In the lull before September 11, before the Iraq war and resurgent white nationalism and 4chan, we were young, upper-middle-class white men with excess energy, more than we could expend on Swedish death metal or catfishing with a 28.8 Kbps modem. Our lefty cousins, ahead of the curve, attentive already to wealth inequality and wage stagnation, fought the Battle of Seattle, smashing Starbucks windows and looting Niketown against globalization, an augury of Naomi Klein and, much later, Occupy Wall Street. Meanwhile, I wrote essays defending urban sprawl and deriding global warming as a hoax.

Ours was a pastiche conservatism, rooted in our belief that we were smarter and more deserving of success than anyone else. Because we lacked evidence for this belief, we adopted an ethos of quotidian domination; we were debased Nietzscheans for whom cruelty signaled strength. We convinced the school to let us do an independent study on Ayn Rand. We called it “Philosophy.” Because we had already read Rand’s full oeuvre, we spent our time creating an elaborate joke, a series of intricately illustrated posters for made-up clubs—the John Stamos Society, the Council of Elders—vehicles for coded slander and eerie absurdism expressed through Simpsons and South Park quotes, lampooning a classmate’s mother’s alleged sexual habits or depicting two clowns discussing an abusive father over a water cooler. We had a mentor, a young social studies teacher who was named Branden after Rand’s acolyte and lover, Nathaniel Branden. But he was a liberal, for which we mocked him to his face.