Bad Takes: Right-wing extremists flock to YouTube for its persuasive power

In May, Brandon Herrera lost his Republican primary runoff to represent Texas’ 23rd Congressional District by fewer than 500 votes.

Known to his fans as “the AK Guy,” Herrera is a gun manufacturer and San Antonio resident popular for his trove of YouTube videos showcasing high-caliber weaponry.

In a series of reports for the Current this year, Michael Karlis exposed Herrera’s extreme views for all to read and retweet. Here’s a sampling of the headlines: “Candidate for San Antonio congressional seat sparks criticism by making light of veteran suicides,” “House candidate running to represent Uvalde dismissive of school shooting in tweet,” “‘AK Guy’ mocks overweight feminists, gets help from Matt Gaetz during San Antonio rally,” “Dan Patrick endorses San Antonio’s Tony Gonzales after primary rival mocks Trump’s kid.”

No slouch, Karlis recently won an Association of Alternative Newsmedia award for Prison Beat Reporting.

Could that coverage have cost Herrera the election? Four-hundred and seven votes out of nearly 30,000 ballots cast is a much, much smaller number than the Current‘s readership. Just sayin’.

But before we score one for print journalism at the expense of social media celebrity, we should invert the question. By Herrera’s own admission, he was shocked as anyone that his margin of defeat proved so narrow.

“It was closer than we had any right to be,” he told his 3 million YouTube subscribers in early June. “Despite the fact that the Establishment outspent us almost 10 to 1 … they almost lost to a YouTuber.”

That a self-avowed outsider — never having held public office and running against a military veteran who had already beaten Democrats twice to acquire and keep his seat — came within several hundred votes of winning may speak to the vulnerability of Gonzales as a candidate in a rabidly red state. Gonzales’ support for bipartisan gun control legislation and immigration reform led to him being censured by the Republican Party of Texas.

But the near-win also speaks to the inordinate influence of rightwing YouTube.

We also recently learned that, during the attempt on Donald Trump’s life, the would-be assassin wore a T-shirt made by another San Antonio-area gun enthusiast with a YouTube channel called Demolition Ranch. Though the motives of the shooter remain murky, he was a registered Republican and used an AR-15-style rifle. We also know that right-wing extremists account for the overwhelming majority of domestic terrorist attacks in the United States, far eclipsing Islamic extremists and leftists.

“The YouTube Right is large and extremely heterogeneous,” Pennsylvania State researchers wrote in a 2022 study primarily drawn from online data collected before the pandemic. If partisan cable news represented “the most politically important development in communication technology in the second half of the twentieth century,” as the researchers summarized in their report, “YouTube represents perhaps the strongest challenge to television.”

Like TV, the biggest video-hosting website in the world is an immersive audiovisual experience, but one that affords content creators broader reach with minimal startup costs. It also features multiple potential revenue streams, from monetizing ads to “super-chat” donations to referrals to Patreon and other subscription services. And for content consumers, the choice of channels is as lavish as the convenience. You can listen while driving, you can wear earbuds while you work and you can even comment alongside hundreds of viewers in real time.

The legendary demagogues of AM radio, from Father Coughlin in the 1930s to Rush Limbaugh in the 1990s, could only dream of such opportunities for audience engagement.

Compared even to Facebook or Twitter, YouTube “makes forming communities around shared ideas and affinity for creators easier than on other websites,” the Penn researchers described. And if platforms such as TikTok amount to “cable news for young people,” as tech reporter Taylor Lorenz deemed them in the New York Times, YouTube remains more popular with the registered voters who actually sway elections.

Given the hefty investments in right-wing echo chambers by religious billionaires, is the YouTube Right more accurately categorized as grassroots or astroturf? Are fringe vloggers clickbaiting to an already-existent choir or do they entrance and radicalize otherwise moderate conservatives down violent rabbit holes?

Several features of the medium may inherently lend themselves to a rightward bent.

“There is some evidence that conservatives respond more to emotional stimuli and conservative elites get more attention from anger- and fear-laden content than liberal elites, suggesting one pathway by which the video modality is likely to benefit right-wing content producers,” one 2019 psychological study found.

Simplistic portrayals of heroes and villains spread much farther in terms of virality, while platforms algorithmically disadvantage complexity and nuance.

Who’s inspired to share a video titled “It’s complicated”?

When computer scientists at the University of California at Davis created 100,000 fake accounts to audit YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, they found “very-right sock puppets encounter more congenial recommendations than any other ideological group.” And considering that “70% of YouTube’s content is watched from recommendations without requiring any additional actions or decisions from the users, this pattern may activate the cycle of radicalizing exposures.”

One in four U.S. adults agree with the statement “There is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders,” according to survey data from the nonprofit Public Religion Research Institute. Over half of those defined as “Christian nationalists” believe it.

That would be disquieting enough, but consider that most Americans have heard or read “nothing at all” about Christian nationalism, according to the Pew Research Center. So when Texas Rep. James Talarico, D-Austin, says with crystal clarity, “There’s nothing Christian about Christian nationalism,” that’s a laudable message but one lost on 54% of the electorate.

British journalist Gavin Haynes, who produced a BBC Radio documentary about the YouTube Right in the UK, coined the helpful term “the parasocial politician.” That’s what Brandon Herrera is — or would have been.

“Parasocial” is a term sociologists popularized in a 1956 paper on “intimacy at a distance,” referring to “a simulacrum of conversational give and take” between a mass media performer and an audience member.

“It’s precisely their amateurism that makes them parasocial, affording them a shonky, homemade DIY charm that disarms, that allows these very ordinary demagogues each to penetrate the places that a journalist or a politician can’t, to become yer mate rather than an authority figure,” Haynes warned in 2018.

“These people might present themselves like jokes, but their ambitions are very very serious,” journalist and antifascist activist Ash Sarkar told Haynes during the course of the documentary. “Indeed they’re not content to remain at the margins of the outer edges of the internet, and unless we want to see the most egregious forms of racism, misogyny at the very center of our political culture, then we need to fight them very very seriously.”

Filmmaker Rob Reiner produced his own documentary on Christian nationalism earlier this year, God & Country. The box office was a paltry $108,000.

“When I was an activist on the religious right, I would meet with fundraisers. I would hear from them, ‘You’ve got to give me plenty of fear and anger. I need to make your people as mad as hell and frightened to go to sleep at night, because when they’re that afraid, they’re going to send you a lot of money,’” former pro-life pastor Robert Schenck confessed in the film.

It’s not all bad news though. According to data compiled by TheRighting, a news aggregator and watchdog, traffic to right-wing sites has plummeted dramatically this year.

Even in the United States, blowing stuff up has to get old sometime.

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This article appears in Best of San Antonio 2024.