The Fascist Film That Plays As Prophecy

Like The Most Effective Propaganda, 'Citizen Vigilante' Is Based In Awful Truths

Armie Hammer as the Citizen Vigilante

Before leaving London this morning, I finished watching one of the most terrifying films I’ve ever seen: Uwe Boll’s ‘Citizen Vigilante’. It is not a good movie, technically speaking: it’s propagandistic, and full of holes (e.g., there are a hundred ways the Vigilante makes it easy for cops to identify him and track him down, but they never seem to do it). Narratively, it is a total mess. But technical excellence is not its point. It’s not even a good movie in the moral sense, more on which later. Not gonna lie, I felt dirty watching it.

But I’m glad I did, because it is an extremely powerful movie, for one reason: it tells forbidden but widely known truths about life in lawless Europe overrun by migrants, and it speaks deeply — deeply — to the sense of suppressed outrage that many ordinary Europeans feel towards the film’s twin villains: migrant criminals and the European establishment (law enforcement, courts, politicians) that allow them to tyrannize innocent Europeans. The academic David Betz warns of civil war coming to Europe if those in power don’t do something serious about migration and the problems it causes. This movie shows you exactly what he means.

The fact that this film now exists, and that no matter how hard they try, European authorities will not be able to suppress it, is strong evidence supporting Betz’s recent claim that it’s likely too late to stop what’s coming.

Before I go further, I want you to understand clearly: I am not endorsing this film’s message, any more than Prof. Betz is endorsing civil war. Rather, I am telling you that “Citizen Vigilante,” written and directed by the German filmmaker Uwe Boll, is a sign of the times. Maybe the most potent sign yet. A move by the German authorities to ban it will only make it more popular — and will also reveal the extent of the judgment they have brought on themselves. (I expect other European governments will follow suit on the ban attempt, and that they will fail as well.)

I have been accused by well-meaning people — people who understand the problem — of somehow encouraging civil unrest by talking about it. They’re wrong. In fact, the outright refusal of those in power to talk about it, and to suppress and punish people who are trying, however crudely, to face the truth, makes propaganda works like this inevitable. And it also makes the fascist fantasy of the film likely to come true.

In fact, let me make this clear: “Citizen Vigilante” is a fascist film, in the sense that it valorizes lawless violence in service of restoring social order and an ideal of justice. It shows exactly why an exasperated people turn to fascism as a solution to a problem liberal democratic governments have proven unwilling or unable to solve.

If you don’t understand that, you will not understand the malign power of this film. Nor will you get why it will become an underground smash, no matter what the authorities do. “Citizen Vigilante” is also a fulfillment of Ross Douthat’s famous prophecy from about twenty years ago, that went something like this: “If you don’t like the Religious Right, just wait till you see the Post-Religious Right.”

Let’s begin.

Armie Hammer, a disgraced US actor, portrays the eponymous protagonist, an American who comes to an unnamed European country (the film was shot in Croatia) to take over his late father’s businesses. He establishes himself as a vigilante who murders migrants who have raped, physically attacked, or murdered native Europeans. He becomes a folk hero, even though Interpol is trying to catch him.

Citizen Vigilante — his name is “Sanders” — tracks down migrant criminals who have been let off. When he sees migrants (and European confederates) behaving with disrespect of the law, he intervenes with violence or a threat of violence. For example, when two migrant youth and a European girl hanging out with them refuse to pay bus fare, he pays it for them so the bus can continue on its way, and delivers a stern lecture to them that they have a responsibility to obey the law. When they leave the bus, they mock him.

Later, when Sanders runs across this same trio robbing and beating a teenage boy in a park, he tases the males, tells the victim to run get his parents and call the police, then stomps the hands of the robbers so hard that he likely breaks them.

Sanders is not a conventionally moral man. At one point, he visits a prostitute in a brothel run in one of his family’s buildings — but he treats her honorably, as these things go. This is an important point, I think: there is nothing at all Christian or religious about Sanders. He is entirely secular.

This is what I mean when I tell you that he is an avatar of the Post-Christian Right. Christianity never comes up in this film, at all.

And it’s a good thing too, because if Sanders treated church authorities the way he treats European police, soldiers, judges, and bureaucrats he blames for the migrant crime wave, he would have taken them out too. It is well known in Europe that bishops, pastors, and even popes are sentimental humanitarians who have demonstrated by their words and deeds that they care more about the welfare of migrants than about the rule of law and the protection of European people.

The most interesting aspect of this film is how Sanders regards law enforcement, even judges, as traitors. He slaughters soldiers coming to get him. He kidnaps and kills a Boomer judge who released members of a rape gang, claiming that the gang rapists were victims of a society that did not try to integrate them.

Director Uwe Boll based this on a real-life event. The show business trade journal Variety reports:

“Citizen Vigilante” was inspired by a notorious case in Hamburg in 2016, when a group of teenagers gang-raped a 14-year-old girl and left her for dead, only for the perpetrators to walk free with suspended sentences.

“If you look at what happened in Hamburg, where the rapists walked free without any penalty, the coverage in the media was like ‘Oh, the poor perpetrators,’” Boll told the Telegraph. “It’s as if we’re living in a completely insane and absurd political environment, especially in Europe, where people have completely lost track. There is a huge difference between so-called ‘hate speech’ and stabbing people in the neck. But facts don’t matter anymore.”

“It’s absurd how I feel politically,” Boll added. “Now you’re being told that if you’re a conservative about anything — social, sexual, political — that you’re a Nazi. But this is how things stand at the moment. If you question anything — such as the hundreds of billions being pumped into Ukraine — then you’re either a friend of Putin or a Nazi or both.” When the Telegraph asked him if he was a Nazi, Boll laughed before answering: “I am not a Nazi!”

I write aboard a plane back to the US, so I don’t have the online ability to research and cite statistics. I encourage you to do so — they aren’t hard to find. What they show is that migrants from Africa, Islamic parts of south Asia (e.g., Pakistan), and the Islamic Middle East, are disproportionately represented in rape and violent crime statistics in the UK and Europe (though not all European governments keep these statistics). Uwe Boll tells a fictional story here, but he’s not making up the problem. Not by a mile.

I would not at all think that Katharine Birbalsingh, herself of migrant background, would support this film. But watching it, I recalled seeing her electrifying speech at ARC, in which she vehemently denounced the woke culture that rendered the police who presided over the slow death of Henry Nowak, stabbed to death by a brown person, wrong-headed in how they handled the incident. As police body cams showed, Henry Nowak, a white Briton who had been stabbed by Vickrum Singh Digwa, bleeding to death from his wounds while police mocked his claims that he had been stabbed. Birbalsingh condemned the culture that had taught the police officers to be more afraid of being called racist than of helping a clearly injured white man.

“Citizen Vigilante” says, in effect: if Britain and Europe will not listen to the good people like Birbalsingh, sounding the warning, then they will inevitably call up demons like Sanders. It’s the most predictable thing in the world.

Another interesting thing about the film: when Sanders visits his family’s company, he finds its workers old, demoralized by bureaucracy, and seemingly indifferent to quality. We learn that his late father had been a bad parent who did not protect or prepare his son and his son’s generation for running a society that works. There is an immense subcurrent of contempt at the Boomer generation for failing to do its job.

The most terrifying passage is the film’s climax. In it, Sanders murders an entire Islamic migrant family for raising its rapist son to think of European girls as sluts who deserve to be raped. The rapist teenager’s mother says that the fault belongs to European girls, who make migrant boys horny by the way they dress. The family slaughter — it’s all very graphic — is a classic example of vendetta “justice”: making an entire family pay for the sins of one of its members.

The recurring message here, from Sanders, to European audiences: “Remember, I’m doing this for you until you learn to do it for yourselves.”

Elon Musk made the entire film viewable on X for a short while; I don’t know if it still is. Musk is a big driver of these narratives. This is the main reason why the EU and UK authorities hate him so much, and are trying to shut him down.

But listen: if not for Elon Musk, there would have been no public outcry in Britain over the Pakistani rape gangs. He singlehandedly, through X, brought the issue back into the public square. The facts were known, but the government, and UK institutions, had kept a lid on public outrage.

Whether you blame or credit Musk for this, his central role is undeniable. And he is making an important point: governments and their establishment allies cannot solve the problem by suppressing information and public outrage.

Here is the film’s final frame before the credits roll:

We have similar problems in the US, of course. Think of Daniel Penny, the good Samaritan who subdued a violent black lunatic on the New York subway. The lunatic died while Penny had neutralized him — and the woke Manhattan DA charged Penny in his death! Uwe Boll made this film about Europe, for Europeans — but there is a message in it for Americans too.

Again: I do not endorse this film! I deeply sympathize with the spirit behind it, but we cannot surrender to vigilante murder. It is impossible to watch at least some of the things Sanders does to the thugs in the film and not inwardly cheer at justice done, even in a bad way. Nevertheless, vigilantism is exactly what we are going to get, because a people cannot endure such horrific injustices indefinitely.

As you know, I’ve written a book titled Weimar America, out next year. The reason Germans in the early 1930s turned to fascism (and some to communism) was because the democratic authorities had failed to address the massive social problems that had impoverished and humiliated the German people. Fascists and Communists offered false solutions that led to the mass murder of millions in a genocide, and world war.

But the Germans of the late 1920s and early 1930s did not know that was coming. They were exhausted from poverty, decadence, and disorder, and had lost all faith in their institutions. The Nazis offered a tough, remorseless solution — and they took it. We know what happened next.

As I said, “Citizen Vigilante” is a bad movie, but it’s also a sign of things to come. The good and responsible people who want to prevent the scenario it depicts from happening are running out of time to to act decisively and effectively to fix the problems they have created through wokeness and mass migration.

How many warnings will they need? At some point — and that point is coming soon — it will be too late. The “civil war” academic David Betz has been warning about is likely to take the form shown in “Citizen Vigilante”: random terror acts against migrants, judges, and authorities.

I don’t want that. Neither should you. But again: it’s coming. “Citizen Vigilante” is a bad film, a dark film — but a prophetic one. It’s in the same vein as the 1973 French novel Camp Of The Saints, which was recently re-translated and published in English. It is a violent and distasteful book, even racist in parts. But it gives a clear and unmistakable warning of what is to come if we don’t act.

At ARC, listening in private conversation to young people (Generation Z), I heard complaints about how “Boomer” many of the speeches were. It wasn’t a cheap slur. What they meant is that older people — that is to say, not only Boomers, but Gen Xers (like me), and even Millennials — do not understand how critical the crisis has become, and how weird and extreme the world really is.

For example, I spoke to one British student who gave me details about actual Nazi cells forming in UK universities. I initially thought this student (who is conservative and Christian) was speaking metaphorically, but the student corrected me: “No, I’m talking about actual Nazis, students who get together to study Mein Kampf.” Even I hadn’t imagined that, but the student gave me specific details that convinced me they were telling the truth. The student told me this as a warning about how utterly out of touch older people like me are with the rapidly forming reality on the ground among Generation Z (“Gen Zed,” as they say in Britain).

This student made it absolutely plain that they hated this, but it is coming, and coming fast — and the older generations, even those who are aware that the status quo cannot go on. I shared with the student the thesis of Weimar America. This person agreed, but (politely, I think) indicated that things are worse than I think.

I left London even more convinced that we Olds need to listen to Gen Z, and not just to tell them how wrong they are. These young radicals of Left and Right really are wrong, to some degree, but they’re not wrong when they warn that we older people who believe in liberal democracy, and want to defend it, are out of touch with the world as it is.

I woke up this morning to the news that Zohran Mamdani’s Democratic Socialists are well on their way to wiping out the Democratic Party in New York City. As Will Rahn writes today in TGIF, this new crop of leftist elected officials are not like your mom and dad’s Democrats. They openly hate America, the West, and Jews. Excerpts:

“Free Palestine” is the now the binding issue on the left, the only thing that actually matters. They’ve given up on global warming. Do Black Lives still Matter? Unclear. Abortion, tax hikes, gun control, nationalized healthcare: all now take a back seat to AIPAC, an American group that funds pro-Israel candidates, and the big bad bogeyman on the left. …

You don’t need to be Bibi Netanyahu’s No. 1 fan to conclude that all this has become totally deranged. Stand against the settlements. Plenty of Israelis certainly do so. But why was the Sunrise Movement — a supposedly environmentalist organization — gleefully posting photos this week of some poor woman who apparently elected to get a “FUCK AIPAC” tattoo on her forehead?

Rahn points out that just before the election, a Brooklyn coffeeshop said that if it had known that Rep. Dan Goldman, “basically the personification of the Democratic Party during Trump’s first term” (as lead counsel for the House Democrats during Trump’s first impeachment, before he was elected to Congress in 2022), it would not have served him. Rahn says that Goldman’s mistake was deciding that Hamas’s October 7 massacre of over 1,000 Israeli civilians was a bad thing.

Even though Goldman supports a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, that’s not enough anymore. Mamdani’s response to the coffeeshop’s bigoted statement against Goldman was tepid at best. The only acceptable solution now to the Mamdani left is the obliteration of the Jewish state. Rahn: “The Resistance movement that matters now is not made up of Trump enemies, but Palestinian militants.” Goldman lost his seat to Brad Lander, an Israel-hating Jew and close ally of Mamdani’s.

Rahn also points out that another Democratic Socialist headed to Congress after this week’s election is Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old Columbia graduate who openly denounced Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and is a prison abolitionist. In an interview with the NYT editorial board, she said that the reason prisons exist is because (like the judge in “Citizen Vigilante”), society has failed black and brown people. Therefore, prisons need to be demolished. Really, the incoming Congresswoman believes this. Rahn:

Look, we’re seeing the emergence of Woke 2.0, and part of the reason I was harping so long on the New York primaries is because we now have a sense of what it will look like.

He’s right. How are these loony leftists going to co-exist with the post-Trump Right? Yes, they share a pathological hatred of Israel and the Jews — Jews are always the canary in the civilizational coal mine — but that’s not going to keep them friends. May I remind you that 1920s Germany, before the coming of Hitler, was wracked by street violence between Communists and Nazis. The conventional conservative and social democratic parties struggled mightily to maintain order. Most Germans kept voting for them, hoping that they could make democracy work.

But after the Great Depression hit in 1929, ordinary Germans — especially the young! — lost faith in liberal democracy, and flocked to parties of the extreme Left and extreme Right. I believe this is happening now in most Western countries, despite the fact that we have not suffered the shattering events that preceded the Great Depression. I wrote in Live Not By Lies that we did not (many still do not) grasp the totalitarian nature of wokeness, because our idea of totalitarianism was police-state control via pain and terror, à la Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Yet the effects were still totalitarian! The refugees from Soviet communism that I interviewed for that book helped me, and my readers, understand this.

Weimar America is written in the same sense. When most of us who know anything about Weimar hear the word, we immediately think of the opening act for Nazism. The idea of a Hitler taking power in America seems absurd, so we dismiss the claim. This is dangerously stupid. As I write in the book, I do not know if Fascist government is coming to America, nor do I know if Communist government is coming (the Communist Party of Germany was a powerful force before Hitler). If I had to predict — and I write this in the book — I would guess that whatever is coming will be severely authoritarian, and will be connected to the normalization of AI.

You subscribers who read me daily have read me saying this a thousand times, but I’m sending this to the whole readership (not just subscribers), so I’ll say it again:

The point of the book is that we have created the psychosocial conditions of 1920s Germany — the social atomization, the collapse of faith in institutions, the cultural and sexual decadence, and so forth — despite our prosperity and freedom, and in many ways precisely because of it!

America has not lost a catastrophic war, as Imperial Germany did. It has not experienced hyperinflation, which destroyed the German middle class in 1923. Nevertheless, in part because of digital technology, we have created a society of lonely, fearful, angry people who have little hope in the future, and who have lost trust in society’s institutions — government, political parties, churches, schools, media, and so forth. The genesis of my forthcoming book was the answer a Gen Z conservative in DC told me last November when, after he confirmed that the mass enthusiasm for Nick Fuentes and his politics among his generation of DC conservatives is true, I asked him what they want.

“They don’t want anything,” he said. “They want to tear it all down.”

Straight Weimar. This is what the Mamdani allies want, from the Left. And it’s what their radical confrères on the Right want as well. They’re succeeding, slowly but surely.

The day may come when we American conservatives miss Donald Trump who, for all his many, many flaws — yes, I am a disillusioned Trump supporter — is not a right-wing extremist. Trump remembers an America that worked. The generation born in the late 1990s has known nothing but failure, uncertainty, and chaos.

Sanders, the killer in “Citizen Vigilante,” is not of Generation Z, but he wants the same thing. That is, he wants to tear down a system that he believes is corrupt, ineffectual, and malign. In one shlocky speech, he chides Muslim immigrants about their contempt for democracy. He’s not wrong about that, but his solution is to … kill them. The lesson I take from that horrific scene is that we who really do believe in liberal democracy — and in the Christian faith — had damn well better start defending them like we mean it.

Katharine Birbalsingh, a brave and good Boomer and descendant of migrants who loved Western civilization, warned the ARC audience that “we are at war,” and had better start acting like it. One more time: I am quite sure that she would be horrified by “Citizen Vigilante” — but I am equally confident that she would agree that if actual small-d democrats don’t start fighting back against the forces, people, and institutions that are allowing our liberal democracies to fall to pieces, we are going to be responsible for the horrors that follow. I loved every word she said, but especially the part when she laid into the audience, telling us that this crisis is our fault, for not finding the courage and the will to defend the civilization we inherited.

To my fellow Christians: not long ago I had an intense conversation with a Gen Z Christian who explained that Nick Fuentes is so popular among Gen Z conservative Christians because Fuentes, clown that he is, straddles the line between Catholicism and “vitalism” — the neopagan worship of strength and power. If the churches don’t find some way to relate to strength — and demonstrate it in an authentically Christian way, not simply demonize it — then the neopagans will win. Moralistic Therapeutic Deism and sentimental humanitarianism are going to be crushed.

We don’t have much time left. We on the Right know who the enemies of civilization on our side are — and they are growing in power and influence, in part because too few of us are willing to stand up to them. I am much less confident that the decent Left understands who the enemies of civilization on its side is, but I am certain that they are far less willing to stand up to them. Still, take Birbalsingh seriously when she says that the enemy is too often … ourselves, in our timidity and denial.

In fact, I advise you, reader, to watch “Citizen Vigilante” with your mature Gen Z kids. Then talk with them about it. Ask them what they think of it, why they think it. Share your own views. If you judge their opinions wrong, then try to lead them in the right way. If they judge yours wrong, then talk to them about it. Maybe they have something to teach you. Ignoring the problems or wishing them away is pointless. Serious engagement of these serious issues requires labor, and the willingness to confront ugly thoughts and things. Wishing, hoping, ignoring, lecturing — none of that will work. None of it. We are at war — and the enemies are not only where we think they are, or where we would like them to be, for our own peace of mind.

To paraphrase Ross Douthat of old, if you, my fellow small-d democrats, and my fellow small-o orthodox Christians, don’t like Katharine Birbalsingh, and you won’t do as she says, well, my dears, just wait till you get the Citizen Vigilante. He’s coming.

(Sorry I’m late posting — couldn’t get this out before boarding the London to Miami flight. Now I’m rushing to get this posted before catching the connection to Birmingham.)