MIchelle Goldberg writes about a blogger and influencer named Alex Kaschuta whose podcast used to be “a node in the network between weird right-wing internet subcultures and mainstream conservatism” and who recently moved away from it saying that the “vibe has shifted.”
Apparently, she’s not the only one. An excerpt:
[S]everal people who once appeared to find transgressive right-wing ideas scintillating are having second thoughts as they watch Donald Trump’s administration put those ideas into practice. The writer Richard Hanania once said that he hated bespoke pronouns “more than genocide,” and his 2023 book, “The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics,” provided a blueprint for the White House’s war on D.E.I. But less than three months into Trump’s new term, he regrets his vote, telling me, “The resistance libs were mostly right about him.”
Nathan Cofnas, a right-wing philosophy professor and self-described “race realist” fixated on group differences in I.Q., wrote on X, “All over the world, almost everyone with more than half a brain is looking at the disaster of Trump (along with Putin, Yoon Suk Yeol, et al.) and drawing the very reasonable conclusion that right-wing, anti-woke parties are incapable of effective governance.” (Yoon Suk Yeol is South Korea’s recently impeached president.)
Scott Siskind, who blogs under the pseudonym Scott Alexander, has been an influential figure in Silicon Valley’s revolt against social justice ideology, though he’s never been a Trump supporter. Last week, he asked whether “edgy heterodox centrists” like himself paved the way for Trump by opening the door to once-verboten arguments. In an imaginary Socratic dialogue, he wrote, “We wanted a swift, lean government that stopped strangling innovation and infrastructure. Instead we got chain-saw-style firings, total devastation of state capacity in exactly the way most likely to strangle innovation more than ever, and the worst and dumbest people in the world gloating about how they solved the ‘grift’ of sending lifesaving medications to dying babies.”
This is super interesting.
I recently watched some SNL episodes from 2020 and 2021 and I was gobsmacked by how much the zeitgeist has changed. If this part of that is finally going out of fashion it can only be a good thing. The ultimate red-pilled techbro who subscribed to this nonsense is Elon Musk. (He was a late bloomer.) I have no idea if this is going to be replaced by something worse. It’s certainly possible. But this “vibe” has been spectacularly destructive and if it’s moving on it can only be a positive.