Identitarianism

WHITER BUT POORER!:

Trump to Wall Street: Brace for Impact (Peter Coy, 03.11.25, Free Press)

[S]tock prices have fallen at least in part because investors are coming to the painful realization that Trump doesn’t seem to care so much for them anymore. In his first term, Trump viewed the market as his personal scorecard. Now? “You can’t really watch the stock market,” he told Maria Bartiromo on Sunday.

With the market nearing correction territory—defined as a 10 percent drop—since its mid-February peak, I asked Mohamed El-Erian, the bond whiz who is now president of Queens’ College, University of Cambridge, whether this realization was part of the reason stocks had fallen over the past month. He agreed. The steadfast belief that Trump would do whatever it took to keep the stock market happy was termed “the Trump put.” (A put is a derivative that protects its owner from price declines.)

Confidence in the Trump put began to erode when Trump and his economic team started talking about bond yields, rather than stock prices, as their metric of choice, El-Erian said. (Bonds can do well even if stocks are doing poorly.)

Even before this past weekend, the market had been falling, partly thanks to the specter of high tariffs. But then, over the weekend, Trump and others on his team seemed to say that even a recession would not cause the administration to pull back from its tariff strategy.

And because the tariffs could lead not only to slower economic growth but also higher inflation—stagflation, it’s called—investors can’t count on the Federal Reserve to bail them out as it has in the past, El-Erian told me. (That’s called “the Fed put” on Wall Street.) The Fed will hardly be eager to cut interest rates aggressively if tariffs are pushing up prices, he said.

Stocks rose after Trump was elected because investors were looking forward to deregulation and tax cuts. Yes, they assumed that Trump might use the threat of tariffs to gain concessions from trading partners. But he surely wouldn’t be so foolish as to erect high and long-lasting tariff walls. Instead, El-Erian said, “The things that the market really likes haven’t come yet,” and the thing the market doesn’t like—tariffs—are turning out to be more than just tactical threats.

Destroying the economy makes America less attractive to immigrants. The nihilism is intentional.

SHERMAN WAS TOO CIRCUMSPECT:

Waiting for Liberal Democracy in the American South : Our country’s constitutional order is withering before us. In the states of the former Confederacy, democracy never fully flourished. (Alan Elrod, Mar 07, 2025, The Bulwark)

Liberal democracy has never put down deep roots in the South in the way it did across the rest of the country. The region never really abandoned its warped electoral politics and inclination to single-party cronyism, a Southern political instinct that helps explain how Democratic dominance transformed so completely into Republican one-party rule following the civil rights era. Inequality continues to define economic life in the region. […]

Bourbon rule across the South is a good starting place for understanding the challenges facing the region. The Bourbons—Southern Democrats of the planter and professional classes who opposed Reconstruction—came to dramatically shape American politics from the 1870s into the early twentieth century. For decades, this small elite fomented discord among poor whites to keep their political energies focused on their peers rather than their de facto rulers. As Reconstruction began to falter in the mid-1870s, Bourbon power brokers gained control in Southern states like Alabama and Georgia. By the 1890s, the Old South was aggressively reasserting itself. In 1896, the Supreme Court enshrined the principle of “separate but equal.”

In 1898, America’s first coup d’etat took place as the Democrats of Wilmington, North Carolina issued a “White Declaration of Independence.” They were attacking the coalition of black Republicans and white Populists that had control of the local government in the 1890s, which the old Confederates of the city found intolerable. With their resentment and rage being fueled by white Democratic powerbrokers, two thousand armed men forced out the duly elected government. None were more pleased by this result than their Bourbon backers.

V.O. Key Jr., one of America’s greatest scholars of Southern politics, blames this “banker-planter-lawyer” class for the South’s political and economic underdevelopment. Ostensibly pro-business but viciously self-interested, the Bourbons not only defended the South’s racial apartheid but also exploited the region’s poor rural whites, as the Wilmington coup attests.

The consequences of this, as of the Civil War, are still being felt. In a 2024 essay for Aeon, academic and writer Keri Leigh Meritt laid out the many ways the South as a region lags economically—pinned down by poverty, hobbled by an absence of public investments, and choked by a miasma of disillusionment and isolation:

Southerners in general are isolated and lonely, and wealth and power are heavily concentrated: there are a few thousand incredibly wealthy families – almost all of them the direct descendants of the Confederacy’s wealthiest slaveholders – a smaller-than-average middle class, and masses of poor people, working class or not. The South, with few worker protections, prevents its working classes from earning a living wage. It’s virtually impossible to exist on the meagre income of a single, low-wage, 40-hour-a-week job, especially since the US has no social healthcare benefits.

Vance’s comments on the Bourbons place them in a national frame, which brings us to another important dimension of the post-Civil War South. Historian Heather Cox Richardson and others have argued that the South’s oligarchic power structures were not dismantled following the defeat of the Confederacy. A number of modern studies have shown that, in many places in the South, the self-styled aristocrat Bourbons recovered their wealth and status in the years following the Civil War.

Always De-Nazifi.

SCRATCH A TERRORIST FIND A TRUMPIST:

Germany’s alleged Christmas market attacker was steeped in far-right ideology. Why didn’t anyone notice? (Jakob Guhl, March 03, 2025, The Prospect)

Our research team at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), an international counter-extremism organisation, has examined al-Abdulmohsen’s online profile over the past eight years and found that he did in fact have a clear set of views—security services just didn’t spot them. Al-Abdulmohsen consistently expressed views inspired by the counter-jihad movement, a loose network of bloggers, thinktanks and organisations promoting anti-Muslim and often far-right ideas. He considered Islam to be a dangerous, violent and totalitarian ideology, not a religion. He described Muslims and Arabs as intellectually primitive, promoted conspiracy theories about the “Islamisation” of Europe and justified discrimination against Muslims. These posts are not outliers but rather part of a consistent pattern spanning more than eight years.

Despite the AfD’s attempt to use the Magdeburg attack as further evidence to support its anti-migration policies, the alleged attacker had supported the far-right party since 2016. In his view at that time, “I and the AfD were fighting the same enemy in order to protect Germany.” In December 2017, he even shared a post by Alice Weidel in which she blamed Islam for security threats to Christmas markets.

He also supported international far-right figures promoting counter-jihad ideology, including Dutch politician Geert Wilders. In April 2019, he retweeted a post in which Wilders justified revoking Muslims’ freedom of religion. In 2020, he shared multiple tweets by Wilders that said “Stop Islam” or “Stop Muhammadanism”. In August 2024, he shared a post calling Wilders a “hero”.

As early as December 2016, al-Abdulmohsen also expressed support for the British far-right and anti-Muslim activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the founder and former leader of the English Defence League who goes by the name Tommy Robinson. In May 2024, he retweeted Robinson stating that “using the word Islamism let’s [sic] Islam off the hook. The problem is Islam.” In October 2024, he shared a tweet by Robinson promoting his new book, which he claimed provided “all the evidence of the replacement of Europeans by the oligarchy”.

Given the remarkably consistent beliefs in the alleged attacker’s online activity over nearly nine years, why were authorities in Germany seemingly unable to link him to the far right?

Because of Islamophobia.

MAGA IS A CULT:

How a son spent a year trying to save his father from conspiracy theories (Zach Mack, February 26, 2025, NPR)

Reporter Zach Mack and his dad are living in separate realities, and it’s tearing their family apart.
This story is an accompaniment to a podcast series released by NPR’s Embedded called Alternate Realities. You can listen to all three episodes here or wherever you listen to podcasts.

About a year ago, my dad bet me $10,000 that he could foretell the future.

It all started when he texted me a picture of a list. Writing in barely legible cursive, he had scribbled 10 politically apocalyptic predictions. My dad was foreshadowing verdicts of treason for Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden and the Clintons, who would go down for murder as well. Biden would ultimately be removed from office, and so would the governor of New York and the mayor of New York City. It went on. Donald Trump, who was seeking reelection, would have all charges leveled against him at the time dropped, all while being reinstated as president without the need for November’s election. He also thought that the U.S. would come under nationwide martial law.

For all his catastrophizing, I wouldn’t describe my father as a paranoid person — I tend to think of him as an optimist. He’s very friendly, the kind of father who cracks a lot of dad jokes with strangers. But like so many Americans, Dad had gotten swept up in conspiracy theories. Chemtrails, Biden body doubles, the idea that a shadowy cabal he calls “the globalists” is secretly running the world — these are just a few secret plots my father believes in.

The list, however, was something new. My father was now predicting the biggest shake-up in the country’s history, and he was absolutely certain that it would happen within a year.

At the bottom of the page was a challenge: $1,000 for each of the 10 predictions that were supposed to happen sometime in 2024.

THEY CAN’T WITHSTAND hIS KISS:

Tech Broligarchs Want Jesus Out of the Way (Russell Moore, 2/03/25, Christianity Today))

“God” is no problem in this view of reality. After all, the word God can be made abstract and even algebraic. Albert Einstein suggesting that “God does not play dice with the universe” implicated an impersonal structure, a logic, not the living God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Spinoza’s “God” will never summon a person before a judgment seat. The words God or religion can be used as stand-ins for the very sort of self-deification the tech-bro ideology and all its successors demand.

Jesus, on the other hand, is not easily dismissed. Once he is heard—not as a theoretical avatar giving authority to some ideology, but for the actual words he spoke, the actual gospel he delivered—the ambitions of every would-be “master of the universe” stand exposed.

Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov said he wanted Jesus silenced because the Jesus of the Bible didn’t “understand” human nature: that what people really want is the filling of appetites and the spectacles of distraction. Against the Inquisitor’s diatribe, though, Jesus, as with Pilate, simply stands there, with a look that pierces through all the manipulations of a mechanistic view of the universe.

The digital view of humanity cannot fit with the vision of James Madison and the framers of the American constitutional order. Utopian revolutionaries have always offered some version of “One must break a few eggs to make some omelets,” regardless of the price of actual eggs at the moment. But behind that utopianism is always a theology—and the theology can co-opt almost everything. Christianity can be co-opted by a digital utopianism, but only by silencing Jesus.

Yet Jesus is not easily silenced. The universe is no simulation. It is created and held together not by an algorithm but by a Word. And this Word is no abstraction to be decoded but a person, one who “became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14).

A million different Babels lie in the ruins of history, and behind them a million different Nimrods, all of whom would storm the limits of mortality and of accountability to create simulations of themselves and of their rule. They are all gone, and they cannot be rebooted.

THE UNFINISHED REVOLUTION:

The revolutionary nature of the 13th Amendment (Miles Smith, January 31, 2025, Washington Examiner)

Thaddeus Stevens, a Pennsylvania Republican and one of the leading architects of the amendment, believed he was participating in a revolution of the slaveholding South and in broader American society. “The whole fabric of southern society must be changed,” said Stevens, “and never can it be done if this opportunity is lost. Without this, this government can never be, as it never has been, a true republic.”

People often don’t realize the revolutionary nature of the 13th Amendment, and conservatives in particular downplay its revolutionary nature. American historians have for a long time treated the actions of the Republican Party, and the ending of slavery in particular, as a modest but nonetheless substantive political and social revolution.

Allan Nevins, whose eight-volume history of the sectional crisis and the Civil War won a string of awards in the middle of the 20th century, called the Civil War a revolution, as did Pulitzer-winning historian James McPherson, author of the 1989 book Battle Cry of Freedom, which is perhaps still the single best history of the Civil War. In fact, it’s hard to see how the Civil War and the abolition of slavery did not remake the United States.

The understandable desire to protect the legacy of Abraham Lincoln’s presidency, and the tendency to view the Constitution as an almost sacred document that created an exceptional nation, are powerful but not always historically helpful ways to conceive of the 13th Amendment and the other two Reconstruction amendments. While slavery did not create the American republic, the Constitution undoubtably tolerated ownership of human chattel.

We did not Reconstruct hard enough.

iDENTITY PRECLUDES THE nEW cOMMANDMENT:

The Rise of the Right-Wing Exvangelical (Jake Meador, 1/31/25, Mere Orthodoxy)

[W]e are now seeing the emergence of what might be called “right exvangelicalism.” If left exvangelicals sought to keep Jesus but dispense with the church, right exvangelicals are following a similar trajectory, but from the other side of the political spectrum. This causes the right exvangelical to end up mirroring the left exvangelical, as it were: Start with right-wing politics circa 2025 and then come to Christianity after you’ve already committed to the political vision of the American right. But whereas this move caused left exvangelicals to keep a proxy of Jesus and dispense with the church, it is causing right exvangelicals to keep a proxy of the church and dispense instead with Jesus. The church can stay as a vehicle for promoting civic religion, for insuring that Christian moral norms are given deference within the culture, and as a way of inculcating the kind of moral vision they seek to enact, particularly as it relates to sex and gender and “common culture.” Jesus’s place, however, is far more ambiguous.

Minimally, one can observe a pattern of behavior amongst right exvangelicals defined by a tendency to condemn many Christian moral norms. Humility and meekness is now “loser theology,” it would seem, and the Sermon on the Mount is leftist drivel. The only Jesus preserved in their conception of the faith seems to be the Jesus of the Second Coming who returns in judgment. The Jesus of the Gospels, “strong and kind” in the words of a song my kids sang for their Christmas program once, is notably absent.