How Conservative Influencers Have Changed

I’ve been on Twitter (now X) since June 2008, meaning that I’ve spent 16 years on the platform. And in that time, I have become increasingly, overwhelmingly aware of its tendency to make the most “online” segments of our politics seem the most dominant or urgent — think “tradwives” and “tankies,” constituencies that aren’t very big in the real world but have a large, noisy, fervent presence on the internet, for both right and left.

And while many of the most “online” candidates lose in real-life elections (Blake Masters in the 2022 Arizona Senate race, for one), why they garner so much support in the first place is worth contemplating. What is it about the purity spiral of the online right — partisans playing to the most intense parts of the online base, continually trying to prove their conservative bona fides — that thrives despite real-world losses?

Mary Katharine Ham is a commentator for Fox News who has been very online and immersed in social media politics just as long as I have. So I spoke with her about the online right — its real-world wins and losses and what the point of being an online conservative influencer is in the first place, especially for women.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity and is part of an Opinion Q. and A. series exploring modern conservatism, its influence in society and politics and how and why it differs (and doesn’t) from the conservative movement that most Americans thought they knew.

Jane Coaston: So, you’ve been an online politics person, and an online conservative since, basically, those terms existed. What was it like being an online conservative woman in the pre-Trump era?

Mary Katharine Ham: It’s been a while, because the pre-Trump era is now so long ago. I don’t think I’m a person who has gotten a lot of online hate, in general, throughout my career, so I’m thankful for that. In the pre-Trump era, I did feel like the attacks, even if they were personal, came on ideological lines, so it wasn’t really coming from my own side back then. In the Trump era, I was a Trump-critical conservative at Fox News at various times, and, particularly, when I was at CNN, it made my hate mail so diverse, because everyone had a reason to hate me.