'What Trap Is This?'

Reflections On The Lethargy Of Our Ruling Class In The Face Of Rising Radicalism

Screengrab from last night’s Bill Maher monologue

It’s the weekend, and yeah, my brain is fried from all the tedious footnoting of my forthcoming Weimar America book I had to do. But the book is FINISHED, thank you Lord, and now there’s nothing to do but sit back and wait for Basic Books to do its magic and get it ready for release. They’re saying early summer 2027. I have zero doubt that its thesis will be even more relevant by then, the way America is going.

Over my morning coffee, I watched Bill Maher’s brilliant monologue last night about the Democratic Socialists of America, and I just had to break my personal vow of “I swear I will chill the freak out this weekend and let my brain rest.” Maher is, of course, a liberal Democrat, but he seems to be just about the only one on that side who sees the DSA threat for what it is, and is not shutting up about it. Do yourselves a favor and watch it.

It starts with Maher saying, “Donald Trump has told one trillion lies, but when he says the Democratic Socialists of America are actually Communists, that’s not one of them. And it’s not hard to prove it, just by quoting the DSA and their candidates.” Watch:

Maher says at one point: “You know what’s being colonized now? The Democratic Party.” He brings up a resolution proposed by two Democratic members of Congress (see the pic at the top) that said “We are capitalist, not socialist. We want safety, not lawlessness. We are proud, not ashamed, of America.” Maher says it shouldn’t be hard for any Congressional Democrat to agree with that, but you know how many signed on to it?

Eight did. Eight out of 212. “Guys, there’s got to be an easier way to lose the swing states,” says Maher.

Yes, said Maher, this is not where most Democrats are right now, but that’s where they’re headed very fast — and the media (says Maher) are suppressing information about their radicalism. Maher quotes James Carville approvingly:

Maher: “Gavin Newsom disagrees. He says he’s good with it, because the party is a big tent. Well, is fine with it. You know what else you find in a big tent? Clowns.”

Yeah, clowns like Francesca Hong, a Democratic Socialist who is on track to become the Democratic nominee for governor, to replace Tim Walz [Note: I stupidly conflated Minnesota, which is governed by Tim Walz with Wisconsin — sorry! — RD] A black opponent dropped out of the race this week, saying that “it’s clear who our nominee is going to be.” Hong is a batshit crazy racist. For example:

Oh, she’s way, way crazier than that. Look at this clip from a recent Fox interview with Hong, in which the network gathered some of her Twitter Greatest Hits:

Here’s a link to the whole interview. One more Hong classic:

Look, 77 percent of Wisconsin’s population is white — up to 81 percent if you count Hispanics. And yet, this racist ding-dong has 38 percent of the Democratic electorate on her side.

My position is pretty much the same as Maher’s, but towards my own side.

Here are relevant passages from Antonia Hitchens’s story from April in the New Yorker. She talks about a southern California man she met called G., who is in his early thirties. Excerpts:

Followers of Fuentes are known as Groypers. They once constituted a tiny subculture of America’s young right; now they hope to overtake it. “I wasn’t really animated by politics until Trump came along,” G. told me. “I was, like, ‘Wow, America could be something great.’ ” Lately, Fuentes has supplanted Trump as the figure who most embodies that sense of promise. G. told me that all the conservative men he knew, and, increasingly, everyone he spent time with, were Groypers, too.

As you readers will remember, a lot of conservatives of that generation to whom I speak say this sensibility is spreading quickly. College professors who talk to me — conservatives — say they’re seeing it everywhere in their young men. Pastors too. More:

I’d first met G. several months earlier in Phoenix, at AmericaFest, the annual conference for the conservative activist group Turning Point. When I arrived in Arizona, young men in white “FREEDOM” T-shirts and black MAGA hats were streaming out of the airport. It was the weekend before Christmas, and pedicabs blasting “Jingle Bell Rock” shuttled visitors around downtown. G. drove from L.A. with a group of fellow-Groypers. In September, Charlie Kirk, Turning Point’s founder, had been assassinated by a gunman at Utah Valley University. AmericaFest sought to bring together factions of the right that were turning on one another in the aftermath of his death, and to anoint Trump’s successor by endorsing his Vice-President, J. D. Vance, for the Republican Presidential nomination in 2028. G. and his friends had come for a different reason. “We’re trying to unite super hard as a voting bloc and get every young conservative on board and just fuck the G.O.P. as hard as we can,” he told me. For a successful young professional attending a political conference, G. said things like “We have literally nothing to live for—we’re ready to die” a lot. His life, he claimed, was hopelessly compromised by the indignities of the modern world. “You watch these videos of Europe or America in the eighteen-hundreds or early nineteen-hundreds, and it’s beautiful,” he said. “Everyone’s well dressed. There’s, like, a tenderness and an innocence to it, and I feel like we’ve all been robbed of our innocence. All our buildings are these hideous rectangles. We’ve watched hundreds of hours of hardcore porn before we ever had our first kiss. Why the fuck did that happen? Do our G.O.P. leaders care?”

More:

Groypers are repelled by the obsequiousness of pro-Trump influencers who are always willing to contort themselves to support the President’s latest actions. Groyperism is more political hobbyism than Republican politics. The movement’s heroes range from Charles Lindbergh—the isolationist antisemite who gave speeches on behalf of the America First Committee in an attempt to keep the U.S. out of the Second World War—to Lana Del Rey, the melancholy, Americana-inflected songwriter whom they revere because she married an alligator hunter and has said, of feminism, “I’m just not really that interested.” They despise most G.O.P. politicians. Vance, for instance, might seem to appeal—he is an internet dweller who speaks openly of a Christian nation for “heritage” Americans—but Groypers loathe him more than they do Trump. Fuentes recently told his followers that Vance, who is married to an Indian woman, is a “race traitor.” Other strikes against him: his Jewish chief of staff, his friendship with Peter Thiel. (Or, more simply, as Clavicular, a Groyper-adjacent influencer, recently posted, “You do not want a weak fattie as your president.”) One Groyper told me that someone with an average I.Q. simply couldn’t understand the nuances of the movement.

I asked a political consultant in Washington to summarize. “Groypers are about demographic change,” the consultant said. “It’s a sovereignty issue. It’s literally, like, ‘Who runs my fucking country? Why do all these people get access to my birthright—not just before me but that might be denied to me? Do I get a deal better than somebody who runs across a border?’ ” Fuentes offers a more concise gloss. “There are basically two things that are going on,” he said recently. “White genocide and Jewish subversion.”

And so forth. It really is a generational thing, on both the Left and the Right — and the older generations (Boomers, Xers, older Millennials) are too disconnected to see what’s happening. By “disconnected,” I mean they either don’t see it at all, or they have this idea that these are radical young people whose enthusiasm can be harnessed for electoral victory, but that ultimately they can be controlled. This is the Franz von Papen Strategy.

The thing is, these radicals on both sides are not wrong in that there’s something deeply wrong with the system as it is, and there needs to be significant structural reforms. I lay the argument out in Weimar America, so I won’t go into it here (publishers don’t like it when you steal the thunder from your own forthcoming book). Let’s just say that if you want to understand the danger in the current moment — the danger to both the Democratic and Republican parties — read historian Peter Turchin’s 2023 book End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path to Political Disintegration.

Turchin’s basic thesis is that the core cause of revolutions in history, across cultures and eras, is what he calls “elite overproduction” — that is, societies that have too many educated and ambitious young people for the jobs and opportunities available. It’s not that the working-class masses aren’t suffering. It’s that educated elites have the intellectual and networking skills to mobilize them against the System. As I never tire of warning y’all, the Nazis and the Communists were fringe parties in Weimar Germany (though the Communists were much more powerful) until the 1929 Great Depression. That was the breaking point. Germans had been through so much since the end of World War I, that they couldn’t take anymore.

And the Germans that ran hardest and fastest into the arms of the Nazis during the Great Depression were educated middle-class young men, who had grown up knowing nothing but the social and moral chaos of postwar Germany. What stake did they have in democracy and capitalism (remember, the Nazis were National Socialists), if it was ruining their country and closing off the pathway to a stable life for themselves? The centrist parties had no answer for them. So they went far Left or far Right.

There are clear parallels with America today. I won’t belabor that here. The point I want to make is that our normie politicians — Democrats and Republicans — are making two very consequential mistakes: 1) thinking that they can work with these radicals, and 2) failing to grasp the legitimate roots of their radicalism (though there are also illegitimate roots), and act meaningfully to address these issues.

The reason I have been so adamant in hoping that J.D. Vance will take the lead here is because I think he, practically alone among senior GOP politicians, understands how screwed the younger generations are, economically. But I think he is mistaken if he thinks he can big-tent these people who want to “tear it all down” (as a DC Zoomercon told me last year) into the party. They hate Vance, but I believe they see him as their best bid for real power.

I’ve recommended this many times before, but if you haven’t yet seen the introductory episode to this 1980s British television documentary about the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, please do make a point of watching it. It’s about the prelude to the war — specifically about how Spanish democracy, in the first half of the 1930s, was caught in a deadly dynamic of competing radicalisms, inevitably leading to civil war. When I first saw it back in 2019, I think it was, it gave me a chill, because I saw similar factors at work in contemporary America. I was right. Check it out and see for yourself.

History is not fated. We Americans can avert this kind of disaster, but we cannot do it if those politicians in power, both Democratic and Republican, fail to appreciate the seriousness of this unstable moment. Yes, it’s true that this radicalism is being stoked and fed by algorithms (sometimes engineered by foreign enemy governments), but it does have some basis in reality. Franklin Delano Roosevelt saved capitalism in the 1930s with the New Deal, as impoverished masses were hungry, desperate, and saw no real hope for themselves in the unreformed system. I would very much like capitalism to be saved, and liberal democracy too! But it’s not going to happen unless people who believe in both, for all their serious flaws, don’t wake up and speak up.

Granted, I’m a doomer, or maybe even a bad-faith postliberal, to the extent that I don’t know how liberal democracy carries on without being based in a shared belief in a sacred order. By “sacred order,” I don’t mean strictly religion. Japan and South Korea are not Christian countries, but democracy works there because for now, at least, there is a general consensus on the unseen structure of the world, upon which every stable social order depends. Richard M. Weaver, in his 1948 conservative classic Ideas Have Consequences, states that men have three levels of conscious reflection on the world: specific ideas about things, general convictions, and a foundational "metaphysical dream of the world". By that, Weaver meant “an intuitive feeling about the immanent nature of reality, and this is the sanction to which both ideas and beliefs are ultimately referred for verification.”

That “metaphysical dream of the world” is the most important, because it is the base upon which everything else is built. The Swiss Catholic philosopher Max Picard wrote in 1946, surveying the ruins of Germany, that the core reason for the German self-annihilation was the loss among the German people of the logos — which you might characterize as a metaphysical dream of a world in which there is an ultimate moral structure undergirding the material world. This is usually expressed as religion.

In the late 19th century, Nietzsche saw what was coming for Europe, because as he put it, in the mouth of his “Madman,” “God is dead, and we have killed him.” Nietzsche was an atheist; he did not believe God ever existed. His statement was about the way the modern West had lost the idea of logos tied to God, as the West had long known God through the Bible, and the Church (or churches). This was very hard for most people to perceive at the time, because Progress was booming. If you read memoirs of people writing about pre-WWI Europe, you can see how almost nobody imagined that they were all about to blow the whole thing up.

Weaver, writing like Picard as the smoke still hung over post-WW2 Europe, said:

Hysterical optimism will prevail until the world again admits the existence of tragedy, and it cannot admit the existence of tragedy until it again distinguishes between good and evil. Hope of restoration depends upon recovery of the ìceremony of innocence, of that clearness of vision and knowledge of form which enable us to sense what is alien or destructive, what does not comport with our moral ambition.

… If society is something which can be understood, it must have structure; if it has structure, it must have hierarchy; against this metaphysical truth the declamations of the Jacobins break in vain.

In his own book about all this, Hitler In Our Selves, Picard says that there can be no hope of recovery for the West without the recovery of logos — and the Logos, which is to say, a meaningful belief in Jesus Christ, the divine incarnation of logos.

Despite the nutjob Christians who are tying the faith to whatever radical, racist, antisemitic programs they push, it is no coincidence that this radicalism has emerged on both Left and Right among the most secular generation in American history — which is also the first digital generation. Read sociologist Christian Smith’s great and chilling tome Why Religion Went Obsolete to better understand this dynamic. He’s talking about traditional religion; his next book, out in January, is called Occulture, which is about how young Americans are abandoning traditional religion, but not for atheism; rather, they are taking up various esoteric and occult philosophies.

I wrote about this in my own 2024 book Living In Wonder. The phenomenon is real, and I am very eager to read Smith’s sociological account, which will surely draw on research not yet available when I wrote my own book.

We are not simply engaged in political war, and culture war, but ultimately spiritual war. And from my perspective, so many normies, both Democratic and Republican, don’t see it. They’re like the Roman pagan elites in Edward Watts’s historical account The Final Pagan Generation: they oversaw the wholesale overturning of the longstanding pagan order, and never really understood what was happening. Rome had always been pagan, and always would be — or so they thought, living in their own epistemic bubble.

So it is with many, many of us today. We understand neither the threat from these radicals on both sides, nor do we understand the material, cultural, and spiritual conditions that give rise to it. If we did, we would be busting our butts both to combat the rising evil on the margins, and also to change the System to address the legitimate grievances of those tempted by radicalism.

And by “change the System,” I don’t simply mean make political and economic changes. Church leaders, both clerical and lay, are mostly blind to the realities around them. (It’s a big reason why I wrote Living In Wonder.) We are a society, and indeed a civilization, accelerating our progress towards the disaster. If we do not avert it, then Philip Larkin’s poem “Myxomatosis,” addressed to a rabbit dying in the wild from a disease introduced by scientists to cull excess population, could well be our civilization’s epitaph. Bear in mind that before the rabbit dies, it becomes lethargic:

Caught in the centre of a soundless field

While hot inexplicable hours go by

What trap is this? Where were its teeth concealed?

You seem to ask.

I make a sharp reply,

Then clean my stick. I’m glad I can’t explain

Just in what jaws you were to suppurate:

You may have thought things would come right again

If you could only keep quite still and wait.

One more thing: it is no secret that I believe that my former friend Tucker Carlson has given himself over to becoming a mouthpiece for spreading a lot of evil in this world. He wasn’t always like this. He has spoken out many times on how he was attacked in his bed in early 2023 by a demon that left bleeding gashes on his body. I knew about this not long after it happened, because he told me about it. I immediately brought in a couple of exorcists — one Orthodox, one Catholic — to offer him help. He communicated with them, but in the end, decided he would be fine just reading the Bible by himself (he doesn’t go to church). He told me (politely) that exorcism seems to him to be like “witchcraft.”

I never said anything about Tucker’s encounter with the demon, until he made it public himself in the autumn of 2024. In this Daily Mail piece today, I briefly discuss why I think the demonic world is real, and why I think Tucker Carlson has come strongly under its influence. I end by saying that Tucker Carlson is not the enemy here — that he is a child of God who is caught in the jaws the real Enemy of humanity, a dragon whose nature Tucker, in his pride, does not understand, and refuses to understand.

Thank you subscribers for supporting my work. I believe what I’m doing is important and necessary, no matter what kind of hatred it brings me. I have been wrong before, and will be wrong again, but I’m always going to do my best to tell the truth as I see it (while remaining open to correction), because I have absorbed some lessons from both experience and from the great gift of talking at length with the brave anticommunist dissidents who stood up to the Machine of lies when it stood to cost them far, far more than it stands to cost any American today. I find this question clarifying: What would Vaclav and Kamila Benda do?

The Benda family at home in Prague, during the Communist years