The Cultural Cowardice of the Irreverent Right
Some thoughts on Carl's Jr, the "soy right ascendent" and the groyperfication of everything
“A commercial with a hot girl talking about hangovers and burgers! It feels like the 90's again! The world is healing!!!”
So says the sunglassed top commenter on the now unlisted Carl’s Jr Super Bowl LIX commercial featuring influencer megastar Alix Earle. That commenter is joined by literally hundreds of men commenting similarly, thanking Trump for bringing “sexy commercials” back. Aside from their vast media illiteracy that makes them think Super Bowl commercials are made in a few weeks, 99% of these commenters have NO idea who Alix Earle is - she’s just a blond girl that’s allowed to be on screen again.
The comments section on a commercial is always fascinating. With the decline of mainstream viewership, major commercials tend to rely on additional online engagement which also makes agencies and commercial producers more aware of its online presence and interactivity. Also why Carl’s Jr would cast someone like online native Alix Earle.
Like TikTok, content online is not passive: the comments section is part of the media itself. In the case of this Carl’s Jr ad, the comments show that these dudes have a LOT of pent-up sexism and reveals their nostalgia for the 90s culture is solely imaginary.
This year, Super Bowl commercial slots were the most expensive of all time, costing $8 million for a 30 second spot ($266,666 per second) and the game was airing in one of the most polarized periods in, oh, 165 years. As a result, many, if not most of the commercials were superficial at best and just straight up boring at worst.
This year’s batch of ads were a mix of absurdist humor, body horror comedy, bait & switch corporate critique, brand sycophancy, and other attempted humor with celebs and influencers. And as it has been for the last decade or so, most of the ads debuted online in advance of the big game to garner attention and drive engagement.
Earle’s burger commercial is supposed to be a remix or remake of the Paris Hilton genre of Carl’s Jr ads - skimpy clothes, sexual innuendos, provocative imagery and sounds, and objectification of women. But this is 2025, not 2005 at the peak of a sexist culture that emerged in the 1990s connected to MTV Spring Break, late night commercials featuring women coerced into flashing, and exclusive Abercrombie culture.
As you may imagine, Fox News was fairly elated by the ad, headlining their piece “Carl's Jr. brings back bikini model ads” and writing copy/paste PR copy to get to the commentary about the YouTube comments. They note the company “pivoted” from the strategy 8 years ago which likely caused a lot of men to go full fascist.
The ad is not a remake in any sense and pulls its punches, allowing Earle to lead the commercial, promote her own brand (“Everyone’s going to be a ‘hot mess’ after the big game”) and promo code. [nb: This commercial doesn’t even sell a burger. It’s for a promo code (the secondary currency of the influencer economy) for a free burger the day after the Super Bowl when you sign up for the app with Earle’s code.] And while Earle wears a revealing top, she admits in interviews she was part of the production process. It’s cowardly to even think this marks a return (retvrn?) to the shittier days of television media.
The commenter boys don’t care! America is back baby! But you cannot undo 20 years of awareness and women’s rights, regardless of how much you think you can just turn back the clock. However, this fact drives the online miscreants even more mad because they believe they’ve missed out. Culture writer Max Read notes that this all aligns with a return of Gamergate politics, driven mostly by what some are calling the “soy right.”
The Shift in Power Dynamics from MAGA to Groyper
I’ve been fascinated with the newer crowd of online users for this Trump term in comparison to his first. In between administrations were massive social justice movements, a pandemic that sent everyone down their own little rabbit holes, and the ascendency of the “soy right.” The “soy right” exhibit a dynamic shift of the online commentariat from pickup truck saltlyfe sunglasses guys to the more trollish, wojak loving irony bros that lean into the cringe fascism of the technocrats over the more obvious hate-filled alt-right figures (Bannon, Richard Spencer, Steven Miller).
But do not take solace in the decline of MAGA’s influence because the soy right’s upbringing in the incel-irony-pilled “just joking” forums have turned them into monsters hiding in plain sight.
The “soy right” represent users that have come online inheriting an internet built by the far-right users before them. However, younger users are more prolific content generators so their culture gets to reshape it. The biggest downside for them is that they can never build it they they way they want it, they can only feel a nostalgia for a culture they never got to experience. Their ascendancy, as described by Max Read, is marked by their “childlike refusal of agency and responsibility, even while in power.”
The simplest definition of “Soy Right”--a term that’s been in circulation for at least a couple years, but has picked up steam since the Trump election--is right-wingers who have adopted the sensitive, aggrieved victimhood pose and corny rhetorical and personal style that they have spent the last 10 years attributing to liberals.
Though still a somewhat gendered insult, “soy” these days suggests less a abstractly feminine weakness and more a specific message-board archetype: grating, weepy sensitivity mixed with undignified over-enthusiasm and self-satisfied corniness--closer to a synonym for “cringe”…
You can see the evolution of the soy right’s ascension through three distinct moments that cumulated in our present: Kavanaugh, Covington, and Kenosha - followed by a concretization of rightward ideologies during the extremely online pandemic era.
Each event, starting in September 2018 with Brett Kavanaugh crying during his Supreme Court justice hearing to the viral television clip of high school student Nick Sandmann wearing his MAGA cap in January 2019 to Kyle Rittenhouse pushing out crocodile tears at his 2021 trial, resulted in the layering up of the victimhood and martyrdom that represent the causes of the soy right (again, cringe, nostalgia, victimhood, racism, and open misogyny).
Max Read points out that Elon’s rise to power along with his bombastic “they can go fuck themselves” public attitude, seems to be a return to Gamergate. I think it’s worse: it’s the mainstreaming of groyper ideologies. Groypers are the far-far-right faction of the conservative movement, usually led by Holocaust denying (Trump dinner guest) Nick Fuentes. They’ve used tactics of irony, victimhood, and gamified antisemitism to launch culture issues and have convinced people like Musk, JD Vance, and Tucker Carlson they are a legitimate constituency.
Read calls the recent image of Musk and Carlson wearing big hats soy right (yes, Carlson is making the meme soy face), but doesn’t mention the big hats are iconic of the groyper movement.
John Ganz writes about the Groyperfication of culture in his Unpopular Front newsletter:
Here’s the thing to understand: every single person under say, the age of 40 on the right is exposed to extremely high levels of groyper content every day in group chats, on their social media timelines, in discord chats, etc. Groyperism totally suffuses the cultural environment of the right. While mainstream media is still chasing after master figures and hidden intellectuals shaping elite consensus, the real story is that young righties look at the opinions and trends among the groypers as being far more interesting and important than respectable intellectuals.
As a result, if you hear someone like Pete Hegseth talk on Fox News, you can hear his dogwhistling to the groypers using phrases that are adjacent to the “great replacement” conspiracy theory. The racism is encoded, but not indecipherable.
Even today, in Munich, JD Vance gave an incredibly heated speech that accused European governments of facing a “threat from within” - as opposed to, ya know, real governmental militaristic powers. It’s culture war as policy where there is no policy. It’s forum racism for the people. It’s the soy right ascendent. It’s cringe fascism. And it needs to be covered honestly from the mainstream media.
We need a media literacy of “just joking” to face the groypers and their cowardly victimhood politics head on and we need the mainstream media to report what seems unreportable. Reminder, they use the term “groyper” to keep it from being reported. (I write about this at length in my book, let me know if you want a pdf of the section.)
The cringe fascists are now in charge and soy right is ascendent, but we are never going back to a time when it was permissible to treat everyone like shit and exploit women on camera to sell burgers. I’m just not looking forward to when they figure that out… again.
As usual, stay curious, stay vigilant, and persist.
New Media Homework is a newsletter that takes a critical internet literacy approach to online media and culture. It comes out when I have time to write it. Thank you for reading! Feel free to share and tell others to subscribe.