The Spectacle of Cowardice
The memorial service for Charlie Kirk in Glendale, Arizona, had hit the maximum capacity of its facility after 200k people had turned up. Members of the Trump administration, including President Trump himself, gave speeches dedicated to Charlie Kirk and his life’s mission at Turning Point USA. His wife, Erika Kirk, had given an emotional speech forgiving the killer, saying that her husband always wanted to save young men, young men such as his killer. This is all well and good; however, NBC had painted this memorial as a “revival” of American conservatism and Christianity. Stephen Miller said that “the day Charlie died, the angels wept.” JD Vance had told the crowd that this event was not a funeral but a revival in celebration of Charlie Kirk. President Trump, as well, compared the memorial to an “old-time revival.” It’s not a hard comparison considering all the people with their hands raised in prayer throughout the service. Then there were the comments of martyrdom, with speakers such as Vance claiming that Kirk is a martyr for the Christian faith in the old-school tradition. Tucker Carlson asked those in the crowd to raise their hands if Kirk had centered them a “little closer to Christ.”
This is where the failure of the Christian “revival” in America begins its steady decline after years of growth among the American youth. Many may disagree, but was this not a victory for Christian churches of all denominations, for America? The Babylon Bee, always experts in vanity, had released a satire piece to Kirk’s memorial entitled “Satan: I’ve Made a Huge Mistake.” It goes like this:
“Well, this isn’t going like I planned at all,” sighed Satan, as churches once again were filled to overflowing around the nation. “Listen to all that worship. How are even more people praising God in the face of death? Ugh. I’ve really screwed the pooch this time.”
Many in the BLM organization and movement believed themselves to be the winner of American politics and the corrector of American history after rioting and burning multiple major cities throughout the nation and forming such a coalition that allowed Joe Biden to be the most “popular” president in US history. But where are they now? In the simplest terms, the system of Power no longer needs them, at least not at this moment, and so their movement fizzled instead of being reinvigorated after Trump’s reelection. This “revival” had first exposed the cowardice of the masses; their optimism had blinded them to the fact that Trump and his administration had hijacked the movement-an administration rife with broken and failed promises in ending wars and releasing the Epstein list, among other economic and domestic failures. Of course no Epstein list could ever be released, do people really expect those running the system to be arrested? They also fell for the recreation of the image of Charlie Kirk, a man who was being dragged through the mud for his undying support for Israel just days before his death, only to be a martyr, a secret Catholic, and someone who was actually changing his mind about Israel.
It was a masterclass in perception management, and conservatives and Christians all over America had fallen for it. This “revival” movement sits in the same chair that BLM had once sat in back in 2020; the hippies of the 1960s had once sat in it too. To understand this, and the future of America, we must understand what the cowardice mask wearers of optimism do not: the true nature of Power.
The Hivemind
After the deaths of Iryna Zakruska and Charlie Kirk, many came out and claimed that they had felt a shift in their spirits, an unease. They had found that their opinions were not only being shared by millions of others in real life and on social media, as if everyone was coming to the same conclusion all at once. The National Review had called it a “racial awakening” among the right; a black man stabbing the only white girl on the train and claiming “I got that white girl” had angered and brought about a release of natural tribalism that the American experiment had attempted to erase in the melting pot. Similarly, after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the popular Catholic influencer, Franco Fernandez, voiced his opinion on how strange the year 2025 has been, saying:
“Charlie Kirk gets murdered today, it’s 2025, a school shooting in Colorado today, 2025. Catholic church school shooting in Minneapolis in 2025. (…) This isn’t just any year, this year has been marked the year of the Jubilee by the Catholic Church. Now Pope Francis passes away, 2025, a mass amount of Christians have been going through a lot, which could possibly be spiritual warfare from the stuff I’ve been reading.”
Seeing the reactions to the murder of Zakruska and Kirk, Franco is right to make such assumptions; where he is wrong, however, is the cause of these mass feelings. These reactions, while truthful and full of emotion, are manipulated and taken over by the same systems of Power that control the organized chaos of the American political scene and its thousands of individuated wants and needs. The founder of public relations in America had written about this process in depth in his book “Propaganda.” He claims:
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized.”
This isn’t to say that young Christian converts or members of the clergy are not legitimate believers; instead it’s an understanding that their faith is both a choice and a target for manipulation, as are all other forms of belief. Just as it’s an option for a young college student to choose clubs and organizations, so it goes with religion. An Evangelical Baptist can convert to Eastern Orthodoxy one day and then neo-paganism the next; lukewarm Christians are a result of this society. A child may grow up in a religious household but decide later in life he does not want to be religious; his school was not religious, nor were his friends. Unlike in the days of old, when being a different religion or denomination was taboo or met with violence, people now have a choice; this is another way in which the power of religious institutions is repressed for the sake of stability and Power within the system.
Kirk’s memorial service was one such act of manipulation in the sphere of democratic organization. On one hand, it was painted as a revival of Christian faith, a service for a man martyred for his Christian beliefs, and an arm-raising glory for the optimistic hope for real patriotic Americans. While on the other hand, the memorial was painted as something more like a circus of unserious actors, with Kirk’s wife walking out onto the stage with WWE pyrotechnics wearing a suit of white and President Trump hugging the crying widow while looking into the camera and biting his lip. This memorial was one way in which Bernay’s secret government, the organized minority, maintains a balance of perception within the United States, ensuring no real winner and no real rebellion.
The Portrait Curse
The memorial service was just one major example of perception management and the containment of this present American moment. Any other day, the perception is managed by first understanding what the American masses are thinking; fortunately for them, there is no shortage of information. The very opponents of the system are the same ones who feed it; the ones who pour their heart out on social media for reactions and comments feed the system with their rebellion. The crudeness of Nick Fuentes, the bombast of Alex Jones, and the faceless Twitter user saying whatever he wants, unafraid of any consequence because his real identity is hidden behind lines of code. This new generation of counterculture rebels, the traditionalist religious or others, have fallen into the same trap the hippies had during the 1960s and 70s. Both groups believed themselves to be an unstoppable wave of change, but if anything these two seemingly different generations have in common, it’s their incessant desire to be heard, praised, and have the rush of dopamine that comes with it.
The difference between the hippies of the past and traditionalists of today is more minuscule than one may think. The anti-state, anti-capitalism, and pacifist stance of the hippies were the exact tools used to not only contain the hippies but also draw their desires and energy away from revolution and street demonstrations and into the realm of eastern spirituality, sex, and drugs. Even their counterculture, once used as a way to antagonize the system they fought against, was absorbed, and like a portrait curse in fiction where one becomes trapped in a two-dimensional realm of paint, became a part of the American pantheon, forever trapped in the capitalist superstructure they rebelled against in their youth: rock’n roll and Cheech and Chong. One of the reasons this occurred was because of an organization called SRI International located at Stanford University. Jay Ogilvy, the Director of Psychological Values Research at SRI, explained this process in the documentary Century of the Self, saying:
“The idea was to create a rigorous tool for measuring a whole range of desires which are values that were prior to that time had been kinda overlooked, they say in business what gets measured gets done. We were basically telling manufacturers if you’re really going to satisfy not just basic needs but individuated wants, whims and desires of more highly developed human beings, you’re gonna have to segment, you’re gonna have to individuate.”
Because social media did not exist in those days, surveys were sent out across the country. Amina Marie Spengler, the Director of Psychological Values Research Program, explained that this process had great success. The return rate was as high as 86%, and some surveys even had notes attached to them asking to send more surveys. The reason why this occurred, she explained, was because they were “asking people to think about things that they had never thought about before, and they liked thinking about them. Like what they felt inside, what motivated them, what was important to them.” Through their surveys, people were placed in identifiable groups that were then used by businesses in their commercial representation and their product strategy. Another way opinions were collected were with focus groups, their opinions would shape the way industries engineered the masses. In the modern day, surveys, as well as focus groups, have fallen out of favor; they no longer have the same pull amongst the youth in 2025 as they did in 1978. While social media tweets and comments can be used to bring about a similar process, the rise of fake bot accounts could send wrong signals to companies and the system of Power.
One way this is worked around is through formal-large-scale debates and the allure of an individual’s vanity; this could be a liberal student eager to defeat Charlie Kirk in a public setting or a traditional wife influencer staring into the screen over a captioned statement while sad music plays. The young traditionalists may abhor the hippies, but the desire to be heard and to be praised for their intellect and rebellious spirit in fighting injustice remains the same. An example of this is the Youtube channel Jubilee, which often holds debates between liberals and conservatives; sometimes big names appear, other times it is only random individuals. Following the end of the Iran-Israel conflict, the questions on Zionist expansionism and Jewish influence in American politics exploded and split the Trump voting base. Two weeks after the end of this conflict, Jubilee invited the liberal Muslim journalist Mehdi Hasan to debate twenty far-right conservatives. During this debate, a young man laughed and proudly proclaimed himself a Fascist, and another was open in his belief that Hasan should get out of his country. One wonders where these men were during the supposed height of white supremacy at Charlottesville; maybe they just didn’t exist. In the end, it doesn’t matter who won that focus group debate; the system was able to tap into the general feelings of a large portion of the country.
This is why the American right, the “revival” movement, and its outside elements, such as the Nick Fuentes crowd, are doomed to fail. They see themselves winning because their messages spread through social media, but this is exactly what will doom them. No one questions why Hitler speeches, once heavily censored on Youtube, can now be found easily and subtitled in English or dubbed in English by AI. The Nazi film “Triumph of the Will” was once impossible to find; now multiple channels all of a sudden post full versions subtitled in English. These people who loudly type their right-wing opinion must sound like madmen to the system of Power, it’s like a lunatic ranting his beliefs, feelings, and intellectual superiority to a doctor across the table while another takes his pulse. Afterwards the doctors will decide what to do with him.
The Shadow Erupts
While these are the outside factors that will contribute to the inevitable disaster awaiting the Christian sect in American politics, the rise of Christianity attaches itself to large and ancient institutions such as the Catholic and Orthodox Churches; the animating spirit of the movement is still based entirely on the individual instead of the collective. Because of this, the individual will face the reality that he must sustain his faith entirely alone; where once the whole town or the whole country was religious as a social norm, they no longer have this social safety net, and most people do not have the willpower to sustain lifelong beliefs by themselves. The failure of Christian politics will also come inwardly, an implosion based on their personalities, minds, and their very psychology. Sigmund Freud had once described the human personality as having three elements that create our complex human behaviors. These elements are the id, the part of the mind that is considered illogical, wishful, and deals with impulsive urges such as sex; the ego, the part of the mind that grounds you in reality, that weighs costs and benefits of an action, and that gives direction to the mind; and then there is the superego, the part of our mind that internalizes our morality and our ideals, that suppresses the id’s urges and that can ground us in ideals and not in reality.
Americans, even before the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s, have an imbalance of the id. They have heightened materialistic tendencies and a vanity that surpasses other groups of people in the world. This trend can be seen in the post-war boom in the 1950s; competition for who owned the best house, the shiniest car, the newest kitchen appliance, and the best-trimmed lawn created a culture of selfish individualism craving the praise and approval of those around them. In the 1960s this mentality morphed into something new: who can express themselves best, wear the most colorful clothing, and be the most peace-loving fighter of injustice in the capitalist system? The hippies found a moral and idealistic ideology grounded in fighting the Vietnam War and the injustices facing black Americans at the time, but it was also an individualistic movement based on freeing oneself from the constraints of society. The hippie movement sought to live close to nature, satisfying instinctual urges through sex, LSD, and rock and roll, their superego morally justifying their behavior. But eventually their rebellious energy was drained, their members splitting off into new factions or buying in completely to the commodification of their counterculture. The founder of the Yippie Party had explained this process in himself in 1978, saying:
“I was willing to die and I had a martyr complex in the sense, I think we all did, and I’ve given up that ideal of sacrifice. I’m not as overwhelmingly moved by injustice as I was, and now we have reincarnated ourselves from within.”
One of his compatriots and co-founder of the party, Stew Albert had given his explanation as to why these events unfolded as it did, claiming:
“Basically the politics were lost, and totally replaced by this lifestyle and then the desire to be deeper and deeper into the self. By now a grandiose sense of the self, the original Yippie founder Jerry Rubin definitely moved in that direction, and I think he was buying into the notion that he could be happy and fully self developed on his own. Socialism in one person. Although that of course is Capitalism.”
American society since then has openly encouraged people to confront and fulfill their urges; this can be sexual, or it can be self-expression in their wild dress. The 1980s, for instance, was rife with this: rock bands wearing tight black clothing and makeup, singing about sticking to the man, like Twisted Sister; sexual dances like Michael Jackson’s; or sexual lyrics like those found in the music of Rick James. Modern American society has only slid more into depravity in the decades since the 1980s; pornography is readily available for free, with children exposed at an incredibly young age, some as young as eleven. Movies, TV, and music urge violence, sex, and drugs; the youth are brought up on all of this. The children are brought up on a different superego, an imbalance in id and sense of right and wrong. Elders are often upset at the immense disrespect of the youth in nearly all aspects, but they fail to realize they had supported, maybe even created, the circumstances that allowed for this to happen. But over the last few years, there has been an unexpected rise in traditional religiosity among this depraved youth. Were they tired of the dissatisfaction that indulging in their urges left them? Perhaps, but this is not the end of whatever struggle the minds of Americans are going through. Freud taught against an imbalanced superego because depression, anxiety, and even suicide are common in this state of mind; it is this truth that will cause the implosion of the Christian political scene.
Another psychologist, Carl Jung, described the id as an archetype known as the “shadow.” Jung explains that suppressing the shadow will only cause its qualities, such as anger and ambition, to gather strength and erupt and project out into others. Both anger and ambitions are sins; the Americans repress these qualities, among many others, which were only natural to them, and so they erupt. The Christians will say they fell back into sin and continue to repress this shadow until the qualities they fear most erupt with more strength until they accept it, and this manifests in new politics, away from pacifist churches and into a party apparatus. Vilfredo Pareto explained in 1900 that times of great crisis always bring with them a rise in religiosity, but they did not win the 20th century; the parties did. The documentary “Century of the Self” interviewed a German man who once attended a Nazi march; he explains:
“I could see from afar, how those hundred thousand people when they passed Hitler, they became completely delirious. They began to shout his cries I will never get out of my ears “heil, sieg heil” demented. And here I got confirmation how those irrational forces, uncontrollable forces, in Germany in the Germans had erupted, had broughton out, were running wild, where the party, marching, marching on.”
A star always shines brightest before its destruction, it implodes and then explodes and leaves no trace of itself except dust and residue. The Christians too shall go back to being residues on the outskirts of politics.
The Grand Inquisitor
Christians, nor the American right, should delude themselves that there are simple means of obtaining true Power. The power that the right and left currently hold are nothing but tools used by the state apparatus for its own benefit; this is both BLM and Turning Point USA. The current men and women that run the narrative for the American right are too cowardly, too loud, and too liberal to do what is needed to fix the runaway train the world knows as America. Herman Goering once told his men, “Every bullet fired from the barrel of a police pistol was my bullet. If you call that murder, then I am the murderer.” Who in American politics can or will say such a thing? Would JD Vance? Nick Fuentes? They’re averse to violence and too patriotic. It is true that the state has a monopoly on violence; its position must be enforced with strength. The leaders know this and clothe their violence in the linen of an animating spirit. In Dostoevsky’s novel, “The Brothers Kazminov,” more specifically, the story of the “Grand Inquisitor,” who used fire to enforce his rule and bring glory to God.
A man commits a miracle and the crowd gathers around him, confused by hope. The Grand Inquisitor orders the arrest of this mysterious man, and in their discussion, the Power of the divine and the Power of the world, meet. The inquisitor explains:
“In the end, it will be to us that they come to lay their freedom at our feet, crying “make us slaves if you will, only feed us, feed us.” They will realize they can never have freedom and enough bread for everybody, that they are too vicious, too rebellious, too insignificant ever to be free. And we shall feed them, proclaiming falsely that it is done in your name.”
Who can delude themselves into thinking they can change this one absolute fact, that in the end the people will always pick security and bread over freedom? They do not have the willpower to conquer their urges, let alone the willpower to run a government:
“We took from him Rome, and the Sword of Caesar, why did you reject that last gift? Had you accepted the council of the mighty spirit you would have answered every need of man on earth, whom to worship, whom to entrust with his consciousness, how all may be peacefully united in one single common ant hill. By accepting the mantle of Caesar you would found a world kingdom, and blessed that world with the gift of tranquility. We accepted it for you, and in doing so of course rejected you, and followed him.”
Every nation was born out of an animating spirit and a myth that makes its people wake up every morning and be prideful in their country and mission, even if it’s a lie. Its founding must be based on violence and repression of its rebels, otherwise there would’ve never been a country in the first place:
“It is true of course that men everywhere are against our power and take pride in his rebellion, but that is of no importance, it is a rebellion of school children against their teacher. The thrill of it will pass and they will have to pay dearly for it. They will cry out in their despair, “he who created us rebels must have meant to mock us. They shall say this knowing it to be blasphemy and their blasphemy will make them even more unhappy.”
Could a pacifist, a Christian so devout to his faith, be willing to take the mantle and be a leader in a Catholic or Orthodox government to stop sin and the bread and games that distract people from their aim of Heaven and God? This man can never be in this position because he will never understand the true nature of Power, he can never make it to this point because this position requires a man of a different nature, even if they both proclaim the same faith.
“Of course we shall allow them to sin, every sin will be redeemed, for we will take their punishment upon ourselves. They will bring us the most agonizing secrets of their consciences, and they will accept our solutions with joy, going quietly to meet their deaths. Those millions of happy children, snuffed out quietly in your name. Beyond the grave they will find nothing, but while they’re alive we shall keep that secret from them, for the sake of their happiness here on Earth. And lure them with an eternal reward in Heaven, for if there were anything in the next world, it certainly wouldn’t be for them. It is prophesied that you would come again with your elect and that you will conquer, and we shall say that your elect saved only themselves, but we saved everybody, and we who took their sins upon us will stand up before you and say judge us if you can and if you dare!”
To run America, there must be an understanding that to deal with a violent land, you must use violence to fight back. The cartels in the south do not play by the same rules or have the same moral guilt as the Americans or the Europeans. Every American wants to be president because he believes he knows how to fix the country; meanwhile he tears himself apart over the guilt of looking at a woman with lust; meanwhile, his enemies hold no similar feelings of guilt or humility. In the 1996 film, “Gotti,” the opening monologue by John Gotti, former head of the Gambino crime family, explains this perfectly:
“Yeah so you humble me. So what you got? You got a war. You got a global war. You got your Chinks, Dominicans, Asians, Russians, Columbians, Jamaicans. What they doin? They desecrate the nation. You got your variable f***in’ snowstorms of cocaine, smack or whatever they shove in their veins. There’s no rules. There’s no perimeters. There’s no feelings. There’s no feelings for this country. You got anarchy. So… 5-10 years from now, they’re gonna wish there was an American Cosa Nostra. 5-10 years from now, they’re gonna miss John Gotti.”
Today, the American right deludes itself with the ideals and hope of patriotism, hoping that calling upon the dead mythos that is now demonized and shunned by half the country will help. If a nation had followed its set of rules and ideals every day of its existence, and it led them to a point of catastrophe, then what was the point of that rule? Donald Trump is the ultimate manifestation of collapsing American power; he’s boastful about strength and patriotic in his fervor, and yet his administration has failed. He is a populist who was contained and became a mouthpiece for true Power. There is a real problem of intelligence within the American political class. Trump and his administration have proven to be incapable of dealing with the domestic and foreign issues facing America, and they are even leaning into the old habits of previous presidents. No one in this administration will be able to solve the problems facing America; the democratic process drains the country while the populists drain the energy from their support base through failed promises and sensationalism. The bureaucrats as well do not have what it takes to fix the problems facing America. Much like the Soviet system, the bureaucrats see the coming collapse, and instead of fixing the problems, they milk the country dry of everything it’s worth.
The Living Organism of Revolution
What had started innocently in 2016 with debating blue-haired liberals and making funny videos has morphed into something far more dangerous. The rhetoric today consists of civil war and revolution, but the revolution has already been born. The Russian and German people in the aftermath of the First World War had seen revolution as a living organism; it is born in a single moment, it craves blood, it brings instability, and it then dies when the period of stability follows. In the 1992 film, “The Chekist,” which follows the activities of the Russian secret police who bring order and destroy the revolution’s enemies, Comrade Srubov begins:
“No, Revolution is not an idea, it’s a living organism, a huge pregnant woman. Not the one Marx made up and clothed in a white gown. There is a myth about a prolific woman, dressed in a lousy canvas shirt. Through her body swarm parasites. We gotta squash them all! Especially in this country, where for centuries the respect for the individual is undermined. We, more than anyone, need an iron law-and-order: Otherwise… our end would be inevitable. But the most frightening thing…will be general mutiny. Therefore, our emerging Revolution will only succeed, if we force the storm… into the bounds of constructive order. Understand? That’s where Marx’ white gown comes in.”
In the Hollywood minds of the people, they see revolution as involving them. How could a revolution occur without me? They may say. They need me and my individual strengths! After the Soviet collapse, Russia fell into worse troubles than before; the former Soviet officials who milked the country’s money and resources became the oligarchs, and crime was rife. This was a revolution because it demanded blood before stability could occur. Srubov resumes:
“Yes, the Revolution is a fierce starveling. It’s hungry for blood. Sucks the blood out of the best men. But it is essential to satisfy its thirst with blood. To shock and renew this world, it’s required to suffer anguish, filth and misery. The new isn’t born without torture and blood.”
This living organism that currently resides in America demands its blood as well. Thomas Jefferson knew this when he said that the “tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of tyrants and patriots.” The stupid huddled masses, however, will not be the heroes in the real story; eventually they shall lay their freedom at Power’s feet and cry, “Feed us, feed us, make us slaves if you will,” and only then will the revolution die, its body dressed in the animating spirit of the time, whether this is Fascism, Marxism, Christianity, or something else. America should admit its situation; there would be more dignity in it.
