the #soyright

chronically online rambling about squirrel A.I. art, marvel memes, harambe, gamergate's legacy, reddit catchphrases, and *checks notes* the online Right on X.com (the everything app)

The so-called alt-right, the sneering trolls of the 2010s, have become the digital anti-woke scolds of the 2020s. The mannerisms associated with a largely bygone era of pussyhat Democrat politics, the “soy” digital affect, now belong just as much to the online Right.

Emboldened by Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, and the striking success of hard-right podcasts, radio shows, and T.V. news (as Mark Cuban recently remarked, “fringe right-wing media” is now more popular than mainstream media), the online Right’s proverbial “soy face” has never been more apparent. The chuds are starting to sound like libs — not in content, but in form.

“Soy” began as an online insult for supposedly emasculated progressive men but has since come to designate something broader. As is often the case, what started as obscure 4chan lingo has become more or less popular internet slang.

Soy soon came to be associated with the “soy face,” the exaggerated open-mouthed awkward smile often seen in the selfies of post-hipster millennial men. Over time, the usage of soy evolved from describing men feminized by soy products to a particular manner of presenting oneself and finally to a distinctive style of online posting. Right-wing trolls mocked and contrasted themselves against the “soy speak” of their ideological opponents that dominated mainstream discourse.

The “soy post” may seem political, but the politics are not the point. The point is to posture, scold, and meme. This is a large part of what is so distasteful about soy, whether Left or Right. The excessive consoomer-ism, awkward use of profanity, bad politics, hatred for sportsball, and Reddit-isms are just the cherries on top of the soy pudding of online politics. The discourse of the late 2010s liberal elite vanguard reflected the ubiquity of their ideology in PMC-coded online spaces. Today’s right-wing soy speak is a direct result of the failures of those politics and the resulting ascendancy of reactionary ideology in formerly liberal online spaces.

Of course, this is not to say there are no differences between the two. The point is that they mirror each other. Remember the particular way that #Resist liberals used “bad words” to dunk on Republicans? This is how Trumpers treat saying “retard” to own the libs. Remember Gritty, the hockey mascot turned leftist meme icon? This week, prominent MAGA supporters have attempted to turn an euthanized squirrel into an anti-woke symbol. They are doing Harambe in 2024 to own the libs. None of this makes sense to the average person; it is purely online posturing, whether left or right. Perhaps the only striking difference between liberal and conservative soy is in its aesthetics; the latter has added A.I. art slop and playing dolls with wojaks to its repertoire of shitty memes.

Beyond just recreating the annoying way that liberals post, right wingers have begun to mirror the exact same pitfalls and splits that the online Left fell into. As Sam Kriss pointed out, the online Right has found itself mired in constant debates about universalism versus identity politics, weird race-obsessed politics, gender wars, and trying to get people fired from their jobs because of their posts. No wonder they have started to post like libs.

This framing of the Right’s shift to soy should not diminish the fact that they have been annoying since the beginning. Occupy Wall Street is often cited as the origin of the contemporary liberal left and undoubtedly foreshadowed many of its most annoying and counter-productive tendencies. Say what you will about Occupy, but at the very least, it was concretely political (even if confused about its exact politics). On the other hand, while almost all of the Republican base is blissfully ignorant of this fiasco, much of online right-wing rhetoric can be traced back to “Gamergate,” an outcry against feminism in video games. This explains a lot. The soy has been present from the start, but now it is plain to see.

The soy from the online Right even occasionally leaks into real politics. Look no further than the Trump campaign’s embrace of Elon Musk and J.D. Vance. If you are as online as I am, you may have noticed a particularly annoying new demographic: guys who look like they would be a “White Dude for Harris” yet are constantly posting about Trump because they are pissed Baby Yoda is woke. They may not be the demographic that won Trump the Presidency (inflation definitely motivated more people to vote than a dead squirrel), but it is remarkable that the campaign catered to them.

When Trump won in 2016, CNN articles about Pepe and 4chan frightened normie liberals. That era of online MAGA counter-culture is over. The symbols of Trumpism 2.0 are A.I. art, shitcoins, and Elon Musk jumping like a schoolgirl.