How Right-Wing Christians Brought Us the Tech Bro Dystopia

With Reflections on What I got Right and Wrong about 2024

Well, fellow bugbears, it had been a depressing few days. You might have expected to hear something from me about the American election results before now, but I needed to take some time to process before posting anything. I am no longer a big fan of hot takes and immediate recriminations in the aftermath of a political disaster.

Everything I do is political—for what it’s worth, most things people claim are apolitical are in fact, emphatically, not that—but The Bugbear Dispatch has never been primarily about chasing the news cycle. I’ll do it occasionally, but mostly this is a place for expressing more reflective, and sometimes very much still in progress, thinking about a variety of social and cultural issues, most commonly and saliently related to the politics of fear and scapegoating. I often focus on unpacking aspects of authoritarian Christian identity, ideology, and practice, drawing on both my academic study and my lived experience, and merging memoir with social analysis.

In what follows today, I’ll assess the national (and also global) disaster that unfolded Tuesday night in the kind of context you won’t get from most outlets, providing some insights and perspective that will hopefully be helpful for getting through the dark times to come. I’ll also take some time to look back at my own thinking about this election in the months that led up to it, owning up to my mistakes and considering what led me to make them.

I was, after all, cautiously optimistic all the way up until they called Pennsylvania for Trump. And yet I’m not as panicked as I was in 2016—maybe that’s just a product of being older and more tired, but I’d like to think there’s some wisdom in it as well, as I remain as convinced as ever that the mass freakout in which I participated on Twitter in 2016 and after was at the very least mostly noise and distraction, and in many ways probably counterproductive.

Crypto and AI, the new fads, are functionally just new means of continuing the macroeconomic trend in place since the Reagan years—funneling more and more of America’s wealth to a tiny sliver of people at the top.

That being said, I do think I produced some good, sober analysis in that era as well. And I didn’t fall down the liberal conspiratorial rabbit hole per se, but I was conspiracy adjacent and sometimes too naive and complacent toward the crowd that was always trying to get “secret inside information” and waiting for someone to “save” us, not to mention the grifters who preyed on them, though I eventually confronted some of the worst of them openly—people like Louise Mensch and Eric Garland and Claude Taylor. Yeah, it’s really not pleasant remembering those days. Let’s never do that again.

2024: The Rise of an Asinine American Oligarchy

The United States has almost always been at least as much oligarchy as democracy, but in the past the oligarchs exhibited a certain sophistication and noblesse oblige. No more. The Ivy-educated WASP establishment has been “disrupted” by the worst of the West Coast. And I should know—I was at Stanford from 2004-2012, earning my PhD in modern Russian history and sometimes getting talked down to by tech bros who insisted I didn’t have “a real job.”

Original pic by Ad Meskens, via Wikimedia Commons. Cropped and edited by Chrissy Stroop.

Elon Musk is not just an entitled idiot; he’s downright tacky.