This Minneapolis shooting turns out to be much darker than I realized yesterday, when I first wrote. The killer was quite clearly possessed, I think. I mean that literally. This story from the New York Post details some of his chaotic, anti-Semitic, hateful beliefs, which seem to have no ideological core. His transgenderism seems to have been not so much at the core of his identity, but rather one manifestation of a malignant, radically disordered mind. Here is the 11-minute video he left behind, before the shooting. It is a horrifying glimpse into the mind of a madman.

This page from his journal jumped out at me when I saw it yesterday:

 

The Russian says:

 

Again: possessed.

Let’s not forget the valorization of revenge violence among trannies. Watch this. And look at this:

 

Peter Savodnik takes the measure of this lunatic. He goes through the various “explanations” people have offered, in an attempt to make sense of Westman’s heinous act, and concludes:

All that finger-pointing obscures a deeper point: Westman seems to have been driven by an all-consuming, destructive force, a nihilism—the conviction that life is meaningless; that words like truth, justice and God are empty slogans; that everything must be razed.

Nihilism is not some obscure academic notion. It stretches back to the 19th century—early Russian radicals were called nihilists—and it has waxed and waned across the past 150 years. Today, you can feel the nihilist impulse coursing through America, which has been mostly stripped of its faith and a shared national culture and has seen once-great institutions—universities, corporations, churches, nonprofit organizations, the media, the military—become engulfed in scandal and politicization.

It is an understatement to say America is struggling to infuse young Americans with a sense of purpose.

Earlier this year, the FBI introduced a new category of criminal: the Nihilistic Violent Extremist, or NVE.

If jihadis kill for Allah, and anti-government extremists like Timothy McVeigh killed in the name of some demented notion of freedom, then NVEs kill simply because they want to kill. They don’t have much in the way of ideological commitments—as the confusing hodgepodge of aphorisms Westman scrawled into his rifle, pistol, and shotgun makes clear—beyond a commitment to chaos and evil themselves.

If we are dealing with true nihilism, then we are all in for a hell of a ride. There’s no way to counter people who want to murder and cause havoc simply for the pleasure of doing it. Last week at the Midwestuary, I heard lots of talk about the spread of nihilism among young American males. This is the far fringe of victims of the Meaning Crisis. Max Remington texted me overnight:

America's Years of Lead are going to be driven by this kind of nihilistic violence by people of all ages. America has so many lone wolves, I wouldn't rule out the possibility it could collapse the country, honestly.

I don’t know the extent of this problem in the US, nor do I know if Europe has a similar problem. But see, this is the kind of thing that David Betz is talking about when he raises the prospect of “civil war”. It will almost certainly not be anything well-organized, he says, but rather random acts of killing, violence, and sundry mayhem, committed by people with different motives, or no motive at all other than destroying a society that they believe has failed them.

The great contemporary literary critic Gary Saul Morson explains the nature of 19th century Russian nihilism, which is not the same thing as what Robin Westman might have instantiated. Excerpt:

“Nihilist” and “nihilism”—terms typically attributed to novelist Ivan Turgenev—originally referred to a group that arose in Russia around 1860. Today we often call people nihilistic if they extend no hope that conditions can improve. Unqualified pessimists, they regard all grounds for optimism as illusory. We also use the term “nihilism” to describe extreme relativism about the bases of human knowledge. Science, in this view, is just another ideology, based, like all ideologies, on the interests of a ruling class. Accepted knowledge is nothing more than power made into a philosophy justifying it. This kind of nihilism often interprets various philosophers—Hume, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Feyerabend, and others—as justifying the claim that one can build on no certain “foundations.”

Neither understanding of nihilism applies to the original Russian nihilists. Far from despairing, they believed that they knew just how to build the perfect society, which, they also held, could be realized in a few years. Regarding “science” as a set of infallible (and mostly metaphysical) dogmas, they deemed their favored social theories scientific and therefore utterly beyond doubt. As their critics observed, these science worshippers missed the whole point of science, openness to contrary evidence.

The group’s leader, Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828-1889), exercised immense influence. His utopian fiction, What Is to Be Done? (1863)—the question was anything but rhetorical—became the most widely read book among the intelligentsia before the Revolution. Lenin credited it with making him a revolutionary, and the Soviets hailed Chernyshevsky as a thinker in the same league as Marx and Engels. Tolstoy, on the other hand, referred to him as “that gentleman who stinks of bedbugs,” a loathsome figure who has persuaded his followers that “to be outraged, bilious, and spiteful is a commendable thing.”

In his novel Demons (sometimes translated in English as The Possessed), Dostoevsky illustrates and condemns the nihilism popular among young people of his era. His character Verkhovensky is a political nihilist, aiming to disrupt society for the sake of creating a utopian future. By contrast, Stavrogin is an existential nihilist, who truly believes life has no meaning, and who lives to channel his despair into destruction.

I have this sense that we are living in a culture accelerating towards a general calamity. Recall that when an audience member in a screening of Live Not By Lies asked me earlier this year if I thought the threat of soft totalitarianism was waning because Trump is in power, and pushing back on woke, I said no. All the conditions that Arendt identified as conducive to totalitarianism are still very much with us: mass loneliness and alienation, a loss of faith in institutions and hierarchies, a love of transgression for its own sake, a willingness to believe that “truth” is whatever satisfies one’s desires, and so forth.

We know very well where wokeness take us. I am particularly aware of how wokeness validated racial identity, and privileging racial identity. The right-wing version is now emerging ferociously. The very right-wing demons I warned many years ago that wokeness was summoning are now here. God only knows how this ends. I’ve always had a superstitious belief that the Jews are a canary in the coal mine of society: that anti-Semitism is a sure sign that a society is giving itself over to radical evil. Now we see that rising on both the Left and the Right.

Last night in Rome I was at a social event with some people from all over Europe. A couple of British interlocutors expressed extreme worry for their country. There’s the migrant crisis, of course, but also the economic crisis, about which I knew little. They talked about how the cost of living is becoming unsustainable, and how the government is barreling towards a fiscal Armageddon. Last week, the Telegraph reported that the government might be forced to appeal to the International Monetary Fund for a bailout. If that happens, my British interlocutors said, there’s a very good chance that the IMF simply will not have the funds to cover Britain’s debts. And if it does, the IMF will demand radical reforms, including either the slashing of pensions, the gutting of the National Health Service, or both. These are moves that the Labour government cannot politically do. So … what, then?

Britain is a post-Christian society. What holds it together, and prevents it from descending into chaos and violence should the economy collapse, particularly at a time of increasing racial and religious tension?

Notice that after Nigel Farage’s deportation speech, Reform has surged in popularity to the point that it has more support than the Tories and Labour combined! Has that kind of thing ever happened?

 

What if the same fiscal disaster happens to France, which is facing its own fast-approaching day of fiscal reckoning? Francois Bayrou, the prime minister, will have to resign in the days to come over the budget impasse. He appeared on French TV this week to say bluntly that the core problem is the Boomers’ pensions, which are politically untouchable.

I also talked to a German woman, who said that her own country is headed towards fiscal disaster. She told me that she used to fear and loathe the AfD (Alternative For Germany), but after seeing how extreme the German establishment has been in trying to crush the AfD, she now sympathizes with them. A German man earlier in the evening told me the same thing.

A German court has banned an AfD candidate for running for mayor in a German city. You’ll never guess why:

The exclusion began when incumbent Mayor Jutta Steinruck (formerly SPD) contacted the SPD-controlled Rhineland-Palatinate Ministry of Interior, requesting information about AfD candidate Joachim Paul from the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. The SPD-led ministry had already made headlines by announcing that civil servants expressing sympathy for the AfD would be excluded from state positions.

The resulting 11-page report claimed “good reasons to doubt Paul’s loyalty to the constitution,” citing:

• A photograph: Paul posted an Instagram photo of himself with Austrian activist Martin Sellner, who was banned from Germany for advocating the deportation of migrants, including those with citizenship who fail to “sufficiently assimilate.”

• The concept of “remigration”: Paul gave a November 2023 lecture titled “Immigration: A Matter of Destiny—Why Remigration is Necessary and Feasible.”

• Literary references: A 2022 article by Paul in the Austrian magazine Freilich referenced Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, stating, “Tolkien’s entire work reflects a conservative mindset of particular value to contemporary conservatism … The protagonists fight for a cause greater than themselves: their homeland, the survival of their culture, a just order, the defense against a global threat.”

• Cultural interests: Paul’s appreciation for Wagner’s Nibelungenlied, which the report claims holds significance for him in terms of “national pride.” The report notes he offers video seminars on the medieval epic.

For Germany’s liberal and cultural left, all of this undoubtedly smacks of “Nazi.” But in a democracy, the question of what to make of Paul’s ideas and associations should have been left to the public. Paul might not have won—some polls didn’t favor him despite the AfD’s strong February performance in the region, where it came a very narrow first with 24.3%. But the establishment wanted to take no risks, knowing full well they have lost the public struggle on migration and national values.

The dude likes Tolkien and Wagner. Clearly a Nazi!

Meanwhile, the Chief Imam of Ireland would like you to know that it was sad that an asylum seeker raped a Dutch woman and later murdered a Dutch girl the other day, but society is also to blame for :::checks notes::: not telling him that rape and murder is wrong:

 

Poor marginalized asylum seeker. How was he to know it was wrong to rape women and murder them?

Somehow, I think the Irish, like many other Europeans, are in no mood to be talked to like this.

‘We Murder To Dissect’ — Wordsworth

A great visual representation of the Medieval versus the Modern:

 

 

In Minnesota — designated in law by Gov. Tim Walz as a “trans refuge state” — tranny berserker shot up a Catholic church full of children — children! — at mass. Does it get any more demonic than that? That photo above is from a video he posted before massacring the kids.

His mother used to work at the school. The shooter had once attended there. Earlier, Mom had signed off on her son changing his name to reflect his chosen female identity.

 

Notice the rifle superimposed on the LGBT omniflag, with the slogan “defend equality.”

I wonder how the Minnesota lieutenant governor Peggy Flanagan, photographed below, feels today:

 

She probably feels no different than she feels yesterday. I woke up in Rome this morning seeing social media full of liberals and talking heads blaming Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and others for asking for prayers for the :::checks notes::: Catholic children shot and killed while at prayer! That, and urging people not to blame transgenderism, on account, I guess, of transgenderism being a religion of peace, or the usual bullshit.

I’m with Wes Yang:

 

 

You will recall that the Covenant School shooting in Nashville was also carried out by a female-to-male tranny who had once studied there. I have a friend who was part of the Covenant community. The devastation of that evil event on the lives of the parents of kids there is unspeakable.

Transgenderism is a form of mental illness. People with gender dysphoria need compassionate psychiatric help. What they don’t need is the “affirmation” that our sick culture gives them.

Note too that in the killer’s video, he wrote on one gun “Kill Donald Trump.” ABC News reported that he had “the name of President Trump written on one of the guns.” True, but misleading: HE WANTED TO MURDER THE PRESIDENT. One might suppose from the news reporter’s description that the killer was a Trump supporter.

I am beyond done with these people and their apologists, especially among media and liberal politicians. I want normality back.

Europe’s Dimming Lights

In other news about the cost of false compassion and sentimental humanitarianism, I was out for dinner in Rome last night. I met some old friends and new at my table, folks from all over Europe. We talked about politics for a while. All around the table, little to no confidence in their governments. Disgust with migrant and Muslim crime. Fear that civil war is ultimately coming, because people’s backs are against the wall.

A German at the table found out I live in Budapest. He had great things to say about Hungary, which he had recently visited. “Before I left, all my German friends told me to be careful in Viktor Orban’s country,” he said. “They were seriously worried. But then I got there, and it’s nothing like they think.”

“Yeah,” I replied, “we see that a lot. Older western Europeans usually end up saying that Budapest today is the Europe they remember from thirty years ago, in terms of safety and order.”

The German, who was on the younger side, said it really does make a big contrast with his country. (Remember, this is Germany we’re talking about, the land where nobody crosses the street against the light.) I told him about an American graduate student studying in Germany, whom I met last summer in Budapest. The American was shocked by how free and open nightlife is in Budapest, with the street cafes full.

I said, “He told me that back in Germany, German people are withdrawing from going out on the weekends, because they are scared of migrant violence.”

“Yes, that’s true,” said the German, sadly.

Similar stories around the table from all over Europe. How much longer can these people stand it?

In UnHerd, the distinguished German columnist Wolfgang Munchau delivers a despairing verdict on his continent. Excerpts:

If you’ve read The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams, you’ll immediately recognise what happened to the Europeans last month. They went into the Total Perspective Vortex. This is a torture device designed by a mad scientist which reveals your insignificance in comparison with the rest of the universe. Almost all who enter are annihilated. That understanding is just too terrible to survive.

More:

I have been a pro-European all my life. But a Europe of coordinated subservience is not one worth having. The whole idea of European integration was to address collective action problems. The EU no longer does that.

Instead, it set out on a path of no return. This has led it a place of low growth, high debt, and a lack of political majorities that support change. Large and increasing portions of European citizens live off welfare. They have no interest in reforms that will invariably lead to a cut in their income. Demography plays havoc with democracy. In Germany, for example, I cannot identify a single political party with a coherent agenda for reform. In the UK, too, there is not one political party that has given serious thought to a post-Brexit economic model. In their decline, European countries are astonishingly similar. The UK, France and Germany are all currently discussing wealth and property taxes as a last and desperate measure. If, and when, this is implemented, they will end up with even less growth. They are running out of ideas.

I hate this. As an American who loves Europe, I want Europe to succeed. It cannot and will not, not with the mindset and the leadership it has today.

‘Meno-Divorce’

A reader sends this infuriating story about women who hit menopause, and decide they’ve had it with their husbands. Excerpts:

Melissa McClure's husband asked if it was a midlife crisis.

No, she told him: "I’m wide awake to the possibility of what my life can be, and it doesn’t include you.”

McClure wasn’t sleeping well. She had hot flashes. Her husband’s loud chewing sent her into a rage. His negative attitude bothered her, and she no longer felt appreciated as a wife and stepmother.

They had been together for 14 years, but perimenopause made her realize she wanted a divorce.

“We spend our entire adult lives taking care of our husbands or partners and children. We give so much of ourselves to other people as nurturers that we lose ourselves in the process,” says the photographer, 44. “It wasn’t a midlife crisis but an awakening.”

Do I want a divorce or is this menopause? It’s a question resonating with women in midlife, when hormones are changing as their stress is increasing – kids moving out and parents moving in and careers often at their peak.

Though divorce rates overall are dropping, divorce among adults 50 and older is increasing. In 1990, almost 1 in 10 of all divorces in the United States were among adults 50 and older. By 2019, that percentage had grown to almost 1 in 4, according to a study by Bowling Green State University’s National Center for Family and Marriage Research. That coincides with a time most women go through perimenopause and menopause.

The "menodivorce" is on the rise.

(I feel it necessary to state here that this had nothing at all to do with my own divorce. So please do not jump to a false conclusion.)

As the reader who sent this to me commented:

The poor schmucks they were married to? Of course none of them are interviewed; they don't factor at all into this tale of women's liberation. It's all about how SHE ditched HIM to find her TRUE SELF - his feelings, the kids' feelings be damned.

While granting that there are certainly situations in which people 50+ are better off divorced, all I can say is I hope the "I gotta be ME!" ladies in this article find themselves abandoned at Thanksgiving by their children and alone at age 80, depending on some hired hand to help them out of bed in the mornings.

Into The Hawleyverse

A reader writes:

I don't know if you are a fan of Noah Hawley, but you might look into his shows. He's tapping into a number of the themes you write about, albeit from a secular perspective.

Hawley is the showrunner for the television series Fargo, and currently, Alien: Earth. As I have been watching new Alien:Earth episodes, I was reminded about this Reddit thread about seemingly human characters that are implied to be supernatural: about https://www.reddit.com/r/TopCharacterTropes/comments/1mxewel/comment/na5pgk2/.

The comment thread refers to Hawley's television series, Fargo, and correctly points out that there's at least one character in each season who represents some sort of supernatural (usually evil) force. The Fargo series, if you don't know, generally refers to and expands upon the Cohen brothers' body of work. It isn't trying to be a reboot of the film. Each season is its own story, with characters and themes that are in conversation with the Fargo movie, but also the entirety of the Cohens' oeuvre.

This supernatural character is a common feature in Cohen movies; many have one or more characters with otherworldly qualities, meant to embody Satan or evil (Anton Chigurh in No Country, Sheriff Cooley in O' Brother) or good (Sam Elliott in Big Lebowski).

As noted in the Reddit thread, every season of Hawley's Fargo series has at least one such supernatural character, who is heavily implied to be an angel or a demon or some kind of pagan god.

Throw in some UFOs in Season 2, and we are in Diana Pasulka territory.

We are also in C.S. Lewis's space trilogy territory, where angels and demons are extrademensional beings, and where the Greek and Roman gods are actually good or evil beings that are servants of God (Mars and Venus) or fallen angels. I assume Hawley and the Cohen brothers don't use Lewis as a source, but their work reflects his ideas.

Which brings me to Alien: Earth. This is Hawley's newest series, currently streaming. I've seen most of the earlier Alien movies, and am enjoying the series, but what struck me recently is that in almost every Alien movie, and in this series, there is also usually a character that seemingly represents otherworldly, supernatural powers of good or evil. And these characters are not the murderous alien species, the Xenomorphs. The big baddies are usually the "synths," which are man-created androids. In the movies, the synths are almost always the reason that the Aliens are able to kill the humans. Especially, there is a synth played by Michael Fassbender called David, who is the Anton Chigurh of the Alien universe - a relentless and supernatural embodiment of evil. But David is an AI robot created by humans.

Anyway, this again reminded me of your and Paul Kingsnorth's writings about AI, especially the Basilisk, and your recent newsletters about ChatGPT. This, also, echoes That Hideous Strength, where the new technology is really just a mask for the demonic (and has to be defeated by the old powers of Merlin, pressed into service by the Christian God).

Even though the Cohen brothers are not Christian, I've always found their work to be brimming with Christian themes, and to reflect the kind of sensibility that you, Lewis, and Kingsnorth write about. Perhaps some of that is owing to their Eastern European Jewish ancestry. And Noah Hawley is picking that up, and also echoing Lewis (and you), probably without trying to. What this tells me, is that these ideas are swimming around in the zeitgeist - aliens and robots and angels and demons. But really just a return of the old gods, and the battle of good versus evil in an enchanted world.

This is all news to me. Thoughts, readers?

Ed West: Cosmopolitan Reactionary

The excellent Substacker Ed West writes about how travel is correlated with becoming more liberal, but he, a frequent traveler, becomes more conservative the more he sees of the world. Excerpts:

There are plenty of cosmopolitan reactionaries out there: I’m probably one, maybe you are, too. For one thing, many conservatives rightly argue that visiting non-western countries brings home how unique our own society and culture is, how unlike the rest of the world. It also illustrates how fragile our own inheritance is.

Although Sri Lanka was filled with gorgeous scenery and wildlife, none of this would make for an enjoyable experience were it not for the immense kindness of the people, gentle, civilised and welcoming.

He goes on to talk about how beneath the pleasant surface, Sri Lanka is a country mired in violence, and ethnic and religious conflict.

More:

One might even say that travelling had reaffirmed my prejudices, but I do wish that policy makers, politicians and commentators alike, read more history beyond Europe in the 1930s or America in the 1960s. Many universalist beliefs rest on a strange lack of curiosity about the world, a parochial cosmopolitanism that ignores how unusual our own political stability is, and contingent.

On the other hand, travel can also open one’s eyes to how far our own country has fallen, compared to those which employ policies regarded as ‘extreme’. A visit to Japan can make us recognise that we don’t need to accept such levels of squalor or crime, even if that country is far from perfect (it’s dying, to be frank). Closer awareness of China, even further from being perfect, suggests that diversity might not be a sign of flourishing globalisation but rather the symptom of an empire in decline.

One added reason for the growing agitation over quality-of-life crimes is that more young Britons are visiting Dubai, which has recorded robbery rates about one-hundredth the level of London. After growing accustomed to not thinking about theft, or taking a metro without being harassed by drug addicts, it’s incredibly depressing and rage-inducing to have to turn on alert mode again. The spell of defeatism, that this is an inevitable part of modern living because it’s like that everywhere, comes to wear away with more foreign travel beyond the west.

I write in this space a lot about Europe’s problems with migration and crime. That said, every time I visit America — my home country, a country I love, and a country to which I plan to return one day — I am aware of how much better the quality of life is here in Europe. I’m not just talking about better food. The thing that always hits me about American life is how fast everything moves. That, and how car-centric everything is. Yeah, the car thing is not exactly news, but when you get used to living in a city where everywhere you want to go is walkable, or accessible by excellent public transportation, you come to value it.

Mind you, I’m spoiled, living in Budapest; my friends in Paris, for example, don’t like taking the metro anymore, because all that migrant diversity has made it more dangerous. In fact, importing to many non-Westerners has made European cities more cosmopolitan, in a trivial sense, but also much less livable. I was born in 1967. Over the course of my lifetime, London has gone from being around 90 percent white British to today, being 36 percent white British. It is the capital of Britain, but most people who live there today are not of British heritage. Isn’t that incredible?

Budapest has migrants, but it remains an overwhelmingly Hungarian city. When you visit Budapest, you know that you are in the capital of the Magyars. I like that. And if they ask me, an American, to depart to keep their capital more Magyar, well, good on them. Traveling within Europe, and seeing what mass migration has done to great European cities, makes me more reactionary. I don’t want Budapest to be like every other blob city in the world. What sort of person wants cities and nations to surrender their particularity for the sake of some sort of abstract ideal of “diversity”? It’s crazy.

I remind you that Renaud Camus says the ethnic dimension of the Great Replacement could only have happened because the country’s elites decided first that their native, traditional culture, with its shared history and habits, were a Bad Thing that needed to be dissolved. A people who know who they are, and who value their literature, music, art, and culture, will not surrender it. The elites had to first dislodge the culture that was there, in part by demonizing it as nothing more than racism, sexism, colonialism, homophobia, and the rest, and replace it with the soulless managerial liberalism and superficial cosmopolitanism represented by Brussels and the EU. Last time I was in Brussels, the strongest impressions I had about the city was that it was home to a bunch of Europeans who are fanatical about LGBT, and a bunch of Muslims who have no intention of integrating. The only thing really European-feeling about it was the architecture and the beer.

I’m a Cosmopolitan Reactionary precisely because I love Europe, I want it to remain Europe, and I realize how very, very hard it was for Europe to become Europe, over many centuries of suffering and struggle. And they’re throwing it all away, chasing a corrupt dream of sentimental liberalism. All those people from outside the West they’re letting in are escaping dysfunctional cultures, but many of them bring the same cultures that made their own native countries undesirable. What good does that do Europe?