DEFINITELY NOT TANNING THEM TO PLEASE WOMEN (profanity alert):

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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