Who’s to Blame? Ask the Far Right—They Have a List.
Feminists, immigrants, professors, and just about everyone else: a look at the movement’s ever-expanding catalogue of villains.
FOR ALL ITS CLAIMS TO REPRESENT the interests of the People, the far right sure doesn’t appear to like a lot of them.
The movement’s list of enemies is so capacious it would put Richard Nixon’s to shame. Some days, it seems as though it encompasses most of the human race. You might wonder how to square this with the right’s commitment to tradition and order. How can a society be justly ordered if it has been set up to exclude most people? The answer is that much of the far right’s social vision is fundamentally volkisch: Homogeneity and unity are goals that override democratic inclusion, and this is where the movement’s resentful agonism comes from.
“Resentful” is a key term here: Anyone who has read or listened to the movement’s leading figures is familiar with the tone of endless aggrievement. This owes to their mental habit of combining snobbish elitism with deep anxiety about dispossession. You are this country’s natural aristocracy, the grifters and thinkers of the far right tell their supporters—well, you would be, anyway, if not for all the wastoids, welfare queens, demonic leftists, and nonwhite people playing blockbuster movie roles that should, for reasons they never quite clearly explain, go to white people. “The bottom 2 percent of society have caused all of the manifest problems in your lives” is a perfect distillation of this view.1 The sense of prevailing threat from below nourishes the far right’s siege mentality.
While there is real variation—and sometimes even creativity—in far-right thought, certain features remain consistent. One of these is that there is always an enemy who is primarily responsible for our “manifest problems.”
The primary enemy role can be played by just about anyone, and a large cast has been forced to cycle through it. Until his recent defeat, Viktor Orbán fearmongered about Muslim invasions, LGBTQ and feminist activists, “citizens of the world,” and George Soros. The People’s Party of Canada, led by Maxime Bernier, attacks “woke ideology” and immigrants, imagined as lazy bums eager for the dole. In the U.K., the Reform party likewise traffics in heavy doses of Islamophobia and attacks out-of-touch liberal Europeans. MAGA in the United States has a genius for finding enemies everywhere it looks: Mexican immigrants, left-wing professors and journalists, Communists (in 2026!), socialists, and Hasan Piker. Glenn Ellmers, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, has argued that “more than half” of the people living in America today “are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term,” which is why “overturning the existing post-American order” has become a patriotic necessity.
The far right’s list of enemies is virtually infinite (which somehow does not seem to prevent it from continuing to endlessly grow). But it isn’t hard to discern some of the higher-level categories of antagonism. Here are three of the most enduring types among the far right’s rogues’ gallery.
Racial Minorities
The far right persistently attacks members of racial minorities. In an international context, they are figured as multitudinous enemies threatening to swamp otherwise pure countries; domestically, they are framed as white people’s innate inferiors living large on account of gullible liberal social policy. Today’s far right employs many different registers to make the same racist convictions palatable to different audiences.
In much of the Anglosphere, for instance, pseudoscientific proclamations of the immutable inferiority of various racial groups have found some purchase among center-right—and even centrist—audiences. Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s controversial The Bell Curve set the standard. The 1994 book marshals data and statistics purporting to demonstrate that many of the country’s socioeconomic inequalities can be explained by innate cognitive differences—including between races. More than just a work of (bad) social science, the book advanced sweeping policy positions in the name of resignation. Murray and Herrnstein’s conclusion is that trying to rectify these inequalities is probably a waste of time and money. The book lent respectability to far-right racist intuitions.
In recent years, the spirit of The Bell Curve has evolved, as it were, into arguments about “human biodiversity” and free scientific inquiry. In his neoreactionary manifesto, The Dark Enlightenment, philosopher Nick Land discusses how a “sane, pragmatic, and fact-based negotiation of human differences is forbidden by ideological fiat,” while claiming that liberal pieties have blinded us to the way “barbarism has been normalized” through racial diversification in large cities yielding criminality and urban degradation. Land is not alone in linking liberal epistemological tyranny with claims about racial intelligence and criminality; it’s a common shtick among the likes of Helen Andrews, Steve Sailer, and Curtis Yarvin, whose arguments overlap.
Other figures on the far right prefer to take their racism in more “spiritual” and cultural forms. Julius Evola and Patrick Buchanan are representative of this tendency, whose proponents stress the alleged incompatibility of nonwhite cultures with that of the West. Inevitably, though, this isn’t just a descriptive exercise: Thinkers of this type nearly always conclude that people from non-Western cultures are inferior to their Western betters in some way or another. Consequently, in their view, any effort to integrate nonwhites in Western society can only lead to decline and fall. (Tolerating or—God forbid—publicly celebrating non-Western culture is right out.) For instance, in a discussion of jazz and black musical innovations in his book Ride the Tiger, Evola laments that “modern man, especially North American man, has regressed to primitivism in choosing, assimilating, and developing a music of such primitive qualities as Negro music, which was even originally associated with dark forms of ecstasy.”
More recently, far-right activists have expressed alarm at high levels of immigration from non-European states, theorizing that a “Great Replacement” is underway in which white populations are being pushed aside and even “exterminated” to make way for people from distant lands. The just-so story told in these quarters is that a larger nonwhite population will increase support for left and liberal causes and grow welfare rolls because the populations being “imported” are unaccustomed to self-reliance and personal discipline.
While this view percolated in many pots among paleoconservative right-wingers in the late 1980s and 1990s, its most prominent expression was arguably Buchanan’s 2002 book, The Death of the West, in which Mexican immigration was characterized as a “Reconquista” and an “invasion.” Buchanan fretted that:
as the ethnic character of America changes, politics change. A rising tide of immigration naturally shifts politics and power to the Left, by increasing the demands on government. The rapidly expanding share of the U.S. electorate that is of African and Hispanic ancestry has already caused the GOP to go silent on affirmative action and mute its calls for cuts in social spending.
The far right typically expresses its racial animus with a combination of powdery condescension and terrified alarm. The contradictions between these stances reflect a deeper incoherence: Following where the rhetoric leads, we end up arriving at the home of “Schrödinger’s immigrant,” a lazy deadbeat and chronic welfare abuser who somehow also manages to steal all the jobs of honest whites. In the hostile world of the far-right imaginary, racial minorities do it all.
Feminists
The far right has a complex relationship with women—or, as some of them prefer to say, “females,” or in Bronze Age Pervert’s ugly terminology, “roasties.” (I’ll leave it to readers to infer what he means.)
On the one hand, Christian nationalists lament the decline of traditional marriages, gender roles, and male headship, which they take to be a major vector of the degradation of our society. Womanhood itself is simultaneously a biological reality and a lost ideal that must be recovered. Women who accept these men’s recovered ideal for them receive protection and cherishment in exchange for obedience and subservience. For some reason, not all Western women are eager to adopt the male headship–promoters’ pattern of life, and the ladies’ larger refusal over the past century is responsible for a variety of malign outcomes in culture—everything from the spread of pornography to the growth of the welfare state.
In Right Wing Revolution, the late Charlie Kirk repeated the shopworn idea that it’s “not hard to grasp why single motherhood naturally leads to voting for more statism and less freedom. Single mothers are more dependent on a large government to support them.” A subtly sexualizing moralist, Kirk recommended women stay thin and in good shape, refrain from getting tattoos, marry early, and display nurturing and deferential attitudes toward their husbands and children.
This represents only one rightward path for the aspiring sexist. For the big brains that have just brought us testosterone testing in the military, much is possible. Influencers in the “Manosphere” refute and even mock these sorts of trad-coded norms, instead praising and recommending a regimen of easy sex (pronouncements often made in a haze of smoke from staggeringly Freudian cigars). The Manosphere insists on the legitimacy of a double standard: Men should play the field, but women should not. Sexual conquest is a game of kings, but a queen could never want the same: In the worldview of the Manosphere (as in the “worldview” of the locker room), promiscuous women are merely sluts.
What unites the angelic woman of the trad imagination and the harlot of the Manosphere podcasters is that sense of resentment, which in this case flows from the perceived loss of patriarchal authority and culture, and an urgent felt need to recover lost manhood.
Feminism, for the far right, represents an artificial and unnatural insistence on women’s equality. It can lead only to social decay. In Suicide of a Superpower, published in 2011, Buchanan argues equality between the sexes is a product of “feminist ideology, not human nature,” citing natural physical differences and gender imparity in the history of achievements in different fields as evidence for the reasonability of his chauvinism.
For Buchanan and others on the paleo right, the politics follows naturally. In their eyes, feminists—and, really, two generations of high-achieving women—have perversely inverted the natural order.
The far right demonizes feminism and feminists for demoting men in the most intimate of spheres: the home—where even a poor man could be a lord over his family. But this demotion has ripple effects far beyond family relations. Indeed, far-right intellects present the spread of feminism and the arrival of women in the workforce, the traditional site of male prestige, as leading to an enervating and toxic feminization of society. Queer and especially trans people represent a related and particularly embodied challenge to the claims of patriarchy. For many on the far right, all these movements are fundamentally related, with the feminist challenge to traditional gender roles opening the door to further libertine experimentation. Mary Harrington makes the connection clear in her defense of “reactionary feminism,” blaming progressive feminists for opening the door to endless playing with gender identity leading to trans activism and worse.
From the tech right, Peter Thiel made many of these connections in “The Education of a Libertarian,” his 2009 article in which he holds that women’s enfranchisement contributed to the growth of the welfare state and the decline of capitalism. A more recent viral essay—“What Is the Longhouse?” by LoM3Z, pseudonym of far-right influencer Jonathan Keeperman—extended these themes. Keeperman described how the last two generations had seen an increase in “social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior.” The ascension of women into positions of power and managerial control has helped spread censorious “woke” cultural norms to prohibit offense and psychological harm. At the same time, they censure “the drive to assert oneself on the world, to strike out for conquest and expansion. Male competition and the hierarchies that drive it are unwelcome.” Reactionary pundit Helen Andrews took this argument all the way to the New York Times. When the online right (borrowing from incel slang) complains about “foids” or decries “HR lady politics,” this is what they have in mind.
The militancy of this anti-feminism might prompt the question of how the far right manages to attract influencers and advocates who are themselves women. Historically, it’s been a tough sell—but not an impossible one. Consider the work Phyllis Schlafly did to help kill the political momentum for the Equal Rights Amendment.
As the radical but idiosyncratic feminist theorist Andrea Dworkin pointed out in her polemic Right Wing Women, one of the appeals the “ultra right” made to women was an offer of security and permanence in a topsy-turvy world. The ultra right “promises to put enforceable restraints on male aggression, thus simplifying survival for women.” These rhetorical motifs are especially common today, especially in right-wing discourse directed against immigrants and other “deviants,” who are depicted in right-wing media as alien sexual predators. It’s also true that, with its assertion of a many-layered hierarchy, the far right offers willing women their own sense of superiority. The only catch, of course, is that they can never be superior to the men. Even so, the second rung of the social pyramid still affords a considerable distance between Laura Ingraham and the people doing her gardening.
In the twenty-first century, far-right women have become more visible, with some even leading their respective parties and movements, like Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s National Rally. Far-right female influencers like Laura Loomer and Candace Owens, too, have become prominent.
The far right benefits from this female presence in several ways. Far-right women have been adept at tactically mobilizing pseudo-feminist rhetoric to justify Islamophobia, police crackdowns on immigrants, and other coercive uses of state power in the name of protecting women from sexual violence. (This phenomenon echoes Dworkin’s point about how, paradoxically, anti-feminist masculinity can be made appealing to women precisely by promising to protect them from worse still.) Second, and perhaps more importantly, as white nationalist Jared Taylor puts it, women can humanize and soften the far right’s image. For a movement widely associated with tattooed gun nuts and perma-online incels, an attractive feminine front is extraordinarily useful.
But misogyny is misogyny, and despite their value to the far right, some prominent women influencers have called out the inevitable sexism in their movement.
Intellectuals
Finally, there are the academics and intellectuals. From JD Vance’s proclamation that “the professors are the enemy”—a Nixon quote—to Ron DeSantis’s and Christopher Rufo’s efforts to remake higher education, to the relentless sneering of Fox News or right-wing talk radio, anti-intellectualism is ubiquitous on the far right. This animosity has deep ideological roots.
From the outset of the modern era, many conservatives have followed Edmund Burke in lamenting that “all the pleasing illusions” that held social hierarchies in place have been steadily worn down by Enlightenment reason, which tended to push ordinary people in radical directions. Conservative thinkers and politicians undertook a rearguard action to protect what they could of the status quo. This is why conservatives from Burke to Russell Kirk have valorized “prejudice,” one such “pleasing illusion” that encourages fidelity to existing social arrangements. In his opus The Meaning of Conservatism, first published in 1980, the late Roger Scruton even commended “unthinking people” as an ideal to strive toward. He valued them because they posed no threat to the social order into which they were born. From this vantage point, society’s problems began when an intelligentsia encouraged happy subjects to have the courage to use their own reason, which had the frustrating tendency of turning them into demanding citizens.
The far right’s contribution to this discourse is to radicalize it, something they do by relying on concepts borrowed from Marx, Gramsci, and other thinkers they normally oppose. In Leviathan and Its Enemies, the white nationalist Samuel Francis, currently undergoing something of a renaissance on the far right, described how liberal elites have forged a near-totalitarian managerial regime based on an egalitarian ideology propagated by a deferential media and academy. Francis contended that the “intellectual and verbalist professions constitute the intelligentsia” of this regime, which for him included virtually every white-collar profession. According to Francis, this intelligentsia primarily functions to render the liberal’s class rule as legitimate while also undercutting the views of “middle American radicals,” often meaning white nationalists.
Curtis Yarvin has reworked this idea in his concept of the “cathedral”—a consortium of the professional class who have for generations worked steadily to entrench the left’s domination of the culture. In its totalizing rule, Yarvin says, the cathedral maintains a controlled “conservative” opposition of Davids French and Brooks while banishing real, dissident right-wingers to the societal fringes. Yarvin’s famous “redpill” metaphor, borrowed from The Matrix, was about the process of waking up to reject the cathedral’s programming. This was presumably made possible by the epiphany that the biggest problem in America was how rich and powerful founders and CEOs weren’t quite as rich and powerful as they should be.
The far right holds that it would be preferable for most people to leave thinking to their betters. But the far right has also theorized that the way to destroy what they see as the left’s intellectual and cultural hegemony is by building an intellectual vanguard of its own.
In his 2022 essay “You Can Only Lose the Culture War,” Yarvin divided society into the nerdy categories of “high elves,” “dark elves,” and “hobbits.” The high elves constitute society’s elite, beholden to liberal ideas and snobbish about it. Hobbits are noncombatants in the culture war: average Joes who “want to grill and raise kids.”
Finally, there are the dark elves. The members of Yarvin’s favored class are “still totally elves and into, like, ‘art films’ and stuff,” but they’re a dissident “Fifth column.” He counsels the dark elves of the right to ally with the hobbits to lead them against the “soyboy” high elves. Having smote their foes, the dark elves will deliver the ideal government, limited but very authoritarian, the hobbits need, and the hobbits themselves can quickly return to enjoying their six-packs and halftime shows. (The high elves in this scenario have, to put it in the language of Tolkien’s source material, earned their reward.)
As Yarvin’s fantasy—really, just a reboot of Francis’s “Message from MARs” by way of Warhammer—shows, the odd thing about the far right’s hatred of intellectuals is that so many in the movement have intellectual pretensions of their own. But you can only get so far when your main purpose in using ideas is to fortify your own fragile sense of superiority.
THIS TOUR OF THE FAR RIGHT’S CHIEF ENEMIES is hardly exhaustive. (I haven’t even addressed their deep animosity toward socialists and Marxists, and barely scratched their loathing for LGBTQ+ people.) But it is representative. In the end, the far right believes that most humans are unworthy and incapable of self-rule, and so ought to be ruled by the worthy. When they cast their eyes across contemporary society, the far right sees decadence and disorder everywhere fueled by a progressive ideology that tells the bugmen they needn’t accept their low status in the world. Many on the far right feel personally victimized by this: victimized by feminists, intellectuals, anti-racists, racial minorities, and all the rest. These classes of people are why Joe the Plumber lost his entitlements—to an obedient wife, to untaxed crypto earnings, and to a deferential class of serfs.
Look what they took from us, they tell each other, and seethe.
Asmongold, the tremendously popular far-right gaming streamer who said this, once claimed to tell the time by a dead rat in his room that got smellier when the sunlight hit it directly. Given how the odor of the rotting animal purportedly helped him maintain his streaming schedule, perhaps Asmongold simply does not count it—again, a dead rat in his bedroom that he refused to clean up—as a “manifest problem.”
 | A guest post by
|