The Soy Right Goes Global

How a childish psychology that has taken over a flailing administration.

If there was one thing that the post-2020 MAGA movement could always be said to have, it was a clear sense of identity. When the administration officially took power in January 2025, everyone from its most committed supporters to its most bitter detractors could give you roughly the same summary of what it was and what it planned to do. Here was a rested and revitalized right-wing populist movement: one with the will, experience, and popular mandate to do the things it failed to do during its first stint in power. This time, they would finally cut back from costly and unpopular entanglements overseas, turn traditional Republican economic policy on its head, go through with those mass deportations, and make a real attempt at consolidating the working-class populist coalition that had brought them to power. What was once a Sonnenrad-shaped glimmer in Pat Buchanan’s eye now seemed to be actually happening.

It may never be possible to precisely pinpoint when this identity started slipping away. Perhaps the easiest answer is July 4th, 2025, when Trump signed his One Big Beautiful Bill and once again reduced his domestic legacy to the exact same set of Paul Ryan-authored tax breaks. Maybe it was November 4th of that same year, when Democratic candidates across the nation shattered his tenuous multiracial coalition while dramatically outperforming polling. I’ve always found a fun dark horse answer to be April 1st, when a surprisingly strong victory by the liberal candidate in a Wisconsin Supreme Court election humiliated then-DOGE chief Elon Musk and set the stage for his eventual departure. In any case, the administration had been reduced to something smaller, less interesting, less popular and simply different from what it was supposed to be by the end of the year. If it didn’t pivot in one direction or the other, it stood to be defined as little more than the third of three straight failed administrations led by an inept old man and his cabal of out-of-touch swamp creature advisors.

It wouldn’t take all that long into 2026 before we learned what their new direction would be: war. The first move came in the early hours of January 3rd in Caracas, where the U.S. military killed 80 people while illegally abducting Venezuelan president Nicholas Maduro and his wife in an intervention that Trump explicitly said was done to access the country’s oil. The next flashpoint came only a few days later, when the administration’s occupation of Minneapolis claimed its first American life with the killing of Renée Good. The following weeks were then dominated by the administration’s inexplicable choice to bring back and put teeth to one of its most bizarre and wildly unpopular foreign policy proposals: that Greenland should be annexed by the United States. It was enough to make even the most cautious and measured world leaders publicly declare that whatever remained of the post-war order was officially dead, and it was all still completely dwarfed by the full-scale war against Iran that the administration launched at the end of the next month.

Why do this? Why do any of this? How was it even possible? Not only have Americans been deeply skeptical of anything even resembling foreign intervention for decades, but this very administration came to power in large part due to its promises to end foreign wars. The polling and politics have been predictably horrific from the start, with even light-touch, zero-casualty interventions still being met with widespread public disapproval. Yet Trump 2.0 has been completely unfazed by each successive political failure, only upping the ante every time they betray their promises, tank in the polls, and watch once-steadfast allies turn away. A quick look at any official government social media account gives one the impression that they are nothing less than overjoyed to do all this despite the massive administration-destroying risks involved, to the point that they see it as little more than a big opportunity for more memes about video games.

To understand how this complete 180-degree turn has happened so seamlessly, we need to set aside everything else we know about American politics. The fundamental things that you might expect any administration to consider when launching a foreign war are irrelevant here. To this White House, all that matters is social media. Their online supporters are their entire world, simultaneously serving as their audience, cheerleaders, and braintrust. They live and die by the reactions they get from them, and the nature of the online right guarantees that they will always receive it. This is because the online right is not at all sophisticated, principled, esoteric, or any of the other adjectives it has liberally applied to itself. It is something else—nothing less than the precise thing it has spent more than a decade relentlessly mocking, day in and day out, until they couldn’t notice that they had come to define it.

The online right is soy. Deeply, truly, unfixably soy, soy all the way down to the bone marrow. It has become exactly what it once described as a fundamental civilizational threat: a very powerful group of overly-emotional, overly-excited, unthinking rule-following children. I bring this up not just because it is ironic, but because it is incredibly politically important—one of the single most important reasons why this White House is as chaotic and uncontrolled as it is. And to fully understand such people, one must go far back, all the way to the first things that made them so utterly obsessed with the concept of effeminacy that they were completely unable to recognize it when it came to define them.

This is not a story that one tells about a serious country. It’s just one that needs to be told about ours. So, without further ado, here’s the most important political story about the online right that you’ve never heard: how tired memes and decades-old insecurities combined to create one of the most potent feedback loops for overseas bloodshed in modern history.