'What’s Your Solution to the Incumbent Political and Existential Crisis?'

A little story and some thoughts.

Composite. Credit: Miracle82.

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 Lydia Laurenson.

New Modalities

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.