On September 18, I gave a talk at the New Saint Andrews College weekly Disputatio lecture series in Moscow, Idaho. My talk was called called “Every Man Gets Forged: On the Radicalization of Young Christian Men.”
I wrote it for the young men in that room. But more importantly, I wrote it for my son. What would I say to him about these topics?
You can watch the talk here on YouTube:
Full Text:
Nobody is born a weapon. A weapon must be made.
To make a weapon, you start with metal that has no particular shape. You heat it until it gives up the shape it had. Then you lay the metal on something hard, something that won’t move.
Then you strike it. Then you heat it again, and you strike it again, and you keep going until it becomes the thing somebody needs it to be. That process is not evil. It’s how many useful things get made. It’s also how every man in this room came to be the man he is today, including me.
Nobody consents to this process. The metal does not agree to the fire. A young man is no different. By the time he’s old enough to ask what is being done to him, most of the work is already underway. And a good deal of it was done by hands he didn’t choose.
Some of you had fathers who took that work seriously and did it with godly intention. You are rarer than you know. Most young men in this country didn’t, and yet the work got done on them anyway. It always gets done. If no one you trust is shaping you, that does not mean you go unshaped. It means somebody else picks up the hammer.
So the question I came here with is not whether you are being formed. You are. That was settled before you got here.
The question is who is swinging the hammer, and what he wants at the end of it.
Because there are two blacksmith’s shops running right now. They take the same young men. Same age, same shame, same phone, same feed. The shops look similar from the outside. Both of them demand something from you. Both of them talk about discipline and brotherhood and a fight worth having. Both of them will tell you that you are soft and that you need to be harder, and both of them will be partly right.
Both shops make weapons. Only one of them makes weapons that get kept.
Over the next thirty minutes, I want to show you the second blacksmith’s shop in detail. How it works, what it uses, and who is in it.
This talk will be in four sections.
First, how you weaponize a young man in America right now.
Second, why the weapon gets pointed at the Jews specifically.
Third, who is holding the hammer, what they are actually after, and where they came from.
And fourth, the question some of you have already started composing in your heads. Is this really the bigger problem right now? What about the left? Hold that one. I will answer it at the end, and I will answer it three times.
Two things before I get started. First, I’m covering a lot, and some of it will go by faster than it deserves. If you think I’ve got something wrong, find me afterward. I’ll be here until Sunday and will talk as long as there are people who want to discuss it, and I mean that.
Second, there are women in this room, for which I’m grateful. But this talk is directed towards the men. So when I say “men” I don’t mean “men” in the Biblical, gender-neutral sense. I mean adult human males. This community is blessed with an abundance of women who can speak to the corruption of women’s hearts, and I leave that subject to them.
My hope is that in speaking directly to the men, the women listening can understand their fathers, brothers, sons, and husbands better. And may that understanding help you discern men worthy of your respect.
Let’s start with the raw material.
Every young man is raw material, and that comes with one guarantee. Somebody is going to work it. If the men who owe him that work do not show up, the material does not stay raw. It gets picked up by whoever walks in the door.
So, the pipeline I am about to describe today does not begin with a recruiter. It begins with an absence.
That is step one, and it is the root of everything after it. Abdicated authority.
For three or four successive generations, fathers have abdicated or been absent entirely. The church in America, broadly speaking, stopped practicing church discipline, and capitulated to the sexual revolution rather than confronting it. And the institutions that were supposed to form young men into responsible adults collapsed.
Generations of men in America have grown up without fathers who could model repentance and sacrificial responsibility. And who could authoritatively answer these questions for their sons: “Who are we? Who are we not? And why?”
That is the raw material. We will return to this.
Step two: into that authority vacuum, three screens stepped in.
Pornography replaced the risk of real intimacy. It offers gratification without vulnerability, without rejection, without becoming a man worth being with.
Video games replaced the experience of real competence. They offer achievement, status, camaraderie, and action, all simulated, so a man can feel like a warrior without being one.
Sports betting replaced real risk. It offers the feeling of non-negotiable consequences, without ever leaving the chair.
An April 2025 survey by the Institute for Family Studies and YouGov asked young men how often they do these things. Two thirds play video games every day. More than a quarter watch porn once per day. And one in eight do both, plus gamble on sports, every single day.
Step three is shame and failure to launch.
The result of all of this? Young men know something is deeply wrong, and they can’t name it.
The shame compounds. Sexual shame, financial shame. Then they switch off the Xbox and are confronted with the awareness that they haven’t built anything: no career traction, no marriage, no household, no legacy. Once men are stripped of their coping mechanisms, the situation looks hopeless. I’ve seen it.
It’s important here to distinguish guilt from shame. Guilt is about what you’ve done. You watched pornography. You gambled away your rent money. You played GTA until 3am.
Shame is about what you are. You are the kind of man who does these things.
Guilt says, “I did wrong.” Shame says, “I am wrong.” Guilt can lead to repentance. And repentance is where shame finds its final relief, at the cross, and only at the cross.
But shame left unaddressed leads to despair. And despair is the fuel for everything that comes next.
Step four: no repentance. This is where it becomes theological. This is the hinge.
The biblical response to guilt and shame is repentance. You take it to God. You confess. You receive mercy and grace. And you start building, brick by brick, in a long obedience in the same direction.
“Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.” — Matthew 7:13–14
That’s the path. It’s not designed for immediate gratification. But it works.
But some of these men have never been shown repentance. They don’t have a father modeling it. They don’t have a pastor holding them to it. Neither do their friends.
And the heart, searching for a correct response and unable to find it, latches onto the first counterfeit it finds.
The first counterfeit is the Manosphere, and that’s step 5.
The Manosphere is the online conversation about masculinity, which offers basic answers to the questions of “Who are we? Who are we not? And why?” Though more often when a man shows up there, the questions are, “Who am I? Who am I not? And why?”
No man stops asking those questions just because his father didn’t answer them. These questions are fundamental to men.
In the lobby of the Manosphere, it does provide a limited form of discipleship. Lift weights. Stop watching porn. Clean your room, as Jordan Peterson says.
But the Manosphere also funnels men into cults of personality, Andrew Tate being the infamous example.
Within those cults of personality, men are taught covetousness. Covet the car. Covet the body. Covet the woman. Covet the lifestyle. It takes a man who is drowning in guilt and shame, and bullies him with anger, envy, and resentment as motivational tools.
The Manosphere also overlaps with 4chan and the Alt-Right, which today is called the Dissident Right, or sometimes the New Right. A young man enters the Manosphere looking for help with his shame and stalled life. He finds basic advice wrapped around a bully. And within months, he’s absorbing content about global identitarian conspiracies, without ever having gone looking for it.
I regret to inform you there is a large and growing Christian Manosphere today too. That’s a talk all on its own.
Step six is the blame ladder. This is the descent.
The blame ladder is located within the Manosphere. It’s at the center of it. The blame ladder doesn’t climb up toward responsibility. It climbs down, away from it. Each rung takes the man further from repentance and closer to destruction.
The initial rung down is fathers: The boomers ruined everything, this rung says. They had prosperity and squandered it. They checked out and left us with nothing.
There is some truth here, and that’s what makes this rung dangerous. There are also a lot of lies, especially from a historical perspective.
But dishonoring your father, even a father who failed you, doesn’t lead to repentance. It sows wind and reaps the whirlwind.
The next rung: mothers, and women broadly. This is the red pill. Women are hypergamous or manipulative, and not worth the effort, we’re told. Any woman I marry is just going to cheat on me with an alpha Chad—or revile me while my pastors look on—so why bother?
Again, there are real grievances here, but the frame is still blame, not responsibility.
The red pill has an acronym: AWALT. “All women are like that.” Your mother is a woman. You don’t get her as a carve-out.
Before we take the next step, notice where the blame ladder begins. The first two rungs are both violations of the 5th commandment: “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the LORD your God is giving you.” —Exodus 20:12
The next rung: institutions. “The universities indoctrinated us,” we hear, “The media lied. The government betrayed us. The economy is rigged. It’s over.”
Yes, in 2020 we all watched institutions detonate their credibility in real time. But a justified distrust of today’s institutions became a gateway to something darker: a rejection of any institutional authority, period.
Independent media has turned this into a rule. If it comes from an institution, it’s false. Which means anything from outside one must be true, which does not follow.
The next rung: minorities. Black people, Asians, gay people, immigrants, legal or otherwise. In the blame ladder, these groups aren’t the architects, and they aren’t quite people either. They’re instruments. Somebody up top is deploying them.
In this telling, they were let in by toxically empathetic mothers and abdicating boomer fathers, who allowed them to flood institutions and the border. Each rung reinforces the others, and the man feels increasingly certain that he’s seeing the full picture.
That’s what makes this hard to break. It’s not one bad idea. It’s an interlocking system of blame. Each step feels like another stage of awakening in a process of pseudo-gnostic revelation.
The final rung down — the one that holds all the others together.
At the bottom of every conspiracy rabbit hole is the same destination. The hidden hand. The puppet masters. The ones you’re not allowed to name. That’s the bottom rung of the blame ladder. And it’s been at the bottom for two thousand years.
The internet didn’t create this. It just made the descent frictionless. An entire chat group can travel from “my dad failed me” to “the Jews control everything” in weeks, if not days.
Elliot Hulse, one of the most popular Manosphere influencers, told an audience at the Manosphere’s 21 Convention that “the J’s” control everything. Not this year. In 2022.
Some of you might be thinking about numbers. Overrepresentation in finance, in media, in the academy. Overrepresentation is a claim about outcomes. Conspiracy is a claim about coordination. You can stack outcome data to the ceiling and never get coordination out of it.
What carries a man across that gap isn’t evidence. It’s need. We’ll talk about that need in a moment.
Every rung of this ladder is the same move down. The young man blames his father. He blames his mother. He blames institutions. He blames minorities. He blames the Jews. But what he’s actually doing—what he can never quite say out loud—is the same thing Adam did.
He’s blaming God for the life he was given, instead of saying, “It’s me, Lord. It was always me.” The whole blame ladder is one of evasion from the one confrontation a man cannot avoid forever, the one between him and his Creator.
That is the ladder. Now back to the main line.
Step seven: conspiracy becomes a unified theory of blame.
When there’s no external target sufficient to absorb your inner shame, conspiracy thinking offers something almost irresistible: a system. It’s not just your father, or feminism, or the economy. It’s all connected. Someone is orchestrating all of it.
This explains your suffering in a way that feels coherent. A unified theory of why your life is broken, without ever requiring you to kneel.
It’s never your fault. Never your sin. It was them.
COVID blew the doors off this. Everyone was isolated, anxious, and extremely online. Conspiracy thinking went from fringe to mainstream entertainment almost overnight.
And there’s a market underneath it. Influencers discovered an enormous, desperate, paying audience of young men looking for someone to validate their anger.
The Manosphere cultivated it. Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan shined a spotlight on it. Andrew Tate exploded it. And now everyone is trying to get their share, adopting whatever language, beliefs, or posture are necessary to get a piece. The scramble for young men’s cash is everywhere.
Some of these influencers believe it. Some got captured by an audience they built and now they have to feed the beast. And some are funded by people with an interest in this country coming apart. I think it’s all three.
Step eight of the pipeline is in-group belonging. This is where it locks in and becomes social.
A young man looks around. All his friends are sharing this content. All his favorite creators are saying it. It’s the in thing. Hating boomers. Hating Israel. Blaming the Jews, if you want to belong.
These are men who’ve been lonely for years. Being part of the consensus thinking—including ethnic hatred and conspiracy—is the price of admission to the club.
For some, the enthusiasm is real. This is edgy and transgressive. I want in. For others, it’s defensive. They see what’s happening, they’re uncomfortable, but they don’t want to be the next target of the group’s cruelty. So, they stay silent when they should speak up or leave entirely.
Either way, hatred and blaming is no longer just an idea. It’s a loyalty test.
For a generation of men who live online, walking away from their digital community isn’t losing some friends. It’s losing the only community they have ever had. They don’t have a friend down the street to ride bikes with. They don’t have a buddy from work, from church, or from sports. They have a group chat. That’s the entire stack.
When you ask one of these men to walk away from blaming, you’re not asking him to revise his political views. You are asking him to walk away from the people in the world he’s closest with, even if he doesn’t know their faces or real names.
Step nine: the promise of political power. This is the end of the pipeline.
The final stage is when the friend group becomes a war-band. It’s no longer just “me and my friends venting online.” It’s a political movement.
The promise is this: “The political system around you, your elders, the men you’ve trusted: they failed you. We’re going to fix things.”
For young men who’ve spent years feeling powerless, the promise is intoxicating. This is where you get the crusader avatars, a digital simulation of heroism.
This is also where you get “Christ is King” as a political battle cry, rather than “Christ is Lord” as a confession of faith. The slogan is what you hear. The confession is what you don’t.
These young men feel like they’re soldiers in a righteous war against an identifiable enemy: liberals, progressives, feminists, immigrant hordes, and the Jews behind them all. It takes the aimlessness and purposelessness of their lives and replaces it with a dark mission, but it’s still a mission. It’s still something to do.
And that is the end of the pipeline. That explains exactly what we are seeing in conservative politics today, including and especially in the Christian sphere, where it absolutely doesn’t belong. And that is why I am here today.
Remember, the war-band is online. The crusade is online. The promise is to finally do something offline. There is a real debate in these online circles whether that should be at the ballot box, or with bullets.
So here is the whole thing in one breath:
A boy grows up without a father who can tell him who he is. Screens step into that gap and give him the feeling of intimacy, competence and risk without any of the substance. By his twenties he knows something is wrong and can’t name it, and the shame of that has nowhere to go, because nobody ever showed him a cross to take it to. So it goes outward. He blames his father. Then women. Then institutions. Then the people he’s told were let in to replace him. Then the ones behind all of it. Somebody hands him a system that explains everything, a group of men who’ll love him for believing it, and a war to fight. And he finally has a mission.
That is where we are, and that is what’s going on. The root is spiritual, and the fruit is political. This is why the right is burning.
That is also how you weaponize an adult human male. Lord willing none of the men in this room are in this process. But the odds say that some of you are.
The sharp-eyed among you might have noticed that this has the architecture of false religion, or as my Pastor Joel Ellis calls it, “structurally antichrist.” It offers everything the gospel offers—father figures, discipleship, a church, even counterfeit saviors—with the cross removed.
Which is why pulling a man out of it is so hard. Once a man gets these ideas wrapped around his axle, you’re not correcting his facts. You’re asking him to become an apostate. That leads to social punishment. And my definition of a cult is: “Any organization you are materially punished for voluntarily leaving.”
If you leave your bowling league and the guys post negative reviews on Google about your business, that is cult behavior. So, what we’re looking at online isn’t just a group chat, or influencers posting hot takes. Dissenters are punished.
When you peel back the layers, you are looking at a cult, operating in the name of Christ and the Reformed faith.
…
Merry Christmas.
Before I move on, two things. One for the man who’s in it, and one for the man watching a friend go.
If you’re in it, I’m not asking you to stand up in this room and take anything back. For now, I’m asking for less. Don’t go further. And find one man who isn’t in your group chat and tell him where you’ve been.
If it’s your friend going in, understand you’re asking him to leave people he’s close to. So don’t try to out-argue him. You will lose, because he’s absorbed more of this than you have, and winning wasn’t the point anyway.
Instead, be the guy who’s still there. Ask him how he’s doing and mean it. And say something. Not a lecture. Just let him know that something he said landed wrong with you. That’s the part most of you will skip, because it’s awkward and you’d rather not make it weird.
You may not be able to save anybody. Do it anyway.
So why the Jews.
Not because the young man went looking for them. He got to the bottom of the ladder and found them already there. They have been at the bottom of that ladder for two thousand years, and in that time the pattern has scaled three times.
Phase one is the local scapegoat.
For most of Christian history, Jews lived as impoverished minorities inside Christian communities. Excluded from guilds, from owning land, from political life. What was left was money-lending and trade, and some did very well there.
Then the crops failed. Or the plague came. And the village looked around for somebody to blame. Locals said the Jews were Christ-killers, poisoning the wells, or sacrificing Christian children. Pitchforks and torches were the result.
But the violence stopped at the edge of the village, because that’s as far as a mob can walk.
Local problem, local scapegoat.
Phase two is the national scapegoat.
The Enlightenment and liberal democracy opened the ghettos. For the first time Jews could enter national life. Universities, professions, finance, politics. And many of them flourished. Some historians argue that a religious obligation to read the Hebrew scriptures had made them a literate people centuries before literacy was common. Which is worth sitting with.
Either way, achievement became a survival strategy. If we’re indispensable, we’ll be safe.
I want to stop here, because this was the catechism of my own childhood. Work hard. Do well in school. Get into a great college. Find a high-paying profession. Nobody ever said why out loud, but I knew why. Because as long as we achieve, we’re safe. I didn’t really get a childhood. That’s what it got traded for. I crushed my SATs and graduated from Stanford University. So, this isn’t an abstraction to me.
This strategy also backfired.
Because visible success produced a new accusation. Not “they’re poisoning the wells” anymore. Now it was “they run our institutions.” And the enforcement was no longer a mob. It was a government. That’s what produced the Holocaust. Not villages settling scores. A state organizing itself against a people inside it.
Phase two also produced a document.
In 1903, in Tsarist Russia, somebody in or near the secret police took a French satire, changed some words, and published it as the minutes of a secret meeting of rabbis. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. A monarchy facing democratic revolution needed to explain the revolution, and blaming the Jews was cheaper than reform.
The thing reads like a bad supervillain monologue, but people took it seriously.
The London Times exposed it as a forgery in 1921. Four years later Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that the newspapers calling it a forgery were the best proof it was real.
That’s the whole thing right there. The Protocols aren’t an argument. They’re an operating system. Every grievance gets a hidden author. Banking. Wars. Immigration. Same answer every time. And if you can’t find the evidence, that’s just proof of how good they are.
Henry Ford brought the Protocols to America in the 1920s, publishing it as “The International Jew.” Yes, that Henry Ford. That’s phase two.
Phase three is where you live. Phase three is not the internet. The internet only made the descent faster. The scapegoat became a state.
For two thousand years the accusation pointed at people. A family or community inside your borders. People can be expelled. Or people can be killed.
Not a state. It has a capital, an army, an intelligence service, a lobby, and a line in the U.S. federal budget. For the first time the hidden hand has a return address.
Phase two ran on a forgery. Phase three runs on the news. A young man doesn’t need a document anymore. He has footage.
So every action that state takes gets read back through the Protocols. Nothing it does can count as a country making hard decisions. It can only ever be evidence.
Now I need to be careful here, and so do you.
A man can look at a specific policy of a specific government and conclude it’s unjust. That is not this. Nations get criticized, and Christians are allowed to criticize them. You can be wrong or right about it, and either way be nowhere near the blame ladder.
The tell isn’t whether a man criticizes. The tell is whether the criticism has quietly become the explanation for everything else in his life. When a foreign country accounts for his mortgage payment, his loneliness, and the state of his church, he’s not doing political analysis anymore. He’s on the bottom rung, and the country name is just the part he’s allowed to say out loud.
Local, national, global. Three scales for the same move. The accusation didn’t change. The address did.
But there’s actually one more scale inside phase three. And to see it requires that we define three terms that will probably make you very uncomfortable.
White supremacy. White nationalism. And Neo-Nazism.
The left, as it does, has rendered these terms meaningless through overuse. If white supremacy is showing up on time, having children, and eating peanut butter & jelly sandwiches, then nothing is white supremacy. But the moral of the story of “the boy who cried wolf” is that the wolf finally shows up and starts eating people.
So, the terms white supremacy, white nationalism, and Neo Nazism have actual meanings, and you need to know them.
First, white supremacy is the belief that white people, due to genetic or mystical qualities, are superior ontologically to every other ethnicity on Earth: Black people, Asians, Indians, etc. Not better at some particular thing. Higher up the order of being.
White nationalism is the belief that whites are a distinct people, that a people deserves a state of its own, and that a multiethnic nation is therefore illegitimate. Either carve a territory out of this one, or take this one and exclude everybody else, by policy or by force.
One can be a white nationalist without being a white supremacist. But in practice, a man who wants a sovereign state for his people eventually has to explain why they deserve one. I’ll come back to that.
Finally, Neo Nazism takes white supremacy and white nationalism and wraps them in a mid-century German aesthetic, complete with rituals, symbols, and militarism.
You’ve had these words thrown at you for going to church, for voting for Donald Trump, and for disagreeing with liberals. So, you learned to hear the terms as noise.
But they are not noise. Each one of them has history behind it, and they are pieces of a movement with arguments and canonical works.
And while you were tuning out the terms, the movement behind them changed clothes. It doesn’t wear a hood or an armband or stomping boots anymore. It wears a suit. It writes books. It has a Substack and a podcast and a reading list.
That’s the danger. Not that you won’t recognize him. That you won’t believe him when he tells you exactly what he is.
So let me tell you what he’s been reading.
Because there is a library behind this. Gobineau. Spengler. Guénon. Evola. de Benoist. Yockey. Stoddard. Rockwell. Carto. Robertson. Pierce. Beam. Lane. Duke. Taylor. Francis. MacDonald. Mason. Spencer—no relation.
That’s not a list of nineteen cranks. That is a parallel course of study, with its own canon, its own vocabulary, its own arguments, and its own way of reading history. Some of these men wrote seriously. One of them held a professorship.
And want you to notice something about this list: not one of them was Christian. Several of them were explicit that Christianity was the problem, a foreign import that made Europeans weak.
So we have men teaching young Christians who they are, who reject the thing that made the West what it was in the first place.
Now, eighty years in the wilderness will teach a movement something. And what it taught them is on display in two men from that list who believed nearly the same things and chose opposite methods.
William Pierce kept the uniform. He built a vanguard, wrote a novel about race war, and waited for the revolution that would prove him right. Somebody read it and blew up a federal building, and after that nobody would touch him.
Willis Carto put on a suit. He founded a newspaper that read like ordinary populist grievance, and an institute with the vocabulary of scholarship. He worked inside conservative politics for fifty years, behind a maze of corporate fronts, and most of you have never heard his name. That was the point.
Guess which method survived. Guess which one is running in your X feed.
That’s what the wilderness taught. The armband loses. The letterhead wins. So the literature travels now without the names attached, rewritten and softened and restated in whatever vocabulary the destination speaks. By the time it reaches a Reformed young man it isn’t wearing a hood. It’s wearing our words. Covenant. Kinship. Nation. Inheritance. Christendom.
Here are my sources, so you can check my work. Thirty-five hundred pages this year alone, so consider this an introductory curriculum:
Blood and Politics by Leonard Zeskind shows you how this was translated from the fringe into ordinary conservative politics. Bring the War Home by Kathleen Belew shows the paramilitary history, where the movement declared war on the federal government and then went cell-based, so that nobody had to be in charge. Black Sun by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke shows you the religion underneath.
Dale Beran’s It Came From Something Awful takes you from there onto the Internet. And James Bloodworth’s Lost Boys takes you from the Internet into the Manosphere. From the Manosphere I trust you can track it into Reformed theology yourselves.
If you twist my arm and ask me to recommend just one, read Blood and Politics by Zeskind. He builds the frame you can hang the rest on. There’s a new paperback edition coming in October, which tells you something.
Most of these are written from the left. You’ll read political asides you disagree with. Read them anyway.
I told you I’d come back to something.
A man says he isn’t a supremacist. He just wants a state for his people. Fine. But he still has to explain why his people don’t have one, and why they lost what they had. If whites are supposedly more intelligent, more capable, and more creative, how did allegedly inferior populations overcome them?
There are only two answers to that question.
The first answer is that we sinned. That we were given a great deal, and we squandered it, and God removed His blessing the way He said He would. That answer is available. It’s the one our own confession teaches.
And no white nationalist movement in history has ever taken it. Because a movement that says “we sinned” isn’t a white nationalist movement anymore. It’s a white repentance movement, and nobody has ever built one of those.
So, they take the second answer. We were robbed. And as soon as you say you were robbed, you need a robber.
That is why this cannot be separated from antisemitism. Not because every man in it hates Jews. But because the worldview requires a thief. Antisemitism supplies one, just as it has for two thousand years.
None of this is a recent discovery. Thirty-five years ago, William F. Buckley—a man nobody could dismiss—devoted forty thousand words in National Review to antisemitism on the American right. He examined it case by case, including men who were friends of his. He took real heat for it.
And the movement did not follow him. No line was drawn. The men who held these ideas kept writing, kept running for office, and conservatism decided it had bigger fights.
Thirty-five years later, nobody on our side has done the work again. I went looking. Not one book. Not one serious accounting.
That should trouble you. It troubles me.
In 2016, the alt-right, the inheritors of all this, went to work for a candidate I don’t believe ever shared their commitments. It didn’t matter. They got a hearing.
And they never left. In 1991 this was small enough to throw out. Now it isn’t asking for a place in conservatism. It intends to supplant it. That’s what the suit and Substack were for.
Which is why it’s in your algorithm and not in Hayden Lake. It doesn’t need a militia anymore. It needs votes. It needs young men who are already conservative, already Christian, and already angry about something real.
That’s you.
And you’re getting hit from two directions, but they don’t work the same way. From journalists on the left, the story writes itself: theocrats in north Idaho, the same country that gave us Aryan Nations, which was a compound two hours up the road. Nobody has to establish a connection. The geography does the work.
That smear can only attack you from the outside. It can’t get in.
The other one is coming from within and calls itself right-wing. It sounds like family. And it doesn’t tell you you’re wrong. It tells you you’re right, and that the men who taught you are too soft to finish what they started.
It’s asking you to dishonor your fathers and call it courage.
And this is where I have to say the hard thing. What white nationalism teaches cannot live in the same building as what this college is doing.
Not because it’s impolite. Because the two answers are incompatible at the root.
You are being taught here that a people is made by covenant, and that a blessed people can lose the blessing by forgetting who gave it. That’s Deuteronomy 8. God warns Israel that when they are prosperous, they will tell themselves their own hand did it, and that when they do, they’ll go the way of every nation God destroyed before them.
The other answer says a people is made by blood, and that what was lost was stolen.
Two answers. You are being taught one of them at New St. Andrews. You are being taught the other one by your phone.
And understand how the second one arrives. It works by learning to speak the language of whatever community it enters. It did that in conservative politics in the 1990’s. It did it in online spaces in the 2000’s. It is doing it in the Reformed church right now.
So it will not show up sounding foreign. It will show up sounding like you.
A year ago, I wrote a piece for the website Christ Over All. In it I proposed a question for pastors to ask a young man applying for membership, when they had reason to be concerned about him.
“Do you believe the Jews are committing cultural genocide against straight white men and families?”
That question caused more trouble than anything else in the article. And men with real platforms, men whose names you would recognize, blocked me over the article. They didn’t argue. They left.
I think that tells you the question was worth asking. Because the answer tells you which side of the line a man is on. That’s why so many people got mad when I suggested pastors ask it. It catches them at exactly the spot they want to get through: the doorway of a Reformed church.
So let’s go back to the blacksmith shops.
I told you at the start that you’re being forged whether you agreed to it or not. Here is what that actually looks like, because both shops are working with the same material.
You can’t buy a house on the timeline your grandfather did. That’s true. You were lied to by institutions that were never punished for it. True. Your father didn’t teach you what you needed to know, or even anything HE knows. True.
That’s the anvil. It doesn’t move. You will be shaped against it.
Now listen to the hammer.
One shop says: they did this to you. Somebody took what was yours. Rise up and take it back.
The other shop says something much more difficult. “We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.”
Same anvil. Same young man. Same facts about his life. Two hammers.
And here’s the thing about the first one. It isn’t lying to you about the anvil. It’s lying to you about what you’re being made into.
I’ve been calling you metal for half an hour now, but you’re not actually metal. A sword can’t know what it’s for. A man can.
So let me say it plainly.
You are going to be a weapon. That was never in question. Scripture is full of men God made into instruments like Cyrus or the Apostle Paul. Psalm 127 says sons are like arrows in a warrior’s hand.
So the question was never whether you’d be forged and picked up. The question is who picks you up, and what he calls you when he does.
Wicked men have words for what they make. Tools. Assets. Foot soldiers. A tool is worth what it can still do, and no more. Use it hard enough and it breaks. Then it goes in the bin. Nobody writes to the shell after it’s been fired.
God has a different word. He calls them sons.
That’s not a nicer arrangement. It’s a different category.
A tool is used up. A son is an heir.
But understand what it costs, because it costs more, not less. A son carries the family name. Which means he can fight, and he should. And how he fights matters as much as whether he fights.
But a son doesn’t choose his war. You don’t pick the enemy and you don’t pick the methods. Both come from your Father, and the fight He gives you is almost always smaller and closer than the one you wanted.
One more thing, and this is the part nobody wants to hear.
If this gets stopped, it gets stopped by men who are willing to pay for it. That means losing friends. It means the invitation that doesn’t come, the opportunity you don’t hear back about, and the email thread that goes dead. It means being the one who says something when the room has already agreed and being called a name you don’t deserve by men you used to respect, and not getting to defend yourself.
There is no version of this where you are brave and also comfortable.
In closing, I promised you an answer to a question, and I said I’d answer it three times.
Is this really the bigger problem? What about the left?
First answer. It doesn’t matter, because you’re measuring the wrong thing.
Some of the largest platforms in the world are being built on this right now, and they are being built for young men. Nobody has to be coordinating anything. There’s an audience, and the market clears.
The pipeline I described at the start is real and nothing has come along to shut it down. Whatever the numbers are today, they are not a description of where this is going.
Second answer. It doesn’t matter, because that isn’t how this works.
In his book Warrant for Genocide about the origins of the Protocols of Zion, the author Norman Cohn cites a German researcher named Michael Müller-Claudius, who did something clever.
In November 1938, the Nazi regime organized a pogrom. Squads of young men burned synagogues, looted Jewish shops and homes across Germany, and killed dozens of people. Those two nights are known as Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass. It was organized and sanctioned. Everybody saw it.
Afterwards, Müller-Claudius had casual conversations with forty-one Nazi Party members and worked out what they actually thought. Sixty-three percent were disgusted. Five percent approved because of—and I quote— “their belief in Jewish world conspiracy.” Thirty-two percent were indifferent.
Müller-Claudius did the same survey again in 1942, while the deportations were running. The fanatics were still five percent. Exactly the same. But the disgusted had dropped from sixty-three to just twenty-six percent, and the indifferent in the middle had more than doubled.
These were Party members. The committed. Nothing had to grow. A fixed handful of true believers, and everybody else quietly stopped caring while the trains ran.
You don’t need numbers. You need a numb majority and a few men who really mean it.
Third answer. It doesn’t matter, because the question isn’t yours to ask.
In 1905, a man wrote to a London newspaper about what was wrong with the world. G. K. Chesterton wrote back. What did he say?
My dad?
All women?
Black people?
Illegal immigrants?
The Jews?
No.
He wrote back that the answer to the question “what is wrong” is, or should be, “I am wrong.” And that until a man can give that answer, his idealism is only a hobby.
Your idealism, only a hobby.
So it doesn’t matter if there are a billion radicals on the left. It doesn’t matter what the numbers say. What matters is you.
Christ said pick up your cross and follow me.
He did not say pick up that cross over there and nail that guy to it.
You will be a weapon. The only question is whose.
…
Closing Prayer
Heavenly Father, thank you for the time together with these men and women today. May these words sink deep into their hearts, and the hearts of all those watching and listening later.
And may the Holy Spirit move in our nation and the church to pry young men’s fingers from the sword.
Psalm 119 - Beth
“How can a young man keep his way pure? By guarding it according to your word. With my whole heart I seek you; let me not wander from your commandments! I have stored up your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you. Blessed are you, O LORD; teach me your statutes! With my lips I declare all the rules of your mouth. In the way of your testimonies I delight as much as in all riches. I will meditate on your precepts and fix my eyes on your ways. I will delight in your statutes; I will not forget your word.”
In the merciful name of Jesus Christ our Savior. Amen.
Q&A
Following this talk, New St. Andrews hosted a Q&A session with students from the college. You can view that portion of the Disputatio here. (Link goes direct to Q&A.)
Read more about Disputatio on the NSA website.
Bibliography
Books
Belew, Kathleen. Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018.
Beran, Dale. It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office. New York: All Points Books, 2019.
Bloodworth, James. Lost Boys: A Personal Journey Through the Manosphere. London: Atlantic Books, 2025.
Bronner, Stephen Eric. A Rumor about the Jews: Conspiracy, Anti-Semitism, and the Protocols of Zion. 2nd ed. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
Cohn, Norman. Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1970. First published 1967 by Eyre & Spottiswoode.
Eisner, Will. The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Introduction by Umberto Eco. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005.
Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas. Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity. New York: New York University Press, 2002.
Greer, Scott. Whitepill: The Online Right and the Making of Trump’s America. Passage Press, 2026.
Kuehl, Christopher. Is God a Zionist? Finding God’s Story in a World Obsessed with Israel. Foreword by Russell Johnson. Restore Seven Publishing, 2026.
Lavin, Talia. Culture Warlords: My Journey into the Dark Web of White Supremacy. New York: Hachette Books, 2020.
Nagle, Angela. Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right. Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2017.
Reeve, Elle. Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics. New York: Atria Books, 2024.
Zeskind, Leonard. Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009.
NOTE: All books were read in print or digital form. No audiobooks.
Articles, Letters, and Reports
Buckley, William F., Jr. “In Search of Anti-Semitism.” National Review, December 30, 1991.
Chesterton, G. K. Letter to the editor. Daily News (London), August 16, 1905.
Audio
Evans, Robert. The War on Everyone. Audiobook. Self-published, 2019.
Statement on LLM Usage
Two LLMs contributed to this talk.
First, after reading the books in the bibliography and seeing them document the same names repeatedly, I used ChatGPT to research the thinkers behind white supremacy, white nationalism, and neo-Nazism, known collectively as the “white power movement.” I investigated more than two dozen key figures, comparing and contrasting their worldviews and their historical contributions to the evolving ideas and tactics of the movement.
When drafting the speech, I originally planned for it to have a three-part structure (I. Pipeline, II. Scapegoating, III. Objections). I had presented the Pipeline and Scapegoating material previously on my Substack. I also gave the same material as a presentation to members of my church, twice, with each running over 90 minutes. The “three scales of scapegoating: local, national, global” material in Section II is derived from Bronner, A Rumor About the Jews (see bibliography). I previously discussed these scales on my podcast interview with Jeremy Boreing. The Objections were my own and were drafted in response to a prompt I received from NSA to talk about the scale of the problem relative to leftist influence. I believe strongly for the reasons listed in the talk that to discuss this in terms of headcount gravely misunderstands what’s going on and seriously risks underestimating it (see bibliography).
A fourth section on White Nationalism emerged from my reading (see bibliography) as a “fourth scale of scapegoating” obscured within Bronner’s original three, so I updated the talk accordingly. (Note: Some authors like Yockey, Evola, Serrano, and Devi among others even posit a fifth, “cosmological” level of scapegoating. See my Black Sun book club series for more.)
Prior versions of this talk used the metaphor of a “forest fire,” which I think is still a valid way of framing the phenomenon. But I felt that a fire was too passive when speaking to young men, because they’re actively being shaped by individuals using unbiblical ideas to generate specific interpretations of historical facts and contemporary realities. So I opted for the idea of a “blacksmith’s shop” which is forging young men into weapons using ideas as “hammers” and facts as “the anvil.” Following that metaphor, the “tools vs. sons” distinction was necessary to make so as not to imply any desire for the same violence I see other groups encouraging.
“Covenant vs. blood” is a distinction drawn from Reformed covenant theology.
“Sinned vs. stolen” arose directly out of my research into the white power movement, as all of its thinkers (such as they are) used blaming strategies of varying degrees of sophistication to explain what they term “white dispossession.”
Putting the blacksmith’s shop together with those two distinctions—covenant vs. blood, and sinned vs. stolen—led me to the clear conclusion that the white power movement’s “parallel course of study” and NSA’s confessional Reformed curriculum are fundamentally incompatible in their efforts to shape men.
I then used Claude to simplify and compress two hours of original material into 37 minutes, refined in language and pacing for members of a younger audience with smartphone-impacted attention spans whom I thought might be disinclined to hear me, especially if I let their attention flag. I aimed for a “simple enough for a five-year-old to get it” standard, which I’ve used in similar discussions of this material because I know audiences seek any reason to dismiss my conclusions. “Too complex” is as good a reason as any. Though because I wrote this with my son in mind, I also assumed they’d be at least as intelligent as my own progeny.
In the concluding section, all three responses to the question, “Is this really the bigger problem? What about the left?” are my own. The Müller-Claudius data can be found on pages 232-233 of the 1970 Pelican edition of Warrant for Genocide. (I failed to bookmark those pages after I read it, and the Lord was very kind to help me open the book almost directly to them when drafting the talk. Hallelujah!)
I first heard the G.K. Chesterton story from Pastor Doug Wilson at the conclusion of Tucker Carlson’s interview of him. When I went searching for the origins of the story, I found that Chesterton’s actual words were stronger than the legend. So I included them.
My conclusion, “Christ said, ‘Pick up your cross and follow me.’ He did not say, ‘Pick up that cross over there and nail that guy to it,’” is something I’ve been saying privately for a couple of years.
The closing prayer was a suggestion from my friend Barb from Camp Spirit Dream, the group who introduced me to Christ in 2015 and baptized me in 2020. The night before the talk, Barb proposed that I close in prayer rather than on the much harder line that precedes it. My first instinct was to select something from Psalms. As my Bible reading plan would have it, I had just read Psalm 118 the day before, so my Bible opened right to Psalm 119. It seemed appropriate.