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Don’t Let X Become the Right’s TikTok
When Elon Musk took over X (formerly Twitter), many conservatives felt like they’d been handed the keys to a long-locked room. After years of technocratic suppression and shadow bans, the self-proclaimed “digital town square” was finally open to free speech, and the right celebrated as though the digital gates to free speech had finally swung open. Musk’s stewardship genuinely expanded that space — but it also transformed the conservative movement itself.
Once the right found its own platform, it began repeating the same online habits it used to mock.
Because once the right found its own platform, it began repeating the same online habits it used to mock.
This is not unique to conservatives. Both major parties are fracturing, and the fault line runs between generations as much as ideologies. Democrats are split between the establishment figures who built their following on cable news and the younger progressives who speak in TikTok clips and Instagram Reels. Republicans, meanwhile, now fight their generational battles on X — a faster, rougher, and far more public arena. (RELATED: America’s New Theology of Violence)
The Libs of TikTok Moment
The shift began during the Biden administration, when X user Libs of TikTok garnered engagement by reposting the more eccentric corners of progressive Internet culture. Chaya Raichik’s account became a rallying point for conservatives who felt they were simply holding a mirror up to the excesses of “woke” America. That word, “woke,” quickly became both a shorthand and a litmus test. (RELATED: The Group Chat Wasn’t an Anomaly — It Was a Mirror)
The viral success of Libs of TikTok proved conservatives could use the left’s media tools to fight back in the cultural arena. Yet it also revealed the same dynamics the right once criticized the left for: an over-reliance on outrage, sound bites, and moral certainty. Just as young progressives police language and preach ideological purity online, young conservatives on X found fresh ground to begin doing the same — only with different buzzwords. (RELATED: Brain Rot and the Crisis of Digital Late Modernity)
Terms like “RINO,” “globalist,” “DEI,” or “based” now function much like “woke,” “homophobic,” “racist,” or “problematic” do on the left. Each signals belonging to a tribe and purity of belief. The content changes, but the culture — the constant self-sorting, the suspicion of dissent, the language of loyalty and betrayal — remains strikingly familiar.
Matt Walsh and the Purity Spiral
Daily Wire host Matt Walsh has warned repeatedly that conservatives risk devouring their own. “The Right doesn’t stick together,” Walsh wrote on X on Oct. 14, sarcastically calling the post-Charlie Kirk assassination party infighting a “great plan.” He urged right-leaning commentators and influencers to converse with fellow conservatives about disagreements in private rather than putting them on blast on social media, referencing recent calls for on-the-fence commentators such as Megyn Kelly to condemn Israel-skeptical voices like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. (RELATED: The Fall and Rise of American Culture)
The Right doesn’t stick together. That’s our biggest problem by far. Conservatives are quick to denounce each other, jump on dogpiles, disavow, attack their allies. I said a few weeks ago that we all need to band together in the wake of Charlie’s death and the answer I got back…
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) October 15, 2025
If you’re a conservative and you have a problem with someone on the Right, you can reach out to them privately and express your concerns. Performatively attacking and denouncing your own people in public is a bitch move.
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) October 15, 2025
Lamenting how easily Republicans turn their ire inward, Walsh presented wisdom in his caution: a movement forever in civil war can’t build anything lasting. (RELATED: Operation Divide MAGA)
There’s tension in that argument. Conservatism at its core best depends on skepticism and debate, even if that means being skeptical of the skeptics and debating others within the party. On that notion is the idea that truth appears through argument, not consensus. While Walsh warned against public spectacles of disunity, asserting that it weakens the party’s strategic advantage, many people did not take well to his words because they perceived him to be advocating for less free expression. To suppress all infighting in the name of unity risks dulling the intellectual edge that makes a movement self-correcting. To let every disagreement become a loyalty test, however, risks descending into chaos.
It would be one thing if we were discussing the White House’s official communications; this conversation is about you, me, and what is socially acceptable to say. It applies to Republicans on X just as it does to Democrats on TikTok, or any other social platform. Somewhere between those extremes lies the balance we must rediscover robust internal debate without the reflexive urge to purge.
There should be no “thought criminals” in either political party; in order to understand each other, we have to keep talking. “Dangerous” ideas won’t disappear until we let them be said, know where they’re coming from, and dispel the concept that collective efforts to silence them signify their truth. And truth can’t come to light if we allow forces to leverage social media’s megaphone to beat down the relentless outcry of ideas never heard.
The Medium is the Message
Marshall McLuhan’s famous insight, “the medium is the message,” feels tailor-made for Musk’s X. Musk restored free speech to the platform, and he also democratized the spotlight. Every activist, influencer, and keyboard philosopher now operates in a global gladiator pit where attention is the coin of the realm.
On X, argument is performance, and performance becomes ideology. The algorithm doesn’t reward persuasion; it rewards engagement, like most social media platforms. Tech companies want to make the big bucks, and they do this by creating tools that teach that constant back-and-forth is the path to a successful career. Outrage, mockery, and calls for purity get clicks faster than thoughtful, creative content ever could. In this environment, patience and nuance weigh you down. That design shapes behavior — not just for users, but for entire political movements.
The Generational Pendulum
What we’re seeing, in both parties, is a pendulum swing. Young activists on the left once built movements on TikTok around “defunding” or “decolonizing.” Now, young conservatives on X rally around “anti-woke” crusades and “saving Western civilization.” How many times have you heard these phrases? They begin to lose their meaning the more they are repeated, but repetition reinforces their dominance. The rhetoric differs, but the digital psychology is the same: compressed language, moral urgency, and viral emotion.
Musk didn’t create this dynamic, but his platform magnified it. In making X a free speech haven, he also revealed the deeper cultural divide. It is not simply between left and right, but between generations raised on different models of communication.
Older conservatives may still think in essays and debates; younger ones in memes and clips. The result is often misunderstanding within the movement, not just outside it.
The Way Forward
The challenge now is not to retreat from X, but to mature within it, to use the platform’s reach without letting the algorithm dictate our tone or values. We are a reactive people, and maybe if we shift gears and prioritize understanding, we can stop talking past each other. Free speech matters only if we know how to listen, not just speak.
Unity should not mean uniformity, and questioning should not mean heresy. Musk’s acquisition of X remains a step in the right direction for open dialogue, but it is up to us to learn how to communicate more effectively within the platform’s framework. If X becomes merely a mirror of the left’s old habits — purity tests, buzzwords, performative outrage — then the pendulum has swung, not forward, but in circles.
READ MORE from Julianna Frieman:
Charlie Kirk’s Assassination Exposes a Generation in Crisis
Charlie Kirk’s Assassination Is a Turning Point for the USA
If You See a Girl Bleeding Out on a Train, What Would You Do?
Julianna Frieman is a writer based in North Carolina. She received her bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She is pursuing her master’s degree in Communications (Digital Strategy) at the University of Florida. Her work has been published by the Daily Caller, The American Spectator, and The Federalist. Follow her on X at @juliannafrieman.
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