The Dissident Right and Its Discontents
Vibe and Tribes
So last week or so there was a minor controversy on the right that made its way into the New York Times. It began with a podcast hosted by
which featured guest . Kaschuta lambasted the dissident right in fairly heated terms, essentially denouncing them as an anti-intellectual mob obsessed with memes and vibes over substantive discourse and achievements. This dialogue somehow came to the attention of Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times, who followed up with an article called “The Vibe Shifts Against The Right,” which picks up and mostly echoes the points made by Kaschuta.Some of those who had been associated with the label “dissident right” and who had themselves been interviewed by Kaschuta, most notably
and , took exception to the fact that Kaschuta seemed to be throwing them under the bus by refusing to clarify that she didn’t include them among those she was criticizing. This in turn led to some wider ugliness on both Substack and X, fueled at least in part by the misconception that Goldberg’s article was a direct interview with Kaschuta rather than simply being based on the aforementioned podcast. For their parts, Gonzalez followed up with a subsequent interview with and Kaschuta wrote what was ostensibly a clarification of her views on her Substack. Gonzalez also wrote an essay elaborating on his own take on the controversy.They both took a lot of heat for their positions among those on the right here on Substack, particularly Gonzalez. Let me state for the record that Pedro Gonzalez has never been anything other than a friend to me, both in public and private, that I regard him as an excellent writer, and that though we disagree on many things- most particularly the character of Donald Trump- he’s always been gracious to me. However, this is just as true regarding many of the people with whom he was arguing. As I was not inclined to take sides in an acrimonious dispute among people I like and admire, my first impulse was to simply stay out. But in his interview with The New Right Poast Gonzalez and Newright both kindly noted me by name as someone who represented the opposite of the tendencies they deplored, as well as alluding to me- without knowing- in reference to some past controversies.
It involved this guy.
This motivated me to say something, but I’d intended to comment anyway regarding a mood I sense in some corners of the right. The excellent
wrote an essay lamenting the boredom he now sees coursing through the online right in the face of a creative endpoint characterized by engagement farming and the endless proliferation of AI slop. (who is apparently Mystery Grove?) wrote a longer piece essentially arguing that the online right is degenerating into a morass of conspiracism and signaling and has not affected the wider culture effectively; this essay was actually mentioned by Gonzalez in his interview with Newright. I’m more optimistic than any of them regarding the future of the right, online and otherwise, a point I’ll return to further on. But I think what’s missing here are two things: context and clarity.In the first place, there seems to be this idea that the dissident right has some uniquely toxic form of discourse that makes them petty, irrational, vicious, conformist, and venal. Both Kaschuta and Gonzalez have granted that other communities do this too, but seem to feel there is something unique about the right in its dysfunction, and they are not alone in this. Look at X, some say; look at Gab and Truth Social, say others. There you will find a metaphorical witches brew of slander and malice.
On Reddit, the witchcraft isn’t a metaphor.
This is undeniably true, but I think there’s a sense in which it is both severely overstated and missing some very important nuance. For one, there is no community, online or otherwise, that can avoid the sorts of antisocial elements Gonzalez and Kaschuta lament without very aggressive policing, which in terms of internet discourse as a whole is impossible, and honestly not very promising as a goal to begin with. Trolls and bots and such are a fact of life for anything but the smallest groups; X as a whole cannot be tamed. Some have commented that the problems they mentions are not so much a feature of the right but of internet culture more generally. I don’t even think that’s true. Politics didn’t get worse with the advent of the internet. People really like to default to that notion, for the obvious reason that it gets us off the hook for our collective ugliness, but if you seek to return to the time when politics was more civil, you’ve got a good bit of digging ahead of you. Gonzalez acknowledges this in his original interview with Kaschuta when he mentions the notorious TV argument between the superficially erudite and courteous William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal, which devolved into the latter calling the former a crypto-fascist, and the former labeling the latter in turn a goddam queer. The problem isn’t people on the internet. The problem is people. The more of them that have an emotional investment in politics the more you will get ideologized forms of the kinds of hatreds they normally reserve for tiresome neighbors and weird foreigners. It’s why the right rejects democracy; Thucydides would have seen the issue right away.
Is this the Netflix version, WTF?!
Again, Gonzalez and Kaschuta understand this, but that makes it all the more strange to me that they would signal out the right as the most pervasive purveyors of toxicity. Anyone who thinks Truth Social is nuts should take a short trip to BlueSky, a DEI lost world where novel pronouns still flourish and a hundred genders bloom. And that’s the place to which the supposedly sane adults in the room have decamped. To that point, I’m not really sure that even the worst offenders among the online right are really worse than the people and institutions of the mainstream media, who spent the previous four years assuring the public that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation, that Donald Trump was Hitler, that George Floyd was a hero worthy of statues, that masking was essential for preventing disease unless you were a Democrat politician needing a haircut or a race rioter, that Joe Biden was sharp as a tack, that a man can decide to become a woman, that looting was a blow for racial justice, that the Ruble will be rubble any day now, and sundry other ridiculous lies and manipulations far more socially harmful than anything even the most odious of frogs has done.
Not Pictured: Anyone on the right
But where I think the disconnect comes in is in the very conceptualization of “dissident right.” In his explanatory essay, Gonzalez states the following:
But the dissident or new right or far right or online right—or whatever adjective you want to use—is fundamentally a poison pill that will cause the eventual moral and spiritual death of anyone who ingests it.
The problem is that the things he describes in that first clause aren’t really facile synonyms. They mean different things in different contexts, and the most fundamental mistake of all, I think, is to equate the first three with the last. It elides extremely important distinctions among very different factions and gives a distorted sense of how ideas move through the right- where they originate, how they spread, and who spreads them.
“Dissident right” proper is a sort of catch-all category for various rightist tendencies and their associated personalities, united by the fact that they are in some sort of ideological opposition to both left-liberalism and mainstream conservative. The dissident right is defined by a stance of opposition, not a single coherent program. After all, one can dissent from something for a range of reasons, and on the dissident right one can find people who are religious and secular, Christian and pagan, libertarian and distributist, militant and quiescent, trads and futurists, Judeophiles and phobes, among many other things. These and a multitude of other gradients of belief coalesce into a range of camps, many of which are hostile to each other, a fact that Gonzalez and Kaschuta do not really acknowledge.
To be frank, there is a vagueness to their critique that I find significantly problematic. They don’t name a lot of names, though Gonzalez is better at this than Kaschuta. In the original interview they describe Nick Fuentes and
as examples of the kind of negativity they were highlighting, the latter of whom they dismiss as a loser who lives with his mother and doesn’t have a real job, making him immune to the negative effects of the economic changes REN advocates. I know REN, and he has- like Gonzalez- never been anything but a friend to me, publishing my work in his Man’s World online magazine. In addition to being a publisher and a writer, REN has a PhD in history from Oxford and has put out his own translation of Tacitus’ Germania. Characterizing him as some kind of basement-dwelling loser is strange to say the least, and being any kind of content creator necessarily means being dependent on people having disposable income; if the economy crashes, it’s difficult to imagine people choosing their manosphere subscriptions over food. If he doesn’t have a “real job,” then no one who produces any kind of content for a living does. Of all people to cite as what’s wrong with the internet right, he seems like a poor example. Fuentes is a very different story, more on him shortly.
Before his doxxing made it impossible, I liked to pretend I was Raw Egg Nationalist on Tinder. You wouldn’t believe how many ladies swiped right on this profile pic, at least once I specified I was 6’4.
But Kaschuta is far more prone to this sort of glib indeterminacy than Gonzalez. Her essay, meant to clarify her remarks, to my mind only exacerbated the basic problem:
So, let me preface this by acknowledging that I appreciate the work of many writers and thinkers on the right, and I don’t deny that there are serious areas worth exploring and many issues that have been previously excluded from mainstream discourse. Most of the people I’ve interviewed over the years have had unique perspectives, made compelling arguments, and expressed legitimate grievances. I don’t disavow my guests, but this doesn’t change the fact that the overarching machine of the online right, much like the Tumblr left that preceded it, ultimately doesn’t serve these interests effectively.
She appreciates the work of “many writers and thinkers on the right.” Who, specifically? She mentions her podcast guests, whom she doesn’t disavow, but she specifically disavowed former interviewee REN, so it can’t be that she means them all categorically. Is there no one apart from them worthy of attention? In any case, whoever these people are, they are inconsequential compared to the “overarching machine of the online right.” The singular here is significant. Kaschuta really seems to believe that the online right is a single, undifferentiated phenomenon, self-contained and self-referential, which begins with individuals interested in new ideas but ends- seemingly inevitably- with:
. . . a relentless focus on classics like "the Jews" or "women," or something more amorphous like the eldritch specter of entropy represented by the Left consuming everything in its path. The audience is a co-author on these journeys; they want their red meat and will take no substitutes. My own audience grew progressively more hungry for its weekly dose of edginess, as it says on the tin: “Subversive.” But there is a limited set of unique insights that can only be found on the online right, and the only way to uncover more is by either escalating or becoming more esoteric, which often means just trading in conspiracies. Personally, I don’t put much weight on the machinations of the Jews, don’t think women are the downfall of civilization, and don’t think the globalists are plotting to abolish private property and make us eat bugs. I do care about empowering smart people to do great things and about issues like crime, mass immigration, families, and children, just as I did when I first became attracted to this space. However, I’ve increasingly found myself out of step with the demands of the meme machine.
The “meme machine” is a core element of her basic conceptualization of the right. She seems to have no awareness of the DR as anything other than an online phenomenon. At no point does Kaschuta display any real understanding of the intellectual roots of the various tendencies within the broader movement, the differences between substantive critique and sardonic, mocking meme culture, and the fact that she is lumping numerous factions together in a common purpose who in fact hate each other and work at cross purposes. For Kaschuta, the sole purpose of the online right- which is all the right is to her- is to generate incoherent outrage that fuels the policies of the Trump administration.
There is a cascade of memes—ZOG/GAE, multipolarity, "manly manufacturing jobs" versus "fake laptop jobs," isolationism versus globalism, NATO as a leech, the 1950s as the apogee of America, and dismissing the "rules-based international order" as fake and gay—that find embodiment in the figure of Donald Trump. Again, all these memes have legitimate grievances at their root, but they crystallize into slogans on their way to the top.
Note the direction. Memes are born of inchoate rage and cynical grifting, each author trying to outdo the other, and they make “their way to the top.” The implication here is that there’s a kind of cyclical relationship between the Trump Administration and the internet right, whereby the administration seemingly trolls the internet looking for ideas with which to con the MAGA base, crafts policies based on the dankest memes, and then the memelords respond by cranking up the dial still further in response.
There would be something to that, were it not for the fact that it’s impossible to trace this exactly, given that in her entire essay Kaschuta names exactly one person whom seemingly exemplifies this phenomenon- Catturd. Catturd creates boomer-tier content (he gets a lot of mileage out of going after the Clintons), to my knowledge has never identified as dissident right, and no one who does regard himself as dissident right would consider Catturd to be any kind of trendsetter or thought leader. She calls out the people who hate Jews without mentioning Nick Fuentes and the people who seem to put down women without mentioning Bronze Age Pervert. Perhaps this is because it would complicate the simple narrative of the right acting as an amorphous hive-mind for MAGA, since the Jew-haters despise both Trump and BAP, the latter of whom they’ve decided is of Semitic descent and the former can be found as “Zion Don” in their rampant denunciations, given Trump’s conspicuous support for Israel. BAP, in turn, dislikes Fuentes and the JQ crowd generally, and is lukewarm at best in his support for Trump. These are just a few of many examples of how complicated the relationships within the online right are, and the right’s collective relations with Trump are far more nuanced than Kaschuta credits, or perhaps grasps.
Say what you will about Catturd, but he did reduce Adam Kinzinger to sputtering, cringey rage with his Ukraine blasphemy.
There is an entire thought-world beyond the internet in which the right partakes. The memes aren’t the source of the ideas, but, at best, a distillation of wisdom that is much older and more subtle than a digital allegory can really encompass. If your knowledge of rightist thought comes largely from memes, or podcast guests, or from insults in social media comments, it would certainly look like that’s all there was, but that simply isn’t the case. Tariffs and DOGE and mass deportations aren’t “meme policies;” they’re the instantiation of longstanding rightist social, economic, and political ideas. Of DOGE Kaschuta notes: “the guiding meme here is ‘the establishment is corrupt and wasteful.’” That’s not a meme. It’s not even especially rightist. It’s basic Reagan Republicanism. Trump is simply the first president to take it- and the voters- seriously.
The economic policies Trump advocates are not memes, either emerging from the internet or sold specifically to it. They are first and foremost the product of ideas Trump himself has advocated for decades, and in a more refined sense the work of his economic advisors- Ivy League PhDs and hedge fund titans who- say what you will about them- certainly aren’t taking their cues from Catturd. Trump’s constituents are not any more likely to be online than anyone else and voted for him based on his repeated promises to enact the agenda he is currently attempting to implement. With his signature rallies and frequent public appearances he is probably the most analogue political leader of the century. The only person in his administration with any substantive connection to the online right is JD Vance, and he is similarly formed by sentiments beyond the Twittersphere, being conversant in post-liberalism and Catholic social teaching. One might argue this is true of Elon Musk as well, but he’s a more mercurial figure who receives both admiration and criticism from various elements of the DR, as does RFK Jr. Indeed, the Trump administration is probably the most intellectually and politically diverse body that any Republican president has had since… ever, all of which belies the notion of government by lockstep Gigachadpoasting. MAGA is informed by rightist sentiments, but in fundamentally normie conservative in its basic appeal, and the right’s relationship with it- online or otherwise- is complex to say the least, far more so than Kaschuta allows.
Take, for example, this…
Kaschuta, I would say, gets the relative memeogenic quality of policies relative to the left and right exactly backwards. She says this:
The Tumblr left had a similar cycle, but it moved at the pace set by a slower substrate. It started as a handful of verbose teenagers debating the finer points of Foucault and ended in “abolish the police” and burning down your own neighborhood for George Floyd. The journey from the sensitive young genius reading Carl Schmitt to the tsunami of rage-slop typifying today’s online right was just faster, accelerated by the much more dynamic nature of platforms like 4chan and Twitter, and the exploding screen time enabled by better phones.
Slow? Teenagers? Weaponized woke- that deluge of cancellings, deplatformings, race-grifts, and forced ideological compliance- burst onto the public scene as a moral panic within the media, wherein the people within an industry suffering from a mass shrinkage of opportunities desperately tried to signal their elite-coded virtue by the conspicuous adoption of hothouse leftist insanity fresh from the most prestigious conclaves of elite human capital production. MeToo and Black Lives Matter literally began as hashtags created by leftists and were hurriedly put into circulation by cynical hacks desperate to keep jobs, settle scores with less with-it bosses, and defeat their class hate-symbol, Orange Hitler. Progressives actually do govern by meme, and do so far less critically than the right ever has.
The idea that the right is little more than a hateful blob driven by irresistible forces beyond its control naturally lends itself to the idea that any criticism of the right from within will inevitably be met with hostility and ostracism due to the “no enemies to the right” credo (neither Gonzalez nor Kaschuta, so far as I can find, mention
). And certainly, they’ve each and together faced no small amount of hostile responses. But that hasn’t been my experience of the right, and it’s not for lack of critical thinking on my part.Granted, I’m far more of a presence on Substack than X, and I’m not really anywhere else online, but certainly in those two places my experience of the right is that of a diverse group of interesting and friendly group of people who accepted me into their midst a couple of years ago and with whom I’ve enjoyed a network of warm relationships ever since. In addition to my own stack I’ve been featured in the aforementioned Man’s World and in IM-1776, been invited to numerous podcasts by creators big and small, and experienced no small amount of success. Nothing about my experiences would lead me to adopt the simplistic and totalist view of Kaschuta that the right is some kind of ignorant and monomaniacal echo chamber.
Of course, I’ve certainly run afoul of some bad actors, but I’ve never had any problem pushing back and no one else in turn has had a problem with me doing so. I’ve written extensively and extremely critically about the JQ crew. I’ve called out doomerism and conspiracism. I regard the ‘elite human capital’ crowd as being some of the worst purveyors of negativity on the internet, who exist primarily to call people stupid for not immediately acknowledging their own brilliance, and it’s interesting to me to see Kaschuta’s frequent reposting of
, given that probably 3/4 of his material is cynical ragebait directed at low-comprehension MAGAs, the kind of slop she supposedly abhors. I’ve gone after the Groypers, whom I suspect are behind something like 90% of what anyone who deplores “the state of the right” means. When it was the in-thing to pile on Vivek Ramaswamy, I wrote an essay called “Vivek Ramaswamy is Right;” I did the same for Chris Rufo. I was never punished for any of these ostensibly unpopular takes. No one told me I was “punching right” or mass-unsubscribed because of my heresy. At each turn, the thoughtful right was largely warmly supportive of my criticism, and presumably many of those who disagreed simply abstained from commenting.‘No enemies on the right’ is not a call for mindless conformity for an online mob. It’s an acknowledgment that we’re at war. If the sort of people that Hanania likes ever get elected again in the US, they will seek to implement a censorship and policing regime much like the ones in Britain and Canada, and I and those who think like me would face the prospect of unemployment, debanking, fines, and prison. In very simple terms, the people who wear my ‘uniform’ are my allies; those under a different flag are my foes. But of course, my ostensible comrades can go off the plot in any number of ways. Wars, no matter how savage, require rules and discipline, and it’s not attacking your own side to remind your comrades of their common purpose and to work against selfishness, cowardice, defeatism, and criminality. It’s the difference between criticism and denunciation, one to which Kaschuta seems oblivious.
Nick Fuentes wears the label of ‘right,’ but he and I are engaged in wholly different activities for wholly different purposes. I suspect pretty much everyone else I know on the right feels the same way, and the hostility they’ve shown in this episode I believe stems from Kaschuta’s unwillingness to clearly and explicitly differentiate them from Groypers and the like. Having been guests of hers in the past and perhaps regarding her as a friend, they had every right to expect this courtesy, especially given the involvement of the elite media. From my perspective, a lot of ill will could have been avoided by a few initial caveats and a reasonable amount of clarity and charity.
I don’t know Kaschuta myself, so I won’t speculate as to her motives. I do know that there is a well-trodden path for people who migrate to the right, absorb its energy, say some edgy things, and then move on to collect praise from all the smart and sensible folks for their courage and foresight in breaking ranks with such a toxic community. They’re a bit like LUGs in college, those girls who go blue-haired and sapphic for four years before cleaning up, marrying an investment banker, and supporting John Kasich for president. “Oh, I just used to be soooo crazy…” they say to their friends as the drink their Chardonnay at parties, friends whom they’ll one day also denounce to a different crowd. For this sort, they never change sides because they never really had one in the first place. Everything is a pose, a posture of sophistication, intelligence, and independence that is maintained for the purpose of declaiming on how stupid everyone else is in order to be accepted by a cooler crowd than the current one. It’s what it means to be elite human capital; you’re defined by who likes you based on who gives you the ick.
None of us are without flaws and none of us are above criticism. For my part, I hope that this is received in a charitable way, and while of course anyone is free to say what he pleases on his own page, I would ask that you not pile on to Kaschuta or Gonzalez in my comments, as I consider the latter a friend. But as I’ve criticized Kaschuta for not naming names, let me state here my own list of who’s right with the right. Please note this is NOT comprehensive, and contains people I have sometimes had disputes with.
I got my start as a commenter on
’s stack. We’ve disagreed at times, but I can say confidently that his work is excellent. , , and are phenomenal writers and good men, as are , and . and are brilliant and committed patrons of many of us here and in the real world. , , , , , , , , , - all quality. and the whole crew at IM-1776 are great, and of course I’ve already mentioned . and -each does great work despite their differences. and deserve ten times their subscriber numbers. was once denounced by ; what better mark of quality do you need? and do the hard work of promoting rightist authors in analogue form, a project very much in need, and are brilliant in their own right. Likewise, few have done as much as to promote interesting rightist thought on Substack and X. Not that they need my endorsement, but , , , , and are all big names worth a follow, and while I don’t always agree, is a must-read. And of course, there’s the ladies- , , and the ever-gracious . All of these are great, among so many others.If you’re bored of what the feed is offering you, read these publications and all the many great accounts I failed to note (feel free to shout yourself out in the comments). If you’ve read them all, go back to the sources, to the literature, to myth, and above all, to faith. The right isn’t X or Substack- what you see online is the surface tension of a deep wellspring. The right is Christ and His Church; it’s Homer and Plato and the whole Classical legacy; it’s Tradition and tradition; it’s Lewis and Tolkien and Evola and Junger and Nietzsche and Spengler and Heidegger and Schmitt and Gomez Davila. If REN isn’t deep enough for you then read his Germania translation. If you don’t like anti-pajeet discourse, read Guenon on the wisdom of the East. If Catturd holding forth on tariffs seems thin in his reasoning, then pick up Chesterton and Belloc on distributism. If you want a trad life that’s more than a meme, do what Roosh V did and explore Seraphim Rose with a humble heart.
The manosphere is not necessarily a dead end.
Leave the online right behind if it’s become a drag, touch some metaphysical grass, and return armed once more for the earthly and spiritual conflict against the enemies of human flourishing. Above all seek out authenticity and express that truth of self as loyalty to your friends, for whom nothing is really worth much in exchange. Focus on the higher things, not petty and ephemeral disputes. It’s always better than it looks.
A phenomena I have noticed about people on the content-creation "right" (into which both Gonzalez and Kaschuda seem to be a part) is that they have next to no interaction with the people of the actual right wing who are doing things in real life. Exit Group, Ridge Runner, Return to The Land, The Old Glory Club are all conspicuously missing in their definition of "the dissident right."
Another way to say this is that these people are unserious slop-generators. Insofar as they are interested in the "right" it is so that they can build an audience that comes to them for ideas. Ideas that were the cutting edge a year or two earlier in the spheres already mentioned. Spheres that are never interacted with, for some reason, by the "ideas" people. Whenever these petty questions come back again (Kaschuda has done something similar to this several times before), I am always left to wonder how it is she can still have an audience that considers itself "dissident right."
One of the biggest differences between the left and the right is that the right doesn’t engage in signalling behaviour as much. They’re just more blunt, regardless of how it comes across to people outside of their immediate in group.
The left, by contrast, is always playing signalling games so when they see this sort of bluntness, they mistake it as signalling an even more toxic worldview, even if that might not necessarily be there.
Great stuff librarian :)