Yes, The Right Has an Omnicause
Notes on leaving the right.
Last week, President Trump accepted a DoorDash delivery from an Arkansas-dwelling grandmother of ten, who quickly became known as DoorDash Grandma. The stunt was intended to celebrate the “no tax on tips” policy. Since DoorDash Grandma, real name Sharon Simmons, is a tipped worker, she has saved some money from not having her tips taxed. Questions erupted as to how much she could actually have saved, whether she’s a plant given her other involvements with Republican advocacy, and so on. Whatever! That’s not my focus.
What I’m interested in is a moment when Simmons is standing next to the president as he answers questions from the press. At one point, Trump argues that the Democrats have to resort to nefarious means to win. “They cheat,” he alleges. “They can’t get elected with their policies … They want to have open borders. They want to have men playing in women’s sports.” He turns to Simmons: “Do you think that men should play in women’s sports?” She replies: “I really don’t have an opinion on that.” Trump presses her, saying he bets she has an opinion, and she reaffirms: “I’m here about no tax on tips.”
That struck me as an extraordinary moment, not because of my opinions on trans women in women’s sports, but because what had seemed like an obvious bet for Trump turned out not to be so obvious. One might assume that a woman who’ll appear on TV with Trump, who likely votes red, and who happily promotes a signature Trump policy, would give Trump an enthusiastic “Amen” on this unrelated topic of trans inclusivity. In that moment, Trump—and probably many viewers—took the right-wing omnicause for granted. Surprisingly, it didn’t hold.
I first encountered the term “omnicause” in a 2024 article by Hadley Freeman. As Freeman puts it, “The Omnicause is, simply, every cause you must care about if you’re A Good Progressive rolled into one, because everything in the world is connected.” Thus, “trans rights are connected to Palestinian rights are connected to environmental concerns, and any self-respecting progressive who cares about one has to care about the other two … According to The Omnicause, they’re all magically connected. It’s the fatberg of causes, and the fat gluing them all together is Western narcissism.”
Freeman defines the omnicause as specifically a progressive thing. I disagree. The right—and I have my own personal experience to back this up—is more than capable of having an omnicause, and what we saw from President Trump’s awkward interaction with DoorDash Grandma was an assumption that the MAGA fatberg would hold strong. If you support Trump’s tax policies, surely you don’t want trans women in women’s sports, right? In reality the two have nothing to do with one another other than falling under the MAGA umbrella. If the assumption is that the omnicause is fairly weak on the right, it might be strengthening, especially under MAGA and growing conspiracy theories that try to unite various right-wing concerns under one umbrella.
I first noticed a right-wing omnicause when I was on the far right myself. In the early to mid-2010s, I was part of a loosely knit right-wing movement called the “alt-lite.” As opposed to the alt-right, which was typically classified as white nationalist and was focused heavily on race, the alt-lite was not racially focused or overtly white supremacist even as it loathed what would become known as “woke” racial politics. In many ways the alt-lite foreshadowed the now played-out “anti-woke” media sphere. It had an unusual degree of sexual and gender diversity, with women and LGBT (yes, even T) people forming large parts of its vanguard. Nowadays, I think alt-lite vibes are too mainstream to bear rehashing. The move of the right away from moral policing to amoral transgression and an edgy sense of humor strikes me as having been driven by the irreverent alt-lite alongside, to some extent, the grimmer and less palatable alt-right.
When I was regrettably on the alt-lite, here are a few things most of us screeched against all the time:
Ideas of a gender spectrum + neopronouns.
What seemed like excuses for riots.
Feminists (even I was annoyed at the ones I considered cringe).
Anti-police sentiment.
Pro-fat activists.
“Fake” mental illness.
Policing of right-wing speech.
Social justice warriors.
Those seem like humdrum targets of complaint for the normie right or even center to some extent but the alt-lite went a lot farther to the right than the average conservative would. It had its points, but the alt-lite was radical and vicious. One might notice ties between a few of these things, while some might seem kind of random if they weren’t vaguely linked by the emergent fatberg. The alt-lite seemed like a 4channy counter to the mainstreaming of progressive cultural ideas mostly associated with Tumblr. It was a counter-fatberg.
For me, a big reason I was drawn to the alt-lite to begin with was its anti-fat-activism content. I was struggling with a burgeoning eating disorder or two and alt-lite media gave me content that reinforced the idea that it was disgusting to be fat—quite handy fuel for my eating disorder. A frequent talking point was that “fat shaming works.” What does that have to do with the critiques of “antiracism” that I was also engaged in at the same time? Not much, but, by bundling them together, it was easy to create a counter-fatberg against them.
While the left has the academic idea of intersectionality to glue together the ideologies of its omnicause, the right may be using conspiracy theories for the same purpose, in the absence of academically approved options for making sense of why its fatberg’s elements are stuck together. Various conspiracy theories that incorporate a broad range of issues, such as the great replacement theory, can perform this sense-making task by taking disparate phenomena of which the right is critical and finding connections where there are—or appear to be—none. Just as intersectionality gives the left a reason to connect Palestine to trans rights, sweeping conspiracy theories may give the right the glue they need for their own fatberg rather than let it be formed only in relation to the opposing fatberg.
I regret having been on the far right. I said rude and inaccurate things and cheerled a movement that exploded into the mainstream in a way I now recognize as damaging. It was eventually the cruelty and oppositional stance that yanked me out of the right. I realized that politics was a sick game for many on the alt-lite, including me, and I could no longer be a cheerleader for it. I realized as well that being part of what I’d now dub a counter-fatberg didn’t provide me with any positive beliefs about the world; it just made me a rhetorical gladiator against something. Fortunately, aside from regrettable in-real-life conversations in private, my engagement in politics was online and anonymous. I could simply delete and log off.
Today I get a sick feeling every time I see a fatberg or a counter-fatberg start to form. I would encourage those on the contemporary right not to make the alt-lite’s mistake (and not to be as extreme as we were). The right, if it has to have any decency, must try to incorporate a range of positive, rather than reactive, visions that strive together to make the world a better place, rather than clinging to a counter-fatberg given to them by pressure from the left.
Virginia Karnstein is a PhD candidate in literature, writing about culture and faith on Susbstack at Overlong Memories and podcasting at Wailing & Gnashing.
A version of this article was originally published in Overlong Memories.
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