I will admit, there was a point at the start of New York magazine's profile of the jubilant young Trumper right when I started to get nervous. The article opens on Inauguration Day, depicting a party scene in D.C. full of young people enjoying the night, the atmosphere, and each other, the kind of celebrations that have felt all too rare in the COVID-19 pandemic's aftermath. I found myself thinking, Could it really be that the right has stolen partying and nightlife from under our nose? Is their scene truly, viscerally alive in a way the fractured and depressed left no longer seems to be? Could they actually be the cool ones now? These fears emerged quickly and were doused ever quicker as I kept reading:
Conservatism — as a cultural force, not just a political condition — is back in a real way for the first time since the 1980s. But here in D.C., among the tourists from Tampa, the donors, and the last politicians Trump whipped into submission, one can also witness the emerging influence of a newer type of conservative. They are not disenfranchised or working class or anti-elite or many of the other adjectives used to describe Trump supporters since 2016. Rather, they are young, imposingly well connected, urban, and very online. They are rebels once again storming Capitol Hill, though without the pathetic scariness of the January 6 rioters.
Turns out, no, these are the same extremely online weirdos as before: crypto bag-chasers, right-wing social media influencers, Rogan bros, tradwife gals—maybe younger than the last crop, but just as poisoned and addled as we've come to expect. You can tell the internet-honed frivolity of their political grievances by what they see as the major concern of our time:
This set’s most visible political stance is a reaction to what it sees as the left’s puritanical obsessions with policing language and talking about identity. A joke about Puerto Ricans or eugenics or sleeping with Nick Fuentes could throw a pack of smokers outside Butterworth’s into a gigglefest. Recounting her time at one of the balls, a woman tells me she jumped the velvet rope into a VIP section “like a little Mexican.” Then she lets out a cackle. This is the posture that has attracted newcomers to the cause. “Six months into Biden being president, I was like, I can’t fucking do this anymore,” says a 19-year-old New Yorker who once quite literally had blue hair and attends Marymount Manhattan, which he describes as “75 percent women and 23 percent trannies.” He had supported Biden, but “I hate watching the things I say. I took a much farther horseshoe around this time.” Later, a former Bernie supporter (who looked like the most Bernie-supporting person one could imagine with long, curly hair and a plaid shirt) told me the same: He wanted the freedom to say “faggot” and “retarded.”
Climate change? Yeah, right. Immigration? Somebody else's problem. Wealth inequality? Don't care. Abortion? Hooey. Just please stop yelling at me on Twitter for saying slurs.
What I like about this story is how it fits into a larger dialogue I have been having with friends about how the axis has tilted too far and it is now an absolute imperative that we abandon much of the internet. Social media most definitely needs to be abandoned, as even a place like Bluesky, while charming, is just another echo chamber and time killer. Legalized online gambling has poisoned the entire web and done more damage than a drug epidemic. Message boards like Reddit need to be abandoned, as they are still fostering mass shooters like 17-year-old Solomon Henderson, a black kid so indoctrinated by extreme right-wing politics that he referred to himself as a black Rhodesian, who shot up his school cafeteria, killing one classmate, injuring another, and then killing himself. Every day seems to bring news of another group of young people who've been dragged into the most fetid of ideological gutters by podcasts, YouTube, and TikTok, and who have emerged just as sick as you'd imagine.
More than just being a vehicle for indoctrination, the internet has completely warped the way everyone thinks now. The phenomenon itself is hardly new. Fifteen years ago, many of the people in this New York article would've been at Vice parties, where they could indulge their taste for slurs and sexual harassment and then still go vote for Obama or whatever left-leaning cause. Now Vice has collapsed and been replaced with Joe Rogan, BuzzFeed has been replaced with Barstool Sports, and so on. It's the same too-online echo chamber I witnessed all those years ago, but grown darker, more twisted, and even more dangerous. We need to get out while (if?) there's still time.
I recognize that this will not be the first article telling you that being online is destroying the way your brain works. Smarter minds than mine can give you all the scientific reasons for why, or how much isolation amongst people is driving this mode of self-destruction. Instead, I come to you as a humble friend with a plea: Try to wean yourself off social media, off TikTok, off YouTube. Join a club or a rec league. Take an art class or join a gym. Go to a park and leave your phone at home. In fact, each day try to go a little bit farther away from home without your phone, until eventually you find yourself out and about without it and feeling fine.
Cell phones were supposed to be tools we used in case of emergency, before a bunch of egomaniacs (many of whom sat front row at Trump's inauguration) convinced us to make them the center of our lives. If a better world is possible, away from petty bigots like those in the New York article who have hijacked social and political culture, surely that world will exist not on our phones but outside, in the sunshine and under the moon, celebrating life in its direct and unmediated fullness. Maybe I'm still in mourning for David Lynch, but it's never been a better time to take part in your world, away from the internet. If there are then still losers who want to assert their inalienable right to use slurs, well, they can tweet about it on a culturally dying online ecosystem.
