Anons of Hope and Glory?

Taking their cue from MAGA, the time of the British right-wing anons is at hand (PLUS: special free trial offer!)

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Spare a thought for anonymous right-wing users of X (formerly known as Twitter) over in the USA.

For the past decade, irreverent anonymous accounts, colloquially known as “anons” and sometimes acquiring millions of followers via their "poasting”, have injected huge amounts of energy into the MAGA movement. They operated anonymously because their ideas were unacceptable to the cultural consensus. Plenty of it was puerile and conspiratorial. Some of it was downright racist and neo-fascist. And it seems obvious that the long-term maintenance of a high-profile online anonymous persona is more often than not cancerous to the soil. Just this week, a popular anonymous Twitter “tradwife” known as @PatriarchyHannah, who claimed to be a mother of 14 and married to a man who built his own town, was revealed to be a divorced singleton who lives with her parents.

And yet more of the anons’ contributions than their critics like to admit were insightful and coherent. At their best, America’s right-wing anons embodied a well-deserved rejection of both the political establishment and the legacy media which refused to scrutinise them. Many attempt to write the anons’ work off as mere "shitposting" and "edgelording". But the history books will surely show that, like it or not, the Overton window of American politics was shifted in no small part by keyboard warriors with frogs in their profile pictures posting “spicy memes”. The anons themselves even like to imagine now that J.D. Vance, the first Millennial Vice-President, might have once lurked in their midst.

And yet, as Donald Trump has rained blow after blow on the decadent US establishment via his Executive Orders over the past month, one wonders if the American anons haven't shed the tears of Alexander the Great. For there are no more worlds left to conquer.

Although Trump, in a very real sense, remains "anti-establishment" despite being ensconced in the Oval Office, the fact is this: the anons won. Sooner or later MAGA will be the establishment—Lord willing, a better one than that which it replaced. But the point still stands. The transgressive frisson of being an American anon will surely dissipate soon enough, especially since some of the biggest anons, either of their own volition or through the efforts of left-wing journalists, have had their identities revealed and actually done pretty well out of it. Those who built their profiles critiquing "the Regime" (which deserved nearly every second of it, to be clear) are now finding themselves welcome in the corridors of power. It's to their credit that some are willing to walk the walk now, but one can't help but think of The Dark Knight: "you either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain."

For conservatives in the UK, watching the US right-wing at the minute feels a bit like peeping over the wall from East Germany in the late 1980s. For all the faults of MAGAism (the sexual profligacy of some of its leaders, Trump’s support of IVF, the list goes on), we can't believe how good they've got it. We see Trump dismantling the trans lobby and forcefully deporting foreign criminals by the cartload; meanwhile, Wes Streeting drags his feet with piecemeal reforms to gender-affirming "care" and Yvette Cooper is pledging to replace all kitchen knives with wooden spoons, or something. This is, apparently, what it looks like to have the Grown Ups back in charge.

Many in the UK (including my fellow British evangelicals) lull themselves to sleep at night with the assurance that the UK has managed to avoid a "US-style culture war" in recent decades. This vanity, however, seems destined for the ever mounting bonfire of exhausted centrist bromides. For the time of the British right-wing anon is at hand.