Today's Right-Wing Influencers Don't "Have It"

The right-wing grifter industrial complex is too crowded, and most of them simply don't have the juice.

As we all wade through the muddy waters of woke, post-woke, woke right, and dark woke (I say you all ought to take a woke to an unemployment office and get a damn job) I’ve noticed a new flavor of the week: the edgy young person attempting to start a right-wing grift by manufacturing a cancellation.

What got you canceled in 2020 won’t get you canceled today, so these people generally have to go all out. Think: using the N-word or F-word (think homophobic slur, not curse.) Doing Nazi salutes. Saying a joke so racist you couldn’t even excuse it with, “I like edgy humor.” And in the case of a DOGE employee’s (very recent) hateful tweets, and for that matter, Elon Musk himself, you might do some of those things and still keep your job.

But—at least right now—not everyone works for DOGE. And recently, a Twitter user reported she was fired from her job for a tweet. The tweet? Oh, just throwing up a Nazi salute, which was quickly explained by Community Notes:

I don’t know much about this person, but a quick peruse through her profile—which I’m not linking for this exact reason—is quite literally full of pro-Hitler content. Think the most deranged, obsessed Ariana Grande stan, but if Ariana Grande was Hitler. Lots of “the Holocaust didn’t happen but it also did happen and it was good.” She is such a prolific pro-Hitler poster that I actually find it surprising she managed to work any job without bringing up Hitler on a somewhat regular basis. She is not someone who did one misunderstood edgelord joke and got fired over it.

Now, it’s entirely possible that this person is a genuine Nazi who has no aspirations to be an influencer—a true labor of love, if you will. But as soon as she was fired (assuming that story was even true,) people were quick to console her with the fact that her story was similar to that of right-wing influencer Lilly Gaddis, who I covered in the very first issue of Many Such Takes. Gaddis fashioned herself a “tradwife” (but was, if I may speak, a bit too mouthy to qualify) who “casually” dropped the N-word a bunch of times in a TikTok video. She was summarily fired from her job—something I didn’t think tradwives had. Immediately, she attempted to parlay this extremely manufactured cancellation into an influencer gig. She spoke on Infowars and insisted her video was taken out of context, and that in the woke mob’s quest to brand everyone and everything as racist, she had been wrongfully accused. But she wasn’t backing down. “I'm the perfect racist for them, you know what I mean?” she said. “So, I think it's just willful ignorance (and) people taking things out of context and they have to have a villain. If I'm going to be the villain of the day, that's fine. I volunteer."

But people quickly noticed something about Gaddis—she just didn’t have the juice. And honestly, neither do most of the other right-wing influencers these days.