observing right-wingers for twelve days

31 Aug, 2026

I’m the kind of person who is very interested in far-right movements, but never interested enough to follow them directly. I let others do such masochistic rituals and then digest them for me on camera. So almost twelve days ago to the dot, I made the decision to create an X/Twitter account for research purposes and cut the middleperson. I was curious to see the American far-right’s rhetoric directly how it is broadcasted on that platform and see how it affects me as a marginalized person.¹ What I was also curious to see was how X/Twitter today (especially within the EU) measured up to other microblogging alternatives.

I’ll address the latter interest first: Despite initially following many right-wing extremists shortly after account creation, my algorithm still showed me the wokest posts you can imagine. My feed is filled with left-wing people arguing about things in a left-wing way. If a right-winger shows up, it’s because they’re being discussed or debunked by lefties. I was surprised to see that! I saw a lot of Nazis in comments when their ideas were being attacked, sure, but honestly not much more than on Bluesky. I expected worse based on all the information about X/Twitter (which I never used prior to its acquisition) I received on Mastodon. Based on my experience, I would say that X/Twitter allows for about as much hate speech (in the EU at least) as I’m familiar with on Instagram and TikTok. I haven’t used either after they changed their moderation policies, so my reference point is how they were up until 2024 (when Trump won).

That made me understand why this many left-wing people, who made up my algorithmic feed, stayed there despite the changes sparking various migrations. I imagine someone with an established presence to have a web of contacts sufficient enough to rarely encounter the worst of what X/Twitter contains (which I’ll get to in a second), while still benefitting from its mass appeal leading to more perspectives being represented on the platform, whereas Bluesky and Mastodon in comparison are extremely white to the point they’re obnoxious to use. Now that posts get automatically translated to the host’s language, it’s effortless to converse with anyone speaking any language and barely notice it.

For all its moral superiority, Bluesky is 90% what X/Twitter is right now, including the bots. A lot of the criticisms directed at X/Twitter are propped up in the alternatives because they want to remain familiar to migrating users. From context collapse to dogpiling, that’s all just part of the short form text format and the abstraction of the person behind the post to an avatar. You can still have your posts break the containment of a familiar audience by going viral on Mastodon, Bluesky or Threads, and then you will be confronted with people pinging you to death with things they wouldn’t say had they spent a few minutes browsing your profile instead of jumping to baseless conclusions. Mastodon, the microblogging platform I’m most familiar with, just never found the pseudo-mass appeal that Bluesky found, so it’s stuck in a sort of hippie phase. It’s about 60% what X/Twitter is right now (a higher percentage if you’re an English speaker).

So now that my platform assessment’s done, I want to get to the heart of my project: observing right-wingers. I created a Far-Right list and pinned it at the top of the interface after initially following those accounts, then realizing that I’d like to follow others that are separate from this project. The list includes 19 accounts that encompass some Hasbaristas (Israeli propagandists), Manosphere influencers, bigoted projects like Gays Against Groomers and Libs of TikTok, some brain-fried (internet) celebrities, and right-wing politicians and pundits. Every day, I browse this list for about ten minutes at most in a single sitting—because I cannot tolerate it for longer than that. I do this a couple of times throughout the day to get the most out of their posting schedule. Because I cap my time spent on this list at around ten minutes, there’s only so much I can see until my inner siren announcing the apocalypse goes off, so if I don’t check in frequently, I’d miss out on a lot.

On the Hasbara side, it is interesting to note the difference in tone in my tiny pool. Some are more for stirring up frenzy while others exploit that frenzy to instill completely warped views of reality. This is the case for every group on my list, however, it’s most pronounced in the Israeli propaganda department. Noa Tishby, Israel’s most sophisticated influencer, usually posts calm, measured videos of her “explaining” things about Israel to clear up any “misconceptions” of it. In one video, she explained how Israel is “so democratic, it’s almost ungovernable” (instead of “one person, one vote,” Israel has “one person, one party,” she claims); quoted a Kalshi graph as “polling;” explained the contested policies; and kissed Netanyahu’s ass. It wasn’t necessarily what she said that presented itself as a goldmine of easter eggs, but how she said it and the imagery aiding her tale. She explained all this as if she was talking to children which stands in stark contrast to others sharing her role like Lizzy Savetsky. Lizzy Savetsky posts videos of herself evidently completely coked out and freaking out over things that don’t matter to anyone but a racist, straight from her West Village penthouse. They complement each other in how Lizzy Savetsky provides the shock while Noa Tishby is the sedative that draws on the impressionable, post-shock mind.

Libs of TikTok and Gays Against Groomers post largely the same things with Libs of TikTok simply posting more frequently. It’s wild how expertly they exaggerate things to skew the image of whoever they’re defaming to fit a stereotype. They make sure to pick an image to put beside their heavily editorialized videos that depicts the person they’re defaming in a way that would generate the most outrage. While Libs of TikTok goes after any marginalized person (Chaya Raitchik now covers more than the “alphabet mafia”), Gays Against Groomers focuses their defamation efforts on queer people who aren’t masculine gay men or feminine gay women (for now). End Wokeness, however, is the furthest from reality out of the bunch. It’s convinced that there is an ongoing white genocide, posts that Elon Musk routinely reposts. Its comment section contains outright genocidal and capital-n Nazi symbolism and talking points. Whereas top comments under Gays Against Groomers and Libs of TikTok’s posts are often people insulting them, End Wokeness’ top comments take the posts’ talking points up a notch. This is likely because the default comment ranking on X/Twitter sorts by “relevance” and I’m choosing to believe that End Wokeness has special tweaks to that algorithm applied to boost the Nazi stuff, seeing how close the account is to Musk. I have nothing to prove my claim with other than pure suspicion.

Speaking of Elon Musk, he and JK Rowling are relentless in their posting. They’re walking proof that obscene wealth is also harmful to those hoarding it. They are posting non-stop about various issues that you’d think were existential dangers to them. Elon Musk frequently invokes the hallucination of white genocide, but switches it up by pseudo-intellectualizing about tech and spotlighting people agreeing with him. JK Rowling, on the other hand, is constantly posting her transphobia. I’m talking multiple times a day every day, often conversing with nonexistent ghosts compared to her.² In truth, she was the reason I went ahead with this project. I was watching a video about her defamation campaign against Imane Khelif in 2023 where the creator commented on her relentless posting about this singular issue. I didn’t think it would still be occupying so much of her mind in 2026, yet it is. It makes you wonder whether people like Elon Musk or JK Rowling aren’t experiencing something akin to a psychosis as a consequence of being jobless, terminally online, and fed so much self-serving propaganda that their minds live in an alternate reality.

As if JK Rowling wasn’t enough transphobia for any timeline, ever, I added Brianna Wu who I personally believe is a social experiment. I stumbled upon her when it came out that she was the most blocked person on Bluesky. Ever since, I’ve been fascinated by this viciously transphobic trans woman whose policy suggestions are thinly veiled trans- and homophobia. She has also taken it upon herself to call out anti-Zionist Jews various antisemitic slurs because “she’s been invited to so many Shabbats,” whatever that’s supposed to mean. She’s going after every minority and still claims to be a liberal which, to me, exposes that there is a pipeline of liberals slowly becoming fascists because anything farther left from them questions the classist, oppressive society and the inherent injustices of its economic system, both of which they’re a part of, which is uncomfortable for them. So they look to simple solutions provided by fascists like blaming specific minorities as the root of all evil because they’re easier to digest without threatening their entire world view.

For Manosphere accounts, I followed the three currents: Nick Fuentes, Clavicular, and Andrew Tate. The funniest thing I noticed is that Andrew Tate has been reposting the same videos from over a year ago daily, ranting how the UK judicial system was corrupt because it was pursuing him on sex trafficking charges but not immigrant rapists for like at least the duration that I’ve had him on my list which would be about a week. They’re two to three minute long videos of him ranting like the lunatic he is in various contexts, often in his car. Clavicular’s niche seems to be to comment on people’s looks in his pseudo-scientific ways and/or beefing with people over their looks. So absurd. Nick Fuentes occupies a curious niche of antisemitic, bigoted rhetoric based on his “America First!” world view. He doesn’t post or interact as often as the others, though. You can tell he doesn’t enjoy this format and prefers shouting at people or into the mic.

Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens fall in the self-styled pundit camp. It seems, like everyone else here, they’ve made Israel-Palestine one of their main issues, if not the one and only. Shapiro posts a lot about who is a Jew and who isn’t in relation to their position on the matter. “A Jew is someone who Ben Shapiro deems a Jew” is all one can take away from his rants. My most esoteric knowledge of the Shapiro family is that Ben Shapiro’s sister, Abigail Shapiro, pioneered the tradwife movement when she made misogynistic videos about being a subservient Jewish woman minding her place in society. She flopped because at the time, this content mostly appealed to men and men preferred to hear their misogyny from Manosphere influencers. Now tradwives have a female audience.

Like Brianna Wu, Candace Owens was a woke liberal until she put out a concept for surveillance technology that uncovers people’s identities and ostensibly combats bullying. Ironically, she was rightfully bullied for her proposal and then “became right-wing overnight.” Still on Shapiro, when I came across Candace Owens for the first time in 2020, she was working for Ben Shapiro. She quit her work with him in 2024 because Ben Shapiro refused to allow her to be antisemitic on her show at The Daily Wire as his employee—because all kinds of bigotry are endorsed except the kinds that affects him—and then went on to work for Charlie Kirk. Now she’s independent and has her own show where she livestreams for multiple hours every day. Considering she streams as much as she does, she is a busy woman and doesn’t post that much. She’s not really part of anything which makes her so much more dangerous, in my opinion, because that means she can’t wrong someone that ostracizes her. She has her media empire and her reach as a black woman, that legitimizes her racist rhetoric to black people, shouldn’t be underestimated. When she posts on X/Twitter, she is usually milking her past association with Charlie Kirk or pushing her incomprehensible conspiracy theories about anything and everything. If you have a question, Candace Owens most certainly has an answer and it’s likely she made it up on the spot.

What all of these influencers have in common is that they treat America as the absolute center of the universe with everything else only peripherally existing as is relevant to America. Their rhetoric is often contradictory and employs misinformation as it befits the moment. Their power doesn’t only lie in what they choose to spotlight, but most crucially in what they choose to omit. Every single one of the 19 accounts on my list (even the ones I found too uninteresting to mention) banks on sensationalizing what they know will dominate people’s consciousness for a while because of their cultural leeway and the media’s unquestioning reporting on them, allowing them to steer the discourse however they wish. They fight in the gutter and thus cannot be held to any reasonable standard because they’ve missed it from their inception in the public eye. Their entire existence definitively strikes down any illusion of cancel culture’s purported power. Cancel culture doesn’t exist because if it did, we wouldn’t be here. If cancel culture ever existed, it died when the alt-right began building their alternative infrastructure to the liberal mainstream as we were celebrating each one of them being kicked off our spaces.

As for how I was affected by this experiment, reading hateful comments that promise or claim necessary to wipe out entire groups of people based on inalienable characteristics hit me harder than anticipated. Every time it felt like a pang in the gut. I thought I had a thicker skin than this, but I also wasn’t prepared to see this many accounts say such hateful things that are elaborated on by others agreeing. Of course, such comment sections might be botted, but I didn’t look closer. Looking closer would’ve distorted the image I was after which was my organic reaction as a passive attendant of a nazi fest. I am horrified that such rhetoric exists in a public space anywhere, but still stand behind my observation that this rhetoric is limited to certain accounts participating in American political discourse that sometimes seeps into queer people’s comment sections, but doesn’t dominate. These forces are negligible on posts I saw from Spanish or Portuguese speakers. Yet that doesn’t lessen the damage to my psyche.

My case study, if you can call it that, focused on top down rhetoric for the most part. The next step for me is to populate my list with a specific subset of bigotry spouted by smaller accounts in comment sections to observe their relationships to each other, similarly to how I’ve been observing Elon Musk’s relationship to End Wokeness. I’m already so damaged by what I’ve done so far, so I’m not sure whether I’ll continue with what I just described.

If you got this far, thank you! I hope this was interesting for you as the reader as it was for me to go through, damage notwithstanding.

#favorites