Another Edgelord Comes to Power

Paul Ingrassia is just your average right-wing edgelord with a law degree and a high-level position at the Justice Department. In the past several years, on X, he has likened Andrew Tate, the misogynist influencer, to the “ancient ideal of excellence”; he has written a Substack post titled “Free Nick Fuentes” in support of reinstating the white nationalist’s X account (when it was still banned); and he has called Nikki Haley, Donald Trump’s former United Nations ambassador who ran against Trump in the Republican primary, an “insufferable bitch” who might be an “anchor baby” too. On Inauguration Day, Ingrassia was sworn in as the new White House liaison for the DOJ.

In his new job, Ingrassia—who did not respond to a request for comment—is responsible for managing other White House appointments within the DOJ, and for identifying and recommending people to potentially be hired or promoted within the agency, according to a department memo. As such, Ingrassia is part of a small but growing class of important Trump officials with a history of posting things (and doing things) that might have been disqualifying for any other administration in recent memory, up to and including Trump’s own four years ago. This group includes Darren Beattie, appointed to a top post at the State Department despite having been dismissed from his job as a Trump speechwriter in 2018 after reportedly appearing at an event alongside white nationalists, and having claimed online that January 6 was orchestrated by the FBI. And also Gavin Kliger, an employee of Elon Musk’s DOGE, who appears to have shared a Fuentes post that disparages white people who adopt Black children and uses the pejorative slang term for women, “huzz.” (Kliger did not respond to a request for comment.)

[Read: A speechwriter gets a second shot at the State Department]

Not every such indiscretion has been completely ignored by the Trump administration and its allies. Another DOGE employee, Marko Elez, resigned on Thursday, reportedly over having made racist posts including “Normalize Indian hate” and “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity.” Within 24 hours, however, Vice President J. D. Vance was lobbying to rehire him under the justification that “stupid social media activity” shouldn’t “ruin a kid’s life.” Later that afternoon, Musk announced that Elez would be brought back.

Ingrassia’s appointment represents another win for young, online reactionaries in Washington. He praised and reposted an article from the fitness enthusiast and proponent of ”race science” Raw Egg Nationalist. He has worked for the Gateway Pundit—a conservative news site that frequently publishes lies and conspiracy theories. And he has extensive ties to Tate, having worked on his legal team; he even posted a picture of himself with Tate and Tate’s brother. Tate is currently being investigated by Romanian authorities for alleged rape and human trafficking, and he has been separately accused of rape and assault in the United Kingdom. He has denied all of the allegations against him.

Ingrassia’s “Free Nick Fuentes” post called for Musk to end a ban on Fuentes’s account that dated to 2021. (Fuentes was banned after what a Twitter spokesperson described as “repeated violations” of the company’s rules.) Such a move was necessary, Ingrassia argued, to “shift the Overton Window” on social media. People who argue against content moderation on social platforms often do so by arguing that more speech is always better. (In Fuentes’s case, that meant more Holocaust denial, more praise of Adolf Hitler, and more denigration of women and Black people.) But Ingrassia also appears to be drawn to at least some of the substance of what Fuentes posted.

And although there were almost certainly members of the first Trump administration who shared Ingrassia’s views, few if any publicly said so, or discussed their ideas online under their own name. They seemed to understand that there were stakes and consequences for airing such beliefs in public.

Ingrassia’s presence in the new administration reflects a departure from that era. It also shows that not all young, online reactionaries are the same. Ingrassia appears to represent the populist, nationalist wing of the MAGA coalition, which stands in opposition, in certain ways, to the tech-right faction including Kliger and led by Musk. The two groups were aligned through the election and still have many shared goals: Witness Ingrassia and Kliger’s shared interest in Nick Fuentes. But they have also aggressively diverged on some issues. The tech industry generally supports the use of H-1B visas for highly skilled immigrants, whereas MAGA nationalists tend to oppose them. Ingrassia, in the latter camp, has written that the United States should end the H-1B-visa program as well as birthright citizenship, and institute a “20 year moratorium on legal immigration.”

That this internal disagreement has been spilling out into public view may be the flip side of the no-longer-need-to-hide-it administration. The H-1B fight, which took off at the end of December, was very visible online. People like Ingrassia, Kliger, and Beattie, with their freewheeling and unapologetic social-media personas, have helped make these internal tensions very clear. They’re just posting through it.