Despite organisers’ best efforts, openDemocracy still got a reporter into the National Conservatism conference
While the National Conservatism conference has been making headlines – for reasons ranging from admissions of gerrymandering to calls for delegates to breed – it’s been quite publicity-shy with journalists. openDemocracy was one of at least three left-leaning outlets whose application to cover the conference was refused.
But I managed to blag my way in anyway.
And once inside, I saw no shortage of whackadoodlery. ‘Deep State’ conspiracy theories were alive and well, as a man in a crumpled linen suit rose to his feet to declare: “One of the reasons Liz Truss was removed as prime minister was that her government was going to move against the Net-Zero agenda!” He offered no supporting evidence.
What I found more interesting was the feel of the place. Over 300 delegates, packed into a plush, wood-panelled hall in Westminster. The mood was angry, but comfortable. These were normally shy conservatives, glad to be among like minds, where they could speak freely.
For a ‘national’ conservatism conference in Britain, it was more Trump rally than Sunak conference. The crowd was almost entirely male, and younger than might be expected. In fact, as a 38-year-old, I couldn’t find anyone my own age – it looked like about 80% were under 30, and the other 20% over 50. One man next to me had dragged along his clearly bored girlfriend, who audibly harrumphed through several speeches.
Standard dress was blazers, tweeds, waistcoats, Union Jack bow ties, and summer dresses. In fact, there were more neckties than I’ve seen anywhere since the pandemic. This wasn’t a political convention; it was the Chap Olympiad.
It was a diverse audience, they assured us. Earnest young men introduced themselves as students from both Oxford and Cambridge. But they were not all Oxbridge types. One member of the audience piped up that he was attending the elite $78,000-a-year private Williams College, in Massachusetts.
The ‘red wall’ voters who featured so prominently in rhetoric didn’t appear to be terribly well-represented among the evidently affluent delegates, many of whom had flown in internationally, their airline labels still affixed to the luggage piled up by reception, as delegates introduced themselves as being from Pennsylvania, California, Copenhagen and Brussels. So much for anti-globalisation.
Still, there is an honesty about the conference: delegates and speakers didn’t really seem to care how they came across. A look at the speeches bears this out. “The ‘mad person’ is the apex individual!” declared writer and philosopher Nina Power, to an audience that lapped it up. Quite a few of them seemed keen to play the ‘mad person’.
What got them going
Most revealing were the bursts of applause. Energetic, prolonged, tub-thumping applauses whenever somebody said something that really struck a chord. It was instructive to see what pressed their buttons.
Immigration was the hottest topic – a guaranteed crowd-pleaser every time. In fact, delegates seemed inordinately interested in it, with outbursts of “oooooh” and “hear, hear” at every mention.
Someone who worked for the hard-right YouTube channel Triggernometry complained: “The left doesn’t distinguish between legal and illegal immigration! That’s what’s happened to people I know, particularly [in] London.” Mentions of London, or big cities, were often accompanied by a hiss.
Another barnstorming topic was gun ownership. When recently elected Trump-backed senator JD Vance of Ohio mentioned that he attended a raffle event where the prize was an AR-15 assault rifle, a prolonged ripple of applause broke out.
Nina Power’s declaration that “I strongly recommend everyone goes to church” also got a rapturous reception, suggesting that the “faith” part of the old far-right rallying cry of ‘Faith, Flag and Family’ is alive and well.
Clean energy and wind farms were a popular object of anger. Vance – who opposes US support for Ukraine – still gave the war as a reason for countries to stick to “coal and gas”, invoking populist tropes against wind farms: “I don’t want to live in some post-apocalyptic hellscape filled with dead birds!”
The subject of trans people’s rights was another favourite bogeyman, as speakers queued up to ridicule “hormones” and trans people themselves, with repeated references to so-called “basic biology”.
Meanwhile, Frank Furedi, a former leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party, who has now seamlessly moved to the far right, told the audience that the conservative cause was “civilisational… there’s so much at stake… it’s existential.”
And, curiously, the most quoted political thinker was Karl Marx. More Marx was cited than at any Corbyn-era Labour Party conference. Delegates seemed obsessed with the idea that Marx lurks behind every corner.
Think tanks
Not all of the delegates were slightly awkward young men from Oxbridge and private liberal arts colleges in the US.
Many introduced themselves as working for conservative think tanks. This makes sense, for the ‘national’ conservatism conference in the UK is in fact organised by the Edmund Burke Foundation, a US think tank.
Among the many think tanks represented were the Bow Group, the Centre for Digital Assets and Democracy, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (an offshoot of the Legatum Institute), and the Hungarian-state-funded Danube Institute – one of the few civil society organisations the Orbán government has not cracked down on, but has instead propped up.
Talk was rife, on and off the stage, of “Anglosphere conservatism” – code for stage two of Brexit, with deepening relations with the hard-right.
Media management
Perhaps surprisingly, given its shambolic public image, the conference has a professionally organised social media presence. It’s just that none of the curators seems to think there’s anything amiss with what is being said.
Organisers film the proceedings, transcribing highlights, while monitoring Twitter and Facebook mentions in real-time, along with a WhatsApp channel.
The conference itself has been tweeting carefully curated highlights of some speeches. (See Douglas Murray declaring, “There was nothing wrong with nationalism in Britain, it’s just that there was something wrong with nationalism in Germany. I don’t see why no one should be allowed to love their country because the Germans mucked it up twice in a century.”)
Of course, one of the two reception desks was marked ‘media’. Given how many journalists had been kept out, perhaps that should have been marked ‘desk for excluding media’.
Is this the future of the right? They certainly think so. Professor Tim Bale has warned elsewhere, though, that this risks being a “cul de sac” for British conservatives – of great interest to the activist base, but navel-gazing over issues that leave most voters baffled, or even alienated.
This is a strand of the right that enjoys seeing itself as a popular insurgency, against the old boys’ club of Westminster politics, the heirs to UKIP and Brexit. But meeting in a prestigious Westminster venue, they did not seem to practise what they preached.
In fact, all it took for me to get in, free of charge, despite my not having booked, was my plummy accent, a blazer, a Panama hat, and old college cufflinks. Deference quickly kicked in, and they were tugging at their forelocks to show me in, imagining me to be one of their own. This was about as ‘establishment’ a gathering as you could imagine.
The US supreme court justice accepted $900 concert tickets from billionaire Gloria von Thurn und Taxis. Who is the socialite linked to right
Stephanie Kirchgaessner and Kate Connolly at The Guardian:
A German aristocrat who hosted Samuel Alito at her castle in 2023 has revealed new details about her friendship with the rightwing supreme court justice, including that they share a mutual friend who played a key role in JD Vance’s conversion to Catholicism.
Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, a onetime party girl turned traditionalist Catholic activist who has faced criticism for her defense of far-right politicians in Germany, told the Guardian that she first met Alito in Rome – she could not remember what year – and that both were friends of Dominic Legge, a priest and Yale Law graduate in Washington who Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, has often cited in discussions about his adult conversion to Catholicism.
The relationship between the 64-year-old noblewoman and Alito sparked media interest after the supreme court justice revealed last week in a financial disclosure form that he had accepted concert tickets worth $900 from the billionaire, who refers to herself as a princess even though Germany’s aristocracy was officially disbanded after the first world war.
She later told the German press that Alito had overestimated the cost of the tickets, but did not elaborate.
The supreme court justice has previously faced scrutiny for failing to report free travel on a private jet from a wealthy conservative billionaire who had business before the court, a story first reported by ProPublica that is a part of a broader ethics scandal that has engulfed the high court in recent years. Alito faced a separate controversy earlier this year after it was discovered that his household had flown an upside-down flag, a symbol of Stop the Steal campaigners who falsely claim the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, as well as a second flag at a beach property that was associated with the Christian nationalist movement.
Alito’s disclosure about the free tickets are significant for another reason: they reveal new insights into Alito and his wife Martha-Ann’s apparent personal ties to a European aristocrat who is deeply entrenched in an international rightwing movement that is seeking to advance conservative Catholic policies.
Allies in her fight include the rightwing nationalist Steve Bannon and the ultra conservative German cardinal Gerhard Müller, who she once called the “Donald Trump of the Catholic Church”. Her circle is known to be fiercely critical of Pope Francis – who is seen as too liberal by orthodox and traditionalist sects of the Catholic church.
Legge, who leads the Thomistic Institute in Washington, is a prominent member of an elite circle of traditionalist Catholics in the US capital, and sits on the board of an organization – the Napa Legal Institute – alongside Leonard Leo, the powerbroker who is widely seen as having used his influence to install Republicans’ conservative supermajority on the supreme court and reportedly recently called for conservative activists to “crush liberal dominance at the choke points of influence and power in our society”.
[...]
Von Thurn und Taxis compared herself to the late British Queen Elizabeth – whose family she noted was of German descent – and said the role of the aristocracy in Germany was to unite people and “keep politics out of the salon”. She also claimed in an email not to know that the decision that overturned abortion rights is called the “Dobbs decision”.
But an examination of von Thurn und Taxis’s own activities shows that the woman who was known during a punk phase – before her turn to conservative Catholicism – as Princess TNT, for her explosive personality – has deep political ties that have given her access not only to supreme court justices, but inside the Trump White House.
[...]
“This is not just about the arrogance of a powerful man already embroiled in controversial ties to billionaires. It is also about the company he keeps: choosing to accept very expensive concert tickets from a woman who embraces far-right politicians who are aligned with her outspoken hostility toward abortion access and marriage equality,” said Lisa Graves, the managing director of Court Accountability and a former deputy assistant attorney general at the US Department of Justice.
Graves added: “Their alliance is unsurprising though very troubling since Alito has been using his position on the supreme court to advance a parallel regressive agenda into law.”
In October 2019, at a speech in Washington in which she effusively praised the Trump administration, von Thurn und Taxis personally thanked Leonard Leo for setting up meetings for Cardinal Müller, who she was traveling with, to visit the White House and meet with people who were directly advising Trump on religious liberty and free speech.
She warned that, if Trump was not re-elected, “they will come after us” and that “nothing less” was at stake than the right to worship. Democrat Joe Biden, a devout Catholic, later won the 2020 election, but neither he nor Nancy Pelosi, another prominent Democratic Catholic politician, are seen as authentic Catholics by traditionalists.
During that trip, von Thurn und Taxis also met and was photographed with Alito, Cardinal Müller, the supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh, and Brian Brown, who was then the head of the anti-LGBTQ+ group National Organization for Marriage (NOM). According to reporting by the New Yorker, NOM was actively lobbying the court on cases involving gay rights at the time of the meeting.
This year, in a speech at the National Conservatism Conference in Brussels in April called Threats to Faith and Family, von Thurn und Taxis served up a series of grievances about the state of the family in Europe, complained that “only homosexuals want to get married”, while unmarried heterosexual couples were opting for pets instead of children.
She also criticized – in an apparent reference to the availability of reproductive rights in Europe – how leaders continued to “finance the killing of our offspring”, which she said would exacerbate future labor shortages on the continent.
“Does this make any sense? Is there some kind of racism? Are we not supposed to reproduce?” she asked rhetorically, before launching into praise of Hungary, which she said was an outlier in supporting families with children. Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian autocratic leader, has been a guest at the noblewoman’s festival.
The Guardian has a explosive report that SCOTUS Justice Samuel Alito has ties to far-right German aristocrat Gloria von Thurn und Taxis.
What it was like attending each NatCon and the Abundance Convention
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At NatCon, the populist proper requires holy warfare towards Huge Tech
In case you needed a way of the present relationship between the tech proper and the populists, you needed to be sitting in Breakout Room C on the primary day of NatCon 5, the annual gathering of the MAGA proper’s powerhouses. On the finish of the afternoon panel on the tradition wars (“The Want for Heroism”), Geoffrey Miller was handed the mic and began berating one of many panelists: Shyam…
If you want to see where MAGA is headed, look no further than this week's National Conservatism summit.
Kiera Butler at Mother Jones:
In a speech at last year’s Republican National Convention, then vice-presidential hopeful JD Vance shared his philosophy of national identity. “America is not just an idea,” he told the crowd. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.” As I wrote last year, Vance’s speech electrified far-right corners of X, whose denizens rejoiced that contained within those clichéd sentiments was evidence that the potential veep shared their opinions on immigration. “This is one of the most important political questions facing America right now,” posted former Trump administration official William Wolfe. “Answer it wrong, we will go the way of Europe, where the native-born populations are being utterly displaced by third-world migrants and Muslims. Answer it right, and we can renew America once more.”
Vance’s Republican National Convention speech wasn’t the first time he had held forth on the theme of America consisting of a particular kind of people. Days before the convention, Vance made a similar speech at the National Conservatism Conference, an annual gathering that attracts right-wing intellectuals, nationalists, and the nationalism-curious. The crowd also leans religious. At that same event, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) delivered a keynote titled “The Christian Nationalism We Need.”
This week marks National Conservatism’s sixth annual conference, and judging from the speaker lineup and schedule, it promises to be its most politically charged. When this group began to meet, the conference talk titles were vague and sleepy. Back then, panels included “Cutting Through the Noise on Big Tech” and “Five Myths About China.”
Over the last six years, the conference has hosted various conservative stars, including media personality Tucker Carlson, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, Brexit leader Nigel Farage, and post-liberal theorist Patrick Deneen. National Conservatism “emerged as a guiding light of the MAGA movement—of the America First movement in general,” notes Ben Lorber, who studies Christian nationalism at the progressive think tank Political Research Associates.
This year’s National Conservatism Conference appears to be less about abstract intellectual debates and more about policy and action, a kind of an IRL Project 2025 for the administration going forward. Session titles include “Overturn Obergefell” and “Fighting the Woke-Islamist Alliance on University Campuses.”
This year’s speaker lineup is also spicier: It includes former White House strategist Steve Bannon; Jonathan Keeperman, a far-right publisher whose Passage Publishing releases works that celebrate fascism; and Calvin Robinson, a firebrand Anglican priest who was defrocked earlier this year when he made a Nazi-salute-style gesture at a Michigan anti-abortion rally.
Vance isn’t speaking at this year’s event, but other Trump administration luminaries are, including US Small Business Administration head Kelly Loeffler, director of the US Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought, and director of the National Institutes of Health Jay Bhattacharya. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri), a reliable fixture at these events, will also be there.
The conference website says it aims to bring together people who are devoted to “the idea of the nation, to the principle of national independence, and to the revival of the unique national traditions that alone have the power to bind a people together and bring about their flourishing.” But behind those lofty goals is a more specific agenda. My colleague Isabela Dias wrote about last year’s event, noting that “for all the ‘owning the libs’ discourse, the attacks on so-called gender ideology, the harangues against identity politics, and the warnings of the ever-present specter of neo-Marxism,” the attendees “rallied themselves most fervently around anti-immigrant sentiment.”
At this year’s conference, that theme is again on full display, with one entire breakout session devoted to “The Threat of Islamism in America” and a speech titled “The Case Against Birthright Citizenship.” As much as conference organizers may have been emboldened this year by MAGA’s rise to power, National Conservatism also appears to be influencing the evolution of the Republican party. A close look at the organizers reveals a religious-nationalist ideology that undergirds the conference and, increasingly, MAGA itself.
The figures behind the National Conservatism movement champion the general idea of nationalism, but they have strong ties to a particular nation—and it’s not the United States. The conference is a project of the Edmund Burke Foundation, a Washington, DC, nonprofit founded in 2019 by David Brog and Yoram Hazony, that describes its mission as “strengthening the principles of national conservatism in Western and other democratic countries.” Brog, a lawyer and former chief of staff for Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), was the executive director of the evangelical Christian Zionist group Christians United for Israel. Hazony, an Israeli-American philosopher, political theorist, and Biblical scholar, was a former advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The Edmund Burke Foundation’s annual revenue is modest—just $1.2 million in 2023—but as investigative reporter Walker Bragman recently reported, it was launched with deep connections to the conservative movement. One early donor was the Thomas D. Klingenstein Fund, which kicked in $100,000. Its namesake is a powerful Republican donor who chairs the board of the Claremont Institute, a right wing think tank. Another major contributor is the Common Sense Society, which describes its mission as a “celebration of the political, intellectual, and cultural inheritance which constitutes our shared civilization.”
[...]
The vision of a single religion as the glue that holds a nation-state together is a major theme at this year’s conference. As Hazony explained to Ezra Klein, “the central place of Anglo-Protestantism in America, with a strong Old Testament taste, the English language, the common law.” Those ideas would certainly seem to resonate with conference speaker Nate Fischer, who runs a Christian venture capital firm called New Founding. Fischer’s firm oversees the Highland Rim Project, which seeks to build neighborhoods with Christian values in rural America, what its website describes as “thick communities that are conducive to a natural, human and uniquely American way of life,” places where “your neighbors are people who seek a self-determinative lifestyle and a return to a more natural human way of living for themselves and their families.” Fischer’s National Conservatism talk is titled “Building American Institutions in the Digital Age.”
William Wolfe, the former Trump administration official who tweeted approvingly about Vance’s RNC speech, is scheduled to speak on “Recovering the Evangelical Political Voice,” a noteworthy topic given the recent decision by the IRS to allow churches to endorse political candidates. Earlier this week, he posted on X, “We must reignite the Protestant spirit in America.”
Another speaker is Doug Wilson, senior pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho. Wilson, who says he is in favor of repealing the 19th Amendment and instead instituting a household-based voting system, is a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist. At last year’s National Conservatism conference, his speech was one of the most strident, bemoaning the depraved state of American culture, which he blamed on secularism run amok. “If we will not have the Appeal to Heaven flag,” he warned, referring to the Christian nationalist banner that made headlines last year when Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s wife, Martha, flew it over the couple’s vacation home, “then we are going to have the tranny flag.” Wilson told me via email that he is looking forward to the conference and “meeting like-minded folks and networking,” and also representing the “evangelical Protestant voices” that he believes are “underrepresented in the conservative resistance to clown world.”
The NatCon Conference reveals where conservatism is headed, and it’s a scary vision.
They’re not MAGA. They’re not QAnon. Curtis Yarvin and the rising right are crafting a different strain of conservative politics.
It was Halloween in Orlando, and we had piled into a car to make a short trip from the Hilton to an after-party down the road, to wind up the first night of the latest edition of a gathering called the National Conservatism Conference. For at least many of the young people, the actual business of conference going seemed to be beside the point, a gesture at how we used to conduct politics back before life in America spun out of control. There were jokes, or maybe they were serious questions, about whether one of the guys tagging along with us was a fed. I surreptitiously made a few searches of the name he’d given me and was surprised when I couldn’t find a single plausible hit—though that could have been because he was a hyper-secret crypto type; there were some of those floating around. Not that anyone cared. These were people who were used to guarding their words.
“Don’t fuck me here,” a dark-haired woman named Amanda Milius said to me—as she somewhat imperiously dealt with a guy at the door who was skeptical about letting a reporter into the party—“and say we’re all in here sacrificing kids to Moloch. We’re just the last normal people, hanging out at the end of the world.”
I had met Milius outside the Hilton when I asked for a cigarette, and she began to chaperone me around, telling people who eyed my press pass that I was there to profile her as an up-and-coming female director who, she said, had attracted more Amazon streams than any woman ever with her first documentary, a counternarrative about Russiagate. “Annie Leibovitz is still scheduling the photo shoot,” she kept saying. In this world, almost every word is layered in so much irony that you can never be sure what to take seriously or not, perhaps a semiconscious defense mechanism for people convinced that almost everyone is out to get them.
…
“This is sad,” Milius said. No one cheered or even seemed interested. But this was not Trumpworld, even if many of the people in the room saw Trump as a useful tool. And these parties aren’t always so lame. NatCon, as this conference is known, has grown into a big-tent gathering for a whole range of people who want to push the American right in a more economically populist, culturally conservative, assertively nationalist direction. It draws everyone from Israel hawks to fusty paleocon professors to mainstream figures like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. But most of the media attention that the conference attracts focuses on a cohort of rosy young blazer-wearing activists and writers—a crop of people representing the American right’s “radical young intellectuals,” as a headline in The New Republic would soon put it, or conservatism’s “terrifying future,” as David Brooks called them in The Atlantic.
But the people these pieces describe, who made up most of the partygoers around me, were only the most buttoned-up seam of a much larger and stranger political ferment, burbling up mainly within America’s young and well-educated elite, part of an intra-media class info-war. The podcasters, bro-ish anonymous Twitter posters, online philosophers, artists, and amorphous scenesters in this world are variously known as “dissidents,” “neo-reactionaries,” “post-leftists,” or the “heterodox” fringe—though they’re all often grouped for convenience under the heading of America’s New Right. They have a wildly diverse set of political backgrounds, with influences ranging from 17th-century Jacobite royalists to Marxist cultural critics to so-called reactionary feminists to the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, whom they sometimes refer to with semi-ironic affection as Uncle Ted. Which is to say that this New Right is not a part of the conservative movement as most people in America would understand it. It’s better described as a tangled set of frameworks for critiquing the systems of power and propaganda that most people reading this probably think of as “the way the world is.” And one point shapes all of it: It is a project to overthrow the thrust of progress, at least such as liberals understand the word.
This worldview, these worldviews, run counter to the American narrative of the last century—that economic growth and technological innovation are inevitably leading us toward a better future. It’s a position that has become quietly edgy and cool in new tech outposts like Miami and Austin, and in downtown Manhattan, where New Right–ish politics are in, and signifiers like a demure cross necklace have become markers of a transgressive chic. No one is leading this movement, but it does have key figures.
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Thiel has given more than $10 million to super PACs supporting the men’s candidacies, and both are personally close to him. Vance is a former employee of Thiel’s Mithril Capital, and Masters, until recently the COO of Thiel’s so-called “family office,” also ran the Thiel Foundation, which has become increasingly intertwined with this New Right ecosystem. These three—Thiel, Vance, Masters—are all friends with Curtis Yarvin, a 48-year-old ex-programmer and blogger who has done more than anyone to articulate the world historical critique and popularize the key terms of the New Right. You’ll often hear people in this world—again under many layers of irony—call him things like Lord Yarvin, or Our Prophet.
I was looking around the party for Vance, who hadn’t arrived yet, when Milius nudged me and pointed to a table off to our left. “Why is it that whenever I see Curtis, he’s surrounded by a big table of incels?” she asked with apparent fondness. I spotted Yarvin, a slight, bespectacled man with long dark hair, drinking a glass of wine with a crowd that included Josh Hammer, the national conservatism–minded young opinion editor of Newsweek, and Michael Anton, a Machiavelli scholar and former spokesman for Trump’s National Security Council—and a prominent public intellectualizer of the Trump movement. Other luminaries afoot for the conference included Dignity author Chris Arnade, who seemed slightly unsure about the whole NatCon thing, and Sohrab Ahmari, the former opinion editor of the New York Post, now a cofounder and editor at the new magazine Compact, whose vision is, according to its mission statement, “shaped by our desire for a strong social-democratic state that defends community—local and national, familial and religious—against a libertine left and a libertarian right.” It is a very of-the-moment project.
Political reporters, at least the ones who have bothered to write about Yarvin, have often dismissed him as a kook with a readership made up mostly of lonely internet weirdos, fascists, or both. But to ignore him is to underestimate how Yarvin’s ideas, or at least ideas in conversation with his, have become foundational to a whole political and cultural scene that goes much deeper than anything you’d learn from the panels and speeches at an event like NatCon. Or how those ideas are going to shape the future of the American right, whether or not Vance and Masters win their Senate primaries. I introduced myself, and soon Milius and I were outside smoking as Yarvin and I chatted about whether he’d be willing to talk to me on the record.
…
This New Right is heavily populated by people with graduate degrees, so there’s a lot of debate about who is in it and whether or not it even exists. At one end are the NatCons, post-liberals, and traditionalist figures like Benedict Option author Rod Dreher, who envision a conservatism reinvigorated by an embrace of localist values, religious identity, and an active role for the state in promoting everything from marriage to environmental conservation. But there’s also a highly online set of Substack writers, podcasters, and anonymous Twitter posters—“our true intellectual elite,” as one podcaster describes them. This group encompasses everyone from rich crypto bros and tech executives to back-to-the-landers to disaffected members of the American intellectual class, like Up in the Air author Walter Kirn, whose fulminations against groupthink and techno-authoritarianism have made him an unlikely champion to the dissident right and heterodox fringe. But they share a the basic worldview: that individualist liberal ideology, increasingly bureaucratic governments, and big tech are all combining into a world that is at once tyrannical, chaotic, and devoid of the systems of value and morality that give human life richness and meaning—as Blake Masters recently put it, a “dystopian hell-world.”
…
And the ferment is starting to get noticed. “I think that’s a really good sign,” one of the hosts of the dissident-right podcast The Fedpost said recently, discussing how Tucker Carlson had just quoted a tweet from one of their guests. “This is a kind of burgeoning sect of thought,” he went on, “and it’s causing people who are in positions of larger influence and relative power to actually have to start looking into it.”
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Part of why people have trouble describing this New Right is because it’s a bunch of people who believe that the system that organizes our society and government, which most of us think of as normal, is actually bizarre and insane. Which naturally makes them look bizarre and insane to people who think this system is normal. You’ll hear these people talk about our globalized consumerist society as “clown world.” You’ll often hear the worldview expressed by our media and intellectual class described as “the matrix” or the “Ministry of Truth,” as Thiel described it in his opening keynote speech to NatCon. It can be confusing to turn on something like the influential underground podcast Good Ol Boyz and hear a figure like Anton talk to two autodidact Southern gamers about the makeup of the regime, if only because most people reading this probably don’t think of America as the kind of place that has a regime at all. But that’s because, as many people in this world would argue, we’ve been so effectively propagandized that we can’t see how the system of power around us really works.
This is not a conspiracy theory like QAnon, which presupposes that there are systems of power at work that normal people don’t see. This is an idea that the people who work in our systems of power are so obtuse that they can’t even see that they’re part of a conspiracy.
“The fundamental premise of liberalism,” Yarvin told me, “is that there is this inexorable march toward progress. I disagree with that premise.” He believes that this premise underpins a massive framework of power. “My job,” as he puts it, “is to wake people up from the Truman Show.”
We spoke sharing a bench outside in the dark one evening, a few days into the conference. Yarvin is friendly and solicitous in person, despite the fact that he tends to think and talk so fast that he can start unspooling, reworking baroque metaphors to explain ideas to listeners who have heard them many times before.
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Yarvin has a pretty condescending view of the mainstream media: “They’re just predators,” he has said, who have to make a living attacking people like him. “They just need to eat.” He doesn’t usually deal with mainstream magazines and wrote that he’d been “ambushed” at the last NatCon, in 2019, by a reporter for Harper’s—where I also write—who made him out to be a bit of a loon and predicted that the NatCons’ populist program would soon be “stripped of its parts” by the corporate-minded Republican establishment.
…
He considers himself a reactionary, not just a conservative—he thinks it is impossible for an Ivy League–educated person to really be a conservative. He has consistently argued that conservatives waste their time and political energy on fights over issues like gay marriage or critical race theory, because liberal ideology holds sway in the important institutions of prestige media and academia—an intertwined nexus he calls “the Cathedral.” He developed a theory to explain the fact that America has lost its so-called state capacity, his explanation for why it so often seems that it is not actually capable of governing anymore: The power of the executive branch has slowly devolved to an oligarchy of the educated who care more about competing for status within the system than they do about America’s national interest.
No one directs this system, and hardly anyone who participates in it believes that it’s a system at all. Someone like me who has made a career of writing about militias and extremist groups might go about my work thinking that all I do is try to tell important stories and honestly describe political upheaval. But within the Cathedral, the best way for me to get big assignments and win attention is to identify and attack what seem like threats against the established order, which includes nationalists, antigovernment types, or people who refuse to obey the opinions of the Cathedral’s experts on issues like vaccine mandates, in as alarming a way as I possibly can. This cycle becomes self-reinforcing and has been sent into hyperdrive by Twitter and Facebook, because the stuff that compels people to click on articles or share clips of a professor tends to affirm their worldview, or frighten them, or both at the same time. The more attention you gain in the Cathedral system, the more you can influence opinion and government policy. Journalists and academics and thinkers of any kind now live in a desperate race for attention—and in Yarvin’s view, this is all really a never-ending bid for influence, serving the interests of our oligarchical regime. So I may think I write for a living. But to Yarvin, what I actually do is more like a weird combination of intelligence-gathering and propagandizing. Which is why no one I was talking to at NatCon really thought it would be possible for me to write a fair piece about them.
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People 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.
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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.
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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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.
“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?”
“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.”
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On the last afternoon of NatCon, a few hours before he was set to give the keynote address, Vance showed up. He spotted me drinking a beer at the bar and came over to say hello. “I still have no idea what I’m going to say,” he said, though he didn’t seem worried.
I wandered down to the ballroom to wait and ended up sitting with the U.S. correspondent for the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel. I knew that some of the reporters there might have been under the impression that this was all mostly just tweedy MAGA pageantry. He had a more complex view, having just spoken to Yarvin, and asked me to explain his philosophy. I found myself at a loss. I said that there were these things called the regime and the Cathedral and that Yarvin was “sort of a monarchist.”
“A monarchist?”he asked. He seemed taken aback to learn that what this hero figure of the New Right dreamed of was a king.
Vance showed up, wearing a suit and bright red tie, looking relaxed for a person who was about to give a speech to hundreds of people who viewed him as possibly a last great hope in saving the American nation from global corporatist subjugation. He’d shot up in the polls and at that moment was second in his primary, helped by regular invitations from Carlson.
I asked how he was feeling about the speech. He looked impish. “I think I’ve got a good topic,” he said. “I’m going to talk about college.”
What he meant was that he was about to give a genuinely thunderous speech, titled “The Universities Are the Enemy.” People immediately pointed out that it was a variation on something that Richard Nixon said to Henry Kissinger on White House tapes back in 1972. Vance denounced elite colleges as enemies of the American people; he has long proposed cutting off their federal funding and seizing their endowments. The speech was later linked in alarmed op-eds to “anti-intellectual” movements that had attacked institutions of learning. But that doesn’t quite reckon with what an apocalyptic message he was offering. Because Vance and this New Right cohort, who are mostly so, so highly educated and well-read that their big problem often seems to be that they’re just too nerdy to be an effective force in mass politics, are not anti-intellectual. Vance is an intellectual himself, even if he’s not currently playing one on TV. But he thinks that our universities are full of people who have a structural, self-serving, and financial interest in coloring American culture as racist and evil. And he is ready to go to extraordinary lengths to fight them.
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A couple of hours later I found Vance standing up by the bar, surrounded by a circle of young and identical-looking fanboys. I went over. He asked what I’d thought of the speech, and he suggested we find somewhere to talk.
He asked me to turn my recorder off so we could speak candidly. I agreed, with regret, because the conversation revealed someone who I think will be hugely influential in our politics in the coming years, even if he loses his Senate primary, as both of us thought was possible.
It also revealed someone who is in a dark place, with a view that we are at an ominous turning point in America’s history. He didn’t want to describe this to me on the record. But I can show it anyway, because he already says it publicly, and you can hear it too.
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“I think Trump is going to run again in 2024,” he said. “I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”
“And when the courts stop you,” he went on, “stand before the country, and say—” he quoted Andrew Jackson, giving a challenge to the entire constitutional order—“the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”
This is a description, essentially, of a coup.
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I’d asked Vance to tell me, on the record, what he’d like liberal Americans who thought that what he was proposing was a fascist takeover of America to understand.
He spoke earnestly. “I think the cultural world you operate in is incredibly biased,” he said—against his movement and “the leaders of it, like me in particular.” He encouraged me to resist this tendency, which he thought was the product of a media machine leading us toward a soulless dystopia that none of us want to live in. “That impulse,” he said, “is fundamentally in service of something that is far worse than anything, in your wildest nightmares, than what you see here.”
He gave me an imploring look, as though to suggest that he was more on the side of the kind of people who read Vanity Fair than most of you realize.
If what he was doing worked, he said, “it will mean that my son grows up in a world where his masculinity—his support of his family and his community, his love of his community—is more important than whether it works for fucking McKinsey.”
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The next morning, wrecked, I put on sweatpants and a hoodie and tried to smuggle myself out of the hotel without having to talk to anyone. I gave my chit to the valet and looked around to find Vance and Yarvin standing there waiting for cars. “How do you guys feel?” Yarvin asked. Vance was wearing a hoodie too and looked like I felt. “I feel horrible,” he said. “Not good.”
Yarvin asked what I’d thought of everything. I said it would take a long time for me to figure that out. We all shook hands, and they waved as I got into my car and we all resumed our usual battle stations in the American info-wars.
