THE MAGA DIARIES

Adventures inside the rabbit hole of right-wing extremism.

Raised in “borderline poverty” by an “oblivious immigrant tiger mom,” Nguyen fell under the spell of libertarianism early on. In prep school on a scholarship, she became involved with a young man who went on to become “Peter Thiel’s hatchet man, introducing the billionaire to white supremacists.” White supremacists were a dime a dozen in the orbits in which Nguyen would travel following college, moving from think tank to foundation to fellowship before finally landing as a journalist, at first writing from the right and then, following an apotheosis that makes for excellent reading, covering the right for the much-hated mainstream media. Among the players in her book are Tucker Carlson, a former boss when he, too, was a genuine journalist, and David Frum, one of whose articles, he told the author, was “my suicide note to the GOP.” Following her disenchantment with “Conservatism Inc.,” Nguyen writes, “the easiest thing to do was become nihilistic about the ideology.” Instead, she dug in deep after trying to avoid the politics beat—lured back in by the emergence of Trump, for whom she has little affection. (That former boyfriend? He was not only an insider but also a leading Holocaust denier.) Nguyen’s episodic anecdotes—they’re not quite a diary, so the title is a touch misplaced—are fascinating, including the process of Carlson’s becoming ensorcelled by the world of Trumpian power politics while not actually seeming to believe much of it or much of anything, as well as a passing story about a former mentor who had developed a not-so-secret code to “disguise ethnic slurs and pro-Hitler slogans.” The bad news? In their relentless quest to reshape American society brick by brick, the rightists “are winning.”

A sobering, endlessly readable fly-on-the-wall account of creeping fascism.