“We are in a late republican period,”
Vance said later,
evoking the common New Right view of America as Rome awaiting its Caesar.

“If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild,
and pretty far out there,
and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

“Indeed,” Murphy said. “Among some of my circle, the phrase ‘extra-constitutional’ has come up quite a bit.”

I’d asked Vance to tell me, on the record, what he’d like liberal Americans who thought that what he was proposing was a fascist takeover of America to understand.

He spoke earnestly. “I think the cultural world you operate in is incredibly biased,” he said
—against his movement and “the leaders of it,
like me in particular.”

He encouraged me to resist this tendency, which he thought was the product of a media machine leading us toward a soulless dystopia that none of us want to live in.

“That impulse,” he said,
“is fundamentally in service of something that is far worse than anything,
in your wildest nightmares,
than what you see here.”

He gave me an imploring look,
as though to suggest that he was more on the side of the kind of people who read Vanity Fair than most of you realize.

If what he was doing worked, he said,
“it will mean that my son grows up in a world where his masculinity
—his support of his family and his community,
his love of his community
—is more important than whether it works for fucking McKinsey.”

At that, we called it,
and the crowd of young men who wanted to talk to him immediately descended on the couches.

People kept bringing drinks, and there was a lot of shit talk, and it went on late.

I remember thinking at one point how strange it was that in our mid-30s
Vance and I were significantly older than almost everyone there,
all of whom thought they were organizing a struggle to change the course of human history,
and all of whom were now going to get sloppy drunk.

Yarvin and Laurenson bounded out of the crowd as the cheers were still ringing.

They were giggling, seeming to have had some wine.

“Nixon—Nixon!”Laurenson said,
still laughing.

I couldn’t tell if she was delighted or horrified.

A couple of hours later I found Vance standing up by the bar,
surrounded by a circle of young and identical-looking fanboys.

I went over. He asked what I’d thought of the speech, and he suggested we find somewhere to talk.

He asked me to turn my recorder off so we could speak candidly.

I agreed, with regret, because the conversation revealed someone who I think will be hugely influential in our politics in the coming years,
even if he loses his Senate primary,
as both of us thought was possible.

It also revealed someone who is in a dark place,
with a view that we are at an ominous turning point in America’s history.

He didn’t want to describe this to me on the record.

But I can show it anyway, because he already says it publicly, and you can hear it too.

That night, I went up to my hotel room and listened to a podcast interview Vance had conducted with Jack Murphy,
the big, bearded head of the "Liminal Order" men’s group.

Murphy asked how it was that Vance proposed to rip out America’s leadership class.

Vance described two possibilities that many on the New Right imagine
—that our system will either fall apart naturally,
or that a great leader will assume semi-dictatorial powers.

“So there’s this guy Curtis Yarvin, who has written about some of these things,” Vance said.

Murphy chortled knowingly.

“So one [option] is to basically accept that this entire thing is going to fall in on itself,” Vance went on.

“And so the task of conservatives right now is to preserve as much as can be preserved,” waiting for the “inevitable collapse” of the current order.

He said he thought this was pessimistic.

“I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left,” he said.
“And turn them against the left.

We need like a
de-Baathification program,
a de-woke-ification program.”

I think Trump is going to run again in 2024,” he said.

“I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice:

Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state,

replace them with our people.”

“And when the courts stop you,” he went on, “stand before the country, and say
—” he quoted Andrew Jackson, giving a challenge to the entire constitutional order
—“the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”

This is a description, essentially, of a coup.