Maroon Pilled: A Culture of Choice

Screenshot courtesy of 4chan.

Consider Joe Rogan, the barbarian Khan of podcasting. His cultural influence is immense, his ideological commitments slippery, his posture one of insatiable curiosity—unless it comes to skepticism toward institutions, reverence for a vague ideal of masculinity, and a deep distrust of intellectual elites. 

The now-famous 2020 4chan meme, depicting Rogan as a “barbarian Khan from the steppes,” captures the conservative cultural project in essence. Rogan is not a thinker but a seeker—one who craves knowledge but distrusts its stewards, for whom institutional legitimacy is itself suspect.

This is modern conservatism’s cultural posture: not an inheritance, but a choice, a rejection of complexity in favor of ideological comfort. What masquerades as inquiry is, in truth, an elaborate mechanism for evasion, an endless circumvention of the discomfort real intellectual rigor demands.

Unlike the evangelicals and populists who form the movement’s reactionary base, the University of Chicago’s Gen-Z conservatives see themselves differently—Nietzsche-reading, post-Trump-pro-Trump, intellectual insurgents who, if forced to choose between a Bible verse and a Ben Shapiro monologue, would always pick the latter. 

Their conservatism is less tradition than self-stylization. A contrarian impulse, a belief that rejecting mainstream narratives makes one uniquely rational, uniquely free. Ironically, in their obsessive rejection of the “liberal consensus,” they’ve created an ideological monoculture of their own—built on podcasts, polemics, and the smirking certainty of a Twitter debater. Even when confronted with internal inconsistencies, their instinct is not reflection, but deflection…

Read the full Op-Ed at The Gate