A Portrait Of The New Right In Forty-Four Stories

They call themselves the New Right. They’re also known as the Online Right, and during Trump’s first term, the Alt-Right. Many of them are proud provocateurs with questionable pseudonyms – Bronze Age Pervert, Endlessbonerz, Raw Egg Nationalist, etc. – who produce and circulate countercultural content (also known “poasting”) that opposes Leftism in all its forms.

While a few members of the New Right have been revealed by reporters, and many of them seem to be academics in good shape, not the putrid pale autistic incels many assumed they were, it’s difficult to ascertain just how influential the New Right has been or continues to be. Certainly, they should be credited for bringing previously unspeakable issues to the fore and ridiculing woke excesses, but it’s debatable how much normal conservatives, a.k.a. “Boomercons” or “normies,” are really affected by them. 

This is because crafting policy and laying out a detailed agenda is not really a concern for the New Right. When they’re not making funny memes or coining novel perjoratives, they are dwelling on abstract concepts like human nature, nationhood, manliness, culture, and art. Readers can try their hand at following some of their more heady arguments, which lean heavily on Nietzsche, Matrix references, and ancient history, but most will encounter the New Right’s ideas in bits and pieces through random references and memes.

In an effort to gather together some of the voices on the New Right and support their work, John Keeperman (a.k.a. Lomez) and his associates recently established Passage Publishing. Besides publishing essay collections from cancelled writers like Steve Sailer, or the under-appreciated classics by H.P. Lovecraft, Passage is publishing books from newer writers representing the New Right. Although printing books seems like a counterintuitive approach to sharing one’s ideas in the Internet Age, Passage has given much needed legitimacy and intellectual heft to the ideas that animate many of today’s younger conservatives.

But what are these ideas? And can they form a coherent ideology to unite people in the real world, or is all this all just off-color banter for online trolls? To address these concerns, Passage has recently published a compilation of flash fiction stories from the New Right in a single volume, After the War: Stories from the Next Regime. Rather than bore readers with a series of political essays on today’s big issues, After the War functions more like a great mosaic of tales that come together to offer a holistic vision of the future according to the New Right. As the writer Zero HP Lovecraft explains in the forward, this picture is altogether positive: “the flash fiction is a kind of anti-joke, a joke for the minions of hell, who, upon hearing it, take perverse enjoyment in a painful emotion, though in fact many of the stories in this collection are hopeful.”

Over the course of the book, a few themes emerge that primarily revolve around a greater theme of masculinity: virility, aggression, leadership, honor, and toxic femininity. Many of the stories depict a future brought low by a totalitarian abuses, dysfunctional bureaucracies, ubiquitous digital technology, and emasculating feminists.

Nevertheless, there are also strong, muscular, supremely competent protagonists to redeem these benighted worlds and fight for a freer, funner, more natural way of life. Sometimes they succeed and end up on top, as in “Reconquista,” or die in a blaze of glory, as in “Darkwing Cruiser.” Other times, they fall short and succumb to the system like in “Sins of the Father” and “Algorithm Egregore.”

Some of the writers are able write quality satire that mock of today’s supposed wisdom. Michael Anton parodies the frequently absurd discourse over mass illegal immigration, likening this to an argument of how people would respond to a leak on a cruise ship. Self-deprecatingly entitled “Float 93,” a man of common sense tries to alert other passengers about the leak, only to be dismissed by everyone with nonsensical leftist arguments. Echoing today’s leftist clergymen, the ship’s chaplain assures him, “Water cannot hurt a ship. If anything, we do not have enough water. I welcome this admixture of new waters to revitalize the ship.”

The other effective satires are “A Big Man on Campus” and “Escape from GAE.” In the former, a young woman entering Ruth Bader Ginsburg College falls for a chaste young man who’s job at the school is to pretend to be the rapist of record for graduates who need a story on their resumes about their sexual trauma. In the latter story, an American couple is illegally fleeing to Mexico since the crime rate in the U.S. has risen “900 percent” and life has become unbearable.

Other stories of note are “The Red Desert Fathers,” a story of Christian monks colonizing Mars; “The Dead Will Have No Rest,” in which a depressed young man agrees to upload his consciousness in a government experiment; and “The Arc of the Moral Universe Slouches Toward Bethlehem,” where an evolved humanity in the distant future takes up religious practices again. Each of these stories are poignant and well-told, with the writers making the most of the few pages allotted them.

Unfortunately, some stories amount to puerile fantasizing, in which the male protagonist kicks butt and wins the girl(s) of his dreams. Perhaps some of these stories are at least humorous, like “Pizza Boy” by Raw Egg Nationalist in which a leader of the New Right lords his success over a washed-up conservative writer of the past, but some of them like “Poster Boy,” “Genesis Revelation,” and “Vampire Island,” by Endlessbonerz, Mencius Moldbugman, and Bronze Age Pervert respectively, are silly and needlessly chauvinistic.

The worst stories, however, have to be the ones that are purposefully incomprehensible. Luckily, there are only two stories guilty of this offense: “Rite of Passage” and “Two Dreams: A Cryptic Diptych.” In all likelihood, these writers were going for something profound, but found themselves thwarted by the narrow limits of the flash fiction genre. On the bright side, they are mercifully short.

There are still many more stories that find themselves somewhere in between these two ends of spectrum quality-wise. If nothing else, the sheer variety, color, and abundance from these otherwise obscure writers is impressive. One can see how their talent, edginess, and risk-taking have been helpful in revitalizing the conservative movement of the past decade and inspiring new ideas and possibilities.

And even when these stories are sometimes crass, stupid, offensive, or some combination of all three, they are never boring. For this reason, today’s more conventional conservatives and right-wingers who are curious to know what lies ahead for their movement would do well to read After the War. Against all odds, this is where the energy is right now, and it’s going to be a good time for those who stop taking themselves so seriously and learn to enjoy the moment as they take over the culture.

Auguste Meyrat is an English teacher in the Dallas area. He is the founding editor of The Everyman, a senior contributor to The Federalist, and has written essays for Newsweek, The American Mind, The American Conservative, Religion and Liberty, Crisis Magazine, and elsewhere. Follow him on X and Substack.