The Anti-Lockdown Imposters of the New Right
Today’s MAGA intellectuals rail against COVID restrictions, but in 2020 many cheered them on—or demanded even harsher crackdowns.
Resistance to the COVID-era lockdowns occupies a central place in the political identity of the New Right—the eclectic group of national conservatives, postliberals, populists, and neoreactionaries at the ideological core of the MAGA coalition. Ironically, it was President Donald Trump who enabled lockdowns by proclaiming a national emergency in March 2020 and appointed Anthony Fauci to lead his administration's pandemic response efforts. And yet the New Right has opted to look past these contradictions.
It has become routine for New Right political figures to position themselves as leaders of a bold resistance against the COVID restrictions—vice president and self-described postliberal J.D. Vance launched his Senate campaign in 2021 with an attack on "Fauci's cabal"—even as they were largely absent as these events unfolded in 2020.
The Rise of Resistance to Expertise
For many on the New Right, COVID serves as the origin story of their own political radicalization. Auron MacIntyre, a columnist for The Blaze and postliberal internet influencer, recently declared as much on Tucker Carlson's podcast: "I just realized, OK, the Constitution is not stopping [the lockdowns]….That's kind of how I started tweeting and, you know, putting out material and writing."
Similar claims about resistance in the time of COVID-19 are a common theme on the New Right, and one that Carlson has parlayed into a broader assault against "experts" across the scientific, policy, and economic realms. In his 2023 book Regime Change, postliberal political theorist Patrick Deneen posits that the pandemic exposed "a growing division between those calling for deference to expertise" and "a more 'populist' resistance to governance by 'elites.'" In his telling, the New Right arose from this backlash against expertise run amok, first exemplified by public health officials during COVID but also extending to the neoliberal economists whose support for free trade he faults for a litany of other issues—real and imaginary.
New Right internet personality and provocateur Mike Cernovich expressed these sentiments more bluntly in a post on X after Trump's "Liberation Day" tariff announcements: "Experts have been wrong about nearly every issue of consequence. COVID showed they will lie shamelessly and face no consequences. Free traders (so called) were nearly, to a person, Covidians."
MacIntyre's autobiographical account to Carlson goes even further in delineating how lockdowns converted him from a Sean Hannity–listening Republican to a New Right spokesman. "I started reading a lot of political theory outside of the mainstream," MacIntyre said. "I read this guy, Curtis Yarvin….And the more I read that, the more I wanted to share what was going on." It is a revealing watershed moment.
The Original Lockdowners
Yarvin (who also writes under the pen name Mencius Moldbug) has become something of a pop philosopher of the New Right. He adheres to a peculiar belief system dubbed the "Dark Enlightenment," which he built on the ideas of 19th century pro-slavery and anti-capitalist theorist Thomas Carlyle. Yarvin's writings espouse a visceral disdain for democratic institutions and "consumerism" in the economic realm, a belief that American constitutionalism is a failed experiment, a fascination with absolute monarchy and feudalism, and more than passing ventures into eugenic theory.
In both content and blusterous tone, Yarvin's style is reminiscent of Ignatius J. Reilly, the bumbling reactionary protagonist of the classic novel A Confederacy of Dunces, albeit with more racism. Despite these eccentricities as well as his more noxious personal bigotries, he has gained a surprising amount of influence on the New Right. Vance is also a Yarvin fan, and Deneen recently joined him in a podcast discussion about the New Right's conceptualization of conservatism.
MacIntyre is a devout Yarvin enthusiast, but with a peculiar twist. At the time of MacIntyre's claimed COVID awakening in April 2020, Yarvin was busy preaching the necessity of Wuhan-style lockdowns, electronic exposure tracking, and other authoritarian measures to halt the coronavirus in America.
Yarvin's counter-pandemic "plan" ventured into extremes that even the most fanatical lockdowners avoided stating openly. "Americans all have [cell] phones," he wrote. "Why haven't we started full population control—with involuntary tracking, testing, and isolation—yesterday?"
He mocked lockdowns in his home state of California for being insufficiently aggressive to accomplish the task of virus control, ridiculed Americans as too "puerile, spoiled and arrogant" to meet the challenge of COVID, and faulted our free economy and democratic institutions for creating obstacles to imposing a China-esque virus control plan. Yarvin's proposed interventions read like a would-be dictator's fever dream.
He called for the creation of a "Coronavirus Authority" with "unconditional and unlimited authority over all public and private actors," operating beyond the reach of Congress and unaccountable to any court review or constitutional oversight. To blunt the economic disruption of such draconian measures, Yarvin proposed that the Federal Reserve convert all private stock and bond holdings into public assets in exchange for a one-time payment. In this new financial reordering, "The Fed owns all public companies" for the duration of the pandemic, with any debt being incurred by the Fed and then canceled. This temporary dictatorship (or as Yarvin put it, "literally the state capitalism of the Soviet Union") would run for the course of the pandemic before resetting society after the lockdowns worked—an outcome in which Yarvin had supreme confidence.
As for anyone who complained, Yarvin's plan called for complete social ostracism and suppression. "In a sane world, anyone with a public record of minimizing the coronavirus would be cancelled—unfit for any further employment, let alone in this crisis." He wanted people to fear even "being linked to a coronavirus minimizer."
Yarvin's Covidian dictator fantasies make for a stark contrast with MacIntyre's recollections of the same period. Indeed, MacIntyre's social media feed from April 2020 reveals very little about his opinions on lockdowns, but he did upload several YouTube videos and posted on X, then Twitter, proselytizing Yarvin's philosophy and his concept of "the Cathedral," an alleged decentralized system of ideological control over society and culture operating at the behest of expert "elites." Yarvin's activities in early 2020 reveal an extreme case of the New Right's embrace of lockdowner ideology as COVID unfolded. But he's not the only example.
Cernovich spent the first several months of the pandemic promoting the very same brand of alarmism that he now projects, without evidence, onto critics of Trump's tariff agenda. He attacked Trump in a blog post for moving too slowly against the virus, calling the pandemic "Trump's Katrina." He shared Sen. Elizabeth Warren's (D–Mass.) call for the government to take control of international supply chains and manage the economy through the pandemic's storm, and posted a podcast denouncing the "losers" who questioned his pandemic alarmism. Left-wing magazine Mother Jones even published a profile of Cernovich touting him as the "surprising pro-Trumper" who was taking COVID seriously.
In a Fox News interview on March 22, 2020, Steve Bannon proposed going "full hammer on the virus right now with a full shutdown," adding that we should "use the stimulus to bridge the economic crisis." He claimed doing so could get us through the pandemic in "two weeks or four weeks," a prediction reminiscent of the administration's eventual "15 days to slow the spread."
Bannon established himself as an alarmist well before most Americans even noticed the pandemic. In a January 2020 podcast, he broadcast apocalyptic warnings about a new virus from China along with guest Jack Posobiec, another New Right journalist attached to the MAGA movement. Bannon and Posobiec called for the implementation of travel bans from Asia and layered their discussion of the virus in apocalyptic hype. Today, both men have largely reinvented themselves as leaders of the COVID-era resistance and skeptics of the very same scientific expertise they once invoked to spread alarm.
It Was Never Just About COVID
Today, New Right figures rail against Fauci and the United States' pandemic response policies that they embraced or acquiesced to in 2020. But they remain suspiciously silent about the lockdown records of other governments they support. The New Right, and postliberals in particular, often extol the government of Viktor Orbán in Hungary as a model for conservative governance. Orbán imposed harsh lockdowns in 2020, far exceeding the restrictions in the United States. Another New Right hero, President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, imposed one of the strictest lockdown regimes in Central America and repeatedly defied court orders that challenged his rule by emergency decree. Bukele's subsequent takeover of his country's judiciary and accompanying prison system are, in part, direct byproducts of his COVID-era restrictions.
As with much of America, genuine fear over an unknown pandemic likely motivated the New Right toward lockdowns and other forms of alarm at the outbreak of the pandemic. Before he turned against lockdowns in the late spring of 2020, Carlson personally lobbied Trump to take more aggressive action in his COVID response. Other, more opportunistic motives also played a role though, as New Right figures tried to appropriate the pandemic response to pet issues such as countering free trade and immigration.
Once again, Yarvin emerged as an early proponent of restrictions, albeit for motives that extended beyond virus control. Writing for the Claremont Institute blog on February 1, 2020, Yarvin pronounced globalism "dead of coronavirus." He endorsed an immediate travel ban across the Pacific, thereby "disconnecting our planet's two great hemispheres," and made condescending jabs at Westerners for viewing quarantines as antiquated relics of the past. Yarvin's commentary had another objective though. He viewed the emerging pandemic as a proxy issue in his own larger battle against "globalization," a longstanding New Right bête noire at the center of their cultural and economic grievances. To Yarvin, COVID shutdowns also disrupted trade, travel, free migration, and the spirit of consumerism that he blames for most of his cultural grievances. Travel restrictions, lockdowns, and other responses to the pandemic would strike a simultaneous blow against the international economic order that his Carlylean worldview finds so abhorrent.
Let the Track Records Speak for Themselves
None of this record should deflect from the fact that COVID restrictions took an immense toll on human liberty in 2020. Some on the New Right may genuinely recognize that toll today, as reflected in more recent comments. It is not difficult to take a bold stance against lockdowns from hindsight in 2025 though. March 2020 was a different story—a time when lockdown critics were vilified in the media, censored by social media companies, denounced by political leaders, and threatened with cancellation—the very same tactics that Yarvin espoused from the outset.
While Yarvin and company were embracing state authoritarianism, I published one of the first critiques of the Imperial College epidemiology model. I helped bring the case study of Sweden to worldwide attention as an example of a viable alternative to lockdowns. I was one of the original co-organizers of the conference that produced the Great Barrington Declaration. I also uncovered Fauci's censorship scheming through Freedom of Information Act requests.
I mention these facts not to boast of my positions but to convey that the anti-lockdown movement was a lonely place at the outset of the pandemic for those of us who advanced it on the ground. The New Right may claim credit for leading the resistance movement today. As those of us who were there in 2020 know, however, they were largely absent from that movement at the time it mattered. Or worse, as with Yarvin, they were directly complicit in the lockdown cause.
