You’re already in the conspiracy world. You might not know it, but you are.

If you’ve listened to Joe Rogan, if you’ve watched Tucker Carlson, if you’ve followed Candace Owens, Ian Carroll, or Alex Jones—or if you’ve so much as scrolled past a reel about the deep state, FEMA camps, or “what they don’t want you to know”—you have been drinking from a well that was thoroughly poisoned before you ever got there.

I know, because I drank from it too. For years.

The Last Thing I Had to Throw Out

I spent two decades in the New Age. I entered the rave scene in San Francisco around the year 2000. By 2018, after three trips to Burning Man and a plunge into what I call the “deep New Age,” I was fully immersed in the conspiracy worldview: galactic civilizations, the moon being fake, the works.

I’ve said many times in this series that when you throw out a biblical framework for reality and go shopping, you end up in some very strange aisles. I should know, because I wandered those aisles for years.

Then I became a Christian in 2020. Like many New Age converts, shortly thereafter I burned my tarot cards and books, smashed my idols with a hammer, and threw out what I couldn’t break.

But there was one thing I didn’t destroy, because I didn’t recognize it for what it was: the conspiracy worldview, itself. That was the last piece of the New Age that had to be sanctified out of me.

And it didn’t start happening until July 2024, after Stone Choir and when I started reading Black Sun. So for me, “Chapter 14: Conspiracy Beliefs and the New World Order,” was uncomfortably like looking in a mirror.

The Poison at the Bottom of the Well

Here’s what Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke documents in this chapter, which he published in 2002. At the very foundations of the American conspiracy movement sit two men, Bill Cooper and David Icke. Before there was an Alex Jones, before there was an Ian Carroll, before there was a Joe Rogan mainstreaming conspiracy content in a cloud of bong smoke, there was Cooper and Icke.

Both of them—explicitly and by name—cited the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as central to their worldview.

Bill Cooper’s landmark book, Behold a Pale Horse, published in 1991, includes a complete reprint of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as its fifteenth chapter. He included the full text of the 1923 Victor Marsden translation. Cooper suggested readers substitute “Illuminati” for “Jews” and “cattle” for “goyim,” but he printed the Protocols in full and built his conspiracy framework on top of them.

His book sold over half a million copies.

Similarly, David Icke in his 1994 book The Robots’ Rebellion, quoted extensively from the Protocols while commenting on how their plans had been realized in current political developments. When confronted with the fact that Hitler used the Protocols to incite antisemitism, Icke responded (in classic New Age fashion) that “because Hitler used knowledge for negative reasons doesn’t reflect on the knowledge itself.” Meanwhile, Icke expressly acknowledges Cooper’s Behold a Pale Horse as a source.

Now here’s the scary part: in Black Sun, Goodrick-Clarke documents that investigators found extremist groups were pursuing a deliberate strategy of entryism through David Icke. Far right and Neo Nazi groups purposefully targeted him, intending to use his platform to disseminate their ideas into the New Age and Green movements.

Read that last sentence again and think about your favorite conspiracy-friendly podcaster.

This is not about the Protocols as a fringe document from history that the conspiracy industry stumbled upon. Instead, the Protocols is the conspiracy industry’s foundation. Nor was the conspiracy world “infiltrated” by the Protocols. It was built on them.

Bill Cooper didn’t toss in the Protocols in as a curiosity or an afterthought. He printed the entire text and constructed his worldview from it… while throwing in a couple of shallow word substitutions to protect himself from charges of bigotry later.

Three years later, David Icke cited Bill Cooper. The next generation of conspiracy content creators cited David Icke. And now millions of people consume conspiracy content every day without knowing they’re standing on a rotten foundation.

So if you’ve been listening to me talk about Hyperborean edits, Savitri Devi, and Miguel Serrano while thinking, “That has nothing to do with me”… guess what? If you listen to Joe Rogan, if you watch Tucker Carlson, if you follow Ian Carroll, or if you consume—or produce!— any conspiracy content at all, you need to think twice.

You’re not several steps removed from the Protocols. You’re one step removed.

The only difference between you and the guy posting Hyperborean edits is that he went digging and found what’s at the bottom. You just haven’t dug deep enough yet.

Because there is no road through the conspiracy industry that doesn’t end at Bill Cooper. Even Art Bell of Coast to Coast AM didn’t start getting into conspiracy content until the early 1990’s, right when Cooper published his book.

Let me be clear: that doesn’t make everyone who enjoys conspiracy content an antisemite. But it means the well you’re drinking from was poisoned at the source, and ignorance of that fact won’t make the water clean.

The Consent of Your Conscience

This is the part that should alarm everyone with a living conscience, and especially Christians. Goodrick-Clarke explains that the conspiracy worldview always arrives at the exact same destination:

“Because war is being waged against you, you are justified in waging war back.”

Those words aren’t stated as plainly today. But in the old days, conspiracy content creators were much more open about it. Cooper said explicitly in 1991 that peaceful citizens are justified in taking “any measures, including violence, to identify, counterattack, and destroy the enemy.” Goodrick-Clarke calls this “a lethal projection.” In other words, by accusing others of being tyrants, you are vindicated in being a tyrant in response.

That was the intended function of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and is why Norman Cohn called his book Warrant for Genocide. The Protocols don’t just describe a conspiracy, they provide the moral license to act. They give men the consent of their conscience to commit violence, using a straightforward logic: if the Jews—or the elites, or the Illuminati, or whatever word you substitute—are waging total war against you, then total war back is not just permitted. It’s required.

This is why young men who started with memes and podcasts end up in dark places. They probably didn’t set out to become extremists or antisemites. They set out to understand why their world felt broken. They went looking for answers.

And the answers they found that were packaged as entertainment, forbidden knowledge, or “what they don’t want you to know,” led them down a well that has poison at the source.

The Protocols have been disseminated worldwide since the late 1800s. Cooper put them in a bestselling book in 1991. Icke amplified them through the New Age. Finally, COVID opened the floodgates.

And now millions of people are consuming content shaped by a forged document that was designed to justify genocide.

There is nothing new under the sun. Or as I said in the recording: there is nothing new under the Black Sun, either.

Check Your Feed

If you’re wondering where all the antisemitism is coming from on X, in Telegram channels, in the comment sections and podcasts of Reformed pastors, you don’t need to look further than your own smartphone and the entertainment choices you’ve been making since 2020.

Don’t believe me? The first fifty pages of Black Sun are free on Kindle. Download them. Read them. If you recognize anything in there, buy the book.

Don’t take my word for it.

IMPORTANT NOTE:

Once again, this session ran longer than I intended. And even though Goodrick-Clarke’s “Conclusion: The Politics of Identity” is only a few pages long, it’s worthy of its own discussion. I intend to do that soon.

However, with a baby on the way who’s due anytime, circumstances may delay that session. I humbly request your patience, as I try to do this discussion the justice I believe that it deserves.

Thank you :)

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Black Sun Live Session #7 👇

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In 1960, Carl Jung wrote a letter to Miguel Serrano, the Chilean diplomat and Esoteric Hitlerist we covered a couple sessions back. Jung told Serrano he thought that the weakness of orthodox Christianity and the challenge of communism had placed the West in a spiritual predicament that looked to him a lot like pre-Nazi Germany in the 1920s.

Jung’s conclusion: “We are apt to undergo the risk of a further Wotanistic experiment. This means mental epidemy and war.”

That was more than sixty years ago. It reads like it was written this morning.

Chapter 13 of Black Sun is titled Nordic Racial Paganism. It explores the movements that have tried to replace Christianity with a race-based spirituality built on Norse mythology.

If you’ve been anywhere near the masculinity conversation, the Manosphere, or the “dissident right,” you’ve run into guys who are into this stuff. You probably just didn’t know the genealogy. They might not have, either. This chapter lays it out.

Three figures anchor Goodrick-Clarke’s narrative.

Wyatt Kaldenberg — His worldview was pure Manichaeanism, an eternal cosmic battle between the forces of light and dark. To him, Aryans embodied everything noble and divine, and Judeo-Christianity everything evil and demonic. Therefore, he believed Christianity should be abandoned for the tribal gods of pre-Christian Aryan/European peoples.

Kaldenberg hated Jews enough to say that Holocaust should be celebrated rather than denied. I’ll give him this much: in his prideful, hypermasculine boasting, he was courageous enough to be consistent. Better than I can say for most men into this stuff.

Jost Turner — Turner was a Vietnam vet who came home broken from the war and started seeking. He moved through flower power, to the Hindu guru Yogananda, then living in Yogananda’s Self-Realization Fellowship ashram, and finally into Norse paganism.

Turner built a National Socialist commune in Northern California called Volksburg, where he developed something called “Aryan Kriya,” attempting to syncretize his beliefs. His system included swastika-posture yoga—”swastikasana”—directed by a supposedly immortal Himalayan guru named Babaji, who was leading white people toward racial evolution.

That sounds insane. Guess what? It IS insane. And it’s what happens when you throw out biblical theology and go shopping. (And you revise Yogananda’s words, too.)

David Lane — A convicted murderer who died in prison serving a 190-year sentence. Lane is the author of the infamous “14 Words” credo: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

If you’ve seen the number 1488 on social media, that’s not a reference to a year. It’s code for Lane. It signifies the 14 words plus 88, which stands for HH, or “Heil Hitler,” using H as the 8th letter of the alphabet.

Now, here’s a problem. There’s another number, 1183, which is floating around in Reformed Christian circles. That number references Stephen Wolfe’s 11 words, “White evangelicals are the lone bulwark against moral insanity in America”—plus “Hail Christ.”

It showed up on Christmas ornaments made by Ethan Holden, aka The Jolly Brawler, who also made the infamous “White Boy Summer” video shared by many guys in the Christian Nationalist camp.

1488 to white supremacists. 1183 to Reformed Christians. It’s not a coincidence. These things are connected. They’re everywhere in the Christian Nationalist world, surrounding a few key figures.

And good men who should know better are remaining silent.

Returning to Lane himself, he rewrote the Beatitudes in his white supremacist vision. To Lane, “Blessed are the meek,” became, “Fortune smiles on a people whose visions are brave, bold, and determined.” And, “Love your enemies,” became, “Smite your enemies with the hammer of Thor and feed their bodies to vultures.”

That’s David Lane. That’s who wrote the 14 Words. My friend has more about Lane in this article.

Oh, and Lane’s 14 Words Press also published the first English-language edition of Miguel Serrano’s The Golden Chain: Esoteric Hitlerism. So if you’re wondering how the worlds of Esoteric Hitlerism and American white racial supremacy connect, there’s your proof. right. through. David Lane.

The Pipeline

The pattern across all three of these figures—Kaldenberg, Turner, and Lane—and in fact across every chapter of Black Sun is exactly the same. It looks like this:

1. Reject Judaism.

2. Therefore reject Christianity as a Jewish product.

3. Lose biblical anthropology, cosmology, theology.

4. Go shopping for something else. Land in Norse paganism, or Hinduism, or occultism, or some syncretistic mess of all three.

5. Layer the Protocols of the Elders of Zion on top as your grand explanatory framework for history.

6. Conclude that total war against immigrants, minorities, and especially Jews is justified, because total war is being waged against you.

And none of it is new. That’s what I keep saying. That’s what this entire Book Club series has been about.

The ideas flooding X, Telegram, and Discord didn’t appear out of nowhere after COVID. They have a documented genealogy going back from the 1990s, to the 1960s, to the 1930s, and finally, deep into the 1800’s and beyond.

Young men discovering this stuff for the first time might genuinely have no idea. I’ll give them that.

But the men who seeded those ideas into the rooms those young men walked into?

They absolutely know.

A Pagan Saw It Coming

And Carl Jung saw it coming. He saw proto-Wotanic “eruptions” (his word) in the German youth movement prior to 1914. This included sun worship, solstice rituals, and pagan symbolism. Jung then saw the full explosion after 1933 when the masses of the Third Reich were collectively seized by the Wotan archetype.

By 1960, Jung was already warning that conditions were already ripe for it to happen again.

I’m no fan of Jung, but he was right about one thing: how the weakness of orthodox Christianity contributes to that grave risk. As we’re discovering, that weakness can face leftward in the form of failing to defend doctrine and caving on cultural issues. But it can also face rightward, by refusing to confront the overt paganization happening inside your own digital house.

BOTH are weakness. Both leave a vacuum. And when Christianity vacates, the false European “father god” Wotan fills up the space.

An occult pagan mystic psychologist diagnosed this. In 1960.

Now here we are.

If you care about the men in your life who are imbibing these ideas, the best thing you can do is read. The first fifty pages of Black Sun are free on Kindle. Download them on your phone. Read them.

If you recognize anything in there, buy the book. Don’t take my word for it.

If you’re wondering what to do after that, take a stand. Get your favorite Reformed content creator, influencer, or pastor to do the same. This has to stop.

The Black Sun session on “Chapter 13: Nordic Racial Paganism” is available below for paid Substack subscribers, along with detailed notes from the session.

“Chapter 14: Conspiracy Beliefs and the New World Order” and Goodrick-Clarke’s Conclusion will receive their own session, because the material there is too important to rush.

The date for that is TBD. Become a paid subscriber for updates, and the link to join the live session when we record.

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Black Sun Live Session #6 👇

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There’s a version of men’s fellowship that most guys are afraid of, and rightly so.

You sit in a circle. Someone shares something heavy. Everyone gets quiet. Maybe someone cries a little. Or a lot. Then you all say “thanks for sharing” and go home feeling like you participated in something meaningful.

I don’t run that kind of group.

There’s also a version of men’s fellowship where nobody shares anything real at all. You talk about the sermon or the game. You pray for safe things. Then you drive home alone with the same weight you walked in with.

I don’t run that kind of group either.

For the past six months, I’ve been facilitating a group of Christian men who meet every other Tuesday night on Zoom. Reformed guys from different churches, different cities, and different industries. We’ve been through a lot together. And what I’ve watched happen in that room has taught me more about biblical masculinity than most books I’ve read on the subject.

Here’s what I’ve learned.

Lesson 1: Other men can see what you can’t.

We all think we understand our own situation. We’ve been living in it, thinking about it, praying about it. We’ve got the whole picture. Or so we think.

Then a brother says one simple sentence and the whole thing shifts.

This happens constantly in our group, and I love it. A man will lay out something he’s been wrestling with for weeks, and another man—often with a completely different background—will point out something so obvious that the whole room goes quiet. Not because it’s profound in some abstract way. Because it’s true, and the man couldn’t see it because he was standing too close.

This is what Proverbs 15:22 means when it talks about the counsel of many advisors. Not that you need a whole committee. But that your own perspective has blind spots, and trusted brothers can see into them.

Lesson 2: Your deepest struggle is probably not unique.

One of the most isolating things about carrying something hard is the belief that nobody else could possibly understand what you’re going through. That your grief, your failure, your fear is somehow yours alone.

Six months of watching men open up has forever cured me of that idea.

Almost every time a man shares something he’s been carrying quietly, another man in the room has lived through the same thing. Not something similar. The same thing.

And that man often has hard-won insight that didn’t come from a book. It came from walking through the fire and coming out the other side, with scars to prove it.

The isolation most men feel isn’t because their problems are unusual. It’s just because they’ve never been in a room where they felt comfortable enough to find out they’re not.

Lesson 3: You are not a burden.

Every man I’ve ever worked with hesitates before sharing something heavy. There’s a voice inside all of us that says, “Dude, don’t put this on them. They’ve got their own stuff. You should be able to handle this.”

Here’s what I’ve noticed: every man who thinks that way is also the first to lean in when another man shares something heavy. The desire to help is immediate and genuine. No one resents it, and no one thinks less of him. In fact, the men snap to attention and the room comes alive.

The idea that you’re a burden is a trick your mind plays on you. The reality is that every man in a room like this wants to help. You’re not taking something from them. You’re really giving them the chance to do what they were made to do.

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Lesson 4: Speaking it makes you accountable for it.

There’s something that happens when you say a problem out loud in front of men who know you. It stops being a private struggle you can manage quietly. It becomes something you’ve put on the table.

And you know that two weeks later, those men are going to ask you about it.

Sometimes that’s all it takes. It doesn’t need a strategy or a framework. Just the knowledge that you told your brothers you were going to deal with something, and they’re going to ask you how it went.

Lesson 5: A shared win is the best feeling there is.

When a man in the group has a breakthrough—he lands the job, has the hard conversation with a friend, calls his pastor, or makes the decision he’s been putting off—it doesn’t just feel good for him. The whole room celebrates. Especially when the brothers contributed to it, and when their counsel, challenge, or prayer was part of what moved him forward.

That’s what real fellowship produces. Not just comfort in suffering, but shared joy in victory. Both matter. But the victories are what make men come back.

And here’s the one that might surprise you:

Lesson 6: A men’s group doesn’t have to be a weepy emotional wreck.

This is the thing most guys are afraid of, and honestly, I get it. It’s a valid thing to be concerned about. A man who’s melting down in his feelings past the point of reason is a painful thing to watch.

But here’s what I’ve learned from six months in the room: Yes, good men have feelings about their lives. We’re supposed to. Those feelings are real and they matter.

But the feelings are not the point.

They’re signposts. They tell you something is going on underneath. Something about your marriage, your calling, your walk with God, your unprocessed grief.

In other words, the feelings point to the thing. But they are not the thing.

A good men’s group doesn’t sit around staring at the signposts. It reads them, and then moves toward what they’re pointing at.

We don’t ignore what we feel. That’s foolish, and only leads to bigger problems later. But on the other hand, we don’t set up camp there either.

Instead, we let the emotion show us where the work is, and then we do the work, together, grounded in Scripture, with men who are for each other and not against each other.

That’s what I’ve watched happen for six months. And it’s the most Christ-honoring fellowship I’ve been part of.

We have room for three more men.

The group meets every other Tuesday, 6:30–8:30 PM on Zoom. It’s $90/month, and I ask men to commit to spending three months with us, minimum.

We’re Reformed, and that theological Christ-centered perspective shapes everything.

If you’re roughly 30–45 years old, serious about your faith, and generally competent but missing the kind of brotherhood that helps you see what you can’t see on your own, this might be the room you’ve been looking for.

To join, you start with a screening call with me. It’s not a sales pitch. It’s a conversation to make sure this is right for you and right for the men already in the group.

Book a call here:

Book A Screening Call

Or DM me on this platform.

Three seats. Once they’re filled, they’re filled.

In the previous session of the “Black Sun” book club, I discussed Wilhelm Landig, Nazi UFOs, and Miguel Serrano’s Esoteric Hitlerism. Those chapters revealed what I called the Luciferian face of neo-Nazism. It’s colorful, fantastical, and virtually tailor-made for meme culture.

This session, that mask comes off.

We covered three chapters:

• White Noise and Black Metal (Ch. 10)

• Nazi Satanism and the New Aeon (Ch. 11)

• Christian Identity and Creativity (Ch. 12)

What emerges in these three chapters is the transition from the fantastical to the explicitly violent. In other words, from Lucifer to Satan.

The Luciferian imagery of Hyperborean gods and Aldebaran UFOs drew men in with fascination. But fascination has a shelf life. Beneath the colorful surface lies the darker face of neo-Nazism that most people actually recognize: the skinheads, the black metal underground, the satanic rituals, and the pseudo-Christian theologies of racial holy war.

Here’s what makes these chapters urgent: the men laundering neo-Nazi ideas into the mainstream today have scraped the skinhead aesthetic off and replaced it with Serrano’s symbolic language, but the worldview underneath is drawn from exactly these chapters.

The appealing imagery comes from Serrano. But the rage, the alienation, the ideology? They come from here.

An Important Announcement

Before getting into the session, I announced that the next book club selection will be Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion by Norman Cohn.

The Protocols show up in virtually every chapter of Black Sun. They appear today in the rhetoric of Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Chris Langan, and dozens of other influencers with massive followings. Sometimes the Protocols appear by name, more often by implication. Push far enough into the conspiracy world and you land at the Protocols every. single. time.

Warrant for Genocide was written in 1967. It’s rare, out of print, and copies run $40+ on eBay. Cohn did extraordinary primary-source research into where the Protocols came from: it was forged from Napoleonic French and Tsarist Russian source material, then launched into the world to become perhaps the most destructive document of the 20th century.

This matters because the Protocols are not a dusty relic. Chris Langan posted material referencing “the elders” to his hundreds of thousands of followers just last week. A young Christian influencer I know with more than 100,000 followers on X called me out of the blue last year and spent half our conversation arguing for the Protocols’ authenticity.

The grip this document has on men’s hearts is staggering, and Lord willing, the facts in Cohn’s book may be the cold water that loosens it. And if not, I pray that it protects others who are yet to be exposed.

We begin Warrant for Genocide in approximately four weeks. I have a digital copy of the book I will distribute to paid subscribers who wish to read along.

White Noise and Black Metal

Goodrick-Clarke opens this chapter by naming what many of his colleagues in academia find politically uncomfortable: increased immigration is fueling white identity movements. He doesn’t endorse this response. He simply observes, with increasing directness throughout the book, that the causal link is undeniable.

The skinhead phenomenon emerged in Britain in the late 1960s. By the mid-1970s, the National Front was recruiting skinheads as street fighting troops, and Ian Stuart Donaldson’s band Skrewdriver became their charismastic rockstar leader. Resistance Records was founded to produce and distribute the music.

The strategy was explicit: use popular music to broadcast racism to a new generation.

Stuart understood the power of the medium. “A pamphlet is read once,” he observed, “But a song is learned by heart and repeated a thousand times.”

The delivery mechanisms have changed over the years—from vinyl to CDs to YouTube videos to reels—but the strategy never does: compress dark ideas into cultural forms that spread through peer networks.

Goodrick-Clarke’s painted a familiar portrait of who got drawn in to skinhead gangs: young men from broken families, with minimal education, engaged in a desperate search for identity and peer recognition. These are the same phenomena I talk about every week. Only today the same phenomena show up in the crisis of fatherlessness, the collapse of tradition, and the absence of hierarchy and meaning which combine to produce radicalization.

I get pushback on this constantly. People tell me these young men all come from great families. Nonsense.

But it’s not only lower-class youth. William Pierce, author of The Turner Diaries, was a physicist. George Eric Hawthorne of Resistance Records was a savvy operator who turned a skinhead music label into a slick international operation. David Myatt was studying physics at Hull University while running a Nazi satanic order.

In other words, these ideas capture intelligent, educated men too.

The numbers in Germany tell a relatable story. Asylum applications rose from 30,000 per year in the early 1980s to over 400,000 by 1992. Alongside those numbers, neo-Nazi organizations grew 25% in three years. Surprise surprise. Meanwhile, the median age of those involved in extremist violence dropped from 27 to barely 19.

Here’s the thing: eighteen-year-old men don’t think rationally about immigration policy… or anything for that matter. They feel. And their most accessible emotion is anger.

Goodrick-Clarke closes the chapter by naming what white power music achieved: a set of passwords. Nietzschean anti-Christianity, Social Darwinism, racial intolerance, and white supremacy became the shared language of a right-wing youth culture spanning North America, Europe, and Australasia. In-group signals became gates for belonging. That’s the dynamic I described in “Eight Steps to Scapegoating” and it’s the same thing happening now.

Nazi Satanism and the New Aeon

This is where the book descends into undeniable darkness.

Behind the white power bands, Goodrick-Clarke writes, lurks an international network of small extremist groups devoted to Nazi Satanism, Nordic cosmology, magic, and occultism. Their staggering core belief: a new elite of supermen will sweep away the inferior masses and usher in a new aeon of planetary evolution.

Before getting to the worst of it, Goodrick-Clarke carefully distinguishes three strains of modern Satanism.

Aleister Crowley was an occultist who claimed direct communication with a spirit entity called Aiwass. His religion of Thelema was built on “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” He combined Nietzschean will-to-power with yoga and tantric sex magic.

Anton LaVey founded the Church of Satan in 1966, but he did not believe in a literal Satan. His Satanism was psychological: self-gratification, personal power, the purging of Christian morality. Satan was a principle, not a deity. This is Satanism as self-worship.

Michael Aquino broke from LaVey in 1975, taking a majority of his followers to form the Temple of Set. Unlike LaVey, Aquino believed in the objective reality of the devil. His rituals invoked the Prince of Darkness as an actual supernatural power.

The distinctions here matter more than it may seem. From God’s perspective, worshiping yourself in defiance of His law and worshiping a literal demonic entity may amount to much the same thing. But the movements are structurally different.

During the book club session, a participant named David raised a sharp question: is the racial self-worship we see on the right today essentially LaVeyan self-worship by proxy? It is just worshiping the self through worship of one’s ethnos?

I think that’s exactly right. It’s never framed in LaVey’s explicit terms, but the dynamic is the same. Alan Bloom wrote in The Closing of the American Mind that in the West today, the soul has been replaced with the self, which we worship. On the right, that self-worship now has an ethnic face.

Then there is David Myatt.

Myatt founded the Order of Nine Angles (ONA / O9A) in Britain. ONA was a Nazi satanic order that combined paganism, Hitler worship, and ritual magic. For Myatt, Satanism went far beyond LaVey’s pleasure principle. The true Satanist must “transcend his limitations” to make direct contact with “acausal sinister forces” in the cosmos. Access to these forces is provided through “nexions,” or gates opened by evil acts and blasphemous rituals.

Including human sacrifice. Myatt wrote actual guidelines for the selection and ritual execution of victims.

This is the logical endpoint of the will to power stripped of Christian moral constraint. When you reject the Bible and pursue personal and racial power as the highest good, the road doesn’t end in Hyperborean memes. It actually ends here.

Myatt also studied “Aeonics,” a theory that satanic ritual can channel cosmic energy into cycles of politics. He saw National Socialist Germany as “a practical expression of the Satanic spirit” and Hitler as a figure who had utilized acausal energy to achieve political goals. The Third Reich was, in his words, “a burst of Luciferian light in an otherwise [Christian], pacified, and boring world.”

When Nick Fuentes says “Hitler is cool,” is this what he’s channeling, even if unconsciously? Probably.

What happened to Myatt after this book was published is telling. He converted to radical Islam because he admired Islam’s posture against the West! The Islamists never accepted him, so he returned to neo-Nazism.

Eventually he disavowed all forms of extremism. Whether genuine repentance is possible for a man who wrote guidelines for ritual murder, I leave to God.

Christian Identity and Creativity

This chapter made me highlight entire pages.

Christian Identity is the theological engine behind a significant portion of the American white supremacist movement. Its doctrine: white Aryans are the true descendants of the biblical tribes of Israel, and the Jews are the literal children of the devil. They’re the offspring of a sexual union between Satan and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The forbidden fruit was supposedly a sex act, with Cain as the product. His descendants are the Jews, and everyone who isn’t white is a “pre-Adamic mud person.”

This is a mutilation of scripture. There is zero biblical evidence that Eve had sex with the serpent. But the theology is internally coherent enough to capture men who don’t read their Bibles, as it drapes racial grievances in the stolen-valor authority of biblical language.

Christian Identity grew out of British Israelism, a 19th-century movement that claimed the British were descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes. In fact, British Israelism was originally philosemitic. It honored the Jewish people as heirs of the two southern tribes.

Then it encountered the Protocols.

William J. Cameron, editor of Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent, introduced the Protocols to the American public and fused them with British Israelism. The result was the antisemitic mutation that became Christian Identity. A movement that once honored the Jewish people was warped into one that declared Jews the cosmic enemy.

This is how powerful the Protocols are. This is why we’re reading Warrant for Genocide next.

Richard Butler then established Aryan Nations at Hayden Lake, Idaho in 1974. It was 20 acres of razor wire, German Shepherds, and a watchtower draped with a swastika flag. He preached that Christian Identity gave whites “divine permission to hate.” His rallying cry: “As long as this alien tyranny of evil occupies our land, hate is our law and revenge is our duty.”

There are men today who call themselves Reformed Christian pastors who seem to believe they have divine permission to hate. I read Butler’s words and wonder if they’re not secretly heading in a Christian Identity direction.

Robert Matthews founded The Order in 1983: a terrorist cell that stole $3.8 million from a Brinks armored car, assassinated a Jewish radio presenter in Denver, and was destroyed by the FBI when its founder was killed in a hail of bullets, and his followers were sentenced to 100+ years in prison. Each.

Matthews’ final letter is a window into radicalization: a man who loved his son, feared for the future, read Oswald Spengler and the Protocols, and concluded that violent insurrection was the only answer.

Finally, Ben Klassen’s Church of the Creator rejected Christianity entirely as a “suicidal religion” that the Jews invented to destroy Rome. Klassen deified the white race and shouted “RAHOWA!” or RAcial HOly WAr.

Klassen’s apocalyptic vision was extermination: the white race and the “mud races” cannot coexist on the same planet. And when I read Klassen’s writings, I’m shocked by how closely the language mirrors what I encounter from contemporary influencers.

What all of these movements share is self-marginalization. They retreat to compounds in the wilderness, convinced they’re planting seeds for an impending Aryan renewal.

What they build instead are graveyards. Without external accountability, without biblical authority that is bigger, older, and higher than any man, ideas get refined and purified to become ever more destructive. Purity spirals beget races to the bottom, before the communities collapse like dwarf stars.

Someone told me during 2020 that Satan’s strategy is to lure individuals into the wilderness so they can be killed. Think of a shepherd’s flock: you lead one sheep away so the wolves can attack. That is precisely what happens in these communities, while the people inside them are deceived into believing they’re growing stronger.

Sadly, in the age of the internet, the people may retreat into the wilderness but the ideas don’t stay there. Now they percolate through the internet and surface in mainstream discourse, scrubbed of their origins.

When Candace Owens calls Jews “shapeshifters,” she is echoing Wesley Swift.

When influencers talk about a conspiracy that “must not be named,” they are talking about the Protocols.

When the reaction to strikes in Iran becomes “the tail wagging the dog,” the unspoken word is ZOG, or “Zionist Occupation Government.”

This is straight from the Christian Identity lexicon.

These are not new ideas. They are an unbroken chain stretching back decades.

What’s new is that influencers with millions of followers are providing air cover for men to bring them out of the shadows.

What Comes Next

The final Black Sun session will cover Nordic Racial Paganism, Conspiracy Beliefs and the New World Order, and the conclusion on the Politics of Identity.

Then we turn to Warrant for Genocide. I don’t expect it will change every mind. But my prayer is that seeing the primary sources—who forged the Protocols, why, and how—will loosen the hold this document has on men who have built their entire worldview around it.

If you’re listening to creators who talk about Jewish conspiracies, who reference a hidden hand, who speak of shapeshifters and dual loyalty and a conspiracy that must not be named, it’s time to start asking them very hard and direct questions.

Because this is exactly what’s going on.

Next Book Club Meeting

Thursday, March 20 2:00pm Pacific / 5:00pm Eastern

For discussion:

• Chapter 13: Nordic Racial Paganism

• Chapter 14: Conspiracy Beliefs and the New World Order

• Conclusion: The Politics of Identity

Video, audio, and session notes are available to paid subscribers 👇

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Black Sun Book Club – Thursday, March 5 at 2:30 pm Pacific

We’re now entering the most dangerous section of Black Sun.

This week we’ll cover:

• Chapter 10: White Noise and Black Metal

• Chapter 11: Nazi Satanism and the New Aeon

• Chapter 12: Christian Identity and Creativity

Up to this point, I’ve described the post-war esoteric right as having a “Luciferic” face: mythic, cosmic, aesthetically compelling, even creative in an unsettling way.

The authors wrote of Hyperborea, polar mysticism, Aldebaran, and Jungian archetypes. They took a counterfeit spirituality and dressed it up as high symbolism.

It glowed… but it was never neutral.

Now the glow fades.

When the Glow Fades

These next chapters of Black Sun document the shift from mythmaking to militant rage, and from romantic esotericism to its inevitable conclusion: explicit Satanism. Here, the rebellion against Christianity stops pretending to be abstract and philosophical, and instead becomes overt and direct.

No more games. The inversion is now intentional.

This isn’t a niche subculture story. It’s the missing link in understanding a portion of what’s happening right now in American political and online life.

And then we arrive at Christian Identity.

Christian Identity is not a meme. It is a racialized theological system that teaches that white Europeans are the true Israel and that Jews are literally the offspring of Satan. It has influenced militias, prison movements, extremist networks, and segments of online nationalist culture. And with the radicalization of the extreme right wing, the vocabulary of Christian Identity is now resurfacing in public-facing discussions.

This matters because we’re living through a period where many Christian men sense real cultural decline, institutional betrayal, demographic anxiety, and civilizational instability. Goodrick-Clarke references some of these same trends in his book, which was published in 2002.

Moments like that create psychic pressure. Under this pressure, reactionary movements either return to the well-lit ground of biblical clarity, or they reach into the murky darkness for myth.

Christian Identity is one of the most dangerous examples of what emerges from that darkness.

Christian Identity represents what happens when biblical language is severed from biblical doctrine, fused to racial grievance, and weaponized against human enemies instead of sin.

In other words, it’s a case study in theological mutilation.

If you care about the integrity of Christian thought in America—including what young men are consuming online—this chapter is not optional.

What We’re Reading Next

One update to our reading plan: American Veda will have to wait.

Our next book will be Warrant for Genocide by Norman Cohn. This book is the definitive scholarly study of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the conspiracy tradition that feeds both Serrano-style mythologies and Christian Identity.

If you’ve never heard of the Protocols, they are the major driver behind the resurgence of Jew-hatred on the extreme right. The notorious forgery claims to document a secret plan for Jewish world domination. As hard as it may be to believe, many young men and even successful influencers are now absorbing and propagating the worldview wholesale.

Cohn’s book traces the actual origins of the Protocols to political intrigue in Napoleonic France and anti-modernist propaganda in Tsarist Russia. Not a clandestine meeting of rabbis.

Cohn also shows how quickly, how widely, and how deeply the lie spread across the world, something that has gained renewed relevance today, sixty years after the book’s initial publication.

The book is rare and out of print, but I have a digital copy I can distribute to paid subscribers who want to follow along.

We’ll begin Warrant for Genocide in April.

Next Book Club Live Session

Join us Thursday, March 5 at 2:30pm Pacific. We’ll be covering the following chapters of Black Sun:

• Chapter 10: White Noise and Black Metal

• Chapter 11: Nazi Satanism and the New Aeon

• Chapter 12: Christian Identity and Creativity

Live sessions are available to paid subscribers of this Substack.

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In the last session of the “Black Sun” book club, I discussed Savitri Devi and the Nazi Mysteries. Those sections explain how popular culture stripped Nazis of their historic brutality and gave them an “occult mystique” that inadvertently made them fascinating instead of reprehensible.

This session, as promised, things get much weirder.

We covered three chapters:

• Wilhelm Landig and the Esoteric SS (Ch. 7)

• Nazi UFOs, Antarctica, and Aldebaran (Ch. 8)

• Miguel Serrano and Esoteric Hitlerism (Ch. 9)

What emerges across these three chapters is a pattern of incredible escalating fantasy.

After 1945, a group of former SS men in Vienna couldn’t accept that they’d been defeated. Rather than confronting what they’d done, they turned to occultism and racist myth-making. This led them to begin constructing an elaborate alternative reality on the thinnest slivers of historical fact.

Yes, German U-boats did surrender in Argentina, and yes, Himmler’s Ahnenerbe did fund Tibetan expeditions and engage in occult speculations. Those parts of history are real, and really weird!

But from these scraps, Nazi enthusiasts constructed—brace yourself—a mythology of secret polar bases, flying saucers, extraterrestrial Aryan origins, and a “last battalion” poised to sally forth from Antarctica and save the world from globalism and liberalism.

Any day now, right?

In all seriousness, this isn’t humorous fringe nonsense. Wilhelm Landig’s novels popularized the mystical “Black Sun” wheel symbol and planted seeds for neo-Nazi mythology in the 1990s underground. Ernst Zündel laundered Holocaust denial with one hand, while selling UFO sensationalism with the other.

And by the late 1970s, the wealthy and connected Chilean diplomat Miguel Serrano had woven every single thread—the Protocols, Kundalini yoga, Jungian archetypes, Gnosticism, Hindu avatars, UFOs, Julius Evola, and the Black Sun—into a unified system he called Esoteric Hitlerism.

Serrano is the convergence point. He’s where 40 years of post-war neo-Nazi mythmaking crystallized into something tailor-made for the internet age.

His theology and worldview is a colorful, syncretic, mystical Nazism that glosses over concentration camps with images of Hyperborean gods, astral travel, and Hitler escaping through a dimensional portal near Venus.

No, I’m not making that up.

This matters because Serrano’s cocktail of ideas—repackaged, meme’d up, and stripped of his name—is exactly what’s circulating in online spaces today. The Hyperborean imagery, the Black Sun edits, the Agartha references… it all traces back to one man and the fantastical ideas he wove together into a single, mystical tapestry.

As I argue in this session: what we’re seeing in these chapters is the Luciferian face of neo-Nazism. It’s colorful, fantastical, and appealing to young men’s imaginations.

But Lucifer always flips to reveal his true identity as Satan.

The remaining chapters of Black Sun will begin to show that darker face. And my prayer is that seeing the full picture will change how you understand what’s happening online, especially on the right.

You’ll hear much more in the Book Club. Full video and audio below.

Next Book Club Meeting
Thursday, March 6
2:30pm Pacific / 5:30pm Eastern

For discussion:

• Chapter 10: White Noise and Black Metal

• Chapter 11: Nazi Satanism and the New Aeon

• Chapter 12: Christian Identity and Creativity

The LIVE Book Club is available to all paid subscribers.

Subscribe now

Video, audio, and summary notes follow for paid subscribers 👇

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There’s a scene in the movie Fight Club where Tyler Durden tries to leave Project Mayhem.

Do you remember what happens? The members of his group threaten him.

That scene stuck with me, because while Chuck Palahniuk got a lot wrong about men, he got that part right. He was describing something real about how men’s groups work when they go bad.

This is something I’ve watched in the men’s movement. It happened in the public-facing Manosphere, in private group chats I was in during COVID, and I see it happening in the mainstream “masculinity” conversation now, too.

Men have built vibrant online communities around shared pain and need, because the challenges they’re addressing are real. But all too often, those communities become something you’re not allowed to question or leave.

This isn’t ever formally stated, of course. But try poking at a core dogma by identifying how it has a blind spot. “Guys, have you ever considered...?”

You’ll find out pretty quickly where you stand.

This pattern is consistent in men’s communities today. And I think pastors, faith leaders, fathers, and even movement followers need to know about it, to identify broken dynamics before they progress from bad to worse.

The C-Word

The word cult has a spooky aura, with overtones of authoritarianism and domination. These are both valid, but I think they’re imprecise measurements. Because what looks like a healthy hierarchy to one person can seem like ruthless domination to another, especially in an age where we’ve lost sight of what righteous authority looks like.

As usual, I’ve found that etymology contributes productively to the discussion. Etymology Online says “cult” is derived from the Latin cultus, which means “care, labor; worship, reverence.” You can see this root supporting words like agriculture and cultivate. There’s a sense of intention and directed growth towards a defined purpose.

In organizational terms, however, these things make “a cult” more of a feeling than anything specific. And feeling alone is a problematic way for people to determine what’s happening to them in the moment.

For example, a faithful pastor like mine can cultivate his flock. But so did David Koresh and Jim Jones with theirs. If a man is using the subjective feeling of being “cultivated,” it might be easy for him to confuse the two. (Though my pastor doesn’t wear sunglasses while preaching.)

Therefore, I think a more precise definition is required.

So I define a “cult” with a measurable, objectively-verifiable standard: any organization you are materially punished for leaving voluntarily.

I like this definition for a couple reasons. First, because it measures external behavior, not internal intention. I don’t know what’s in any man’s heart. But I can know and document what he does in response to me.

I also like my definition’s flexibility (if I do say so, myself) because it can be applied in non-religious contexts where bad behavior still thrives, like informal social groups.

For example, if you decide to voluntarily leave your bowling league, and the president of the league leaves a negative review of your small business on Google—or induces others to do the same—that will feel kinda “culty” for good reason. While this behavior happens rarely, it does happen. (Nothing against bowling, btw)

Behaviors like this are especially troubling in religious contexts, of course, because coercion and faith are rightly regarded as antithetical. God could have compelled us to love Him. He could have reached into Adam and Eve’s hearts and forcibly halted their desire to sin.

He didn’t. Instead, the Lord gave us our measure of free will specifically to prevent us from being coerced into loving and choosing Him.

As much as I’d like to chase a clarifying rabbit down a Calvinistic hole, I think that’s better saved for another time. Instead, I’ll simply stop at the observation that coercion in the name of God isn’t just wrong, it’s a contradiction of His design.

The Blood Oath You Didn’t Sign

Whereas people largely identify cult-like behavior in religion (Jim Jones, David Koresh, Heaven’s Gate, etc.), I believe we’re now seeing it in the mainstream men’s movement, too.

Again, none of this is made explicit to insiders. Upon joining a Signal chat, no one is told that they’ve made a blood oath to the bros. Instead, the cult-like behavior shows up in the internal dynamics of the group. Asking “the wrong questions” suggests that while being inside the group, you’re still outside it, or working on behalf of those who are. This is a huge problem, because the desire to improve the group by asking intelligent questions is understood instead as an attempt to destroy the group.

So skeptical members encounter comments like the following, often in not-so-many words:

“We don’t question [insert idea].”
“We don’t question this speaker or that creator.”

Wait, really—why not?

I don’t believe in any earthly authority that exists beyond question. But there’s a consistent pattern in conversations about masculinity: once you start questioning core dogmas or personalities, you get called a cuck, a simp, or a beta.

Don’t believe me? Try pushing back on disparaging statements about women made by Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes, or Rollo Tomassi, author of the core Manosphere text The Rational Male. Attempting to grant women innate worth as being made in the image of God (Gen 1:27) invites a hate-storm. Their favored term for Bible-believers is “Christ-cuck.”

Try doing the same in private communities who support those men. You’ll get it double.

Then if you change your mind and leave? Or worse, if you leave and warn others about what you were involved in? Don’t be surprised to see your private chats sprayed all over your X timeline, with epithets, memes, and insulting AI artwork included.

Public name-calling and reputation destruction are forms of shaming. Public shaming is an attempt at material punishment. Material punishment for dissent is my definition of cult behavior.

If I’m a loser for disagreeing with you, first of all, that’s not an argument. Second, that bullying dynamic is exactly why groups of men invite suspicion today.

The “First Rule of Fight Club” is famously that you’re not allowed to talk about Fight Club. The second rule might as well be, “You’re not allowed to question Fight Club, either.”

The Product You’re Following

Our pervasive online life today obscures an important distinction: a personality is not a person. In fact, someone’s personality is just a sliver of who they are.

A person is a three-dimensional, 24-hour-a-day thing. He sleeps. He eats. He calls his mom. He has weaknesses, hangups, and quirky habits. He has preferences and moods on both good days and bad.

A personality, on the other hand, is more-or-less consistent. The goal is to provide the same thing every time, as much as humanly possible. This is why TV hosts are called TV personalities. When the cameras roll, they’re a product.

But a multi-dimensional person can’t actually become a product. So it’s better to view “social media personalities” like performers... with one big difference: they’re in a totalizing role.

Social media personalities don’t just read teleprompters for an hour in the evening or play scripted characters onscreen. The role they’re playing is themselves. And because the role is total, any break in the consistency of performance gets framed in such a way as to feed into it. Otherwise, the “willing suspension of disbelief” that hides the person/personality divide will slip, and we’ll see behind the curtain in ways that shatter the illusion.

You can see this on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok all the time, the confessional-sounding video that begins, “Sorry, I’m down today guys, but here’s why.” Then they carefully fit their mood into the narrative they’ve established in their content overall. The apparent “break” is all just part of the show.

And when it isn’t? That’s when content empires get destroyed in a day.

So when you follow a creator, what you’re interacting with isn’t a whole man. It’s a part of him. There’s the perception of interacting with a person, especially if he’s able to create the impression that he’s being genuine. But it’s just not true.

As a podcast host and content creator, I include myself in this. You’re not here with me while I’m cleaning my office or snoring when I sleep (hypothetically-speaking, of course.) I also wake up every day with different moods and feelings about my life. All of this makes me a person.

But when the camera rolls to record a podcast, I have to set all that aside for my guest and, ultimately, for my audience. Even in my most comfortable formats, I’m still a personality. As is every other man you interact with in this space.

That may be illusion-breaking, because we all long for connection. But embracing this reality is vital for what comes next.

Funnels, Not Fathers

Believe it or not, all of this is fine for what it is. After all, celebrity culture is nothing new.

In the case of the masculinity conversation, however, a novel problem has entered through the door of economics. And it’s what makes the whole thing dangerous.

For those who don’t know the term, a “sales funnel” is a system used to generate income for a content creator. It works like this:

First, he gets you on his email list. Then he tries to sell you a five-dollar product. Those five-dollar customers become candidates for a hundred-dollar, thousand-dollar, and even ten- or fifteen-thousand-dollar products.

As you move through those sales levels, the content creator is “working you through his funnel.” The objective is to derive the maximum amount of income over the duration of the relationship with each customer. The technical term is “CLV,” or “customer lifetime value.”

Now look, I don’t have a problem with people making money. I’d rather there be 87,000 men’s coaches than 87,000 IRS agents. And every business makes money by selling you an entry-level product or service, and then trying to bring you back to buy more of that product/service, or additional products/services at a higher cost. This is basic business practices, and there’s nothing wicked about it.

But in the masculinity conversation, there is an enormous blind spot. Men in this space are standing in for fathers.

We exist as a movement because of the war on manhood and masculinity. There was no need for men like me just three or four generations ago. Why would you need to listen to the gramophone—or the radio, or the hardwood-encased cathode-ray TV—about being a man?

You wouldn’t, because your dad showed you, alongside your grandfathers and other men in your family.

These fathers, grandfathers, and righteous men in the family and church still exist. I’m blessed to know some of them, like my pastor. But they’re rare enough that an entire multi-billion dollar worldwide industry has sprung up to fill the vacuum.

Somewhere in the mid-20th century, too many men gave up. The reasons why are too numerous to explore in this piece. But suffice it to say that the men leading the masculinity conversation today, standing in for our absentee relatives and leaders?

THEY AREN’T OUR FATHERS.

They may act fatherly, but in many cases their goal is the funnel. They’re not giving self-sacrificially like a father does. On some level, they’re hoping to receive in return—in some cases, millions of dollars.

Again, I don’t have a problem with people making money. I offer my own mentorship program, and it costs money. Because men’s need for guidance is real, and so is other men’s need to eat and build a living based on what they know about the topic. So this isn’t to incriminate coaching or coaches as a whole. If so, I’d only be incriminating myself.

But let’s put the pieces together.

You have a small sliver of a man, a personality—which might be entirely an act—presenting himself as a complete person and playing upon men’s societal father hunger. He’s doing this in order to make money, sometimes lots of it, and often unethically with high-pressure sales tactics and false promises he can’t or won’t deliver on.

And in this situation, you’re not allowed to ask questions or leave, or you’ll be punished, most often through shame and name-calling.

I call that a cult... of personality.

Scripture has a word for this. The prophet Ezekiel describes leaders who feed themselves instead of the flock:

“You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fat ones, but you do not feed the sheep. The weak you have not strengthened, the sick you have not healed, the injured you have not bound up, the strayed you have not brought back, the lost you have not sought, and with force and harshness you have ruled them.” — Ezekiel 34:3-4

That’s the pattern. Men are crying out for fathers, and wicked men hear that cry as a revenue opportunity.

The sheep are hungry. And the shepherds are hungry too.

This is by no means exclusive to the men’s movement. But it’s dangerous in the men’s movement specifically because our society is desperate for fathers. That desperation can be exploited, and often is.

If you have a seven-figure year making content, what are the odds that’s going to go to your head? That you’ll begin to think you are the answer, and other sources of healing and transformation aren’t?

We have a real problem in America with knowing when enough is enough, do we not?

If you as a man make money on your personality, it’s easy to let the personality take over past the point where you stop being a person. And if the men around you reinforce a policy of no question-asking, you become unaccountable. Then you get lost.

And so do they.

Hand Over the Keys, Old Man

When I first offered some of these observations in a solo podcast episode in 2023, the Manosphere was still mostly an internet subculture. Andrew Tate had surfaced pieces of it during his 2022 explosion into mainstream awareness. Dr. Jordan Peterson had also touched on parallel topics, though his education technically placed him outside the Manosphere umbrella.

Since then, the old Manosphere has imploded. But the ideas didn’t disappear.

Instead, they’ve gone mainstream through figures like Nick Fuentes, podcast host Myron Gaines, live-streamer Sneako, and “looksmaxxing” influencer Braden Peters, aka Clavicular. Take this for what it’s worth, but in 2025 Grok also claimed that Andrew Tate’s War Room was generating up to $8 million per month.

If “cults of personality” used to be a dangerous corruption of an otherwise necessary system, the cult has now become the product, especially for Gen Z men.

A couple years ago, disliking Andrew Tate meant that you were a “Boomer.” Feeling the same way about Nick Fuentes today means you’re “out of touch with young men’s pain.” And if you question Clavicular’s use of methamphetamines and testosterone replacement therapy? You must want young guys to be fat, ugly, and alone.

Hand over the keys already, old man! Your time has passed.

In this way, identifying with these influencers and their groups signals belonging not just to a club, but to a whole generation. And this generation has defined itself in opposition to everything that’s come before.

The fundamental problem hasn’t changed. When a personality reaches millions instead of thousands, the cult dynamics scale with it. The funnel gets wider and the father hunger gets exploited at volume, often by men who are younger than their own followers!

Meanwhile, the cost of questioning gets higher, because now there are millions of men ready to call you a cuck for asking.

What This Costs

These cults of personality don’t serve anyone. The leaders are incentivized to bring forth the worst aspects of themselves, which they gratefully do. The cults don’t serve the men in them, because the sheep are getting feasted on instead of fed. And they don’t serve our societal father hunger, either. A wayward older brother definitionally can’t meet the need.

The apostle James is blunt about this, at least in a Christian context: “Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness” (James 3:1). Any man with a platform, however, carries a weight he may not even realize. And Christ Himself is even more direct about what happens when leaders cause the vulnerable to stumble:

“Temptations to sin are sure to come, but woe to the one through whom they come! It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were cast into the sea than that he should cause one of these little ones to sin.” — Luke 17:1-2

The further we go into this dynamic, the worse it potentially gets when it all blows up.

And it will blow up. In some ways, it already has.

The original Manosphere collapsed because the nakedness of sinful men was revealed in their sexual deviancy, infidelity, substance abuse, and explosive temperaments.

Godless men will not, cannot solve the problem of father hunger. Like a man lost at sea drinking seawater to quench his thirst, they’ll only make it dramatically worse.

The great economic heights will be followed by crushing emotional depths when the truth comes out. And young men who already felt fatherless will end up feeling betrayed on top of it.

Son, Come Home

Many sons today are trying to resolve a hunger that history has likely never known. Never before has the world had so many living fathers, and so little fathering.

What are we to do with this?

In various ways, I’ve been participating in the conversation about masculinity for 25 years. I first started asking, “What does it mean to be a man?” in a college psychology course in 2001. I discovered the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement—inspired by Robert Bly’s bestselling book Iron John—in 2013. YouTube introduced me to the Manosphere in 2018, and I became a content creator in that space in 2020.

In 2021, I even attempted to produce and direct a Netflix-style documentary series about the history of the masculinity discussion. I crafted a 3-minute promotional trailer and a 20-minute mini-documentary with my footage, which I collected over a 14,000 mile road trip across the U.S. that summer.

From my own life story, I can tell you that this dialogue is both needed and useful. My intention with this piece is not to disparage the conversation as a whole, merely to point out where and how it’s going wrong.

But as I also learned, the answers the world provides are, at best, incomplete. Because after more than two decades of searching—through psychology, men's groups, world religions, psychedelics, and every secular framework I could find—I became a Christian.

I had run to the end of all of those roads, and found… nothing. In a real sense, Christ was my last stop. I knew if the answers weren’t there, they were nowhere.

So I went down into the water of the Spokane River, came back up, and found the beginning of those answers waiting for me on the shore.

Since then I’ve come to learn that if a man doesn’t have God above him, he becomes his own god. And for every young boy—at least for a brief time—his father IS god. So, fatherless men are seeking out father substitutes from men who are playing god.

Yet for all its brokenness, this still connects with a deep need dwelling in men’s souls today, a masculine “groaning too deep for words” (Rom 8:26).

Again, I don’t fault fatherless men for seeking. Nor do I fault most leaders, coaches, and content creators for trying. In meeting halls, offices, forests and in my own life, I have witnessed the depth of men’s pain in ways I cannot forget. A bandage on a grievous wound isn’t as good as sutures. But it’s better than bleeding out.

Praise God, the sutures are available. And antiseptic, medicine, and rest.

Because the answer is hiding in plain sight: in the loving, devoted relationship between God the Father, and Christ His Son.

Christianity is explicit that God reveals Himself to us in a loving Trinitarian bond between three masculine persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is a powerfully masculine vision, and it offers a satisfaction for father hunger that no other man can match.

This Father doesn’t punish you for asking questions. He invites them. “Come now, let us reason together” (Isaiah 1:18). God isn't a personality performing wholeness from behind a screen — He is whole! "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change" (James 1:17). And He isn’t running a funnel. Church is free, the preaching is free, the sacraments are free, and even some Bibles are free.

Because the price was already paid. It just wasn’t paid by you.

This Father doesn’t just feed our minds and hearts, but our very souls, forever.

No personality can do that. No funnel leads there.

And brother, if I’ve learned one thing in all my years of searching, it’s this: just one man, the God-Man, calls us home to Him:

A Field Guide for the Road Ahead

If you’re a young man exploring the online dialogue about masculinity, welcome. Truly.

With your help, we might be able to fix our society’s perspective on men and manhood in a generation or two, Lord willing.

But before you venture forth into this wild land, you’ll need some tools for how to avoid the cults of personality that you’re all but guaranteed to encounter.

As a veteran of these conversations (full story here and here) these are my recommendations for followers, fathers, and faith leaders on how to mark and avoid dangerous circles in the early stages.

See it. First, know when you’ve entered into or are participating in a cult of personality. Be aware that you’re not interacting with a man—even me—but rather just a sliver of him. And make sure that he’s willing to be honest about that.

Note that just because you’re spending money on a creator doesn’t mean you’re in a cult of personality. By all means, reward creators you draw value from! But when you start feeling that it’s becoming about the man rather than his creations, run.

Examine group dynamics. Be mindful of what happens when a man leaves the group you’re in. What gets said about him in private after he departs the group chat? Then watch what gets said in public.

Sometimes legitimate conflicts do arise, and men’s egos are a real thing—especially in text-based channels that lack body language and tonal cues. Also, if we’re being real, how a man asks his questions is as important as the questions he asks. A man who asks good questions while being a jerk about it will (and should) wear out his welcome, if he doesn't course-correct his attitude.

But if honest questions asked in a spirit of sincerity are consistently shut down without good answers, and if you get the sense that a respectful man with good insights is being “othered,” that’s a marker of a dangerous dynamic you need to be prepared to avoid.

Also note, the men who follow a creator can form a cult of personality around him without him even knowing. If you feel like this may be the case, and that others have become bullies in his name, let him know.

Diversify your intake. Don’t dive too deeply into any one secular perspective on masculinity. Read and absorb from many different sources, both modern and ancient. Every man has at least something to teach, even if it's how NOT to be. Similarly, watch out for the idea that any one man has all the answers for your life, or anyone else’s.

Ask questions. Exercise your discernment. Be curious. Ask, “Is this true? Is something being left out? What am I not seeing about this man or this teaching that might lend important context?” Be critical, including and especially of yourself.

Find a church. Not a podcast. Not a Discord server. Not a livestream. A physical church with a real pastor who knows your name, where you sit across from other men and are known.1

The father hunger you're trying to resolve will not be resolved through your smartphone. It will be resolved in a pew, at a table, in a room where a man can look you in the eye and ask how you're actually doing.

Give him the real answer.

If this resonated with you, subscribe. I write about Christianity, culture, and the formation of men. I examine the spiritual forces shaping modern narratives, where they fail, and what faithful living actually costs. You can also find me on YouTube.

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Every time someone writes a viral article about how AI is about to take your job, eat your sandwich, and sleep with your wife, I recommend you do one thing:

Get a paid account with Claude or ChatGPT. Whichever. (I have both.)

Then use it for a day on something mission-critical to your business. Not writing emails or churning spreadsheets. The sort of thing only YOU can do.

You will see, as I do every day, that the mystical aura and apocalyptic fear around these tools is pure hype.

Claude and ChatGPT lie. They make stuff up. They fail to follow even basic instructions. You can craft the perfect prompt, and they will still fail to produce a consistent outcome from it.

And they’ll kiss your butt the entire time while they do.

Can you get great outputs with these tools? Sure. I can hit the jackpot on a slot machine too. But that’s not a financial plan.

Tech people are famous for believing “This new innovation is gonna change everything forever! *I* am gonna change everything forever!”

And I learned that tech people will question absolutely anything… except that idea. That is the forgone conclusion that they live inside: that technology will fix the world forever and ever, and they are the ones to show us the way.

Some of them fancy themselves prophets of approaching change, like the author of the viral post I screenshotted. Others are high priests, with their wizardly words and techniques. And there are a few kings of their world, mostly CEO’s who hope to lead a new global-technocratic empire.

But I might remind Matt Shumer that COVID was a giant nothingburger of media-created hype.

You know who actually died of COVID? Senior citizens (80+) and those with 4 or more comorbidities, like advanced Type 2 diabetes, emphysema, and obesity. (This data was already available in summer 2020 btw.)

Many of these were people who had so abused their bodies with poor lifestyle choices that a Chinese Frankenstein lab monster could finish them off easily… following a ride on a government-subsidized ventilator. An image that was also used to terrify grandma and grandpa into submission at the isolated end of their lives.

You know who DIDN’T die of COVID? Healthy adults with low BMI’s, and children.

Oh sure many of them died *with* COVID, thanks to PCR tests that gave pieces of fruit false positives. But hey, those rookie numbers had to be pumped up somehow.

Besides, Pfizer needed a testing ground for new tech. Which led to a whole bunch of “suddenly” for a couple years.

Remember that? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

I bring all that up because Matt Shumer uses COVID as a framing device for coming change. But COVID was pure hype facilitated by global special interests to get you to think differently about your life, your liberty, and your relationship with technology and the State.

When you look seriously at COVID—past the shrieking flight attendants and dancing nurses—nothing was there but illusion and propaganda. Especially not for healthy, aware, and conscientious people.

Which is why everyone who didn’t take the jab is still here, and doesn’t regret that decision at all.

So yeah, if you’re a “senior citizen” at your job with 4+ comorbidities of laziness, low effort, and a lack of a desire to innovate or contribute, maybe AI will take your position. Before it rummages through your fridge at midnight and plays fetch with your dog.

Or you can do what humans do: work harder, think better, and grow as a person. Stop streaming and swiping and start reading.

Then go touch grass, which AI can’t do. It’ll never know what it means to lay in the sun at the park on a warm day.

Because AI is not human and cannot replace real humans.

So stop being afraid of diseases and computers and murder hornets, or whatever else the media tells you. (Next week it’ll be UFO’s.)

And remember: COVID and AI have a lot more in common than this author lets on. The “killer app” might just be “killer hype.”

Go see for yourself.

This article was originally posted on X.

Additional posts skeptical of Shumer’s claims, and AI more broadly:

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The last Book Club session on Julius Evola generated some attention.

A clip I posted on X about his influence in New Right / alt Right / Dank Right circles surprised some people who hadn’t realized how deep his fingerprints go. Some knew already, praise God. But most didn’t.

I’ve had conversations with friends and colleagues since then as they’ve begun to recognize Evola’s themes woven through modern dissident right thinking—“hiding in plain sight,” as it were. My sincere prayer is that this work continues to spread, and more people see what’s been percolating under the surface is now rising into public consciousness.

This past week we covered three chapters: Imperium and the New Atlantis, Savitri Devi and the Hitler Avatar, and The Nazi Mysteries.

This is where things get weird, and they don’t stop being weird.

As we learned in session 1, Lincoln Rockwell drove a “hate bus” around and led street provocations. In session 2, we saw how Colin Jordan did the same in England.

What both men shared in common was that they focused on material concerns like ground-level activism, public confrontation, and what we might call “earthly” grievances. They used Nazi symbolism explicitly to refer to the actual, historical Nazis.

Yes, Rockwell had a moment of “universal awareness” where he felt called to continue Hitler’s mission. But that cosmic consciousness wasn’t his emphasis. He wanted provocative violence in the streets.

Julius Evola, on the other hand, marked a shift into something else entirely. He took Neo Nazism into explicitly cosmological territory.

Before we continue, one important note is that Black Sun isn’t organized linearly by time. Rockwell didn’t lead to Jordan who led to Evola in sequence. Instead, their streams of thought (if you want to call it that) run parallel, intersect, and then influence groups across the subsequent decades.

For example, Evola was already active before the war. His ideas then sprang back up afterward, infusing neo-Nazi movements with dark spiritual life.

So, think of Black Sun as layers of transparency that Goodrick-Clarke is separating for us to illustrate the complicated picture underneath.

This is important, because rhe material we covered this week includes both the post-war era AND thinkers who were active in the 1850s through the 1930s. And that’s what I mean about these ideas percolating in the underworld for a long time. Before the internet, they circulated in obscure publications, fringe communities, and bulletin board systems (BBS’es for you 90’s kids). When conspiracy thinking went mainstream, they flooded out from exile directly into online communities, feeding what young men think about history, masculinity, and meaning.

That’s why I’m doing this work.

The Spiritual Foundation

In chapters 4 and 5, Black Sun focuses on three key figures in the development of the postwar neo-Nazi religious worldview: Francis Yockey, James Madole, and a woman named Savitri Devi.

Francis Parker Yockey wrote his work Imperium in 1948, when the rubble had barely stopped smoking in Europe. He was working from a premise called “meta-historical antisemitism,” or the idea that “Aryans” and “Semites” (Jews) have been locked in a Manichean struggle between light and dark since the beginning of time. Yockey in turn was borrowing from Oswald Spengler’s work Decline of the West, which similarly claimed that Jews exploited rationalism, capitalism, and democracy to destroy Western traditions.

To justify his worldview, Yockey even gave an early version of Holocaust denial, claiming that the gas chambers had been faked. And Imperium is dedicated to “the hero of the Second World War, Adolf Hitler.”

Is all this sounding familiar?

As Goodrick-Clarke writes: “It is impossible to overestimate Yockey’s importance in early postwar Nazi networks.” (Black Sun, p.77)

The second key figure of this section, James Madole, was celebrated as “the father of post-war occult fascism.” For more than three decades he haunted the New York City streets calling for fascist revolution. His National Renaissance Party (NRP) also fused political beliefs with occult spirituality, drawing from Theosophy, Hinduism, paganism, and satanism. It had even been confirmed that Madole had a satanic altar in his apartment with an image of Baphomet (p. 83).

Common to many satanists and pagans, Madole saw Christianity as Jewish in origin, and condemned it as a Semitic aberration forced upon the proud Aryans. And similar to Evola’s idea of authoritarian spiritual elitism, Madole saw his NRP “Security Echelon” activists as occult warriors upholding the order of the cosmos.

The third figure, Savitri Devi (born Maximiani Portas) played a pivotal role via her creation of a Hindu-baesd framework for Hitler veneration. Devi adopted the Hindu cycle of ages, agreeing with Evola that the modern era is located in the Kali Yuga. And Devi believed Adolf Hitler was an avatar of Vishnu, a divine incarnation sent to redeem humanity. She didn’t mean this metaphorically, she meant it literally. Her Hitler cult even included prayers to Shiva while clasping Hitler’s likeness to her breast, and reading the Nazi Party program alongside the Bhagavad Gita.

She was no fringe figure in neo-Nazi circles, either; her books inspired Lincoln Rockwell, William Pierce, and Colin Jordan, and she was a founding member of the World Union of National Socialists (WUNS) at their camp-conference in 1962. Through Rockwell and Pierce, her ideas about Hitler’s significance as an avatar and savior for “the white race” reached an international readership.

In other words, the founders of the neo-Nazi movement in the United States and Britain loved her work.

Again, none of this is Christian, nor has it ever been. Neo Nazi cosmology and anthropology is explicitly anti-Christian AND anti-Jewish. This has been the spirit animating Nazi beliefs in the underground of the internet for 80 years or more.

The Mystification

In perhaps one of the most important sections of the book, chapter six shows how Nazis were stripped of their negative stigma and infused with occult mystical power. The great losers of World War 2 were invested with a satanic aura. It was meant to be a criticism, but it tragically ended up giving them a dark fascination.

By the early 1960s, a sort of “Nazi mystique” had emerged based on a sensationalized presentation of the movement. The Nazis were stripped of their brutal political and historical context, which enabled them to enter mainstream popular culture through the backdoor as the perennial “supervillain.”

The massively popular books The Morning of the Magicians (1960) by Pauwels and Bergier and The Spear of Destiny (1972) by Trevor Ravenscroft tantalized the West’s comfortable imagination with enticing images of Nazi mystery. Much later, the “Indiana Jones” films in the 80’s brought worldwide awareness to SS interest in ancient traditions, including the Lost Ark, the Holy Grail.

The “Nazi mysteries” thus became a very profitable genre. As a result, today we have what Goodrick-Clarke calls a “Nazi mysteriosophy” that has divorced the modern image of the Nazis from historical realities.

As he writes, “The original stigmatization of Nazism as pure evil was thus inverted to celebrate the taboos of the liberal democratic world as forbidden gods of a dark realm.” (p. 127)

That’s what we live in today. Nick Fuentes can say that Hitler is “effing cool” because young men don’t have images of people shot in the back of the head on cold concrete. Instead, they have in their minds an occult mystique driven by fictional images that divorce Nazis from historical reality and turn them into profitable film villains.

Why This Matters

Christ doesn’t call men to romantic fantasies of civilizational collapse or mystical participation in cosmic racial warfare. He calls men to obedience, humility, courage, endurance, and faithfulness across generations.

If you have sons, brothers, or young men under your influence, you can’t afford to ignore that these ideas are shaping their imagination online.

You’ll hear much more in the Book Club. Full video and audio below.

Next Book Club Meeting

Wednesday, February 25
2:30pm Pacific / 5:30pm Eastern

For discussion:

• Chapter 7: The SS Experiment and Nazi UFOs

• Chapter 8: Antarctica and Aldebaran

• Chapter 9: Miguel Serrano and Esoteric Hitlerism

The Book Club is available to all paid subscribers.

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Her name was Savitri Devi. And she was Greek, not German.

In the 1930’s, she traveled to India, immersed herself in Hindu mysticism, and recast Adolf Hitler as a messianic avatar for all “white” people everywhere.

Before her, there was no such thing as “white identity” in the Nazi imagination. Because Hitler didn’t care about white people. He cared about the Germans! The French were his enemies. So were the British, Belgians, Americans, Slavs (especially them), and more.

But Savitri Devi changed all that. She took a German ethnic movement and spiritually-universalized it into something targeted at disaffected men across the Western world.

It worked. As a result, today’s hyper-masculine “dissident right” influencers have no idea that a woman wrote their script for them.

This is just one thread in a story I’ve been tracing for months. In July 2024, I discovered the book Black Sun by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke. Within fifty pages, I realized that what’s surfacing on social media today is deeper and darker than edgy politics or ironic memes.

Clarke’s book demonstrates that, at bottom, it’s an occult religious system, complete with rituals, myths, and messianic figures. It’s explicitly set up in opposition to Christ.

And men are consuming it by the gigabyte.

I’ve now posted the first two sessions of my Book Club, where we’re currently working through Black Sun together. In these sessions, we cover:

• George Lincoln Rockwell’s “cosmic awareness” experience while meditating on a swastika

• How Julius Evola’s tantric sex magic became “based” Manosphere philosophy (Bronze Age Pervert took his whole shtick from Evola)

• The spiritual trap that captures young men and systematically destroys their relationships and their faith

• Why none of these ideas are new; they were circulating before the rubble stopped bouncing in post-war Europe

The ideas and pattern aren’t new. But the digital distribution is.

Watch now:

or listen here:

Book Club Continues Tomorrow

Wednesday, 2:30pm Pacific / 5:30pm Eastern, we cover chapters 4-6: Imperium, Savitri Devi and the Hitler Avatar, and Nazi Mysteries.

This is where things get genuinely strange. A Greek woman’s Hindu-inflected Hitler worship. Tantric concepts of civilizational cycles. The deliberate fusion of Eastern occultism with Western racial ideology. And the templates that are still circulating through Christian spaces today—unrecognized.

Zoom link below for paid subscribers.

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If you think conspiracy theories spread only because people are stupid, this essay probably isn’t for you. Conversely, if you think every conspiracy theory out there is secretly true, it probably isn’t for you either.

I want to examine something more difficult: how intelligent, sincere people end up believing things that eventually turn brother against brother. And why anti-Semitism—or, hatred of the Jews—so often shows up at the end of that road.

This isn’t abstract for me. I’ve watched it happen in real time to people I know. I’ve counted eight steps in the process. They happen slow at first, then all at once.

My hope is that once you see the pattern, you’ll recognize it everywhere.

Step One: Perceived Elite Coordination

Global media has long embraced the idea that conspiracy theories only spread among the ignorant, the malicious, and the unstable. They’re not entirely wrong about that; fringe ideas do have a certain appeal for fringe types.

But at the same time, that alone can’t account for the whole “conspiracy” phenomenon.

Often conspiracy thinking begins not with delusion, but with reasonable perception—specifically, that powerful people coordinate with one another in ways ordinary people don’t have access to.

And that perception is not wrong.

Anyone paying attention can see that global elites share language, values, incentives, and priorities across the institutions they control. For example, every June during Pride Month, global corporations with completely unrelated products adopt the same moralizing language at the same time. YouTube is full of compilations of local media outlets repeating the same phrases word-for-word. And politicians across different countries communicate to their citizens the same idea about global social and political change: “This is inevitable, there is no alternative.”

We’ve seen it with public-health debates over the last few years, especially with COVID. You don’t have to believe in a conspiracy to notice the mass coordination that took place for years in plain sight. You literally just have to have eyes.

And that’s step one. Often, there’s nothing irrational about it.

Step Two: Abstract, Faceless Power

Where things start to break down is not in that perception itself, but in what happens next.

Perception of coordination alone doesn’t explain how coordination works, or what kind of coordination it is. Is it a conscious effort, with deliberate execution, and explicit goals? Or is it an emergent phenomenon from people with shared incentives, class backgrounds, and ambitions? Perhaps some combination of the two?

These are genuinely difficult questions, and unsurprisingly, most elites refuse to answer them.

That leaves observers with speculation as their only option for understanding what they see. So the human mind starts filling in the gaps. That leads to step two: powerful elites become abstract and faceless.

Most people never meet the individuals who actually shape policy, culture, or media narratives. You might know the name of your favorite TV news presenter, but not the name of his or her producer. Similarly, you know the name of the President or your Governor, but not the identity of their advisors.

This transforms power into something bureaucratic, distant, impersonal. You can feel the effects of this power everywhere—in hiring practices, in school curricula, in what you can and can’t say online. But you can’t point to a single person and say, “That’s the one responsible.”

This is psychologically intolerable.

Human beings want agents. We want authorship. We want names! Our minds are built for a world of tribes and chieftains, not a world of algorithms, NGOs, and anonymous institutional capture.

So, when names aren’t available, we go looking for them.

Step Three: History Supplies an Archetype

Human beings don’t reason in a vacuum. When we try to make sense of complex systems and unseen power, we tend to rely on stories that already exist. Every culture has them.

The ancient Greeks explained chaos and fortune through gods hidden on Mount Olympus. Medieval societies explained misfortune through demons and curses. Modern societies have their own versions, and some of those versions are very old.

Once a plausible story is available, it doesn’t just explain events, it organizes our perception. This is called a “conceptual grid.” New facts get filtered through it. Facts that don’t fit get filtered out. This also removes the ambiguity and uncertainty from facts that don’t seem to fit together. Because the “grid” is doing the thinking for you.

At first, this can feel like relief. Finally, an explanation makes sense! Finally, it all ties together.

But there’s a hidden cost. Explanations quietly generate false positives in pattern recognition, before hardening into assumptions. Then, the story stops being tested against reality. Instead, reality starts being fitted to the story.

Step Four: “Elite Power” Becomes “Jewish Power”

This is where things become morally, intellectually, and spiritually dangerous.

It’s important to note first, however, that this shift usually doesn’t happen through a sudden embrace of open hatred. In other words, no one wakes up one day thinking, “After years of feeling ambivalent about them, I have decided to hate Jews.”

Instead, the shift from “elite power” to “Jewish power” happens through association. Jews are historically visible in finance, law, medicine, media, the arts, and intellectual life. But not because of a coordinated plan of infiltration. Rather, it’s the result of their diaspora, literacy rates, intact families, and centuries of genuine persecution that pushed them into particular indispensable economic niches.

My parents didn’t want for me to be a doctor or a lawyer as part of a coordinated plot from Central Command. It was just our family values, as well as those of every other Jewish family I knew.

That’s why Jewish achievement in certain fields is not a myth. There are real facts at play here.

But what happens next is the distortion.

A vague, impersonal system (see Step 2) suddenly gets mapped onto a people. The language changes just enough to feel like they’re being careful: not all Jews, but… Jewish elites… no wait, Zionists. Each qualifier sounds more precise than the last, but their function is the same: to collapse a complex web of institutions, incentives, and ideologies into a single, identifiable group.

In other words, power has stopped being abstract and finally gets a face. And that feels like relief.

Once power has a face, it feels understandable. You can get a handle on it, or get your mind around it. Blame feels possible. Anger finds justifications. Then, the anxiety of not knowing who’s responsible gives way to the soothing clarity of accusation. Unfortunately, it’s a false clarity.

At this point, “Jews” are no longer being treated as individuals with wildly differing beliefs, loyalties, and politics—even within Israel! Instead, they start being treated as symbols. They’re a stand-in for globalism, modernity, materialism, irreligion, rootlessness, and more. Everything confusing or destabilizing about the modern world gets projected onto “Jews.”

Power finally has a face. But it’s the wrong one.

Step Five: Analysis Becomes Myth

At this stage, the explanation stops needing actual proof. Not because the evidence is overwhelming, but because the story has become self-sustaining. It can explain everything if you just try hard enough.

Any apparent contradiction becomes a confirmation. Any counterexample becomes evidence of how hidden the truth really is.

The presence of Jews who oppose the supposed conspiracy?
They’re controlled opposition.

The absence of evidence?
Proof of how deep the rabbit hole goes.

The existence of powerful non-Jews?
They’re puppets or useful idiots to the real power source.

The belief now no longer functions as an explanation of reality, instead it’s a closed or “self-sealing” system. It can’t be tested, corrected, or falsified. And most importantly, it can’t be escaped without significant psychological cost.

It’s a bit like a prison. Because at this point, abandoning it would mean admitting that the soothing clarity you felt was an illusion. This allows anxiety back in the front door, often holding hands with public humiliation. For many “disaffected” and isolated young men, this is an intolerable duo to entertain.

But once a belief can’t be falsified, it’s no longer analysis. It’s a mythology. And mythology has a dangerous advantage: it feels deeper than facts, like a soul-level insight. You’ve finally seen behind the curtain to where the puppet masters pull the strings. You don’t have to guess or speculate, you know.

This would be bad enough. But sadly, in the modern world, conspiracy thinking almost never stops here.

Step Six: Myth Becomes Moral Signal

This is when conspiracy thinking stops being a private explanation held by an individual, and instead becomes a public signal to others.

You can hear it in the language:

”We’re not allowed to say this, but…”

”If you don’t see it, you’re asleep.”

”Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.”

These aren’t arguments, they’re markers of identity. They communicate something about who you are... and who you’re not.

Believing the theory now says you’re not naive. Unlike the “normies,” you’re not fooled. You’re brave enough to name the truths that others are afraid to say! The belief becomes a confession, or even a slogan. Either way, it’s a public declaration of moral awareness, which takes it into territory far beyond the mere inner description of reality.

This is psychologically powerful. In a world that feels chaotic and dishonest, being among the few who really understand what’s happening is intoxicating. It provides certainty, superiority, and community all at once. Especially for young men whose entire social life is now conducted online.

But notice what’s happened: the belief is no longer primarily about understanding the world. It’s about performing a certain kind of identity.

Truth has been subordinated to belonging.

Step Seven: Belief Becomes Belonging

Once a belief functions as an in-group signal, it inevitably becomes a gate.

This is where online communities form around shared ideas. Groupchats, Telegram channels, Discord servers and more are where the “dissident right” / “alt right” / “Dank Right” congregate. They’re spaces where rebellious irony and edginess are encouraged, and where memes do the work that printed manifestos used to do.

In these spaces, agreement with the consensus earns status. Questioning earns silence, ridicule, and exile. Belonging with “the bros” becomes more important than truth.

Antisemitism in these contexts still often functions less as open hatred and more as an in-group password. You don’t have to add anything to the discussion. You just have to signal your affirmation at the right moments. Use the right euphemisms. Signal that you’re one of “us” not them—the normies, the cucks, the Boomers, the controlled.

Increasingly, these spaces are pulling in Christian men as a substitute for vibrant (and male-friendly) real-world church community. These men feel abandoned by mainstream institutions. They sense something is deeply wrong with the modern world and are looking for both belonging and answers.

They find both in these spaces. But at a cost they don’t understand, at least not right away.

Step Eight: Doubt Becomes Betrayal

Once belief is tied to belonging, questioning it is no longer mere intellectual disagreement. It’s a grievous moral failure requiring the imposition of guilt (“You did something wrong.”) and shame (“There is something wrong with you.”)

If you ask for evidence, you’re compromised. If you introduce complexity, you’re controlled. If you refuse scapegoating, you’re either a coward or an infiltrator.

The very act of critical thinking has thus become suspect.

At this stage, anti-Semitism doesn’t even require Jews to be named as the sole enemy. The real enemy is now the skeptic, the moderate, the Christian who insists on theological precision and intellectual honesty over in-group solidarity.

This is how conspiracy thinking consumes its own. It starts by naming an enemy outside the group. It ends by making enemies of brothers inside the group.

The logic is relentless: if you won’t join the accusation, you must be part of the conspiracy. There’s no middle ground. No room for nuance. No possibility that you might simply disagree. The gravity of the consensus has developed the inescapable pull of a black hole.

The choice is stark:

Endure the guilt and shame of men you once called friends, and then be cast into exile. Or deep-freeze your conscience, bow the knee, and continue along with the crowd. Or reinvest and demonstrate your loyalty by redoubling your commitment, darkly “repenting” for your error.

Young men are seeking a story to explain their lives, and a community to ground themselves in. They find both.

It’s fun for a minute, before it devours them.

Why This Matters

Conspiracy thinking often begins with legitimate grievances and rational observations. People sense real dysfunction, elite insulation, ideological capture, and institutional cowardice. They feel genuine contempt from people who hold power toward those who don’t.

These aren’t imaginary. The sense that something is deeply wrong with our modern institutions is not paranoia. It’s an accurate perception.

But instead of naming those forces accurately—ideology, incentives, institutional design, careerism, cowardice, sin, and simple folly—conspiracy thinking adopts a simplistic explanation that feels satisfying and community-forming. But ultimately it poisons its own cause.

By contrast, Christian theology gives us a far better diagnostic framework than conspiracy thinking ever could.

Scripture takes evil seriously without granting human beings godlike competence. It recognizes spiritual realities that transcend any ethnic group:

“For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” - Ephesians 6:12

It shows that these spiritual realities share information with each other through unknown means:

“But the evil spirit answered them, ‘Jesus I know, and Paul I recognize, but who are you?’” - Acts 19:15

It teaches that folly, pride, and fear destroy more societies than grand plots ever do:

“The wicked plots against the righteous
and gnashes his teeth at him,
but the Lord laughs at the wicked,
for he sees that his day is coming.

“The wicked draw the sword and bend their bows
to bring down the poor and needy,
to slay those whose way is upright;
their sword shall enter their own heart,
and their bows shall be broken.” - Psalm 37:12-15

And it explicitly forbids scapegoating, because false accusation corrodes the soul of the one who tells it as surely as it harms the one accused:

“You shall not spread a false report. You shall not join hands with a wicked man to be a malicious witness. You shall not fall in with the many to do evil.”
- Exodus 23:1-2

“He who justifies the wicked and he who condemns the righteous are both alike an abomination to the Lord.” - Proverbs 17:15

“Each will have to bear his own load.” - Galatians 6:15

Yes, there is real elite ideology. There are real structural incentives. There is real institutional cowardice and moral corruption. The task is to name them accurately, which requires more intellectual heavy-lifting than simply identifying a historically-convenient group to blame.

Paradoxically, when we collapse complex realities into a mythology, we stop being able to resist these realities effectively. If you misdiagnose the disease, you’ll prescribe the wrong remedy, and nothing gets healed.

Far worse, if you identify the wrong enemy, the real enemy can use that cognitive weakness against you, to your destruction.

As for the groupchats, in-group belonging built on a lie will always demand more lies to sustain it. The commitment to uncomfortable truth costs more for every member of a group. But if that commitment is shared, it’s the only thing that won’t eventually turn brother against brother.

The Pattern

If you zoom out, what you see isn’t a single bad belief. It’s a progression:

Insight turns into suspicion. Suspicion turns into myth. Myth turns into belonging. And belonging eventually demands the explicit identification of an “other” to blame, at all costs.

That’s the pattern. Eight steps from legitimate observation to moral, social, and spiritual catastrophe.

And this is what’s happening to young Christian men online in private, and increasingly in public.

The antidote isn’t naivety on one hand, or censorship on the other. It isn’t pretending that elites don’t coordinate or that institutions aren’t captured. Nor is the solution to shut down conversations about those facts. Doing either will only drive the discussion underground, meaning it will emerge again.

Instead, the true antidote is better thinking: more precise diagnosis, more careful attribution, a biblical conceptual grid, and genuine theological depth about the nature of evil.

And perhaps most importantly: the willingness to belong to communities that tolerate doubt rather than shaming it.

If your community treats questions as betrayal, it’s not seeking truth. It’s enforcing conformity with a tribal mask.

Christ calls us to something better.

If you want to go deeper into how these ideological dynamics have developed historically—including their roots in occult fascism and the intellectual genealogy of modern antisemitic conspiracy theory—I’m working through Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity in my ongoing Book Club, which is available for paid subscribers.

The book traces how ideas that seem fringe eventually enter the mainstream—and understanding that history is essential to recognizing the pattern when it shows up in new forms today.

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It’s a spiritual movement with explicitly religious roots and ambitions.

That truth only becomes more clear as the book continues.

In our second session, we worked through Chapter 2: The British Neo-Nazi Underground and Chapter 3: Julius Evola and the Kali Yuga.

The first chapter shows how quickly fascism reconstituted itself after World War II. Within five years of Germany’s defeat, Neo-Nazi groups were organizing internationally. These movements weren’t born from social media, economic anxiety about inflation and home ownership, or even the “post-war consensus.” They emerged immediately, while Germany was literally still in ruins.

British figures like Colin Jordan openly revived Nazi symbolism. Their grievances centered on immigration and racial identity, but those concerns quickly gave way to full-throated antisemitism and veneration of Hitler as being “right.” British groups were also explicit in their belief that Nazism was a religious worldview incompatible with Christianity.

An important pattern emerged every early on: Neo-Nazi political grievances were a gateway, not the destination. The movements inevitably drifted past material concerns and into deeper questions of metaphysics, myth, and dark spirituality.

In other words, it wasn’t just about headlines and policy proposals. Within two decades, Neo-Nazis were crafting a new theology that encompassed history, race, and destiny. All of which legitimized violence towards what they saw as a corrupted world.

When Fascism Becomes a Spiritual System

That drift accelerates dramatically beginning in Chapter 3.

Julius Evola was where neo-Nazism fused with occult spirituality, Eastern mysticism, masculine elitism, and metaphysical rebellion against Christ.

Evola was not a street agitator or a propagandist in the prosaic mold of Rockwell or Jordan. Instead, he was an aristocratic intellectual who drew explicitly from tantra, magic, esotericism, Theosophy, Vedanta, and Gnosticism.

His worldview rejected Christianity as weak, feminine, egalitarian, and corrosive to hierarchy and heroic virtue. He taught that history moves in cycles of rise and fall, not a linear path redemption.

Evola was the first Westerner to claim that we are allegedly living in the Hindu “Kali Yuga,” a prophesied dark age of decline marked by egalitarianism, materialism, and moral decay.

To Evola, collapse was inevitable. Therefore, destruction was necessary. To him and his followers, violence became not only morally justified, but spiritually meaningful as the timeless path to civilizational renewal.

This is not fringe trivia. Evola’s ideas are foundational to much of the modern online right, especially in masculinity spaces. If you’ve ever heard the phrase “immanetize the eschaton,” that idea traces to Evola.

Evola’s Fingerprints on the Modern Right

Other popular right-wing conceps like:

1. “Return to Rome” / RETVRN

2. “Enjoy the decline”

3. The “Longhouse” critique of modern feminist society

… all trace directly back to Evola’s writings.

Bronze Age Pervert did not invent these ideas. He laundered Evola’s worldview into 4chan meme culture. Other influencers have done the same, often without naming their source.

What troubles me most is not simply that these ideas circulate in pagan or secular spaces like the Manosphere. It’s that they have quietly crossed into Christian environments, sometimes defended with the claim that, “Evola says some good things!” or that his insights can be selectively mined.

They unequivocally cannot.

This Is Spiritual Poison for Christian Men

Evola was a tantric occultist who believed in spiritual hierarchy, sex-magical self-transcendence (Tantra), and the destruction of Christian moral order due to its weakness, democracy, and effeminacy.

Evola’s worldview is not compatible with Christianity at any level. It’s not neutral philosophy. It’s a spiritual poison.

After reading Evola, men aren’t merely adopting talking points. They’re absorbing a metaphysical story about the world that reshapes how they view women, power, authority, violence, history, and even God Himself.

Even worse, these ideas don’t stay theoretical. Every movement documented in Black Sun ultimately expresses itself in radicalization and deadly violence. The trajectory is consistent.

I’ve lost good friends to this pipeline. I’ve watched intelligent, capable men I thought I’d be friends with forever slowly detach from reality, grow embittered and isolated, and then begin making dark conclusions about the world and their place in it. What begins as irony or curiosity hardens into conviction and separatist identity.

Scripture warns us that false spiritual systems enslave before they destroy. This false spirituality today promises strength, clarity, and transcendence for men.

What it actually produces is pride, contempt, alienation, and finally, destruction.

What Christ Actually Calls Men To Become

Christ doesn’t call men to nihilism or romantic fantasies of civilizational collapse. He calls men to obedience, humility, courage, endurance, love of neighbor, and faithfulness across generations.

Long, slow obedience in the same direction isn’t glamorous, but it’s how civilizations like the West are built and preserved. Because it’s how a man’s household is built first!

If you have sons, brothers, or young men under your influence, you can’t afford to ignore what is shaping their imagination online. It’s my hope that the material in Black Sun will equip you to recognize these patterns, symbols, and language early, before they metastasize into something with real consequences.

Below you’ll find the full video and audio from our second Book Club meeting, along with an AI-assisted summary and detailed outline to help you navigate the discussion.

This material is heavy. It’s definitely not entertaining. But I believe it’s urgent.

Let’s continue the work.

NEXT BOOK CLUB MEETING

Wednesday, February 11
3:00pm Pacific / 6:00pm Eastern

For discussion:

• Chapter 4: Imperium and the New Atlantis

• Chapter 5: Savitri Devi and the Hitler Avatar

IMPORTANT NOTE:

Savitri Devi is crucial to understand in order to see how we get from Nazism being about the German people to Neo Nazism being about “white people” as a whole.

She is an ESSENTIAL bridge. All the moreso because she’s a woman, undercutting the misogyny of the movement.

The Book Club is available to all paid subscribers:

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Video, audio, and summary notes follow for paid subscribers 👇

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His books Revolt Against the Modern World (1934) and Ride the Tiger (1961) became classics in the Manosphere and its related online spaces. To many men in those circles, Evola became a prophet who foresaw the coming collapse of society under egalitarianism, liberal democracy, and secularism.

To combat those corrosive forces, Evola emphasized tradition, masculine excellence, and hierarchy. He saw history moving in cycles of rise and decline, as civilizations drift from spiritually driven achievement into materialism, dissolution, and collapse.

He was also an occultist. Evola drew heavily from Tantra, Buddhism, and Western esotericism. He despised Christianity for its teachings on humility, moral restraint, and the equality of souls.

And when I mentioned his name on X in the summer of 2025, some “Christian masculinity” leaders attacked me—which tells you something about the questions we’re not allowed to ask.

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke devotes a whole chapter to Evola in Black Sun, which we’ll dig into this Wednesday.

I dedicate this edition of the Book Club to all the men who say, “But Evola said some good things!”

Maybe so. But his foundations are utterly rotten.

Don’t take my word for it. Read it and see for yourself.

Learn More
→ About the Book Club
→ About Black Sun

This session will be recorded and available for all paid subscribers.

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Will Spencer Book Club — Meeting #2

Wednesday, January 21
2:30pm Pacific / 5:30pm Eastern

Assigned Reading — Black Sun (Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke)
• Chapter 2: The British Nazi Underground
• Chapter 3: Julius Evola and the Kali Yuga

Link below to join the session 👇

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The first 50 pages of Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s Black Sun opened my eyes to a reality beyond what I’d considered: neo-Nazism isn’t just radical politics or edgy internet humor. It’s an occult religion that has set itself up in direct opposition to Christ.

This is why I started the Book Club with this particular book. What we’re seeing in our circles, including the rhetoric on X, the ideas creeping into Reformed spaces, the friends and brothers we’re losing to bitterness and rage—none of it is new.

It’s all documented. It all traces back. And it’s all deeply, explicitly spiritual.

But don’t take my word for it. You can read Black Sun for yourself.

In our first 90-minute meeting of the Book Club, we worked through the introduction and first chapter on American Neo-Nazism. I read extensively from Goodrick-Clarke’s text and connected the historical dots to what we’re witnessing today, with emphasis on:

• George Lincoln Rockwell (prominently featured in the infamous White Boy Summer video)

• William Luther Pierce — CalTech scientist and author of The Turner Diaries

• The “14 words” by murder accomplice David Lane

• Esoteric Hitlerism on social media

• The internet pipeline from 4chan to your timeline.

We also had two substantive Q&A moments about the movement’s eschatology, its connection to the prison system, and painfully, what it looks like when someone you love gets caught in its grip.

If you’ve been wondering why certain ideas keep surfacing, why some brothers seem to be changing before your eyes, or how to recognize what’s actually happening around us in right-wing politics, this is where we start.

Below you’ll find the full 90-minute video discussion, plus an AI-generated summary and detailed outline to help you navigate the content.

I think even just the first few pages of the book will open your eyes.

Let’s get to work.

NEXT BOOK CLUB MEETING

Wednesday, January 21
3:30pm Pacific / 6:30pm Eastern
For discussion:

• Chapter 2: The British Neo-Nazi Underground

• Chapter 3: Julius Evola and the Kali Yuga

NOTE: Julius Evola is very popular in right-wing political circles. In the next section, you’ll see how genuinely dark his worldview is.

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Video, audio, and summary notes follow for paid subscribers 👇

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What they despise more than anything else is men’s submission.

A man is not a sovereign authority over women, nor is he a sovereign authority over himself. A good man lives in submission to a moral order outside himself: to God, to the Church, and to a framework that governs his thoughts, words, and actions.

Many men today reject this outright. And they do so for predictable reasons.

Most often, it begins with an appeal to victimhood:

“Young men today have been so put upon by women, minorities, or ‘elites’ that you can’t possibly expect them to bear the burden of a transcendent moral authority over their own lives.”

This is then followed by an appeal to civilizational emergency:

“We need these radicals to save the West. You don’t know what time it is!”

When effective, this strategy accomplishes its real goal: it shifts attention away from rebellious, undisciplined men… and onto anyone who dares to question them.

There’s much more to be said about this pattern and what it signifies. But here is the crucial point: there’s nothing new about it.

As Solomon observed long ago:

“What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.”
Ecclesiastes 1:9

Men have always sought to defy—or outright deny—transcendent moral authority in order to legitimize their own flawed pursuit of independence.

Eddie LaRow on Authority, Power, and Rootless Men

This question of authority and submission isn’t merely philosophical. It has a deeply personal dimension, as well.

In the clip below, explains why men always seek to be captains of their own souls. This is why moral authority feels intolerable to the undisciplined man, and why men’s desire for autonomy today attempts to disguise itself as strength.

Watch the Full Conversation

This clip is one thread in a much longer conversation. In the full interview, Eddie and I explore:

• Why Gen Z men are drawn toward radical politics

• How rootlessness produces substitute authorities

• Why power replaces authority when institutions collapse

• How speed and media distort the inner life

• Why men need formation, discipline, and rooted communities

Catch the full 90-minute conversation on YouTube:

Or listen on Apple and Spotify.

The Will Spencer Book Club

Many of the dynamics Eddie describes aren’t merely political or psychological. Deep beneath the surface, they’re spiritual. And not in a Christian way.

That’s why Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke is the first book we’re reading in the Will Spencer Book Club.

Black Sun traces how modern movements repeatedly substitute counterfeit meaning for lost authority, especially among young men searching for identity, purpose, and belonging.

This applies directly to the conversation Eddie and I had, in ways that might surprise you.

If you want to understand the modern historical roots of much that we’re seeing online today, this is the right place to begin.

The Will Spencer Book Club begins this Wednesday, January 7, and is available to paid Substack subscribers. All sessions will be recorded and shared afterwards for subscribers.

Subscribe now

Read more about the Book Club here.
Read more about Black Sun here.

“I’m spiritual, but not religious.” 

Perhaps you’ve come across this widely known saying before. It conveys an individual’s preference for personal mystical experiences over formal doctrines and practices. The expression gained popularity during the New Age movement, which, in most people’s minds, reached its peak in the 1980s and 1990s with bestselling books like Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch and The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle.

It might be tempting to believe that the New Age vanished after this cultural high-water mark. But that’s a dramatic misreading of the past. Instead, “the New Age” has become America’s default religion. A 2022 poll by YouGov.org revealed that 87% of Americans believe in at least one teaching of New Age spirituality, and nearly half believe in five or more. 

As recent years have shown, the less Evangelicals recognize a threat, the more it seems to tighten its grip on them. In my view, the lives of many Evangelicals reveal that they, too, embrace the “spiritual but not religious” mindset. These beliefs haven’t just stolen into the pews — they’ve taken root in the pulpit as well.

The Long Road

I spent two decades in the New Age before coming to Christ. I visited more than 30 countries around the world seeking God. Or so I thought.

I participated in ayahuasca retreats deep in the Peruvian jungles and explored sacred geometry during workshops nestled in Bali’s hills. My journey also took me to massive Hindu festivals in India, attended by millions, and to Buddhist meditation mats in the mountains of Kashmir. Blending Jungian transpersonal psychotherapy with past-life regression, tarot readings, psychedelics, Reiki, and other practices paints a vivid picture of the person I used to be.

What drew me away from those beliefs was the undeniable presence of evil, which I glimpsed in small but striking ways during my travels, particularly in less-developed countries. Yet, in a worldview where “all is One” (monism) or “all is God” (pantheism), I found no solid basis to label the wickedness I personally encountered as truly wrong.

Consider: if good and evil are equally “God,” by what standard can we judge whether an action is one or the other? This leads to troubling moral waters. Do these principles also mean industrial waste is “God”? How about slavery, the gulags, or genocide? I found such ideas revolting, and literally unconscionable.

Worse still, no one in the New Age community would discuss this problem with me. For instance, as an extreme example, I’d challenge fellow seekers to tell an imaginary sex-trafficked child that her grim fate was simply “her karma.” This hypothetical scenario, though consistent with the logical outcome of the concept of karma, abruptly ended many conversations. Few of us in the New Age had considered the trajectory of our theological presuppositions.

A Homecoming

In February 2020, COVID madness descended over the world I’d just returned from exploring. With surging global fear in view, I concluded that any notion of God that couldn’t account for evil was no notion of God at all. That would be like a model of Earth and the Solar System that explained daylight but not nighttime.

After nearly two decades of spiritual seeking I’d come up fruitless. Having exhausted other answers, I was ready for my first work of Christian apologetics: NT Wright’s Simply Christian.

In the book, Wright explains how a great wave of evil was preparing to crash over Jesus as He hung on the cross. But through Christ’s death and resurrection, He drove back the wave of evil forever:

“The real enemy, after all, was not Rome, but the powers of evil that stood behind human arrogance and violence, powers of evil with which Israel’s leaders had fatally colluded. It was time for the evil which had dogged Jesus’ footsteps throughout his career — the shrieking maniacs, the conspiring Herodians, the carping Pharisees, the plotting chief priests, the betrayer among his own disciples, the whispering voices within his own soul — to gather into one great tidal wave of evil that would crash with full force over his head ... In meeting the fate which was rushing towards him, he would be the place where heaven and earth met, as he hung suspended between the two. He would be the place where God’s future arrived in the present, with the kingdom of God celebrating its triumph over the kingdoms of the world by refusing to join in their spiral of violence” Simply Christian, NT Wright).

Something clicked.

After that, I read CS Lewis’ Mere Christianity — the only other Christian book I knew of — and The Screwtape Letters. Confronted by the luminous words of Lewis, the last defenses surrounding my heart collapsed. I was captured by the truth.

I wasted no time taking the next step. I immediately asked some Christian friends to baptize me, which they did several weeks later in the Spokane River, on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend 2020. These were the same friends who gave me Simply Christian in the first place. I’d met them in August 2015 at the 80,000-person pagan Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert. They’d been running an underground Christian ministry there for more than a decade.

Today, five years after reading Wright, I’m a Confessional, Calvinistic, and Covenantal member in good standing of a Reformed Presbyterian church. God is truly great!

Lies and Truth

But something unexpected happened to me on the way to Westminster. 

For 20 years, I explored the New Age, searching for truth, but came up empty-handed. That hollow world is filled with broken people clinging to spiritual crutches that buckle under the mounting pressure of their burdened consciences. New Agers dive into self-denying Eastern meditations, “Law of Attraction” workshops, and trendy practices that chase spiritual highs through emotional outbursts or, increasingly, psychedelic substances. With enough money, time, and effort, relief is possible — but regeneration? Never. All the “trauma healing” I pursued only sharpened my flaws, tightening the grip of my demons: spiritual ambition and lust. (They call it “reclaiming your authenticity,” if you want the technical jargon.) 

But then, in an astonishingly short time, Christ set me free from it all. And He did so for the low, low price of ... free. No expensive trainings, workshops, or seminars required. The church membership class that introduced me to the doctrines of grace was free. My friends in Idaho gave me a study Bible as a gift. The Holy Spirit took it from there, guiding me with gentleness, care, and boundless grace through intense waves of confession and repentance.

New Age Infiltration

So, you can imagine my shock to be a Prodigal Son, returning home to my Father’s house, only to discover my siblings feeding from the pig’s trough!

For example, I’ve been astounded to see the angry reaction from Christians on X when I question the Hindu practice of yoga. Enthusiasts say it’s “just stretching,” that they enjoy the exercise, or that it’s permissible as a “meat sacrificed to idols” issue (ref. 1 Cor 8) and that I should just lighten up.

The word “yoga” is based on the Sanskrit term “yuj” meaning “yoke,” as in “to yoke—or become one with—the Divine.” Every entry-level yoga teacher training explains how different poses are devoted to Hindu demons. Popular sequences like “sun salutations” express embodied devotion to a solar deity. Many yoga classrooms have idols of the Hindu false god Shiva and end their classes with chants of the so-called sacred syllable “OM” after concluding with Shavasana, or “corpse pose.” And advanced contortionistic postures are even used to awaken the “serpent energy” known as Kundalini. This same “secret energy,” said to be coiled at the base of the spine near the genitals, is also used in sexually driven conjuring rituals, aka sex magic.

So no, it’s not “just stretching.”

Cancelling the Enneagram

I was further floored to discover the popularity of the Enneagram with Christians in positions of power. Russell Moore claims to be an “Enneagram Type 4” and spoke at the 2023 Gospel for the Enneagram Summit. Andy Stanley discussed the Enneagram on his leadership podcast saying, “It helped me tremendously.” Even N.T. Wright uncritically referenced the Enneagram on his own website, in a discussion about the Psalms.

Little do Christians know that even in New Age circles, that “personality test” was considered woo-woo!

The Enneagram was introduced to the West in the 1920s by a Russian mystic named G.I. Gurdjieff, who taught a system of “awakening to higher consciousness” he called The Fourth Way. Gurdjieff’s work became foundational to the Human Potential movement, which formed a major artery of the New Age.

Much could be said of Gurdjieff and his propensity for drunkenness, violence, and abuse of his pupils, which he claimed helped them “awaken.” But as Margaret Croydon sums up on the Gurdjieff International website:

“Finally, [Gurdjieff] was the first thinker in the West to believe in the evolution of man’s being through ‘work on oneself’ — an evolution which, for him, was related to the evolution of the cosmos. ‘As above, so below,’ he said.”

“Spiritual evolution” through “self-work” along with the occult saying, “as above, so below,” are pillars of the New Age.

No Quarter for False Teaching

Yoga and the Enneagram are two examples of New Age contamination I’ve seen in Evangelical circles, but I could name more. It seems that every day Americans aren’t the only ones who are “spiritual but not religious.” Many professing Christians are, as well.

Christians should know better. But at the encouragement of respected leaders they’ve adopted the same practices I fled from. They’re trading the rich, saving discipleship of historic Christianity for empty spiritual dead ends.

The difference is stark: One offers endless seeking without finding; the other offers Christ, who finds us (Matt. 15:24). One requires constant payments for diminishing returns; the other gives in abundance what money can’t buy (Jn. 7:38). One collapsed under the weight of evil. The other explained and defeated evil forever:

“These things I have spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).

When Christ warned about the narrow gate (Matt. 7:13-14), He wasn’t just speaking about moral standards. He was also referencing how the exclusive claims of faith in Him stand against the global array of “spiritual, but not religious” options.

So, my question for the Evangelicals church today isn’t whether we’re spiritual — it’s whether we have the courage to be distinctively Christian. Have we invited the same spirits I fled from into our sanctuaries, wrapped in Christian language and excuses?

The New Age hasn’t disappeared; it’s been baptized. And until we recognize this infiltration for what it is, we’ll be offering brothers and sisters stones instead of bread, serpents instead of fish, and death instead of life eternal.

Further Reading & Discussion

For readers who want to understand these influences more deeply and historically, I host a small Book Club focused on primary texts and careful discussion.

We’re currently reading Black Sun by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, a sober account of modern occult and esoteric movements. Our next selection will be American Veda by Philip Goldberg, which traces how Eastern spirituality, yoga, and “spiritual but not religious” thinking entered the American mainstream.

If this essay raised questions you’d like to explore, please join us.

• Information about the Book Club is available here.

• Information about Black Sun is available here.

• Information about our first meeting is available here.

(Paid Substack subscribers receive access to the discussions and recordings.)

Subscribe now

This essay originally appeared on The Christian Post.

I’m excited to officially announce that the Will Spencer Book Club will launch on Wednesday, January 7, 2026, at 3:30pm Pacific / 6:30pm Eastern.

We’ll begin with the following sections from Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke:

• Introduction (p. 1)

• American Neo-Nazism (p. 7)

As tempted as I am to rush headlong into some of the middle chapters, I think the opening of the book warrants careful study. Reading through it, I think you’ll recognize themes that feel uncomfortably familiar from today’s right-wing political dialogue.

I think you’ll also see how much of the modern alt-right / dissident right / “new right” conversation—including from figures like Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, and others—borrows heavily from previous ideological streams. In other words, it’s nothing new.

Paid subscribers: details and links for the first call are included at the bottom of this post 👇

A Word of Thanks

Also, I wanted to say a sincere thank you.

Your interest in the book club has been very encouraging. It tells me that you’re hungry for serious reading. Like me, you want to encounter works that not only help us name the forces shaping the modern world, but also identify the spiritual currents running through them.

That’s why Black Sun is our starting point.

Unlike other authors who’d tackle the same topic, Goodrick-Clarke isn’t writing a polemic. Instead, he’s telling a story by tracing continuity. He shows how Hitler and the Nazis’ mystical, quasi-religious ideas didn’t disappear after World War II. Instead, the ideas mutated, spread, and embedded themselves in modern ideological movements, long before the Internet.

As hard as it may be to believe, that’s what we’re seeing today, only digitized.

Beginning with the first two chapters will also allow us to focus on the historical groundwork before moving into the darker, more occult material that illustrates where all this ultimately leads. (Nowhere good.)

I’m looking forward to reading this book with you.

Read more about the Book Club here.
Read more about Black Sun here.

A Look Ahead

Also, here’s a preview of what’s likely coming next.

Lord willing, our second book will be American Veda: From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation—How Indian Spirituality Changed the West by Philip Goldberg.

Read that subtitle again:

From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation—How Indian Spirituality Changed the West

If Black Sun helps us understand how mystical, occult, and esoteric ideas are re-emerging on the political RIGHT today, then American Veda helps explain how Eastern mysticism first took root on the LEFT in previous generations. From there it quietly worked its way into the mainstream of American life.

Taken together, these books help reveal something important: the modern West didn’t become “secular.” Instead, it became spiritually confused… and in many cases, spiritually compromised.

That confusion now expresses itself literally everywhere: politics, therapy culture, psychedelics, identity movements, your local yoga studio, and yes, even parts of the church.

This book club exists to read thoughtfully and consider the gravity of this historical moment and our response to it, together.

Joining the Book Club

The book club discussions are available to paid Substack subscribers. Your subscription helps support the time, preparation, and live conversations that go into the project.

If you’ve been considering upgrading, now’s a great time to do so.

Subscribe now

🔒 Paid Subscribers — Book Club Details Below

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Last week, when I announced the new Will Spencer Book Club, I selected for our first book The Myth of Mental Illness by Thomas Szasz. It’s a compelling and important work, and one I intend to return to.

But in the meantime, I’ve realized something.

There is one book I have recommended more than any other over the past year:

Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke.

Over and over again, I hear from men and women, fathers and mothers, pastors and educators, asking the same question:

“What is the best book I can read to understand this whole Neo-Nazi phenomenon on the right?”

This is always the first book I point them to.

Black Sun documents the rise of Neo-Nazism in America, the UK, and Europe after the Second World War. The story begins in the 1950s and ends in 2002, when the book was written.

That timeframe matters. Because the events Goodrick-Clarke describes predate the internet. This is all before Reddit, before 4chan, before anonymous message boards, livestreams, and algorithmic radicalization. What the book captures instead are the deep roots and the slow incubation of ideas that would later explode into public awareness once digital tools made them viral.

If we want to understand what we’re seeing today, we have to understand what has already been happening for decades, quietly and out of sight.

Black Sun has become the lens through which I view much of our current moment, without realizing it. I take it for granted. So when I try to explain to pastors what I’m seeing, many of them don’t believe me.

My hope in sharing this book is to remedy that, for as many readers as possible.

Long Before the Memes

Because what struck me when I first read Black Sun, and what still strikes me today, is how little of this is actually new. Goodrick-Clarke is not describing a sudden eruption, which is how it appears to most observers. Instead, he’s describing a continuity.

Writing in 2002, he opens the book by noting:

“Black Sun examines the survival and revival of ‘Aryan’ racial ideas in response to the challenges of the postwar world. More than half a century after the defeat and disgrace of Nazism and fascism, the far right is again challenging the liberal order of the Western democracies for political space.

Radical ideologies are feeding on the threats of economic globalization, affirmative action, and Third World immigration. Nazism is revived as an extremist response to communism, liberalism, and more especially the desegregation of African Americans and colored immigrants.

However, despite their overriding concern with colored races, neo-Nazi ideology still identified the Jews as the demonic adversary of the white Aryan peoples. Here the Jews are regarded as the architects of a multi-racial world order, which supposedly dissolves all nations, traditions, and loyalties, before the final accomplishment of Jewish world conquest.” (pp. 2-3)

Does all that sound familiar?

Remember, this was written before social media, before meme culture, and before the hyped-up digital marketing of these ideas.

What Goodrick-Clarke describes has taken a new shape for a new era. I’m not making this up, nor am I imagining it. This is real.

And now it’s in our timelines, families, and churches.

WHY BLACK SUN

I want to read this book to demonstrate three crucial points:

1. Modern Neo-Nazism is not primarily political, it’s religious.

One of the most common mistakes people make is assuming that Neo-Nazism today is simply “politics gone too far.” The frequent claim is that left-wing excesses of yesterday are driving the right-wing excesses of today.

Goodrick-Clarke demolishes this assumption.

What he documents is not merely a political identity, but a mythic and occult worldview. The view blends paganism, esotericism, pseudo-history, and spiritual rebellion into a coherent religious vision.

These movements are animated at their core not by concrete policy goals, but by cosmology. Not by winning elections, but by initiation, symbolism, and myth.

This matters because you cannot argue someone out of a religion using policy proposals.

But more importantly, you cannot counter a counterfeit spirituality without first recognizing it as spirituality.

2. “Irony,” memes, and aesthetics serve a dangerous purpose

These movements understood something that modern conservatives often miss: ideas move through symbols before they move through arguments.

Runes. Suns. Myths of lost civilizations. Cycles of decline and rebirth. Initiatory language. A sense of hidden knowledge possessed by the elite few.

These aren’t accidental flourishes. They’re recruitment tools. And they’ve been spreading online for years through memes, hidden symbols, and viral video edits.

Goodrick-Clarke shows how Neo-Nazi groups deliberately framed themselves not as hate movements, but as “keepers of forbidden wisdom.” This appeals to intelligent, alienated young men searching for meaning, hierarchy, and transcendence in a society they feel has abandoned them.

If you want to understand why some online subcultures feel more like secret societies than political movements—and why that gives them such seductive power over men—Black Sun will explain why.

It also explains the tribalism of the anons, and why many leaders prefer to signal allegiance to those tribes, rather than sanctify them.

3. Christians today are not seeing the battle correctly

Perhaps most importantly, Black Sun strips away the illusion that we’re dealing merely with “bad ideas” or “edgy politics.”

What Goodrick-Clarke describes is a spiritual revolt. These movements define themselves in opposition to true Christian morality, Christian anthropology, and the universal Christian promise of salvation. They reject repentance, humility, and grace, replacing them with blood, destiny, and mythic struggle.

In other words, this is not just a social problem. It is a discipleship problem.

Only now it has changed shape, reframing bad ideas in Christian-sounding terms for a generation of young men whose knowledge of the faith comes from memes, tweets, and attention-seeking podcast hosts.

And if pastors, fathers, and educators do not understand the spiritual nature of this threat, they will keep fighting it with the wrong tools.

Why This Is the First Book for the Book Club

When I announced my Book Club, I titled the post, “I Read Books to Relax. I Read Books to Fight.”

The kind of therapeutic sentimentalism Thomas Szasz critiques is worth fighting against. But it isn’t the fight right now.

This is.

In the wake of October 7 and the assassination of Charlie Kirk, anti-Semitism—or, hatred of the Jews—has taken hold on the right to a stunning degree. Many assume it’s driven by simple ethnic or religious animus. It isn’t.

What’s motivating it runs deeper: a worldview, an anti-Christ religion, and an offer of tribal belonging to young men who are in the process of rejecting inherited wisdom and authority in favor of the brute force of the symbol-drenched strongman.

As I’m fond of saying, I don’t make the rules, I just work here. This is what’s happening.

I believe Black Sun can show you.

A Word of Caution

This book discusses real darkness in clear terms. Like all works that address the occult, it’s not for casual curiosity.

Black Sun doesn’t sensationalize evil, but it does take it seriously. That means it names, documents, and explains belief systems that are genuinely destructive.

If a man is drawn to forbidden knowledge for its own sake, untethered to healthy Christian community, or if he’s prone to lose discernment through fascination with the forbidden, this is not a book to read lightly or alone.

But for pastors, fathers, mothers, teachers, and mature believers charged with the care of souls, this book is an important tool. We read it to recognize error, aiming not to be impressed by darkness, but to strip it of its mystique and shine Christ’s light into it.

Scripture tells us that, as Christians, we must not be ignorant of the enemy’s schemes (2 Cor 2:11). It also commands us to take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead to expose them (Eph 5:11).

That means we must not remain naïve.

So together, we’ll read this book prayerfully and soberly under the authority of God’s Word, and within the life of the Church.

Our aim is not to become experts in darkness, but to become men who can see clearly enough to feed the sheep, shoot the wolves, and guard what has been entrusted to us.

Join the Book Club

To understand what’s really forming young men right now, beneath the memes, personalities, and slogans, this is where we need to begin.

The Book Club will take place on Zoom every other week, and is available to my paid Substack subscribers.

If you want more details about the Book Club format, schedule, and how it works, you can read the original announcement here.

And if you know pastors, parents, teachers, or friends who are asking the same questions, tell them about this book and invite them to read with us.

Let’s read, and fight.

Become a paid subscriber today:

Subscribe now

More than once in the past few weeks, I’ve been asked the question, “Why do you hate us?”

The “us” might not be who you think. It’s not feminists, gay people, or two-spirit disabled women. Instead, they’re as straight, white, and male as can be. Because the “us” in question is the so-called “New Right,” which a wise man has also dubbed the “Dank Right.”

My response is that I don’t hate anybody, which is true. To which they reply, “You might not, but you amplify the voices of those who do.”

I don’t know what’s in any other man’s heart. But here’s what I do know: cultural commentators across the political spectrum are correct that a bitter vine of ethnic and religious animosity has twisted itself around the hearts of young men. And a weatherman doesn’t have to be conservative or Christian to tell you that it’s raining.

You’d think that would be the end of it—that my interlocutor and I could look at this obvious phenomenon and agree it’s there. Perhaps we could shake hands confident in the knowledge that I don’t hate anyone. Like others, I’m merely pointing out what is.

Except that’s not what happens. Instead, the questioner usually asks, “Why can’t we be resentful and angry towards other religions and ethnicities?”

A bit of context, perhaps, before you fall out of your chair? Their question relates to a longform essay I wrote for the website Christ Over All in June 2025. In the article, I argued that a conspiratorial worldview based on hatred of the Jewish people has surfaced from the depths of the Internet into Reformed circles since 2020.

I don’t have the space to reproduce my description of that worldview here. In a thumbnail sketch, however, it’s that the Jews are the source of all evil in today’s West, including feminism, unchecked immigration, inner city violence, pornography, homosexuality, inflation, and more. You name it, the Jews are behind it.

So, what the questioners are really asking is, “Why can’t I think that the Jews are the source of all evil?” One man said those exact words. It shocks me every time, and I dread the day when it doesn’t.

Believe it or not, though, I understand the nature of the question. It’s tempting to think we can hold ideas in a mental “safe zone” where beliefs don’t work their way out. I’m sure we all think that if we were a worker in a nuclear power plant—or scientist in a zombie virus lab—we’d handle delicate contaminants with ease.

By the same logic, we can keep ideas quarantined from the rest of our being… can’t we?

You’re Not a Brain in a Jar (Unfortunately)

There’s just one problem: you’re not a brain in a jar. You’re a brain in a head with a mouth. And feet. And hands.

Put another way, thoughts have a tendency to become words, which have a tendency to become actions.

I’ll demonstrate this with a thought experiment. Imagine if you thought that guy over there was the source of all evil. No, not that guy. The one next to him. Yeah, him. He is the source of all evil in the West!

Are you just gonna sit there and let him trash your civilization? Or are you actually going to do something?

Perhaps instead you’d put the “source of all evil” guy on the top floor of a skyscraper. Or better yet, an island volcano lair! You can’t personally get your hands on him anymore. But are you just gonna let him hide out? Or are you going to rally the troops—or assemble an elite team—to stop him and his deadly schemes?

What do your moral instincts tell you?

This is why our life- and world-view matters. What we believe about reality in general influences what we think about the specific situations in front of us. Those thoughts eventually express themselves in words (Luke 6:45). Once we’ve said something, the pressure builds for us to act.

Or as James 2:17 reminds us in another context, “So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.” And the faith that “the Jews are the source of all evil in the West” is no dead faith. Because it is impervious to the demands of reason.

By contrast, the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ has been scrutinized not just by theologians and philosophers, but also by historians and archeologists. As bestselling books like The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel demonstrate, the case for the resurrection as a verifiable, if scientifically inexplicable, historical event is plain to see, even without the eyes of faith.

On the other hand, to say that Jews alone are the source of all evil in the West tends to defy rational examination.

Plot Twist: It’s Not Actually the Jews

Yes, we should question the ideology of World Economic Forum (WEF) adviser Yuval Noah Harari, an ethnic Jew and avowed transhumanist homosexual who celebrates the fact that “humans are hackable animals.” Yes, we should have tried and convicted Jeffrey Epstein before he had the bad manners to up and die somehow. I’ll even spot you the belief that Ben Shapiro has been a net negative on conservative politics. I disagree, but I’ll grant it for the sake of argument.

Before you pop the champagne bottle that “the Jews” are behind it all, Harari’s boss at the WEF is Klaus Schwab, who grew up Lutheran. Jeffrey Epstein’s partner— some say intelligence community “handler”—was Ghislaine Maxwell, raised Anglican. And the brains behind the Daily Wire? That was Jeremy Boering, who describes himself as an evangelical Christian.

Do you see? Even if the Jews are “behind it all,” they’re not standing alone, and for good reason. Because “Jews vs. Christians” is misplacing the antithesis from cosmic good versus cosmic evil into merely human terms of man versus man.

Or, as Doug Wilson puts it, “Misplacing the antithesis reassigns the line of demarcation, placing it between groups other than the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent… [it] wants the foundational division to be separate races, or classes, or sexes, or tribes, or political factions…”

The great battle on Earth is not between Christians and Jews. Dating back to the Garden (Gen 3:15), it has always been between the Sons of God and the Sons of the Serpent, in whatever race, class, sex, tribe, or political faction they may be found—including our own.

This is why straight, white, Christian men can’t hold animosity towards Jews as “the source of all evil.” First, because the belief logically tends towards targeted acts of persecution, which are themselves evil. Second because it’s simply wrong, as in anti-Biblical and therefore anti-Christian.

In plainer terms, eventually men and women who believe that “the Jews are the source of all evil” will have to choose between that belief and their Christian faith. They can’t hold onto both. Nor can they hold the former belief in a mental “safe zone” while they attempt to live out the latter belief in public. One will eventually win out.

Stop Campaigning for Your Own Chains

To return to our Dank Right questioners, this is what I try to explain to them. Despite what they may think, they’re not asking a socio-political question. They’re asking a sanctification question, revealing a root of bitterness in their hearts (Heb. 12:15), and an envy that needs to be laid at the foot of the cross.

However forcefully they may argue with me—raising voices, calling names, or belittling me in public—they’re merely campaigning for their own chains. This is no different from any “oppressed victim class” from the lefty woke era, just with substantially less melanin.

In Luke 4:18, our Savior proclaims, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed.”

Bitterness, envy, anger, and hatred oppress and blind us. Our feelings are dangerous because, unlike outward restraints like prison bars and handcuffs, feelings are invisible, internal, and visceral. They distort our thoughts, words, and actions towards ungodly ends before we even realize it.

But Christian faithfulness promises “the peace that surpasses understanding” (Philippians 4:7) and the fruits of the Spirit like love, joy, goodness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23).

Has the belief that “the Jews are the source of all evil” created either of those in any man—or pastor—that you know? If you’re reading this and hold that belief yourself, has it created them in you?

When a Christian preaches gospel truth to a man bound in chains, it often pricks his conscience. That’s a feature not a bug. Even done with the utmost care, it can be a painful procedure. Christ Himself encountered this among the captives of Israel whom He came to set free, and who then murdered Him for His trouble.

But the pain itself is not evidence of hatred. So to the Dank Right, or New Right, or whatever you want to call yourselves, I don’t hate you, and I never have.

Brothers, this is what it feels like to be loved.

If this essay was helpful, I write regularly on Christian faith, moral formation, and the ideas that quietly shape men for good or ill.

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Originally published in the 2025 Fight, Laugh, Feast magazine.