The Vibe Shifts Against the Right

 

Opinion

Michelle Goldberg

The Vibe Shifts Against the Right

 

April 14, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/opinion/dissident-right-trump.html

Michelle Goldberg

By Michelle Goldberg

Opinion Columnist

 

Alex Kaschuta’s podcast, “Subversive,” used to be a node in the network between weird right-wing internet subcultures and mainstream conservatism. She hosted men’s rights activists and purveyors of “scientific” racism, neo-reactionary online personalities with handles like “Raw Egg Nationalist” and the Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters. Curtis Yarvin, a court philosopher of the MAGA movement who wants to replace democracy with techno-monarchy, appeared on the show twice. In 2022, Kaschuta spoke at the same National Conservatism conference as Ron DeSantis and Marco Rubio.

 

Finding progressive conventional wisdom hollow and unfulfilling, Kaschuta was attracted to the contrarian narratives and esoteric ideas of the thinkers and influencers sometimes known as the “dissident right.” They presented liberal modernity — with its emphasis on racial and gender equality, global cooperation, secularism and orderly democratic processes — as a Matrix-like illusion sustained by ideological coercion, and themselves as the holders of freedom-giving red pills.

 

For Kaschuta, who lives in Romania, the promise of a more authentic, organic society, freed from the hypocrisies of the existing order, was apparently inviting. “There’s always been something tantalizing about the idea that the world is not how it is presented to you,” she wrote on her blog. “A frontier opens up.”

 

But over the last couple of years, that frontier started seeming to her more like a dead end. Recently, she abandoned the movement. “The vibe is shifting yet again,” Kaschuta wrote on X last week. “The cumulative IQ of the right is looking worse than the market.”

 

Kaschuta is not alone; several people who once appeared to find transgressive right-wing ideas scintillating are having second thoughts as they watch Donald Trump’s administration put those ideas into practice. The writer Richard Hanania once said that he hated bespoke pronouns “more than genocide,” and his 2023 book, “The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics,” provided a blueprint for the White House’s war on D.E.I. But less than three months into Trump’s new term, he regrets his vote, telling me, “The resistance libs were mostly right about him.”

 

Nathan Cofnas, a right-wing philosophy professor and self-described “race realist” fixated on group differences in I.Q., wrote on X, “All over the world, almost everyone with more than half a brain is looking at the disaster of Trump (along with Putin, Yoon Suk Yeol, et al.) and drawing the very reasonable conclusion that right-wing, anti-woke parties are incapable of effective governance.” (Yoon Suk Yeol is South Korea’s recently impeached president.)

 

Scott Siskind, who blogs under the pseudonym Scott Alexander, has been an influential figure in Silicon Valley’s revolt against social justice ideology, though he’s never been a Trump supporter. Last week, he asked whether “edgy heterodox centrists” like himself paved the way for Trump by opening the door to once-verboten arguments. In an imaginary Socratic dialogue, he wrote, “We wanted a swift, lean government that stopped strangling innovation and infrastructure. Instead we got chain-saw-style firings, total devastation of state capacity in exactly the way most likely to strangle innovation more than ever, and the worst and dumbest people in the world gloating about how they solved the ‘grift’ of sending lifesaving medications to dying babies.”

 

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It is too early to know what these small cracks in the dissident right mean and whether they presage more substantial defections. They suggest to me, however, that not everyone can sustain the level of cognitive dissonance necessary to rationalize away this administration’s destructiveness.

 

One reason some people reacted so furiously against wokeness is that they felt as if they were being pressured into dishonesty; trans women in sports became a major flashpoint not just because of perceived unfairness, but also because people felt bullied into denying the existence of sex differences. A term of high praise on the dissident right is “based,” short for “based in reality.” But never has an administration been more divorced from reality, and more determined to shove insulting ideological fictions down our throats, than Trump’s.

 

When liberalism was firmly entrenched, its discontents could treat authoritarian ideas as interesting avant-garde provocations. Authoritarianism in power, however, was always going to be crude and stupid.

 

Trump’s tariffs have pushed some to the breaking point because they reveal the immediate material cost of that stupidity. The decadent cynics of the new right could dismiss Trump’s lies about the 2020 election as mere hyperbole. It’s harder to be sanguine about a collapse in one’s own net worth and economic prospects. “It kind of made the consequences seem real,” Hanania said of the trade war.

 

Well before the tariffs, Kaschuta, who trained as an economist, was moving away from the movement that once thrilled her. She recently appeared on the podcast of another dissident from the dissident right, the onetime conservative influencer Pedro Gonzalez, where they discussed their mutual disillusionment.

 

The mother of young children, Kaschuta described internalizing tradwife ideas about women’s primacy in the home. When she tried to take on all the domestic labor in her own family, it nearly broke her. She started to realize that while the new right’s racism and misogyny were often delivered with an ironic smirk, it was no joke. she said. As a woman, she said, “you’d have to lean back and just accept that people will belittle you.”

 

For all her mounting disgust, however, the tariffs seemed to push her over the edge. When she looks back on the milieu she was once a part of, she said, she sees no solid ideas for a post-liberal society — it was all just aesthetics, resentments and vibes. “And now the vibes have knocked into reality,” she said. “And it is so jarring to see that none of the vibes stand up to scrutiny. None of the vibes actually fit onto the 21st century. None of the vibes, if implemented, would lead to anything but immiseration and war.”

 

Irving Kristol famously said that neoconservatives were liberals who’d been “mugged by reality.” Maybe soon we’ll need a similar word for the right wingers who can’t stand to live in the world they helped build.