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Brad Thomas's avatar

Just takes the “100 Club” to send $100 each. Lets do it for Dave, decency, and democracy, on America’s 250th!

Terry C's avatar

Hi Dave,

Today’s political and cultural landscape bears little resemblance to the America you and I grew up in. As with chess — featuring its tried-and-true openings and middle-game moves — there used to be some things in American politics that were more or less predictable. The rules have changed and are, to borrow a line from Kamala Harris, “unburdened by what has been.”

There was a time when I was rather dismissive of the stated fears of the Jewish left about a rise of 1930s-like anti-Semitism becoming mainstream in the United States. Our entire society was so hostile to that sort of thing that I just couldn’t imagine the slimy ilk of someone like Nick Fuentes ever gaining any real traction. I thought the antibodies in American culture were too strong for that. But here we are.

Your analysis of the rightist Zoomer victim mentality is spot on. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t hear some kid shaking his fist at the boomer generation and blaming them for stealing his future because they refuse to die. The complaint takes different forms — housing, wages, debt, dating, family formation, the economy, capitalism, “the system” — but underneath it all is this same growing sense of grievance. And once grievance becomes the organizing principle of someone’s worldview, it always goes looking for a villain.

What is especially striking to me is that this victim culture did not begin on the right. We watched it emerge and harden on the left first. Everything became oppression, trauma, grievance, identity, and victimhood. Then, over the last several years, the same basic mechanism migrated to the right. The vocabulary changed, the scapegoats changed, the symbols changed, but the machine itself remained very much the same.

That, to me, supports one of your central points: this is not just some organic thing that “happened.” Human hands are involved. Ideas are pushed. Narratives are funded, repeated, rewarded, and amplified. People are taught what to care about. That was true on the left, and now we are watching the same mechanism operate on the right. Different tribe, same machine.

That is the part that I think many people still do not want to face. For most of my life, I could never quite understand how a modern, educated,first-world nation like Germany could be swept up into something as barbaric as Nazi anti-Semitism. I could never quite understand how men like Oswald Mosley in Britain or Benito Mussolini in Italy could capture the imagination of so many people in their respective nations. I understood the facts historically, but I did not understand the mechanism emotionally.

Now, watching grievance, resentment, economic frustration, online radicalization, and scapegoating all feed into one another in real time, I understand it much better than I wish I did. The common denominator between then and now is not difficult to see. It is economic grievance. As you have pointed out many times in your own writing, where the tire meets the road, real politics is almost always meat-and-potatoes politics. That was true in the 1930s. It was true in 1917 when the Russian Revolution occurred. And it is true right now.

People can dress it up in ideology, theory, racial language, religious language, or revolutionary language, but underneath it all are people who believe the world has cheated them. They believe they were promised something that has been withheld. They believe someone else has stolen what should have been theirs. Once that frame takes hold, all that remains is for someone to tell them who the thief is.

The 1992 video is not some dead artifact from the past. As you so vividly point out, it is very much alive, and its danger has multiplied rather than faded. Young men are finding it, absorbing it, and using it as an entry point into something much darker. It has metastasized into a damn golem, animated long after its maker no longer believes in it, and it is doing real damage in ways you never intended. That is why it cannot simply be ignored, explained away, or wished into irrelevance. It needs to be refuted point by point, and the only man truly suited to drive the stake through its heart is the man who made it.

I intend to buy both of your upcoming books when they become available. I have also left a contribution to financially support this new documentary project. I do not think one book or one film will magically fix the problem, but I do believe bad ideas do not correct themselves. If destructive narratives are being pushed by human hands, then they have to be answered by human hands as well. You are trying to correct the record before that old work does any more damage, and given the direction things are moving, I think that effort is not only worthy of support — it is necessary.

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