Kirk Killing: The Radical Right's Reichstag Fire

White Nationalist Pastor: 'You Killed Charlie. Now You Get Nick. Enjoy!'

The last moment of Charlie Kirk’s life

I promised y’all to lead without politics today, but I woke up this morning and saw this incredible, detailed, deeply reported piece from Simon van Zuylen-Wood in New York magazine, and I realized that I needed to start with it. This is really important journalism. In fact, I can’t remember the last piece of political journalism that seemed so urgently significant. It made me think, for the first time, that the assassination of Charlie Kirk was the Radical Right’s Reichstag fire. By which I mean, the catalyst for coalescing and firing up the smoldering extremism on the young Right.

It’s about the radicalization of the Gen Z Right. You might be thinking that because this is in New York, a liberal magazine, it’s going to be biased and predictable. Trust me, it’s not. Yes, it’s clear that the author’s views are generally liberal, but he succeeds in getting that out of the way, and letting these prominent young Rightists speak for themselves. It’s really comprehensive, and vital to understanding the current moment. I’m going to quote some key excerpts, then give you my analysis at the end.

It begins with a vivid portrayal of the New York woman, Lesley Lachman, who runs Turning Point USA on the Ole Miss (!) campus. She’s Catholic, and is determined to downplay the Jewishness of her father. Bookmark that girl — for better or worse, she’s going places. SZW (the author) travels to Clemson, to talk to young Rightists there (seems insufficient to call them “conservatives”). Excerpt:

Vance, Trump’s heir apparent, was also suspect, thanks in part to his Never Trumper past and backing from tech elites such as Peter Thiel. Last summer, Vance gave a speech in California in which he offered a reading of American identity that moved away from the “creedal” principles of the founding documents and toward the ancestral claims made by so-called heritage Americans. “It’s weird to me that he is essentially flirting with the concept of blood-and-soil nationalism while also having a wife who’s from halfway across the world,” Lyle said. (Usha Vance was born near San Diego, unless that’s what he meant.) If you were a real heritage American, Heaberlin added, “why would you name your kid Vivek, rather than, like, John?”

Their cohort’s fixation on curbing legal immigration, Lyle theorized, stems from a fear of losing more than just their jobs. “It is essentially the question that will determine what it means to be an American: Is it just holding a piece of paper? Is it just being here under the correct legal status?” Lyle asked. “The answer we often find is that there is something further. You know, there is certainly a religious element. Obviously, an ethnic element. I mean, you ask a Japanese person what it means to be Japanese and they’ll start by describing themselves physically. I mean, you ask an American and they go … I don’t know. I don’t want to get in trouble.”

It does not take a great deal of internet research to deduce whose rhetoric all this echoes. The day after Kirk’s murder, a Christian-nationalist pastor named Joel Webbon posted on X, “You killed Charlie. Now you get Nick. Enjoy.”

More:

In the wider world, one question got everyone’s attention as clips were passed around. A woman asked Vance how he reconciled his staunch Christianity with his marriage to a Hindu woman. When he replied that he and Usha were raising their kids Christian and that he hoped she might one day convert, many watching at home felt he had thrown his wife under the bus, stoking the pervasive internet speculation that their marriage is on the rocks.

But in the arena, where virtually everyone was conservative, it felt as if Vance risked losing the crowd when he defended Usha’s freedom of religion. It was hard not to think of Fuentes — who has called Vance a “race traitor” and his in-laws “Uber drivers and call-center scammers” — or of the puzzlement I heard at Clemson about the name of their son. [Note: Vivek, their second son. — RD]

…Vance, who has done more to champion populist nationalism than anyone in the current GOP and is fluent in the idioms of the online right, was now being cast as the discredited Establishment. After the event, Fuentes claimed victory on X: “We run this.”

More:

“That’s why it hurt to lose a figure like Charlie who could channel masculinity into something virtuous,” said [Clemson TPUSA chapter head Charlie] Clontz. “It’s like you can live a fulfilling life with a happy family and a wife you love very much; or you could be, like, an OnlyFans pimp like Andrew Tate.”

In mid-December, Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy published a New York Times op-ed urging Republicans to publicly denounce Groyper-esque ethnonationalism before it infected the whole party; by that point, it had reared its head in institutions ranging from a conservative magazine at Harvard University to the New York State chapter of the Young Republicans. “This pattern eerily mirrors the hesitance of prominent Democrats to criticize woke excess in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, even though most Democratic voters clearly never believed that math is racist, or that hard work and the written tradition are hallmarks of whiteness,” he wrote, forecasting the dissolution of the multiracial coalition Trump rode to the White House. “If the post-Trump GOP makes the same mistake with our own identitarian fringe, we will meet a similar fate.”

More:

Until recently, the wokeism Ramaswamy was writing about served as a unifying enemy for the warring strains of the right the way communism had for previous generations. But in the wake of Trump’s bullying of academia and legacy media, wokeism looks like a spent force, and a classically liberal ideal like race blindness doesn’t seem so exciting to the right anymore. When Ramaswamy sent out a post calling to “End identity politics,” he elicited a response from the son of former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, the moderate Republican of Indian ancestry. “End H-1B Visas,” replied Nalin Haley, a 24-year-old who works in finance. At least among right-wing zoomers, it can feel as if the only debate going is whether to interview racists and that the only policies in the world involve Israel and H-1B visas.

SDW notes that prior to the Ole Miss rally, J.D. Vance gave an interview to the UK publication UnHerd in which he denounced Nick Fuentes by name, at last. But in front of the Ole Miss gathering of the faithful, he did not, “delivering a keynote speech that tried to appease virtually every constituency of the emergent young right and in which he confessed that he too had spent sleepless nights researching conspiracy theories about Kirk’s assassination.”

Later, Lachman, who is now on a study-abroad semester, denounced Ben Shapiro’s courageous AmFest speech denouncing racists, anti-Semites, and others moving into positions of real influence on the Right. This woman with a Jewish father hated it.

“We have midterms coming up. I don’t know if now is the time to jump onstage and slam Carlson, Nick Fuentes, and Candace.”

Screw fundamental moral principle, the only thing that matters is power. Look, let’s not be naive: in real-world politics, sometimes, you have to make compromises with people you find distasteful in order to advance important political goals. But there has to be a line somewhere. Back in the 1990s, when the ex-Klansman David Duke was a powerful force in Louisiana state politics, leading Republicans denounced him in no uncertain terms, saying it would be better to lose than to win by empowering a hater like that. That seems like ancient history now.

One more from Lachman:

“Everybody I know watches Nick. He’s funny,” she told me by phone a couple of days before our lunch. Lachman tried to explain that he serves a different purpose than Kirk did. “Charlie, I take notes and apply to my life.” Fuentes “is a character; he likes to humor people.”

Once again, I think of what that Texas college student told me last fall in Budapest: that he has friends who get hit daily with a barrage of funny, transgressive anti-Semitic memes, and one day boom, they wake up and hate Jews. Something snaps.

OK, I’ll stop quoting the article now. Please read the whole thing. It’s such a rich picture of our moment — a moment that older conservatives like me are struggling to understand, in the same way Bill Clinton Democrats might have been blindsided by the rise of the woke in their own party.

So, what to make of all this? None of these themes are new to readers of this newsletter. But they land differently to me now, given all my reading over these past two months about Weimar Germany’s history. Let me explain.

In the book The Nazi Mind — only $4.99 on Kindle, by the way, for the moment — author Laurence Rees writes:

One of the first things I learnt in my studies [of the Nazis] was that in order to understand why the Nazis possessed the mentalities they did, we must embrace the reality of a fundamental truth: we are all creatures of a particular time and a particular place. That might seem self-evident, but my experience is that many people don’t fully appreciate the extent to which they are shaped by time and place. The idea that there was a specific ‘Nazi personality’ is exactly the kind of categorical thinking we need to avoid.

This is an important point. When I talk to some conservatives about the relevance of 1920s Germany (“Weimar Germany”) to our own time, they’re quick to point out that contemporary America has not experienced the massive traumas that Germany did from 1914 (the start of the Great War) till 1933 (when Hitler, leader of what had just become the largest party voted into the Reichstag, assumed dictatorial powers). We did not lose a catastrophic war that killed millions of our young men. We have not experienced postwar hyperinflation that destroyed the wealth of countless German households. And we have not suffered the Great Depression, which, along with parliamentary political paralysis, was the final blow that moved the Nazis from the fringes to the mainstream. So why worry?

The answer is in Rees’s words: We are all creatures of a particular time and place. If we ever get fascism or communism in America, it won’t come the way it came to Germany and Russia. It will come in an American way, through means particular to our own era. The thing to focus on is not a strict one-to-one comparison between Now and Then, but a more general one, meditating on the material, social, and cultural conditions that made the emergence of political extremism possible.

That’s my task in this new book I’ll be writing (soon I’ll be able to share details with you about the deal). I didn’t really know much about Charlie Kirk, but since his death, the more I’ve gotten to know about him, the more I realize that I’m more or less a Charlie Kirk conservative. And the more it has become clear to me that Charlie’s personality, and especially his Christianity, was what held back the tide of darkness that is now rolling across the young Right like a tsunami. My general thesis — subject to change once I go even deeper into my investigation — is that active, serious Christianity is the only barrier that will keep this from happening to the Right, and the country. In a 1940 review of Mein Kampf, George Orwell, a Social Democrat, wrote:

All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.

Or, as Rees says of the Nazi concept of belonging to a single nation:

It was an emotional feeling, a psychological gift rather than an economic reward. It was about everyone feeling equally important, not the price of vegetables at the greengrocer.

In The Nazi Mind, Rees sets out to understand the psychology of Nazism, and why Nazism eventually overtook the German people. It is very, very important to remember that for all the turmoil and suffering of 1920s Germany, the Nazi Party were never more than a fringe, even though the Germans were a generally conservative people. In the 1928 election, they only won 2.7 percent of the vote nationwide. The next year, the Great Depression hit — and the only nation that suffered as much as the US did was Germany, whose economic revival in the late 1920s had come from American loans. In the 1932 election, the Nazis won 37 percent of the vote, making them the largest faction in the Reichstag — but still far from a majority.

Elderly President Hindenburg, who did not like Hitler, was persuaded by his conservative advisors to name Hitler chancellor, on the grounds that they could take advantage of his dynamism, but control him. The burning of the Reichstag building in 1933 by a Communist catalyzed the Nazis and the nation behind Hitler. That was the end of democracy.

Rees keeps pointing out in the book that unlike Stalin, Hitler, even as dictator, had to appeal to the will of the German people. I had always known that Hitler was ultra-charismatic, but I had not quite appreciated how great Dr. Goebbels was as a propagandist until reading this book.

Anyway, Rees writes that “the Nazis thrived on conspiracy theories.” Conspiracy theories go hand in hand with scapegoating. From the book:

The latest psychological research demonstrates that this attempt at scapegoating fits into a typical pattern. The social psychologist Professor Karen Douglas believes that as most conspiracy theorists are ‘looking for someone to blame’, the idea that ‘there are these people pulling the strings behind the scenes’ helps deal with their ‘feelings of powerlessness and disillusionment’. Research suggests that ‘people sometimes believe conspiracy theories about other groups as a way of protecting or enhancing their own group. People who are especially narcissistic about groups they belong to tend to be more likely to believe conspiracy theories about other groups.’ The ‘narcissism’ of the German High Command was considerable. They considered themselves the best soldiers in the world. So how could they be losing this war? It must be someone else’s fault.

That last line refers to the “stab in the back” myth that the German High Command articulated to blame Germany’s loss in World War I. The fact is, they lost it through their own bad leadership — but offloaded the blame onto Jews and leftists back home. Ordinary Germans wanted to believe it too, because it explained why a nation as powerful as theirs, one whose propaganda during wartime had told them over and over that they were winning, actually lost, and made themselves subject to the humiliating Treaty of Versailles.

So why are so many young right-wing Americans today subject to conspiracy theory and scapegoating (N.B., the same phenomenon affects the Left, but let’s leave them aside for now)?

I think it has to do with overwhelming anxiety about the present and the future. I linked the other day to a news report (can’t find it now) about a new study linking early exposure to digital media (iPads, etc.) to higher levels of anxiety in teenagers — this having to do with brain development. But there are also social factors. If you were born in the late 1990s, you have known a world of relative chaos and growing precarity. Many normal cultural boundaries have been removed (by the political and cultural Left), the border was left basically open, leaving you to worry about loss of control of the future of the country, and the Left erected borders based on identity politics — borders that made it harder for white males to get a fair shot, solely because they are white males.

Embracing conspiracy theory and scapegoating is a standard strategy for coping with anxiety that threatens to overwhelm one. A politician who knows how to weaponize that will go far. Don’t misread me: many of these problems are real! But the answer to them is not scapegoating and embracing conspiracies.

Rees:

Worse still, as Professor Douglas points out, psychological research shows that ‘It’s very difficult once someone holds a belief very strongly to change those beliefs.’ Moreover, ‘If someone believes one conspiracy theory, they are more likely to believe in or look for others. People can go down the rabbit hole and you can get a bit lost.’

Did you see that Candace Owens is now theorizing that Charlie Kirk may have been some sort of time traveler? She remains a very popular podcaster on the Right.

Rees:

Psychological research offers us an explanation for Hitler’s immediate success. He was, without knowing the scientific reasons, tapping into a profound truth about the way the brain works. By stirring up hatred against Jews and Bolsheviks he was targeting the amygdala – the part of the brain that immediately processes feelings of anxiety, fear and anger. These powerful emotions are produced almost instantly, because it’s the amygdala that helps us avoid sudden danger. We are descended from human beings who needed to respond instantaneously to threats in order to survive. Are these new people approaching friends or foes? Should I be happy to see them or ready to fight them? It’s a decision that we shouldn’t think about for long. Consequently, we possess the ability to process people at once into one of two categories – Them or Us.

According to the neuroscientist Professor Robert Sapolsky, ‘Them and Us’ is ‘hard-wired into us via the amygdala and we’ll never get rid of it’. He points out that ‘it is a neurobiological tendency that is way older than humans. So the most pessimistic thing I can say is that it is virtually inevitable that your average human is wired up so that very quickly they have a strong pull towards Them/Us dichotomizing with a propensity towards thinking that the Thems are not such great people. That said, it is incredibly easy to manipulate people as to who counts as a Them and who counts as an Us. Germany and Hitler is mostly a lesson in how powerful pseudo-speciation is [that is, deciding that someone belongs to a type of ‘Them’ that is almost a different species from ‘Us’].’

From what I’ve been able to find out, research indicates that early and frequent exposure to the Internet and social media, by affecting the amygdala, intensifies the Them/Us reaction that is already present in the normal brain. Sure, the Nazis didn’t have social media, and still came to power. But this could explain why from a psychosocial point of view, we don’t have to have suffered gross traumas, like defeat in war or hyperinflation, to nevertheless have turned into a people especially subject to conspiracy theories and scapegoating.

This, from Rees, is especially interesting:

Understandably, given the horrors to come, much of the focus today on the motivations of Nazi Party members is on the nature and cause of their anti-Semitism. But it would be a mistake to conclude that hatred of the Jews was the main reason that Germans came to support the movement. The evidence shows that large numbers – almost certainly the majority – joined the party in the 1920s and early 1930s for another reason altogether. Their hope was that Hitler would deliver a Volksgemeinschaft – a ‘people’s community’. Peter Merkl in his seminal analysis of Theodore Abel’s study of several hundred Nazi supporters who became involved with the party before 1933 concluded that the most common ideological theme binding them together was not anti-Semitism but their belief in the Volksgemeinschaft. However, as we will see, the two concepts were often linked in many people’s minds.

You will recall this tweet from last week:

Which I compared to Hitler’s propaganda slogan: “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer!” (that is, “One People, one Empire, one Leader!”). It is normal to want to feel at home in one’s nation. But what the Nazis did was to racialize this, and to make non-Aryans into a biological pestilence that threatened the body politic. Keep this in mind when you read about these young Rightists blathering on about “Heritage Americans,” and questioning JD Vance’s bona fides because he named his second son Vivek.

Rees:

The Volksgemeinschaft simplified enormously the task of working out who was friend or who was foe. No longer did you have to spend time getting to know someone to see if they were welcoming or not. You only had to ask one question – are you a member of the German ‘race’ or not? The desire to categorize people, as Gordon Allport pointed out in his pioneering work The Nature of Prejudice, can often lead to biased thinking. The Volksgemeinschaft made that biased thinking easier than ever.

Why would a Catholic TPUSA leader feel so strongly about downplaying her father’s ethnically Jewish roots? Does she, um, know what time it is? Rees:

Goebbels, without knowing the psychology, understood the power of referring to ‘Jewish filth’. That is because the part of the brain which makes you react to hideous smells is also activated merely by ‘thinking about something morally disgusting’.13 Thinking ‘of the neighbouring tribe as loathsome cockroaches’, wrote Professor Robert Sapolsky, causes the ‘insula and amygdala’ to activate and is central to how our brains process ‘Us and Them’. The Nazis’ description of Jews as ‘filthy’ or ‘vermin’ had a similarly powerful effect.

The Nazis hated Christianity, but knew that they couldn’t be open about this. So Hitler at least at first, pursued a vague vision of “positive Christianity”. Most Lutheran believers didn’t need much prompting to be on his side. Catholics were a harder sell, so the Nazis began to propagandize against priests, trying to make Catholics afraid that priests were going to rape their sons. Rees:

In the years to come [keeping Christians and anti-Christians together] would prove to be a tricky balancing act, because Hitler had to ensure not only that Christian Nazis like the brutal district leader Erich Koch were happy within the party, but that passionately anti-religious figures like Martin Bormann, who would come to dominate the party organization, were content as well. By keeping to a vague commitment for ‘positive Christianity’ while simultaneously – once he was secure in power – attacking in private the whole basis of Christianity, Hitler hoped to keep them all on board. By emphasizing these few broad concepts – ‘positive Christianity’, pan-Germanism, anti-Semitism, hatred of Versailles and the pursuit of Volksgemeinschaft – Hitler kept the appeal of the Nazi Party simple.

Rees doesn’t mention Trump, but he explains inadvertently why “Trump is Hitler” is so silly. He says that one doesn’t get to be a dictator by focusing on one’s own greatness. One gets to be a dictator by convincing the masses that the dictator is the living symbol of the nation. One of the Nuremberg Rally speeches — maybe by Hitler, I can’t recall — featured a speaker saying, “Germany is Hitler, and Hitler is Germany.” Nobody would ever be able to say that about Trump. In other words, Hitler seduced the Germans.

Often perceived only as a dictatorial egotist, Hitler was instead conscious of the need to inspire his followers and keep them with him. It is a common misconception, believes Professor Alex Haslam, an expert on the psychology of leadership, that leadership is about ‘the great “I” ’. ‘Leadership’, he says, ‘is always all about “us”.’

You don’t become a good leader by possessing a checklist of personal qualities, he argues, but by understanding the aspirations of the group you lead and pressing on towards a common goal. This was something Hitler understood, announcing during the trial that he had ‘resolved to be the destroyer of Marxism’ – a common goal his followers shared.

Now that is Trump: he does not possess a checklist of admirable personal qualities, but he understood, and understands, fairly well the frustrations so many Americans have with the established system. He cannot become a Hitler, in my view, even if he wanted to, because he is so divisive, and doesn’t have the skills to unite most of the nation behind him.

Here’s Rees again about how Hitler and his messaging went straight into the subconscious brain:

Without the ability Hitler and the Nazis possessed to convince millions of Germans to support their racist utopian dream, they could never have come to power. It was a dream, as we shall see, that many young people found attractive. And this was partly because of a psychological truth about the way the brain develops.

Check this out:

During this decisive period of the early 1930s, the people who were disproportionately ‘tempted’ to join the Nazi Party were those in their twenties. The pseudo-Darwinian nature of the party had obvious appeal to the young and healthy, as did the notion of ‘righting the wrongs’ of a war in which almost all of them had been too young to fight, but which had cast a shadow over their childhood.

‘I went into the mountains with lots of Hitler youths,’ said Emil Klein, one of the earliest members of the party. ‘The youth movement had been around a long time previously, perhaps we were just more enthusiastic about the whole thing. Everyone came freely and did not come just because their parents wanted them to. Many came precisely because their parents were against it, because their father was a Social Democrat perhaps. They came in spite of it.’

As the economic depression intensified, the young Stormtrooper Wolfgang Teubert was one of many who fought against the communists in the streets: ‘Of course, one can’t understand it looking at it from today’s perspective, but in those days we were literally pushed to the limit. The people were unemployed and just obeyed the slogans, one lot following the Marxist slogans and we followed the others. And that resulted in these conflicts. And the fact that these conflicts weren’t always dealt with verbally, well, that was obvious.’

An article in May 1932 in the local socialist newspaper in Bernburg bemoaned the fact that ‘These young people, from mostly sheltered families, who now cannot find a livelihood… have, with their anger about this [situation] and with their political ignorance (school and parents have failed completely here), become easy prey for political adventurers. The Nazis have promised these youths everything and anything conceivable: the less specific these promises, the stronger they are.’

Psychological research helps us to understand why so many young people were susceptible to the extreme, passionate message of the Nazis, and demonstrates why the Nazis’ focus on youth was such an astute strategy. The key reason is because the frontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for regulating emotional impulses and analysing problems, is not fully formed until around twenty-five years old.

‘We were selected for delayed maturation of the frontal cortex,’ says Professor Robert Sapolsky, ‘because it takes a long time to learn your culture’s hypocrisies and learn your culture’s exceptions and to learn the difference between laws that should be followed and laws that shouldn’t be followed and can be ignored, and laws that you can die for and laws that you would die for opposing.’

While young people’s critical faculties are not yet completely developed before their mid-twenties, the parts of the brain which long for novelty and excitement are already shaped. This can lead to thrill seeking of the wildest kind.

‘The most interesting thing about adolescence’, says Professor Sapolsky, ‘is that it’s not only the time of life when you’re most likely to become a murderer, but it’s also the time of your life you’re most likely to commit your life to becoming Mother Teresa. If you’re going to form a new religion – that’s the time. If you’re going to stupidly horrify your parents by giving away all your savings to a charity, that’s the time. If you’re going to join some hateful ideology, that’s the time. It’s the extremes.’

It’s worth pointing out here that in pre-revolutionary Russia, so many of the young who surrendered to Bolshevism did so to defy their parents.

Next, think about Antifa, and the ICE vs Anti-ICE clashes we are seeing daily now, then read this:

Although against the use of violence themselves, many Germans clearly believed the violence of the Nazis might be necessary to protect them from a communist uprising. In short, their longing for peace and quiet made them embrace a party that promised to use violence to achieve that aim. It is a key reason why millions of law-abiding people felt able to vote for a law-breaking political party. It is also evidence of an important psychological insight. Research demonstrates that, as a species, very few of us are against violence in absolute terms. What we care about is that aggression is used only in appropriate situations. In the right circumstances most of us can be enthusiastic supporters of violence. Almost all of us want the security forces to protect us, for instance, and if they have to kill people who are about to kill us, then so be it.

We are not going to be able to reason people who have given themselves over to Fuentes-Candace-Tuckerism out of it. Rees:

In focusing on faith not cognition, Hitler benefited from a reality psychologists have known for years. It is almost impossible to convince people who have formed a strong emotional belief that they are wrong by using reasoned argument. Since faith is not dependent on reason, how can reason be used to convince anyone they are mistaken?

I’ll stop there — I’m running out of space. Though I’ve focused on the Right in this post, I’m learning from Rees’s book about the Nazi mind a lot about why the claims of wokeness captured the Leftist mind. Maybe in a future post I’ll draw those side by side comparisons. As it is, today I’ve got a lot to do to sort out my mother’s medical situation (she’s fine, but it’s a big mess for other reasons).

I want to leave you, though, with what the New York writer found in his travels among post-Charlie TPUSA folks: that the two things that wind them up most are Israel and issues having to do with national identity — particularly ethnic identity. Rees points out that though anti-Semitism had long been latent in German culture, it arose with unprecedented savagery in the Nazi period, as a response to an unprecedented catastrophe for the German people. Arendt too, 75 years ago, said a surge in anti-Semitism is typically a sign of deeper disorder within a culture, because it reveals an eagerness to believe in scapegoating and conspiracies.

I’ve devoted the entire newsletter today to Simon van Zuylen-Wood’s reported piece on the fight for TPUSA post-Charlie, because it is such an important window into what’s happening among politically engaged right-wing Gen Z. There’s a lot more to say about it, but again, I’m out of space. We might be lucky that the transgressiveness of Nick Fuentes is clownish, not like the deadly-serious transgressiveness of Hitler and his team. Nevertheless, the effect is similar: to demolish important taboos.

These people are paving the way for an American Caesar.

Before I go, let me remind you that much of my work for the past few years has been about how the Left has been busily building a progressive authoritarianism, or even a “soft totalitarianism.” Ed West writes today about how Starmer’s Britain is becoming that. I have no doubt that when the Left eventually regains power in the US, it will act as Starmer is doing. Wokeness is the leftist reaction to the same forces now animating the ideological vanguard of the young Right. We are caught in a terrible dynamic in this country, the same one that led Spain to civil war in the mid-1930s.

Knowing what we know about history, and knowing what we know about psychology today, a century after the rise of the Nazis, what can we do to arrest the totalitarian temptation? How can we on the Right assure that Charlie Kirk’s vision triumphs, not Nick Fuentes’s? I have a deep belief that religion is at the center. We’ll see what I discover. Eager for your reading recommendations in the comments.