The Rise of the Online Villains

Twitter Becomes Real Life as the Posters We All Love to Hate Head to the White House

I remember the first time I really noticed Laura Loomer - it was the Fall of 2018 and she had just handcuffed herself to the front door of the Twitter offices in Manhattan. This was purportedly due to her ban from the platform for Islamaphobia, a lifelong passion of hers - but Laura had (hilariously) only handcuffed herself to one of the two large swinging front doors, totally defeating the point of the whole exercise and simply making a scene to mostly disinterested onlookers and annoyed Twitter employees. About a year later, I was working for a client (not Twitter) on a project out of the exact same building on W17th St, and on the day where the fire inspection supervisor gave the office his annual fire safety talk - he brought it up. The actual New York City Fire Inspector came into our regular ass office and told us to watch out for Laura Loomers. I had to explain to several middle-aged colleagues what the fuck he was talking about, which was both strange and uncomfortable. It was the first time I had really experienced the characters I knew from Twitter leaping off the timeline and into my real life, but certainly not the last.

Smash cut to 2024, and Laura Loomer is flying around the country with Trump on his campaign jet, advising the (now) president-elect on whatever insane shit she’s obsessed with lately (the good money is still Islamaphobia), rubbing his malformed dick through his Dockers, and showing him Liveleak vore clips. There was a momentary backlash to her presence on the campaign trail that caused Trump to temporarily distance himself from Laura, but that was pretty obviously an optics issue for the campaign rather than any real problem Trump has with her, so there’s little to stop him from rekindling the relationship now that the election is over.

And it’s not just Loomer. The freaks and psychopaths we spent the last decade or so taunting in the quote tweets have slowly slithered their way into almost every organ of the conservative power structure. The Manhattan Institute currently has anti-woke crusader and posting addict Chris Rufo as its mascot, leading the “investigative” wing of the storied arch-conservative project. Infamously ant-riddled and abhorrently-hideous gaming blogger Ian Miles Cheong has become a mainstay of the Elon-era Twitterscape, regularly interacting and influencing the men who will soon make up Trump’s cabinet. Unmarried 48 year old woman Chaiya Raichik (LibsOfTikTok) has become maybe the most important conservative voice of the past few years, chiding other women for not getting married and having children in between directing various hospital bomb threats and child-stalkings. And let us not forget the biggest ratfuck poster of them all - Elon Musk - is about to be in charge of making sure poor children return to the coal mines for an epic salary of $420.69 a year.

The 2014-2020 era of posting felt like its own thing - speaking on politics and culture but with a healthy distance from both. The people who had outsized voices on Twitter were rarely anywhere near the actual halls of power, which tended to be occupied by folks who were too old to have developed a natural talent for the posting arts, and looked at social media as a bit of a sideshow rather than a genuine political space. Even Twitter’s founder Jack Dorsey was a dogshit poster, using his account mostly for mechanically-constructed product update announcements or the occasional note about leaving for Thailand on an Ayahuasca and dry-rub masturbation retreat. But at some point in the past four years, that dynamic changed. Part of it is the conservative lead on conquering new media platforms, which is significant (look at the leading posts any given day on Facebook or the top podcasts on Spotify and you’ll get the picture). But another huge part of it is simply that native-born posters are finally aging into the realm of political viability, and (unlike the hospice-bound Democrats), Republicans have mostly embraced the young guard of their party in a real and functional way.

There were endless clues as to the influence of the Posting-Right throughout Trump’s campaign, which seemingly accelerated as we got closer and closer to the actual election. You could see their grubby little handprints all over the “Peanut the Squirrel” mania that gripped conservatives in the week runup to November 5th, on the panic that surrounded the “Haitian migrants eating cats” thing, on pretty much every single thing that Trump or his surrogates talked about for the past six months. The old-school Republican messengers are mostly on the outs, relegated to sexually harassing teen staffers over at the Lincoln Project or simply slumping off into Consultancy World. They are being aggressively replaced with a different kind of guy, and unfortunately for anyone who was on Twitter for the past two administrations - we probably already know them pretty well.

One thing (amongst many) that should scare us about a second Trump term is that the former-and-future president will have literally zero motivation to care what people think about who he surrounds himself with. In his first term, he (or someone in his administration) made a point to staff the White House with mostly normie-style conservatives who seemed relatively palatable to the broader electorate. There was obviously the occasional reality-show-character like Omarosa, but those were vastly outnumbered by McMasters and Mulvaneys. You can tell that Trump didn’t much care for these guys, which is assuredly due to the fact that despite their deep evilness, they did not sufficiently blow smoke up his ass at all times. In imagining who Trump with surround himself with in his second term, it’s not hard to guess who that might be: Loyalist Posters.

I won’t wrap this up by pretending I really have any idea about what to do here. The Dems should have been investing in this sort of thing a decade ago, and now it may be too late. Democrats are intensely averse to allowing the party to evolve in any sort of meaningful way, which is why you have Clinton World running campaigns in 2024 instead of anyone who has the font size on their phone lower than 72 pt. In an ideal scenario, the left party in this country would be embracing online personalities like Hasan Piker (who just broke Twitch records with his election night stream) into the fold to help guide the message for the next election - but that would require ceding control of the party platform and message and that is a price party leaders seem totally unwilling to pay. What if they say something critical of one of our donors? What if they criticize Israel? What if they ask for me to stop trading stocks while in office? Can’t have that. So they astroturf safe and approved social content, which usually ends up looking like the corniest Twitter post you’ve ever seen or its another podcast from some 48 year old Obama admin alums. Which both suck.

So what we are left with is a really awful representation of the posting landscape: the absolute most insane, most shameless, and most villainous posters are the ones moving up to the big leagues. The ones we all laughed at in 2016 and 2017 and 2018 are the ones having the last laugh. They are in the Capitol, they are in the White House, and they are on K Street - while we are all still just hanging out on the TL. And the bad news is, it’s only going to get worse from here. These posters have found themselves in a world where their audience and their voice have a real value to their political elites, and they are going to keep clawing their way up that ladder until someone pushes them off.