Why I Was Part Of The Neoreactionary or Dissident Right Movement In 2020

And a few things that happened while I was there

Starting roughly around ~2020, I spent several years involved in a political movement broadly called the “dissident right” or “New Right.” I was mostly in the neoreactionary sub-movement, sometimes nicknamed NRx. Many people were surprised by this, because before that I was known for a liberal-leftist lifetime and career.

A lot of people ask about my trajectory and what led me to make the decisions I made. It’s a crazy story and a long one. Here is some of it.

—

This poem, by Muriel Rukeyser, was published in 1968:

I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.

I lived in the first century of these wars.

—

Up front, a few things:

Firstly: These days I’m not aligned with any of the main USA political movements, not Red Tribe and not Blue Tribe. It’s hard to place myself among named political groups, even niche ones. When I talk about the larger landscape, I generally use the phrases “Red Tribe” and “Blue Tribe,” which are common in my Bay Area social context (as opposed to words like “conservative”-“right” or “liberal”-“left”). I use those phrases because they signify the cultural boundaries differentiating these groups.

Secondly: I have criticisms of the current administration. This post is not about those criticisms. I still have friends on both sides of the aisle and I truly wish there was more shared understanding among both.

And finally: I was briefly engaged to Curtis Yarvin, one of the best-known NRx writers. When I talk about NRx, people often want me to talk about Curtis. So I’m telling you now that this post is not about Curtis. I’ll mention him because he’s part of the story, but Curtis is more incidental to my life than people seem to think. Also, Curtis and I were never married, and we are not friends. Comments that mention Curtis, whether positive or negative, will be deleted or edited. Thank you for understanding.

—

My Background Leading Up To 2020

I grew up in the Westchester suburbs of New York City, in a solidly Blue Tribe community, with solidly Blue Tribe parents. My parents were both raised in Ohio, and both left in early adulthood. They chose to raise me Unitarian Universalist, which is an extraordinarily liberal and open-minded religion that is often maligned by Red Tribe.

Growing up, my family always had a subscription to the New York Times and the New Yorker. My father, a lawyer who went to Yale, collected the old New Yorker issues and kept a big stack in his closet. There were always New Yorker cartoons on the fridge, too. When I was a little girl I would look through the magazine covers and cartoons and ask my parents to explain them to me. Once, I saw my dad reading the Wall Street Journal, and I was like: “Dad, isn’t that a conservative newspaper?” and he said: “Yes, it’s important to know how the enemy thinks.”

As a young adult, I found myself wanting to work on causes that would help other people, but I was never interested in party politics per se. I served in the Peace Corps in my early twenties and I also did a lot of sex-positive feminist activism. For a long time, I had an internet pseudonym, Clarisse Thorn, where I wrote about BDSM and sex education.

But there were many things I didn’t like about Team Social Justice, including cancel culture, and also the general lack of solidarity and effectiveness. I burned out hard in my late twenties and put social justice work on the back burner. Still, even though I had many critiques, I chose to distance myself rather than publicly criticizing Team Social Justice, because I felt strongly that it was still correct on the merits.

In 2013, I moved to the Bay Area and entered startupland. I worked on stuff generally labeled “media innovation” and published freelance articles on the side. I started tracking issues like misinformation and political polarization, and I was struck by the fact that polarization was known to be rising rapidly in the USA; this is a bad rising statistic, being a warning sign for civil war. I wanted to understand whether media could make a difference, so between 2017-2019, I took client work with NGOs who paid me to research the relationship between polarization and digital media. I eventually summarized and published this work in 2019.

This intersected with my lifelong opposition to censorship. (Fun fact: almost twenty years ago, I chose my old pseudonym Clarisse after a character from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.) I was aware that Red Tribe websites were becoming minor censorship targets, and I objected on principle, even though I didn’t identify with them. This led to emotional debates among my Blue Tribe community as I habitually argued against censoring Red Tribe stuff. At one point, I attended a panel of Red Tribe journalists hosted by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism. When I heard their critiques of the mainstream media, I started thinking the issues they were facing might be structural. I was startled to learn, for example, that they did not feel their side had any large or powerful media organizations on the level of the New York Times.

By 2019, I knew very little about Red Tribe in general, but I continued to study polarization and look for ways to build bridges. In 2019 I launched my own magazine because I had numerous critiques of the mainstream media, particularly about epistemology. I wanted to create something innovative and independent.

—

My First Contact with NRx

Around the time I launched my magazine, The New Modality, in San Francisco, another new local magazine started getting attention. It called itself Palladium.

It was an open secret that Palladium had “connections to the alt-right.” I decided to keep my distance from Palladium because the rumors made me think they were extremists. As months went past while I developed my magazine, I assumed they were also keeping their distance from me. Imagine my surprise when Wolf Tivy, the founder and editor in chief of Palladium, reached out directly and asked to get coffee.

I was confused about what Wolf thought we had in common, so I agreed out of curiosity. (Also, I’ve long thought that paranoia about competition among early stage startups is silly; early stage success is mostly about grit and execution, not ideas.) I insisted on meeting Wolf at Dandelion Chocolate in the Mission District because they have the best chocolate, and I spent the first 90 minutes of our first meeting quietly eating chocolate, saying almost nothing.

Wolf pitched me on his idea that, despite our obvious differences, we were basically on the same team: West Coast Media, which Wolf differentiated from East Coast Media. I thought this was an interesting claim, but I wasn’t sure I bought it. Then Wolf dropped the fact that he was raised Unitarian Universalist. And that floored me. If there was one thing that I had never even considered might exist, it was a Red Tribe Unitarian Universalist. I was instantly fascinated.

Given my interest in depolarization, I started feeling like maybe — just maybe — Wolf and I could become friends and build bridges between our coalitions, with friendly intellectual arguments. After that meeting, the same day, Wolf went on Twitter and tagged me in a tweet while declaring that he was still Unitarian Universalist; this caused a minor sensation because most of Red Tribe hates UUs. I later referred Wolf to my printer, which is why our magazines use the same printer. Wolf asked me to write for him, and he offered to contribute an article to New Modality. Observers referred to Palladium and New Modality as “the emerging center-right and the emerging center-left.” We were never close, and we didn’t hang out often, but some of my Blue Tribe friends thought this turn of events was hilarious; they liked to joke that Wolf was secretly in love with me. I always shut down the jokes immediately (I thought Wolf was a cute boy but too young for me, and more importantly, he is monogamously married and I never participate in cheating). But the fact that these jokes were made says something about the vibe.

In early 2020, the pandemic hit while I was producing Issue One of my magazine. My Bay Area community went into lockdown. Everyone created chat groups using platforms like Slack and Discord, because we missed our friends. I finished Issue One and sent it to the printer (which was hard because society was a mess). After it was done, I didn’t know what to do, because my original launch plan included activities that were suddenly impossible in 2020, like paid events in San Francisco. Then my mom got covid.

My mother lives in Minneapolis-St. Paul. Covid was new and terrifying, and I was very worried, so I went there. I arrived on what turned out to be the second day of the riots following the death of George Floyd.

—

Violence During the Protests in 2020

My first clue that something was up was that, while driving into Minneapolis-St. Paul, major roads were closed. I didn’t see the devastation in person until much later. Pretty soon, however, I got texts from friends asking if I was safe. I saw local news about burning buildings and widespread chaos. Originally, I had planned to book workspace outside my mom’s house, but I quickly realized that leaving her place for any length of time was unsafe.

I tried to post on Instagram letting my friends know that I was safe despite the riots around me. Upon seeing my post, some coastal Blue Tribe friends informed me that it was racist for me to use the word “riot” despite the fact there were, in fact, literal riots. Unsettled, I took down the Instagram post.

I tried to make sense of what was happening. I didn’t grow up in Minneapolis-St. Paul (MSP); my mom moved there late in life. I wasn’t able to easily venture far from her house. The pandemic was still in its early stages; many businesses were closed, and public gatherings were discouraged. There were curfews enforced by the police and a ton of messaging telling everyone to stay home. Where was violence, and where wasn’t it? The gas station a few blocks from my mother’s place was covered in caution tape, and it had obviously been knocked over, so that was a visceral reminder of the situation. Yet most streets in her neighborhood seemed untouched. I had never been in circumstances like these before. My mom seemed to think her own neighborhood was probably safe, but she’d never been in circumstances like these, either.

I turned to my media skills; this seemed like a question that ought to be easy to answer given modern media tools. The local media, such as newspapers, was helpful in minor ways, but didn’t help me with live tracking or prediction. Some of the chat rooms I’d joined at the beginning of the pandemic were global, so I sifted through those chats and found MSP people who were close to me in space even though I didn’t have a good way to meet them in person. I found a live Google Map, with MSP locals posting geotagged reports of local violence as it happened. I found a Discord where MSP citizens were actively organizing neighborhood action groups. Some MSP locals took shifts, posting watch on their streetcorners and reporting back to Discord. Some built small, manned barricades that they hoped would protect their streets from rioters.

The gap between what was happening locally, and the way it was reported nationally, just kept widening. Increasingly, I didn’t know how to talk about any of this with people I cared about on the coasts. The 2020 riots were politicized so rapidly that by the time I had some idea of what was in front of my face, it seemed impossible to describe it without triggering coastal associates into enraged rants about racism. Out of dozens of chat rooms I joined at the beginning of the pandemic, there was exactly one Slack chat where people seemed really interested and open to hearing about what I was seeing. Wolf was there, as were several others I’d already met around the Bay.

The group felt hard to categorize. It seemed more Red Tribey than Blue Tribey (though it contained both), and I eventually learned that its membership contained many old-school NRx scenesters. But these guys violated my expectations about Red Tribe, because they were funny, brilliant media observers who never said anything racist or sexist (at least not in that Slack). Nowadays there is a ton of media coverage about NRx and the dissident right, but this coverage has largely failed to capture how the best parts of the movement felt non-denominational. Or at least, that’s how it felt when I started spending hours per day in this Slack group.

I don’t spent as much time in the movement these days; it’s turned into an echo chamber; racism and sexism are front-and-center, and most of my favorite people have left. But there was a fascinating moment in time when it truly felt like the so-called “dissident right” could discuss almost anything in a sensible way. Years later, in 2022, a Vanity Fair article would be published about us, quoting the writer Walter Kirn as follows:

Kirn didn’t want to put a label on this movement, describing it as a “fractious family of dissenters” when I called him at his home in Montana — “a somewhat new, loose coalition of people whose major concern is that we not end up in a top-down controlled state.” He told me he didn’t consider himself right wing and found some of the antidemocratic ideas he heard expressed in this sphere to be “personally chilling.” But he described it as a zone of experimentation and free expression of a kind that was now closed off in America’s liberal mainstream.

That was how it felt to me, too. When they found out I was a sex-positive feminist, some of the NRx guys asked questions, seemingly without becoming upset or offended. It became one of a very small number of “safe spaces” where I could decompress. Some of them helped me plan how to stay physically safe, too. Meanwhile, Blue Tribe friends living in wealthy Blue Tribe neighborhoods informed me that I was morally wrong when I admitted feeling unsafe, so I eventually stopped admitting it to them.

Then I started looking into how the riots were spreading across the country, and that was when I got a real shock: No one in the national media seemed to be reporting on them, anywhere.

As the Black Lives Matter protests spread, I knew that the riots were spreading too. The Slack group made a channel called “#unrest.” I spent a lot of time in that channel, reading every news source and tweet that got posted. I initially did this because I was trying to model ways that the riots might escalate within a modern American city like MSP. I reasoned that, if I could gather a large amount of information about how the riots went in other American cities, then that would be useful in MSP, too.

Yet when I tried to track down the facts about what was happening where, it felt even more impossible than my local efforts. The only other people who shared my concerns appeared to be niche writers and weirdos on Twitter, plus the NRx-dominated Slack scene I’d stumbled into. Quickly, I went from confused to fascinated by the way nobody in my industry was paying attention.

A fact surfaced from the back of my mind: Scholars of polarization draw “escalation curves” to diagram the process by which countries fall into civil war. I’d seen those diagrams years before, but now they took on new meaning. Before the pandemic, I’d considered the United States to be at the “elite polarization” level, which is bad enough. Before the pandemic, I heard stories about how peacebuilding experts were quitting jobs in foreign war zones and coming home to America, because they were worried about catastrophe. Now I felt the same fear. In the charts, “elite polarization” precedes “violence in the streets.” In a highly polarized society, widespread street violence often immediately precedes civil war.

I began to spend hours every day monitoring fragmented information sources. I was no longer merely trying to track the violence; I was trying to understand why it wasn’t being reported, and how I might be able to report on it. Some of my Red Tribe people made cynical comments. They told me that Blue Tribe wasn’t reporting on this because they didn’t care, or were somehow benefiting from the violence. But I didn’t believe that. I believed the best about my chosen industry and my colleagues, so I renewed my determination to understand what was happening.

Over the next few months, Chicago became my favorite case study. Chicago had its single most violent day in the city’s recorded history on May 31st, during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. I found out about the riots in Chicago four days after they escalated; this was a bizarrely long amount of time, given that I was a media professional actively trying to figure out where riots were happening in the US. I quickly ascertained that the extreme violence in Chicago was barely covered in any contemporary mainstream national news source, whatsoever.¹

The first piece of relevant media I saw was an article from a local Chicago newspaper, the Chicago Sun-Times, and I only saw it because Claire Lehmann, the editor in chief of Quillette, tweeted it without comment. (Quillette was an outlet I’d not bothered reading before 2020, because the good people of Blue Tribe considered it radioactive; but as I began scouring the internet for information about the riots, Quillette and its editor was one of the more reliable sources I found.)

Here’s a quotation from the Chicago Sun-Times article as they tried to describe the violence:

“We’ve never seen anything like it at all,” said Max Kapustin, the senior research director [at the University of Chicago Crime Lab, whose data on local street violence goes back to 1961]. “I don’t even know how to put it into context. It’s beyond anything that we’ve ever seen before.”²

But the most striking source about the 2020 Chicago riots is not that article. It’s an illicit recording, taken during a May 31st meeting when the mayor spoke with all the aldermen. (Chicago is divided into political units called “wards,” each represented by an elected “alderman.”) After their meeting, a 78-minute recording was leaked to Chicago’s PBS affiliate WTTW. As far as I can tell, I am one of a very small number of people outside Chicago who ever bothered to listen to this entire piece of audio.

The politicians thought they were speaking privately, so they were candid. Their panic, rage, and tears came through loud and clear: “I’ve got over 10 videos of people shooting other people,” said one alderman. “Broad daylight. They’re just shooting.”

“People are just f***ing lawless right now,” said Mayor Lori Lightfoot.

“I’ve been crying all day,” another alderman said.

Another called their ward a “war zone.”

Later that summer, an independent writer named Michael Tracey published a Medium post, with photos of wreckage and quotes from residents in places like Minneapolis-St. Paul; Chicago; Milwaukee, WI; Green Bay, WI; Olympia, WA; Fort Wayne, IN; Atlantic City, NJ; and Philadelphia, PA. In his article, Tracey noted that he heard nothing about the damage in most of these cities before he visited in person, even though he described himself as “abnormally attuned to daily media coverage.” Tracey then asked: “What does it say that these kinds of experiences have barely impinged on the national consciousness?”

It was obvious to me that the mainstream media was rapidly discrediting itself — not just to Red Tribe, but also to me and lots of people like me. My hardcore Blue Tribe friends continued arguing that the media was basically honest, but more and more, I had behind-the-scenes conversations about how many of us no longer trusted it. If this was the state of the media now, I thought, what would ensue if even worse events came along?

While collecting this material, I set aside my growing terror and tried to think clearly. I began to systematically call friends in Chicago, where I had lived for eight years in my twenties. My friends in rich North Side neighborhoods had so little information about what was happening in the rest of the city that they asked me what I was hearing.

Through my Chicago friends and the internet, I collected evidence for my Chicago case study. I then systematically called friends and colleagues in California, as well as Washington, D.C., and New York, where I grew up. In each conversation, I asked my friends: Did they know that Chicago just had its most violent weekend since the Crime Lab started measuring street violence? That a local politician elected in the 60s said it was “worse than 1968”? That 80+ people were shot, and at least 18 people died in one day? That was when I realized that none of them knew.

These were people at major newspapers, or on academic misinformation initiatives, or on the relevant teams at social media platforms, or working in intelligence. Their job was to track information. And none of them seemed to have a clue how bad the riots had gotten, at all.

If my Blue Tribe people had responded with interest to what I was learning, I would have been less horrified. But it quickly became clear that if I was too blunt about these facts in Blue Tribe circles, then I’d be dismissed as a “radicalized conspiracy theorist.” People just didn’t want to know. And it kept getting worse. Later that year, a set of mainstream media headlines insisted that “most” of the protests were peaceful, after a survey of thousands of protests found that 7% had turned violent. In other words: Every mainstream headline about that survey cited it as proof the protests weren’t violent; here’s CNN:

The findings, released Thursday, contradict assumptions and claims by some that protests associated with the Black Lives Matter movement are spawning violence and destruction of property.

… but if one runs the math on that number, then what it actually means is that, out of thousands of protests, hundreds involved violence. How were they violent? Where? The articles didn’t have the precise details I wanted, and downplayed the details they gave.³

Simultaneously, while much of the mainstream media denied it, other Blue Tribe media commentators egged on the violence. A respected literary magazine, the Paris Review, posted an impassioned and widely praised pro-violence article, titled “Let It Burn,” in June 2020, while city blocks were burning and innocent Americans were being shot to death. The Paris Review was hardly alone in this sentiment. It was all over Twitter. Those of us who pushed back or were silent became viewed with suspicion. In August, NPR published a piece defending looting (the piece was later edited, but that link is close to what was originally published).

My mother recovered from covid and I went home to the Bay Area. It didn’t make me feel any better to talk to my coastal loved ones in person. If I hadn’t known them personally, I would have concluded that my Blue Tribe friends and family were disingenuous when they claimed to care about poor people. But I did know them, so I was just upset and confused. What did it even mean to “care about the less privileged” while simultaneously declaiming slogans like “defund the police” and ignoring riots across the nation where poor people were being shot?

In August, a pair of older and very committed Black social justice activists named Don and Sondra Samuels, who lived in MSP, sued the city of Minneapolis asking to get the police back into their neighborhood. Contemporary surveys indicated that less privileged demographics did not want the police to be defunded and that, within those same demographics, support for Trump was rising. I inferred this to be caused partially by the fact that Red Tribe politicians at least appeared to care about the violence (again, what I’m saying is that they appeared to care, which is regardless of whether Red solutions would work). When I pointed this out to my Blue Tribe friends, they questioned the poll data, or explained to me that underprivileged people are always “voting against their own self-interest,” or, when all else failed, they accused me of turning into a “radicalized conspiracy theorist.”

I later learned that my trajectory was a standard Blue Tribe to Red Tribe trajectory. There are several issues where “once you see it, you can’t unsee it,” and street violence is one of them. (There are also issues that operate to move Red to Blue, of course.)

Around this time I found the poem by Muriel Rukeyser that I quoted at the top of this post. I read and reread it and tried to get my friends to read it. I also ran across a blog post from 2007, written by a blogger under the name hilzoy, titled “Liberating Iraq.” I discussed this passage with the NRx guys in Slack, where the moderator pinned it:

Violence is not a way of getting where you want to go, only more quickly. Its existence changes your destination. If you use it, you had better be prepared to find yourself in the kind of place it takes you to.

—

Trying To Talk About It

I was sure there had to be a way to communicate the impact of the riots, and the distance between Red and Blue Tribe perceptions of them, and the danger this implied beyond the riots themselves. There had to. I was also weirdly convinced that if I could figure it out, then this would be a springboard to a media initiative that would help keep people safe and avert a potential civil war.

I did not yet have the faintest clue how hard a challenge I’d set for myself.

I prayed. (I am very into spirituality, another fact about me that tends to surprise people.) I lit candles. I knelt on the floor and begged every benevolent power I could think of to help me. I prayed to God, to the gods, to enlightened bodhisattvas. I prayed to my ancestors, some of whom fought in the Revolutionary War.⁴

My forebears put their bodies on the line to found my country. Despite all the hypocrisies and dark history of the United States, I still believed it was the greatest country in the world. What did I have to give?

I wrote draft after draft of a piece about the riots and their aftermath. I felt desperate to show my community the threat I was seeing, and determined to accomplish this task without either (a) fracturing the community or (b) harming causes that I still believed in. I contacted dozens of people I knew, ranging from NRx friends to buddies at Blue Tribe NGOs, and I asked for private feedback on my drafts. I rewrote the drafts over and over, paying maximum attention to my contacts’ feedback, determined to develop an account of the riots that was true, accountable, and accessible to both sides.

But slowly, it became clear that it was simply not possible for me to write something true about the riots that would make sense to everyone. Moreover, it seemed likely that the attempt would be unhelpful. On the tenth draft I was still eliciting furious, cutting comments (and sometimes insults) from Blue Tribe people I asked for feedback, and these were my friends.

After ten drafts of an article six thousand words long, I gave up. When I go back and reread the drafts I wrote during those months, I cry. Here’s one of them. (You’ll notice that some of that material has been re-used for this post.)

Meanwhile, censorship on social media platforms was ever more brazen. But my friends didn’t want to talk about that either. Years before, when I’d gotten involved in anti-censorship circles, certain tactics were considered counterproductive at best, and evil at worst. Now those same tactics were becoming widespread, like shadowbanning. I’ll throw my old friend Peter Eckersley under the bus here, because he’s dead (I miss you, Peter, RIP): Peter was one of those whose lack of opposition to the censorship shocked me the most. Where were our principles?

Before the Hunter Biden laptop story broke, I already felt like a basket case. As the story broke, I paid less attention to the story itself than I did to the actions of the mainstream media around the story: Twitter, for example, did not merely openly censor the story, but also changed their policy reasoning for the censorship multiple times; they initially said it was due to an obscure policy about “hacked materials” that they never enforced on any other journalistic stories, and then they came up with a totally different explanation within the next few weeks. Twitter also punished the story’s publisher by suspending their Twitter account, which I have never seen happen to another large media company, before or since.

I had largely stopped trying to talk to my Blue Tribe loved ones about these matters. But the way the Hunter Biden story was handled horrified me so much that I tried, one last time, to say something to my friends and family. My father had raised me from birth on stories of free speech advocacy; when I brought up the laptop story, he and I had a screaming fight at the dinner table.⁵ Meanwhile, Peter, and other misinformation experts, calmly explained to me that I didn’t understand why the story was misinformation because I didn’t understand misinformation, despite the fact that I’d been working in the field with them for years. (The story was, of course, later proven to not be misinformation.)

Okay, I thought. Maybe there isn’t a way to talk about this right now. But I refused to be defeated. Maybe I couldn’t write anything that would have the effect I wanted, but there had to be something I could do. I already had my tiny media company, with one magazine issue; I knew I had a lot of latitude for future issues; there was room to shift or pivot as long as I continued doing a good job serving my core community. Previously, I’d envisioned my magazine as a minor ecosystem player, maybe even a bootstrapped lifestyle business. I began considering it in a new light. What if I tried to go big, instead?

I launched an internal skunkworks project within New Modality, which I named “The Territory.”⁶ I didn’t have a job and was living off savings, but everyone I knew was still saying things like “maybe the pandemic will be over soon;” anyway, I couldn’t go out and network because socializing among Blue Tribe was verboten. So I doubled down on R&D. (This was also a period of my life where I prayed and meditated a lot, trying to work through core spiritual questions.) I reasoned that, if I was about to go big, then I needed to restructure my organization and gain a new understanding of the market. My idea behind “The Territory” was to develop a community of people with different networks, all who cared deeply about good epistemology, though they had different experiences informing what that meant to them.

I wanted to solidify a cohesive group that could communicate across different identities and party lines, whose members were naturally motivated to track different areas of interest, who saw the value in sharing that information back with each other and potentially influencing the Discourse. I planned to eventually combine the group with a small, speedy media company structure: For example, what might we create, if community members in The Territory could work with professional fact-checkers and journalists to develop stories? For about a year, I sank hours every day into this experiment. The hardest part was making it so the Red Tribe and Blue Tribe people weren’t constantly triggering each other; I broke up a lot of fights.

A year later, I wasn’t sure if my little project could function as I’d originally envisioned, though I learned a lot (I’ll probably say more about this when I write something longer about media innovation soon). What I did have was a reasonably solid understanding of Red Tribe, which, as far as I could tell, was better than any other Blue Tribe media professional I knew.

I also had a deep, deep alienation. My family and everyone I lived with was Blue Tribe. My information diet was increasingly different from theirs. I tried to be non-confrontational about it, but now I was siding with Red Tribe on other issues, not just the crime stuff. Of course, this isolation and alienation set me up for a bad relationship. I broke up with my long-term partner in the fall of 2021; later that same day, Curtis Yarvin sent an email to his list saying he wanted to get married again, and I answered it, thinking, What’s the worst that could happen? ⁷

I don’t want to talk much about the personal aspects of my engagement to Curtis here. It is, however, worth mentioning his Antiversity concept, which, in theory, is about building a new media company that has the best access to truth. I am not into authoritarianism (I agree with the famous quote that democracy is better than other forms of government that have been tried). At the same time, by 2021 I had come to believe that there was no extant media organization trusted by both political sides to tell the truth, and I wasn’t sure any of them could be effectively reformed from within. I believed — and still believe — that such an organization, if it could be built in this polarized era, could do an incredible amount of good. One of several ways I deluded myself about Curtis was believing that he and I could build this together.

Hopefully, this clarifies another thing, which is that Curtis was not my formative influence in NRx. I was never on the dissident right “for Curtis’s sake.” I was there for the same reasons most people ended up there: Because the frames Blue Tribe offered me to interpret my observations seemed obviously false, so I became alienated from the politics that governed my milieu.

During my relationship with Curtis, I spent most of my time meeting people among the dissident right. We became publicly engaged, which caused many problems for my reputation, as many of my Blue Tribe friends stopped being my friends. Curtis asked me to have his children, I became pregnant, and then we broke up while I was pregnant. After that, Curtis sued me less than two weeks after I gave birth to our son. This led to serious complications in my life, including health complications. After a few months in the court system, a court official referred me to a psychologist who diagnosed me with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from these events. I’ve spent most of my time since then taking care of my child and trying to figure out what to do with my career, while recovering.

I still get hate comments about being a so-called “Nazi” or married to one (Curtis and I broke up three years ago, people, and we never got married in the first place). So I will reiterate what I said at the beginning of this post: Curtis and I were never married, and we are not friends. Comments that mention Curtis, whether positive or negative, will be deleted or edited. Thank you for understanding.

—

Now What

What now?

As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened...

A lot of people have asked me to write something like this, and I haven’t felt like there was anything helpful I could say. I still don’t know if there’s anything helpful I can say.

I get hate comments because I’m publicly affiliated with both the dissident right and with sex-positive feminism. I don’t especially want more of those comments, not from the Blue Tribe people who think I deserved to get my face eaten by a leopard, nor from the Red Tribe people who think I deserved what happened due to my sexual history, or whatever it is they’re saying about me now. It’s tempting to put up a front, to make a show of being immune to all that, but I’d be lying if I claimed the backlash when I write stuff like this doesn’t affect me. Sometimes, despite my love for it, I wonder if I’m cut out for the media. And yet it seems that I am trying to write more recently. I am trying to have a thicker skin about it all. I’m trying to have faith that there’s still something helpful I can do here.

It’s a staple of Red Tribe media for people like me to write their “how I ended up in Red Tribe” stories, but this is not that story. If conversion is the story you want, then I recommend Red Tribe publications like the Free Press, which has plenty of conversion stories, or perhaps a heterodox outlet like Quillette, which publishes stories by frustrated commentators on all sides. For me, I don’t think of myself as a full-on “convert” to Red Tribe. If I have learned anything from the last few years, it’s that most Red Tribe leadership is just as hypocritical and untrustworthy as my Blue Tribe elders always said they were. By getting involved with Red, I jumped out of the frying pan into the fire.

I’m not trying to inspire people to join one of the big teams. But I also don’t want to foment despair.

We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves…

I’m scared. But I still love my country, and I still believe in the power of media. I still have friends on both sides of the aisle. I still think about how to create a basis for the conversations that need to happen. Here are some initial thoughts.

Firstly: Society should not tolerate people violating their own clearly stated principles for bad reasons and then denying it, especially if they have important responsibilities. If people do this, they should experience social consequences at the very least, and be excluded from decision-making power.

Put another way, any political group I’d want to be part of would demonstrate a clear understanding that, right now, both political tribes have too much open hypocrisy. Again, I’m talking here about people who have repeatedly been caught in blatant violations of their own principles, for bad reasons, often after they demonstrated the ability to make detailed, intelligent arguments against what they themselves are doing. There are exceptions, obviously. There are not enough exceptions that I’d voluntarily back any major group at the moment.

Secondly: In the absence of integrity from political leaders, most of the large-scale stuff our society needs cannot be built or rebuilt. It’s fashionable now to recommend doubling down on small-scale community in order to build local resilience, since our infrastructure is probably gonna get wrecked. This is something I try to work on locally. I suspect that practicing integrity in close relationships and community is the primary, deep cure to where we are now. But also have your go bag ready, and maybe there’s a media thing too.

Thirdly: Both political tribes have real truth to what they are saying, things they’re concretely right about. I want no part of any coalition that ignores massive truths out of political convenience.

Maybe that means no existing coalition will have me.

Or maybe there are other people out there who want what I want.

Let’s find each other?

We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.

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Update, 5/28/25: Two things: Number one, I’m working on a followup post, which will respond to some of the things people have commented and privately messaged me about. Number two, I have now restricted comments on this post to paid subscribers. (Previously, comments were open to all commenters.) I’m sad to do this because I know there are a lot of potentially valuable comments from free subscribers. But as anyone who has moderated internet comments can attest, moderation (especially on a viral post that “breaks containment”) is a project that will consume all your bandwidth if you allow anyone to leave whatever comments they want.

With that said: If you are someone who has a track record of good conversations with me and/or leaving good comments on my posts (even if we don’t agree about everything), and you’re strapped for cash, then I can give you a temporary paid subscription so that you can comment without paying. You know who you are!

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Update, June 2025: The New Yorker recently published a profile about Curtis Yarvin, and I was quoted in it. You can read my statement about the profile here.

Meanwhile, I am still planning to write a followup, which will address open questions from this post. It will happen!

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1. For example: The New York Times first brought up the events of May 31st over a month afterwards, in an article published July 5th. This article mentioned the Memorial Day violence only briefly, casting it as part of a broad trend. It did not mention, at all, that the violence happened during the Black Lives Matter protests.

2. I tried to follow up on this statement by calling the Crime Lab, by the way. But after the Crime Lab gave that quote to the Sun-Times, they went completely silent on the issue. I emailed and called repeatedly requesting further interviews, and they responded once and then went dark. Later, I ran across a short piece in a Chicago student newspaper, noting that shortly after these quotes were published, the crime lab suffered a funding shortfall. Unfortunately I did not save this clip but, if I recall correctly, it ran in the Chicago Maroon. (Update 5/27: I received an email from someone who worked at the Crime Lab in 2020 and I may post an update from them in a follow-up post; they let me know that the Crime Lab is fine for funding.)

3. Sometimes I go back and reread my posts soon after they’re published and worry about whether I am being precise enough in my statements, particularly with hot-button issues like this one. The initial version of this post had this sentence as “The articles didn’t say,” which, in fairness, was exaggerated; so I have now updated to the more precise version here, “The articles didn’t have the precise details I wanted, and downplayed the details they gave.”

4. I am descended from two signers of the Declaration of Independence. (At least, I am in theory; my mom says the connection to Richard Stockton might have been made up by an interstitial ancestor; but the descent from Charles Carroll is definitely real.) I am related to Francis Scott Key, who wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner,” as well as the man who began the Whiskey Rebellion, which was the first challenge to the new government after the Revolution. I’m also qualified to be a Daughter of the American Revolution. I don’t have an active membership, but I can document the relevant lines of descent, and I have my maternal grandmother’s DAR jewelry.

5. Shortly after publishing this post, I added this footnote, because I feel like I was slightly unfair to my dad by not describing his perspective. He seemed to feel (a) that the threat of censorship by private companies was not significant because they are not government entities (I disagreed and still do), and (b) that in my fury about these free speech problems and others, I was downplaying the risk to our country of something like Roe vs. Wade getting repealed (in retrospect, my dad was right about this). Sorry Dad, I love you.

6. This name is a reference to the saying “the map is not the territory.”

7. Famous last words.