The vibes-BASED international order
What’s wrong with the online right
The online right is one of the most creative and potent vibe-crafting machines in history, but its real-world powers are limited, and many of its strengths have curdled into liabilities. That’s the conclusion I’ve come to after years of interviewing its thinkers, platforming its ideas, and believing it could be a vessel for renewal. Instead, it has drifted into becoming a system where performative energy has replaced constructive direction, more often producing delusion, dysfunction, and a slow erosion of its own promises.
The first four months of Trump's return now seem like a case study in government by meme.
After my “crashing out” was documented in the New York Times, I thought I’d try to explain what I object to. Despite many speculations, there was neither a monetary reward nor an opportunity to craft how I was presented in the article. It was based on a rather heated and freewheeling conversation with Pedro Gonzalez, a friend. Michelle Goldberg contacted me to say she enjoyed the podcast, that it reflected a broader phenomenon she was researching, and that she would use some quotes from it for a piece. I was incensed enough with the events of the day to say: “Go ahead.” When it turned out that my story was the backbone of the piece and I was the poster girl for defection, after a bit of shock, I realized that many people would take it personally. Clarifying my views seems fair to the people who feel disrespected or hurt by my words.
So, let me preface this by acknowledging that I appreciate the work of many writers and thinkers on the right, and I don’t deny that there are serious areas worth exploring and many issues that have been previously excluded from mainstream discourse. Most of the people I’ve interviewed over the years have had unique perspectives, made compelling arguments, and expressed legitimate grievances. I don’t disavow my guests, but this doesn’t change the fact that the overarching machine of the online right, much like the Tumblr left that preceded it, ultimately doesn’t serve these interests effectively.
I’ve seen people who started with curiosity, integrity, and yes, a dose of rightful indignation, morph into walking, talking bundles of thought-terminating clichés. The end of the road is either a relentless focus on classics like "the Jews" or "women," or something more amorphous like the eldritch specter of entropy represented by the Left consuming everything in its path. The audience is a co-author on these journeys; they want their red meat and will take no substitutes. My own audience grew progressively more hungry for its weekly dose of edginess, as it says on the tin: “Subversive.” But there is a limited set of unique insights that can only be found on the online right, and the only way to uncover more is by either escalating or becoming more esoteric, which often means just trading in conspiracies. Personally, I don’t put much weight on the machinations of the Jews, don’t think women are the downfall of civilization, and don’t think the globalists are plotting to abolish private property and make us eat bugs. I do care about empowering smart people to do great things and about issues like crime, mass immigration, families, and children, just as I did when I first became attracted to this space. However, I’ve increasingly found myself out of step with the demands of the meme machine.
The news cycle continuously feeds this system by providing memeable anecdotes. “He did the meme.” Every influencer waits to see what comes down the daily social media slop chute and how it can be framed within their existing toolbox of memes to fit the narrative. Taking something that seems to counter your usual story and managing to verbally spin a win out of it, shoehorning it into the proper meme format, is the craft of a true artist. Reality bends to the meme, not the other way around. And the only direction a meme can take is further. To de-escalate is to cuck.
Whoever can play this game the most consistently, the most breathlessly, the most reductively, with the most animus towards the other side and the most flattery for the in-group, wins. The goal of every interaction is to be seen as the most based, the most stone-cold, and the most heterosexual. Insert Gigachad and, at all costs, avoid being the soyjak. There are many sophisticated and thoughtful meme merchants, true, but the stuff that trickles to the top is Catturd-tier, because it has been wrung through so many chad-take-all in-group signalling cycles until it’s polished into a minimalist, snappy nugget of based.
There is a cascade of memes—ZOG/GAE, multipolarity, "manly manufacturing jobs" versus "fake laptop jobs," isolationism versus globalism, NATO as a leech, the 1950s as the apogee of America, and dismissing the "rules-based international order" as fake and gay—that find embodiment in the figure of Donald Trump. Again, all these memes have legitimate grievances at their root, but they crystallize into slogans on their way to the top.
The Liberation Day Tariffs are one of the first online-right meme policies. They are a perfect storm of congruence between the ascendant memes of “multipolarity,” “America First,” and “reviving manufacturing will bring back the 1950s social order,” and Trump’s hardened mind palace where he has been obsessed with both the trade deficit with China and the idea of tariffs as revenue since the 1980s. The policy, from its framing of tariffs as a tribute paid to the US by lowly but extractive lesser nations, to the way they were napkin-calculated based on bilateral trade deficit numbers, to the implication that this is the one way to reshore manufacturing, is the effect of memes coming home to roost. The schizophrenic implementation of the policy is the result of the rough landing of pure vibes in the real economy. The endless 4D chess justifications for every twist and turn are nothing new; they are the trade of the online right influencer, sharpened on the daily grind of fitting memes and meanings onto the events of the day, “just asking questions” and applying edifying lenses like “you don’t hate journalists enough” or “don’t make me tap the sign” (*the elites are pedophiles).
DOGE is also a meme policy. Despite there doubtlessly being ways to make the government more efficient, the guiding meme here is “the establishment is corrupt and wasteful.” For the true believer, and Trump is surrounded by nothing but, it is natural to boast about a massive budget deficit reduction before assessing if the reality on the ground matches the priors set by the meme. The projected $2 trillion in cuts are now looking more like at best $100 billion, and both spending and the budget deficit are higher than under Biden at this point in the year. The details of the DOGE cuts are meme-powered in themselves, gutting USAID (clearly a longhouse-adjacent empathy racket) but also targeting the Department of Energy and programs like the LPO, which are critical to enabling the nuclear energy expansion promised as part of the administration's economic revival. The boast-to-bust cycle is built in.
The pattern repeats: “Trump will end the Ukraine war in one day.” Here, the meme is “you only need one great man of history (or a small team of hyper-competent autistic ones) to change the world.” Boast-to-bust in… one day. Currently, this is “Biden’s war,” and fading into the background of Trump’s preoccupations.
The deportations, as performed by this administration—whatever you think of the merits of mass deporting illegal aliens—are another meme policy. Numbers for FY 2025 are running about 5,200 removals (approximately 4%) behind the pace set in FY 2024 under Biden. Ghiblified illustrations of crying fentanyl dealers posted by the White House may amuse the meme lords, but they don’t do much to increase effectiveness on one of the most electorally salient issues.
The meme-first approach to policy means you and your supporters have already assumed the meme is accurate. You skip the vitiated organs of the establishment (every mainstream opinion on the matter) because it’s time to implement. It’s only logical to make bold, manly promises because your view of the world is presumed correct, so taking strong steps to solve the meme problem quickly is the best course of action. But pretty much all meme policies deform on impact with the rocky soil of reality.
One key insight of the online right is that meme magic is indeed much closer to how most people think, and that trading in engaging (or enraging) vibes means you can harness power in a democracy. The feels are how you move electorates. People want to see themselves a certain way, want to be heard, and want to be aligned with perceived high status. In many ways, it matters less what happens in the real world when "your guys" are in power. Bare subsistence is taken care of for most, but status, a close second in importance, can’t be.
The Tumblr left had a similar cycle, but it moved at the pace set by a slower substrate. It started as a handful of verbose teenagers debating the finer points of Foucault and ended in “abolish the police” and burning down your own neighborhood for George Floyd. The journey from the sensitive young genius reading Carl Schmitt to the tsunami of rage-slop typifying today’s online right was just faster, accelerated by the much more dynamic nature of platforms like 4chan and Twitter, and the exploding screen time enabled by better phones.
The online right signalling ratchet also selects for the most apocalyptic scenarios of the future lest the issues be resolved. This is part of the escalation cycle and a crucial component of trusting the plan. The end is nigh, so we have to do something, anything, to stave it off. But these scenarios, however plausible or implausible, don’t reflect the concerns of the average person, even if they do enjoy the memes. Most people do not want to return to the social compact of subsistence agriculturalists. They’re nostalgic for the ‘90s. They want prosperity, safety, and meritocracy. They want to skip the DEI seminars and not get mugged on the street. Wokeness had already peaked around 2020, and its worldview has since been discredited in the eyes of a vast number of people, including a large proportion of the elite. It’s not dead yet, but a bumbling and cartoonishly evil right might be just the adrenaline shot it needs to reanimate.
I know a lot of people in my audience will say: It’s still better than the alternative. He, at least, cares about what I care about. Without theorizing about Trump’s personal values, which are controversial in their own right, I can still understand that view. You trust the plan, or at least that whatever the plan will turn out to be, it will be more aligned with your values and interests than whatever the left had in store. I used to agree, but watching the reality of what is happening politically at the end of the funnel of right-wing memes, both in the US and Romania, has been very sobering.
I don’t think the meme machine is capable of governing, and it seems like it is actively antithetical to competence. The destruction of flawed but functional institutions, trillions of wealth for your own constituents, and the affordance of immense executive powers to people who have proven to be disconnected from reality in proportion to how loyal they are to Trump and the right-wing memeplex are serious. Not to mention the more salient point for those who believe in a more right-wing future and finding actual solutions to the grievances on this side: the fracturing of a formerly relatively cohesive coalition against the excesses of the left and the discrediting of the right wing more generally.
All this is, in large part, a consequence of the online medium itself, how it propagates and amplifies ideas, and the incentives it sets for people engaging in the discourse. I don’t think there’s something inherent to right-wing ideas that creates this escalation cycle, nor do I think that individual influencers can do much to stop it. “Counter-signalling”, as in speaking out against people on your own side, is thoroughly discouraged by friends and audience alike, so it’s usually just a ticket to ostracism and dwindling viewership. There are similar dynamics happening on the left, and I believe wokeness is in part the resulting slop at the end of the funnel of the left’s empathy ratchet. This is probably a natural result of politics-as-entertainment, which was enabled by the internet. People sorting themselves by instinct, class and temperament into their respective silos and turning up the heat on either virtue or vice signalling spirals. The existence and visibility of the other silos is yet another reason to radicalize in horror. Libs of TikTok made a massive career out of nutpicking to feed the right-wing meme machine, and there are countless people on the left making careers out of having daily tantrums about posts trending on the right. This is the world we live in now and we get the politics to match.
One of the core issues is that there is no truth test for a meme. It is powerful in proportion to how emotionally resonant, oppositional to the other side, and personally flattering it is. There is also no de-escalation mechanism online. These ideas will have to fail in the real world to be discredited.
Whatever the merits of individual thinkers and thoughts, in the end, as the meme goes, the purpose of a system is what it does: the online right is a machine for creating ever-escalating brainworms, personality cults, mental dissociation, haphazard and destructive policies, and in the end eating itself through purity spirals and the eternal struggle to prove you are the most based left standing at the top of the iron hierarchy of nature.
Trump may act like an emperor, but he is not one yet. Time is ticking, both electorally and physiologically, and his chances at cementing power in his corner are dwindling. At this rate, the left will have an extremely easy time positioning itself as the side of sanity in any future election cycle. The right is in power now, but it will last as long as it can at least seem to deliver on its promises to the electorate, not to the pool of edgelords that have, yes, memed the path to victory, but are now impairing any chance to govern competently. Negative polarization cuts both ways. The new populism is not much different from the old - it’s just faster, louder, and proportionally more deranged.
As for me, I didn’t change sides. I didn’t sell out. I didn’t take a deal. I looked at what was happening in front of me, in real time, and saw that it wasn’t leading to renewal. It was leading to rot. And if I can’t say that honestly, what the hell was I ever doing here in the first place?
“Conquering the world on horseback is easy; it is dismounting and governing that is hard.”
– attributed to Genghis Khan (to the right of Donald Trump)
This is a thoughtful piece, and I'm sure you'll get a lot of adulation for being Stunning & Brave™—which is probably not your primary goal, but still—so I'll try to just gently pick on couple things, that I hope you can take in good faith.
1. Given that you're a smart woman with online media literacy who talks to a lot of smart people who also have online media literacy, you **must know** that (a) being featured in the NYT in this way basically serves to disavow wholesale that any right-wing thinkers—especially & including the interesting ones your interviewed—have anything worth listening to, and that (b) the goal of the NYT is to accomplish exactly this type of sidelining.
That makes a statement like this:
> I appreciate the work of many writers and thinkers on the right, and I don’t deny that there are serious areas worth exploring
rather worthless, because anyone who is even slightly normie-coded at this point is forever discouraged from listening to any such guests and actually finding out what any of these 'legitimate grievances' are and in what unconventional ways rightists are tackling them.
Now, my best guess is that you did the calculation, and decided this result is worth it. That's pretty disappointing, but that's your choice, and you deserve a lot of pushback because of it.
2. The implicit implication, unless otherwise stated, of every single piece that takes the shape of what you have just written (including some similar essays I've written myself!) is that because X coalition has a populism &/or low human capital problem, then clearly a return to moderation is the best best because look how:
– badly the bad people are messing things up (competence argument); and
– how badly they treat others while they do it (behavior argument); and
– how cynical and depraved they are the whole time thy are doing (moral argument)
"Therefore, let's not try to make anything catastrophically worse by legitimating anything that could empower the worst actors."
If your broader argument is that any large-scale movement has to have excellent foundations so as to avoid descending into slop and chaos that's fine, and I agree. But, importantly, this is not the same as a making a case for why anybody should stop migrating to the fringes.
There is not a single thing that has happened in the past decade that 'centrist institutionalism' has done to equalize out or earn back in excess the trust & credibility it has destroyed in the way it has violated its own commitment to democratic principles to civil liberties to economic freedoms to several other areas.
There is only the same tirade shoved down people's throats—that managed decline is axiomatically better than haphazardly blowing everything, simply because the latter path seems more dangerous on its face.
Your version is phrased more softly:
> I used to agree, but watching the reality of what is happening politically at the end of the funnel of right-wing memes, both in the US and Romania, has been very sobering.
but it contains the same essential message. People (or maybe I'll just say, "I am", to avoid speaking about anyone else, but I'm definitely not alone) are very, very, very, very tired of being held hostage in this way.
Nothing you've presented here actually encourages anyone who has been burnt out of mainstream culture to course correct by, e.g., trying to re-engage with institutions.
3. I've been listening to your podcast on-and-off for a couple years now. The episodes that I've enjoyed the most are tangential to politics: that one nuclear energy guy you had on to talk about policy, Joe Norman on complexity science, that cool 4chan HBD guy, etc. (In fact, I think I've only listened to 2.5 explicitly political episodes.)
This is because those guests talked about real projects they were doing with friends & family to take back power from systems that made an enemy out of them, and **that are still making an enemy out of them**. Many of those guests may have come to similar conclusions about the 'online right'. However, they didn't give permission to some journalist to air their dirty laundry to millions of viewers, they just continued trying to improve their own situation and build alternatives.
Any scene that is initially based upon something real and substantive will undergo an evaporative cooling effect past a certain scale, leaving the losers to hold bag. You've certainly become busy with your family, so it makes sense that you want to move on.
To the extent that you want to continue running a media project, I hope you focus more on platforming 'outsiders' who refuse to capitulate to impotent temperamental conservatism, and that you don't descend into blandly manufacturing consent for a senescent establishment.
Be well.
This is perfect, every word. I think some people—including decent folks who were initially hopeful about this scene—now understand that this ecosystem is a brainworm generator. Who’s basically left now is utterly cynical: either a paid shill for MAGA; or (even darker) someone who understands how damaging it is to civilization, and is dedicated to that mission. I don’t blame you for not wanting to participate, or even to see these people as allies.