Soy Right ascendant

A Read Max re-run

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Greetings from Read Max HQ! Today’s post is a “Read Max Re-Run”--a post from the archives I think subscribers might enjoy--running while I catch up with some small-business housekeeping chores.

A reminder, as always: Read Max is 99.9 percent funded by subscriptions. I’m able to treat this newsletter as a full-time job, and even to take weeks “off,” because of the generosity of paying readers. If you’re interested in my recommendations, or even if you regularly enjoy the weekly column, please consider upgrading your subscription for the low price of $5/month and $50/year.

*Tips fedora* Well meme’d, sir!

We’re now three weeks into the second Trump administration, and it seems clear that something has changed from the first go-round. The MAGA populist fraction of the Trumpist coalition has been relatively marginalized in favor of the austerian-accelerationist Silicon Valley right. The archetypal article about Trump voters in rural diners has been replaced with magazine stories about obnoxious arrivistes comparing Trump to Beyoncé and the inauguration to Comic-Con. Even Trump himself seems oddly sidelined, his threats about tariffs and treasuries effectively ignored by both heads of state and the stock market, his striking and creative Truth social postings left mostly unread--while Elon Musk attracts all resistance energy simply by tweeting “🤣” at some of the worst jokes on the planet.

The end beneficiaries of Trumpist upward redistribution haven’t changed much. But the affect of the second Trump administration is, so far, wholly different. Gone is the apocalyptic malevolence of “American carnage,” supplanted by the unctuous corniness of “DOGE.” Gone is the sense of a lasting political realignment, succeeded by an inescapable minoritarian whine. Gone are Steve Bannon, the alt-right, and the “forgotten man and woman” Trump celebrated in his 2016 victory speech. In their place: Elon Musk and the Soy Right.

The Soy Right

“Soy,” as a piece of internet slang, originated among masculinist reactionaries in the 2010s as a dismissive synonym for “fragile” or “feminine,” deriving from the high phytoestrogen content in soy and the right-wing folk belief that soy consumption has “feminizing” effects on men. A “soy boy” was any man who was physically weak, passive, thoughtful, genial, or otherwise didn’t conform to the speaker’s gender standards.

Though still a somewhat gendered insult, “soy” 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.” You might “soy out” over Marvel movies or Zelda games, or pose for photographs with a YouTube thumbnail-type expression of fake, open-mouthed surprise, known as “soy-facing”:

“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 simplest definition of “Soy Right”--a term that’s been in circulation for at least a couple years, but has picked up steam since the Trump election--is 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, as Scarlet writes at Dialectics of Desire:

They have special diets are afraid of seed oils. They wear skinny jeans and have meticulously groomed beards. They talk non stop about masculinity, drive pickups, and wear plaid, but can’t change a tire to save their lives. While the right spent years mocking liberals for wanting “safe spaces” and echo chambers, for crying about identity politics, for being frail, fragile, overly-sensitive weaklings, they were slowly transforming into the perfect mirror of all of it — without the nagging concern for equality or any of that lib shit. […]

The Soy Right is being oppressed and they want you to know it. They’re scared to take the subway, they’re offended that you called them white or cis, they’re upset that you didn’t think they were cool in high school, they want to call the manager because there’s less boobies in video games. They are crybabies of the highest order. While the right is winning cultural and political victories nonstop lately, that’s not enough. They also need you to like them. Why don’t you like them?!

It makes me think of the great poster @ok_but_still’s observation from last August: “this the kind of conservative we're stuck with now. whiney sobbing guy with major depression diagnosis in bio who is still an asshole about everything.” An even more succinct way of putting it might be the phrase on this circa-2015 t-shirt, updated for 2025: “Kanye Attitude with Drake Feelings.”

To me the other key aspect of the Soy Right psychological profile, beyond its desperate need for approval and respect, is a childlike refusal of agency and responsibility, even while in power. A 20-something with access to Treasury Department systems is a “kid” whose racism shouldn’t be disqualifying. The South African billionaire throwing Nazi salutes is a enthusiastic neuroatyptical man who needs our sympathy. The Vice President of the United States would never have attracted the attention of the Pope if it weren’t for “hysteric progressives,” the real villains. Silicon Valley oligarchs were “driven into Trump’s arms” by the perfidy of Democrats. No one in the Soy Right makes affirmative choices; they’re smol beans who need protection and care.

This insistence on one’s own weakness is a contemptible way to live in the world. But the style of the Soy Right is as important, and in some ways even more depressing, than its animating resentments. If the online right of the first Trump administration was an unstable blend of Facebook credulity and 4chan nihilism, the Soy Right is an unbearable mix of Reddit corniness and Twitter self-satisfaction. We can look at some examples. Renaming a government agency after a decade-old memecoin and making the website an A.I.-generated cartoon--that’s Soy Right:

Describing the identification of six DOGE employees in Wired magazine as “doxing” and complaining distressedly that it places “a target on their backs”--that’s Soy Right:

Dressing up as a character from Sicario to record a video about your coffee technique--Soy Right:

blackriflecoffee

A post shared by @blackriflecoffee

A gaming website editor turned priest “hitting a Nazi salute and then the Dreamworks face”--Soy Right.

Smugly bragging that you’re “tripling down” on transphobia while still nervously self-censoring the slur--Soy Right:

This sentiment, voiced in this way, using this metaphor, is unbelievably Soy Right:

Soyfacing next to the president while wearing a crazzzzzzzy MAGA hat--definitionally Soy Right:

The most prominent Soy Right elected politician isn’t Trump himself--too strange, too original, too flamboyant--but J.D. Vance, a smug, weak skinsuit who recently threw his own kids under the bus in order to rescue a groyper’s job as a means of sucking up to Elon Musk, and who also tweets bad jokes in the deeply soy M.C.U. “so that just happened” voice:

The return of Gamergate

Does this odd and annoying mix of weepy fragility, oblivious self-importance, and obscene corniness sounds familiar? It should, because as a matter of tone it’s identical to--here imagine me talking over you as you attempt to finish my sentence with “the emotional register of 20th-century European fascism”--the psychotically annoying way that Gamergaters tweeted in 2015.

I have to imagine that if you’ve made it this far in the post, through all this absolutely heinous over-analyzed internet-culture stuff about “soy” and “based” and the video-game Nazi priest, you are familiar with “Gamergate.” If not: In broad strokes, Gamergate was a campaign of targeted misogynist harassment against a number of games journalists and commentators (and, eventually, me and the website I worked at) spurred by a set of intricate and boring and extremely unimportant accusations of “bias in games journalism.” For those of us who were involved at the time, it’s generally remembered as the moment we all realized Something Bad Was Coming. As Kyle Wagner wrote at the time in a piece called “The Future Of The Culture Wars Is Here, And It's Gamergate”:

There are notes here, too, from a hymn book that predates the internet: self-pity, self-martyrdom, an overwhelming sense of your own blamelessness, the certainty that someone else's victimhood is nothing more than a profitable pose. All culture wars strike these same chords, because all culture wars are at bottom about the same thing: the desperate efforts of the privileged, in an ever-pluralizing America, to cling by their nails to the perquisites of what they'd thought was once their exclusive domain.

What we have in Gamergate is a glimpse of how these skirmishes will unfold in the future—all the rhetorical weaponry and siegecraft of an internet comment section brought to bear on our culture, not just at the fringes but at the center. What we're seeing now is a rehearsal, where the mechanisms of a toxic and inhumane politics are being tested and improved. Tomorrow's Lee Atwater will work through sock puppets on IRC. Tomorrow's Sister Souljah will get shouted down with rape threats. Tomorrow's Tipper Gore will make an inexplicably popular YouTube video. Tomorrow's Willie Horton ad will be an image macro, tomorrow's Borking a doxing, tomorrow's Moral Majority a loose coalition of DoSers and robo-petitioners and scat-GIF trolls—all of them working feverishly in service of the old idea that nothing should ever really change.

You don’t really need to draw any elaborate comparisons or jump through any hoops to say that the online presence of Trumpists in his second term is “like” Gamergate. It just straightforwardly is Gamergate, composed of many of the exact same people, who were, just last week, complaining incessantly, with Elon Musk’s participation, in a tone I can only describe as “Reddit Sephiroth” about--I’m not kidding--“woke gaming journalism.”

A not incorrect answer to the question “what is the Soy Right”? is: Gamergate, ten years later, plus a handful of movement-conservative influencers, plus the Vice President of the United States, plus the richest man alive.

Does the Soy Right matter?

Let’s reaffirm, here, that we’re mostly talking about an online phenomenon--a particular mode and tone of discourse that has come to dominate political rhetoric on X, the Everything App, and among certain Republican politicians. Most Trump voters are not members of the Soy Right; I would venture to say that most of them are not members of any “right” at all. To the extent “soyness” extends to actual policy it’s mostly in stuff like renaming the Gulf of Mexico or complaining that Hakeem Jeffries used the word “fight”--moronic high-profile “trolling” and sniveling whining.

For this reason I hesitate to suggest that the Soy Right is “important” by any reasonable definition. I don’t think it’s particularly politically detrimental or advantageous to have your administration represented online by a bunch of gushing cornballs and larmoyant freaks, and it also seems clear that Musk is going to illegally gut the federal government regardless of whether or not you or I think he’s “based” or “epic.”

But I do think the prominence of the Soy Right online right now is an interesting reflection of the second Trump administration’s priorities and composition. It seems to me to be a natural consequence of Trump’s decision to offload most of his policy and action to the tech industry--and, in particular, to Elon Musk himself. As Matthew Ellis recently observed, the classic sunglasses truck-selfie PFP posters who once dominated Trumpist discourse on Facebook and Twitter “aren’t really the main right wing characters on here anymore,” disappearing, along with Steve Bannon and the rest of the MAGA populists, from the Trump administration’s media profile. In their place are the statues and the cypherpunks of “the dumbest RETVRN posters and crypto maniacs”--and, of course, the Soy Right. If truck-selfie Twitter had a loose correspondence to the Bannonite wing of Trumpism, the Soy Right directly represents the Muskite wing.