Andrew Prokop
speaker
268 appearances
9 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 15 Sep
Andrew Prokop’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
This is something that had spread among the kind of conspiratorial online right that the government was sitting on all these files that will prove that Jeffrey Epstein, the sex trafficker who died in 2019, had blackmail material on prominent Democrats and celebrities. And she ended up trying to make a big splash out of this and handing material on Epstein to online right influencers.
And it turned out there was absolutely nothing new in those documents, and it ended up being a total embarrassment.
But there's also many more serious policies and issues that reflect this influence. I'd say that one through line uniting a lot of what the new Trump administration has done is this unified effort to kind of attack what they see as the power centers of progressivism in an effort to roll back wokeness and what they see as progressive cultural dominance.
So you see that in things like funding cutoffs to universities. universities' limits on their research dollars. And you see it in policies aimed at threatening investigations of nonprofits and corporations and colleges that use affirmative action or DEI policies that the administration doesn't like. It's basically a whole set of different issues.
These are folks who use the word woke and don't define it, which makes it tricky to pin down what they're attacking exactly. But you just ran through a list of things, including universities, including certain sectors of the government. And the attack aimed at these places is what exactly? These guys say... You're doing what wrong?
So I view the online right as essentially an alliance of posters with varying different interests and policy priorities. But they were kind of united in what they saw as combat against the woke. This shared resentment of what these online right people saw as progressive cultural dominance. In Trump's first term, the online right was kind of disreputable. They were viewed as sort of weirdos.
They weren't in the halls of power in the Republican Party. But there was a real shift that happened after Trump lost the 2020 election and under the Biden administration. When more people who had... You know, some misgivings, some qualms about progressive cultural issues, about the Great Awokening, felt freed up to focus on that more and became more open about being resentful about this.
This includes Elon Musk. He stayed out of politics for the most part in Trump's first term. But under Biden, he became increasingly radicalized and vocal online about wanting to stop what he called the— The worldwide virus. And lots of other prominent figures in Silicon Valley were also part of this trend. Even J.D.
Vance, he was kind of politically neutral in 2020 and fell more and more into this online world in the 2020s.
Broadly, what are these beliefs of theirs that they're trying to protect or that they feel are under attack?
Well, you know, it's different for different people. But, you know, there's a segment of the online right that is kind of just open racists. They want to stand up for white predominance in America. This is sort of, you know, the alt-right. They're very willing to say racist, offensive, politically incorrect things. This kind of blurs over to other people who
say such things, but then they argue that they're just saying them ironically. This is kind of something that we saw in the new administration related to a young engineer on Elon Musk's team, Marco Elez. It turned out that just a few months before joining Doge, this guy had made various racist posts online under a pseudonym, including... I was racist before it was cool and normalize Indian hate.
You know, in the old Trump administration, that would probably have gotten him fired. And it did eventually at first in the new Trump administration. But then he became a kind of cause celebre among the online right. J.D.
The idea that people who make racist posts online are on your team, that's part of the online right culture. They want to be allowed to say offensive, racist things. They think that woke censoriousness and groupthink went so far. You used to be able to say all kinds of things and now you can't anymore. You got to watch what you say. You might get canceled. And who are the people that are...
imposing this oppressive censorship. It's the media. It's progressives. They are the enemy. They are the enemy. And as you can see in what Vance said, you know, siding with the media is worse than trying to fire a racist from your government.
You write that these ideas have led to policies, actual policy that governs how you and me and every other American lives our lives. What policies would you point to here, Andrew?
I think probably one of the clearest examples of this influence of the online right was an executive order that Trump released in his first week which was anti-DEI and anti-affirmative action.
And the specifics of this order are noteworthy because it rolled back an executive order from all the way back in 1965 issued by President Lyndon B. Johnson that has stood since then, that what it essentially did was it required that federal contractors make efforts to employ more women and people of color, that they practice affirmative action. And
You know, every previous Republican president has let this stand. But in recent years, as the online right has been exploring various theories about wokeness, about how they could fight back against it, one of their theories was about this specific executive order on affirmative action. They said this needs to be reversed.
That has been the obsession of one particular writer on the online right for several years now. He's been hammering this drum again and again. His name is Richard Hanania. He argued that the roots of wokeness were in federal civil rights law and specifically in this affirmative action executive order and that –
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