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With the well-deserved collapse of public trust in the mainstream media, there has been a concomitant rise in popularity of online influencers as sources of news and opinion. The upside is, there is a lot to be said for giving a massive platform to independent journalists such as Andy Ngo and Michael Shellenberger. But there has also been an alarmingly high number of social media influencers on the Right amassing millions of followers but delivering everything from misinformation to conspiracy theories to propaganda.

The two most notable examples are, of course, Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. When Carlson was fired from Fox News two years ago, conservatives including me were giddy that his independent platform would bring hope and change for a fearless conservative voice, and help bury the obsolete propagandists of the mainstream media. Instead, he has become the biggest disappointment for conservatives since Supreme Court Justice John Roberts. Carlson, with over 16 million X followers, now shills for every Western-hating Islamic power from Qatar to Iran, and supportively platforms subversives like former kickboxer Andrew Tate and “historian” Darryl Cooper (pictured above), who asserts that Hitler was the peacemaker and Churchill the villain of World War II.

Although a few like myself saw Candace Owens from the beginning as nothing more than a glib, low IQ grifter, she plummeted from Turning Point USA and Prager U stardom into a raging antisemite with a conspiracy nut’s shaky grasp of history, so much so that the Horowitz Freedom Center felt compelled to post a statement denouncing her and regretting having boosted her career early on. She has nearly seven million followers on X.

Other examples abound.

The Hodge Twins, with over 3 million followers, have also chosen the antisemitic path of Candace Owens and embraced an absolutely brainless defense of our Middle Eastern enemies. On Sunday they posted this clueless doozy: “Anybody ever thought maybe these Middle East countries wouldn’t hate us if we would have just left them the fuck alone years ago?” Seriously, how is it possible to be this uninformed about the 1400-year-old jihad being waged against Christians and Jews, or the boiling, existential enmity Iran has held for America since 1979 – uninformed and arrogant to boot?

Jack Posobiec is no better. With only slightly fewer followers than the Hodge Twin grifters, the Senior Editor of Human Events told Steve Bannon recently, “Every Middle East War ends with Christians slaughtered, by one side or the other. All these areas used to be Christian, they’re all slaughtered, and you say, ‘Oh, we pray for them,’ or you could maybe not start a war and get them all killed.”

The truth is that those Christian communities all throughout the Middle East were almost wiped out long before we went after bin Laden in Afghanistan. They were the victims, not of revenge for American boots on the ground in the Middle East, but of the Islamic imperative to wage genocide against Christians – a genocide still ongoing in the Middle East and in Africa as well. Christians in Nigeria, for example, aren’t being slaughtered because of anything America did but because Islamic fundamentalists there burn with a theologically-mandated, murderous hatred of infidels. But that doesn’t fit Posobiec’s anti-Israel narrative.

While I’m at it, allow me to note that Posobiec and Candace Owens are arguably the two biggest weaponizers of the “Christ is King” rallying cry against Jews. As a Christian, I believe Christ is King – or more properly, King of Kings – but when used insincerely it becomes a dog whistle to the mobs of Jew-haters among their followers. Benny Johnson, with nearly 4 million followers, is another one guilty of this. They know exactly what they’re doing when they promote this slogan.

But that’s not all.

Some influencers are perceived as being Right-leaning but merely use some conservative positions (like being pro-family) as a flag of convenience to cover for their grifting and/or Jew-hatred. The despicable sex trafficker – sorry, alleged sex trafficker – and Muslim convert Andrew Tate, who has exploited both men and women in his ruthless aggrandizement of money and notoriety, sells his degraded version of masculinity to nearly 11 million followers. The slimy Nick Fuentes has “only” an estimated 878,000 followers (over all social media platforms, not just X), but is a lightning rod for some of the ugliest antisemitism online.

There are, of course, major conservative influencers (and may I say that I hate that word? Because I do; modernity has produced some of the most inane concepts in history, and “influencer” is one of them) who are smart, not antisemitic, and insightful. I think Ben Shapiro (almost 8 million X followers), Dan Bongino (nearly 7 million), and Matt Walsh (3.7 million) can be counted in that number, although I don’t always agree with them – and that’s okay. As conservatives, we don’t – or shouldn’t – have to agree with each other on every topic.

Charlie Kirk (over 5 million X followers) of Turning Point USA, for example, recently hopped on the “no regime change in Iran” fence, posting that “The proponents for regime change [in Iran]…  know they are losing and their position is indefensible and unpopular.” Wrong. Wanting the Iranian mullahs to be changed out by any means necessary is both defensible and popular, in America and in Iran itself. This came shortly after he, Megyn Kelly (3.6 million), and other conservative influencers leapt to the defense of degenerate Leftist Glenn Greenwald after a sex video featuring him was leaked.

And then there are some influencers I literally know nothing about, like Steven Crowder (2.4 million X followers). As a rule, I ignore comedian/pundits, who are sometimes just stupid, like Dave Smith or Stephen Colbert, but always unfunny.

The Right has to come to terms with the fact that too many of our internet superstars have gone too far off the rails, wield way too much influence, and dominate our political discourse far too much. It’s not good for our side, and not good for America. Pray for wisdom and discernment in whose voices we reject and whose we embrace.

Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior