How the Internet Made the Far-Right

When Politico published racist and antisemitic messages from a Young Republican group chat in October, the surprise was as much who was talking as what they said. These weren’t anons who’d been unmasked as political operatives. They were already inside the machine, joking that they “love Hitler”—under their government names, in writing, in an ostensibly professional space. Their tone was casual, the jokes lifted from an online dialect so pervasive that for the already terminally online, it hardly registered as shocking. Offensive, sure. Shocking? No.