Revenge of the (KKK) Nerds
Or, LARPing the Crusades, the Inquisition, and a few deleted scenes from Mississippi Burning, probably.
A lot of “alt-right” Christian soldiers all over X have spent a good portion of the last few days declaring that they refuse to shed blood — or have their sons and daughters shed blood — “for the Jews.” One of these people, a longtime friend and retired SEAL now doing ministry work with veterans, even reached out to me yesterday to make this proclamation directly:
Kinda lame to see a complete atheist playing the Jew victim card now Jeff. You never served in the military either so maybe take a knee here as some Christians don’t want to sacrifice their sons for Israel. Maybe you do, but I sure don’t.
There is much wrong with this characterization — so many misrepresentations packed into so short a missive — that I felt compelled to answer at length, but I’ll spare you those protestations here. If you want to read the response, click this link.
On a less directly interpersonal level, though, let me make my positions even more clear: I’m disgusted by the way we’ve taken to using our military — and I’ve written on this at length over the course of protein wisdom — because I feel we’re too often putting our troops at risk with no intention of winning wars. Our politicians are so caught up in appearances and in placating pacifists or leftist fellow travelers of hostile regimes masquerading as “human rights” referees, that they essentially sacrifice US personnel by creating absurd and often conflicting Rules of Engagement, in some cases even attempting to prosecute soldiers for doing what soldiers should be doing: killing the enemy. During war time. So cocksure do we pretend to be of our own perceived military might that we fight wars with at least one hand tied behind our backs in order to make the fight “fair.” This is madness. War is not sport, and soldiers aren’t vessels for the preening moralism of those not fighting.
This conclusion was a revelation to me — and I use that term without recourse to the Holy Spirit, in this instance — one that ultimately turned me against US foreign adventurism, and made me regret supporting the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions in the latter years of those conflicts.
War is — and should be — hell. This fact can be obvious whether you’ve volunteered for combat service in a non-mandatory military or whether you’ve spent your life as a putrid “chicken hawk” in the civilian sector, mocked and derided by the Colonel Jessups of the world for presuming to live under the freedoms that better men and women secure for you. War should always be a last resort and not another card in the deck of civilian leaders who have little actual blood on the line, and often no more than mere electoral skin in the game.
My belief is that if we enter into war, we win that war — quickly, and with the utmost ferocity, knowing without doubt our cause is a righteous one.
I have no such feelings about our involvement in Ukraine right now; and I understand why a lot of Americans don’t wish to get involved in another Middle East conflagration.
Israel, like the US, needs to prosecute wars to win them, not to placate a purposely implacable “international community” of virtue-signaling, soft western democratic socialist nations, nor the morass of autocratic and totalitarian shithole countries who should, by rights, have little to no say in the matter. Fuck ‘em all.
All that said, we have, in this country, fought and spilled blood against other Christian nations — our Revolutionary War comes to mind — and American soldiers have over time spilled blood in wars to defend Buddhists, Muslims, Catholics, Taoists, Chinese communists, the indigenous religions of the Chinese provinces, and etc.
And yet suddenly, we’re being told that “Jew blood” is uniquely unworthy of “our” sacrifice, despite Israel itself being a US ally that often fights proxy wars against terror states, keeping US intelligence up to speed and keeping those terror states to occupied with regional fighting to launch more frequent broadsides inside and against the US.
One of these countries Israel provides us a buffer with is Iran. And yet “Christian nationalists” — US citizens — have determined, repugnantly in my view, to throw their support behind a nation that chants “death of America” — so long as the payoff is that they get to paint, verbally and outwardly and with smarmy sanctimony, “satanic Jews” as the actual enemy of America, mapping fanciful dreams of fighting with the angels in support of the Book of Revelations onto actual geopolitical realities. I may be misremembering, but I believe Jesus at least once drew a distinction between the politics of man and the kingdom of Heaven. But who knows: maybe today’s awakened militant Christian soldiers received a new New Testament that I haven’t read, and in it, they’ve been deputized to speak both as and for God.
Saving that, however, what we’re actually witnessing is insanity and hysteria masquerading as religious rapture, ginned up by leftists and reinforced by grifters who believe whatever the zeitgeist commands.
The “alt right” Christian identitarian movement — whose agenda ((I)) was harangued for pointing out in a piece for The Federalist back in the Fall of 2016 — is a collective movement. It is a white grievance movement that wishes white Christians to reject pluralism, reject e pluribus unum, reject the idea of individual agency — all in order to unite as an identity tribe with political aspirations that track with their idea of a pax Americana.
It is anti-American, this movement. It is, in fact — and the “alt right” bristles when you point this out — the Klan’s active attempt to usurp and then redefine conservatism to its own ends: Having found itself on the outs in the Democratic Party, where the power math following a decades-long policy of legacy immigration and an epistemic shift toward cultural Marxism eventually dictated that the Democrats’ best strategy is to embrace historical victim groups through the sophistic diktats of academic leftism and its various offshoots — relegating whites, as a necessary consequence, to permanent oppressor class and villian — white identitarians mixed with, and drew close to, actual conservatives (many of them white) to rage against Woke inc., and, quite fairly in many instances, to rage against the reduction of whiteness to a kind of incurable political and social disease.
The consequences of this political shift, however, is that conservatives, whether intentionally or not, accepted as allies an identity collective, aggrieved leftists whose strategy to address this grievance is to create a Great White Christian Awakening, an etho-nationalist movement consonant with Black nationalism, La Raza, et al, one that is entirely at odds with Constitutional conservatism, our Founding, and our Framing.
That is, this white identity cult rebranded liberation theology as Christian nationalism to account for its own minimalization within the hierarchy of identity collectivism as it has long existed on the left. Knowing that pure “whiteness” grievance was unlikely to sell, so fraught was it with historical baggage brought about by earlier racism, this burgeoning identity movement made the calculation to further coalesce around an historical “Christian” identity, irrespective of the numerous different branches of Christianity. The frontline zealots appear to be fundamentalist evangelical integralists; but, in need of a greater show of strength, they’ll take all comers, provided those people swear allegiance to Christ, or at the very least, give lip service to just such an allegiance. Beggers can’t be choosers, after all. In this way, the organizing principles of this white identitariam Christian nationalist movement are not much different from the scriptural interpretations of groups like the KKK.
In this new collectivist Christian nationalist movement, Christians — largely white Christians — are depicted as perpetually “oppressed”; and, because most of those who have fashioned progressive policies to oppress them historically are themselves nominally Christian, old scaprgoats get deployed to explain how “their own” erected the social and political edifice in which they find themselves in such a lowly position on the intersectional grievance scale. “Godless Jews” — “harlots of Revelation,” “rootless cosmopolitans,” “subjects of Molloch,” “Christ killers” — get blamed, in this revisionist fairy tale, for the ills fashioned and approved largely by Christians in a still largely majority Christian nation. Jews are presented as both so powerful and so Satanic that poor, hapless Christians have, from time immemorial, been powerless against them, unable to escape the tempting call of their pornography and pedophilia, and forever subject to their “secret arrangements,” which control the globe through media, banking, and a pact with the Devil himself.
And so to combat the enemy in this redemption play, new, more powerful, more militant — and, importantly, more collectivized and more religiously righteous — Christians, have determined that they must answer the call to fight for both the Kingdom of Heaven and the soul of a white Christian nation simultaneously.
It’s the hero arc born of an origin story in which the Christians who came before them were feckless weaklings bullied by toothy, venomous Jews. It is self-serving and pompous. It is vainglorious and presumptuous. Not exactly the hallmarks of traditional Christianity as I’ve been led to understand them.
Still, this new breed of Christian, having eschewed humility, views itself as holy Inquisitors, “willing to ask tough question” and “willing to speak uncomfortable truths,” as they see it. For example, here are just a few — not from internet randos, but from “alt right” or “independent” influencers with a combined following of over 1 million people on X. First up is Mindy Robinson:
If you've been following me for years and learned to trust me because everything I've ever said has turned out to be true, let me fill you in on a little something I've figured out in the last few months/years. Iran is not the bad guy here. Israel (their government, not necessarily the people) is the bad guy. They've been starting shit and crying victim while hiding behind "anti-semitism" this entire time. Their government has absolutely no problem slaughtering the Palestinians and the original Israelites just to push this one world dystopian agenda. Israel is the most vaccinated country in the world for a reason, these baby killing Satanists have absolutely no problem wiping them off the map for good, once they've served their purpose in helping them take over the Holy Land. Don't fall for the fear mongering, because these evil powers-that-be live off the negative energy, if you couldn't tell....they're hoping to get you all worked up to crusade for some evil fucking regime that rigged our elections, bought out and blackmailed all our politicians, and created all the anti-American, pedophile bullshit we're dealing with now. Don't show support for anything other than pacifism, and let the Persians do their thing...they're good at this stuff and rightly pissed off. Good is about to fucking win, and there's nothing these evil pricks can do about it. Just remember WWJD....which would be to whip these bankers out of existence and drown a bunch of MF pedophiles.
Klan Barbie, as I’ve dubbed her, then goes on in subsequent posts to protest that calling her antisemtic for her views on the “evil powers-that-be” desirous of “taking over the Holy Land” who “created all the anti-American, pedophile bullshit we’re now dealing with” — and whom Jesus himself would “whip…out of existence and drown” — is just another tricksy Jew ploy to pretend she feels hatred toward Palestinian slaugherers in league with the Dark Lord, when really, as a follower of Christ, she’s all about love! QED!
Second, here’s Emerald Robinson, reminding you whose country this really is — and whose role it is to fix the ills created by those not like them:
Only faithful Christians can defeat militant atheists and communists in the contest to save our civilization.
Until my exchange with the retired SEAL yesterday, I would have read this simply at face value, then asked why it is that only faithful Christians can defeat atheists and communists. Because that seems like a role anyone who wishes to defeat atheists and communists, for whatever their reasons, can play equally.
But now I know that, though the signifiers show “atheists” and “communists,” the signified — the referent that solidifies and turns the sign into language through its intent — is “Jews,” who, as in the past by those sympathetic to the Klan, or by KKK members themselves, are synonymous with atheism (I’m a “godless Jew,” I was informed yesterday) and communism (many of those who favored communism early on were ethnic Jews, though communism itself is godless by design, so it’s unclear why Judaism is said to play an especially important role).
All of this, naturally, is pure fantasy — an extension of the alt-right’s 2015-16 memetic AI images of Trump on a lathery and muscular white steed dressed as a holy Crusader, poised to deliver a Christian nation from the mud peoples who invaded it and imprisoned the poor put upon Christian lemmings. Not only does this fantastical narrative inadvertantly denigrate earlier Christians as passive dupes and willing bottoms, though; it’s faux-militancy is nothing but Christian nationalist cosplay. Mindy Robinson isn’t going to pick up a sword. She expects you to. The collective needs leaders, after all, and those leaders can’t be putting themselves on the front lines in harm’s way! Who would direct the revolution?
All of it is indescribably pathetic. Absolutely risible. Cringe.
Two things the conservative movement — the REAL America First movement — can ill afford, is to go either full Klan or full retard.
You never go full retard. Because when you do, you’ve become what you pretend to fight, and you legitimize the rules of the left’s game. Christian nationalism is a competing identity group’s claim to power. That it’s done through appeals to being victimized — in this case by a cabal of Jew oppressors — shows that there isn’t much daylight between Christian nationalist collectivism and, say, the LGBTQIA+ victimhood narrative.
Put down the swords, alt-righters. You aren’t Christian soldiers. You’re just another grievance group vying for crumbs. You hide behind Jesus to justify your claims to supremacy and ownership. But you’re not righteous vessels. You’re just scared, dispossessed humans looking to explain your current plight.
Just like the KKK has always wanted you to.
Conservatives should absolutely give these people no quarter and return them to the Party to which they’ve always hitched their wagons. The purge must begin now. These are infiltrators. They are collectivists. And though we may share some common enemies, or reject some common policy, we aren’t remotely similar either intellectually or philosophically.
These people have adopted the same genetic notions that pushed earlier progressive leftists into adopting eugenics; in fact, it was the left’s eugenic movement that greatly influenced a certain infamous hater of Jews in the early parts of the last century. Leftist eugenicists popularized genetic racialism. They created the very conditions for identity politics exploited by people like Herbert Marcuse and Kimberlee Crenshaw.
Is that really what conservatism wants to welcome in as an ally?
Reject this sanctimonious, self-righteous claim to the country by a bunch of incels egged on by grifting pleasers who’ve insinuated themselves into the conservative movement for just this moment.
It’s an op. And a pretty obvious one, at that.
But! As an op, it has the salubrious effect of bringing the white Christian collectivists into the light. And not the good kind of light, where they believe Jesus will greet them as conquering hereos. Rather, where we can all see clearly who and what they are until they regain their bearings and quickly scatter back into dark corners like the leftist roaches and Konservative Klan Kristians they truly are.
The left is trying to pin its white identitarian problem on conservatives and conservatism. They’re trying to force a second narrative of the “southern strategy” onto the GOP. Reject these people and show them that we refuse to recycle their garbage for them.
Now is the time for choosing.
NB: Of course not all Christians are structural leftists and identitarians. It was Christians, as I’ve pointed out, who founded the country, and did so with the understanding that chief among our natural rights was religious freedom. They recognize the man has free will, given him by Nature and Nature’s God — and that the travails of earth are not the battles of angels but rather of men, fallen and imperfect. Individuals, with individual choice. When joined by a common religion, they are joined by a worldview that brings them together in some ways, but certainly not in all ways. Morality and ethics are independent of religious doctrine — no matter how much they were originally informed by such doctrine. The Ten Commandments are displayed in most US courthouses. The Christian identitarians, I feel, would like to see such Old Testament vestiges replaced with New Testament dictates. These people use Christianity as a cloak and a sword, not to preach the Good News but to damn those who have not, as I was told yesterday, already taken the leap. Those people should “shut the fuck up” and “take a knee” so that Christian nationalists can take the reins of a new, theocratic Utopia.
I’ll pass.
*****
It's always worth a re-read: "Who Goes Nazi?" by Dorothy Thompson, Harper's Magazine, Aug 1941. You'll no doubt recognize some of the types.
https://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/
Excellent essay. Collectivism has no place on the Right.