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Yarvin has mused that the liberal regime will begin to fall
when the “cool kids” start to abandon its values and worldview.

There are signs that this may be happening,
though not all the so-called cool kids involved in this vibe shift would want to be colored as the vanguard in a world historical rebellion against the global order.

“I’m not, like, into politics,” the writer Honor Levy,
a Catholic convert and Bennington grad,
told me when I called her.

“I just want to have a family someday.”

Levy, who was a leftist recently enough that she cried when it became clear that Bernie Sanders wouldn’t be the Democratic presidential nominee,

is friendly with Yarvin and has had him on the podcast she cohosts, "Wet Brain"

—“Yeah, the Cathedral and blah blah,” she said when we got to talking about political media.

But she said she’d never even heard of J.D. Vance or Blake Masters.

Levy is an It girl in a downtown Manhattan scene
—The New Yorker has published her fiction; she is named in a New York Times story that tries to describe that scene
—where right-wing politics have become an aesthetic pose that mingles strangely with an earnest search for moral grounding.

“Until like a year and a half ago I didn’t believe good and evil existed,” she told me,

later adding: “But I’m not in a state of grace, I shouldn’t be talking.”

I asked if she would take money from Thiel and she cheerily said,
“Of course!”

She also described her cohort as a bunch of “libertines,”
and on her podcast you can get a window into a world of people who enjoy a
mind-bendingly ironic thrill by tut-tutting each other for missing church or having premarital sex.

“Most of the girls downtown are normal, but they’ll wear a Trump hat as an accessory,” she said.

The ones deep into the online scene, she said, “want to be like Leni Riefenstahl – Edie Sedgwick.”