It was Halloween in Orlando, and we had piled into a car to make a short trip from the Hilton to an after-party down the road, to wind up the first night of the latest edition of a gathering called the National Conservatism Conference. For at least many of the young people, the actual business of conference going seemed to be beside the point, a gesture at how we used to conduct politics back before life in America spun out of control. There were jokes, or maybe they were serious questions, about whether one of the guys tagging along with us was a fed. I surreptitiously made a few searches of the name he’d given me and was surprised when I couldn’t find a single plausible hit—though that could have been because he was a hyper-secret crypto type; there were some of those floating around. Not that anyone cared. These were people who were used to guarding their words.

“Don’t fuck me here,” a dark-haired woman named Amanda Milius said to me—as she somewhat imperiously dealt with a guy at the door who was skeptical about letting a reporter into the party—“and say we’re all in here sacrificing kids to Moloch. We’re just the last normal people, hanging out at the end of the world.”

I had met Milius outside the Hilton when I asked for a cigarette, and she began to chaperone me around, telling people who eyed my press pass that I was there to profile her as an up-and-coming female director who, she said, had attracted more Amazon streams than any woman ever with her first documentary, a counternarrative about Russiagate. “Annie Leibovitz is still scheduling the photo shoot,” she kept saying. In this world, almost every word is layered in so much irony that you can never be sure what to take seriously or not, perhaps a semiconscious defense mechanism for people convinced that almost everyone is out to get them.

“Oh, fuck,” she said as we walked into a small ballroom where the party was already underway. The room was pitifully quiet, lit in strip-club red, and the sparse crowd was almost entirely male, with a cash bar off in the corner that seemed unable to produce drinks fast enough to buoy the mood. “We have a thing we say,” she said. “ ‘This is what the people at The Washington Post think we’re doing.’ Well, this is exactly what the people at The Washington Post think we’re doing.”

A portly guy running for Congress in Georgia made his way to the front of the room to give a speech heavy on MAGA buzzwords and florid expressions of fealty to Donald Trump.

“This is sad,” Milius said. No one cheered or even seemed interested. But this was not Trumpworld, even if many of the people in the room saw Trump as a useful tool. And these parties aren’t always so lame. NatCon, as this conference is known, has grown into a big-tent gathering for a whole range of people who want to push the American right in a more economically populist, culturally conservative, assertively nationalist direction. It draws everyone from Israel hawks to fusty paleocon professors to mainstream figures like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. But most of the media attention that the conference attracts focuses on a cohort of rosy young blazer-wearing activists and writers—a crop of people representing the American right’s “radical young intellectuals,” as a headline in The New Republic would soon put it, or conservatism’s “terrifying future,” as David Brooks called them in The Atlantic.

But the people these pieces describe, who made up most of the partygoers around me, were only the most buttoned-up seam of a much larger and stranger political ferment, burbling up mainly within America’s young and well-educated elite, part of an intra-media class info-war. The podcasters, bro-ish anonymous Twitter posters, online philosophers, artists, and amorphous scenesters in this world are variously known as “dissidents,” “neo-reactionaries,” “post-leftists,” or the “heterodox” fringe—though they’re all often grouped for convenience under the heading of America’s New Right. They have a wildly diverse set of political backgrounds, with influences ranging from 17th-century Jacobite royalists to Marxist cultural critics to so-called reactionary feminists to the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, whom they sometimes refer to with semi-ironic affection as Uncle Ted. Which is to say that this New Right is not a part of the conservative movement as most people in America would understand it. It’s better described as a tangled set of frameworks for critiquing the systems of power and propaganda that most people reading this probably think of as “the way the world is.” And one point shapes all of it: It is a project to overthrow the thrust of progress, at least such as liberals understand the word.

This worldview, these worldviews, run counter to the American narrative of the last century—that economic growth and technological innovation are inevitably leading us toward a better future. It’s a position that has become quietly edgy and cool in new tech outposts like Miami and Austin, and in downtown Manhattan, where New Right–ish politics are in, and signifiers like a demure cross necklace have become markers of a transgressive chic. No one is leading this movement, but it does have key figures.

One is Peter Thiel, the billionaire who helped fund NatCon and who had just given the conference’s opening address. Thiel has also funded things like the edgelordy and post-left–inflected New People’s Cinema film festival, which ended its weeklong run of parties and screenings in Manhattan just a few days before NatCon began. He’s long been a big donor to Republican political candidates, but in recent years Thiel has grown increasingly involved in the politics of this younger and weirder world—becoming something like a nefarious godfather or a genial rich uncle, depending on your perspective. Podcasters and art-world figures now joke about their hope to get so-called Thielbucks. His most significant recent outlays have been to two young Senate candidates who are deeply enmeshed in this scene and influenced by its intellectual currents: Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance, running for the Republican nomination in Ohio, and Blake Masters in Arizona.

Thiel has given more than $10 million to super PACs supporting the men’s candidacies, and both are personally close to him. Vance is a former employee of Thiel’s Mithril Capital, and Masters, until recently the COO of Thiel’s so-called “family office,” also ran the Thiel Foundation, which has become increasingly intertwined with this New Right ecosystem. These three—Thiel, Vance, Masters—are all friends with Curtis Yarvin, a 48-year-old ex-programmer and blogger who has done more than anyone to articulate the world historical critique and popularize the key terms of the New Right. You’ll often hear people in this world—again under many layers of irony—call him things like Lord Yarvin, or Our Prophet.

I was looking around the party for Vance, who hadn’t arrived yet, when Milius nudged me and pointed to a table off to our left. “Why is it that whenever I see Curtis, he’s surrounded by a big table of incels?” she asked with apparent fondness. I spotted Yarvin, a slight, bespectacled man with long dark hair, drinking a glass of wine with a crowd that included Josh Hammer, the national conservatism–minded young opinion editor of Newsweek, and Michael Anton, a Machiavelli scholar and former spokesman for Trump’s National Security Council—and a prominent public intellectualizer of the Trump movement. Other luminaries afoot for the conference included Dignity author Chris Arnade, who seemed slightly unsure about the whole NatCon thing, and Sohrab Ahmari, the former opinion editor of the New York Post, now a cofounder and editor at the new magazine Compact, whose vision is, according to its mission statement, “shaped by our desire for a strong social-democratic state that defends community—local and national, familial and religious—against a libertine left and a libertarian right.” It is a very of-the-moment project.

Political reporters, at least the ones who have bothered to write about Yarvin, have often dismissed him as a kook with a readership made up mostly of lonely internet weirdos, fascists, or both. But to ignore him is to underestimate how Yarvin’s ideas, or at least ideas in conversation with his, have become foundational to a whole political and cultural scene that goes much deeper than anything you’d learn from the panels and speeches at an event like NatCon. Or how those ideas are going to shape the future of the American right, whether or not Vance and Masters win their Senate primaries. I introduced myself, and soon Milius and I were outside smoking as Yarvin and I chatted about whether he’d be willing to talk to me on the record.

People often struggle with what to make of Thiel’s involvement in this ecosystem. Last year the journalist Max Chafkin published a biography of Thiel, titled The Contrarian, in which he described Yarvin as the “house political philosopher” for a network often called the Thielverse. The book focuses heavily on Thiel’s political maneuverings, describing how he evolved from being a hyper-libertarian to someone who now makes common cause with nationalists and populists. And it explains how Thiel helped both Cruz and Josh Hawley on their paths to the Senate. The Contrarian ends with a dark picture of the billionaire trying to extend his political reach ever more overtly by funding and shepherding the campaigns of Masters and Vance. “Masters and Vance are different from Hawley and Cruz,” Chafkin writes; the former two are “extensions” of Thiel.

This is only partly true. It would be just as accurate to say that Thiel has been influenced by the intellectual currents and political critiques of the New Right that he’s now helping to support. Many of these people are friendly with Thiel, or admire him, but are by no means beholden to him. And many of them hold views that would seem to make Thiel, a tech oligarch currently worth around $8 billion who recently resigned from the Meta—née Facebook—board of directors, their natural enemy.

This New Right is heavily populated by people with graduate degrees, so there’s a lot of debate about who is in it and whether or not it even exists. At one end are the NatCons, post-liberals, and traditionalist figures like Benedict Option author Rod Dreher, who envision a conservatism reinvigorated by an embrace of localist values, religious identity, and an active role for the state in promoting everything from marriage to environmental conservation. But there’s also a highly online set of Substack writers, podcasters, and anonymous Twitter posters—“our true intellectual elite,” as one podcaster describes them. This group encompasses everyone from rich crypto bros and tech executives to back-to-the-landers to disaffected members of the American intellectual class, like Up in the Air author Walter Kirn, whose fulminations against groupthink and techno-authoritarianism have made him an unlikely champion to the dissident right and heterodox fringe. But they share a the basic worldview: that individualist liberal ideology, increasingly bureaucratic governments, and big tech are all combining into a world that is at once tyrannical, chaotic, and devoid of the systems of value and morality that give human life richness and meaning—as Blake Masters recently put it, a “dystopian hell-world.”

Kirn didn’t want to put a label on this movement, describing it as a “fractious family of dissenters” when I called him at his home in Montana—“a somewhat new, loose coalition of people whose major concern is that we not end up in a top-down controlled state.” He told me he didn’t consider himself right wing and found some of the antidemocratic ideas he heard expressed in this sphere to be “personally chilling.” But he described it as a zone of experimentation and free expression of a kind that was now closed off in America’s liberal mainstream. “They seem to want a war,” he said. “The last thing I want is some kind of definitive ideological war which leaves out the heterodox, complicated, and almost naively open spirit of American politics.”

And the ferment is starting to get noticed. “I think that’s a really good sign,” one of the hosts of the dissident-right podcast The Fedpost said recently, discussing how Tucker Carlson had just quoted a tweet from one of their guests. “This is a kind of burgeoning sect of thought,” he went on, “and it’s causing people who are in positions of larger influence and relative power to actually have to start looking into it.”

Vance sits somewhere in between these two tendencies—at 37, he’s a venture capitalist who is young enough to be exposed to the dissident online currents. But he’s also shaped by the most deeply traditionalist thinking of the American right. He is friends with Yarvin, whom he openly cites as a political influence, and with Dreher, who was there when Vance was baptized into the Catholic Church in 2019. I’d been writing about militias and right-wing stirrings in the rural West for years, but I didn’t really understand how this alchemy worked until I first met him last July. I’d gone back to Ohio to see my uncle, who was dying of cancer. Vance and I both grew up around Cincinnati, immersed in a culture of white rural migrants who had come from coalfields and farm towns to look for work in the cities of the Midwest. We had met as a kind of experiment—I was going to be in town anyway, and because my uncle was sick, I was thinking a lot about the place and what it meant to me. On a whim, I asked an editor at a conservative magazine if I could write something from the perspective of a skeptical leftist. Vance suggested that we meet at a diner where my dad had often taken me as a kid. He was barely registering in the polls at the time.

Vance believes that a well-educated and culturally liberal American elite has greatly benefited from globalization, the financialization of our economy, and the growing power of big tech. This has led an Ivy League intellectual and management class—a quasi-aristocracy he calls “the regime”—to adopt a set of economic and cultural interests that directly oppose those of people in places like Middletown, Ohio, where he grew up. In the Vancian view, this class has no stake in what people on the New Right often call the “real economy”—the farm and factory jobs that once sustained middle-class life in Middle America. This is a fundamental difference between New Right figures like Vance and the Reaganite right-wingers of their parents’ generation. To Vance—and he’s said this—culture war is class warfare.

Vance recently told an interviewer, “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine,” a flick at the fact that he thinks the American-led global order is as much about enriching defense contractors and think-tank types as it is about defending America’s interests. “I do care about the fact that in my community right now the leading cause of death among 18- to 45-year-olds is Mexican fentanyl.” His criticisms of big tech as “enemies of Western civilization” often get lost in the run of Republican outrage over Trump being kicked off Twitter and Facebook, though they go much deeper than this. Vance believes that the regime has sold an illusive story that consumer gadgets and social media are constantly making our lives better, even as wages stagnate and technology feeds an epidemic of depression.

I wrote a piece that came across as critical of him. It expressed my deep hopelessness about the future of America. I figured he’d want nothing more to do with me. But the morning it was published he sent me a short, heartfelt email. He said that he’d been a bit “pained” to read in the piece that my parents disliked him but said he’d like to talk more. “I don’t see you as a member of the elite because I see you as independent of their ideological strictures and incentives,” he wrote. “But maybe I’m just saying that because I like you.”

“Despair,” he signed off, “serves the regime.”

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.”

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

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

“ ‘The regime’ sounds really sexy, right?” he 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.

I asked 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.”

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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