Dasha Nekrasova And The Hypocrisy Of Her Moral Critics

Co-host of the Red Scare podcast, Dasha Nekrasova, has occupied a unique position as a post-woke Hollywood actress. While discussing controversial topics on her podcast over the years, espousing a countercultural perspective, many have found it perplexing that she has been able to maintain industry credibility, being cast in hits like Succession and Materialists, and was due to appear in Iconclasts, Gabriel Basso's directorial debut. However, all that came crumbling down after an amateur actor in the industry’s multi-year crusade to get the actress and podcaster canceled finally made headway.

Canceling Dasha Nekrasova

After hosting Nicholas J. Fuentes on a recent episode of Red Scare, actor and producer Jonathan Daniel Brown wrote some concerned emails to Gersh, the agency that employed Nekrasova. The industry adversary had an axe to grind with Nekrasova’s platforming of problematic intellectuals with extreme views like “white supremacists and fascists.” I will leave that up to the readers to decide, as multiple people in The Hollywood Reporter article are falsely listed as white nationalists despite neither subscribing to that ideology (notably Richard Hanania and Steve Sailer) and falsely refer to public intellectual Curtis Yarvin as “Curtis Jarvin.”

Brown had been emailing agents at Gersh for more than two years, pressuring them to fire Nekrasova for espousing problematic views and mingling with unsavory public figures. Brown spent multiple years tracking Nekrasova’s comments on Red Scare and dutifully reporting them to the Hollywood gatekeepers. While he claims they never responded, he took notice of Gersh agents who were suddenly monitoring his Instagram stories.

After seeing the October 28 episode of Red Scare featuring Nick Fuentes, he reached out to Gersh again in addition to the agency’s majority owners, still to no avail. Deciding to ramp up the urgency, he shared his concerns on his public Instagram stories and tagged a Deadline journalist, which seemed to speed things up. Pretty quickly after, Gersh Communications was reportedly looking at his stories, and Nekrasova was swiftly dropped from the agency. But Brown was not done; he wanted to finish the job.

Brown had contacted a producer on the upcoming Iconoclast film, informing them of the Nekrasova controversy, suggesting it was a “bad idea to be associated with anyone who is openly pro-Hitler.” After news of Gersh dropping Nekrasova broke, he followed up with the producer, texting, “I hope you find an excellent actress to replace her,” to which the producer reportedly responded, “Yes. She is being replaced right now.”

Nekrasova, who describes herself as a free speech absolutist, has been making light of the situation, calling The Hollywood Reporter's bombshell a “tremendous story about a brave man and his years-long quest to punish a podcaster who had the audacity to have a job.” She has previously foreshadowed her cancellation, telling Megyn Kelly, “I understand why I have been hindered in my career as an actress for being a media personality,” adding, “it is not ideal. It is a liability, people do not like liability,” and confirming that her agent tells her to shut up. As for why she has hosted such controversial figures on her podcast? She told Megyn Kelly, “I think things will shift,” perhaps seeing herself as the one to make that shift a reality.

Appearing post-firing on the Glenn Greenwald show, Nekrasova admits she thought the Overton window had shifted enough that interviewing Fuentes was no longer a big deal. He has recently been profiled by virtually every mainstream news publication, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Reuters, and the list goes on. He has also recently appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show, to much criticism that has divided public opinion on the right.

On an Instagram post, Brown argues that some of these online influencers, who the entertainment industry is trying to cast in TV and film to garner the attention of younger, more online audiences, have ideological belief systems that are “incompatible with a sane and democratic society.” Brown admits he is not perfect and claims he is “not a cancel culture guy,” literally as he campaigns to cancel someone for guilt by association, but says if you espouse a viewpoint on your platform that sides with the team that lost WWII, “then we are going to have a f***ing problem.” Brown argues that there are so many talented actors and creatives who have that basic sense of right and wrong baked into their belief system that Hollywood should just hire those people.

What an interesting moral conscience. This guy has starred in pornography and has spent multiple years engaging in behavior many describe as stalking and harassment of a young Hollywood actress but wants to be the authority of moral abasement in the industry. Is it out of spite? Many believe so, considering his most notable film credit is in the 2012 film Project X. When Brown beckons for Hollywood to hire more creatives with an actual moral pulse, he is really saying, “Please, pretty please, hire me!”

From Sailor Socialism to TradCath?

Once known as “Sailor Socialism,” Dasha Nekrasova first went viral online in 2018, after a man-on-the-street interview with InfoWars guest reporter Ashton Blaise Whitty. Dressed in a Sailor Moon outfit, she was approached by Whitty at an SXSW event where Bernie Sanders was slated to give a speech. Whitty asked her what she likes about Sanders as well as why she supports socialism.

The values Nekrasova said gave Sanders a lot of integrity included being a socialist and standing for “eating the rich.” Whitty’s attempted gotcha maneuvers fell flat when she tried to establish an inconsistency in Nekrasova’s support for socialism. Most notably, Whitty tried to draw a parallel to Venezuela with the classic line “a majority of the country is currently eating rats while their politicians are drinking champagne on a daily basis.” To be fair to Whitty, there were isolated reports of Venezuelans eating rats during the economic collapse, but her claim was grossly exaggerated and amounted to a self-own.

Throughout the interview, Nekrasova, clearly not a seasoned political commentator, maintained her composure, was quick on her feet, and emitted a sort of disaffected wry humor that won over viewers. Deadpan lines like “I just want people to have healthcare, honey” became instant classics. Her drawn-out dismissive vocal fry and Slavic attitude sipping on her iced coffee without a care in the world made people curious about who this random, quick-witted girl dressed like Sailor Moon was, and how she was so effortlessly mogging. It shot Nekrasova to internet fame while serving as something of a humiliation for Whitty.

Failing to capture the “triggered snowflake” or “libtard owned” clips InfoWars had her gunning for, the internet thought Nekrasova was compellingly charismatic and felt like Whitty was out of her depth. Whitty’s tenure with InfoWars turned out to be short-lived, and she has been incredibly hard on herself over the years because of this interaction. It has led to a lot of self-reflection, accountability, a career change, and a lot of humility to admit that at a young age, an oversized ego led her down the wrong path. She has since found her way back to more authentic interests revolving around pop culture, and when she does talk about politics, she does so less authoritatively rather than positioning herself as an expert.

The reason I bring up this exchange is that the most amusing thing about it is the Freaky Friday switch Nekrasova and Whitty performed, as some have joked on social media. That is, Nekrasova went on to become known as a tradcath podcaster as co-host of Red Scare with Anna Khachiyan, and Whitty went on to embrace a post-right identity and largely rejected much of what she advocated for in her short public political career.

The first episode of Red Scare was released two weeks after the viral InfoWars debacle, and they quickly positioned themselves as “one of the seminal Dirtbag Left podcasts.” Their influence has been huge: achieving numerous celebrity listeners like Lena Dunham, Charli XCX, Chloe Sevigny, Elizabeth Olsen, Slavoj Zizek, and Mike White, who modeled the Gen Z characters Paula and Olivia, played by Brittany O’Grady and Sydney Sweeney, after the Red Scare hosts for the debut season of The White Lotus.

The early days of the podcast positioned itself as socialist-sympathizing Slavic women (Nekrasova is from Belarus but immigrated to the United States when she was four) who were more concerned with class struggle than identity politics. As such, they positioned themselves as “dirtbag leftists” who were burnt out on woke liberal politics and opposed to neoliberalism, the excesses of liberal girlboss feminism, and the wokescold tactics of Lefty Twitter. They were anti-cancel culture, pro-vulgarity and offensive comedy through a vaguely left-wing, irony-poisoned lens.

Leftist YouTuber Hoots Hootman contextualizes the history of the Dirtbag Left, explaining that the term was coined by Amber A’Lee Frost to describe a political style that “eschews civility and embraces vulgarity,” which was popularized by a conglomeration of mostly left-leaning New York City podcasters in the mid-2010s. The genre was trailblazed by the podcast Chapo Trap House in 2016. The dirtbag ethos can best be understood as a leftist political strategy to fight fire with fire.

Where liberal politics were previously synonymous with cringe therapy speak, empathy language, rambling, weepy think pieces, and wokescolding, a more reactionary wing of the left emerged and asked themselves, “Why do we not just embrace irreverence and political incorrectness to achieve our political aims?” The Dirtbag Left embraced shitposting, memes, irony-poisoned communication, and a sort of ideological code-switching akin to locker-room talk. The objective was to win over people who were disillusioned with wokeness and convert them into caring about class politics by speaking their language through anti-respectability discourse.

Shifting Rightward

Red Scare has been incredibly successful because it started out as a left-wing firebrand hosted by two Slavic women born in Belarus and Moscow, whose signature disaffected tone gave them a reputation of nihilistic distance between the issues they discussed. From 2018 to present, the podcast has shifted from edgy leftism to post-left with reactionary aesthetics but stops short of actually embracing conservatism or traditionalist ideologies wholesale (though they definitely flirt with it).

They rejected the political binary, continuing to move culturally rightward and embracing tradcath vibes, but it's more accurate to describe them as apolitical cultural pessimists. In a recent interview with Joshua Citarella, Nekrasova clarifies her political evolution by responding, “I mean, I did not have real political commitments,” which is her way of saying she is not partisan. She maintains that her personal and political beliefs have not really shifted that much; “the center has just shifted,” but she does not consider herself a conservative who “left the left” or even affiliated with the right in any meaningful sense.

While she reflects on how she was nominally affiliated with the left, she clarifies, “I cannot really say I had, like, real convictions.” They touch on this concept of the Bernie Bro to New Right pipeline, too, which is the hypothesis that there was a political pipeline between Bernie supporters who liked Sanders for his populist ideals and class over identity politics rhetoric, finding common ground with the populist politics of Trump regarding anti-wokeness, anti-establishmentarianism, and concern for working-class Americans. Nekrasova grants that these seem like vaguely real phenomena but maintains that it's mostly the political realignment taking place around her that is most responsible for her evolution.

Her approach to political thought reminds me of a recent essay from Charli XCX on “the realities of being a popstar.” In it, she articulates feeling perplexed by the expectations placed on pop stars to be entirely truthful all the time. “Over recent years, some people seem to have developed a connection between fame and moral responsibility that I have never really understood. All my favorite artists are absolutely not role models, nor would I want them to be, but maybe that is just me. I want hedonism, danger, and a sense of anti-establishment to come along with my artists because when I was younger, I wanted to escape through them,” she writes. As for whether the artists she looks up to tell the truth, lie, play a character, adopt a persona, or fabricate entire scenarios and worlds? To her, that is the point, where the drama, fun, and fantasy lie.

Nekrasova approaches Red Scare much in the same way and articulates looking forward to a post-politics sentiment that will arise from the Trumpian era. “Politics will not be so charged, and people will not feel such a need to identify themselves with political factions or take some principled stance on global or domestic politics,” she says, granting that this vision might be naive or too optimistic.

Citarella asks her about her position on journalistic ethics and whether they should apply to the influential cultural currency that new media has. Since influencers and content creators are now filling the roles journalists, editors, and curators used to in generations past before eroding institutional trust, what responsibility do they share in producing quality information that shapes and informs political subjects?

Nekrasova responds, “I do not see myself really that way. I guess I still see myself primarily as an entertainer, and so the quality of my information and platform kind of has to do with my performance and ability to entertain people,” adding that she does not necessarily see herself doing hard-hitting reporting even when she has an interview subject. “It is the radio. I am trying to do, like, a radio show, and my ultimate responsibility is to entertain rather than to inform, and to be honest.”

The Fuentes Question

This sets the scene for her eagerness to interview controversial subjects, beginning with Alex Jones, and solidifying a full-circle moment politically. Most recently, though, Red Scare crossed a line in the minds of many who view Nick Fuentes through a lens of menacing villainy, threatening to co-opt the future of conservatism with his Groyper army.

Fuentes is the Christian Nationalist leader of the political faction known as the Groypers. Quickly cast out from mainstream conservatism, he carved out a niche as the anti-establishment semi-identitarian leader of the far right. For years, he was relegated to the fringes of online political organization. He was deplatformed, de-banked, and even placed on the No Fly list for a time. If he was a threat to the establishment, he was a neutered one until very recently. In the wake of the more moderate face of the young Republican voting cohort, Charlie Kirk’s shocking assassination on a college campus in September, people scrambled to speculate who would fill the power vacuum.

The dust seems to have settled, ironically, around Fuentes, Kirk’s political nemesis, who has been more discerning with his public image in recent years, especially in response to Kirk’s assassination. Fuentes, for the first time, had an outpouring of kind and respectable things to say about Kirk. Importantly, he condemned all forms of political violence and retribution, calling his followers to embody the teachings of Christ, to unconditionally love our enemies, and pursue legitimate institutional power from the ground up. People find Fuentes’ growing influence worrisome and for good reason, but it's complicated.

He has gone viral countless times over the years for his inflammatory statements that flirt with all the isms: racism, sexism, antisemitism, his ironic or not so ironic praise of Hitler, his taunting of pro choice women over Roe v. Wade with memes like “your body, my choice,” and his rants about wanting to settle down with 16-year-old brides when he is 30 because women “age like milk.” These are obviously intentional ragebait. Some of it is a fictional persona, some of it is performance art, some of it is throwing a bone to the audience. As Richard Hanania has pointed out, some of it's trolling, but it taps into an underlying ideological sincerity.

Much of Fuentes’ ascension as something of a cult of personality has to do not only with his charisma and skill as an articulate orator, or his sense of humor, or positioning as the edgy conservative speaking truth to power, but with his capitalization on the disillusionment of young white American men, a niche with unmet demand before Fuentes came along. If anything, the left has proven that intimidation tactics of institutional depersoning, censorship, and narrative control, all of these only temporarily hinder a political enemy.

In the bigger picture, it positions them as a dangerous truth-teller, of being seductively punk, a martyr for the cause. Speaking of martyrs, it does not help that the moderate alternative to Fuentes's public murder was just celebrated by far too many on the left. The reality is, a lot of poor decisions have led us to where we are right now, and while it would be great if we could, in hindsight, course correct, we are where we are. Fuentes cannot be ignored. I mean, you can ignore him, but because he has substantial influence and is a leading right-wing thought leader, that influence will not just fizzle out overnight; it's demanding to be addressed.

Chris Rufo wrote an essay titled What Everyone Misses About Nick Fuentes calling for people to prioritize cool analysis over emotional reaction. He argues that the mainstream media is failing a basic literacy test by taking his statements seriously and engaging with them in good faith. “Instead, the Right should consider him an actor in what postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard called 'hyperreality,' a system in which the simulation of reality comes to replace reality itself.”

He explains that under conditions of hyperreality, symbols of past phenomena, Hitler included, lose their original meaning. “Emptied out, they then circulate through digital media, where they drive the discourse and, while purely derivative, still spark real emotional involvement. In this way, the hyperreal becomes 'more real than real,' masking the true nature of reality.” Rufo argues this is Fuentes’ true framework, embracing these taboos because doing so drives attention and creates a spectacle in digital media that benefits him. It's only successful because Fuentes became the perfect avatar for the left’s decade-long strawmanning of the conservative movement. It eventually burnt out on itself, and we now enter a post-Godwin’s Law era of discourse.

Talking to the Enemy

On Red Scare, Khachiyan in particular pushes back on several of Fuentes’ ideas, asks for clarification on others, and questions whether some of his positions are hypocritical. But she also gives him the opportunity to discuss his public persona and whether he is embracing sanitizing his image. His answer is quite revealing. “I feel like the game years ago is that being an edgelord had a lot of currency. To say the edgiest thing got you attention, and people were outraged, and now I feel like it has become passé. It is almost like cringe to be an edgelord because it is like ‘oh, great, this guy is making a Hitler joke, he thinks that is still funny.’”

The broadening of the Overton window under Elon Musk’s X has made formerly unutterable statements banal. Paradoxically, the ability to say anything has reduced the social capital of trolling. What was subversive ten years ago is now just content. The problem is, the left does not really have a leg to stand on in opposing identitarianism, in whitewashing mass atrocities and the leaders responsible for them.

Fuentes’ relevance has risen in direct proportion to the left’s insistence that white men need to be scapegoated for all of our country’s problems while ignoring their grievances. Hyperbolic framing of everything as Nazism meant that they overplayed their hand with that accusation. People had so much Nazi fatigue they could not bring themselves to care anymore. It made identifying with the “real” thing mimetically appealing.

In recent years, though, Fuentes has developed a kind of playful contempt for his audience, constantly course-correcting the absurd fringes of his followers when they lean too conspiratorial, blame everything on Israel or the Jews, and fall for other far-right mimetic viruses. It seems that Fuentes entering the mainstream has also necessitated forming more sophisticated politics that do not, well, scare everyone. Mindless glazing of Fuentes is a problem, but the more visibility he has in the mainstream, the less appeal he has as a transgressive firebrand that institutions fear.

As the modern equivalent of radio shock jocks, Red Scare should be free to talk to whomever they want, especially if the goal is de-radicalization. That does not happen through isolation or ostracism. How do you think skinheads reform after prison, by everyone refusing to speak to them? If we're suddenly holding podcasters to journalistic standards, it's worth remembering that journalists have always “platformed” wrongthink if not outright criminality by interviewing serial killers, vigilantes, dictators, and mass murderers.

These conversations are matters of public interest. And as long as mainstream outlets keep publishing unintentionally flattering profiles of Fuentes to the extent of being accused of editing his photos to make him look more like a “Chad,” it's hard to argue that two internet culture commentators having a frank conversation with him is beyond the pale. If The New York Times can contend with his ideas, so can they.