World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 7 Mar 2026In the spring of 1934, Nazi Germany stands on the edge of internal collapse. In this episode of Death of Democracy, we follow the escalating conflict between Adolf Hitler, the SA stormtroopers, and the German Army that culminates in the Night of the Long Knives. As economic cracks appear behind the Nazi “recovery”, Joseph Goebbels launches propaganda campaigns against critics while Heinrich Himmler expands SS power over the Gestapo.
When Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen publicly challenges the regime, Hitler moves decisively. On June 30, 1934, the Nazi leader unleashes a purge that eliminates Ernst Röhm, the SA leadership, and political rivals — consolidating absolute power.
Using contemporary voices from Martha Dodd, Victor Klemperer, and underground SPD reports, this episode explores how terror, propaganda, and political maneuvering reshaped Germany in just a few months — and paved the way for dictatorship.
Watch the full Death of Democracy series to understand how democracies collapse from within.
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March 8, 2026
How to Destroy Your Own Revolution: Night of the Long Knives – Death of Democracy 06 – Q2 1934
January 8, 2026
WW1: The War Begins… | EP 1
The Rest Is History
Published 25 Aug 2025Following the declaration of war in 1914, how did the outbreak of the First World War unfold? What were the earliest military engagements of this terrible, totemic event? Who were its key political players and how did they respond? What was the attitude to the war in Germany? Were the allies unified from this early stage, or were they suspicious and frozen by indecision? And, how did the Germans, with the mightiest army in all the world, make its move on “plucky little” Belgium?
Join Dominic and Tom as they launch into one of the most consequential events of all time: the outbreak of the First World War.
00:00 – Germany: from peaceful nation to war machine
02:30 – Introduction to WWI series: scope and importance
04:16 – Was Germany uniquely responsible for the war? Historians’ debate
06:12 – Fear versus aggression: German motivations
06:46 – The July Crisis: Sarajevo, blank cheque, Kaiser’s holiday, Austrian ultimatum
08:08 – Helmuth von Moltke the Younger: personality, melancholy, moustaches
12:01 – Germany’s strategic weakness: encirclement fears, manpower and GDP
13:45 – The Schlieffen Plan explained
18:06 – Von Moltke panics
19:00 – Kaiser signs mobilization order; emotional scene in Berlin
22:53 – The problem of Belgian neutrality and Britain’s obligations
23:47 – British cabinet debates: how far into Belgium would justify war?
25:04 – German ultimatum to Belgium: demands for railways and fortresses
26:14 – Belgium rejects ultimatum; King Albert’s defiance
27:59 – “A scrap of paper”: German gaffe fuels British propaganda
28:35 – King Albert’s speech to parliament: “Determined at any cost”
29:52 – Total War Rome (Creative Assembly)
30:37 – German invasion begins
36:18 – German reprisals in Belgium
50:00 – Comparisons with Allied conduct in Ireland, colonies, and elsewhere
50:47 – The Leuven library fire: destruction of manuscripts, global outrage
52:12 – Germany’s reputation collapses: admired culture turned to “barbarism”
53:28 – Fall of Brussels: German army enters the capital
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November 13, 2025
QotD: Anarchists
It is a sign of age, I fear, but I seem to be the last person to lament the declining quality of our Anarchists. Those of more than a century ago were rugged individualists, to a fault. With one well-placed bomb, they could do what takes the contemporary anarchist a cumbersome bureaucratic organization. They were men of action; and some of the women, too. No one could confuse them with party hacks. You could not coerce them into a party line.
When I was younger and, perhaps, more spunky, I used to read Proudhon and Kropotkin. These were all very well, but the systemizing tendency had infected both. Utopianism also muddled their thinking. Without going back to Zeno of Cilium, let me just say that the posterior tradition in recommending anarchy was more subtle and arch. (Read the Antigone, for instance. Today it’s just the brand name for a Givenchy bag.) Anarchy was an inheritance from Greece and even Rome. It could never have been reduced to an election manifesto.
It is interesting that the first English use of the term, anarchisme, dates back to Henry VIII. Those resisting his Divorce and Reformation were taken to be anarchists. Nobly they defended the ancient liturgical order, in such spontaneous actions as the Pilgrimage of Grace.
Prominent anarchists of our modern age have, at their best (or worst, depending on one’s point-of-view), had dodgy ideological affiliations, but a real appreciation for economy of means. One thinks of e.g. Gavrilo Princip, the ingenious Serbian, able to ignite a Great War with a few gunshots, and bring down the Austro-Hungarian Empire almost as an aside. Or a certain Osama bin Laden, able to drag a superpower into pointless foreign wars, with very limited means. I do not approve of either gentleman, please note, but their efficiency was astounding.
David Warren, “Anarchia”, Essays in Idleness, 2020-07-09.
September 26, 2025
John Carter revisits the cancellation debate
As part of a much longer essay, covering a lot more ground, John Carter considers the pro and con arguments for the much-cancelled right to fully indulge in cancelling figures on the left in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination and the widespread celebration of the murder by leftists:
Talking heads on network television are whining that it’s getting out of hand, while abruptly unemployed leftists take to GoFundMe to beg for support.
The purge has started, and yes, thank you, I’m feeling quite vindicated right now.
Repeating myself is boring, so I’m not going to rehash the arguments in favour of turning cancellation against the left. Suffice to say, they have it coming. It’s also worth pointing out that there’s an important distinction to be made between getting a labourer fired because he made the OK sign, and removing a medical professional who openly celebrates the death of a man for having opinions shared by half the country. Can a bloody-minded leftist doctor be trusted to give medical care to a Trump voter, when he’s on the record as advocating the execution of Trump voters? The doctor should certainly be allowed to say what he pleases, and he should have the same right to use a social media account as anyone else, but he probably shouldn’t be allowed to practice medicine.
But I don’t want to rehash that. Instead, I want to focus back in on human water fountain women as an exemplar of that choir of liars suddenly singing hymns to the sacred practice of freedom of speech. People would be shocked by this self-serving mendacity if long experience had not accustomed them to it.
We aren’t shocked because we’ve seen this before, repeatedly. The left screamed about the spontaneous unguided tour of the capitol on J6 as an insurrection and an unforgivable attack on our democracy, conveniently forgetting that the Weather Underground were bombing federal facilities, including the Capitol, back in the 70s, or that the state capitol of Wisconsin was occupied by protesters in 2011 … or that they’d attacked the White House in 2020 … to say nothing of the nation-wide Burning Looting and Murdering they committed in the wake of Floyd’s fentanyl overdose.
The curious phenomenon of leftist narrative blindness was repeatedly demonstrated during the COVID years, in which the entire professional-managerial caste would switch from one narrative to its opposite like a school of fish, confidently proclaiming on one day what they had denounced as anti-scientific misinformation just the day before.
Sure enough, in the wake of Kirk’s murder, with his blood still on the ground and their gleeful cries ringing in the world’s ears, the left went on an immediate disinformation counter-offensive. They adopted the narrative that Tyler Robinson was a right-wing groyper – an online follower of Nick Fuentes – who had assassinated Kirk for not being based enough, or for supporting Israel, or something. It was for lying about this that Kimmel was pulled off the air. The evidence for Robinson’s right-wing sympathies were that he’d been raised in a conservative Mormon household by a police officer father, and that he’d dressed up as a gopnik once or something. Robinson’s live-in relationship with a troon, the Antifa slogans he’d carved into the bullet casings, and his friends and family attesting to his left-wing radicalization were waved away. This is what abusive narcissists do: “I didn’t do the thing you just saw me do to you, and anyhow you deserved it”. Sure enough, as I wrote this, another leftist sniper attacked an ICE facility in Dallas; sure enough, leftists immediately began insisting that he couldn’t possibly have been a leftist, this time on the grounds that the shooter inscribed “Anti-ICE” rather than “Fuck ICE” on his bullets.
The left also tried to change the conversation to the supposed problem of right-wing violence. Professional-looking infographics flooded onto social media, pushed by Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute, Ilhan Omar, and the Economist.
Ilhan Omar (note that the data are from the ADL).
The infographics make it look like there’s an epidemic of right-wing political violence being waged against a peaceful, tolerant, and defenceless left. This is of course nonsense. Every time someone dug into their data, it turned out that they were basically doing this:
It isn’t even necessary to subject the datasets to close scrutiny. Look at the Economist graphic. See that little black rectangle in 2020? The Economist would have you believe that there was practically no left-wing political violence at all in 2020, which as everyone remembers was a fiery but mostly peaceful year. The Economist dataset turns out to have been curated by an Antifa activist, by the way, which I suppose makes the Economist an affiliate of an international terrorist organization, now.
Now, you can say “they’re just lying”, and yes, quite a few of them know exactly what they’re doing.
[…]
In a lot of cases, however, calling them “liars” isn’t quite accurate. Lying implies conscious deception. If you’ve talked to these people, which I know you have to the point where you have post-traumatic stress disorder, you know that they seem to really believe the things they say. It does not matter in the slightest if they contradict the thing they said yesterday. They apparently have no memory of their previous statements. Their present belief is always entirely sincere. It does not matter if observable reality is in stark contradiction to their belief. They have lost the ability to distinguish between fact and fiction, with the result that they routinely mistake their own pop culture propaganda for reality.
That they do not even seem to notice when they contradict themselves suggests a void of self-awareness. This is the origin of the NPC meme, which depicts leftists as Non-Player Characters, effectively no more than computer programs that emulate human behaviour. When the meme first began to spread a few years ago, there was a purge of Twitter accounts that posted it. The NPC meme cut leftists to the quick because they instinctively recognized – as everyone did – the truth in it. Leftists complained that the NPC meme was dehumanizing, which is actually perfectly correct. An NPC is not really human.
We see evidence for this NPC absence of self-awareness everywhere. A self-aware person who had spent a decade viciously persecuting anyone who publicly contradicted leftist orthodoxy would understand that an appeal to freedom of speech once they themselves were persecuted for their words would garner mockery rather than sympathy. A clever Machiavellian would therefore preface their entreaties with expressions of contrition for their past behaviour, however insincere. Not one of them has done this, which makes it less likely that their attempt to appeal to freedom of speech is mere calculated cynicism. It is instead as though they themselves are not aware of their own previous actions.
September 23, 2025
“[A]nyone who tries to tell you ‘Antifa is just an idea’ is not merely deluded, but consciously and deliberately lying”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR uses the methods of counter-terror analysis:
None of Antifa’s public propaganda channels have attempted to deny that they were behind the assassination of Charlie Kirk. This is a fact of considerable significance, which I will now use the methods of counter-terror analysis to examine.
Antifa’s distributed structure makes it impossible for any one chapter or cell to know what another subgroup didn’t do.
It is quite possible that Tyler Robinson is a true stochastic terrorist, inspired and motivated by Antifa propaganda and considering himself part of Antifa but without planning or logistical support from others in the organization. I give this about 60% probability.
The fact that Robinson had peers on Discord with apparent foreknowledge of the assassination attempt does not falsify this possibility. Even if they did assist with the assassination, their connections to Antifa might be equally deniable, equally just a matter of their states of mind.
The assassination was in complete accordance with Antifa doctrine and propaganda. Direct action against “fascist” targets, ranging from low level intimidation up to political killings and organized attacks on government facilities, is exactly what Antifa is organized to do.
Thus, with over 90% probability, other members and aboveground allies of Antifa regard the operation as a (tactically) successful Antifa op, whether or not they had any foreknowledge of it and whether or not Robinson was stochastic.
The ones who aren’t fanatics or idiots have probably figured out by now that the assassination was a serious strategic blunder. You might expect that they would be scrambling to deny that Antifa had anything to do with Kirk’s death.
Some of Antifa’s aboveground allies [are] in fact doing this; the dominant form of denial by Democratic politicians and activists is to deny that Antifa even exists as more than an idea.
But Antifa itself has not done this, and I predict very confidently (95%) that it will not. The real reason it won’t has nothing to do with its structural inability to know that no member of Antifa was involved.
To understand why this is, you need to grasp what Antifa is for. Not its ultimate purpose, which is to foment a violent revolution that will enable Communists or Left-Anarchists to seize power, but the way it operationalizes that goal in practice.
The purpose of Antifa direct action is to shape the political environment through terror. Its goal is to intimidate its opponents into paralysis — to raise the costs of their speech and public action by predictably opposing it with violence.
I am not speculating about this, because if you read Antifa’s propaganda and organizing materials it will tell you exactly this.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk is perfectly accordant with Antifa doctrine. Antifa cannot deny this, nor disown Tyler Robinson even in the likely event that he is only stochastically connected to the organization, because … what use is a terror network that disavows intimidation of its opponents?
Antifa’s goals require it to be a credible threat to “fascists”. If it denied that it had anything to do with killing Charlie Kirk, it would demotivate its own foot soldiers and decrease its usefulness to its aboveground allies.
Antifa needs to exist in a kind of mixed state — simultaneously deeply threatening to its enemies but deniable by many of its allies in the Democratic Party, journalism, and academia.
It is also, however, important that none of its aboveground allies can actually believe their own denials. Otherwise Antifa, perceived as useless, would risk losing the funding and political cover that has until now allowed it to operate with some degree of impunity.
You may therefore safely assume that anyone who tries to tell you “Antifa is just an idea” is not merely deluded, but consciously and deliberately lying.
At Woke Watch Canada, C.C. Harvey discusses the “red thread of Antifa subversion” over the last ten or so years:
Establishment leaders now even cuddle up with extremists who do not hide their violently subversive orientation. When the ENTIRE establishment took a knee for for the (self-identified) queer, Marxist, violently revolutionary group BLM during the 2020 riots, the subjugation of the professional classes was complete. We stopped being allowed to object to our institutions becoming vehicles for communist revolution. We were called racists and far right extremists and conspiracy theorists for even thinking bad thoughts about BLM and the woke communist revolution, and could be punished for talking to friends about it in group chats. We all became ideological captives of neoMarxist revolutionaries.
The DEI industry exploded, and although it is losing steam in the USA, it still functions as a modern Red Guard policing Canadian discourse and behaviour. If we’re being honest, we will admit that even most conservative politicians here were cowed. The entire establishment worked together to erect a new politburo and stasi throughout Canada and the USA, and far beyond.
Republicans are dismantling the neoMarxist structures that have been erected in America, and this is of course being disingenuously characterized by leftists as proof that Trump is fascist and authoritarian. BLM has largely imploded with corruption and infighting, but Antifa appears to have grown even stronger, especially its queer contingent, and their membership is agitating heavily as they see the Trump administration tearing down what they built.
Antifa is not just a gang of idealistic rabble-rousers in black hoodies rebelling against authority. It is the heir of a century-long Marxist project seeking massive, sweeping revolution, and advancing their goals via inversions: turning truth into lies, sin into virtue, desecration into liberation. From the beginning, Antifascist communists were passionately committed to revolution in all areas of human life and society.
It is not by coincidence that antifa and the LGBTQIA+ are entwined. Antifa have always been committed to sexual revolution — crossing sexual boundaries, normalizing deviance, dissolving the family.
Even in earliest iterations, the antifascists were dangerously radical in sexual ideology and policy: the historical record shows they handed children to paraphilic predators in the name of antifascist sexual liberation as early as postwar Germany. That anti-family, fetishistic spirit runs straight through antifascist history and is on full display in today’s TQ+ movement. TQ+ is conjoined with Antifa (Trantifa, if you will) to actively promote hypersexualization, the destabilizing of sex identity and family, and the mainstreaming of disorder and perversion.
Marx and Engels attacked the family as a “bourgeois prison”. Later Marxists carried this out through radical experiments in sex and pedagogy, all under the banner of liberation. Today’s gender and queer theorists are majority Marxists.
Marxists deal in inversions, so indoctrination presented as education, perversion rebranded as liberation, abuse disguised as compassion, self-mutilation celebrated as authentic selfhood. Today, Antifa-aligned “Queer Resistance” brigades advance sexual inversions and corruptions that are just as damaging as antifascists of bygone eras: in postwar Germany, the antifascist Kentler experiment assigned orphan boys to be raised by wealthy pedophiles. Today, an uncomfortable number of LGBTQIA+ activists have been caught adopting babies and toddlers to abuse, raping their own children, or sexually assaulting minors. As a result of our establishment embracing the far left revolutionary zeitgeist and sacralizing “marginalized” identities, safeguarding has been sacrificed on the altar of LGBTQIA+ identitarianism.
Update, 25 September: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
September 22, 2025
HBO’s Rome – Ep 12 “Kalends of February” – History and Story
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 30 Apr 2025Today, we look at the final episode of Season One, which deals with the last days of the conspiracy against Julius Caesar and his murder on the Ides of March — not that the date gets a mention. There is quite a lot of soap-opera stuff in this one, the culmination of character arcs, so less time for politics.
One day, we may do Season Two, but for the moment, that’s all folks!
September 19, 2025
After the Charlie Kirk assassination, here are three possible futures
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR lays out what he sees are the three most likely short-term futures for the United States after the assassination of Charlie Kirk:
I’m a student of history. Here are three possible futures following the assassination of Charlie Kirk. They’re based on historical examples of what happens when a Communist subversion campaign or insurgency overplays its hand and triggers broad popular resistance.
1. Popular revulsion against aboveground leftists celebrating the murder gives the Trump administration political cover to go after Antifa and its shadow funding network hard. Both are smashed.
Communist agents of influence in the mainstream media and academia continue to self-discredit.
Relatively few Communists are arrested, but their millions of aboveground tools become isolated and demoralized.
Propelled by a huge swing in voter registrations that we are already seeing happen, the Democrats get crushed in the 2026 midterms.
The long period of fever, madness, and Left ascendancy that began with the assassination of JFK by a Soviet agent in 1963 ends not with a bang but with a whimper.
This is the best case scenario for everybody, including the Communists who don’t get thrown out of helicopters or shot down in the streets.
If things don’t go this way it will likely be because Democratic lawfare prevents the counter-subversion push from being fully effective. An obvious index of this failure would be another high-profile political assassination or attempt against a conservative target after about 4 months out.
What happens in the event of that failure, especially if the third public attempt to kill Trump succeeds:
2. A period of Caudillismo. A charismatic strongman rides popular anger into power. If this happens, the Left better pray that the strongman is an infuriated JD Vance, because any alternative to him is likely to be worse for them.
The crackdown against the Communist network becomes brutal and routinely uses extra-Constitutional means, possibly thinly covered by a declared state of emergency.
At the harder end of this range of possibilities, right-wing death squads not exactly formed by government but winked at by it go after Communist public figures that are out of reach of the law because they’ve carefully preserved deniability. Many journalists are at the top of this target list.
It is not likely that the Communist network can survive this future. The only way it happens is if they have enough popular support to develop a semi-militarized resistance — in effect making certain parts of the country no go regions for Federal agents.
Going by historical precedents, the index of this failure would be a resurgence of banditry by armed groups, initially with overtly political goals but decaying into general predation.
This would land us at:
3. Low-grade civil war, a la Bosnia or the Irish troubles. Anybody wishing for this has no idea how bloody, ugly, and brutal it would probably be. Especially if the Left succeeds at what it will with absolute certainty try to do, which is racialize the conflict.
I don’t think there is any realistic scenario in which the Communists win any of these confrontations. Not in the U.S., not in the 21st century. The question is how much blood and agony the rest of us will go through before they are finally defeated.
Update, 20 September: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
September 14, 2025
Funny … I saw multiple reports that the accused assassin was an extremist “conservative” …
I don’t normally lean on content from the social media site formerly known as Twitter, but there’s more solid information there than in 99% of the legacy media. For instance, here’s ESR on the background of the alleged assassin (I use the word “alleged” because I can’t afford lawyers for nuisance suits):
The Salt Lake City FBI office released these photos of a “person of interest” in the Charlie Kirk assassination.
Two newspapers are now reporting that Tyler Robinson was living with a transsexual who is cooperating with the FBI, so I’m going to consider this confirmed.
Rather than talking about the obvious stuff, I want to focus on the questions I think the FBI will be asking the boyfriend.
Not about the assassination itself. They’ve already got Robinson dead to rights on aggravated murder. Given that he apparently had to be dissuaded from committing suicide when he was caught, he may even plead guilty and confess.
No, the interesting question is his connections. With probability approaching unity, he was Antifa. The question is: explicit Antifa, or stochastic?
I think we can take it as given that Robinson wasn’t given orders to kill Kirk by some supervillain sitting at the top of a command hierarchy. Antifa doesn’t work that way.
Antifa is not a unitary conspiracy, it’s a whole bunch of interlocking directorates with common ideological goals. This trades away some capacity for large-scale organization in order to gain resistance against single-point attacks.
To the extent Antifa as a whole takes orders at all, it’s by paying attention to the targets suggested by above-ground left-wing figures. Yes, including Democratic politicians, who treat Antifa as a conveniently deniable militant wing. The decentralization of its organization helps with the deniability, too.
Robinson may have been part of an Antifa cell that provided him with logistical support, knowing what they were contributing to.
Or, he may have been acting alone in a direction shaped by Antifa propaganda. There’s actually a continuum of possibilities; he might have dropped deniable hints to Antifa associates as a way of gaining status within the group.
I think what the boyfriend is going to get the most serious grilling about is the nature and scope of those connections. That is, if Robinson doesn’t reveal them himself.
They’re going to get his cell, if there is one. They may be able to nail down the entire Antifa chapter it’s part of.
Further connections are going to be tough to prove. It is highly unlikely, for example, that there are direct command links from the Democratic National Committee to Antifa.
It will probably be more productive to follow the money; if they can flip the right people in his chapter they may be able to go after dark-money groups like Arabella, the Tides Foundation, and the Open Society Foundations.
Which, to be fair, probably don’t know they’re funding assassinations? But are probably carefully averting their eyes from the fact that they fund people who fund other people who fund assassinations. The network is carefully designed to preserve deniability in all directions.
The long play in smashing a terror network is always to cut its funding chain. That job got well started with the dismantling of USAID, but there’s a lot more work to do.
Charlie Kirk’s assassination may give us the thread that unravels the whole weave.
Also on former-Twitter, Larry Correia:
Oilfield Rando @Oilfield_Rando
Imagine the newsroom editor meetings where they’re trying to figure out some way, any way, to spin the news that the shooter was shacked up with a trooner before they publish articles about it.Because make no mistake, they can’t avoid publishing it. They know it.
My bet for the news blitz narrative that’s coming —
It’s the fault of his conservative, religious family, for driving this young man to kill because they couldn’t accept his forbidden love. How tragic. The real bad guys here are those conservative Christian hate mongers who won’t let love be love, and as usual liberals are the real victims. Plus a single shot from a really old deer rifle shows why we need to ban assault weapons. If you grew up with a Republican father that means you are MAGA forever and pay no attention to the millions of militant leftists and rainbow haired pronoun people on TikTok bragging about how much they hate and rebelled against their conservative religious parents, that’s different.
Larry Correia, Twitter, 2025-09-13.
“When must we kill them?”
On the social media platform previously known as Twitter, Tom Kratman provides an excerpt from The Care and Feeding of Your Right Wing Death Squad:
Reposting this seems apropos:
The Care and Feeding of Your Right Wing Death Squad, Chapter 32 Copyright © 2025, Tom Kratman, Harry Kitchener
“When must we kill them?”
That question was asked recently by a leftist student, one Nicholas Decker, from George Mason University. It’s a very interesting question, and one that most, and perhaps all, hard leftists in the United States are contemplating. Indeed, we see now, from an NCRI / Rutgers survey, that something over half of leftists believe that assassinating Trump would be justified, and nearly half think the same thing about Musk.
Note, here, that this was of all people identifying as left of center. I would suggest that this means that almost nobody who is slightly left of center would agree with that and nearly everybody who is far left of center agrees with that. And if we needed any more proof, just contemplate the number of would be groupies moistening their panties over murderer Luigi Mangione, as pointed out by former New York Times reporter Taylor Lorenz.
Why do they think so or why are they wondering about it? It’s actually more understandable than most on the right and perhaps even many on the left would understand. They’re wondering about it because, with the destruction of the Deep State, with so many billionaires turning against the left and – horrrors! – no longer letting the left wing narrative control online and legacy media political discourse, with no prospect of the kind of money being shunted from the taxpayer, through the Federal Government, to left wing NGOs to help swing elections, they do not really think there is any serious prospect of the left ever winning a national election again or, at least, not in their lifetimes. And they may be right about that.
With James Carville telling the Democrats to give the boot to the gender and woke ideologues, the identity politics losers, the little boy penis choppers and little girl breast destroyers and vagina removers; they see themselves being marginalized, losing their influence, and losing their dream, forever. And this seems fairly likely. With no possibility, once Trump gets finished deporting all the illegals, of turning just enough of those illegals into client voters to swing elections just enough for control, they think that leftism will be hopeless in the United States. And they’re probably right about that. With the Communist factories of higher education being broken to the will of the right, with Gramsci’s / Rudi Dutschke’s “Long March Through the Institutions” being walked back, and quickly, they’re thinking about it and wondering about it because leftism is dead in the United States, a corpse just awaiting burial.
So, though the point of this entire exercise in the Right Wing Death Squad has been to convince the left to chill out, FFS, it seems that certain key point bear repeating.
1. Urban Guerilla movements invariably succeed in creating the kind of oppressive government that they believe will infuriate the people and lead to a general uprising. Those governments then proceed to exterminate the Urban Guerillas and all their supporters, and do so to general popular applause.
2. The armed forces, barring some political generals and morally cowardly colonels, hate you and everything about you. Posse Comitatus is only a law, not something in the constitution that would require going through the difficult process of amendment. Change the law – and do but note who has control of the House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court (so that constitutional grounds could not be manufactured to create an objection to getting rid of the law) – and the military would be very happy to round you all up. And you’re completely, incompetently, incapable of resisting this.
3. Moreover, though you have a few people with some military experience and training, the key word there is “few”. Yes, yes, I know that, since Vietnam, the left has been obsessed with the inner city black cannon fodder meme, but it wasn’t true then and it isn’t true now. Conversely, the white working class and conservative populations at large – to the limited extent these categories may differ – are replete with people with a lot of military training and experience and they hate you, too. They also have most of the guns. Your side has fairly few, in comparison, and little skill in using what you do have, alone or in groups.
4. You also fundamentally misunderstand the difference between your approach to violence – as a rheostat to be turned up or down, to suit – with the right’s – which is an on-off switch marked “peace and good feelings” on the one hand, and “kill every one of them” on the other.
You know all those terrible things you and your pals like to say about right wing, especially but not always white, Americans? Well, we know you don’t really believe those things because if you did you would be afraid ever to leave your mom’s basement. But you really ought to try to grasp this; sometimes those things are true.
Although our purpose with this project has been to try to get you to save yourselves, still, one cannot help but look forward to the prospect of young Mr. Decker finding this out.
So, if you were to succeed in killing the president, you will get Vance. Vance will have a mandate, in that case, to obliterate you. If he fails to carry out that mandate then genuine Right Wing Death Squads will take up the slack. No trial, no due process at all; they will proceed to obliterate you and every safe harbor and supporter you have, and often in creatively disgusting ways.
Amusingly enough, your only safety, in such a case, would be in being sent to some variant on El Salvador’s CECOT. I could see the population of El Salvador roughly doubling in the course of a few years as millions of American leftists find out just how grim a Latin American prison can be.
But, seriously, why would they or anybody waste the money when you could as easily just become an unfortunate statistic? Were I betting on it, I’d bet that few of you see a flight – or even half a flight – to El Salvador, but that many of you would have a long last moment staring down into a ditch you had just been forced to dig while a man with a pistol walks up behind you.
So the answer to young Mr. Decker’s question, “When must we kill them?” is “When you want to die.”
September 12, 2025
A primer on patterns in past political assassinations
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR shares his observations on common patterns in political assassinations which may be relevant to the investigation of the assassination of Charlie Kirk:
The Salt Lake City FBI office released these photos of a “person of interest” in the Charlie Kirk assassination.
I don’t know anything other than public information about the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
However, a primer follows about patterns in past political assassinations. I will sketch what scenarios an intelligence analyst would come up with looking at this one.
The first and most important rule in this kind of investigation is: when you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras.
In political assassinations, as an ordinary murders, the correct suspect is usually the most obvious suspect. Airport-thriller-style convoluted plots and false-flag ops pulled off by unlikely people or organizations are rare in the real world.
Accordingly, when you’re trying to solve a political assassination, the right question to ask is “Who said they wanted him dead?”
Then, you infiltrate those organizations, or arrest a bunch of members, and do contact tracing. Usually you do in fact find your killer that way. It’s not very different from ordinary police work except for the stakes.
There are broadly speaking three different kinds of assassin: the nutter, the zealot, and the pro. They are not difficult to distinguish once you got your hands on them.
Nutters don’t have a coherent political ideology, though they may spout semi-random slogans that political actors can seize on to pretend that they do. They generally have quite an obvious history of mental illness
Before capture, given the kind of public evidence we have now in Charlie Kirk’s assassination, it’s difficult to tell the zealots from the pros by their MO. It used to be easier, but as I noted in a previous post sniper doctrine and technique have been leaking into popular culture for decades.
It’s easier to spot the nutters; they tend to have poor forward-planning capacity. A very obvious way this manifests is a weak or non-existent plan for exfiltrating after the hit. Thus, the nutter is very likely to get caught quite soon after the assassination, often at the site.
This also produces a false-prominence effect – people think political assassins are more likely to be nutters than is actually the case.
Pros – professional assassins working for intelligence agencies or militaries – are also rare. They do occasionally strike – as when, for example the Bulgarian secret service whacked Pope John Paul – but high-profile public assassinations carry a risk of diplomatic and political blowback the most nations are unwilling to assume.
Also, trained assassins are a scarce resource and exfiltrating in the hue and cry following a very public assassination is chancy. Usually you’re going to send them against more obscure targets like exiled dissidents that you think might still be dangerous, hoping not to trigger a full law-enforcement and counterintelligence response.
There’s been talk in some of the wackier corners of the Right that the Mossad did this one. No analyst would take this seriously; the blowback risk to the Israelis is far too high to justify any gain. Same goes for the Russians, though they have a higher risk tolerance than the Israelis and had a much higher tolerance in Soviet times.
In the case of Charlie Kirk it’s pretty high odds we’re looking at a zealot. That’s usually the way to bet, and in this case, the quality of his exfiltration plan and the fact that he has successfully disappeared raises the odds.
Given all these factors, LEOs are going to be looking for zealots associated with domestic organizations that said they wanted Charlie Kirk dead.
Yes, this seems boring and obvious. The main point I’m trying to drive home here is that the boring and obvious theory about a political assassination is usually the correct one.
Accordingly, the first place investigators of the assassination of Charlie Kirk are going to be looking is gun clubs associated with Antifa and the hard left, like the John Brown Gun Club and Redneck Revolt.
It’s not certain that Kirk’s assassin is a member of one of those groups, but if you had to place a bet that would be where to put it.
Update: while I was composing my analysis there was a leak from inside the ATF. They found a .30-06 with engravings expressing “anti-fascist” and transgender ideology.
As I said: When you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras. The obvious suspect is usually the correct one.
And later, on the particulars of this particular assassin’s work:
PSA for those speculating about the sniper who killed Charlie Kirk:
No, the shot he made was not a difficult one, and does not constitute evidence that he was a professionally-trained sniper.
His choice of hide and the quality of his exfiltration plan was impressive. That could indicate pro-level training. Or, it could just mean he played the right videogames.
Information about sniper practice has been leaking into popular culture for decades. It used to be that good practice could enable you to make deductions about the background of the sniper, but that time is past.
Nothing has yet been released about what ammunition or weapon he used. It is highly likely that the bullet has been recovered and identified.
About the most we’re likely to be able to extract from the caliber is whether the sniper used an American traditional caliber like .30-06, NATO-standard 7.62, or Russian 7.62. The latter two cases may not be distinguishable if the bullet is deformed.
Knowing this won’t really tell us anything, as rifles in all plausible calibers are generally available in the United States. Furthermore, if this were a pro-level hit, misdirecting investigators by choosing an adversary or third party weapon is part of normal covert operations doctrine.
All in all, it is not possible to deduce anything of significance about the sniper from the publicly available information. Mistrust anyone who claims otherwise.
September 11, 2025
Charlie Kirk, RIP
I don’t follow US conservative figures, so while I’d heard of Charlie Kirk, I didn’t know much about him or what differentiated him from other right wing figures. He was assassinated on Wednesday while speaking to an audience at Utah Valley University:
An assassin’s bullet struck down Charlie Kirk, the prominent conservative commentator and founder of Turning Point USA, while he was speaking at an event at Utah Valley University on Wednesday. He was 31.
Graphic video footage of the killing, which occurred as Kirk addressed a large outdoor crowd of students and supporters, showed him being shot in the neck. He was rushed to the hospital but did not recover.
The shocking tragedy has prompted an outpouring of lamentations from Kirk’s many friends in conservative media and Republican politics. Announcing his death on Truth Social, President Donald Trump wrote that Kirk was “Great, and even Legendary”.
“No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie,” wrote Trump.
Kirk was influential among young people. He launched Turning Point USA in 2012, with financial backing from Tea Party activist Bill Montgomery. The organization’s stated goal was to foster a conservative movement on college campuses, following in the footsteps of past groups such as Young Americans for Freedom. He was adept at creating catchy slogans and useful talking points for conservative students to deploy against leftwing thinkers; he popularized the phrase “Socialism Sucks” and added it to t-shirts, posters, and banners. He took advantage of dramatically increased interest in crazy campus happenings among the broader American public, and he encouraged dissenting kids to challenge their liberal professors, form right-leaning organizations, and invite Republican speakers to campus. Under Kirk’s leadership, the group became the undisputed king of conservative campus activism, helping turn thousands of non-liberal students into fans of the Republican Party and its rising stars: Candace Owen, Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, and of course Trump.
Chris Bray posted some brief thoughts on the assassination as a way marker on the path to modern day nihilism:
Ryan Gerritsen on X – “People have yet to realize how the media affects the minds of so many. Just look at these headlines on Charlie Kirk. This affects people. It’s targeted & purposeful.”
First, the murder of Charlie Kirk is just the next level up the behavioral chain from the way Robert F. Kennedy was just treated in front of a Senate committee. He wasn’t mistaken, or wrong: He was an unforgivable monster, wholly illegitimate in every imaginable sense, who had no views or arguments that were worth considering in any way, and the only possible response to him is personal destruction. Our institutional left is a rage mob with formal titles. We’re not having a debate.
Second, the transition to radical violence is a reflection of the events that followed the death of the radical dream of the 1960s New Left. After the hippies, the Weatherman and the Symbionese Liberation Army. The turn to radical violence is the turn that follows obvious failure. It’s an acknowledgement of political impotence, and a last-ditch emergency reflex: If they won’t submit to our political vision, we’ll coerce them into submission. It’s the death rattle. It means the arguing and convincing has failed, and they see the failure.
Third, Camille Paglia persistently describes late-cultural-stage sexual disorder, especially widespread transgenderism, as a turn to sadomasochism, and I didn’t get that description for a long time. I’m seeing it now. It comes from an impotent rage over the limits of personal will, a Veruca Salt disgust that the world doesn’t do what I want, and a desire to hurt the body that’s trapped by a nature that won’t yield to ideology. I’m going to dive back into Sexual Personae today. Notice how much left-oriented political identities are currently invested in causing literal, physical injury, and in celebrating moments in which political opponents suffer actual pain. Go look for leftists celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death on social media, if you want to wade into that sewer. “Progressive” politics is becoming a torture fetish.
John Carter explains why we all need to watch the video to understand what happened. The post was originally about the murder of Iryna Zarutska on the light rail system in Charlotte, North Carolina. Before he published it, he heard about the shooting of Charlie Kirk:
Just as I got to this point in the article, I received word that Charlie Kirk was shot in the throat with a high-power rifle.
Once again, this is a difficult video to watch. Once again, I think you should watch it. Do not turn away from this. In case you’re hesitant, here is the last tweet Charlie Kirk will ever write.
[…]
Initial reports were that the assassin was some hapless boomer, but the police seem to have arrested the wrong person; FBI director Kash Patel has recently announced that the actual perpetrator has been apprehended, although as of the time of this writing the shooter’s identity hasn’t been released. Kirk was brought to hospital, and there were reports that he’d been stabilized and was receiving blood accompanied by prayers for his recovery. Soon after that we received confirmation of his death.
[…]
Reports are that his children were present for his assassination.
If Iryna’s death was the murder of peace, Charlie Kirk’s was the death of debate. Dialogue was shot in the throat, the very organ that produces speech. That probably wasn’t intentional: it’s likely the shooter was aiming for the head. Regardless, the symbolism is profound. Kirk was no bigoted firebrand, for all that the left cast him in the role of a fascist racist Nazi rabble-rouser. If anything, those on the right considered his politics to be rather milquetoast, though it’s certainly true he became more based in recent years. His modus operandi was to go to college campuses and enter into calm, reasonable, good-faith debate with the students there, because he believed profoundly that when we stop talking to one another, we begin to see one another as evil, and violence follows. Kirk was no stranger to violence himself: he’d received numerous death threats, he’d been driven off campus and out of restaurants by Antifa, he’d been assaulted. He knew full well the risks that he took by making himself such a high-profile public figure, and he took those risks anyhow, in full knowledge that he risked life and limb. Those are the actions of a man possessed of great physical courage.
No sooner did news of Kirk’s shooting hit the Internet, than the lying media was spreading doubt about the incident and heaping scorn upon the victim. Perhaps the shooter had been a supporter, one talking head suggested, and had been firing his rifle in celebration … it was all a big accident, and that’s just what you get for supporting the Second Amendment. Other journalist scum were at pains to emphasize that Kirk was divisive, polarizing, controversial … implying that if he’d just been a good boy and said what all the other good boys are supposed to say, he would have been safe. Getting shot in the throat is just what you get for speaking out of turn, so shut your mouth, bigot.
Leftists on social media were far less circumspect than their counterparts on the major networks. Almost without exception – by which I mean that I have seen no exceptions, though of course I have seen only the screenshots that people have shared, and cannot rule out that there are a few, for all that I doubt it – they are exulting in Kirk’s death. There is no surprise to this. The left is vicious, and to take pleasure in the death of an enemy may be the only healthy instinct they have left. I’m not even angry at them for that. I expect nothing else from them. Nevertheless, the gloating pleasure the left takes in Kirk’s death only serves to underline that dialogue is dead.
Thanks in part to Kirk’s tireless efforts, the left has been steadily losing the war of ideas, and with it their hold on the mass mind. They no longer have the ability to define the boundaries of the Overton window, because every single one of their claims has been shown to be baseless, deceptive, and destructive of both individual lives and society itself. Since the advent of mass media the left has had the ability to delineate the acceptable boundaries of discourse; since the rise of social media, and the advent of the meme war, this power has slipped through their fingers. Truth has leaked into peoples’ brains, and the people have realized that they have been lied to shamelessly on an almost incomprehensible scale about almost everything that matters. The people have seen the left for what it is, a malign force that delights in their humiliation, that glories in their annihilation, an influence whose special talent is to take the best impulses of people and twist them into something self-destructive and foul. And so, the people have turned from the left, and coalesced into into an opposition that has become determined to put an end to the left’s tyrannical parasitism. Not all the people, to be sure. But a lot of them.
September 1, 2025
Who Killed Pakistan’s First Prime Minister, Liaquat Ali Khan? – W2W 42
TimeGhost History
Published 31 Aug 2025October 1951: Pakistan’s first Prime Minister is gunned down on stage, and the world is left asking — who ordered his death? Was it the British, the Americans, or his own allies in Pakistan? Dive deep into a tangled web of espionage, conspiracy, and Cold War politics as we follow the murder mystery that set the course for South Asia’s future.
(more…)
August 4, 2025
QotD: The impeachment of Andrew Johnson
Almost.
I am greatly obliged to my old friend revisionist historian Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, who encouraged me to look into the Johnson impeachment. Johnson was the 17th President of the United States, rising to that office when his predecessor, Abraham Lincoln, was assassinated. Johnson had been a southern Democrat Senator, unjustly reviled by both sides, but remained in the Senate throughout the War Between the States and was chosen by Lincoln to help spread the appeal of a crypto-Republican “National Union” party dedicated to the peaceful and humane reintegration of those states that had seceded and been militarily crushed.
Lincoln’s Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, however, held a somewhat different view. He thought he should be running the government. For various unsavory reasons — that would fill a book or two by themselves (hint: look up Grenville M. Dodge) — Stanton wanted to grind the South down even further under the Northern boot-heel, establishing, for example, extra-constitutional military zones to supervise the phony replacement “carpet-bag” state governments that the North had imposed on Southern states.
Once Johnson became President, he fired Stanton — whom more than one historian believes actually engineered Lincoln’s assassination — immediately running afoul of a little ditty called the 1867 Tenure of Office Act, which it appears was specifically cobbled together to keep Johnson from operating his own Presidency, leaving the nascent Stantonian Police State intact. Stanton and his cohorts impeached Johnson; his conviction failed by one vote in the U.S. Senate. Stanton resigned and skulked off to the garbage-heap of history.
L. Neil Smith, “Andrew and Donald”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2019-12-22.
July 21, 2025
Caligula: Was He Really Mad?
The Rest Is History
Published 3 Feb 2025Enough of the Princeps, what remains to be described, is the monster …
The Roman emperor Caligula endures as one of the most notorious figures in not only Roman history, but the history of the world. Famed as a byword for sexual degeneracy, cruelty and corruption, the account of his life written by the Roman historian Suetonius has, above all, enshrined him as such for posterity. Throughout the biography there is a whiff of dark comedy, as Caligula is cast as the ultimate demented Caesar, corrupted absolutely by his absolute power and driven into depravity. Born of a sacred and illustrious bloodline to adored parents, his early life — initially so full of promise — was shadowed by tragedy, death, and danger, the members of his family picked off one by one by the emperor Tiberius. Nevertheless, Caligula succeeded, through his own cynical intelligence and cunning manipulation of public spectacle, to launch himself from the status of despised orphan, to that of master of Rome. Yet, before long his seemingly propitious reign, was spiralling into a nightmare of debauchery and terror …
Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss the most notorious emperor in Rome: Caligula, a man said to have slept with his sister, transformed his palace into a brothel, cruelly humiliated senators, and even made his horse into a consul. But what is the truth behind these horrific legends? Was Caligula really more monster than man …?
00:00 A mysterious emperor
05:18 Why are the stories about Caligula so bad?
08:40 Germanicus: the best man in Rome
16:20 Caligula is the heir
19:30 The death of Tiberius
20:55 Caligula’s cynical intelligence
22:50 Caligula’s skill playing to the gallery
28:39 Caligula’s turn to evil (according to Suetonius)…
31:35 Caligula as Suetonius’ monster
37:22 Caligula confronts the senate
45:10 The conspiracy against him moves
48:14 Did all this actually happen?
58:43 Did he make his horse a consul?Producer: Theo Young-Smith
Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett
Video Editor: Jack Meek
Social Producer: Harry Balden
Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor
June 24, 2025
Political violence increases as the power of the state increases
Many people note that they don’t remember political conflicts being quite so nasty in years past as they are now, but the more power that accretes to the state the higher the perceived — and actual — risk of allowing the state to fall into the hands of your opponents. We’d be far better off if partisans would consider the possibility that the latest addition to state power they support will be used by their political opponents after the next partisan shift in electoral fortunes … if you fear this power in the hands of a Trump, you shouldn’t put it in the hands of a Biden.
As should be obvious to anybody following news about riots, assassinations, and arson attacks, politics have become far too important in America. With government large, growing, and reaching into every nook and cranny of our lives, Americans perceive politics as too much of a high-stakes game to lose. And so, they have divided into hostile camps to make sure their side comes out on top — and some turn ideological conflict into literal war.
A Surge in Political Violence
That point came home to me after Israel launched its preemptive attacks against Iran’s nuclear facilities. My wife’s rabbi (she’s Jewish and I’m not) called me and asked if I was willing to work security during services on Saturday. “No Kings” protests were planned across the country for the day, with the potential to turn nasty at the hands of people who insist anybody wearing a Star of David bears responsibility for the Israeli government’s actions. Tensions were already high after the Molotov cocktail attack on Jews in Boulder, the murder of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, D.C., and the firebombing of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s official residence on the first night of Passover.
So, I spent much of Saturday standing in front of the synagogue, wearing a ballistic vest, with a pistol holstered on one hip and pepper spray on the other.
Underlining the point was that two Minnesota state lawmakers were targeted by an assassin the same Saturday — fatally in the case of one legislator and her husband. The day’s protests were predominantly, but not entirely, peaceful. That’s better than we’ve seen at recent protests against immigration enforcement that turned violent in Los Angeles and Portland, and at some pro-Palestine demonstrations.
That’s all recent. If we go back in time just a little, there’s the bombing of a fertility clinic by an “anti-natalist”; attacks on Tesla cars, dealerships, chargers, and owners by people opposed to Elon Musk’s temporary role in the Trump administration; and, notably, the murder of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. The alleged assassin, Luigi Mangione, has become something of a celebrity.
“Targeted violence is becoming normalized online and in the real world,” warned a December 2024 report from the Network Contagion Research Institute, affiliated with Rutgers University. “Memes, viral content, gamification and the lionization of Luigi Mangione are constructing frameworks that endorse and legitimize violence, encouraging harassment and further acts of violence against corporate figures.”
The report added that “the spread and scope of justifications for murder have significantly eroded what was once a barrier between mainstream society and fringe online communities that supported violence and glorified killers.”
