“How did the author of Harry Potter become an avatar of conservative cause?” like

“how did VICE give rise to the Proud Boys”, “how did celebreality competition TV give us a president”, “why is 4chan still Like That but now geopolitically”, “why is Billy Corgan conservative now”, “why was Dan Savage’s Seattle Stranger the cradle for Jesse Singal’s clique”, “why is Matt Yglesias at least anti-bluepilled now”

“Cultural conservatism” has updated its golden-age referent from The Fifties to The Nineties (in both cases it showed up late and bled into the next decade). The people who rose to the top of The 90s Culture will defend it as fundamentally legitimate, which is now coded as archconservative

Meditate on the way the Reaganite 80s (lasting into the Clinton era, remember school uniforms and prayer as issues lol) were taken as an unstoppable onslaught of 50s revival but in the 90s it was obvious that people who kept the spirit of the 60s alive had won

(And how in fact performatively dirtbag VICE was really part of 2000s 70s-revivalism, same as American Apparel)