New Right

hmmn / IDW?

natcon?

-=-=-

SAME NEW RT?

AN 826

Over the course of President Donald Trump’s second term, many in his coalition have been disappointed by his decidedly interventionist approach to international affairs. Once he leaves office, warns one distinguished security expert, those in the “New Right” with a stricter ideological agenda will redouble their efforts to “upend America’s role in the world” even more than Trump has.

This is according to Leonard Schuette, an international security fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, who wrote in Foreign Affairs on Wednesday, “The intellectual movement that provided the ideological fuel for U.S. President Donald Trump’s rise to power, the New Right, is forging a new contender” to the traditional American grand strategy. Schuette calls it “civilizationism.”

As Schuette explains, “References to Western civilization permeate strategy documents and speeches by key members of the administration. Vice President JD Vance set the tone in his February 2025 speech at the Munich Security Conference, stressing the ‘threat from within’ to the fundamental values that characterize ‘our shared civilization.’ The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy warned of ‘civilizational erasure.’ This January, at Davos, Trump emphasized ‘the bonds we share with Europe as a civilization’; the next month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio called on the United States’ transatlantic partners to ‘renew the greatest civilization in human history.’”

Rather than the concept of Western Civilization long held by many in the U.S., which is “rooted in a shared set of principles that anyone, regardless of origin, can espouse, such as constitutional democracy, liberty, and equality,” according to Schuette, “for thinkers on the New Right, the West is defined by a specific geographic territory, a shared ancestry, and Christianity.” And “rather than aspiring to global leadership,” “they reject the universal ambitions of primacy and the constraints imposed on U.S. sovereignty by liberal internationalism.”

As Schuette explains, “Civilizationism differs markedly from Trump’s approach to the world. Although the Trump administration often speaks the language of civilizationism, Trump’s behavior is primarily motivated by personal grievance, transactional impulses, and a private interest in maximizing the wealth of his kin and clique. The biggest rupture between the administration’s foreign policy and civilizationism lies in Middle East policy. Contrary to his campaign promises, Trump did not retrench from the region, instead launching what he initially billed as a regime-change war against Iran. His attitude toward Israel — mostly treating it as a privileged ally — resembles that of neoconservative hawks such as the late U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham.”

But civilizationists reject neoconservative positions like this. According to Schuette, “If Washington were to adopt a consistent civilizational grand strategy, it would completely upend U.S. foreign policy. It would allow for previously unthinkable concessions to the United States’ geopolitical rivals. Civilizationism would pose a historic challenge to the already battered transatlantic relationship by granting Russia de facto control over eastern Europe or treating Moscow as part of a common Western civilization and agitating more openly against sitting governments in Europe. Other historical U.S. alliances would suffer, too. Tolerating Chinese regional hegemony would throw East Asian allies under the bus, and disengaging from the Middle East would leave Israel to fend for itself.”

He warns that civilizationism would end up being both contradictory and violent, writing, “Civilizational claims could overlap and become a recipe for regional wars. By defining other civilizations as alien cultures, a civilizationist grand strategy might fuel antagonism rather than tolerate differences. Even European far-right parties seem increasingly uninterested in being so overtly backed by their U.S. counterparts. And even if great-power conflict could be avoided, intracivilizational violence would abound. Japan, Pakistan, and Poland would be unlikely to accept regional hegemony by China, India, or Russia, respectively.”

With Trump’s reign soon to end, concludes Schuette, “the American right wing’s ideological future, and the future of U.S. grand strategy, is wide open. The Trump administration has broken with the bipartisan post–Cold War consensus on liberal hegemony but has failed to offer a coherent alternative. In the coming contest to define Washington’s foreign policy, civilizationism is poised to be a central contender.”

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RWW

Kyle Mantyla

Michelle Goldberg @ The New York Times: I Went to Florida to See the 31-Year-Old Candidate Thrilling Gen Z. We’re in Trouble.

Last Tuesday, James Fishback, a 31-year-old running for governor in Florida, was speaking to a packed house at the Queens Harbour Yacht and Country Club in Jacksonville. Every one of the room’s almost 100 seats was taken, and people were standing several rows deep around the perimeter, with more listening from the lobby outside. The crowd was mostly male and very young; several attendees told me they were in high school. A few wore the “America First” baseball caps popular with followers of Nick Fuentes, the influential white nationalist troll.

Aleja Hertzler-McCain @ The Roys Report: Over 100 Latino Christian leaders say Trump adviser Samuel Rodriguez’s reach is misrepresented

More than 100 Latino Christians leaders signed a statement saying Samuel Rodriguez, an evangelical adviser to President Donald Trump and a go-to voice for Hispanic evangelical perspectives, and news media have exaggerated the size of Rodriguez’s reach as president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference.

Sam Adler-Bell @ New York Magazine: The Young Women Leaving the New Right

Defectors say the movement has dropped the pretense of protecting women and is now openly “cruel and fickle.”

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AN 8 25

Back in the early 1980s, left-wing R&B singer Gil Scott-Heron (remembered for his incendiary "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised") was fond of saying that "the New Right is the same old wrong." The term "New Right," in those days, referred to President Ronald Reagan's fragile coalition — a mixture of neocon defense hawks, evangelical Christian fundamentalists, libertarian budget hawks and moderate Reagan Democrats. But in 2025, "New Right" has a radically different connotation and is synonymous with President Donald Trump's far-right MAGA movement.

Journalist Laura Field, author of the book "Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right," examines the elements of the 2025 "New Right" in an interview with Vox's Zack Beauchamp published in Q&A form on August 14.

Field describes today's New Right as a coalition, but one that is considerably different from the Reagan coalition of the 1980s.

"I'm talking about the MAGA New Right, (in contrast) with the Reagan-Buckley right, or the establishment right, which is propped up by fiscal conservatism (free-market economics), social conservatism (conservative social values), and anti-communism," Field told Vox. "The New Right turns against a lot of that. Michael Anton, one of these Claremont Institute guys, says that Trumpism and the New Right is all about economic nationalism — turning against the free market orientation of the establishment — as well as closed, secure borders."

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Field added, "So that's the anti-immigration strain and America First foreign policy. I think that there's also just a hardcore social conservatism at the core of a lot of this — at least spiritually."

The Clairemont Institute, a right-wing think tank, was founded in 1979 by the late Harry V. Jaffa, once a speechwriter for Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona). Claremont has changed dramatically since then, and its ultra-MAGA leanings are a major departure from the Goldwater and Reagan conservatism it once championed.

Describing the elements of the MAGA New Right, Field told Vox, "I have three main camps: the Claremonters, the post-liberals, and the national conservatives. Then, I talk also about the hard right, but the hard right travels alongside all three of them ideologically. The hard right is the hardcore, Manosphere-fascist types. Each of these groupings are different. The Claremonters are the West Coast Straussians that I was speaking about before. They are really committed, at least in theory, to the American founding. They have this very grandiose vision that's beyond even your ordinary patriotism. It's that this is the best regime of all time. They're also at the very cutting edge of the culture war…. And then, there's the national conservatives."

Field continued, "They're a little more vanilla, with just nationalism as their core thing. But it turns into ethno-nationalism in some cases and certainly Christian nationalism. They're a big tent."

The journalist/author stressed that even though the New Right is full of "weirdos," that doesn't mean they haven't achieved power in the Republican Party.

"The knee-jerk reaction to think 'who cares' is a natural one, because a lot of these people are bizarre — weirdos," Field told Vox. "That's why it's alarming to see them wield so much power, to see (Vice President) JD Vance have that clout. I think they have dramatically reoriented the GOP."

ref

no lnx

The “weirdos” shaping Trump’s second term

Politics

The “weirdos” shaping Trump’s second term

A liberal writer explains her journey through intellectual MAGAland.

by Zack Beauchamp

Aug 14, 2025,

Key Speakers At Conservative Political Action Conference

Michael Anton, current director of policy planning at the State Department, speaking during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland, on March 2, 2023. Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Zack Beauchamp

Zack Beauchamp is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad. His book on democracy, The Reactionary Spirit, was published 0n July 16. You can purchase it here.

If you’ve been following American politics in the Trump era, there’s a decent chance you’ve heard of “the New Right.” It’s a loose movement of radical intellectuals who share a basic hostility to American liberal democracy. They all think the system is rotten, that it needs to be fundamentally overhauled, and that Donald Trump can be a vehicle for putting something better in its place.

But why do they think that? How much influence do they really have? And what would a response to their rising prominence look like?

In an upcoming episode of Vox’s The Gray Area podcast, I spoke about all of this with Laura Field — a political theorist who spent a lot of time in the conservative intellectual world. Her book Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right is a fascinating taxonomy of the wild world of far-right thinking.

We talk about who these people are and how they replaced the “old” conservatism with something more aggressive and authoritarian. We also talk about how they are influencing the Trump administration, and why ordinary Americans should care what a handful of thinkers are putting out on obscure Substacks and YouTube channels.

Part of our conversation is transcribed below, edited and condensed for clarity. The full interview contains much more, and you can listen to it on Monday. We’ll update this link with the embed when the episode is out.

And, if you just can’t get enough of Zack and Laura content, you can come to our Vox-sponsored panel at the Liberalism in the 21st Century conference — held in DC on Friday. There’s already a waitlist, so sign up soon.

You’re someone who is liberal but found yourself as a professional academic and intellectual in conservative spaces — and that’s pretty unusual because there tends to be a lot of self-segregation away from that world. What pulled you into it and what was it like being an insider-outsider in the conservative world of ideas?

I wanted to go into medicine and be a doctor in the developing world. I was very, very liberal and sort of a save-the-world type. I had to take some required courses in political philosophy, and one was a wonderful course on ancient political philosophy and early modern thought. It was mind-blowing.

The right today uses this language of being “red-pilled,” where you see through the lies that we are told by the regime. They use this extreme language, but something sort of parallel happened to me, just reading Plato with these really great teachers.

I fell in love with these books and the tradition of political philosophy and literature that these teachers were so good at explaining. My politics didn’t change dramatically, but some of those circles were quite adjacent to the people who were the leaders of the avant-garde of defending Trumpism: the West Coast Straussians, call them the Claremont Institute people.

When that started happening, I was really quite alarmed.

You use “new right” as an umbrella term for all of these different pro-Trump factions. What makes the new Right a cogent grouping, not just a random smattering of people who all like Trump? What connects them and what differentiates them from the old right?

I’m talking about the MAGA new right, [in contrast] with the Reagan-Buckley right, or the establishment right, which is propped up by fiscal conservatism (free-market economics), social conservatism (conservative social values), and anti-communism.

The new right turns against a lot of that. Michael Anton, one of these Claremont Institute guys, says that Trumpism and the new right is all about economic nationalism — turning against the free market orientation of the establishment — as well as closed, secure borders. So that’s the anti-immigration strain and America-first foreign policy.

I think that there’s also just a hardcore social conservatism at the core of a lot of this — at least spiritually.

The new right has shared principles: preoccupation with gender, strong support for Trump, a general disinterest in the traditional norms of democratic politics, and a commitment to unremitting culture war against the left. But there are huge divisions. If you were to divide the new right into camps, what would you say the fault lines are?

I have three main camps: the Claremonters, the post-liberals, and the national conservatives. Then I talk also about the hard right, but the hard right travels alongside all three of them ideologically. The hard right is the hardcore, manosphere-fascist types. Each of these groupings are different.

The Claremonters are the West Coast Straussians that I was speaking about before. They are really committed, at least in theory, to the American founding. They have this very grandiose vision that’s beyond even your ordinary patriotism. It’s that this is the best regime of all time. They’re also at the very cutting edge of the culture war. So America is the best regime of all time, but we’ve completely lost the plot. The liberals and liberal way of thinking have taken over to such a degree that we need a counter-revolution. They’re the [type] who defended January 6.

Michael Anton, who you mentioned earlier, is now a Trump administration official, a high-ranking one. He’s one of the key leaders in that faction.

Yeah. And then there’s the national conservatives. They’re a little more vanilla, with just nationalism as their core thing. But it turns into ethno-nationalism in some cases and certainly Christian nationalism. They’re a big tent.

The tensions are clearest when we are talking about the post-liberals, who are the most highbrow of the New Right. They tend to be Catholic intellectuals: people like Adrian Vermeule at Harvard, Patrick Deneen at Notre Dame, and writer Sohrab Ahmari. These are serious Catholics who are more committed to social conservatism and really want to shape the morals of the country in a much more traditional Catholic direction. But they’re also interestingly much more sincere about the left-oriented [redistributive] economics.

The new right as a whole speaks as if they want to help the working class, and create new populist programs. But I think that the people who are closest to Trump haven’t really followed through. They’ve got the tariffs, but otherwise economically, they’re still doing the big tax cuts. They’re still beholden to donors. So that’s been a big fissure, because the post-liberals are almost open to socialism.

A lot of other fissures come in terms of how accepting they are of the hard right. Ahmari has been quite outspoken against the Proud Boys and the manosphere, Bronze Age Pervert and those guys.

I think another interesting divide, which came about just after the election, was DOGE vs. MAGA. DOGE came in and did the destructive part of getting rid of the so-called administrative state. But a big part of the new right wants to harness the state and weaponize it for their own purposes.

Why does any of this matter for our politics?

The knee-jerk reaction to think “who cares” is a natural one, because a lot of these people are bizarre — weirdos. That’s why it’s alarming to see them wield so much power, to see JD Vance have that clout.

I think they have dramatically reoriented the GOP. It’s not just JD Vance who’s some weirdo who’s gotten to the top. It also seems to matter a lot to young people. These kinds of movements can build energy, and young men are influenced by these circles.

A lot of these people I’m writing about are in the intellectual spheres. They’re pretty smart. A lot of them have PhDs, which is no marker of genius, but they have a lot of education and resources available to them. They’re experts in ways that would surprise many people. They know a whole lot. I wouldn’t want to debate some of them on the founding or other questions.

These well-learned people shape the minds of people like Joe Rogan. Ideologically, there is a trickle-down effect. The culture war has a big impact. You see the impact of someone like Christopher Rufo.

You argue that the right operates with an “ideas first” approach, believing that ideas have a tangible, causal impact on politics. Democrats, in contrast, are putting ideas last. You contrast the “coarse brazenness of [the right’s] ideologues and the tepid intellectual and cluelessness and cowardice of so many centrist and liberal leaders both within academia and beyond.”

That is a stinging indictment of the liberal intellectual class. Where are you coming from here? When you say that they’ve failed in contrast to the coarse brazenness of the new right, what do you mean?

Trump has been much more effective in his second term. The Democrats are in a difficult position. They had a very rocky electoral cycle with Biden staying in so long and Harris in this awful position of having to parachute in and not being very well prepared.

I don’t feel like there’s much of a response from the left intellectually to what’s going on. It doesn’t seem to me like the party has much to offer on the ideological front.

It is frustrating as an observer to see that Bernie and AOC were the people who went and toured the country. But I didn’t see more centrist Democrats doing very much. And I still think that’s the case. They seem very shocked and unprepared. And I think that that comes down to a failure of imagination — taking way too much for granted for a very long time. And that’s part of what got us Trump in the first place.

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an 4 25

MAGA media outlets like Newsmax TV, One America News (OAN) and Breitbart News are full of relentless cheerleading for President Donald Trump's second term. On those outlets, Trump is often praised for, MAGA pundits claim, getting a lot done at breakneck speed.

But Trump's policies are by no means universally loved on the right. Liberal-leaning MSNBC features plenty of Never Trump conservatives, The Bulwark is a bastion of right-wing Trump-bashing, and The Lincoln Project continues to crank out anti-Trump videos.

The conservative website The Dispatch offers in-depth analysis of Trump's second term in an editorial published on April 10, attacking Trump on everything from the economy to foreign policy.

"Donald Trump has literally made America — and Americans — poorer, bringing the United States to the brink of a recession in recent weeks by threatening to unilaterally impose one of the most regressive tax hikes in U.S. history," The Dispatch laments. "He's momentarily been talked into standing down, but an economic environment in which the whims of one famously mercurial man can upend the international trade system and wipe out trillions of dollars in stock market value is not one conducive to sustained growth."

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The Dispatch continues, "For the next 90 days — and really, for the remainder of Trump's term — decision-makers at businesses across the country and the world will be forced to speculate: Are the president's tariffs merely a negotiating tool, or an effort to fundamentally remake the global economy? Even key White House officials seem not to know."

The Dispatch stresses, however, that the "financial volatility of recent days is just one symptom of a broader, more deliberate descent."

"Decline doesn't solely mean impoverishment; it means degeneration, to sink backward and down," The Dispatch argues. "And that is what the United States' current leadership class is choosing for this country by willfully dismantling the free-market system, abandoning America's role as a global leader, and degrading the separation of powers and rule of law."

The Dispatch adds, "Even worse, it is doing so based on a suite of false assumptions: that Americans are weak, unable to compete in an open market, and incapable of responding to any incentives or exhortations more high-minded than rank self-interest or partisan contempt."

The editorial, headlined "Slouching Towards Tyranny," also lambasts Trump for failing to respect "the rule of law."

"Nowhere is the evidence of the new right's willful decline more obvious than in its rejection of fidelity to the rule of law and the Constitution," The Dispatch warns. "As the Trump Administration ignores due process, encroaches upon press freedom, and subverts the independence of the judiciary — all central pillars of self-government — top executive branch officials and Republican members of Congress turn a blind eye, or cheer it on."

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rww --> huffpo

no lnx huffpo

The Far Right Is Having A ‘Coronation Ball’ At The Watergate Hotel To Celebrate Trump’s Inauguration

Major MAGA figures are set to attend the black-tie event, hosted by a publishing house whose marquee author has advocated for a “dictator” to run the U.S.

Christopher Mathias

:{Jan 7, 2025,

A far-right publishing house that publishes the works of historical and contemporary fascists is hosting a “Coronation Ball” at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., to celebrate Donald Trump’s second inauguration, featuring a guest list that’s a veritable who’s-who of MAGA influencers and so-called New Right luminaries.

Passage Press will throw the confab in the Watergate Hotel’s Moretti Ballroom on the evening of Jan. 19, the night before Trump will be inaugurated as the 47th president of the U.S., according to an events page on the publishing house’s website.

That the event’s title refers to Trump’s inauguration as a “coronation” — a word typically reserved for the crowning of kings and queens in monarchies — underscores the anti-democratic, authoritarian nature of the black-tie soiree.

“Celebrate the inauguration of Donald John Trump,” Passage Press tweeted Monday, the four-year anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. “Be there as NRX is introduced to the MAGA brain trust. Be there as MAGA meets the Tech Right.”

“NRX” stands for “neoreactionary” and is used as a shorthand for “the Dark Enlightenment,” a far-right movement whose adherents are often as explicit in their distaste for democracy as they are in their reverence for fascism and monarchism.

One of Passage Press’ biggest authors is Dark Enlightenment figurehead Curtis Yarvin. The former Silicon Valley programmer blogged for years under the pen name “Mencius Moldbug” before emerging as a kind of court philosopher for reactionary tech billionaires and prominent MAGA movers and shakers (including Vice President-elect JD Vance).

Yarvin has advocated for a “national CEO, [or] what’s called a dictator” to be in charge of America. He is scheduled to attend the Coronation Ball, according to a post from Passage Press, as are Jack Posobiec, Mike Cernovich, Christopher Rufo, Steve Bannon, Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova.

The publishing house later deleted its tweet listing the Coronation Ball’s “confirmed attendees.”

Hotels, particularly in the Washington area, have a history of canceling or refusing to host gatherings for white supremacists or other bigots.

Reached for comment about hosting a party whose organizers and prominent attendees have espoused fascist views, the Watergate Hotel — housed in the same building where former President Richard Nixon’s lackeys broke into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in 1972, precipitating Nixon’s resignation — sent HuffPost the following statement:

“The Watergate Hotel prides itself on being a luxury destination that reflects the values of inclusivity and respect. As a hotel with a long-standing reputation for excellence, we prioritize the safety, comfort, and dignity of our guests and our dedicated team of employees.”

What we know about Passage Press comes largely from a remarkable Guardian exposé published by journalist Jason Wilson last year. In the piece, he unmasked the head of the company, a far-right influencer who went by the name “L0m3z,” as Jonathan Keeperman, a former English lecturer at the University of California, Irvine.

Jonathan Keeperman speaks at the National Conservative Conference in Washington D.C., Wednesday, July 10, 2024.

Jonathan Keeperman speaks at the National Conservative Conference in Washington D.C., Wednesday, July 10, 2024. DOMINIC GWINN via Getty Images

As “L0m3z,” Keeperman accrued a following on X, where he currently has 95,000 followers, in part by posting invective directed at anti-racist protesters, queer people and journalists. He expressed support for Kyle Rittenhouse, the armed teenager who fatally shot two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2020, writing, “May a million Kyle Rittenhouses bloom.”

He also wrote the he was “coming around to the idea that the most powerful and effective political argument against the left in 2020 is probably simple as: shut up fag.”

And Keeperman once appeared to advocate the mass execution of journalists. “The press are in fact the enemy,” he tweeted. “They are mewling midwit scum. Sniveling liars and desperate status junkies. My abiding contempt for them is only ever confirmed.” As Wilson reported, Keeperman also posted a list of “policy proposals” that included the phrase “lamppost the journos” — an apparent call to kill reporters by hanging them.

Keeperman and Passage Press didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about these statements, nor did they respond to questions seeking further details about the Coronation Ball.

Under Keeperman’s leadership, Passage Press has reprinted “out-of-print or public-domain books by historical fascist and reactionary writers,” Wilson wrote, including works “by radical German nationalist and militarist Ernst Jünger; Peter Kemp, who fought as a volunteer in Francisco Franco’s army during the Spanish civil war; and two counter-revolutionary Russian aristocrats, White Russian general Pyotr Wrangel and Prince Serge Obolensky.”

Passage Press’ contemporary authors include Steve Sailer, a blogger for the white supremacist site VDARE. Sailer has written that Black people “tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups” and “need stricter moral guidance from society.” Sailer’s book for Passage Press, Noticing, is an anthology of his musings on, among other subjects, “human biodiversity,” the preferred white supremacist nomenclature for eugenics and so-called race science. (Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson provided a fawning blurb for the book, writing that “if the meritocracy were real, Steve Sailer would be one of the most famous writers in the world.”)

Passage Press also publishes a magazine called Man’s World, which is edited and run by the pseudonymous misogynist “Raw Egg Nationalist.” In the Fox Nation documentary “The End of Men,” hosted by Carlson, Raw Egg Nationalist argued that “globalists” were manipulating food supplies to lower testosterone levels and emasculate men. Before working with Passage Press, Raw Egg Nationalist published books with Antelope Hill, a neo-Nazi publishing house based in Pennsylvania.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis listens to activist and New College of Florida trustee Christopher Rufo before signing three education bills on the campus of New College of Florida in Sarasota, Fla. on Monday, May 15, 2023. The Washington Post via Getty Images

Keeperman has also formed relationships with major figures in the MAGA movement, including Rufo, a fellow at the major conservative think tank the Manhattan Institute and close ally of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. The Republican governor is known for fanning the flames of outrage surrounding “critical race theory” and “trans ideology,” which right-wing figures like Rufo claim are being taught in America’s schools.

After Trump’s election victory in November, Rufo claimed he was set to meet with the president-elect at Mar-a-Lago to pitch him on policy proposals.

Rufo is listed as an attendee of the Coronation Ball, according to a tweet from Passage Press, but didn’t immediately respond to a request to confirm his attendance.

Rufo, Yarvin and Keeperman are often considered part of the New Right, a rebranding of familiar counter-revolutionary and anti-democratic politics. It’s the same ideology that animated the “alt-right,” the white supremacist movement that exploded into the public consciousness for its close relationship to the 2016 Trump campaign, only to collapse in the wake of its deadly and disastrous “Unite The Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The Coronation Ball hearkens back to two alt-right gatherings in Washington D.C. celebrating Trump’s election win. In November 2016, the city hosted a conference held by the now-defunct National Policy Institute, the fascist organization helmed by suit-and-tie neo-Nazi Richard Spencer. Spencer finished his speech by declaring “Hail Victory!” — the English translation of the Nazi cry “Sieg Heil” — and “Hail Trump!” A viral video from the event captured Spencer’s supporters throwing up the stiff-armed Nazi salute in response.

There was also the Deploraball event in January 2017, on the eve of Trump’s first inauguration, attended by a slew of conspiracy theorists and bigots, including the anti-Muslim activist Pamela Gellar; Gavin McInnes, the founder of the violent fascist street gang the Proud Boys; white nationalist Lauren Southern; Jim Hoft, founder of the misinformation-heavy news site Gateway Pundit; Cernovich, a pundit and date rape denier; and Posobiec, a conspiracist with a long history of associating with extremists.

Cernovic and Posobiec are both scheduled to appear at this month’s Coronation Ball, according to a tweet from Passage Press. They also both confirmed that they would attend in posts on X.

Posobiec’s path from PizzaGate influencer to fancy Watergate gala attendee is representative of how Trump’s ascent in politics has catapulted a coterie of once-fringe media figures into powerful positions in American politics.

He got his start as a “Game of Thrones” blogger before pivoting to promoting multiple far-right conspiracy theories, all while developing extensive ties to white supremacists and publicly posting racist and antisemitic messages online.

Posobiec nevertheless became a MAGA star and a prominent pro-Trump propagandist, appearing regularly on Fox News and at the Conservative Political Action Conference, among other forums. Last year he published the book “Unhumans: The Secret History Of Communist Revolutions (And How To Crush Them),” in which he argues that Americans with left-of-center views are subhuman while praising the violent fascistic regimes of Franco in Spain and Augusto Pinochet in Chile. (Vance provided a blurb for the book.)

“President Donald J. Trump is waiting in the wings,” Posobiec said while promoting ”Unhumans” at the National Conservatism Conference last year. “And when he assumes office again, let me tell you, the globalists and their entire regime will be smashed to pieces and scattered to the winds.”

He then added: “We don’t negotiate with unhumans because that’s the stakes of this — humanity versus unhuman; populist nationalist versus atheistic Marxist; strength, beauty and genius versus weakness, ugliness and stupidity; civilization versus barbarism; crime and chaos versus law.”

Other expected guests at the Coronation Ball, per Passage Press, include Joshua Lisec, a ghostwriter for right-wing influencers and a co-author with Posobiec of ”Unhumans.”

Jack Posobiec, center, attends the cocktail hour of the New York Young Republican Club's annual gala at Cipriani Wall Street, Sunday, Dec. 15, 2024, in New York.

Steve Bannon is set to attend, too, according to Passage Press. He cofounded Breitbart, which he called the “platform for the alt-right,” before running Trump’s 2016 campaign and later serving in Trump’s White House. Bannon was recently released from prison after serving four months for refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena from the committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. He is currently the host of the popular ”War Room” podcast. Bannon didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about whether he would attend the Coronation Ball, but his War Room co-host, Natalie Winters, tweeted that she will be at the event.

Two other popular podcasters, Khachiyan and Nekrasova, hosts of “Red Scare,” are also scheduled to attend the Coronation Ball, according to Passage Press. Khachiyan and Nekrasova started the podcast years ago as a nominally left, socialist program, but eventually emerged as apostles of the New Right, cozying up to Yarvin and far-right tech billionaire Peter Thiel, along with the type of conspiracy theorist they used to skewer — InfoWars’ Alex Jones. Neither Khachiyan or Nekrasova immediately responded to a request for comment.

Grimes, the famous musician and ex-wife of Elon Musk — the world’s richest man and a close Trump ally, currently on a campaign of embracing Europe’s most extreme right-wing and fascist political parties — was listed by Passage Press as a “confirmed attendee,” but a representative told HuffPost she will not be in attendance.

Also listed as an attendee is Jeremy Carl, a fellow at the Claremont Institute, the influential MAGA think tank. Carl is the author of the book ”The Unprotected Class,” which ludicrously asserts that “anti-white racism is the most predominant and politically powerful form of racism in America today.” Carl didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Countdown To Trump Is On

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On Tuesday morning, Passage Press tweeted that the Coronation Ball was sold out. That tweet was deleted Tuesday afternoon, around the same time the ticket price for the event on the Passage Press website shot up from $250 to $875.

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The Forebears of JD Vance and the New Right

the ascension of Ohio Senator JD Vance from, as he was dubbed by much of the American media, white working class-whisperer author of Hillbilly Elegyto Donald Trump’s 2024 nominee for vice president has made him a standard-bearer of a rising brand of illiberal, antidemocratic conservatism that has quickly built visible power on the American right.

Few of Vance’s politics are truly new. His anti-immigrant nativism is reminiscent of the Know-Nothing party; his nuclear family-oriented cultural and economic politics — and his views on “childless cat ladies” — are in step with long-held preferences of conservative Christian voters and less-Christian GOP politicians. It is Vance’s relatively new embrace of antitrust industrial policy, and rhetorically, American manufacturing workers, that have been the most puzzling to many of those who have watched his political evolution and the rise of the “New Right.” Is this populism? Is it something like social democracy? What does worker-friendly conservatism mean?

The spectrum of modern American politics, as it’s usually understood, ranges from free-market orthodoxy on the right to social democracy and the welfare state on the left. But Vance’s rhetoric and political bedfellows — such as American Compass founder Oren Cass and Compact magazine founder Sohrab Ahmari, among others — signal that Vance is positioning himself as the frontman of an American movement that, like far-right movements in Europe, pairs conservative cultural politics with an active government role in shaping markets and economic policy. To hear Vance tell it, he was once a standard Republican with “a dogged commitment to neoliberal orthodoxy.” But then he met the Christian billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel — himself a nationalist quasi-libertarian who has led the right-wing charge against Big Tech, and whose ideas about the moral failings of elite striving for success were formative for Vance at Yale Law School — converted to Catholicism, and began to rail against the economy and culture that, in his view, liberal elite-dominated politics have created.

Right-wing discomfort with the moral and cultural consequences of market capitalism is not new. Nearly a century ago, another generation of American conservatives, distrustful of the economic changes around them, also invoked “tradition” to counter what they saw as the extreme forces of their time: industrial capitalism, communism, and fascism. They were known as the Agrarian-Distributist movement, and like members of today’s right-wing movements, they also found themselves accused of harboring unsavory ideologies. That movement’s origins and dissipation helps us understand the historical precedents and intellectual genealogy of today’s resurgent right.

In 1930, a group of Southern literary scholars and writers, including the poets and essayists John Gould Fletcher, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren, published a collection of essays titled I’ll Take My Stand. The book pushed back against industrialization and urbanization, calling instead for a “return” to localism, agrarianism, and smallholding modeled off the Old South of their imagination. They believed it possible to separate plantation slavery from the South’s true culture; according to historian and Agrarianist Frank Lawrence Owsley, they were “demanding a fair hearing for the fundamental cause of the South — now that slavery can no longer befog the real issue.” Willing to sideline the existence of actual slavery for the specter of enslavement under industrial capitalism and communism, Agrarians sought an alternative to both. They worried that by disconnecting workers from land and agriculture, industrialization threatened the moral fabric of society.

The authors of I’ll Take My Stand were 12 men with 12 visions of the traditional society to which they wished to return; their political philosophy was incoherent. Agrarianism sought a hierarchical, quasi-aristocratic society — “I suppose this is Jeffersonian,” Allen Tate wrote — where each man had a smallholding that allowed him to provide for himself and his family. In its adherence to private property, it avoided the pitfalls of collectivism and communism; in maintaining a social hierarchy and man’s (almost always man’s) connection to land and production, it avoided the alienation of industrialization. None of the authors themselves lived the lives of a smallholder or subsistence farmer. If they had, they might have thought differently about the aesthetic and cultural freedoms they imagined possible in such a life.

I’ll Take My Standwas put forth as a Southern regional philosophy, but it had grander ambitions. “I think we … were a little more aware of the world movement towards reaction than I’ll Take My Stand indicated,” Tate wrote three years after the book’s publication. Putting their principles forward first as a regional movement was, he wrote, strategic. From the beginning, he felt that agrarianism’s Achilles heel was that the United States, apart from the South, did not truly have a history of the type of “traditional” society the movement desired.

In 1933, the New York publisher Seward Collins started a magazine to serve as a mouthpiece for these very different sorts of critiques of industrialism than those being put forth by the era’s ascendant Left. In his editorial note for the American Review’s first issue, Collins explained that its purpose was to:

give greater currency to the ideas of a number of groups and individuals who are radically critical of conditions prevalent in the modern world, but launch their criticism from a ‘traditionalist’ basis … It should be obvious that a periodical aiming to bring these groups and individuals together is particularly needed in this country, where tradition took little root before it was overridden by the disruptive forces that are now threatening Western civilization.

The American Reviewwas not a particularly well-run magazine, and Collins not a particularly good publisher. His failure to pay writers promptly nearly severed the Agrarians’ relationship with the magazine several times. (“I would like to point out to you that you cannot possibly hope to make a success of the American Reviewwithout the fullest possible courtesy to those who are likely to stand by you in what I think is going to be the coming struggle in this country — the struggle between fascist agrarianism and industrial communism,” Arkansas poet John Gould Fletcher wrote after months of no payment and no response from Collins.) But the publication served its purpose. It forced the Agrarians to put to paper a positive — not simply reactionary — vision of their political prescriptions. And it connected the American Agrarians to their counterparts elsewhere, providing a forum for the development of right-wing thought across continents.

It was in the company of the American Reviewthat the Agrarians first encountered the British writers Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton, proponents of a philosophy dubbed “Distributism.” Both Catholics by the end of their life (Chesterton converted from Anglicanism), Chesterton and Belloc were able to situate their philosophy comfortably within Catholic teaching and what they understood to be Christian orthodoxy: equal distribution of property and a hierarchical structure of society. Belloc, in his 1912 book The Servile State,wrote that “industrial society as we know it will tend towards the re-establishment of slavery,” and he recommended a reversal of his era’s “Pagan economic society” to the Christian “Distributist” state of Middle Age monasticism, a “distributive system … guaranteed by the existence of co-operative bodies, binding men of the same craft or of the same village together, guaranteeing the small proprietor against loss of his economic independence, while at the same time [guaranteeing] society against the growth of a proletariat.”

Belloc and Chesterton each had essays in the first edition of the Review,and Collins asked Tate to review their respective books, The Servile Stateand The Outline of Sanity.“Great God, how could we have missed all this?” Tate wrote to Collins upon receiving the books. “It is all pure gospel.”

The established practice of monasticism gave the Distributists an aesthetic and a set of values to strive for: self-sufficiency, asceticism, and a devotion to beauty and higher orders of thinking. Theirs was a politics, as they framed it, with a precedent in the European context. Unable to locate their politics in any usable sort of American tradition — the Southern tradition had been defeated, and its real-world associations were with enslavement, anti-democratic impulses and cultural backwardness — the literary scholars who formed the Agrarian “movement” struggled. Agrarians viewed themselves as traditionalist reactionaries, but it was never entirely clear what tradition they were drawing on, or to what tradition they wished to return. They had started with a Southern regionalism, but few remained committed to it after the publication of I’ll Take My Stand. The Europeans had Catholicism, and, perhaps more importantly, a history of societies organized around Catholicism and monarchism to draw upon for traditional credibility. But “we are not Catholics, and we cannot use Catholicism for our own ends,” Tate wrote. “We are fated to use what our own tradition offers us.”

That didn’t stop them from trying. The New York historian Herbert Agar soon became a spokesman for the movement and the Agrarian most committed to putting the philosophy’s ideals into political practice. Agar had spent several years living in England, where he became enamored by Distributism. He was a frequent contributor to the American Review,and upon his return to the United States, Tate brought him into the Agrarian fold. He was the human link between the Agrarians and Distributists that made their alliance a reality.

It was the Great Depression, the time of the New Deal. Agar and other Agrarian-Distributists criticized the New Deal for its band-aid approach to fixing problems that they saw as fundamental to industrial capitalism and collectivism. Agar began putting together a symposium, Who Owns America?, a follow-up to I’ll Take My Standthat the group hoped would be a starting point for Agrarian-Distributist influence on establishment American politics. The book, published in 1936, opened with an introduction tearing down “monopoly capitalism.” That system was un-American, per Agar, for promising to give freedom to American laborers while subjecting them to the whims of the labor market and deep boredom. Monopoly capitalism also imperiled “a stable family life” and the chance “to do creative work,” to “enjoy responsibility,” and to “live in an atmosphere of equality.”

Just as this political effort began in earnest, Seward Collins gave an interview to a communist magazine in which he expressed sympathies for Hitler, Mussolini, and fascism. In the interview, he implied to journalist Grace Lumpkin that the Agrarians were also fascist sympathizers. Just a decade earlier, this may not have been so controversial — in the 1920s, many mainstream American commentators and journalists expressed a fascination with the rise of Mussolini and fascist Italy. But by the 1930s, Mussolini, Hitler, and fascism were poisonous to any serious political movement in America.

The interview caused significant coalitional problems for the Agrarians. Tate exchanged letters with Lumpkin in the New Republic,writing “I am so deeply opposed to fascism that I should choose communism if it were the alternative … Both are slave-states, but the aim of fascism must be realized by force, while the aim of communism, ideally at least, looks toward order and consent.” Lumpkin replied that “any honest examination of the theoretical basis of fascism by you and your group should make you uncomfortable at the similarity,” and wrote in another letter to Collins in the New Republicthat she would leave Tate “with genuine regret and sadness as he goes about with his butterfly net busily recapturing Southern traditions.” The Agrarians, like conservatives before and after them, struggled to distance themselves from the racist and fascist elements of their movement — in part because racism and a romantic vision of American slavery was fundamental to their project. The boundaries were porous; the communication with people whose ideas they publicly denounced was frequent. Tate’s and other Agrarians’ close personal relationships with Collins continued even after Tate publicly denounced his fascist sympathies.

The split between fascist-sympathizing Agrarian sympathizers and those — like Agar — who sought to bring about Agrarianism democratically became more and more pronounced. Collins argued that democracy and reactionary agrarianism could not coexist; instead, he believed, monarchism was preferable to a watered-down, democratic agrarianism. Agar, in the introduction to Who Owns America?, wrote that the contributors’ common ground was “a belief that monopoly capitalism is evil and self-destructive, and that it is possible, while preserving private ownership, to build a true democracy in which men would be better off both morally and physically, more likely to attain that inner peace which is the mark of a good life.”

Who Owns America?was the Agrarian-Distributists’ last hurrah. The American public — including, ironically, the very farmers and working men that the movement sought to “save” — was simply not attracted to the philosophy. Stringfellow Barr, reviewing the book for the Virginia Quarterly Reviewin 1936, wrote that while American agriculture was caught up in capitalism’s cycles of debt, it wasn’t necessarily against its own wishes — “the American farmer dearly loves a mortgage.” In the decades since, historians and scholars have given a variety of reasons for the movement’s downfall. In 1941, historian Thomas J. Pressly’s “Agrarianism: An Autopsy,” published in the Sewanee Review, enumerated the charges against the Agrarians: confused and contradictory ideas, conflation of the subsistence farming tradition they sought with the Old South’s commercialized agriculture, failure to reach the common man. More recently, historian Paul Conkin wrote that it was the “last significant … battle against either socialist or corporate forms of collectivism,” and that it was their struggle against “every trend in American life” which doomed them. My own opinion is that it was Agrarianism’s lack of a convincing American tradition of order, hierarchy, and smallholding — as well as its tainted association with fascism and the Confederacy — that doomed the movement. It didn’t help that a movement meant to support the working man and farmer found it difficult to escape the elite circles from which it rose.

Today’s populist, illiberal right is often explicitly Christian, and often — like Vance — explicitly Catholic. It struggles less with the problem of democracy than its forebears did; many of its politicians, adopting a populist aesthetic and rhetoric, explicitly favor less democracy. Rather than reaching back to the Old South or pre-industrial feudalism, Vance and his counterparts on the New Right seem to envision America’s industrial age — families organized around a single breadwinner employed at a factory or a mine — as the ideal to emulate. They seek welfare and social insurance policies that incentivize marriage and single-breadwinner nuclear families; they speak fondly of midcentury trade unions and autoworkers’ unions. It is a reactionary traditionalism that recalls the “good old days,” and is aligned with similar theocratic movements in Hungary and Austria. But while it is in some ways more explicitly extreme in its political views, more religious, and, due to its presence in a mainstream political party, potentially more powerful than Agrarianism, it ultimately could be done in by the same internal contradictions — and unsavory alliances — that doomed that earlier movement to the margins of American history.

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Donald Trump Jr. recently told The Wall Street Journal that his father, former President Donald Trump, "always jokes—or maybe doesn’t joke, I’m not 100% sure sometimes with him—'You know, you’re much better at politics than you were at real estate.'"

The former co-host of "The Apprentice," and current host of "one of the most popular" podcasts on the Rumble platform, Trump Jr. has big plans for the GOP in the case his dad reclaims the White House next month, the WSJ reported Sunday.

“I don’t want just MAGA with only Trump, and then it goes back to the old ways,” Trump Jr. told the newspaper. “We need to have a bench. And for a long time I don’t think we had any of that. And this election cycle, you’ve seen the emergence of people that can actually carry that mantle. I think that’s really important.”

READ MORE:[The 'contradiction at the heart of the Republican Party' that gives Dems an advantage: columnist

The MAGA heir is proud that he successfully managed to get Senator JD Vance (R-OH) on the 2024 GOP ticket.

“I expended about 1,000% of my political capital" in persuading his dad to pick the Ohio senator as running mate, Trump Jr. told the WSJ, "as Vance smiled bashfully beside him."

“Making the argument, getting others who believe the same thing to do that—you know, just a constant barrage. I can be pretty persistent when I need to be.”

WSJ reports:

Vance isn’t the only lawmaker he’s handpicked and promoted. Rep. Jim Banks, a wonky young Indiana congressman who grew up in a trailer park, caught Trump Jr.’s eye with a 2021 memo calling on the party to ignore the “embittered and loud minority in the GOP that finds our new coalition distasteful” and seize the opportunity to 'permanently become the Party of the Working Class.'

Trump Jr. was one of Banks’s first supporters in his current run for Senate, endorsing him even before his father did, hosting multiple fundraisers and campaign events and helping clear the field of GOP competition. 'More than anybody, Don is focused on the future of the movement, building the new Republican Party, getting younger people like myself and JD elected in key places,' Banks said. “He recognizes those of us who are fighting back, changing the old-school Republican Party to the America First, pro-Trump party.'*

The WSJ also highlights Trump Jr.'s appeal with GOP donors as one of his superpowers.

“From a donor standpoint, he’s by far the No. 1 requested person,” a top Republican fundraising consultant told the newspaper. "He goes places and they sell out immediately. He’s the No. 1 surrogate and it’s not even close. It’s pretty rare that you have someone who has that kind of hybrid appeal with both donors and grassroots.”

If his father defeats Vice President Kamala Harris, "Trump Jr. will be well positioned to call in favors from the Congress he has stocked with friends and allies," such as Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL).

"I think the Republican Party has just drastically changed and there’s no going back," Vance told the WSJ. "And my job is to make sure that that change is successful and effective and can actually implement successful public policies."

READ MORE:['The party needs to burn to the ground': Former adviser rips into GOP u

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GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump's running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), often rails against "elites." Yet in July, Forbes estimated the "Hillbilly Elegy" author's net worth to be around $10 million.

In a think piece article published on September 16, Politico's Ian Ward examines the "tension" between Vance's anti-elite rhetoric and the fact that he is a multi-millionaire who graduated from Yale University's law school and became a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley.

Vance, according to Ward, "has become a vociferous conservative critic of that same elite on behalf of disaffected Middle Americans, a role he can claim by virtue of his upbringing in post-industrial Ohio and his family's roots in eastern Appalachia."

"At various points throughout his career," Ward explains, "Vance has acknowledged this tension — without really trying to resolve it.… Now that Vance is accompanying Trump on the top of the Republican ticket, this paradox has opened Republicans up to fresh criticisms. How populist can Vance really be while cozying up to billionaires in Silicon Valley?"

Ward continues, "What does a Yale-educated attorney and ex-venture capitalist understand about the lives of Trump's blue-collar voters? Is a guy who owns not one but two million-dollar houses a credible mouthpiece for the GOP's fledgling economic populism? But the deeper I've dug into the conservative world Vance comes from — often referred to as the 'New Right' — the more I've come to see Vance's split identity as a feature rather than a bug for his ideological supporters."

Back in 1980, the term "New Right" referred to Ronald Reagan's conservative coalition. The late political R&B singer Gil Scott-Heron, a major supporter of progressive and left-wing causes, was fond of saying that "the New Right is the same old wrong."

But in 2024, the term "New Right" has a decidedly MAGA connotation and vehemently rejects the Reagan, Goldwater, Bush and McCain conservatism of the 1980s and 1990s.

READ MORE:['Smallest man who ever lived': Trump slammed over 'dangerous' Taylor Swift post

"In fact, Vance embodies an archetype that has been theorized about at length in New Right-adjacent books and podcasts, many of which Vance has read and listened to," Ward explains. "By forging an alliance between the elite 'New Right' and the MAGA masses, Vance, according to this reading, could serve as the leader of a new movement to institute an illiberal and explicitly reactionary political order."

Ward adds, "Though adopting the rhetoric of conservatism populism, this new order would be a fundamentally elitist one: It would expel America's current ruling elite in order to replace it with a new, more conservative one, drawn from the ranks of the New Right."

READ MORE:[Trump's hate is no joke

*Read the full Politico article at this link.

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