Luke Ford

Denotation and connotation were the whole story in that six-Democrats video. The denotative meaning was banal. “Active-duty service members cannot follow illegal orders” is straight out of military law. No one disputes it. It is the kind of line that would be unobjectionable if delivered in a Pentagon training module or a West Point lecture.

Yet millions of people heard something else. Mark Halperin’s admission captures the point. He looked at the video and saw what the words literally said. Many others looked at the same words and felt something closer to an accusation about 2025, a preemptive delegitimization of a possible Trump presidency, or even an effort to rally the military against a future commander-in-chief. That reaction was connotative. And that is what this whole fight is really about.

Here is the lay of the land.

I.
The denotative meaning of the video was routine.
No one objects to the rule that illegal orders must be refused. It is covered in Little v. Barreme and in the Uniform Code of Military Justice. It is taught in basic training. It is not partisan.

But communication never lands on denotation alone, especially in a polarized environment. If a judge says “no one is above the law,” it can read as a neutral civic platitude or as a shot at a specific politician. If a pastor says “watch your leaders closely,” it can sound like wisdom or like a warning aimed at a named villain. Context guides connotation.

II.
The connotative meaning hit like a live wire.
Many conservatives heard the video as a form of anticipatory resistance. The problem was not the literal sentence. The problem was the framing: six Democratic veterans staring into the camera, naming Trump, warning about illegal orders, warning about January 6. In the connotative register, the message sounded like: “We expect Trump to be a lawbreaker and we are telling soldiers to prepare to resist him.”

You can disagree with this inference, but you cannot deny that this is what millions of people heard. Connotation beats denotation when trust is low.

Halperin admits he underestimated the sincerity of that reaction. He assumed people were acting. They weren’t. They felt provoked at a pre-rational level. They felt that the military chain of command was being politicized again, and that the warning was not legal but theatrical. This is the same emotional response that flares when either side suggests the other is illegitimate or dangerous before a single policy has been enacted.

III.
The reverse connotative reaction was just as strong.
Millions of Democrats saw Trump’s counterattack and felt a different kind of alarm. For them, the connotative meaning of his response drowned out his words. They heard “traitors” and “death penalty” and felt the stakes jump from a communications skirmish into something darker: a president implicitly threatening members of Congress for speech that is plainly protected by the First Amendment.

They were not arguing about the legal definition of sedition. They were reacting to the emotional freight of Trump’s language and the history he drags behind him. On that side, the video was defensive and prudent, not provocative. The connotation was: “We know what happened last time. We are not naive.”

IV.
Mutual connotations are now stronger than shared denotations.
This is the real divide Halperin is pointing toward. Two groups of Americans can look at the same neutral sentence and perceive mutually exclusive realities because every word is now loaded with historical cues, partisan memories, and assumptions about the speaker’s motives.

When trust collapses, even neutral language becomes symbolic.
When symbolism dominates, plain meaning loses its authority.

That is why the argument instantly escaped the literal text. Conservatives demanded to know which illegal orders Trump had issued. Democrats pointed to Trump’s threats to lock up his opponents. Conservatives insisted the video undermined civilian control of the military. Democrats insisted Trump’s post was itself a threat to democratic norms.

The debate never touched the sentence that started it.

V.
The deeper problem: political language is no longer literal.
Every major political message now carries three layers.

The denotative meaning.

The connotative meaning the speaker intends.

The connotative meaning the audience projects.

All three layers are widening. When the parties no longer share a common frame, even a safe sentence becomes radioactive. “Illegal orders” becomes code. “Rule of law” becomes code. “Chain of command” becomes code. And code is susceptible to fear, fantasy, and projection.

VI.
The lesson is not that one side is overreacting.
It is that each side is reacting to the connotations supplied by their own experience. To conservatives suspicious of a repeat of 2020, the video sounded like soft-coup rhetoric. To liberals who watched Trump threaten enemies for years, his post sounded like a promise of vengeance. Neither reaction is fully detached from reality. Neither is purely strategic. Both are emotional interpretations of an environment where the stakes feel existential.

Halperin is right to say the denotative meaning should have settled the argument. But American politics now runs on connotation, not denotation. The shared dictionary has cracked. Tone, history, and identity supply most of the meaning.

The irony is that both sides insist the other is being Orwellian when both are reacting to symbols, not sentences.

What Halperin is really urging is a return to literal reading before emotional reading. He is not asking either side to abandon its concerns. He is asking them to separate the words themselves from the aura they carry.

That is a healthy instinct. But it is not easy in a country where the aura has become the argument.

LF: “I notice that the MSM tends to take people’s words too literally, too denotatively…and the exceptions reveal the MSM bias.”

You’re putting your finger on something real. The mainstream press prides itself on being the sober interpreter of literal meaning, yet the pattern over time shows that it toggles between denotation and connotation depending on who is speaking and what story it wants to tell.

The inconsistency is what exposes the bias.

Here’s the clean way to think about it.

I.
When the speaker is someone the press trusts or sympathizes with, the MSM defaults to denotation.
It grants the most literal, charitable reading possible.
It treats language like a legal contract.
It focuses on what was said, not what it implied.

So Republican outrage over “refuse illegal orders” gets treated as unserious because the literal meaning is unobjectionable.
“Words mean what they say” becomes the standard.

You see the same pattern in coverage of progressive protests. When activists chant dramatic slogans, the MSM urges the audience to separate rhetoric from intent.

Examples:
“Defund the police doesn’t really mean defund.”
“From the river to the sea is complicated and contextual.”
“If you read the whole transcript, the line isn’t as bad as it sounds.”

Literalism becomes the shield.
Connotation gets flattened.
Intent is assumed to be noble.

II.
But when the speaker is someone the press distrusts or considers dangerous, the MSM suddenly pivots to connotation.
Everything becomes subtext.
Everything becomes coded language.
Everything becomes a threat.

Trump is the clearest example.
He gets read connotatively every time.
A stray exaggeration becomes a plan.
A half-joke becomes a doctrine.
A sloppy metaphor becomes a blueprint for authoritarianism.

Even when the denotative meaning is trivial, the connotative meaning gets inflated into the headline.

Republicans in general face this treatment.
“Fight like hell” becomes incitement.
“Take our country back” becomes white identity politics.
“Drain the swamp” becomes fascistic purging.

Words get interpreted the way a prosecutor interprets clues.
Intent is assumed to be corrupt.

III.
The asymmetry rests on a simple but unspoken premise:
Some speakers can be trusted to mean only what they literally say, and others cannot.
Once the press makes that judgment, it decides which register to use.

Trusted speaker: read them literally.
Untrusted speaker: read them connotatively.

That is why the pattern feels so lopsided.
The MSM believes it is being consistent on principle, but it is actually being consistent on loyalty.

IV.
What this does to the audience is corrosive.
People feel gaslit when only one side’s connotations are taken seriously and only one side’s denotations are taken seriously.
They start watching not the facts but the interpretive frame.
They begin to assume that meaning is now adjudicated by the tribe, not the text.

And they aren’t wrong.

The six-Democrats video was a perfect example.
The literal meaning was defensible.
The connotative meaning was provocative.
The MSM chose the literal reading because the speakers were aligned with its worldview.
But if six Republicans had made the same video about Biden, the connotative reading would have dominated the news cycle.

V.
The press insists it is “just following the words.”
But everyone else can see that it is following the speaker.

That is why your observation tracks with the lived experience of millions.
It isn’t the literal vs connotative distinction that bothers people.
It’s that the rules change depending on who talks.

Literalism for friends.
Connotation for enemies.
And every exception gives the game away.

Mark Halperin emailed his subscribers Nov. 27, 2025: Last week, I made a mistake.

A small one, perhaps, but not small in spirit. And certainly not in keeping with the season, nor with the ethos I try—on my better days—to bring to the Wide World of News, to 2WAY, to “Next Up,” and to the daily civic practice of paying attention with goodwill.

It came the day after the president, the White House, congressional Republicans, and much of conservative media launched a full-throated denunciation of the video by Mark Kelly, Elissa Slotkin, and four of their House colleagues. I took one look and assumed it was the usual Washington pageant: crocodile tears and choreographed outrage, a familiar kind of Student Body Right of modern politics, designed to rouse the base, raise the money, and tilt the battlefield to terrain where MAGA feels most at home.

My intellectual premise then is the same one I hold now on one key point: that to claim members of Congress who say “active duty service members cannot follow illegal orders” are actually urging them to defy legal orders is an Orwellian inversion—an up-is-down, black-is-white contrivance that deserves little more than a shake of the head and a tip of the cap for sheer organizational audacity.

But here is where I erred: I assumed bad motives. I assumed people were pretending to be outraged.

They weren’t. Many — most — were genuinely upset by the words spoken in that video. And that genuine upset deserves more than my glib dismissal.

If we are to reclaim something softer and more generous in the American conversation—if we are to reverse the coarseness that has hardened our national town square for far too long—then that work must include Mark Kelly & Co. pausing long enough to hear why so many of their fellow citizens felt alarmed, even affronted. Instead, the six members of Congress and their backers simply display defiance, fueled by endless cable TV hits and fundraising appeals.

I’ve spent the past few days doing the opposite. Not waving away the concern, not judging it, but sitting with it. Grappling with the ways two sets of sincere Americans can look at the same words and see not merely different interpretations but different realities.

And I would ask those who are outraged by the video to make the reciprocal effort—to understand why millions of their fellow citizens are alarmed by the reaction to that video.

Those reasons include:

a. the real possibility that illegal orders could come from a president whose past conduct makes it imprudent to assume otherwise

b. the apparent lack of faith in our service members—the belief that a simple video could persuade them to abandon their duties or confuse right and wrong

c. the president’s own social-media posts about killing members of Congress

d. the lack of respect for the First Amendment

e. the threat of investigations into members of Congress for speaking their minds, no matter what their intentions

If we could all take a breath, step back, and attempt—not perfectly, but honestly—to understand the nature and intensity of the upset on both sides, we might give our children and grandchildren a Thanksgiving gift more precious than any feast: a glimpse of a kinder civic future. Not to take the politics out of politics, but to endeavor to appreciate another point of view, deeply held.

Two writers today try to do just that.

Karl Rove, in a column lamenting our politics of performance over purpose, wrote:

The person most responsible, however, for accelerating the drive by political figures to focus on social media is the president. Given Donald Trump’s online domination, even generally sensible Democrats and Republicans have stopped being serious and started seeking more retweets and followers. Take the six Congressional Democrats, all veterans of the military or the CIA, who released a video last week encouraging active-duty service personnel to “refuse illegal orders” from Mr. Trump.

One problem: None of the six could name a single illegal order issued by Mr. Trump in the video. So embarrassing. But implying there had been “illegal orders” was enough to give the Video Six their moment to expand their social-media followings.

The need for and wisdom of their video is highly debatable. But what is certain is that Mr. Trump’s response was outrageous. He attacked the video on Truth Social: “This is really bad, and Dangerous to our Country. Their words cannot be allowed to stand. SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!! LOCK THEM UP???”

Oh my. The penalty for treason can be death and for sedition up to 20 years in prison… A commander in chief calling for the execution or imprisonment of members of Congress over a video is mind-blowing… By doing so, the president also missed a valuable opportunity to talk about things that affect real families… He’s smart enough to know that but, apparently, couldn’t resist the temptation.

And Kevin Dowd, filling in for his sister Maureen with his trademark astringent wit:

Six congressional Democrats released a shameful video without giving any context encouraging service members to disobey illegal orders, thereby threatening the foundation of our military: the chain of command. But instead of shaming them, Trump posted on Truth Social that it was “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” causing the oily Senator Chris Murphy to warn that the life of every Democratic congressperson was in jeopardy.

Let’s all make a vow—quiet, unshowy, but real—to look at every side of an argument, especially the ones that provoke us most. To listen even when we want to roll our eyes and clench our fists. To make room, even an inch more, for views we resist.

Bari Weiss put it plainly in a recent panel: we need a public square where all voices can be heard, not because all are right but because democracy falters when any are silenced.

If you want a clear statement of my own priorities on this point—on the imperative of bringing and keeping all voices under one roof—listen to Bari’s grand and good aspirations for CBS News:

A whole ecosystem of parallel institutions has sprung up on the American right. Not the old-line movement infrastructure like Heritage or National Review, but new media companies, new schools, new financial platforms, and new health communities that try to bypass what conservatives call “the regime.” The names range from The Daily Wire to PragerU, Rumble, Locals, Hillsdale College, Liberty University, the Classical Christian school movement, Gab Pay, PublicSq, Jeremy’s Razors, and the growing cottage industry of “functional medicine” and “anti-institutional” health influencers like Peter McCullough, Robert Malone, and Joseph Mercola. The question isn’t whether these institutions exist. It’s whether they can survive once the emotional spark fades.

The first wave came in media. The Daily Wire, Tim Pool’s empire, Glenn Beck’s BlazeTV, Dan Bongino’s network, Project Veritas under James O’Keefe, and Rumble all positioned themselves as alternatives to mainstream outlets. Their pitch was simple. The big platforms unperson you. We won’t. Rumble grabbed Megyn Kelly, Russell Brand, and Glenn Greenwald. Locals gave creators like Dave Rubin and Michael Malice a home built around subscription communities. Tucker Carlson left Fox and instantly became the face of this world. The energy is real. It’s also unstable because the business model depends on perpetual conflict. Audiences stay only if the system stays hostile. If hostility decreases, so does the revenue.

Then came the schools. Hillsdale College became the flagship. Classical Christian schools spread across the country. PragerU content entered home-school circles. Ron DeSantis flirted with creating a new conservative university in Florida and turned New College into a culture-war petri dish with Christopher Rufo at the helm. The classical-education revival around institutions like the Sattler College, Thomas Aquinas College, and the Great Books movement gives intellectually inclined conservatives an identity that feels deeper than public school bureaucracy. Yet the fragility is built in. These schools depend on charismatic leadership, donor enthusiasm, and a cultural mood that distrusts mainstream education. Long-term institutional survival demands governance, not vibes. Governance has never been the right’s strong suit.

Finance is next. Parallel payment processors like Gab Pay, anti-woke marketplaces like PublicSq, conservative asset managers like Vivek Ramaswamy’s Strive, and donor-backed ventures like the Babylon Bee’s funding platforms try to create “safe” economic spaces. But finance is brutal. These ventures can thrive only if they reach scale. Without scale, they remain symbolic. The right’s anti-ESG finance rhetoric gave some of these efforts a boost, but they face the same problem that tanked Parler and hobbled Truth Social: you can’t build a parallel financial system without massive capital and regulatory resilience. Most right-leaning financial startups exist because the founders believe the culture war is eternal. If it cools, the business case evaporates.

Healthcare is the wildest and most precarious frontier. During the pandemic, figures like McCullough and Malone created a medical counterculture built around skepticism of institutional science. On the less extreme end, you see the rise of “parallel wellness” communities inspired by Andrew Huberman, Mark Hyman, and others who aren’t ideologues but became heroes to conservatives who feel manipulated by Big Pharma and regulatory agencies. The problem is simple. Medicine punishes error. You can freelance media. You cannot freelance healthcare. Sustainability requires accuracy and professional infrastructure, not just anger at Fauci. Without that, the movement risks building a shadow ecosystem that falters the moment it tries to handle real complexity.

So is the parallel-institution build-out sustainable. Only pieces of it.

Media is sustainable as long as there is conflict. Platforms like Rumble and The Daily Wire can endure because their audience is large and culturally invested. But even there, loyalty is to personalities, not institutions. Tucker lasts. The company hosting him may not.

Education is partly sustainable. Hillsdale will last because it has real governance. Smaller start-ups will fade unless they mature into stable, accredited institutions with boring administrators. Most will not.

Finance is shaky. The right-wing financial ecosystem survives only if it reaches mainstream scale or if mainstream institutions keep escalating deplatforming. If the pressure drops, the motivation to use parallel systems drops with it.

Healthcare is the least sustainable. A counter-establishment advisory culture can maintain an online following, but it cannot replace hospitals, research labs, or regulated pharmaceutical pipelines. The right can build commentary ecosystems. It cannot build a parallel Mayo Clinic.

The real issue is that the right builds institutions the same way it builds movements: around crisis, charisma, and emotional urgency. That creates bursts of innovation but not durable structures. The left builds through bureaucracy and professional guilds. The right builds through energy spikes and outsider resentment.

Parallel institutions are sustainable only when they evolve from rebellion to administration. Hillsdale did. The Daily Wire might. Rumble is trying. Most others won’t. They’ll burn hot, then cool, then get replaced by the next round of rebellion.

The right is very good at building alternatives. It is terrible at maintaining them. The future of its parallel institutions depends entirely on whether conservatives can learn a skill they’ve spent sixty years avoiding: the slow, boring work of permanence.

There is always a new “villain” influencer on the right because the movement runs on a cycle of emotional intensity rather than institutional stability. Each generation of right-wing audiences needs a figure who tests boundaries so aggressively that the rest of the movement is forced to police him, banish him, condemn him, or eventually absorb him. The names change but the pattern stays the same: Milo Yiannopoulos, Laura Loomer, Gavin McInnes, Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, Candace Owens, Andrew Tate, and now Nick Fuentes. The churn isn’t an accident. It’s the structure.

The cycle starts with a personality who taps into some raw emotional truth the mainstream right won’t touch. Milo did it with transgression-as-performance. McInnes did it with Proud Boys masculinity. Owens did it with racial provocation and institutional resentment. Tate did it with hyper-masculine swagger and anti-modern fatalism. Fuentes does it with anti-establishment fury, taboo rhetoric, and the promise of “forbidden knowledge.” These figures thrive because they say the part the polite right won’t say, and they wrap it in charisma that feels fearless to their audiences.

In the early phase, these people serve a purpose. They vent the anger that Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk, Matt Walsh, and Fox News can’t express openly. They let thousands of young men feel represented in ways that sanitized conservative media cannot. At this stage the mainstream right pretends not to see them, or gives them light validation. Kirk boosted Owens early. Breitbart elevated Milo. Alex Jones appeared on Tucker. Steve Bannon surfed the Trump wave while the rest of the movement held its nose.

Then comes the panic phase. The figure grows too fast. He becomes a symbol that outsiders use to judge the whole movement. Mainstream conservatives start worrying about donor pressure, advertiser risk, and institutional credibility. At that point the “villain” is cast out. Milo was exiled. McInnes was disowned. Owens left Daily Wire in a cloud of tension. Tate became radioactive. Fuentes got the “do-not-associate” label after the Ye debacle. Even Bannon was sidelined when his influence threatened Trump’s image.

The banishment is never clean because the base doesn’t fully cooperate. A chunk of the audience sees the exile as proof that the villain was telling the truth. They view the punishment as a status ritual that protects the elites. This is why Fuentes’s audience actually grew after the condemnations, and why Tate’s arrest made him a martyr. The movement’s emotional logic favors the rebel over the gatekeeper.

The strange part is the re-entry phase. After being exiled long enough to cool the panic, the villain usually finds a path back. Milo reappears in new forms. McInnes built a media zone outside the mainstream and regained influence. Bannon regained relevance through War Room. Owens still commands a loyal audience. Tate remains a fixture in the masculine self-help space. Even Alex Jones, after a decade of formal banishment, is whispered about again in certain circles. The return works because the base never actually accepted the excommunication. They still crave the rawness that the safe influencers can’t supply.

The deeper reason this cycle never ends is simple. The right is a personality-driven movement with weak institutions. Every ecosystem built around outrage, grievance, and rebellion produces outlaws faster than it produces gatekeepers. And because young audiences enter politics through algorithmic discovery rather than institutions, they meet the villains first. Fuentes, Tate, McInnes, and Jones reach men who have never heard of National Review. They become the gateway.

The mainstream right ends up playing a losing game. They must condemn the villains to maintain legitimacy, but every condemnation elevates the villain’s status inside the very demographic the movement depends on for energy. It is an emotional arms race where someone always outflanks the existing lineup. If Shapiro feels too polished, the audience goes to Carlson. If Carlson feels too polished, they go to Bannon. If Bannon feels too polished, they go to Fuentes. If Fuentes feels too polished, they will find the next man willing to cross even more lines.

There is always a new villain because the right’s emotional economy demands one. Outsiders supply identity. Gatekeepers supply boundaries. The base tests the boundaries by falling in love with the outsider. The establishment exiles him. The base remembers. Then the cycle resets.

It’s not dysfunction. It’s a feature of a movement organized around charisma instead of structure, outrage instead of policy, and status contests instead of institutions. In that world, the villain is not a glitch. He’s the fuel.

The post-liberal temptation keeps pulling in young intellectuals because it promises depth without demanding the actual burdens that come with throwing out liberalism. It offers a sense of rebellion, moral clarity, and civilizational purpose. The people who flirt with it range from Sohrab Ahmari and Patrick Deneen to the Claremont crowd around Ryan Williams to online writers like Gladden Pappin, Bronze Age Pervert, and the more serious Orthodox and Catholic Substackers. They dip into the critique but avoid the hard questions about what comes next.

Part of the appeal is aesthetic. Post-liberalism looks weighty. It has the tone of a continental philosophy seminar mixed with the imagery of medieval Christendom or classical republican virtue. Ahmari writes with cultural anxiety that feels lofty. Deneen frames liberalism as a centuries-long civilizational exhaustion. Adrian Vermeule offers a legal theory that reads like a manifesto. Even someone like BAP dresses the argument in mythic masculinity. Young thinkers feel like they’re connecting to something older and deeper than the procedural liberalism of John Rawls or the policy wonkery of David French. The vibe is “we’re the ones who see the big picture.”

The second part is emotional. Liberalism feels thin to a lot of younger men and women who grew up in an atomized world: weak community, weak churches, weak families, unstable jobs, and no rituals. Post-liberalism promises thick identity. You see it in the trad-Catholic revival around Bishop Barron, the Orthodox wave visible in Jonathan Pageau’s audience, or the Protestant postmillennial faction around Doug Wilson. It gives people the sense that liberal neutrality is a lie and that a more ordered world is possible. It provides meaning in a culture where meaning feels like a private hobby.

The third part is political exhaustion. Liberal proceduralism and technocracy feel bloodless. Watching Mitt Romney or Pete Buttigieg speak feels like watching HR explain risk mitigation. Post-liberal writers offer a bracing critique: multicultural managerial liberalism has no soul. That critique resonates. People like Deneen, Ahmari, and Pappin identify real failures: collapsing social trust, elite consolidation, rising inequality, and the hollowing of civic life. Younger thinkers latch onto this because it gives them a language for their own dislocation.

So why don’t they commit. Why is post-liberalism a temptation rather than a destination.

Because commitment requires giving up things they aren’t ready to lose. Post-liberalism demands hierarchy, discipline, boundaries, and authority. Not as metaphors but as lived reality. If you take Vermeule’s “common-good constitutionalism” seriously, you have to accept a far more directive state, with fewer exit options. If you take Deneen’s “aristopopulism” seriously, you must accept that elites must be reshaped, constrained, or replaced. If you take Doug Wilson’s postmillennialism seriously, you’re signing up for a social project that will shape not just politics but personal life. These things carry real costs.

Most young intellectuals don’t actually want hierarchy in their own lives. They want community without obligation. Ritual without authority. Belonging without constraint. They want the emotional thickness without the institutional thickness. They want the energy of medieval imagery with the freedom of modern autonomy. They want to critique liberalism’s emptiness while still enjoying its personal liberties. Post-liberalism is thrilling as a stance and heavy as a system.

There’s also the problem that post-liberal intellectuals have not produced a plausible blueprint. Ahmari says we need a pro-worker, pro-family state but doesn’t describe the enforcement mechanism. Vermeule’s theory raises more questions than it answers. Deneen calls for renewed civic virtue but doesn’t map the transition from liberal pluralism to his preferred order. BAP offers mythic poetry rather than policy. The thinkers who sound the most confident—Wilson’s camp, for example—have communities but not scalable models. The young intellectuals sense the gap. They want the diagnosis but not the cure.

Finally, commitment requires responsibility. Building institutions. Submitting to authority. Raising families. Forming actual communities. Accepting tradeoffs. The temptation of post-liberalism is that you can talk like a counterrevolutionary without having to lead a counterrevolution. You can critique the hollowness of the present without risking anything to build the future.

Post-liberalism keeps rising in influence because its critique is correct in many places: liberalism is tired, elites are brittle, and modern life is spiritually thin. But the movement remains a temptation because living outside liberalism requires enormous discipline. Young intellectuals flirt with the idea because it makes them feel part of a deeper tradition. They don’t commit because the real costs—authority, hierarchy, sacrifice—are things they’ve never been trained to accept.

It’s easier to admire the cathedral from a distance than to move into it.

The new right’s obsession with authenticity didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s the natural result of a culture where institutions collapsed, expertise lost prestige, and every public figure feels like they’re reading from a script. In that world, “he says what he really thinks” becomes the highest political virtue. It outweighs policy knowledge, governing skill, or even consistency. You see it across the movement in figures as different as Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, J. D. Vance, Russell Brand, and even someone like Joe Rogan who isn’t a partisan actor at all. The style matters more than the substance.

Trump is the clearest case. He broke every norm that policy-driven conservatives like Paul Ryan or Ben Sasse valued. He didn’t know details, didn’t read briefs, didn’t care about precision. Yet he convinced millions that he was honest because he lacked the polish that defined the political class. His rough edges became proof of sincerity. His unpredictability was interpreted as transparency. When he said outrageous things, people believed the outrage itself was a form of truth.

Tucker Carlson took the same idea in a different direction. His audience trusts him not because he presents airtight arguments but because he appears unfiltered. He sounds like someone thinking out loud, even when he’s clearly shaping a narrative. That conversational authenticity beats the think-tank tone of someone like Mitt Romney or Nikki Haley. The right increasingly treats self-assured improvisation as the mark of a genuine man.

Alex Jones represents the extreme version: someone who seems incapable of self-censorship. His errors and excesses become part of the brand. The audience sees him sweat, rant, panic, and overreact. That emotional exposure looks like honesty. It creates a bond that no policy white paper can match. You don’t have to believe his claims to feel that he believes them.

J. D. Vance is the hybrid figure. He came from Yale Law, wrote a bestselling memoir, and spent time in the establishment world. But what won the populist base wasn’t his literacy. It was his willingness to speak bluntly about class resentment, opioid collapse, and the failures of the American elite. His shift toward a more combative tone wasn’t a random pivot. It aligned him with the authenticity economy of the new right. He stopped sounding like a Republican staffer and started sounding like someone who hated the same people the base hated.

Ben Shapiro shows the contrast. He is more informed than most of these figures. He can debate anyone. But the new right doesn’t value precision the way it once did. Shapiro sounds like someone performing credibility rather than revealing himself. It’s not fair, but it’s real. His polish becomes a liability in a world that prizes rawness. The rise of Candace Owens, who built her brand on emotional intensity rather than argument, revealed this shift inside his own empire.

Joe Rogan sits at the center of this cultural mood, even though he’s not a right-wing figure. The right embraced him precisely because he acts like a normal person thinking through problems in real time. He admits confusion. He changes his mind. He asks dumb questions. Ordinary people read that as honesty. He’s relatable in a way think-tank conservatism can never be. His authenticity makes up for his lack of political knowledge, because the audience sees themselves in him.

What young men especially crave is emotional realness. They grew up with curated influencers, polished corporatism, and social environments where every wrong word can cost you. When they see someone who doesn’t filter himself, they interpret it as courage. That’s why someone like Andrew Tate gains traction even when he contradicts himself daily. His intensity is the appeal. People don’t come to Tate for coherence. They come to watch someone who refuses to submit.

This obsession with authenticity is really an obsession with vulnerability. Not emotional vulnerability in the therapeutic sense, but exposure. When a figure seems unguarded, his followers feel they’ve glimpsed the real man. Policy knowledge, by contrast, feels like armor.

The danger is obvious. When authenticity becomes the main currency, sincerity beats competence, and emotional spectacle beats governing skill. You can be wrong, reckless, incoherent, or destructive, but as long as you seem unfiltered, you’re treated as trustworthy.

The upside is that this hunger for authenticity comes from a real wound. People don’t trust institutions. They don’t trust media. They don’t trust polished politicians. They crave someone who feels human.

The new right didn’t choose authenticity over policy because it hates policy. It chose authenticity because it hates being lied to. In a world full of spin, the unvarnished personality feels more honest than the polished expert. Whether that leads to better politics is a different question entirely.