Reflections on the Right and its Violence, Part I

A Theoretical Investigation into Reactionary Violence
Glimpses of American Freedom by William Gropper (1919)

Overture - What is the Right?

What is the right? Even those on the right rarely enquire what being there means. Moreover, in the event that they do pose this question, their answers are universally more mystifying than clarifying—often deliberately so, I might add. When we on the left pose the question, points of clarification are immediately demanded. Are we asking at the level of sociology? (In which case we are really asking who is the Right?) Politics? History? Psychology? Which Right? Fascist, conservative, liberal, autocratic, agrarian, Christian, Kahanist, Salafist, or some other?

I am not particularly interested in asking or answering such questions. The Right is a historical concept; its meaning cannot be fixed easily, or perhaps at all. On the intellectual front, their output is too flimsy, incoherent, and downright stupid to form the theme of an investigation unless one adopts a deliberately simplified and narrowly philosophical frame like rationalism vs. irrationalism. Dominant psychological types can be described and a certain psychological home terrain can be delineated, but these efforts run the risk of falling back into an untenable reliance on the psychological as the explanans of social life, rather than something which is simultaneously explanans and explanandum in relation to society.

My approach here is political in a broad sense while also acknowledging the sociological, psychological, and cultural moments.1 This essay is, at base, an attempt to ‘seek truth from facts,’ so to speak. I want to show the basic unity of what I am calling the Right in a theoretical, rather than historical—or, for that matter, conspiratorial—manner, with reference to the theme of violence.2 In a certain sense, this is a way of doing unto others as they have done unto us. We on the left are already lumped into one big category; there is a specially designed socio-legal wastebasket taxon just for us (for more thereabout, see Section II below). The overall structure of these reflections is somewhat interrupted by the necessity of publishing them in two parts.

So much for prolegomenizing. Let’s look at an example. The official story is that a US Army soldier, one Jarret William Smith, was arrested for unwittingly sending IED recipes and bombing plans to an undercover FBI agent posing as a fellow member of an online neo-nazi group founded and led by a thirteen year-old Estonian boy who went by “Commander.”3 Immediately one must ask questions. Does a thirteen year old (and a rather immature one at that, judging by his leaked chats4) have the organizational chops to run an international—members were also arrested in the UK, Croatia, Lithuania, and Germany—terrorist outfit? The FBI were clearly present in the chatroom. How real were these plots? How many undercovers were in the group? Were any other intelligence agencies there? Was the whole thing a false flag or pseudo-gang? Entrapment seems possible, but we can never know. The full story lives only with people who will never talk. Interestingly enough, it seems that Smith did not attempt any kind of entrapment defense. Instead, he pled guilty and then tried to mitigate his sentence with various feckless arguments: He had depression, he was born with a cleft palate, he “yearn[ed] for acceptance,” and so on.5 In other words, his own defense was that he was so mentally weak as to be taken in by the questionable charisma of Feuerkrieg Division’s prepubescent Commander.

There is some more relevant background here. The name Feuerkrieg Division was clearly inspired by the American organization Atomwaffen Division (AwD). The latter was founded in 2015 by members of the forum Ironmarch, a spinoff of the more famous Stormfront for only the most radical of nazis. Brandon Russel, considered AwD’s founder, was only twenty years old at the time. Devon Arthurs, another founding member and former roommate of Russel who is serving a 45 year sentence for a double murder of two other Atomwaffen members committed in 2017 when he was eighteen, would have been just sixteen when Atomwaffen was founded. Although they seem to have disbanded around 2024, their influence is still strongly felt in the neo-nazi scene. Their key inspiration was the obscure figure James Mason, an American neo-nazi (and pedophile, allegedly) who claimed Charles Manson as a positive example for ‘The Movement’ and advocated committing individual acts of terroristic violence—including, comically, killing mailmen in particular—to bring about a race war. Another influence on certain members of Atomwaffen was the Order of Nine Angles (O9A). O9A is a secretive Satanist-cum-Neo-Nazi (or Neo-Nazi-cum-Satanist, depending on which account you believe) ‘organization’ that originated as a Wiccan group before being taken over by one David Myatt (pseudonymously known as Anton Long) in the mid 1970s. (I put ‘organization’ in inverted commas because it’s unclear to what extent it exists as a real group and not merely a set of diversely authored texts and self-proclaimed representatives.) O9A is infamous for their promotion of human sacrifice, pedophilia, and rape, among other atrocious things, and the credible links between the so-called Order (or at least its ideas) and actual acts of terrorism, murder, and sex crimes.6

The Order and related groups are one of the focal points of this essay because they represent the furthest point in the right, a sort of finis terrae politicae and thematic North Star for that reason. I am, however, trying to avoid turning this endeavor into a study of salacious neo-nazis, so enough about the Commander. Enough rudimentary genealogy of his movement. Let’s look at the case of a different demonic youth.

I - Collateral Social Murder

Who is Big Balls? Nineteen year old Edward Cortistine enjoyed a career as an online scammer, computer science freelancer, and founder of a handful of rather stupid seeming tech startups before stumbling into the opportunity of a lifetime: a post in Washington, DC at Elon Musk’s Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE).7 It seems that he was associated in some way with a group known as The Com, an online community of cybercriminals distributed across messaging platforms like Discord and Telegram that is closely linked to 764, a different online cult/criminal organization inspired by the Order of Nine Angles and similarly dedicated to pedophilia, sexual blackmail, grooming children, and so on.8

(A brief aside: Everyone on the right, from Big Balls to Trump himself, takes pleasure in playing the pig killing game in all its sundry forms. “Bears make money; bulls make money; pigs get slaughtered,” as the saying goes. Take, for example, the case of ‘Remilia Corp,’ the group behind the Milady NFT. On the surface, it is a scummy online cult-turned-crypto firm run by one Rohit (AKA “Krishna”) Ohkandiar—himself the scion of a wealthy family and formerly employed by Palantir—with connections to several other image-obsessed right wing firms funded by Peter Thiel and co (e.g. ‘Praxis’). There are credible allegations, however, that the leadership of Remilia has engaged in acts of grooming and sexual blackmail with a strikingly similar MO to that of 764. Last I heard, Ohkandiar himself was being sued by his co-founders for stealing 1.7 million dollars from them after they were forced to sideline him for his racism, pedophilia, and cult-like activities. So it goes.)

On August 5, it was reported that Big Balls was jumped by some teenagers in Washington DC the previous Sunday. Right wing media initially claimed that the youths shouted, “This is Kamala country!” while clobbering him. By Monday the 11th, Trump had taken federal control of the DC police force and ordered the national guard deployed to the city. The attack on Big Balls, who was now being considered for a Presidential Medal of Freedom, was transparently the justification for this move. Comparisons with Horst Wessel, the SA member who became the most important martyr of the Nazi party, began immediately.9

But Horst Wessel was a small-time crook only elevated to fame after his idiotic death in a petty squabble. Big Balls is part of a team who will be responsible for millions of deaths in the Third World. The goal of DOGE was never simply austerity, as Musk’s ouster over a row about deficit spending demonstrated. The destruction of USAID is, in its consequences for human life, an act that recalls the Nazi Hunger Plan, yet it was seemingly devised as part of some crude political game—one notably designed by a ketamine-addled Afrikaner megalomaniac. This is an act of social murder on a planetary scale that is being executed to prove some oblique point in Babylon’s political contest, extermination as a form of trolling. At time of writing, one estimate puts the additional deaths resulting from the cuts at over 520,000 so far, with over 355,000 of those being children.10 An article in The Lancet estimates that over 14 million people will die by 2030 if the cuts are not reversed or made up for by some other source.11

Of course, all the people responsible hate Black people and all Africans—African countries being many of the main recipients of aid from USAID with regard to disease prevention and treatment—but this act seems just as defined by callousness and the rules of the political game as by negrophobic spleen. Few who die as a result of the DOGE boys’ wanton cruelty will know the names, faces, or motives of their murderers: They will just run out of medicine. Furthermore, the abandonment of the goal of biopolitical stability foreshadows a brutal reinforcement of the existing cordon sanitaire around the mother continent. The world-historical meaning of the Mediterranean for the human race will be overshadowed by its role as a moat for keeping the darker races out of Europe.

Another reason to doubt that this is a purely racist or economic act is that the same party is doing the same things in their own country with similarly disastrous results expected. Legalistic shake-ups of the CDC and its vaccine recommendations and the recent declaration that the State of Florida will suspend all vaccine mandates will have a similar effect: denying medicine to the poor, to the workers, and undermining the herd immunity effect that vaccination and other preventative public health measures establish. It is hard to see any possible economic benefits to these measures beyond a ludicrous gamble on (1) the possibilities unleashed by creative destruction and (2) the extent to which force can serve as an economical alternative for welfare institutions. The campaign of social murder therefore appears to be a kind of gigantic, planet-wide biopolitical experiment.

II - I Want to Try and Get to Heaven

The six year old daughter of a Texas Mennonite family died from measles earlier this year. She was, of course, unvaccinated. “The measles wasn’t that bad,”12 the girl’s mother claimed in an interview with the anti-vaccine organization Children’s Health Defense (formerly chaired by RFK Jr.). The quack doctor who ‘treated’ their daughter as she died was “amazing” and “great,” the father maintained. Answering a question about their opinion on measles and whether or not they would vaccinate their children after what they had experienced, they gradually lapsed into Low German dialect. “Es was nich so bad,” the mother reiterated in Platt-Denglisch. “The measles are good for the body, for the people,” the father added in English. I cannot follow what exactly they said in Low German after this. The translator present at the interview glossed it as “It was her time on Earth […] she’s better off where she is now.”

“If I can save seven thousand people a week from being killed, I think that’s a pre—I want to try and get to heaven if possible. I’m hearing I’m not doing well.” Thus spoke the President of the United States of America.13 He was clearly being somewhat facetious, but the statement reflects the paralyzing fear of death that characterizes everyone in the present, but especially the right. The Mennonite parents (who were presumably vaccinated against measles as children) showed recklessness, not bravery, in sacrificing their child on the altar of alternative medicine. They themselves were never in any danger. They did not look death in the eye.

“Natural immunity” is a biopolitical critique of biopolitics. The outrage over RFK Jr.’s “miasma theory” is misplaced: it presupposes the reality of germ theory, but offers something like a ‘spatial fix.’ True, proponents of alternative medicine never worked a maternity ward before Semmelweis and Pasteur, but they don’t have to. They know the figures of maternal or infant mortality are moral blackmail, the revenge of the sick on the healthy. For the enlightened anti-vaxxer, the real immunity of the vaccine is the death of freedom. The measles are ‘nich so bad.’ The survival of autistic children, a holocaust.

Preventative medicine is poison; nothing good can come from alien biota. Be sure that thou eat not the blood: for the blood is the life; and thou mayest not eat the life with the flesh.14 Only dead things may enter the body, and in continuously bracing itself for the worst, the body itself ceases to live and becomes an inanimate suit of muscular armor fueled by exogenous testosterone. The obsession with ‘mewing’ and other boutique mandibular exercises reveals itself as a sublimation of the same drive-derivative behind teeth grinding and the wish to bite: revenges of the angry infant that doesn’t want to eat.

Health and wellness is, we are told, an inherent property of the people (for whom the measles are good). “The Amish,” whom white Americans see as forefathers out of time rather than contemporaries, “have no autism” whatsoever!15 If nos ancêtres les Amish have no autism, and we proud Americans do, then this can only be the result of corruption, what one right wing author has called the “Medical Assault on the American Brain.” Look around: factory farms, hormone-loaded beef, genetically altered spuds, questionable medicaments, poisonous painkillers, high fructose corn slurry—how can any of this be good for us? Make no mistake: much of it is bad, quick fixes that cause problems (and profits) at the same rate that they solve them, but diagnosing the counter-revolution in healthcare as a distorted, symptomatic reaction to the hurt that has accompanied the real medical advances of the past two hundred years has its limits. On one hand it runs the risk of reducing politics to pathology, and on the other it fails to inquire why social symptom formation has taken such a reactionary course.

Here, then, is a hypothesis: All this pathological fear of disease and contamination, of “mind viruses” and “social contagions,” is at some level a functional response by the immune system of hegemony, so to speak. This hatred is grounded, to some extent, in an awareness (conscious or otherwise) that the ideologies, institutions, and psychological structures that keep this machine running are vulnerable to subversion.

All that is Black, foreign, queer, communist, liberal, anarchist, whatever—it’s all the same dirty, revolting substance. This is the explicit argument of a recent piece of American right wing, Nietzsche 4 Dummies pablum, the book Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (And How to Stop Them) by Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec:

History does not repeat, but it rhymes. For as long as there have been beauty and truth, love and life, there have also been the ugly liars who hate and kill. This is the way of things in all things. There is light and there is dark. Always has been. Always will be. Civilization is the superstructure built on law and order that keeps the petty, the resentful, and the cruel away from the rest of us. Some societies have been better at this than others. Those who fail at repelling the repulsive fall to unhumanity—to a state of affairs in which human thriving is impossible and surviving improbable.16

Similar sentiments are expressed in so many words by much of the conservative establishment, whether publicly or privately. The threat is formed e pluribus unum. The adversary uniformly possesses the same generic being, little more than social vermin. She is legion, for they/them are many.

But do we not tell a very similar story? At least since the New Left it has been accepted—rightly, I might add—that the so-called ‘new social movements’ (feminism, gay/queer liberation, ecology, anti-racism, immigrants’ rights, etc.) are crucial parts of the socialist (I would even say communist) package. And we have been (re-) discovering since then that many of these factors were even acknowledged by Marx, Engels, and the like in rudimentary ways. Not every ‘new social movement’ has genuine revolutionary implications in and of itself, but a genuine revolution implies the resolution of the conflicts which made these social movements necessary.

III - The Ku Klux Klan Is Back, But Now It Is the Most Powerful Agency in Human History

Only a few days after the Utøya massacre, Mario Borghezio, a representative of the Italian Northern League and member of the European Parliament, lauded Anders Breivik’s manifesto. Live on Italian state radio, Borghezio claimed that he shared Breivik’s ‘opposition to Islam’, including his call for a ‘crusade’ by Christians against Europe’s ‘drift toward Islam’. He then added that positions like Breivik’s ‘account for 20 per cent of votes in Europe’, and that ‘100 million people think this way’. In a separate interview with Il Sole-24 radio station, Mr Borghezio declared that the ideas expressed by Breivik are generally ‘good barring the violence – and some of them are great’. I don’t think that Borghezio is far from the truth when he asserts that 100 million Europeans would agree with Breivik’s thought, as espoused in his Declaration. The text of the murderer perfectly expresses the feelings and opinions of a large portion of the European people, not to mention Americans. These opinions are not the product of madness or of a crazy delirium, but the rational neo-conservative elaborations of a right-wing idiot who thinks that European identity is based on the Christian faith and that Islam is the worst enemy of Europe, which has to be confronted and rejected by any means necessary. What Breivik writes might be signed in full and almost without correction by the neo-conservative intellectuals and the Tea Party militants of the United States.17

Bifo was writing in 2015 about an event that occurred in 2011. In a 2025 article on the subject of mass shootings, he correctly notes that such massacres “have become a common fact of life.”18 It’s not just for white men (although they continue to predominate): People of any race and gender can commit these acts of violence. For Bifo, this is a sign that we are living in “the age of extermination.” Agreement with the opinions of the killers has also grown: Keir Starmer has lately decided to try domesticating the racist demon that holds dominion over so many of his countrymen for the purposes of the Labour Party instead of fighting it. Berardi summarizes the state of the world succinctly: “The Ku Klux Klan is back, but now it is the most powerful agency in human history.”

A number of Bifo’s recent essays have touched on a sort of leftist appropriation of Spengler’s organicist conception of history. Instead of searching for a spiritual angle from which to specify and analyze the decline of the West—Bifo actually calls it a “mutation,” not a decline—and its causes, however, he points to a more directly biological (or biopolitical) factor: the aging of the population in Western countries due to the prolongation of lifespans and decrease in birthrates.19 A laundry list of symptoms is brought forth: There is “loss of memory, mental confusion, marasmus, and finally, furious aggressiveness for the humiliation and impotence that the fall of energy has provoked,” but also a “post-alphabetical” mentality among the young, who are permeated by an air of all-encompassing dysphoria that manifests as “anxiety, depression, and panic syndrome.”20 This biopolitical condition manifests as a “cyclone” of racism, nationalism, and “senescent despair and furious revenge against the senile humiliation.”21 The automata of 21st century capitalist material culture (inclusive of digital infrastructure) exist in a “violent symbiotic relationship” with these forces of chaos simultaneously puerile and senile, holding them back and emboldening them at the same time.

Delirious acts of hatred and rage will continue to proliferate, Bifo tells us, but with an important caveat: “American society will not be destroyed by this proliferation, however, because American society has always been based on violence, fear, and dementia.” I think he is right about that. A preponderance of great American authors—Hawthorne, Melville, Faulkner, Burroughs, etc—have thematized this world-historical delirium (to paraphrase Deleuze). Hawthorne’s dialogue between Goodman Brown and the Devil, in which the adversary tells the young Salemite of how he assisted his Puritan ancestors in abusing Quakers and burning Native American villages, is characteristic, as is the climax of Absalom, Absalom! where Henry Sutpen murders his half-brother Charles before he has the chance to marry their (half-) sister Judith not because of the consanguineous nature of the union, for he has already made peace with incest, but because he has learned that Charles has African ancestry.

Even though we have all been living in a world defined by violence and fear since the invention of private property, it seems that something new is happening. The late Mike Davis diagnosed a “ruling class brain tumour” back in 2022 when Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine.22 He saw the ‘Special Military Operation’ as a characteristic sign of the “growing inability” in the ruling class “to achieve any coherent understanding of global change as a basis for defining common interests and formulating large-scale strategies.” Davis’s assessment therefore went beyond the opinions of the sociologists (Michael Mann, Immanuel Wallerstein, Giovanni Arrighi, etc.) who saw George W. Bush’s presidency as the ascendance of ill-advised militarist strategy correlated with the decadence of the American empire following the untimely demise of its Soviet nemesis. The cancer had apparently metastasized since 2008, no doubt partly because of the chaos wrought by the Global War on Terror, and bad strategy has given way to no strategy.

What Davis’s brief article failed to mention—probably because he took it for granted—is the openly right-wing character of this cancerous, chaotic politics. It may lack strategic foresight, but it has been accompanied by ideological justification (and in some cases democratic approval) all the way. Bloodshed is seen as the only way out of the crisis of class civilization. The exhaustion of extensive socio-economic expansion in the face of climate apocalypse transfigures the ver sacrum to which capitalism has always devoted its youth into a neverending season in hell.23

IV - To Serve Two Masters

Satanist and nihilist terrorists are part of the same lineage and milieu as Christian ones. Catholicism and Orthodoxy are just as much a part of this culture of murder as Klan-style protestantism and appeals to cultural Christendom. The objective collusion between Opus Dei and the Order of Nine Angles is—to my knowledge, at least—not a premeditated conspiracy, although one might be shocked at how easily connections can be drawn. I want to emphasize that all these organizations, groups, and individuals are part of the same global social movement and, in a broad sense, the same tradition and culture. If, as the erstwhile Waffen-SS volunteer Armin Mohler argued, the European right could be described as a continental “conservative revolution” originally born in reaction to the French Revolution,24 the events of the twentieth century transformed this European current into a truly global one. Being a Nazi, a Satanist, a Christian, a pagan, an atheist, or, indeed, even a Jew, does not disqualify one for membership in this movement, which in past decades was more inclined to create formal international bodies like the World Anti-Communist League and New European Order.25

The culture of the right is a religion of death. This is the great and profound thesis of Furio Jesi.26 All reactionaries pray to the same god—death—but they employ different rites. Here is an example from a document circulated by the Ukrainian neo-nazi organization Misanthropic Division: “Misanthropic Division Chapters should struggle by all means necessary and whatever it takes to rebuild a common european society, based on Family, Folk and Tradition; protecting our European Culture and Identity.”27 The Misanthropic Division’s defense of Family (note the capitalization) is clearly of a kind with that of Alternative für Deutschland, Reform (UK), the Republican Party, and so on. There is human sacrifice by means of terrorism and human sacrifice by means of legally sanctioned capital punishment (something that the parties of the European right desperately want to bring back), but at base they are the same thing. The nazi esotericism of O9A follows Francis Bacon in seeing knowledge (and all human activity) as a form of domination, only now afflicted by a mutation born from the definitive exhaustion of enlightenment in the 20th century. Through a chiasmic reversal, domination is posited as a form of knowledge before the violence of ‘order’ itself degenerates into stochastic atrocities.

At the linguistic level, the right’s speech is empty and devoid of trust. Ideas without words, words without ideas, bad faith, and floating mythological signifiers abound. Mein Kampf is one product of this fundamental attunement with the false; ironic-but-not-really videos from the United States’ Department of Homeland Security glorifying the willful cruelty of its slipshod ethnic cleansing campaign by means of tongue-in-cheek references to pedophilic memes are another. (An expanded frame is therefore necessary to understand—dare I say, to grok—the real meanings and purposes beneath their utterances, purposes which sometimes operate behind their own backs, and the way these utterances work; this is Jesi’s idea of a “science of non-knowledge.”28) Communication thus dies and is replaced by the voluptuous circulation of ideologemes (Jameson) or mythological materials (Jesi) on one hand and merely strategic use of language on the other.29 The affective world of the right is that of fear and shadow, sad passions and man’s baser instincts. It is a world where camaraderie only comes uneasily and on the basis of either hierarchy or a collective plan for revenge.

Beneath the jargon and facades, however, the right confesses to another master besides the god of death: Mammon. Perhaps we could say, using the jargon of religious studies, that the culture of the right is henotheistic: there is one supreme god (death), but worship of other deities (Mammon) is permissible. Or is it a polytheistic religious ecosystem in which the Mammonites have their own temples separate from the Mortuators? Or maybe Mammon is like Brahman, the unseen and impersonal master god, and Death is like Kali as seen by the Shaktas, the active essence of Brahman in personal form? I jest, but the reality of conflicts on the right is sometimes inscrutable to us on the left. We try to argue that so-and-so politically represents this faction of capital and what’s-his-name represents the opposing one. Appealing to things like contingency, tactical flexibility, genuine disagreements, and interpersonal friction can seem like a cop out, but it’s the best answer. They fight for a variety of reasons, but they always seem to make up in the end. When exterminatory fascism is ascendant, capitalists fall in line and look for a way to make some money from the situation. When economically liberal forms of reaction reign, the fascists enjoy a role in their coalition whether formally or otherwise. Capitalism is the unsurpassable political horizon of reaction.

Notes

  1. In this I am attempting to follow Alberto Toscano’s lead; see his Late Fascism (Verso, 2023). ↩

  2. I am also limiting the scope to the United States for the most part and trying not to take events that happened after I started writing this into account because I would never be able to finish if I tried to keep pace with the news cycle. ↩

  3. Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism, “Dangerous Organizations and Bad Actors: Feuerkrieg Division,” Middlebury Institute of International Studies, 07/19/2022. https://www.middlebury.edu/institute/academics/centers-initiatives/ctec/ctec-publications/dangerous-organizations-and-bad-actors; Alex Newhouse, “The Threat Is the Network: The Multi-Node Structure of Neo-Fascist Accelerationism,” CTC Sentinel, vol. 14, no. 5 (June 2021), 17-25. https://ctc.westpoint.edu/the-threat-is-the-network-the-multi-node-structure-of-neo-fascist-accelerationism/ ↩

  4. Chris Schiano and Unicorn Riot, “LEAKED: Neo-Nazi Terrorist ‘Feuerkrieg Division’ Organizing Chats,” Unicorn Riot, 03/20/2020. https://unicornriot.ninja/2020/leaked-neo-nazi-terrorist-feuerkreig-division-organizing-chats/ ↩

  5. United States of America v. Jarrett William Smith, Case No. 19-cr-40091-DDC. https://extremism.gwu.edu/sites/g/files/zaxdzs5746/files/Jarrett%20William%20Smith%20Defense%20Sentencing%20Memorandum.pdf ↩

  6. Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism, “Dangerous Organizations and Bad Actors: Order of Nine Angles,” Middlebury Institute of International Studies, 09/23/2023. https://www.middlebury.edu/institute/academics/centers-initiatives/ctec/publications/dangerous-organizations-and-bad-actors-order-nine ↩

  7. Brian Krebs, “Teen on Musk’s DOGE Team Graduated from ‘The Com,’” Krebs on Security, 02/07/2025. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/02/teen-on-musks-doge-team-graduated-from-the-com/ ↩

  8. Ali Winston, “There Are Dark Corners of the Internet. Then There’s 764,” Wired, 03/24/2024. https://www.wired.com/story/764-com-child-predator-network/ ↩

  9. A better candidate for the new Horst Wessel has emerged since then. ↩

  10. https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?view=table\&sort=title\&order=asc I have had to increase this number several times due to the span it has taken me to complete writing this piece. ↩

  11. Cavalcanti et al, “Evaluating the impact of two decades of USAID interventions and projecting the effects of defunding on mortality up to 2030: a retrospective impact evaluation and forecasting analysis,” The Lancet, Volume 406, Issue 10500 (July 2025), 283-294. ↩

  12. CHD TV, “EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Parents of the child who died during the Texas measles outbreak speak out,” posted 03/28/2025 by CHD TV, YouTube, 18:43, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGN155XRJ8g ↩

  13. He has struck a more pessimistic tone since, saying that he “[doesn’t] think there’s anything that’s going to get [him] into heaven.” ↩

  14. Deut. 12:23 ↩

  15. Jon Hamilton et al, “Trump blames Tylenol for autism. Science doesn’t back him up,” National Public Radio, 09/22/2025. https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/09/22/nx-s1-5550153/trump-rfk-autism-tylenol-leucovorin-pregnancy ↩

  16. Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec, Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (And How to Stop Them), Skyhorse Publishing (2024) ↩

  17. Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide, Verso (2015). ↩

  18. Franco “Bifo” Berardi, “New Heroes,” e-flux, 01/15/2025 https://www.e-flux.com/notes/649956/new-heroes ↩

  19. Franco “Bifo” Berardi, “Senectus Mundi,” Crisis and Critique vol. 11, no. 1 (2024), 8-12; 9. ↩

  20. Ibid, 9, 11 ↩

  21. Ibid, 11 ↩

  22. Mike Davis, “Thanatos Triumphant,” New Left Review/Sidecar, 03/27/2022. https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/thanatos-triumphant ↩

  23. Cf. Rudolf von Jhering, The Evolution of the Aryan, tr. Adolphus Drucker, Henry Holt and Company (1897), 250. Jhering’s description of the ver sacrum is rather fanciful, but suggestion that the ver sacrum was executed with no concern “as to the fate of the wanderers, who were given over absolutely into the hands of the deity [in the case recounted by Festus, Apollo]” resonates with the ambivalences of today’s gerontocracy towards the young. This account of the ver sacrum shows both sides of the sacer in a way which accounts that wholly assimilate it to colonization do not. ↩

  24. Armin Mohler, Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918-1932: Ein Handbuch, 3rd expanded edition, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft Darmstadt (1989), 10-11. ↩

  25. About the latter, see Jeffrey Bale, “The ‘Black’ Terrorist International: Neo-Fascist Paramilitary Networks and the ‘Strategy of Tension’ in Italy, 1968-1974,” PhD Diss. (University of California at Berkeley, 1994), 98ff ↩

  26. See Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis, Verso (2023), Ch. 6 “Ideas without Words” and Ingrid D. Rowland, “Furio Jesi and the Culture of the Right,” in The Making of the Humanities, Vol. III, eds. Rens Bod et al, Amsterdam University Press (2014), 283-298. Unfortunately Jesi’s book has yet to be translated into English. ↩

  27. FOIA Research, “Misanthropic Division,” FOIA Research, 01/06/2025 https://www.foiaresearch.net/organization/misanthropic-division# ↩

  28. See Kieran Aarons, “Genealogy of Far-Right Accelerationism,” Polemos, No. 1 (2022), 261-294; 264. ↩

  29. Spengler argued that language originated in what I, following Habermas’s scheme, am referring to as the strategic dimension of its use as command, see his Man and Technics: A Contribution to the Philosophy of Life, tr. Charles F. Atkinson, Alfred A. Knopf (1932), 54f. ↩