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I live in a town located roughly midway between Cleveland and Columbus. It’s nicknamed the “World Headquarters of Nice People.” But lately, folks here have been angry. They’ve been smashing Flock cameras, leaving broken poles, battered solar panels, and dangling fistfuls of wire in their wake. The other night, somebody drove through one of the surveillance units, leaving a yard sale of car parts strewn across a two-lane street. I guess they thought sending a message was worth a trip to the body shop.

Flock isn’t the only manufacturer of cameras with automated license plate reader (ALPR) technology. But it is the largest, with more than 90,000 units silently watching highways, parking lots, and streets nationwide. Flock creates a visual fingerprint of your vehicle—the make, model, color, license plate, bumper stickers, even dings and dents—and then uploads it to a database, where users can access it. Its vast network of cameras can create a detailed record of an individual’s movements, effectively allowing for warrantless mass surveillance of anyone within its field of view. Naturally, that’s raised many concerns, and not only among groups like the ACLU, as evidenced by brewing popular discontent.

But Flock CEO Garrett Langley insists that all he wants is a safer country, even if it means encaging within a digital panopticon. The problem he faces is that most Americans aren’t prepared to turn privacy into a quaint artifact of the past in exchange for living under an orderly techno-dystopia.

One of the most common rebuttals to concerns about Flock is that mass surveillance would exist even if every one of its cameras were taken down tomorrow. We really gave away our privacy, the argument goes, when we embraced “surveillance capitalism,” defined by Shoshana Zuboff, professor emerita at Harvard Business School, as “the unilateral claiming of private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data.” Zuboff traces its origins to Google, the first company to learn how to collect surplus behavioral data and make it valuable to advertisers at scale in the age of the internet, though surveillance capitalism has long since escaped that limited context.

We rushed to the internet expecting empowerment, the democratization of knowledge, and help with real problems, but surveillance capitalism really was just too lucrative to resist. This economic logic has now spread beyond the tech companies to new surveillance–based ecosystems in virtually every economic sector, from insurance to automobiles to health, education, finance, to every product described as “smart” and every service described as “personalized.” By now it’s very difficult to participate effectively in society without interfacing with these same channels that are supply chains for surveillance capitalism’s data flows. For example, ProPublica recently reported that breathing machines purchased by people with sleep apnea are secretly sending usage data to health insurers, where the information can be used to justify reduced insurance payments.

The ubiquity of surveillance capitalism does not, by itself, justify it. Zuboff has noted that just before the September 11 attacks, “there were new legislative initiatives being discussed in Congress around privacy, some of which might well have outlawed practices that became routine operations of surveillance capitalism.” The Federal Trade Commission warned in a 2000 report to Congress of the urgent need for legislation to protect the privacy of consumers because companies could not be counted on to effectively self-regulate. It recommended Congress enact legislation to offer a baseline level of privacy for consumers, establishing “basic standards of practice for the collection of information online.”

“The Commission believes that industry’s limited success in implementing fair information practices online, as well as ongoing consumer concerns about Internet privacy, make this the appropriate time for legislative action,” the report concluded.

Fifteen months after the report was released, the Twin Towers were engulfed in flames. Privacy concerns took a backseat in the aftermath, and the federal government turned toward the surveillance capabilities being developed in the private sector, setting the stage for today’s public-private surveillance apparatus.

Zuboff contends that the current state of affairs was not inevitable, and she is correct. But surveillance capitalists and their allies did a good job of portraying their own interests as tantamount to technological progress. To impede their practices, to suggest the possibility of alternatives that do not condition participation in the digital on partaking in their economic model, was and still is framed as impeding a broader societal good. Downplaying or even defending, then, every additional intrusion on privacy in this light is akin to seeing a burning man, astutely determining that he is indeed on fire, and concluding, “What’s a little more fuel to the flame?”

The issue remains one of consent, and the disregard that people like Langley seem to have for it. Indeed, Langley has characterized Flock’s critics, particularly DeFlock, an open-source project that maps ALPRs, as “terroristic.” He apologized for those remarks, but only amid a tidal wave of public fury. In framing detractors as dangerous, subversive forces, Langley took a page out of Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s book, who said that he loved “the idea of getting a drone and having light fentanyl-laced urine spraying on analysts that tried to screw us.” Notably, elements of the far-right have embraced mass surveillance (and Palantir specifically), viewing it as a way of monitoring, intimidating, and suppressing their domestic opponents, who they paint as fringe groups and “woke” militants, as Langley and Karp have. But that characterization is untenable. For example, I live in an overwhelmingly white, conservative slice of America. Langley, Karp, and their far-right fans could be forgiven for assuming these are their natural allies. And yet they’ll find few defenders of mass surveillance here. In the local Facebook community chatter group, opposition to Flock cameras seems to be one of the only issues that elicits bipartisan agreement. That shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Last year, a YouGov survey found that 71% of Americans “are concerned that surveillance powers could be used by the U.S. government to target political opponents or suppress dissent,” while 56% said that “collecting and analyzing Americans’ phone and internet data is an unnecessary intrusion into Americans’ lives, rather than something that is justified as a way to combat terrorism and crime.”

Most people simply hate this stuff. Just because “it’s already happening” does not mean they want more intrusions, more surveillance, less privacy. They understand that it can be a useful crime-fighting tool, but the cons still outweigh the pros in the mind of the average person, at least under the current arrangement. For good reason, too, as more incidents of misuse and abuse continue to make headlines.

Police in Lenexa, Kansas, used ALPRs to track down a technology writer who published an op-ed critical of their department. CNN reported Sunday that, in the last month, “five Albany police officers in Georgia were arrested and fired for allegedly misusing Flock, and police in Greer, South Carolina, fired two officers for misusing the product.” The Institute for Justice has documented several cases of cops using Flock to “keep tabs on their romantic interests, including current partners, exes, and even strangers who unwittingly caught their eye in public.” In Milwaukee, a police officer used Flock to track the location of his ex and his ex’s partner 124 times. He ended up resigning. So did one of the detectives who investigated him, after it was revealed that he had also been misusing Flock.

Some local governments have resorted to measures not so different from those my unruly neighbors have used to thwart Flock.

In Ohio, the Dayton Police Department announced that it would cease using Flock after it found more than 7,000 cases of “searches related to immigration enforcement made by outside entities,” Fortune reported. In response to that revelation, Dayton police assisted municipal workers in covering every ALPR with good old-fashioned black trash bags because the city is contractually prohibited from taking them down. Officials in Evanston, Illinois; Oxnard, California; and Renton, Washington, have undertaken similar efforts to “DeFlock” their communities after discovering that outside agencies had access to local data. In Oxnard, that data was accessed without the police department’s knowledge or approval, and despite the security settings restricting access to authorized users within California.

Flock has repeatedly downplayed data-sharing concerns, establishing a pattern of misdirection, obfuscation, and deceit. When a police chief in Loveland, Colorado, worried that federal agents were accessing ALPR data, Flock reiterated that it does not hold any federal contracts, dismissing the chief’s concerns. Flock later admitted that it does indeed have contracts with U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Homeland Security for pilot projects that enable those agencies to have access to data. Denver City Council President Amanda Sandoval said that Langley “lied to [her] face” about this issue.

Yet Langley seems undeterred by the groundswell of backlash. Speaking to Forbes, he predicted that within the next decade, Flock’s fixed and flying products could blanket the country in an inescapable surveillance field like so many unblinking eyes. It’s how we would eradicate all forms of crime, once and for all, he believes. Langley rejects the idea that living under the largest security state the world has ever seen would come at the cost of civil liberties. It’s unclear which one Langley would pick, if given a choice between the two. His ideal regime calls to mind the OneState from Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We.

Before Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, there was We, and Zamyatin’s vision of a shining, high-tech, totalitarian society in which all dwellings are made of “splendid, transparent, eternal glass,” depriving denizens of privacy whatsoever. Every aspect of life is algorithmically managed within the clear and sterile OneState under its ruler, the Benefactor. Orwell said that We provided him with a model for his own work. It’s unlikely Langley is familiar with Zamyatin, but I suspect he would come away from the author with the wrong lessons.

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Philip K. Dick wrote that if “you can float enough disinformation into circulation you will totally abolish everyone’s contact with reality, probably your own included.” And I can’t imagine a better way to describe the collective cognitive state of the right, as evidenced by the response from chuds to Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Don’t worry, you don’t need to have seen it because this isn’t a review. The positively psychotic reaction playing out online is probably a more entertaining movie anyway.

First, here are some facts about the film. As of this writing, The Odyssey has generated more than $264 million globally, putting it ahead of Nolan’s opening numbers for Oppenheimer. On Rotten Tomatoes, audiences rate it 97% fresh. Its “A” grade on CinemaScore is even more impressive because that figure is derived from in-person polling of opening-night moviegoers at randomly selected theaters. Put plainly, it’s already a massive success with the majority of viewers, not just professional critics, although it has unsurprisingly received high marks from those as well. None of this should come as a surprise, considering the director and the subject matter: not just a foundational text of the West, but an essential cornerstone of human storytelling that has fired imaginations for thousands of years. And now Nolan has done his part to keep the flame burning. According to data from Circana BookScan, print unit sales across all editions of The Odyssey are up 76%. On the Amazon Best Seller list, editions translated by Emily Wilson and Robert Fagles have climbed into third and ninth place, respectively.

So an acclaimed director produced another successful film based on a timeless epic, inspiring a whole new generation of people to either revisit or acquaint themselves with Homer for the first time. That is an unqualified triumph at a time when people are fretting about “the end of reading.”

However, you wouldn’t know any of the above if all your news and information came from Twitter, where MAGA seems to have suffered a collective psychotic break, unable to cope with the popularity of a film that they’ve been rooting against since before it was ever released.

Writing in Jacobin, Matt McManus sets it up nicely:

For almost a year now, the Right has been raging against Nolan’s adaptation of the Odyssey, with the pitch getting ever shriller as trailers and promos showed off the film’s shockingly multiethnic cast. Back in May, Elon Musk insinuated that Nolan “desecrated the Odyssey so that he would be eligible for an Academy Award,” referring to the academy’s new rules mandating diversity in film productions in order to qualify for Oscars. Days ago, legendary keyboard warrior Michael Knowles breathlessly agreed, speculating that the epic was reworked to adapt to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science’s “DEI requirements.” Musk described Nolan’s opus as “pissing on Homer’s grave” and “anti-white.” No less than the greatest model of performative masculinity in ours or any other age, the Matt Walsh, accused Nolan of “emasculating” Homer. Months before the film was even released, Walsh speculated the movie might be “the worst film adaptation ever made” and complained about casting “sub-Saharan African” actress Lupita Nyong’O as Helen—the most beautiful woman in the world. Walsh, one of the artists responsible for the conservative comedy film Lady Ballers, called Nolan a coward who could never be a great artist because he is pandering to the decayed spirit of our woke age.

There was also a lot of outrage when the news broke of Elliot Page being cast as Achilles.

Only that was never true.

Page plays Sinon—a Greek warrior mentioned in Virgil’s Aeneid—who convinces the Trojans to accept the gift of “a horse of mountainous size.” I think Nolan’s inclusion of Sinon was clever, and could not care less that he cast Page in the role.

Though it was always a lie, the rumor about Page playing Achilles was promoted by grifters and garbage outlets like Breitbart. Then Musk, naturally, joined the dogpile and seemed to make it his personal mission to sink the movie before it ever hit theaters. The world’s richest man appears to value, above all, being perceived as the king of the online dumpster fire he lit when he took over Twitter, presumably because money can’t buy respect or the love of his estranged children.

In the shadow world inhabited by right-wing culture warriors such as Musk, these and other creative choices by Nolan reflected some grand conspiracy against the white race, heterosexuality, and the West itself. The average person is not particularly affected by someone like Lupita Nyong’o playing Helen of Troy. They don’t care that the cast was multiethnic and, by the way, the Greeks don’t care either. The Odyssey smashed the pre-sale record previously held by Avengers: Endgame in Greece, the country whose culture Nolan supposedly disrespected.

If the Greeks can live with Nolan’s direction, why can’t MAGA? Because Nolan’s epic had to fail in their minds, for its success would violate the strongly held delusions of the worst people in America. Misery loves company, and there is no more miserable group than MAGA chuds who believe that 2024 represented some national cultural shift in their favor, a death blow to everything they deem “woke.” That is why the predictable success of The Odyssey hit their brains like the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs.

It turns out that the average person does not bristle at the sight of a minority on screen or become incensed at Anne Hathaway’s portrayal of a strong Queen Penelope. This is not a surprise if you are normal, though it has come again as a shock to MAGA—too strong a shock, apparently. Instead of admitting defeat, the right has spiraled into new extremes of cope. It has latched onto one conspiracy theory after another, from claiming that there is a vast plot afoot to rig reviews in favor of The Odyssey on every website to insisting that the box office numbers are only good because Nolan is buying the tickets in bulk. The Venn diagram of people who believe the 2020 election was stolen and people who believe booked-out theaters across America are actually empty is a perfect circle.

It was bad enough when the brain spores emitted by Donald Trump only directed the infected to engage in the conspiratorial nonsense related to politics. All this is truly, without an ounce of exaggeration, downstream of Trump, who battered the brains of his supporters until they became convinced that they cannot lose, only be cheated, thus precluding the possibility of good faith discussion. My time in the world of right-wing media and politics exposed me to the most dishonest, cynical, shockingly self-interested individuals I’ve ever had the displeasure of meeting, and who publicly portray themselves as paragons of patriotism and virtue—the living, breathing pillars upholding a beleaguered “Western Civilization.” In reality, they’re the cancer eating away at it from within, and the sum of their political contributions over the last decade has been to cast vice as virtue, moral profligacy as piety.

But now this malignancy has spread well beyond politics, seeping into virtually every aspect of American life it touches. It has just become a feature of current events now that MAGA will become enraged at the dumbest, smallest things imaginable, attempt to ruin whatever it is that brings others joy, then move on to the next object of their ire, like cultural locusts. It is actually difficult to tell the difference between cynical grifters who are just ragebaiting to make a buck—Musk’s contribution to the public discourse was incentivizing the equivalent of shitting in your hand and pitching the load into a crowd—and true believers who are sincerely convinced that Nolan is the latest James Bond villain masterminding some grand conspiracy with no greater purpose than humiliating the chuds, when nobody does that better than chuds themselves.

PKD would have laughed, or wept, at the sight of these people proudly smashing reality to bits to get a leg up over their enemies, only to realize that they don’t know how to fit the broken pieces back together. They don’t even remember breaking them.

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.

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.