Soy Right: The Coal Awakens

Redditification comes for us all–even the Online Right

“The Anakin edits might turn the tides of the midterms.”

“It cannot be overstated how culturally significant Anakin poasting is. I dont think you could engineer a better anti-progressive memetic virus in lab if you tried.”

“This is not a meme anymore. It never was. We successfully saved Anakin, and possibly Star Wars itself. This is a monumental zeitgeist victory the likes we’ve not yet seen. Your posting matters. Our posting matters. Never stop. Protect our hero’s. Protect our myths. We will WIN!”

These are just some of the unironic viral posts about the Online Right’s latest obsession: Star Wars. This trend follows a month of obsessive posting about Harry Potter. Both topics have now made their way onto official Trump administration accounts and Elon Musk’s timeline. The midterms may be today, but apparently we’re focused on a culture war in a galaxy far, far away…

It may seem a frivolous conversation, but as someone who wrote a book on this subject, it’s my job to discuss these things. The Redditfication indicates the Online Right may be losing its edge and transforming into the “Soy Right”--a humorless, lame movement that resembles the worst aspects of woke, minus the cultural power of woke.

Soy Right is a term coined by leftists. Max Read defined it in a Substack post last year as “right-wingers who have adopted the sensitive, aggrieved victimhood pose and corny rhetorical and personal style that they have spent the last 10 years attributing to liberals.”

Soy is an appropriate adjective here, as Read explains:

“[S]oy” these days suggests less a abstractly feminine weakness and more a specific message-board archetype: grating, weepy sensitivity mixed with undignified over-enthusiasm and self-satisfied corniness--closer to a synonym for “cringe” or “Reddit” or “Funko” as adjectives than to “cuck” or “pajama boy”...

“Soy” still means “weak,” but with less emphasis on the physical more on the digital. In essence it’s a particular way of being bad at posting online: over-emotional, un-hip, sycophantic, sensitive, unoriginal, a rule-follower, reliant on stale formulations and hackneyed jokes. “Soy” is how the online right (always the vanguard of Trumpism) has perceived liberals since the Hillary Clinton campaign, against which they imagine and define themselves as “based”: Brave, authentic, unafraid, self-confident, cool.

The obsessive discourse over “Malfoid” and the Star Wars prequels demonstrates this Soy Right transformation. These topics have effectively replaced discussion about the midterms in the Online Right sphere. Like the lamest libs of a decade ago, several RWers now base their political consciousness on movie franchises made for kids. It’s a strange development, but it makes some sense in modern America.

Harry Potter and Star Wars provide a shared cultural language and reference points for Americans. Our culture is shaped far more by blockbusters and children’s books than by our history and high literature. It obviously marks a significant decline from the classical literature which public figures relied on in the past. These fundamentally liberal stories are primarily made for children. But it’s our cultural canon.

Nothing defined the lameness of 2010s libs more than their desire to describe politics and world events through references to Harry Potter and Star Wars. It established their inability to comprehend the world outside of references to kids’ movies. Seeing libs moved to tears over getting handed a Rebel Legion patch or unironically calling their movement “Dumbledore’s Army” made them a laughingstock. Libs sucked because they were too earnest, too humorless, too feminine, too sensitive, and too weak. They were soy.

Now this mentality has infected the Right.

Plenty of readers may not be aware of the Right’s obsession with Malfoid and the Star Wars prequels. Malfoid refers to a genderswapped version of Draco Malfoy, Harry Potter’s rival. The female version of this character now becomes Potter’s girlfriend. It is as weird and gay as it sounds. Star Wars memeing imagines Anakin Skywalker, the Empire, and Palpatine as the real heroes of the prequels. Anakin becomes a symbol of oppressed BASED Zoomers revolting against libtard Boomers. His transformation into Darth Vader is celebrated as what young men are turning into in response to society. Anakin could’ve been a normie, but now he’s an epic fascist in a mechanical outfit.

It’s not the first time RWers have relied on a popular franchise for memes and ideas. “Redpill” comes from The Matrix. Lord of the Rings memes have been a staple of right-wing posting for years. But there’s a level of earnestness and self-seriousness about this content that differentiates it from past memeing. People would just tweet a funny picture or post altering quotes from a movie and move on. There are several essays on how Malfoid represents the cultural renaissance of the West. This is a genderswapped fictional teen who many older men wish they dated. There’s one viral 8,000 word essay, possibly written by an LLM with zero wit or irony, about how the Right needs to embrace the “Sith pill” as a model for political engagement. Political and cultural analysis descends to the level of LiveJournal fanfiction.

This stuff is pure coal. Middle-aged men imagining they have a Malfoid gf or turn into Darth Vader is the exact same as libs LARPing as Han Solo or posting Sonic the Hedgehog declaring support for trans rights.

It’s defended on the basis that it’s a great way to reach the “Zoomers.” That’s delusional. Both Harry Potter and the Star Wars prequels are Millennial-core. Zoomers were too young to experience these products at their zenith. Like most things on the Online Right, the majority of content is produced by Millennials. “Chad Zoomers” aren’t yearning to date a genderswapped Draco Malfoy or writing long-ass treatises on why they should dress up as Darth Vader. Yet, our posters constantly appeal to this imaginary Chad Zoomer audience to defend their posts. “It’s what the kids like” is offered as justification and as an appeal to cool. But it’s not what the kids are into. The people posting about it are adults, with a sizable cohort who lost their hair back when Obama was president.

The Tumblr Left was at least the product of young people. The Soy Right is not as youthful as its adherents believe.

Some contend that trends are necessary to fight the culture war. But no one is getting redpilled by animated AI Malfoid videos or joining the Sith. This is content entirely to entertain an increasingly bored and out-of-touch internet Right bubble.

Past memes served to troll libs and make them point and sputter in rage. Having a self-serious journalist lose his mind over anime girls and Pepe the Frog exposed their extreme sensitivity and lack of humor. But libs are not upset about Malfoid and Anakin lionization. They mock it in the same way the Right used to ridicule libs who called Trump Voldemort. Nearly all outside observations of the Malfoid meme focus on how it resembles “genderqueer” lit and even makes right-wingers look like pedophiles (Malfoid would still be underage after all). Libs find it hilarious middle-aged right-wingers now imagine themselves as Darth Vader, arguing it demonstrates the Right’s misanthropy, love for cartoon villainry, and slavishness towards evil old men. They also note how it amusingly reverses their past mockery of Reddit culture.

The Online Right drew in young people because of its irreverence, authenticity, and bold mockery of liberal authority. It was a breath of fresh air from the staleness, conformity, and effeminacy of “official” culture. But the Soy Right eliminates the freshness and draws the sphere closer to official Internet culture, making it far lamer to the “Chad Zoomers” the Right wishes to draw in.

It goes hand-in-hand with some right-wingers’ desire to appear as victims. The weakest part of Max Read’s definition of the Soy Right is its emphasis on the sensitive and aggrieved victimhood pose. Leftists regularly claim that the Right pointing out the dangers of mass immigration, anti-white racism, and political correctness are somehow victimhood narratives. It’s an asinine take. However, some parts of the Right now want to embrace victimhood morality under the mistaken belief that presenting ourselves as marginalized losers will convince society to take our side. It misunderstands that victimhood morality explicitly sees white men as the villains and excludes them from its privileges. But that hasn’t stopped some right-wingers from adopting the victimhood appeals of the campus snowflakes of the previous decade. Examples of left-wing extremism are now more likely to cause hysteric hyperventilation and claims that “words are violence” among right-wingers than fearless mockery.

The emerging victimhood complex within the Online Right is nowhere near as damaging as the Woke Left’s version. But it does lead to soy posting and diminishes the image of cool confidence the Right seeks to uphold.

So how did a Soy Right emerge? Some of it is a problem of growth.

The Online Right is far bigger than it was a decade ago, and many of the “redpilled” are semi-normies who once loved Reddit and Marvel. They share the same cultural tastes and humor as their peers who unironically called Trump Voldemort and imagined Democrats as the Rebellion. Anakin posters have different politics from Redditors, but they still have the same soy spirit.

Elon Musk exemplifies this. The world’s richest man turning into a right-wing “extremist” is a massive benefit, but it comes with downsides. Musk is spiritually a Redditor. He loves corny jokes and capeshit. He also likes to engage in hysterics and claim he’s a victim. X is shaped to reflect his own tastes. While it’s great that RW content now dominates the platform, it’s often of the soy variety to satisfy the Elon algorithm.

X further exacerbates the problem by resembling an echo chamber. In the past, the Online Right sharpened itself by trolling prominent liberals. Since libs have fled X, it’s now mostly newly-redpilled Millennials and Gen Xers talking among themselves within a bubble. Old Twitter was both younger and less insulated. It gave you a wider range of opinions and perspectives. The X algorithm only gives you content from your particular sphere. It’s how people convinced themselves Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey would bomb. Reddit tastes come to predominate–without any concern for how gay it will look to outside observers–because what matters is what the recently-redpilled bubble will think. Since the bubble is quite large, posters can delude themselves into thinking they’re reaching the masses. But it only stays within the bubble and general society ignores it.

We’re now more like the normies and Redditors we mocked because more of them are into the Online Right. Extreme corniness may just be the price to pay for popularity. Dumbledore cringe also didn’t stop the woke from changing America.

But this is all emerging at the same time the Right is getting more blackpilled. Today’s elections could deliver a historic defeat for the Republican Party. Much of the right-wing sphere takes a grim view of the political future. The DSA is ascendant while Online Right-backed candidates struggle to get double-digits in primaries. There’s a feeling the right-wing moment may be coming to an end. I don’t share that feeling, but some of the soy posting is motivated by this. People feel politics are pointless, so they might as well devote themselves to fanfiction and Sith LARPing. It gets great engagement and makes people feel “seen”, and that’s what’s most important to some.

The Right has a compulsion to retreat to fantasy in the face of adversity. If we lose an election, our guys confidently predict a super BASED dictator/revolution is on the horizon to cope with it. Usually this fantasizing relates to harebrained political schemes and scenarios that will never come to fruition. Now, it’s about how a genderswapped Harry Potter character will fall in love with you after you just turned into Darth Vader. One can forgive overly imaginative third graders coming up with this stuff, but it’s another story when the source is a balding 45-year-old man.

If the Online Right perceives itself as politically irrelevant, it won’t try to organize intentional communities or focus on cultural creation. It could just turn into Tumblr and fixate on childish impulses to play with Marvel characters. (There’s still plenty of time and space for our sphere to start doing Avengers fanfiction.) The Soy Right could get a lot worse if our guys think elections are pointless.

Soyness may be an inevitable part of internet culture. One man’s kek can be another man’s coal. The most popular online content is often extremely cringe to the more “enlightened” parts of the World Wide Web. Just look at MrBeast and IShowSpeed. Soyness may not be bad for a YouTuber, but it can spell death for a political brand aiming to win over alienated youth. Few young men wanted to associate with resistance libs over their extreme corniness and shrill sentimentality.

It’s why “No Marvel” is part of the Greerhead Pledge. Resisting the soy starts at home, and one needs to avoid these lame cultural products to avoid becoming a Redditor. It’s also partially why I took “No NFL” out of the pledge. If guys aren’t watching sports, they’re prone to get into soy culture. The NFL is a much better thing to follow than Harry Potter fanfic.

The Elon takeover of X has proven a tremendous benefit to us. But it also awakened the soy force within us. It’s why you shouldn’t let the X bubble consume you. There’s a world beyond the RW X echo chamber of stale memes and histrionic blackpills–and it’s not interested in genderswapped romantasy for middle-aged men.

Order Scott Greer’s new book, “Whitepill: The Online Right and the Making of Trump’s America,” from this link.