From Edgy To Evil: The Contrarian's Fate
Reflexive contrarianism can make you feel cool. It can also send you down some dark paths.
To put yourself into the mind of the professional contrarian, remember the primal sensation of hearing your parents’ instructions, digesting those commands, and doing the exact opposite.
Recall the thrill of it all, how it made your brain buzz with a feeling of Total Independence from the repressive powers that be. All at once you were your own person, a servant to no master, a free person in a free country in a free world. You had shaken off the chains of mildly demanding expectations. Nothing had ever felt quite so good.
I was not a rebellious kid. I was the boy who urged others not to be rebellious for fear of conflict. No, no, I'd tell the other boys, you don't understand. Do the stuff you're told to do and you'll be rewarded with something more valuable than gold: Approval. It's easy. Anyone can do it.
I was the boy every mother pointed to and asked why their sons couldn’t be the same way, so happily obedient and eager to please, so self sufficient and easy going. I grew up that way and I very much enjoyed the positive feedback from my parents and teachers and my friends’ parents. In fact, I craved it. It was a self-reinforcing system: I listened, I did what I was told, I received praise, and I listened and did what I was told all over again. Then the praise flowed, on and on and on.
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One day in eleventh grade, after being exposed to a few music videos my parents had forbidden me to watch for fear of the devil working his magic, I decided it was time to paint my fingernails. Not all of them, of course. I hadn’t gone insane. I painted exactly two nails, both middle fingers. I used black polish because that’s what the dudes on the music videos had used. And they looked cool as shit.
The dopamine rush of strolling through the hallways of my ultra-conservative Baptist high school the next day, people gawking at my fingernails, felt wrong at first. Transgression should not feel this good, I thought. It shouldn’t feel good at all. It did though. It felt so good, in ways the approval of authority figures never had. Because this affirming dopamine rush was coming from peers – including girls, importantly – who in one way or another expressed their approval of my two painted fingernails. People would ask me why I painted my nails and I would shrug and they would say, my god, this guy is crazy, and we like crazy. I had always been told people don't like crazy. They did though. They liked it a lot.
I can’t emphasize this enough: Girls were into the nails. Girls who had never talked to me suddenly wanted to chat and know about me, the upstanding white boy varsity baseball player turned bad. A few jocks called me gay. Even that felt good, like affirmation that I was on to something. Doing a thing I was not supposed to do felt good and right.
Denny Carter
It felt good to be transgressive, if only a little bit. I kept my nails painted – even painting my thumbnails at one point – for a few days before the vice principal told me I faced a suspension if I stepped any further outside the prescribed boundaries of masculinity. That was that: My rebellious phase was over. I was back to being the Good Boy, clean fingernails and all.
I think about my 72-hour rebellious phase when I see clips of the professional contrarian class of writers and pundits and podcasters grace my various social media timelines. It’s always the same story when you drill down deep enough: Mom and dad said not to do a thing or think a thing or say a thing, and that would not stand. The professional contrarian, making loads of money from Substack subscribers who see contrarians as the only real truth tellers remaining in a broken information environment and obscenely wealthy men who need media attack dogs to do their bidding and pay well for such services, is told what is verboten and instantly knows which direction to turn.
For the professional contrarian, the man who is simply Asking Questions even though those questions aways – without fail – are in service of right-wing interested, mom and dad usually take the form of normie liberals and their favored media outlets. Anything these folks profess to believe – including easily provable reality – is not just wrong, according to the contrarian, but dangerous and censorious. Mom and dad say this or that political development is bad, so it must actually be good.
Mom and dad, you see, are not cool. The political movement that permits you to be your worst self is quite cool. For the teenage-brained contrarian, the choice is easy.
Denny Carter
In this way the professional contrarian is deeply immature and undeveloped as an adult, fueled by the impulses of a moody teenager telling mom and dad and teacher and coach and religious leader to shove it, to fuck off, to stop telling me what to do. It makes all too much sense then that professional contrarians appeal so widely to Gen Xers, whose disdain for authority and young adult nihilism was always going to prove vulnerable to an American fascist movement, and whose support for the country's first tyrant has been steadfast bordering on frothing.
It’s not my favorite admission, but I get it. I get what drives contrarians like Jimmy Dore and Naomi Wolf and Michael Tracey and Matt Taibbi and Briahna Joy Gray and Glenn Greenwald – the king of the contrarians – to keep doing what they’re doing and serving a critical role for a range of entrenched interests, including, of course, billionaires with far right, broken brain, blackpilled politics. They are useful weapons against democracy. I think they understand that well.
What Is Human Trafficking Anyway?
Being told by finger-wagging lefties that you can’t say or do that is jet fuel for the poisonous content these people produce and the oceans of bad faith required in this work. Bucking against the libs for these folks is a shot of dopamine straight to the brain, a guaranteed strategy for going viral on the X platform formerly known as Twitter and drawing all the hate and praise and outrage you could ever want. You say the Thing That Cannot Be Said and profit. There is no middle step. It’s why contrarianism has been a sustainable business model for so many media types willing to sell out the truth in exchange for the approval and platforming and money of wealthy and powerful right wingers.
Getting that sweet, sweet Elon retweet is what matters most. Daddy says you did a good job and instead of a smile and a pat on the head, you get a pile of cash, the social media reach of a god, and frantic online engagement that would make the brain leak out of the ears of the average social media user. It's a win-win-win for the principled contrarian.
The contrarian longs to feel cool and edgy. There is no concern about the truth, or actual reality, or the well being of other human beings, all of which are impediments to being Fully Contrarian and telling Democrat-voting mommy and daddy to eat shit and die. The feeling is what matters. Transgression feels good. And if mom and dad are mad at you, you must be doing something right. The cycle is all too easy to repeat and the incentives lead to more and more contrarianism until one day you’re doing a podcast about how Jeffrey Epstein did nothing wrong.
Matt Taibbi says that there was no trafficking involving Jeffrey Epstein that went beyond Epstein himself, and then Michael Tracey says that there was no trafficking at all and it was just made up by prosecutors.
— Post-Left Watch (@postleftwatch.bsky.social) 2026-03-14T02:57:22.549Z
Michael Tracey and Matt Taibbi last week said during a live stream that Epstein's supposed web of human trafficking was either an exaggeration, per Taibbi, or an outright lie, according to Tracey.
"What is trafficking anymore?" Tracey asked with practiced smugness, barely breaking a sweat while Just Asking Questions about whether a world-renowned sex abuser and child trafficker actually did anything wrong amid the release of millions of documents showing he did, in fact, do bad shit.
"It's just what a prosecutor wants to decide to try to fit a fact pattern and then charge it under one of the trafficking statutes," Tracey said as Taibbi nodded, smiling wryly, knowingly. These were two pros playing the game at the highest level. "It can mean everything and nothing."
"Smiling at a lady" and asking her to walk down the street, Tracey said, could be legally classified as human trafficking. So who's to say if it's good or bad.
The incentive for always taking the contrarian view of current events leads to some pretty fucking dark paths. A real contrarian, someone who will not be told what to do no matter how logical the advice, has to keep up the bit. They have to push a little further every day, every month, every year, until one day they're saying Jeffrey fucking Epstein was just a regular guy smeared by ... the left? Elected Democrats? The press? The ruling class covering their collective ass? It's hard to say exactly. Embracing contrarianism as an ethos, as a guiding light for your politics and the way you view the world, will eventually lead to these dark places because there's nowhere else to go after a while.
The Epstein Files, Tracey claims, have been unfairly or ungenerously interpreted by those looking to grind a political axe against the late sex offender. If anyone's electronic messages were released to the public they too could be painted as a sex criminal and trafficker of human beings, Tracey says. It could happen to anyone.
"Indiscriminately dump several decades' worth of your own private emails, texts, chats, and DMs onto the internet for all to peruse, and let's see if we can find anything that might seem a bit 'odd' out of context, especially if we apply the heuristic where certain references are presumptively understood to reflect coded language – and not just any coded language, mind you, but an entire secret vocabulary related to depraved pedophilic sex crimes," Tracey posted on the X platform to the cheers of right-wing grifters desperate to cover for the president, Epstein's longtime friend. "I'm sure you'll come out of this exercise totally unscathed, so please, go ahead and dump all the material."
Tracey these days spends a lot of time talking about "pedophilia as a pathology" and the woke "broadening out" of that definition to include 17 year olds. A perusing of his X account shows Tracey saying "prepubescent" quite a bit in dismissing any idea that there exists a ring of ultra-wealthy sex criminals with longtime ties to Epstein. It's all quite disturbing.
Mom and dad say Epstein was bad and you instinctively say no he wasn't. Maybe he was even good. Maybe it's you who are bad; let's see your texts and direct messages and emails, mom and dad, and see if we can make you look like a sex criminal. Look upon my edginess and marvel. I, like fellow bad faith master Bari Weiss, am a heterodox thinking rock star. Look at these middle fingernails painted black.
The need to be contrarian, to maintaining an edginess that proves downright irresistible to a certain nihilistic portion of the American populace, Tracey has dismissed the well-documented suffering of dozens of women who have bravely come forward in recent years to say Epstein and his associates hurt and abused and sold them to the highest bidder. Their basic human rights were violated by an extraordinarily wealthy and well-connected man whose private island appears to be the set of a particularly fucked up horror movie. Only it wasn't a movie. It was real, and real people – innocent people – were exploited and abused and traumatized by men who believe the law is not for them.
Tracey sees all that and dismissively waves it away. It's his only move if he's going to keep inching forward with an unmatched edgelord aesthetic that has served him so well during a time of rising fascism in the United States.
What Is An Insurrection Anyway?
Tracey came to prominence with a relentless gaslighting campaign of well-meaning liberals on Twitter during the first Trump term. Tracey's hard gaslighting work culminated with podcast appearances and columns in which he said nothing had happened on January 6, 2021, that all the violence and destruction the libs claimed had happened had not in fact happened. Your eyes, Tracey said over and over again, had lied to you.
It was all a hoax, a verifiable CIA-style psy-op. Any violence seen on January 6 was the fault of undercover feds or George Soros operatives or maybe it was Antifa or some other violent left-wing group. Who knows, the contrarians said in one strangely coordinated voice after the insurrection we all watched live on our TVs, helping to lay the foundation for a competing narrative that offered permission to elected Republicans and right-wing media to deny the events of January 6 and help their leader complete his insurrection against the United States four years later.
Denny Carter
In the unreality created by Tracey and other bad-faith contrarians, a group of concerned Americans held a rally in support of the sitting president asking legitimate questions about whether the 2020 election had been free and fair. Or maybe they did a walking tour of the Capitol. It's hard to say, but no one was hurt and no one had any ill will. Mom and dad (Democrats and mainstream media outlets) said some of the concerned citizens were armed, but that wasn't true. Mom and dad were wrong. There were no weapons involved, Tracey claimed in the days after the failed insurrection. They were, of course. That didn't matter though.
Furthermore, the contrarians said with straight faces, no one died except Ashley Babbitt, an innocent, concerned American citizen doing nothing more than exercising her constitutional right to free speech. For that, the contrarians said, Babbitt was shot and killed during the January 6 Capitol walking tour.
With our algorithms boosting this unreality, a full-blown attack on representative democracy in the US was swept aside, as if it had never happened at all. The contrarians' frantic post-insurrection work to obscure actual events provided cover for Trump to pardon those who had stormed the Capitol without much grief or political blowback because there were two versions of what happened on January 6. Enemies of the United States being freed by the president they sought to keep in power was a wondrous victory for the professional contrarian class. They had flexed their collective muscle and as usual, fascists benefited.
As the guy who logs on to Bluesky every day and tells football enjoyers that every NFL team should play indoors, I get the contrarian appeal (my pro-dome stance is genuine; that doesn't mean I can't enjoy traditionalists losing their minds in my replies). It's fun to be the center of attention; whether that attention is positive or negative doesn't much matter. Not everyone's brain works this way, I understand. But we live in an attention economy, baby, and I swim in pools of cash when I upset football fans online.
Is this healthy? Of course not. Does that matter to me in the moment? No, it does not.
It is the life of the contrarian though. And when the contrarian refuses to stop pushing the contrarian bounds or taking an intentionally provocative stance for the sake of taking one, they will eventually, one day, end up doing legwork for evil people and organizations and causes. For some that means asking questions about whether Jeffrey Epstein did anything wrong. For me it might be doing PR for an NFL owner trying to bully a city into building him a big, beautiful dome, for evil is not all that far a walk from edgy.
Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.
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