Meet the e-girls selling European decline to America

Earlier this year, a striking 28-year-old woman, dressed head to toe in a vivid shade of crimson, stepped up to the podium at a conference in Hungary. “Ladies and gentlemen: hello Budapest. I’m so thrilled to be here again,” she began, adjusting the twin microphones and gently swiping a strand of long blonde hair from her forehead. “As some of you might remember, last year I gave here a speech as well, about the ‘great replacement,’” she continued, confidently glancing around the assembled audience. “I wanted the whole world to know that the ‘great replacement theory’ was, in fact, not a theory, but reality. White people are becoming a minority in their own homelands at an exceptionally fast rate.”

Everything about this woman – her honeyed tresses, the impeccably tailored suit, the precisely arched brows accentuating a dewy, youthful glow and, of course, the words she was actually saying – might have situated her squarely within the heart of the MAGA playbook. Everything, that is, except the lilting accent and occasional grammatical flub betraying her European origins.

Far from being the latest addition to Donald Trump’s inner circle, Eva Vlaardingerbroek – who was speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference, known as CPAC – is a Dutch political commentator who has harnessed social media to broadcast her warnings about the “astronomical cost of mass migration” and the “demise of democracy.”

She has fashioned herself into a warrior against what she sees as the scourge of the left – particularly across her home continent – and in doing so, she has cultivated celebrity status and more than 900,000 followers on Instagram. She has also emerged as something of a figurehead of a new cohort of young, digitally native women denouncing, or at least criticizing, their homelands and exalting the US as a beacon of hope in a world they believe to be broken.

Their rise is more than cultural curiosity. It may well signal a subtle but real shift in the center of gravity within American conservatism itself. A political movement once dominated by homegrown men – self-styled patriots steeped in the mythology of the heartland – is evolving to become a stage for young women who arrive not from red-state strongholds, but from overseas.

These telegenic expat firebrands, fluent in the art of digital influence and polished by the cosmopolitan milieus some of them now shun, have begun to redefine the contours of the right. In their eyes, American conservatism – underpinned by an awesome bureaucracy and a canonical constitution – is a refuge: a battlement against the forces they believe have overtaken their own homes.

Each woman who belongs to this new class of conservative Americophiles shares a fundamental admiration for the principles and values upon which this country is built – or at least their interpretation of those principles and values. Each also has her own reason for doing so, her own story of what brought her here.

Jade Warwick, a 28-year-old woman who grew up in Wales, in the United Kingdom, started modeling when she was a teenager – a career that took her to Los Angeles, where she fell in love with the US. Today she lives in Washington, DC and has a more than 300,000-strong – and rapidly growing – Instagram following, to whom she broadcasts her thoughts on immigration and her admiration for the First and Second Amendments of the US Constitution. Her content is delivered with a balanced blend of snark, sarcasm, humor and provocation – a mix that makes it exquisitely shareable.

In late September, Warwick, a self-described “culture warrior” who counts Florida Representative Anna Paulina Luna among her friends, posted a picture of herself on Instagram, from her American citizenship ceremony. “I am proud to be an American, in the home of the brave,” she wrote in the comments. A month later, at a Halloween party, she appeared dressed as Kristi Noem, replete with ICE baseball cap. She chose the outfit, she wrote in a post accompanying a photograph, because “it upsets the libtards,” who she says were dressing up as the assassinated Charlie Kirk.

When I ask Warwick what she loves about America, she doesn’t hesitate. “Americans are courageous because they are descended from fearless immigrants who worked hard for their families. They were disappointed with their governments [and they were] yearning for freedom,” she says. “They had the guts to leave at a time when you couldn’t just get on a flight. These people are built differently.”

But her favorite thing about America “is the American spirit.” And she also really admires the Second Amendment – the right to keep and bear arms – and Americans’ determination to defend it. “They don’t want the government to become so powerful that they can’t defend themselves. That’s incredible,” she says. “And as a Brit who did not grow up with guns whatsoever, I love that.”

In Europe there’s a lot that needs to be fixed, Warwick says. “Treading water is as good as drowning,” she says. “And in the UK we have been complacent and lived in the past. At some point you have to speak up and take action.” Specifically what she means is that Europe needs to take a tougher stance against illegal immigrants.

“I’m saying, let’s be proud of where we came from and let’s protect our homeland, protect our women and protect our children. I don’t want Middle Eastern and North African people coming over and – I’m sorry – raping and murdering,” she says. “That’s unacceptable. Men used to go to war over that. And now we sit by and allow the police to protect them and allow the governments to pardon them [the immigrants].” Or said differently, yes, Warwick wants to “make Britain great again.”

Vlaardingerbroek – who in October posted a picture on Instagram of her and her family in front of the White House, captioned “so glad to be back in the land of the free and home of the brave with my boys” – did not respond to my requests to speak to her. Neither did Naomi Seibt, a 25-year-old German right-wing activist who recently applied for political asylum in the US, citing fears for her safety in her home country.

Seibt, who has more than 460,000 followers on Twitter and has been dubbed the “Anti-Greta” on climate discourse (perhaps for her slight resemblance to the Swedish eco-warrior), is a supporter of the Alternative for Germany party – the AfD – which German authorities have labeled extremist. In October, she met with Luna, the Republican Representative and Warwick’s friend. Luna posted a picture of her and Seibt on her Twitter account. In the caption she wrote that she is “personally assisting” Seibt’s asylum application. “The very same German government that claims to fight Nazism,” she wrote, “is acting like the secret police.” In one of her own Twitter posts, meanwhile, Seibt is seen at what looks to be a Trump rally. Her caption: “I came all the way from Germany and get to witness American patriotism in action. Supporters of Donald Trump, you give me hope for western civilization. Thank you.”

However successful each of these individual young women is in her pursuit of justice, liberty or perhaps personal fame and recognition, it’s undeniable that they, as a group, have tapped in to something. Their followings are growing by the day. They’re getting through and resonating. What their ascendance ultimately signals is perhaps still unclear. Are they a fleeting social-media phenomenon? Or are they early ambassadors of a deeper realignment?

When I ask Warwick whether she thinks she’s starting a movement, she hesitates for a few seconds. Then she admits: “Weirdly, I do think I am.” Friends have called her, she says, and told her she should go into government. She can, she says, imagine running for Senate. “There are a lot of people backing me [and] they want to see me save the West. I’m one person so I don’t know how I’m gonna be doing that,” she says. “But teaming up with other aligned women? I do think that would be a very smart idea.”