A conversation with Simon Laird

Simon reached out to me with a request for a podcast appearance. I countered with an offer for a written conversation.

The new right / left divide

SL: Could you start by giving your general take on what's happening in the right wing right now?

Sure, it might be a little scatterbrained but I can give it a crack.

First I have to disclaim that I don't really consider myself right wing in most settings, certainly not compared to the people who adopt the label themselves. But I think most people do consider me right wing, and we don't get to pick our own labels. I'm a two-time Obama voter and once-Hillary voter who feels very disaffected / politically homeless. My contingent on the electronic right could probably be better described as disaffected libs than truly right wing in the Buchanan sense or Ron Paul sense, that's certainly how I see myself. But I do spend a lot of time around these people, so here are my views.

First, I see a big push against complicated technocratic solutions in favor of common sensical / traditional understandings of social issues.

SL: My view of the left / right distinction is that in America in 2025, the single most important political fault line is whether you support the establishment or whether you oppose the establishment. If you support it, you're Left wing. If you oppose the establishment, you're Right wing. It's similar to the Catholic/Protestant divide during the Reformation

I think that's accurate, yes. Although it's strange to hear the left described as the Catholics in this divide, wokeness being a branch of Protestantism. It's also a pretty stunning inversion historically. We have a left-wing steeped in a tradition of protest and resistance who are oblivious to the fact they've have held essentially all institutional power for 60 years. Yet still they "resist". Who they are resisting is just a function of the last election, they're never resisting the centers of real power that they obviously control.

SL: Yes, I think the Left is incapable of adjusting to the fact that they are in power. Left-wingers believe in the mainstream media and academia, they agree with Hollywood morality, and they basically trust the government. Right wingers disbelieve the mainstream media and academia, disagree with Hollywood morality, and think the government is evil and illegitimate. Wokeness is a descendant of American Protestantism, but I'm not sure how much similarity they really have. Wokeness conceivably could have taken a different form (e.g. is transgenderism or radical feminist TERFism more woke? They're both equally hostile to nature and traditional order). Part of their ideology is that the underdog is always right, which undergirds their sympathy for criminals, their anti-whiteness and even their anti-male stance

Yes, I think you have nailed the essential character of the left / right divide.

Crime and punishment

What I was saying earlier about the technocratic pushback: for example, on crime, the left is obsessed with the idea of “eliminating the true causes of crime” as opposed to simple incapacitation of criminals, which obviously works quite well. So the right is pushing back on this idiotic idea that taking criminals off the street for a decade at a time won't reduce crime. We know it works because it always has, but the left has a permanent revolution mindset which insists that the status quo is always broken no matter what it is, in this case “over-incarceration”. The reality is that America has a dramatic under-incarceration problem, far too many known criminals are allowed their freedom. We know who they are and where they live but won't lock them up because they (the criminals) are considered the true victims of crime.

So that's one trend I see on the right: a new insistence that no, actually, not everything we've done as a society is broken and needs to be replaced with a better version. For many issues, we know what works and just need the will to do it.

SL: Malcolm Gladwell wrote a really silly book about this many years ago. He talked about “broken windows policing” and presented the idea that ‘people who see disorder like broken windows and fare jumping become possessed with the criminal spirit and start breaking laws.’ In reality, broken windows policing works for a much simpler reason: People who jump the gate at the subway also commit lots of other crimes. If you get them off the street for fare jumping, they aren't able to go out and murder people.

Ah, our midwit in chief. I love Gladwell, I'm a normie that way.

This is one message I wish I could hammer into normal urban libs: the typical criminal does not commit a single crime or a handful of crimes. A tiny minority commit nearly all crimes, and when you incarcerate them the crime goes away. It isn't the case that mysterious systemic forces cause the crime to re-equalize after you lock up one career criminal, there isn't another one waiting in the wings to take his place.

Western chauvinism and colonialism

On a related note, I think there's another foundational element on the new right, which is Western / American chauvinism, a refusal to apologize for winning on the part of white men / America / the West. And this is again a reaction to a push from the left to insist that our history and heroes are despicable and must be replaced.

SL: Very true. I see two versions of this. Version 1: people who say 'might makes right I don't care if my ancestors committed atrocities, I want my tribe to win.' Version 2: the claims about Western crimes are simply not true. The industrial revolution, the settlement of America and European imperialism were enormous, unmixed goods for humanity. Even racial egalitarians should endorse what European imperialists did in the 19th century.

Yes, by any objective measure the West's impact on the world has been overwhelmingly positive, even if you consider colonialism to be an atrocity. I tend to think it was quite mixed, personally.

SL: Colonialism has to be compared to the other states which would have ruled those areas in the absence of European imperialists, which would have been worse on almost every metric. Admittedly, the Spanish rule of Mexico and Peru was pretty brutal, and the Caribbean sugar plantations were atrocious. I was referring to the golden age of European imperialism from 1800 - 1900.

Yes, it's striking how much worse / more brutal some colonial powers were than others. The French on Haiti in particular seemed to really deserve what they got. The Spanish were absolute kittens by comparison (no pun intended). And they were conquistadors, rather than colonists primarily.

SL: The Potosi silver mines were run like the Caribbean sugar plantations. The life expectancy of a slave in the mines was less than a year.

In any case, I think it's a mistake or simple slander to insist that this western chauvinism is white nationalist or racist in its essential character. Obviously there is that element, there always has been. But Trump getting the most non-white votes of any Republican in history should have laid to rest the idea that this movement is only for white people. For generations the right has been talking about how Latinos in particular are natural republicans (hard working, family oriented, religious) and it is now finally coming to pass. What a time to be alive.

SL: Yes, and Latinos finally started shifting to the GOP with Donald Trump as the candidate, after Romney's 2012 post-mortem said they had to be careful to avoid offending Hispanics, lol.

The gender gap

More than the racial depolarization, what I find most fascinating is the gender polarization especially among the young. I think most Democrats don't realize they've permanently lost a lot of men under 30, of all races. And this is pure reaction to leftist hegemony, it has very little to do with anything the right has to offer as a contrary positive vision for society. They just hate being ruled by these people.

SL: I'm hoping it's enough to make up for the polarization of young women to the Left. It's a common pattern that men get on board with a movement first, and then women follow. Hopefully that's what we're seeing now

In the long term, it has to equalize again, right? A society divided along gender lines makes no sense and cannot last. If for no other reason than democracy is a proxy for warfare and men could simply impose their will.

SL: Men could impose their will now if they wanted to, but it seems unlikely. I also don't think that would be a constructive road to go down. I've seen some data that 18-21 women are more conservative than 25-29 women, so we may already be seeing the shift

This sort of brings me back to my original line of thinking about what's going on with the right. I think we're seeing the beginnings of the right being something more than just a reactionary movement, somebody who believes whatever liberals did 15 years ago. It's still very inchoate, but you can see the outlines of what it might be.

And yes, that is my bet for what happens long term, women follow men.

SL: I actually don't think the majority of the right has ever been just liberals 15 years late. That's definitely what the Republican leadership was like - but the Republican leadership has been almost universally hated by republican voters for a very long time.

I wonder to what extent that's true personally. Certainly the normiecons I know in my parents' generation don't feel that way, they're very much on board with Con Inc. and the leadership. I think the dissident right is different, younger and less hypnotized by cable news.

SL: The dissident right is definitely younger. And the dissident right was only possible because of social media. At this point, we're probably well organized enough that we could find each other and organize even if social media was shut down tomorrow.

Definitely, it's a McLuhan phenomenon at its root. I guess the internet would be our printing press, which makes us the Lutherans in this dispute. Brings me no pleasure to realize.

SL: Yes. I think that makes the Reformation even more apt.

Pornography

SL: We recently talked on Substack about porn use statistics. I found some data from Pornhub stats. According to Pornhub, they get 3.1 billion visits from the US per year. With about 260 million American adults, that comes out to 12 visits per American adult per year, or 1 per month. Pornhub makes up roughly 25% of US porn traffic. To a rough approximation there are about 4 porn site visits per American adult per month. That's consistent with everyone viewing 4 times per month, or 25% of people viewing 16 times per month (every other day). According to the survey on porn use from the Survey Center on American Life, 44% of men and 11% of women had viewed porn in the past month.

But I'm sure that's not unique viewers. This business is whale-driven like anything else involving compulsive behavior. I think it's hard to study. I just don't trust any numbers around this, especially not survey results. That said, I do think you are directionally correct that there's real widescale pushback against porn now, for the first time since the 60s.

I forget who said this, maybe Kryptogal? But basically the ubiquity of porn made women aware for the first time what male sexuality is actually like, and it repulsed them. They were happier not knowing, they wish they didn't have to be aware of the kind of imagery and production that gets men off. And I think that's new. When porn was scarce in the form of magazines and other physical media, it naturally limited how much you could run into it if you weren't actively looking for it. You could marginalize it and pretend it didn't exist, just don't go to that store or open his sock drawer. And that's no longer true with digital video on demand.

SL: I was going to say that if those 44% of men and 11% of women are making up the bulk of the porn use, they would have to watch porn almost every other day, which seems high. So there's probably some underreporting, and also a large portion of people not using it at all

I don't think watching porn every other day is high at all, I think the modal single guy in his 20s watches every day for example.

SL: But guys in their 20s are a relatively small part of the population.

True.

SL: Kryptogal also said that she constantly runs into "horrific" porn clips on twitter all the time. I don't know what parts of twitter she's hanging around in, but I have never seen porn clips on twitter, much less "horrific" ones. I thought she seemed paranoid.

I haven't either, you have to look for it. It must be a function of who she's following, it won't recommend it otherwise. It’s actually stunning how good they are at filtering it out. But I have had to unfollow more than one young man because of his tendency to post anime porn. Those guys are the ones that really confound me. Like I understand the impulse to look at porn, but in private. The idea that you would share it with other people online, talk about it proudly as an important part of your identity, is totally alien and gross to me. And I have to believe that behavior repels close to 100% of women who notice it.

Shrimp welfare

SL: We also wanted to discuss the Silicon Valley / Effective Altruist people. I believe you critiqued one of the Shrimp Welfare guys who is now a Bug Welfare guy.

I think he's never met a creepy-crawlie he didn't want to protect, yes. Bentham's Bulldog is pretty funny to me, I enjoy reading him despite thinking he's faintly ridiculous most of the time. The sign of a talented writer I guess. But this is a guy who convinced himself that God exists using math, and simultaneously believes that morality is an objective fact of the universe, but not ordained or dictated by the God he conjured with math. Truly an original set of viewpoints, and he defends them quite well even if I remain unconvinced.

I was planning to write a longish takedown of utilitarianism, which I find disgusting and alienating, but a writer in Aporia magazine recently did it for me better than I possibly could have. Specifically, it’s a takedown of Singer, whose drowning child thought experiment Scott Alexander recently jumped onto like a live grenade.

SL: I see a lot of those guys because they are in the process of taking over George Mason University. I will do my best to preserve GMU for the libertarian faction, to which it of course rightly belongs.

I really like Scott Alexander and owe a lot of my own intellectual development to his essays from a decade or so ago. He was the first person I encountered that led me to realize I wasn't completely alone in my views on certain topics (at least among intelligent nerdy types). The community he built around SSC, helping those people find each other, is really remarkable and laudable. But I find myself disagreeing with him more and more lately, and I don't know which one of us changed, or if perhaps we were never that similar to begin with.

Silicon Valley’s Trumpism

SL: Silicon Valley came to Washington in the last election (Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, etc.). It remains to be seen how much influence they will have.

It's hard to say how any of this shapes up after Trump leaves office. The new right coalition is very fragile in that way. I think tech swung right for the same reason that young men did: they got tired of being the punching bag for everyone on the left.

SL: The old Republican establishment is actually still in control of the Senate (Mitch McConnell and John Thune) but Trumpists control the House and the conservative media ecosystem. And the silicon valley personality is intrinsically more compatible with Trumpism than establishmentarianism.

If Trump has a true heir, Vance or otherwise, we'll see. Maybe the McConnells of the world will be right back in power when he's gone.

I think in particular Silicon Valley is the last bastion of American dynamism, where taking risks and making big bets is celebrated. It's still very male-coded relative to corporate America at large, and it will be interesting to see how it holds out against the creeping feminization of social norms and political processes.

Illiteracy

SL: Final topic before we finish: Did you come up with a number for the percentage of people who can actually read? You had a great substack post about that a little while ago.

The numbers for literacy come from The Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), and is based on research they do. These charts on literacy levels have been circulating for a long time, but very few people bother to read the actual test material to understand concretely what the various literacy levels mean. I think that's why those posts of mine went viral, because I showed in concrete terms the kinds of literacy tasks that different proportions of Americans can or cannot accomplish.

If "actually read" means being able to understand and summarize a long article in the New York Times, or read and understand Aquinas, research indicates we're talking about 1 in 8 Americans.

SL: That's really staggering. And the proportion for the world as a whole would be even lower. It really is surprising how many people are unable to read the most basic things. Its hard to even imagine what it must be like to go through life like that. When they see billboards on the side of the road, do they comprehend the words? Do they read menus at restaurants?

“Literacy” is really just the wrong word in my opinion, all of this stuff is mostly measuring raw IQ. Being able to read words on a page or understand a short sentence is a pretty low bar, and that's what “literacy” measures. Once you start grilling people on what they absorbed from the reading, you hit various ability ceilings of many of them really quickly.

By the best data we have, about 20% of Americans can't read a bullet point list of items and answer a factual question about it. Those are the people basically limited to reading from menus as their high water mark. And many of them find that too challenging. This is the kind of person who favors restaurants with big pictures of the food items on it with numbers next to them. It’s not that they “can't read”, it’s that it’s hard for them. They avoid doing it if possible.

SL: I remember encountering this in high school English class. My classmates would read aloud from a book, and then when I referenced some point they had just read 1 minute previously, they wouldn't recognize that they had just read that point. It felt bizarre and made me almost doubt my own sanity.

Taking advanced writing classes in college was an eye-opener from me, lots of borderline illiteracy there, total inability to write grammatically correct sentences. And most of them got English degrees.

One of the consequences of the Great Sort is that most people are sheltered from truly different levels of cognitive strata their entire lives, which is why so many people find this information shocking or hard to believe.

SL: The only solution is for the masses to follow enlightened philosopher kings like us. Thanks for the interview!

My pleasure¹.

Simon Laird is a policy analyst for CPAC. He holds a master’s degree in economics from George Mason University. He has been published in Aporia and The Hill, among other places. You can read his personal substack here. The conversation above was lightly edited for clarity and organization.

1. Editor’s note: I was rude and didn’t actually say this, we just started talking about our independent plans to publish this content.