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For years, the online far right was a chaotic digital side show.

If you saw any of it, it was bizarre memes and live streamers and lots of trolling and racist jokes. And mostly it seemed stuck there in the

darker corners of the internet. But the journalist Antonia Hitchens says that world isn't on the

outside anymore. Hitchens begins her article in't on the outside anymore.

Hitchens begins her article in the New Yorker last summer with the moment when Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grock started calling itself Mecca Hitler and was talking about another Holocaust.

And this is what happened when Musk asked users to supply the system with what he described

as politically incorrect information.

It became kind of trendy among certain sets to say that Hitler hadn't really been the bad guy

of World War II.

It may have been Churchill or that actually there was no way of knowing really

how to come down specifically on which one of them was to blame for anything. And so I met one of

them in person who became part of the subject, my piece on Groypers.

Groypers are what we've come to call these young, deeply online activists who are trying to cram their white nationalist ideas and conspiracy theories into conservative politics.

They're almost always followers of the podcaster Nick Fuentes.

They're almost always men.

And Hitchin's story is called how the Internet fringe infiltrated Republican politics.

One of the gropeers she writes about is a young man she calls G.

During our first meeting, G, who is in his early 30s and who wore a suit with a skinny tie,

performed what appeared to be a Nazi salute, then took a sip of water, chuckling to himself.

His pose is both a joke and completely serious, he said.

...