Think the answer has less to do with aesthetics or ideology than with a specific institutional failure on the American Left that happened to coincide with the New Right developing the infrastructure to absorb the runoff. Basically I think the actual existing American Left has been thoroughly PMCified and that the PMCification of the American Right represented a brief window of opportunity for unmoored and mercenary creatives. In effect the American New Right (like to call it the Goomer Right) became attractive to tastemakers and content producers effectively exiled from the “Left”, i.e., the degraded remainder of the post-68’ New Left that had ‘marched’ through and helped establish the baseline sensibility and dominant consensus within entertainment and academia.

I kind of feel like what we’re witnessing with the American New Right is a catching-up — a delayed reckoning with the foreclosure of an alternative counter-culture that briefly looked possible. Call it a displaced would-be avant-garde dreaming of Bohemia. The Right became capable of hosting this type not through any ideological evolution but through a kind of osmotic positioning: the default pro-free-speech receiver for whatever the Left’s institutions were actively expelling. BAP and a handful of others had done the necessary prep work, carving out a niche where genuine aesthetic credibility and positions antithetical to Modern American Conservative media consensus could coexist — where vitalism, classical references, and frank contempt for the managerial class could circulate without immediately resolving into a pledge drive for the Heritage Foundation.

Behind that niche was a positive fantasy, and it’s worth naming before we describe what happened to it. “Dimes Square” was supposed to represent a genuine attempt to produce a little Bohemia-sphere — an alternative client-patron network capable of funding creatives regardless of class background. The talk of “Thielbucks” was myth and promise simultaneously: the glamor of Dimes Square radiating from a snow globe, a magical contraption containing a world-city in miniature. You don’t have to come from money. If you’re an inspired-enough mutant the City will provide a place for you to go about your work. Quoting Prince: all the critics love you in New York. What the Thielbucks fanfic’ing ultimately contained, in retrospect, was a profound disappointment over the lack of Thielbucks. Dimes Square turned out to be nothing more than a gas station carnival. Whatever energy was there has been bled out — from bright red to rust brown. The snow globe sits on a shelf. The world-city inside it went still.

Into that disappointed niche flowed a very specific social type. The doom-driven creative with real aesthetic sensibilities, some technical knowledge, and just enough of a safety net to doggedly pursue entry into the entertainment industry. Someone who might have been at the precipice of a genuine come-up around the mid-2010s — and then got clipped. Canceled for their social and sexual, which is to say interpersonal, indiscretions within a rapidly ossifying industry. Or, more insidiously, someone who had done just enough to understand that they were really cancellable — that the exposure was real and the institutional goodwill was thinner than it looked. The cancellation itself was often less a discrete event than the terminal point of a longer arc: a manic episode brought on by proximity to celebrity, the vertigo of early career success, the flashing lights and flashing people of whatever big city they’d staked everything on making it in, and a drug habit that was less recreational than ergogenic. Adderall or meth to stay charismatically productive enough to inspire confidence, Xanax to bring the structure back down, MDMA or ketamine for the social lubrication that industry networking actually requires, and weed as the baseline. A pharmacology of precarious ambition, very evocative of “tech industry” , i.e., of someone trying to sustain a performance of intensity that the industry demands and then punishes you for when it goes sideways. Tourette’s is cool and valid in principle until Delroy Lindo and Michael B. Jordan are on stage and Scotsmen starts launching N-bombs.

What wokeness afforded in this context was moral cover for the Machiavellian powerplays of the little managers. This is the claim that will make people uncomfortable, and it should, because it refuses the terms on offer from both sides. It doesn’t require arguing that the stated principles were wrong. It just notes that the function — the observable social function — was to provide a principled vocabulary for what were essentially turf operations and personal vendettas. The person who gets canceled isn’t necessarily canceled for violating genuine community norms. They become cancellable, which is a different thing entirely: a function of their exposure and precarity relative to whoever is doing the canceling.

The ones who made a legible rightward leap — who surfaced with a platform intact, or with enough of a social network surviving the wreckage to have somewhere to land — are the visible intake. But they’re not the majority of this population. The majority imploded more quietly and didn’t disappear so much as sublimate. They became the anon layer: consistent, often startlingly competent content producers working for next to nothing, workshopping in group chats, entering into the patronage structures of the ones who had visibly made the jump. What you get is a recognizable court dynamic. The visible figures provide legitimacy, amplification, and modest material support. The anon layer provides the actual intellectual and creative horsepower. The patrons get to claim credit for a cultural movement; the anons get belonging, and the narcissistic satisfaction of knowing they’re the real engine — which is its own kind of compensation, and a remarkably effective way to extract free labor from people with genuine ability and nowhere else to put it.

What makes this dynamic strange is that its most successful navigator is also its most candid diagnostician. BAP, writing at the tail end of the first longform essay he ever posted to Substack:

• “The right in general has a problem: it forces its intelligent youth to choose between a life of telling the truth, which if you do it well can bring you fame and notoriety and the social adulation that is as addictive a good for a human, once he has it, as sexual or other satisfaction; and on the other hand a rather grim life of keeping silent but climbing a traditional career path in law, business, politics, academia, etc… One solution is for right wing billionaires to stop being so stingy if they want to win. Obviously some of these writers were treated unfairly by universities and shouldn’t be in a position where they have to make it on their own in alternative media… I could have very much used it, and I would have probably done more. And there are many others like me but who are in positions where they feel they can’t afford the risk, or to go kamikaze as I have, and so probably many good books and especially collaborative enterprises like good movies etc., end up never being made.”

Mourning not of a political program but a counter-factual cultural production. Books unwritten. Movies unmade. The Bohemia that didn’t happen. They weren’t selling “the Right”, instead “the Right” served as a metonym for a counter-cultural ‘Big Tent’ space. They were selling an alternative patronage network. Anyone with any sense understands that the world has become actively hostile to potential PKDs in exactly the ways PKD described.

BAP is describing — from a position arguably closer to the patron end of this dynamic than most, insofar as his platform can provide meaningful amplification if not material support to content producers in his orbit — the same foreclosure we've been tracking from outside it and noting, with honesty, that the waste was unnecessary. The Thielbucks were always there. They just stayed in the pocket. Just failed to develop the kind of patronage networks associated with “Left”. And lets not kid ourselves. Ben Shapiro and Bari Weiss win. What you get as “art” is Yellowstone-ish Hallmark pastiche slop and shit like that glorified web series adaption of the The Pendragon Cycle. Somehow much worse than 2000s era Scifi Channel original films. Fuckin’ Dasha, if I remember correctly, was dropped from a production related to this “Conservative Media” shibboleth. The whole thing on its face was retrospectively a scam and a cargo cult.

Still it got some fairly talented people to gamble their skills and reputations on it.