Why does Jordan Peterson cry so much? Why does James Lindsay think that breakfast cereal is woke?1 Why does Tucker Carlson think the First Lady of France is secretly a man? Why does Curtis Yarvin think his children are going to die in the Holocaust?

The first time I ever saw Curtis Yarvin cry was in 2020, when he was describing the personal trials of Freda Utley, a communist-turned-liberal.

Yarvin’s story is one in which a communist woman goes to the Soviet Union, her husband goes to a gulag, and when she returns to New York, her former friends are unsympathetic toward her.

When I read in The New Yorker that Yarvin was sobbing over the future Holocaust of his children at the hands of Mexicans, I wasn’t surprised.

The reason why Yarvin sympathizes so deeply with Freda Utley is because she is a key architect in his worldview:

“There [is] no crime that the Nazis committed that we or our allies did not also commit ourselves…”2

“I had referred to our obliteration bombing, the mass expropriation and expulsion from their homes of twelve million Germans on account of their race; the starving of the Germans during the first years of the occupation; the use of prisoners as slave labourers; the Russian concentration camps, and the looting perpetrated by Americans as well as Russians.”3

Some people might find it odd or “random” when Yarvin takes to posting Wikipedia screenshots about just how bad the Allies were to the Germans during WWII. But this is the foundation of Yarvin’s worldview: the belief that America is secretly as evil as Nazi Germany, and that Eisenhower’s death camps will rise again in the form of white genocide… Unless… America is broken apart into a system of patchwork states, ruled over by petty monarchs like Bukele.

Yarvin is an entertaining storyteller, even when he gets the basic facts wrong. In an interview with The Spectator, he claims that crime is spiraling out of control, Deliveroo drivers are slaves, and there is a shadow army of 20 million people of which “we don’t even know who they are.” Putting aside empirical errors,4 Yarvin’s yarn-spinning abilities are in the top 1%. He’s certainly better at what he does than Jordan Peterson, Tucker Carlson, or James Lindsay.

If I were right-wing, highlighting Yarvin’s tears would be an ad hominem cheap shot to portray him as effeminate. Right-wing opponents of Yarvin might claim that he is a weak person who should not be listened to on the basis that weak people have bad ideas.

This isn’t the case I am making. Yarvin is very kind in his personal life. He invites people to Thanksgiving, and according to Razib Khan, “love, hurt and humor burst forth from him like an avalanche.” Khan freely admits that Yarvin cries a lot. This isn’t a curse, but a blessing. It isn’t a weakness, but a power. This is the power of the hysterical conservative.

The Power of Hysteria

The left is hysterical. We’ve all heard about the genocide of black trans women. The Dionysian hysteria of the left is ancient, going back to the feminist Maenads of the Bacchae. Human sacrifice cults go back 12,000 years or more, and all of them involve hyping up a mob to ritually cannibalize a corpse, or else the Gods will destroy us! Nothing new under the sun.

Conservatives are supposed to oppose this. They are supposed to be the sober ones, yelling stop! at the frenzied masses. While leftists freak out over Ukraine, trans genocide, Palestine, and the deportation of Mexicans, conservatives are supposed to be the masculine adults in the room. Facts don’t care about your feelings.

The devil may care attitude of James Bond represents this conservative archetype. He drinks whiskey and smokes, and gladly dies for his country in obscure missions overseas involving corrupt moral compromises, because he trusts in the Deep State to act for the greater good. Right or wrong, my country.

Compare this to the modern hysterical conservative,5 a hypochondriac, a roided freak, or a sobbing slob. While James Bond fought Asiatic despots overseas, the hysterical conservative embraces foreign strongmen, to own the libs. Putin is good because he is strong; Zelensky is bad because he is gay.

I don’t expect to see Peterson and Yarvin on a podcast together any time soon, but the vector of their respective ideologies reduces to the same: Ukraine bad, Russia good. Deep State bad, foreign strongman good.6 How did it get this way? How did we go from the party of Mitt Romney to populist prognostications about civilizational collapse in the span of 10 years?

If you ask them why, you have to listen patiently to get an honest answer. First, you will have to suffer through some irrelevant diatribe about dragons and dinosaurs, philosophers you’ve never heard of, and historical intricacies meant to make you feel dumb. It’s the rhetorical tactic of have you even been there? If you don’t want to get sucked into some non-sequitur about Queen Victoria and Carl Jung, that just means you’re too ignorant to have an opinion about anything.

When that fails, the rhetorician answers the question with a question. Why do you support raping kids? Why do you support white genocide? Why do you support fascism (or communism, depending on the opponent)?

Once you get past all of that, the reason for Yarvin and Peterson’s opposition to the Deep State comes down to the idea that the system is broken beyond reform; experts can’t be trusted; preferred pronouns have brought civilization to the brink of annihilation.

Tucker Carlson, to his credit, engages in less rhetorical flourishes and speaks clearly: Russia is engaged in a Holy War against child groomers in the Ukraine. America is fascist. The “elites” (read: Jews) are killing us with opioids. Macron’s wife is a man. The COVID vaccine is a bioweapon designed by Bill Gates to kill us. The Great Replacement is HAPPENING.

In the face of these suggested, plausible, possible atrocities, there is no level of hysteria too great. Trump is our last chance, our last hope! If the Democrats take power, they’ll put us in death camps. If the Democrats win, we won’t have a country. If the Democrats come back, they’ll be 1,000 years of darkness, and so on…

500 Years of Conspiracy

There has always been a paranoid, conspiratorial form of the right, which ultimately derives its ur-mythos from the Black Legend. As Dutch and English Protestants fought against the Spanish Empire, they imagined the Habsburgs as a Satanic royal family, accusing them of mass child rape.

Conspiracies about Spanish Catholics narrowed in on the Jesuits as a shadowy organization, a secretive cabal which controlled the church from behind the scenes. Centuries later, anti-Jesuit conspiracies were joined by anti-Masonic conspiracies, and finally, antisemitic and anti-communist conspiracies.

After the American Revolution, conspiracism didn’t dominate American elections, because the adults in the room (Freemasons) were in charge. Property restrictions on voting prevented any form of populism.

I invite you, dear reader, to suspend your passive consumption of this stream of information and to become an active participant. I’m going to issue you a challenge, which will hopefully help you understand the long-term dynamics of American politics on a much deeper level than is typically expected of a Substack reader.

Think for a moment: try to guess when a majority of voters became non-property owners. If you’re a real political history junkie, you will already know the answer, but if not, I want you to put on your thinking cap and try to figure this out yourself.

Think deeply: who was the first populist president?

• Who claimed to be “fighting the bankers”?

• Who began mass deportations of non-whites against the ruling of the Supreme Court?

• Who pushed the highest increase in tariffs of all time (prior to Trump)?

Can you guess? If not, here’s a chart of the voting percentage of adult white males to help you out:

There was a huge jump in the national average voter participation rate of 27% in 1824 to 56% in 1828 — it doubled in four years. We should not be surprised to learn, then, that 1828 was the year when Andrew Jackson was elected president.

Jackson’s presidency led to several constitutional crises. His forceful passage of tariffs, against the will of South Carolina, set the stage for the Civil War by broaching the subject of states’ rights and Southern secession.

With Jackson ushering in America’s “populist moment,” political campaigning became a sordid affair. Before we had Go Tell Yo Mama, Vote for Obama and Sing for Change Obama, or Yo Voy A Votar Por Donal Tron and Daddy’s Home by Tom MacDonald & Roseanne Barr, we had Van Buren (1840):

Who rules us with an iron rod? Who moves at Satan’s beck and nod? Who heeds not man? Who heeds not God? Van Buren!

Who would his friends his country sell? Do other deeds too base to tell? Deserves the lowest place in hell? Van Buren!7

Besides the hot-button issues of tariffs, states’ rights, and slavery, immigration and Catholicism also fueled the rise of the Know-Nothing Party. It reached 21.5% of the vote in a coalition with the Whig Party in 1856, but was thereafter absorbed and dominated by the Republicans.8

In the election of 1860, the radicals (Republicans and Southern Democrats) received a majority of the vote, while the moderates (Democrats and Constitution Unionists) only received 34.1%. With the victory of Republicans in the Civil War, the pressurized steam of populism was temporarily released. The issues of immigration, Catholicism, states’ rights, and slavery fell out of mainstream discourse.

After the Compromise of 1877, political radicalism moved away from slavery and state’s rights toward socialism. William Jennings Bryan achieved 43% of the vote in 1908, the high-mark of socialist electoral success.

Due to the legacy of Jackson, it was Democrats, not Republicans, who monopolized the Gribble vote. If there is any doubt as to whether the Democratic Party represented a force for populism, it is enough to read Bryan’s Cross of Gold:

But we stand here representing people … [against] the few financial magnates who in a backroom corner the money of the world…

The gentleman from Wisconsin has said he fears a Robespierre. My friend, in this land of the free you need fear no tyrant who will spring up from among the people. What we need is an Andrew Jackson to stand as Jackson stood, against the encroachments of aggregated wealth…

Jackson… destroyed the bank conspiracy and saved America…

What we oppose in that plank is the life tenure that is being built up in Washington which establishes an office-holding class and excludes from participation in the benefits the humbler members of our society…

[They] place legislative control in the hands of foreign potentates and powers…

The sympathies of the Democratic Party, as described by the platform, are on the side of the struggling masses, who have ever been the foundation of the Democratic Party…

There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.

All of the elements of Trumpism are familiar here. An international class of elite globalists conspire in a “backroom corner” to oppress the struggling masses. There’s even a reference to “trickle down economics.” During this period, however, the Democratic Party remained mostly out of power, and Republicans maintained stable rule to the exclusion of demagogues.

The First Red Scare

The issue which brought populism into the Republican Party was the Red Scare. American diplomats like Montgomery Schuyler claimed that Jews were trying to overthrow western civilization in 1919:

It is probably unwise to say this loudly in the United States but the Bolshevik movement is and has been since its beginning guided and controlled by Russian Jews of the greasiest type… I would not hesitate to shoot without trial if I had the power any persons who admitted for one moment that they were Bolsheviks.

In America, Victor Berger was elected to congress in 1910, and Meyer London followed him in 1914. Race riots, the Wall Street Bombing, and the First Red Scare lead Warren Harding to promise a “return to normalcy” in 1920.

As FDR took power, Father Coughlin and Charles Lindbergh emerged as popular figures who accused the Jews of goading America into a new world war. After Pearl Harbor, Coughlin and Lindbergh were silenced and briefly forgotten. But their worldview was repackaged in the post-war era under the aegis of the John Birch Society and McCarthyism.9

Civil Rights and the Conspiracy Right

What began in 1919 as an anti-Catholic, anti-Masonic, anti-communist, and antisemitic movement gained new impetus with the conflict over segregation. For the first time since 1856, the conspiratorial element within America made an electoral splash, first quietly with the 2.4% won by Strom Thurmond in 1948, and then loudly with the 13.5% won by George Wallace in 1968.

During this period, Birchers were never able to equal the electoral or popular influence of Southern Dixiecrats. The Republican Party remained immune to the seduction of conspiratorial thinking, while Democrats struggled to maintain coherence. But Goldwater’s Southern Strategy began a great party flip which made an old Democratic problem into a new Republican one. Just as FDR co-opted socialism to neuter the left, Goldwater’s Southern Strategy was eventually successful in neutering the radical right.

After 1972, the Party of Nixon had to contend with its new identity as the party of reformed segregationists. Nixon played a shrewd game of footsie with these elements; appealing enough to win their votes, but keeping enough distance to avoid impropriety. This “dog-whistling” came to define the Republican Party.

In this year, 1972, the post-segregation hysterical right began to gain momentum as a popular movement. Mike Warnke, a fabulist in the vein of L. Ron Hubbard, wrote The Satan Seller. It was a critical success within the new “Evangelical” subculture of American Christianity. Warnke alleged that he had been part of a Satanic cult which engaged in orgies, the promotion of drugs, kidnapping, and rape.

Warnke sounds like a fringe figure, but he achieved mainstream success. In 1985, ABC brought him onto prime-time TV to spread his tall tales. Warnke provided the template for a host of copycats, who became increasingly wild and lurid in their claims. Not only were Satanists raping kids — they were doing so in the hallowed halls of power, in tunnels under Washington, D.C. The fascination surrounding Pizzagate and the Epstein files can all be traced back to this period.

The prime distinguishing feature between Evangelicals and Mainline Christians is that Evangelicals were (are) obsessed with conspiracy theories. After 1990, the Evangelical movement began to decline in favor of the rise of the “nones” and the “unclassified.” These include atheists and agnostics, but also “non-denominational” Christians.

The movement from mainline to Evangelical to non-denominational can be viewed as a continuous trend of disenchantment with “mainstream” authorities and institutions.

In 1978, Mainline Protestants were 42% of the Republican base. In 2018, that fell to 15%. Over this period, those of “no religion” tripled, and those of “other faith” doubled.

To say that the Republican Party has become “less religious” is deceptive. It would be more accurate to say that the Republican Party has swapped out a sober-minded, hierarchical, traditional religious framework in favor of a hysterical, populist, conspiratorial framework. Qanon is its ecumenical doctrine.

Bush Derangement Syndrome

President Lincoln was so divisive that he ignited a Civil War. However, after 1865, American presidents were largely untouched by scandal. Campaigning was a difficult and messy affair, but once in office, newspapers generally respected the office of the president.

With Nixon’s adoption of the Southern Strategy, Democrats responded with their own dirty tricks. Watergate was unprecedented, since no president had ever resigned before. 20 years later, the right-wing got their revenge: the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal was also unprecedented, and hurt Gore’s campaign in 2000.

But the hatred against Nixon and Clinton was rather technical and personal and not directly related to any particular ideology or political philosophy. The “age of derangement” really begins with George W. Bush.

At the forefront of Bush derangement syndrome was Alex Jones. Jones combined anti-war populism with anti-establishment radicalism, and declared war on “globalists,” who he accused of conspiring to depopulate America using vaccines and FEMA camps. Jones fused the worst fears of the left and the right by claiming that the “globalists” were a combination of Nazis, like Werner von Braun, and communists, like Bill Ayers.

The Infowars approach to politics was directly plagiarized by Glenn Beck in 2006, who took the conspiratorial style to CNN. Beck began by “just asking questions,” and ended up suggesting that George Soros was using Islamic terrorism to usher in a communist New World Order.

By 2015, the Alex Jones narrative on Bush was mainstream. Consider this special from Comedy Central, which makes the following claims:

• JFK was assassinated so Lyndon Johnson could profit from Vietnam

• Bush Sr. killed JFK, and was rewarded by Saudi Arabia

• Bush Sr. started the Gulf War on behalf of the Saudis

• When Bush Sr. failed to take out Saddam, he lost re-election due to Saudi interference

• The 2000 election was stolen

• Bush Jr. did 9/11 for the Saudis and the surveillance state

• the United States funds terrorism in the Middle East

• Six companies run the entire world

It’s not hard to replace “Saudi Arabia” with “Israel” and end up with the position of the Dissident Right today.

Some of the claims of Bush Derangement Syndrome were ridiculous:

• The top 6 companies in America only controlled 8% of GDP in 201510

• JFK helped to escalate the War in Vietnam

• It was Saddam who started the First Gulf War by invading Kuwait, not Bush Sr.

• Saudi Arabia didn’t cause Bush Sr. to lose in 1992; that was Ross Perot

Other claims are more realistic:

• America did directly fund the Mujahadeen, and indirectly funded Salafism

• The NSA did legalize the blanket surveillance of all Americans

• The 2000 election was decided by Clarence Thomas (Bush Sr. appointed), who was necessary for the 5-4 vote in Bush v. Gore

When I use the term “derangement,” I am not using it to mean “falsehood,” but rather I am referring to an emotional fixation on a particular political figure resulting from polarization. Of course, derangement leads to conspiracy theories, and conspiracy theories are more often false than true, but one can be deranged and factually accurate at the same time.

There was a flip-side to “Bush Derangement Syndrome,” which Kevin Philips identified in his book American Theocracy (2006). Increasingly, Evangelicals were taking over the conservative movement. Evangelicals were speaking in tongues and promoting a war in the Middle East as a necessary instrument to the second coming of Jesus. The “Fundies,” as they were referred to, were a deranged cult with an uncomfortable proximity to power. Today, the “Fundie” energy has been fused together with the Trump cult.

Politically, Democratic presidential candidates refused to engage in conspiracy mongering since 1908. Wilson, FDR, Truman, JFK, Johnson, Carter, and Clinton all made their peace with the international, interventionist establishment. Obama postured as a populist, but governed as a moderate.

It was Trump who decided to take upon himself the mantle of anti-war populism, breaking the cordon that had been established since 1908. In addition to the Alex Jones “globalist formula” of attacking the elites as warmongers and economic parasites, Trump added to this fears of white genocide via the Great Replacement.

Trump should be viewed as a product of Bush Derangement Syndrome: “he lied, he got us into the war with lies.”11 Did Bush lie about WMDs, or did he also lie about 9/11? While Goldwater and Nixon pioneered the use of racist dog-whistling, Trump pioneered the use of conspiracy dog-whistling.

Left and right have always had fringes within their coalition. But Reagan’s courting of Evangelicals, which increased with Bush Jr, brought the crazies into the limelight. Leftist conspiracies about capitalist warmongers were reappropriated by Jones and then Trump into “anti-globalism”, blaming elites for economic decline, warfare, and genocide. Trump did more to mainstream Chomsky’s anti-American vision than any mainstream Democrat.

Conclusion.

James Lindsay claims to oppose “the woke right,” but he is one of its best representatives. Wokeness refers to an awareness of hidden racism and capitalist conspiracies — a superstructure hidden from plain view. Lindsay, in the same vein, claims that the left is run by a secret cult of Marxist Gnostics.12

Lindsay, Peterson, Carlson, and Yarvin all believe that dark forces are arrayed on the horizon which, if not stopped, will lead to the Holocaust happening again. This time, the Holocaust won’t just be against Jews, but all white people.

The modern conservative has re-appropriated Jewish hysteria about a second Holocaust and projected it onto the entire white race.13

Populist hysteria is nothing new. Protestants in the 16th century imagined that the Catholic church was conducting child sacrifices. The suspicion of secret societies was then re-applied to attack Freemasonry in the 19th century. Fear of elite cabals combined together with fear of immigrants to produce the Know Nothing Party, one of America’s most successful third-party movements.

After the absorption of the Know Nothings into the Republican Party, populism and conspiracism was largely excluded from the right, and remained ghettoized on the Democratic plantation. William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, and Father Coughlin were all Democrats.

The crack in Republican elitism came with the Bolshevik revolution, which inspired antisemitism among conservatives. Charles Lindbergh was the first Republican14 to break the mold and spread popular antisemitism from a conservative perspective. Although Lindbergh was silenced by the war, the American First movement continued on through the activism of the John Birch Society and McCarthyism.

These forces were never dominant in the Republican Party, with the extremely popular Eisenhower directly opposing McCarthy. It wasn’t until Goldwater’s Southern Strategy and the great party swap that Republicans began to inherit populist elements which had been alienated from the Democratic Party.

The roots of hysterical conservatism can be traced back to the influx of Southerners into the party of Nixon. Having lost the battle for segregation, Southerners turned away from explicit discussions of race and toward an implicit feeling of “anti-institutionalism.” The failure of segregation led to a crisis of faith, and this crisis of authority fueled the new Evangelical movement.

Having been betrayed by Eisenhower and the Democratic Party, but unable to express how or why, former segregationists spread conspiracy theories about Satanist rapists who secretly controlled the elite.

Between 1972 and 2012, Republicans were able to wrangle this unruly coalition without much trouble. The base could be satisfied with promises to “defend marriage,” keep taxes low, and keep the military strong.

What broke this stable arrangement was the failure of the Iraq War and the election of Obama. Conservatives believed that Bush’s wars would help keep foreigners at bay, and saw mass immigration as a betrayal of this promise. The election of Obama reactivated implicit racial concerns which were dormant since 1978. The combination of those two elements alone were enough to destroy the traditional conservative movement — the additional psychological stress of the Great Recession only added fuel to the fire.

Donald Trump shouldn’t be thought of as a uniquely malicious demagogue, but as an opportunist who had been observing the Republican drift toward populism over several decades. While the Democratic Party became increasingly hostile to conspiracism and xenophobia, the Republicans embraced it.15

Although conservative intellectuals like Lindsay, Peterson, and Yarvin all consider themselves to be sophisticated and educated, the essential core of their worldview is hysterical conspiracism.

What makes hysterical conservatism so robust and powerful as a political ideology is that it resists all intellectual inquiry. Anyone who questions the conspiracy is either a co-conspirator, a coward, or a useful idiot.

Elites are interested in governing and managing populations, not exterminating them. When rabble-rousers attempted to foment a revolution, medieval elites had their bodies torn asunder by horses. As the west has transitioned away from corporal punishment toward societies of control, the means by which the population is ordered have become more abstract.

Conservatives prefer control by violence over control by social conditioning. They pine for Bukele; they resent the nagging school teacher. In the conservative mind, public spankings allow for emotional catharsis. Conservatives, in this way, are like a bratty sub who resents their partner as weak for not hitting them.

From the elite perspective, the shift from physical punishment to more abstract tactics of guilt and shame isn’t motivated by hatred of the populace, but by a desire for power and control. Liberals are easier to control than populists.

Conservatives, unable to accept this logic, prefer to believe that the elite wish to exterminate them. Yarvin fantasizes about Mexicans chopping up children with machetes as an expression of an unmet need for corporal punishment. Monarchy represents the return of the strong father who will spank his children, proving that he truly cares for them. The conservative is unable to accept the apathy of elites, that they do not care, and instead chooses to imagine their hatred.

For the conservative, it is better to be hated than to be irrelevant. The desire to be hated rather than ignored has propelled the hysterical conservative into the heights of political power.

Trumpism will be defeated either by humiliation or absorption. The Know Nothings were destroyed by the ascendance of Lincoln and his Republican Party — the Civil War was so traumatic that it overshadowed the nativist concerns about immigration and Catholicism. William Jennings Bryan had to be humiliated by losing three different presidential elections before the Democrats finally submitted to the regal and educated authority of the Princeton President, Woodrow Wilson.16

The establishment, whether of the neo-con variety, or the open-borders variety, has contributed to the rise of populist hysteria. Starting endless wars in the Middle East while inducing rapid demographic change, in the midst of the worst recession in 78 years, was bound to aggravate the population. Trying to negate the backlash with half-hearted censorship hasn’t helped either.

The best way forward for elites would be to deliver Republicans 12 years of electoral defeat. The surest way to achieve that is by appealing directly and unambiguously to white men. Democrats simply need to run a white man: when they do, they win, when they don’t, they lose.

Whether or not Democrats can exercise sufficient ideological discipline to accomplish this is up in the air. Against the power of hysterical conservatives, hysterical liberals might choose to double down on the most annoying and alienating aspects of their ideology. Unless elitists within the party exercise prudence, 2028 could be the most hysterical election since 1860.

End credit lyrics:

It’s a thief in the night to come and grab you
It can creep up inside you and consume you
A disease of the mind, it can control you
It’s too close for comfort, oh

Put on your brake lights, you’re in the city of wonder
Ain’t gon’ play nice, watch out you might just go under
Better think twice, your train of thought will be altered
So if you must falter, be wise