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I really can’t say enough how much I appreciate everyone who reads Contra. This Substack has been as much a newsletter as a chronicle of my life through some pretty wild transitions and tribulations.

It’s interesting to go through the archives and see how much has changed—how much I’ve changed. That makes me even more grateful to the people who have stuck with Contra through the years. I very much got a good sense of who read me for me and what I have to say, and who just wanted their views mirrored in someone else.

I have some stories coming for you, and a review of Scion, a fun novel I just finished. But for now, I’m going to go chase my kids around the backyard.

Thanks for reading.

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Ursula K. Le Guin wrote that “truth is a matter of imagination.” I thought about those words after being reminded, against my will, of the beat-to-death debate as to what constitutes “right-wing art,” and whether such a thing is possible or even desirable today, by the news that The Daily Wire is developing a new movie.

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Our fourth baby, my third daughter, is due to be born any day now. I’m excited because I love being a dad to girls, and it means we get one last chance to watch a kid grow up. It goes fast. You close your eyes and open them to find babies turned into toddlers. So you savor every moment, every mem…

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I’ve got a few recent interviews and articles that I’m proud of publishing, along with some updates about this newsletter. If you read this, you’ll probably see where I’m going before I get there.

First, I wrote for Washington Monthly about artificial intelligence and how models are trained on massive amounts of physical texts that are then destroyed. A…

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My boy started school last week. I wasn’t ready for it.

I mean, logistically speaking, I was, thanks to my organized and thoughtful wife. He’s got a nice backpack, new clothes, and new shoes to fit his growing feet.

What I wasn’t ready for is the sudden awareness that time is accelerating. That my oldest is becoming a big boy. I’…

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He wiggles his tooth with a finger and thumb. Blood oozes from the base of the incisor, crimson on ivory.

“Not long now,” I say.

It is the first of his baby teeth to loosen. We give him, my son, a box and tell him to place it under his pillow when it falls free, tell him the tooth fairy will come for it.

“What will she bring?”

“It’s a surprise.”

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I don’t remember what time we got into the water. Only that the swim started late at night and ended not long before dawn. My kidneys felt like someone was cutting them out with a dull knife, probably because of dehydration and a few accidental gulps of water tinged with pollution in the San Diego Bay.

Voices on the shoreline called us out as we …

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Jim poured himself another shot of tequila, then raised the glass from the stone counter to meet mine. The sweet smell of barbecue drifted in on the breeze from the backyard, and the sun had just dipped beneath the waves. Jim likes the warmth of añejo and makes a margarita with teeth, but we’re drinking neat tonight in his home on a hill overlooking the Pacific.

My friend, whose name I’ve changed here, is a white man with an Anglo-Saxon last name. He’s worn many hats in different seasons. Special forces for one, DEA for another, to list a few. You’d never guess. Jim is part of that vanishing breed of operator who wouldn’t think to write a memoir. He’s content with a quiet life of surfing and grilling by the ocean. He loves Mexico and talks about it like an old flame.

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There is a line I used to hear people on the right use in reference to Donald Trump, typically as a way to cope with his awful moral character: “He fights.” It’s a reference to Abraham Lincoln’s defense of Ulysses S. Grant during the Civil War amid attacks from detractors.

“I can’t spare this man; he fights,” Lincoln said of Grant. “I’ll tr…

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The voice on the other end of the line was firm but reassuring. I was doing the right thing, she said. It didn’t feel that way at first, or rather, I kept asking myself if perhaps I was overreacting. After all, this was the first time I had received a threat that seemed serious enough to contact multiple law enforcement agencies.

The lady I was speaking with on the phone worked for the local FBI field office.

“You’re doing exactly what someone in your position should do,” she repeated as I went over the details again. Someone on the far right had made threats against me after I called for cooler heads to prevail in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s killing. This was late last year.

Then it happened again, more recently, after I wrote that the shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis by an ICE agent was unjustified, a position held by most Americans.

The average person recoiled in horror at the sight of Kirk and Good being shot, regardless of their politics. The sadism from the far left and far right in response to these incidents does not reflect the values of the middle and, in fact, both hate the middle equally and for the same reasons, which I will get to.

The problem now is that the new right feels little reason to restrain itself after winning a close election, which it has interpreted as a mandate to impose an unpopular agenda on Americans by force, if necessary.

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There’s a saying here that people use on New Year’s Eve: Guten Rutsch. It means “good slide,” and is a s…

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Celebrity deaths don’t generally exercise me. The murder of Rob Reiner did, and I wasn’t sure why at first.

His movies were certainly a big part of my adolescence. I don’t recall how old I was when I first saw Stand By Me. Probably too young. As a boy, it shaped my perception of friendship as a thing tempered by adversity and adventure; as an adult, it impressed upon me how fleeting life is, and that friendship, real friendship, is rarer than rhodium. Did you know we’re living through a “Friendship Recession”? According to the American Perspectives Survey, the percentage of adults who report having no close friends has quadrupled since 1990. People are reporting having fewer friends overall and spending less time with them throughout the week. We’re also, apparently, becoming meaner to each other. Nearly half of Americans say people are ruder now than before the pandemic, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey.

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The phone rings again. A frightened babysitter answers it a final time, only now realizing that the menacing stranger on the other end of the line is calling from inside the house. She panics and flees, but it’s too late.

It’s one of the most recognizable horror tropes in cinema, “the sitter and the man upstairs.” It’s also a recurring theme in politics: the greatest threats political movements face often come from within, and their leaders are incapable of recognizing that until it’s too late.

The new right is currently having its call-is-coming-from-inside-the-house moment as several of its most prominent members struggle to figure out how their camp has been overtaken by belief in conspiracy theories. A few individual problem children have been identified, suggesting that smoothing out these rough edges will suffice. But that is wishful thinking. The rot goes all the way to the foundations of the movement, and cutting it out would mean bringing down the house.

The new right’s affinity for conspiracy theories raises more fundamental questions about its relationship with knowledge. I think the reason it cannot help but indulge in these beliefs is that it constitutes what Florian Primig, a research associate at Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, calls a “counter-knowledge order,” that is, a movement self-consciously oriented in opposition to established “presuppositions, internal regulations and external conditions for the production, application, distribution, administration, implementation, utilization, etc., of knowledge in society.” That’s a fancy way of saying that the new right has a very different relationship with the concept of truth than most people.

There are really two groups currently engaged in this discussion. One is genuinely troubled by the current information environment, and the other is essentially just looking for scapegoats. I understand both because I once defended conspiracy theories by telling myself and others that each contained a kernel of truth that somehow justified its fetid exterior. I refused to push back on them because I operated under the maxim of “No Enemies to the Right,” a delusional and dishonest concept. And I looked the other way because I told myself that the political utility of these conspiracy theories, insofar as I saw them as conferring my faction with an advantage, outweighed any concerns. I regret these things profoundly and hope that I can at least offer insights into why conspiracy theories are features rather than bugs on the new right.

Last month, around the time that conspiracy theories about the death of Charlie Kirk began to reach a fever pitch, Christopher Rufo published an article in which he singled out Candace Owens as a main offender:

Owens, whose YouTube channel has more than 5 million subscribers, has raised questions about camera angles and underground passageways near the shooting site; suggested that Israeli cellphone signals detected on the day of the shooting might have had something to do with the assassination; and argued that the alleged shooter’s chat messages, released by the FBI, are, in fact, fabrications deployed in service of a grand cover-up.

In a podcast with Jonathan Keeperman, Rufo revisited the substance of that article. During their hour-long discussion, Keeperman pushed back on historian Richard Hofstadter’s thesis that the politics of paranoia that give rise to conspiracy theories are a distinctly right-wing phenomenon, arguing instead that it is a “phenomenon that tends to capture whatever side is out of power.” There is some truth there, and it actually connects to Primig’s theory of counter-knowledge orders and how they emerge. More on that later.

“So you don’t have control of the sort of apparatuses that produce knowledge, these sort of epistemic authorities,” Keeperman said. “You don’t know where sort of or how even consensus reality gets made. And so you start to kind of spin up these ideas, these answers to to questions that can fill the gaps.”

Keeperman said that he ultimately isn’t worried about people like Owens and believes that the solution to her conspiratorial content is “better,” presumably truthful content. Rufo more or less agreed and concluded that the “liberalization of the online sphere” that has tipped the scales in favor of people like Owens has been a “net positive,” despite some turbulence along the way.

About a month after that episode aired, and once Tucker Carlson threw in behind Owens with his following, Rufo and Keeperman took a more critical tone on the matter.

“The Right’s media apparatus is how the Right teaches its followers how to think, and it’s currently getting consumed by conspiracy, psychodrama, and tabloid conflicts,” Rufo tweeted. “If left unchecked, it will turn the audience into the equivalent of a Third World click farm.” Meanwhile, Keeperman chafed at the elimination of gatekeepers and guardrails. “The conventional wisdom circa 2010: ‘The open, disintermediated internet will finally bring about the purest expression of democracy the world has ever known!’” he wrote.

“>monkey paw curls.”

It is true that belief in conspiracy theories is neither new nor is it a phenomenon relegated to people who happen to vote Republican. It is also true that people like Owens have always existed; there have always been kooks who profit from disseminating nonsense and falsehoods to large audiences. However, two aspects of our situation are arguably novel: conspiracy theories now have more influence on mainstream thought, discourse, and politics than ever before, and the president of the United States—and the head of the new right—is a prolific conspiracy theorist.

Trump has made paranoia and lies cornerstones of the movement to such a degree that we hardly think of it anymore. It’s just sort of a fact of political life now that he not only rejects truthful, accurate information but also the way most people arrive at the truth. And yet, even though we have been completely inured to it by now, it is impossible to discuss the new right’s trouble with reality without acknowledging that this is a fish that has been rotting from the head down.

I think there are different kinds of conspiracy theorists. There are people who, for whatever reason, are drawn to and prefer them over fact and are sincere in the sense that there is no ulterior agenda motivating them. I do not believe there is actually anything wrong with this. Competing and even contradictory knowledge claims are normal and not particularly harmful in a democracy. People are entitled to their views, including outré ones that they may only subscribe to as a kind of cognitive hobby—a pseudo-belief. But the presupposition there is that of a common reality and common ground, two things that the new right, more than any other faction in the United States, has actively worked to erode. When all culture, all politics, all life are reduced to a zero-sum game, any information, in any context, that does not support their framing is subject to being contested and discredited by any means necessary, including and especially through conspiracy theories.

Even now, with complete control over the awesome power of the federal government, the new right continues to declaim against the “swamp,” “the establishment,” “the globalists,” and a myriad of other malevolent forces that are somehow capable of undermining and overpowering Trump, who promotes these conspiracy theories himself as a means of consolidating and strengthening his hold over his base. Indeed, a hallmark of his long reelection bid, one that perhaps went under-appreciated, was just how much Trump’s messaging intentionally drew from conspiracy theories like QAnon, which holds that he is spearheading a subterranean war against a cabal of child abusers. He has gone so far as to share on Truth Social so-called “q drops”—cryptic messages that a deep-state insider with top-secret clearance supposedly disseminates to those with eyes to see.

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I’m wrapping up two big ghostwriting projects and halfway done with a third. Something I’ve really enjoyed about this work is putting myself in the lives of others, learning to write in their voice, and helping convey in words things lived and dreamed.

Before I got started writing political things, I wrote little stories that’ll never see the light of day, mostly as a way of taking the world around me and straightening it into a narrative thread that made sense. Parents who fought a lot. A vision quest that didn’t pan out. Half-sister who struggled with addiction. These things developed in me a healthy sense of empathy, but I think that once I started down the path of political commentary, the aperture of my empathy narrowed because I began to primarily evaluate people (and things) based on ideological criteria. It’s hard to put yourself in the shoes of others after you have reduced them to an abstraction, an idea denuded of flesh and blood. The degree to which this happens depends on how far you go down the rabbit hole and how much of your being you surrender to ideology. I was in pretty deep. In my defense, the last decade has been one of profound polarization, and I am recovering.

This might seem like a strange way to back into an article about how the new right has been subsumed by the manosphere and adjacent online communities and the culture that accompanies them. I hope it will make sense by the end.

What I’m writing is part personal reflection, part analysis of a movement I had once associated with but no longer. I should start by saying that I am not a “trad” person. You will not find my writing in First Things or The Lamp. I am too self-conscious to even pretend I have it all figured out. I believe, like Jack Kerouac, in “order, tenderness, and piety,” although I am not particularly religious. I am telling you these things so that you understand where I am coming from and why I occasionally write about being a parent. I have three kids. Being a dad helped me recover normalcy, for which I am grateful.

So on Wednesday, in a short Substack Note, while waiting for a pot of coffee to brew, I posted about being a dad.

I do not use Notes frequently, and was not expecting much of a reaction, let alone a psychotic, even violent response to such a mundane post from the manosphere and adjacent spheres.

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Humans have been telling stories about the world around them since the first man stoked the embers of the first fire that set the night ablaze and chased away the dark. Parmenides equated night and darkness with ignorance, and thus stories—narratives that provided some sense of order and resonance with lived experience—illuminated the lives of men who wove, memorized, and recited them, passing them down orally from one generation to the next like a torch.

The true salience of that lies in the fact that humans are, as far as we know, the only creatures endowed with the capacity for storytelling. Other animals can “talk” to one another, but that communication is limited for the most part to conveying the needs and wants of bare life. Only we have the capacity for reason, which is to say, only we have the capacity to think in abstract terms, which is the basis of logic and allows higher-order thinking in the pursuit of knowledge and mastery over nature. That faculty is why we are at the top of the food chain, but it is the same one that made us the first weavers of myths and epics; in other words, we applied our singular faculty of reason toward the creation of fiction. One might say that man did that in the past because he was ignorant, and continues the tradition today to keep himself entertained. But I believe that fiction is often more real than reality because the stories we tell are really studies of the human condition that cast experiences, familiar and unfamiliar, in vivid and accessible colors.

At some point, we decided to start committing these stories to physical memory, crystallizing them in murals, pottery, inscriptions, tablets, and scrolls. It was the Romans who developed the precursor of the book as we know it today, known to them as the codex, which consisted of bound parchment. The exact origins of the codex are somewhat mysterious, but the first written reference to codices comes to us from the Roman poet Martial, who encouraged his readers to leave those big, cumbersome scrolls at home and purchase his poems in what was then still a new and portable, chic format instead:

You who long for my little books to be with you everywhere and want to have companions for a long journey, buy these ones which parchment confines within small pages: give your scroll-cases to the great authors—one hand can hold me.

It is amusing and fitting that the earliest extant reference to the modern book was essentially a sales pitch.

The art of bookmaking is fascinating because it arose from a need, a recognition that our narratives are worth preserving, worth taking with us wherever we go, worth passing down, even by the mute testimony of time when those who committed the words to memory have fallen silent and their recitation would otherwise be lost. But it is also an art that many seem to have forgotten. Not Old Sovereign Publishing, though.

Under George Carter’s leadership, Old Sovereign Publishing, a small, independent press, is producing gorgeous works of art in the classic style of bookmaking.

Carter commissions some of the best artists in the business to bring the pages of his catalogue to life with beautiful illustrations. He has also launched The Grand Agon, a playwright contest. The prize is $1,500 and a book contract. Two finalists will get to see their work performed on a London stage.

I wanted to know why George decided to undertake this enterprise. Publishing is hard, and I imagined that publishing meticulously crafted classics of literature was even harder, so it takes a special kind of person to decide to make this his cause.

Beyond that, I have been building a library filled with books that have been made to stand the test of time. I look at them like heirlooms, things that my children will someday read and inherit. When I had the opportunity to speak with someone in the business of creating the kinds of heirlooms I am seeking, I jumped at it.

I hope you will enjoy our conversation and consider checking out Old Sovereign Publishing’s offerings. You can also follow them on X at @OldSovPub.