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.

I remember sitting in the living room with my father, exercising his mind with the kind of questions you would present to a small child. He resembled one then. Alzheimer’s had wasted him away.

“What’s your favorite animal?” I asked.

“Caballo,” he said.

“Did you have one as a boy?”

“Sí.”

“What was its name?”

“Caballo.”

I laughed harder than I had in a while. His mouth wrinkled into a gentle smile, beneath the glassy eyes of a waking dreamer. He would be dead a few hours later.

Reading through Aaron Gwyn’s “The Cannibal Owl” made me think of my dad again. Clocking in at just 66 pages, it is a beautiful novella inspired by the true story of Levi English, who ran away from home as a boy to Texas, where he lived among the Comanche for a time.

Gwyn’s writing is cinematic and elegiac, a panegyric for a different time, a different way of life. The tale he tells is one of loss, love, and revenge. It’s also deeply informed by knowledge of the ways of the Lords of the Southern Plains, whose prowess on horseback is nearly peerless in history.

If you hate plot spoilers, I recommend reading it before listening. Though just talking about it doesn’t do the quality of Gwyn’s work justice.

We also discussed his new short story in Panoptica, “Last of the Cowboys.”

You can grab a copy of “The Cannibal Owl” from Belle Point Press or Amazon.

A boy sits in the dark of a cavern stolen deep beneath the earth. It is quiet except for the sound of a subterranean lake lapping the rough stone walls. He holds in his hands a porcelain mask glowing with eldritch light, and stares into the voided eye sockets. He must choose between the purity of his heart and the darkness flitting at the edges of his soul.

It’s one of my favorite scenes from In Search of Sacha, a beautifully illustrated fantasy storybook by , an artist whose portfolio includes a handful of popular Netflix series, movies, and novels.

I first connected with Guzman a few months ago while searching for someone to create original artwork for an episode of the Contra podcast that I recorded with Jonathan Maberry, the editor of Weird Tales and a prolific novelist. I asked Guzman to create something inspired by Robert E. Howard’s Bran Mak Morn character. The result was a proper homage to the saturnine Pictish king.

But Guzman is more than a supremely talented illustrator. He also weaves a good yarn. I think I mentioned to him in passing how it can sometimes be difficult to find high-quality children’s books that are fully illustrated. He recommended his own 80-page fairy tale. My kids liked it so much that they held still long enough to read it from cover to cover in one sitting.

The story of In Search of Sacha follows a mother and father, Elysia and Amar, who are on a quest to find their boy. It opens with the pair streaking across the dense canopy of a dark forest, weightlessly bounding from tree to tree, soaring over rivers and racing down mountains, like the bamboo forest scene from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Nature stirs and submits in their awesome wake.

Throughout their adventure, Amar and Elysia draw strength from their love. That bond allows the couple to overcome the monsters standing between them and Sacha as they flutter through the woods in robes of white and silver.

Sacha, who is named after one of Guzman’s sons, wanders brokenhearted, wounded by a girl who could not love herself and pushed him away. In one sense, this is a story about parents dealing with the heartache of a child struggling with unrequited affection. That first big letdown, when it seems like the sky is falling and feels like the sun might not rise again, or it wouldn’t matter if it did.

But Guzman is doing more here with the sinister character of Lady Ravine, a wicked enchantress and siren. “Her presence manifests when despondent souls indulge in self-sabotage.”

Lady Ravine’s song is especially alluring to the young and lost and brokenhearted, for they are the ones most vulnerable to “romantic and poetic despair.” Cupidity is like a flame that threatens to consume. Sacha’s “flame does not burn, but it purifies,” though that will change if he gives himself over to self-loathing, which does burn until there is nothing left.

It is much easier to hold on to something that hurts us than to let it go because, even though the burden of recollection inflicts suffering, that pain becomes like a companion. Find new ways to dress the wound with vice so that it won’t heal because it is better to be haunted by the shadow of love than to release it and be forgotten.

Sacha is faced in the final scenes with the choice of saving himself or surrendering to the darkness as his parents rush to rescue him from the Mistress of Death. But it is a choice he must ultimately make alone, and he draws strength from the love and example set by Elysia and Amar. It is a touching tale of how the light—or dark—in us is reflected in our children.

In Search of Sacha is available on Amazon and Guzman’s website, where you can also find a copy of his art book, showcasing a collection of fantasy and sci-fi paintings.

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Fall, 1978.

A man arrived in Nashville, down on his luck and broke, hunting for work. He had a mean streak, but he could build. Carpentry, stonemasonry, architectural design. His hands had mastered it all, and lucky him, Mack Lipsey needed a hand building a great room. The man’s name was Cormac McCarthy, and he wrote Suttree in the evenings after construction.

McCarthy was living off of hot credit cards, three novels into his career. Something to keep in mind if you’re a struggling artist or just plain struggling. You know his story, so you know that he died one of the greatest novelists who ever lived. You can read the full story about that in The Cormac McCarthy Journal.

I didn’t make the connection between McCarthy’s roughing it and the current political moment, in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s death, until after I had wrapped my talk with , a contributor to Vanity Fair, and the author of Barney’s Rubble.

Barney's Rubble

Literature, history and politics with a dash of Hitchens, a sprinkle of Vidal and a whole lot of rubble.

By Vincenzo Barney

He’s been on the show before, and I was glad to have him back. We opened with McCarthy, then transitioned into a longer talk about the assassination of Kirk and its meaning. Vincenzo and I start in different places along the political spectrum but end up in the same spot: we agree that the vision of America, and Americans, being ripped apart is a nightmare, and anyone championing that, taking advantage of fear and anger, is an utter fool or worse.

Some people think we’ve passed the point of no return, or crossed the Rubicon, a term I’ve heard a lot over the last few years—and used to use myself. I’m not convinced. Americans are more resilient than riverine rhetoric. I think about McCarthy and how the man simply refused to quit, finding a path through sheer grit and ingenuity, that distinctly American way.

I hope that you enjoy this talk with Vincenzo and check out our previous conversation if you missed it. You can follow him on Twitter here.

Charlie Kirk had just passed the microphone to an interlocutor when the crack of a rifle silenced the murmuring throng of students that gathered to see him at Utah Valley University beneath the noon sun on a clear day. It was the first stop on his American Comeback Tour, and the last. For a stunned second that dragged on, the crowd watched Kirk recoil a…

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The podcast has been my favorite thing in a long time, and I’ve got a few great guests coming soon, now that I’m back from visiting family in Germany. I’m going to w…

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I think I’m getting old because I’ve lost my stomach for culture war discourse. That became clear to me amid the reaction to the Annunciation Catholic Church and School shooting in Minneapolis.

Around 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday, 23-year-old Robert “Robin” Westman approached the church clad in black during an all-school Mass. Westman carried a pistol, shotgun, and rifle on which he wrote in white marker all manner of insane ravings, mainly references to memes and other very online items.

The pews inside were packed with children and adults, ears and hearts open to a psalm beneath stained-glass windows glowing with the early morning light. “For you darkness itself is not dark, and night shines as the day,” a member of the church read. And as they were all about to say Alleluia, bullets began to tear through the windows and pews and people.

Westman had opened fire from the outside and would shoot more than a hundred rounds over the next two minutes. He then took his own life in the rear parking lot, as cowards usually do to avoid punishment in this life, but maybe not the next.

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Sometimes, when I feel the pressure of a looming deadline like a vice around my frontal lobe, I will open Instagram and let the feed wash my brain of worry. I’m not proud of this habit, but it has allowed me to glimpse the abyssal plains of content, where minds go to be temporarily lobotomized, my own included. It’s like a cerebral crac…

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I’m going to tell you a story, one that until very recently wasn’t public.

Back in 2023, Tucker Carlson called me and told me that the Trump campaign was going to come after me because I had become a gadfly of theirs. As a former supporter who had sources within the first administration, I had insight into that world that made me a problem, I guess. I’ve never understood why I became such a focus of their operation. The best I could surmise is that I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Somebody had to be made an example of, and that somebody was me. I think I appeared on Carlson’s show nearly two dozen times. I was a semi-regular on Steve Bannon’s program. Both Carlson and Bannon praised my journalism profusely.

Anyway, Carlson called me over Signal and explained, in careful detail, what was going to happen and who exactly was behind it, down to the names of each individual. Someone had clearly briefed him on it, though I still don’t know why.

I asked Carlson to intervene, told him my wife was pregnant, and the point of this was to hurt not only me but also my family. He refused to lift a finger, insisting that he wanted nothing to do with debates about Trump. Remember, this was the Carlson who had referred to Trump as a “demonic force,” a sentiment he had privately reiterated. Nothing that he had said to me indicated that he had fundamentally changed his mind about Trump.

Then, a few weeks later, Carlson announced his first major advertising deal since leaving Fox News with a company linked to Donald Trump Jr. That was significant because Carlson told me that Don Jr. was one of the people involved in the attack on me. Not long after that, Don Jr. also joined a venture capital firm that invested $15 million in Carlson’s new company, “Last Country Inc.” I had a similar experience with JD Vance, who used to seek my input out of the blue, before he entered Congress to right up until he adopted his umpteenth persona as Donald Trump’s strongest soldier after downloading a new personality via the Palantir microchip that Peter Thiel installed in his brain. I couldn’t understand it, but it made sense when it came out that Don Jr. had lobbied for his father to saddle up with Vance. In JD’s defense, we had been in contact before he received a new psychological profile update.

When the campaign went into action, I was leading a discussion with some young people about the Agricola, a book by Tacitus on the life and character of his father-in-law, Gnaeus Julius Agricola. It’s a work that I frequently revisit. Agricola was, according to Tacitus, a decent and just man who nevertheless labored in the service of an empire that at that point seemed to hold in suspicion above all men like him. I used Agricola as an example of someone who fought to maintain his integrity, his moral core, though he marched beneath the banner of a despot, when republican virtues were not in fashion and in fact could cost one their head. I thought that maybe Agricola could offer the group I was speaking with some inspiration.

In the aftermath of that little ordeal, my wife held it together until I got home, and then she melted into tears in my arms. The point of the attack wasn’t just to silence me. It was also intended to hurt my family.

For years, I had lived under the delusion that the conservative movement had something like honor. I’m embarrassed to have ever believed in that. I’m even more embarrassed to have believed in the moral sucking sounds that are beings like Carlson and Vance, who more and more people are seeing through. The former editor of Chronicles, an ornery but very intelligent man, had an excellent post about Carlson recently:

Fleming is spot on. Carlson isn’t a fascist, a conservative, or a populist. He is an actor who is playing a part. But that’s not unique to him. It’s true of Vance. It’s true of the vast majority of “thought leaders” in this movement, including anons, which is why it would be more accurate to refer to it as an entertainment industry or media market. Carlson plays the part of a truth-teller, but what he actually does is send people down one dead-end rabbit hole after another while putting on this absurd everyman persona. One nice thing I’ll say about Trump is that, as a masterful bullshitter, he sees right through Carlson’s bullshit, which is why Trump will openly mock him. For example, during the Iran fiasco, Trump was asked what he thought about Carlson’s insistence that the U.S. not be involved at all in that conflict.

“I don’t know what Tucker Carlson is saying,” Trump said. “Let him go get a television network and say it so that people listen.”

Not only did Trump mock Carlson for getting booted from Fox News, he also dismissed the network that his own son’s venture capital firm had invested in as utterly unserious. There were actually two bombing runs during this period. One on Carlson’s dignity, and the other on the Fordow Uranium Enrichment Plant.

Carlson didn’t reply. What could he say? Trump essentially owns him, and they both know it.

Meanwhile, Vance, or rather, the current iteration of the entity known as JD Vance, not to be confused with its previous incarnation as JD Hamel, or even the JD Vance who compared Trump to Hitler, no, I am referring to the currently existing Vance, whose role it is to scrape right-wing Twitter for talking points and then regurgitate them like a chatbot in order to seduce Millennials into thinking that “their guy” is in the White House. This Vance will flirt with far-right lines about race and so on, sending the terminally online wild, and in the next breath tell people that, well, shucks, if someone is going to build the digital surveillance state, it may as well be Thiel, the man who created his political career, just like maw maw would want. I could spend a lifetime trying to explain Vance’s phoniness to people. I doubt I could summarize it better than this: “Vance uses Appalachia in the same way it’s been used for centuries - a place to extract resources from.” Who knew that Hillbilly Elegy was a double entendre, with its less-known meaning signifying the final death of our tattered privacy, ushered in by a man who traded on the accident of his birth.

I’m glad all of these things happened to me. I’m glad I had reason to insulate my family from that world and go in an entirely different direction, professionally and creatively. Everything that happened, awful as it was in the moment, was ultimately a boon, a blessing in disguise. And I’m sharing a small part of that story because I think there are a lot of people who feel a little lost, unsure about where to go and how to feel about the current moment. Forget Trump’s historically bad job approval ratings. That’s probably the least of the right’s problems. Earlier today, I posted on Notes:

The right feels frozen in 2015/2016, down to its preferred political scandals. Talking about Hillary and her emails in 2025. Posting the same content about crime statistics, about feminism, long after these things have lost any modicum of shock value. The bleeding edge of the right is running on a hamster wheel of unoriginal ideas. It’s a backwards-looking movement, which I think is why there is such an aggressive push to make it seem like the exotic-sounding NRx is the reigning ideology of the hour. “Dark Enlightenment.” Except it’s not, and nobody outside of a small, self-interested set believes NRx is relevant. Anons are no longer interesting. Their content is indistinguishable from anything a representative of TPUSA would post.

It’s bad enough that Costin Alamariu, a prolific liar and purveyor of slop who posts under the name “Bronze Age Pervert,” is talking about creating a members-only forum, after he and his friends contributed to the decline of Twitter. It’s an endeavor that has all the self-awareness of locust lamenting that there’s nothing left to eat. If you are plugged into the right-wing discourse online, then your attention span has likely been hijacked by people who want you to believe that half the country thinks Sydney Sweeney’s big naturals are racist, and that South Park has gone “woke” because it decided to lampoon Vance and Charlie Kirk. It is absolutely desolate, a barren womb of ideas, a cognitive desert strangling wayward brain cells unlucky enough to wander into the salt flats.

Comes the reply, and the name of this post: what, then, is your solution? That’s a great question, and I talked a bit about this in my latest podcast with .

The honest answer is that there is no solution in the sense that people want to hear. Immediate, decisive, straightforward. Carlson isn’t going to enlighten you. Vance isn’t going to save you. Kirk isn’t going to lead you to the promised land. None of them cares about you, let alone the country.

I’m convinced that the only meaningful thing that people can do right now is focus on building a foundation for themselves in something that is not political, something that is not connected to the success of a political movement or political personalities, because these things are ephemeral, these things will pass away, and you will be left with yourself and your conscience in the end.

A few months ago, I came across an essay by someone named . I had no idea who she was, but the title of what she wrote caught my eye: “Why I Was Part Of The Neoreactionary or Dissident Right Movement In 2020.”

Lydia described a familiar journey that took her from one political tribe on the left to another on the right and then no tribe at all. And although we had never met, we tracked along parallel roads, occasionally encountering the same people on that weird way. In fact, it turns out that Lydia was engaged to Curtis Yarvin around the time I first met him.

Solar Light

a newsletter by Lydia Laurenson

By Lydia Laurenson

Like Lydia, I thought the “Red Tribe” was promising. There’s a joy that comes with undertaking new political endeavors, feeling like you’ve finally found the right camp to bivouac with. It’s natural, but also often an illusion. Politics, in the low sense, is just one type of building material, and an unstable one at that.

There’s a discussion here about the meaning of the political. For Aristotle, it meant the human things that happen within a city, the participation in self-governance, a means toward cultivating a flourishing that is essential for a life well-lived. That is obviously not what most people have in mind when thinking about, let alone forming, political movements and identities. Realistically, no one thinks like that anymore. You get laughed at for even proposing such a thing. But I think there’s a gradient, a spectrum between utopianism and open psychopathy. In my experience, the left is inclined toward the former, while the right leans toward and indeed currently revels in the latter.

I think that building around shared cultural and civilizational interests is one of the only meaningful kinds of projects that people can shoulder right now. Lydia briefly published a magazine with that aim in mind. It was called The New Modality, and it had one of the coolest aesthetics I’ve seen for a publication. You can still get copies of it on BackerKit.

Lydia and I talked all about her magazine, her background and unlikely political journey, and her work as a researcher of polarization and misinformation. Some of the findings she made seem counterintuitive. Here is one that we discussed:

The best research studies we have do not indicate that digital media is increasing polarization. It’s still possible that digital media is driving polarization, but explanations for how it would be doing that are becoming increasingly baroque due to the contradictory evidence.

She also found that echo chambers aren’t as prevalent as they seem, or at least that you have to really go out of your way to cocoon yourself. That raises a lot of questions about how people actually choose to interact with information online.

We touched on that and a lot more in this episode. I hope you’ll enjoy it.

For the last two or three weeks, I’ve been working on a story about Pizzagate, QAnon, Jeffrey Epstein, and the role conspiracy theories play on the new right. It’s sprinkled with some anecdotes about my experiences with various media personalities and politicians, before I hopped off the Trump Train for good.…

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Alex Wei looks a little nervous on camera beneath his scraggly mop of curly hair. He’s sitting in his one-bedroom apartment, shooting a new video for his YouTube channel. A lonely acoustic guitar stands in the background. His studio equipment consists of only an iPhone, in keeping with Gen Z’s preference for low-production value, signaling authenticity and relatability.

Everything about the setup screams “recent alum” trying to figure things out. The description of Alex’s vlog is “self-improvement, personal stories, and thoughts on life.” The title of this episode? “I Voted for Trump And I Regret It.”

Alex is one of a growing number of Zoomers who voted for Donald Trump and are now experiencing buyer’s remorse. That has given rise to conflicting theories on the left and right regarding the true source of their dissatisfaction, with each side wishingcasting their heart’s desires into the well of data.

One of the most notable voting trends of the 2024 election was that Gen Z appeared to shift dramatically to the right, especially young men like Alex. It left Democratic data scientist David Shor stunned.

“Young people have gone from being the most progressive generation since the Baby Boomers, and maybe even in some ways more so, to becoming potentially the most conservative generation that we’ve experienced maybe in 50 or 60 years,” he said.

The media made a whole lot of hay with what appeared to be the political equivalent of Earth’s magnetic field flipping: conservatives were suddenly the cool kids.

Or rather, the “cruel kids.”

In a cover story for New York Magazine, Brock Colyar attempted to capture and impugn the youthful vibe swirling about Trump’s inauguration in the Imperial City, where liberals had gone into full retreat before his conquering shadow. Colyar’s article, “The Cruel Kid’s Table,” featured a flattering photograph of a group of young, well-dressed Republicans living large in the afterglow of Trump’s triumph over Kamala Harris. One 28-year-old conservative influencer described the environs thusly: “It’s Republican Coachella, and Donald Trump is our Beyoncé.” The images from that night evoke scenes from Baz Luhrmann’s “The Great Gatsby,” with pleasant physiognomies not seen since the Gilded Age, when America basked in ill-fated opulence. Maybe that was foreshadowing of the coming crash.

All the most recent public opinion polling indicates that Trump’s support among Gen Z has collapsed. That could change, but it’s our reality right now. One of the most widely cited figures comes from a CBS/YouGov survey conducted between July 16 and 18, which found that Trump’s approval among those aged 18-29 plummeted from 55 percent in February to 28 percent in July.

The question is why. What made the pendulum swing so violently?

In a tweet that has more than 14,000 likes, a young woman named Maia Mindel declared that the notion Gen Z is conservative has been found “dead” six months into Trump’s second term. Based on her profile, it’s safe to assume that she is on the left and clearly thinks that this bodes well for the future. But if you read the replies beneath her tweet, you’ll find a different interpretation of the data.

“This poll doesn’t indicate what you think it does,” wrote Aedmar Skýjárn, a pseudonymous right-wing poster. He included a picture of a smiling Ralph Fiennes as Austrian SS functionary Amon Göth in “Schindler’s List,” implying that plunging support among Zoomers for the GOP stems from the fact that Trump is not the Hitlerian figure they had dreamed of and voted for. Some variation of this has become the standard line on the right for processing Trump’s declining approval overall.

According to CNN’s Harry Enten, Trump appears to be imploding faster than an OceanGate submarine on every big issue, from immigration to his handling of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.

Trump’s net approval rating on all the major issues, minus-five points on immigration—his best issue, he’s underwater. How about the economy? That was what he was elected for—minus-14 points. How about foreign policy—minus-14 points. How about trade, in those tariff wars, minus-15 points, and, of course, the Epstein case, the lowest of the bunch, minus-37 points, 37 points below water. My goodness gracious, on every single issue, Donald Trump is below water on all the major ones. They’re all dragging him down, no matter it seems what Donald Trump does, the American people do not like it.

So, how is Dark MAGA responding to these numbers? By insisting that Trump isn’t being Trumpian enough for most Americans. “The country is to the right of Trump on all major issues,” claimed a poster who goes by BowTiedRanger.

It’s certainly true that there is a contingent of Republicans who believe that Trump hasn’t gone “hard” enough against his and their foes. This cohort eyerolls their older counterparts in the party, disinterested with talk of free markets, common ground, individual liberties, and traditional Republican support for Israel. Trump, in their view, is a means to a revolutionary end, a vehicle through which the GOP will be remade in their image, according to their concerns, fixations, and enmities. Trump 2.0 is their opportunity to darken the doorways of power and maneuver themselves into positions of influence, biding their time until, at last, the hero in history emerges to lead them into the final battle. And if this story sounds familiar, it is because the right has told it before, about Trump, who already campaigned on the “Final Battle.” Thus, he must now be retconned as not Adolf Hitler but as a precursor figure who still commands unflinching loyalty and is incapable of failure, only of being failed by his handpicked confidants. Something like that.

Overall, however, this narrative, that Gen Z’s break with Trump is primarily because he isn’t willing to burn the country to the ground and build a right-wing Mecca in Washington, is unconvincing. It seems to stem from a sense of frustration, a desire to beat one’s chest in the face of humiliation and disorientation. Cope, in other words. In fact, the same people who are saying today that Gen Z’s flight is due to Trump not being “based” enough were only yesterday proclaiming “Got What I Voted For” every time the administration unveiled some policy that made life worse for everyone else and, in particular, young people. Which is it, then? Nobody knows, least of all them. Indeed, if anything, Trump’s messaging and optics have been tailored to the tastes of this crowd. The performative cruelty of Studio Ghibli deportation memes. The trotting out of ghouls like Stephen Miller. The endless kitsch portraying Trump as a kind of Übermensch, a hunter of men, and vengeful spirit of a people scorned. The aesthetic transformation of the White House into a new right fever dream has happened in parallel with Trump’s rising unpopularity and the general public’s souring on his immigration agenda.

For a more accurate picture that I think represents how a much larger slice of Zoomers feel, it might be wiser to listen to what people like Alex have to say about why they voted for Trump—and why they’re walking away.

“An overwhelming amount of young people, especially young men, felt politically homeless at the time because we didn’t trust the Democrats,” Alex said of his rationale for supporting Trump. The lies about Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, the coronation of Harris as his replacement, the lecturing about “who to vote for and the moral high ground” from people “living in mansions and looting the economy.” All these things factored into his decision.

Like many young men, Alex said he felt completely alienated by the Democratic Party. It’s not a new story, but one worth minding because Trump won this demographic by a margin of around 14 points over Harris.

“We got the message that we were toxic, privileged but also useless.”

The “shaming,” he said, was too much, too absurd, especially to boys who have nothing, and whose prospects seem so bleak.

“The economy is broken, wages are flat, jobs feel meaningless, the dating culture is a complete mess, housing costs are becoming unaffordable, and the overall culture constantly tells men that we’re the problem. And that’s when it goes beyond politics and becomes something personal.”

Voting for Trump felt like giving a “middle finger” to the establishment, and it helped that he was putting together a team of what appeared to be political outsiders from across the spectrum. Tulsi Gabbard. Bobby Kennedy. Elon Musk, “back when people thought he was a genius.”

“It’s true that a lot of Trump supporters, even to this day, are simply just cult members who have some kind of weird emotional attachment to him and will never criticize him, no matter what,” he said, before reiterating that there were rational reasons for why people like him thought The Donald was a viable alternative.

What changed?

“Trump’s actions have betrayed the people who once believed in him.” Yes, Trump promised to drain the swamp. “But what did he do? Filled it with even more swamp creatures.” He pointed to Marco Rubio as an example, and said that Trump’s decision to bomb Iran was like spitting in the face of the anti-war movement that he courted. “No new wars means no new wars.”

The so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” also pushed Alex away from Trump because it cuts “the social safety net for ordinary people.” The disconnect between populist rhetoric and what he was seeing with his own two eyes became too great to ignore.

“His inner circle just looks like a hedge fund meeting, filled with the swamp of political and business elites everywhere.”

The third reason he gave for splitting with Trump was how the Epstein files have been handled, which seems to confirm Enten’s point that voters do consider this issue an important one. Many observers have been scratching their heads at that fact because, well, why would so many Americans care about a dead sex criminal? Part of it has to do with lingering questions about just who Epstein really was, the origins of his vast wealth, and whether he was connected to domestic or foreign intelligence agencies. A big conspiracy, the kind of thing no politician would dare to expose. Nobody except Trump, the outsider, the daywalker who has traveled in both worlds and is therefore immune to the kind of compromise that Epstein’s powerful friends are said to have fallen prey to. Trump tapped into this narrative when it suited him, vowed to bring “dark to light,” as fans of QAnon would say. And then, he didn’t. Instead, he recoiled in animal terror at who knows what and hasn’t stopped running scared since, demanding that the GOP block all attempts to release the files, personally trying to kill stories before they go to print, calling his top influencers and telling them to back off and toe the line, struggling desperately to control everything that the public sees and hears about the matter. People like Alex have taken note of that.

“Trump is obviously on the list,” said Alex, referencing Epstein’s list of associates. “The pictures, the mountains of circumstantial evidence, the testimonies, the reports. At some point, you just gotta ask yourself, if Biden tried to cover this up, would you be making the same excuses?”

Again, the level of gaslighting from the Trump administration around Epstein has been unlike anything I’ve seen in a decade. The diversions and deceptions are endless and impossible to avoid noticing. Never has Trump seemed so afraid of the unvarnished truth—the thing that only he was supposed to be willing to tell. The trouble is that there is no one with a big platform on the new right who would dare challenge Trump’s lies and therefore provide his movement some credibility. Not Tucker Carlson, not Steve Bannon, not Charlie Kirk, who is currently working on rehabilitating Epstein’s accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell. That’s right.

Trump is reportedly considering cutting a deal with Maxwell, leniency in exchange for her providing details about her old friend—details that would, of course, exclude anything damning about Trump. In the intelligence business, this is referred to as a “limited hangout.” It’s what spy agencies do to manage perception by volunteering crumbs of truth to divert the public’s attention so that they stop demanding the really good stuff, which, in this case, are the Epstein files that Trump has been named in and is refusing to release. Maxwell, in Trump’s frightened mind, could be his ticket out of trouble. But don’t take it from me. Kirk spelled it out. “Maybe she wants immunity, maybe she wants some sort of protection, I don’t know,” he said on his show this week. “But it definitely is something that is worthy of praise, and worthy of our encouragement.” Newsmax host Greg Kelly echoed Kirk, somberly calling Maxwell a “victim.”

I’m not sure if it’s youthful idealism or what, but it seems that Zoomers do see through, or at least care about, these lies more than their generational peers. Epstein, in their eyes, was the twisted face of the system, everything Trump swore he stood against. Of course, he doesn’t, never did, and now Gen Z is grappling with that. Forty-one percent of Gen Z respondents to a July 18 YouGov poll said that Trump likely knew “a lot” about Epstein’s crimes before his arrest, while 42 percent believe the pair were “close friends.”

Alex’s overall experience is more in line with what we see in the data now. A closer look at CBS/YouGov polling that the new right takes as a sign that Zoomers, one and all, crave a more Hitlerian Trump actually shows that Gen Z opposes Trump’s immigration policies by the largest margin of any age group. Sixty-six percent say Trump has become “too tough” on the issue.

How about the economy and inflation? We hear from the White House how great Trump is on those things all the time. Well, Gen Z’s reality disagrees. Only 29 percent of them approve of how Trump is handling the economy, while 72 percent say that the administration is focusing “too much” on tariffs, and just 27 percent say he’s doing a good job of tackling inflation. What about DEI programs? Some 55 percent of Gen Z thinks Trump is focused on ending them “too much.” A thing to keep in mind here is that Trump’s anti-DEI crusade has also undermined scientific and medical research that isn’t political, so there’s a chance that some Zoomers see it as an indiscriminate and counterproductive war.

These numbers are showing up everywhere.

In a poll conducted by Morning Consult between July 18 and 20, 72 percent of Gen Z disapproved of Trump’s job performance. A recent Harvard Youth Poll found that nearly half of young men believe Trump is destroying the economy. And according to a new YouGov/Economist poll, Trump’s support with Gen Z voters is sitting around 28 percent.

None of this should be surprising. Since taking office, Trump has done nothing but make their lives harder, while his media allies have asked them not to believe their lying eyes. Take, for example, a recent podcast between Kirk and Carlson, in which the duo discussed the issue of “debt slavery” for Gen Z. You see, these two aren’t like stodgy, callous Republicans. Their hearts are with the youth. That’s why Carlson campaigned for Trump, who, upon taking office, rolled back consumer safeguards imposed on the “buy now, pay later” providers used by upwards of 44 percent of Gen Z. It would be truer to say that Carlson campaigned for debt slavery, and Zoomers are getting what he asked for.

Meanwhile, student loans continue to rise, with Gen Z reporting monthly payment burdens of over $500 at a time when we seem to be in a stealth recession or something like that. What’s Trump doing about it? He recently proposed “no tax on capital gains” for home sales. That sounds great. If you own a home, which Zoomers can’t actually afford. The number of first-time homebuyers is currently at half the historical norm. But at least it’s good news for those lucky young people who are homeowners, right? Well, no. Not unless the profits of the sale exceed $250,000 for single filers or $500,000 for married couples filing jointly. In other words, it is a policy win for those who are already better off, and a slap in the face to those who are just starting out.

The prices of homes are skyrocketing, hitting an all-time national median sale price of $435,300 in July. Food prices are soaring, with beef hitting record highs. Most Americans cannot afford what Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity calls the “minimal quality of life.” This is the world Trump is leaving Gen Z, a wasteland called the “golden age.”

What happens next is unclear. I do believe that a young faction of hard-right Republicans will continue gaining influence within the party in the years to come, but that is a separate issue from the mostly Millennial and Gen X Trump supporter delusions, whose only refrain to doubters, including Gen Z, is that every betrayal, every regressive policy must be tolerated because Trump is going to “deport them all” or something inane like that. He won’t, obviously. He will fail. In fact, the only thing he has succeeded at is improving how Americans feel about immigration. It turns out that most people do not have the new right’s taste for theatrical cruelty.

It’s also unlikely that Gen Z will, in the near term, simply turn toward the arms of the Democratic Party, unless it undergoes a rapid and convincing reform. Specifically, it would have to convince young men like Alex that it doesn’t hate them. I tend to agree with Jean M. Twenge, a psychology professor who said that Zoomers as a “uniquely pessimistic generation.”

Twenge’s study of Gen Z high-school seniors found that they are more likely than previous generations at the same age to agree with the statements “It is hard for me to hold out much hope for the world” and “I often wonder if there is any real purpose to my life in light of the world situation.” I should also add that Twenge’s research appears to dispel what I suspect would be another line of cope: if Gen Z is less inclined to be hard right as a whole, then that is because it is also less white. But according to Twenge’s data, fewer white young adults identified as conservative in 2024 than did in 2016.

I think that just confirms that a lot of these kids feel like Alex. In Trump, they saw a savior, a challenger, a truth-teller. Someone whose bold campaign promises pierced the shroud of pessimism that has enveloped their lives. Now, some are seeing that this person was just a mirage, and they are turning away from the illusion and trying to figure things out again. Good for them.

My son will be five when next he opens his eyes. I wonder what dreams flutter behind little lids gossamer thin.

Sometimes he remembers enough to tell me all about dinosaurs and aliens and big bugs and the “baddies” who tasted his steel in that place far from here. His stories grow more incredible all the time. Dispatches from the land of sleep and encha…

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