The Vibe Shifts Against the Right

New York Times

15-04-2025

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.)
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