'I Just Want To Go Home'
And: Speaking Of Home...; Men Being Manly; British Elites Who Hate The British
If you ask me, the most clarifying and terrifying moment of the evening was this clip of Erika Kirk, whose husband was murdered by a leftist last autumn, leaving the White House Correspondents dinner after the shooting last night. She’s dazed and sobbing and crying, “I just want to go home.”
We all do, ma’am. We all do.
Where is “home”? It’s a country where people can sit in a ballroom with the president, and not have to worry about him or anybody else being shot by a leftist. It’s a country where a woman doesn’t have to be left a widowed mother early in life because a young leftist wanted to avenge the honor of his transgender lover. It’s a country where that same woman doesn’t have to be tormented every day by an insane right-wing media personality, accusing her of being involved in killing her own husband.
It’s a world in which Jew-haters, neo-Nazis, and bloodthirsty Communists remain firmly on the margins, not regularized by mainstream figures and publications with massive platforms. It’s a world where you can go to a cocktail party in the nation’s capital and never once hear a Holocaust joke.
It’s a world in which conservatives are morally decent and liberals are not maniacs who want to kill or maim the rest of us:
For that matter, it’s a world in which 17-year-old girls aren’t murdered in a food court shootout between young black males, whose parents (or more likely, parent) don’t give a damn about them, and who are in some cases left to prey on good people by sympathetic judges.
Watch Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry rage, rightly so, against the killers of Martha Odom, and demand that the state legislature send animals like those gunmen to Angola for life. America needs to go all Nayib Bukele on these gangbanger types. Get caught committing gun violence? Life in Angola. Up with the carceral state! Landry said, “It’s not the government’s job to raise these people,” he said. “Somebody has failed.” Yes — and if society must be willing to protect itself from feral young men unfit to live in society, no matter what liberals say. People had better get to the point where they’ve had enough of the anarcho-tyranny.
I could go on for the rest of today’s newsletter, with example after example, but you get the point. The violence, the decadence, the chaos — this isn’t home. Believe me, I’ve got only about 2,000 words left to write in my Weimar America book, and it’s all landing pretty hard after this weekend’s third assassination attempt against President Trump (who, to his credit, was a cool character during all this madness).
“Was assassination part of Weimar culture?” a friend and reader of this newsletter texted me from the US after the Washington event.
Oh, you bet — but unlike America today, it was the Right back then who were by far the main instigators of political violence. The German radical Right murdered Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the Communist revolutionaries, in 1919. They murdered in 1921 Matthias Erzberger, the Catholic politician Matthias Erzberger (they hated him for his role in signing the armistice), and in 1922, the Jewish industrialist and foreign minister Walther Rathenau. There were many more lesser figures, and some mainstream right-wing newspapers cheered for it.
Toward the end of the Weimar years, as the Nazis were rising, the SA (Brownshirts) made street violence against political opponents normal, as Antifa does today in America. To be fair, the German Left of the era was also violent, but there were far more on the Right, and they had a lot more support from the Establishment.
When I see The New York Times platforming a figure like Hasan Piker, who once said, of landlords and capitalists, “Yeah kill them! Kill those motherfuckers and murder those motherfuckers in the streets. Let the streets soak in their fucking red capitalist blood, dude” — I am reminded of the case of Tägliche Rundschau, a respected Berlin right-wing newspaper with national reach, who said of Erzberger before his assassination “he may be as round as a bullet, but he is not bullet-proof.”
Where do our politicians, both Republican and Democrat, our media leaders, our academics, and so forth, think this radicalism that they refuse to condemn on their own sides is headed? On my side, there are prominent politicians who refuse to condemn, at least in any sustained or unequivocal way, far-right figures like Nick Fuentes, thinking, perhaps, that they can be tamed. Yeah, that worked well for the German conservative leadership in 1932, when it talked itself into believing that it could put the reins on Hitler, and use the power of his movement but in a controlled way.
On the Left, same thing. It has been tolerating anti-white hatred, and all kinds of hatred, for so long that it doesn’t even recognize what this looks like to the rest of us. Hate is great, as long as you hate the right people. In that Times bit with Piker to which I linked, you have three rich left-wing elites — Piker, Spiegelman, and Tolentino — praising stealing as a politically appropriate act. Piker, as I said, has gone and does go much farther than praising stealing.
Again: where do you normal Republicans and Democrats think all this is going?
In my forthcoming book, I go in depth with the parallels between Germany of the 1920s and early 1930s, and America today. It’s not a one-to-one comparison; we have significantly more defenses against totalitarianism than the Weimar Republic did. But those defenses are fast eroding, as I show in the book. We cannot or will not read the signs of the times. And from the ghettos to the wealthy suburbs, we have raised a generation that feels little or no loyalty to the social order and the system they have inherited.
René Girard had the number of the educated radicals of our time: “The children repeat the crimes of their fathers precisely because they believe they are morally superior to them.”
I have reached the end of my manuscript believing that we are one major economic crisis away from something awful happening. Here is German historian Harald Jähner on the weakness of democracy as the Weimar Republic reached its final years, just before the Great Depression hit:
The fragile balance of power in the Reichstag held as long as things were looking economically rosy. But the mood was growing more irritable, the tone more vitriolic, and attempts to find common ground were abandoned. For far too many players in the Republic, the following applied: ‘Principles were upheld and compromise scorned.’
Sound like any Congress you know? Should America fall into an economic crisis as severe as the Great Depression, then as in Weimar, the middle-class youth are positioned to be the revolutionaries. Historian Volker Ullrich wrote of the radicalism of German youth of the Weimar period: “In fact, faced with economic hardship and bleak career prospects, most German students turned their backs on the republic.”
We could lose our democracy. We really could. It is not enough that we condemn the radicals and racists who threaten our values. We have to give the younger generations reason to believe in it. This is something I think most of us older people — Boomers and Xers — don’t fully understand. If you are young, and are faced with the inability to build a career, buy a home, raise a family, because there is too much economic instability, why should you support a system that has denied you that? All the free market nostrums of the Right are powerless in the face of unemployment and despair.
I remind you: as late as 1928, the Nazis only got 2.6 percent of the vote in the national elections. But in the first elections after the arrival of the Great Depression, Nazis polled 18 percent. Young, educated, middle-class Germans, whose expectations for a normal life had been dashed, were the most enthusiastic converts to Nazism.
Moreover, if you have been educated by a left-dominated system that has taught you, as a leftist or left-liberal, to hate your own history and heritage — if the Founding Fathers were not just flawed, but evil — then what purpose is struggling for reform of that system? If you are a young right-wing white, why should you support a system that blames you (or your fathers and brothers) for everything that is wrong in the world, and that seeks to disadvantage you in getting placements in college, and in the job market, solely because of your race and perhaps your sex? Why should you support a system whose ruling class, out of misplaced sentimentality, has more pity for the kind of people who shot Martha Odom than for the Martha Odoms of this world?
You see where I’m going with this. But do you see where we, as a country, are going with this, if we don’t reverse course while we can?
Something similar is happening in Europe. The European ruling class, including in the UK, still thinks it’s fighting Hitler, and has permitted, and continues to permit, the colonization of their countries by migrants. They are blind and full of moral self-regard. Anybody who objects to their managerial-liberal tyranny is, in their minds, a proto-Nazi who must be punished. There really are actual far-right neo-Nazi types, but most Europeans condemned by the ruling class (including the media) are normal men and women who have simply had it with a system that prioritizes the welfare of migrants, legal and otherwise, over the people born there, and whose ancestors built the country.
This young Syrian woman was welcomed into Germany as a refugee. Now she has turned on the people who helped her. Watch her subtitled rap video:
I’ll tell you, ma’am: Better off.
Somebody on X said of this woman that this video does not mean she has failed to assimilate into Germany, but rather proves that she has. To be a mainstream German today is to hate your own country and to view migrants, the Other, as a bearer of redemption. This chick knows it. Zineb Riboua, a Moroccan analyst living in Washington, says:
Germany welcomed Syrian refugees during and after the civil war and have no colonial past in Syria to atone for. What do they get in return? Resentment, a Third-Worldist rant basically about Western colonizers as eternal oppressors.
The contrast with Syria itself is what makes this interesting. Syrians inside Syria today want the West. They want a peaceful Damascus, a functioning banking system, trade, integration into the global economy. The loudest anticolonial voices and movements now sit in Western capitals advocating for things their own people aren’t aligned with.
I would like to go Home — Home as a place of order, of familiarity, of safety, of trust. A lot of us would. Looks like we are going to have to fight our way back. I’m not talking about literal fighting, but serious struggle. If we don’t struggle hard now against the myriad forces driving us off course, then the fighting is going to cease being a metaphor, and it’s going to happen faster than you think, in both Europe and America.
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