Thank you, Meghan, this was so interesting! I have been on Twitter/X for years but have never joined any groups and avoid following people who might upset me, so I follow science leaders I admire, for example, and my brother in law who posts bird photos. I very much enjoyed the conversation between you and River Page
I mostly found this conversation disappointing. I think River Page has too limited of a view on the subject.
I find Twitter/X a useful experience, and, further, a much better experience since it was purchased by Elon Musk. (Many people seem to have forgotten the excessively censorious covid period.)
On Twitter/X, I read the "Following" feed, not "For You". I follow 156 people, not the hundreds or thousands that many people apparently follow. That means I mostly see what interests me. If you follow "For You" and click on links, you are going to get all kinds of stuff you don't want to see. Don't do that. If you do, you will see what River Page and Meghan are talking about. It's awful.
Occasionally I have followers who repost more tweets than I prefer to see. I can mute their reposts. Sometimes I am following people who post seemingly dozens or hundreds of times per day. I either mute them, or, eventually, just stop following. There is no need to follow anyone who tweets that often; you will eventually see at least some of their posts, because the people you follow will repost them.
Is the new "woke right" making a mess of things? They sure are.
I like a fair bit of what the Trump/Vance group is doing. And every day, they do things that I find stupid or dumb or both. I love the close look at how we are wasting money. And some of the rest -- oh my, so many unforced errors.
I try to remind myself that if this were Biden/Harris or Harris/Walz, I'd be very unhappy pretty much every day and I'd be tuning it out.
The Trump/Vance group is perfectly capable of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory every day, all by themselves. I wrote to a friend recently -- some days it's 2 steps forward and 1 back, and some days it's 1 forward and 2 back.
The woke right may well eat themselves -- but Trump Derangement Syndrome is alive and well, and bigger than ever. And it's been joined by Musk Derangement Syndrome. I fear both sides and will work against both of them.
This is a great way to use X and everyone should do this too, but frankly you are missing what’s happening at the moment. There are accounts with millions(!!) of followers whose entire timeline is antisemitism. And they’re not anonymous. This is new… it is no longer extremely fringe to praise hitler or to be against “miscegenation” (interracial procreation). It might sound alarmist until you realize how much this is already spilling over into real life. Candace owens and more recently Tucker Carlson are dangerously close to supporting Nazis. It may not seem that way but I’ve been steeped in Nazi twitter for months and some of the things they say sound strikingly similar to outright open Nazis. My friend’s younger brother from a liberal state is now openly antisemitic (and racist,sexist,homophobic— the reason I highlight antisemitism is bc for these people other bigotries almost always point back to Jews bc Jews are pushing LGBT and diversity in order to subvert our culture).
If these ideas continue to grow at the rate they’ve been growing at, we will see blatantly antisemitic, racist, and homophobic people get elected to public office in a few years. We are closer to nazism than any country has been since 1945… and if you’re not on twitter you’ll have no idea that it’s happening (unless you’re a libtard who thinks trump is lichrully hitler in which case you’d be right for wrong reasons)
"We are closer to Nazism than any country has been since 1945".
There are genocides, ethnic cleansings, concentration camps happening in multiple places at this very moment yet you still wrote that sentence?
I'm curious as to why millions of "people of color" are so desperate to enter a country (some legally, others illegally) that is on the verge of Nazism.
1. I’m not saying we’re about to become a Nazi country, I’m just saying we’ve never been closer to that possibility
2. There have been many horrors since 1945 but Nazism is specifically about white nationalism and antisemitism. That doesn’t make it necessarily worse than other forms of fascism/authoritarianism but those other forms are not Nazism without those characteristics
Maybe the online right will eat itself, but I’ve never been sold on it as being a meaningful influence on society. The trans thing went from weirdos inventing pronouns on Tumblr to censorship and elective amputations in less than ten years. Conversely, the wave of mass shooters inspired by the Joker movie never happened. They even made the second movie as an ostensible criticism of a sort of toxic fan of the first movie, but that toxic fan does not appear to actually exist. There is a lot of shitposting out there, but I’ve yet to see it make the jump to reality and even though they talk about this, I think they underestimate just how far a twenty year old guy will go to troll. It is totally realistic for someone who isn’t a Holocaust denier to write a novella about denying the Holocaust to make some ironic point. It’s bad speech, it’s free speech, but that’s all it is. Maybe DOGE is finally the payoff for all the warnings we’ve had about the 4chan people over the years, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
It's terrific to have you back Meghan. I hope you and Hugo are settling in wherever you are!
This conversation illustrates why River Page has become one of my go-tos for understanding how online insanity spills over into the real world--a 2025 update on Angela Nagle.
Elon spoke about the awkward arm salute on Joe Rogan. They discuss and show a video of Tim Walz making the exact same gesture. What is the point of trying to make it anything else but an awkward arm gesture?
2. MAGA has picked up on it. Bannon did it at CPAC and a right wing influencer just got fired over it. Previously a priest was defrocked for doing it at an anti-abortion event. He was very consciously mimicking Elon.
This is the point of Meghan’s podcast. The online right is getting so into noxious “jokes” that it’s consequential in people’s lives. As it breaks containment into the broader culture, it creates a backlash against the Republican Party.
I may be projecting but regarding the wellness culture thing I don’t think it’s about control. I think we are very physically sick as a society (specifically in the US) and a lot of us have been living feeling pretty crappy for years maybe decades, so all the wellness culture is simply a response to that. It then becomes political because they think there are people/corporations/the government subtly poisoning us and then everyone draws their own conclusions about why they would do that
Also in the mom / parenting part of the internet - a ton of crunchy moms are rightfully angry / skeptical of what we are feeding our kids, microplastics, other toxins, vaccine skepticism, etc. Sometimes it veers into weird conspiracy like directions, but overall it’s pretty valid when you consider the rates of child obesity / diabetes bc of the food industry, and then you have big pharma then prescribing ozempic to kids. And let’s not forget the way that the trans issue plays out within the medical / pharmaceutical industrial complex.
There was a 2014-2024 pendulum, and now the swing back is going for the jugular. The rights women or LGBT improved to the point that dominant culture’s rights did not improve. This direct relationship has always existed. Probably everywhere in the world. This is a hard fact. Moreover, in this time-window smartphones forced eyeballs to see the improvements seem to sink the status of the dominant culture. Should marginalized people “know their place“ to save democracy?
Thank you, Meghan, this was so interesting! I have been on Twitter/X for years but have never joined any groups and avoid following people who might upset me, so I follow science leaders I admire, for example, and my brother in law who posts bird photos. I very much enjoyed the conversation between you and River Page
Great to have you back!
I mostly found this conversation disappointing. I think River Page has too limited of a view on the subject.
I find Twitter/X a useful experience, and, further, a much better experience since it was purchased by Elon Musk. (Many people seem to have forgotten the excessively censorious covid period.)
On Twitter/X, I read the "Following" feed, not "For You". I follow 156 people, not the hundreds or thousands that many people apparently follow. That means I mostly see what interests me. If you follow "For You" and click on links, you are going to get all kinds of stuff you don't want to see. Don't do that. If you do, you will see what River Page and Meghan are talking about. It's awful.
Occasionally I have followers who repost more tweets than I prefer to see. I can mute their reposts. Sometimes I am following people who post seemingly dozens or hundreds of times per day. I either mute them, or, eventually, just stop following. There is no need to follow anyone who tweets that often; you will eventually see at least some of their posts, because the people you follow will repost them.
Is the new "woke right" making a mess of things? They sure are.
I like a fair bit of what the Trump/Vance group is doing. And every day, they do things that I find stupid or dumb or both. I love the close look at how we are wasting money. And some of the rest -- oh my, so many unforced errors.
I try to remind myself that if this were Biden/Harris or Harris/Walz, I'd be very unhappy pretty much every day and I'd be tuning it out.
The Trump/Vance group is perfectly capable of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory every day, all by themselves. I wrote to a friend recently -- some days it's 2 steps forward and 1 back, and some days it's 1 forward and 2 back.
The woke right may well eat themselves -- but Trump Derangement Syndrome is alive and well, and bigger than ever. And it's been joined by Musk Derangement Syndrome. I fear both sides and will work against both of them.
This is a great way to use X and everyone should do this too, but frankly you are missing what’s happening at the moment. There are accounts with millions(!!) of followers whose entire timeline is antisemitism. And they’re not anonymous. This is new… it is no longer extremely fringe to praise hitler or to be against “miscegenation” (interracial procreation). It might sound alarmist until you realize how much this is already spilling over into real life. Candace owens and more recently Tucker Carlson are dangerously close to supporting Nazis. It may not seem that way but I’ve been steeped in Nazi twitter for months and some of the things they say sound strikingly similar to outright open Nazis. My friend’s younger brother from a liberal state is now openly antisemitic (and racist,sexist,homophobic— the reason I highlight antisemitism is bc for these people other bigotries almost always point back to Jews bc Jews are pushing LGBT and diversity in order to subvert our culture).
If these ideas continue to grow at the rate they’ve been growing at, we will see blatantly antisemitic, racist, and homophobic people get elected to public office in a few years. We are closer to nazism than any country has been since 1945… and if you’re not on twitter you’ll have no idea that it’s happening (unless you’re a libtard who thinks trump is lichrully hitler in which case you’d be right for wrong reasons)
Well said. Yes, it's pretty incredible how siloed this is. Some people don't see this stuff at all and for others (like me) it's all we see!
"We are closer to Nazism than any country has been since 1945".
There are genocides, ethnic cleansings, concentration camps happening in multiple places at this very moment yet you still wrote that sentence?
I'm curious as to why millions of "people of color" are so desperate to enter a country (some legally, others illegally) that is on the verge of Nazism.
1. I’m not saying we’re about to become a Nazi country, I’m just saying we’ve never been closer to that possibility
2. There have been many horrors since 1945 but Nazism is specifically about white nationalism and antisemitism. That doesn’t make it necessarily worse than other forms of fascism/authoritarianism but those other forms are not Nazism without those characteristics
Maybe the online right will eat itself, but I’ve never been sold on it as being a meaningful influence on society. The trans thing went from weirdos inventing pronouns on Tumblr to censorship and elective amputations in less than ten years. Conversely, the wave of mass shooters inspired by the Joker movie never happened. They even made the second movie as an ostensible criticism of a sort of toxic fan of the first movie, but that toxic fan does not appear to actually exist. There is a lot of shitposting out there, but I’ve yet to see it make the jump to reality and even though they talk about this, I think they underestimate just how far a twenty year old guy will go to troll. It is totally realistic for someone who isn’t a Holocaust denier to write a novella about denying the Holocaust to make some ironic point. It’s bad speech, it’s free speech, but that’s all it is. Maybe DOGE is finally the payoff for all the warnings we’ve had about the 4chan people over the years, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
One of my favorite episodes. River is young yet so smart.
It's terrific to have you back Meghan. I hope you and Hugo are settling in wherever you are!
This conversation illustrates why River Page has become one of my go-tos for understanding how online insanity spills over into the real world--a 2025 update on Angela Nagle.
Angela Nagle! That's a high compliment. I've been trying to book her for years!
That would be such a terrific conversation!
Elon spoke about the awkward arm salute on Joe Rogan. They discuss and show a video of Tim Walz making the exact same gesture. What is the point of trying to make it anything else but an awkward arm gesture?
1. Elon lies a lot.
2. MAGA has picked up on it. Bannon did it at CPAC and a right wing influencer just got fired over it. Previously a priest was defrocked for doing it at an anti-abortion event. He was very consciously mimicking Elon.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/30/michigan-priest-salute
This is the point of Meghan’s podcast. The online right is getting so into noxious “jokes” that it’s consequential in people’s lives. As it breaks containment into the broader culture, it creates a backlash against the Republican Party.
I may be projecting but regarding the wellness culture thing I don’t think it’s about control. I think we are very physically sick as a society (specifically in the US) and a lot of us have been living feeling pretty crappy for years maybe decades, so all the wellness culture is simply a response to that. It then becomes political because they think there are people/corporations/the government subtly poisoning us and then everyone draws their own conclusions about why they would do that
Also in the mom / parenting part of the internet - a ton of crunchy moms are rightfully angry / skeptical of what we are feeding our kids, microplastics, other toxins, vaccine skepticism, etc. Sometimes it veers into weird conspiracy like directions, but overall it’s pretty valid when you consider the rates of child obesity / diabetes bc of the food industry, and then you have big pharma then prescribing ozempic to kids. And let’s not forget the way that the trans issue plays out within the medical / pharmaceutical industrial complex.
There was a 2014-2024 pendulum, and now the swing back is going for the jugular. The rights women or LGBT improved to the point that dominant culture’s rights did not improve. This direct relationship has always existed. Probably everywhere in the world. This is a hard fact. Moreover, in this time-window smartphones forced eyeballs to see the improvements seem to sink the status of the dominant culture. Should marginalized people “know their place“ to save democracy?
Just a Roman salute, huh? But the Italian Fascist salute was based on the Roman salute, and the Nazi salute was based on the Fascist salute.