The rise of the cosmopolitan chud… – John Michael Chambers

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There’s something a bit strange about being a right-wing American living in Florence, a city where nearly everything is wrapped up in art, history, beauty, architecture, literature, and culture. Not because any of those things belong exclusively to the left, but because somewhere along the way, modern culture became so closely tied to liberal politics that people basically think of the two as a package deal.

Most of the expats I meet are very liberal, and Florence is hardly known as a great conservative stronghold. My circle of friends includes artists, writers, poets, and even a few eccentric performers, which means politically I’m basically a red dot on a very deep blue canvas.

I’ve always felt completely at home around artists, writers, theater kids, and wonderfully strange creative people. The awkward part is that modern politics has decided a right-winger like me isn’t supposed to belong in that world.

I don’t need to show my voter registration card to appreciate Michelangelo’s work. I can spend an afternoon wandering through a museum, read a great novel, listen to strange music, travel somewhere completely unfamiliar, and surround myself with interesting people who see the world differently than I do. None of that has ever felt political to me. Those are simply the things that make life interesting.

Somewhere along the way, though, politics decided that these things belong to the left.

The cultural world became increasingly associated with liberal politics: Hollywood, publishing, universities, galleries, music, independent film, fashionable neighborhoods, literary circles, and all those little places where young people gather to talk about ideas, discover something new, and figure out who they are.
The right became culturally associated with a very different set of places and values: churches, suburbs and small towns, family life, business, the military, sports, hunting and fishing, country music, talk radio, pickup trucks, practical skills, patriotism, and a general suspicion of institutions like Hollywood, universities, modern art, and elite media.
None of those right-wing things are bad. The problem is that over time they became a complete cultural identity, while the left claimed the other half of life: galleries, literature, independent movies, theater, fashion, cities, intellectual circles, experimental music, bohemian neighborhoods, and the general idea of being “cultured.”
So you ended up with this bizarre choice: if you liked hunting, church, football, and the military, you were on the right. But if you liked foreign films, museums, poetry, weird music, and that cool downtown life, you were on the left.
Over time, that cultural “line in the sand” started feeding itself. The more left-wing cultural spaces became, the faster conservatives ran away. And the faster conservatives ran, the easier it was for the left to take complete ownership.
And the more hostile Hollywood, universities, publishing, museums, and the arts became toward conservatives, the more conservatives said, “Fine, screw those people.”
This made it so much easier for the left to dominate those institutions.

These days, if you’re young, culturally curious, artistic, urban, and interested in books, music, or film, everybody pretty much knows your politics. I can attest to this as an expat living in Italy. Apparently, moving to Florence comes with a whole political starter pack: I hate America, Orange Man bad, and naturally I escaped to Europe just in time to avoid MAGA fascism.
And for eons, those assumptions were pretty spot-on, and nobody questioned them. But now that old way of sorting people into neat little political boxes is starting to fall apart.
Something interesting is happening, especially among young conservative men.
A growing number of young men are moving to the right politically, and they’re doing it without turning into cultural monks. They aren’t suddenly throwing away their hip record collections, abandoning cool cities, or deciding that art, fashion, literature, foreign films, travel, and philosophy were all mistakes from their liberal past.
In other words, they’re not trading in their Criterion Collection for a fishing pole.
They still enjoy the same things they did before they busted out of the political closet. What changed was how they see politics, society, and the future.
Welcome to the rise of the cosmopolitan chud.
“Chud” started out as an insult, a favorite bit of Internet slang used by the left for the kind of right-wing guy they considered a backwards, obnoxious dullard. There’s even a whole meme character built around him, called the Chudjak.

pic.twitter.com/iFb3QNYu3m

— Chudjak (@chudjak) October 7, 2024

But the right-wing guys do what they always do when somebody tries to insult them: instead of being victims, they own the insult and wear it like a badge of honor.

And maybe that’s where this story gets even more interesting.

If these young men can take a name that was supposed to shame them and make it their own, why can’t they do the same thing with culture? Why should the left get to keep art, music, movies, great books, galleries, cool neighborhoods, and everything else that supposedly comes with being young and culturally interesting?

Maybe the next thing the cosmopolitan chud takes back isn’t another political insult. Maybe it’s culture itself.

And that brings us to Australian writer Drew Pavlou, who recently wrote about this exact dilemma in a Substack essay with the wonderfully ridiculous title, “The Dilemma of the Cosmopolitan Chud.” Pavlou describes the whole thing as having a “right wing brain but a left wing personality.”

Here’s how Pavlou explains the problem.

Drew Pavlou’s Iceberg Journal:

It’s extremely difficult being a cosmopolitan chud.

I have been struggling through this ever since I finally declared myself to be right wing last year and lost most of my friends.

My politics changed but my cultural interests remained the same, which led me to reflect on the way the left dominates the cultural products I enjoy.

Let’s face it, there is very little in the way of ‘‘cool’’ right wing film, literature, music, art today.

What makes his story interesting isn’t just that some right-wing guy likes books and movies. It’s what happened when he stopped keeping his politics safely inside the cultural lines that have been firmly drawn around him. He says he lost most of his friends, and suddenly the places where he had always felt comfortable and welcomed came with a new problem… sure, he could still belong there culturally, but only as long as nobody looked too closely at what he believed.

Pavlou gives a perfect real-life example of what that felt like. He shares the time he went to an Earl Sweatshirt concert. He was surrounded by people who shared his taste in music but probably very little else.

Drew Pavlou’s Iceberg Journal:

I go to the Earl Sweatshirt concert and everyone’s waving Palestine flags and talking about ‘‘Land Back’’ and other woke shit. Honestly, I don’t care. I actually genuinely don’t really cancel people for their personal views. If everyone around me is going to be left-wing, I literally don’t care – I’m still going to enjoy the concert. I’m not like mentally obsessed with politics to the degree that I can’t go to a concert surrounded by left-wing people and just enjoy it. But at the same time, it’s still difficult and it’s still alienating to know everyone there would hate you if they could see you through the darkness.

That’s a much weirder kind of exile than just being “unwelcome” somewhere. You’re still inside the room. You know the music, understand the inside jokes, love the art, and speak the “insider” language. You just know there are parts of yourself you now have to hide.

The irony is hard to miss. For decades, the left has insisted that nobody should have to hide an important part of themselves just to stay welcome in the room. That’s a pretty good principle, actually. It just seems to come with one gigantic exception: whatever you do, don’t let anybody find out you’re right-wing.

And honestly, that’s the bigger deal here. We got to a point where being artistic, culturally curious, urban, well-read, or interested in the bigger world came with a political label. But it wasn’t always this way. The right didn’t spend much of Western history kicked back in a recliner watching football while the left painted, wrote novels, composed music, and built beautiful things. Conservatives, traditionalists, nationalists, religious thinkers, eccentrics, rebels, and legit political misfits have always been part of the cultural world.

But over time, the cultural worlds drifted apart. Universities, publishing, Hollywood, journalism, theater, modern art, and the music business marched firmly to the left, while conservatives built their lives around a very different set of institutions and tradition. The right also became very suspicious of the cultural establishment, eventually treating it like enemy territory.

Once the right decided the cultural world was enemy territory, it did the worst thing possible… it surrendered the ground and walked away. Conservatives got very good at criticizing bad movies, mocking ridiculous art, complaining about Hollywood, boycotting brands, and building their own media ecosystem, but criticism isn’t creation, is it?

Meanwhile, the left didn’t return the favor. It kept pushing into spaces the right once thought were safe, from churches and sports to country music and corporate America.

And taking culture back doesn’t mean turning every movie into a campaign commercial or painting Trump riding a bald eagle into the sunset. That approach misses the entire point. It means young men on the right decide they’re allowed to make beautiful, strange, provocative, funny, and ambitious things without first asking whether those things fit neatly inside somebody’s idea of “conservative culture.”

Which brings us right back to Pavlou, because after laying out this whole strange dilemma, he ends up asking the question that really matters.

Drew Pavlou’s Iceberg Journal:

I still want to be involved in the world.Where do we go from here? When will the next great right wing artist emerge?

Maybe the answer is that the next great right-wing artist doesn’t need permission to emerge from the shadows. And he most certainly doesn’t need a separate “conservative” art world either. He may already be out there making films, writing novels, designing clothes, composing music, painting, building, or doing something none of us has thought of yet. The real shift comes when young men on the right stop seeing culture as somebody else’s territory and start treating it as a place where they belong, too.

Every generation makes its own culture, and this one is coming of age in a completely different world. These guys grew up on the Internet, with memes, rock music, video games, podcasts, foreign films, political chaos, and access to basically every book, song, painting, and bad idea humanity ever produced. Whatever they create from that strange mix is going to be theirs.

Drew Pavlou’s X post is what got me thinking about all of this in the first place, and it’s worth reading in full:

It’s extremely difficult being a cosmopolitan chud.

I have been struggling through this ever since I finally declared myself to be right wing last year and lost most of my friends.

My politics changed but my cultural interests remained the same, which led me to reflect on the way the left dominates the cultural products I enjoy.

Let’s face it, there is very little in the way of ‘‘cool’’ right wing film, literature, music, art today.

Most culture in the West today is either explicitly left wing or at the very least just kind of ambiently woke.

So if you like film, literature, music, art, you either have to just accept everything being vaguely left wing forever or become a hermit.

Historically there have been many great right wing artists: Mishima, Eliot, Cormac McCarthy. But they are few and far between these days, and many artists with right wing views feel that they need to hide it. So it remains true that the left dominates most culture today.

This is one of the biggest difficulties in my life right now, the tension between my right wing politics and my cultural interests and cosmopolitan personality type.

My conversion to right-wing politics was essentially an intellectual conversion over a decade, because I eventually decided that left-wing ideology was intellectually bankrupt and could not be justified rationally.

And yet at the same time, my cultural interests remain largely the same cultural interests as any young person in their twenties in the West today.

While I am a proud Christian, I am not an austere Trad Cath type who wants people to reject the modern world, and I am not a born again Christian fundamentalist type that thinks playing Grand Theft Auto is Satanic.

(Note: I once had a second uncle try to stop my Mum from letting me play GTA and World of Warcraft as a kid. He said these video games were demonic and anti-Christian. Honestly he was correct to stop me playing WoW because it would have made me a massive loser but I still think he was wrong about GTA).

So this is the overall difficulty I face: being right wing with a cosmopolitan personality type. It’s like having a right wing brain but a left wing personality.

I’ve always had the same personality since I was a kid. I always hated censorship and always fought with the strict teachers at school. I always chafed against arbitrary imposed restrictions and remember desperately wanting to grow up quicker so that I could read, watch, play whatever I wanted.

Back then, I used to read Mad Magazine and despised old crusty conservatives who wanted to ban video games like Grand Theft Auto.

I still remember there were some parents at school who wouldn’t even let their kids watch The Simpsons because they thought it was anti-Christian.

I was really lucky that I had relatively chill parents who let me basically read or watch anything I wanted. I always liked being able to just chart my own path and explore on my own without annoying arbitrary restrictions by adults.

When I was in junior school, Mum wrote a note to the school library allowing me to borrow Stephen King books like ‘‘The Shining’’ which helped me fall in love with reading. Around the same time I started listening to Tyler the Creator through his dark ‘‘Tron Cat’’ era.

Earlier still, when I was 8, my Dad let me watch the legendary Coen Brothers movie ‘‘No Country For Old Men’’ with him. It basically became my all time favourite movie. Adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s novel, the film follows Sheriff Bell as he laments that the old America is dead. In Bell’s eyes, terrifying, nihilistic, amoral forces sweep in over the southern border and plunge the country into moral chaos.

I was lucky that I got to direct my own learning as a kid.

I never really liked the structured environment of school and always got school detention for playing class clown and fighting with authoritarian teachers.

When I got to university I absolutely loved it because I had more freedom. I enjoyed the intellectual environment and really loved being able to pursue my own intellectual interests: history, philosophy, English literature.

I still sleep with a stack of about 15 books on my bedside table and read left wing magazines like the New Yorker and the New Left Review. And my favourite ever writers – authors like Roberto Bolaño, J.M. Coetzee – are very politically left wing. My favourite musicians, film makers are also largely left wing.

So ultimately it is a very alienating experience if you are politically right wing but enjoy activities which are increasingly coded as left wing or liberal today: living in a dense urban environment, reading, going to the cinema to watch kino films, etc.

I went to an Earl Sweatshirt concert last year. I have always loved his work because he’s like the smartest living rapper, just an amazing lyrical technician. I’ve been listening to him since I was 12 years old, since the ‘‘FREE EARL’’ era.

I understand, just to a certain degree, that artists will always be high-degree-openness types which correlates with being leftie.

What are you supposed to do? I’m not going to become a hermit and completely cut myself off from my own age group.

I still like the same movies and music that young progressive people in their twenties like.

For example, I really like the British popstar Charli XCX. She makes music mostly for left wing girls, but I still really like her music and find it really catchy.

It’s difficult. These people are sadly objectively a lot ‘‘cooler’’ than everyone on the right wing. There’s basically no ‘‘cool’’ right-wing artists today besides maybe Michel Houellebecq. The cultural space is just completely dominated by leftists.

I still want to engage with the outside world. I still like music, I still like art, I still like movies. So I feel like I just have to accept that everyone around me is going to be left-wing all the time in these spaces. But it’s very difficult. It’s very hard.

In real life I am an extremely friendly person and I can easily make friends with random lefties. But aside from a few loyal long term friends, most friendships with lefties only last exactly as long as people don’t know who I am.

When I visited San Francisco, I became friends with the first people I met on the street, just two young college kids at the San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge tourist area. I offered to take their picture, we then started talking, ended up walking on the bridge together and became mates.

One was a young Chinese progressive guy and another was a young Indian progressive guy. They were vaguely progressive, they didn’t like Trump or the Iran War but were not hardcore about it, they could agree they found Trump funny. We ended up being chill and they took me to see other tourist sites in San Francisco.

As long as somebody isn’t like an open communist who wants to murder me, I can be friends with them. I genuinely don’t care if somebody just has generic leftie views on social issues – ‘’be nice,’’ ‘’be heckin compassionate,’’ ‘‘support the trans girlies,’’ I actually genuinely don’t care if they have these views so long as they aren’t radical communist activists who want me to actually be murdered.

But nobody wants to be friends if you have different political views. I have a couple old leftie friends who I have been friends with since middle school, but they are sadly the exception rather than the rule.

I would say that the vast majority of my friends from university cancelled me, even before I became explicitly right wing. Even when I was still kind of a moderate left/liberal centrist – simply to question the overwhelming leftist consensus on Palestine and mass migration etc was enough to put you outside the tent.

Now it is brutal.

I meet somebody at university who I find funny, cool, interesting – in another life I would easily become friends with them, but now I can’t talk to them because they will immediately hate me for my extremely public political views.

Other times, I might find an interesting author, filmmaker living in Australia – someone like J.M. Coetzee, Christos Tsiolkas – I can’t talk to them about art because I suspect they might immediately hate me for my political views.

There was a cool old Greek Orthodox artist guy in Ipswich who painted modern abstract art as well as Orthodox icons. I really liked being friends with him just because he was a cool and interesting guy. Where else are you ever going to find a cosmopolitan artist painting Greek Orthodox icons? But he didn’t want to remain friends after my political views changed.

I basically sacrificed almost all my personal relationships and friendships to become right wing.

I met up with an old friend of mine from law school who was one of the top 5 students in our law cohort. He was a really smart guy who loved Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg.

This guy was moderate but he admitted to my face that most of my former friends would celebrate if I was killed like Charlie Kirk. Straight up admitted this to my face. I said “you have to admit, they would all share laughing memes if I died,” and he had to acknowledge that this was true.

I went through a genuine ideological conversion, because I believe nationalism and cultural conservatism are most conducive to building strong cultures that can preserve the unique inheritance of Western civilization. That’s why my views changed and I was willing to burn the boats and lose all my friends.

But I do still experience a bit of a paradox when it comes to multiculturalism – a paradox between my day to day interest in and appreciation for random different cultures versus my intellectual view that ideological multiculturalism and state-approved ‘‘diversity’’ has comprehensively failed almost everywhere in the West today.

I like going through life almost a bit like an anthropologist. Even though I know it has made for a highly combustible and socially tense atmosphere in most Australian cities today, there is a part of me that does find it intellectually interesting to go through life doing EthnoGuesser for hundreds of random ethno-cultural groups in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne.

I genuinely really like going to Sunnybank in Brisbane – the Asian grocery stores, Asian restaurants. I love that stuff. It’s interesting. I like learning about other cultures.

I had a barber in Brisbane who was a member of the Karen ethnic minority group in Myanmar, and I started talking to him about Myanmar history and politics for 20 minutes. He was actually shocked that I knew what the Karen people were, we ended up having an awesome conversation.

I’m generally just interested in learning about other people’s cultures. Honestly, in a strange way I have even developed an affection for the ‘‘Lebs’’ of West Sydney despite so many of them messaging me to tell me that they want to bash me.

So this is a big dilemma for me. It’s very tough. I don’t really know how to intellectually square it – again, it’s almost like having a left wing personality while having a right wing brain.

In reality, I think multiculturalism as it is expressed as an ideology in the West today is essentially an ideology in favour of separatism. An ideology which enables the creation of sectarian ethnic blocs, social tension, violence, a decline in public trust.

But at the same time, I still like learning about other cultures. I like to travel. I’ve been to Muslim countries and in foreign Muslim countries I found it very interesting to be woken up by the Muslim call to prayer.

I don’t want the Muslim call to prayer to ring out across Australian suburbs, because I think this would mark an erosion of what makes our own culture special and distinct. But when I travel I find it interesting to be engrossed in another culture.

So I don’t know. It’s a very difficult thing.

I wonder how many people like me exist. People who have a kind of high degree of openness, people who are interested in stuff like history and philosophy and movies and art, things that are basically kind of dominated by a kind of left-wing stranglehold today.

All the things that I’m interested in are sort of dominated by leftists. But I can’t just become a hermit. I can’t just basically sequester myself in a monastery. I still want to be involved in the world.

Where do we go from here? When will the next great right wing artist emerge?

It’s extremely difficult being a cosmopolitan chud.

I have been struggling through this ever since I finally declared myself to be right wing last year and lost most of my friends.

My politics changed but my cultural interests remained the same, which led me to reflect on the… pic.twitter.com/G00vPY8SJy

— Drew Pavlou 🇦🇺🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 (@DrewPavlou) August 13, 2026

And definitely read Pavlou’s full Substack essay, “The Dilemma of the Cosmopolitan Chud,” where he gets much deeper into what it actually feels like to be young, right-wing, culturally curious, and trying to figure out where you fit in all of this. You can read it here.

The right already knows how to make a culture when nobody gives it permission. The question is what happens when that same creative energy moves beyond memes and into film, music, literature, art, fashion, and everything else it spent years assuming belonged to somebody else.

Maybe the cosmopolitan chud isn’t waiting for the next great right-wing artist after all. Maybe he’s becoming one.

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