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washington’s biggest problem these days isn’t partisanship. It’s that far-right lawmakers are living in their own reality.
Extremist Republicans have broken off from the rest of their party to create an alternate universe in which they’re in charge, empowered by Donald Trump’s followers. This disconnect is fueling an internal GOP fight in the US House of Representatives that has the federal government careening toward a shutdown at midnight on Sunday, October 1. As he claws and scrapes in an attempt to negotiate federal spending legislation, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy seems to be realizing that his rank-and-file Republicans now occupy a different universe than everyone else.
“This is a whole new concept of individuals that just want to burn the whole place down,” an exasperated McCarthy told the congressional press corps last week. “That doesn’t work.”
McCarthy’s far-right foes say their bomb-throwing ways are working. They’re being rewarded in kind. With the fifth slimmest majority in history, McCarthy can afford to lose only four GOP votes. If he reaches across the aisle, his speakership will likely be challenged. While his Republican agitators don’t have any replacement waiting in the wings, the speaker hasn’t dared negotiate with Democrats.
The meme-centric culture that swept former president Donald Trump into power is now increasingly mainstream in the Republican Party. On the surface, McCarthy’s struggle is to persuade an estimated seven to 10 conservatives to avert a government shutdown. In reality, the speaker’s battling against a nameless army of tens of thousands of angry antiestablishment voices whose frustrations have increasingly become Republican orthodoxy and mirrored by the powerhouses of conservative media—many of whom remain niche figures, even as they’re followed by hundreds of thousands of fans.
“We’re beyond the alt-right and the fringe-right. The fantasy-right is making policy,” former Virginia congressman Denver Riggleman tells WIRED. “It’s the fantasy-right. It is a cult. It is a religious belief system. It is a way of living. It’s that simple. It is the party.”
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McCarthy’s paradox is the same one facing the Republican Party and America’s two-party system as a whole: Which reality does he govern in? While he campaigned for Speaker of the House with Trump’s backing, will he—can he—govern from Planet Trump? Like all party leaders who preceded him, McCarthy is tasked with leading a diverse, divided, yet ultimately United States. That’s dismissed as “normie” nonsense in Trump’s angry, amped, and very online GOP. A few of Trump’s biggest supporters in Congress, some of which have more social media followers than the speaker himself, are demanding McCarthy embrace their new minority-rule vision for America.
Under Trump, the far-right Freedom Caucus proved loyal lieutenants who held the line for his border wall funding for 34 days on Capitol Hill. That period stretched from the waning days of Paul Ryan’s speakership in December 2018 through the kickoff of Nancy Pelosi’s second act as speaker in January 2019—and holds the dubious record as the US’s longest shutdown in history. It ended without Trump getting his wall. But the former president has also remade the Republican Party in his own image, one that party leaders have tried to mirror, remaking themselves in the process. Since recapturing the House, Trump’s ranks of loyal soldiers in Congress have expanded. Still a relatively small band, they’re emboldened now, especially since Trump indictments stacked up this summer.
“Congress is in charge of money and everything for the government, and Congress should be in charge of funding special counsels. Those are my red lines,” Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican, told a group of congressional reporters.
Greene’s other top demand is impeaching President Joe Biden. McCarthy has already launched an inquiry. With Trump polling popularly in the GOP, McCarthy and other Republican leaders continue to float along as the party moves rightward.
“It’s polling. They’re willing to absolutely destroy their own integrity [and] have no moral baseline in order to spout cross-tabs from a poll,” says Riggleman, a former member of the Freedom Caucus.
McCarthy’s been trying to negotiate around the impasse using the traditional means of persuasion and promises. He may be negotiating with the wrong people, though, because today’s rank-and-file serve different masters. These days, what was once confined to 4chan has become normalized in the GOP, with some elected officials on the new right seemingly fine with torching the party as the internet has demanded. Social media screens have come to life on Capitol Hill in part because MAGAism is now packaged as a lifestyle.
There are right-wing alternatives to seemingly everything. Patriot Mobile boasts being “America's only Christian conservative wireless provider.” Tusk Search is an alternative to Google, labeling itself a “free speech web browser with [an] anti-censorship newsfeed.” Public Square directs conservatives to “patriotic businesses” and has become the go-to app for Republicans like Donald Trump Jr., who also launched MxM News, an alternative news aggregator for Republicans, earlier this year. The Right Stuff, a dating app, aims to Make Conservatives Sexy Again. Owning the libs, and the establishment, has morphed into an identity.
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Those ventures are all pushed by the stars of today’s new conservative media universe, which includes the likes of anti-politically-correct online spaces, like Truth Social, Rumble, and Parlor. Elon Musk’s makeover of Twitter (now X) into his personal selective-free-speech-absolutist site has made it feel like a safe place for many of those who used to hide in the shadows.
Over the weekend, former Trump strategist Steve Bannon had Colorado congresswoman Lauren Boebert on his show War Room, which now airs live on Newsmax, and thanked his audience for empowering her and other Freedom Caucus members during their time on Capitol Hill.
“You are also part of this fight. You’re just not some passive person listening to talk radio or watching some TV or streaming,” Bannon encouraged his audience. “No, you’re actually part of this, and we know you are because you’re kind of the driving force in this. You’re the protagonist, this audience.”
With a supportive audience outside of Washington, DC, Boebert’s not looking for ways to help her party while she’s there. That was on display when she and other Freedom Caucus members held out their support for McCarthy’s speakership in January, gleefully turning the routine start of a Congress into a 15-round slugfest that ended with them obtaining a myriad of McCarthy promises—from a vote on term limits to releasing the January 6, 2021, Capitol footage publicly. The demands have only expanded since then.
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“We were called domestic terrorists by members of our own party, simply by wanting reforms in Congress,” Boebert told Bannon. “No one likes the way Congress operates, and so my colleagues and I took a stand—a 15-round stand—to make fundamental historic changes to the way this place operates, and right now we are at the breaking point on one of those promises that we said needed to be kept.”
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What “reality” means on the right largely depends on which social and media ecosystems one inhabits, even as the party is more unified than ever in its anti-Biden fever.
If you tuned in to most Fox News shows last week, the government funding battle probably seemed like an afterthought, if it made the cut at all. Instead, viewers were bombarded with stories of an “invasion” at the southern border.
Some Fox News hosts like Sean Hannity are pro-shutdown. “Take a stand,” he encouraged House Republicans on his radio show on September 19, while others, like host Laura Ingraham, make taking a stand against Biden and Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer the only moral option. As Ingraham casually told viewers last week, Democrats “hate America so much—our tradition, our history, our culture—that they prefer to start over with millions of poor migrants.”
The rightward shift has been decades in the making. Former congressman Tom Davis, a Republican from northern Virginia, was first sent to Washington in 1995. Then-speaker Newt Gingrich and the GOP had just recaptured the House for the first time in 40 years. “You didn’t even have Fox in 1995. It has fragmented everything. You’re in a world now where bad behavior gets rewarded, where Marjorie Taylor Greene raises more money than a committee chairman because she raises it online,” Davis tells WIRED. “That’s the problem, and it makes governance very hard.”
Republicans also controlled the Senate in 1995. The party was itching for a fight then, after having endured a political drought that stretched from 1955 through 1995. “It was unified at that point,” Davis says. “Everybody wanted the same thing, and Republicans decided to stay together, and that’s how we were.”
The tides turn quickly in today’s GOP. After he officiated a former staffer’s same-sex marriage, Riggleman, the libertarian-leaning former Freedom Caucus member from Virginia, lost his seat in a nationalized local primary that overflowed with distortions and lies. The vitriol was fueled, in part, by QAnon, whose members targeted Riggleman after he spoke out against far-right conspiracy theorists.
“Disinformation has a better return on investment than any other data-specific type of activity. I think it’s massive,” Riggleman says. “I experienced it. I mean, if you think about what happened to me, they won. QAnon beat me … Bad guys win, and they don’t think they’re the bad guys.”
A former US intelligence official, Riggleman was tapped by the special January 6 committee to be a senior technical adviser, helping to scour the recesses of the dark (and not-so-dark) web for any digital chatter the FBI might have missed in the lead-up to the attack on the Capitol. He has since launched the Riggleman Information and Intelligence Group, which advertises itself as a “boutique firm specializing in open source intelligence and e-discovery.”
One of Riggleman’s first clients was Hunter Biden, the president’s legally beleaguered son, whose team sought Riggleman’s services because they wanted to understand where the unrelenting streams of digital accusations, threats, memes, and falsehoods were coming from. Many of the same accounts hammering Hunter Biden have been encouraging this small band of House Republicans to go to war with their own party leaders.
“These people are nuts,” Riggleman says. “And, by the way, crazy has more energy than sanity.”
After losing his seat and watching the Capitol be overrun on January 6, Riggleman says there’s no time for passivity and patience.
“You need to go after the disinformation, and you need to have people brave enough to call it out,” Riggleman says. “Because I don't want to get rid of the First Amendment, but if people are using the First Amendment for danger, weaponization, and stupidity, the people who are sane need to use their First Amendment [rights] as a wrecking ball. You gotta destroy these people.”
