In February 2024, my military fantasy novel Doomsday Recon launched and immediately found an audience. A few of them, not many at the time, but too many, were genuinely bigoted, and assumed that because I’m a pro-2A veteran writing military fiction, I must be “one of them.”
So I pushed back, because that’s what I do.
That statement apparently drove away more than just “a few” readers ready to onboard with my new series. I wasn’t terribly concerned. Defending basic human decency and condemning Nazism seems like a fairly reasonable line in the sand to me, and if that makes you not want to buy my books, good riddance. I don’t want bigots’ money anyway.
Fast forward to September later that year.
During a presidential debate seen live by tens of millions of Americans, Donald Trump made a baseless accusation against the Haitian refugee community in Springfield, OH.
I recognized it immediately as modern blood libel.
For those unfamiliar with the term, blood libel is the ancient false accusation that a group—historically Jews, but the pattern repeats across targets—commits heinous acts against the innocent. It’s the claim that they steal children, corrupt youth, defile what’s sacred. The accusation doesn’t need to be true, it just needs to be visceral enough to justify what comes next.
And what came next? Over thirty bomb threats against Springfield schools, hospitals, and government buildings.[^1]
The reaction of those in my conservative circles? Literally no one—except me—called it out for what it was. No one was concerned about the overt racism or dehumanization. No one believed it was a false accusation. No one even cared about the threats of violence.
Instead they made jokes, memes, and AI art of Trump rescuing kittens from hordes of dark-skinned savages.
A close family friend of ours is Haitian. She wasn’t laughing
Neither was I.
Through the election and into this year, I watched with growing concern as dehumanizing rhetoric escalated, moving rapidly from the far-right fringes of conservative spaces into the mainstream. People I knew weren’t extremists, reasonable people I respected, were increasingly beginning to parrot neo-Nazi-talking points without stopping to think about what they were saying. Coded language. Dog whistles. Replacement theory. Blood and soil rhetoric. Increasingly more and more dehumanizing language about the “other.”
Then came the August 23rd Dundee incident in the UK. An unnamed 12-year-old girl became “Sophie Braveheart,” the “Young Queen of Scots,” an overnight viral symbol of Muslim immigrant violence based on nothing but gross misinformation and exaggeration. My conservative circles didn’t care about the truth as it slowly emerged. The fiction they embraced felt right, so it was right. She became their heroine “defending herself, her sisters and her homeland from the predatory migrant hordes.”
The pattern unfolding right in front of me was unmistakable. Dehumanizing rhetoric often starts with something seemingly reasonable, but “they’re stealing our jobs” quickly becomes “they’re eating the pets,” or something similarly dehumanizing, and eventually the predictable “they’re raping our daughters” arrives. It’s a classic progression that genocide scholars have documented in detail for decades. So on August 30th, I posted what I called my “Foment Genocide Bingo Card.” It was an analogy. Three boxes checked. Jobs. Pets. Rape. The terrifying prize? What happened to Jews, Tutsis, Armenians, Rohingya, and countless others.
It got 83 views and three likes, because of course it did. Meanwhile Elon Musk had shared the false version of the Dundee events to his 225 million followers. So on September 3rd I wrote about social media and the algorithmic amplification of extremist conspiracy theories that spread hate.
Then Charlie Kirk was assassinated at Utah Valley University on September 10th and my conservative circles erupted.
Not in grief. Not in calls for unity. In alarmist vitriol against the entire Left. Half the country. Claims that liberal violence was surging, that “they” wanted “our” blood. That September 10th was “our October 7th”—as if the death of one man, however tragic, equated to 1,200 Israelis massacred. As if hordes of leftists were about to descend from the hills and murder conservatives in their beds.
Yes, some on the Left—a small number, but highly visible due to social media’s algorithmic boosting of controversy and accounts like @libsoftiktok—celebrated his death. I agree it was disgusting. But the reaction in conservative circles was disproportionate mass hysteria on a national scale. And the dehumanizing rhetoric I’d been tracking was rapidly turning into calls to “lock and load” and “take to the streets.”
I was watching tempers flare and the language of atrocity accelerate in real-time, and in response, two days after Kirk’s assassination, on September 12th, I posted an observation on Twitter about the difference in dehumanizing rhetoric between the Left and the Right, and why what the Right was engaging in was historically far more dangerous.
The CEO of my publisher publicly replied it was a “bad take.”
Maybe so. I acknowledge the post unfortunately lacked nuance, as posts on Twitter often do, and so the next day I did what I should have done from the start: I wrote two comprehensive essays on Substack, cross-posted to my blog and social media. The first clarified my argument about how rhetoric that targets WHO people are (race, ethnicity, sexuality) poses fundamentally different dangers than rhetoric targeting WHAT people believe or do (political positions, professional roles, policy decisions).
Calling a fifth of the global population an existential threat to civilization is not morally equivalent to saying “punch a Nazi.” Citing Leviticus 20:13 as “God’s perfect law”[^2] is significantly more harmful than calling someone a homophobe.
The second article analyzed how the current administration wasn’t just normalizing the kind of dehumanizing rhetoric that historically precedes atrocities, but was also actively building the infrastructure that enables them.
I didn’t claim genocide was happening now, or even MAGA’s intended goal. I argued we were heading down a well-documented path and the red flags were popping up everywhere. I said we needed to course-correct. That we had bad actors in our ranks. A cancer that needed to be cut out.
I also posted repeatedly on social media calling for de-escalation and rejection of tribalism—on both sides.
None of it made me particularly popular in my circles.
Was my timing terrible? Undoubtedly. But when would’ve be a “better” time? Alarmist anti-Left rhetoric in conservative circles was reaching what I worried was a tipping point. Dehumanization accelerates fast and prevention windows close even faster.
Meanwhile, I’d been researching. Was deadly “radical leftist” violence actually on the rise? How bad was it getting? What were the trends over the last 20 years? I compiled data from multiple sources: the Global Terrorism Database, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the National Institute of Justice, the Anti-Defamation League’s HEAT Map. I tracked every ideologically motivated fatality I could document from 2005 to 2025. The data told a very different story than the narrative in my circles. It demonstrated the vast majority of ideological fatalities came from right-wing extremists—more in fact than Islamic extremists. And radical leftists? An entire order of magnitude less than either, with no evidence of any rise in the last twenty years. Hate crimes against immigrants, Muslims, and other minorities, however, were rising, and violence against LGBTQ+ Americans like my own son had more than doubled in the last five years alone.[^3]
In 2023 it was at the highest levels ever recorded (with only a 6.07% drop in 2024).
On September 14th, I posted my research. Just the results without commentary. I simply said, “I looked into leftist violence and here’s what’s actually going on.”
The pushback was immediate. Some critiques were valid questions about my methodology, data sources, and categorization. I engaged with those, reran the numbers with different parameters, consulted additional datasets. But the pattern held. Right-wing extremism still accounted for disproportionate fatalities by an order of magnitude. Even per-captia non-fatal violence is highly disproportionate on the Right, and has been for years.
On September 16, my publisher notified me I was no longer marketable to their audience and they couldn’t justify investing in further promotion of my books—including an audiobook releasing just two weeks later and a new series set to launch in late 2025. We agreed it’d be best if I took my series to a different publisher with an audience more receptive to my views.
The bad faith deflections persisted for weeks. No one wanted to look at the data. Even consider the Right might have a problem that needed addressing. And while I exhausted myself defending my arguments and research, the country kept getting worse, seemingly by the day. Troop deployments in American cities defying court orders. Conservatives calling justices who blocked executive actions “corrupt” and “politically motivated.” Systematic delegitimization of every checking institution. What had once been what I considered “my side” was now celebrating authoritarian power grabs, men and women calling themselves “patriots” justifying and defending shredding the Constitution as necessary to “save America.”
I was aware of the obvious patterns unfolding not because I’m particularly brilliant, but because I’ve studied totalitarianism and genocide, including Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
I was watching her framework operate in real-time in my own country.
In October I analyzed how Trump’s claimed powers exceed what most historical monarchs possessed. How three apparently separate crises—constitutional collapse, deportation infrastructure, eliminationist rhetoric—operated as one integrated authoritarian mechanism.
That recognition—that we aren’t just experiencing political polarization but replicating the specific mechanisms that historically precede atrocities—is what drove me to keep writing essays no one bothered reading. To keep documenting. Not to change minds—I’d given up on that by late September. Just to create a record, for whatever it might be worth. Maybe just for myself. Because I needed to say something and no one else in my conservative circles was (publicly at least—I’ve gotten some supportive DMs).
Listen, I’m not a scholar. I’m not an academic. I’m not a social or political scientist. I don’t have credentials that should make you trust me more than your own eyes. I’m just a guy who reads a lot of history, recognizes patterns, and writes about things that are important to him. What I do have is proximity—I was inside the spaces where this rhetoric normalized, and I documented what I saw before I got excommunicated for calling it out. That’s it. My essays aren’t particularly brilliant analysis or deeply philosophical. They’re just timestamped observations from someone who happened to be paying attention.
The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt went to Jerusalem in 1961 to cover Adolf Eichmann’s trial for The New Yorker. Eichmann had been a key architect of the Holocaust’s logistics—organizing train schedules, coordinating deportations, managing the bureaucracy of genocide. Everyone expected her to report on a monster.
She found a middle manager instead.
Eichmann wasn’t a sadistic ideologue. He was a bureaucrat who spoke in clichés, followed orders, and—this is what chilled her—never realized what he was doing because he didn’t think. He couldn’t imagine what the people he was shipping to death camps actually experienced. He’d replaced moral reasoning with administrative efficiency.
Evil isn’t primarily monstrous or demonic, she argued. It’s banal. Ordinary. Thoughtless. “The sad truth,” she wrote, “is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”
Eichmann wasn’t exceptional. He was representative. The Holocaust didn’t require a nation of sadists—it required a nation of people willing to go along, to follow orders, to not think too carefully about where the trains were going. Good Germans. Ordinary people. Neighbors and coworkers and church members who participated in atrocity through thoughtless compliance. She identified specific mechanisms that enabled this. The Nazis used euphemisms—“Final Solution,” “special treatment,” “resettlement”—that detached actions from moral reality. You weren’t murdering children. You were “processing cases.” The bureaucratic language made it possible not to think about what you were actually doing.
Most perpetrators weren’t fanatics. They were careerists, bureaucrats, people who went along because everyone else was going along. Social conformity, not ideology, drove participation. And at the core was thoughtlessness—the inability or unwillingness to imagine what the targeted person experiences. To think through what harm your words and actions actually cause. To connect the euphemism to the reality.
Seventy years later the banality of evil now has a retweet button, and I watch intelligent conservatives share memes about immigrants eating pets and poisoning the blood of our nation and raping our white daughters without appearing to think about what they’re actually saying or where this rhetoric historically leads.
Arendt’s own work was controversial when it appeared as a series in The New Yorker in 1963. She was accused of bias, exaggeration, unfairness. Critics said she was too harsh on the victims, too sympathetic to the bureaucrat, that she didn’t understand what she was seeing. But she changed how we understand evil precisely because she wrote with moral clarity rather than false neutrality. She called it as she saw it. She documented the mechanism without worrying whether the documentation would be popular.
That’s what I’m trying my best to do here. The same pattern she identified is operating in our communities, our country, right now. And it needs to be documented while it’s happening, not after.
The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them.
The inevitable objection came instantly when I first raised the red flag, and it’ll keep coming.
“You’re not seriously comparing America to Nazi Germany?”
Correct. I’m not.
I’m comparing America in 2025 to Weimar Germany in the early 1930s. To Rwanda in the early 1990s before the genocide. To Yugoslavia before Bosnia. To Myanmar before the Rohingya expulsions.
I’m documenting the infrastructure phase, not an active atrocity itself.
This distinction matters because it’s the entire point of applying Arendt’s framework preventively rather than retrospectively. She wrote after the abyss. I’m writing from the edge. That’s not alarmist hyperbole—it’s the appropriate use of her analytical tools.
Genocide scholars don’t wait for mass killing to start before identifying warning signs. They look for specific patterns that historically precede atrocities. Dehumanizing rhetoric becoming mainstream—when language that would have been socially unacceptable stops triggering moral alarm. When comparing human beings to animals, vermin, diseases, or invasive species becomes normal discourse. Legal infrastructure enabling mass action—laws and administrative systems that could theoretically be used for legitimate purposes but create the capacity for rapid, large-scale coercive action against targeted groups. Institutional capture and checking mechanism failure—when courts get defied, oversight gets eliminated, and anyone who might constrain executive power gets delegitimized or purged. Stochastic terrorism patterns—when rhetoric creates a climate where individuals act on the logic of the dehumanization without explicit coordination. When manifestos cite the same talking points you hear on mainstream—or in 2025–social media.
I’m not claiming these patterns guarantee atrocity. I’m documenting that we’re exhibiting them and that we’re already backsliding as a democracy.
March 18th 2025: V-Dem Institute Director Staffan I. Lindberg predicts “democracy [in the U.S.] will not last another six months.” (For the full report context, see V-Dem’s official PDF.)
October 14, 2025: Lindberg in the Swedish newspaper Expressen states that preliminary expert assessments (full 2025 data due January 2026) indicate the U.S. has “clearly crossed the threshold into autocracy” and would now classify as an “electoral autocracy” under V-Dem’s framework—elections occur, but without sufficient liberal guarantees like robust civil liberties or executive checks.
We arrived right on schedule.
This is what Arendt’s framework allows us to see. You don’t need to wait until the machinery is operating at full capacity to recognize it’s being built. The infrastructure matters more than stated intentions. The normalization of thoughtless cruelty matters more than whether anyone currently “plans” genocide. Because history teaches the machinery gets built by people who insist they would never use it for atrocities. Then circumstances change, crisis arrives, and the capacity that “no one intended” becomes the atrocity that “no one could have predicted.”
Except for every major atrocity since WWII people have predicted it. People have documented the warning signs. People have pointed to the historical patterns.
They were also dismissed as alarmists comparing things to Nazi Germany.
The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.
Arendt identified specific mechanisms that made the Holocaust possible through ordinary compliance. I’ve watched those same mechanisms operate in my conservative circles over the last year and a half—with one critical addition she couldn’t have anticipated: social media.
The Nazis used euphemisms. “Final Solution.” “Special treatment.” “Resettlement to the East.” Bureaucratic language that detached actions from moral reality, making it possible not to think about what you were actually doing.
The progression of normalized dehumanizing rhetoric from the 2024 presidential debate to the Dundee incident was textbook, going from “they’re eating our pets” to “they’re raping our daughters” in less than twelve months, escalating the dehumanization and making the next step thinkable. By the time you’re at “raping our daughters,” you’ve created permission structures for eliminationist action. This isn’t a conspiracy theory I cooked up in a meth lab. It’s real and very, very well documented with numerous historical parallels.
Nazi Germany had bureaucrats who processed paperwork, organized logistics, filed reports—all while managing not to think too carefully about what their efficient administration actually meant. “I was just following orders.”
America in 2025 has the retweet. Sharing memes without fact-checking. “Everyone’s saying it” as justification. The share button as thoughtless participation. People continued sharing “Sophie Braveheart” memes even after corrections emerged, because it confirmed what they already believed about Muslim immigrants like my late mother-in-law. If I attempted to correct them? Ridicule. Name-calling. Blocked.
Nazi Germany didn’t need fanatics or sadists to make the Holocaust work. It needed “Good Germans.” Churchgoers. Professionals. Parents. People who went along because everyone else was going along, because it seemed patriotic, because questioning would be socially awkward.
Today I watch church-going conservatives I’ve known for years, veterans, accomplished professionals—people who I believe would have been horrified by this rhetoric eighteen months earlier—now calling Muslim immigration “invasive colonization” and sharing apocalyptic threat-framing about leftists wanting to “destroy America.”
Or worse, that they already have and drastic action is required to “save” our republic.
These aren’t anonymous trolls or fringe accounts. These are people I respected. People whose judgment I’d trusted. Intelligent people capable of reasoning in every other area of their lives. But they’ve stopped thinking and they can’t—or won’t—imagine what the targeted person experiences. They’ve replaced moral reasoning with tribal loyalty. This is what Arendt meant by banality. Not the ranting extremist posting from a compound. The ordinary person hitting “share” because everyone in their feed is sharing it too.
We in 2025 differ from anything Arendt studied. She analyzed thoughtlessness in an era of newspapers and radio. Information traveled slowly enough that correction was possible. Communities had enough heterogeneity that dissent could be heard.
Social media changed everything.
Algorithms don’t reward thoughtfulness. They reward engagement. And nothing generates engagement like rage, conspiracy, and tribal validation. The platforms are designed to amplify thoughtlessness at unprecedented speed and scale. Nuanced analysis dies in the algorithmic feed. Conspiracy theories thrive. My Foment Genocide Bingo card got buried while Elon Musk’s false Dundee narrative went viral. Social media isn’t neutral infrastructure. It’s a thoughtlessness accelerant. It create echo chambers where people never encounter counter-evidence. It makes the retweet feel costless—you’re not doing anything, just sharing information—while making you complicit in spreading dehumanizing rhetoric to millions.
Arendt documented how evil becomes banal through ordinary compliance. I’m documenting how social media makes that compliance frictionless, instantaneous, and globally distributed.
The machinery Arendt studied took years to build. Ours operates at the speed of a viral tweet.
Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality.
Arendt’s thesis wasn’t abstract philosophy. She was explaining specific mechanisms that made atrocity possible. I’m documenting those same mechanisms operating in America.
Arendt showed how Nazis targeted WHO people were—their race, ethnicity, religion as identity—not what they believed or did. This distinction matters because identity-targeted rhetoric historically produces different violence patterns than ideology-targeted rhetoric. I’m tracking this same pattern in America today. Right-wing rhetoric increasingly targets WHO people are. Haitian refugees are “eating pets.” Immigrants are “poisoning the blood.” Muslims as apocalyptic invasive colonizers and civilizational threats. LGBTQ+ Americans continue to be systematically dehumanized and targeted.
These aren’t abstract groups for me. They’re literally my own immediate family members.
The data confirms the pattern. Hate crimes are rising. Mass shooter manifestos explicitly cite replacement theory, “invasion” rhetoric, and mainstream conservative media talking points. Buffalo, El Paso, Pittsburgh all show the same pattern.
Arendt documented how Nazi bureaucrats built machinery for mass action—deportation systems, identification protocols, detention capacity—often without “intending” genocide. The infrastructure preceded and enabled the atrocity.
Now I’m watching similar infrastructure develop in America. Legal frameworks through Alien Enemies Act reactivation, emergency powers expansion, systematic attempts to override judicial oversight. Operational capacity through mass detention facility construction, deportation logistics at unprecedented scale, military deployment in domestic cities. Checking mechanism elimination, justices who block executive actions labeled “corrupt” and “politically motivated,” systematic delegitimization of every institution that might constrain executive power.
Democratic backsliding research shows Hungary, Poland, and Turkey didn’t lose democracy through coups. They followed a progression: courts and oversight bodies get captured or delegitimized, power consolidates under executive authority, accountability mechanisms get dismantled. Elections continue, but the checks are gone. Arendt taught us the machinery matters more than the stated purpose. Infrastructure creates capacity. Capacity creates possibility. Possibility becomes probability under crisis conditions.
When Kirk was assassinated, my conservative circles couldn’t see actual people anymore. They couldn’t see my wife who votes Democrat. My neighbors, my children’s teachers, my coworkers, the cashier at Albertsons who made a blanket when my first daughter was born—all progressives in my daily life. None of them celebrated Kirk’s death. None were fomenting violence.
Frankly, most were terrified about conservative retaliation.
That deserves repeating. They are scared. They are not out for your blood. My family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers are living in fear because of what you are turning our country into and the man you elected president.[^4]
But conservatives don’t see any of that. They can’t. They’ve put on the blinders and built a false tribalist “us versus them” apocalyptic narrative that overrides reason and logic and rejects evidence as proof of some “leftist” conspiracy that doesn’t exist.
This is Arendt’s banality—the ordinary person who stops thinking. When I post about dangerous dehumanizing rhetoric, my publisher calls it a “bad take,” while a hundred and fifty-odd other people dogpile me with name-calling, telling me to “get back on your meds” and worse. I post the results of my careful and unbiased research into ideological violence that shocked me, cross-referenced with similar professional studies, and the response proves my point—intelligent people refusing to engage with straightforward data because engaging would require reconsidering the tribal narrative.
By September 18th, I was already sitting in the crater. I’d lost my publisher, I was losing friends, my conservative circles had expelled me for raising constitutional concerns. So I said fuck it—I’ll call it out plainly: Movements that systematically expel internal critics, that can’t tolerate evidence contradicting their narrative, that demand absolute loyalty over principle, they aren’t political coalitions—
In late October on r/Republican, I asked people to please consider what the precedents they were celebrating would mean when a future Democrat inevitably held the presidency. My post was immediately removed and I was permanently banned for being “anti-Republican.” Despite having voted Republican[^5] in every election since I was old enough to vote. Despite having served in uniform. Despite still holding conservative principles about limited government and constitutional constraints.
Thus proving my point, because that’s how cults operate.
We’ve watched this happen in extreme progressive spaces for years. The irony is MAGA can’t see they’re doing exactly the same thing now. The purity tests, the witch hunts, the cancelations. Everything we’ve criticized the Left of forever. It’s the same old bullshit totalitarianism, just wearing red hats and cargo pants now.
Except it’s worse than that, because MAGA isn’t a fringe of blue-haired ultra-woke puritans, it’s an electoral majority. It’s cult mentality working on a scale never before seen in a democratic nation. It’s worse because while cancel culture ruins careers, replacement theory fills mass graves.
And MAGA isn’t just a cult. It’s a cult with nuclear weapons.
Even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and that such illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances.
Hannah Arendt wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963, analyzing events from 1941-1945 and a trial from 1961. She explained how the Holocaust was possible after it had already happened. After the machinery had operated at full capacity. After six million Jews were dead.
I’m writing in 2025, documenting patterns as they form. Before the infrastructure is complete. While prevention windows still exist. This distinction matters because it changes what’s possible.
Arendt could explain the mechanisms retrospectively. She could show how thoughtlessness enabled atrocity, how ordinary compliance built the machinery, how language rules made the unthinkable routine. But she couldn’t warn anyone. The warning would have needed to come in 1933, not 1963.
I’m attempting what Arendt couldn’t—using her diagnostic framework as an early warning system. Which is why timestamps matter. They prove the documentation came before it was safe to speak, not after the graves have long been filled. They prove the pattern recognition preceded the crisis, not in response to it. This is what Arendt’s framework enables when applied preventively. Creating a record while events unfold, before they disappear into contested memory or algorithmic oblivion. Making it impossible for future readers to claim “no one could have known.”
We knew. I documented that we knew. Other people are documenting too. We have a timestamped record proving it.
When I posted the results of my research into ideological violence, my conservative circles could have engaged with the evidence. They could have said, “You’re right, we have a problem with extremist violence, we need to address this.” They could have course-corrected. When I asked r/Republican to simply consider the precedents being set, they could have engaged in the thought experiment about what happens when we next have a Democrat in the White House.
They all chose not to think instead.
Real-time documentation doesn’t just create historical records. It creates moments of choice. It makes the refusal to think visible. It proves that people had the evidence, had the warning, had the opportunity to act—and chose complicity through silence or active participation instead.
Arendt wrote after the choice was made. I’m writing while it’s still being made, even though I don’t know if the documentation will matter. Warnings get algorithmically buried while conspiracies thrive. Speaking costs more than most people will pay. Movements that can’t tolerate internal criticism don’t course-correct—they just expel the critics. The bubble is self-sealing.
Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.
Hannah Arendt argued that totalitarianism destroys something essential to human society—plurality. The capacity for multiple perspectives to coexist. The space between people where disagreement remains possible without becoming existential threat. Totalitarian systems collapse this space. They demand uniformity of thought. They make dissent impossible not primarily through violence but through eliminating the social conditions that make dissent thinkable. Everyone must see the same way, speak the same way, think the same way. Difference becomes betrayal. The same thoughtless compliance, the same social conformity, the same unwillingness to think—now applied not just to the demonized “other” but to anyone within the tribe who questioned the narrative.
We’re watching the collapse of plurality in America’s Right in real-time. It doesn’t need concentration camps or midnight arrests, just the quiet, systematic elimination of anyone who won’t conform. The social death that precedes physical death. The expulsion of internal critics before the machinery turns to external targets.
Arendt would recognize this pattern. She documented how totalitarian movements purge their own ranks first. How ideological rigidity demands ever-greater conformity. How the space for disagreement shrinks until only perfect loyalty remains acceptable.
The particularly chilling part is the people expelling me genuinely believe they’re defending constitutional principles. They genuinely believe they’re patriots. They’ve convinced themselves that anyone raising concerns about executive overreach, institutional capture, or eliminationist rhetoric is the real threat to democracy. They’re not thinking. They’ve replaced thought with tribal reflex. And when you can’t think, you can’t recognize that you’re participating in exactly the pattern you claim to oppose. I’ve lost friends over this. People I’ve known for years who’ve gone silent or hostile. Not because I changed my principles—I’m still the same person who wrote in March 2024 that Nazis can fuck themselves. But because I applied those principles consistently, even when it meant criticizing my own tribe.
The loneliness of this is profound. Not because I need validation—I have the receipts, the data, the timestamps proving the patterns are real. But because I’m watching a community I belonged to for decades destroy itself—and my country—through thoughtless conformity. And I can’t stop it. I can only document it.
I guess this is what reformation looks like from inside. Speaking truth while your tribe demands silence. Maintaining standards when your side abandons them. Being expelled precisely for holding principles the tribe claims to share. Watching others stay silent rather than face the same costs. Arendt wrote that totalitarianism makes plurality impossible. I’m documenting the stage before totalitarianism—when plurality is still theoretically possible, but the social mechanisms for eliminating it are already operating.
But nobody on the Right is thinking about what they’re actually building.
That’s the banality.
That’s always been the banality.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.
Hannah Arendt’s analysis was fundamentally pessimistic. Once thoughtlessness takes over a society, once ordinary people stop thinking and start complying, moral collapse becomes nearly irreversible. She offered no clear roadmap for prevention, no actionable steps to interrupt the machinery once it starts building. Her focus was explanation, not intervention. She wanted us to understand how evil becomes banal, not necessarily how to stop it.
But writing from the edge rather than the abyss changes what’s possible. If the patterns are recognizable before they complete, if the infrastructure is visible while it’s being built, if the thoughtlessness can be named while people still have the capacity to think—then maybe prevention becomes possible.
Maybe.
I’m not naïve about the odds. Warnings get algorithmically buried while conspiracies thrive. My comprehensive September essays cost me my publisher. My constitutional concerns got me banned while executive overreach gets celebrated. Nuance dies in the algorithmic feed and truth is algorithmically invisible.
And social media gives thoughtlessness rocket fuel.
Maintaining plurality requires refusing complicity. Every time someone retweets dehumanizing rhetoric without thinking, they participate in collapsing the space where different perspectives can coexist. Every time someone stays silent rather than push back, they enable the normalization. Thoughtlessness spreads through participation and silence both.
So what does it mean to actively think in an age of algorithmic thoughtlessness?
It means refusing clichés. When someone says “they’re eating our pets,” stop and ask—who is “they”? Is this actually happening? What am I being asked to believe about an entire group of people based on this claim?
It means imagining the targeted person. These aren’t abstract categories. They’re actual human beings. Can you imagine what they experience when this rhetoric spreads?
It means rejecting tribal epistemology. Just because everyone in your feed is sharing something doesn’t make it true. Evidence exists independently of tribal loyalty.
It means calling out your own side. The hardest thing I’ve done through this period was calling out my own conservative circles. That’s what cost me my publisher, my friends, my community belonging.
It means creating records while events unfold. Don’t wait until it’s safe to speak. Don’t wait until the pattern is complete. Document in real-time. Timestamp everything. Make it impossible for future readers to claim “no one could have known.”
It also means accepting that documentation may not stop anything. My essays didn’t prevent my novel series’ cancellation. They didn’t stop the Reddit ban. They didn’t change minds or slow the patterns. But they exist. They’re sourced. They prove we had the evidence, the warning, the opportunity—and what we chose to do with it.
This is what Arendt couldn’t give us because she wrote after the choice was made—the recognition that we’re in the moment of choosing right now. The infrastructure isn’t complete. The patterns are recognizable. The prevention windows haven’t fully closed. We can still think our way out of this if enough people choose thought over tribal reflex. But the algorithmic accelerant makes that choice harder than anything Arendt studied. Thoughtlessness has never been this frictionless, this instantaneous, this globally distributed. The retweet is costless. The like requires no reflection. The share happens before you’ve finished reading.
So here’s my prescriptive contribution to Arendt’s framework.
Slow down. Before you retweet, think. Before you share, verify. Before you let apocalyptic threat framing justify dehumanization, imagine the actual person being dehumanized.
Choose thought over compliance. The machinery is being built through ordinary participation. Through people who aren’t monsters, just thoughtless. Through the banality of the retweet.
Be willing to lose belonging. If maintaining your community requires abandoning your principles, the community is already lost. Better to stand alone with your principles intact than stand with a tribe while it builds the infrastructure of atrocity.
Create the record. Even if no one reads it. Even if it costs everything. Even if the algorithmic feed buries it. Because future readers will need to know—we had the evidence. We saw the patterns. We knew.
And what we chose to do with that knowledge is the choice that defines us.
Arendt gave us the framework for understanding how evil becomes banal. I’m giving you the warning that it’s happening now. In your feed. In your likes and shares and retweets. In your choice to think or not to think.
Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
My full documentation exists across fifteen essays written between August and October 2025, organized into four thematic collections:
Genocide Warning Signs and Political Violence examines patterns of dehumanizing rhetoric, tracks two decades of ideological violence data, and analyzes how democracies build infrastructure for atrocities.
- The Banality of Evil (August 30, 2025)
- Sticks and Stones: When Words Kill (September 13, 2025)
- The Infrastructure of Atrocity (September 13, 2025)
- Tracking Two Decades of Ideological Violence in America (September 14, 2025)
Constitutional Crisis and Executive Power documents systematic democratic backsliding, analyzes claims of executive authority that exceed historical monarchical power, and tracks the three-phase playbook of delegitimizing checking institutions.
- This We’ll Defend (October 7, 2025)
- #NoKings Isn’t Hyperbole (October 19, 2025)
- Things Aren’t as Bad as They Seem; They’re Much Worse (October 20, 2025)
- My Oath Didn’t Expire. Neither Did Yours. (October 21, 2025)
- He Who Saves His Country Does Not Violate Any Law (October 23, 2025)
Information Ecosystems and Tribal Dynamics explores how algorithms amplify extremism while burying nuance, why conspiracy theories thrive while evidence-based analysis dies, and what happens when movements cannot tolerate internal disagreement.
- Secret Cabals, False Heroines, and the Death of Truth and Nuance (September 3, 2025)
- Screaming into the Wind (September 26, 2025)
- The Price of Reform (October 8, 2025)
- The Perfect Specimen (October 10, 2025)
- An Open Letter to r/Republican on Reddit (October 22, 2025)
Faith, Politics, and Biblical Interpretation challenges the claim that Christians can’t vote Democrat and examines how the same hermeneutical methods once used to defend slavery and oppose interracial marriage are now weaponized for partisan purposes.
- You Can’t Vote Democrat and be a Good Christian? (October 13, 2025)
These essays aren’t predictions and I’m not a prophet. They’re simply pattern recognition. They document specific, measurable phenomena with sources anyone can easily verify. The violence statistics aren’t opinions or conspiracy theories—they’re compiled from multiple independent research organizations tracking the same events. The V-Dem assessment isn’t alarmism—they made a specific prediction based on observable evidence six months in advance, and it came true on schedule.
I wrote these essays because I needed to document what was happening as it happened, if not for anyone else then for myself. Not in hindsight, when it’s safe to say “we should have seen the signs,” but in real-time, when speaking costs something.
Accusations that I was “capitalizing on tragedy” or “scoring political points” miss that these essays are a personal record. Documentation of patterns before crisis, during crisis, and as crisis accelerates. Receipts showing that the warnings came first. They’re absolutely not for some kind of sick vindication of being proven right.
Because God I hope I’m wrong.
When people say my timing was bad or I was being tone-deaf back in September, my response is “when would have been a good time to raise these concerns?”
There is no good time. Speaking during crisis gets you accused of exploiting tragedy. Speaking before crisis gets you ignored as being alarmist and hyperbolic. Speaking after crisis means you failed to warn anyone when it actually mattered. I wrote these essays because the alternative was silence. Because movements that expel their own critics don’t course-correct—they become more rigid and detached from reality until something terrible happens or they shatter. Because someone in the tribe needs to document what true patriotism is when the tribe abandons it.
I’m swore an oath when I was seventeen to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. As far as I’m aware that oath didn’t expire, and it certainly doesn’t have a partisan exception clause nor suspend during moments of tribal crisis.
These essays are what honoring that oath looks like when your own side becomes the threat you swore to defend against. My observations about what’s happening right now are factually correct and verifiable. My warnings about where this path leads are supported by history and scholars of atrocity and democratic backsliding. Will we course correct? I pray we do. Will this lead to the fall of democracy in America or, worse, genocide? Heaven forbid. But if it does, and you’re reading this later, wondering how we got there—this is how. The data existed. The patterns were documented. The warnings were issued. Half the country chose not to see them because seeing them would have required acknowledging that their tribe, their side, their people were the ones building the machinery of authoritarianism and hate.
These essays are the record of what one veteran documented while watching it happen. Not because documentation would stop it, but because he personally needed to witness what was happening, create the historical record, and, most importantly, stand up and refuse to be counted among those pretending we didn’t know.
We knew.
The only question now is what are you going to do about it?
[^1] The false narrative led to at least 33 bomb threats against Springfield schools, hospitals, and government buildings, costing the city hundreds of thousands of dollars. JD Vance admitted on September 15, 2024 to CNN: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
[^2] I’ve never suggested Charlie Kirk wanted gay people executed. But when a public figure with 3M+ followers calls Leviticus 20:13 “God’s perfect law,” they’re building rhetorical infrastructure that others will use to justify violence, whether they intend it or not.
[^3] According to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Hate Crimes Facts and Statistics page, anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes more than doubled from ~1,200 in 2020 to peaks of 2,569 in 2023 and 2,413 in 2024. The 2024 figure is a slight drop but still the second-highest on record and among the top three bias categories overall.
[^4] If you think that’s a good thing, if you think people on the Left should be scared, then speaking as plainly as possible in words you’ll understand, you can fuck all the way off. Because the threats they face from the people you’re protecting are very real and demonstrably deadly. And getting steadily worse.
[^5] Excluding Donald Trump. I have personal and political reasons why I could never vote for him in good conscience. Many of my friends did, and I sympathize with many of their reasons. I don’t condemn anyone for voting for him. Although I’ll admit now, in November 2025, after all that’s transpired, I have a very hard time respecting anyone who still supports the man. Or the MAGA movement for that matter.
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Beyond the Margins 
It takes two to start a war. I say this as by American standards I’m a left wing, pinko, commie fag. The balance between conservatism and progressiveness is fundamentally built on evolutionary outcomes, where the former maintains the status quo, while the later takes risks exploring new ways of doing things (that’s a seriously abbreviated account of the process).
The banality of evil is a feature, not a bug, which is why we see the pendulum swing back and forth over the centuries. History teaches us this, but we fail to learn from history, because we are not that smart. Human beings are not rationale creatures, we rationalize what we feel is true.
Again, this is a feature not a bug. What to do? I don’t know, because what I’ve learnt from history is that everything has been tried, and everything fails. The best we can do is try our best.
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