Yet the event didn’t bring the American Right together. Rather, it triggered infighting that persists to this day. To understand why, we have to be willing to honestly reassess the legacy left behind by the departed. We must even speak ill of the dead (for if we don’t, as Christopher Hitchens asked, who will?). The truth is, Charlie Kirk helped build up the culture of conspiracism that would come to haunt his own death.

Initially, Trump administration figures like Stephen Miller and JD Vance pledged vengeance against the hard-Left militancy that inspired the murder, as well as investigations into whether anyone else was behind the deed. Yet soon, a different narrative emerged on social media and in the podcast realm. The conspiracy theories suggested that perhaps Tyler Robinson, the young man accused of murdering Kirk over his political views, wasn’t the killer at all. Maybe it was the Israelis or the Egyptian security apparatus; or Kirk’s own organization, Turning Point USA; or Kirk’s widow, Erika, who in the eyes of her critics seemed a little too eager to seek the spotlight in the aftermath.

The divisions marred even Kirk’s memorial service, which brought a reported 90,000 attendees to the State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz., and overflow venues in the area, on Sept. 21, 2025. Three speeches at the event captured a split that was already emerging on the Right.

First came Stephen Miller’s theme: vengeance. “You have no idea the dragon you have awakened,” the hard-line Trump consigliere thundered. “You have no idea how determined we will be to save this civilization.” Days later, Miller would vow to deploy all the resources of the federal government to go after the Left-wing networks he held responsible for Kirk’s death.

This was followed by the Christian message of forgiveness. Speaking through her tears, Erika announced that she forgave the young man who’d taken her husband’s life and left her children fatherless. It was a stirring piece of oratory, moving even to many nonbelievers and drawing a sharp contrast with Miller’s ferocious, almost-bloody rhetoric.

Finally, there was Tucker Carlson, who brought in the spirit of conspiracy. The former Fox News host eulogized Kirk by recounting the passion of Jesus. Carlson presented the biblical narrative as a story of powerful people in Jerusalem “sitting around eating hummus,” adding that “there’s always one guy with the bright idea, and I can just hear him say, ‘I’ve got an idea. Let me just kill him.’” 

While Carlson’s defenders tried to refute the notion that he was implying a Jewish hand in Kirk’s murder, even the arch-Groyper and unabashed Jew-hater Nick Fuentes was taken aback: “They say I’m the No. 1 antisemite. That was a little intense.” Carlson would, of course, go on to prove Fuentes correct and make a fool of his apologists, not for the first or last time.

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Over the following weeks and months, these three forces battled it out. Yet Miller’s promise to crack down on Left-wing activists was perhaps never realistic without evidence that Tyler Robinson had acted in concert with others — and no such evidence ever came to light. The only vengeance on offer was the firing of schoolteachers and grocery clerks for being disrespectful toward Kirk’s memory or insufficiently mournful over his death. As for forgiveness, it never really had a chance in today’s MAGA climate.

It was thus the conspiracy impulse that won the hearts and minds of Right-wing audiences. The day after Kirk’s memorial, podcast host Candace Owens opened her show by mocking Erika and declaring that her husband had been “betrayed” by some within TPUSA. Owens would soon release texts from Kirk complaining about pressure from Jewish donors. In February, Owens launched a docuseries titled Bride of Charlie, in which she questioned everything from Erika’s family background to her finances, and suggested she may have been involved in human trafficking. According to a Washington Examiner count, by April 2026, Owens had devoted no fewer than 84 podcast episodes to Kirk’s killing, weaving a web that included “‘German mystical Jews,’ the CIA and Mitt Romney, Egyptian planes, and, naturally, Jeffrey Epstein.”

Not to be outdone, Carlson declared in June that Kirk “was most likely murdered for his evolving views on Israel.” This came after months of Carlson’s platforming of people promoting similar ideas, including the anti-Semitic crank Ian Carroll.

Those who preferred vengeance came to express deep frustration about the turn toward conspiracy. In December, the conservative Media Research Center released a poll showing that only 24% of likely voters identified Kirk’s killer as Left-wing, a result attributable in part to public personalities like Owens and Carlson muddying the waters. 

Blake Neff, one of the current hosts of The Charlie Kirk Show, decried what was happening, charging figures like Owens with causing confusion about an issue that could have been a conservative slam-dunk. “They took something where a radical Leftist, for very legible, specific, Left-wing reasons, did something, and they have pivoted it to, ‘Actually, it was people in our own movement who did it, whom you should now distrust.’”

The far-Right writer and publisher Jonathan Keeperman, known online as l0m3z, had high hopes that something productive might come out of the tragedy of Kirk’s murder. On the day after the killing, Keeperman called for the creation of a Charlie Kirk National Park and a “Smithsonian exhibit on the Woke Era (2012–2024).” In addition to these symbolic steps, he demanded a legal crackdown against the political enemies of MAGA: “Laws will be written. Extremist organizations will be dismantled. Assets will be seized. Individuals and institutions that cultivated the conditions for this climate of violence will face criminal liability. These are necessary measures of statecraft that will in large part determine whether we get another Red reign of terror, or whether we emerge from this with our nation intact.”

The sweeping crackdown Keeperman envisioned never materialized, even though Trump did launch a federal initiative aimed at investigating and disrupting Left-wing networks and their funders. Keeperman lost the argument and later went on to vent anger at the Kirk truthers. In December, the conservative writer Scott Greer likewise lamented that Kirk’s death had “offered the promise of unifying the Right in a common cause against the Left” — an opportunity wasted by infighting over whether Tyler Robinson was actually responsible for the killing. 

Why did the conspiracists win? Sadly, Kirk himself, it must finally be said, contributed not a little to the atmosphere of epistemic madness and institutional mistrust that now suffocates rational thinking on the Right.

Tucker Carlson, after all, was a regular guest at TPUSA events. Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for TPUSA, relayed a hadith from the recently murdered Kirk: “Honestly, people telling me not to have Tucker makes me want to have Tucker” at the organization’s conferences. After Kirk’s death, Carlson guest-hosted an episode of the show alongside Neff and Kolvet, who would both later be hounded by conspiracy theorists. This was only two days before Carlson blamed “hummus eaters” for the assassination. Already at that point, Carlson had for years been pushing pro-Kremlin narratives and conspiracy theories like the claim that the Pentagon was operating secret bioweapons labs in Ukraine and the idea that Jan. 6 had been a false flag incited by federal agents.

Then, too, Kirk himself was a key promoter of the most significant political conspiracy theory of our generation: the idea that the 2020 election was stolen from President Trump. Unlike the conspiracy involving his own death, the #StoptheSteal nonsense Kirk promoted led to actual political violence and a coup attempt that could have proved catastrophic for US democracy had not a brave few — most notably, then-Vice President Mike Pence — acted against it.

In December 2020, Kirk condemned then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) for congratulating Joe Biden on his victory, comparing it to congratulating someone who had just robbed a bank. In the topsy-turvy fantasy world Kirk had created for his followers, Biden had obviously stolen the 2020 election.

Two days before Jan. 6, Kirk announced that Turning Point Action was “honored” to be “sending 80-plus buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president.” This tweet was later deleted. He also told his audience at the time there was “an almost guaranteed way Donald Trump serves four more years.” All it would take was for Pence to refuse to certify the results in the swing states that Trump had lost. As for those who might object on constitutional grounds, Kirk’s answer was to “make them sue.” 

When called before the Jan. 6 committee to discuss his role in challenging the 2020 election results, Charlie Kirk invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself. And it wasn’t simply election denial; under Kirk, TPUSA events and shows became gathering points for every kind of crank the Right produced, including anti-vaxxers like RFK Jr. In May 2021, TPUSA gave a show to Jack Posobiec, a man best known for having pushed Pizzagate — the theory that Hillary Clinton and her associates operated a child-sex-trafficking ring centered on a Washington, DC, pizza restaurant.

Kirk could at times be just as conspiratorial as Carlson or Owens, with the main difference being that his theories always had a reliable partisan tilt. He claimed that Biden had deliberately allowed the Afghan government to collapse in order to import more Democratic voters. He thus compressed the peaceful transition of power or the closing of a two-decade war into MAGA-friendly conspiracy theories. 

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Charlie Kirk spread election denial and other kinds of conspiracy theories for the same reasons that Owens and Carlson would later spread conspiracy theories about his death: money, relevance, and playing to the audience. It was only when his family and the remnants of TPUSA became the targets of the forces Kirk had helped unleash, that those left behind began denouncing others for taking advantage of the ignorant and the misinformed.

What are the broader lessons we can draw for the future of the conservative movement? The bad news is that the human-capital problem has gotten so serious, and the media environment so poisoned, that we can no longer expect a baseline of shared reality across the political spectrum. There will always be assassinations, wars, and shocking news events. And as with Covid, the 2020 election, the Ukraine war, and the death of Charlie Kirk, wide swaths of the Right — and, to be sure, some on the Left — will fall to conspiracism. 

But there is a silver lining. As figures like Greer and Keeperman have noticed, a more conspiratorial Right is a less effective one. Despite there never having been any evidence that Tyler Robinson was part of a wider network, there were demands from the moment of the shooting to indiscriminately round up Leftists, and there were certainly figures in the administration like Miller who seemed ready to implement such plans. Had the American Right remained united behind that project, the Kirk murder could have been the Trump administration’s opportunity to further turn the machinery of government against its enemies. Instead, the energy unleashed went into arguing about Egyptian planes flying around assassins. 

Still, the damage is extensive. For more than a decade, Kirk taught a young audience that institutions always lie, that the official story is a cover, and that anyone telling you to stop asking questions has something to hide — while making a special exception for Donald Trump. He was the filter between the leaders of MAGA and the movement’s raging id in cyberspace. Upon his death, the audience he had developed was still primed to suspect that it wasn’t being told the full truth, and hungry for a hidden explanation. 

The young activist’s very corpse became a prop that others in conservative media used in their fights to claim his audience. It’s a fitting postscript for the life of a man who helped make the Right safe for the very conspiracy theorists who would make a mockery of his death.

In the mid-2010s, Greer was a rising star within mainstream conservative journalism. In 2018, it was revealed that he had written for Richard Spencer’s white-nationalist website Radix a few years earlier, where he made arguments about topics such as the “Jewish role” in promoting multiculturalism. He had already left The Daily Caller for several months before his dox. But henceforth, he would be in essence canceled from movement conservatism.

As Greer points out in Whitepill, his career would have easily survived the revelations about his past today. The things he was saying in 2014 on white-nationalist websites are often scarcely distinguishable from the talking points of major Right-wing influencers and GOP elected officials today. “We know our country’s better than yours,” Megyn Kelly told Haitian immigrants recently, adding: “We don’t want you.… Go back to fucking Haiti.” Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee refers to Zohran Mamdani as “little Muhammad” and demands that New York’s mayor be stripped of his citizenship and deported. Rep. Brandon Gill, meanwhile, has complained about Indians working at 7-11 stores — this, despite his wife being of Indian heritage. 

Greer’s new book is a victory lap celebrating what has been accomplished. The title is a reference to taking the white pill, which in online circles refers to being happy about a given state of affairs, in contrast to the black pill, which signifies the loss of hope — both being a spinoff of the red and blue pills made famous by The Matrix. The lesson of his book is that white nationalists have won. But it leaves the thoughtful reader wondering what the point of this race-based politics is supposed to be.

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Full disclosure here: I have known Greer since his alt-Right days. I wrote for some of the same websites, though my politics have obviously gone in a different direction. I now reject white identitarianism of all kinds. My doxxing came in summer 2023. For this reason, I briefly appear as a character in Whitepill, with Greer using me as one example to demonstrate that by the time my former views were unearthed, people could survive revelations that they once expressed racist and other reactionary views. 

Whitepill is essentially a history of the American Right from the Obama era to the present, with a particular focus on race and identity issues, such as DEI, affirmative action, and, above all, immigration. There is not a lot here that is going to surprise anyone who has followed the news over the last decade: from the rise and fall of the Tea Party to the killing of Trayvon Martin; and from the Henry Louis Gates controversy and the resulting beer summit to then-candidate Donald Trump’s comments on immigrants in his 2015 launch speech and the summer of George Floyd. 

The bulk of the book might be a valuable read for young people not old enough to remember the Obama era, or those who only recently started following politics. But for those of us who have kept up with current events over the last 10-plus years, particularly developments on the American Right, there is limited value in most chapters. 

The point of the book is to demonstrate just how much has changed on the Right. The most interesting parts are the author relaying his first-hand account of the transformation. In 2015, Greer was one of the first people at The Daily Caller to support Trump. It marked him as an outcast, and colleagues thought that it was a joke; he built a “wall” of books around his desk in order to show his support for Trump and his signature border proposal. 

Greer’s takeaway from this is that the mainstream movement’s stalwarts in those days were “lame.” He was, and remains, outraged that conservative activists and journalists were uninterested in race and immigration issues, instead stressing deregulation and free markets. Greer’s alt-Right circle, in contrast, featured “a heroin addict with sociopathic tendencies, an unstable taxi driver who couldn’t control his racial outbursts, and one likely federal agent who tried to recruit us into a militia.” For those who weren’t there, it is useful to stress just how marginalized white identitarian attitudes and adjacent opinions were across the political spectrum in the pre-Trump era.

Now, Greer asserts, most prominent figures in conservatism share at least some of these views. This might be an overstatement. Much of the Christian Right remains theologically immune to the racist appeal, and likewise, there are many who haven’t adopted based signaling and racial slurs in the populist bargain.  Nevertheless, as Trump’s hard-line immigration positions and the quotes above from the likes of Kelly and Ogles demonstrate, the author is correct about the general direction of travel.

He celebrates Tucker Carlson for bringing identity issues to the forefront of American conservatism, and the transformation of the late Charlie Kirk, spending five pages documenting his move toward immigration restrictionism and a pinched account of national identity. He correctly points out that Republican voters are motivated primarily by identity-related concerns, rather than economics, which is what created an opening for Trump and more intellectually minded nativists to take over the party. He’s backed up here by a large amount of political science data, which I’ve written about before.

That doesn’t mean that Greer is completely satisfied with the direction of modern conservatism. He thinks it’s too conspiratorial, for one thing. Indeed, it was Greer who coined the term “Insane Clown Party” to highlight Republicans’ growing fascination with topics like UFOs and Satanic pedophile rings. He also has little patience for religious debates on the Right, perhaps limiting his intellectual horizon, since American Christianity has at various points — and sometimes simultaneously — challenged and upheld white supremacy. 

The bigger question is: what exactly is all this for? This is the question that Whitepill never answers, and Greer’s other work likewise avoids. This book is meant to convince those who, like the author, reduce identity and belonging to race and then prioritize racial identity concerns over all else. For Greer, other issues (such as economics or foreign policy) are of secondary importance at best. They matter only insofar as they might promote immigration restrictionism and defeat multiculturalism. Greer doesn’t like conspiracies or abstract intellectualizing as part of a political movement mainly because they make it more difficult to achieve his larger goals. 

What Greer never does is explain what exactly he believes and why. His project is an insular one, proceeding from the unstated assumption that the reader will agree with him on the importance of winning on the issues white identitarians care about; all that’s left are discussions of tactics and strategy. For example, when Greer addresses abortion, it’s from the perspective that those focused on the issue are causing dissension within the Republican coalition. He calls on pro-lifers to be grateful for what Trump has done, and calls on the Right to tune them out as political liabilities. But what if you actually believe that abortion is murder? He makes no attempt at explaining how abortion issues should fit into the white-nationalist project, except from the perspective of its political impact.

To be sure, he’s honest enough to sometimes acknowledge that his own preferred policies are unpopular, as he does on mass deportation. But in that case, he explicitly says that Trump should do it anyway (which is what pro-lifers want on abortion, too). There’s something unprincipled about this approach to political analysis, though one can easily discern the underlying logic. Greer wants to submit to public opinion — that is, until the need comes to get tough on immigration. Because on that issue the Republicans need to forge ahead and do what’s best for the country.

In order to piece together why Greer believes that identity issues need to be paramount, one has to gather stray comments. He tells us that H-1B visas threaten to harm American workers, and that mass immigration has made cities like Minneapolis “hotbeds of Third-World corruption and politics dominated by ethnic spoils.” But he doesn’t elaborate on these points. One might ask for some data on the H-1B issue, or whether Somalis in Minneapolis, an extremely small portion of new arrivals to the country, are representative of immigrants as a general matter. Mainstream MAGA pretends that immigration leads to much higher levels of crime, but Greer seems aware that this is not true in the aggregate. By not taking up such false narratives, he is left with few tools to make the positive case for his hardline positions. 

It is important to note that Greer rejects the label of white nationalist. To him, though, this rejection simply implies that he accepts the American system and doesn’t aspire to form an ethnostate. However, this is precisely what I would call a worldview that prioritizes maintaining white demographic dominance and cultural primacy. Why else consider every single form of immigration a threat, and why else should anti-white racism, especially after the vibe shift, remain such a high priority? Greer doesn’t explain, but it all makes sense in the context of a racialist worldview.

To Greer, the victory chronicled in Whitepill means that today we can just call this conservatism. It follows that white identitarianism has so successfully swept the Right that Greer doesn’t even feel the need to make the first-order case for his beliefs.   

But that leaves him vulnerable to all sorts of counterarguments (which, again, he doesn’t even bother acknowledging). Even as white identitarianism has ascended, one justification after another for limiting immigration has fallen by the wayside. It was once said new arrivals would boost crime. But crime has consistently fallen — despite some localized disorder and anecdotes that the Trump 2024 campaign pointed to as representative of the effects of immigration (they weren’t, statistically speaking).

Then there is the argument about migrants pushing the electorate to the Left. In her 2015 book ¡Adios, America!: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third-World Hellhole, Ann Coulter argued that nonwhites can be expected to vote Democratic indefinitely into the future; hence, conservatives had to close the border if they hoped to win on any other issue. In 2024, however, naturalized immigrants may well have voted majority-Republican. Now, conservatives are reduced to complaining about competition for tech jobs, despite tech workers not making up any significant part of their coalition, and the American tech industry being such an overwhelming success that it is powering the rest of the economy and putting us at the forefront of the most important industry in the world.

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Some of the MAGA faithful may not see such points clearly, but Greer does. Still, he refuses to intellectually tackle them. Instead, the emotional response to immigration comes first, and justifications are simply put forward on an ad hoc basis. As the intellectual case for restrictionism gets weaker, conservative attachment to nativism only becomes more firmly entrenched. 

The main premise of Whitepill is undeniably true. On the whole, Republicans have moved toward white identitarianism. This being America, even many of our white identitarians are diverse, with names like Nick Fuentes. But there is practically no reflection here on why that is something to celebrate. The worldview presented lacks any larger conception of the good, or a belief in a politics that places an emphasis on virtue. 

To take one example, while Greer laments immigration as a threat to American culture, he is indifferent to the fact that it was his political hero, Trump, who attempted an insurrection. Greer plays down the events of Jan. 6 and ignores the larger context of what we know about Trump trying to overturn the results of the presidential election he lost. What matters is Trump, and the larger Republican Party, as vessels for demographic politics. Even when Greer admirably breaks with his own tribe, as in the case of his denunciation of conspiracy theories, it is a matter of political pragmatism in the service of his larger goals, rather than due to a commitment that honesty and truth are valuable for their own sake.  

Greer has some virtues that are rare among his political tribe. He doesn’t, for example, drink the entire glass of MAGA Kool-Aid. He doesn’t believe that Haitians eat dogs and cats. Nor does he conveniently adopt socialist economic views to oppose immigration. Nonetheless, he is an avatar of a strand of conservatism that centers white identitarianism — without being able or willing to articulate why. 

As a pragmatist, Greer understands that identity politics for white people has worked, and can continue to be a powerful force into the future. But the sad intellectual and ethical state of his type of Right wing politics, and the hollow nature of his attempts to defend what it has become, show why even smarter versions of white identitarianism are degrading and ultimately morally poisonous.

While much has been written about the rise of populism from the American perspective, what we are witnessing in the United States is part of a global phenomenon.

Just months before Americans first elected Trump, the British public voted to leave the European Union, a move that had practically no support among media, academic, and political elites. The Populism in Power database shows an approximately fivefold increase in the number of populist leaders and parties ruling over democracies between 1990 and 2019. 

An analysis of six major democracies — the UK, the US, Australia, Germany, France, and Canada — reveals a significant decline in support for traditional center-Left and center-Right parties, dropping from about three-quarters of the vote share in 2000 to just over half in 2024.

Latin America is also seeing one of its perennial populist waves, and populism is even making inroads into Asia. Ruling elites even in nondemocracies, such as Putin’s Russia, are adopting aspects of populist rhetoric as legitimization strategies. 

Beyond how we feel about any particular candidate or party, perhaps the political question of our time is whether we should embrace or reject this trend. Approaching this topic from a social science background, my inclination is to first look for data. Practically all of it points to the lesson that countries should avoid populist leaders if they want to maintain freedom and achieve economic growth. How do we know this? Ideally, you’d have randomized experiments where you assign some countries to be ruled by populists and others by normal leaders. 

Since we can’t do that, we have to go by theory and observation. When theory and observational outcomes point in the same direction, then we might think we know something about the world, though it depends on the plausibility of the theory and the strength of the relevant correlations. There have never been randomized controlled trials establishing that smoking causes lung cancer, but I would bet my life that it does. 

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Before we even begin on this topic, however, the first thing we have to do is ask: what even is populism? The political scientists Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser settle on the definition of “a thin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic camps, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite,’ and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people.” This seems like it would lead to a lot of debates. Was President Barack Obama a populist because he talked about rich people and the working class? Did he present each class as “homogenous” enough and did he do enough to declare them “antagonistic”? Maybe you can make a case that every major politician this side of retired US Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) is populist according to this definition.

In practical terms, however, when scholars make lists of populist leaders, they basically agree on who qualifies, and examples come from the Right and the Left, which means we can’t tell a simple story of political bias. Trump, former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, and former Bolivian President Evo Morales all count, no matter who you ask. Standard definitions of populism are fuzzy and create edge cases, and often disagree with one another, but this is a common issue in politics, and one can say similar things about concepts like democracy and nationalism. 

“I know it when I see it” can be fine as a standard in social and political analysis. There is definitely an essence that Trump and Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, currently in US custody, share, which former US President Joe Biden and current German Chancellor Friedrich Merz do not. Since analysts agree on who populists are, we can undertake observational studies and see whether such leaders being in power is associated with worse outcomes. Perhaps the most comprehensive paper to do this is “Populist Leaders and the Economy”, published in the American Economic Review, arguably the most respected journal in economics. The authors found that between 1990 and 2020, a country being ruled by a populist is associated with a 10% lower GDP after 15 years relative to a reasonable counterfactual.

Left-wing populists do worse, which is not surprising, given that they have a deeply flawed understanding of economics. So ideology as traditionally understood matters a lot, but populist rule still has its own independent negative effect. 

What about non-economic indicators? Here the news seems to be even worse. In a report for the Tony Blair Institute, journalists Jordan Kyle and Yascha Mounk investigated the period from 1990 to 2018. Populists over that time degraded checks and balances, and were four times more likely than other leaders to preside over democratic backsliding. In fact, of the breakdowns of democracy that the world has seen since the end of the Cold War, excluding those involving foreign interference or in countries with a GDP per capita of less than $1,000 a year, two-thirds occurred under populist leaders. Such leaders were also bad for freedom of the press and civil liberties. Perhaps most remarkable of all: 40% of populist leaders ended up charged with corruption. This is despite the fact that they often try to stack institutions in their own favor. 

When The Economist made a list of countries with the highest ratio of negative to positive years of growth between 1950 and 2023, the top eight were Libya, Argentina, Syria, Iraq, Chad, Congo, Sudan, and Venezuela. As I’ve previously written, “This is not a list anyone wants to be on. That’s six countries in Africa and the Middle East that have experienced civil wars, and two Latin American nations that did it to themselves through Leftist economic policies.” Venezuela and Argentina have mostly been democratic throughout this time period, without suffering anything close to the level of intrastate violence seen in the other nations on that list. Interestingly, most communist countries have shown a better ability to correct their issues than Venezuela and Argentina. Populist democratic socialism seems to be an unusually good way to keep a country economically dysfunctional in the long term, since communist regimes usually end up collapsing like they did in Eastern Europe or reforming as China and Vietnam have. Of course, when they don’t do either of these things — think North Korea and Cuba — their outcomes are worse than what you get with any form of populism even in the long term. 

Another data point is what has happened in the UK since Brexit. Stanford economics professor Nicholas Bloom and his coauthors found that by 2025, simulations based on the performance of comparable countries indicate that GDP per capita was 6% to 8% lower in the UK than it would have otherwise been, with investment down 12% to 18%. Firms that were most exposed to European markets were hardest hit. The UK was at about the tenth percentile for growth among the 33 other countries analyzed since the second quarter of 2016. The authors note that their paper likely underestimates harms, since the countries they compare the UK to were themselves hit by Brexit, making the one that actually left the EU look better by comparison. Brexit did not involve the victory of a populist leader, but it was a shock that caused the enactment of a major populist policy, one that had practically no support among traditional elites. The results look similar in kind to what we get when publics elect populists into office.

That’s the empirical evidence. What about theory? It’s much easier to come up with a plausible story of why populism would be bad than one showing why it would be good. Let’s say you believe that elites have made a lot of mistakes. They are self-dealing and corrupt, the media is lazy and has a Left-wing bias, and intellectuals write to impress one another and are cut off from reality. That can all be true. The question is why anyone would think that a leader whose only claim to power is a direct connection to a mass audience would be better. Or that the kinds of people such a leader should be expected to mobilize would be preferable to old elites.

Experts who abuse their authority to push a political agenda should certainly be held to account. At the same time, it is impossible to deny that gatekeepers are usually right. There is a general tendency to focus too much on the man-bites-dog cases, such as claims made by credentialed elites that trans women have no advantage over biological women in athletic competitions, or that the US is a white supremacist nation. Most of the time, media and academic elites are gatekeeping views that are clearly false and often harmful. Among these, to take a handful of examples of beliefs promoted or given a respectful hearing on The Joe Rogan Experience, the most successful podcast in the country, are the following ideas: there is an ancient city beneath the Giza pyramids; HIV doesn’t cause AIDS; there were advanced human civilizations that predated those accepted by archaeologists and historians; 9/11 may have been a government operation; mind reading is real; Covid vaccines are more dangerous than the disease itself; and humans became more susceptible to polio due to vaccination. 

You might oppose elites on completely reasonable grounds, but creating a political culture in which expertise is rejected as a general matter leads to a decline in intellectual and moral standards, as we’ve seen happen in populist movements across the world. 

Sometimes, the elites of a country truly are bad enough to justify grabbing onto almost any alternative. We have seen this in the case of Argentina. It is the one nation that has such a deep history of populism that populists themselves became the establishment. And we have seen the results: a country that, in the early 20th century, was as wealthy as major European powers is now no longer even in the category of advanced nations. So President Javier Milei comes along as a populist with a libertarian agenda, and is probably worth supporting. Even though he is surrounded by the kinds of scandals that dog other populist leaders, the combination of his sensible economic views and the degree to which Argentine elites have failed makes this an unusual case. Populism usually being bad doesn’t mean it is always a negative, and we have to exercise judgment in individual cases. 

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More typical than Milei is someone like Trump, whose critique of the establishment of his country is that they are too pro-market and globalist. While Milei slashes tariffs, Trump enacts new ones and goes beyond any previous president in taking ownership stakes in major corporations. Even if Trump enacts more sensible economic policies than his opponents on average, that has to be balanced against the costs of higher levels of corruption and institutional decay, along with generally opening up the government to cranks, from anti-vaxxers to nativists who believe that America belongs to white Christians alone.

Populist movements don’t simply reduce the power of elites, but raise the status and influence of a new group of people. Ten years ago, it would have been rational to criticize The New York Times for getting things wrong and to not worry too much about what conspiracy theorist personalities were saying. Today, the Joe Rogan Experience and other low-quality sources of information have influence comparable to that of the mainstream media. Independent journalist Nick Shirley’s video on Somalis in Minnesota ended up having major policy consequences, leading the Trump administration to open investigations and begin a crackdown on illegal immigrants in Minneapolis. This made little sense as a policy matter, since Shirley’s shoddy reporting had nothing to do with the immigration status of people living in that state, and few Somalis are here illegally. But this is the kind of policy-by-word association you get under populist rule.

The fact that alternative media and influencers are increasingly powerful means that you now have to apply a more critical eye to their beliefs and behaviors. Is US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. more or less important than the American Medical Association? The latter might still matter more in the long run. But their power levels are at least in the same ballpark. Same thing if you are weighing the virtues and flaws of The Wall Street Journal versus political commentator Tucker Carlson, or Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Kash Patel versus the American Civil Liberties Union. Conservatives could once laugh off these comparisons, adopting the argument that the establishment had more power so its flaws are the only ones that matter — ironic, given conservatives’ hatred of these types of arguments when made by postmodernists. One can imagine them adopting the mantra: “misinformation is poor journalism plus power.” But we’re not in that world anymore, and sometimes populism achieves so much success that its figures must be judged by the same standards we once applied to organic elites. 

We have now arrived at that moment. And the historical record is clear. Whatever problems your country is facing, populist parties and candidates are rarely the answer.

This essay was adapted from the author’s book, Kakistocracy: Why populism ends in disaster, published July 7 by Broadside Books.

After working its way through the conservative press and the online Right, this narrative got a major boost last week, when White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that the administration was looking into the matter. The next day, President Trump himself informed the media that he had attended a meeting on the issue, and commented that the matter was “very serious,” promising that we will know more in a fortnight.

The GOP’s hysteria apparatus — it’s now almost an official part of how the party operates — went into action. According to Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.), for example, the disappearances and deaths are “too coincidental” to have happened by chance. He called on officials to “pay attention to this issue and make sure that our nation’s top scientists are safe and secure.”

Fortunately, this entire narrative appears to be, to put it gently, complete nonsense.

In a country with an estimated 2 million researchers, some of them are bound to fall victim to unfortunate events, possibly even within a short span of time. And there is nothing to indicate that the events that have been linked together in the Right-wing media have any connection to one another. The fact that this narrative has gone so far is both a damning index of low journalistic standards in conservative media — and a revealing sign of where their biases lie.

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Nick Shirley and the rotten new journalism

By richard hanania

Until recently, the number of dead or disappeared scientists stood at 10. Fox News reports that these were “individuals tied to US military, nuclear, and aerospace research.” On Friday, an 11th name was added to the list: Amy Eskridge, a Huntsville, Ala.-based researcher who committed suicide in 2022.

Nearly everything about Eskridge’s background raises red flags about any narrative that might include her in a list of important scientists. She was the co-founder of an organization called the Institute for Exotic Science, where she purported to be working on something called “gravity-modification research,” which isn’t a recognized branch of science. In 2020, she claimed to be ready to present groundbreaking work on “antigravity” but needed approval from NASA.

Eskridge apparently believed that she was facing harassment from shadowy forces, who had fired a “directed-energy weapon” at her. There appear to be no credible scientists who have taken her claims or alleged research seriously. I say “alleged” research because, looking for peer-reviewed papers by an author named Amy Eskridge, I was only able to locate one from 2009, and it is unlikely to have been the same woman because she would have been about 21 years old at the time, and the topic is decidedly unexotic: bridge engineering.

Eskridge’s family placed an obituary for her in The Birmingham News. It noted that “after her graduation from [the University of Alabama in Huntsville] with a double major in chemistry and biology, she became an interdisciplinarian and a master of electrical engineering, chemistry, physics, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology.” By that standard, Lisa Kudrow is a master of exobiology, nanochemistry, and gravitational waves; the Friends star studied science as a Vassar undergraduate, after all.

Which is more likely: that Eskridge, with a bachelor’s degree and big dreams, was a persecuted genius whom a foreign government recognized as a threat that had to be eliminated? Or that she was simply a crank who committed suicide?

Unlike Eskridge, many of the other 10 names on the list appear to have been more serious scholars. Yet for the most part, they toiled in widely divergent fields, held different positions, had no obvious connections to one another, and lived in different parts of the country. They included a retired Air Force major general, an MIT professor, and a pharmaceutical scientist who apparently only made the list due to having a Pentagon contract.

Two of the names were shot and killed. Nuno Loureiro, the MIT professor, was murdered by a former classmate from Portugal. This has led some to speculate that a personal dispute or professional jealousy might have been the motive, though we may never know, since the suspect killed himself. Carl Grillmair was a Caltech astrophysicist whose alleged killer had previously been reported for trespassing on his property. In addition to Grillmair’s murder, the 29-year-old suspect in the case has been charged with carjacking and burglary in separate incidents.

Melissa Casias and Anthony Chavez both had been employed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and both disappeared within a few months of each other in 2025. This at first glance seems strange. But neither of these individuals was an important scientist doing cutting-edge research. Casias was an administrative assistant. Chavez had once worked at Los Alamos, but he was a 78-year-old man who’d been retired since 2017. It’s much more plausible that he fell off a hiking trail than that he was a prime target for a Kremlin-directed assassination.

One of the individuals on the list, Frank Maiwald, is simply listed by media outlets as a 61-year-old who died, with no public cause of death given. There is nothing particularly unusual about a man of that age passing away, and his inclusion on the standard list just goes to show how far conspiracy theorists need to go in order to build their case that something strange going on.

I could go on. We’re not talking here about, say, the 11 top scientists in the country disappearing in a short period of time. To get the list of 11 people over a four-year period, the conspiracy theorists have had to scour the land for retirees, government contractors, random cranks, and administrators.

Where did this narrative even come from? The earliest article on this topic is dated March 22, and was published in the Daily Mail. It notes five missing scientists. The article quoted Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), a man who rarely meets a conspiracy theory that he doesn’t think is worth promoting on social media (unless it implicates Donald Trump).

Two days later, a website called The Liberty Line added another name, expanding the list to six. According to its X account, the website specializes in “Philadelphia sports and whatever else comes to mind.” Right-wing media and influencers kept adding names until we reached Eskridge, with old cases treated as breaking news. Finally, the story made its way to Fox News and the White House briefing room.

What is the lesson here? I’ve written in these pages about the problem of Right-wing influencers proliferating crank information. Yet the disappearing-scientists story came from the more “highbrow” — I use the term relatively — corners of the conservative press. The narrative has been pushed by the New York Post, The Daily Mail, and Fox News. Each of these outlets is a cross between professional journalism and the tabloid press. They report real news, and you can trust that most of the time they aren’t fabricating nonsense. But these outlets also sensationalize stories, engage in celebrity gossip, focus more than the mainstream media on personality over substance when discussing politics, and often play fast and loose with the facts in service of a narrative.

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By michael tracey

You can often tell the ideological bias of an outlet by noticing when its reasoning ability breaks down. With the Left-leaning press, we see particular hysteria surrounding men alleged to have engaged in sexual misconduct. A prominent man can be accused of anything from forcible rape to making passes at women, and once it is decided he might have behaved inappropriately, no accusation is too small or too poorly verified to get a hearing. Behold the feeding frenzy over Rep. Eric Swalwell, who has articles written about him in which accusations of drugging and raping women are placed alongside tales of flirtatious text messages. See also Michael Tracey’s coverage of the Epstein Files, and the degree to which the most salacious accusations about human trafficking remain widely believed despite the lack of evidence.

Where does logical reasoning break down in the Right-wing press? First, there is just a general conspiratorial orientation. The narrative about disappeared scientists is linked to excitement over the idea that the government is hiding the truth about UFOs. In early 2024, a Pentagon report determined that most UFO sightings can be explained as ordinary objects, and concluded that there was no evidence that we are being visited by extraterrestrial lifeforms. Yet in the world of Right-wing media, conspiracy theories never die once they take hold. Ignoring previous reports, Trump recently promised a TPUSA crowd “very interesting documents” related to the UFO phenomenon.

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In Trump, conspiracy theorists have the president of their dreams, and the halls of Congress are likewise filled with lawmakers who pander to them. Yet they remain disappointed on topics like UFOs and Jeffrey Epstein. Where are the arrests of all the shadowy pedophiles? Where are the little green men? It can’t be that there is nothing there. Some end up disillusioned with Trump, believing he is no better than the members of the Deep State he supposedly displaced, while others keep trudging to TPUSA events, holding out hope that in another week or two, Trump is going to get to the bottom of things.

For Fox News, however, this isn’t simply a matter of playing to conspiracy theorists. The network is always in search of a narrative involving foreign threats. While the podcast sphere and the online Right have been disappointed with hawkish Trump administration policies like the war with Iran, on Fox News it might as well still be 2005. The story of the 11 dead or missing scientists thus not only scratches a conspiratorial itch, but also has the potential to hype the audience up for hawkish policies abroad.

The online Right lives and breathes exciting fever dreams that appeal to the less educated based on distorted or fabricated information. The mainstream Right-wing press is preferable but still plays footsie with the conspiracy theorists and cranks who compose its audience. Increasingly, members of Congress find it beneficial to play to the same crowd, if they are not conspiracy theorists themselves. All of this is a recipe for a constant stream of false narratives. The story of the disappearing scientists is yet another case proving this point. 

Do not expect anything to come of it. Soon, they will move on to something else.

With WiFi connections still unavailable on most flights back then, Sacco tuned out the internet for several hours as her plane crossed oceans and continents — before landing and finding her life and career destroyed. By the time Sacco reached Cape Town, millions of Twitter users, including Donald Trump, had branded her a racist and got her fired from her job.

To many internet historians, this episode marks the beginning of the “woke” and cancel culture era, which lasted until about 2022 (or never went away, depending on whom you ask). Yet in retrospect, it’s clear that the Sacco incident epitomizes something else: the era of social media, a fundamentally populist mode of communication that wreaked havoc on rational public discourse and made possible the populist politics, both Left-wing and Right, of the decade that followed.

Now, as artificial intelligence eclipses social media, it is possible that period is coming to a close — ushering in something closer to a new era of technocratic rationality. 

The writer Dan Williams recently made a version of this argument, pointing out that while social media is populist, AI is technocratic (I’ve made a similar contention about social media in the past). If you believe that we’ve suffered from an impoverished public discourse since Twitter took off, there might be good reasons to hope that there is relief right around the corner. While the social-media era was one in which everyone had a voice, and any random person could go viral, AI speaks with authority and is trained on practically the entire corpus of human writing — only, with rational thinking ability and a tilt toward sources deemed credible by elites.

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This means that the more that AI cannibalizes public discourse, the less conspiratorial and more fact-based it is likely to be. Interestingly, there is evidence suggesting that the American Right — the side that most needs to get back in touch with reality amid the rise of figures like Candace Owens — is making more use of the best tool we have for being able to do so. 

With social media, each individual is his own content producer, and engagement is the coin of the realm. Since most people are either not that smart or not that interested in truth, if not both, the largest social-media accounts tend to be sensationalist and not exactly sticklers for intellectual probity, factual accuracy, or logical coherence. People want to hear about how their tribe is more morally upstanding and righteous, and they enjoy emotionally charged rhetoric and conspiracy theories that make the world seem more legible. AI systems, in contrast, are by definition optimizing for intelligence. People pay for these models because they want accurate representations of the world.

It’s interesting that when you try to program AI to reflect certain political biases, it goes haywire. There was the famous Google Gemini experiment, in which the model was told to add diversity to pictures. The result: early Gemini became a laughing stock after spitting out images of black Nazis. There is also the experience of Grok. When Elon Musk tried to create an “anti-woke” AI, the model started to take after fascistic and Nazi Right-wing accounts. Musk then pulled the plug on this experiment, and since then, Grok behaves much more like other prominent AI models, albeit with a more subtle Right-wing tilt.

The lesson here is profound. Arguably, you can’t create an artificial intelligence that is worth using while also telling it to accept Elon Musk’s view of political reality. The training data and model parameters may skew things in one direction or the other, but there are some limits to what a system can believe and still be, well, intelligent.

This kind of convergence can also be seen among humans. Let’s say you have two individuals who are both highly intelligent, enjoy access to the same sources of information, and have a good-faith interest in finding the truth. They may end up differing in their politics, but they probably won’t differ nearly as much as any two randomly chosen members of the population. Neither will end up believing that communism can work or adopting Hitler’s views on race and geopolitics. They also likely won’t end up believing more humdrum sorts of misinformation, such as 2020 election denialism. There is probably something similar at work with AI. Can you create a model that is good at coding and having rational conversations about the widest possible range of topics — but also thinks that Libs of TikTok is an excellent source of information, superior to what you find in the prestige press?

Theoretically, you could surely design an AI platform that is simply a propaganda machine. Take a highly intelligent system and simply direct it to act as an effective partisan. Such roleplaying is already possible with today’s models. But the thing about conspiracy theories and biased reasoning is that people need to believe they’re getting the information straight in order to be influenced. Individuals rarely wake up and declare, “I want to be brainwashed.” See how often partisan hacks sell themselves as people who are just telling it like it is. All of this is to say: there’s unlikely to be much of a market for an AI marketed as telling you what you want to hear.

One could imagine more subtle biases through market processes. Say Grok wants to appeal to Republicans, and so tilts information in a Right-leaning direction. But given the power of AI, most people are probably going to choose the models that they can gain the most benefit from. Someone made a Right-wing alternative to Amazon called Mammoth Nation, and nobody uses it, because even Republicans are more interested in being able to get shoes delivered to their door quickly than in backing “anti-woke” firms.

In 2021, conservative influencers were hyping a $500 “Freedom Phone” that would allow the user to avoid Big Tech censorship. But it turned out to be a rebranded Chinese Android that normally sold for $119. Most people aren’t considering politics when purchasing goods and services. Thus, they will use the most affordable and useful AI models they can find, instead of looking for products that will shape their thinking about current events.

This raises a natural question, however: why would people who have completely turned against elite institutions — from the mainstream media to their local hospital — trust large language models? Williams points out that LLMs will listen to all your concerns and don’t condescend to you. This is a powerful tool for helping people whose worldview is shaped by Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson podcasts, who do not misunderstand just one or two events, but whose entire picture of reality is warped. Few human individuals have the patience or the time for deprogramming such unfortunate souls. Luckily, AIs don’t get tired or emotionally overwhelmed by human stupidity. And they’re constantly on call.

Take conspiracy theorists. One reason they’re difficult to deal with is that they will often know more about a topic than the ordinary person. Conspiracy theorists spend their lives researching an event. But in doing so, they push the mountain of facts through a distortive filter so that “the Jews” or Freemasons or the Royal Family always end up blamed. No human fact-checker could hope to answer conspiracy theorists’ claims without making a massive time investment just to find out what they’re talking about. Again, AIs solve that problem. A 2024 paper found that LLMs are effective at debunking conspiratorial beliefs, with the effect lasting for months, in part because they could tailor the arguments needed to each specific individual.

Then, too, AIs are so useful that individuals come to trust them in their day-to-day lives. People might ask AI what to say to a love interest, or the best way to lose weight, what their digestion problems are telling them, or how to plan a vacation. In school, they’re constantly relying on it to study and even do their assignments. How do you then turn off your trust when you’re curious about a political or social question? The professional fact-checker also serves as their study buddy, dating coach, nurse, travel agent, and all-around oracle. That’s a powerful combination in terms of improving the quality of people’s thinking — and the quality of public discourse.

I remember my amazement when a year or two ago, I observed my car dripping some kind of fluid in the back and went to AI for help. I took a picture, uploaded it to ChatGPT, and queried it on what was going on. The app asked some questions, and then reassured me that since the fluid was clear, this was simply the natural result of running the air conditioning on a hot day. I remember going to an actual mechanic soon after this happened, recounting the story, and raving about AI and how I couldn’t believe that he wasn’t yet using it in his own business. Now imagine transferring the same feeling of wonder to a machine that also shreds conspiracy theories.

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AI is a gift to my students

By Susan Pickard

In the past few years on X, you might have noticed users interacting with dubious stories or videos by asking, “@grok, is this true?” Epistemology, to be sure, is indeed quite difficult, presenting a profound bundle of questions that even scholars and academics often argue about. It’s overall salutary, however, that people in their day-to-day lives are discovering that AI is a good source of information on a whole host of issues; and that they are, correctly, beginning to assume that listening to AI on politics is better than trying to do their “own research” or talking to people they know, who often share the same cognitive limitations and biases. 

People’s worldviews aren’t built or deconstructed in a single interaction. Your average conspiracy theorist isn’t going to fact-check a few pieces of information and suddenly become rational. But over time, incorporating chatbots into our processes of opinion formation — by means of asking Grok or reading the replies when others do so — could create better intuitions regarding whom and what to believe.

In a new preprint, economics professor Thomas Renault and his co-authors investigate how fact-checking is used in the wild. They investigated all X posts between February 2025 and September 2025 that tagged either Grok or an AI service called Perplexity, analyzing 1,671,841 fact-checking requests. They found that Republican-leaning accounts were more likely to ask whether information was true. Not only that, but Republicans are targeted more for fact-checking, from both fellow Republican (107.5% more) and Democratic (83% more) accounts. Overall, Grok and Perplexity were more likely to say Republicans were not being truthful. Thus, we have the remarkable finding that even though Grok was designed to be anti-woke by Elon Musk, and Republicans are the ones who disproportionately use it, the tool still rates Democrats as more truth-oriented. This is consistent with what we see with community notes, which flag Republican posts more often, along with other data showing that Republicans are more likely than Democrats to share false information on social media, and less able to differentiate fact from fiction overall. None of this is surprising, given that today’s Republican base is both less educated and less likely to interact with credible sources of news.

So we have the interesting and seemingly paradoxical result that Republicans on social media are more reliant on AI, even as it tells them their favorite narratives are more often wrong than those of the other side. This should be seen as a positive sign. We’ve been asking, “What would happen if fact-checkers had infinite time and patience, considered all aspects of problems, and weren’t a bunch of smug Left-wing know-it-alls?” The answer might just be that those who have lost trust in our institutions begin to recover their sanity. 

Yet today, it’s clear that Idiocracy was, if anything, too optimistic. Twenty years hence, American public discourse is cruder and attention spans are shorter; mind-deadening drugs have become more pervasive, and politics is far more tribal and hateful than anything depicted by Judge. All this has taken place on a much faster time scale than Idiocracy predicted, moreover, and the changes are far more the result of ideologies spun up from resentment and hate than the biological degeneration featured in the film. 

Call it the Great Stupidization.

In Idiocracy, set in 2005, Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson), a low-ranking soldier in the US Army, and a prostitute named Rita (Maya Rudolph) are selected to be frozen for a year in a top-secret experiment. But with the general leading the initiative caught in a personal scandal — he gets a little too close to the pimp who procures the prostitute for him —  the program is shut down and forgotten by the feds. Joe and Rita wake up 500 years in the future. 

During those five centuries, the narrator informs us, dysgenic breeding has dramatically dumbed down the American population, leaving Joe and Rita the two smartest people on the planet. In this brave new world, corporations dominate the globe, down to the hospitals and law courts. Massive piles of garbage are everywhere, and agriculture has failed because crops are watered with a branded sports drink (“Brawndo, it’s what plants crave”). Joe, with an IQ of 100 according to the scale of his era, scores off the charts on an intelligence test while in prison, and is then appointed secretary of the interior by President Camacho, a former professional wrestler who governs via spectacle. 

The parallels with our own world are easy enough to spot, from the reality-TV president to the short, declarative sentences that characterize both President Trump’s and Camacho’s manner of speech (“I know everyone’s shit is emotional right now,” Camacho declares amid a looming famine). We even have a form of scientific illiteracy similar to watering crops with sports drinks in the form of Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vaccine stance. He’s just using his position to promote Steak ’n Shake instead of Carl’s Jr., the real-life fast-food chain whose advertising motto in the film runs: “Carl’s Jr. — fuck you, I’m eating!” As for cinema, Americans in the film’s distant future relish watching human butts up-close, farting.

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Yet despite its obviously dystopian vision, the film reflects the optimism of the era from approximately the end of the Cold War to the Great Recession. Consider that its stupid people do not engage in racial or ethnic scapegoating. They’re not aggressively misogynistic, and the institutionalized homophobia is limited to a prosecutor telling the court that Joe “talks like a fag.” In Idiocracy, the president is black, and no one comments on it; compare this to either the woke left denigrating speakers for their whiteness, or those on the right who now believe that the value of an individual’s opinions depends on whether he is a “Heritage American.”

In the film’s future America, moreover, conspiracy theories do not seem to play any role, despite the fact that they dominate our own timeline, such as the QAnon theory that liberal elites like Hillary Clinton and Tom Hanks kidnap and rape children, with it being Donald Trump’s mission to stop them.  Stupid people in Idiocracy repeat corporate slogans, but they don’t believe that they have discovered secrets about the way society works that have been hidden from them by shadowy elites. Judge couldn’t imagine the toxic spew of hate and paranoia, fueled by fantasies of persecution and revenge, that we generate today.  

We laugh at QAnon, but we don’t fully consider the bloodlust generated in the theory’s adherents, who believe in a horrifying universe of elite Satanic pedophiles and dream of mass executions when the child rapists finally face justice. And the Epstein saga drags on, without proper moral weighing of its consequences for truth and probity. The reality is that not a shred of evidence has emerged for elite pedophile or sex-trafficking rings surrounding Epstein, and the woman who was most responsible for spreading these claims was a confirmed fabulist, with deep mental-health issues. Yet high-school-dropout-turned-congresswoman Lauren Boebert drags the Clintons before Congress in order to ask Hillary about the connection between the Epstein story and Pizzagate. Such accusations are nearly always combined with at least an undertone of violent threat. 

Our era, fueled by this venom, is much darker than that of the film. President Camacho compares favorably with Trump in terms of decency and interest in the common good. He at least wants to address his nation’s crises in a serious way. The fictional president even admits fault, unlike Trump, who blatantly lies about economic and crime data and has an uncanny ability to convince his supporters that up is down. 

As Camacho tells the House of Representatives, “I know shit’s bad right now. With all that starvin’ bullshit. And the dust storms. And we runnin’ out of French fries and burrito coverings. But I got a solution.” Camacho informs the audience that Joe has the highest IQ of any man alive, and the crowd is impressed. After the speech, Camacho promises Joe a full pardon for a crime he is facing if he fixes the crop situation. That implies public-spiritedness and can be contrasted to Trump’s use of the pardon power for the benefit of those who can help him politically or who contribute to his family’s various crypto scams. 

Dumb people in Idiocracy are relatively harmless: they just want to be entertained. They don’t harbor deep, irrational social grievances, or construct false oppression narratives for themselves. Yes, they will laugh when a guy gets hit in the crotch — the 26th century has an entire TV show dedicated to the concept, Ow My Balls — and they enjoy criminals being eliminated in a spectacle that is a combination of a monster-truck rally and the Roman Colosseum. But there’s none of the ideology-driven moral righteousness that has motivated many of history’s greatest atrocities and now fuels contemporary haters. They’re also much humbler. When told that the smartest man in the world is going to fix their problems, they’re inclined to give him a chance, rather than think that they know better because they “did their own research” on vaccines. 

In Idiocracy, humanity’s IQ drops, but the impact on our moral culture is relatively limited. We still maintain capitalism and democracy, albeit in degraded forms. The achievements of the civil-rights revolution are apparently locked in for good. The morons seem generally happy, comfortable with their place in the universe.

In the real world, we know that intelligence has a strong association with practically every positive trait we might measure. Smart people are more tolerant of others, have more liberal social views, and are less authoritarian. They commit fewer crimes and are more pro-social, which is the main reason why richer communities, where the people are more intelligent, are nicer places to live. Intellectual elites not only have nicer houses, but are also better friends, neighbors, and citizens.

Perhaps the fact that the movie’s stupid people are so much more decent than our own explains why the America of Idiocracy maintains a GDP per capita that is higher than one would expect based on the national IQ. Their society still has advanced technology, such as a machine at the hospital that correctly diagnoses one’s condition by putting tubes into various orifices (the dull health-care workers, of course, manage to screw it up, putting the wrong tubes into the wrong orifices before correcting their errors, to hilarious effect). Rita finds it easier than ever to work as a prostitute: she doesn’t need the protection of a pimp, and the johns are stupid enough to pay without her having to service them. 

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The relative success of Idiocracy’s America — a country where everyone is borderline or fully retarded, yet the streets are safer than modern Honduras or Brazil — is never satisfactorily explained, though the public does appear to be dulled into a much less agentic state. We are told that the English language has deteriorated into a combination of “hillbilly, valley girl, inner-city slang, and various grunts,” reflecting popular subcultures that exist in modern America, and giving the speech of the masses a comfortable familiarity. But conspiracy theorists were too far below the radar in the mid-aughts to get representation; if Judge made the same film today, he would fail the test of verisimilitude. 

The benevolence of the universe of Idiocracy — and of our former world, or at least the way we perceived it — is also reflected in its omission of international relations. You would think that maybe countries would genetically decline at different rates, allowing one state or a small group of them to establish hegemony over the rest. But 1990s and early-aughts optimism saw the world as such a safe, predictable place, the film fails to even gesture at such possibilities.

The mechanism through which humanity gets stupider in Idiocracy is genetic, while what’s happened to us has been the result of screens melting our brains, demagogic politicians exploiting preexisting ignorance, and the internet and social media removing gatekeepers and democratizing the discourse (yes, healthy public discourse needs intelligent gatekeepers, a fact that was obvious to Western civilization going back to Plato). Moreover, it is at this point difficult to see many scenarios where we get to 2505 without humanity being either destroyed by artificial intelligence, or so transformed by it as to be unrecognizable.

Insofar as this fate is the result of advanced technology, we might say that the real problem has been not too little intelligence, but too much of it, carelessly applied. The confidence of the Idiocracy era contained the seeds of our downfall. We once believed that you can get as dumb as you want and the world would still remain relatively safe; no one would look for reasons to hate; and other human beings, whether foreign adversaries or local criminals, would be unlikely to try to purposely hurt you. The crude genetic determinism of the film likewise obscured the more immediate threats to human cognition; the iPhone was officially announced a mere four months after Idiocracy’s release.  

Luckily, we still have the biological potential to change course. But doing so must begin with a recognition of how bad things have gotten, and a realization that a stupider world is also a much darker and more unsettling one. The political discourse is not simply insignificant chatter providing various forms of entertainment and anxiety to tens of millions of Americans. It reflects the character with which we approach public life and the nature of our existence as political animals. From that perspective, we are in many ways in a more degraded state than the viewers of Ow, My Balls!. 

“Wokeness is dead,” I typed out. This was a succinct way to express the idea that there was something subversive about a blonde female celebrity unapologetically appealing to the male gaze. It’s not too much to say that this launched the discourse around Sydney Sweeney as a Right-wing icon, prompting dozens of think pieces across the ideological spectrum and feeding into the debates generated by Sweeney’s controversial “good jeans” commercial for American Eagle.

The result: I’m mentioned on Sweeney’s Wikipedia page, one of my proudest accomplishments.

Yet by many people’s intuitions, when I sent that Sweeney post, I shouldn’t have been online at all — I should have been playing with my kids. My scrolling and posting at the moment were related to what you might call my “phone addiction,” though I don’t like the term; the vocabulary of mental health likely causes more problems than it solves. Better to say, simply, that over the years, I’ve looked at my phone too much.

But more recently, with the start of the new year, I’ve managed to keep the habit in check. This, without giving up technology or screens altogether, which would be impossible for me — that is, unless I were willing to give up on my information-based line of work. But as the Sweeney post showed, in this job, it pays to always be ready to blast out an inspired line or take at the right moment. The post did bring me a great deal of attention; punditry is, in part, a numbers game, especially in a digital age. Likely, online attention and interaction are beneficial for your work, too, even if your job is less public-facing than mine.

In my defense, moreover, when I’m on my phone, I’m mostly doing things that are squarely related to my job as a writer. I surf real news, cycling through the apps for Substack, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and other high-quality sources of information. The rest of the time is spent answering emails or direct messages, participating in group chats, and, above all, tweeting (or whatever it’s called nowadays). Practically all my book reading is now done through screens, too. Still, despite these practical uses, I have for years walked around with the nagging feeling that I should cut back. 

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And now I’ve managed it. How? I’ve made some rules that share three important qualities: they are strict, minor, and realistic. There’s no silver bullet. Rather, I’ve found that moderation is the best policy. And it has made a real difference in terms of improving my productivity and ability to focus. 

Absolute restrictions don’t work. In the past, I tried (or thought about trying) drastic rules, such as not using the phone during meals, when I’m with my kids, during an entire day of the week, or for four to eight hour periods. But I’ve concluded that such measures are too demanding. Maybe one day, I will be able to afford these more substantial breaks, but I’m not there yet. Nonetheless, while total abstinence over any substantial period of time is not a realistic option, there have been a few easy ways to cut my screen time, while helping, rather than hindering, my ability to communicate with a large audience.

It’s actually one, easy rule: I’ve eliminated device usage during what I call transition periods.

For example, take going to the gym. It used to be normal for me to look at my phone when I arrived, in periods between switching stations, and when walking from one part of the facility to another. I would thus end up spending too much time in the gym, when it would’ve been better for my state of mind, productivity, and physical health if I just simply put the phone away and listened to music without scrolling through apps and social media feeds. I’d certainly be able to do more sets in a shorter period of time. So now I have a new rule: no being on my phone while working out, except for choosing which songs to listen to.

Peeing had also come to take up too much of my time. Standing at a urinal is 10 seconds of my life where I have always found it more enjoyable to scroll X than stare at a tiled wall. But as with the gym, once you allow the phone to intrude on that, ahem, sacred space, everyday activities are drawn out. A quick glance might absorb me in a comments section or group chat. The 10-second urinal visit, in this way, ends up taking several minutes, by the end of which I forget the next thing I need to do. This adds up. Sometimes, it’s good to have 10 seconds just to think — or urinate — without any outside stimulation, freeing oneself to get back to work as soon as possible. 

The biggest change has been no longer looking at my phone while walking or driving. Yes, I was actually doing this. Now, if I’m walking and have the urge to read an article or respond to text, I will either put it off or stop in my tracks in order to scratch that itch. The most dangerous thing for productivity and the general flow of life isn’t when I’m focusing completely on a device. Rather, it’s been the in-between states, when I’m distracted by the screen in my hand while I am supposed to be working out, going to the bathroom, or just walking from Point A to Point B. In these intervals, I’m usually not handling the phone for its more productive uses, such as reading books or answering emails, so I’m just making every task take much longer than it otherwise would, for little benefit. 

And yes, in the past, I’ve sent texts and composed tweets while on the road. I once heard that John von Neumann read books while driving, and since I wanted to be a genius like him, I also took up the practice. It’s actually doable. Like von Neumann, though, I also have a habit of getting into car accidents and decided to no longer tempt fate. No more looking at my phone, even at a stoplight. The practice of scrolling for a short indeterminate amount of time has no real advantages, interrupts what could be fruitful trains of thought, and is difficult to prevent from snowballing into being online while the vehicle is moving — amid the unpredictable sea of other cars, pedestrians, garbage trucks, and so on.

That’s it. Walking, driving, working out, peeing. It doesn’t seem like much. But these things cumulatively make up a large part of my days — and those of many others. I have not adopted an antagonistic relationship with my phone. It is, after all, a library of books, a daily newsstand, a connection with friends, and even my job — the portal through which I influence the world. 

There would be no way to hate my phone without hating myself and everything I am doing in life. I am grateful to Big Tech for giving me a single device through which, within the span of a few minutes, I can look at pictures of my kids at school, post a comment on some contemporary controversy that might be seen by millions of people, and read a page or two from Diarmaid MacCulloch’s magisterial new book on the history of sex in Christianity. We shouldn’t forget that we are lucky to be alive in the time after Steve Jobs made his contribution to the world. 

Even with my more limited cutback, I’ve seen changes to the rhythm and flow of life. Now, much more often than before, I’ll notice some quirk of someone I come across whom I previously would have ignored, and I’ll strike up a conversation with them. Or my ear will catch the chatter of a married couple fighting, which will cause some reflection on the human condition. Sometimes, I just have a few extra seconds to ponder an important idea that I’ve read in a book, using brain space that would otherwise be occupied by intricate knowledge of some completely worthless social-media feud.

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Nonetheless, the nature of my work and my intellectual interests means that I have to practice moderation toward the real world as much as I do toward cyberspace. I’m not making any heroic attempts to be less online. It would be nice to say that I unplug and take entire afternoons off to play with my children. But here’s a secret about kids: they’re kind of boring in large doses. You can make a silly face, throw them up in the air and catch them, buy them a toy, and so on. But after a while, you find yourself looking for something more stimulating. I don’t feel bad about allowing them to run off and play while I look at my phone, and then turning my attention back to them while chuckling over a very funny tweet I just sent. 

In addition to letting go of the belief that my family needs my full attention, I’ve also given up on the romantic dream of a simpler life, in which work and recreation are kept separate, or in which “meatspace” is the default and the digital realm is the exception. When I’m tweeting, I’m working, being entertained, engaging in self-expression, and keeping up with friends at the same time. 

Like every other intellectual, I have moments in which I envy those who work “normal,” tangible jobs and are supposedly doing something much more real and in tune with human nature than I am. But I quickly snap out of it, understanding that, for better or worse, I’ve chosen the kind of life in which someone with my peculiar combination of strengths and weaknesses is most likely to flourish. Appreciating the phone without letting it control my life is in part a story about self-acceptance and growing increasingly confident in my place in the universe. 

One day, I would like to step away. Perhaps not permanently, or even for a multiyear period, but just long enough to get a true feeling of what it is like to live without a constant sense of connection to the outside world as mediated through pixels on a six-inch screen. I’m just old enough to remember being an adult without the iPhone, but it’s been so long that there is no way to trust that my memories are accurate, and haven’t been radically distorted by the conversation around what phones are doing to our national politics and the mental health of young people.

There is a balance we must all live with. For some, going cold turkey, or taking prolonged breaks, might make sense. If writing essays like this one weren’t my job, circumstances would probably push me more in that direction. Many years down the line I might be satisfied enough with my accomplishments, influence upon the world, and level of wisdom attained to put the phone down completely. Until then, I’ll see you on Substack, X, and the UnHerd app. 

Some establishments didn’t answer the door. Other attempts ended in confrontations with confused Somali women who appeared to have practically no English skills, bewildered by the young man and his old friend and partner in journalism, Dave, who’d just come by asking to see some kids.

In response, the Right-wing echo chamber went wild. “Prosecute @GovTimWalz,” tweeted Elon Musk. JD Vance exclaimed that Shirley had done more valuable journalism than the winners of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize. Before long, the Trump administration froze billions in funds for childcare and assistance to the poor going to Minnesota, and four other blue states for good measure. Rep. Eli Crane (R-Ariz.) has even introduced a resolution to award Shirley a Congressional Gold Medal.

Yet the real lesson of this story is how poorly suited the American Right is to engaging in journalism — and, indeed, the movement’s impoverished understanding of what journalism is all about.

Start by stipulating that there has been fraud involving Somalis in Minnesota. In 2022, the Biden administration charged 47 defendants in a $250 million scheme to exploit a child-nutrition program. This summer, the acting US Attorney for Minnesota said in an interview that his office had prosecuted cases amounting to $500 million in fraud over the past few years, and that in the case of the federal Housing Stabilization Services program, the “vast majority” of the money being distributed is fraudulent.

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It appears that most of this is coming from within the Somali community, and The New York Times in November reported on how Democratic politicians in that state were shy about shining a light on criminal activity in a way that could demonize a minority group or alienate a sizable new voting bloc.

None of this, however, means that Nick Shirley was engaging in real journalism. What he did was the equivalent of a reporter covering the mafia randomly showing up at Italian-owned butcher shops and restaurants with a prefabricated narrative that criminal activity must be going on. Almost immediately, Shirley’s narrative began to fall apart. The Minnesota Department of Children, Youth, and Families last week visited the daycares targeted by Shirley and determined that they were “operating as expected.” Children were, in fact, present at all of the sites, except for one that had yet to open for the day. Apparently, just showing up at a daycare and asking “Can I see the children?” does not get you access to them.

Reporters from the Minnesota Star Tribune visited the 10 facilities in Shirley’s video, and found children in four of them. The other six were either closed or did not open their doors, which would be understandable, given what they had recently been through. At one facility, the paper reported, “the daycare’s phones now ring nonstop from early in the morning to late at night, with people pretending to want to place their children there or threatening harm.”

The Star Tribune reported that some of the facilities had been cited for large numbers of violations in recent years. And the state Department of Children, Youth, and Families is pursuing ongoing investigations of four of the 10 daycares in the video. One of them, Quality Learning Center, closed down after Shirley’s visit. But there is little in Shirley’s video that, without more, qualifies as evidence of wrongdoing.

From the video itself, Shirley appears to not have much understanding of how health-care and government licensing work. At one point, while wandering through a facility of various medical providers, Shirley wonders, “Why would you have the same company essentially inside of the same building?” The kid has apparently never heard of a medical plaza. While visiting an office that appears to have patients in a waiting room, he asks a bewildered receptionist what their “health-care rates” are — a question that no patient in the American health system ever asks a provider. At facilities like the ones in the video, payment is often provided through government health programs, and depends upon the exact services that are authorized. This isn’t like asking for a menu in a restaurant.

Shirley finds a facility that is licensed to care for 102 children, and expects to see exactly that number of kids, not understanding that this is the maximum number they are authorized to serve. When the Star Tribune went to the same place, the paper found around 50 children inside. They simply hadn’t been visible from the door. At another facility, Dave (Shirley’s partner) taunts people standing outside that they might need an Amber Alert for the exact number of kids that they are licensed to care for.

Shirley has inspired similarly ignorant imitators on social media. One December X post, from the sensationalist @WallStreetApes account, declares that regular homes in Minnesota being registered as assisted living facilities is indicative of fraud (it has garnered more than 900,000 views as of this writing). Yet as the journalist Christina Buttons points out, the trend in US policy has been towards encouraging home- and community-based care over large institutions, meaning that these homes could well be assisted-living facilities.

Some have followed Shirley in showing up to random Somali businesses and haranguing the people inside. One video with 16 million views as of this writing involves a YouTuber informing her audience that “90% of small businesses fail, yet the Samara Adult Day Care still has their lights on without having one customer seemingly.” The woman who answers the door doesn’t speak English very well, but communicates that she is waiting for a driver to bring the people they take care of. The lack of assimilation among Somalis clearly does hinder communication, but that is not the point the influencer is going for. Without any evidence that anything is untoward is happening, the woman is smeared as a fraudster based on her ethnicity and line of business.

The episode is another showcase of why the nation needs real institutions, and highlights the failure of conservatives to build or maintain ones Americans can trust. Elon Musk encourages “citizen journalism,” giving the impression that anyone can show up with a camera — without any background knowledge, editorial guardrails, writing ability, or fact-checking — and provide useful information on current events.

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The amateurism is corrosive to Americans’ capacity to reform real problems. Shirley’s partner, Dave, claims at one point that Tim Walz took Minnesota from having an $18 billion surplus to a $6 billion deficit, a swing of $24 billion, of which he attributes 90% to fraud. In fact, Minnesota still has a surplus for the current fiscal year. There is projected to be a deficit of about $6 billion by 2028-2029, but no evidence is provided in Shirley’s video for the claim that fraud will be a substantial reason why.

The only attempt to ground his so-called journalism in empirical data is Shirley’s running tally of supposed fraud uncovered, based on which businesses he considers illegitimate. That determination, in turn, rests on little more than his unsuccessful attempts to locate children or wrangle “health-care rates” out of confused receptionists.

In a sense, Shirley starts with a narrative and then grabs on to whatever evidence he can find in order to tell the story, including short videos and official government numbers provided without the necessary context to understand what is going on. Do mainstream-media institutions sometimes do the same thing? Undoubtedly. But the Shirley version is so much more grotesquely low-quality — and subject to none of the editorial scrutiny and pushback that is routine for institutions like the Times even on their worst days.

To be clear, conservatives have uncovered a real problem in the form of government fraud. There are points to be made about topics such as immigration from clannish, hard-to-assimilate backgrounds, and Democrats letting fraud run rampant to avoid accusations of racism and to curry favor with an ethnic voting bloc. Yet a Times reader could have learned about Somali fraud in Minnesota in late November, minus the encouragement to harass random people who may not have had nothing to do with criminal activity.

Shirley is far from the worst influencer in the new Right-wing media ecosystem. That’s not saying much, however, in a community in which it is completely normal to sit in a podcast studio and fabricate “facts.” What the young YouTuber reveals, however, is in some ways even darker. It is that, even when the Right has a point about a news story, its partisans, and even its leaders, are either unwilling or unable to either demand or adhere to basic journalistic or intellectual norms. Moreover, there appears to be a growing appetite for opportunities to harass minority communities in real life over the sins committed by individuals who share the same background. That is a greater threat to the future of the country than welfare fraud.  

Zarathustra, coming a mere 24 years after Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, is best known for its prophet’s declaration that “God is dead.” The main character’s moniker makes a mockery of the Christian deity — Zarathustra is the Germanized name of the Persian prophet who founded Zoroastrianism, a precursor to Christianity that may have later influenced it. With God dead, Zarathustra was to be a counter-gospel.

What was to replace God? Nietzsche explains: “I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?” He goes on: “All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape.…”

Zarathustra speaks in parables grouped under various headings, often on themes dear to the hearts of reactionaries. “On Women” is a moving, and deeply un-PC, reflection on the animal passions that motivate relations between the sexes, with a bit of trolling thrown in. “Everything about woman is a riddle, and everything about woman has one solution: that is pregnancy.” As Zarathustra is about to part from the old woman he is talking to, she promises him a “little truth”: “You are going to women? Do not forget the whip!”

Zarathustra occasionally hits on politics, and when he does, it is to denounce the rabble and peddlers of equality. The Christian and his spiritual descendant, the socialist, he says, preach egalitarianism as a cover for a desire to tear down what is strong, life-affirming, and healthy in man. 

If you think much of this sounds like Andrew Tate and other manosphere influencers, you are correct. But Nietzsche deserves full credit for getting there first. 

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While young reactionaries today look back at a simpler time, in which supposedly all normal people had a community, a partner, and a secure job, Nietzsche was already living a lonely, sexually frustrated existence in 19th-century Germany. He might have had sex once at a brothel — where he may or may not have contracted syphilis — but otherwise he either was rebuffed by women or kept them at a distance. The man who effusively praised conquerors like Napoleon and Alexander, and expressed contempt for Christian morality, was constantly sick, felt overwhelmed by social gatherings, and had trouble tolerating bright lights and loud noises. As the intellectual historian Peter Gay wrote in the introduction to The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, the philosopher’s “life was a dramatic one, but all his drama was interior.”

More than a century after Zarathustra was published, I became one of a countless number of young men who found solace in Nietzsche’s thought. A life-affirming philosophy compensated for not being very good at life. Wasn’t I smart enough to reject God, and strong enough not to need a supernatural crutch? Didn’t I see through both Christianity and Left-wing political ideas that denied the obvious truth that some human beings were more valuable than others? When Nietzsche discussed the Overman, I thought he meant me. Or at least, someone I might one day become. 

In truth, just about anyone else in the world would have been a better candidate. Like Nietzsche, I was smart and introverted, with poor social graces. I had ideas about the opposite sex and what women should or did want, but little practical experience with them. To understand Nietzsche as cope for losers, though, would be to miss out on his continuing relevance.

If many of us began thinking of ourselves as Übermenschen without much evidence, the fault was with us, rather than Nietzsche, whose real message was that although life was ultimately tragic, we were to find meaning in the struggle. He stressed resilience, self-assurance, and emotional and intellectual detachment from the mob. In the Nietzschean worldview, genetic determinism coexists alongside an obsession with individual and collective transformation. We are naturally unequal, but we can all become something better than we currently are. Nietzsche was, to some extent, a 19th-century self-help guru.

Much of the intoxication of reading him comes from his seductive combination of depth and lightness. With the death of God, this world is all we have left, and we must take it seriously. There is profound beauty in the journey toward becoming something better. At the same time, we have no choice but to remain self-aware enough to poke fun at ourselves. (“I no longer trust myself since I aspire to the height, and nobody trusts me any more; how did this happen? I change too fast: my today refutes my yesterday.”) Nietzsche uses humor not in the modern way that avoids judgment or responsibility; rather, his trolling works because the underlying point is deadly serious. He taught that there was hope, and even if you failed, you could get some laughs along the way, many of them at your own expense. What else to make of a man who published an autobiography with chapter titles such as “Why I Am So Wise,” “Why I Am So Clever,” and “Why I Write Such Excellent Books”?

Nietzsche’s ideas today sometimes seem banal, but only because we have fully incorporated his worldview. I now take for granted that humans are often driven by resentment, and the desire to tear things down rather than any positive vision of the good. Also, people aren’t always honest about their motivations, even with themselves, and this is especially true on sensitive and emotional topics like politics, or what a person looks for in a romantic partner. Freud admired Nietzsche and hit on many of the same themes, as does some of the most up-to-date work in psychology and anthropology.

When people make Nietzschean points on X (formerly Twitter), we roll our eyes at the lack of originality. But Nietzsche showed remarkable foresight in understanding the motivations behind socialism in the late 19th century, before it would come to dominate large swaths of the world. The entire 20th century in a sense stands as a testament to his prescience, with one nation after another witnessing Left-wing revolutions descend into barbarism, despite their association with beautiful words and ideals. Echoes of these instincts can be found among wokes and degrowthers, and in the self-pitying rhetoric of the populist Right. Even many stock phrases in use today originate with Nietzsche: “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” and “he who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” 

The other great tragic force of the 20th century was German nationalism, particularly in its most virulent form, Nazism. Nietzsche’s ideas took off in his native country beginning around 1890, and were an inspiration to militarists up to 1945. Pocket editions of Zarathustra were distributed to soldiers on the front lines in World War I, and according to the historian Steven Aschheim, it was among the three most popular books taken into battle, along with Goethe’s Faust and the New Testament. His thought also became an inspiration for the Nazis — this, despite the fact that he opposed anti-Semitism, mocked German nationalism, and condemned conformity and obedience to the state.

As with many continental philosophers, it is often difficult to pin down exactly what Nietzsche believed, and if you start with the assumption that writers will see their work bastardized in the popular imagination, it is easy to understand how Nietzscheism in practice came to be co-opted by fascists. Praise for the salutary effects of war and contempt for weakness are staples of his books. Aschheim writes that although Hitler and his followers appropriated other figures from German history, “the particular Nazi emphasis on Nietzsche derived from his peculiar capacity to legitimate them.” It is no accident, then, that in addition to being praised and cited by Hitler, Nietzsche today has disciples that include race-obsessed far-Right intellectuals like Costin Alamariu, better known as “Bronze Age Pervert.”

Left-leaning adherents of Nietzsche blamed his sister’s appropriation of his legacy after his death for the way he was supposedly misread. Some German nationalists agreed. Ernst Krieck, a prominent Nazi theoretician, sarcastically remarked in 1937 that the only things keeping Nietzsche from being a National Socialist thinker were that he was not a nationalist, not a socialist, and rejected a racial worldview. Nonetheless, such critiques were ignored by Nazi dogma, which promoted the philosopher’s love of war and contempt for Christianity. The most charitable thing one can say about attempts to absolve Nietzsche for his impact on German nationalism is that if a thinker gets interpreted wrongly again and again, he surely deserves at least some of the blame. (Though admittedly, the idea of trying to cancel Nietzsche in his grave strikes me as amusing.)

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The truth is that it has been possible for individuals and movements with wildly contradictory views to embrace Nietzsche. There are postmodern Nietzscheans, nationalist and anti-nationalist Nietzscheans, and, in my heart at least, Nietzschean liberals. This last philosophy accepts his insights into human inequality and the psychology of resentment, while remaining skeptical of his attempts to assert a positive vision that can be imposed on society. Celebrating the idea of a heroic struggle, or one man’s will to overcome obstacles, can be useful in terms of self-improvement or even creating a cultural movement, but such impulses are likely to end in disaster if they are elevated to a governing philosophy.

We continue to see demonstrations of some of the same pitfalls of Nietzscheism today. Somewhere in Silicon Valley, there is a venture capitalist telling himself he is the Overman because he is investing in an app that more efficiently separates sports fans from their money. Nietzsche did not spell out the politics he supported, but he did provide an endless number of quotes that can be easily appropriated by those wanting to commit atrocities. And young people on X and TikTok, particularly those attracted to far-Right influencers, are often getting a bastardized version of Nietzsche, twisted to fit a political agenda. Better to go back to the original source. If you think the lesson of Nietzsche is that he agrees with your politics, it is more likely that you are a member of the rabble than a champion of individualism standing apart from it. 

Still, there are few books that I am certain changed the path of my life, and Zarathustra was one of them. I discovered Nietzsche in an era before iPhones and ubiquitous social media, when something closer to the kind of solitude Zarathustra experienced was still possible. If my feelings of superiority were at first unjustified, over the years, I did develop a genuine — and, I like to think, well-earned — understanding of myself as a lone hero willing to stare down the mob. Seeing myself through the eyes of Zarathustra stamped out any fears of social isolation and rejection, and has allowed me to withstand — and even enjoy — the frequent demands for my banishment from public life. 

If one day the world does reject me, I will return to the void I emerged from, and look back at the whole thing with a laugh. Nietzsche went mad, perhaps from syphilis, but the sense that life is a cosmic joke is so intensely apparent in his writing that I find it difficult to imagine him ever having truly suffered.

Now, the most storied think tank in the history of modern conservatism has fallen.

On Thursday, Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage, took the side of Tucker Carlson in a dispute over the former Fox News host conducting an interview with Fuentes. Roberts declared, “We will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda” and vowed that Carlson would always be a friend of Heritage. Those criticizing Carlson’s interview with Fuentes were part of a “venomous coalition,” Roberts said, that is “sowing division.” While denouncing anti-Semitism and disavowing some of the things Fuentes has said, Roberts argued that he shouldn’t be canceled, but debated.

This was widely seen as a capitulation to the Groypers, coming down on their side over and against those who criticized Tucker’s interview and his more general descent into conspiratorial anti-Semitism. For his part, Fuentes applauded Roberts’s “courage in standing up for open discourse and defending Tucker against the Israel First Woke Right.”

For readers unfamiliar with the term, “Groyper” refers to the loose network of mostly young, male, hard-Right types who orbit around Fuentes, a live-streamer and social-media personality from suburban Chicago. Fuentes built his following through hours-long webcasts mixing irony and an ideology that is a combination of racial nationalism, Christian theocracy, and hostility toward feminism and immigration.

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His supporters call themselves “America First” and have traditionally been Donald Trump supporters. Yet the movement takes cues, above all, from Fuentes himself, who has regularly expressed contempt for JD Vance based on the fact that the vice president and MAGA heir apparent is married to a non-Christian brown woman. At one point, Fuentes asked, “Do we really expect that the guy who has an Indian wife and named their kid Vivek is going to support white identity?” He’s also taken a liking, ironically, to Gavin Newsom, seeing the “beautiful genetics” of the Democratic California governor and his family of four white children as more worthy of praise than Vance’s mixed-race progeny. Fuentes is also known for insights such as the idea that sleeping with women is gay.

This may all seem too absurd to take seriously. Some young people, it will be tempting to tell ourselves, cycle through nutty politics before burning out or settling into grownup conservative or liberal worldviews; there will always be a fringe. But Fuentes has a substantial following, 1 million and growing on X (formerly Twitter), and he increasingly sets the tone for the entire conservative media ecosystem.

One way to see the radicalization of the likes of Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Megyn Kelly is that they are adopting Fuentes-Lite positions on issues like immigration and vaccines. Fuentes has spin-offs and haters throughout the Right-wing influencer ecosystem, including British and Portuguese imitators. There are X personalities whose entire claim to fame revolves around hating him. Watch any event with a prominent conservative speaker these days, and you’ll find Groyper or Groyper-adjacent young men asking the questions that end up going viral on social media. It was indeed this kind of in-person pressure that, as Fuentes has bragged, got Kirk to turn against even legal immigration.

The fact that Heritage, too, has now fallen in line suggests that what we’re seeing is something much more ferocious and remarkable than even the most pessimistic critics of the online Right appreciated. It has led me to conclude that I’ve underestimated not only the pace and extent of the Groyperization of the Right, but also its potential to have a large and lasting effect on our political culture.

The comparison has been made to wokeness taking over the Left beginning in the mid-2010s, through many of the same mechanisms, primarily social-media mobbing of mainstream figures and institutions. But we must consider the possibility that we’re observing something much more capable than wokeness of remaking one side of the political spectrum and thus enduring as a long-term force in American society.

The Roberts statement was prompted by Fuentes sitting down for a friendly chat with Tucker Carlson. Previously, Carlson had expressed contempt for Fuentes, calling him a “weird little gay kid living in his basement in Chicago.” But then Fuentes appeared on a few other podcasts, and it became safe for Carlson to have him on. Carlson predictably forgot all other principles and objections as he did what comes naturally to him: chasing an audience. That’s how you become the top news podcaster in the country, which Carlson is, at least according to Spotify rankings.

If all you see of Carlson these days is a few clips of him saying outlandish things — like that he was attacked by a literal demon — you might think that he, too, has turned into some kind of fringe figure. On the contrary, there are few who are more mainstream within the MAGA movement. Days after Kirk was assassinated, Carlson was speaking with JD Vance about his legacy. He then went on to insinuate, at Kirk’s memorial, that the Jews may have killed him — just as people “eating hummus” in Jerusalem did to another hero 2,000 years ago — while attempting to maintain plausible deniability. Fuentes hilariously mocked the attempted spin, cutting through any supposedly non-invidious interpretation of Tucker’s words (Yes, Fuentes is very funny — unlike Tucker, who switches between brooding and manic laughter directed at things no one else finds funny.)

Tucker matters, perhaps more so than any other media personality on the right, with the possible exception of Fuentes himself. And after attacking Fuentes repeatedly, he deigned to invite him to his show. But how? How can Carlson call someone a gay federal infiltrator one minute and schmooze with him the next? The thing to understand with these people is that it’s all a show. They hit each other over the head with chairs one week, and then the next week team up together. The ultimate thing the audience wants, of course, is for their influencers to encourage people to vote for their kind of Republican — anti-immigration and aligned with MAGA views and aesthetics — even as they enjoy feuds and eccentricities outside of election season.

The same goes for the Vance-Fuentes relationship. I had also assumed that it would be going too far to expect that Fuentes would endorse Vance after attacking his wife on account of her race and religion. Now that seems silly. Of course, he will likely endorse Vance, or at least not go full Newsom. It’s fun for Groypers in 2025 to gush about Newsom’s beautiful white family and hint that they’re going to jump ship at the prospect of an Indian First Lady. But that’s just an angle to create a new storyline and keep the show exciting. Raise tensions, rant about how much Vance sucks, and then perhaps make a big show of allying when he denounces Indian immigration strongly enough in time for the 2028 primaries.

To wit, Vance was recently grilled at the University of Mississippi by a Groyper type about having a non-Christian wife. Already, the vice president feels the need to reassure his supporters that his wife wasn’t raised in a religious household, contrary to what she herself has previously said. While once talking positively about being in an interfaith marriage, he now knows that there is a not insubstantial portion of his base that finds Hinduism strange, if not downright demonic, and his wife has become a political liability.

The only thing that might stand in the way of Vance and Fuentes being on the same side in 2028 is Fuentes’s own cantankerousness. He has an independent streak — in October 2024 he said he wouldn’t vote for Trump — while Vance would abandon almost any previously cherished principle if it raised his chances of being president by a few percentage points on Polymarket.

We’re at the start of something, not the end of it. This is more like wokeness in 2014 than wokeness in 2022. And to make a comparison to wokeness might be underselling it. I would point to three factors that potentially make Groyperism stronger.

First, the appeal of wokeness was always largely astroturfed. The woke relied on censorship and nonstop propaganda from elite institutions. Relatively few Americans bought into the craziest ideas about race and gender. Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility may have sold more than a million copies, but Carlson has nearly five million subscribers on YouTube. I asked ChatGPT how many podcast downloads he gets per episode, and it came up with a figure somewhere in the range of 4 million to 8 million (8 million to 15 million, if you include video). Candace Owens is in the same ballpark. And these are actual fans, not people encouraged to buy a book for a class or h.r. seminar.

We’ve never seen numbers like this for anything affiliated with wokeness, which was a hysteria driven by individuals in the rarefied fields of journalism, academia, and activism. They were always outnumbered in the rest of the country, and relied on being able to control powerful institutions and the informational ecosystem.

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The second point is related: namely, that Right-wing radicalism taps into human nature in a way that wokeness never could. From a historical perspective, large numbers of young people wanting to experiment with a different gender is quite odd. Usually, males and females seek to portray and cultivate traits that are attractive to the opposite sex. Members of a majority group supporting discrimination against themselves is likewise unnatural, but this has always been core to DEI and the ideology of white guilt. One of the reasons that cancel culture was so intense was that proponents were always pushing against people’s preexisting inclinations; we were bound for a correction.

But racism, sexism, tribalism, homophobia, and religious fundamentalism are organic parts of our souls, and can dominate societies for centuries. While most Americans aren’t inclined toward a Groyper worldview, it does seem strong enough to take over one half of the political spectrum in a country with a great deal of education polarization. And while there were ballot-box backlashes against wokeness, the Right becoming more crudely populist has been associated with relatively high levels of electoral success.

Finally, the Right lacks the institutional guardrails to contain Groyperization. The culture of the Left is shaped by elite institutions, like universities and major media outlets, in addition to labor unions, professional associations, and nonprofits. During the Great Awokening, these institutions were often taken over by aggressive upstarts speaking the language of academic seminars, and their leaders would repeat the magic words demanded by identity-focused activists. At the same time, the institutional framework in which these battles took place allowed for pushback from within. The New York Times editorial board is capable, for example, of gently shifting away from trans extremism. Universities can adopt free-speech policies, as many have done, in response to both internal and external pressure.

In contrast, it is unclear in what format moderates on the right would take on the fringes. Individuals like Owens, Fuentes, and Carlson — in addition to countless lesser influencers — get their power directly from the audience and, as a result, place real pressure on politicians. There is no Groyper faculty senate where people can get together and vote to condemn anti-Semitism in the same way that leaders of the University of Michigan decided to take a step back from DEI. Robin DiAngelo is no longer cited in the media, and Ibram X. Kendi’s antiracist center was closed down. Without institutional support, their power and influence have waned. By contrast, the podcaster who reflects and shapes the minds of the most engaged GOP voters can’t in a similar way lose his place at the center of political discourse.

Could the Republican voter ultimately be a check on all this? Doubtful. Right-wing media’s political atmosphere should generally be taken as predictive of what the Right-wing electorate will do. The Republican base loves Trump and flocks to news sources like Owens, Carlson, and an increasingly conspiratorial and demon-obsessed Megyn Kelly. Thus, there is little reason to think the party’s core electorate will act as much of a moderating force.

One factor working in the opposite direction is that Groyperization has occurred among the relatively weak and disempowered. One could therefore argue that Left-wing identitarianism is naturally more influential. The truth of this consolation, however, has diminished over the last several years. Radicalized Republicans are appointing similarly radical people to top positions, and there’s relatively little educated elites can do about it.

Nonetheless, the ongoing elite status of the Left suggests that at least when Republicans don’t control the federal government, Groyperization will be less powerful. We won’t see something like Trump’s first term, in which the president was Right-wing but the political Left was so mobilized that the culture moved in the opposite direction from the one that the government was pushing. I have been accurately foreseeing the Groyperization of the Right for a while now, and when I have been wrong, it’s always been in the direction of underestimating how much the conservative coalition has changed, and how quickly things are shifting towards conspiratorial ethno-populism. At points, I assumed that there was still a Republican establishment that could exercise a positive influence on Trump and Trumpians — hence, my endorsement of him last year — and it turned out that this largely wasn’t the case.

If there is any hope of effective resistance against the direction of travel, it needs to come from a powerfully influential individual leader. It can’t be Trump, as it is as difficult to imagine him making coherent arguments as it is to imagine him taking a stand against his base for the greater good. By contrast, Vance, as the presumptive heir, is articulate and has been viciously attacked by the Groypers.

While he has denounced Fuentes in passing, the vice president is capable of making a much more passionate case against those he considers political enemies when motivated to do so. What is needed is something like a speech denouncing Groyperism, rather than a quick criticism followed by a pivot towards attacking the Left or the media. Up to this point, the vice president has never found it in his political interest to go after any substantial part of the conservative coalition. While he would clearly much rather avoid the energetic wrath of the Groypers, if things continue on their current path, they might leave him with no other choice.

Unfortunately, as conservatives position themselves for the post-Trump future, there are indications that what is coming is likely to be much worse: more conspiratorial, hostile to institutions, and beholden to a pinched and angry nationalism. If anything, Trump has been a moderating force against these tendencies. After him, the deluge.

Consider that last month, the surgeon general of Florida, Dr. Joseph Lapado, and allied legislators announced a sweeping plan to eliminate all childhood vaccine mandates. Lapado declared that even long-established requirements for diseases like chickenpox, hepatitis B, and the like “drip with disdain and slavery.” Within days, the proposal began to collapse under political pressure, especially after Trump himself criticized the idea. This forced Sunshine State health authorities to backtrack, converting the plan into a more limited rollback of a few optional immunizations, while leaving core school-entry vaccines intact for now.

The idea of Trump as a moderating force within the GOP might seem absurd at first glance. Yet this is only one of many data points suggesting that he is, in fact, holding back some of the worst impulses and brainstorms pushed by figures who have now gained control over American conservatism.  

There are two indicators we may look for in forecasting the future of a movement. The first involves examining areas in which the base and its spokesmen show resistance against the ultimate leader. There is a natural tendency to defer to the leader of a party, but tensions always exist between him, those in the middle ranks, and the base, and where the pressure points are can tell us something.

This method would have accurately predicted the Republican Party’s hard turn against immigration in the aftermath of the Bush and McCain era, during which talk radio helped dash proposals for a grand bargain supported by GOP elites. We’ve seen something similar on the Democratic side over the last year, with the party mainstream abandoning support for the Israeli war effort in response to pressure from the Left flank.

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The other method involves assessing a movement’s information ecosystem. I would argue that this is a more useful guide than general public opinion within a party, since most people aren’t thinking about most issues most of the time, and it is the opinion-forming class of today within each that shapes what normies will care and vote about tomorrow. On the Democratic side, the relevant elites are the prestige press and the liberal activist class; for Republicans, it’s Fox News, major podcasts, and the community of Right-wing influencers on “X” (formerly Twitter).

Both indicators suggest that the post-Trump GOP will be more conspiratorial, more deeply in thrall to pseudoscience, and more likely to hold uncompromising attitudes toward immigrants and political opponents.

Consider how the GOP base itself has often resisted Trump when he has strayed from its instincts. At the height of the pandemic and for years after, he touted the success of Operation Warp Speed, which invented the mRNA vaccines used against Covid. Trump also encouraged his supporters to take the jabs, only to be met with boos at rallies and open defiance from talk radio and online influencers, forcing him into a sheepish retreat.

More recently, conservative media have been buzzing with demands to release the Epstein files, a subject Trump has largely ignored, given his past associations. Yet the online Right remains unrelenting in its obsession with the issue, even generating memes that characterize Trump as a “pedo protector.”

When it comes to high-skilled immigration, meanwhile, Trump has sometimes gestured toward Silicon Valley’s and corporate America’s desire for more engineers and programmers. Yet grassroots activists, talk-radio hosts, and social-media influencers have maintained fierce anti-immigration pressure, ensuring that any liberalizing reform will be met with an immediate backlash.

Such episodes highlight that there is more to Republican politics now than simple deference to Trump himself. There is a populist current that will outlive him, and it rewards conspiracy-minded narratives and punishes any gesture toward compromise on the immigration issue.

Note that the backlash isn’t coming in response to Trump’s glaring corruption, such as engaging in crypto scams and accepting a private jet from the Qataris. Nor does the base seem all that exercised by cuts to Medicaid and other entitlements, contrary to the expectations of disappointed populists like Sohrab Ahmari and Oren Cass. That’s not where the GOP base’s heart lies. Instead, it’s immigration and the threat posed by shadowy, vaccine-pushing elites, which include all Democrats and any elected Republicans who fail to go full-bore MAGA. 

The trajectory of Right-wing media is similarly instructive. According to Spotify, the top-four news podcasts today are The Tucker Carlson Show, The Daily from The New York Times, Candace, and Up First from National Public Radio. This supports the general conclusion that Democrats listen to traditional media elites, while Republicans have influencers.

What distinguishes the Right’s influencers at the most basic level isn’t policy outside the aforementioned exceptions of immigration and vaccines — when was the last time you heard Candace Owens’s position on the size of government? — but a general conspiratorial outlook. Carlson has argued that UFOs are interdimensional demons and has spent the weeks since Charlie Kirk’s death hinting that Israel was behind the assassination. Owens is being sued by Brigitte Macron for promoting the idea that France’s first lady was born a man.

Right-of-center influencers who want to climb the rankings must follow this deranged path. Megyn Kelly is also among the top-10 news influencers, albeit toward the bottom at No. 9. Perhaps to boost her audience, she has begun to warn about demons interfering in earthly affairs and implying that vaccines cause autism, deep truths supposedly covered up by the mainstream media. She also declares that she does not care about reports that border czar Tom Homan was allegedly caught on tape receiving a $50,000 cash bribe, as long as he is tough enough on illegal migrants. A once sensible media voice detects which way the wind is blowing, and has changed her views accordingly. 

To be sure, the GOP will be better off without some of Trump’s worst flaws. The cult-like aspect of his movement meant that large numbers of people could look past any level of personal corruption and even storm the Capitol on his behalf. It is difficult to imagine JD Vance or Ron DeSantis acting this way after losing an election, or inspiring thousands of people to risk their physical safety and freedom in a misinformation-fueled effort to keep either of them in office.

But Trump also has a pragmatic streak and common sense when it comes to issues like vaccines and immigration, and whether conspiracy theories are credible. His base, in contrast, makes hostility to foreigners and distrust of the liberal establishment central to its worldview, and the figures that are most successful among conservative audiences reflect the kind of content that Republican-leaning listeners and viewers find compelling. 

If there are countervailing forces within the Republican Party they remain mostly hidden for now. In fairness, mainstream Republicans have put pressure on RFK over his anti-vaccine positions, and likely have stopped the Department of Health and Human Services from embracing pseudoscience even more than it has. When Trump has tried to prosecute his enemies on flimsy pretexts, he has encountered resistance even among his appointees. In order to get his indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, the president had to push out his own US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia and replace him with one of his personal lawyers, over the objections of his top-two officials at the Department of Justice, one of whom had also served as his personal lawyer. 

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As with Jan. 6 and the events leading up to it, it is difficult to imagine a similar story involving any other Republican leader. Trump is an outlier both in terms of how flawed he is as an individual, and also in the kind of personal grip he maintains on the GOP base. Top attorneys in the executive branch aren’t Twitter influencers, and have their own code of ethics and professional norms. They will resist a leader who tries to get them to do things that are too far outside of the bounds of legality and established norms. Still, working under Trump makes the ability to draw red lines much more difficult.

Yet when it comes to conspiratorial thinking and anti-foreigner scapegoating, the demand is organic and likely to persist even after Trump. Partly, this is the result of a more general political realignment of which Trump is both a cause and symptom. While people with less formal education and low levels of trust, two predictors of conspiratorial thinking, used to be somewhat divided between the parties, they have now consolidated on the Right, as the decline of gatekeepers allows them to have more of a voice in our politics. The Trump cult in certain ways puts a lid on such instincts, but even as he maintains control over the GOP, divisions between the leader and the base still occasionally rise to the surface. 

 After Trump, the conservative movement will find itself at a crossroads, but one that is unlikely to point back toward moderation or institutional responsibility. Trump’s departure, whenever it comes, won’t mean a simple reversion to pre-2016 norms, because the forces he has unleashed and the informational environment that sustains them are larger than the man himself.

The two lenses for understanding the party’s trajectory — pushback against the leader and the informational ecosystem — reveal the general direction of travel: namely, conspiratorial populism. Elites who try to resist their base, as we saw with immigration reform under George W. Bush or Trump’s attempt to promote vaccines for the sake of his own ego gratification, are quickly punished, and those who play to fanatical audiences are the most richly rewarded.  

When Trump exits the stage, what remains will be a Republican Party still driven by grievance and suspicion — minus a major check on where those impulses can lead.

Yet this particular animus — hostility to Indians and Indian-Americans — isn’t “just” an online shitposting phenomenon. It reflects the Right’s shifting reception of South Asians: from an affluent, hard-working minority to a group that takes your jobs and despoils your neighborhoods.

Conservative influencers and politicians have decided that Indian immigration is a problem. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently appeared on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show to say that too many Indians coming in as H-1Bs is a reason to be against the program. Ingraham herself warns that “any trade deal with India will require us to give them more visas.” Steve Bannon has similarly called for a complete halt to the H-1B program, saying “instead of stapling a green card to their diploma, staple an exit visa.” 

This is a strange development. Conservatives have long recited a litany of complaints about immigration, and none of them appears to apply to Indians. Conservatives worry about illegal immigration showing contempt for the law, or low-skilled new arrivals committing crimes or becoming dependent on welfare. There are often complaints about a failure of assimilation or the threat of terrorism from Muslim arrivals. But Indians are among the highest earning ethnic groups in the country. According to one study, they make up less than 2% of the population, but pay 5% to 6% of all federal income taxes. Their crime rate is negligible, and there is no history of them committing terrorist attacks or contributing to anti-Semitism. 

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This leaves the wages argument, which rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of economics. The idea that wages need to be protected from competition rests on what economists call the “lump-of-labor” fallacy, which assumes that there is only a set amount of work to be done. On the contrary, economists have found that new arrivals increase jobs by boosting aggregate demand, and can contribute to the expansion of an industry.

It is common for people to fall for economic fallacies, and this doesn’t always involve them having racist motivations. Yet the way this one is selectively applied to Indians suggests that the roots of such views lie elsewhere. For example, even if conservatives believe in the lump-of-labor fallacy, why do they then spend their time complaining about migrants who don’t work? 

Imagine someone waved a magic wand and a large share of the Latino immigrants whom conservatives have traditionally opposed suddenly started getting higher standardized test scores and became tech workers. Wouldn’t everyone agree that this is a desirable outcome? Conservatives are having it both ways: people who don’t work or are in low-wage jobs are harming the country because they use welfare; people in white-collar professions are harming Americans because they compete in the labor market. This is broadly an anti-human way of looking at the world, one which would suggest that public policy should be aimed at shrinking the population, and that there is basically no way any group of newcomers could ever make a contribution to the country. Heads we win, tails they lose.

Yet conservatives are usually not zero-sum thinkers in other contexts. They are mostly for higher birth rates, free markets, and economic growth. How to explain this discrepancy? What we are witnessing is the Groyperification of the GOP: its spiritual takeover by the followers of the admittedly racist and anti-Semitic online personality Nick Fuentes, who wields a vast influence on Zoomer men, especially. 

Anyone who has spent any time engaging in Right-wing circles online knows that there is a fanatical hatred of Indians, which erupted around Christmas in a long-running argument on H-1B immigration between Elon Musk and X personalities who had previously been in his camp. Memes about “street shitters” — the notion that Indians defecate in public — are a dime a dozen, and garner hundreds and sometimes thousands of likes. 

Due to this energy, mainstream-media figures, activists, and politicians on the Right are going where the most excited portion of the base is. Laura Ingraham wants viewers; Bannon is reportedly gearing up for his own presidential run; and Ron DeSantis wants to be covered favorably by figures like Ingraham when he runs for president again. The online Groyper in the comments section is at the bottom of this pyramid. His arguments might have to crawl out the gutter and be made presentable before they’re ready for Fox News or a presidential debate stage. But in the end, he gets what he wants. 

As someone who grew up familiar with the leading lights of the American conservative movement, it was particularly striking for me to hear people like Senator Eric Schmitt discussing immigration as a threat to future generations of Americans, for no other reason than that they compete for jobs. One of my first exposures to economics was reading the books of Thomas Sowell, the celebrated conservative intellectual, who eviscerated the anti-human philosophy of famed environmentalist Paul Ehrlich, a zero-sum thinker known for population-control arguments based on ecological considerations. Still today, tributes to Sowell and dunks on Ehrlich are regularly seen on X. Yet now, conservatives regularly reach for Ehrlich-type arguments to argue against Indian immigration. 

The best way to understand the development of anti-Indian attitudes is as part of the broader trend in which small but highly motivated extremist factions online end up shaping the conservative discourse. Groypers in particular are a relatively small group of activists, but they’ve proved capable of pushing around major figures in the movement.  

The New York Times just profiled Fuentes, noting that officials and advisers to the administration “would not be quoted for the record about Mr. Fuentes out of fear, they said, of inviting online attacks from him and his zealous followers.” There is a common understanding that this is where the energy of the party is, and anyone who is not a Groyper or white nationalist must tread carefully when discussing the movement. While open racial hate is still taboo in Republican circles, nobody with national ambitions can take a position in favor of high-skilled immigration at odds with the views of white nationalists.

This dynamic is crucial to understanding why Indians have become a target. The typical normie Republican doesn’t particularly dislike Indians. But the online Right does, and it produces an endless stream of propaganda reframing anti-Indian sentiment as economic populism — talking about wages and corporate power instead of openly expressing racial animus in the style of Fuentes and other white nationalist influencers. Regular Republicans encounter these ideas in Fox News clips or election-season talking points, without ever realizing their origins in online subcultures. 

The story of how opposition to Indian immigration became standard in Republican discourse is a microcosm of what has happened to the right more generally. 

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More typical GOP voters  may still think of themselves as simply conservative, patriotic, or skeptical of elites. But they are operating in a discourse increasingly structured by online extremists. The same way Ron Paul’s internet following fed into the Tea Party, how birtherism and fear of demographic change fed into Trumpism, or how conspiratorial thinking about Epstein and QAnon narratives bled into the GOP mainstream, the anti-Indian rhetoric reflects a fringe obsession metastasizing into national politics. Similarly, while the Covid vaccines were once championed by every major Republican politician and supported by the majority of the public, no ambitious Republican would dare say a positive word about them today.  

The process works because there simply isn’t much of an audience pushing in the other direction. The largest Right-wing influencers display some combination of adherence to the Trump Cult, hostility to outsiders that has roots in white-nationalist sympathies, and proneness towards conspiratorial thinking. Intellectuals and influencers partial to classical liberalism, technocracy, or old-school conservative principles have much less power. In the end, it’s all about the audience. The Right, increasingly the home of the distrustful, paranoid and less educated, without serious newspapers or intellectual influences, is drawn to racist and conspiratorial thinking, which is constantly being laundered through new arguments into the Republican mainstream.

Opposition to Indian immigration is a clarifying issue. When it comes to Chinese arrivals, there is at least a national-security concern one can point to which, if sometimes pretextual, isn’t completely devoid of reason and contrary to supposed conservative principles. With Indians, however, we confront a perfect group for testing whether conservative opposition to immigration has a rational basis or is ultimately rooted in the lowest forms of bigotry. 

If you think that Republican politics will go back to something close to normal after Trump, this issue also serves as a wakeup call. Pay attention to what goes on in the comments section on X, and what gets discussed on Nick Fuentes’s livestream. If you do, you’ll get a glimpse of the future of conservatism, and the kinds of rhetoric and policies Republican normies will be supporting before long. 

One might be tempted to conclude from this data that voters simply agree with Republicans more on the issues. The real story is more complicated. What Democrats are lacking isn’t so much the right policy package, but a demonstrated willingness to stand up to Donald Trump and his agenda in the second term. The issue, moreover, is less one of increasing Democratic unpopularity, than Republicans weathering a general decline in trust in institutions due to the unique connection Trump has with a significant minority of the country. Democrats cannot break this bond; they can only hope to mobilize the forces against it.

Consider polling about specific bills. Last month, Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill, the signature legislation of his second term thus far. On average, it had a net approval rating of -23, making it the second most unpopular major piece of legislation under consideration since 1990, only beating out the 2017 GOP health-care bill. In contrast, Biden’s infrastructure bill was at +39 when it was polled.

Put another way: When asked about specific pieces of legislation, voters prefer the Democratic approach of higher spending on infrastructure and social services to Republicans’ spending cuts that only partially offset tax cuts disproportionately favoring the wealthiest Americans.

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Nate Silver’s tracking of polls finds Trump’s approval rating to be underwater by double digits on inflation, trade, and the economy. Immigration is Trump’s strongest issue, but even here, net approval is currently at -3. To be sure, the Journal poll shows Republicans to be more trusted on issues like immigration and the economy. Meanwhile, YouGov in May found nine issues where Democrats had an advantage, and 10 where Republicans did. It’s difficult to know what to make of polls showing that voters agree more with Democratic tax-and-spending bills than those favored by Republicans, while at the same time Republicans are more trusted on the economy as an abstract issue. Another contradiction: while Americans dislike Trump’s tariffs, and one would think that Democrats represent a return to the status quo, they still trust Republicans equally as much as Democrats or more on the issue. This shouldn’t be logically possible, and probably again reflects voters not thinking too carefully about their political attitudes.

Issue polling is, in short, a mess. Although we can draw broad lessons about which party owns specific policy areas, I would be hesitant to use it in order to make inferences regarding recent changes in how Americans view Democrats and Republicans.

So if not policy, what does explain the sorry state of the Democrats? It would be one thing if they were cratering with Independents. That would suggest that they are simply out of step with the majority of Americans. In fact, the party leadership is reaching new lows because it faces discontent among its base. In the CNN poll cited above, only 58% of Democratic-aligned adults have a favorable view of their party, compared to 76% of Republicans. Morris and Radcliffe point to a Strength in Numbers/Verasite poll showing that Left-wing Democratic voters are disproportionately unhappy: about 20% of self-identified “very liberal” Democrats now have an unfavorable view of their own party, far higher than the equivalent disaffection among “very conservative” Republicans, who are at 8%. If you factor out this Left-flank discontent, Democratic approval would rise by a net of eight points. In the Strength in Numbers poll, Democrats actually do better with Independents.

The Republican advantage, then, seems mostly or completely driven by very liberal voters not liking the current Democratic Party. Does that mean that, in order to match Republicans in popularity, all Democrats would have to do is move Left? Unfortunately for them, surveys indicate that their voters would like them to do precisely the opposite.

According to a February poll from Gallup, as of early 2025, only 22% of Democrats were content with the party’s current ideological approach — everyone else wanted change. Crucially, 45% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning Independents said the party should become more moderate, while 29% wanted it to be more liberal or progressive. Among Republicans, in contrast, a healthy plurality of 43% was satisfied with the party and wanted it to stay the course.

What this means is that Democrats might need to think twice before simply trying to satisfy the most extreme voices among their base. Otherwise, they may lose moderate voters in the process, as more of their supporters want them to take a centrist path.

There is nothing all that mysterious about any of this. No matter where the Democrats are ideologically, voters could disapprove of the party from either side. A very liberal Democratic voter and a moderate one might both have gripes, which you would expect in a large, diverse country with only two major parties representing the entire political spectrum.

Perhaps it is a mistake, then, to focus on Democratic unpopularity. Maybe the question we should ask is why Republican approval remains so high among its base, in an era where trust in institutions is collapsing. The Trump-era GOP has taken radically unpopular positions on taxing and spending policy. Yet the Republican base seems to shrug everything off and remains malleable, seemingly due to Trump’s unique charisma. A KFF tracking poll shows that while only 61% of Republicans approved of the Big Beautiful Bill in June, that figure had risen to 78% in July.

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Republican politicians now regularly justify their actions based on the idea that they follow the will of Trump. Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma was more explicit than most when he said that he fought against releasing Epstein documents in order to give Trump “cover,” arguing that Democrats would use any information that came out to target the president. Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, when praising the recent trade deal with South Korea, urged his followers to “Trust in Trump”. A recent New York Times headline reads: “Texas Republicans Unveil Gerrymandered House Map, Trying to Please Trump,” showing that the president’s influence reaches down to what have traditionally been state and local issues.

The behavior of the current Congress has been downright cult-like. As the Associated Press reports, a raft of GOP proposals would allow Americans to “take the day off work for Donald Trump’s birthday,” receive “a $100 bill with Trump’s portrait on it,” and land at “Donald J. Trump International Airport near the nation’s capital,” among other similar measures.

It’s easy to feel contempt for politicians here. But we can assume that they are simply following their voters, who really love this man. Trump’s approval remains sky high in a party that was famous for turning on its leaders in Congress throughout the Obama era. Since 2023, researchers at Vanderbilt University have been asking Republicans if they consider themselves more supporters of MAGA or the traditional GOP. The first time they posed the question, 37% of respondents reported that they feel MAGA first. Today, the MAGA-first group is at 52%.

This is particularly interesting because MAGA is notoriously flexible when it comes to ideology. Those who consider themselves more intellectual Trumpists have no shortage of complaints about the president, from his bombing of Iran to his Medicaid cuts. A popular meme shows Trump implementing tariffs and being praised for it by a cartoon supporter in a red hat, who then turns around and declares “art of the deal” every time he removes the levies.

The story of falling Democratic popularity relative to Republicans is therefore only partly a story about Democrats. We are in an era of declining trust, which afflicts nearly all institutions, from the media to Congress to the medical system. Of course, the two major political parties are likely to take a hit under those conditions. Yet Republicans are buoyed by a cult of personality that is largely impervious to the effects of bad news or unpopular policy positions.

According to the Wall Street Journal poll, Republicans are currently about where they were in 2010 in terms of net favorability. Meanwhile, Democrats have seen an almost continuous decline. Thus, the notion that Trump is a drag on the GOP likely gets things exactly backwards. While his overall popularity might be underwater, what distinguishes Trump from other politicians is his ability to hold a base of support among a substantial and unshakable minority of the American people. This rubs off on the rest of the GOP, as long as lesser Republicans are seen to be doing the bidding of their leader.

That doesn’t mean all hope is lost for Democrats. While the party is indeed divided on whether it should become more moderate or liberal, there is greater unity on standing up to Trump. In a March poll that asked Democrats how they would grade their party’s response to Trump, 70% gave them a C or lower, with 21% giving an F. Only 17% said that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was doing enough to fight Trump; 61% felt he wasn’t doing enough. Democratic voters overwhelmingly support efforts like trying to block Trump’s actions through the courts and engaging in mass protests.

It follows that Democratic elected officials can likely shore up their own base of support by standing together against Trump’s political priorities. Would that possibly hurt them with Independents? One can’t say for sure, but given that Trump’s overall approval rating is underwater, it isn’t as if they would be going against the tide of public opinion. And Republicans are already extremely polarized against Democrats, and likely to stay that way, given their increasingly propagandistic media-consumption habits.

Trump’s role in the national psyche is so overwhelming that nearly every major political story is, at heart, a story about Trump. Republicans believe what they believe largely based on what Trump says and does. The Democrats are now a party that is ideologically divided, but united in opposition to Trump.

Given the fact that Trump’s base can’t be moved, Democrats might as well show life and pull out all the stops to oppose his agenda. On policy and messaging, it probably makes sense to moderate, rather than move to the Left. On anti-Trump opposition, however, the party must be resolute. In other words, Democrats need a centrism that fights. As the Republican Party becomes more and more enthralled to one man and his personal agenda, there is little to be gained by hoping to appease the other side.

Oppositional centrism would shore up the Democrats’ own base, and likely has the best chance of winning over the small number of Americans who are still persuadable. MAGAs will find a reason to be angry regardless. In order to thrive in the face of an increasingly unified opposition, Democrats cannot keep living in fear of the backlash that might result from standing up to Trump.

The fight over housing reform exposed a deep divide between the elite discourse-shaping class — those aligned with YIMBYism and the new “abundance” movement — and the older, activist-driven wing of liberalism that is parochial and operating on autopilot, directed by the concerns of a previous era. This latter group primarily wants to preserve local control and community character, even if it comes at the cost of affordability and housing availability. Animated by habit and identity and disconnected from wider debates taking place, it has long stood in the way of reform.

Newsom’s success, along with other recent YIMBY efforts across the country, suggests that in key policy areas, liberalism may be slowly shedding some of its self-imposed constraints. Understanding the conflict between an intellectually engaged elite and grassroots activists stuck in outdated paradigms is key to making sense of current battles within the American Left.

At the end of June, as part of the yearly budget process, Newsom signed two bills which mark the state’s most significant shift on housing in at least a generation. CEQA was enacted in 1970 to ensure that state and local agencies assess, disclose, and mitigate the environmental impacts of development projects. Over time, it came to be used to delay or block new housing, especially in urban areas. The new reforms limit the reach of the law by, among other changes, exempting the majority of multifamily infill housing projects, limiting the grounds for lawsuits, and streamlining review processes for qualifying developments.

Showing the importance of elite discourse, in his speech announcing the signing, Gavin Newsom thanked YIMBYs for their “abundant mindset,” adding that this was a “plug to Ezra.” For those unfamiliar with internal squabbling within the liberal coalition, this is a reference to the book Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, which was released this year and has caused a rift among left-leaning activists and intellectuals.

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At the same time, a coalition of over 100 environmental groups sent a letter calling Newsom’s changes “the worst anti-environmental bill in California in recent memory.” Organized labor also put up a fight, demanding certain carve outs as part of the reforms, at one point “fill[ing] a hearing room at the state Capitol mocking, yelling, and storming out at points while lawmakers went over the details of Newsom’s plan.”

As someone who has tried to understand the Left from outside the coalition, I’ve been fascinated watching this debate unfold. Abundance is highly readable and convincing, especially to someone with a pro-market orientation. On the housing issue in particular, we have built too little for too long, and, as Klein and Thompson point out, there’s a reason that Republican states are more affordable places to live.

Yet little that they said on this topic was surprising. Before the book came out, these arguments had been circulating for years in liberal media. Freddie deBoer expresses frustration that NIMBYs appear to be completely shut out of the discourse, estimating that pro-YIMBY perspectives are heard in mainstream media outlets by a ratio of at least 10 to 1. So what took so long? And why did so much of the organized Left still unite in opposition to California housing reforms?

The Right-wing political theorist Curtis Yarvin famously uses the term “the Cathedral” to describe what he sees as the informal but powerful ideological and institutional complex that shapes public opinion and policy in Western democracies. Under this theory, the Cathedral had a position on housing, politicians in California realized what it was, and acted accordingly. But somehow the memo had not trickled down to organized groups within the liberal coalition. While the Cathedral just notched a major victory, it was difficult and long delayed. State Senator Scott Wiener has credited Governor Newsom for putting his political capital on the line in order to enact the recent reforms.

When I recently interviewed Derek Thompson, I asked him about this divide on the Left. He responded that the key variable is age. Older Leftists grew up in a world in which ideas about overpopulation were taken seriously and development was seen as infringing on unspoiled nature. This was the time when Paul Ehrlich’s dire warnings about overpopulation and coming famines were staples of TV and radio. Younger people, in contrast, realize that housing costs have gotten out of control, and that housing is a fundamental issue facing members of their generation as they seek to build a life.

What all of this reveals is that the concept of the Cathedral, or any framework that sees the establishment in monolithic terms, needs to be unbundled. Take a look at the environmental groups that opposed housing reform. Aside from a few exceptions, most of the rest are completely obscure, even to policy wonks.

Some have names like Green Latinos and Senior & Disability Action, organized around the logic of identity politics. Many, however, are hyper local, calling themselves Alianza Coachella Valley, Los Angeles Waterkeeper, or Sierra County Land Trust. They don’t necessarily have the support of The New York Times. But they represent the priorities of liberals with money and a desire to work in the field of activism.

These people are evergreen activists, far from the intellectual currents of their own party. We may call them practitioners of Curb Your Enthusiasm liberalism. One of the recurring themes in the early seasons of the show was Cheryl Hines, Larry David’s wife, dragging him to charity events and parties with do-gooder activists. The class her friends represented were mocked for their vapidity and virtue signalling. In “The Anonymous Donor,” for example, Larry is vilified for wanting public credit for his donation, while another donor who goes by “anonymous” is celebrated, even as it turns out that he made sure his identity was whispered throughout social gatherings.

Probably not accidentally, since art is often an exaggerated portrayal of real life, the actress who played Cheryl Hines is married to RFK Jr, who spent much of his life an anti-development environmental activist before becoming better known for his views on vaccines and public health. It’s tempting to speculate that such activists might begin to feel more at home among the GOP in the future, given that RFK is now part of the Trump administration, and some of the most strident resistance to YIMBYism in blue states comes from Republican politicians.

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This demographic tends not to incorporate much new information from the wider world. They are enamored with a few narratives like the need to always be “doing more” to protect the environment, ready to also latch on to new causes like covid safety-ism and wokeness when they detect a cultural shift that is too large to ignore. And yes, they are often very old, with a lot of time on their hands.

While the NYT, Harvard, and other shapers of the discourse often get the blame for what has gone wrong with liberalism, the story of housing reform shows how problems are often caused from below. Both Curb your Enthusiasm-style Leftists and readers of Abundance can be considered liberal elites, yet while YIMBY journalists engage in high-level persuasion, those who provide money and support to most Left-wing activist groups are channeling the ideas of intellectuals and journalists of a previous generation.

In the long run, it is those who engage in the world of ideas who often triumph on the Left. But they face formidable foes among activists in the short term. The battle over Covid restrictions seems to have been another instance where these two classes were at odds. Schools remained closed to full-time, in-person learning for much longer than elite media messaging supported such an approach.

Yarvinism is right in the sense that a few prestigious media outlets and educational establishments have an outsized role in shaping discourse; but it’s too conspiratorial in its outlook. It implies internal cohesion, centrally planned messaging, and doors being closed to outsiders, when in reality, liberal institutions are often undermined by activist groups. A better model here would be Jürgen Habermas’ theory of communicative action, with democratic legitimacy coming from rational-critical deliberation among citizens.

California is finally waking up from its self-imposed crisis. The enemies of progress have often not been the liberals most prominent in public discourse who get the most attention from conservatives, but vain, superficial, and parochial interests that seek to extract rents and signal virtue to others in their social circle while imposing costs on the rest of society. Gavin Newsom took on this class and won. He’ll have a powerful story to tell in the likely event he runs for president in 2028.

It is also a case study in the weaknesses of the Trump movement’s simplistic approach to punishing enemies, and how instincts that can be healthy in one situation can be disastrous in another.

Partly, the delay in disbursing funds has been caused by a combination of incompetence and the time it’s taken to scrutinize research projects for “DEI” and other politically disfavored themes. Nonetheless, as if to leave no doubt of its ultimate intentions, the White House is proposing a budget that would cut funding for the NSF by 57%, and for the National Institutes of Health by 40%. Cancelling grants to Harvard while making impossible demands is another sign that the administration doesn’t think that support for science is worthwhile, as is its crusade against foreign students.

This is a bizarre set of priorities in light of what the empirical research says about American science, and even the nature of the forces that supported Trump’s 2024 campaign: above all, the Tech Right. Of the 210 drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration from 2010 to 2016, every single one was connected in some way to NIH funding. Qualitative estimates tend to find massive returns on investment.

The benefits of American innovation go well beyond pharmaceuticals. Seminal advances in artificial intelligence, from deep-learning algorithms to foundational natural language processing models, often trace back to basic research funded by the NSF and the Department of Defense. mRNA vaccine technology — which enabled the rapid response to Covid despite its current poor reputation on the Right — drew on decades of NIH-backed research into RNA biology and lipid nanoparticle delivery systems.

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The Human Genome Project not only transformed biomedical science, but catalyzed entire new industries in genomics and precision medicine. The Global Positioning System, initially developed by the Department of Defense, underpins modern navigation, logistics, agriculture, and ride-sharing platforms. Even touchscreens and voice assistants depend on publicly supported breakthroughs in materials science and speech recognition. Far from being wasteful, these investments are the root infrastructure for entire sectors of the 21st-century economy.

Moreover, a major political theme of the last few years has been the rise of the Tech Right, which preaches a positive attitude toward science and innovation. Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” is perhaps the most famous document reflecting this outlook. Many believed that the involvement of successful Silicon Valley entrepreneurs would make Trump a more pro-science president. While the Tech Right has always been more interested in deregulation than government support for innovation, many of the individuals involved, particularly Elon Musk, have greatly benefited from subsidies and built their companies on work in the public sector. There was reason, then, to hope that they would guide the administration in the right direction.

What, then, is behind the current delays and cuts, along with the proposals for massively reduced budgets?

First of all, there is a kind of zombie fiscal conservatism, which has been seen most clearly in the DOGE project. A rational fiscal conservatism would make use of cost-benefit analysis and think about where the most useful cuts can be made. Scientific funding is a minuscule part of the federal budget. Funds going to the NSF and NIH combined are less than a 10th of what the Pentagon receives. If you count all science funding across the federal government, including in the Department of Defense, you end up with only 3% of the budget. DOGE failed in its attempts to make major spending cuts, and Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, despite some reductions, will increase the deficit.

Unable to claim major victories on the spending front, therefore — and for political reasons unwilling to touch entitlements or the Pentagon — fiscal hawks have fallen back on attacking the NIH and NSF to at least feel like they are doing something. This will have negative downstream consequences for the country. But it wouldn’t be the first time that the administration has shown that it prioritizes short-term political wins over the long-term future.

The other factor here seems to be the degree to which the culture war dominates thinking on the Right. Like Leftist radicals who want to burn down the entire system, MAGA World doesn’t see US institutions, even the best-functioning ones, as shared inheritances that Americans have an obligation to cultivate and defend. Most scientists vote Democratic, and work in universities and research labs that Trump supporters accurately perceive as hostile to their values. To the Trumpians, it is irrelevant that the average scientist devotes a lot more time to thinking about cellular development or the latest innovations in quantum computing than to destroying the nuclear family. Among the intellectually inclined Trumpians, enthusiasm for the work of Carl Schmitt — the Nazi jurist who defined politics as enmity — gives rise to an all-encompassing and zero-sum approach to our common life.

There has always been one MAGA movement in theory, and another in practice. Since Trump rode down the escalator in summer 2015, he has been a grassroots-driven political phenomenon that actors have tried to shape for their own purposes. Some, like immigration restrictionists and anti-woke activists, have succeeded in getting much of what they wanted out of Trump. Others, like the Tech Right, have found themselves out in the cold when their priorities have conflicted with the views of the president and his most fervent supporters. For those who have a vision of American greatness, the results have been mixed.

The assault on American science has unfortunately been a case of the Trumpian id triumphing over any kind of rational policymaking. Musk’s role in the administration prior to his falling out with the president has only reinforced its natural inclinations. A healthier vision of nationalism would appreciate the successes of American science, take the things that are working, and try to build upon them, while surgically targeting shortcomings. There is certainly room for improvement, through initiatives such as cutting DEI funding and reducing bureaucratic red tape.

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In some cases, the Trump administration has in fact moved the nation in the right direction. It appears that many if not most of the grants that have been outright cancelled had a DEI component, including education programs aimed at women and minorities that get classified under the category of STEM funding. An executive order ended a half-century ban on overland supersonic flights within US airspace. The Department of Health and Human Services under RFK, despite embracing anti-vaccine positions and other forms of quackery, has taken some positive steps in terms of deregulating the ability to manufacture and bring new drugs to market.

Then, too, the Trumpian urge to spite bureaucrats and those seen as political enemies has done a bit of good. During Covid, it was public-health and bureaucratic elites who insisted normal precautions be taken while expressing doubts about the feasibility of delivering a vaccine quickly, despite all forms of reasonable cost-benefit analysis suggesting at the time that the government needed to move as fast as possible. There are certain jobs in the government-scientific establishment that harm rather than promote innovation. This includes not only enforcers of DEI orthodoxy, but also much of the field of ethics, which is overly cautious in seeking to prevent harms regardless of how much doing so restricts individual choice and makes it more difficult to provide new drugs and treatments that can help people and save lives.

The two sides of Trump administration policy towards science are a microcosm of the strengths and weaknesses of the populist movement writ large. Elites have regularly failed in their duties, and often made themselves ridiculous to the point that they’ve discredited the entirety of American science in the eyes of much of the public. At the same time, we cannot lose sight of the fact that the United States remains the innovative engine of the world, particularly in the field of biomedicine. As conservatives used to preach to liberals, change should always come with a clear-sighted appreciation of what is currently working well and may not easily be rebuilt once it is destroyed. The slash-and-burn approach can’t but wreak havoc on American scientific and industrial capacity.

The DEI bureaucrat does not represent every American scientist. And every individual who votes against you is not an implacable enemy who must be defunded, if not destroyed, regardless of whatever merits they may have. Many scholars and academic leaders are all too aware of the blind spots of their institutions. This means that, by working with greater precision and sophistication, the administration could potentially find support for reform within the academy. If something good is going to come of the Trump movement going forward, it will need to keep these nuances and tensions in mind.

Sunstein imagined that Biden might not remember him, as they hadn’t seen each other in years. Yet Biden took Sunstein’s arm and recited his whole biography to the French President, including “details about my life that I only vaguely remember[ed].” But that was only a rare glimpse of a Biden who was no more. A younger Biden would have been able to assert leadership, make the case for his policies, and take arguments about his vision directly to voters. That is not the man we got. Rather, we ended up with a greatly diminished to barely functioning commander in chief.

Yet contrary to the cartoonish narratives of the Right, the debacle revealed not only the weaknesses of the Democratic coalition and mainstream media — but also some of their strengths.

Biden’s deterioration over the course of his presidency is a Shakespearean tragedy. His whole life, he enjoyed being around, and sometimes helping, other people. He finally achieved the position where he could best indulge his sociality and lift up his fellow citizens. Yet by then, Biden simply couldn’t function in the job, as recounted in Jake Tapper’s and Alex Thompson’s new book, Original Sin.

The authors’ portrait of Biden shows a man who is still gregarious and optimistic. But he is unable to reliably go even minutes unscripted without embarrassing himself or causing political headaches. This forced Biden’s top aides to hide the once charming and charismatic politician from the media and the public as much as they could possibly get away with.

Throughout the process, however, there was always dissension within liberal ranks, and much of the media and Democratic establishment were just as fooled as members of the public. There are certainly villains in this story, but also some heroes. These are realities we cannot forget in the Trump era, when previously unthinkable levels of corruption and fealty toward one man have been normalized. 

Original Sin offers necessary background on Biden’s life, followed by a mostly chronological account of his downfall, covering his 2020 campaign through the end of his presidency. It is now clear that the problems that became so glaringly undeniable in the June debate with Donald Trump had been brewing long before Biden won the Democratic nomination. Those close to him trace his mental deterioration to the death of his son Beau from glioblastoma in May 2015, which was followed by Hunter’s downward spiral. 

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The Hur Report, released in February 2024 after a probe into Biden’s mishandling of classified information, cited tapes from 2017 and described them as revealing “significant limitations” in Biden’s memory and speaking ability. During debate prep in 2019, Biden forgot the name of Mike Donilon, whom he had worked with since 1981. Tapper and Thompson speculate that if it hadn’t been for Covid preventing a traditional campaign that year, Biden would have shown himself unqualified and never become president. 

At one point, the campaign decided that the candidate would have a Zoom meeting with a group of Americans and then release the footage. Yet the product was unusable in the end, with one top Democrat sighing that Biden “couldn’t follow the conversation at all.” Another Democratic figure told the authors that, even at that early point, it was clear there was no way Biden could be president. In the end, staffers were only able to release a few minutes of exchanges on the topics of racial justice and health care.

The Zoom debacle was one example of a half-decade-long effort to hide Biden’s shortcomings from the world. The presidency was an endless minefield. Those who led him through it were referred to internally as “The Politburo,” which was composed of Donilon, counselor to the president Steve Ricchetti, and White House deputy chief of staff Bruce Reed, with other aides, such as Anita Dunn, just outside that innermost circle.

It fell on this group to constantly find ways for Biden to shirk his expected duties. Biden couldn’t pronounce the names of world leaders, so by 2021, staff would write out “President / Prime Minister of X country” on texts he was supposed to read. An organization would ask for a five-minute video from the President; but the White House would only produce one or two minutes, and even then, Biden would botch his lines.

There would be fundraisers at which a politician would normally be expected to deliver off-the-cuff remarks. But Biden aides would ask for a teleprompter setup and insist that the demand was nonnegotiable. The White House was in a constant state of crisis management, always ready to mislead journalists or go on the offensive to try to discredit reporters who raised uncomfortable questions about the President’s age.

What lessons are there to draw from this tragicomedy? The Right has a ready and predictable answer. Once again, the Establishment lied to us. There was an important fact about the world that the vast majority of the American people could see with their own eyes, and Democrats and their media allies wouldn’t acknowledge said reality for partisan and self-interested reasons. There is certainly some truth here. Original Sin makes apparent that things were much worse and for much longer than those of us on the outside had reason to suspect.

Yet to turn this into another elite-bashing narrative would be an oversimplification. Yes, there were real malefactors: Donilon, Richetti, Reed, and First Lady Jill Biden — not to mention the former President himself. They misled the public, and there should be reputational consequences for this. But there were also heroes, and ultimately, the party did push Biden out of the 2024 race.

We learn throughout the book that Democratic members of Congress and journalists had their own suspicions, which is why they were kept away from the President throughout his administration. Presumably, had they known how bad things were, the idea of Biden running again would have been untenable within the party much earlier.

Nonetheless, there was pushback even before the debate with Trump that ultimately led to Biden’s downfall. In June 2024, The Wall Street Journal reported that behind the scenes, there was the widespread impression that Biden’s mind was slipping. Journalists added up the number of news conferences and interviews Biden had done, and told the world that he compared unfavorably to recent presidents. Ezra Klein used his position as a New York Times columnist and podcaster to take the remarkable step of calling for the President not to seek re-election — all the way back in February 2024. 

Then, too, Biden’s political, legal, and personal problems in large part stemmed from the fact that Democratic and media elites demanded some adherence to the rule of law and the idea of impartial justice. 

Hunter was put on trial in the summer of 2024, and members of the Biden family sat in the courtroom as they were publicly humiliated. The defendant had lied on his application for a gun by claiming that he wasn’t a drug user. The trial ended up drudging out the skeletons in the Biden family closet. The prosecution recounted how after Beau died, Hunter began an affair with his widow, introducing her to crack.

Hunter’s daughter Naomi took the stand and claimed that her father was progressing in his recovery when he bought the gun. But she was revealed to be lying when prosecutors presented texts showing that he was ignoring her pleas to get together around the same time he had given a drug dealer access to his bank account. Hunter was convicted — and still awaiting sentencing, along with a trial on tax-evasion charges — when his father pardoned him just after the election. 

Biden had the power to stop this at any point, but he chose not to. He could have pardoned Hunter earlier. Going back further, the President himself made the decision to keep Trump-appointed US Attorney David Weiss in his role as he was investigating his son. Biden could have stacked federal law enforcement with complete toadies like Trump later did through appointing figures like Pam Bondi and Kash Patel as top law enforcers.

The Hur investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents similarly required the President to take a hands-off approach throughout the process and refrain from exercising powers he technically had. It was even Biden’s personal attorney, Patrick Moore, who originally found classified documents stored in the President’s former office at the Penn Biden Center. Moore contacted Biden aide Bob Bauer — Anita Dunn’s husband, another one of the staffers responsible for hiding his condition from the world — who informed White House Counsel Richard Sauber.

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This eventually led to an FBI investigation, and ultimately, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to look into the matter. From this came the Hur Report, which concluded that Biden likely violated the law but would be difficult to prosecute because a jury would have too much sympathy for him as an old man with memory problems, which provided fuel to those who questioned his mental capacity.

Needless to say, it is impossible to imagine any of this happening with Donald Trump. 

I have yet to meet a single Trumpian who disagrees with the proposition that Trump would have ever let one of his sons be prosecuted. This isn’t simply because Biden is more personally ethical than Trump, although that is likely true. Democratic elites and the media care about the rule of law, about maintaining fundamental norms, as can be seen in the ways in which law enforcement caused headaches for Biden and his family even as he was in control of the executive branch.

Republican and conservative elites don’t care nearly as much about legal procedure. At least, not under the current populist dispensation. They complain about the politicization of the justice system and corruption among Democrats, and then look the other way as Trump doesn’t even pretend that the DOJ and FBI should operate independent of his personal will; encourages people to send him bribes through purchasing his meme coin; and sits back as his sons strike real-estate deals with foreign governments that he directly benefits from.

Don Jr. and Eric Trump openly attend conferences centered around crypto ventures and the opening of new Trump properties abroad. Trump’s eldest son has even joined forces with members of the administration and donors to start a social club in DC with a $500,000 membership fee. Trump accepting a “palace in the sky” jetliner for his own use from Qatar is only the latest outrage that would have been unthinkable in any other administration. Activities involving far worse corruption than even the worst-case scenario of Biden and his son — if the accusations were proven true — are daily occurrences in Trump World, carried out without the least bit of shame.

There is no political pushback from Republicans to any of this. Trump will, of course, never be in a position to decide whether he will have to pardon his son, because he has made personal loyalty to himself the main criterion for appointing law-enforcement officials and government attorneys, showing few scruples about firing those who refuse to do his bidding. 

In our current moment, it is important to keep two contradictory ideas in mind. Yes, elites make a lot of mistakes, and those responsible for them should suffer consequences. At the same time, things could have been much worse. Indeed, they are much worse with gruff populists.

Democratic elites and the media for the most part didn’t cover themselves in glory when discussing Biden’s mental state. But there was internal dissension throughout the entire unfortunate course of events, as liberals who loved Biden and wanted Democrats to win at least sometimes did their jobs as journalists, attorneys, law enforcement officials, and political leaders. This is not something we can take for granted, and presents a striking contrast to the administration in power now. 

History will remember the personal failures of Biden, and those who worked to cover up his limitations. Yet we cannot blind ourselves to the nature of the developing counter-elites who seek to replace the old liberal establishment. If they have their way, they will bring about a new order with many of the same flaws as the old one, and none of its virtues.

Correction: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the first name of Merrick Garland.

No one embodies this paradox better than the world’s richest man.

He who controls Twitter, now X, exercises a vast power over the culture, and the website is now the personal playground of Musk. As a prolific tweeter with some 219 million followers, Musk would have a powerful voice if he were just a regular user who could amplify certain accounts. As it is, he has also changed the tone and ideological tilt of the public square toward his preferred direction through measures like revenue sharing and the algorithmic derogation of links (meaning, if you share a link in an X post, far fewer people are likely to see it).

To say Musk is biased in his posts or that he shows a disregard for the truth doesn’t come close to capturing the constant stream of nonsense he blasts out to the world. This isn’t a matter of being biased or getting things wrong like CNN occasionally does. His feed is more in the neighborhood of InfoWars, where Alex Jones will typically point to a document that actually exists to make wild extrapolations about what Democrats or “globalists” are up to. Musk is somehow more reckless: the things he regularly promotes lack even that kind of nexus to something based in reality.

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He approvingly retweeted a tweet about a story pertaining to hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants being on the voter rolls in California, yet the link in the original post he himself shared was to a Snopes article debunking the claim. Musk has also falsely asserted that federal disaster-relief funds meant to help Americans were redirected towards housing illegal immigrants, even though the two are completely different programs. When a pro-Russian account claimed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had a 4% approval rating in Ukraine — in contradiction to all reputable polling — he was fact-checked via a community note, which caused Musk to flip out and charge that the system was being gamed. These aren’t isolated instances. Things like this happen all the time.

It might be reasonable to suspect that someone as successful as he is must just be playing dumb online, while displaying a hidden command when it comes to policy. Yet even if you are sympathetic to his goal of reducing the size and scope of government — as I am — focusing on firing federal employees is just about the worst possible way to achieve that end. Fewer people working at the Food and Drug Administration, for example, doesn’t mean regulators getting off the backs of pharmaceutical companies trying to bring drugs to market. Instead, it makes drug-approval processes longer and more arduous. Or consider: Republicans have tended to oppose student-loan forgiveness, but now cuts at the Department of Education may lead to there not being enough workers to collect debt. Put another way: Muskian methods may be enacting a de facto version of former President Joe Biden’s policies.

Federal employees are a small part of the budget, and Musk’s assertions that huge savings might come from uncovering waste, fraud, and abuse is not taken seriously by anyone who has looked into the issue. He has spread false claims about dead people collecting Social Security that were based on a misunderstanding of a government database. All of this is even before getting to the question of how much of what he has been doing will hold up in court, with many of his moves already facing legal setbacks.

Musk is not alone. Other members of the tech oligarchy close to the administration have regularly spread false or misleading information, albeit on a much smaller scale. The venture capitalist Marc Andreessen went on the Joe Rogan podcast a few months ago and made claims that were somewhere between vastly exaggerated and completely false about the Biden administration “debanking” its enemies. During election season, a prominent VC investor asserted that there was massive voter fraud going on in California based solely on a text message someone sent him.

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All of this means that even for those of us who are true believers in the capitalist system, it has become clear that the traits that make one successful in business do not necessarily transfer into governance. Nor do they equate to having sensible, or even reality-based, views on policy.

Sure, successful entrepreneurs must have a high level of intelligence and a decent work ethic. But if Musk and other tech titans who have come close to the Trump administration are any indication, they seem to have other traits that imply they should be kept as far away from political power as possible.

What is going on here?

In a well-functioning market economy — assuming we are not talking about an exceptional case like a firm that peddles a highly addictive or otherwise harmful product — profit tends to be straightforwardly related to improving social welfare. People pay because they want a good or service, given conditions of scarcity and their own subjective preferences. Markets also take into account how workers are treated, the well-being of suppliers a business deals with, and an endless number of factors and interests that influence how capital and resources are allocated.

Government, in contrast, doesn’t have a similarly crisp measure of success. Sure, there are some metrics that guide policy makers, such as GDP and the unemployment rate. Yet leaders are expected to consider the long-term health and well-being of a society. They are supposed to respect rights and uphold fundamental values, even if we often disagree about what those values are.

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As Musk goes on a firing spree and seeks programs he can kill, we see that, in the absence of a widely agreed upon metric for success, he has decided to choose ones that will serve his private purpose. The fewer government employees and the less money government is spending, the better he thinks he’s doing. Again, even if you are a libertarian, this is a dumb way to go about achieving libertarian goals. DOGE has the word “efficiency” in its name, but efficiency is hard to define and measure, so employees fired and money saved have served as lousy proxies. Note also his influence on the latest congressional budget process, which was focused on reducing the page count in the legislation.

Of course, even in terms of Musk’s chosen metrics, success has been limited, as a government official, even a high-placed one, lacks the freedom of a CEO. Congress won’t let Musk touch the true drivers of government spending — namely, entitlements and defense. Musk appears to know this, but doesn’t seem to care when he is making exaggerated claims about what DOGE can and has accomplished. Grasping for metrics that are as useful as profits and losses in business has clearly led him astray. Note also that even when he finally acknowledged recently how much of government spending goes to entitlements, he felt the need to lie about these programs and say that they are there so the Left can attract illegal immigrants to the country.

Compounding the problem is the information bubble in which Musk has imprisoned himself. On X, his engagement is overwhelmingly with con artists, conspiracy theorists, and grifters. He now follows Catturd, a man who believes in every conspiracy theory from anti-vax to chemtrails, and whose ignorance and sycophancy towards Trump are legendary among regular X users. When the Trump administration tried to stir up social-media influencers by giving them the “Epstein files”, the results were so ridiculous that even many MAGAs felt compelled to say so. Yet Musk was still spreading the narrative that the deep state was thwarting Trump’s attempts to get to the bottom of the issue. Understand that there is a hierarchy in terms of how insane MAGA influencers are, and even among them, Musk pushes narratives that only appeal to the worst.

There is no indication in his prodigious tweeting that he relies on any newspapers, serious books, or credible sources of information. When a data scientist at X once told Musk that he had fallen for a conspiracy theory that would only appeal to a person at the tenth percentile of gullibility, Musk cursed at him. The man seems to have a deep lack of intellectual curiosity not only about the arguments of his political opponents, but even those of informed observers who would be inclined to support his project.

Again, having a kind of tunnel vision actually works well in business. An entrepreneur can afford to ignore the business press and what is happening in other industries and simply go about pursuing his vision of change. Yet a political actor can’t completely discount the views and opinions of those he disagrees with, because they are going to be part of the landscape going forward. And wise leadership requires a broad perspective on legal, economic and political affairs that raw genius can’t compensate for. Having a policy idea, for example, requires not only knowing whether it will work in the narrow sense, but also whether it can get through the courts and the legislative branch. This doesn’t mean that it would be a good use of his time for Musk to be reading case law, as no one can be an expert in everything, but it is necessary to have a grasp of reliable sources of information.

This leads to perhaps a more important difference between business and political success, which comes down to the ability to negotiate with and placate one’s enemies. An entrepreneur or CEO can act like a conqueror, provided his product is innovative enough or his market power overwhelming enough. If he builds a better, cheaper, faster product, society benefits, and he conquers his sector — or even creates an entirely new market. He never has to even be in contact with his competitors, who are free to do something else if they are less talented or lucky.

In contrast, the fundamental question of democratic politics is how to peacefully settle disputes between individuals and parties that disagree with one another. Healthy democracies celebrate leaders who bring us together, or at least take actions that are conducive to long-term peace and stability. Musk regularly spreads completely fabricated conspiracy theories about his political opponents, has repeatedly implied that those he disagrees or has disputes with are sympathetic towards pedophilia, when not referring to them as pedophiles themselves, and recently called Sen. Mark Kelly a traitor after he posted his support for Ukraine. Mean words directed at a business rival hurt feelings but have little social significance. In politics, however, fortunes reverse quickly, and today’s defeated opposition could be tomorrow’s governing party primed for payback. Moreover, truly lasting change is usually a product of bipartisan efforts.

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Finally, successful capitalists often have superhuman levels of optimism. The upside of such an outlook can be huge, and there is nothing wrong with this. If they fail, they simply lose money and distress their investors, who knowingly took on the risk. But public responsibility requires an appreciation for life’s tragic dimension and for the possibility that careless action, combined with bad fortune, can wreck society and millions of lives.

Musk’s reliance on sycophants like Catturd seems related to his overwhelming optimism. There’s little in his past to indicate he has ever sought out people who challenge him intellectually. Again, this trait may not matter in business, where so much depends on taking innovations that exist and bringing them to market. Drive and the ability to inspire a team can be what make the difference between success and failure.

But again, public life is different. Foolish wars are often started because leaders think they’re going to be easy — think George W. Bush’s overthrow of Saddam Hussein or Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Say what you will about communist regimes, one thing they have never lacked is optimism about how their plans will turn out.

To be sure, this analysis doesn’t explain everything about Musk’s recent behavior. There may be other dimensions. I recently listened to a podcast he did in 2021 on the history of technology in warfare in which he seemed like a completely different man. He displayed not only knowledge in engineering, but history, including strategy and tactics in the Second World War. This supports the theory that something in this man’s brain broke around 2022, whether it was from drug use, social-media addiction, a combination of both, or something else. It’s possible that all his business ventures begin to fail from now, which would indicate a more general decline in his cognition and ability to regulate his emotions. Much reporting has been done on Musk’s drug use, which has been serious enough to worry many around him.

Yet if Musk continues to succeed as a businessman while being this dumb about everything related to public policy, he will end up having given us what was by far history’s greatest demonstration of the non-transferability of insight and skill across domains where wise leadership is necessary for human flourishing.