The Unraveling Right 

It turns out that Charlie Kirk was the glue holding MAGA together. 

Almost five months after the assassination of the 31-year-old activist, warfare has erupted on the right, with establishment conservatives from Ted Cruz, Ben Shapiro, and the writers at National Review fretting about conspiracy theory-minded antisemites in their ranks.  

Almost five months after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, warfare has erupted on the right, with establishment conservatives from Ted Cruz, Ben Shapiro, and the writers at National Review fretting about conspiracy theory-minded antisemites in their ranks.  

Kirk’s importance was never a secret to those who study the right. Turning Point USA, which he co-founded in 2012, is arguably the most important right-wing student organization since Young Americans for Freedom in the 1960s. After his death, many political commentators compared Kirk to William F. Buckley Jr., who organized YAF in 1960 and became, of course, a lynchpin of the postwar right. Buckley is credited with pushing disreputable elements, especially antisemites, out of the conservative coalition. (Whether or not this is true remains hotly contested.) Kirk performed a similar exorcism: He froze out rivals like Nick Fuentes, the 27-year-old basement streamer whose antisemitism was too explicit for MAGA. Still, like Buckley, Kirk indulged racist currents in the movement. His last words were a swipe at Black criminality, a capstone to a career where he claimed that the Democratic Party “love[s] it when America becomes less white,” that the “great replacement strategy … is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different,” and that in American cities “prowling Blacks go around for fun to target white people.” 

Kirk’s foray into more explicit racism in his last months may have been a strategy to sap momentum from Fuentes and his “Groypers,” as Fuentes’s band of fascist followers has dubbed itself. Fuentes is, in many ways, Kirk’s dark shadow. Kirk built TPUSA into a behemoth through traditional conservative politics: He got wealthy donors to write big checks. Fuentes, by contrast, gradually built an online audience, relying on small donors and subscribers, and now has millions of viewers. Unlike Kirk, Fuentes is antagonistic to mainstream conservatism. His Groyper army came to prominence by disrupting conservative events (including Kirk’s public appearances). Despite dining with the president at Mar-a-Lago in 2022, Fuentes is not a Trump fan. He regularly denounces the 47^th president as a failure and beholden to Israel. And, of course, Fuentes—who attended both the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017 and the January 6, 2021, insurrection—has called for political violence. Little wonder that following Kirk’s assassination, there was widespread speculation on social media that a Groyper was responsible. 

Fuentes broke the cordon sanitaire in November, appearing on Tucker Carlson’s podcast. After being cashiered from Fox News, Carlson has retained his influence on the right, and the shared popularity of Fuentes and Carlson reveals genuine enthusiasm for unapologetic racism and antisemitism among many ordinary Republicans. After a trip to Washington, D.C., the Orthodox Christian writer Rod Dreher, who now lives in Hungary under Viktor Orbán’s postliberal regime, estimated that 30 to 40 percent of young GOP staffers in Washington are followers of Fuentes. According to a Manhattan Institute poll of current Republicans under 50, “a notable minority report that they themselves openly express racist (31 percent) or antisemitic (25 percent) views.” The precise figure is beside the point: Groypers can be found in practically every conservative institution. Kevin Roberts, the Heritage Foundation chief whose 2021 installation signaled MAGA’s takeover of the GOP establishment, faced a donor revolt after defending Carlson’s decision to platform Fuentes. Although Roberts walked back his initial statements, he has not recanted them. Were he to do so, he would face a staff revolt at Heritage from Fuentes sympathizers. Roberts has already faced one staff insurrection this winter, as a dozen staffers in Heritage’s legal and economic departments resigned over his support for Carlson. Tellingly, most of the departees are in their 50s and 60s.

After a trip to Washington, D.C., the Orthodox Christian writer Rod Dreher estimated that 30 to 40 percent of young GOP staffers in Washington are followers of Fuentes. According to a Manhattan Institute poll of current Republicans under 50, “a notable minority report that they themselves openly express racist (31 percent) or antisemitic (25 percent) views.”

JD Vance, whom Fuentes frequently attacks, has remained silent amid the controversy. Perhaps this is because, as the writer John Ganz has pointed out, the vice president is functionally “Groyper adjacent” in his politics. Or it could be because Vance’s future depends on this rapidly growing faction on the right. Although the veep condemned Fuentes for insulting his Indian-American wife, at a December Turning Point USA appearance, he also condemned introducing “purity tests” on the right.  

Kirk’s role was not to invent MAGA’s ideas but to manage its contradictions and to serve as a broker between donors and street politics, between institutional conservatism and its increasingly radical base. His death exposed how fragile that arrangement always was. And while the battle for the right has devoured much of the news cycle, there is a point that has eluded most of the pundits. For one, the past decade has seen the development of a distinctive MAGA universe—a set of institutions and networks—that are worth fighting over. These range from MAGAfied legacy institutions like the Heritage Foundation, to the grassroots network of TPUSA, to the accelerator-inflected networking groups like American Moment. This is a new development. In 2015, MAGA was the slogan of a Trump campaign that was initially dismissed as a joke. It lacked Republican institutional backing. That emphatically is no longer the case. For another, the MAGA Right, a distinctive political movement, has an increasingly ambiguous relationship with Trump. (Consider the Marjorie Taylor Greene breakup, Candace Owens using her chart-topping podcast to lambast the president’s foreign entanglements, or Nick Fuentes attacking the president as not sufficiently America First.) The popular movement is not entirely in thrall to Trump’s political whims—many of the animating ideas on the MAGA Right predate the rise of Trump—but it is reliant on Trump’s cult of personality for its own political success. So, what comes after Trump?  

Laura Field’s Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right is a nuanced and sophisticated look at MAGA’s intellectual and institutional infrastructure. The “MAGA New Right” is an umbrella term that Field uses to analyze various strains of right-wing anti-liberalism. Field argues that, despite its populist nature, it is fundamentally an elite-driven project. Her cast of characters consists mainly of far-right faculty at prestigious schools who write books and edit magazines. Field herself is a political theorist with a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin—a scholar of the philosophic crosscurrents on the right rather than organizers, activists, and live streamers like Kirk and Fuentes. “I focus squarely on the intellectuals and ideas behind right-wing populism,” Field writes. Her attention is mainly on the “extremely smart people who occupy positions of power and prestige in American institutions.” 

Field, like many of her subjects, was educated in the tradition of Leo Strauss, the late philosopher best known for his injunction that the great political writers of the Western canon wrote esoterically, camouflaging their views to avoid political persecution and the fate of Socrates. In the United States, the Straussians have been divided into East Coast and West Coast branches, the former more concerned with foundational philosophical questions, the latter with more narrowly defined political questions. Critical of both factions, Field finds more value in the East Coast variety: “I take for granted,” she writes in outlining her methodology, “that ideas—and not just or even primarily material conditions—have power in shaping our world.” 

For Field’s subjects, liberalism cannot answer “big” existential questions because it seeks to defuse their power and meaning by emphasizing pluralism, proceduralism, and compromise. Field herself understands the postliberal critique to be a coherent and even defensible intellectual position.

Organizers and popularizers like Kirk and Fuentes are absent from Furious Minds. This is unfortunate, because social media influencers are the main conduit through which young people first encounter right-wing ideas. While Field does an exemplary job of critically analyzing MAGA New Right intellectuals and their influence on the right’s political culture, she eschews any larger theory of how MAGA won political power, first within the conservative movement and then throughout American politics writ large. “[T]his book does not fully address Trumpism as a popular phenomenon,” she writes in the introduction. But Trump is the vehicle through which the desires of the MAGA New Right are expressed, and the intellectuals contort themselves to fit the leader’s impulses as much as they try to guide him. Even Fuentes​, hardly the intellectual,​ seems to have a grasp on the Straussian nature of his project, declaring recently that “our great superpower is that we have an exoteric and esoteric meaning.”  

The capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro is a case in point: Republicans, pundits, and intellectuals, many of whom denounced foreign interventionism in 2020 and 2024, have fallen lockstep behind Trump’s latest act of aggression. To be fair to Field, this is a broader problem for scholars of the American right. The intellectual side of MAGA clearly matters, insofar as it shapes right-wing political culture and public policy. But focusing on the intellectuals cannot offer a comprehensive theory of our social and political crisis. Nevertheless, Field shows how the intellectual and institutional infrastructure of the populist right has expanded since 2015, retroactively providing the substance behind these great popularizers of right-wing populism. This group very much includes Trump.  

One of Furious Minds’ contributions is categorizing the three major factions of the MAGA New Right. There are the Claremonsters, the faction of West Coast Straussians whose numbers include Michael Anton, of “Flight 93 Election” fame, an essay which essentially compared the potential election of Hillary Clinton to 9/11. There are the Postliberals—like Patrick Deneen, Notre Dame political philosopher, and legal scholar Adrian Vermeule at Harvard, notorious for his admiration for Francisco Franco’s fascist dictatorship in Spain. And finally, there are the National Conservatives, for whom liberalism is a threat to national cohesion and ethnic identity. The National Conservatives include figures like Yoram Hazony (the organizer of the National Conservative Conference) and Kevin Roberts at Heritage. These are big-tent factions with considerable overlap. (The diagram that Field provides, visualizing the relationships between them, is appropriately blurred.) There is also another group that Field dubs the “Hard Right Underbelly.” This is as close as the book gets to analyzing the world of the Groypers, and appropriately, given Field’s interest in political philosophy and intellectual history, she focuses on figures like Costin Alamariu, better known by his nom de plume Bronze Age Pervert. This unapologetically eugenicist political theorist holds a PhD in political philosophy from Yale.  

There are tensions between these MAGA New Right factions, but what binds them is opposition to the fusionist conservatism of Buckley and Ronald Reagan that once dominated the GOP. Kirk was the heir of this tradition, not in policy terms—Kirk has been critical of NATO commitments and expressed sympathy for Vladimir Putin—but by trying to bridge between old-guard Republicans and the New Right. But in the New Right’s view, fusionism was hopelessly contaminated by liberalism. To be clear, this is not a novel position. In the 1960s, the nascent white nationalist movement condemned Buckley for being more interested in catering to liberal elites as “responsible” conservatives not “conserving” anything. What distinguishes the MAGA New Right is not its complaints about its forebearers, or, for that matter, its substantive ideology, but rather its success. 

While taking the intellectual substance of MAGA seriously, Field critiques the “Ideas First” approach that dominates the intellectual New Right. “Ideas First,” according to her, derives from the famous injunction of Richard Weaver, the 20^th-century intellectual, that “ideas have consequences” and that, therefore, ideas, more than material conditions, are the proper drivers of politics and history. But this emphasis on abstract ideas can lead to monomaniacal conclusions. Indeed, Field is clear-eyed about the danger of the Ideas First approach even as she defends the joy, even necessity, of intellectual discovery and philosophical argument. This is befitting given Field’s Straussian background from student days at the University of Calgary and later at Texas. At one point, while discussing Michael Anton and the “Flight 93 Election,” Field mentions the “lure of Syracuse.” Alcibiades, a student of Socrates, took the philosophical education he had received from the master and wedded it to his boundless political ambition, becoming a general and switching sides several times during the Peloponnesian War. He is remembered, at least among some Straussians, as a warning of the possibly corruptive power of philosophy and the liberal arts. The “lure of Syracuse” is, according to Field, a temptation for right-wing political philosophers who take “big ‘meaning-of-life’ questions seriously.”  

For Field’s subjects—particularly postliberals like Deneen and Vermeule—liberalism cannot answer “big” existential questions because it seeks to defuse their power and meaning by emphasizing pluralism, proceduralism, and compromise. Field herself understands the postliberal critique to be a coherent and even defensible intellectual position. She writes with nuance and some sympathy about the postliberalism of Deneen, Vermeule, and Sohrab Ahmari—the founding editor of Compact magazine, probably most famous for attacking New York Times columnist David French as insufficiently conservative—as being rooted in a substantive critique of liberalism. “[F]or all of its pretensions to neutrality, liberal, pluralistic, modern constitutionalism has normative tendencies and implicit preferences and inevitably shapes the liberal democratic psyche in specific ways.” But while the critique itself might be substantive, Field observes, the postliberals’ “failure to speak openly about what they would propose to do with the massive plurality of people in liberal societies … who do not see the world as they do” is both alarming and illustrates a limit to the Ideas First approach. Society is more complex than a seminar. 

It is little surprise that many of the intellectuals Fields profiles owe a considerable debt to Carl Schmitt, the early 20^th-century German legal and political philosopher most infamous for joining the Nazi Party in 1933. The influence of Schmitt’s seminal works—particularly Political Theology, where he developed the argument that political theory is, in essence, secularized theology, and The Concept of the Political, where Schmitt developed his friend-enemy distinction as the essence of authentic politics—is discernible throughout Furious Minds. Taking Schmitt seriously as a political philosopher does not make one a Nazi—Giorgio Agamben, the Italian political philosopher, famously used Schmitt’s concept of the state of exception to analyze the War on Terror. But when Franco-admirer and self-avowed Schmittian Adrian Vermeule cites the master’s example, it sure is suggestive. Schmitt’s broader critiques of liberalism, namely its lack of political authenticity through its drive to manage political conflict through compromise, are shared by most of Field’s protagonists. Yoram Hazony, an Israeli-American political philosopher who runs a research center in Israel focused on Zionist political thought, attempted in his 2018 book The Virtue of Nationalism to rehabilitate the concept of nationalism, which he felt had been smeared by its association with the depredations of the Nazis. His “foil,” as Field puts it, is “imperialism,” by which Hazony really means liberal universalism—in the sense that liberalism proclaims universal human values—which he believes destroys the particularism of nations and peoples. For Hazony, this is a theological as much as a political argument, and most of his reasoning is based on a selective interpretation of the national covenants with God in the Hebrew Bible. His book was widely criticized upon release, not just from the left. Sam Goldman, a political theorist and professor at the University of Florida’s Conservative Hamilton School and hardly an advocate for contemporary liberalism, called Hazony’s argument “confusing and counterproductive.”  

There are tensions in Hazony’s thinking. For one, as Field notes, he has been outspoken in his support for Ukraine since the Russian invasion in 2022. Still, he has said nothing about the national rights of Palestinians and has enthusiastically supported Israeli settler movements in Gaza and the West Bank. For another, Hazony has been remarkably obtuse about how his defense of nationalism as a virtue in respectable institutional circles has been​ ​manna for white nationalists and right-wing antisemites. Hazony said in a speech at the National Conservatism Conference in September 2025 that he was surprised by the depths of antisemitism on the right, especially after spending years being “the guy who defended [right-wing nationalists] against absolutely false, ridiculous accusations of antisemitism.” As Jonathan Chait wrote in The Atlantic, Hazony “appeared genuinely baffled that antisemitism would pop up in, of all places, a reactionary nationalist formation dedicated to purifying the homeland of foreign influences.” 

Antisemitism is not a significant theme in Furious Minds, surfacing occasionally as a constitutive feature of the Hard Right and its fascination with white nationalism, fascism, and Nazism. But as Mark Mazower emphasizes in his recent work On Antisemitism, political antisemitism emerged in 19^th-century Europe as a response to liberal universalist assumptions about nationality and citizenship that underpinned Jewish emancipation. The first generation of avowed antisemites—the term itself dates back only to the 1870s—combined their opposition to liberal universalism with conspiracy theories about Jewish power. And while antisemitism is not a theme of Field’s book, apocalyptic conspiracism about “woke neo-Marxism” being promoted by a cabal of liberals and left-wingers is commonplace among her subjects. Perhaps the most common variant—found, among other places, at the Claremont Institute—is that progressivism seeks to emasculate and neuter American men. 

All the dramatis personae Field examines are men, and the hypermasculine nature of the MAGA New Right is one of her themes. She is correct in noting that her intellectuals’ obsession with masculinity is part of a broader “crisis of masculinity” discourse. This is reflected above all in the emergence of the online “manosphere,” a loose confederation of incels, men’s rights activists, pick-up artists, and misogynists that overlaps with the MAGA New Right. Field dedicates an entire chapter to the intellectual wing of the online manosphere, ranging from Carlson, who produced a 2022 documentary decrying how chemicals in the environment are causing testosterone levels to plummet, to Raw Egg Nationalist, an Oxbridge-educated health guru and conspiracy theorist, and, of course, to Bronze Age Pervert. Alamariu’s (or BAP’s) Yale PhD dissertation, which he self-published on Amazon in 2023, is an explicit defense of eugenics and argues that breeding and reproduction form the bedrock of Western philosophy.  

Bronze Age Pervert is committed to race science, the belief that biological races are scientifically real and can be measured through genetics and statistical tests like IQ. Field rightly notes Alamariu’s influence amongst the online Hard Right. Still, while Alamariu’s eugenic thoughts are extreme (Field calls him more “visceral and brutal” than his rivals), they are hardly unique. Curtis Yarvin, Steve Sailer, and Richard Hanania all swim in similar waters. Hanania is a curious absence from the book, given his credentials (a PhD in political science from UCLA), public profile, and influence as a contributor to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the blueprint for the second Trump administration. But more importantly, Hanania’s career shows that profoundly illiberal and anti-egalitarian thinking is not just limited to the Hard Right. Although Hanania’s public career was damaged by the revelations he had posted anonymously on white nationalist forums, he has successfully reinvented himself as a center-right conservative. Like Yarvin, he says white nationalism is for losers while defending race science to an audience mainly consisting of Silicon Valley elites. He criticizes Trump for being corrupt and incompetent, decrying the illiteracy and conspiracy theorizing among rank-and-file conservatives, a scant two years after writing a book that argues for the repeal of the Civil Rights Act. Hanania is, in fact, running the same playbook as William F. Buckley did in the 1960s, branding himself as a “responsible” conservative interested in serious intellectual debate with liberal interlocutors. Considering his influence amongst centrist pundits and bloggers like Noah Smith and Matthew Yglesias, that project has been remarkably successful. 

The book is as much about Field’s political and intellectual journey towards liberalism as it is the development of the MAGA New Right, and one gets the impression that she embraced liberal pluralism in part because of the unrelenting ugliness of its right-wing critics. “Becoming a mother,” she writes, “has made me ferociously attached to liberalism—to its hospitals, doulas, and midwives; to its everyday domestic comforts … to the hope that my kids will grow up and live good, free lives too.”

This is, ironically, the weakest part of Field’s analysis. Two of the few women in Field’s narrative are Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan, the hosts of the Red Scare podcast and key figures in the Dimes Square counterculture scene in New York. Field uses them to explore the “left-to-right pipeline,” a loose collection of podcasts, magazines, and forums that bring leftists and right-wingers together under the shared banner of rejecting neoliberalism. This is undoubtedly a real phenomenon. Nekrasova and Khachiyan went from hosting an edgy “dirtbag left” podcast in the 2010s to recently featuring Nick Fuentes as a guest last year. (Another reason why Fuentes’s absence in Field’s account is glaring.) There are a handful of Marxist writers who contribute to Julius Krein’s American Affairs journal or Compact magazine while also penning columns for Jacobin or New Left Review. Still, it is unclear just how meaningful these alignments are. Even hardened anti-identitarian Marxists still have universalist political commitments. Not everyone who steps on this path goes full Red Scare.  

Part of Field’s suspicion of these alignments stems from her fundamental commitment to liberalism. She writes movingly about her commitment to “multiracial, pluralistic, liberal democracy,” a position she did not always embrace. The book is as much about Field’s political and intellectual journey towards liberalism as it is the development of the MAGA New Right, and one gets the impression that she embraced liberal pluralism in part because of the unrelenting ugliness of its right-wing critics. “Becoming a mother,” she writes, “has made me ferociously attached to liberalism—to its hospitals, doulas, and midwives; to its everyday domestic comforts … to the hope that my kids will grow up and live good, free lives too.” Field is not blind to the forces undermining this liberal ideal—rampant inequality, violence, and “the contemporary degradation of public common goods and public education.” But what this means, in essence, is that the primary force undermining liberalism is … neoliberalism. The atomistic, market-driven approach to social, cultural, and political life that has dominated for the past 50 years has done more to undermine the social fabric of our society than anything ​identified in the writings​​ ​​of​​ ​Vermeule​ or Deneen​. Indeed, the emergence of the MAGA New Right is a consequence of the hollowing out of American life, not the cause. And while the red-brown alliances of the Dimes Square set are certainly not desirable, they are in this sense less dangerous than the incorporation of figures like Hanania into the neoliberal Silicon Valley consensus. Herein lies the danger of lacking a broader theory of Trumpism. If Trump is the vehicle for the MAGA New Right’s political agenda, we need an explanation for how Trump was able to co-opt the Republican Party and win two out of the last three presidential elections. And the answer to that is an indictment of the liberal order that has presided over the inequality and degradation of the public good that Field rightly laments.  

Young people continue to search for meaning and purpose in their lives, but only a small minority of Gen Zers have become Schmittians. The toxic masculinity of the manosphere is rightly viewed with contempt by the overwhelming majority of American women, including those on the right.

What, then, to make of the future of the MAGA New Right? Antonio Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony, widely cited by MAGA New Rightists as an aspirational goal, helps assess the project’s success. According to Gramsci, a ruling class achieves cultural hegemony when it renders political ideas as “common sense,” moving them beyond the scope of political debate. The premises are simply accepted as accurate. But the MAGA New Right, despite its best efforts, has not been able to achieve cultural hegemony. Nick Burns pointed out in Hedgehog Review recently that Christopher Rufo, who has self-consciously invoked Gramsci in the past as a guide, admitted recently that the reason he is advocating for the destruction of the Department of Education is that “it’s very difficult to change the culture of an institution” and hence the better option is to destroy it. But that destruction, while incredibly damaging, has been so far incomplete. Trump’s approval ratings are at record lows. The administration’s attacks on American universities and other cultural institutions have provoked an electoral backlash. All the money thrown at ICE has not caused the deportation regime to become more popular, nor has it stopped popular resistance in cities like Minneapolis, Chicago, and Portland. 

Young people continue to search for meaning and purpose in their lives, but only a small minority of Gen Zers have become Schmittians. The toxic masculinity of the manosphere is rightly viewed with contempt by the overwhelming majority of American women, including those on the right. That is not to downplay or diminish the cultural and political strength of the MAGA New Right—Kirk was, after all, a household name among college students even before his assassination. But there is a distinction between notoriety and hegemony. We all know who Fuentes and Carlson are. But outside of their hardcore supporters, not many of us like them. And that still means something.  

Still, the MAGAfication of the American right—and its control over one of America’s two major political parties—remains a brute fact. As we saw in 2024, all it takes is one election for the country’s political direction to shift dramatically. For that matter, even some of Trump’s critics on the right, like former congresswoman Taylor Greene, remain committed to the MAGA vision. If anything, their critiques of Trump are that he is not America First enough. Sam Francis, reflecting on what he perceived to be the failure of American conservatism in the 1990s, titled his book Beautiful Losers. The MAGA New Right are many things, but—at least in the context of American conservatism—they did not lose.