Shifting Intellectuals Right
Can the brainwashing of radical institutions be reversed? Let's hope so!
First, let’s check in with how our “future leaders” are handling the second Trump era:
Oh my.
And from perusing the lefties who have left Twitter for the bluer pastures of Threads and BlueSky since Trump’s inauguration, their derangement is developing at the same torrid pace it developed in 2016.
But fortunately, their sway has been largely diminished as most people have woken up (at least partially) to the dangers that rabid leftism poses to us all, and are largely tired of all the bullshit.
And yet…
The Educated Urban Elite Holdout
The country is still quite divided, largely because the “Educated Urban Elite” cohort (or EUEs for short), largely on the coasts, still subscribes to a left-facing culture that can broadly be described as “woke leftism”. Despite Trump’s victory, this view is still dominant in those circles: white urban college grads favored Kamala over Trump by almost a 2-to-1 margin in the 2024 election (source):
And this understates the effect: I am sure that this gap is far wider in the Northeast and on the West coast. Despite Trump’s win, places like NY, DC, and SF still have the exact same dominant culture they’ve had for the past ten years. These bastions have been most surprised by Trump precisely because they are the most insulated:
This orientation sustains because they tend to only interact with other urban college-educated people who are part of the same monoculture, and because they are largely insulated from the consequences of the disastrous worldview they support. To name a few:
They work cushy office jobs that pay enough that grocery prices don’t matter.
They don’t face the brunt of illegal immigrants that border states do, or the American laborers who have to compete with them.
They tend to still raise their families very traditionally despite pushing radical acceptance of dystopian ideologies on everyone else.
They buy homes in the priciest & cushiest of school districts or send their kids to private schools, rather than subject them to the failing government-run schools they verbally support.
They believe to their core that Trump tricked the stupid rural yokels into voting for him, despite never actually talking to anyone who voted for him.
I could go on and on and on. The only thing more stunning than the hypocrisy is the inability to self-diagnose it. Instead, they create an insular culture that demeans anyone portraying opposing views as some uneducated mouth-breathing hillbilly that ensures they almost never have to face their own hypocrisy.
Now, you can call me crazy (or an uneducated mouth-breathing hillbilly), but I don’t believe this kind of insular hypocrisy is an inevitable path for the “Educated Urban Elite”.
But for that to happen, we need at least two things:
Content that provides the clear justifications and explanations of different belief systems, and
Initial leaders/influencers bold enough to speak out against the hypocrisy and advocate for, frankly, better worldviews.
Approaching the Tipping Point
We need this kind of movement because it is critical that woke leftism is roundly defeated in all it’s forms. Despite Trump’s win, and a general cultural shift, the EUE culture still seems poised to persist.
While it can likely continue to be beaten at the ballot box, the big tent approach is to try to provide a path for these EUEs into a new cultural movement. Despite it being a broad monoculture, there are conservatives hidden amongst the EUEs everywhere, even in New York, SF, and DC.
To help those people, we need to understand dominant and alternative narratives, something I’ve covered well in The Book of Principles. Simply put:
There exists a dominant culture, idea, or narrative that leads society, 10-20% of the population are zealots who enforce conformity.
Alternatives to that dominant culture rise and are naturally demonized by the dominant enforcers. This is somewhat useful as it does weed out bad alternatives and ensures that only the strongest survive.
Eventually an alternative narrative continues to build and reaches a tipping point (in terms of number of subscribers and the zealotry of them), and overthrows the dominant narrative.
That alternative culture is now the dominant culture. The cycle begins again.
I believe we are very near that tipping point right now. Mindless adherents to the dominant culture will trash people like Joe Rogan and Elon Musk. “Funny Man Bad” and “Rocket Man Bad” have joined “Orange Man Bad” as the proud badges of the zealots of the dying regime.
But in the meantime, tens of millions of people are listening to Rogan, reading Elon’s stream of consciousness on X, and catching clips of Trump’s press conferences.
The numbers are close, but we need to open up the communication to take people from being silent supporters of the alternative narrative to being vocal supporters of the alternative narrative.
Building the Alternative Narrative
The political right is far more fun right now because the alternative narrative is still being developed. This lack of development, combined with other factors, leads to the mischaracterization that it isn’t intellectual.
But the ideas being shared on long form podcasts, niche Twitter accounts and blogs is frankly far more intellectual than the toxic waste now pumped out by captured institutions.
Case in point: how was it known that Covid was a lab leak back in February of 2020, instead of waiting for the NYTimes and CIA to all but confirm it in 2024 and 2025? It wasn’t some racist conspiracy theory - it was the work of various online sleuths investigating the work of Dr. Fauci, Peter Daszak, and EcoHealth Alliance, and their ties to the Wuhan Coronavirus Lab.
That’s one example, but there are many such cases. It does take weeding through a lot of noise, in the form of misleading internet theories and trolls. But even with that downside, the information ecosystem is far more robust and informative than the existing mainstream narratives.
But broadly, this intellectual case is what I hope to provide through this blog, as well as The Book of Principles, particularly in 2025. So we’ll have more to say next time outlining some of the hypocrisies that we pointed out above.
For now, if you are still reading this, think about what you’d like to see from the right, or need to see from the right, to make a more intellectual case that could convince you and the people you know recover from woke leftism. And, of course, let me know in the comments below!