The way online millennials speak is cringeworthy and bad, but the New Right won’t usher in better prose.
A man who calls himself Dudley Newright has coined a new term, “Millennial Snot”, to describe the cringeworthy and desperate way liberal millennials speak online (“not a good look”, “I don’t flex often here, y’know”, “it’s giving…”, “that’s … a choice”) and sketched the social, political and psychological conditions that caused them to adopt this uncool and over-the-top lingo en masse. His analysis is interesting, well-written and basically correct, from where I’m standing.
But then he predicts that this way of speaking will soon pass, and will be succeeded by “a new age of sincerity and clarity”, midwifed in by some combo of zoomers and (implicitly) the New Right.
He’s dead wrong there, I reckon, but let me backtrack a little.
For years now I’ve been surprised how slowly and tepidly the New Right cultural zeitgeist has permeated Aotearoa. It’s a US political movement – or internet subculture, really – so maybe that’s not surprising, but since the early days of the pandemic it’s been the only interesting thing happening online, and a cottage industry of legacy media explainers and profiles has sprung up in its wake, with people like Dudley Newright basing entire newsletters and podcasts on relaying what’s going on in New Right circles to curious (often left-wing or liberal) outsiders.
If it hasn’t permeated your neck of the woods either, the New Right – or Dissident Right, or Online Right – is a constellation of right-wing internet personalities who are “new” in that, unlike the Old Right, they aren’t arch capitalists and are often explicitly concerned with the plight of the working class (who the left, everyone agrees, has long abandoned), and “right” in the sense that they love tradition, being Catholic (new converts abound), asking questions no one else will about race science, and enjoying the naughty frisson of saying “retard”, “tranny” and “gay”.
I got really into reading and listening to these guys when our Covid lockdowns were in full swing. I was alienated at the time by our Covid-max approach and couldn’t find a single person who (openly) shared my concerns about vaccine mandates and closing schools, so I turned to pockets of the internet where this stuff was being discussed intelligently and irreverently by people on either the dissident/non-woke/Dimes Square left, or the New Right.
I wasn’t convinced the New Right was the political movement for me, mostly because it dismayed me how quickly it all devolved into Great Replacement theories and physiognomy, but the energy and style of speaking was refreshing, especially to a leftist burnt out by the po-faced, scolding excesses of social justice politics (so, plenty of us).
It was cathartic in the extreme to see the same screeching social justice warriors who made my life a misery be mercilessly skewered by people who (a) had a forensic read on how pathetic and soft-handed they ultimately were, (b) weren’t scared to say so, in very un-PC terms, and (c) were objectively heaps cooler (especially the Good Old Boyz and Red Scare girls, from whom most of this cultural energy springs.)
I have no doubt Dudley Newright is right that the days of millennials saying “that’s tea, sis” are numbered. “Millennial Snot” is a fun term, and as a millennial woman who counts “it do be like that” and “skkkrt” among my stock phrases, I’m definitely implicated; I felt the satisfying burn of a perfectly aimed roast. Few of my cohort will emerge unscathed. I highly recommend the read on that front.
But Dudley is wrong that a new age of sincerity and clarity is just around the corner, and the New Right certainly won’t usher one in. And I feel confident saying that because I marinated in New Right circles for a good couple of years, and the way they speak is, unfortunately, cringe, cliched and bad too, and will definitely degenerate into something approximating Millennial Snot over time.
Yes, the New Right scene is refreshingly devoid of the kind of millennial phrasing Dudley singles out (“she’s so mother 😭”, “hauntingly on-the-nose on about 15 different levels”, “it’s like… not what i’m here for”.) But it has its own inventory of slang and stock phrases that, especially when they become ubiquitous, will be rightly seen as equally annoying and embarrassing. I haven’t really kept up with these guys since my daughter was born, but when I last checked in they were all calling each other “frens”, posting endless pepe memes of minimal comedic value, parroting the phrase “fake and gay”, saying “retarded” with the energy of a toddler testing boundaries, propagating endless permutations of “lib”, “shitlib”, “hicklib”, basedbasedbased, writing poetry and short stories that caused painful second-hand embarrassment, saying “coastal elites” a full 10,000 times, “looksmaxxing” this and “chud” that, and giving themselves bios like, to pick a typical example, “horrorist. let no one reduce us to the status of ascetics. there is no pleasure more complex than that of thought.”
Is this better than Millennial Snot? At the moment, yes, because it is currently fresher and mildly less embarrassing, although for my money, not by much. But when this is the new lingua franca, which it will be – Dudley Newright’s own post in praise of “sincerity and clarity” is peppered with New Right-isms – we will see that we are not in a beautiful age of stark and inventive prose, but a shitty mirror world.
The UK writer Sam Kriss has documented the way in which the New Right has replicated all the pathologies and infighting of the social-justice left. Language wise, the same thing will happen. The Millennial Snot style of speaking is, according to Dudley Newright, “supposed to say, I’m smart, but I’m also cool.” This is exactly the right diagnosis for the New Right style of speech too: these guys are perennially self-impressed and go overboard to court the friendship and admiration of their peers. They’re humans, in other words, preening on the internet.
As an editor, I’m as keen as Dudley is to encounter more language that doesn’t feel claustrophobically internetty; endlessly copypasta’d and workshopped and self-conscious. To my endless frustration, I find it really hard to remove these tics from my own writing and speech (I noticed recently that I can never just say “one” now without reflexively adding the numeral in parentheses. Weak.)
But if you want bracing, stark prose, unblemished by the internet and pure as driven snow, don’t look to the New Right. Don’t even look to zoomers. Go to thespinoff.co.nz, and read this ranking of deer by a deer hunter.
