The tricky business of reporting on the New Right

What do billionaire Peter Thiel, Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance, and edge-lordy, art-kid podcasts like Red Scare and Wet Brain have in common? According to journalist James Pogue, the author of an expansive, 9,000-word article that ran in Vanity Fair last month, they’re all part of a loose-knit constellation of fringe public intellectuals, conservative politicians, and independent media personalities that make up something called the New Right. 

It’s not exactly the next wave of Trumpism, even if it occasionally looks that way: On the back of an endorsement from the former president, and funding from Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance recently won the Republican primary in the race for the U.S. Senate in Ohio. But James’ reporting suggests that the movement is a lot more ideologically heterodox, and weirder, than that. Some of the players in the movement are Marxists or former Marxists; others, including thinkers that Vance himself is taking cues from, are sketching out visions of society that, to our ears, sound an awful lot like a socially conservative dictatorship.

James’ article, titled “Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel is placing his biggest bets,” is a deeply chilling read. But the public response to it has been arguably just as thought-provoking: Readers and commentators on the left of the culture war, including the hosts of this podcast, heralded it as a frightening account of a fringe movement that could, sooner than we think, represent an actual threat to American democracy. People on the right, including James’ own sources and post-woke antagonists like Glenn Greenwald and Bari Weiss, praised it for being the rare work of journalism that engaged with its sources, and their thinking, in a nuanced way. (Jeff Bezos also praised James’s article in a quote tweet of Greenwald, which was just weird.)

The piece important questions about the fraught business of reporting on the right in post-Trump America: What are the dangers, especially in this media climate, of giving any real estate at all to the opposition’s ideas? What are the dangers of not engaging with them, especially when half of America has already accepted many of them as fact? And perhaps most importantly, is the media’s approach to reporting on the right achieving the intended result?

James joins us on today’s show to discuss why acquainting ourselves with the rhetorical moves these movements are making may ultimately be in the left’s best interests; whether there’s a case to be made for long-form literary journalism in pushing the political conversation forward; and the role, if any, that downtown Manhattan scenesters have to play in all this.

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