A List Of Better Ways To Experience The Frisson Of Transgression Than Becoming A Fascist

You could almost feel for Anna, the tedious nitwit described in the opening paragraphs of "The Young Women Leaving the New Right," a New York magazine feature by the writer Sam Adler-Bell. Tormented by, in Adler-Bell's formulation, the "overweening, haughty moralism of Peak Woke" (I suppose she and Adler-Bell may share the delusion that this ever was a thing), Anna dropped her flimsy, contrarian liberalism in the mid-2010s to become "a celebrated pundit of the New Right"—only to later discover, to her evident dismay and horror, that the New Right is a right-wing ideological movement of people with right-wing beliefs dedicated to furthering right-wing causes. That's rough, buddy!

Anna, you see, is "somebody, dispositionally, who likes to have a good time" (her words), a trait she shares with literally every human who has ever existed or will ever exist, but which she, a solipsistic bigot, believes makes her too raw for the kinds of social spaces where people think a joke must do more than put a hard R on the N-word to be funny. The "humorlessness" of the left—which is to say, certain types of people correctly regarding her as a boring moron—turned her off. She was, in her words, "in love with the frisson of transgression."

For this reason Anna decided to become a fascist. Later she discovered that the right-wingers organizing themselves since long before she was born, around the idea that social progress should be reversed and rights withdrawn from certain types of people, regard her as one of the types of people from whom rights should be withdrawn. Now she wants a new scene.