What happens when you put four of the Trump right’s leading intellectuals together in a room? You see what it looks like when a political movement gets high on its own supply.
The conversation in question is a recently published two-hour video roundtable hosted by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, an organization dedicated to educating and connecting young conservatives. The panelists are tech monarchist Curtis Yarvin, “postliberal” political theorist Patrick Deneen, the culture war activist Chris Rufo, and globetrotting journalist Christopher Caldwell.
Prior to President Donald Trump, Caldwell was the only member of the panel with a claim to real influence. Since, however, each has become a defining figure in the pro-Trump coalition. Yarvin’s ideas helped inspire DOGE. Deneen is a major influence on Vice President JD Vance. Rufo shaped Trump’s war on higher ed. And Caldwell’s ideas influenced its attack on civil rights law.
On a casual watch, their conversation seems like a debate over the American experiment. Yarvin is opposed, repeatedly suggesting that the US take lessons from French autocrats like Louis XIV and Napoleon. The other panelists disagree, arguing that it’s possible to build a better America by making the current system more right wing.
But what’s actually important is how much all four of them agree about what a “more right-wing America" should look like.
“We all have strong opinions — agreements, disagreements — but it all seems like we’re moving in the same direction,” Rufo says near the roundtable’s end. “We can hash out the ideas among ourselves [because] we had the big debate with the left between 2020 and 2024. I think we’ve effectively won that debate.”
That overall direction, it is clear, is giving more and more power over our lives to Donald J. Trump. Over and over again, the speakers praise Trump’s consolidation of power over the executive branch and urge him to go further, ignoring or mocking concerns about legality and democracy. Yarvin’s authoritarian provocations aren’t immediately dismissed or scorned by his co-panelists but serve as a conversational focal point that permits the others to indulge their own radicalism. Their shared ambition is explicitly revolutionary, aiming not merely to transform the government but also to remake the very souls of American citizens.
“I think the aim should be not simply to dismantle, but to replace,” Deneen says. “And not just replace the government, but replace the America that — in some ways — fostered and brought it into being.”
But that’s abstract. To understand not just how radical, but how weird, the pro-Trump right has become, take these three moments from the conversation:
1) Turning Black men into wards of state-sanctioned churches
About 20 minutes into the discussion, Yarvin proposes a distinction between two types of Americans that the other panelists rather like (they return to it repeatedly throughout the two hours).
On the one hand, Yarvin says, you have “modern” Americans who flourish in a society that gives them control over the direction of their own lives. On the other hand, you have “pre-modern” Americans who “cannot take care of themselves in a civilized society.” He picks, as an example of the latter — “a gangbanger in Baltimore” — and proceeds to propose a flagrantly illegal scheme for putting their entire life under control of a local church:
You are going to get your welfare check from your minister. And you are part of that community. You don’t pay taxes — basically, your relationship with the state is intermediated through your church. Your minister can drug test you, he can assign you work, he can put an AirTag on you, he can tell you where to go [and] where not to go.
Yarvin never says the word “Black,” but we all know who “gangbanger in Baltimore” is supposed to refer to. What he’s describing, in short, is the government turning Black men who it labels “gangbangers” into serfs whose lives are fully managed by state-blessed churches. This isn’t a call to reinstitute slavery, but it’s pretty damn close.
And nobody objects to this in principle! Not one person says, “Hey, what you’re talking about is both a gross violation of human rights and quite a bit racist.” In fact, the rest of the panel takes Yarvin’s ideas and runs with them.
The first response, from Caldwell, is that Yarvin’s scheme would be unconstitutional under the First and 14th Amendments. The First Amendment prohibits the federal government from establishing a religion, and the 14th “incorporates” the First, a legal term for applying the protections in the Bill of Rights to state governments. The state of Maryland cannot legally turn the population of Baltimore into church property, because that would effectively establish a religion.
After pointing this out, Caldwell then suggests repealing the 14th Amendment. It’s not exactly clear if he thinks that’s a good idea or suggesting it’s a big problem for Yarvin that his plan would require something as big as repealing an amendment.
Before Caldwell can fully clarify, Deneen interjects with a different proposal: for the Supreme Court to un-incorporate the First Amendment. He wants, quite explicitly, for the Court to allow states to make certain religions official and privileged — describing this as a way that people can live together in a divided country.
“Religion, in the original Constitution, was officially established,” Deneen declares (dubiously). “The First Amendment was written to allow for the establishment of religion in the states.”
The point here is not merely that these ideas are wild and illiberal (imagine, say, an Alabama where the dictates of the Southern Baptist Church enjoy force of law). It is that Yarvin’s bizarre ramblings about Baltimore, which should be dismissed by any sensible person, were instead used as a jumping-off point for various other radical schemes designed to transform the American social compact.
2) Ron DeSantis should have been more of an authoritarian
Around the 40-minute mark, the conversation turns to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — whose tenure, nearly everyone agreed, prefigured the aggressive use of political power Trump is currently deploying. Rufo worked closely with DeSantis, particularly his attempt to impose state controls on higher ed, and spent much of his conversation singing the governor’s praises.
His biggest critique, in fact, was that DeSantis erred strategically by running against Trump.
“He would have been better off saying, 'Hey, I’m very popular, Florida should repeal term limits and I will rule Florida for 25 years,'” Rufo moots.
Not to be outdone, Yarvin proposes that DeSantis should have ramped up his “heresies” against American liberalism “by 10x” or even “100x.” He suggests DeSantis should have established “a branch of the Boy Scouts, where they’re the Florida Scouts, where they wear Florida uniforms.”
Deneen immediately replies that “that’s a good idea” — prompting a bit of nervous laughter given that, as Rufo notes, “It’s been tried before.” I took that as a reference to the Hitler Youth, though Yarvin swiftly clarified that he was thinking of the Young Pioneer groups in the Soviet Union and Communist China.
As with the Baltimore discussion, nobody is willing to directly attack Yarvin on the obvious grounds. In this case, that totalitarian youth indoctrination shouldn’t be a model for policy in 21st-century America. Remarkably, Rufo tries to defend DeSantis by arguing that he actually did something like what Yarvin wanted — specifically by reviving the Florida State Guard, a state militia that had been inactive since 1947.
Caldwell did challenge Yarvin somewhat, arguing that “not every reform benefits from being deptupled.” But note that his objection was not the direction of change — authoritarian — but rather the size and speed of the change.
3) DOGE was an ideological purge — and that’s good?
Nearly an hour and a half into the video, the panelists get into an argument about Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. There was consensus that its true purpose was not efficiency but, rather, conducting an ideological purge. Their debate was about the wisdom of using “efficiency” as window dressing.
Caldwell argues that Musk’s talk of efficiency was a “necessary smoke screen” to hide its true purpose from the public. Had the Trump administration been honest about DOGE’s true purpose, which is firing anyone who disagreed with it, they would have faced significant mass resistance.
“It’s a much less acceptable story to present to the public than, ‘We’re saving money,'” he argues.
Rufo, largely backed by Deneen and Yarvin, takes exception. He claims that Trump and Musk should have openly claimed that they had a mandate to remove liberals from the state, to conduct a “systematic extirpation” of anyone in the federal government who might have qualms about their agenda.
“President Trump won. So he gets to determine who is in his administration,” Rufo says. He goes on to say this efficiency talk was “a mistake that Elon made, because he thought that DOGE was a clever meme…and that he is a libertarian.”
Once again, the shared premise here is more important than the surface disagreement. There is, for the most part, a general sense that an ideological purge is basically a good idea. Much like the Florida youth cadres discussion, the kind of behavior that’s widely seen as a mark of democratic backsliding and authoritarian mismanagement in other countries is seen by the panelists as a masterstroke in the war on liberalism.
There are moments, in the conversation, where it appears as if Caldwell is willing to question this premise. “It’s a corrosive thing to say that you can’t work in the federal government if you believe this-or-that,” he says.
But, challenged by Rufo, who explicitly endorses such a political test for public employment, he reverts back to the public relations argument, saying the problem with Rufo’s position is that “it doesn’t command majority support.”
Caldwell is no moderate. He has repeatedly written favorably about foreign right-wing authoritarians, like Viktor Orbán and Narendra Modi. In his book on civil rights, he writes that white people “fell asleep thinking of themselves as the people who had built this country and woke up to find themselves occupying the bottom rung of an official hierarchy of races.”
Yet, in this conversation, he is clearly the voice of restraint relative to the other three panelists. His willingness to give on the DOGE question reflects the fact that he is, in fact, no moderate — he is a radically aggressive culture warrior, just one who is somewhat less open about his authoritarian means than Yarvin or Rufo (who explicitly describes himself in the conversation as producing “propaganda” professionally).
I would call it a mask-off moment for the right’s intellectual cadres. But I think the mask has been off for quite some time.
