September 2025

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

A Reagan-Appointed Judge Just Wrote a Blistering Anti-Trump Decision (Noah Lanard, 9/30/25, MoJo)

Young, who is 85 years old and was appointed to the bench four decades ago, begins by quoting a postcard he received on June 19 that reads: “TRUMP HAS PARDONS AND TANKS …. WHAT DO YOU HAVE?” Young replies in the ruling:

Dear Mr. or Ms. Anonymous,

Alone, I have nothing but my sense of duty. Together, We the People of the United States—you and me—have our magnificent Constitution. Here’s how that works out in a specific case—

The judge goes on to write that the case he is deciding is “perhaps the most important ever to fall within the jurisdiction of this district court.” He concludes that there was not an “ideological deportation policy” targeting pro-Palestine speech. Instead, there was something more sinister:

[T]he intent of the Secretaries was more invidious—to target a few for speaking out and then use the full rigor of the Immigration and Nationality Act (in ways it had never been used before) to have them publicly deported with the goal of tamping down pro-Palestinian student protests and terrorizing similarly situated non-citizen (and other) pro-Palestinians into silence because their views were unwelcome.

By defending that policy, Young writes, the president has violated his “sacred oath” to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” That Trump is “for all practical purposes, totally immune from any consequences for this conduct,” Young adds, citing the Supreme Court’s 2024 immunity decision, “does not relieve this Court of its duty to find the facts.”

CONSERVATISM SEEKS TO CONSERVE LIBERALISM:

The American New Right Looks Like the European Old Right: When conservatives reject constitutional limits on executive power and foment civil conflict, what exactly are they conserving? (Jack Nicastro and Phillip W. Magness, 9.26.2025, reason)

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Illustration featuring (left to right) Auron MacIntyre, Curtis Yarvin, Carl Schmitt, Yoram Hazony, and Darryl Cooper | The Auron Macintyre Show, Tucker Carlson / YouTube, Illustration by Adani Samat
(The Auron Macintyre Show, Tucker Carlson / YouTube, Illustration by Adani Samat)
There was a time when the American right was conservative: appreciative of inherited wisdom, skeptical of rationalism, wary of excessive government power, and against radical change. Exemplified by figures like William Buckley Jr. and Ronald Reagan, American conservatism is, in the words of The Dispatch’s Jonah Goldberg, a political philosophy that defends “the revolutionary ideals of classical liberalism.”

The New Right is not interested in defending these distinctively American ideals. Drawing instead on collectivist, nationalist, and even monarchist traditions from continental Europe, this New Right seeks to wield the tools of government to advance its own social, cultural, and religious priorities. For years, the New Right, by its own admission, has rejected the tenets of classical liberalism, including individual liberty, mutual toleration, and limited government. But, following the recent assassination of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk, the New Right has doubled down on its authoritarian tendencies by reviving the cultural teachings of Carl Schmitt, one of Nazi Germany’s chief legal minds.

Not only is the Right’s ideology anti-conservative and anti-American, it’s anti-Christian.

WHY THE rIGHT IS SO GEEFUL ABOUT HIS MURDER:

Charlie Kirk, Martyrdom, and America’s Authoritarian Apostles: The entanglement of fascist politics and Christian imagery is not new, and it is dangerously powerful (Adam Gurri, 25 Sep 2025, Liberal Currents)

Despite the obvious tensions between fascism and Christian virtues, the entanglement of fascist politics and Christian imagery is not new. It is dangerously powerful, especially in the contemporary context of an American Christianity in the grips of a right-wing identity crisis. I want to elaborate on the way MAGA has portrayed Kirk since his assassination and connect it to the warped, spiritually dessicated version of Christianity that undergirds Trumpism today. I hope to highlight how degraded our moral situation has become.

I have seen more than a few allusions to Horst Wessel in the days since Kirk’s killing. Wessel, a young Nazi and member of the SA, was murdered by members of the Communist Party of Germany in 1930. His death became a rallying point for Nazi Party, and they adopted a march for which he’d written lyrics as the party anthem.

The references are apt. Kirk is being valorized in service of a fascist project. But I want to turn in particular to the way historian Tom Holland examines Wessel’s martyrdom, in which he stresses the explicit Christ allegory, as an especially helpful point of comparison.

As Holland observes in his book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, Nazi leaders were quick to grasp the utility of Wessel’s death and to wield it to great effect. He writes how Josef Goebbels understood the Christian power in making Wessel a martyr, even as the Nazis despised much of what Christianity stood for. Goebbels went so far as to proclaim at Wessel’s funeral service that he would rise once again. Holland writes:

A shudder ran through the crowd, “As if God,” one of the mourners later recalled, “had made a decision and sent his holy breath upon the open grave and the flags, blessing the dead man and all who belonged to him.” One month later, Goebbels explicitly compared Wessel to Christ.

Since his killing, right-wing rhetoric around Kirk has become increasingly religious. In one hearing, Representative Troy Nehls of Texas declared “I would say if Charlie Kirk lived in Biblical times, he’d have been the 13th disciple.”

Hard to see Christ organizing Identitarian groups.