Also thank you to this dozens of new paid subscribers who responded to last week’s appeal. The response was really heartwarming and encouraging and I really do appreciate it. Welcome.

In the turgid miasma of online antisemitism, one voice stands out: Candace Owens. Owens is not one to traffic merely in familiar antisemitic cliches of Jewish control of Hollywood or finance. No, like her broad palette of conspiracy theories—e.g., that Brigitte Macron is a transgender woman and Emmanuel Macron’s father—her antisemitism is a concatenation of half-baked lunacies cobbled together from the fringes of the brain-rotted internet. To take but one recent example: Jews didn’t have Charlie Kirk assassinated merely because he questioned American support for Israel; rather, they offered him as a blood sacrifice (in cahoots with Erika Kirk) because they practice the occult.

But the most bizarre aspect of Owens’s antisemitic rants is their frequent references to hitherto obscure figures in Jewish religious history: the seventeenth-century false messiah Sabbatai Zevi and an eighteenth-century successor named Jacob Frank. Having spent much of my academic career studying these figures (and writing a book about one of them), it was disorienting to hear their names on Owens's lips; I began to have questions. Why is Owens fixated on these mostly-forgotten figures in Jewish history? And how did she even find out about them?

Now, one caveat: Owens may just be grifting here. She is all about the Benjamins, and her followers on social media have almost doubled in the last year alone. And her views have been quite malleable in the past: Owens is a former progressive (her parents successfully sued her school district for failing to protect her from racial discrimination) and anti-harassment campaigner who abruptly switched teams in 2017 to join conservative Gamergate harassers Mike Cernovich and Milo Yiannapoulos. She is also a one-time colleague of politically conservative Orthodox Jews Dennis Prager and Ben Shapiro, yet she now claims that Jews are or were in control of the slave trade, the Mafia, and the United States government. (Owens has clearly never been to a bar mitzvah; we can’t even control the lines for food.)

So maybe it’s a mistake to take anything Owens says seriously, if she’s reaching for whatever idea will get her more plays. Then again, given her 25 million YouTube followers, maybe it’s a mistake not to take her seriously. Let’s discuss, then, Owens’s analysis of early modern Jewish apostasy.

Sabbatai Zevi lived from 1626 to 1676 in present-day Turkey. In the early part of his life, he was an eccentric figure, not unlike people you would see in the old Times Square shouting that the end of the world is nigh. Scholars conjecture that he had bipolar disorder. But in 1665, he was discovered by a well-known Kabbalist, Rabbi Nathan of Gaza, who proclaimed him the Messiah.

This was like a spark lit among dry pine needles. It came only 17 years after the horrifying Chmielnicki Massacres in present-day Ukraine, in which an estimated 100,000 Jews were murdered, and in the context of a Jewish mystical tradition which had heightened messianic expectations since the 1492 expulsion from Spain. Sabbatai Zevi reached the heights of his popularity in 1666 (a coincidence noted by Christian observers, who identified him as the Antichrist), and eventually amassed such a following that he was thrown in jail and then brought before the Ottoman Sultan, who gave him the choice to convert to Islam or die.

It was at this moment that Sabbatai’s messianic followers believed he would seize the crown of the Ottoman Empire from the Sultan, restore Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel, and lead a return of the Jewish people there. Instead, Sabbatai chose to save his skin and convert to Islam.

This was the end of Sabbateanism as a mass movement. But, as Leon Festinger described in When Prophecy Fails (1964), the most devout followers redoubled their devotion. Some remained outwardly Jewish and secretly heretical; others converted outwardly to Islam but remained secretly Jewish. Astonishingly, this smaller, secret movement lasted through the twentieth century, and a few of the faithful remain even today, living in Turkey and Israel. But mostly, Sabbateanism dropped out of historical relevance. Its most lasting impact, as the pioneering scholar Gershom Scholem wrote, was to greatly weaken rabbinic authority and pave the way for reforms that would come a century later.

Though not, as we will see, for Owens.

One of the successors to Sabbatai Zevi was Jacob Frank (1726-1791), who led a sect of believers in present-day Poland. As Frank’s popularity grew, the rabbinic establishment reported his sect to the Christian authorities as a heretical movement, and they were offered the same choice as Sabbatai: convert (this time to Christianity) or die. In 1759, they converted en masse, in the largest mass apostasy in Jewish history.

That conversion was eventually exposed as a sham, and Jacob Frank spent 12 years in prison in the monastic fortress of Częstochowa, the national shrine of Poland. Following his release, he preached a more radical antinomian philosophy (which is what I wrote my book about), blending heretical Judaism, Western Esotericism, and Christianity, and had a strange second career as a kind of European esoteric charlatan. He died in 1791 and his movement withered not long after.

Antisemitic conspiracy theories are 99 percent false—but they do have grains of truth to them. In this case, it is true that Frank’s followers, especially one Moses Dobruschka, had contact among the Freemasons, and ran guns from the Habsburg Empire to the French Revolutionaries. It is also true that others, including the ancestors of Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis, did eventually become prominent Jewish reformers in the nineteenth century, although Scholem rather overstated their importance. And in the Ottoman Empire, some of Sabbatai’s followers’ descendants became some of the leading Young Turks who helped establish secular Turkey; the scholar Cengiz Sisman has written brilliantly about them.

It is also true that Sabbatai and Frank abrogated parts of traditional Jewish law, including many prohibitions around sex. It was a longstanding idea in Jewish mysticism that many of the ordinary rules that govern Jewish life would no longer be valid in the Messianic Age. Frank added a further, libertine rationale: God wants people to be free, not constrained by empty and pointless restrictions. Thus these sectarians ate non-kosher food, changed or eliminated some Jewish holidays, and, in rare and ritualized settings, had sexual intercourse outside of marriage. They also transgressed patriarchal gender roles: the Sabbatean community had more female leaders than any Jewish community in history before the late twentieth century.

Naturally, stories of secret, heretical orgies stoke the imagination of heresiologists, fundamentalists, conspiratorialists, and hedonists. And they did, at times, take place, according to the few reliable records we possess. I have further argued that these movements presaged what we now know of as “spirituality”—the possibility of religious experience without religious laws and structures. But neither the historical nor theological activities of these sectarians ever amounted to much. They are footnotes to Jewish history.

But not to Owens.

In the upside-down world of Owens’s imaginaire, many of the people who today claim to be Jews are, in fact, Sabbateans. When she said, on one occasion, “This is the church of Satan we’re talking about,” she was not simply libeling Judaism, but claiming that the Rothschilds, Soroses, and Epsteins of the world are not even real Jews, but either followers of Sabbatai Zevi or heirs to them. Ditto when she accuses Jews of practicing the “occult”—this means Sabbateanism, or sometimes the Kabbalah.

These “Sabbateans,” says Owens, controlled European history and orchestrated the destruction of traditional religion. They didn’t just run some guns to the French Revolution; they puppet-mastered the whole thing. And they didn’t die out a century ago; they are alive, well, and shaping history in smoke-filled rooms.

Where did she even get this stuff? If you think the story’s been weird so far, buckle up.

Believe it or not—and here I am drawing on excellent, as-yet-unpublished research by University of Colorado professor Nan Goodman and independent historian Mark Gunnery—the ultimate source for Candace Owens’s antisemitism is a chemist and Orthodox rabbi named Marvin Antelman.

In the late 1960s, Antelman (1933-2013) was radicalized by racial conflict and white flight in Boston and became active in Jewish extremist circles, including Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defense League. In 1976, he and two other rabbis convened a bogus Jewish beit din (rabbinic court), called the Rabbinic Court of America, at the New York Hilton Hotel. There, they convicted of “betraying the Jewish people” such disparate figures as Henry Kissinger, Noam Chomsky, and the liberal organization New Jewish Agenda. (Most of the “traitors” were liberals; Kissinger was convicted because he had delayed arms shipments to Israel during the Yom Kippur War.) As real rabbinic courts had done centuries earlier to Baruch Spinoza, Antelman’s kangaroo court pronounced the ban of herem—excommunication—against them.

These were, of course, cosplay trials, at once bombastic and ridiculous. Antelman was basically a crank.

Two years earlier, in 1974, Antelman had self-published a book entitled To Eliminate the Opiate, self-described as “[a]n in-depth study of Communist and conspiratorial group efforts to destroy Jews and Judaism.” In it, he claims that Communism, the Jewish Bund, Reform Judaism, the Haskalah (the rationalist “Jewish Enlightenment” of the nineteenth century), the Rothschilds, and the French Jacobins are all derived from the Illuminati, who themselves were derived from the Sabbatean and Frankist movements. Far from being failed messianic sects, these movements were the conspiratorial architects of communism and liberalism alike, up to and including Boston progressives in the 1970s. They were Soros before Soros was Soros. Wrote Antelman:

Whether the Frankists became Jacobins, Reform or Conservative movement leaders, or otherwise, one thing came down from generation to generation in their circles, profound hatred for Torah, true Judaism, the Talmud and the Rabbis, which, unfortunately, manifests itself to this very day among large segments of the leadership of the Conservative and Reform movements throughout the Diaspora.

Indeed, per Antelman, the Frankist-Communist-Reform conspiracy continues to this very day:

The Frankists today no longer call themselves by that name. The Organization has grown into an international group labeled by outsiders as the Cult of the All-Seeing Eye…. In the United States they are most active in Boston, New York, Washington and San Francisco. Their ranks and sponsors include some very famous people, numbering diplomats, senators, governors and clergymen in their ranks…. In Jewish circles, they dominate the Reform movement at many levels and the Conservative movement at the highest level. The late Reform clergyman Maurice Eisendrath and the Conservative cleric Abraham Joshua Heschel belonged to them. Eisendrath was always involved in Communist causes and tried to sabotage the Zionist movement. Heschel was the hero of the New Left’s Ramparts Magazine, and contributed articles to it.

Heschel’s book, The Prophets, is two-faced and crypto-Sabbatian, and is used by this elite as a text because of its references to neo-Platonism, Kings and Priests, Greek and Babylonian cults. The other Jewish circles that they dominate are the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Congress and Federations of Jewish Charities in many American cities. One of their cliques of so-called Jewish lawyers is active in the subversively oriented National Lawyers Guild. Their major projects currently include attempts by the American Jewish Congress to destroy the network of Jewish Religious Day Schools in the U.S., and a newly formed women’s activist group, the National Council of Jewish Women, which is agitating for Women’s rights, and is attempting to use Women’s Liberation to destroy the role of women in Judaism.

You get the idea.

The original, 1974 book is very much of its time: McCarthyist paranoia about Commies in the bathroom, filled with references to the Illuminati and with conspiratorial rantings like this one:

We can see from our study of the Frankists and their elite that they were truly monsters. Indeed the concept has been preserved—and not by accident—in the novel Frankenstein, which deals with the creation of the Frankenstein monster. Mary Shelley (the wife of the famous poet Shelley) who wrote Frankenstein, was a member, together with her husband, of the Illuminati.

The symbolism inherent in the name Frankenstein is as follows. The word “Frank” stands for Jacob Frank, founder of the Frankists. The “en” is an Anglicization and abbreviation of the three letter Hebrew word “ayin,” which means “eye,” e resembles the first letter and nis for the last. “Stein” in German means “stone.” In the symbol of the Cult of the All-Seeing Eye, as in the great seal of the U.S. found on the American dollar bill, the eye stands over stones, forming the base of the pyramid. So Frankenstein = Frank + eye + stone.

What set the work apart, however, is not only that it was written by an Orthodox rabbi but that it was based, albeit tenuously and tendentiously, on real scholarship. Antelman wrote at least once to Gershom Scholem, who wrote in the margins of his copy of To Eliminate the Opiate: “Nonsense based on me!”

The book was not widely read, but it did circulate among two constituencies: Kahane-adjacent Jewish extremists and antisemites. To wit, according to Wikipedia, “the highest-frequency author citing To Eliminate the Opiate in an August 2022 search of Internet Archive is David Duke in archives of his books My Awakening (1998), Jewish Supremacy (2003), and The Secret Behind Communism (2013).”

The conduit from Antelman to Owens, though, is David Icke, the notorious British football-player-turned-antisemitic-conspiracy-theorist, who cites Antelman multiple times in his 2019 book of 9/11 Trutherism, The Trigger. (Icke is also a favorite, alas, of brilliant but deluded American author Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple.) In Icke, Antelman’s web of Sabbateans, Communists, and Reform Jews becomes known simply as “The Death Cult,” an elite secret network responsible for Marxism, Antifa, Skull & Bones, the ADL, and, of course, 9/11 itself.

For Icke, the appeal of Antelman is clear. First, here’s an actual Orthodox rabbi exposing the international Jewish conspiracy from within. But, second, the conspiracy isn’t even Jewish—it’s a secret cult within Judaism—which means Icke can say he’s not technically antisemitic. (It’s unclear how the Death Cult relates to the reptilian aliens who Icke says are running the planet, but that’s a different story.)

Yet Icke does make some tweaks. First, he depicts Sabbateanism less like a radical communist plot and more like a Satanic cult; second, he depicts it as having infested both Judaism and Christianity:

Rabbi Marvin Antelman describes in “To Eliminate the Opiate” how Sabbatian-Frankists established their own fake systems to appoint rabbis that appear to be the genuine article while pursuing a very different agenda.

Antelman described them as ‘barbarians’ who masqueraded as rabbis. He said these same Sabbatian-Frankist groups continue to Christianise Judaism and Judaise Christianity (Christian Zionism) with the ultimate aim of destroying both. The planned replacement is Sabbatian-Frankist Satanism which is why its symbols, methods and ways of life are gathering all around us.

Given Icke’s relatively high profile on the antisemitic internet, these ideas circulate widely, which is where Owens, who frequently cites Icke, picked them up. It is Icke’s Sabbateanism, not quite Antelman’s, that Owens talks about: an “occult” conspiracy that connects the dots between Israel, Epstein, the Clintons, and even Jewish Republicans like Shapiro. It’s also close enough to QAnon’s secret network of often-Jewish billionaire pedophiles—a conspiracy theory newly resonant now that such a network has actually been exposed (albeit with Q’s savior as one of the central villains).

Hopefully you notice the irony: a politically conservative Orthodox Jew pens two weird books attacking liberal Jews, and now they’re being used to attack the state of Israel, the Netanyahu regime, and Jews more generally, all of whom Antelman loved.

I told you it would be a weird story.

At this point, the noise has eclipsed the signal: search “Jacob Frank” or “Sabbatai Zevi” on YouTube, and most of what you get is conspiratorial and/or antisemitic bunk. It has filtered through even well-known online figures like “Professor Jiang,” the Chinese charlatan (not actually a professor) who guilelessly repeats Antelman-Icke-Owens misstatements about Jacob Frank to his 2.2 million YouTube followers. One of his videos is called “Faith of Evil.” (Then again, maybe don’t watch those videos, since if you do, Google’s algorithm will immediately start feeding you rabid antisemitism, as it did to me.)

I admit to a certain despair regarding whether this genie can ever be put back into the bottle. Obviously I’m not concerned with the reputations of Sabbatai Zevi and Jacob Frank, or with the fact that around 90 percent of what is said about them is historically inaccurate. But I am concerned that this twisted antisemitic conspiracy theory puts real Jews, or people who appear to be real Jews, in danger.

Rational attempts at debunking this stuff won’t work; they didn’t work with QAnon, Plandemic, or Trumpist Election Denial, let alone with earlier iterations of what Richard Hofstadter called the paranoid style in American politics. Conspiracy theories aren’t believed because they are intellectually sound; they are believed because they address cognitive dissonance. They are a form of motivated reasoning, in which a need to find a single explanation for complicated, sometimes intractable problems yields preposterous connect-the- dots theories about hidden conspiracies and malevolent actors. Like gnosticism, conspiracy theories explain why the world is not as it should be: because bad actors are in charge. They confirm one’s priors and validate one’s prejudices. Ultimately, it’s easier for some people to believe that a shadowy conspiracy of Illuminati are manipulating world politics than that a majority of Americans actually preferred Joe Biden to Donald Trump.

Fundamentally, as J. Eric Oliver and Thomas J. Wood wrote in their important book Enchanted America: How Intuition and Reason Divide our Politics, belief in conspiracies is based on intuition, instinct, and emotion, not intellection. You can’t argue someone out of them.

And even if you could, they’d soon be replaced by something else. Even if we could whack the mole of Icke’s Death Cult, a new paranoid mole would surely pop up to take its place.

Still, conspiratorial antisemitism does seem to be gaining new adherents in the wake of Gaza, Epstein, and now Iran. Right-wing antisemitism is widespread online and in the halls of power in Washington. This is not going to end well for the Jews. And left-wing and right-wing antisemitism are horseshoe-ing together to the point where Nick Fuentes and Ana Kasparian are saying the exact same things about Israel.

Marvin Antelman created an elaborate pseudo-history to explain how liberalism was intrinsically hostile to Judaism. His solution was Jewish militancy in the diaspora and Jewish supremacy in Israel. But Icke’s and Owens’s embrace of his ideas shows that he had it exactly wrong. It is not liberalism but illiberal nationalism that is the threat to Jewish survival, with its definitional hostility to minorities, be they immigrants, non-whites, or Jews.

The world is indeed a place of brokenness, but that is not because of a Sabbatean conspiracy. It is because we are flawed creatures, and among our flaws is the desire to dominate and suppress people unlike ourselves. The very liberalism that Owens and Antelman despise is an attempt to cultivate certain better angels of our nature: reason, reflection, the capacities for human connection and coexistence. These are not the teachings of a false messiah.

On the contrary, to whatever extent the messianic age exists, even if only in our imagination, they are its harbingers.

Thanks for joining me in one of the strangest rabbit holes I’ve ever gone down (which is saying a lot). Check out arcmag.org for highly literate, engaging, and non-echo-chambery writing on religion and politics. Et cetera. Meanwhile, I’ll have a lot to say about this past week’s big psychedelic news (linked below) in the coming days.

Share Both/And with Jay Michaelson

“I, too, sing America” —Langston Hughes

1.

This post begins with a meta-take, but morphs into a meditation.

This week’s dueling halftime shows — Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl, Kid Rock at a Turning Point USA event in North Dakota — have yielded many, many takes. My original idea for this post was to contrast the affirmations of the Bad Bunny appreciations — the only thing more powerful than hate is love, read the jumbotron — with the rage of the haters. I’ll still do that a bit, below.

But as I thought about it, I realized that this meta-take was misleading. Because America is not actually polarized, if polarization implies a split into two even sides. Numerically, according to polls and record sales alike, Bad Bunny’s exuberant, basically pluralistic ideal of America is overwhelmingly more popular than Kid Rock’s resentful, jingoistic, nationalist version.

That extends well beyond Super Bowl Sunday. It includes ICE’s actions in Minneapolis, Trump’s insane swashbuckling about Greenland and Venezuela, and the GOP’s Big Beautiful Billionaire tax cuts. These policies are wildly unpopular, polling in the 60/40, even 70/30 range, which, in American politics, is a landslide.

In a way, this makes sense: MAGA populism has never been that popular. Republican presidents like Reagan and Bush were obviously not liberal, but their policies — some culture war issues, smaller government, bigger military — coexisted with a basic consensus reality about American democracy and values. (Here’s Reagan on welcoming immigrants, for example.) That is American conservatism — not Kid Rock and JD Vance. Not MAGA.

The metaphor of “two Americas” is an illusion. One is the overwhelming majority; the other is not. They only look symmetrical because of billionaire-funded, right-wing media; opportunists pumping out pseudo-populist rhetoric and incendiary distortions; and politicians and corporatists willing to go along with it. These tactics sometimes work, but there are not two equal sides here, numerically or morally.

This isn’t polarization; it’s an attempt at a takeover.

2.

The two halftime events did present two very different versions of America. But they are in no way symmetrical to one another.

There have been many profound and insightful responses to Bad Bunny’s halftime show; here’s Jannese Torres unpacking some of the specific Puerto Rican culture, symbolism and history in the show and how it moved her, as a Latina woman watching it. As a non-Latina and non-woman, I loved and learned a lot from her post (and others like it).

Here, though, I want to focus on the way the performance reflected a certain vision of America united not by blood and soil, but by ideals of freedom, family, and opportunity — words which are often conservative-coded but can also have joyous, pluralistic, liberal meanings as well. Of the many such responses I could choose from, I’ll quote from a viral post by North Carolina State Senator Michael Garrett. I encourage you to read the whole thing, but here are some highlights:

I watched Bad Bunny deliver the most American halftime show I have ever seen…

That is the American story, not the sanitized, gated, English-only version that small and frightened people try to sell us. The REAL one. The messy, beautiful, multilingual, multicolored, courageous one. The one that has always been built by hands that speak every language and pray in every tongue and come from every corner of this hemisphere.

That is the America I want Jack and Charlotte [Garrett’s kids] to know. That when the moment came, when the whole world was watching, a Puerto Rican kid who grew up to become the most-streamed artist on Earth stood in front of 100 million people, sang in his mother’s language, blessed every nation in the Americas, and spiked a football that read “Together, we are America” into the ground. Not with anger. With joy. With love so big it made hate look exactly as small as it is.

And what did the President do? He called it “absolutely terrible.” He said “nobody understands a word this guy is saying.” He called it “a slap in the face to our Country.” The leader of the free world watched a celebration of love, culture, and everything this hemisphere has given to the world, and all he could see was something foreign. Something threatening. Something disgusting…

Bad Bunny didn’t say “ICE out” tonight. He didn’t need to. He just showed the whole world what America looks like when we are not afraid of each other. When culture is shared, not policed. When language is music, not a threat. When a flag from every nation in this hemisphere can walk across a football field together and the only words you need are the ones he gave us: “THE ONLY THING MORE POWERFUL THAN HATE IS LOVE.”

This is my patriotism too, as I’ve written about before. Like other progressives, I know America has always fallen far short of its ideals, from slavery and the genocide of Native Americans to the profound economic inequalities and other depredations of the present day. We can only move forward toward greatness. But unlike some further to my left, I also still believe in those ideals, which inspired my immigrant grandparents to come here and inspire the immigrants of today as well. And the Bad Bunny show epitomized that, with its diverse presentations of America, faith, family, and freedom – including some of my queer community’s favorite icons (and hunky same-sex dancers). The final image of the show was iconic:

But, as I’ve also written about, there are also other versions of American patriotism. Kid Rock may be an incoherent and idiotic exponent of them, but JD Vance and other ‘post-liberals’ have stated the case clearly: American greatness is about the traditions of the European-descended, Christian, male-dominated majority. It is not about shared values but is principally about the greatness of that ethno-nationalist culture, from Manifest Destiny to this administration’s white-supremacist-derived social media posts.

Share

And in that culture, specific versions of faith, family, and freedom are more American than others. The English language is more American than Spanish. And while many American populists have grudgingly adopted a kind of color-blindness, Vice President Vance has stated that even his own wife, an Indian-American woman, is less American than he is.

Here’s Megyn Kelly, who I’m choosing for a specific reason, epitomizing this vision of majoritarian nationalist America (and making the center-right Piers Morgan look like a multiculturalist):

@piersmorganuncensoredMegyn Kelly says Bad Bunny performing his Super Bowl halftime show in Spanish was "a middle finger to the rest of America". "Football is OURS!" #megynkellynews #superbowl #PiersMorgan #piersmorganuncensored #news #fyp #ice #america #badbunny

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So the contrast is clear. But is it really polarization? No.

3.

These two “sides” are neither numerically equal nor morally equal.

On the numbers alone, 142.3 million people watched Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl. Four million watched Kid Rock fail to lip-sync properly. And as my friend Noah Shachtman wrote in the Times, Bad Bunny is gigantic: Spotify’s most streamed artist, Grammy winner for album of the year, he is at the heart of the global music scene in 2026. More importantly, around two thirds of America disapproves of Trump’s handling of immigration, and most of the remaining third gets their news from propagandistic sources and online echo chambers.

So why the “divided” reaction to the Bad Bunny show? As Ilhan Omar said, it’s all about the benjamins.

Kelly, after all, is mostly a charlatan and clout-chaser. When presenting herself as a moderate advanced her career, that’s what she did. When that failed, she realized she could get more clicks as a rabble-rouser, so that’s what she’s doing now. She’s an opportunist and a grifter. Who knows what she believes.

And, we learned in the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit, the same is true of Fox News as a whole. For years, I believed the left-wing myth that Fox News was a giant psy-op by the Murdoch family, inventing crises about Ebola or immigrant caravans to move American politics to the right socially and economically. And, to be sure, that is part of it; Roger Ailes has said as much. But in the internal documents from the Dominion suit, we learned that by 2020 anyway, Fox News was mostly just chasing the bag. Having enraged and incited their audience, now they were slaves of “audience capture,” having to tack right in order to keep ratings up in the face of further-right outlets like One America News and Newsmax. Fox executives and hosts knew the 2020 election wasn’t stolen, but they also knew that if they didn’t jump on the Big Lie bandwagon, their audience would desert them — as indeed, much of it did. The real MAGA Right now sees them as corporate media sellouts.

That “real MAGA Right” is around twenty percent of the population, and always has been. Indeed, depending on how one understands ethno-nationalism, populism, and authoritarianism, it has long been the case that in nearly every Western country (and increasingly, non-Western ones, most importantly India), between fifteen and twenty-five percent of the population holds far right, ethno-nationalist views. This figure has been remarkably stable across time. It was true in 1930s Germany, in Mussolini’s Italy, in Fascist Spain and Portugal. And it was true in 1950s America, where around a quarter of the country supported Joe McCarthy, the John Birch Society, and Jim Crow.

The trouble is that, in electoral politics as in advanced mathematics, twenty five percent is half of fifty percent. Mainstream conservatives (Reagan, Nixon, Bush) usually find ways to accommodate the ‘patriots’ on the far right. They bring the Christian Right into their coalitions, they peddle soft racism about welfare queens and inner cities, and they talk of God, family, and country. This is not pure cynicism; they believe in these things, just not to the extremes of right-wing ethno-nationalism.

But at other times, the nationalists win, and the lunatics take over the asylum, so to speak. Now, the former mainstream — big business and media, in particular — must curry favor with the far right in order to thrive. And that is where we are now. As it always does, Capital capitulates, kowtowing to the authoritarian, giving him what he wants in exchange for what it wants. Politicians who had only recently lambasted the authoritarian as a danger to the republic — in our case, people like Vance (“America’s Hitler”), Lindsey Graham (“race-bating, xenophobic”), and Marco Rubio (“con artist”) — suddenly jump on board. And as long as they remain subservient to the autocrat, bygones are bygones and the nationalist takes over.

And then, rapidly, the authoritarian consolidates power: making it harder for free elections to take place, as Trump is doing; diminishing the authority of courts and the legislature, as Trump has done; creating armed forces accountable only to him, as Trump has done.

All this happens without the will of the majority. Remember, contrary to everything Stephen Miller or Mike Johnson says, Trump didn’t even win on ethno-nationalism; he won on the economy and on the sense of dread and betrayal that many Americans felt. Yes, somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of America believes in Kid Rock patriotism. But most really don’t. They may be more traditionally patriotic than I am, they may Back the Blue and Support our Troops in ways that I don’t — but they don’t think Bad Bunny is an anti-American terrorist, for God’s sake.

Let’s be clear, too, that in addition to its demographic minority, no amount of both-sidesing can equate these two visions of America. Even aside from Kelly’s anger and rage, and even aside from the historical or philosophical merits of her claims, there’s the simple imbalance of harm. Liberal pluralism, while it may make some cultural values less hegemonic than they used to be, isn’t putting kids in cages and deporting them. Liberal America does not oppress MAGA America the way that MAGA America seeks to oppress immigrants, people of color, queer people, and others. Bad Bunny is celebrating the many ways in which people live their lives and find joy. Kid Rock and Megyn Kelly are spitting on them.

This asymmetry reaches into nearly every aspect of our contemporary politics. Trump’s posting of a video with obviously racist depictions of Barack and Michelle Obama, together with the White House’s admonishment that we should all relax and learn to take a joke. Abject lies about Minneapolis ICE protestors, who are not Antifa (which, reminder, does not exist), not terrorists, and were not out to kill anyone. (Unlike, say, Kyle Rittenhouse.) More lies — as Vance himself admitted — about Haitian immigrants eating pets, which may now lead to the mass deportation of hundreds of people living lawfully in America. And so on.

Is this really “polarization”? Or is this a takeover by the Far Right, abetted by a media ecosystem that it is rapidly taking over?

4.

As promised, I want to turn from the political to the personal. And, as I sometimes do, I’m putting this last part behind the paywall since, well, it’s a little more personal.

Read more

There really is an elite cabal of pedophiles and enablers out there, orchestrating US foreign affairs in clubby, semi-secret networks and helping put presidents into the White House.

Only it’s got a whole lot of Republicans in it.

First and foremost, there’s Steve Bannon, who was plotting political conquest with Jeffrey Epstein at the same time as he was promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory alleging a left-wing pedophile network. Every accusation is a confession indeed. More on that one below.

But obviously, the lead story coming out of the 20,000 documents from the Epstein estate (a small fraction of the ‘Epstein Files’ held by the Department of Justice) is that Donald Trump is personally implicated by the world’s most infamous sex trafficker, who says he “knew about the girls” and that Epstein could “take him down” if he wanted. (You can search through all 20,000 documents here.)

You’ve probably read about that already, and it will be headline news for weeks. But there are other revelations as well that haven’t gotten as much attention, and that also relate to the subjects of this newsletter: the intersections of politics and religion, spirituality, ethics. I’m going to focus on three of them: the confusion about the moral core of the scandal; how MAGA supporters have correctly understood it; and how deep the betrayal really is, now that one of MAGA’s principle architects is revealed to be thoroughly implicated.

And then, as a bonus, bit about how the Internet is responding.

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1.

First, let’s again center the survivors of Epstein’s crimes. Here’s a moving, compelling PSA featuring four of them. Please watch this first:

Fundamentally, that is what this scandal is about: the abuse of these young teenagers by some of the most powerful men in the world — men who rightly believed themselves to be invincible.

And consider: If the president of the United States knew that these girls were being abused and scoffed at it — let alone if he actually participated in the exploitation — that is an indelible stain on his character. It is real. And while progressives may be tempted to simply add it to a long list of Trump’s profound failings, it is, for millions of people, something different. It is new, and it is horrible.

Contrast that reality with one of the side-shows of this scandal: the dependably awful Megyn Kelly explaining that, technically speaking, being sexually interested in 14- or 15- year olds isn’t actually pedophilia, since that term refers to being attracted to pre-pubescents. This disgusting commentary has been justifiably repudiated by anyone with a conscience, but I’m interested in what Kelly unintentionally revealed by offering it.

Diagnostically speaking, Kelly is right, of course; there are different kinds of sexual disorders that may have different psychological causes. But did you watch the video? Is it not abundantly clear that Kelly has completely missed the point of the entire affair: namely, that powerful men sexually abusing 14-year-old girls is morally wrong, psychologically devastating, and absolutely horrible?

This lapse is revealing because I think Epstein’s enablers seem to have made a similar error in judgment: that this isn’t all that bad. After all, in many cultures and time periods, including quite recently, it has been legal to marry teenage girls and culturally permissible for men to desire them. It would be absurd to say that our current taboos are universal; they are not.

But none of that is the point. What matters is not whether Epstein’s crimes are gross, but whether they are evil — more specifically, that these girls, who grew up in in our society and century, could not possibly have consented, did not consent, and were clearly traumatized by the abuse.

And, of course, that the criminal acts of their abuser(s) were enabled by a host of other people, systems, money, and power, apparently including the current president. As the New York Times related in detail, Epstein hobnobbed with all the movers and shakers of New York, and with large swaths of the US foreign policy and intelligence elite. Epstein’s black book does not discriminate on ideology or area of focus: there’s Peter Thiel, Noam Chomsky, Les Wexner, Deepak Chopra, Larry Summers, Michael Wolff. And despite the protestations of these associates today, it seems painfully obvious that everyone knew what Epstein was up to, especially by the late 2010s, after he had been convicted (and then given a sweetheart deal by an associate of Pam Bondi’s) and written about in the press. But power is power, right?

That is the moral evil: not doing something disgusting, but doing harm to young people. It doesn’t matter whether you think a 60-year-old demanding a ‘happy ending’ from a 15-year-old is disgusting or not, or whether it is socially acceptable in some times and places, or whether it’s a vice shared by every man who ogles the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders. It matters that, for God’s sake, dozens of girls were assaulted in ways that are profoundly harmful, violent, and abusive. It matters that it is rape.

This seems glaringly obvious, and yet to some people, apparently it isn’t.

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2.

In contrast to New York elites and pundits like Kelly, MAGA-supporting Americans have understood this for years. Ro Khanna, the Democratic sponsor of the House Bill, now a law, demanding the release of the files, recently told the New York Times’ David Leonhardt this:

I was on Theo Von’s podcast and I was on the “Flagrant” podcast and I was going to places like Johnstown, Pa., and going to places like Warren, Ohio. When I was there, the issue would come up about the “Epstein class” — that’s what they called it. They said, well, are you on the side of the forgotten Americans or on the side of the Epstein class?

I realized how much the abuse by rich and powerful men of young girls and the sense of a rape island that Epstein had set up for people embodied the corruption of government. And then many of them saw Donald Trump as fighting this corrupt government and standing up for forgotten Americans. And this was the symbol for the most disgusting abuse and corruption of our government. And so when the issue came up that Pam Bondi said that there was nothing to release, I knew that this was a betrayal of the core promise that Trump had made to MAGA voters.

That seems exactly right, and useful for progressives to understand. This isn’t some peripheral issue, or a sideshow. For them, it is the core of Trump’s importance: not that he was a right-winger taking on the left, but that he was an outsider taking on the insider elites. It wasn’t the conservatism that put him over the top, but the populism.

And now that is revealed to be bullshit. Trump is all over the new emails, just like the liberal New York elites who funded and made money from Epstein or who clamored to be invited to his parties. He’s right in there with the rest of them.

This is not a right-left issue; it’s an inside/outside one, or if you prefer a class focus, an up/down one. The MAGA grievance against the ‘Epstein Class’ is not unlike the refrain of Kendrick Lamar’s Grammy-winning diss track: “They not like us / They not like us.” The underage girls, the fake man-of-the-people shtick, the wealth and power and mansions — Epstein is just an older, whiter Drake.

And Kendrick and MAGA are right: these people are not like us at all, and in this case, “us” even includes upper-middle-class white people like me. We don’t have personal assistants or private jets, or houses on multiple continents, or a guy who arranges shell companies and tax dodges for us, or a team of publicists, or crypto scams and shady real estate deals, or the knowledge that we fundamentally operate above the law and the team of lawyers to make sure we get off scot-free.

Rep. Khanna put it well: the Epstein scandal is a “symbol for the most disgusting abuse and corruption of our government.”

Democrats need to pay attention, because the party continues to run people perceived, rightly or wrongly, as part of the Epstein Class — people like the Clintons, or even Kamala Harris, who worked her way up through the Democratic machine. Some of this is unfair; the real elites are the technology, finance, and real estate billionaires bankrolling Republicans. But there are many kinds of elites, and one kinds are the people who drank martinis at dinner parties with Jeffrey Epstein. MAGA is not wrong about that.

And of course, while Trump and Bannon are heavily implicated by the recent emails, so are many Democrats, which is one reason Trump had pushed to have the files released in the first place, before changing his mind and then changing it back again.

It’s not that every Democratic candidate needs to be a Zohran Mamdani socialist. But Democrats need to stop nominating septuagenarian insiders for statewide and national office instead of messy, problematic outsiders who actually speak to people’s ‘Epstein Class’ suspicions. Obviously, I’m not on board with the GOP’s association of “elites” with culture warriors or trans people; that’s propaganda. But MAGA is right to suspect the ultra-rich, the connected, the people who congratulate one another at Rao’s. As an essay by Jeet Heer in The Nation puts it,

Epstein trafficked not just in the bodies of the children he abused but also in social connections that could bring elites together. He well understood that the ‘desperation of those in power’ could make them eager to buy what he was selling: connections with other powerful figures and security systems to clamp down on dissent.

3.

And now Trump has been revealed to be just like the rest of them. The fifty year con of the Republican party — talk populist values and Christian morals while passing plutocratic economic policies — is temporarily up. The emperor has no clothes anymore.

That’s especially true because the surprise special guest of the Epstein Emails is none other than Steve Bannon.

Credit where it is due: I wouldn’t have known about this fact but for Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day newsletter, which, together with his podcast Panic World, is rapidly becoming an indispensable source for deciphering the current news matrix. I started following Garbage Day a year or so ago, kind of as a guilty pleasure, but especially since the Kirk assassination, which was perhaps our country’s first “extremely online” act of political violence, Broderick and his team have killing it.

Broderick, in a piece co-written by Adam Bumas, Ellie Hall, and Lester Feder, goes deep into the Epstein Emails to discern how big a scandal this ought to be. They write

Bannon and Epstein were in close contact during Trump’s first presidential term. Based on the emails and texts we now have between the two men, they gossiped and schemed with each other as Bannon traveled Europe in 2018, attempting to franchise his far-right populist movement across Europe.

The irony is rich. Bannon was in cahoots with a pedophile and his network of shady operatives while spreading a lunatic conspiracy theory about a network of pedophiles and shady operatives. He was literally talking about himself.

And it’s intimate. Epstein coaches Bannon on what to say to Qatari diplomats. He helps him catch a plane, and notes that massages are not included (!). The two plot ways to create a crypto scheme for the populist right and muse founding a church. They talk about toppling governments in Argentina, Venezuela, Slovakia, and Pakistan. (Many of those regimes were later overthrown.) In 2019, Bannon texted Epstein, “Now you can understand why Trump wakes up in the middle of the night sweating when he hears you and I are friends.”

The rot goes right to the top, right to Trump and Bannon. Now are you persuaded that this is real news? This is a wrecking ball hitting the core of the MAGA movement. ICE is a big deal; cutting USAID, EPA, and the Department of Education is a big deal; the Supreme Court is a big deal; but this is also a big deal.

3 ½.

Finally, notwithstanding all of the foregoing, readers of Both/And may not know about the Internet’s primary reaction to the release of the Epstein Emails, which has nothing to do with any of the above. Fox News, for its part, is ignoring everything that’s just been talked about, focusing on one redaction of one victim’s name and claiming the Democrats are falsely trying to implicate Trump. But the Internet, which is not controlled by sycophants, is focused elsewhere: on the following email thread from 2018:

You read that right: “the photos of Trump blowing Bubba.” I.e., Bill Clinton.

That was not on anyone’s dance card, I don’t think.

Now, I don’t think Epstein’s brother is really being serious here. My assumption is that he’s speaking metaphorically, or just making a joke, or who the hell knows. (He has also denied that “Bubba” refers to Bill Clinton, but that is wildly implausible: not only is it a common nickname for the ex-pres, but he’s referred to that way numerous times in the released emails themselves.) But the Internet has taken the exchange literally, spawning a thousand memes and TikToks reminiscent of one of my favorite Onion headlines of all time.

I admit, I had not guessed that Monica Lewinsky and Donald Trump would have this much in common.

Since this is a family newsletter and I am a rabbi, I’ve decided not to embed my favorites of these. The Garbage Day piece links to several. But while the focus on Trump Blowing Bubba may be a distraction from the serious ethical and political aspects of the Epstein scandal, I’m on board with anything that keeps this story alive, especially as Bannon’s acolytes will continue to “flood the zone with shit” just as they have done so far. And unlike Epstein’s crimes, the AI videos and memes aren’t making light of horrible stories of abuse and violence — just a couple of philandering chief executives in flagrante delicto. And if you need any more proof that Trump has lost wide swaths of his extremely-online base and that this scandal is here to stay, well, here you go. Enjoy. See you next week.

It’s been quite a week! In addition to following the news, I’m busy in my other career as well — my Emory colleagues and I will be presenting new data from our studies of psychedelics in religious communities at the American Academy of Religion conference this weekend, and the website for that project just launched.

Here are some great pieces I read this week:

• First, just a re-shout-out to Garbage Day’s coverage of the Epstein Emails.

• Second, Andrew Rice wrote an absolutely brilliant piece on the schools crisis here in my very privileged hometown of Montclair, and how both liberals and conservatives have played a part in creating it. I’m chest-deep in this local story already but I think it’s a great read even for people who aren’t.

• Paul Krugman had a great piece on the Heritage Foundation’s descent into the abyss.

• Despite some dubious decisions by the Grey Lady of late, I really enjoyed this piece by Daniel K. Williams on why so many Gen-Z people are embracing conservative Christianity — pairs well with last week’s Both/And Newsletter actually. And also this revealing and disturbing look inside Trump’s DOJ, in the words of people who’ve quit.

• And, for a break, I really enjoyed ’s explainer of the importance of Greenland and rare earth minerals.

Thanks to all my subscribers, and thanks for helping to spread the word.

A few days after ICE agents ripped kids out of their beds in Chicago, I went to Six Flags Great Adventure with my daughter.

It was a beautiful day, part of this elongated summer that’s either a random blessing or a sign of impending climate doom. And the crowd was just as you’d expect at a New Jersey amusement park: a broad, diverse group of all kinds of people from all kinds of backgrounds. There were Orthodox Jews in kippot enjoying the same rides as Muslim women in hijabs. People were Latino, white, South Asian, East Asian, Black, and mixes of all of the above.

None of this was remarkable; it’s what New Jersey, and much of America, looks like today. But the news was on my mind, so I noticed it more than I might’ve otherwise.

And mostly I thought, what the fuck is wrong with MAGA people.

I do “get it.” I grew up in Tampa, Florida in the 1980s, which despite having large Cuban and Puerto Rican communities was still a lot less diverse than it is today. Not only that, but open racism was celebrated (if already a little taboo) among us white kids. White people were the norm, and other people were the deviations from it. I didn’t personally fit in, as a Jewish, pre-gay, non-athletic nerd, but I passed, more or less. In any case it was obvious who was at the top of the social ladder. We were Americans.

Now, America looks different. There are more different-looking and different-acting people around, and some of them are in charge of things. But watching my daughter spin around on yet another nausea-inducing ride, I thought, So What? I get that it’s different, but can’t people accept that things change, and can still be good, or even get better?

Of course, I also “get” that, because of my outsider status, I never quite enjoyed the hegemonic position of straight, white, gender-typical Christians. I also thought that mainstream American society was stupid; I was a Catcher in the Rye kid in the Reagan years. I couldn’t wait to get out of Tampa and go to some college in the Northeast, where I thought things would be better. (They were.) So I never had that much to lose, I guess.

“We Can Return” says a new DHS ad. Return to what, exactly?

2. The Lies

It’s tricky to call any of this racism, because so much of it is subconscious or unconscious. Many (most?) people think of racism as a kind of conscious bias: holding ideas about the capacities, intelligence, or humanity of people based on their genetic history, and acting on the basis of those ideas. But most racism, studies have shown, operates unconsciously. A white person sees a group of Black kids gathered on the sidewalk and feels threatened. Is that racist? Consciously, they may think it’s a reasoned judgment about the risk of violence. But that judgment is based on years of consuming racist media and messaging, on biases may be unconscious, and a thousand other factors. It is racist, but it’s not felt to be racist, which one reason why nationalism and fascism function by giving permission to express the animus that is ordinarily forbidden.

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True, the racism of MAGA has been more and more apparent, from Young Republican chat rooms and nominees to administration positions to the claims about Haitians eating pets, to the recently announced immigration policies that favor white immigrants over non-white ones. But still, there are protestations that anti-“illegal” sentiments (even though the very term “illegal” is a racist tell) aren’t racist but are about immigrant crime or violence, or the very act of immigrating illegally, or immigrants taking American jobs. It’s rare that nationalists (or as they have rebranded, National Conservatives) tell the truth — though I’ll turn to that in the next section. Mostly, it’s a long series of lies.

Yet it’s increasingly apparent, though I assume unreported by Fox or CBS News, that most migrants being rounded up by ICE have either no criminal record whatsoever or minor infractions like traffic tickets or pot busts. This isn’t new: even “illegal” immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than native-born citizens. Gangs like Tren de Aragua and MS-13 exist, but their members surely account for less than a tenth of a percent of immigrants. Most migrants are here for obvious reasons: for economic opportunities or to escape violence in their home countries.

As for illegal immigration itself, in fact many migrants, while technically undocumented, have applied for asylum or other forms of legal protection but have to wait years (literally) to even get a hearing in our broken, underfunded, and Trump-rigged immigration system. For God’s sake, ICE is arresting people when they lawfully show up for their immigration hearings; no one can really maintain this is about illegal immigration when it’s the law-abiding migrants getting thrown into detention centers. And of course, all those immigration laws are of relatively recent coinage; when my grandparents came here from Eastern Europe, they didn’t even exist.

Meanwhile, immigrants are largely either (a) doing jobs that native-born citizens don’t want to do at rates that employers want to pay them, or (b) getting H1B visas because our country’s educational system has failed to produce enough skilled employees for the tech and medical industries. Resentful MAGA supporters need to look in the mirror at their lack of qualifications, or at Republicans’ refusal to raise the minimum wage.

The lies all collapse. And what is left?

3. The Truth

Once you strip away the false claims of criminality or violence or the stealing of American jobs, what you’re left with is the truth: that some mostly-white people don’t like the way the country is changing. They don’t like that there’s more Spanish being spoken, more Islam being practiced, more Asian Americans in universities and tech jobs. They don’t like the scene at Great Adventure, with the people in their weird clothes and the Black kids acting uppity. They don’t like that my husband and I could legally marry and raise our daughter. They miss the old America.

And lately they are saying the quiet part out loud.

On July 5, JD Vance gave a speech to the Claremont Institute in which he said the following:

Social bonds form among people who have something in common. They share the same neighborhood. They share the same church. They send their kids to the same school. And what we’re doing is recognizing that if you stop importing millions of foreigners into the country, you allow that social cohesion to form naturally…

If you think about it, identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let’s say, of the Declaration of Independence, that’s a definition that is way over-inclusive and under-inclusive at the same time. What do I mean by that? Well, first of all, it would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions of foreign citizens who agree with the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Must we admit all of them tomorrow? If you follow that logic of America as a purely creedal nation, America purely as an idea, that is where it would lead you. But at the same time, that answer would also reject a lot of people that the ADL would label as domestic extremists. Even though those very Americans had their ancestors fight in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. And I happen to think that it’s absurd, and the modern left seems dedicated to doing this, to saying, you don’t belong in America unless you agree with progressive liberalism in 2025. I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong.

This is a fundamental redefinition — and a profoundly un-American one — of what the United States of America is meant to be. For Abraham Lincoln, America was fundamentally defined by the “abstract truth [of the Declaration of Independence] applicable to all men and all times… a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.” This is how he could insist that slavery could be abolished, over the objections of a lot of people whose ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War: because slavery was Un-American. (Notice the descendants of slaves didn’t fit into Vance’s hierarchy.) As are, yes, the ideologies of today’s domestic terrorists, who renounce all “claim over America” when they take up arms against innocent people on the basis of political, religious, or racial affiliations. Obviously.

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As I wrote about a few months ago, it’s as if we live in different countries. To me, the crowd at Great Adventure reflects the best of America: its diversity, its commitments to equality, its multicultural reality. To Vance, they are less American than he is. To him, being American is a national identity, and patriotism is less about upholding values than celebrating our national-cultural heritage. Perhaps they are to be tolerated, but, as Vance said of his own Indian-American wife, they will never be as American as other people are.

At the recent National Conservatism conference, Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt made this case even more strongly, perhaps channeling his namesake Carl Schmitt:

The Continental Army soldiers dying of frostbite at Valley Forge, the Pilgrims struggling to survive in the hard winter soil of Plymouth, the pioneers striking out from Missouri for the wild and dangerous frontier, the outnumbered Kentucky settlers repelling wave after wave of Indian war band attacks from behind their stockade walls—all of them would be astonished to hear that they were only fighting for a “proposition.”

They believed they were forging a nation—a homeland for themselves and their descendants. They fought, they bled, they struggled, they died for us. They built this country for us…

We Americans are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims that poured out from Europe’s shores to baptize a new world in their ancient faith. Our ancestors were driven here by destiny, possessed by urgent and fiery conviction, by burning belief, devoted to their cause and their God…

When they tear down our statues and monuments, mock our history, and insult our traditions, they’re attacking our future as well as our past. By changing the stories we tell about ourselves, they believe they can build a new America—with the new myths of a new people. But America does not belong to them. It belongs to us. It’s our home. It’s a heritage entrusted to us by our ancestors. It is a way of life that is ours, and only ours, and if we disappear, then America, too, will cease to exist.

Read that again: “We Americans are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims that poured out from Europe’s shores to baptize a new world in their ancient faith.” In that reading, I can never be as American as Senator Schmitt is. (His German ancestors came here in the 1840s.) Nor can any non-European.

Now, unlike the false claims of immigrant crime, pet-eating, or job-stealing, Vance and Schmitt are at least saying something that is true: that they are, for lack of a better term, white supremacists who believe that they belong here more than others, and that that belonging is based on ethnicity and heritage. It is clearly true that many people believe that.

What is not true is everything else. That the descendants of slaves are also not real Americans. That America has always welcomed European immigrants — in fact, when Friedrich Drumpf came here in 1885, he was met with anti-German and anti-Catholic prejudice on the part of Anglo-Americans (and changed his name to Frederick Trump) which would later increase during the war years. Italian, Jewish, and Irish immigrants fared even worse.

And most of all, that this American nationalism has nothing to do with America’s core principles or founders. America is not the same as France or Finland, with a particular culture (or set of cultures) that has been here for five hundred years (and of course, those cultures have always evolved and been subject to migration of all sorts). There is nothing in our founding documents that establishes the United States as an ethno-state. Where does that come from? Only from opinions that people like Vance and Schmidt have about it, and the power they have often possessed, including now, to implement an ethno-nationalist vision which conveniently puts themselves at the top of the heap.

4. The Real America

As between Vance’s and Schmidt’s America and the America I saw at Great Adventure, I know which one I believe in and even sometimes love, for all its faults. I love precisely what Vance appears to hate: a multicultural America that continues to wrestle with itself, that has always been stained by racism, but that has an ‘idea’ of transcending it; the America defined by ideals like the rule of law, democracy, and the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Honestly, I can’t believe that this even needs to be said, but apparently it does.

My hope is that MAGA represents the last, dying gasp of this old order – certainly, many of its adherents see it that way, as a last, desperate attempt to ‘save America,’ even if doing so requires the rollback of democracy itself. To be sure, they are indeed attempting to do just that: in advance of next year’s elections, they are gerrymandering, sending troops into cities, installing partisan ‘election integrity’ commissions, and doing everything they can to avoid having a fair election. And they may succeed in doing so.

But eventually, I think Great Adventure America will prevail. You only cheat when you know you can’t win a fair fight, and there are more of us — i.e., real Americans, from whatever background, who believe in the core values of this country — than them. Who knows, maybe some of their supporters might even come to understand that their problems are due to hyper-capitalism and economic inequity, not DEI, Antifa, or brown people.

I don’t meant to be too optimistic. Maybe this will never happen. Or maybe the change will come too late; maybe the combination of AI disruptions, global warming, and the weakening of America in the intervening years will leave us with the mere ruins of a country. I don’t know.

But I know the real America is out there. I saw it at Great Adventure. We are different, but we have a lot in common. We get along. We can enjoy a nice fall day at a park with our friends and families. And we’re not hung up on who is the whitest.

Thanks for your support of this work. Some pieces I’ve liked this week:

• Thank heavens someone finally wrote this piece: Joel Wertheimer at about why Section 230 of the CDA needs to be repealed and why tech companies should be held liable for the crap their algorithm promotes. I do not understand why we feel like this business model is an unchangeable fact of nature. It is not. Wertheimer’s analogy between Big Tech and Big Tobacco is insightful as well. Read this.

• did a nice, juicy historical dive into why authoritarians always deputize goons and thugs.

• on the Trump educational ‘compact’ (including a nice summary of all the steps the regime has taken against universities).

• Not to state the obvious, but Antifa Does Not Exist (from )

Oh, and buy the way, you can still buy a coke and a red truck, though I guess this is an antique truck built in the 1950s before the Civil Rights Act, so.

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We don’t yet know a lot about Tyler Robinson, the young man who killed Charlie Kirk, but we do know that, as yet, there is not a shred of evidence that he is a left-wing activist radicalized by a vast conspiracy of America-hating foundations, publications, and professors. If the text messages released by the police are authentic, Robinson’s motives are at once left-leaning (complaining of Kirk’s “hatred”) and extremely online (making use of gamer tropes and memes). But by all accounts he acted alone, responding to things Kirk said about gay and trans people.

And yet, as I write these words, the United States government is promising to attack left-leaning nonprofit foundations, create blacklists of people deemed to have criticized Kirk or celebrated his murder, and prosecute “hate speech” against political figures like Kirk (though presumably not against ones like Barack Obama or Joe Biden). The goalposts of authoritarianism continue to march rightward.

Do Republicans know that this is based on a lie? Can we even know what they know?

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For years, I’ve been interested in Republican Epistemology — what we can know about what Republicans know. By “Republicans” here, I mean the politicians, advisors, and media figures who set the messaging for the movement, not the rank and file who are the audience for that messaging. I often wonder: What are they thinking?

This is hardly the first time that Trump and his minions have said obviously false things, after all. Some of these lies are ridiculous (crowd sizes, hair weaves), but many are profound. There’s the Big Lie about the 2020 election, of course, which is demonstrably false but which led to a violent mob attacking the Capitol building (some of whom were bussed to D.C. by Charlie Kirk’s organization) and to a conspiracy theory now believed by almost a third of Americans. Or the lies about immigrant crime, even though the crime rate among migrants is lower than that among native-born citizens. And the lies about trans people, amplified in recent days. And so on.

These aren’t matters of interpretation or spin. When Republicans say that the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ law helps working people, that is, to some degree, open to debate. To me, massive tax cuts that disproportionately favor billionaires, accompanied by cuts in essential services, do not help working people. But there is at least a theory (however discredited) that lower taxes on the rich spur more job creation.

Even climate denial is supported by a pile of junk science, fake think tanks, and fossil-fuel-sponsored conferences, books, and movies that deny the actual scientific consensus on global warming. Do some Republicans know that they’re endangering the ecological balance of the planet? Maybe; I don’t know.

But when Donald Trump says on national television that Kilmar Abrego Garcia has ‘MS 15’ tattooed on his fingers, when those figures were clearly photoshopped in next to an array of other symbols, that is a different kind of lie. When he says that Haitian immigrants are eating dogs and cats, that is a different kind of lie. When, years ago, Trump modified a poster of the National Weather Service’s hurricane forecast using a sharpie, that was also a different kind of lie.

These lies are vranyo: lies not meant to be believed. They are instances of a kind of fascist nihilism, gleefully delighting in the Leader’s ability to say whatever he wants, to shape facts in his own image. His followers will choose, consciously or not, to believe him, and his opponents can simply be criticized (or worse) for lying.

So what about Robinson? Is the claim that he was radicalized by some left-wing conspiracy meant to be believed? Or is it simply vranyo, a transparently false excuse for a crackdown on political opponents?

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2. Extremely Online

Here’s what appears to be true, based on the evidence we have in front of us, knowing that it’s still early, that there is likely to be much more evidence yet to come, and that almost everything everyone has said about Robinson has turned out to be at least partly incorrect.

Robinson is apparently not a right-wing Groyper (a neo-Nazi follower of Nick Fuentes) or otherwise conservative. He is not a left-wing activist. He appears to be a very-post-2020 creature of the internet, combining basically left-wing political views (at least on LGBTQ+ topics, based on the text messages) with neither-left-nor-right online culture.

For example, the bullet casings recovered by police contain inscriptions that are well-known in online subcultures: an insult originally derived from the Furries subculture (if you don’t know what those are, I’m not going to tell you); an anti-fascist lyric that is also popular on the Far Right; a well-known (among gamers) reference to the game Helldivers 2; and a simple bit of adolescent trolling (“if you read this, you are gay”).

To really understand these references, I highly recommend Ryan Broderick’s newsletter, Garbage Day, and podcast, Panic World, which go into this stuff in detail, drawing on Broderick’s fifteen years of reporting on the dark corners of the Internet. As Broderick said in the episode about Robinson, the vast majority of people over thirty have no idea what any of this means. If you think it’s about a spectrum from right to left, you’re wrong.

Here’s Broderick with a short summary:

Of course, this reality pleases no one. Liberals were hoping and praying that, paraphrasing Utah Governor Spencer Cox, he was “not one of us.” There was some evidence that Robinson was a creature of the Right: one photo shows him in a Halloween costume as a tracksuited European, squatting like a meme of Pepe the Frog, now a symbol of the Groyper movement.

There was also hope on the Left that Robinson was part of accelerationist, chaos-anarchist online subcultures like Com and 764, which seek to bring about the fall of society through real-world and online acts of chaotic violence. (Think Fight Club but extremely online.) Which he may yet turn out to be: there are ideologies in these communities, but they range from left-wing anti-capitalism to right-wing anti-elitism and everything in between; often they horseshoe together. Also, nothing these people say can be taken at face value; everything is ironic, sarcastic, for the lulz. The whole conceit of seriousness is part of what’s being attacked.

But if the text messages are authentic (their diction is so bizarre, formal, and specific that some have questioned them — here, read for yourself), it appears he committed this heinous act in opposition to Kirk’s many extreme statements about queer people.

One thing there’s no evidence for, however, is that Robinson is part of a giant left-wing octopus that poses a clear and present danger to America. One claim is that Robinson was radicalized in college — but he only attended one semester at Utah State University before enrolling in Dixie Technical College, near his hometown, where he was in the third year of an electrical apprenticeship program. Neither of these institutions are liberal bastions of indoctrination.

There have also been insinuations that Robinson was part of Antifa, whatever that means, but there’s no evidence for that, Antifa is not an organization, it's not clear what 'part of' means, and whatever it is seems to barely exist anymore.

The unfortunate reality, if the texts are legit, is that Robinson is a mishmash of left, quasi-right, and neither-left-nor-right. Unfortunate, that is, if you want to blame the Other Side for all that is evil in the world.

3. Der Neue Reichstag

On February 27, 1933, a Dutch anarchist named Marinus van der Lubbe set fire to the German parliament building, the Reichstag. It is now generally understood that van der Lubbe acted alone and was not a communist (though some historians disagree with this view). Yet the Nazis accused the German Communist party of setting the blaze, and the next day President von Hindenburg approved an emergency decree called "The Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of the People and State." On the false pretext that the Communists were plotting to overthrow the state, the decree declared a state of emergency and suspended the right to assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and other constitutional protections, including restraints on police investigations. The police were authorized to arrest and incarcerate political opponents without charges, dissolve political organizations, and suppress publications, and the central government was authorized to overrule state and local laws.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Obviously, we are not living in Nazi Germany — I don’t mean to engage in the kind of hyperbole that I’m criticizing in this essay. But then again, neither were Germans in February of 1933; at that point, the Nazi party held only a plurality in parliament and Hitler had only been chancellor for a month. He was not yet a full-on dictator. And the pattern is similar: someone does something bad, an emergency is declared, and the entire Left is blamed, justifying a crackdown on civil liberties and a targeting of liberal institutions. This is how authoritarians operate: with a veneer of legality, in a fog of supposed national emergency.

We’ve even seen a similar pattern quite recently: one attack on a young, priapic DOGE aide justifies calling in the National Guard to Washington, D.C. Isolated instances of antisemitism on college campuses justify withholding billions of dollars of funding for scientific research. And so on.

Here’s a statement from White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, replaying the Reichstag Fire script while on the Charlie Kirk show guest-hosted by Vice President JD Vance:

We are gonna channel all the anger we have over the organized campaign that led to this assassination to uproot & dismantle these terrorist networks … the organized doxxing campaigns, the organized riots, the organized street violence, the organized campaigns of dehumanization, vilification, posting people’s addresses, combining that with messaging designed to trigger, incite violence, and the actual organized cells that carry out and facilitate the violence. It is a vast domestic terror movement.

With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again. For the American people, it will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.

That is chilling stuff; I appreciate the efforts of some progressives to say “don’t worry, they can’t do this; they’re just trying to scare you,” but I dunno, the entire might of the federal government, military, DOJ, FBI, abetted by an obedient Congress and pliant Supreme Court — feels like it could do some real damage.

And let’s be clear about how inaccurate all this is. On the same show this week, Vance said that “while our side of the aisle certainly has its crazies, it is a statistical fact that most of the lunatics in American politics today are proud members of the far-Left.” Now, I’m not sure what Vance meant by ‘lunatics’ but if we’re talking about incidents of violence and murder, Vance is extremely wrong:

Incidentally, the Department of Justice has reportedly removed from its website the National Institute for Justice study that generated these statistics. So here’s similar data from the Cato Institute:

And here’s some from the ADL:

So does Vance know he’s lying? Or does he think he’s telling the truth? If my own and tens of thousands of other lives weren’t hanging in the balance right now, these questions would just be fascinating.

4. Epistemic Nihilisms

Unsurprisingly, I think the epistemological answer is both/and. Vance, Miller et al. know there is no vast left-wing conspiracy and know that they are willfully using the Kirk assassination as a pretext for a nationwide crackdown. But they also have long believed that “the Left” is out to destroy America, and if this particular pretext isn’t totally true, the overall situation is. It’s a lie that points to a bigger truth.

The epistemology of Donald Trump is a bit different. As has been exhaustively documented, this man lies all the time; in his first term in office, he made 30,573 false or misleading statements, and that was before the Big Lie. Maybe the little lies are even more telling: pretending to be his own publicist, even using a fake voice; printing fake copies of Time magazine with himself on the cover; even the combover, which journalist Michael Wolff finally explained in his 2018 book. This preceded his political career: there’s the fake university, the fake foundation, the fake ‘ownership’ of properties to which he’d only licensed his name. But as I’ve written about before, Trump’s unique ability to seem like he’s telling the truth while in fact lying all the time is perhaps the key to his success as a con man president.

Some people say that this rapid-fire nonstop deceit is a political tactic, learned from Roy Cohn and memorialized by Steve Bannon’s exhortation to “flood the zone with shit.” Maybe so. Or maybe Trump has been lying to everyone for seventy years and has a sociopathic (even psychopathic) inability to distinguish between objective truth and subjective desire.

But for people other than Trump, I think it’s become impossible to distinguish when someone believes what they’re saying, or believes that what they’re saying may or may not be true but points to a larger truth, or is simply lying. At some point, the swirl of cognitive dissonance, audience capture, and communal truth engulf individual psychology. MAGA is a kind of messianic religious faith.

I’ll close with a dark, final irony in all this, which is that if Tyler Robinson was swimming in a sea of extremely online nihilism, so are his MAGA opponents turning our civil society into a Putinesque carnival of nihilism in which vranyo is just as good as the truth. (I’m reminded here of M Gessen’s writings first of Putin’s and then of Trump’s successful campaigns to utterly separate fact from fantasy, history from conspiracy.) . In the service of whatever higher values they claim to hold — God, family, country, whatever — they are willing to ignore their own souls, which, in quiet moments, surely know better. They knowingly spread lies about progressives in order to defeat us. They hold up Kirk as an icon of free speech, and in the next moment call for firings of anyone who dared to criticize him. This, too, is nihilism.

In both cases, the online nihilists and the Machiavellian ones, great pain lies below their acts of verbal and physical violence. Online kids fear they have no lives; conservative nationalists fear they have no country. In both cases, the stakes are too high for the truth.

Thanks subscribers for your support! I’m gratified that my last two posts (on Charlie Kirk’s religious faith and Bari Weiss’s journalistic strategy) have found a wide audience. I’d love to increase subscriber revenue so I can do this work more — please consider upgrading to paid if you’ve not done so yet.

Here are some things I’ve been reading this past week:

• As noted in the text, Garbage Day has been doing great work in the wake of the Kirk shooting. This and this are great analysis, much more detail than I could offer in the space above. In many ways, this really was the Internet’s first assassination, crafted by and for online culture.

• In the Eerily Prophetic Statements department, check out ’s quotation of Liesl Schillinger’s summary of Stendhal’s advice to elites wishing to suck up to autocrats.

• The NatCon conference is now old news, but did an excellent analysis of the blood-and-soil nationalism espoused by some of its speakers.

• I loved this NY Times video on the wellness-to-conspiracy/RFK/wacko pipeline.

• Finally, on the spiritual side of the house, I loved this new, devotionally juicy cover of George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord by kirtan performer Anadi with electronic psychedelic spiritual wizard :

Let that devotion carry you through your day.

In some ways, it doesn’t matter what Kirk believed. Murder is wrong. Kirk was a father, a husband, and a human being. And whether assassinations are politically effective or not (and sometimes they are – just ask Yigal Amir), they are unethical acts that threaten civil society as a whole. Obviously, they must be condemned.

But in other ways, it matters a great deal what Kirk believed, as he will now surely become a symbol of MAGA, with myth already eclipsing fact. Moreover, while liberals of a certain stripe may be dimly aware of him as a bomb-throwing young activist who created a remarkably powerful political organization, this is only one part of Kirk’s relevance to our contemporary moment, and an unhelpful generalization.

In fact, understanding Kirk’s religion is essential to understanding Kirk.

Charlie Kirk started out as a basically secular conservative activist; from 2012 to around 2020, his organization, Turning Point USA, was focused on free markets and limited government. But his emphasis shifted around the time of the pandemic (and perhaps around the time of Kirk’s discipleship under megachurch pastor Rob McCoy), and his beliefs and rhetoric evolved into (and shaped) contemporary Christian Nationalism.

Kirk was never your father’s Christian conservative; he was smart, savvy, and blunt. Like conservatives from Father Coughlin to Barry Goldwater to Rush Limbaugh, Kirk’s gift was to say the taboo thing about race, women, immigrants, or ‘woke’ culture. Of course, conservative beliefs have never really been taboo; they’ve long been held by a third to half the country. But Kirk played on the sense of those who held them that elite institutions (universities, coastal elite media, government) had fallen sway to anti-Christian wokery, which he saw as his religious responsibility to resist. Yet Christian Nationalism is selective Christianity, affirming some traditional Christian teachings (on masculinity, sexuality, and so on) while rejecting others, such as the importance of empathy, humble speech, love for all people, and concern for the “least of these.” In contemporary Christian Nationalism, these virtues became vices.

Only by understanding this faith can we understand Kirk’s legacy, and the way in which it hangs in the balance.

1. The Fusion of Vulgarity and Faith

At first, it seems like a contradiction: figures like Kirk combine a fervent religious faith with an almost shocking vulgarity and meanness. This was not true of a previous generation of Christian conservatives; their piety extended to their speech. Nor is it true of other figures on the Religious Right: Ben Shapiro, for example, is a conservative firebrand, but he doesn’t use profanity or sexual imagery (and indeed, rails against it). But for Kirk, as we will see, vulgarity and faith reinforce one another.

Let’s look at the vulgarity first. In the last day, many right-wing figures have taken to TwitterX to laud Kirk’s efforts to create civil political discourse. For example:

But this is not reflective of the facts.

First, Kirk frequently phrased political debates not in terms of policy, or even ethics, but as spiritual warfare between good and evil. Last year at a Trump campaign rally in Georgia, Kirk said the election was a “spiritual battle” that would be “civilizational defining,” saying that “these next 12 days will define the future of our republic. The forces of darkness have tried everything they possibly can.” Is it “modeling civil discourse” to refer to one’s political opponents as “the forces of darkness”?

Second, Kirk didn’t shy away from vulgarity. Here is something he wrote two months ago:

Whatever this tweet tells us about Kirk’s tolerance for different cultural practices or his own personal hygiene practices, it is clearly not modeling ‘civil political discourse.’ Nor is apparently starting a brawl with ‘young Turk’ Cenk Uygur:

@thatssofetch333He’s so…. (Insert comment here) #charliekirk #embarrassing #debatefail #rankingtiktok #popculture #iconicmoments #worstmoments #cringecontent #fyp #viralvideo #politicaltiktok

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Again, no one deserves to die for vulgarizing our political discourse in this way, but let’s not pretend that he was elevating it.

Kirk also played fast and loose with the facts, combining – like Trump – numerous false claims with the air of certainty. For example, here is Kirk describing his experience speaking to a group of Cambridge University students in May, 2025:

The Cambridge student body might as well be stuck in the high summer of 2020. For all their learning and talent, the students were unprepared and appalled to hear takes that, by now, are mainstream and even boring in America. When I described lockdowns as pointless and forced submission to mRNA shots as tyranny, they seethed and muttered. When I said George Floyd died from a drug overdose rather than under a police officer’s knee, they went into an uproar.

Note that, for Kirk, these false claims are “mainstream and even boring.” But they are also false. The George Floyd claim, though popular on the Right, does not match the evidence in his autopsy, and has been completely rebutted by experts. Likewise, there was no “forced submission” to the Covid vaccine among the general population, and the evidence shows that most lockdowns were, in fact, effective, and the states with the most lenient Covid rules had the most Covid deaths.

These are facts, not opinions. (“Tyranny” is an opinion.) But despite his many online debates, Kirk did not allow these claims to be seriously interrogated. He did not debate experts; he usually debated college kids.

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One would be forgiven for assuming, based on this rhetoric and casualness with the truth, that Kirk is simply a bro, part of the Tate/Schulz/Von/Fridman/Rogan manosphere. And he did have that aspect to his persona. Yet Kirk also espoused an extremely traditional form of Christian morality on some issues, while ignoring or inverting Christian teaching on others.

First, Kirk was explicit that a conservative interpretation of Christianity should form the basis of American society and politics. At the 2020 CPAC conference, he invoked “the seven mountains of cultural influence,” the dominionist view that Christians should have “dominion” over government, media, education, business, arts and entertainment, family and religion. This is not a ‘live and let live’ conservatism; it is a theocratic conservatism in which Christianity dominates all aspects of American civil life.

Or something like Christianity, anyway. As many progressive Christians have noted, Christian Nationalism is a radical rewriting of Christian belief and practice. A prior generation of Christian conservatives praised America because it was home to Christianity; this generation praise Christianity because it promotes American strength, patriotism, and nationalism. It’s hard to overestimate the importance of this change. Liberals (secular and religion) often wonder how professing Christians can ignore the offenses committed by ICE, for example, or the many authoritarian acts of Donald Trump, many of which target the most vulnerable. But for Christian nationalists, protecting the homeland is a Christian responsibility, and anything that gets in the way of that — the rule of law, ‘weak’ compassion for the vulnerable — is evil.

Perhaps the clearest example of this in Kirk’s case is his statement “I can't stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new-age term that does a lot of damage,” made during an October, 2022, episode of his show. (Though this feels similar to Elon Musk’s statement that empathy is a bug in human nature, I think the roots of the sentiment are somewhat different.)

This is in clear contradiction to numerous Christian teachings, including Romans 12:15 ("Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Be of the same mind toward one another. Do not set your mind on high things, but associate with the humble. Do not be wise in your own opinion ), 1 Peter 3:8 ("have unity of mind, sympathy, brotherly love, a tender heart, and a humble mind”), and Colossians 3:12 ("compassionate hearts, kindness, humility...") among numerous others.. Indeed, for many Christians, empathy is the defining feature of Jesus Christ himself, both in his ministry to the “least of these,” including lepers and prostitutes, and in his act of giving his life for others.

I think anti-empathy may be the Rosetta Stone for understanding Kirk’s other beliefs; it brings them all together. Here is Kirk fantasizing about a world where children could watch public executions as a form of initiation:

This is the my other problem with the death penalty - it takes too long. Too many appeals… It should be public. It should be quick. And it should be televised… You could have, like, brought to you by Coca Cola. And no. I'm not kidding. By the way, I would totally tune in to see some pedo get their head chopped off.

Where Jesus said that he who is without sin should cast the first stone, Charlie Kirk said that “I would totally tune in to see some pedo get their head chopped off.”

If we understand Christian Nationalism as a hyper-masculine, nationalist, militaristic revolt against empathy and ethics in the name of defending (white, Christian) America, then the contradictions in Kirk’s character begin to disappear. Kirk’s meanness was not despite his Christian faith, but because of it. As Kirk put it in one interview, citing Psalm 97:10, “As Christians we are called to fight evil… My call is to fight evil and proclaim truth.”

And you don’t fight evil with gentleness and decency; you fight it with everything you’ve got. Of course, for many Christians (and Jews), evil means, first and foremost, moral evil: cruelty, dehumanization, failing to support the poor, intolerance, and so on. But for this version of Christian nationalism, evil means anything that pushes against certain core conservative values or weakens America — which are always the same things.

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2. Race and Gender

This ideological rubber hits the political road chiefly in the context of race (which includes immigration) and gender.

Kirk’s rhetoric was full of (at least) racist overtones. He called Floyd a “scumbag.” On his show in November 2023, he said that “prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people” He frequently espoused the “Great Replacement” conspiracy, which claims that liberals are bringing non-white people in as immigrants to replace white people. The Left, he said, “won’t stop until you and your children… are eliminated.” He said that Haitian immigrants would “become your masters” if allowed in, stating Haiti is “legitimately infested with demonic voodoo” and amplifying the false claim that Haitian migrants were eating pet dogs and cats.

Other Kirk statements on race include, “I'm sorry, if I see a Black pilot, I'm going to be like, boy, I hope he's qualified." And, speaking of Joy Reid, Michelle Obama, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson (a graduate of Harvard Law School), Kirk said,

They're coming out, and they're saying, ‘I'm only here because of affirmative action.’ Yeah, we know. You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person's slot to be taken somewhat seriously.

As with Kirk’s other assertions, these statements fly in the face of actual facts. They take Black racial inferiority as a premise, and then reason from there that a Black person must have less “brain processing” than a white person. But it is again tied to an Edenic vision of a past America where hierarchies were clear and power was held by the people at the top of them.

Similarly, Kirk’s views on women and family are traditionalist, rejecting feminism entirely. Here, for example, is Kirk’s response to the engagement of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, from his August 26, 2025, show:

Maybe one of the reasons why Taylor Swift has been so, just, kind of annoyingly liberal over the last couple of years is that she's not yet married and she doesn't have children. I say this non-sarcastically. I say this as a husband and a father. Having children changes you. Getting married changes you… Taylor Swift might go from a cat lady to a JD Vance supporter, and I think we should celebrate that… We want Taylor Swift on team America. We want you to leave the island of the wokeys. And we would welcome you with open arms. One of the reasons why so many people on the right have been just skeptical or at least a little bit negative on Taylor Swift is, up until this point, that's not a great role model for young women, to wait all the way until you're 35 and just put your career first. We just talked about this with Katie Miller. However, there's a great chance to change that…

It's a great chance for Taylor Swift now to get married and have a ton of children… Engage in reality more and get outside of the abstract clouds. Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You're not in charge.

Again, contrary to liberal generalizations, this is not simply a bunch of hateful name-calling. It is an articulate, reactionary anti-feminism that does not pause for a moment to reflect on how different women may want different things in life, what ‘submission’ to a husband means for women in abusive relationships, or that femininity itself may not be the same for all women. It is far more insidious than simple hate speech, because it offers itself as, at once, radical protest and shared common sense.

Of course, this rhetoric resonates with young men who resent that their former status and power has been somewhat diminished by the advent of feminism, as well as with the growing ‘trad-wife’ phenomenon. But it depends on an unwillingness to entertain the voices of women who have a different view of themselves or of the world.

Kirk also didn’t believe women’s accounts of being sexually assaulted:

It is so materially insane to think that one in five American women will be raped in their life … meaning that they're lying about being raped, that they're lying about being sexually assaulted. Like a fraternity guy and a sorority girl at age 19 hooking up, both five drinks in at 2 a.m. and all of a sudden, like, she removes consent. Yeah, like, that's a murky, middle gray area.

There are other issues that Kirk has spoken about, of course. Many have posted his tragically ironic statements about deaths being ‘worth it’ to maintain gun freedoms. Turning Point USA played a central role in the 2020 ‘Stop the Steal’ campaigns to undermine the election. And even more than most, Kirk was outspoken in his rhetoric against transgender people, at one point calling for a ‘Nuremburg-like’ trial for physicians.

But the primary concerns of what has been called the “alt lite” remain that of race, gender, and sexuality. As the ADL put it in its profile of Turning Point USA:

The “alt lite” is a spin-off movement from the white supremacist alt right. Its adherents typically eschew the explicit white supremacy of the alt right but otherwise share its extremism and its prejudices, including against Muslims, immigrants, LGBTQ people (especially transgender people), and women.

These were Kirk’s primary concerns as well. His performative hyper-masculinity, his ‘muscular’ Christianity, his affinity for Trump’s authoritarian impulses — all of these are bound together into a single ideology, which has now become popular among millions of people.

There is, of course, an important difference between Kirk’s views and those of a more liberal bent: Kirk would impose them on others. Many times, Kirk described abortion as being worse than the Holocaust, and he, among with many others, won the battle, with abortion now illegal in twelve states. And while conservatives may describe ‘gender ideology’ and LGBTQ equality as forcing them to accept a kind of orthodoxy, that is still less invasive than ending my family’s legal recognition or condemning a trans person either to social ostracism or lifelong gender dysphoria. Not to mention the legitimation of ICE’s cruel tactics, which depend upon the dehumanization of migrants, or at least non-white ones.

This is what is Karl Popper called the paradox of tolerance: that to maintain a tolerant society, society must be intolerant of intolerance. Yet if unlimited tolerance is extended to intolerant groups, they could exploit that tolerance to suppress others and destroy tolerance itself. While Kirk preached a kind of ideological tolerance, his politics practiced a profound intolerance of all those who diverged from his worldview.

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3. The Reaction

In the period immediately following Kirk’s death, numerous right-wing figures continued the rhetoric of warfare and vengeance that Kirk used during his life.

First, it’s worth contrasting the reactions to Kirk’s assassination with those of other victims of political violence, including Minnesota State Senator Melissa Hortman gunned down by a right-wing assassin in Minneapolis; and Officer David Rose, who was killed by a right-wing terrorist at the CDC headquarters; as well as the attempted murder of Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her husband Paul, also by a right-wing extremist.

First, while every single national Democrat has unequivocally condemned Kirk’s murder, some Republicans – most importantly, Donald Trump – often didn’t even mention these others. And when they did, it was often to mock them. It’s now been over a month since the attack on the CDC campus in Atlanta; Trump has never once mentioned it. And when it came to the attack on the Pelosis, Republicans spread a whole net of misinformation, alleging that the attack was a gay thing, that the Pelosis knew the attacker, and so on. Meanwhile, here’s a now-deleted Instagram post by Donald Trump Jr. after the attack on the Pelosis, parroting those same lies:

Of course, that’s just hilarious, as long as the attacker is a white, right-wing extremist radicalized by right-wing media’s decades-long demonization of Nancy Pelosi. I have not seen any similar joke posts from anyone in the Democratic party mainstream, despite Kirk’s decade of rhetoric calling for spiritual warfare against them. I’m sure some amoral idiot on the far left has said something irresponsible, but not the president’s son and confidante.

And of course, white, right-wing terrorists are just deranged lunatics in need of mental healthcare, whereas any left-wing terrorists are part of a vast left-wing conspiracy.

Second, some rhetoric surrounding Kirk’s death — even before we know the identity or beliefs of the murderer — has been violent and vengeful, with far right figures calling for civil war and even mainstream figures using language of violence and retribution.

“They are at war with us, whether we want to accept it or not,” Jesse Watters, the right-wing Fox News commentator, said on Wednesday, threatening that “we are going to avenge Charlie’s death in the way that Charlie wanted to be avenged.” Similarly, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said “all of us must now dedicate ourselves to defeating the evil that stole Charlie from this world.” Again, this is before the murderer was found.

Meanwhile, Christopher Rufo, sure that the “radical Left” is orchestrating a “wave of terror” (no one is a deranged lone gunman except young white men on the right), posted:

There is simply no both-sidesing the partisan responses to political violence. To be sure, many Republicans have called for calm. But many others have called explicitly for vengeance, characterizing half of the country as domestic terrorists, again, before we even know who committed this heinous act and why. That includes, of course, Donald Trump who — again before we know anything about the killer’s motives — said from the Oval Office that

For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today. And it must stop right now… We will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it. From the attack on my life in Butler, Pennsylvania, last year, which killed a husband and father, to the attacks on ICE agents, to the vicious murder of a health care executive in the streets of New York, to the shooting of House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and three others, radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives.

That should fill anyone who cares about liberal democracy with dread, especially as Trump omits right-wing political violence entirely. Then again, Trump himself encouraged perhaps the greatest incident of American political violence since the Civil War, so one hardly expects him to be even-handed. And there is no parallel to this on the Left; all Democrats have condemned all of the left-wing violence Trump listed, none have called for vengeance or retribution, and none have pretended as though all the violence is on one side.

In the end, how the Right, and thus the government, chooses to respond to Kirk’s murder may determine how Kirk’s legacy is understood.

On the one hand, there is the rhetoric of Kirk’s eulogizers, and his own stated claims, that he is for free speech, honest debate, and tolerance of different perspectives; as noted above, Kirk explicitly renounced violence, as have many Republicans (including Rep. Mike Johnson) in the wake of his murder. On the other hand, there is the way in which Kirk’s words can easily be interpreted, or misinterpreted, as a call for actual warfare against evildoers.

This dichotomy, of course, is present in organized religion itself. There are teachings that urge compassion and empathy, and those that urge strength, violence, and even cruelty in the defense of the good — the latter being currently put into practice by Israel’s Jewish radical right, Islam’s radical right, and Christianity’s radical right. And both were present in Charlie Kirk.

Perhaps in the next few months, we’ll see which version of Charlie Kirk prevails.

Note: The initial version of this article included the frequently repeated but inaccurate statement that Kirk yelled the Anti-Asian slur “Chink” at an event attendee, when in fact he yelled “Cenk” as in the commentator “Cenk Uygur.” This has been corrected.

I admit that my main emotion right now is dread — dread of what the government and right-wing mobs are going to do, assuming the murderer turns out to have left-wing or pro-trans ideas. That, itself, should tell you something. Here’s a prayer that political violence will be renounced.

I’ll share some favorite reads and other material next week.

“What the hell is going on?”

Donald Trump asked this question in 2015 about our nation’s fight against Radical Islam (remember that?), calling for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” until it could be answered. (It never was.)

Now, of course, those of us who still follow the news ask a similar question every day. The zone has been flooded with shit, the Roy Cohn boxing manual has been followed, each day brings both a new absurdity (Qatar jet bribe! Meme coin! South African conspiracy theory!) as well as a new horror. There are so many different kinds of malefactors: plutocrats passing tax cuts for the rich, petrocrats gutting the EPA, isolationists weakening America’s position in the world, racists rolling back affirmative action and ending voting rights enforcement, MAGA enforcers deporting innocent people without due process, the Trump Revenge Goon Squad targeting political enemies and pardoning criminals.

All of these activities more or less cohere, sort of, but they also fly off in different directions, which can be disorienting.

Among the many constituencies in the Trump coalition, a new brand of Christian conservatives have, in part by sheer luck, ascended to power. Whereas previous generations of the Christian Right — Francis Schaffer, Phyllis Schlafly, Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed — argued (based on a highly selective reading of history) that America was founded as a Christian nation but had strayed from the true path and was in need of correction, these new conservatives go a step further, arguing the very notion of American liberal democracy was fundamentally flawed, sinful, and doomed.

This school of thought has become known as “postliberalism." The ideology takes many forms, but it is generally a radical, religiously-grounded critique of American society that goes beyond conservatism and nationalism and argues that American constitutional democracy is incompatible with promoting goodness, and should be disassembled and replaced by a non-democratic society based on Christian values.

That is obviously a wildly radical program. It’s dour, extreme, overtly-antidemocratic, and not unlike The Handmaid’s Tale. I admit, it’s sometimes difficult to know how seriously to take it. But for the results of the 2024 election, postliberalism might still be a fringe theory popular among Opus Dei types but peripheral to mainstream political discourse. And yet, the 2024 election did happen; JD Vance, an acolyte of postliberalism, is vice president; and postliberal policies predominate in Project 2025, at least 80% of which has already been put into effect. So it can’t be ignored or dismissed.

Who are these people? The network of postliberals, common-good constitutionalists, and National Conservatives includes, on the pragmatic end, Russell Vought and Kevin Roberts, two of Project 2025’s principal architects, as well as figures like Rick Lowry and Leonard Leo; and, on the radical-intellectual end, Harvard Law Professor Adrian Vermuele, Netanyahu-whisperer Yoram Hazony, Rod Dreher, Patrick Deneen, Sohrab Ahmari, David Brog, and others. There are the funders, including Peter Thiel, Howard Ahmanson, and Barre Seid. And there is a long intellectual lineage that includes Leo Strauss, Allan Bloom, Rene Girard, Edmund Burke, and others.

More broadly, postliberals are also in conversation with anti-intellectual and pseudo-intellectual figures like Dark Enlightenment/NRx sages Curtis Yarvin, and Costin Alamiriu (better known as ‘Bronze Age Pervert’), and even the new wave of Christian pop-culture figures like Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan, who recently said on his show that:

Unfortunately, the problem with living in a secular society and living in a society that has a lot of people that are atheists, that have no belief system at all, is you find a belief system… But I think as time rolls on, people are going to understand the need to have some sort of divine structure to things, some sort of belief in the sanctity of love and of truth. And a lot of that comes from religion. A lot of people's moral compass and the guidelines that they've used to follow to live a just and righteous life has come from religion.

It’s a sliding scale, of course; Rogan is not calling for Gilead-like theocracy, whereas Dreher, Deneen, and Hazony are. But thenotion that secularism has led to anomie and decadence — that is the shared core.

Finally, this cadre of disproportionately Catholic thinkers sits alongside a distinct, but mutually dependent, stream of Christian Nationalism, led by once-fringe evangelical and charismatic Protestant movements like the New Apostolic Reformation. As we’ll explore in a future newsletter, these two groups are quite different: post-liberals are mostly Catholic, intellectual, and highly-educated, whereas the ascendant Christian Right epitomized by Paula White (now director of Trump’s ‘White House Faith Office’) is mostly evangelical, anti-intellectual, apocalyptic, and suspicious of educated elites even within their own movement. In a way, this alliance replicates the original Christian Right of the 1970s and 1980s, which likewise united Catholics and Protestants — bitter enemies only a generation earlier — against the depredations of the Sixties. Only now with more radical agendas, and as we saw on January 6, 2021, violent proclivities.

2.

In a previous post in this series, I talked about the two radically different visions of American greatness held by small-l liberals on the one hand (again, that includes moderates and conservatives) and nationalists and post-liberals on the other. For small-l liberals, what makes America great is our shared ideals (quoting my earlier piece): “that all people are created equal; that we may say and believe what we wish, free from government interference; that we all have basic rights that were either given to us by God or agreed upon by compact; that the possibility of economic self-sufficiency was available to all; and that there are no lesser or greater Americans.” But for nationalists, being American is a national identity, and patriotism is less about upholding values than celebrating our national-cultural heritage.

For post-liberals, mere nationalism doesn’t go far enough. Or far back enough.

In 2019, a group of postliberal thinkers created a manifesto entitled “Against the Dead Consensus,” published in the conservative journal First Things. The manifesto held that pre-Trump conservatism “too often tracked the same lodestar liberalism did—namely, individual autonomy. The fetishizing of autonomy paradoxically yielded the very tyranny that consensus conservatives claim most to detest… Yes, the old conservative consensus paid lip service to traditional values. But it failed to retard, much less reverse, the eclipse of permanent truths, family stability, communal solidarity, and much else.” Like JD Vance’s recent politics, the manifesto argued that plutocratic Republicans had betrayed American workers, and embraced restrictions on immigration, and the banning of “pornography, designer babies,’ wombs for rent, and the severing of the link between sex and gender.” It was signed by many of the figures named above: Ahmari, Deneen, Dreher, and others.

Notice the radicalism here: it is autonomy, itself, that is the problem. American citizens (and presumably all human beings) should not be allowed to determine their own values and live their own lives. The state and the culture must embrace “permanent truths,” i.e. Natural Law, even if a majority of people do not agree with them.

If that is true, then the root of the problem goes back well before the Sixties. Dreher argues the trouble began in the Fourteenth Century, in fact, when nominalist philosophers ceased to regard the immanent world as connected to the transcendent God. In the medieval period, Dreher wrote in 2017, “men construed reality in a way that empowered them to harmonize everything conceptually and find meaning among the chaos.” But then came the separation of science and theology, Renaissance humanism, Reformation challenges to clerical authority, the Enlightenment, democracy, capitalism, and the sexual revolution.

As result, like the fox says in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, “chaos reigns.”

America, in other words, was doomed from the start. It was founded on Enlightenment values as a liberal, secular state, in which individuals had freedom of choice to determine their own morality and their own ways of life. This, for Dreher, was grave error, which he ascribes to Deism, the Christian philosophy that influenced John Locke, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and others, and that holds that “God that is a cosmic architect who created the universe but does not interact with it.”

And thus, since true Christianity and secular liberalism are fundamentally incompatible, the latter must be overthrown. “It is far more important to me to preserve the faith than to preserve liberal democracy and the American order,” Dreher writes. As for mainstream Christianity, Dreher says that “We have allowed our children to be catechized by the culture and have produced an anesthetizing religion suited for little more than being a chaplaincy to the liberal individualistic order.”

What is needed is sometimes referred to as ‘Integralism’ since it seeks to integrate ‘Natural Law’ into every facet of life: politics, culture, society, education, everything. None of creation is “off limits to grace,” writes Vermuele at one point, and thus nothing is off limits to government coercion to force us to act in accord with universal (i.e. Catholic) moral teachings.

A few weeks ago, I quoted a passage from Justice Kennedy’s opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 Supreme Court holding that limited Roe v. Wade but left it intact: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

To small-l liberals this statement is practically axiomatic. It is the foundation of American liberal democracy, even if we fall short of its ideal, which is one reason I hadn’t given it much thought until recently. And yet, as I wrote about earlier, it is anathema to post-liberals, who have singled it out for opprobrium. For Dreher, Justice Kennedy’s dictum was “the end point of modernity”: a valorization of “the autonomous, freely choosing individual, finding meaning in no one but himself.” This is what is wrong with America, he says.

3.

In 2021, J.D. Vance gave a talk entitled “Universities are the Enemy.” Here it is, you can watch the whole thing:

Vance begins his remarks by saying, “I think if any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” Later he suggested, “Maybe it’s time to seize the endowments, penalize them for being on the wrong side of some of these culture war issues.”

Which, of course, is exactly what has transpired.

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If you listen to the entire Vance speech, he makes a lot of silly points. He points to one Twitter dust-up over an AI article as evidence that the entire university system promotes “deceit.” He harps on public health officials’ statements that Black Lives Matter marches in the Summer of 2020 would not pose a major Covid risk, without noting that these marches were outside and participants were largely masked (which turned out to be more protective than was needed, not less). He woefully misinterprets scientific studies of gender, citing the thoroughly debunked Mark Regnerus. He calls feminism a “fundamental lie” And so on.

But eventually, Vance comes to the point. Universities, Vance says, are simply about power. Anthony Fauci got his legitimacy “from a piece of paper” — not, of course, that Fauci completed years of undergraduate and graduate study of science, but that he was ordained, basically, by the liberal church known as the university. Colleges and universities “make it impossible for conservative ideas to ultimately carry the day” — not because these ideas do not hold up to rational argumentation, but simply as a matter of power. There’s no engagement here with the substance of what universities teach; there’s simply an attack on universities because they undermine conservative values. As in Dreher’s attack on Enlightenment liberalism, Vance sets up a zero-sum kulturkampf between conservative values and the university as if it’s some kind of wrestling match.

Of course, nationalists have many reasons for wanting to diminish the power of universities. Some are purely political: if a Mussolini or a Putin wants absolute power, then all those who question the leader must be silenced. Intellectuals question things, which is why Orban’s Hungary destroyed its once-proud universities and Pinochet’s Chile disappeared intellectuals. But it’s also the case that universities question moral values, religious myths, and claims to absolute truth. For nationalists, fascists, postliberals, and National Conservatives, from Yoram Hazony to Dedra Meero, they encourage “chaos.”

4.

There is a uniquely rich irony among this new wave of arch-conservative Catholics, beginning with Vance himself. On the one hand, Natural Law is said to be rational and objective – part of the structure of the universe, like gravity or the speed of light. On the other hand, most of these figures embraced conservative Catholicism for largely non-rational reasons: spiritual crisis, a personal sense of being unmoored or alienated from society. Postliberal claims to be about “permanent truths” but it is actually grounded in subjective spirituality.

Vance wrote rather movingly of his journey to Catholicism — I took a deep dive into his essay in this previous post. Dreher is a convert as well — twice, in fact, first to Catholicism and then to Orthodoxy. And I see this happen all the time: lost young people (more often men, but women too) find a traditional system of religion that gives them answers to their existential questions. In my case, I see it among Jewish baalei teshuvah — people who are not born into Orthodox Jewish life but take it on later. I myself was a baal teshuvah in this mode, from around age 22 to age 30. But it also happens among marginalized young men who embrace radical Islam, often with deadly results. And it happens among people who find Jesus in any number of forms, from emotive charismatic Protestantism to intellectual Catholicism.

Catholic baalei teshuvah are perhaps unique in insisting that what they discovered along their emotional and spiritual quest is, in fact, the one and only rational truth that is true for everyone everywhere. Natural Law is said to not even be particularly religious, unlike articles of faith like the Trinity, Virgin Mary, and resurrection of Christ. It travels around the academy, including the legal academy, claiming to be philosophy.

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But of course Natural Law is no such thing. It is premised upon an unproven hierarchy of body, mind, and spirit, and the axiom that the former must be made subservient to the latter. It has a vision of society that claims to be scientific but ignores science, particularly the science of any sexuality or gender combination that doesn’t look like Popeye and Olive Oyl, i.e., a Dominant Strong Man and a Submissive Womanly Woman, even though other permutations are widely found among both human and non-human animals. And it is grounded in the existential crisis of human beings seeking for meaning.

It is religion, in other words, which is fine, except that these thinkers pretend that it isn’t. That life begins at conception and that the life of a blastocyst takes precedence over the moral judgment of an adult human — these are perfectly acceptable theological claims, but they are said to be demonstrable philosophical positions, which of course is poppycock.

As philosophy and as intellectual history, postliberalism is amateur hour at best. For example, is Dreher correct that there is a binary choice between Catholic (or Natural Law) theocracy on the one hand and “finding meaning in no one but himself” on the other? Of course not. Atheists, humanists, Kantians, existentialists, Rortian pragmatists, Buddhists, Unitarians, even utilitarians are obvious counterexamples; all derive meaning beyond themselves without having recourse to conservative Catholicism.

Natural Law is no more necessary for trans-subjective meaning-making than gin is for making a martini. It works well enough, but there are plenty of other options.

But now we have to take postliberalism seriously, because of a cosmic coincidence that, if I were a believer, I might readily believe to be Divine providence: these guys rode the Trump train to power.

It’s pretty clear that JD Vance, Catholic Integralism, and post-liberalism had absolutely nothing to do with Donald Trump’s victory. Post-liberals were already in the MAGA coalition, and Trump won, all the data says, on the basis of the economy, not, say, the depredations of 14^th century nominalism. Trump was also quite close to choosing Doug Burghum, rather than Vance, as his running mate, until Thiel and others interceded. Toss a few coins the other way, and these wingnuts would be politically irrelevant.

But coin tosses are part of life, and part of politics. And so now Vought, Vance, Roberts, and dozens of their minions have power.

A lot of Americans have wondered what could possibly be gained by this administration’s seemingly suicidal enterprise in national self-destruction that is already demolishing American leadership in scientific research and innovation. After all, who could possibly think America is better off without scientists, without research, without higher education?

That is not a rhetorical question.

Thanks for reading and thanks to subscribers for your support. If you are considering upgrading to a paid subscription, that would really make a big difference! I look forward to continuing this dive into postliberalism and the American spirit… but not every week.

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Here are some things I’ve been reading:

• did a great analysis of the fatal flaws in Kristi Noem’s attempt to stop Harvard from enrolling international students. Turns out, there are a laws about this stuff.

• I’ve longed for someone knowledgeable about art and kitsch to talk about Trump’s hideous Oval Office decor. Emily Keegan did just that in the Times.

• Looking for some Elon Musk schadenfreude? Here’s one about his broken spirit, and here’s one about his broken company.

• That statistic above that 80% of Project 2025 has already put into action? I got it here.

• Finally, the most original and startling piece I’ve read in a long time comes from ’s Chartbook, “What Fires Burned at Auschwitz?” Tooze persuasively demolishes the conventional wisdom that the Nazis built an effective killing machine, instead showing how it was kluge’d together with duct tape and string. Along the way he makes some deeply unsettling points about technology, fascism, and human mythmaking — all highly relevant to the moment of course. Really startling.

Speaking of great pieces, I’ve been informed that I won third place (better than fourth place!) in the Society for Features Journalism award for general commentary. Sweet.

I live thirteen miles from the Statue of Liberty. Like most people in New York and New Jersey, I don’t go there much: I took my daughter there last summer and took my mother-in-law a few years earlier, but before that, probably the last time I was there was when I was a kid.

But the statue is a symbol, of course, and as such looms larger in our national consciousness than over New York Harbor. Until recently, I had always understood the symbol’s meaning to be universally appreciated. On the one hand, we are a nation of liberty – or more expansively, a place where everyone enjoyed rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And on the other hand, we are a unique nation of immigrants – not only immigrants, but people seeking a better life in a land of opportunity. As Emma Lazarus’s famous poem, written in 1893 and emblazoned on the statue in 1903, reads:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Give me your tired, your poor
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Yes, this country was founded by English colonists, on land taken from indigenous people and partly farmed by African slaves, but since then it has then populated by waves of immigration, including my Eastern European Jewish grandparents, who came here in the 1910s and 1920s, and Donald Trump’s German grandparents, who came here in 1902 and 1905. (Trump’s Scottish mother, incidentally, immigrated in 1930).

Obviously, we have long failed to live up to these ideals. For half our history, nearly 15% of the population were slaves and women couldn’t vote, and there have been waves of prejudice against Irish, Italian, German, Jewish, Asian, and Latin American immigrants. But we are a country of flawed human beings, and the ideals, I thought, were clear, and shared.

Of course, I was wrong.

2.

There have always been competing versions of America. Donald Trump did not invent American nationalism. And while we may use the same words — liberty and justice for all, says the Pledge of Allegiance — they clearly mean very different things to different people.

One version of America is a country centrally about certain ideals: that all men people are created equal; that we may say and believe what we wish, free from government interference; that we all have basic rights that were either given to us by God or agreed upon by compact; that the possibility of economic self-sufficiency was available to all; and that there are no lesser or greater Americans. This was the dream that drew my Jewish immigrant grandparents here: that it was a land of opportunity and possibility, without all the limits of the Old World. You could make it here, live the American dream.

Again, these promises were often largely unkept. As Frederick Douglass asked in 1852, “what, to the slave, is the Fourth of July?” But they were the ideals, and when America fell short of them, we could point to the Statue of Liberty, recite the Pledge of Allegiance, and read the Bill of Rights to hold our country to account. Conservatives and liberals have always disagreed about how to balance competing ideals — freedom and fairness, civil liberties and public safety — but we mostly shared the belief that what makes America, America are our core values reflected in the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and, sure, the Statue of Liberty.

But there was always another version.

In that version, being American is a national identity, and patriotism is less about upholding values than celebrating our national-cultural heritage. Where a liberal, moderate, or mainline-conservative pledges allegiance to the flag, it is to a republic that promises liberty and justice for all. But, as we saw in the last few decades of hysteria over flag-burning and kneeling in protest, the pledge and the flag have nationalist meanings as well. The pledge is a loyalty oath, and the flag stands for our nation, first and foremost. This is what nationalism means.

And that nationhood is culturally specific. It is a nation where minorities are included, but in which (as JD Vance said in his RNC acceptance speech) they must assimilate into a dominant culture that is mostly led by Christians, white people, Europeans, and (straight, conventionally masculine) men. Apple pie is more American than kimchi. Farms are more American than hipster cafes. Country music is more American than hip-hop. Christianity is more American than Islam.

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3.

In the liberal view, America’s racial caste system is a profound failure of the republic to live up to its stated ideals. But in the nationalist view, it doesn’t exist, and the disparities between Black and white populations in health, income, criminality, and a dozen other measures of well-being are due to racial differences between these groups. This is science, we are told — witness the resurgence of the debunked ‘Bell Curve’ garbage made popular by Charles Murray thirty years ago. Yes, racism is bad, but it is a matter of personal prejudice, not systems baked into our society. Thus, as long as we are personally colorblind, we can ignore (and, in Trump’s America, are required to ignore) the legacy of four centuries of white supremacy from slavery to Jim Crow to redlining to education funding. After all, what’s past is past, and dredging it up fosters division. Unlike, you know, flying Confederate flags.

And then there’s religion. In the liberal view, the ideal America is one where there is a wall of separation (to quote Thomas Jefferson) between church and state. Obviously, Christianity plays a central role in our culture; Christmas is a federal holiday, ‘In God We Trust’ is on our coins, and Christian morality has been encoded in law for centuries. But when I look at the Statue of Liberty, I see the lines from Justice Kennedy’s 1992 opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey:

At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.

To me, this is the best of America. Our secular nation does not enshrine religious doctrines (such as whether or not an embryo counts as a human being) in its laws. We are pluralistic, and stronger as a result of it.

But this is not how nationalist conservatives see it. In fact, that quote from Casey has become a central rallying cry for the Christian Nationalists, Catholic Integrationists, and Post-Liberals who are now shaping policy in the White House. For example, in his book The Benedict Option, Rod Dreher condemns it for celebrating “the autonomous, freely choosing individual, finding meaning in no one but himself.” Notice how Dreher here conflates political autonomy with amoral anomie; either the state imposes morality, or we’re all doomed to narcissistic amorality. Never mind religious progressives, ethical atheists, and people who find meaning in their relationships, love, eros, spirituality, work, activism, or art. If the state does not impose conservative Christian (mostly Catholic) morality, life has no meaning for anyone.

The thinkers and leaders of these intellectual movements (quite different from one another, but, for the moment at least, sharing power) are not household names to most people: Dreher, Patrick Dineen, Yoram Hazony, Sohrab Ahmari, Rick Lowry, Curtis Yarvin, Adrian Vermuele, David Barton, Leonard Leo. But they are well-known to today’s far-right conservatives who believe that our country was (or ought to have been) founded on Christian morality, and has strayed dangerously from the path. And all this trickles down to Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, Ben Shapiro, Bari Weiss, and a host of other figures who have profited handsomely off of it.

As a result, these figures have said for years, radical (re-)action is needed. The ‘Cathedral’ of universities, media, and the deep state must be destroyed and replaced. Christian morality must be encoded into law. The foundations of America must be rebuilt to save us from chaos or immorality or even Satan himself. For these people, Kennedy’s eloquent articulation of American pluralism is shameful. And they, obviously, are in power.

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4.

Progressives, meanwhile, are stumbling over themselves trying to figure out how to describe what the Trump regime is doing right now. Is it fascism, authoritarianism, populism, nationalism? Is it ‘flooding the zone with shit’? Is there a method to the madness? Is it about corruption, greed, racism, narcissism? Is it simply all of the above?

It obviously is all of the above, but it’s also less complicated than it appears. It’s American nationalism, which has always been with us, and which has always reacted to change with verbal or physical violence, from the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s to the John Birch Society of the 1950s, from McCarthyism to Anti-Antisemitism, from Father Coughlin to Tucker Carlson. Nothing is new under the nationalist sun.

American Nationalism celebrates liberty, but only for good Americans who use their liberties in a patriotic way. Those deemed to be anti-American are to have those liberties taken away, and over the last two centuries they have included communists, socialists, Catholic immigrants, Jews, intellectuals, coastal elites, leftist, liberals, Black Panthers, DEI-promoters, Abolitionists, “Antisemites”, coastal elites, globalists, journalists, hippies, and of course immigrants of all stripes, whether legally here or not. At present, some of these groups are now favored (some Jews, some Blacks, most Catholics) and others disfavored. But that status is dependent upon the extent they “hard weld” themselves to the Christian Nationalist patriotic train, as Steve Bannon warned American Jews last fall.

And as for immigration? Here, the water has been so muddied by decades of propaganda that it’s impossible to see clearly. Yes, illegal immigrants have broken the law. But let’s remember that the law, itself, is broken — most recently by Donald Trump himself, who stopped bipartisan immigration reform last year. My grandparents and Trump’s grandparents didn’t face the obstacles blocking today’s migrants. Whatever the right immigration policies should be, they are obviously not what we have now.

Moreover, immigrants are routinely, wildly lied about in right-wing propaganda . Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born citizens. They are not stealing jobs; they’re often doing jobs that no one else wants to do, as we’re now seeing in California’s agricultural sector. They’re not rapists and murderers; overwhelmingly they’re people just like my grandparents, seeking a better life and fleeing violence. So outrageous and preposterous are these lies (told about immigrants as a group and about individuals like Kilmar Albrego Garcia) that one is forced to ask what is really going on — what this is really all about. Likewise with the reckless, illegal, unconstitutional, cruel, and dehumanizing ways in which “mass deportations” are being carried out. Whatever enforcement of immigration laws is appropriate, this is clearly not it. Not only is the immigration crackdown is not about the rule of law; on the contrary, it now poses one of the greatest threats the rule of law in America has faced in a century.

As I’ve written about before, the dehumanization is the point. Like the crackdown on civil liberties and civil society, the immigration crackdown is part of the essence of nationalism, which pits the nation against malevolent foreigners, especially foreigners within. Liberals and mainline conservatives interpret the Statue of Liberty as reflecting one of America’s core values: that we are a nation of immigrants — subject to laws, yes, but people from all over the world who create America’s melting pot (or gorgeous mosaic, for multiculturalists) together. Nationalists see it as a symbol of America, which is threatened by barely-human “terrorists” or “criminals” or “rapists” or Haitians who eat the pets of Springfield.

For a time, American Nationalism could be relatively domesticated by the mainstream Republican Party. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush waved the flag and enraged liberals with their jingoism, but they never turned to the John Birch Right, and never said something like “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” Richard Nixon captured the white-dominated South in the wake of the Democrats’ embrace of civil rights, but he didn’t promise “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” like George Wallace did, and when Wallace garnered only 46 electoral votes in 1968 to Nixon’s 301, the triumph of more moderate conservatism seemed complete. And so it was, for nearly half a century.

No longer. America First, once a slogan of Nazi sympathizers, is now the maxim of the White House. Higher education, media, and the civil service are being attacked, just as Christian Nationalists promised. The nationalistic version of America is not new, but it is newly dominant in all three branches of the federal government. And we have seen massive attacks on both liberty and immigration — the two values for which the Statue of Liberty stands for. Or is meant to stand for. Or I thought is meant to stand for.

5.

In law school this semester, I’ve been teaching about post-liberalism as a form of antinomianism, which is the view that it is religiously or morally required to break the law if one has direct access to God, morality, mysticism, or messianism. A central figure in the class has been Robert Cover, the late law professor, philosopher, and activist who, despite impeccable left-wing credentials, critiqued the Supreme Court’s imposition of secular values on the racist, right-wing Bob Jones University back in 1983. In his pioneering essay responding to the Bob Jones case, “Nomos and Narrative,” Cover demonstrated how law creates worlds, and how we live in social worlds shaped by legal and ethical principles. When the Court forbade Bob Jones University from enacting race-based admissions, housing, and dating policies, it was destroying the nomos – the legal world – of the university. This wasn’t necessarily the wrong result, Cover wrote, but the Court pretended it was just going about its ordinary business, when instead it was destroying a world.

Bob Jones—the university itself, and the decade-long governmental campaign against it – has remained a symbol for the Right all these years. It, and other “segregation academies,” were founded as a white-Protestant response to the civil rights movement and Brown — Bob Jones himself preached a highly-circulated sermon defending segregation on scriptural grounds. And to this day, it is a must-visit stop during Republican presidential primaries.

In other words, Cover was right. Bob Jones University is and was a symbol of a different American nomos from the one I inhabit. American Nationalists and American small-l liberals (which includes liberals, centrists, and the neo-conservative Right) inhabit the same geographical area, but in our minds, we live in different countries. We look at the Statue of Liberty and see different things. I see pluralism, diversity, civil liberties, and multiculturalism. They see American particularism, Christianity, patriotism, and nationalism. And so of course we see one another as opposed to what makes America great.

I recognize that the democratic-republican, classically liberal version of America is not in power today. It is not the regime under which I actually live. But I still look at the Statue of Liberty, and still read the words inscribed on her base. And even if it is only a dream, I still defiantly believe that it represents my country.

Thanks everyone for your support. This is the first of what will be a series of posts on post- and anti-liberalism, taking what I hope is my distinctive approach to the intersection of mind and world, spirituality and politics. I’m eager to hear how it lands for you.

Here’s more of me in the world:

• I was on the debut episode of Arc Magazine’s new podcast talking about all the usual subjects, and some unusual ones with .

• Next week I’ll be in Indianapolis talking about religion and psychedelics on May 13. Not flying out of Newark.

• I had an essay on queer theology published in a cool new anthology.

And, in the meantime, I’m grading a whole lot of papers and exams, plus celebrating a non-milestone birthday. See you next week.

We live in a time not only of tragedy but of madness.

Our present decade has melted into a noetic world of unreason in which neither facts nor rationality itself hold any sway over the levers of power. In government, the very apparatus of scientific knowledge is being disassembled, and outright denials of environmental science, epidemiology, economics (e.g. confusing tariffs and trade deficits) and medicine are the basis of policy. State violence depends not upon the word but upon the whim.

And in our public discourse, sensationalistic, preposterous, and easily debunked claims are now so ubiquitous that traditional media, no longer able to fact-check them, must somehow play a kind of attentional catchup. Instead of quenching these fires, media has to compete with them.

Among the many lunatic provocateurs in this rhetorical circus, Fox News anchor Jesse Watters stands out. This is someone who made his reputation with a racist, puerile video making fun of Chinese people, and who has successfully monetized misinformation, rage, and fear ever since. He spreads misinformation, hyperbole, and hypocrisy with such naturalness, it makes me wonder what he was like as a pre-teen.

This week, Watters upped the ante of his own stupidity, stating on national television that:

When you sit behind a screen all day, it makes you a woman. Studies have shown this. Studies have shown this! And if you’re out working, building robots like [co-host] Harold [Ford], you are around other guys. You’re not around HR ladies and lawyers—and that gives you estrogen.

Here’s the video:

While I’m not offended by this outburst—this lib can’t be owned so easily—I admit that I am fascinated by it. Does Watters actually believe this? Is he pandering? Does anything mean anything? Is it all just for the lulz? This is what I’m interested in.

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2.

For months now, Watters has presented a very weird, fragile, threatened, and malleable conception of masculinity. While Watters has denied that transgender people exist, ordinary men can suddenly transition into women by engaging in a variety of activities. Last July, for example, after Kamala Harris was announced as the Democratic nominee for president, Watters said “I heard the scientists say the other day that when a man votes for a woman, he actually transitions into a woman.”

Yet even when they don’t spontaneously transgender themselves, men are bound by strict rules. Responding to a clip of Joe Biden eating ice cream, Watters stated “You know my rule about men eating soup in public: I don’t think it’s manly. I think the same thing for ice cream. You should save that for vacation. A grown man, especially the president, should not be licking ice cream in public.” (Several clips of Watters eating ice cream in public subsequently surfaced.)

And now ‘HR ladies’ shed estrogen and just working in front of a screen can turn a man into a woman.

The context, appropriately enough, was Watters’s desperate attempt to defend the Trump tariffs that wiped out an astonishing $10 trillion in value before being abruptly withdrawn. Per Watters—and, not coincidentally, other right-wing voices including Bayta Ungar-Sargon and Milo Yannopoulos—the pain of the tariffs is worth it, because it will restore manufacturing jobs, which are manly, and will thus help address the crises facing American men.

There is, to be sure, a version of this argument that makes sense. American men are disproportionately lost, confused, and angry. Many of the components of their sense of self (and their social superiority) have been lost, and working-with-your-hands jobs are one of those. And the success of heinous Manopshere influencers like Andrew Tate (and Joe Rogan as well) owes a lot to this loss of status.

Then again, many American men are perfectly fine—in particular the ones who don’t attach their sense of self-worth to a narrow conception of masculinity. And it’s highly unlikely that the steel plant will over reopen anyway.

But obviously, this is insane. I admit, I didn’t want to waste time fact-checking Watters’ assertion, so I just googled the “studies” that Watters may have been referring to, and Google’s AI replied thus:

So that’s clear enough.

Still, I asked Midjourney to imagine a science fiction film in which women turn men into women and got this retro gem:

3.

It’s possible that Watters is simply acting out of self-interest. He knows that Fox News has lost audience share to people like Rogan, Tate, Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, and others who don’t hesitate to spread unfounded conspiracy theories—and, for good measure, monetize this rage by selling supplements to men hoping to man up. In a way, he’s just a knockoff version of them, and not a good knockoff either.

It’s also possible that Watters is, himself, so immersed in the post-factual “upside down” that Naomi Klein wrote about that he cannot tell truth from falsehood. Maybe the “studies” Watters is referring to are actually articles or books that have never been peer-reviewed and lack any empirical evidence — this is always a good ‘tell’ when some RFK-aligned wellness wacko tells you that lavender enemas cure cancer, but only cites something someone said on the internet. This does not actually count as “research.”

Or maybe Watters trusts those sources because he believes in some conspiracy theory that all the scientists are in cahoots to feminize heterosexual men, and that the only people telling the truth are non-specialists who sell pills.

Of course, it’s also possible that Watters is just trolling here. He may be so nihilistic that words don’t really have meaning anymore. In the video, you can here Jeanine Pirro (hardly an avatar of moderation) laugh out loud at Watters’s idiotic comment, and then point out that Watters, himself, works in front of screens all day. So no one takes him seriously.

And really, nothing means anything. Tariffs are the same as trade deficits. Decades of science on climate, gender, infectious disease are all bogus. Innocent people have no due process rights. Did Watters even come across a ‘study’? Does he care? Maybe he doesn’t care. He just says things for the lulz. In a way I find this explanation more depressing than ascribing his rant to cynical manipulation or believing in nonsense. At least those explanations have some meaning at their core, whether it’s the profit motive or a tin-hat conspiracy theory. But if it’s just nihilism, maybe there is no meaning to anything anymore, and words are just tools to exercise more power. That is sad to contemplate.

But I don’t think that’s quite right either.

4.

Despite himself, there’s a deep truth lying beneath Watters’s weird conception of fragile, malleable masculinity: his audience’s profound anxiety.

Let’s revisit Watters’ fundamental contradiction: on the one hand, nothing can turn a man into a woman (certainly not hormones, social transition, gender confirmation surgery, or one’s own deep and discerning self-knowledge), but on the other hand, everything can, even just staring at screens or voting for a female candidate.

I don’t think this is mere hypocrisy; I think it’s two sides of the same coin. I think the newly permeable boundaries around American masculinity have caused a kind of “trans panic” in which every man is vulnerable to spontaneous de-masculinization. The threats are everywhere: soup, screens, lawyers, books in a library, the letter ‘T.’ If you’re not careful, you’ll end up like one of those men wearing a dress yourself.

Once, there was a commie in your bathroom; now there’s a trannie in your soup.

This is also a trans origin story. In the old days, there were no screens, no female presidential candidates, and no pernicious HR ladies shedding estrogen. Now that there are, look what’s happened: lots of men believe themselves to be women. So that explains it! It’s not that the gender spectrum has existed for all of human history; it’s that technology and changes in gender roles have transmogrified millions of men, deluding them into thinking that they’re women. It’s like Aristophanes but in reverse.

Like the hysterias of the past, from Reefer Madness to McCarthyism to the Satanic Panic, Watters’s depiction of masculinity reads like self-parody. It’s a caricature of fragile straight masculinity, a joke one of my queer friends might tell. Is masculinity really so threatened that a mere ‘HR lady’ can cause the loss on one’s manhood?

Apparently it is. Like Trump, Watters is emotionally correct even as he is factually batshit. Men do feel vulnerable. But instead of unpacking why that’s so, instead of reaffirming traditional masculine traits that don’t depend on patriarchal dominance or the myth of manual labor—instead, that is, of actually helping—Watters and the men he is imitating stoke ever more ludicrous terror.

This isn’t (just) nihilism, opportunism, or madness: it’s terror. Watters is giving voice to a profound fear among American men, at once explaining the phenomenon of transgender women (in Watters’s world, men who are deeply deluded) and warning that you, too, could fall victim to it.

It’s easy to laugh at this nonsense, and I don’t mean to spoil the fun. But these scared men have the guns right now, and they are pointing them at a lot of innocent people: legal residents mistaken for gang members, activists mistaken for ‘antisemites,’ and trans people mistaken for sexual predators. (Indeed, one trans woman just got arrested for peeing in a women’s restroom, despite passing for female so completely that she would surely be booted out of any men’s room.)

To darkly paraphrase Margaret Mead, never doubt that a small group of terrified, angry men can change the world for the worse; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.

Thanks for reading. I hope you followed Trump’s advice and bought the dip three hours before he revoked the irrevocable tariffs. I am considering joining Truth Social to not miss any future tips.

My favorite opinion piece of the week, by far, is by the president of Wesleyan University, Michael Roth, who brilliantly called out the insane lies and extreme danger of “anti-antisemitism” in the New York Times this week. Please read it, especially if you’re about to celebrate Passover with folks who have fallen for it.

Speaking of Passover, I did a brief comparison of Stephen Miller’s musings on due process with the values of law, reason, and empathy espoused in the Torah.

And on that note, time to get back to work in the kitchen.

When I was growing up five hundred years ago, “decency” was part of the square, bourgeois normalcy that I — as a privileged, rebellious, closeted teenager in suburban Tampa, Florida — hated.  It was epitomized by the Reagans and their old-fashioned values and anti-drug crusades.  I wanted to tear it all down.

Now, of course, I’m a lot older.  For one thing, I see how much of my adolescent rage was misguided – I was angrier at shopping malls and “hypocrisy” than racial or economic injustice.  I was Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye, equal parts privilege and angst. 

For another, the poles of decency have switched.

Today, the Democrats are the party of decency, and the Republicans are the party of trolls, name-calling, vulgarity, and extremism.  They want to tear it all down, “it” being the globalized and multicultural society that has ‘ruined America.’  And accompanying their radical zeal is a puerile, trollish nastiness that makes Holden and me look like Gandalf the Grey. 

Of course, this “decency” was always a part lie, since it lay atop so much oppression and violence. The dominant group was never that decent to women, people of color, immigrants, the disabled, or queers, to name a few.  After all, I stayed in the closet for a reason.

But there were at least some standards for how public figures, especially politicians, behaved.  Reagan shredded the welfare state, created the wealth gap that is still growing today, and ignored AIDS for years, but he didn’t brag that he could grab women by the pussy. That should count for something.

It’s not just Trump, though. Trump may have raised populist American vulgarity to a demagogic art form (Jeff Sharlet has written about how it is the main point of his rallies) but there was plenty already there in the Tea Party movement and, of course, in the once-far white nationalist Right.  Now it oozes beyond Trump to tens of millions of Americans who love nothing more than to own the libs, like some powerless teenagers vandalizing a city wall because they have no other way to flex their muscles.

Take, for example, the entire GOP’s insistence on mispronouncing Kamala Harris’s first name.  Everyone who follows politics knows that she pronounces it KOM-ala, not kam-AH-la.  Yet at the RNC, nearly half the speakers intentionally mispronounced it.  Indeed, looking at the Washington Post’s chart of who said what, the mispronunciation tracks one’s MAGA-hood.  Matt Gaetz yes, Nikki Haley no.

There are at least two reasons for this bullshit.  First, it serves to otherize Vice President Harris. “Everyone” – meaning, every white person – can pronounce Donald, Tim, and JD.  But “Kamala”?  That’s weird.  Foreign-sounding.  Especially with the accent on the second syllable.  It’s a subtle birtherism, but it’s birtherism nonetheless.

Second, and I think more importantly, it’s just trolling.  Disempowered MAGA men love to imagine that they’re making woke progressives cry “liberal tears” by their mean little antics.  They say Kam-AH-la — and “Democrat Party” instead of “Democratic Party” — simply because it’s name-calling, because they hope it will get a rise out of us.  Again, like a pathetic schoolyard bully.

And of course it’s not just mispronunciation. Trump has called Kamala Harris “dumb as a rock,” “nasty,” a “bum,” and “real garbage.” I’ve seen numerous memes making fun of Harris, who is clearly quite intelligent and whose vocabulary and sentence structure dwarfs that of Trump, as “dumb.” I’m not sure if this is trolling or racist/ sexist delusion: The Nation has devastatingly catalogued the way Trump denigrates Black women in particular.

These people think that what is new and dangerous about America are things like woke ideology, trans people, and immigration.  But what’s really new and dangerous is their tolerance for violence, their vulgarity, and their sheer meanness of spirit. 

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Of course, as soon as the poles of mockery are reversed, right-wing snowflakes call foul.  “Don’t condescend to Trump voters,” coastal elites like me are always told.  And part of me (especially the rabbi/meditation/psychedelic part) agrees.  It’s manifestly obvious that the name-calling and lib-owning are, like all bullying, symptoms of a deep self-loathing and profound insecurity.  These people know that the country they once loved — the mean, chauvinistic, white-dominated, Christian-first, English-only, gay-bashing one where they or their husbands were in charge — is never coming back, even if Trump wins the election. I think they know, too, that they have allowed themselves to be victims of globalization and economic change, even if they blame their loss of status on elites and immigrants rather than billionaires, large corporations, and their political enablers. They know that their old ways don’t work anymore; their disregard for truth and decency has, at its root, a sad, nihilistic despair.  So I do feel some compassion for them.

Then again, a lot of people experience grief, loss, and change.  Not all of them turn their pain outward, scapegoating and dehumanizing “illegals” or supporting a boorish demagogue.  Some accommodate themselves to new realities, find ways to grow with them, and take responsibility for their shortcomings, rather than blame someone else.

But MAGA lashes out in vengeance, rage, and nihilism.  Do 90 million Americans really believe the Big Lie, or do they just not give a fuck?  Trumpism is a lot like pro wrestling (maybe not a coincidence, since arch-hucksterer Vince McMahon played a big role in creating both).  Everyone knows it’s fake, but they still shout along as if it isn’t.

I’m reminded of this well-known passage by Hannah Arendt, writing of past totalitarians but equally apposite to Putin and Trump:

This constant lying is not aimed at making people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore.  A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong.  And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies.  With such a people, you can do whatever you want.

This seems mostly true today, though now the lying is done by sinister overlords to manipulate the people, but by a demagogue and television networks responding to ‘audience capture.’  Maybe Trump’s billionaire backers are engaged in mass manipulation, but Trump, Carlson, Vance, and the rest?  They’re giving the people what they want.

3.

Like many progressives, I can’t believe that the presidential race remains this close.  Not because of the MAGA base, but because of the twenty or so percent of Americans willing to put up with it, or don’t know about it, or think it’s just fake news.

This is a profound moral failure.

It should count that this candidate is a convicted felon; that he incited a riot against the capital that stated the express intention to kill members of congress; that he, every day, lies more than any politician before him, from the ‘Big Lie’ that the 2020 election was stolen to the preposterous lies about the size of his political rallies; that he is vulgar, mean, intemperate, and brutish. 

Sure, for a MAGA nativist or Christian nationalist, all these sins may be denied or overlooked in the name of revenge or apocalyptic messianism.  But what about everyone else?  These things used to matter, especially to conservatives. 

I think back, again, to the conservatives of my youth.  This was the party that — to a fault, in my view — used to insist on virtue, morality, and moderation.  And now?  How many of them are willing to overlook the obvious criminality and venality of Trump and his cronies, just for the sake of a tax cut, or a more accommodating policy toward Israel, or some other bowl of porridge that’s worth selling the conservative birthright to obtain?

Of course, many conservatives today know this. They know how Trumpism has destroyed their party. In a sense, their loss is even greater than mine, since they’ve lost their political home. Here’s what some of them have said about Trump:

And yet, even some of the people on this chart have now lined up behind him.

Possibly even worse, the “low-information voters” who may now decide the election represent an even greater failure on the part of the American educational system. Every time I read an interview of them, I wonder to myself, how do they not see that one of these candidates is a serially lying criminal who wants to build concentration camps for suspected “illegals”? How can they not know the stakes?

The great gamble of the Harris campaign is betting that enough people feel disgusted with Trump and Trumpism that they will take a chance on “joy.”  I am sure that a small legion of political strategists have reviewed the numbers, and I have nothing to offer to their calculations, other than the hope that they are right. 

For sure, fighting negativity with negativity hasn’t worked. All the warning and doomsaying about Trump from commentators like me hasn’t moved the needle.  People either aren’t paying attention, or they’ve grown immune to hyperbole.  Liberal journalists have cried wolf too many times. 

The Harris bet is that there is still a thread of decency, however hypocritical or incomplete, that runs through the fabric of mainstream America.  This was never where I found myself most at home, and teenage me would surely be appalled at my embrace of it.  But it is there nonetheless.  And the Harris campaign is betting that enough people know in their guts — that is, their moral intuition — that Trump is just a bad guy, and that it’s worth taking a chance on someone more positive. This is, in a sense, a spiritual campaign.

We have come back from the brink before.  Consider the period in American life that gives this essay its title: McCarthyism.  Red-baiting demagogue Joe McCarthy has a lot in common with Trump: the draft-dodging, red-baiting Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s former aide who taught Trump his aggressive strategy of always attacking, exaggerating, and demonizing the opponent.  But also a nativist fanaticism; Trump has even begun calling Harris a “Communist” of late, which is utterly ludicrous from a factual point of view.  And a disregard of the truth.

In early 1954, McCarthy accused the Army – during the Eisenhower presidency, no less – of being “soft on Communism.” During weeks of congressional hearings, McCarthy had failed to make his charges stick; Army special counsel Joseph R. Walsh had refuted every single one of them, and McCarthy had been caught lying more than once.  Then, on June 9, McCarthy went after a young associate in Welch’s own law firm, alleging that he, too, had ties to the Communist party.  That’s when Welch responded, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”

Harris isn’t asking Trump that question, because she knows the answer. She’s asking it of ordinary American people, and predicting that they’ll answer in the affirmative. God help us if she’s wrong.

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I hope y’all are having a decent week. (See what I did there?) I’ve been doing a bunch of work in the psychedelics-and-law space this week - digging ’ take on recent efforts to improve safety in medical and religious psychedelic use, including some by my colleagues at Emory.

I also wrote this helpful reminder to would-be Defenders Of The Jews that spreading conspiracy theories is never good for us.

Thanks to Jay Kuo at for injecting some fact-based reasons to be optimistic about a Harris victory. Also, in the category of “How is this election even so close when one side is promising militarized authoritarian nationalism?” check out ‘s harrowingly sober analysis of what mass deportations would actually look like.

Have you all seen that my friend and meditation comrade in arms has a new Substack? Check it out! Inner mysticism, m*therf*ckers. (That’s a Dan paraphrase.)

Thank you for subscribing!

And so, dear reader, I have journeyed down the rabbit hole. Fortunately, I have emerged with notes — Notes on Vance, if you like.

There are many threads here: the question of whether Vance is a believer or an opportunist; the strange convergence between ‘Trad-Cath’ (traditional Catholicism) with ‘Tech-Fash’, the turn of many Silicon Valley elites to hard-right politics; and of course there’s the weird factor, now the most effective word Democrats have used against their opponents in two decades.  It will take me a bit more time than usual, but I’m going to try to weave these threads together.

The prolegomenon to all this is whether Vance is an opportunist or a believer.  Most folks seem to believe the former.  Pete Buttigieg, finally recognized as the best Democratic politician on television, said to Bill Maher, “I knew a lot of guys like JD Vance at Harvard who would say whatever they needed to, to get ahead.” Here on Substack, my friend described Vance as an “empty vessel” not unlike Trump himself, writing “I cannot think of a belief [Trump and Vance] hold that could not be tossed aside if their ability to obtain more power required them to do so.”

I see it differently.  I think Vance has the zeal of the converted, which combines the strength of conviction with the ease of persuasion.  His beliefs have the appearance of depth, but on close inspection reveal a kind of youthful shallowness. Vance does believe this stuff, and believes it with a great deal of subjective sincerity, yet it all seems rather thin.

I will begin with Vance’s reactionary religious outlook, and then turn to what would seem to be in tension with it but which in fact is quite aligned: the libertarian eugenic futurism of the Thiel-Musk-Rand axis, which has funded Vance’s rise to his current position.

1. Trad-Cath

Vance’s faith is a very 21^st-century phenomenon, precisely because it claims to be timeless.

He has, in numerous speeches and written work, expounded on the virtues of Trad-Catholicism, including its authoritarian political offshoot,  Catholic Integralism, which holds that Catholic doctrine must be integrated into public, civic life.  (Leonard Leo is probably the most influential believer in that ideology.)  Like Russell Brand, Joe Rogan, and Jordan Petersen alongside him, Vance is convinced that human beings are prone to do evil, that our society has lost its moral and philosophical moorings, and that only transcendent, objective, rock-solid values can save us.

It's not easy to argue against this position, since it is taken as much spiritually and emotionally as intellectually.  Certainly, humans are capable of great evil, notwithstanding the progress of recent centuries (cf. Steven Pinker, despite reservations) and the many ways one can cultivate kindness and compassion.  And it’s also certainly true that our social fabric is fraying under the many stresses of technological change (and the new cultures it has brought into existence), globalization, economic disruption, and changes in morality.

Vance himself articulated his journey to faith in a remarkable essay entitled “How I Joined the Resistance,” published in 2020 in the Catholic magazine The Lamp. It is a fascinating read, mostly for what Vance apparently fails to realize, and I’ll quote liberally from it here.

Vance describes growing up in a rather typical independent-evangelical family, then becoming an atheist in his early twenties and enjoying “a brief flirtation with libertarianism.”  But then Vance had a crisis of meaning:

Though I had fallen in love, I found that the emotional demons of my childhood made it hard to be the type of partner I’d always wanted to be. Randian arrogance about my own ability melted away when confronted with the realization that an obsession with achievement would fail to produce the achievement that mattered most to me for so much of my life: a happy, thriving family.

I had immersed myself in the logic of the meritocracy and found it deeply unsatisfying. And I began to wonder: were all these worldly markers of success actually making me a better person?

Vance was moved, at this time, by reading St. Augustine, encountering the shocking-to-him fact that religion can accommodate doubt and science, and, surprisingly, attending a 2011 talk by Peter Thiel, who bemoaned the soullessness of the high-achieving life:

We would compete for jobs at elite law firms, and then for partnerships at those same places. At each juncture, he said, our jobs would offer longer work hours, social alienation from our peers, and work whose prestige would fail  to make up for its meaninglessness. He also argued that his own world of Silicon Valley spent too little time on the technological breakthroughs that made life better—those in biology, energy, and transportation—and too much on things like software and mobile phones.

Learning that Thiel was Christian (“He defied the social template I had constructed—that dumb people were Christians and smart ones atheists.”), Vance moves on to one of Thiel’s influences, scholar of religion Rene Girard, and comes to believe that

In Christ, we see our efforts to shift blame and our own inadequacies onto a victim for what they are: a moral failing, projected violently upon someone else. Christ is the scapegoat who reveals our imperfections, and forces us to look at our own flaws rather than blame our society’s chosen victims.

People come to truth in different ways, and I’m sure some will find this account unsatisfying. But in 2013, it captured so well the psychology of my generation, especially its most privileged inhabitants. Mired in the swamp of social media, we identified a scapegoat and digitally pounced. We were keyboard warriors, unloading on people via Facebook and Twitter, blind to our own problems. We fought over jobs we didn’t actually want while pretending we didn’t fight for them at all. And the end result for me, at least, was that I had lost the language of virtue...

That all had to change. It was time to stop scapegoating and focus on what I could do to improve things.

While, Vance says, we live in a “a society oriented entirely towards consumption and pleasure, spurning duty and virtue” (note the extrapolation from a very limited, specific experience to a broad claim about “society”), Catholicism is

obsessed with virtue, but cognizant of the fact that virtue is formed in the context of a broader community… and above all: a faith centered around a Christ who demands perfection of us even as He loves unconditionally and forgives easily.

After these realizations, Vance experiences a few synchronicities, is only briefly deterred by the Church’s record of systematic sexual abuse (he does not say how this issue was resolved), and becomes a Catholic.  And that is that. 

So, let’s recount. Raised nominally religious, Vance tried the hamster-wheel of high achieving Yale law students but found it empty of meaning (I can relate!). Then he encountered a billionaire bemoaning the same thing and followed him into a Christian belief that de-emphasized intellectually untenable literalism and emphasized meaning, virtue, and community. 

Which is all well and good, though it does seem Vance is swayed quite quickly by a few books and conversations.  But I don’t want to belittle Vance’s conversion experience. I became an Orthodox-practicing Jew in my twenties (when I was also at Yale Law School) on a similar basis.  I, too, found a community that valued depth and spirituality over superficiality and consumption.  I, too, was besotted. Once again, I can relate.

The trouble is, despite claiming in his 2020 essay that “I try to keep a little humility about how little I know,” Vance is now out preaching Trad-Cath morality as the sole path to happiness.  In just a few years, he’s moved from finding a personal answer to his existential crisis to imposing that answer on everyone else.  Everyone must have children, our entire society must conform to a specific set of moral principles. 

Otherwise, Vance says, we must all be as miserable as he was at twenty-four. Consider Vance’s now-infamous claim that the country is being run “by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”  Really?  Has Vance ever met a progressive?  Maybe even smoked a joint with one?  Trust me, we are really not miserable.  In fact, unburdened by Vance’s body-shaming dogmas and myths of heaven and hell, I would say we’re having a pretty good time of it.  And we’re creating communities of mutual care and concern, and working for a little more justice in the world.  Vance’s depiction of us is downright silly.

Like most people who choose their religion, Vance came to his faith after a period of personal crisis, and religion delivered the answers to his questions.  But then he projects his own experience out onto five billion other people, and assumes that what has given him solace is essential to all human thriving.  It seems never to have occurred to Vance that his is but one path up the mountain.

This is perhaps the most obvious, glaring error particular to the Trad-Cath worldview, no matter how much it is gussied up by philosophical verbiage: that it is committed to its universalism, that what is best for me is best for thee, and that this is just how things are, a matter of Natural Law, which is as real as the laws of science.  This is how Catholic Integralists like Leo, and it seems Vance, can justify anti-democratic means to achieve moral ends: because the rest of us are objectively wrong.

2. Tech-Fash

As many observers have noted, there’s increasingly a convergence between this kind of traditional religiosity (and religious nationalism) and conservative elements in the tech (and wellness) world as well as in the still-somewhat-hedonist denizens of the Roganverse.  Here’s on the turn of some in tech to hard-right, sometimes overtly fascist politics:

There’s the popularity of Stoicism, of Nietzsche, Jordan Peterson, paleo-conservatives like Curtis Yarvin or Bronze-Age Pervert, even Traditionalists like Julius Evola. These different philosophical strands share a sense that the modern west is decadent, we’re in a twilight of values, and we need a New Order. Douthat noted this ‘congruence between the tech right and what I’ve called the neotraditionalist version of religious conservatism’. 

Indeed, there is a vibe shift in Silicon Valley, especially now that it’s partly located in Austin.  Vanity Fair noticed it in 2022 (thanks to Evans for linking to that piece.) At the extreme edge is the tech-libertarian utopianism encapsulated in the unwieldy acronym TESCREAL: transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism.  But there are milder versions as well, and I’ve seen various versions of it firsthand among friends and acquaintances. It’s not just Elon and Peter; it is ubiquitous. (Here’s and about the overall vibe.)

What has caused this turn? Some is a resentment of wokeness and DEI, which have spoiled a lot of parties (literally and figuratively, as Silicon Valley’s raucous sex parties now get written up in scandal sheets).  And, sure, some is economic self-interest as Washington tries, ham-fistedly, to regulate AI, TikTok, and the rest; as Buttigieg put it, these are very rich men supporting the party that helps out very rich men.

But it’s not just a marriage of convenience. I think most of it, having been down this rabbit hole for much of the last few weeks, is the congruence between the ideologies: that, as I wrote a few months ago, everyone is sure that it’s the end of the world, society is collapsing, and some sort of big change is in order.

Again, there are shades of gray in this worldview.  Among hyper-libertarians, there’s the recognition that TESCREAL dreams can only be achieved if government gets out of the way.  In the Musk/Thiel worldview, the salvation of humanity is going to come not from collective action but from extremely smart and powerful people doing things like enhancing AI, creating transhumans, and engineering the next generations of post-humanity.  Only these transformations will save us.  In a very weird way, it’s a kind of transhumanist humanism.

In such a view, anything that restricts these geniuses is bad—but government restriction is doubly bad, since the government is paternalistic, driven by politics, and prone to regulate the things that the Howard Roarks of the world want to do, from crypto to AI to building island nations. To save the world, we’ve got to stop Big Gov.

I haven’t seen any evidence that Vance believes all that stuff.  True, he has, quite recently, made the case for working with people who believe crazy things, but I haven’t seen him articulate the extreme versions of this ideology himself.  But you don’t have to drink the entire TESCREAL soylent to see areas of commonality. Both Trad-Caths and Tech-Fashs believe that democracy is in the way of the higher good; that the people do not know what’s best for them; and that as a result, society is in decline and some degree of authoritarianism is necessary to save it. 

“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Peter Thiel wrote way back in 2009.  Which is what Project 2025 believes about morality and democracy: it’s either one or the other.  When society has lost its way, you can’t leave it to society to find it again; you – the cultural, intellectual, economic, corporate, philosophical, or religious elite – have to lead them back to it, whether they assent or not.

And if putting up with retrograde Christian Fundies is the price of achieving the Singularity, isn’t that good ROI?

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3. The Weirdness

My last point is a redemptive one, because for once, I get to end this overlong newsletter on a high note. Two high notes, in fact.

First, there’s the schadenfreude that progressives like me are experiencing as we watch Trump’s Mini-Me become an albatross around the neck of the GOP.  As much as Kamala’s candidacy has invigorated the better angels of our nature, Vance’s Hindenburg-like self-immolation has delighted the lesser ones.  Finally, it feels like the winds of change have turned.         

Second, I am thrilled that the best word being used to describe Vance and Trump, apparently first used by possible VP candidate Tim Walz, is “weird.” 

I say this even though I’m a bit of a weirdo myself.  Because Vance and the rest of these natalist-eugenicist-tech-fash dudes are really weird, and finally, America is able to see that.  In the bubble that is Silicon Valley, this kind of weirdness often goes unremarked, because so many successful people are weird; some weirdness is clearly a competitive advantage.  And a lot of these guys confuse achieving great success in one field with having profound insight into everything; their great wealth and power has led them to great arrogance.

In reality, the only reason these guys can propound these weird, poorly-articulated philosophies at fancy conventions is that they’ve paid for the fancy conventions.

And, of course, because strivers want to get some of their money and attend out of self-interest.

So now they’ve paid for one of their own, more or less, to go on national television and run for vice president. But guess what: normal, center-right people do not like mean, weird jerks who think they know everything.  (Mean policies are fine, apparently, but they have to be delivered by normal-seeming people.)  

The problem isn’t that Vance is willing to say anything.  The problem is that he can’t seem to shut up.

There’s one final ingredient in the stew.

I’ve been reminded, over these past few weeks, of Mark Rylance’s brilliant portrayal of tech futurist billionaire Peter Isherwell in Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up. Isherwell has infinite money, power, hubris, and intelligence of a certain type.  He also has an unworldly, unsettling weirdness, which to some people must look like genius, but which really just makes him… weird.

Above all, Isherwell has arrogance. Having spectacularly failed to save humanity, Isherwood sets out to at least save the elite by shipping them (and himself) off on an intergalactic voyage to a habitable planet. Spoiler alert: this does not work. Isherwood is gobbled up by an alien within seconds of being defrosted, thousands of years in the future.

Vance claims to be humble, but his arrogance is overwhelming. He’s going to lecture us about what makes us American, about the way to a good life, and about the need to reclaim society from degenerate elites. And based on what? A few years in the corporate legal rat race? A bestselling popular book? A seminar-level syllabus on contemporary Trad Cath theology?

There’s an old saw that Americans elect the candidate they’d rather get a beer with. But can you imagine anything worse than sitting next to Vance at a bar while he drones on and on about virtue?

Alright, this was a big one, and I didn’t even talk about Lord of the Rings. I hope you’ll share this post with folks you think might be interested.

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For further reading on this subject, I can recommend:

• did an excellent summary of all the radically weird things Vance has said about women and child-rearing.

• did a great job connecting the backlash to the Paris Olympics’ Dionysian tableau with tech’s trad/fash turn.

• I can also “recommend” Ross Douthat’s take on Trad-Cath/Tech-Fash, not as a useful analysis but as an excellent exemplar of how Trad Caths like Douthat essentialize and misconstrue progressives. I can’t believe he has such a large platform to spread such ill-considered ideas.

• Here’s my piece on Vance’s natalism.

Please add your recommendations in the comments. And thanks as always for your support.

Share Both/And with Jay Michaelson

There are many reasons why right-wing nationalism is surging: globalization, extreme inequality, migration (and attendant changes in demographics, especially in majority-white countries), the loss of working class jobs and opportunities, changing social norms around gender and sexuality (and resistance to liberal Western values surrounding them), and many others. All of these have contributed to a perceived loss of status among groups that had previously enjoyed it, particularly (in Europe and the United States) among less-educated whites, as well as a sense of creeping disorder and loss of traditional values.

So, perhaps a billion people have responded, as they often have in the past, with an embrace of “blood and soil” nationalist identity politics that blames elites and outsiders for the decline of the nation and its values. (As I’ve written before in these pages, progressives often share this sense of looming disaster, but have very different responses to it.)

Perhaps even more important than the causes of right-wing nationalism, though, is the way it can be utilized. Ironically, populist anti-elitism can be exploited precisely by elites, who have bankrolled populist movements from German National Socialism (i.e. Nazism) in the 1930s to Trump’s campaign in 2024. In the American formulation, perhaps first pioneered by Ronald Reagan, the ultra-rich get tax breaks and deregulation, thus increasing their wealth, while the religious-nationalist base gets social conservatism and anti-immigrant actions like Muslim bans or mass deportations. Tragically, these conservative economic policies often worsen working people’s economic position, as in the cases of Brexit or the shredding of America’s social safety net and infrastructure. But as long as they are concealed by charismatic, nationalistic patriotism, the volk often supports them.

There are also important, interesting differences among nationalisms, particularly between American and European varieties.  Which led to a fascinating conversation I’d like to share with you here.

My conversation partner is Joel Schalit, a leading journalist-thinker covering European fascism and nationalism, now primarily at the publication he co-founded, The Battleground.  Joel is also a friend and long-ago colleague of mine (we worked together at the Jewish online magazine Zeek back in the 2000s), and we started chatting online about how right-wing nationalists have embraced J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, a subject I’ll be writing about soon.  But our conversation quickly turned to the ways in which American and European nationalisms align with and diverge from one another, and by the end of it, I’d learned a lot.

So, we went back and reviewed our chat, adding more texture and examples, and here’s the result.  I think you’ll find it as illuminating as I did. We started with this picture Joel sent me of a German imperial flag (left) hanging over a Tolkien-branded fascist social center in Torino, Italy:

Joel: These are Italian Génération Identitaire, a block away from us.

Jay: Fascinating. I found this great quote that maybe it’s not so surprising that fascists love books about immutable races, each living in their own separate feudal city-states.

Joel: Really well-put.

Jay: What I find odd is, these troubling parts of Tolkien resonate more with European ethnonationalism than with what JD Vance claims to stand for.  Vance isn’t a white supremacist – his wife is of Indian descent – but is a ruralist nationalist, kind of a Jeffersonian. (Also, Vance is now in bed with coal, oil and other industries, the people who destroyed Appalachia like Saruman tried to destroy the Shire, but I guess that's just selling out.)  

Joel: Those are crucial distinctions to make that set him part from his European counterparts. But even the head of the AfD in Germany, Alice Weidel, is queer and partnered with a South Asian woman.

Jay: That’s interesting.  Multiculturalism for me but not for thee?  A revival of Aryanism?  

Joel: Exactly. Hindu Indians are still Aryan for certain kinds of fascists. In the Italian case, Tolkien appeals to Catholic nationalist sensibilities, since Italy is so fiercely regional. I think the American right has a habit of cribbing from Europeans crudely: what Vance is doing is similar to the appropriation of Identitarianism and Illiberalism by folks like Tucker Carlson and the Alt.Right.

Jay: It is bizarre to see nationalism at least nominally detached from race.  How do you have blood and soil without the pure blood?

Joel: It's detachable because nationalism is somehow perceived as independent from race, but it ultimately leads back to it. Vance is selling provincialism as an ethnos.

Jay: IDK if you read or watched Vance's RNC speech but he made this quite explicit: that America isn't just our founding ideals but is also about being in a specific place and history.  Here’s what he said:

You know, one of the things that you hear people say sometimes is that America is an idea. And to be clear, America was indeed founded on brilliant ideas, like the rule of law and religious liberty. Things written into the fabric of our Constitution and our nation. But America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.

Joel: Bingo. Minorities who buy into this are in for a rude surprise.

Jay: He even addressed the contradiction.  Here’s another quote: 

Now, it is part of that tradition, of course, that we welcome newcomers. But when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms. That’s the way we preserve the continuity of this project from 250 years past to hopefully 250 years in the future. And let me illustrate this with a story, if I may.

I am, of course, married to the daughter of South Asian immigrants to this country. Incredible people. People who genuinely have enriched this country in so many ways. And, of course, I’m biased, because I love my wife and her family, but I it’s true. Now when I proposed to my wife, we were in law school, and I said, ‘Honey, I come with $120,000 worth of law school debt, and a cemetery plot on a mountainside in Eastern Kentucky. . .’

Now that cemetery plot in Eastern Kentucky is near my family’s ancestral home. And like a lot of people, we came from the mountains of Appalachia into the factories of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Joel: There you go. This reminds me of German leitkultur (leading culture) ideology. It's pushed hard by both the centre and the far right in Germany to argue that minorities who do not conform to the hierarchy, as means of cultural integration, are out. He's working with a parallel concept.

Jay: What does that mean, like “You're invited here but remember ours is the primary culture and yours is not”?

Joel: Exactly.

Jay: Sounds similar to France: “Muslims are welcome here if they become French, but not if they keep wearing veils and speaking Arabic.”

Joel:  Yes, the Laïcité framework for secularism, formulated at the height of French colonialism.

Jay: I'm not a conspiracy person but Putin couldn't have orchestrated this better. Just like Masha Gessen predicted, we're all living in Putinland now.

Joel: Yes, Gessen nailed it. Putin is the zeitgeist. Silvio Berlusconi’s early exaltation of Putin - and later, Trump, who copied Berlusconi, helped signify this. 

Jay: The meditation-psychology person in me really wonders how correct the Steve Bannons of the world are that ethno-nationalism is just evolutionarily wired in. All primates love the in-group and hate the out-group, and most humans folks see loyalty to the nation or group as a moral value. (Jonathan Haidt wrote about that as well.) Cosmopolitans or multiculturalists like you and me are weird outliers.

Joel: Under conditions of extreme inequality, it's inevitable people react this way. Especially if they’re given nationalist narratives to do so. Since the 2008 crisis, the Euro-American far right has done its work in making this possible.

Jay: Right, it's not black & white. These tendencies may be wired in, but if the context is suitable, they get activated by people or forces who have an interest in activating them, from Hitler to Exxon.

Joel: Absolutely.

Jay: I guess we should be happy that Jews are not the new Jews. Only the real OGs still see us as the outsiders within now. Now it’s Muslims, or immigrants, or quasi-Jews like the “cultural elites.”

Joel: That’s right.

Jay: I have a question for you, which is: How populist are European far-right populisms?  What I mean is, do they have economic policies that actually will help the volk, or are they total bullshit like Trumpism, which preaches populism but actually practiced plutocracy and supply-side economics. By the way, that’s even true in Project 2025 — check out this analysis of how it would increase taxes on the working and middle classes while offering even more breaks for the rich:

Joel: National populism, as we call it at , is very real in certain EU member states: Italy, Germany, Hungary etc. But there is no egalitarian economic vision. They’re neoliberals. There’s no socialism or Keynes in their offer. The socialist pretense is often there but never adhered to. Marine Le Pen’s party indulged redistribution rhetoric the last few years only to give it up during the French elections and endorse Macron’s pension reforms.

Jay: Here of course, there’s not even that pretense. The rhetoric is the opposite: opportunity, freedom, revitalize American industry, etc.  Which is so sad — these voters really think the plant is gonna reopen.  Trickle-down economics is the ultimate con.

Joel: Yes, its a bait and switch that leaves millions out in the cold. In Europe, the far right has always been beholden to the rich. Hitler collaborated with Krupps, for example, supplying the company with slave labour. Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Salvini always benefited from Silvio Berlusconi’s largesse and just named renamed Milano’s airport after him, as though to appease his still-powerful family. The poor are always hoodwinked by these parties.

Jay: There’s a new book out called White Rural Rage about this – like What's the Matter with Kansas? but updated for 2024 – how people in the heartland consistently vote against their economic well-being.  I found the book lacking because it describes social issues as “trinkets,” i.e., just some bullshit distraction, whereas in Trump’s America, people really believe in that stuff.  And in both America and Europe, demographic changes are real and it’s foolish for liberals to write off the concerns people have. These have to be engaged with, not dismissed. But on the economic side, the book is just devastating.

Joel: In Europe, the lower and middle classes are so disoriented and so hooked on the need to feel better, the plot always gets lost. If for five minutes, they feel some sort of pride, they got what they came for and don't take it further. There is a sense that they're not entitled to anything else or understand that metaphors are metaphors, not money. Self-esteem is in short supply, and demagogues are always there to exploit it. The psychology is as it reads. 

Jay: On the one hand I want to be more, idk, respectful of people’s non-economic beliefs.  On the other hand, come on, people.

Joel: Same here.

Jay: I want to go back to Vance’s speech, which was full of anti-elite, populist rhetoric:

As always, America’s ruling class wrote the checks. Communities like mine paid the price. For decades, that divide between the few, with their power and comfort in Washington, and the rest of us only widened. From Iraq to Afghanistan, from the financial crisis to the Great Recession, from open borders to stagnating wages, the people who govern this country have failed and failed again. That is, of course, until a guy named President Donald J. Trump came along. 

Joel: The far right have returned to class warfare rhetoric. This is populism 101 as the Dutch sociologist Cas Mudde explains it. It disguises the exploitative politics of the wealthy by inciting against so-called elites, as though they were revolutionaries who will solve inequality and return power to the people. As we know, such discourses are often racist and are not directed at classes, but minority communities like Jews, aka Viktor Orbán’s ‘globalists’.  

Jay: It’s so infuriating, because Trump gave the largest tax break in history to the richest .1%.  Reagan’s deregulation of the financial industry set the stage for the Great Recession twenty years later. Wages stagnate in large part because Republicans oppose minimum wage increases and crush organized labor. But none of these facts stick. Trump projects so much (fake) authenticity, it's hard to sell the reality. Meanwhile Vance, who worked for Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm and actually criticized the people of Appalachia as lazy, now sells himself as the original “hillbilly.” 

Joel: People don't want to hear it because they have messianic needs. They feel so powerless, and Trump gets that. Hence his constituency: downwardly mobile, heavily religious.

Jay: Totally. I wrote about that in the newsletter. What’s struck me about populism is how it accurately diagnoses the pain that’s out there, but then prescribes a quack cure that obviously is not going to work.  I guess, as you say, it can provide moments of pride, and that’s maybe worth something.  But the plant isn’t going to reopen, whiteness isn’t going to be as dominant as it used to be, and the richest people in America will just get even richer, even faster. How many Brexits have to happen before this gets learned?

Joel: That’s a really good question, Jay. If you read recent British opinion polling, 55% of those surveyed now view Brexit as a disaster. While today’s Labour Party is nothing to write home about, the Tories got voted out and the country now has some room to reflect on what happened, and build new alternatives to neoliberalism. Let’s keep a close eye on what happens and see what can be learned from the UK, and France’s New Popular Front as well.

The victory the coalition achieved in containing Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, is worth reflecting on. You don’t have to like Jean-Luc Mélenchon to appreciate what the Front pulled off. They blocked one of Europe’s biggest fascist parties from power. Even if that’s the only thing they accomplish, it was a rare moment of inspiration we can all benefit from. 

This is the first of several newsletters I’ll be devoting to the psychology (and religion) of right-wing nationalism. This question is, for me, at the heart of what Both/And is trying to do: bring together the analytical tools of political journalism (even political science) and psychology/religious/contemplative studies. I’ve been taking deep-dives into the radical elitism of Peter Thiel, the revanchist Tolkienism of his acolyte JD Vance, and related questions. I’m gratified by your support, as a subscriber, to enable me to do this work.

Over at the Forward, I did a similar bit of intersectional journalism, looking at how Trump and Biden embody very different understandings of strength, and how the entry of Kamala Harris into the race foregrounds the gendered nature of them. I also, because I couldn’t resist, wrote a progressive Jewish speech in response to Shabbos Kestenbaum’s RNC speech.

There have been some great Substack pieces this week:

• did a fantastic piece on the underreported story of Sinclair Media, which is feeding right-wing misinformation into local news around the country.

• did an excellent summary of what’s at stake for the Earth in this year’s election. Please send it to anyone on the Left who is having doubts about this.

• isn’t the only one to cover Trump’s cognitive failings, but his piece on how they were on display in his RNC speech is very, very good.

• On the same subject of this week’s newsletter, did a very good take on JD Vance’s blood-and-soil nationalism and called a spade a spade.

I hope you’re feeling encouraged and empowered by the twists and turns of the last few days. Remember, as I wrote a few weeks ago, we have no idea what is going to happen. Now let’s take that as inspiration to get to work.

Now one of the resident conservatives at the New York Times, French is one of the few mainstream journalists who really understands American religion, especially conservative Christianity, and sees how religion and politics are so closely intertwined.  And he knows (and explains) that most Americans make political decisions not on the basis of policy positions or cost-benefit analysis, but on non-rational factors like community, trust, faith, identity, fear, and hope. 

French’s op-ed on Christian nationalism published this week is essential reading for anyone trying to understand the unshakeable appeal of Donald Trump to the MAGA base, which is mostly (though not entirely) conservative Christian.  As many have noted, Trump is the most un-Christian ex-president in history: a serial adulterer, sexual predator, vulgar narcissist, proven liar, and, likely, a soon-to-be convicted felon. 

But to his Christian nationalist base, he is quite literally a messianic figure: God’s chosen one who will restore Christianity to its rightful position in American society. Over 25% of white evangelicals who attend church at least once a week say they believe this.  In fact, as has been clear since 2016, Trump’s personal failings only make the case stronger for these believers.  It shows that he is in this place because God ordained it, rather than because he deserves it.  

While religion often gets described as about “belief,” French astutely points out how these are emotional positions, not intellectual ones.  Drawing on the work of historian of religion Thomas Kidd, French usefully distinguishes between the conceptual ideologies of Christian nationalism on the one hand, and the emotional, even mystical Christian nationalism that actually animates Trump’s supporters.  (Obviously, the boundary between the two are porous, but I think the dichotomy is a useful one.) “Actual Christian nationalism,” French quotes Kidd is saying, “is more a visceral reaction than a rationally chosen stance.”

This is an important insight, and explains why you’ll never persuade your Trumpist uncle to change teams.  His allegiance is tied up with identity, belonging, and, if he’s religious, God. 

But I think French doesn’t take this analysis far enough, so I’d like to begin where he leaves off.

French observes that much of Trumpist messianism is grounded in the visceral, emotional appeal of apocalyptic mysticism and prophecy, such as leaders in the Apostolic Reformation anointing Trump as the chosen one, or individual Christians being told so by the Holy Spirit.  And he predicts, in the last line of his piece, that “the Trump fever won’t break… until the ‘prophecies’ change, and that is a factor entirely out of our control.”

But wait a minute. 

Prophecies come from somewhere, and they succeed in varying degrees.  I can sit here in my Sukkah, where I’m writing these words, and prophesy that the righteous will soon dwell in a tabernacle made of the skin of Leviathan – an actual Jewish myth retold at the end of the Sukkot holiday.  But I doubt that prophecy will find many adherents, because it doesn’t speak to any widely and deeply held human needs.

Trumpist prophecies, however, are classic apocalyptic pronouncements that resonate with groups with profound insecurity about the world.  And while French omits this point, it’s a key part of understanding the phenomenon, and thinking about ways it might be shifted.

The roots of the MAGA base’s insecurity are many and well-documented: the loss of white Christian hegemony in the United states, globalization, technology, threats to traditional masculinity and ‘traditional’ values (including but not limited to advances for women and LGBTQ people) and the loss of economic security that, since Reagan, has been successfully sublimated by Republicans into anger at cultural elites rather than at the plutocrats actually responsible for it.

The world these people love is indeed going to hell.  They’re not wrong about that, even if they are wrong about why it’s happening and whether it’s actually hell or, in fact, the kind of change that can be lived with and even appreciated.  No surprise that a large majority of white evangelicals say that the Rapture will happen during their lifetimes.  Look, from their perspective, at what the world has become: it’s already the end of the world.

These profound psychological dissonances are at the roots of why Trumpist messianic prophecy appeals so strongly to his terrified, enraged, white MAGA base – just as other dissonances have always been at the roots of messianisms from Jesus Christ and Sabbetai Zevi to Adolf Hitler and Jim Jones.  (I wrote a dissertation and book about one such figure, an 18^th century heretic named Jacob Frank, so this is familiar territory for me.)

For that reason, I’m not sure I agree with French’s final line, that these prophecies are entirely out of our control.  Sure, the ship has sailed and Trump is the captain.  But even seemingly unshakeable religious beliefs evolve – witness the changes in attitudes toward LGBTQ people among younger evangelicals – especially if spiritual crises force them to do so.

French simultaneously gives these folks a pass for clinging to some pretty odious, unexamined beliefs about what makes America great – check out Robert P. Jones’s new The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy for a searing Christian self-examination of that – and gives the rest of us no direction forward.  Trumpism not just emotional messianism: it’s emotional messianism that resonates with some very specific, deeply held feelings and beliefs.

And that’s where attention should be focused.  This won’t come from liberals like me shouting about equality or justice, but conservative figures – religious leaders, politicians, journalists – doing traditionally masculine things like growing some courage, manning up, and speaking truth to power.  Trump is a liar – that is not what Christian masculinity is about.  Owning up to the truth of American racism isn’t wokeness or “critical race theory” – it’s recognizing our collective sins and opening to the possibility of forgiveness. Climate disaster isn’t some hoax or natural phenomenon (as a majority of Republicans say it is); it’s human selfishness, pride, greed, and arrogance, and it’s against the will of God.  Is there really a War on Christmas, for God’s sake? Or do Christians need to find some moral courage again, some backbone not to cower in the face of opportunistic demagogues who exploit fears for their own ends?

These are just a handful of examples.  More broadly, there needs to be a real spiritual reckoning among Christian conservatives that, again, is not going to come from people like me, but which could come from people like David French.  French has rejected this apocalyptic insanity at significant personal cost.  Others can too.

Prophecy has roots, and that means it can be uprooted. Repentance is possible.