#hawley — Public Fediverse posts

Stephen Wolfe grew up in Napa, California,
and his father was an admirer of the right-wing pundit and erstwhile GOP presidential candidate Pat Buchanan.

After attending West Point and serving in the Army, Wolfe earned advanced degrees before leaving academia to
“do the Wendell Berry thing”
in North Carolina with his wife and four kids.

Over the summer, Wolfe, 41, agreed to speak with me on the condition that I refer to him as “Dr. Wolfe”
and call him an “expert on Christian nationalism.”

The Dr. Wolfe I spoke with was a more muted version of the firebrand I’d watched online.

He said his ideal version of America would be led by a Caesar figure.

Gay marriage would be strictly prohibited.

Women would not be allowed to vote
—instead, men would vote for their households.

When I brought up the bit from his book about heretics being killed, he grew annoyed.

“I do think it’s permissible, in principle, for a state to suppress theological heresy,
but that doesn’t mean that it’s prudent or proper,
suitable in every circumstance or every tradition or way of life.”

The Founding Fathers, he added, had encouraged religious liberty,
so killing heretics would not be appropriate in the United States that we inhabit.

We turned to remarks he had made at a recent conference convened by Brian Sauvé:
“I think we need to reflect on this idea of Judeo-Christianity,
or Judeo-Christian worldview,
or Judeo-Christian whatever,
and really eradicate that from our thinking.

Because if we say that America is a
Judeo-Christian country,
then it can’t be a Christian country, okay?”

What role, I asked him, would Jews play?

After a deep sigh, he told me that they would be allowed to “exercise their religion freely.”

We spoke a week before Vance’s RNC speech,
and Wolfe’s remarks helped me understand what the TheoBros heard in Vance’s phrase about
"America as a people".

The founders, Wolfe noted, intended for their country to be “Anglo-Protestant with an American inflection.”

America, he continued, is “a place of settlement and rootedness,
but it’s an open ethnicity in which people can become one of us.”

Which is to say that, like some others, Wolfe is not necessarily opposed to the idea of nonwhite people in America
—as long as they agree to assimilate to the Anglo-Protestant dominant culture.

In this telling, America is not a pluralistic society at all,
but rather one in which there exists an uneasy truce between Christians and those they reluctantly tolerate.

Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Wolfe what motivated him.

“I want Christians to be more assertive and to recognize the Christian heritage of the American way of life,
and to seek to restore that,” he said.

“This is a Christian country, and we’ve got to work to restore it to what it once was"

In his keynote address at Sauvé’s conference, titled “Why Multicultural Pluralism Fails and What to Build Instead,”
Wolfe called the concept of America as a melting pot
“an early 20th-century idea cooked up by a Jew in New York who despised the confident Anglo-Protestant establishment.”

WASPs were the “distinct ethnicity” of America, he insisted,

and America should only welcome those who aspired to assimilate.

As he put it, “This is our homeland, and we welcome you on the condition of conformity.”

Or, in the words of JD Vance, America “is a group of people.”

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/09/theobros-jd-vance-christian-nationalism/

#Heritage #Action #Andrew #Isker #Andrew #Torba #Gab #refugees #Paul #Gottfried #Richard #Spencer #William #Wolfe #Big #Eva #Josh #Abbotoy #Claremont #Institute #Project2025 #Heritage #Foundation #Chris #Buskirk #Rockbridge #Network #Leonard #Leo #Peter #Thiel #Vance #Josh #Clemans #Charles #Haywood #warlord #Nate #Fischer #Brian #Sauvé #Mefferd #Joel #Webbon #dominant #man #submissive #woman #Hawley #Johnson #Lee #Vance #Trump #Turning #Point #USA #Tucker #Carlson #flamethrower #Douglas #Wilson #Calvinism #Vance #hypermasculinity #birthrates #ethnonationalism #misogyny #TheoBros #Calvin #Rushdoony #homeschooling #charismatic #New #Apostolic #Reformation #reformed #TheoBros #apostles #prophets #Bible #postmillennialism #Aaron #Renn #Andrew #Isker #Douglas #Wilson #shared #history #patriarchal #Christian #nationalism #young #pastors #Christian #prince #women #flogging #Franco #multiculturalism #Taylor #Swift

William Wolfe served in the Trump administration
both as the deputy assistant secretary of defense
and as director of House affairs at the Department of State.

He is also an alumnus of #Heritage #Action,
a sister organization of the Heritage Foundation,
the arch-conservative think tank behind Project 2025,
whose chief architect, Russell Vought, posted on X that he was “proud to work with @William_E_Wolfe on scoping out a sound Christian Nationalism.”

A few months later, the Bucks County Beacon uncovered a lengthy online manifesto on the goals of Christian nationalists.

The document, which listed Wolfe and Joel Webbon as contributing editors
and Oklahoma Sen. #Dusty #Deevers as a co-author,
called for “civil magistrates” to usher in 💥“the establishment of the Ten Commandments as the foundational law of the nation.”

The manifesto doesn’t specify exactly how Christian nationalists should achieve these goals.

As Tabachnick, the extremism researcher, interprets it, the TheoBros are imagining a utopia where “they are going to be free to be entrepreneurs in all different senses,
including the tech world that they’re mixing with so freely.”

The key, she said, is that authoritarianism “is required to have the utopian vision.”

Last year, the extremism watchdog group Right Wing Watch posted a video of Wolfe quoting a scripture passage.
There are times when “even the God of peace proclaims by his providence, ‘to arms!’” he says.

“If we have ever lived in a point of time in American history since then that we could argue that now is a time ‘to arms’ again, I think we are getting close.”

William Wolfe’s Christian nationalism manifesto made the rounds on social media,
but in mainstream conservative outlets,
it was #Stephen #Wolfe
(no relation to William)
who brought TheoBro ideas to the wider world.

In his book, which was praised by editors at the Federalist and the American Conservative,
Wolfe paints America as a “#gynocracy” whose government and culture have been feminized by unhappy women leaders.
(Sound familiar?)

He has stated on X that women should not have the right to vote, and that “interethnic” marriage can be “sinful.”

#Andrew #Isker #Andrew #Torba #Gab #refugees #Paul #Gottfried #Richard #Spencer #William #Wolfe #Big #Eva #Josh #Abbotoy #Claremont #Institute #Project2025 #Heritage #Foundation #Chris #Buskirk #Rockbridge #Network #Leonard #Leo #Peter #Thiel #Vance #Josh #Clemans #Charles #Haywood #warlord #Nate #Fischer #Brian #Sauvé #Mefferd #Joel #Webbon #dominant #man #submissive #woman #Hawley #Johnson #Lee #Vance #Trump #Turning #Point #USA #Tucker #Carlson #flamethrower #Douglas #Wilson #Calvinism #Vance #hypermasculinity #birthrates #ethnonationalism #misogyny #TheoBros #Calvin #Rushdoony #homeschooling #charismatic #New #Apostolic #Reformation #reformed #TheoBros #apostles #prophets #Bible #postmillennialism #Aaron #Renn #Andrew #Isker #Douglas #Wilson #shared #history #patriarchal #Christian #nationalism #young #pastors #Christian #prince #women #flogging #Franco #multiculturalism #Taylor #Swift

One eager customer is 38-year-old TheoBro #Andrew #Isker
—the pastor who interned at Wilson’s church,
studied divinity at New Saint Andrews,
and co-wrote a book on Christian nationalism with #Andrew #Torba,
the openly antisemitic CEO of the social media platform #Gab.

In July, Isker announced on X that he planned to move his family of seven to lead a church in a New Founding community in Tennessee.

Life in his native Minnesota, he said, had become untenable because of permissive laws around trans rights and abortion,
not to mention how hospitable the state has been to #refugees.

“Minnesota is one of the top destinations for resettling foreign people hostile to our way of life,” he said.

That month, Isker spoke at a Texas conference about the
“war on white America”
alongside #Paul #Gottfried,
the mentor of prominent white nationalist #Richard #Spencer.

The conference was hosted by the "True Texas Project",
a far-right group with ties to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Like many TheoBros,
Isker sees much to like in Vance.

In early July, before Trump announced his running mate, Isker referred to him as
“Senator JD Vance (R-Heritage America).”

In late July, he posted a video of Vance and told his 29,000 followers,
“You need to double down on childless cat lady discourse.
Kamala sees happy, large families and hates them.
She wants them destroyed.
She wants you to never be able to have this.
She is a nasty, bitter harridan who hates all that is true, good, and beautiful.”

One problem is that there simply are not enough TheoBros to populate Christian communities like the one Isker plans to move to.

Enter #William #Wolfe,
the founder of the
"Center for Baptist Leadership", which aims to persuade members of the Southern Baptist Convention that it,
the largest of all Protestant denominations in the United States,
has fallen prey to the corrupting forces of liberalism.

Baptists are only the beginning.

Wolfe wants to win over the entire evangelical mainstream,
which he and other TheoBros refer to as “#Big #Eva.”

In August, he posted on X,
“Once you realize that Big Eva thinks it’s a bigger sin to desire to preserve the customs, heritage, values, and cultural homogeneity of your own nation
than to kill the unborn in the womb, you can better understand their moral framework.”

#Josh #Abbotoy #Claremont #Institute #Project2025 #Heritage #Foundation #Chris #Buskirk #Rockbridge #Network #Leonard #Leo #Peter #Thiel #Vance #Josh #Clemans #Charles #Haywood #warlord #Nate #Fischer #Brian #Sauvé #Mefferd #Joel #Webbon #dominant #man #submissive #woman #Hawley #Johnson #Lee #Vance #Trump #Turning #Point #USA #Tucker #Carlson #flamethrower #Douglas #Wilson #Calvinism #Vance #hypermasculinity #birthrates #ethnonationalism #misogyny #TheoBros #Calvin #Rushdoony #homeschooling #charismatic #New #Apostolic #Reformation #reformed #TheoBros #apostles #prophets #Bible #postmillennialism #Aaron #Renn #Andrew #Isker #Douglas #Wilson #shared #history #patriarchal #Christian #nationalism #young #pastors #Christian #prince #women #flogging #Franco #multiculturalism #Taylor #Swift

An even more well-connected Wilson emulator is
#Josh #Abbotoy,
executive director of "American Reformer"
and managing partner of a venture capital fund and real estate firm called "New Founding".

A former fellow of the right-wing think tank the #Claremont #Institute, Abbotoy reported that he recently participated in a #Project2025 presidential transition “strategic planning session”
hosted by the right-wing think tank the #Heritage #Foundation.

Bucks County Beacon reporter Jennifer Cohn revealed venture capitalist #Chris #Buskirk was listed as the editor and publisher.

In 2022, Buskirk co-founded the #Rockbridge #Network,
a collection of powerful Trump donors including Catholic judicial kingmaker #Leonard #Leo and Silicon Valley billionaire #Peter #Thiel.

Another co-founder of the Rockbridge Network?
None other than
JD #Vance.

Thiel, Vance’s mentor and former employer, is also a major funder of the National Conservatism movement.

Obsessed with global birthrates, Thiel spent $10 million on his protégé’s successful 2022 Senate campaign.

In July, shortly after Trump had announced Vance as his running mate,
Cohn surfaced a tweet by New Founding’s network director,
#Josh #Clemans:
a photo of Vance with several New Founding staffers.

The caption read “Our guy.”

New Founding lists as a partner the "Society for American Civic Renewal",
a secretive fraternal order founded by Indiana shampoo baron #Charles #Haywood,

who describes himself as an aspiring Christian “#warlord.”

According to founder #Nate #Fischer, New Founding wants to “form the backbone of a renewed American regime”
and that its members
“understand the nature of authority and its legitimate forceful exercise.”

But its main public-facing project appears to be turning tracts of land in Appalachia into Christian communities.

Promotional materials describe a community of
“unmatched seclusion”
where
“simple country faith”
protects local culture from rainbow flags and crime.

Potential buyers, he advises, should not delay.

“Who’s going to grab the land?
Is it going to be good, based people who want to build something inspiring,
something authentic to the region’s history,
or is it going to be Bill Gates and BlackRock and hippies from California?”

#Brian #Sauvé #Mefferd #Joel #Webbon #dominant #man #submissive #woman #Hawley #Johnson #Lee #Vance #Trump #Turning #Point #USA #Tucker #Carlson #flamethrower #Douglas #Wilson #Calvinism #Vance #hypermasculinity #birthrates #ethnonationalism #misogyny #TheoBros #Calvin #Rushdoony #homeschooling #charismatic #New #Apostolic #Reformation #reformed #TheoBros #apostles #prophets #Bible #postmillennialism #Aaron #Renn #Andrew #Isker #Douglas #Wilson #shared #history #patriarchal #Christian #nationalism #young #pastors #Christian #prince #women #flogging #Franco #multiculturalism #Taylor #Swift

Day 2 Wallyfest all weekend https://rockradio.live #live #liveevents #radio #radioshow #swag #givesway #rockandroll #livemusic #meetandgreet #havingfun #sale #events #free #freeradio #radiostation #wallyfest #hawley #hawleypa #wallenpaupack

We are at Wallyfest all weekend https://rockradio.live #live #liveevents #radio #radioshow #swag #givesway #rockandroll #livemusic #meetandgreet #havingfun #sale #events #free #freeradio #radiostation #wallyfest #hawley #hawleypa #wallenpaupack

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.

#Kyle #Rittenhouse #Unabomber #Kaczynski #Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook

“We are in a late republican period,”
Vance said later,
evoking the common New Right view of America as Rome awaiting its Caesar.

“If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild,
and pretty far out there,
and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

“Indeed,” Murphy said. “Among some of my circle, the phrase ‘extra-constitutional’ has come up quite a bit.”

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.”

At that, we called it,
and the crowd of young men who wanted to talk to him immediately descended on the couches.

People kept bringing drinks, and there was a lot of shit talk, and it went on late.

I remember thinking at one point how strange it was that in our mid-30s
Vance and I were significantly older than almost everyone there,
all of whom thought they were organizing a struggle to change the course of human history,
and all of whom were now going to get sloppy drunk.

#Kyle #Rittenhouse #Unabomber #Kaczynski #Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook

Yarvin and Laurenson bounded out of the crowd as the cheers were still ringing.

They were giggling, seeming to have had some wine.

“Nixon—Nixon!”Laurenson said,
still laughing.

I couldn’t tell if she was delighted or horrified.

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.

That night, I went up to my hotel room and listened to a podcast interview Vance had conducted with Jack Murphy,
the big, bearded head of the "Liminal Order" men’s group.

Murphy asked how it was that Vance proposed to rip out America’s leadership class.

Vance described two possibilities that many on the New Right imagine
—that our system will either fall apart naturally,
or that a great leader will assume semi-dictatorial powers.

“So there’s this guy Curtis Yarvin, who has written about some of these things,” Vance said.

Murphy chortled knowingly.

“So one [option] is to basically accept that this entire thing is going to fall in on itself,” Vance went on.

“And so the task of conservatives right now is to preserve as much as can be preserved,” waiting for the “inevitable collapse” of the current order.

He said he thought this was pessimistic.

“I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left,” he said.
“And turn them against the left.

We need like a
de-Baathification program,
a de-woke-ification program.”

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.

#Kyle #Rittenhouse #Unabomber #Kaczynski #Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook

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.

#Kyle #Rittenhouse #Unabomber #Kaczynski #Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook

We drove a long way into the desert before we arrived at the campaign meet-and-greet,
which was being hosted by a former CIA official in a comfortable retirement community.

The crowd of a few dozen was mostly sweater-wearing retirees,
immersed in a media culture in which the people who repeated the most incendiary and Trumpist talking points tended to gain attention and political support.

This kind of groupthink was not just a phenomenon of the liberal media,
and this fact has hampered the campaigns of both Masters and Vance,
who are often seen as Trump-aligned culture warriors,
and who have had a lot of trouble working their more complicated policy ideas into our fervid political conversation.

He talked through his proposal to regulate tech companies as common carriers,
like America once regulated phone companies.

The crowd seemed interested but hardly electrified.

When he took questions at the end, they were mostly the usual ones about the supposedly stolen 2020 election
—a view that Masters did not push back on
—the border wall,
vaccine mandates.

One man raised his hand to ask how Masters planned to drain the swamp.

He gave me a sly look. “Well, one of my friends has this acronym he calls RAGE,” he said.

“Retire All Government Employees.”

The crowd liked the sound of this and erupted in a cheer.

#Kyle #Rittenhouse #Unabomber #Kaczynski #Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook

I asked Masters whether he thought the core of his project was a fight against a consumerist
techno-dystopia that many on the left have also come to fear.

He said yes.

I asked why, if this was the case, it almost never came across in his mainstream media appearances.

“That’s interesting feedback,” he said. “That it’s not coming through.”

“I go on, and it’s the tail end of the B block, and I’ve got two minutes to talk about #Kyle #Rittenhouse,” he’d said earlier,

talking about his spots on Fox News.

“And it’s like, ‘Well, the left is insane, and this kid shouldn’t have been on trial,
and they’re punishing him for being a white guy who defended himself with an AR-15.’ ”

Conservative media seems to thrive on culture-war touch points as much as all the rest of it.

“I feel like I’m willing to go there,” he said.

“But you can’t do that on Laura Ingraham sound bites.”

He was a little less rosy about the future with some interviewers than he was with me.

“We need someone with their hand on the tiller who understands where we’ve been and where we need to go,” he told the podcaster Alex Kaschuta recently.

“Otherwise we will get just totally owned by the progressive left.

And the progressive left just remains the enemy.

It’s the enemy of true progress. It’s the enemy of everything that is good.”

I asked if he could give me a vision of what he thought victory for his side would look like.

“It’s just families and meaningful work,” he said,
“so that you can raise your kids and worship and pursue your hobbies and figure out what the meaning of it all is.”

Pretty much anyone could agree with this. And pretty much anyone could wonder how it is that this sort of thing has come to seem radical,
or distant from the lives of many people growing into adulthood today.

“It just feels so networked,” he said. “It’s so in-the-matrix.”

#Unabomber #Kaczynski #Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook

“ ‘The regime’ sounds really sexy, right?”
Masters said to me.

“It’s a tangible enemy
—if you could just grapple with it in the right way, you can topple it.
And I think it’s actually just a lot less sexy and a lot more bureaucratic,” he said.

“But I’ve read that stuff, and I see what it means.”

I asked him about the term
Thielbucks,
and how true it was that the Thiel Foundation was funding a network of New Right podcasters
and cool-kid cultural figures
as a sort of cultural vanguard.

“It depends if it’s just dissident-right think-tank stuff,”
he told me,
“or if anyone actually does anything.”

“I don’t know how that became a meme,” he said about Thielbucks.

“I think I would know if those kids were getting money.”

“We fund some stuff,” he told me. “But we’re not funding an army of meme posters.”

He told me that he and Thiel had met with Khachiyan, one of the cohosts of Red Scare.

“Which was cool,” he said. “Their podcast is interesting.”

I asked if there was a world in which they might get funding from Thiel.

“Maybe, yeah,” he said.

“We fund some weird stuff with the Thiel Foundation.”

We drove together to a campaign event, talking about everything from how technology is reshaping our brains to environmental policy,
both of us circling from different political directions to an apocalyptic place.

“I do think we’re at a moment of crossroads,” he said.

“And if we play it wrong, it’s the Dark Ages.”

Masters has publicly said he thinks “everybody should read” the #Unabomber’s anti-tech manifesto,
“Industrial Society and Its Future,”
which may sound strange for a young tech executive running to serve in the United States Senate.

But to Masters, #Kaczynski’s critique was a useful analysis of how technology shapes our world
and how “degrading and debasing” it could be to human lives.

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A few weeks after NatCon, I drove from California to Tucson to meet Masters,
a very tall, very thin, very fit 35-year-old.

I wanted to see how all this might translate into an actual election campaign,
and I’d been watching a lot of Fox News,

including Yarvin’s streaming interview with Carlson in which he gave a swirling depiction of how the Cathedral produced its groupthink.

“Why do Yale and Harvard always agree on everything?” he asked.

“These organizations are essentially branches of the same thing,” he told a mesmerized Carlson.

“You’re like, ‘Where are the wires?’ ”

He sketched his vision of (as he calls it) a “constitutional” regime change that would take power back from this oligarchy
—so diffuse most people hardly knew it was there.

“That’s what makes it so hard to kill,” he said.

At a coffee shop near the house he’d bought when he moved back home to Tucson from the Bay Area,
Masters and I went through the tenets of his nationalist platform:

on-shoring industrial production,
slashing legal immigration,
regulating big tech companies,
and eventually restructuring the economy so that one salary would be enough to raise a family on.

I mentioned Yarvin and his line of arguing that America’s system had become so sclerotic that it was hopeless to imagine making big systemic changes like these.

“In a system where state capacity is very low…” I started the question.

“Alas,” he said, with a twinkle in his eye.

“Do we need a crisis to get there?” I asked him.

“Maybe, maybe, maybe,” he said.
It wasn’t where his immediate thinking was.

“I’ll have the proverbial machete,” he said. “But yeah, it may take some kind of crisis to get us there.”

He paused. “But we’re already sort of in one, right?”

Masters often says he’s not as black-pilled and pessimistic as some in the New Right spheres.

He seems, unlike many New Righters, to still earnestly believe in the power of electoral politics.

But he does think that the culturally liberal and free-market ideology that has guided America’s politics in recent years
is a hopeless dead end.

“A country is not just an economy,” Masters told the dissident-right outlet
IM—1776
recently.

“You also need a conception of yourself as a nation, as a people, and as a culture.

And that’s what America is increasingly lacking today.”

“It’s true that I’m incredibly hopeful,” he said to me.

“I think it’s really bleak, I think the default is continued stagnation, and maybe you get the crisis in 5 years or maybe it’s 30 years from now.”

He told me that he didn’t like to use terms like the Cathedral and used “the regime” less often than Vance,

although I later noticed that he used this latter phrase frequently with interviewers on the dissident right.

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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.”

This is the Cathedral at work.

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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.”

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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.”

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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.

#Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook

Yarvin had given people a way to articulate a notion that somehow felt subversive to say out loud in America
—that history was headed in the wrong direction.

“Somebody said something earlier that captured it for me,” Laurenson said,
just before they had to leave to go to a slightly hush-hush private dinner with Vance and a few others.

“They said, ‘You can be here and know you’re not alone.’ ”

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.

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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By the time TechCrunch publicized Yarvin’s identity, in 2013,

he had become influential in a small circle of the disaffected elite.

In 2014, The Baffler published a lengthy look at his influence, titled “Mouthbreathing Machiavellis Dream of a Silicon Reich.”

The piece warned that Yarvin’s ideas were spreading among prominent figures like #Thiel and #Balaji #Srinivasan, formerly the CTO of #Coinbase,

and that it was possible for an intellectual fringe to
“seize key positions of authority and power”
and “eventually bring large numbers of people around,”
just as the #Koch brothers once had with their pro-business libertarianism,
a position that Thiel was quickly moving away from.

In 2017, BuzzFeed News published an email exchange between Yarvin and #Milo #Yiannopoulis in which Yarvin said that he’d watched the 2016 election returns with Thiel.

“He’s fully enlightened,” Yarvin wrote.

“Just plays it very carefully.”

Masters soon had an office in Trump Tower.

He and Thiel worked,
generally without success,
to install figures like Srinivasan,
whom they proposed to head the FDA,
and who himself often talked about the
“paper belt,”
in an echo of Yarvin’s Cathedral concept,

and made common cause with figures like #Steve #Bannon, who wanted to pick apart the administrative state,
an idea that at least had a hint of Yarvin’s RAGE proposal.

Yarvin eventually stopped working as a programmer and left the Bay Area,
moving with his wife and two children to Nevada.

His wife died in April 2021, and he seems to have been devastated,

publishing searching poems about her.

But last September, a month before we spoke, he posted a dating call,
inviting women who were “reasonably pretty and pretty smart,” as he put it,

and “have read my work and like it,” and who thought that “the purpose of dating is to get married and have kids,”

to email him so they could set up a Zoom date.

“His writing doesn’t really represent who he is,” Laurenson told me.

“So I answered this email and I was just like,
‘Hi, I’m a liberal, but I have a high IQ. And I want kids, and I’m actually just really curious to talk to you.’ ”

The two are now engaged.

Laurenson told me she’d had a gradual awakening that accelerated during the upheavals of the early pandemic
and the protests of the summer of 2020.

“I started really getting drawn to #NRx ideas,” she said,
using a common online abbreviation for the
neo-reactionary fringe,

“because I was tracking the riots,” by which she meant the violence that erupted amid some of the Black Lives Matter protests.

“I have a background in social justice,” she said.

But she was “horrified” by “how the mainstream media covered the riots.… It was just such a violation of all of my values.”

She’d had a strange realization after she and Yarvin started dating,
discovering that some of her friends had been reading him for years.

“I found out that all these people had been reading NRx stuff just like me.

They just never told anyone about it,” she said.

“It has been very striking to me,” she said, “how cool this world is becoming.”

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"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.

You won’t hear people use the "Cathedral" term a lot in public,
although right-wing Twitter lit up with delight when Yarvin sketched the concept on Tucker Carlson’s Fox Nation show last September.

People who’ve opened their eyes to this system of control have taken the red pill,
a term Yarvin started using back in 2007,
long before it got watered down to generally mean supporting Trump.

To truly be red-pilled, you have to understand the workings of the Cathedral.

And the way conservatives can actually win in America, he has argued,
is for a Caesar-like figure to take power back from this devolved oligarchy

and replace it with a monarchical regime run like a start-up.

As early as 2012, he proposed the acronym #RAGE
—Retire All Government Employees
—as a shorthand for a first step in the overthrow of the American “regime.”

What we needed, Yarvin thought, was a
“national CEO, [or] what’s called a dictator.”

Yarvin now shies away from the word "dictator" and seems to be trying to promote a friendlier face of #authoritarianism as the solution to our political warfare:

“If you’re going to have a #monarchy, it has to be a monarchy of everyone,” he said.

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As Moldbug,
Yarvin wrote about race-based IQ differences,
and in an early post, titled
“Why I Am Not a White Nationalist,”
he defended reading and linking to white nationalist writing.

He told me he’d pursued those early writings in a spirit of “open inquiry,”
though Yarvin also openly acknowledged in the post that some of his readers seemed to be white nationalists.

Some of Yarvin’s writing from then is so radically right wing that it almost has to be read to be believed,
like the time he critiqued the attacks by the Norwegian far-right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik
—who killed 77 people, including dozens of children at a youth camp
—not on the grounds that terrorism is wrong

but because the killings wouldn’t do anything effective to overthrow what Yarvin called
Norway’s “communist” government.

He argued that Nelson Mandela,
once head of the military wing of the African National Congress,
had endorsed terror tactics and political murder against opponents,
and said anyone who claimed
“St. Mandela” was more innocent than Breivik might have
“a mother you’d like to fuck.”

He’s tempered himself in middle age
—he now says he has a rule never to
“say anything unnecessarily controversial,
or go out of my way to be provocative for no reason.”

Many liberals who hear him talk would probably question how strictly he follows this rule,

but even in his Moldbug days, most of his controversial writings were couched in thickets of irony and metaphor,

a mode of speech that younger podcasters and Twitter personalities on the highly online right have adopted
—a way to avoid getting kicked off tech platforms or having their words quoted by liberal journalists.

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.

#Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook

We spoke sharing a bench outside in the dark one evening,
a few days into the NatCon 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.

Strange things can happen when you meet him.

I’d gotten in touch with him through a mutual friend,
a journalist I knew from New York who once had a big magazine assignment to write about him.

The piece never came out.

“They wanted him to say I was really evil and all that,” Yarvin told me.

“He wouldn’t do it and pulled the piece. And I thought, Okay, that’s a cool guy.”

This friend has now made a bunch of money in #crypto,
works on a project Yarvin helped launch to build a #decentralized #internet,
and lives hours out into the desert in Utah, where he’ll occasionally call in to New Right–ish podcasts.

He recently had dinner with Thiel and Masters
—both Masters and Vance have raised money by offering donors a chance to dine with Thiel and the candidate.

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.

But the winds are shifting.
He told me about how he’d gone to read poetry in New York recently,
at the Thiel-funded NPC fest.

“A bunch of lit kids showed up,” he said, grinning.

I had grown into adulthood in the New York lit-kid world;
even a few years ago, there was no question that anything like this could have happened.

But now Yarvin is a cult hero to many in the ultrahip crowd that you’ll often hear referred to as the “downtown scene.”

“I don’t even think
bothered showing up,” Yarvin said.

“What would they do? It was an art party.”

Yarvin had asked his new girlfriend,
#Lydia #Laurenson,
a 37-year-old founder of a progressive magazine, to vet me.

The radical right turn her life had taken created complications.

“One of my housemates was like
—‘I don’t know if I want Curtis in our house,’ ” she told me.

“And I’m like, ‘Okay, that makes sense. I understand why you’re saying that.’ ”

Laurenson had been a well-known blogger and activist in the #BDSM scene back when Yarvin was the central early figure in a world of “neo-reactionary” writers,

publishing his poetry and political theory on the Blogger site under the name #Mencius #Moldbug.

#Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook

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.”

#Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook

In the months after Roe fell, their efforts would reach beyond the outlines of that one document.

A.D.F. lawyers would get involved in the two high-profile Supreme Court cases,
argued before the justices this spring,
that could define post-Roe abortion access for American women;

they focused on🔹 the legality of medication that is the most common method of abortion 🔹
and on 🔹emergency care for pregnant women who face grave medical complications🔹 in states where abortion is banned.

But all that was to come.

Onstage that night, Fitch beamed.

For so many decades, Roe had seemed indestructible,

the backdrop to the lives of three generations of American women
and their families.

Soon it would be a relic of an earlier time.

“We’ve got tough times ahead,
but we’re ready,” Fitch told the audience.

“This has been certainly a God thing.
We’ve all been called.
We’ve all been waiting.”

Now, she said, they would not stop.

“Everyone in this room, you’re ready.”

(15/15)

#Waggoner #Hawley #Barrett #Stewart #Fitch #Currie #Taylor #Fiedorek #Burke #Dannenfelser #AllianceDefendingFreedom #fedsoc #FederalistSociety #viability #Roberts #Kennedy #Alito #Leonard #Leo #Misha #Tseytlin

And now, amid the applause,
A.D.F. leaders looked ahead.

Their ultimate goal was sweeping change across America to preserve the values of conservative Christians.

A.D.F. was, after all, a “religious ministry,”
not just a legal network,
as Kristen Waggoner said in an interview.

Ending abortion was the first target, but A.D.F. had already begun planning for more.

According to an internal strategy document dated to May 2021,
A.D.F. leaders set out to achieve what they called
“generational wins,”

victories that,
like overturning Roe,
would change the law and the culture of America
for an entire generation.

The document, never before reported,
reveals secret details of the legal decisions A.D.F. hopes to challenge in the coming years.

A.D.F. lawyers would work to reverse the Supreme Court’s 1990 decision in
🔸Employment Division v. Smith, 🔸
to “fully protect the free exercise of religion,”
the strategy document explained.

That decision, written by Scalia,
ruled that religious beliefs did not excuse disobeying laws.

They would pursue litigation to enforce free-speech rights on college campuses.

They would push legislation to protect the freedom of association there as well,
to eventually overturn a decision that Ginsburg wrote in
🔸Christian Legal Society v. Martinez. 🔸

The ruling allowed a public university not to recognize a Christian student group that excluded gay students.

In his dissent, Alito called the decision a “serious setback for freedom of expression.”

They would target 🔹L.G.B.T.Q. rights and protections 🔹
and “stop efforts to elevate sexual orientation and gender identity to protected-class status in the law akin to race.”

They would “work to restore an understanding of marriage, the family and sexuality
that reflects God’s creative order.”

And they wanted the court to
🔹strengthen parental rights over state authority🔹
by having the court revisit the 2000 case 🔸Troxel v. Granville,🔸
which allowed the state to override a parent’s wishes in some circumstances.

A.D.F. would work to pass state legislation, similar to its approach on abortion,
that would prioritize parental rights in medical decisions for minors who say they are transgender,
to prevent parents from “being coerced into consenting to life-changing, ill-advised surgeries and procedures in the wake of gender dysphoria.”

It was an agenda that would inflame their liberal opponents and that not even everyone in the ballroom knew about.

(An A.D.F. official distanced the organization from the specific cases named in the document,
saying its legal strategies shift based on precedent and current events.)

(14/n)

#Waggoner #Hawley #Barrett #Stewart #Fitch #Currie #Taylor #Fiedorek #Burke #Dannenfelser #AllianceDefendingFreedom #fedsoc #FederalistSociety #viability #Roberts #Kennedy #Alito #Leonard #Leo #Misha #Tseytlin

After Stewart argued the case at the Supreme Court in December 2021,
leaders of the anti-abortion movement gathered that evening
at the JW Marriott in Washington
for an invitation-only dinner banquet
sponsored by A.D.F.

Everyone from the network seemed to be there,
and A.D.F. gave out party favors of small wooden plaques
depicting a pregnant woman leaning against a Supreme Court column.

The mood was celebratory even though their ultimate victory wouldn’t come for another six months,
with the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson that would overturn Roe.

Marjorie Dannenfelser was in the room.
As were local activists who pushed abortion bans through their statehouses.

Authors of the amicus briefs supporting Stewart’s case.
Becky Currie, who believed she had come up with the idea of the 15-week law in Mississippi.

Many participants knew only the small part they played,
not how the whole fit together.

Currie met Stewart briefly that night for the first time.

“He couldn’t pick me out of a crowd,” she said.

Onstage, Lynn Fitch, Scott Stewart and Erin Hawley sat proudly
as they described how they had gotten to this moment.

“First of all, to God be the glory,” Fitch began.

“We all prayed, worked so hard for this day.
It all came together because everyone here,
everyone that’s been involved across our country,
we’re believers,
and we knew this day would come,” she said.

“God selected this case. He was ready.
The justices were ready to hear what we were all going to be talking about.”

For those listening,
the people around them in that ballroom
and all they accomplished represented
a vision of the kingdom of God
coming on Earth,
as Jesus’ prayer taught in the Gospels.

Their work offered a vision of what a modern Christian empire looked like.

It did not involve violent crusaders or declaring an official state religion.

It was not clerics instituting a theocracy.

The anti-abortion movement had used the existing system to define the Constitution the way it saw fit.

A right was not being taken away from women,
the movement argued,
because it never should have existed in the first place.

Even Ruth Bader Ginsburg had said Roe,
rooted in a right to privacy,
wasn’t built on the strongest legal ground.

An argument explicitly based on a constitutional right to equal protection would have better protected it from challenges, she argued.

A.D.F.’s strategy on Dobbs reflected how it believed it could reshape America
and overtake majority opinion.

There’s a saying that law is downstream from culture,
said Greg Scott, a former longtime communications strategist for A.D.F.,
explaining the idea in an interview that a cause gains popular support first
and then the law formalizes those beliefs.

“I actually reject that,” he said.

“We are in this feedback loop and this ecosystem where frequently that is true.

But then at other times, the law does drive culture.”

(13/n)

#Waggoner #Hawley #Barrett #Stewart #Fitch #Currie #Taylor #Fiedorek #Burke #Dannenfelser #AllianceDefendingFreedom #fedsoc #FederalistSociety #viability #Roberts #Kennedy #Alito #Leonard #Leo #Misha #Tseytlin

Stewart’s thinking reflected the shifts that had overtaken the anti-abortion movement and the conservative legal project
during the Trump administration.

For four years, they had gone bigger and bolder than what previously felt possible.

Courts blocked many of their state abortion bans. But the efforts themselves had further opened the window of possibilities.

To overturn Roe, conservatives had to directly ask the court to do so.

A.D.F. might have been skittish about making the request, but Fitch and Stewart were not.

While the anti-abortion views of the movement’s leaders still represented a distinct minority of the country,
they had built an elite legal and ideological ecosystem of activists, organizations, lawmakers and pro bono lawyers around their cause.

Their policy arms churned out legal arguments and medical studies.

Their lawyers argued their cases, and their judges ruled on them,
all fostered by the bench that Leo built.

And their allied lawmakers pushed their agenda in statehouses and Congress.

Yet despite their overwhelming success, many on the left continued to underestimate them. It was their greatest strength.

Behind closed doors, Fitch’s team drew up a nine-slide blueprint, marked “Confidential”:
a 12-month political and public-relations strategy in the run-up to the expected court decision on Dobbs in June 2022.

“Strategy to maximize impact at SCOTUS,” it began.

The whole operation was surprisingly low-budget,
estimated as up to $231,000,
to be paid out of the attorney general’s office and Fitch’s political fund,
according to the private document.

When Stewart filed the new brief for Mississippi that July,
his argument was a full-scale assault on a precedent that had defined American life for nearly half a century,
in plain language.

“Roe and Casey are egregiously wrong,” he wrote.

“The conclusion that abortion is a constitutional right has no basis in text,
structure, history,
or tradition.”

That same month, Stewart attended a reunion of Thomas’s law clerks hosted at a West Virginia resort by the justice
— before whom he would soon argue his case.

If Stewart won, Roe would fall.

At least 13 states already had trigger bans on the books,
making them certain to move quickly to ban abortion,
with very limited exceptions.

And at least a dozen more states were likely to follow quickly with their own restrictions.

A victory by Mississippi could make abortion illegal in about half the country.

(12/n)

#Waggoner #Hawley #Barrett #Stewart #Fitch #Currie #Taylor #Fiedorek #Burke #Dannenfelser #AllianceDefendingFreedom #fedsoc #FederalistSociety #viability #Roberts #Kennedy #Alito #Leonard #Leo #Misha #Tseytlin

Squeezed around a long table,
A.D.F. lawyers lined up on one side
and the Mississippi team on the other.

This private meeting,
one kept secret from the press,
top politicians and even other allies in the anti-abortion coalition,
would signify a pivotal turning point in the strategy of their movement.

This account of the meeting is based on interviews with multiple participants and people familiar with the discussion.

The A.D.F. lawyers outlined their thinking.

Priority No. 1, they argued, was to get the Supreme Court to
remove the viability line established in Roe as the limit for when states could ban abortion.

Removing that limit
— about 24 weeks
— would open the door to all kinds of restrictions being upheld by lower courts.

It would be a huge victory for their cause.

It was a backdoor way of gutting Roe,
invalidating the central principle of the original decision,
without requiring the justices to take the thornier step of overturning 50 years of precedent.

Stewart disagreed.

The lawmakers of Mississippi had enacted a law,
and that law was fundamentally incompatible with Roe, he argued.

“The people of Mississippi are pro-life,” he told the room,
according to Erin Hawley.

“They enacted this law. It is my duty to defend it to the best of my ability, and the right thing to do is to ask the court to overrule Roe.”

The only effective strategy, Stewart said,
according to participants,
was to target the very heart of it all:
the right to abortion that the court had found via
💥a right to privacy 💥
that it decided was protected by the due-process clause of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution in 1973.

The best argument was that Roe was wrong, he decided.

Some of the A.D.F. lawyers bristled.

Stewart’s plan felt risky and aggressive.

If the court wanted to use this case to overturn Roe, it could,
the A.D.F. team argued.

But to ask for that explicitly could be pushing too far too fast,
even for this new court.

A defeat would be devastating,
potentially even going so far as to reaffirm abortion rights in some way
and create another precedent to fight.

There was a lot to consider.

It wasn’t totally clear that they had five votes to fully overturn Roe right now.

Certainly, it was the best court they had faced in a long time.

But the 6-3 conservative majority was still new,
and the country was still reeling from the contentious Supreme Court battles of the Trump era.

And looming over the conversation was the reality that
Stewart had never argued a case at the Supreme Court.

By this point, A.D.F. lawyers had argued and won 12 Supreme Court cases.

The A.D.F. lawyers’ message was clear:
The safest path to victory was their plan.

They should simply ask the court to uphold their 15-week law.

Fitch’s team was grateful for A.D.F.’s help.
But to them, this had the feel of a power grab
— a bunch of Washington lawyers coming down to Jackson to take over once there was a chance to make history.

This was Fitch’s case.

She had chosen Stewart, and Stewart was determined.

Mississippi would forge its own path.

“Like everything else, you get four attorneys in a room, you’re going to get 10 opinions,”
Kevin Theriot, an A.D.F. lawyer, said later in an interview,
adding that he was on the phone for part of the meeting.

“It’s not that our original strategy went out the window.
It was just that instead of making
‘You should overturn Roe’ the second argument,
they made it the first argument.”

(11/n)

#Waggoner #Hawley #Barrett #Stewart #Fitch #Currie #Taylor #Fiedorek #Burke #Dannenfelser #AllianceDefendingFreedom #fedsoc #FederalistSociety #viability #Roberts #Kennedy #Alito #Leonard #Leo #Misha #Tseytlin

It was not a moment for compromise, Stewart reasoned,
according to people familiar with his thinking.

It was a lesson he had learned from Thomas,
his former boss and mentor,
who was known to hold the line without deviation.

He would be steadfast:
Roe and Casey were wrong and must be reversed.

Within weeks, in early June 2021,
A.D.F. lawyers were on flights to Jackson.

It was a crucial moment for the entire anti-abortion coalition.

But even after years of pushing for this singular goal,
the coalition was not a monolith.

Stewart wanted to openly ask the Supreme Court to
overturn Roe.

A.D.F. also wanted Roe overturned, of course
— its ultimate target was to ban abortion nationwide at conception
— but it favored a more limited, less risky approach,
lawyers at the organization recalled in a series of interviews.

And they saw the Dobbs case as their project.

Now they just had to make sure Stewart and Fitch didn’t jeopardize the plan that had been laid almost six years earlier with Tseytlin at the Mayflower Hotel.

The A.D.F. lawyers rode the old mirrored elevators of the Walter Sillers State Office Building in Jackson to the 12th floor
for a private meeting with Fitch and Stewart.

This could be the case of a generation, and A.D.F. wasn’t about to cede control.

A.D.F.’s incoming president,
Kristen #Waggoner,
brought a core team of top-notch attorneys and media experts,
including a new lawyer A.D.F. had hired:
Erin #Hawley, a graduate of Yale Law School.

She was married to Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri.

Overturning Roe was a joint mission for the Hawleys, who met as clerks for Chief Justice Roberts.

(10/n)

#Barrett #Stewart #Fitch #Currie #Taylor #Fiedorek #Burke #Dannenfelser #AllianceDefendingFreedom #fedsoc #FederalistSociety #viability #Roberts #Kennedy #Alito #Leonard #Leo #Misha #Tseytlin

@stopgopfox #GymJordan is the lowest of the low: first we come for #fatdonnietwotimes, then we come for #MTG, #Boebert, #Gaetz, bird-hands #Hawley, and bloated #Wolverine #cruzdelsur... but we save the ultimate consequence for rat-faced little Gym Jordan