Tina's Tragedy

Notes on "The MAGA Diaries: My Surreal Adventures Inside the Right-Wing (and How I Got Out)"

This is the book of an anxious woman who feels trapped and feels the need to explain herself. But it’s a misconception about memoir-writing that just because you’re writing about yourself, you are excused from learning about the people you’ve been involved with, and really, if you want to do it well, you have to try and give them a fair hearing. That’s the test Tina fails too many times here.

It’s not her fault. If she were honest, the Israelis would hurt her, too. Tina Nguyen has decided the safe thing to do, despite the chaos in Israel and multiple indictments of Israeli spies over the last year, is to describe anyone talking about it as shrieking about Jews. I am sorry to put it this way and it will offend some people, but there is a very Asian striver sensibility and status-consciousness on display here.

There are all sorts of benefits to being friends with David Frum, with whom she is speaking tomorrow at Politics and Prose, but only if you toe the line. And the line of David Frum, that consummate unpatriotic dual loyalist, is not America’s. This is a book about getting out of the right, but if she’s still in his orbit, can she really say she has?

Frum is well aware of the weirdness of the restrictionist world, and when Tina is briefly employed with a former Tom Tancredo aide, she’s closely in touch with him. Tina is caught in a trap where the Israelis get to decide what legitimate restrictionist opinion is, and which is considered racist. They change their minds all the time about that, so it’s no surprise that Tina feels anxious about it.

I’ll be up front here, I know almost everyone in the first half of this book, even the people who are not named. There’s a curious character who recurs throughout, whom she calls “Maxwell.” Maxwell is a “gangly boy,” “wearing a suit in the sweltering heat.” Maxwell wrote about broadband with Tina. Maxwell knew Grover Norquist and wanted to be a speechwriter. “Maxwell and I had bonded over our love of musicals and song parodies.” Maxwell has invited her to a party at David Frum’s house. And, finally, Maxwell has been palling around with Richard Spencer.

Maxwell is a sword-cane figure, by which I mean the sort of person who would own a sword cane. The kind who fancies himself a practitioner of the dark arts—my favorite euphemism for sodomy. A person for whom the Romans invented their taboos about thespians. Mischling Maxwell is Mytheos Holt.

I asked Tina about this last night and she confirmed it, and gave me several unsatisfying explanations for why he is pseudonymized here. She does not feel he is a public figure, though he is at least as much of one as many of the others here. He is, I’m told, living in LA under an assumed name. She claims not to have spoken to him in a long time. She claims neither David Frum nor Mytheos himself asked her to use the pseudonym.

This is very curious because Holt has had bylines in a whole bunch of publications, used to write for FrumForum, and was employed at a number of think tanks. I suspect that we have another reporter, like Rosie Gray, close to the Israelis, who is hiding things about white nationalists. How about that?

The tell that this is a bad book is the unnatural quality of the audio recording of her reading it. Her prose is unmusical, except when she’s writing about her early life. It doesn’t sound good. There are only so many twists on a phrase like “adrenaline-juiced journey through the raging id of MAGA populism” you can actually write.

This is also a book about a weird inferiority complex people who write for conservative publications develop. There are endless lines about her fear of being ghettoized, something she was warned about by Matt Lewis. She describes herself as “pretending to be a conservative pretending to be journalist,” a “grody content orphan,” and a “grubby little ex-libertarian blog monkey[] banging on [a] typewriter.” There’s a fine line between being self-effacing and lacking self-respect. As for Lewis, he has maintained his respectability by going to work for Beijing Barry Diller, who was involved with 23andMe. If this is respectability, to hell with it.

Her time as a tech reporter at the Daily Caller, in which funding was arranged by Jon Henke and she was vetted for ideological conformity, obviously looks like a corrupt arrangement, which to her credit she was uncomfortable with. It is not, however, unique to conservative media for tech reporting to have a serious payola and corruption problem. That’s one reason the explosive shifts in the tech economy over the last year have felt so violent.

Another recurring figure in this book, who has been involved in similar activities as Mischling Maxwell, is Charles Johnson. She knew him as “Charlie,” when he was her high school boyfriend, and later he becomes “Chuck.” I can see why she feels the need to explain this relationship. Charles is a colorful figure.

Tina more or less has learned to think what her colleagues in the New York media think about Charles, though many of them have worked with him as a source, and it is now a documented fact that he was a federal informant. The Israelis don’t want you to think it’s OK to talk to him. In fact, for talking to him and sussing some of this out, they leaned on Neil Patel to get him not to re-hire me a few years ago, which is very typical of their sort of blackballing. I’m tempted to make a joke that after letting them into the clubs, this is what they start to do. At a certain point we need publishers who are willing to stand up to it.

Let’s just go over some of Tina’s basic claims about Charles, some of which she is clinging to after they have become untenable. She brings up the Bob Menendez controversy about the Dominican child hookers, from about a decade ago. She says, uncritically, that Charles was fed that story by Cuban counterintelligence, which was the spin of Menendez himself at the time, and all the Israeli-aligned reporters accepted it. Given that Menendez was charged with corruption this year, it might be cause for a little more open-mindedness.

Tina is, in other words, not very good at this. She presents no evidence for the claim, which is quite a serious one, that the Russians “would feed [Johnson] intel meant to destabilize trust in American institutions.” In fact, it appears to be him who persuaded Peter Thiel to become an FBI informant on the Russians. Johnson is rendered here as Thiel’s “hatchet man,” and being the one who hooked Thiel up with a group of far-right guys for that dinner in Cleveland in 2016. It was actually someone else, and I’m curious why he hasn’t showed up in some of these stories yet.

Tina exhibits a basic lack of familiarity with business that can be attractive in a woman but is unbecoming in a reporter. She doesn’t seem to know what angel investing is, and describes the PayPal mafia as comprised of programmers, which is not really true. You can read her account of the Clearview AI situation if you care how Tina felt about it, but it won’t help you understand it in any way. The technology certainly raises a lot of ethical and cultural questions, but it’s not really accurate to call it, strictly speaking, a “privacy-smashing technology.” There’s now a whole book about this company. Maybe Tina should read it. She ends this chapter quoting one of Charles’s fairly recent blog posts, before doing a WASP impression: “Poor boy, I thought, despite myself.”

Poor girl, I’m afraid.

It’s hard to describe how strange Tina’s sensibility is. She treats politics as theater, but is obsessed with these weird marginal guys, which is a little bit like preferring burlesque to opera. She describes trying her hand at reporting on the left, and being disappointed by how low-stakes she feels it all is—she asks AOC a question about how the “party elders” feel about her. There’s a brief interlude about Reid Hoffman and how a bunch of sincere liberals don’t like him.

“It wasn’t that I couldn’t map the left, I realized,” she writes. “It was just that the left had, relatively speaking, nothing to map.” This is just plainly untrue. She describes as “wokeism” “the idea that liberals were trying to institute some great social leveler on behalf of minorities and underrepresented groups.” There’s a sublime, Zen-like quality to this line for anyone who knows lefties, or who has spent any time with them. I think they would say they are trying to do this. Does she, like, know how any of this works?

I hate going to meetings as much as the next guy, but it really is tens of thousands of aldermen, precinct captains, members of county boards and boards of zoning appeals that do most of the governing in this country. It’s a little sad that she’s uninterested in their stories, and it’s maybe the one way she fits in with the people from Vanity Fair.

One might expect Tina to also have a little more insight into the conservative movement, given that it’s where she spent a decent chunk of her life and which she now writes about professionally. She writes in the introduction that thousands of books have been written about it, but she doesn't seem to have read any of them. And she seems basically uninterested in things like money flows or who the main players are.

There is a lack of charity to her subjects here, and an unwillingness to credit some of their claims. Conservative activists are described as avoiding TikTok because “in their belief, it was a Chinese-government-backed spyware app and not to be trusted.” Well? Conservatives “wouldn’t have seized their power through a violent coup—they were going to do it gradually and slowly, using the Constitution as a clever road map.” Isn’t this just participating in government? It is on page 11, when she describes conservative activism as a “kudzu plant,” that one realizes she simply has absorbed the Condé Nast set’s general perspective that there’s something weedy about conservatives’ participation in public life at all. Yet we are supposed to feel bad for her that “acknowledging that I see this figures as real, living humans—not monsters but people—has taken a toll in my life.”

This is a very, “are we the baddies?” sort of comment.

There’s a sad Alice in Wonderland quality to this story, too—a fish not noticing the water. She thinks she’s special because she met Andrew Breitbart in college, was introduced to Alan Dershowitz by her high school boyfriend, is introduced to David Frum and babysits his daughter. She’s brought over to Politico by the very Israeli Blake Hounshell, who tragically jumped off a bridge last year. She describes Frum at one point as “my one last thread to the world of legitimacy.” Hanging by a thread, of course, is exactly how he wants her.