Jan 2, 2026, 11:30 AM UTC Elon Musk speaks during an America PAC town hall on October 26, 2024, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Samuel Corum/Getty Images Inside the war tearing the Heritage Foundation and the American right apart All this helped change right-wing norms and standards on what is acceptable to say publicly, to the dawning horror of some in the movement. After being bombarded with anti-Indian attacks in October, conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza — not exactly the most politically correct guy around — wrote: “In a career spanning 40 years, I have never encountered this type of rhetoric. The Right never used to talk like this. So who on our side has legitimized this type of vile degradation?” Rufo, for his part, is not exactly uniformly opposed to racially charged conspiracy theories: He happily spread the accusation that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Ohio last year. But he’s been perturbed by three ideological trends he saw gaining steam among parts of the right: racialism, antisemitism, and conspiracism. These trends have only worsened as the year continued — for instance, in the conspiracy theories over the murder of Charlie Kirk. Lately, Rufo has pointed the finger at X’s algorithm as a main culprit, complaining that “Musk’s decision to pay content creators has further detached reach from quality” and urged him to make changes on the platform. Longtime conservative blogger Razib Khan expressed similar concerns, recently writing that he’s “starting to worry reading X and seeing the impact of youtube influencers that we’re going to lose because our arguments are starting to sound very stupid.” This shift, he added, represents “a major decrease in IQ.” The Trump administration’s X obsession – and the attempt to reunite the online right X has grown more extreme amid a remarkable context: The second Trump administration is the most online in US history, with many current top officials positively obsessed with how they are viewed among the online right, and turning to X first to assess that. Indeed, Trump administration policy seems to be driven in part by Trump’s own personalistic whims, in part by White House adviser Stephen Miller’s anti-immigrant fanaticism, and in part by various officials’ independent attempts to try and impress online right influencers. The examples are legion. The continuing saga over the “Epstein files” began as Attorney General Pam Bondi’s botched attempt to pander to right-wing influencers. Top FBI officials Kash Patel and Dan Bongino are chronically online and obsessed with criticism from right-wing influencers over their supposed failures to reveal deep-state conspiracies. FCC chair Brendan Carr’s threats against Jimmy Kimmel were made as tough talk to impress a right-wing streamer. And Vice President JD Vance is the most online of all, driven to defend the honor of racist shitposters so long as they’re on his side. This continued obsession with pleasing the fringiest figures on the right does not seem to have been very successful at making Trump popular — his approval rating is mired at about 42 percent, with 54 percent disapproving of his job performance. Yet his administration has plowed ahead with its base-pleasing strategy regardless, either mistaking X for ordinary voter sentiment, or thinking X is more important to their future career prospects than ordinary voters are. Rabbit holes, conspiracy theories, and bigotry are spreading on X with no end in sight, and alienating the less extreme people who are exposed to it. But right-wingers’ hope is that they can restore their frayed unity by redirecting their energy to targets they can all agree on. And they’ve had some success on that in recent days, in right-wing outrage about fraud allegedly committed by Somali immigrants against Minnesota’s welfare programs. It was in fact Rufo who helped focus the right’s attention on this long-public scandal, and a young conservative YouTube influencer who helped it go mega-viral in recent days. On this topic, they could all agree on who the bad guys were: African immigrants, Democratic Gov. Tim Walz, and the media. It was like old times. Can it last? See More: