Recent disruptions to many democratic systems have been marked by the sudden circulation and mainstreaming of initially fringe, far-right issues and ideas. This development occurs at a time when media and party systems have experienced rapid transformations. Ideological cleavages are increasingly emerging not only between but also within many political parties. Meanwhile, highly ideological and digitally networked media organizations create informational networks that feed into partisan politics. To understand how these developments are tied together, we examine a case from the United States, where the topic of “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) diffused from being a far-right talking point into mainstream politics. We construct an original dataset of right-wing as well as mainstream news sources and analyze the role of Republican politicians in spreading this agenda item. We then examine what distinguishes these Republicans from others by looking at various indicators for ideological preferences as well as modes of connectivity. We find that a particular faction of Republican elites—who are particularly extreme in Congress and more connected to digital right-wing media—play an outsized role. The combination of these factors, ideology and connectivity, predicts whether a Republican Member of Congress will help spread the “CRT” agenda. We refer to this mechanism as an emerging “logic of connective faction” and discuss the implications of this finding for Congress, the Republican Party, media systems, and for actors beyond the US.