Over the last two weeks, I onboarded at Genspect as a staff editor without a byline. They needed someone and I was available. However, that also means I have fewer weekly hours to attend to this website. Henceforth, I will be posting just 3-4 times per month besides my two podcasts and at least one book review, so I am dropping the premium subscription rate by 40 percent. I will also be publishing everything behind the paywall first, with less content unlocking than before. Upgrade your subscription now to have full access to this content in 2026. I will be at Genspect this weekend and will have exclusive reporting next week.
In 2014, when I was working in the right wing extremism reporting space, I was asked to look into Charlie Kirk and his organization, Turning Point USA. With little effort, I determined that they were an anodyne conservative debate club, so I dismissed them as a concern and continued to write on a diversity of oddballs associated with fringe right views: sovereign citizens, neo-Nazis, the odd klansman, a ‘scholarly’ Holocaust denial institute. By the end of 2015, however, I realized that the actual topic of actual right wing extremism was not of actual interest to liberals at all. What they were really interested in already, and took interest in with ten times the intensity in 2017, was the projection of extreme right wing views on figures like Charlie Kirk.
By that time, I had realized something about the “thousands” of “hate groups” that had supposedly bloomed like online corpse flowers of hate speech. I did the math: if we count any blog, page, or podcast as a hate group, then whenever four hateful people start a group together, and inevitably fall out with each other like the Knights of the White Magnolia to create four new groups, there will now be five “hate groups” with four people in them. The Southern Poverty Law Center milked this phenomenon for years. Rather than an explosion of hate, the real problem for the American left was the relative rarity of actual right wing extremist hate. The market needed more, so more had to be created, primarily by projecting the ‘right wing extremist’ label on every disagreeable opinion.
Charlie Kirk’s memorial yesterday marked the culmination of that cultural revolution. What happens now?
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