How to Defeat the Dissident Right

To neutralize the growing appeal of white identity politics, we must confront the loneliness, shame, and rejection that give it fuel.

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About the Author

Julian is a columnist for Reality’s Last Stand and a member of the Braver Angels media team. He’s also the founder of Heal the West, a Substack movement dedicated to combating illiberalism via spiritual formation and rebuilding the American community.

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In The Free Press, conservative giant Rob Dreher makes a compelling case about the dangers posed by the “Radical Right”—a loose collection of shitposters, edgelord podcasters, white supremacists, and antisemites. Though small in number, Dreher warns, they represent a genuine threat to civil society.

His entire column is brilliant, and he argues that those of us not on the Radical Right—also known as the “Dissident Right” (a term I prefer, as it’s what many within the movement use)—should be more vocal in confronting their ideas. As he writes, “If we fail to confront this now, wherever it manifests, we cannot later claim that we didn’t see it coming.”

Dreher’s willingness to devote a full column to this subject is valuable in itself. But if we truly want to defeat the Dissident Right’s ideas, we need to go further. We need to talk to them.

This is, to put it mildly, an unpopular stance. It’s far easier to demonize these angry young men than to try to understand them. Jordan Peterson has suggested that many of them suffer from “psychopathology,” effectively discouraging his audience from engaging with them at all. New York Times columnist David French describes the Dissident Right as driven by “blind rage and a quest for control.”

Even Shadi Hamid, cofounder of Wisdom of Crowds and typically a staunch advocate of free speech, has said he refuses to debate white supremacists. Popular podcaster Eric Weinstein has called for the return of “shunning” antisemites.

But shunning and demonization don’t work. In fact, there’s a strong case to be made that this kind of exclusion helped fuel the rise of the Dissident Right in the first place. When I speak to young men involved in the movement, many of them bring up Critical Race Theory (CRT) as a major concern. Many strands of CRT teach that white men are inherently “oppressors” because of their immutable characteristics. These young men are growing up in educational and social environments where they’re told that whiteness is a kind of original sin—the root of much of America’s evil.

At the same time, they watch as their black, Hispanic, and Asian peers are encouraged to form identity-based communities—while being told that any analogous communities for white people are off-limits.