The Women Leaving the New Right

"I think I fell in with the right wing as an aesthetic choice initially. I was in love with the frisson of transgression. The online right had begun to engage more explicitly with forbidden subjects: nativism, race science, and gender essentialism drawn from evolutionary psychology. There was an element of gnosticism to it, the sense that you know secret things that other people don't know."

"I'm somebody, dispositionally, who likes to have a good time. She found the humorlessness of the contemporary left more alienating than the conservatism of her youth. She wasn't attracted to the right by the romanticized aesthetic of traditional America - big beautiful houses and bread-making and families with half a dozen children."

Anna, a religious Catholic who grew up as a liberal contrarian in a conservative town, gravitated toward the New Right during college in the mid-2010s. Repelled by what she perceived as the humorlessness of progressive activism, she found the online right's engagement with transgressive topics—including nativism, race science, and gender essentialism—intellectually appealing. She describes her attraction as rooted in the "frisson of transgression" and a gnostic sense of possessing forbidden knowledge. After college, she became a celebrated pundit, writing for right-wing outlets and working for conservative institutions while socializing with young movement figures. Her early writing focused on feminism and gender, where she gained attention for provocative statements.

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