In 2025, bigotry was trendy, and we found out who our friends really are<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt\u2019s Republican Coachella,\u201d conservative influencer Xaviaer DuRousseau told New York<\/em> magazine in January 2025,<\/a> \u201cand Donald Trump is our Beyonc\u00e9.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n The piece in which DuRousseau appears, entitled \u201cThe Cruel Kids\u2019 Table,\u201d was the cover story of the magazine that month; it announced to the world that the \u201cpost-woke\u201d \u201cvibe shift\u201d had finally arrived, and that young Republicans were\u2014could it be??\u2014cool<\/em> now. The new, hip right contained \u201cgays of all stripes,\u201d according to writer Brock Colyar, and \u201cmany are hot.\u201d This alone ought to be enough to ensure \u201ccultural domination.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Colyar\u2019s piece was a culmination of a long strand of trend pieces. The \u201cvibe shift\u201d\u2014which, trend experts assured us, would bring on an era where \u201cthe culture-war topic no longer seems quite as interesting,\u201d and \u201cyounger people are less interested in things like quote-unquote cancel culture\u201d\u2014was announced back in 2022<\/a>. The MAGA debutantes and tradcaths of Dimes Square were profiled by the <\/em>New York Times<\/em><\/a> <\/em>and Vanity Fair<\/em><\/a> <\/em>that same year. Lana Del Rey started attending a megachurch<\/a>. Post-wokeness even infected Brat Summer; Charli XCX\u2019s \u201cMean Girls\u201d was (I\u2019m sorry you have to hear this) about Red Scare <\/em>podcast host, Dimes Square mascot and Steve Bannon superfan Dasha Nekrasova.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Flash forward 11 months, and the post-woke moment seems to have fizzled (maybe because it was led by people named Xaviaer Du Rousseau who said things like \u201cit\u2019s Republican Coachella and Donald Trump is our Beyonc\u00e9\u201d). Regardless, this was how we opened the year: with the announcement that Donald Trump had a mandate, that culture had shifted, that identity politics was a losing battle, that woke was dead and that it was, for all these reasons, not only safe, but trendy<\/em> to hate queers and minorities again. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In the wake of that announcement, every single public figure with a bit of hidden bigotry felt free to show their entire<\/em> ass. Queer people and their allies have spent a year figuring out who our friends are\u2014and we\u2019ve learned that there are fewer of them than we\u2019d hoped. <\/p>\n\n\n\n There was nothing to distinguish \u201cpost-woke\u201d from any other brand of far-right politics except the youngish age of its participants and the fact that they spoke in the edgy, \u201cironically\u201d unironic fascism of online message boards. Many, due to their age, had once espoused leftist politics, a stance they abandoned the moment it conflicted with being assholes: Colyar\u2019s article mentions, in passing, a Biden voter who turned Republican because \u201cI hate having to watch what I say\u201d around the \u201ctrannies\u201d at his liberal arts school, and a Bernie Sanders supporter who now hangs out with white nationalists because \u201che wanted the freedom to say \u2018faggot\u2019 and \u2018retarded.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet these were the tastemakers to whom pop culture was expected to cater. It was instructive, and depressing, to see who complied. <\/p>\n\n\n\n By March 2025, beloved bisexual White Lotus<\/em> showrunner Mike White had cut a plotline about a trans child from the show<\/a> while keeping a long, transphobic monologue delivered by Sam Rockwell; he was hailed by anti-trans pundit Helen Lewis as having created \u201cthe first great \u2018post-woke\u2019 art\u201d<\/a> and went on to defend said art on Andrew \u201cBell Curve\u201d Sullivan\u2019s podcast<\/a>. It girl Sydney Sweeney\u2014herself a White Lotus <\/em>alum, whose character was (I\u2019m so sorry) also<\/em> inspired by the Red Scare<\/em> hosts<\/a>\u2014reportedly registered as a Republican<\/a> and made a bizarrely eugenicist ad for American Eagle jeans.<\/a> Olivia Nuzzi, a star in the East Coast media scene, who had long professed her affection for right-wing figures like Ann Coulter<\/a>, was fired from New York<\/em> magazine after a baffling yet reportedly passionate love affair with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; by September, Vanity Fair<\/em> had hired her as its West Coast editor<\/a>, a more prestigious position than the one she had lost.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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