Anna Richards

What Poland can teach the Internet Right

Karol Nawrocki flashes the victory sign at supporters (Getty images)

A change in politics is coming. Until now, the progressives were the ones with networks, stemming from Joe Biden’s White House, to think tanks, and the legacy media. For the right, politics was not a fair fight. The internet has changed that. Karol Nawrocki’s win in Poland’s presidential election marked a key moment in the translation of the new right from the internet to geographical reality. Donald Trump’s backing was combined with that of Kristi Noem, the US Secretary of State for Homeland Security, at Poland’s first ever Conservative Political Action conference (CPAC).

A change in politics is coming

From the 1960s onwards, the progressives turned universities into a reproduction mechanism for their own political ideals in a ‘long march through the institutions’. Conservative ideas were forced online. Right-wingers adapted to online systems of idea replication, becoming more aggressive to optimise for social media engagement. It took Trump’s two elections to get the ‘Internet Right’ into the institutions.

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