The Dangerous Lost Boys of the American Right

Hate and bigotry based on race, religion, sexual orientation and national origin have long been a steady undercurrent of American society, yet since Donald Trump's launch of his 2016 campaign when he depicted Hispanics as an evil enemy such hatreds have been not only mainstreamed but also given a level of respectability in "conservative" and Republican circles.  One need look no further than Ron DeSantis' campaign - aided by Republicans in the Florida legislature - to see that open war has been declared against gays and blacks not to mention women who want control over their own bodies. DeSantis' message of hate stems in part from his desire to appeal to the "Christian" extremist and white supremacist dominated base of today's Republican Party.  As a column in the New York Times analyzes it also stems from the toxic masculinity so prized among those on the far right that needs someone to denigrate and marginalize to infuse itself with a sense of self worth - and someone to blame for one's own failures and lack of accomplishments.   Then, of course, you have the grifters who use hatred to thrill their audiences while enriching themselves.  How this viciousness can be ended is hard to say, but it is clearly a societal threat. Here are column highlights:

Since the ascendance of Donald Trump, with depressing regularity, right-wing men have been outed for using the most vile rhetoric. In private chats and sometimes in full view of the public on social media, they’ll engage in blatantly racist, sexist and homophobic speech, flirt with fascist imagery and then often disavow their words and actions the instant they’re caught.

The examples are legion, and they’re not coming from fringe outlets on the American right. For example, last month, the Ron DeSantis campaign parted ways with a young speechwriter named Nate Hochman who reportedly inserted a Nazi sonnenrad symbol into a pro-DeSantis video online. Hochman was previously under fire for telling Nick Fuentes, a notorious white supremacist . . . Hochman responded, “I said some really stupid things, which I don’t actually believe, that signaled agreement with Fuentes, even though I couldn’t disagree more with his vision of the world.” Roughly a year after that incident, according to Axios, he created the sonnenrad video.

Was Hochman fringe? Hardly. Before he joined the DeSantis campaign, he worked as a staff writer at National Review and interned at The Dispatch, where I worked as a senior editor before joining The New York Times. He even once wrote for The Times.

Hochman is not alone. In June the right-wing publication Breitbart published group chats and private messages from Pedro Gonzalez, a popular online influencer and DeSantis supporter, which included comments like “Whites are the only hope nonwhites have of living civilized lives” and “The only tactical consideration of Jews is screening them for movements,” along with a host of other comments not suitable for a family publication.

This month HuffPost reported that Richard Hanania, an influential anti-woke writer, published a series of pseudonymous posts at racist publications in the late 2000s and early 2010s. . . . . close observers of his contemporary work were hardly surprised by the revelations. Just this past May, for example, he posted in a thread on crime that America needs “more policing, incarceration, and surveillance of Black people.”

The September issue of The Atlantic contains Graeme Wood’s fascinating and disturbing profile of a man named Costin Alamariu, better known online as Bronze Age Pervert, who has a cult following among the young right. Alamariu argues, writes Wood, “that the natural and desirable condition of life is the domination of the weak and ugly by the strong and noble. He considers American cities a ‘wasteland’ run by Jews and Black people . . .

Terrible stuff. And even more terrible is the realization that I could fill this entire column with other examples of right-wing bigotry, from Christian nationalists, a former Trump speechwriter, a former Daily Caller editor and one of Tucker Carlson’s former top writers. And this is hardly a complete list. The problem is so widespread . . .

What is going on? Why are parts of the right — especially the young right — so infested with outright racists and bigots?

Some readers might respond to my question with a question: Why am I surprised? The right has always been infested with racists and bigots, you might argue. Yet while I freely acknowledge that there was more racism on the right than I was willing or able to see before the rise of Trump, there has been a distinct change in young right-wing culture. It is dramatically different from what it was when I was in college, in law school and starting my legal career.

As I survey the right — especially the young, so-called new right — I see a movement in the grip of some rather simple but powerful cultural forces. Hatred, combined with masculine insecurity and cowardice, is herding young right-wing men into outright bigotry and prejudice. Contrary to their self-conception, they’re not strong or tough or courageous.

A tiny fringe adopts this mind-set as a conscious ethos, but for a much larger group, it is simply their cultural reality. In their minds, the left is so evil — and represents such an existential threat — that any accommodation of it (or any criticism of the right) undermines the forces of light in their great battle against the forces of darkness. Attack the left in the most searing terms, and you’ll enjoy the thunderous applause of your peers. Criticize the new right, and you can experience a vicious backlash. The result is a relentless pull to the extremes.

As they see it, classical liberal politics, which preserve free speech and robust debate as a priority, emboldened and empowered the left. Compromise, in their view, ran only one way, and conservatism conserved nothing. The left, in their mind, is winning the culture war in a rout.

And here’s where masculine insecurity enters the equation. To the new right, their opposition to the left is so obviously correct that only moral cowardice or financial opportunism (“grifting”) can explain any compromise. To fight on the right — mainly by trolling on social media or embracing authoritarianism as the based alternative to weak-kneed classical liberalism — is seen as strong, courageous and cool.

But what happens if you disagree? What happens if you ask: Wait, are we going too far? Well, then, you’re weak and small. . . . . Worse still, even when one initially embraces bigotry “only” as a form of social transgression, marinating in that environment soon turns trolling into conviction. . . . So in the name of strength, these young men capitulate until their minds and hearts are warped beyond recognition.

In the meantime, these angry online sheep can still bite. They’re using their platforms to whip countless Americans into their own frenzy of fear. We should expect more bigotry and more revelations. Dark words spoken in secret will spill out into the public square. The lost boys of the American right corrupt our culture. Full of fury against their opponents and afraid of running afoul of their “friends,” they poison our politics and damage their own souls.