A specter is haunting the Left: the specter of a new conservative counterculture known simply as “Dark MAGA,” or as I like to say, “The Dark Right.”
What is The Dark Right?
Simple: It’s a collection of conservative influencers, writers, podcasters, fashionistas, and even tech bros, mostly headquartered in America’s major cities, who, rather than huffily complaining that the Left always casts us as the villains of history, have decided to revel in the power their negative perception gives us.
We like being portrayed that way. We look good that way.
Not because we’re evil by nature, but because in casting us as villains, the Left lets us dominate the frame. They have so lost touch with the American spirit that in the contest between their "heroes" and the Right’s "villains," people cannot help rooting for the bad guys. Because, as the kids say, America has entered its "villain era."
The era where we set boundaries—and borders—regardless of who it upsets.
That endeavor will not be prosecuted by wide-eyed ingenues and matinee idols. It will be prosecuted by people with the ruthlessness of pop culture’s great antiheroes. Such as the great wrestling heel turned great man of history, Donald J. Trump. Because if Trump understands anything, it is that virtue signaling is out and vice signaling is in. Being the bad guy is badass. We are the baddies.
For the past ten years, the Left has been fighting a losing battle to stuff a genie it released back into the bottle. See, in reaction to the cringey, kitschy, self-righteous “compassionate conservatism” of the second Bush administration, the Left decided to lean into statue-toppling skepticism of all stripes. And it worked so well that in under a decade, Barack Obama won on a platform that was essentially diametrically opposed to Bush-era conservatism. And just like that, the old, unfun Right was dead.
Suddenly, the Left controlled mainstream morality. There were things you shouldn’t question – and an ever-expanding list of them: Race. Gender. “Lived experience.” Personal pronouns. They built false idol after false idol, sacred cow after sacred cow, and Golden Calf after Golden Calf. They did this in the ashes of the religion they’d destroyed, hoping to create a new, ersatz religion of wokeness. And in so doing, they became the blue-haired, mentally ill twin of the uptight Bush-era Republican Party. Two stillborn aesthetics united by their intolerance for subtlety, irony, and above all, transgression.
Which is where we come in.
We have to transgress against modern morality—because modern morality is Leftist morality. And it has been that way for as long as most of us have been alive. We have to melt down the Golden Calf to have space to build the new Temple: a Temple built from ideals so old that they have become new again.
The lesson of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight is that sometimes the hero must let himself be vilified in order to keep his city safe. The Dark Right is no less willing. In fact, we take it as a compliment. From the impotent Left, being cast as the bad guy is a tell: “It’s afraid.”
Worse still for the Left, many of them are seduced by our forthright embrace of the image they created for us. Because among the sorts of people who want to be cutting-edge cultural innovators, self-confessed darkness doesn’t inspire fear so much as curiosity.
The reason for this is simple: cultural innovators may like Leftism, but they need transgression. Because only through transgression can they find the fresh, boundary-pushing ideas that can create art that is truly new. Can they find that on the Left, with its endless list of speech codes, unsayable words, unthinkable thoughts, and emoji-filled bios? Or can they find it by breaking the speech codes, saying the words, thinking the thoughts, and reaching for ideas that emojis cannot capture?
I can already hear the old school conservatives getting nervous reading this, and you know what? Good.
If President Trump showed us anything, it’s that we are done with fogies on the Right—or as you might know them, RINOs. These people spent so much time on their fainting couches that they never lifted a finger to conserve anything for their children and grandchildren.
They pretended to be the good guys while collecting checks from Big Pharma as it poisoned our people, Big Agriculture as it enabled an invasion of our homeland, and the Military Industrial Complex, as it sent our children to die to pad its bottom line. Their so-called “intellectuals” let the Left redefine what it was to be “good” and kept trying, fruitlessly, to pretend that the Right still conformed to that redefinition. They’re spineless because they want to be seen as good, and nice. But not us.
The Dark Right is not all of the Right, and it shouldn’t be. But there’s a reason we are here. After being taken advantage of for so long, the American people crave blunt, unapologetic authenticity. Many of us have been part of this movement since before it was cool. We’ve been portrayed as villains our entire lives. It doesn’t hurt anymore.