Welcome to Right Wing Watch. I’m Peter Montgomery, the research director at People For the American Way. I’ve spent more than 30 years reading right-wing propaganda, attending Christian nationalist gatherings, absorbing far-right social media, and otherwise marinating in the ideologies and personalities that helped bring the MAGA movement to power.
With this newsletter, we’ll bring you news and analysis about the Christian nationalists, white nationalists, and other far-right actors who are undermining freedom and threatening the ideals of an inclusive democratic society—along with the funders and politicians who give them power.
This newsletter is our way to share our hard-won knowledge about the forces pushing our country to the right. In other words, you’ll get to read our research without having to subject yourself to hours and hours in the company of the worst people in the world. You’re welcome!
Right Wing Watch documents the ways that religion and patriotism have been manipulated and exploited to elevate racism, nativism, antisemitism, religious bigotry, and misogyny. We identify emerging influencers on the far right and document their extremism before most people are paying attention. While everyone else is reactive, we’re being proactive and identifying threats before they can emerge.
You don’t have to take our word for it. Some of the best journalists who cover politics have relied on Right Wing Watch monitoring and analysis.
A few years ago, when news broke that lesser-known white nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes had just had dinner with Donald Trump and Kanye West, many reporters were asking themselves, “Nick Who?” National media outlets turned to Right Wing Watch and our video archives for credible information about Fuentes, who we had been covering for five years as he was building an audience among disaffected young men.
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow recognized the importance of our reporting, calling Right Wing Watch “a fire alarm system for the whole country” and “great public service.” Mother Jones Bureau Chief David Corn has called Right Wing Watch “essential.”
We want Headquarters to be the go-to spot for the latest news you see on your feeds. This newsletter will dig into some of the deeper undercurrents that motivate MAGA:
Why are people in 2026 talking about denying women the right to vote? And why are those people still welcome in the MAGA movement?
How did most white evangelical Christians become so intensely loyal to an amoral and brazenly corrupt liar like Donald Trump?
What does it mean to have a vice president whose career has been funded by a tech oligarch who doesn’t believe in democracy?
We’ll equip you with answers to those “how can this be happening?” conversations we’re all having these days.
We’ll expose politicians who empower the bigots and fascists.
No matter what happens on Election Day, the far right isn’t going anywhere. They’ve spent the past 50 years and countless billions of dollars building a powerful political and media infrastructure that won’t be vanquished by winning a single election, no matter how large that victory may prove to be.
The better we understand it, the better we can resist and defeat it.
- Peter
