was engaging with fringe figures and having race scientists on his podcast. He was giving them cover.
The far right used to rely heavily on demonstrations of physical power like the Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, Virginia. How did it turn into an online phenomenon?
There are two ways to answer this. One is that the online sphere just matters tremendously: Nick Fuentes has directly cited the adjustment of X’s policies to allow people like him back on and to speak in a manner that previously would have been considered hate speech. That enabled both his personal stock and the stock of his ideas to grow.
But these groups don’t need to show up in the street anymore, because the administration is showing up for them. I was talking to a former leader of the Proud Boys recently, and he said, to paraphrase, “The administration is sending ICE out to do the kinds of things that are beyond anything we are able to.” In the first administration, there was a line that law enforcement couldn’t cross, so the Proud Boys did it—they went out and antagonized anti-fascist protesters, for example. That doesn’t need to be done anymore, because there are no such lines for ICE.
Are these the same people who have always been on the far right?
It’s hard to say with absolute precision, but you can see that these ideas are becoming more salient with younger people. Polling shows that there is a large number of young people who are very open to anti-Semitic ideas. Nick Fuentes is able to consistently generate six-digit viewership on his streams, which indicates that the audience is shifting younger. Previously, you had people mostly in their late twenties and thirties on the far right. Now we see a group of people who are closer to eighteen.
You started writing about Fuentes before he was broadly popular. How do you see his rise, and why did he become so successful? Why him?
The reason I always kept an eye on him is that he’s talented. He is very good at speaking into a camera in an entertaining way. He has good comedic timing. He has charisma. He also understood the weak or, as he puts it, “compromised” spots of right-wing ideology. He was able to point out what he saw as contradictory. He’s not beholden to major corporate donors, so he doesn’t have to hold his tongue or navigate multiple interests. He just accepts his position and takes it all the way.
He was also one of the first people to speak of the immiserated conditions of young people in this modern version of the American economy. That’s a really key part of his message that I think a lot of people miss. You absolutely cannot ignore the racism and the anti-Semitism, but the savvy thing he did was to speak to people who were not doing well in a way that large swaths of the political class didn’t. He was talking about how people cannot afford houses before Trump or even Charlie Kirk did.
Figures like Fuentes love attention, and they’ve recently received a lot of it from the mainstream press. It can be argued that, by reporting on them, you are actually enabling them. How do you navigate that?
I spend a lot of time thinking about who specifically matters and why. Like, what is already occurring that we don’t know about? The reason I ended up covering Nick Fuentes is that he was already getting a lot of views. His streams get more views than any single article I write about him. Maybe there’s some sort of extra impact of the article coming out, but it’s about something that’s already pretty influential and shaping people’s lives.
But occasionally, you’ll see mistakes. A pretty big one was Dark MAGA a few years ago. If you looked at it, all of the tweets about Dark MAGA had, like, twelve likes on them. It was not a real thing. The single most important moment in the development of the idea were the articles that came out on it.
What do you think is the most valuable thing to come out of this coverage?
I think that it gives people an understanding of the movements and ideologies that they might not have a clear framework for. Nick and others have made it part of their project to be pro-America without referencing white supremacy or Nazism. So what people like myself do is go back and note these connections and parallels. Another thing that’s useful is giving a sense of the memes and seeing how these ideas make their way into the mainstream.
How influential do you think the far-right media bubble could get?
I think it’s already here. Like, the disdain and hatred for Somali immigrants existed way before Trump went into Minneapolis. I don’t know if the administration made a decision based on that, but the online and the physical worlds are fundamentally connected. It’s probably going to become even more of a thing as younger people who have been more deeply steeped in the internet get older. So it is here, and it will be here for a long time.
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