https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/opinion/dissident-right-trump.html The Vibe Shifts Against the Right April 14, 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.) 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.” 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. 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.
LOL one day these people will learn they’re not part of the “in crowd,” and they never will be…THEY DON’T LIKE U Vivek Ramaswamy gotta go on Twitter every other week and prove to MAGA he’s American
I can't imagine how much of a braindead moron you have to be to vote for Trump as a brown person. It sincerely breaks my brain thinking about it.
I don’t know what the brown person equivalent of a house negro is, but that’s basically what they are…tap dancing for the people who hate u hoping u won’t get it as bad as others, just to realize you’re still not safe of course they treated his ass like a criminal
I just saw a video of a Trump supporter who was asking if anyone knew any contacts in lesser tariff’d countries because he relies on Chinese products and the China tariffs will implode his small business in under 6 months the dumbass is 45 with a wife and kids When u have people depending on u, shouldn’t u make it your job to be as informed as possible when casting your vote? Shouldn’t u put your hatred of others and overall ignorance aside and vote for what will best help your business and family? now look at u
I hope he losses his entire livelihood and ends up with nothing. His kids should grow up knowing how big of a dipshit their parents were.
I’m with u I can excuse these young 20 something/college age kids voting on vibes, but you’re a grown ass man with responsibilities and a small business reliant on China who voted for tariffs…lmao Idk if he was hypnotized with hatred like a lot of them and/or just that dumb, but u reap what u sow…enjoy your new reality
People are ******* idiots until the bell tolls, like hundreds of millions of Boomer chain smokers who knew it would kill them since the 80s but didn’t quit (or the ******* younger gens who did it anyway) then cried a river when they ended up with cancer, copd or some other smoking related disease. Pain is the best teacher for these people.
None of the Trump voters in my circle of contact are vocal anymore. Seems like their coping mechanism is to just ignore things. as expected for cowards.
One of the biggest problem with democracy is that voter competency, oh and elections have consequences.
My circle of trump thumpers now tell me the tariffs are for our children and their children, and we should all get behind the tariffs and bring back jobs that were stolen, I guess were now the victim LOL......GOD loves tariffs
Not enough pain in their lives yet. See my post above, let us know how they're feeling in six months.
