Vanity red fem
From Vanity Fair:
eople at the conference seemed excited about being in a place where they weren’t alone. I skipped most of the talks—which ranged from sessions about confronting the threat of China to the liberal influence on pop culture to “Worker Power.” Hawley gave a keynote on the “assault on the masculine virtues,” and Cruz offered up a traditional stump speech, evoking Reagan and saying he thought conservatives would soon prevail at the ballot box. “I’m pretty sure a lot of the 20-somethings rolled their eyes at that,” Yarvin said to me afterward with a smirk. The 20-somethings had a bigger vision.
Up by the bar every night, hordes of young men, mostly, would descend to drink and bear-hug and spot favorite podcasters and writers. You could see Dave Rubin, and Jack Murphy, who hosts a popular New Right–ish YouTube channel and is trying to build a fraternal group of men who believe in “positive masculinity” that he calls the Liminal Order. Pretty much everyone had the same trimmed beard and haircut—sides buzzed short, the top longer and combed with a bit of gel to one side.
I didn’t see a single Black person under the age of 50, though there were attendees of South Asian and Middle Eastern descent. In March, the journalist Jeff Sharlet (a Vanity Fair contributing editor who covers the American right) tweeted that the “intellectual New Right is a white supremacist project designed to cultivate non-white support,” and he linked it to resurgent nationalist and authoritarian politics around the world: “It’s part of a global fascist movement not limited to the anti-blackness of the U.S. & Europe.” Yet many on the New Right seem increasingly unfazed by accusations that they’re white nationalists or racists. Masters in particular seems willing to goad commentators, believing that the ensuing arguments will redound to his political advantage: “Good luck [hitting] me with that,” Masters told the podcaster Alex Kaschuta recently, arguing that accusations of racism had become a political bludgeon used to keep conservative ideas outside the political mainstream. “Good luck criticizing me for saying critical race theory is anti-white.” But for all the chatter of looming dystopia, no one I spoke to raised one of the most dystopian aspects of American life: our vast apparatus of prisons and policing. Most people seemed more caught up in fighting what they perceived as the cant and groupthink among other members of the political media class, or the hypocrisy of rich white liberals who put up Black Lives Matter signs in front of multimillion-dollar homes, than they were with the raw experience that has given shape to America’s current racial politics.
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Milius was a sardonic and constant presence, easy to find smoking as Yarvin stood and talked at warp speed in his unmistakable voice. She was by far the most strikingly dressed person there, favoring Gucci and Ralph Lauren and lots of gold jewelry and big sunglasses. She is the daughter of the conservative director John Milius, who cowrote Apocalypse Now and directed Red Dawn. She grew up in Los Angeles, and it turned out that we’d both gone to the same tiny liberal arts college in Manhattan, so, like pretty much all the people there, she was used to living in social spaces where conservative views were considered strange if not downright evil. She thought something had radically changed since 2015, after she went to film school at USC and started working in Hollywood, before she suddenly dropped everything to work for Trump’s campaign in Nevada, eventually landing a job in his State Department.
“What this is,” she said, “is a new thought movement. So it’s very hard to put your finger on and articulate what it is outside of Trumpism. Because it really is separate from the man himself, it has nothing to do with that.”
She argued that the New Right, or whatever you wanted to call it, was, paradoxically, much less authoritarian than the ideology that now presented itself as mainstream. “I get the feeling, and I could be wrong,” she said, “that the right actually at this point is like almost in this live-and-let-live place where the left used to be at.” What she meant specifically: “The idea that you can’t raise your kids in a traditional, somewhat religious household without having them educated at school that their parents are Nazis.” This apparent laissez-faire obscures somewhat the intense focus that some people in this world have on trans issues—or what they might say is the media’s intense focus on trans issues, one of a suite of “mimetic viruses,” as Kaschuta, the podcaster, put it, that spread a highly individualistic liberal culture that is destructive to traditional ways of life. But the laissez-faire has helped win unlikely converts. Milius brought up Red Scare, a podcast that has become the premier example of this attraction—she’d actually cast one of the hosts, Dasha Nekrasova, in the film she made as her senior thesis in directing school at USC.
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The Red Scare hosts both started out as diffident socialists, back when it was still possible to think that socialism represented an edgy political stance, in the little interlocking spheres of America’s media and political set. One of them, Nekrasova, actually became known in media circles for a clip that went megaviral in 2018, when she cut dead a reporter for Alex Jones’s Infowars trying to ambush Bernie Sanders supporters at a festival in Austin. “I just want people to have health care, honey,” she deadpanned. “You people have, like, worms in your brains. Honestly.”
Fast-forward to November 2021, and Nekrasova and her cohost Anna Khachiyan were posting photos of themselves with Jones’s arms wrapped around them under an evening Texas sun. Nekrasova now has a role on HBO’s Succession, playing a P.R. rep working with Kendall Roy; the show itself set “right-wing Twitter”—a sphere heavily populated by 20-somethings who work in tech or politics and seem to disproportionately live in D.C. and Miami—alight with delight when an episode in the latest season included a litany of key New Right phrases such as “integralist” and “Medicare for all, abortions for none.”
The Red Scare hosts are only the best-known representatives of a fashionable dissident-y subculture, centered in but not exclusive to downtown Manhattan. “Everyone dresses like a duck hunter now,” a bewildered friend of mine texted recently. People use the derisive term “bugman” to describe liberal men who lack tangible life skills like fixing trucks or growing food—guys who could end up spending their lives behind the bug-eyed screen of a V.R. headset. Women wear clothes from Brandy Melville, which you can hear described ironically as fashionwear for girls with “fascist leanings,” and which named one of its lines after John Galt, the hero of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. People are converting to Catholicism. “It’s a good thing I have a girlfriend,” my friend texted. “Because casual sex is out.”
Yarvin has mused that the liberal regime will begin to fall when the “cool kids” start to abandon its values and worldview. There are signs that this may be happening, though not all the so-called cool kids involved in this vibe shift would want to be colored as the vanguard in a world historical rebellion against the global order.
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“I’m not, like, into politics,” the writer Honor Levy, a Catholic convert and Bennington grad, told me when I called her. “I just want to have a family someday.”
Levy, who was a leftist recently enough that she cried when it became clear that Bernie Sanders wouldn’t be the Democratic presidential nominee, is friendly with Yarvin and has had him on the podcast she cohosts, Wet Brain—“Yeah, the Cathedral and blah blah,” she said when we got to talking about political media. But she said she’d never even heard of J.D. Vance or Blake Masters.
Levy is an It girl in a downtown Manhattan scene—The New Yorker has published her fiction; she is named in a New York Times story that tries to describe that scene—where right-wing politics have become an aesthetic pose that mingles strangely with an earnest search for moral grounding. “Until like a year and a half ago I didn’t believe good and evil existed,” she told me, later adding: “But I’m not in a state of grace, I shouldn’t be talking.” I asked if she would take money from Thiel and she cheerily said, “Of course!” She also described her cohort as a bunch of “libertines,” and on her podcast you can get a window into a world of people who enjoy a mind-bendingly ironic thrill by tut-tutting each other for missing church or having premarital sex. “Most of the girls downtown are normal, but they’ll wear a Trump hat as an accessory,” she said. The ones deep into the online scene, she said, “want to be like Leni Riefenstahl–Edie Sedgwick.”
Like Levy, Milius is in the funny position of being at the intersection of many of these crosscurrents, having worked in mainstream politics but appearing on so-called dissident podcasts and being on the periphery of a cultural scene where right-wing politics have taken on a sheen approximating cool.
She said she was too “black-pilled”—a very online term used to describe people who think that our world is so messed up that nothing can save it now—to think much about what it would look like for her side to win. “I could fucking trip over the curb,” Milius said, “and that’s going to be considered white supremacism. Like, there’s nothing you can do. What the fuck isn’t white supremacism?”
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“They’re going to come for everything,” she said. “And I think it’s sinister—not that I think that people who want to pay attention to race issues are sinister. But I think that the globalization movement is using these divisive arguments in order to make people think that it’s a good thing.”
This is the Cathedral at work.
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