Identitarianism

MARCO IS IRREDEEMABLE:

Thymos and American Foreign Policy: Marco Rubio seems to have quoted my work on recognition. He doesn’t understand it. (Francis Fukuyama, 10/12/26, Persuasion)

Secretary Rubio’s desire to stay on his boss’ good side leads him to twist reality like a pretzel. He speaks about an alliance between the United States and Europe based on shared values, gliding over a president who clearly admires Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping far more than those of other democratic countries. He talks about the wonders of science and technology created by Western civilization, even as his administration is cutting funding for scientific research across the board. He celebrates the agreement over Greenland, without mentioning his desire to grab it away from Denmark.

Secretary Rubio praises thymos without regard to the ends to which it is directed. He would do well to remember that it was an excess of megalothymia that led Alcibiades and the Athenians into the disastrous Sicilian Expedition, which Thucydides explains was the beginning of their defeat in the Peloponnesian War. The Secretary should also focus a bit on the lines from the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal.” It is this principle of human equality, and not the celebration of great individuals, that has underlined a lot of American foreign policy over the decades.

SCRATCH A POST-LIBERAL FIND A RACIST:

A Catholic Theologian Signs Up for Mass Cruelty: Yet another thinker puts his faith in the service of monstrous deportation policies (Gabriel Schoenfeld, 10/03/26, The UnPopulist)

A lesson from the 20th century is that intellectuals sometimes choose to serve monsters. Hitler, Stalin, and Mao all found thinkers willing to sing their praise even as they murdered millions. On the spectrum of evil and death, Donald Trump, a crass, ignorant would-be authoritarian, is not in their league. And yet already, under Trump’s rule, people have died—and already lives are being ruined by the tens of thousands. As all this happens, crankish right-wing intellectuals have been drawn to Trump’s scepter as moths to a flame.

A case in point, not exactly a household name but not entirely unimportant, is Chad Pecknold. […]

What is the chief source of this threat? You guessed it: Immigration!

America, Pecknold tells us, “is not an idea, it is a PEOPLE.” With the unchecked influx of strangers, that “PEOPLE” is facing disintegration. The migration crisis, he writes, has “thrown the very concept of American citizenship itself into doubt.” In its rejection of America as a creedal nation in favor of one defined by heritage and inheritance, postliberalism slides inexorably into nativism.

The source of the trouble, in Pecknold’s view, is that “American Christians, Protestant and Catholic alike, have been so captivated and captured by the implicit open borders theology of liberalism that too many have forgotten how to think like Christians—and like Americans.” Contrary to the precepts of liberalism, statesmen have a “sacred duty,” he says, to restrict who may remain in a country. Accordingly, he maintains, we must reject the constitutional precept of birthright citizenship under which anyone born here, including to parents lacking documentation, is automatically a citizen. At stake is nothing less than whether “our laws permit Americans to have a country or not.”

THE DARWINIST RIGHT IS SO FRENCH:

Demographic Fears and Far-Right Fantasies: Alexandra Minna Stern explores the eugenic fantasies and enduring legacy of Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel ‘The Camp of the Saints.’ (Alexandra Minna Stern, September 26, 2026, LA Review of Books)

The French New Right was led by thinkers such as Alain de Benoist, who founded the Groupement de Recherche et d’Études pour la Civilisation Européenne (Group for Research and Study of European Civilization, or GRECE), which promoted anti-egalitarianism and the veneration of authentic European identity. Purportedly inspired by the Italian neo-Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s concepts of cultural hegemony and “war of position,” the French New Right incubated ethnonationalism and identitarianism in scholarly and cultural niches. It emphasized themes such as authenticity, borders, patriarchy, and the threat of immigration to national identity. It also contested changing gender norms and the rise of a worldwide liberal order allegedly masterminded by global organizations such as the United Nations, with its Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The New Right decried policies that loosened immigration restrictions and promoted the social inclusion of minorities and women in education, the workplace, and politics.

Across the Atlantic, The Camp of the Saints was embraced by ideologues like Wilmot Robertson, who spearheaded proposals for a white ethnostate and published the antisemitic journal Instauration from 1975 to 2000. Instauration’s inaugural issue in December 1975 featured a review of Camp of the Saints as a “cautionary anti-epic” that is a “brilliant inquest of the West, the fictional climax of a racial inundation that started long ago,” and “leaves the reader reeling with doom.” As historian of ecofascism Miroslava Chávez-García has shown, the American white nationalist Garrett Hardin, who popularized the term “the tragedy of the commons,” praised Camp of the Saints and its exhortation to “save” Western society. Twenty years after its initial release, at a time when anti-Mexican racism pervaded California and on the heels of the passage of anti-immigrant Proposition 187, Hardin cited the novel to a Los Angeles Times reporter, carping about immigrants and opining that “things look much closer to that book than they did 10 years ago.”

The Camp of the Saints has been accreting influence for five decades. From the perspective of the United States, it gestures to early 20th-century tales about the Jukes and the Kallikaks, in which one bad seed turned an entire family line dysgenic, and generated an “army of idiots and imbeciles” that defiled society. Additionally, the book sits downstream from The Passing of the Great Race: Or, The Racial Basis of European History by Madison Grant. Published in 1916, this treatise of demographic downfall foretold the demise of the United States under waves of immigration from Southern Europe, Asia, and other parts of the globe. The Passing of the Great Race served as a repository of (flawed) data and a nativist justification for the passage, in 1924, of the draconian Johnson-Reed Act, which placed strict quotas on immigrants from countries outside of Western Europe. Like Camp of the Saints, Grant’s tract has been reissued by far-right publishers, most notably in a 2016 centennial edition. It has been referenced by Stephen Miller and other MAGA extremists as inspiration for policies of so-called remigration, forced removal, and an end to birthright citizenship.

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Literary scholar Corina Stan aptly describes how the themes of Camp of the Saints have congealed into a “a political myth about migration.” Over the day in which the story unfolds, scores of immigrant others, crowded by the thousands onto ships, determinedly set out to make landfall on France’s southern shores. This plot, writes Stan, “draws on a well-established archive: the tradition of invasion novels, replacement theories, and other texts by far-right intellectuals and violent revolutionaries.” Rather than represent the arrivals as French-speaking immigrants from North Africa, which might have hit too close to home given France’s violent repression in Algeria (1954–62) and the massacre of Algerian protesters in Paris in 1961, Raspail anonymizes them into a featureless Indian multitude. This lack of historical specificity and reliance on a generically “Brown,” bloodthirsty trespasser has made the novel’s invasion sequence readily transferable to a range of geopolitical and ideological scenarios.

The construction of this racial myth has harmonized not only with traditional ultranationalist politics but also with the more recently formed Reconquête!, an Islamophobic ethnonationalist party organized by politician and author Éric Zemmour, who declared on the presidential campaign trail in 2022 that “the French people are being replaced by another civilization. This wounds me, this destroys me. I come before the French people to say, let’s together stop this evolution.” Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s observation that literary dehumanization frequently deploys a “lack of figuration,” Stan underlines Camp of the Saints’ endless descriptions of Brown migrants, portrayed as deformed, defective, and diseased. The metaphors fractionate and recoalesce into a carnivalesque parade of shapeless bodies and body parts, nameless, throbbing, and overflowing, and described in animalistic terms as groveling packs of desperate creatures. Toward the end of the novel, when the multitudinous bodies disembark from the ships, flooding French soil, they are like “grotesque little beggars,” “basset hounds,” and “a herd of clumsy seals.”

THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

Religious ‘integralists’ on the right, meet your socialist soulmates: Where, exactly, do JD Vance and Zohran Mamdani differ on “the warmth of collectivism”? (George Will, September 25, 2026, Washington Post)

DSAers want to scrap the Constitution in order to facilitate confiscating wealth, private property and other impediments to government-enforced equality and social perfection. Christian integralists, who are disproportionately Catholic, are devout and determined to make the nation more so. They would enliven politics if they would specify the measures they advocate to (as they mistakenly say) return America to being a “Christian nation.”

Integralists want to integrate spiritual and temporal (government) power, subordinating the latter to the former. Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule, the most intellectually interesting integralist, opposes “the relentless expansion of individualistic autonomy,” and those who are “enslaved to the original meaning of the Constitution.” Integralists have no “horror of political domination and hierarchy” because law — government — must be “parental, a wise teacher and an inculcator of good habits.”

Vermeule’s constitutionalism aims not to “protect liberty” as “an end in itself,” because “constraints on power are good only derivatively,” by serving the integralist agenda, which requires robust parental government. Government should “direct” individuals and society toward virtuous living through “respect for the authority of rule and of rulers; respect for the hierarchies needed for society to function.” Well.

IT’S A HATE CULT:

Watching Bigots Erupt (David French, Sept. 17, 2026, NY Times)

I had two responses to French’s tweet. First, the picture itself helps refute one of the most common arguments from the populist right — that immigrants from Asia and the global south can’t assimilate into American culture, that there’s just something about them that’s different from, say, the Irish or, in the president’s famous formulation, Norwegians, that prevents them from becoming truly American.

I’m sorry, but when you’re wearing a cowboy hat, losing your mind at a college-football game and throwing up the (very annoying) hook ‘em horns sign, you’re doing a lot of things and one of them is assimilating.

In fact, anyone who spends five minutes with immigrants knows and sees the power of American culture. It’s a prime reason people come here in the first place. They don’t want to replace Americans; they want to be Americans.

But don’t tell that to MAGA populists. They came out in force to defend French. They’re here to tell you that, regardless of whether the students in that picture were immigrants or natural-born American citizens, there is something about their home countries — or their parents’ home countries — that will always and forever make them different and somehow dangerous for the American experiment.

And also, there is a real victim here: white people, and white men especially.

“Texas politicians rigged the game against their own citizens,” Sean Davis, the co-founder of The Federalist, wrote, “broke the rules to make sure their own children didn’t suffer under the new regime, and then had an absolute meltdown when one guy pointed it [out]. Here are the latest numbers at the University of Texas: only 13% of undergrads are white men.”

Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for Turning Point USA, the organization Charlie Kirk co-founded, and the executive producer of the Charlie Kirk Show, wrote: “America was ~80% white 40 years ago. Now it’s ~50%. The demographic replacement of America is happening at a historic, truly insane pace. It’s not racist to notice.”

Jack Posobiec, a MAGA influencer with an immense following, posted, “Defend @bofrench like the Alamo.” (Given the fate of the Alamo, I’m not sure that’s the analogy Posobiec wants to use, but never mind about that.)

And if you want to know why South Asians can’t assimilate, then Steve Deace, a Christian talk show host, can tell you: “Why is it a bad idea to import so many people from India? Just 2.3% of India is Christian.”

On that theme, John Daniel Davidson, a senior editor at The Federalist, posted on X, “You know what would be way WAY more Texas-assimilated than wearing a cowboy hat and cheering at a Longhorn game? If Indian immigrants converted to Christianity and tore down the 90-foot demon monkey statue they erected in Sugar Land.”

(Davidson is referring to a statue of Lord Hanuman, a part-monkey, part-human Hindu deity, that was consecrated in 2024.)

These arguments get to my second, deeper response to French’s post. Parts of the populist right are taking aim at the American experiment itself.

Not part, all.

“HONEY, THE CHICKENS ARE HOME!”:

What Charlie Kirk sowed: He pushed the conspiracism that haunts his death (Richard Hanania, Sep 10 2026, UnHerd)

Tucker Carlson, after all, was a regular guest at TPUSA events. Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for TPUSA, relayed a hadith from the recently murdered Kirk: “Honestly, people telling me not to have Tucker makes me want to have Tucker” at the organization’s conferences. After Kirk’s death, Carlson guest-hosted an episode of the show alongside Neff and Kolvet, who would both later be hounded by conspiracy theorists. This was only two days before Carlson blamed “hummus eaters” for the assassination. Already at that point, Carlson had for years been pushing pro-Kremlin narratives and conspiracy theories like the claim that the Pentagon was operating secret bioweapons labs in Ukraine and the idea that Jan. 6 had been a false flag incited by federal agents.

Then, too, Kirk himself was a key promoter of the most significant political conspiracy theory of our generation: the idea that the 2020 election was stolen from President Trump. Unlike the conspiracy involving his own death, the #StoptheSteal nonsense Kirk promoted led to actual political violence and a coup attempt that could have proved catastrophic for US democracy had not a brave few — most notably, then-Vice President Mike Pence — acted against it.

In December 2020, Kirk condemned then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) for congratulating Joe Biden on his victory, comparing it to congratulating someone who had just robbed a bank. In the topsy-turvy fantasy world Kirk had created for his followers, Biden had obviously stolen the 2020 election.

Two days before Jan. 6, Kirk announced that Turning Point Action was “honored” to be “sending 80-plus buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president.” This tweet was later deleted. He also told his audience at the time there was “an almost guaranteed way Donald Trump serves four more years.” All it would take was for Pence to refuse to certify the results in the swing states that Trump had lost. As for those who might object on constitutional grounds, Kirk’s answer was to “make them sue.”

When called before the Jan. 6 committee to discuss his role in challenging the 2020 election results, Charlie Kirk invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself. And it wasn’t simply election denial; under Kirk, TPUSA events and shows became gathering points for every kind of crank the Right produced, including anti-vaxxers like RFK Jr. In May 2021, TPUSA gave a show to Jack Posobiec, a man best known for having pushed Pizzagate — the theory that Hillary Clinton and her associates operated a child-sex-trafficking ring centered on a Washington, DC, pizza restaurant.

Kirk could at times be just as conspiratorial as Carlson or Owens, with the main difference being that his theories always had a reliable partisan tilt. He claimed that Biden had deliberately allowed the Afghan government to collapse in order to import more Democratic voters. He thus compressed the peaceful transition of power or the closing of a two-decade war into MAGA-friendly conspiracy theories.

Charlie Kirk spread election denial and other kinds of conspiracy theories for the same reasons that Owens and Carlson would later spread conspiracy theories about his death: money, relevance, and playing to the audience. It was only when his family and the remnants of TPUSA became the targets of the forces Kirk had helped unleash, that those left behind began denouncing others for taking advantage of the ignorant and the misinformed.

THE rIGHT ALSO ENVIES THEIR OPPRESSION OF “OTHERS”:

Suicidal hostility and the fall of the American empire: The price of paranoid conservatism (Nick Cohen, Aug 28, 2026, Writings from London)

In ways I do not believe most of us have grasped yet the perverse logic of paranoid conservatism leads Trump to embrace the West’s enemies, and leads Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen to do the same.

If you believe your allies are cheats, who have been ripping off honest Americans since 1945 with one-sided trade deals and defence alliances, what then of America’s actual enemies?

If America’s allies are “the worst countries in the world”, the countries that genuinely are the world’s worst cannot be so bad.

Suicidal hostility turns friends into enemies and enemies into friends. Just as the man who insists that benefit claimants are cheats whitewashes the behaviour of sweatshop employers so the superpower that insists its allies are swindlers, whitewashes the behaviour of its enemies.

WHAT’S THE MANDARIN FOR LUDDISM?:

China is secretly fueling America’s data center rage (Josephine Walker, 8/26/26, Axios)

Roughly 200 accounts from a suspected Chinese bot farm have quietly tried to influence Americans to oppose AI data centers on social media, X said Thursday night.