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

Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets

They’re not MAGA. They’re not QAnon.

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

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

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

Political reporters, at least the ones who have bothered to write about Yarvin, have often dismissed him as a kook with a readership made up mostly of lonely internet weirdos, fascists, or both. But to ignore him is to underestimate how Yarvin’s ideas, or at least ideas in conversation with his, have become foundational to a whole political and cultural scene that goes much deeper than anything you’d learn from the panels and speeches at an event like NatCon. Or how those ideas are going to shape the future of the American right, whether or not Vance and Masters win their Senate primaries. I introduced myself, and soon Milius and I were outside smoking as Yarvin and I chatted about whether he’d be willing to talk to me on the record.

People often struggle with what to make of Thiel’s involvement in this ecosystem. Last year the journalist Max Chafkin published a biography of Thiel, titled The Contrarian, in which he described Yarvin as the “house political philosopher” for a network often called the Thielverse. The book focuses heavily on Thiel’s political maneuverings, describing how he evolved from being a hyper-libertarian to someone who now makes common cause with nationalists and populists. And it explains how Thiel helped both Cruz and Josh Hawley on their paths to the Senate. The Contrarian ends with a dark picture of the billionaire trying to extend his political reach ever more overtly by funding and shepherding the campaigns of Masters and Vance. “Masters and Vance are different from Hawley and Cruz,” Chafkin writes; the former two are “extensions” of Thiel.

This is only partly true. It would be just as accurate to say that Thiel has been influenced by the intellectual currents and political critiques of the New Right that he’s now helping to support. Many of these people are friendly with Thiel, or admire him, but are by no means beholden to him. And many of them hold views that would seem to make Thiel, a tech oligarch currently worth around $8 billion who recently resigned from the Meta—née Facebook—board of directors, their natural enemy.

This New Right is heavily populated by people with graduate degrees, so there’s a lot of debate about who is in it and whether or not it even exists. At one end are the NatCons, post-liberals, and traditionalist figures like Benedict Option author Rod Dreher, who envision a conservatism reinvigorated by an embrace of localist values, religious identity, and an active role for the state in promoting everything from marriage to environmental conservation. But there’s also a highly online set of Substack writers, podcasters, and anonymous Twitter posters—“our true intellectual elite,” as one podcaster describes them. This group encompasses everyone from rich crypto bros and tech executives to back-to-the-landers to disaffected members of the American intellectual class, like Up in the Air author Walter Kirn, whose fulminations against groupthink and techno-authoritarianism have made him an unlikely champion to the dissident right and heterodox fringe. But they share a the basic worldview: that individualist liberal ideology, increasingly bureaucratic governments, and big tech are all combining into a world that is at once tyrannical, chaotic, and devoid of the systems of value and morality that give human life richness and meaning—as Blake Masters recently put it, a “dystopian hell-world.”

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We are, in short, in a truly strange and disturbing new world. With that in mind, let Mazzarino lead you into her version of it. It should take our collective breath away. --- Tom

The Costs of Trump’s War on Federal Workers

Tom Dispatch

The Costs of Trump's War on Federal Workers

9 hours ago

A Personal Dispatch from the Capital Region

By Andrea Mazzarino

The second administration of President Donald J. Trump has already started working its special magic across the Washington, D.C. capital region.

Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have fired tens of thousands of federal workers, with more to come.

Those who have lost their jobs include people who find housing and other support for veterans struggling with mental illness.

They include civil servants who maintained safeguards to prevent our nuclear weapons from becoming dirty bombs.

They include healthcare researchers developing treatments for cancer and other killer diseases; workers who ensured that low-income, homeless, and rural students were able to get an education; agricultural researchers who opened up international markets to American farmers; and too many others to mention here.

My neighborhood, located on farmland about 40 miles outside Washington, D.C., is among those wracked by this administration’s shakeup of the government workforce. An estimated 20% of our country’s federal workers make their homes right here in Maryland and in nearby Virginia within reach of the capital. And that doesn’t count the tens of thousands of us who work in (or adjacent to) federal agencies as contractors. All those workers have also been subjected to the same back-to-work requirements, anti-DEI policies, and (depending on their roles) job insecurity, as their government colleagues.

Click here to read more of this dispatch.