On the day I recorded this episode with
of , the economy was really starting to feel the pain of the trade war. I think some degree of hurt is inevitable, and that tariffs can be a useful instrument.This, however, has been something else entirely.
Businesses big and small have been sent reeling by the haphazardness of how these policies have been implemented and thrown into chaos by the uncertainty they’ve generated. But the most shocking aspect of this has been the new right’s reaction.
The number of pundits I have seen outright celebrate the destruction of livelihoods here and abroad has been infuriating.
I spent nearly a decade as a cog in this machine. My readership here was built largely during that time. I expect to lose readers, free and paid, by publishing this.
Yet all I want to do today is warn people away from it because I cannot think of a better word than “evil” to describe it. Maybe demonic would be more appropriate.
Now, that’s not the say there are no conservatives or right-wing writers, activists, or organizations that aren’t decent or trying to accomplish something good while staying above the stupidity. I know many who I consider friends.
But the dissident or new right or far right or online right—or whatever adjective you want to use—is fundamentally a poison pill that will cause the eventual moral and spiritual death of anyone who ingests it. These people do not care who you voted for in November. Indeed, if you voted for Donald Trump, they just see that as a license to gloat about your suffering because, in their minds, you gave them power over you, and you should have known better.
Many or most of them do not have real jobs and are often insulated from policy outcomes that would hurt you. That pundit who is indifferent to or even celebrates the liquidation of your wealth and immiseration of your children? There is a good chance that his political project stems from the resentment that he lives with his mother or that he secretly hates that his wife is the real breadwinner in the household or that his lack of basic social skills set him back in life. That’s also why his politics are defined entirely by an endless number of enemies, whether it is Jews or women or working-class Americans who just don’t see the grandiosity of his delusions. He has a faker job than those Australian TikTok girls who work at a skincare company. It’s certainly faker than the jobs of the forgotten men and women they pretend to care about.
But even the mask of faux populism has slipped for the moment. They are telling you that they want you to suffer, and they think that it is funny.
knows this better than most people because, like me, she spent a lot of time in the movement before becoming utterly disillusioned with it. And like me, she wants people to see it for what it is: a political, moral, and spiritual vacuum that traps and crushes everything that gets dragged in by its gravitational well. It is as hostile to life—to the integrity of the soul of the individual—as the most extreme iteration of the left.I hope you’ll listen to what Alex has to say and know that it does not have to be this way.
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