The Ezra Klein Show: Your Guide to the New Right

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From New York Times' opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show.

Hey it is Ezra.

I am on book leave, but our guest this week is my colleague, The Times' opinion columnist

David French, whose work I have learned a ton from and whose just way of comporting

himself in public life I've often quite admired.

He began his career as a lawyer, he has deployed with the U.S. military, he's the author of

many books including Divided We Fall, America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.

And I'm excited to see what he does here behind the mic.

I hope you enjoy it too.

One more thing today.

So I am doing the annual Jefferson Memorial Lecture for UC Berkeley, which I'm excited

about as a kid who grew up in California, idolizing and then getting repeatedly rejected

by UC Berkeley when I applied there.

And it's going to be the first time I try to work through the ideas of the book in public

with an audience, in conversation with someone else who knows what they're talking about

on these issues, Amy Lerman in this case.

And if you'd like to join and hear what I've been thinking about, you can.

At first glance, the U.S. Senator J.D. Vance, Catholic integralists and bigoted right wing

influencers might not be so obviously connected, but they've all been associated with the

New Right, an umbrella term for a range of subcultures and schools of thought that are

generally critical of traditional conservatism and embrace illiberalism.

Today I want to help you understand the New Right, both the ideological movement emerging

in the conservative establishment and the fringier, extremely online subculture of edge

lording that seems to loom over it.

I've called the men who occupy the space, and yes, it's mostly men, the lost boys of

the American right.

They've made headlines for openly flirting with white supremacy, anti-Semitism, ethno-nationalism

and nakedly authoritarian politics.

And to me, they represent one of the strangest and most troubling aspects of contemporary

politics.

Why are these voices emerging?

What is their worldview?

How dangerous are they?

To help answer these questions, I've turned to Stephanie Slade, a senior editor at Reason.

I can't think of anyone who's done more original reporting on the New Right than Stephanie.

She's been to their conferences, she's read their books, and she knows their culture.

Stephanie is going to be our guide into a dark world.

As always, the show's email is ezraclineshow at nytimes.com.

Stephanie, welcome to the Ezra Klein Show.

Thank you so much for having me on.

So Stephanie, we're here to talk about the New Right.

Not just to talk about the New Right ideologically, but also to talk about the New Right culturally

and why it matters.

How, Stephanie, would you define what the New Right is?

And let's just start ideologically, ideologically, what is the New Right?

In American politics, we have a tendency to mostly, first and foremost, think about the

left versus right distinction.

But what we're talking about when we talk about the New Right is a sort of different

axis, AXIS, which would be the liberal versus illiberal distinction.

And of course, it runs across both the left and the right.

You could have four quadrants.

And on the right, you can have a sort of liberal conservative or liberal right, which strikes

some people as an oxymoron, but it's not.

It's classical liberalism is sort of what you think of when you think of Reagan-Skyle,

old school, fusionist conservatism, a commitment to limited government and individual rights

and rule of law.

And then there's this schism that's opened up, I call it the liberalism schism.

And on the far side, you have the illiberal right.

And these are folks who kind of think that that stuff is pretty outdated or maybe ideologically

and philosophically wrong and always was.

And so they reject the idea of limited government and individual liberty to a greater or lesser

extent.

And part of this as well is that the distinction here is that on the sort of classically liberal

side, there's a pretty strong continuing commitment to what might be considered like

the Martin Luther King Jr. approach to race relations, which says, what should matter

is the content of your character and not the color of your skin.

But on the far side of that divide, there is more willingness to say, no, in fact, identity

groups matter, ethnicity matters, and maybe in some cases to flirt with the idea that

certain races or identity subgroups are superior to others or that we should care about the

purity or lack thereof of our society.

That stuff is happening on the far side of that schism.

And the new right would be made up of a whole bunch of different sort of factions and different

groups and individuals and currents.

And they're not all synonymous with each other, and they don't even always all play nicely

with each other.

So I think that the new right is an umbrella term that contains a whole bunch of different,

I mean, they are legion, as you might say.

So who would be the politicians?

Again, let's talk sort of ideology.

Who would be the politicians of the new right?

The people, if they're going to look and they're going to say, OK, these are the people perfectly

or imperfectly who best embody what we're trying to do in the body politic.

I think there are three members of the US Senate who fall into this category.

First and foremost would be J.D. Vance, brand new senator in his first term, who ran explicitly

to be a part of the vanguard in the face of the new right.

And he says things like, my voters hate the right people.

And there is no longer a distinction between the public sector and the private sector in

America.

He's a militant and it's pretty radical.

It's quite populist.

And he's very explicit about this.

He wanted to be the face of the new right.

I think Josh Hawley is another one.

And we all remember the famous image of him raising his fist on January 6th before the

actual insurrection activities began.

But he cares a lot less about things like individual liberty and free markets than old-school

Reaganite conservatives would.

And then another person who's kind of gone on a journey would be Marco Rubio, who I think

started definitely as much more of a Reaganite, fusionist, old-school,

classically liberal conservative, but has adopted what he calls common good conservatism.

And this is definitely part of the lingo of the new right, which is freedom is not enough.

Individual liberty free markets are not enough.

We need, again, muscular government that's willing to pursue our goals as conservatives,

including potentially through interventions into the marketplace that conservatives

in the past have been skeptical of.

And in some cases in the social sphere, a willingness to use the power of the state to

sort of impose virtue on people or forcibly reorient society to the common good as they

understand it.

And then in the presidential race, probably the paradigmatic example of the new right would

be Ron DeSantis.

Yeah, Ron DeSantis is interesting because he is a hybrid of the two.

And in many ways he came up as very much a free market guy, right?

Yeah.

A limited government guy.

But in the last few years, he has absolutely adopted the rhetoric of the culture warrior.

He's clearly responding to the influence of the new right.

And again, when it comes, if you're thinking about what is a paradigmatic example of willing

to use state power to prosecute the culture war, to reward our friends and punish our enemies,

as they might say, DeSantis going after Disney would be the perfect example.

Right.

So DeSantis, all Disney did was essentially raise its voice in opposition to Florida state

laws that were restricting education on sexual orientation and gender identity in K-12 schools.

Disney objects to that.

And then Ron DeSantis takes strong and decisive action against Disney, eliminating an improvement

district of state entity that had been built around sort of the Disney property, then replacing

it with a new state entity who then take action against Disney on the basis of trying to essentially

punish Disney for its more progressive ideas.

Would you say that of the sort of the political figures, DeSantis has been most successful at

actually translating the new right vision into actual policy as compared to a JD Vance or a

Josh Hawley or a Marco Rubio who really don't have policy wins to point to.

But DeSantis actually has concrete policies that look like what the new right wants.

Yeah, that's a fair to say.

It's easier to do when you're the governor of a state.

You have more leeway to implement your will.

And in the past, that's just not been a thing that most Republican governors have said they

wanted to do or an agenda that they have pursued of again, exercising their will and imposing

their will on their state.

But that is something that DeSantis has been very clear that he sees no problem with.

And I think in the Disney case, to be clear, this is problematic from a classically liberal

perspective for two reasons, sort of in two dimensions.

One is that it's an intervention in the marketplace.

It's saying the state should be able to tell businesses how they run, what views they're

allowed to express, and so on and so forth.

So it's a challenge to the, again, the old fashioned idea that Republicans are pro free

market or pro business even.

But I think the much more disturbing part of this, and of course you've done amazing work

elucidating why this is, is that it's a challenge or a violation of the rule of law

by using the power of the state to enact retribution against a private entity,

whether an individual person or private business or whatever it may be.

When the government uses power to punish somebody retributively for their political

speech, that is a true violation of the rule of law, as far as I'm concerned.

So I'm going to read something that you wrote, or actually you read a quote that you quoted

in a piece that you wrote.

And this is when in 2022, you went to NatCon 3, the sort of the convention for national

conservatives, and there was a speech, a segment that you highlighted.

Here's the key language.

The institutional left does not intend to leave anything of the old Republic behind

for us to salvage.

Constitutionalism, scientific inquiry, individual liberty, civil society,

volunteerism, patriotism, parental authority, free expression, free enterprise, religious

pluralism, cultural diversity, they're coming for everything.

So national conservatism must come for them.

I think that that's one of the best distillations of sort of that view of the world that I've

read, and it seems to cut across all of the strands of national conservatism or the new

right, whether it's Catholic integralism or national conservatism.

It is this idea of wielding the power of the state in a punitive way, not just in a way

that's advancing a particular set of policies, but also in a way that's designed to destroy

political opponents, to end their influence in American life.

Is that a fair summary?

Yes, and so that's why I have tried to coin the term will to power conservatism as an

alternative to common good conservatism, which I think is pretty self-serving and obviously

doesn't tell us anything, because of course, I believe in the common good very much as well.

We have different ideas about how to go about pursuing the common good.

What differentiates us is that they have that will to power.

They want power and they want to wield it to destroy their enemies and to reward their friends.

And that phrase, to use power to reward friends and punish enemies is an explicit quote from

that conference and from some of these self-identifying national conservatives.

They say that that's what they're for, but I would draw something else out from the excerpt

from the speech that you were just mentioning, which is really important, I think, to understanding

what's going on here, which is that it is reactionary.

It is a reaction against what they perceive as egregious violations of the rule of law

and of classical liberalism from the left.

So they say the left is not abiding by the bargain that we had where we don't try to

destroy you and you don't try to destroy us and we coexist peacefully.

The left is unwilling to play by those rules, and so we must respond in kind.

Because they have kind of a point in some cases, they're not completely imagining that.

It means that they are able to hold their heads up high and believe that they have the moral

high ground, while even as they succumb or give in to their temptations to use power in this way.

Yeah, I think the free speech arena is a good place to locate some of these differences.

So for example, I litigated First Amendment cases for most of my career.

I've only been a journalist for only eight years and I was a litigator for more than 20.

So I'm dating myself right now.

But one thing that I litigated for more than 20 years were university speech codes.

In other words, universities were enacting policies that were designed to sort of cleanse

the university space from so-called hate speech.

But these speech codes have been struck down in court repeatedly.

And it has seemed to me that that First Amendment context has been where it's most acute,

whereas the classical liberal defense to an illiberal speech code was open up the marketplace

of ideas. The new right defense to a speech code is, no, no, no, our speech code instead of your

speech code. So that would be, for example, the Ron DeSantis Stop Woke Act, which limits speech

even in higher education, classroom speech in higher education regarding race, for example.

Or in many of these states where you've seen bands on, for example, drag queen events or bands on

events related to drag queens, that, no, no, we're going to use the power of the state to

target expression that we don't like. It seems to be as a way of showing the different ways

that state power should be exercised. Yeah. And they openly explicitly reject

liberal neutrality. So they would say, this idea that we can have a state that just calls balls

and strikes and doesn't throw its weight behind one side or the other, that that's a fantasy,

that it never happens that way in practice, what really happens is that the state is constantly

throwing its weight behind the left. This is the story they tell themselves. And so

we should stop even aspiring to any kind of neutrality or any kind of impartial adjudication

by the state and say, nope, we're going to use that power the way we want to use that power to

impose our will against them. Okay. So that's the ideology. It's a very state-centric ideology

it's designed to exercise state power on behalf of right-wing ideas with the goal to ultimately

eradicate or dominate your opposition. But the cultural part of it to me, Stephanie, is almost

more salient. The way in which the new right interacts with its ideological competitors,

the way in which the new right interacts with each other really gives a flavor for sort of the kind

of people that they want exercising power. So if you're talking about pulling more power into human

beings in government, it becomes quite fair to ask, okay, well, who are these human beings? What is

the culture of this movement that wants to exercise so much power? I find that there's insufficient

attention paid to the culture. You've been in that con three, you have been reading these folks for

years and years. How would you sort of sum up the culture of the new right? In a word, angry,

aggrieved, right? I want to go back to something I said, which is that there are a whole bunch of

different factions and currents that are sort of coexisting under the banner of the new right.

And so actually the folks on stage at the National Conservatism Conference, if you can believe it,

are the most respectable faces of this movement. What's happening in the shadows and mostly online

is many of the same themes, but amped up on steroids and dialed up to maximum

inflammatory-ness, right? And so it depends a little where you're looking. If you're looking

at where the self-proclaimed public intellectuals of the new right and the NatCon movement are and

what they're saying, you're going to see one thing. And if you go to 4chan or even, you know,

corners of Twitter, you're going to see something that's similar, but again, worse. So it depends

a little about which part of the culture you're looking at, but they're angry. They, again,

they feel like what characterizes the Reaganite conservative consensus or right of, you know,

classically liberal conservatism was weakness and an unwilling to treat politics for what it is,

which is to borrow a phrase, war and enmity. And so they just think that those of us sort of on

the other side of the divide are weak and unwilling to see reality for what it is. And so it's angry

and it's militant and it's extremely self-consciously and sometimes comically, almost in a caricatured

sense, masculine. Right. Okay, we're going to drill down on that for a minute, but I want to

talk about the anger for a moment. The anger that I have seen isn't just an ideological anger. In

other words, it's not just I'm angry about ideas and sort of angry that this idea is still advanced

and I believe doesn't work. They're angry at people. They're very angry at individual conservatives.

So for example, there was an essay written several years ago called Against David Frenchism. So not

just sort of against classical liberalism, but against very specifically me and my brand of

classical liberalism in it, that essay went viral and it turned into a debate in Catholic

university that got pretty heated. It's also very personal. And so here's the question that I've

long had. Part of this feels like a legitimate intellectual exercise. In other words, the role

of the state in a large, diverse, multi-ethnic society is a matter for debate. The extent and

the scope of the First Amendment is certainly a matter for debate. And we can have good faith

debates about this all day long. But what's happening in the new right is it seems to be taking place

against the backdrop of personal animosity. And what I am having difficulty parsing out is how

much of the personal animosity is driven by ideology and how much of it is driven by quite

literally a desire to sort of tear down one set of people and stand in their place. In other words,

this is a combination of personal ambition and ideological enmity. And it strikes me that there's

a lot of very personal beef that is attached to this ideology. Yeah, it's tribal for sure. And so

an example, this is a little bit less personal. I haven't had anybody right against Stephanie

Slatism yet. But what you saw in the second half of the 20th century was the idea that in order

for conservatives to succeed, you have to build a big tent, right? Bring a bunch of people under

the same tent and come together and create some sort of a functioning coalition. That is definitely

not the approach here. Instead, it's like, if you speak out against us on even one thing ever,

you are the enemy. Even if you are actually quite close to us ideologically, if you don't pledge

allegiance to us and to our tribe, you are just as much the enemy as the far left is. And so somebody

coming at this from the libertarian camp, I definitely see that they perceive me as an enemy

because I am consciously attempting to stand in the way of their desire to use power against the

left. Not because I agree with the left, but because I disagree with using power in that way.

But so I'm seen as an enemy. And so they have no compunction, they have no sense of like,

let's build a coalition or let's get ahead by making friends. It's much more about purity

in tribal allegiance. All right, now let's talk about masculinity because I'm so glad you brought

that up. That is a pervasive theme here. So it is not just that our ideology is

subdued, they would say, not just that their ideology is more superior to progressive ideologies

or classical liberalism to all the competitors. They also make some very specific claims about

the masculinity of their views. In other words, that the movement, both as an ideological and

cultural matter, is an authentic expression of what real masculinity is. And it seems like a

largely male dominated space. Nat Khan doesn't strike me as nearly as gender diverse as even

CPAC, for example. What are you seeing as you're looking at this phenomenon? Because it has been

an absolute, I'm not going to say undercurrent, it's often the main current.

I think it's absolutely right. And it's even more heightened if you move again off the stage at Nat

Khan where they've made at least some effort to at least showcase diversity or give the perception

of diversity. And if you go into these online spaces, which is where most of the ferment is

actually happening, it's overwhelmingly male. It's young men on the right that we're talking

about here. Overwhelming. There are very few women. There are few and far between who are

seduced by these ideas. On the other hand, even if we were to take a step back and just talk about

the Trump phenomenon, which of course was both men and women who lined up behind Donald Trump and

who swept him into office in 2016, if you were to ask them why they supported him, why line up

behind Donald Trump, why is he your man? And if you expected them to give some sort of an ideologically

coherent answer, you would be disappointed. The answer was he fights, right? That is the way that

they would characterize what he has that other people don't is he fights. So that's kind of the

theme here.

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So that's actually a perfect segue. So you have a lot of personal animosity.

You have a lot of commitment to this ideology as a matter of masculinity. So this is going deep

into identity. And then let's bring up the race angle of this. And this is where you're going

to start to see where a lot of this starts to get really, really grim. And what you've begun to see

is a lot of people online dabbling in explicitly anti-Semitic language, dabbling in anti-Semitic

dog whistles, sometimes not that dog whistly, sometimes just like referee whistly, very loud.

So you see an anti-Semitic strain. You've seen a strain talking about the virtue of ethnicity,

of defending particular ethnicities. You'll see things, for example, like Charlie

Kirk tweeting, for example, about how great it is to be white. And you see this real racialization

of the movement. You hit on a word reactionary, reactionary. And whatever you see the left

latch onto as an issue, the new right is going to latch onto in sort of an equal and opposite way.

And one of the ways we've seen this is in the matter of race. As the left gets more anti-racist,

there seems to be a pull in parts of the new right to flirt with, if not jump into

outright racism, often it appears to be as a troll or a troll that turns genuine. What's going on?

I think there's two parts of this. One is the more intellectual part of it. And in this case,

I don't mean that as a compliment. And the other part is the more populistic groundswell

component of this. On the intellectual side, there are people who, and they coin terms like

race realism and human biodiversity, and they're making a case for why in some cases,

in the most extreme cases, for why some races are superior to others. And they want to call upon

race and IQ science, and they want to compare crime trends, and they want to make build an

intellectual case for why we ought to care about keeping America pure in some sense, racially

pure in some sense. And then that trickles down, of course, into their policy preferences of

low or no immigration and very aggressive policing in inner cities, you know, in black

communities and that sort of thing. That is actually the more intellectual, it's probably

actually the more disturbing part. But that is the part that is where they're attempting to put

a veneer of science on top of what they're doing. I think there is this other thing, which is a

little closer to what you were talking about, which is that there's just a lot of people out

there who did not start out caring about this. If anything, they came up again in that paradigm of

ideally races irrelevant. We ought to care about the content of your character and not the color

of your skin, that that being the ideal that we are striving towards in America, and that that's

a worthy ideal. I think most people, even the vast majority of people on the right of center,

start there. But as it seems like identity becomes the only thing that the left wants to talk about,

and as they tend to approach, the left is seen as approaching this in a sort of zero-sum way,

where advances or achievements on behalf of previously marginalized groups come at the expense

of the status of other groups, then it heightens the salience of those identity characteristics,

and it creates a backlash. So there's a lot of people that I think they're not reading the race

and IQ stuff. They're not reading the literature on this and putting together an intellectual case

for racism. They're just saying race is becoming more salient in our politics. The other side is

injecting race into our politics, and so we are going to react in the natural way, which is to

think more about race as an important part of our identities as well. I think it's somewhat

of a natural backlash that's happening, which isn't a defense of it, but I think that the bigger

phenomenon here actually is that sort of stuff that's bubbling up from the bottom as a reaction

against among the grassroots, as opposed to the people who are reading these blog posts and

doing the intellectual stuff. However, the intellectual stuff has now come out from the

shadows recently, and that is disturbing. The fact that these folks feel that they can talk openly

about this and that people who have dabbled in this stuff are finding their ways into positions of

influence in our mainstream politics, that's the thing that has changed.

Yeah, and then you also add on to one final layer, which is actually taking delight in the

anger or misery of your enemies. So you're going to enjoy, if you're a member of the

new right on this culture, when you make people angry. So you're going to want to press boundaries,

you're going to want to go a little further than you're, quote, supposed to go. If you're pushing

the discourse to the edge and beyond, if you are advocating ideas that were previously considered to

be unspeakable, that that is what they would call based. It demonstrates that you don't care what

people think of you. You have the strength, you have the strength of will, etc. That is what

sort of this dynamic that says we're actually trying to hurt your feelings for lack of better

term. We're actually trying to make you angry as part of this culture. Yeah, it's transgressiveness

as the source of social capital. And it's especially the case, again, in these online communities.

So to the extent that we're focusing on this young men online, which is aware a lot of this

stuff is happening, but it's not, you know, I can't go to that conference and report on it.

So we're not going to be naturally, we're not going to be focusing on it as much. And because

up until recently, those folks also were not in positions of influence in our country. It was easy

to overlook that and focus on what's happening in the more intellectual levels. But yes, transgressiveness,

being intentionally provocative and even inflammatory, dancing right up to the line and

crossing it and daring someone to call you out for it and then laughing at them for being a

snowflake, if they do, it's irony. The culture of these spaces is what defines them, not the ideas.

Yeah. And let's make it kind of concrete. There's a lot of examples of individuals who,

it's been a consistent pattern, Stephanie, really since 2016, which is a young, usually

male figure on the right, gained some notoriety, almost always initially on Twitter,

with some very edgy rhetoric, really kind of pushing the boundaries of what's

within the overton window, which is kind of a term for the zone of acceptable conversation.

They're always sort of right on the edge of that. And then you find out that in private,

they've been saying even worse things. And then as their public voice evolves,

it gets worse and worse and worse. And to the point where sort of the private starts to merge

with the public. And then when they're called out or when it's exposed, sometimes they'll say,

hey, that's not me. Sometimes they'll just say, hey, don't even try cancel culture on me.

And almost like it's, baptizes their expression. Their expression is,

the worst sin is not their expression. It's the imposition of cancel culture. And so,

thinking of example, like a young man named Pedro Gonzalez, who rose to prominence in the last

five or six years. And when I say prominence, I mean sort of like Twitter prominence, not,

not a famous person, but rose to Twitter prominence so much so that he was considered a

DeSantis influencer earlier in the campaign. And his cycle was basically this. So he's

very overtly aggressive in his Twitter persona. One of this, one of his trademarks was,

when he saw somebody he hated, he would put a picture of them, a particularly unflattering

picture of them and talk about their physiognomy. And he got called out for doing this because

at one point he did it to a Jewish economist and he called that the Rothschild physiognomy,

which has, it's not just subtly anti-Semitic, it's like really anti-Semitic. But then his defense

was, well, I'd say that about everybody, Jewish and tile. Like, you know, I'm not anti-Semitic,

I'm just hateful in general, I guess, is the defense. Then later on, it emerges that a lot of

the things that he'd said in private messaging groups with people who are also in the new right

were not just subtly or anti, or dog-wistly anti-Semitic, but extremely aggressively and also

with a lot of racist content. And then as this comes out, he said this really interesting thing

to the Free Beacon, the Washington Free Beacon. He attributed their remarks to his dissent and

to what he described as an online Trump world that embraced absurd rhetorical extremism.

What starts off as joking can very quickly become unironically internalized as an actual

belief, he said, adding that I said those things and I take responsibility for them and I apologize

for them and ultimately it's on me. And he said he had a change of heart since becoming a father.

He said, you develop a kind of revulsion for the immaturity that defines these extremely

online movements, a kind of performative bigotry that's a feature of it. So here he was being

pretty self-aware, I would say. And I think the really key element here is this statement,

what starts off as joking can very quickly become unironically internalized as an actual

belief. And the way I describe it is from trolling to conviction. And I have seen this pattern

time and time and time again. I have a piece where I wrote and I had example after example after

example of that. And it's as if the trolling develops in a momentum all its own, that it can't

be ironic anymore. It has to be a matter of conviction or you're not really with the team.

Yeah, you are what you pretend to be, right? So a lot of these conversations, because he's,

of course, not the only young right-wing activist who has been outed in this way in the last few

months. And often the conversation turns to trying to parse whether or not the things that were said

or done reflected the sincerely held belief of the person. If you incorporate Nazi imagery in a

campaign video, does that make you a Nazi, for example? And some of those conversations may

be worth having. But ultimately, I think what you're pointing to is why that conversation is

kind of irrelevant. Because ultimately, you are what you pretend to be. And these young men who

play act or another phrase that I've heard used is larping live action role playing, which is a

sort of gaming word, right? They're play acting or they're larping as neo-fascists or choose your

adjective. But maybe they start out as play acting. But at some point, they're also spreading those

ideas to other people. And Pedro Gonzalez has like 150,000 followers on Twitter. So I would always

prefer to receive an apology than not and to hear somebody express some regret. But the damage

is continuing to be done. Whether or not they believe what they're saying, they're spreading

the ideas and the fallout from that can potentially be enormous for the, especially because we're

talking about the culture that the next generation is being steeped in. I think your point about you

are what you say is particularly salient because the common pushback that you get is sort of

how dare you believe that what I said was what I actually meant. So you had this DeSantis staffer

who has the Sononrad, a Nazi symbol that's between two lines of troops. So not exactly subtle, right?

And one of the defenses is, no, he obviously doesn't believe that. Or this is a person who had

said before about Nick Fuentes, who's one of the most notorious just out and out white supremacists

in the United States that in many ways Fuentes was a better model for conservatives than say

Ben Shapiro. Time and time again, there's this argument that, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute.

You don't think we're actually fascists, do you? I mean, this is, you can't hold this against us.

But how is anyone supposed to know that your true beliefs, your true self is somehow

fundamentally opposed to what you say? Such an important point. And I'm glad that you

brought up Fuentes. He is in some ways, I hate to elevate him like this, even rhetorically,

but he is in some ways the man behind the curtain for a lot of this stuff. Among the young men that

I talk to, college age and just out of college, I mean, this is who they're looking to. He's

such a huge influencer online. He's like, I think he's the self-proclaimed king of the dissident

right. And he has this huge following. He puts out these videos, and he has said explicitly

that the use of jokes and irony are important for giving a lot of, quote,

cover implausible deniability for our views. So he's admitted this openly, that they're using

irony to make it so that you can never hang anything on them. They can say what they believe

or what they don't believe. How could we possibly know the difference? And then they can always

have deniability by keeping it light and ironic and jokey. And a lot of people have learned that

skill from Nick Fuentes, including the young man you were referring to who lost his job on the

DeSantis campaign after using this Nazi imagery. Yeah, it's a really remarkable the level to

which this guy, Nick Fuentes, keeps coming up. I mean, then to say that he's irrelevant, well,

he had a meal with Donald Trump and he is a model for a lot of, again, mainly young men, which is

remarkable.

All this is interesting. All this is disturbing in many ways.

But how pervasive is this? How much does this matter? Or is this just sort of

interesting only because, oh, it's always fascinating to find out about really obscure

and dangerous subcultures. But they're not. How dangerous are they really?

It's a hard question because it's a live debate right now. The sort of future of the conservative

movement of the Republican Party, all of this is being actively litigated in real time. And we

don't know which of the factions or which side of the liberalism schism, as I called it, is going

to come out on top, is going to actually sort of define the future of this movement. Once we

expand the lens from this sort of more intellectual new right or what I earlier called the more

respectable new right into the dark corners of the internet where people are watching Nick Fuentes

videos and exchanging anti-Semitic and misogynistic messages in their private group chats that we

can't see, then you actually start to see even other disturbing things. So Nick Fuentes has hosted

events. In fact, I was at CPAC in 2022, which was in Orlando, Florida. And the night before,

he hosted a rival called AFPAC, America First PAC. It was a rival. I essentially described it as

CPAC for people who think CPAC isn't racist enough. Marjorie Taylor Greene was there. She

spoke at AFPAC at the Nick Fuentes event. And then the next day, she was on the main stage at CPAC.

So there's definitely bleeding of the lines between this stuff. What starts out, again,

in the dark corners of the internet and you think, well, how important could this 25-year-old

kid really be? Then you start to see these ideas and people associated with these ideas showing

up in the actual halls of power. All of that said, I think it's really important to recognize that I

do not think that the average American voter, even the average Republican primary voter,

is even aware of most of this stuff. To the extent that they are in any way

buying into any of this, it is entirely what I described earlier as the sort of bubbling up

from the ground up of just saying something has gone wrong in the left. There really is

illiberalism on the left as well, a willingness to use state power to enforce their will upon us.

And we don't want to take it anymore. And we want somebody who will fight back against that.

But it's not very well thought out. And I do think, when it comes to the racial stuff,

that the way forward is a return to sort of color blindness or an approach in which we say it

should be irrelevant what the color of your skin is. What we care is about who you are on the

merits and what's inside. And that, I think, is a winning message even among most conservatives now.

But there is definitely an open question about which direction the movement is headed. And

since there are people articulating these two paths, one of which is really ugly racialist,

race realist stuff, then we have to care about whether it's going to go down that path, whether

the movement is heading that direction or not. Yeah, I would put it like this. I would say,

if you dive into the intellectual aspects of this, like we did at the very start,

and you run them by your average Trump supporting Republican, say, where I live in Williamson

County, Tennessee, they would look at me like, come again, what are you talking about use of

power for the common good to punish enemies and reward for what that would not compute. There's

still a lot of sort of background level, Reaganism, limited government, fighting against socialism,

et cetera, et cetera, although there is a lot of animosity towards the left. So they're very

willing to hear the fight, fight, fight message. But there's a couple of aspects here. One is,

Trumpism is kind of an ideological void. What is Trumpism besides the ambition of Donald Trump?

And into that ideological void, a lot of people are pouring a lot of different things. We've

talked about the intellectual new right. Well, there's also this sort of pop culture Christian

right, like the Michael Flynn, Seven Mountain Dominionism, very sort of Christians are destined

to rule this country kind of strain that gets poured into this. But here's where Stephanie,

I think that the young new right has an advantage over all of these other streams trying to put

some sort of flesh and bones on Trumpism, is that they tend to be highly educated and many of them

living in D.C. And so therefore are going to be disproportionately staffing the next Republican

administration. And they have been hardcore in institution building mode in the last two years.

So they're launching new online journals and they're standing up organizations that helped

seek out college students who subscribe to these views and funnel them into internships on Capitol

Hill in the Senate. Or wherever they're putting a lot of thought and effort in a really sophisticated

way into how do we take our ideas and translate them into actual exercises of power? They said

that that's what they believe in, they're trying to do it. And there's another example of this

phenomenon being Catholic. I try to keep an eye on what's going on in this sort of Catholic

integralist space. I can't emphasize enough that the average Catholic in the pews has never heard

of Adrian Vermeul, who is the sort of leading Catholic integralist intellectual in America

today. He's a Harvard Law professor. He's written a book on this. People who are paying attention

to the intellectual currents are reading Adrian Vermeul. The average Catholic in the pews has

never even heard his name, let alone the word integralism. They're not buying into this.

However, what I am hearing from people who would know is that the young men studying

to be Catholic priests, the seminarians, are paying attention and they are buying into these

ideas. And so even if Catholics today are not interested in this, if the next generation

of Catholic priests have bought into these ideas, that is scary. That is a scary thought. That is

a potential vector in which we could see this incredibly fringe set of ideas actually enacted

in real ways in the real world. You used a term and I've used a term and I just realized we probably

haven't defined it very well. Catholic integralism. What is integralism? So this is one of the strains

of the new right, one of the currents that's under that umbrella category. And I think it's

probably the most fringe of all in terms of the actual number of people who believe in it,

but it has gotten a lot of attention because it has these high profile advocates such as

Adrienne Vermeule. It's a rejection from a Catholic perspective of the separation of church and state.

And so they say that church and state ought to be integrated. That doesn't mean that they

should necessarily be the same thing, but depending on who you talk to actually a lot of times what

they'll say is, well, we need a civil government and we need the church government, the church hierarchy,

but if they're ever in conflict with each other, the civil government ought to be subordinated to

and take its cues from and in fact could be ordered around by the Pope, by the Catholic hierarchy,

because the Pope, the church is concerned with our eternal salvation, which is a higher order good

than our mere temporal salvation, which is what the government is in charge of. And so civil

government exists to do the will of the church if needed. Again, this is like a very wonky thing

that not a lot of people are buying into, but it does have historical antecedents, right? Because

if you think about medieval Europe, this is closer, this is sort of the ideal theory for what

they were attempting to accomplish in medieval Europe. And so these are people today who are

saying, well, maybe we didn't do it perfectly back then, but that's still what we ought to be striving for.

So we're going to get into some of the weeds here because, but it's important to get into these weeds

because these kinds of debates and arguments really are animating a lot of the most politically

motivated young men on the right. There's this kind of fantasy world in which, and I'm sure you've

seen this, Stephanie, where people will extol, for example, the experience of the medieval peasant

as a substantially superior way of life than what we have now, the rise of what are called the rad

trads, in other words, a radical traditional Catholic perspective. So this is all percolating

in subcultures, but again, hyper politically engaged subcultures. But what's the difference

between Catholic integralism and Christian nationalism writ large?

There's some overlap, but as a general matter, as I understand it, Christian nationalism tends

to be a Protestant phenomenon and it's nationalist. It's explicitly and self-consciously saying,

we are an ethnic body. We ought to be trying in some sense to maintain our homogeneity as a people,

as the American people, and that the important characteristic is that we are a Christian people

and a Christian nation. And so that leads to policy preferences like limiting or ending immigration

from non-Christian countries and non-Protestant countries. And Catholic integralists tend to not

be as concerned about the nationalistic side of things, in part because the Catholic Church is

a universal church. In fact, more immigration from Latin America would probably increase our

Catholic character as a country. So there's not really any reason in principle for a radical

Catholic to be opposed to immigration. That doesn't mean that every radical Catholic is

in favor of open borders, but in terms of the theory here, it's more universalistic and it's

more about subordinating all the countries of the world to the one true leader in the pope,

right, and the one true faith. So there are definitely theoretical differences. In practice,

there's a lot of overlap in terms of preferences, in terms of domestic policy that people in these

camps would be for. Maybe not so much on the international side, but domestically, they're

going to be talking about things like making it harder to get a divorce, requiring stores to be

closed on Sundays, perhaps bringing back prayer and Bible reading to public schools. There's more

and less radical versions of this. So the more radical versions might be re-establishing a test

in which you have to affirm your faith in God or to a particular church in order to be able to

run for office or serve on a jury, or even the most illiberal and most troublingly illiberal

versions of this would say, we're going to ban mosques in this country. This is a Christian

country. You cannot practice a religion that isn't the religion of the country. There are very,

very vanishingly few people would even think about defending that, but they are out there

and they are publicly articulating these views. And because, as we talked about earlier, the culture

of these online new right communities, you gain cultural capital, but by being as transgressive

and edgy as possible, then flirting with these ideas becomes a way forward. It becomes a way to

gain status within your online community. Well, and also it's tied to your masculine strength,

right? So you see this in the pro-life community is right now torn apart by debate between sort

of traditional pro-life advocates and what are called abolitionists. And abolitionists

strongly believe in prosecuting women who have abortions. That is a core element of abortion

abolitionism. And one of the ways in which they engage in this conversation or engage in this

fight is by essentially attempting to bully anyone who is in disagreement, that you don't

really want to protect babies. You don't really believe babies are a human life equivalent to

other human lives. And in this kind of pattern of, I'm going to stake out the most extreme position,

and then anyone who's one inch to my left is woke and has to be fought viciously, if necessary.

It is the pattern here. What can be done? Is this the future of the right? Or what is it that can

be done to pull people back from this precipice? I really do think this is a live debate. It's a

live question. Where is the conservative movement going to go? What is the future of the Republican

party going to look like? And anybody who thinks they know for sure what the answer to that is,

it has to be fought out at the level of ideas and at the level of, again,

practical institution building. So I don't know the answer about what the future looks like.

I like this question, though I'm a little bit apprehensive about the answer I want to give.

I think we ought to remember the difference between fault and responsibility. Of course,

the people adopting these horrifying views, they are to blame. And I would never in any,

even the slightest way want to sound like I am justifying or excusing them.

But I do think that there are ways in which our approach, among libertarians, among classical

liberal conservatives, and on the left as well, approach to advocating for social change can

make it more or less likely that the more radical elements of the new right will be successful.

And so if we treat social change as zero sum, if we act as if any advance toward justice for one

group of people comes at the expense of another group, that is going to provoke backlash and

that is going to empower the worst voices that we've been describing. There is an alternative

to that approach of social change as zero sum. We can talk about it as positive sum. And if you

look at the ways that, for example, gay rights activists in the 1990s and early 2000s advocated

for the change that they were in favor of, they did it in an inclusive way. They did it by humanizing

their cause. They did it by talking about equal rights under the law and liberal values like

that. And in some cases, even in appealing to conservative values, family values, family formation,

right, lifelong commitment. So they achieved an incredible feat really in terms of, if you look

at the polling data about how quickly public opinion changed on support for gay marriage,

for example, it was rapid and it was dramatic. And that is the kind of activism success story

that there are going to be textbooks written about. And I think if we're being honest with

ourselves, we compare that to the kinds of activists in the gender politics space today or

really any kind of social justice space today. We find that they have adopted a very different

approach to pushing for the things they believe in which it is much more militant and much more

retributive against anyone, not just we want equal rights under the law, but we want to punish you if

you do not line up behind our views. I think that is a huge mistake. It is definitely empowering

the worst voices on the right and making it much harder for people like us to counter them

because then they can point to us as enablers of the cultural rights defeat. So I would call upon

folks who are on the center left, on the left of center as well and thinking about not in any way

how they are at fault for this phenomenon. But what can they do? How can they contribute to

stopping it? Which I think I hope we can all agree is the most important thing here.

All right. Three books, Stephanie. I'm eager to hear what three books I should be reading that I'm not.

I would recommend The Book Radicals for Capitalism by my Reason Magazine colleague Brian Doherty.

It is a freewheeling history of the modern libertarian movement. So anybody who may be

wondering what is libertarianism all about, this is the book to read. It is long and thorough,

but is also thoroughly entertaining, Radicals for Capitalism. Charles Taylor's The Ethics of

Authenticity is a short work of political theory that I really love because it is the model of

the kind of thinking through of ideas and approach to ideas that I aspire to in my own work, which

is to say he does not say the answer is black or white, which is sort of the way so many people

nowadays can't help but approach every issue. So he's talking about individuals and expressive

individualism and authenticity and these things that many people on the right seem to think are

completely at odds with other goods like transcendent truth and objective morality and tradition.

And instead of saying one or the other of these two positions is the right one, he says,

let's figure out what the productive synthesis is between them. So The Ethics of Authenticity.

And then because I'm a huge fiction reader and I especially love big books of fiction,

I would recommend one of my favorite novels of all time, which is War and Peace. It's a huge

investment of time and it's absolutely worth it. Thank you, Stephanie. And thank you for

the yeoman's work you've been doing for years diving into this movement, into this emerging

movement and understanding it from the inside out. And thank you for sharing your insights

with Ezra's listeners. Very much appreciated. Thank you for having me on. I really enjoyed it.

This episode of the Ezra Klein Show was produced by Kristen Lin, fact checked by Michelle Harris.

Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Annie Rose Strasser. The show's production

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