// THE VERGE — MODA & SOCIETÀ
The midterms proved once and for all that X is not real life
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A week before the midterm elections, Vice President JD Vance hosted a town hall in Texas with Fox News host Jesse Watters. It was a friendly event with a friendly audience in what should have been a friendly state, and maybe that’s why Vance couldn’t help himself. When a college student earnestly asked how the right expected young people like her to settle down and have kids, given the ever-growing cost of living, Vance replied with a quip about Jon Husted’s ass.
The student, Kate White, introduced herself as the vice president of the Texas Christian University chapter of Turning Point USA, the conservative group started by Donald Trump ally Charlie Kirk. She was offering Vance an opportunity to explain how MAGA could work for young people, and he turned it into a joke. Vance did eventually answer the question, saying Republicans don’t pay enough attention to the issue of affordability and blaming rising housing costs on institutional investors and the “20 million illegal aliens” supposedly living in the United States. But the order of operations revealed the fatal flaw of Republicans’ 2026 strategy: Everything is a gag to them, and they’re way too online.
For the past decade, Republicans have adhered to Steve Bannon’s maxim that politics is downstream from culture. This fixation with liberals’ alleged capture of elite institutions has animated the right’s war against Big Tech and in particular social media platforms — which the right claims actively silenced conservative voices — and its crusade against diversity, equity, and inclusion. With his purchase of X, Elon Musk finally succeeded in building a conservative platform where right-wing voices not only had real influence but also a direct line to those in power. More recently, some people have claimed that Musk’s X is the only social media that really represents the people, unlike platforms like Bluesky, which have more left-leaning user bases.
Cocooned in their online echo chamber, MAGA figureheads convinced themselves the public was on their side, even when polling suggested otherwise. They ignored their base’s valid concerns about affordability and served them nonsensical memes instead. And they failed spectacularly in the realm where it actually mattered: politics. X, we can now declare once and for all, is not real life. Republicans not only lost historically red states like Texas, Kansas, and South Carolina, but barely managed to win Florida. The Senate race in Mississippi, of all places, is still too close to call.
Vance, especially, is a creature of X, where his following list includes such illustrious accounts as Raw Egg Nationalist, Bronze Age Pervert, Howling Mutant, and Captive Dreamer. But White House aides, department employees, and Hill staffers are stewing in the same ecosystem. Writer John Ganz has termed this phenomenon “groyperfication,” after followers of influencer Nick Fuentes, who call themselves groypers. This is a useful shorthand, though Fuentes’ fans are mostly too NEET-pilled to land jobs on the Hill. American Moment, a boot camp for young conservative up-and-comers, reportedly screens out groypers. There’s a real need for such protective measures. Kingsley Wilson, the hard-right press secretary for the Department of War (or per its legal name, Defense), has posted antisemitic conspiracy theories about Leo Frank, a Jewish man who was lynched in Georgia 1915 for allegedly raping a teenage girl. (Historians largely believe Frank was innocent.) The Department of Homeland Security regularly posts fascist fancams