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      Number of US white nationalist groups falls as extremist views go mainstream

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      The number of white nationalist, hate and anti-government extremist groups in the US has dropped not because of their declining influence, but because many of their proponents feel their beliefs have become normalized in government and mainstream society, according to a new report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).The SPLC’s annual Year in Hate and Extremism report, published on Thursday, said it documented 1,371 hate and extremist groups across the country in 2024, down from 1,430 groups in 2023.These groups use “political, communication, violent, and online tactics to build strategies and training infrastructure to divide the country, demoralize people, and dismantle democracy”, the non-profit group said.The 5% drop in hate and extremist groups in 2024 can be attributed to the fact that many feel a lesser sense of urgency to organize, because their beliefs have infiltrated politics, education and society in general, according to the report.In 2024, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives became “ground zero” for many of these groups, the report said, some using threats of violence and “creating chaos that opened the door for political strongmen and authoritarian measures”.These efforts built a foundation for nationwide policy actions to follow by Donald Trump, including legislative measures to restrict discussions of race and gender in classrooms, and cutting funding for programs that disproportionately affect marginalized communities.The SPLC said there were 533 active hate groups in 2024, including ones that express views that are anti-LGBTQ+, anti-immigrant, antisemitic and anti-Muslim. Last year’s report saw “record numbers” of white nationalist and anti-LGBTQ+ groups, as well as an increase in direct actions such as hate crimes, flyering, protests and intimidation campaigns.The groups featured in this year’s report make up the “hard-right movement that has long been behind rhetoric and actions that target Black people, women, immigrants, Jewish people, Muslims, and low-income, Indigenous and LGBTQ+ people”, according to the SPLC Intelligence Project’s interim director, Rachel Carroll Rivas.“Their power comes from the use of force, the capture of political parties and government, and infesting the mainstream discourse with conspiracy theories.”The report’s release comes as a Japanese American college professor is scheduled to make his first public appearance after he was brutally attacked in Los Angeles last month in a possible hate crime.Aki Maehara, 71, was struck by a vehicle and called a racial slur while riding his bike in Montebello, 10 miles (16km) east of downtown Los Angeles. He suffered serious injuries to his elbow, neck, cheekbones, jaw, hips and lower back, according to the Los Angeles Times.Maehara teaches a course on the history of racism in the US at East Los Angeles Community College. “There’s a long history,” he told the paper.“They’ve picketed my classroom at East LA College. Chicano Republicans came after me and picketed me at Cal State Long Beach. The KKK came to my classroom at Cal State Long Beach when I was teaching a course on the US-Vietnam war. This is not the first time I’ve been targeted.” More

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      How Ohio became a hotbed of white supremacism, spreading its tentacles globally | Stephen Starr

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      By many accounts, Hilliard, a leafy suburb west of downtown Columbus, is a midwestern success story: its progressive school district gives a vacation day for all students to mark the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr – the first in Ohio to do so – and its homes are highly sought-after by a growing number of diverse families where locals enjoy shopping at the oldest Asian grocery in the state.But it is also where Christopher Brenner Cook, a convicted terrorist, grew up. In April 2023, Cook and two others were sentenced for conspiring to attack America’s electrical grid, and he was given a 92-month prison term.Cook, who was 21 at the time of his sentencing for conspiring to blow up electricity stations, was previously a devout white supremacist who tried to recruit people to the neo-Nazi cause. He focused specifically on children in an effort to avoid detection by law enforcement.More than 3,780 miles away in Derbyshire, England, 14-year-old Rhianan Rudd encountered Cook on WhatsApp and Discord, the online chat app. As of September 2020, the BBC noted she had been in contact with Cook “for some time”. By early 2021, Rudd – who was autistic and had a history of self-harm – was spending up to 15 hours a day speaking to Cook online.Cook had been grooming, sexually abusing and radicalizing Rudd. The last time she had contact with Cook, he told her he loved her, and she felt a “gaping hole” and “very sad for a long time”.In May 2022, aged 16, Rhianan killed herself.American extremists are going globalAs prominent supporters and members of the current administration such as Elon Musk and Steve Bannon have taken to Nazi-style salutes in front of large audiences, the tentacles of a resurgent American white supremacism are stretching around the globe, often with deadly consequences.Members of American white supremacist groups, including Patriot Front and the California-based Rise Above Movement (RAM), have traveled across Europe to take part in public marches and distribute propaganda while the Base, a group of American neo-Nazis, reportedly has Russian links.A founding member of RAM was extradited from Romania in August 2023 to the US on charges of inciting violence. A Slovakian teenager who killed two people outside a bar popular with members of Bratislava’s LGBTQ+ community in October 2022 was radicalized in part by California- and Idaho-based leaders of the so-called “Terrorgram Collective”; those individuals last September were charged by the Department of Justice for soliciting hate crimes and other offences.View image in fullscreenBut not all of America’s far right’s global endeavors are confined to the dark corners of the internet or violent extremists. Trump’s closest allies have also courted a resurgent far-right across Europe where such parties are gaining mainstream support and power.Bannon, whose War Room podcast has more than 15,000 reviews on Apple Podcasts, has traveled to France, Hungary, Germany and elsewhere to meet with and advise far-right political leaders. Musk, who has promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories on X, was criticized for appearing online at a campaign event for Germany’s far-right AfD party in January.“The ideas that used to be fringe are much more mainstream,” says Christian Picciolini, a former white supremacist leader and author of White American Youth: My Descent into America’s Most Violent Hate Movement and other books.“This isn’t just my opinion; it’s the opinion of white supremacists. They love that the president has their back.”Ohio’s fall into extremismFor decades, Ohio was a national political bellwether that reflected America’s wider socioeconomic milieu. Its three large cities – Cincinnati, Columbus and Cleveland – provided a solid backbone of support for progressive politics.In the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama won more votes in Ohio than any Democrat in history, repeating the feat four years later when he was elected to a second term in the White House. Until 2011, Democratic party governors were not uncommon.However, in recent years, Ohio has seen a marked shift to the right.The perpetrator of the 2017 Charlottesville car attack that killed 32-year-old Heather Heyer and the founder of the Daily Stormer, an influential neo-Nazi website, are both from Ohio. The plot to kill the Democratic Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, was formulated in Dublin, the same well-to-do Columbus suburb where Cook spent part of his childhood.Eighty-three Ohioans were charged for their part in the 6 January 2021 attack on the Capitol that was prompted by President Trump. After Delaware, West Virginia and Pennsylvania – all states geographically closer to the capital – Ohio had the highest per capita number of arrested rioters. The same year, Columbus experienced a higher per capita incidence of hate crimes than all but three other US cities.In 2023, a Nazi homeschooling effort with more than 3,000 online subscribers run by residents of Upper Sandusky in the state’s north-west was unearthed. Ohio’s department of education found that no law had been broken.Ku Klux Klan white supremacist flyers and marches by neo-Nazis are also now happening with growing frequency in places such as Springfield, Ohio, after Trump’s false claims in September that immigrants there were eating pets.Neo-Nazi publicity efforts in Cincinnati, Columbus and elsewhere in Ohio – a defined effort, experts say, to desensitize communities to their imagery and normalize their presence – are on the rise.View image in fullscreenAt the statehouse in Columbus, Ohio, politics has been overrun by far-right Republicans. Increasingly, Ohio Republicans have voiced extremist views or passed laws that disproportionately affect minorities and immigrants – groups regularly targeted by white supremacists.“The far right has long been working to engage in local and state politics. They recognize that change is more likely when like-minded persons are designing policy and making decisions,” said Laura Dugan, a professor of human security and sociology at Ohio State University.“We have no mechanism to stop this radicalization when it is being reflected in the statehouse.”It was in this environment that Cook grew up. He and his co-conspirators “fanaticized” about “the opportunity for white leaders to take control of this country and its government”, according to his sentencing memorandum.Eight months after Cook was charged with conspiring to give material support to terrorists, the Columbus Dispatch ran an op-ed calling out some Hilliard residents for spreading hate. Some have filed lawsuits against the local school district to force staff to stop wearing badges in support of LGBTQ+ communities.“Nothing is happening in the schools, and I think it really needs to because young men especially are being influenced by this culture wars stuff and the manosphere,” said Picciolini.“There really isn’t enough happening to counter that.”Picciolini was recruited by the Chicago-area SkinHeads when he was 14 years old and spent eight years as a member of white nationalist groups. Since leaving the movement, he has been involved in founding or co-founding many deradicalizing programs and has criticized the lack of government support for them.Picciolini said he had seen children as young as nine be recruited online.“The reason that anybody joins these groups is not the extremist ideology. It’s [for] the sense of identity, community and purpose,” he said.“For people who feel marginalized, they have a difficult time with what I call ‘potholes’ – trauma or challenges with mental health; a health issue; physical abuse. It pushes people to the fringes and to the internet. A lot of these kids are being targeted because of their ‘potholes’.”For Rhianan Rudd, who struggled to make friends, the internet proved to be both a release and a trap.Her deepening online relationship with Cook saw her further radicalized, prompting her to make verbal threats to blow up a synagogue and download information on bomb making, for which she was arrested in October 2020. That resulted in her being taken out of Prevent, the deradicalization program her mother had signed her into the month before. Six months later, she became the youngest person ever charged with terrorism in the UK, charges which were dropped when investigators concluded she had been groomed and abused by Cook.View image in fullscreenAn officer for Prevent referred to Rudd as the “most vulnerable individual she’s ever met”, after the teen admitted that Cook had been radicalizing her. She told her social worker that she felt she had “two competing individuals in her head”.Cook wasn’t the only American male with a white supremacist background in Rudd’s life.Rudd’s mother, Emily Carter, had been in contact with Dax Mallaburn, a convicted felon and known member of the Aryan Brotherhood in Arizona, through a prison pen pal program. They began a romantic relationship that saw Mallaburn move to the UK and live with Rudd and her mother. Mallaburn is alleged to have sexually groomed Rudd, and information gathered by police found that Cook was in contact with Mallaburn, telling him to teach the child “the right way”.The terrorism charges against Rudd were dropped in December 2021, but the damage had been done.Just weeks before her death, she asked her mother for help contacting a neo-Nazi group in the US and attempted to travel to London to acquire a visa to travel to Texas.“Her being groomed was huge and I saw Rhianan change,” Carter said at an inquest into Rudd’s death and the role antiterrorism and other agencies played. The inquest is ongoing until June.Missed opportunitiesWhile the internet may have facilitated Cook’s abuse of Rudd, law enforcement agencies on both sides of the Atlantic have come in for criticism.On two occasions in early 2020, Cook’s vehicle was stopped by law enforcement officials, in Ohio and Texas. Drugs, Nazi paraphernalia and weapons were found, and yet both times Cook was let go.The FBI shared information with British intelligence about Cook’s activities and grooming of Rudd five months before she took her own life, while several years before her death, an MI5 agent lamented to a senior colleague that Rudd couldn’t be referred to an anti-extremism program while she was under a police investigation.Although Cook’s sentencing memorandum recognized that his “singular” end goal was linked to “the propagation and fruition of white supremacist ideology”, he was not investigated for his exploitation of Rudd or faced potential charges related to her death.Legal experts say there is nothing precluding Cook from being charged for crimes related to the death of Rudd in the future, so long as no relevant statute of limitations has passed and there is probable cause to support specific crimes under US law. He could also be extradited to the UK to face charges, although that would be an unprecedented move.Ohio’s rising hateCook’s sentencing memorandum suggests he has embarrassment and remorse for his terrorism-related actions, pleading guilty to the crimes he was charged with. But given the opportunity to discuss details of his relationship with Rudd, Cook is more circumspect.When the Guardian sought to interview Cook through the federal correctional institute he is being held in South Carolina, he declined. In an interview with Columbus Monthly published last year, he also declined to discuss his interactions with Rudd.While Cook is set to be released well before his 30th birthday, there is little evidence to suggest that Ohio will have solved its problem of white supremacist extremism by then.In November 2023, a 20-year-old man entered a Walmart store in Beavercreek, Ohio, and shot four people before turning the gun on himself. Police found Nazi flags and a “SS history book” at his home. The Anti-Defamation League found that Ohio was second only to Texas for the number of white supremacist incidents in 2023.About a dozen neo-Nazis, some armed, unfurled flags and signs bearing extremist material in February 2025 over a highway close to a historically African American community in Cincinnati. In response, there’s been silence from the White House.“They love this administration,” said Picciolini of the extremists. “They love the environment they are in.” More

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      ‘The universities are the enemy’: why the right detests the American campus | Lauren Lassabe Shepherd

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      In 2021, JD Vance, then a candidate for Ohio senate, gave a provocative keynote address at the National Conservatism Conference. Vance’s lecture was an indictment of American higher education: a “hostile institution” that “gives credibility to some of the most ridiculous ideas that exist in this country”. The aspiring politician did not mince words before his receptive rightwing audience: “If any of us wants to do the things we want to do … We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities.” The title of Vance’s keynote was inspired by a quote from Richard Nixon: “The universities are the enemy.”The Maga movement, of which Vance, the vice-president, is now at the forefront, has been unabashedly on the attack against campuses, professors and students. Donald Trump characterizes colleges as “dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics”, and student protesters as “radicals”, “savages” and “jihadists” who have been indoctrinated by faculty “communists and terrorists”. He has already delivered swift vengeance against campus protesters and non-protesters alike with visa terminations and deportations. This administration has gleefully withheld hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding to force colleges to crack down on student dissent.While Vance paid homage to Nixon and other forebears on the right, he failed to acknowledge that his political lineage had been fighting the university as an enemy for more than 100 years. In fact, reactionary backlash is a feature of two main milestones in the academy’s history: the democratization of admissions and the diversification of curriculum. Trump and Vance’s attacks are part of a longer history of rightwing backlash that follows each time college becomes more democratic.Before the universities were the enemyFor the first 300 years of US higher education, starting with the founding of Harvard College in the 1630s, the academy was a realm exclusive to the Christian elite. Only an extreme few attended the colonial and antebellum colleges, which were meant as sectarian educational clubs for the sons of the landed gentry. Boys of the Protestant ruling class attended college to socialize, form lifelong friendships and business partnerships, and even link their families legally through intermarriage of their sisters. Young men were exposed to the liberal arts and Christian theology, to be sure, but college was just as much a place to meet other boys like themselves and to be steeped in the cultural norms of their religious denomination and social class. This three-century tradition has been slow to change, and when it has, colleges have met fierce opposition from those who have benefited from the status quo.Throughout this time, the only people of color or women who appeared on campus were the wives and daughters of the faculty, maids, cooks, laundry workers, servants and enslaved people. By the 1830s and through the end of the century, segregated colleges were established for white women, and free men of color (until the founding of Bennett College and Spelman College, women of color had to “pass” as white to attend women’s colleges), but these institutions were not meant to rival or even resemble the standard colleges. The curriculums were vastly different from the liberal arts instruction of Harvard and Princeton – for girls, lessons were about homemaking and Christian motherhood; for children and adults of color, the practical vocations. Still, college-going by anyone was a privilege. Even at the turn of the 20th century, less than 5% of Americans went to college, and many fewer completed a degree.Backlash against who gets inThe right’s first rumblings about the college as enemy occurred during the 20th century, as the nature of the campus began to change for the modern era. The right’s grievance at the time was focused on who was admitted. By the 1920s, European immigrant students were starting to matriculate in east coast campuses, particularly in New York and Pennsylvania. The oldest and most prestigious colleges, such as Harvard, Yale and Princeton, sought to severely limit enrollment of the “socially undesirable”, especially Jews, to preserve the campus for old-stock Protestants. A combination of antisemitism and reactionary backlash to the era’s progressivism led rightwingers to cast a suspicious eye on the campus, where all of the decade’s new social science seemed to be emanating. Christian fundamentalists, terrified by the science of evolution, also decried the sinister academic classroom.By the 1930s, wealthy industrialists joined the chorus of college skeptics. The Franklin Roosevelt administration had assembled its famous “brain trust” of academics whose calculus was needed to pull the nation out of the Great Depression. But industry titans who refused to tolerate Roosevelt’s planned economy responded by creating free-market thinktanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) that produced rival economic white papers in defense of capitalism. Academic departments, AEI’s existence proved, were not the only place where experts could create knowledge. In fact, the right’s thinktanks would become their signature tool for churning out partisan disinformation such as climate crisis denial and race pseudoscience throughout the 20th century.By the time the second world war ended, Congress needed a way to ensure a smooth economic transition as a mass of veterans returned to the job market. The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, AKA the GI Bill, allowed more than 1 million returning soldiers to delay workforce re-entry by a few years as they entered the classroom. To the horror of many free-marketeers and social elites, the GI Bill in effect doubled the national population of college students, thus diversifying the campus by class, age and in the case of wounded veterans, physical ability (though not by race or gender).Backlash against what gets taughtOn the heels of the democratizing GI Bill, the McCarthyite purge of more than 100 academics for their prewar affiliations with the Communist party has become legend. At the same time, Joseph McCarthy’s young admirer William F Buckley Jr produced his 1951 opus, God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom, arguing that socialist professors had run roughshod over the campus, indoctrinating students in Keynesian economics and atheism. The academy, to McCarthy, Buckley and their followers, had transformed into a hotbed of anti-Americanism. The right’s understanding that higher education could not be trusted was now well developed: too many people were entering college and learning the wrong lessons.Following the McCarthy attacks came the storied 1960s, when the campus continued democratizing its admissions and curriculum. Lyndon Johnson’s Higher Education Act of 1965 allowed for greater access to student loans and work-study programs. This allowed additional generations of working-class students to matriculate, especially more people of color, who demanded to see themselves in their lessons. The creation of Black studies, women’s studies, Chicano studies and similar disciplines throughout the 1970s followed militant strikes by student protesters. At the same time, anti-Vietnam war unrest challenged their institutions’ commitments to cold war weapons development. For the right, this was but more evidence of the college as a radicalizing institution.Increasingly, the liberal center began to agree with the notion that the campus had radicalizing potential. The 1980s and the 1990s marked the bipartisan obsession with culture wars, with the campus as its apparent locus. To the benefit of the right, popular debates about political correctness and identity politics in effect drew attention from austerity measures that had sucked resources away from higher education since the Reagan years. Through the 2000s and 2010, the right revved up its offensives against campus antiwar movements, attacking faculty and students who spoke out against the “war on terror” and protests to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel. By the 2010s, in the aftermath of the Great Recession’s deep cuts to higher education, conservative attacks shifted back to campus social crusades as the right railed against the Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements, and ginned up moral panics over safe spaces, trigger warnings and cancel culture.Throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, conservative rhetoric cast colleges and universities as deeply politicized, inefficient and anti-American. From the 1920s to the 1980s, this generated popular notions that the college should be reformed back to its previous role as a selective space for class reproduction. Since the 1980s, the purpose has been to delegitimize the academy to get mass buy-in to defund, privatize and eventually abolish public higher education. The goal is to return colleges to a carefully constructed environment not to educate all, but to reproduce hierarchy (especially if it can be done for profit).This has not been an exclusively American process. Autocrats around the world have cracked down on the academy, journalism and venues of arts and culture for the last 100 years. These are places where ideas are shared and traditional conventions are challenged. Crushing them is central to consolidating authoritarian power. Today’s international rightwing leaders want to control higher education, just as they want dominion over all other social, cultural and political institutions. For the first time, a US president is finally willing to deliver the right’s century-old goal.

      Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, PhD, is a historian of US colleges and universities. She is the author of Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America and host of the weekly American Campus Podcast More

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      Conservatives fighting ‘antisemitism’ are actively targeting US Jews. Why? | Josh Schreier

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      The Trump administration claims that its moves to defund universities, arrest and deport students and force schools to demote or monitor professors are meant to combat antisemitism, protect Jewish students and remove “Hamas-supporting” foreign nationals from the country. American pro-Israel groups including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Hillel International, Aipac and the Heritage Foundation have united behind Republican measures to crack down on higher education and its putative antisemitism. Religiously identified groups such as the Orthodox Union and Christians United for Israel have joined the chorus, celebrating the punishment of supposedly antisemitic students and professors. Whatever their varied pasts, today’s pro-Israel groups are not about protecting American Jews. Instead, they are allies in Maga’s war on free speech, academic freedom and the US’s democratic society itself.To be clear: the pro-Israel campaign to “protect” Jews by punishing anti-Zionist speech often targets Jews. After a student complaint about a tenured Jewish professor’s Twitter post, Muhlenberg College fired her. The ADL has rewarded Muhlenberg by grading it “better than most” colleges for fighting “antisemitism”. The ADL also accused Jewish Voice for Peace, a large, anti-Zionist Jewish group with chapters on many American campuses, of “promot[ing] messaging” that can include “support for terrorists”. Under pressure from the Trump administration, Columbia University expelled a Jewish graduate student and United Auto Workers local president who demonstrated against the war in Gaza.Most chillingly, the Trump administration recently sent all staff at Barnard College a questionnaire inquiring if they were Jewish, ostensibly to gauge campus antisemitism. For many, the experience of being asked by the government to self-identify as a Jew was terrifying; as one historian put it: “We’ve seen this movie before, and it ends with yellow stars.”Canary Mission, a pro-Israel website that publishes information on students and professors who supposedly “promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews”, has been targeting an Israeli American scholar of the Holocaust along with many other Jews (including the author of this piece). Project Esther, an initiative launched by the conservative Heritage Foundation – the thinktank behind Project 2025 – blames the “American Jewish community’s complacency” for the “pro-Palestinian movement’s” ability to continue working for “the destruction of capitalism and democracy”. Maga’s pro-Israel partners do not protect Jews; they help Trump in his war on our academic freedom and open society more generally.Of course, unlike some pro-Israel groups, the Trump administration has a broader antipathy toward higher education. As JD Vance put it, “the professors are the enemy”. But the pro-Israel movement furnishes Maga with a crucial weapon in their war on this “enemy”: charges of antisemitism. The entire “US education system”, according to Project Esther, has been “infiltrated” by “Hamas-supporting organizations” that now “foster antisemitism under the guise of “‘pro-Palestinian,’ anti-Israel, anti-Zionist narratives … within the rubric of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and similar Marxist ideology”. Of course, by linking Palestinian solidarity with longstanding rightwing bogeymen like antiracism and communism, Project Esther gives away the game; their “antisemitic” charge is a tool to silence Maga’s left-leaning critics in higher education.Meanwhile, many pro-Israel groups seem to tolerate Maga’s proximity to antisemitism. If they didn’t, we might expect to hear more about Vance’s meeting with Germany’s neo-Nazi-linked AfD, Steve Bannon’s singling out of “American Jews that do not support Israel and do not support Maga” as “the number one enemy to the people in Israel”, or Trump’s claim that the Democratic senator Chuck Schumer is “not Jewish” but “Palestinian”.The ADL went so far as to defend Elon Musk’s apparent Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration. True, the ADL rightfully criticized some of these other incidents, as well as Trump’s antisemitic advertisements, and his meeting with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes. But these cases do not seem to merit breaking with Maga. Why? Because the pro-Israel movement advocates for Israel, not American Jews.For this reason, the American pro-Israel movement has been collaborating in the Trump administration’s campaign to roll back everyone’s constitutional rights. By now, most of us have seen the footage of Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk, both students at American universities, being surrounded by groups of government agents and forced into the backs of unmarked vehicles. The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, promised that hundreds of other students have been stripped of their visas. Neither Khalil nor Öztürk have any demonstrated ties to Hamas. Khalil even spoke out against antisemitism, declaring that “antisemitism and any form of racism has no place on this campus and in this movement”. Furthermore, as a permanent resident and a student visa holder, both Khalil and Öztürk are guaranteed first amendment protections. Yet Hillel International failed to condemn the arrests, and the ADL outright celebrated Khalil’s.Ultimately, Trump and many in the pro-Israel movement have allied against free speech in higher education because it is a pillar of an open society that threatens both of them. The right has long had it out for universities. The pro-Israel movement, meanwhile, saw the campus encampments with horror; a wide cross-section of students and professors from a variety of religious, racial and ethnic backgrounds came together to speak out against Israel’s killing of tens of thousands of people.Even more galling for the pro-Israel movement, Jews actively participated in the protests – even conducting Passover seders, as well as Kabbalat Shabbat and Havdalah services amid them. These young Jews are not alone; less than half of Americans now sympathize with Israel, and one-third believe Israel is committing genocide. These facts do not threaten American Jews, but they do threaten Maga and the heavily evangelical pro-Israel movement. As long as increasing numbers of students, professors and many others speak out for Palestinians’ humanity, the pro-Israel movement, armed with disingenuous accusations of antisemitism, will aid Maga’s war on American higher education and democracy itself.

      Joshua Schreier is a professor of history and Jewish studies at Vassar College. More

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      What did Pope Francis think of JD Vance? His view was more than clear | Jan-Werner Mueller

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      We might never quite know what Pope Francis said to the US vice-president during their very brief meeting on Sunday. In the widely shared video clip, it was hardly audible. The morning after, Francis died, and Vance jetted to visit India, finding time to tweet that his heart went out to the millions of Christians who loved Francis (implying, I suppose, that not all Catholics loved him) and patronizing the dead pontiff by calling one of his homilies “really quite beautiful”).Francis had been as outspoken as could be without naming names, when he criticized Vance in his February letter to US bishops; but he was not just registering his rebuke of Trump and Vance’s cruel treatment of refugees and migrants; he was reacting to a broader trend of instrumentalizing religion for nationalist and authoritarian populism.In February, Vance had an online “close-quarters street fight” with Rory Stewart, the former UK Conservative minister, diplomat and now professor in the practice of grand strategy at the very university from which Vance obtained his law degree. At issue was what to most of us wouldn’t seem an obvious source of social media outrage: the correct reading of St Augustine’s notion of ordo amoris, the right ordering of love.In January, Vance had alluded to the concept in an interview with the Trump courtier Sean Hannity; according to the Catholic convert, it was a “Christian concept” that love and compassion start with family, then extend to neighbors, then nation, and, last and least, reach fellow human beings as such.Stewart had registered skepticism, observing that Vance’s stance was “a bizarre take on John 15:12-13 – less Christian and more pagan tribal. We should start worrying when politicians become theologians, assume to speak for Jesus, and tell us in which order to love.” The infamously very online Vance hit back with: “Just google ‘ordo amoris’.” In typically snarky fashion, Vance then questioned Stewart’s IQ and added that “false arrogance” of the Stewart type “drives so much elite failure over the last 40 years” (never mind what would constitute appropriate or correct arrogance).As plenty of learned observers remarked at the time, complex theological questions will not have bumper-sticker-size answers. But eventually a figure not entirely irrelevant for Catholics weighed in with a view that perhaps carries indeed more weight than those of others. Francis, in a letter to US bishops, instructed the flock that “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. In other words: the human person is not a mere individual, relatively expansive, with some philanthropic feelings!”He added, driving home the rebuke without naming names, that “the true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan’ … that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.” Apparently, Cardinal Pietro Parolin was dispatched on Saturday to explain all this to Vance again.Vance is not the only far-right populist who has smuggled nationalism into what he touts as the correct notion of Christianity. Viktor Orbán, a great model for Vance and other self-declared US “post-liberals” (meaning: anti-liberals), has been declaring for years that a proper understanding of “Christian Democracy” is not only “illiberal”, but nationalist.That would have been news to the many Catholics who experienced nation-building projects in Germany and Italy during the 19th century as outright oppressive. After all, Catholics were suspected of putting loyalty to Rome ahead of civic duties (a suspicion still very much alive in the US when JFK ran for office). Bismarck started the Kulturkampf (the original meaning of culture war) against Catholics in the 1870s; the Vatican forbade the faithful to participate in the political life of unified Italy.Far-right populists claim that only they represent what they call “the real people”. Of course, they have to explain who “the real people” are (and, who by contrast, does not truly belong). Many have instrumentalized Christianity for that purpose. Giorgia Meloni, in her autobiography, states: “The Christian identity can be secular rather than religious.” What matters is not believing (let alone actual Christian conduct), but only belonging. It’s what the social scientist Rogers Brubaker has called “Christianism”, in contrast with actual Christianity.Some far-right populists have tried to square their Catholicism with their populism by criticizing the hierarchy as a somehow illegitimate, or at least hypocritical, elite. Italy’s Matteo Salvini, who likes to flaunt the Bible and a rosary when riling up the masses of “real” Italians, pioneered this move; Vance copied it when he insinuated that there was something corrupt about church leadership; concretely he had accused US bishops of resettling “illegal immigrants” in order to obtain federal funds (an accusation deemed “very nasty” by Cardinal Timothy Dolan).The point is not that the correct understanding of Catholicism (or Christian Democratic political parties, as they have existed in Europe and Chile) has always been liberal; that’s hardly plausible. The point is that Francis reaffirmed that Catholicism is not compatible with the “America first” (and humanity last) view of the Trumpists.

      Jan-Werner Müller is a Guardian US columnist and a professor of politics at Princeton University More

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      ‘The bomber’s words sound mainstream. Like he won!’ Oklahoma City’s tragedy in the time of Trump

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      The world’s first reaction to the young military veteran and far-right radical who blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City 30 years ago this month was near-universal revulsion at the carnage he created and at the ideology that inspired it.A crowd yelled “baby killer” – and worse – as 26-year-old Timothy McVeigh was led away in chains from a courthouse in rural Oklahoma where the FBI caught up with him two days after the bombing. He had the same crew cut he’d sported in his army days and stone cold eyes.An hour and a half’s drive to the south, 168 people lay dead, most of them office workers who had been providing government services, along with 19 young children in a day care centre directly above the spot where McVeigh parked his moving truck packed with ammonium nitrate and other explosives.The children were, most likely, his prime target.Bill Clinton, then president, rallied the country by vowing justice that would be “swift, certain and severe”. His attorney general wasted no time announcing she would seek the death penalty. Whatever flirtation the country had been entertaining with rightwing militia movements in the wake of a national assault weapons ban that enraged gun rights activists, and controversies over the heavy-handedness of federal law enforcement, came screeching to a halt.Even elements of the radical right, McVeigh’s fellow travellers, were stunned by the sight of firefighters pulling dead babies out of the wreckage. Before the bombing, they had been full of heady talk of war against the government, but many of them imagined this would involve an attack on federal judges who had displeased the movement, or blowing up a building at night.“Didn’t he case the place?” one acquaintance of McVeigh’s asked incredulously. “The bastard has put the Patriot movement back 30 years,” lamented an erstwhile mentor of McVeigh’s from Arizona.View image in fullscreenFast-forward those 30 years, and the movement is not only very much revived but has moved from the outer fringes of American politics to the very centre.McVeigh wanted to strike at what he saw as a corrupt, secretive cabal running the US government – what Donald Trump and his acolytes refer to as the Deep State and are now busy dismantling.McVeigh believed the US had no business extending its influence around the world or becoming entangled in foreign wars when white working-class Americans from industrial cities such as Buffalo, his home town, were suffering – an early expression of Trump’s America First ideology, which won him tens of millions of blue-collar votes last November.McVeigh’s favourite book, a white supremacist power fantasy called The Turner Diaries, blamed a cabal of Jews, black people and internationalists for perverting America’s true destiny – a sentiment now finding coded expression in Trump’s twin wars on immigration and on diversity, equity and inclusion.McVeigh believed it was up to ordinary citizens like him to take up arms and fight against a tyrannical ruling order, no matter the cost in innocent lives, because that was what the country’s founders had done during the American war of independence. The T-shirt he wore when he was arrested carried a quote from Thomas Jefferson: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”View image in fullscreenDuring the Capitol riot on 6 January 2021, the QAnon-friendly Republican congresswoman Lauren Boebert expressed much the same sentiment as she cheered on the rioters smashing and bloodying their way past uniformed police officers into the halls of Congress. “Today is 1776,” she tweeted.The parallels have not been lost on political veterans of the 1990s. Clinton himself observed in a recent HBO documentary: “The words [McVeigh] used, the arguments he made, literally sound like the mainstream today. Like he won!”The threat the far right poses to the US government is no longer a physical one – not when it comes to the executive branch, anyway – since the radicals intent on cleaning house now have like-minded leaders such as Trump and Elon Musk doing it from the inside. It’s hard to imagine McVeigh, who was executed by lethal injection in 2001, objecting to the administration’s campaign to hollow out the international aid agency, kick career prosecutors and government watchdogs out of the Department of Justice, or vow to refashion “broken” institutions such as the FBI.“Their beliefs and values are allied,” said Janet Napolitano, who in 1995 played an administrative role in the bombing investigation as US attorney for Arizona and went on to run the Department of Homeland Security under President Obama. “It is a far cry to say that there are people in political power in the United States now who want to blow up federal buildings. We have to be very clear about that. But the notion that the country has somehow been stolen from them, that it’s run by elites, that they are trying to take away our guns – that has become a very accepted view among many.”Present and former members of the governing class still have reason to fear threats from the far right, either because they have been tagged as Deep State enemies by groups such as the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, or because they have been identified by President Trump as targets for “retribution”.Those threats, in the Trump era, have included a foiled plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and a hammer attack on the husband of then House speaker Nancy Pelosi. In concert with the administration, activists sympathetic to Trump have engaged in doxxing and other forms of harassment at people deemed to be political enemies and their families, including whistleblowers, college campus protesters and former associates turned critics of the president. Seasoned national security experts like Napolitano fear it may not stop there, however, and worry particularly about judges who have issued rulings hostile to administration interests. “Those far-right groups – they’ve all been given permission,” she said. “Pardoning all the January 6 defendants sends a terrible message about the rule of law in this country, just like purging from DoJ and the FBI sends a terrible message.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenIt was a very different world when McVeigh washed out of the army in 1991 following his service in the first Gulf war. After bouncing from one dead-end job to another and racking up thousands in sports gambling debts, he hit the road in his Chevy Geo Spectrum to sell army surplus supplies and copies of The Turner Diaries at gun shows around the country. This was the very definition of a marginal existence.McVeigh was part of a cohort of so-called “angry young men” who felt the brunt of a downturn in manufacturing and defence contracting jobs at the end of the cold war and found their solace in guns, gun culture, and radical politics verging on the paranoid. Talk at the gun shows – which one violence prevention group memorably nicknamed “Tupperware parties for criminals” – obsessed over black helicopters and jack-booted government thugs. McVeigh himself told people the government had inserted a computer chip in his backside.Some of the movement’s loudest grievances were entirely genuine. McVeigh kept a list of raids that federal law enforcement agencies conducted in the name of the War on Drugs and the innocent people caught up in them through error or inadvertence. He was appalled when the feds besieged a cabin in the Idaho mountains in October 1992, killing both the wife and the 14-year-old son of a survivalist who had refused to act as an informant on the far right. And he was appalled all over again the following spring by a second botched raid at a religious compound outside Waco, Texas, culminating in a deadly fire that killed more than 80 men, women and children.In Washington, these events were not generally viewed as indications of deep structural rot, but rather as operational screw-ups to be addressed through internal after-action reports and congressional review. McVeigh, though, was shocked by the sight of Bradley fighting vehicles moving in to force an end to the Waco siege, because he had driven Bradleys in the Gulf and, as a decorated military gunner, knew just how deadly they could be. Using them against civilians, including children, struck him as an abomination that cried out for revenge.Despite his later protestations to the contrary, compelling evidence suggests that McVeigh targeted the daycare centre as revenge for the children who died at Waco. The centre’s operator, Danielle Hunt, told the FBI she remembered McVeigh visiting four months before the bombing, pretending to be an active member of the military with his own young children. He asked a lot of strange questions about security, she recalled, looked at the windows and said, over and over, “There’s so much glass”.The FBI confirmed that McVeigh was indeed in Oklahoma City at the time, along with his friend and fellow veteran Michael Fortier, who ended up cutting a deal with prosecutors in exchange for his testimony against McVeigh at trial.When agents first showed photographs of the dead children to Fortier, he showed no empathy for them, according to contemporary FBI records. Rather, he jumped out of his seat and exclaimed: “This is about Waco! Those parents did not kill their own children!”“These guys were just evil people,” said Kenneth Williams, one of the first FBI agents to question Fortier. To this day, Williams believes Fortier should have received a far harsher sentence than the 12 years he and the government agreed on.View image in fullscreenLargely because of the children, the radical far right soon abandoned its dream of overthrowing the government by force. Even McVeigh, who had hoped to be seen as a hero and a martyr to the cause, came to wonder if he shouldn’t have opted for targeted killings of federal agents instead of indiscriminate slaughter.Much of the high emotion surrounding the bombing has been lost in the intervening decades. Outside of Oklahoma, few Americans under 30 know much, if anything, about it. In the age of Trump, that looks like a lost opportunity – for the country to understand the nature of the disillusionment and rage building for decades in “rust belt” cities and in farming communities across the heartland.Part of the reason for that lost opportunity is the US government’s failure at trial to tell the full story of who McVeigh was, the subculture he moved in, and the deep ideological wellsprings that led to his act of folly. For reasons largely dictated by courtroom expediency, prosecutors chose to depict McVeigh as a lone mastermind, with significant help from only one person, another fellow army veteran named Terry Nichols, who later confessed to helping McVeigh buy materials for the bomb and assemble it.“Two evil men did this, and two men paid,” the Oklahoma governor at the time of the bombing, Frank Keating, said when the trials were over. Yet few in government or on the prosecution team believed that everyone involved in the plot had been caught, or that those who had been identified necessarily received the punishment they deserved.“Some people got away with bloody murder, Fortier being one of them,” Williams, the former FBI agent, said.The government dropped several promising lines of investigation – into a radical religious compound in eastern Oklahoma, into a neo-Nazi bank robbery gang, some of whose members later accused others of involvement in the bombing, and into Louis Beam, at the time the chief propagandist of the anti-government right, who was reported to have said in 1994 that “some kid” was going to blow up a building in Denver, Dallas, or Oklahoma City in revenge for Waco.The justice department’s fear was that following one or more of these leads and pointing to a wider conspiracy would weaken the case against McVeigh, when the directive from above was to obtain the death penalty at all costs. “At some point,” Napolitano acknowledged, “a strategic decision was made to focus and get a clean straightforward case against McVeigh, and not pursue every rabbit down its hole.”And so the wider story – of a heartland America desperate and cynical about its government, of a small but growing minority willing to embrace the notion that one day it might have to take up arms against tyranny in Washington – went largely untold. In 2025, we know at last how important that story was, and where it was destined to lead.Andrew Gumbel is the author of Oklahoma City: What The Investigation Missed – And Why It Still Matters (William Morrow, 2012) More

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      A crack in the manosphere: Joe Rogan’s guests are revolting | Sam Wolfson

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      Sam Harris is the kind of guest Joe Rogan loves to have on his podcast: he dresses awkwardly in a sport coat with jeans; he undertook a PhD in neuroscience after a transformative experience with MDMA; his tone is accessible yet patronising; he has a sense of academic authority which belies a set of controversial views that include calling Islam “uniquely uncivil” and almost unfettered support for Israeli attacks on Gaza; he made an app called Waking Up, which promises to be “a new operating system for your mind”. Rogan has hosted Harris on his podcast many times and the pair call each other good friends.But even Harris seems perturbed by Rogan’s more wholehearted embrace of Musk and Maga. “He’s in over his head on so many topics of great consequence,” Harris told his listeners of his own podcast last week. “He’ll bring someone in to shoot the shit on ‘how the Holocaust is not what you think it was’ or ‘maybe Churchill was the bad guy in world war two’ … or he’ll talk to someone like Trump or Tucker Carlson, who lie as freely as they breathe, and doesn’t push back against any of their lies … It is irresponsible, and it’s directly harmful.”Joe Rogan’s podcast success has in large part been about building a community of regular guests from the worlds of comedy, wrestling, psychedelics and non-fiction publishing, a kind of Rogansphere that has begun to feel like a subculture. He hosts his favourite guests time after time, with many of them building entire careers off their appearances on the show.But recently, various members of the Rogansphere have started to turn against their leader. They can’t understand how the host of the most popular podcast in the world seems to have gone from examining both sides to defending Elon Musk at every turn and providing a platform for second world war revisionists.View image in fullscreenIn the past few months, Rogan has called people who thought Elon Musk’s hand gesture was a Nazi salute “dumb”, “crazy”, “illogical and weird” and defended it by saying it’s how Americans used to give the pledge of allegiance in the 1940s. Weeks later, he gave a very sympathetic interview to the podcaster Darryl Cooper, who has previously called Winston Churchill the main villain of the second world war and tweeted an image of Nazis in Paris, saying it was “infinitely preferable” to the drag “Last Supper” scene at the 2024 Paris Olympics opening ceremony.Rogan wasn’t always like this. Over the past decade he has built his podcast into by far the most successful in the world, weathering numerous controversies. He spent much of his career being mislabelled as ideologically rightwing or misogynistic when in fact he’s more of a simpleton who agrees with almost everyone who comes on his show, even when the things they’re saying are contradictory. He has been a staunch believer “in just asking questions” but not so much in listening to or processing the answers. He has supported both Bernie Sanders and RFK Jr, and has taken conflicting views on everything from trans rights to Ye, sometimes hilariously so.The best thing you could say about Rogan is that he is distrustful of all mainstream narratives, in an indiscriminate way. That’s led to him promoting a number of conspiracy theories that fly in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence about vaccines and the climate crisis, but also vocally criticising the war in Gaza and the influence of lobbyists in Washington DC.But his outlook has shifted since Trump was elected for the second time, a victory many credit to a good performance on Rogan’s podcast and Rogan’s subsequent endorsement. On Saturday night at a UFC fight, Rogan ran into Trump, warmly embraced him and said: “I’m so happy for you sir.” Many of his biggest fans, those that discuss episodes in detail on Reddit and Discord, are complaining that he has become a shill for the elites he used to claim to distrust.Rogan has tended to brush off these critiques in the past, saying he’s just an interested comedian asking questions. But even Rogan’s comedy friends have started to bristle at his unwavering support for Musk. Rogan values comedy above all else, investing much of the riches from his podcast in the Austin comedy scene, buying up clubs and appearing regularly as a panellist on Kill Tony, the open-mic standup podcast that takes shots at perceived wokeism. Rogan has a regular cast of comedians on his podcast including Shane Gillis, Kyle Dunnigan and Tim Dillon. These comedians give Rogan his street credibility, and he in turn has given them a huge platform.While they haven’t turned on Rogan yet, they are incredibly disparaging about Musk. Dillon called Musk’s White House press conference “the grossest and cringiest shit anyone has seen for a long time … I disagree with close friends of mine who think Elon Musk is the new Jesus.” Gillis laughed about Musk’s salute on his podcast, and said he thought Musk was “psychotic” and “fucking weird” for lying about how good he is at video games.Rogan meanwhile has recently called Musk “a super genius that’s been fucked with” and “one of the smartest people alive”.This emerging divide between Rogan and his comedic milieu came to a head last month at the recording of Kill Tony’s first special for Netflix (filmed at Rogan’s Comedy Mothership club in Austin). Both Dunnigan and Rogan were on the panel together but Dunnigan was in character, hilariously, as Musk. It was a brilliant and vicious send-up of Musk’s bizarre humour and minimal intelligence that had everyone laughing except Rogan, who avoided making eye contact or saying almost anything for the entire episode. It seemed as though he didn’t want to give any impression to Musk that he was was mocking him.There are no simple ideological lines being drawn between Rogan and the guests that are turning on him. Douglas Murray, for example, is an incredibly conservative pro-Israel historian who supports the withdrawal of visas from students who demonstrated on college campuses last year and has said he wants to ban “all immigration into Europe from Muslim countries”. In many ways he is to the right of Rogan, and used much of his appearance losing a debate on the podcast with his fellow guest Dave Smith over Gaza. Yet he also used his time to admonish Rogan for having too many amateur and conspiracy theory-minded historians on the podcast. “I feel you’ve opened the door to quite a lot of people. You’ve now got a big platform and have been throwing out counter-historical stuff but a very dangerous kind.”Rogan had very little in the way of a meaningful defence. Defending why he had the conspiracy theorist and Pizzagate proponent Ian Carroll on his program, Rogan replied: “I just think I’d like to talk to this person … I brought him on because I want to find out, like, how does one get involved in the whole conspiracy theory business? Because his whole thing is just conspiracies.”There are no smart guys here; both Murray and Rogan have tendency to use circuitous straw man arguments that suit their specific brand of politics. But it does show cracks in the cultural wing of Trumpism.Rogan himself seems to be backing down from a full-throated endorsement of the president’s policies, calling the Venezuelan deportations “horrific” and “bad for the cause”, and calling Trump’s feud with Canada over tariffs “stupid”. Last month he said healthcare should “100% should be socially funded” and was celebrated by Bernie Sanders for doing so.Yet these acknowledgements of bad policies haven’t translated into a lack of enthusiasm for either Trump or Musk, yet. But with Rogan it only takes one convincing guest to change his mind.What’s more, Rogan’s main constituency of listeners, young men, appear to be feeling buyer’s remorse about Trump, with new polling suggesting the group is swinging away from the president. Where his audience go, Rogan tends to follow.On his podcast, Harris told his listeners: “Our society is as politically shattered as it is in part because of how Joe [Rogan] has interacted with information.” Rogan might revel in criticism from progressives, but barbs from his friends are likely to sting. How long Trump can count on Rogan’s cuddles and warm wishes might depend on whether his favourite guests begin to ostracize him. More

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      Having as many babies as possible is not the only way to show you love humanity | Zoe Williams

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      ‘Perpetuating humanity should be a cross-politics consensus,” read an article in the Atlantic last week, “but the left was mostly absent at a recent pronatalism conference.” It’s such a simple proposition – everyone loves babies and wants the species to perpetuate, right? – but pronatalism has provoked a ferocious battle on the American left. Should they be trying to engage meaningfully at a preposterous far-right conference? Or should the left stop self-flagellating and start organising?But what is pronatalism – and is it really borderline fascist? I don’t want to think about slippery, bad-faith, rightwing claptrap any more than you do, but in an era in which US politics can sneeze and the world catches encephalitis, we do, regrettably, have to think about bad-faith everything, all the time.The motivation of the pronatalists is that birthrates are in decline, in some places (such as South Korea) so precipitously that the nation will soon cease to meaningfully exist. It has been a bugbear of the right, particularly the alt-tech right, for almost a decade. In 2017, Elon Musk wrote on Twitter: “The world’s population is accelerating towards collapse, but few seem to notice or care.” That was before he owned the platform, so few people noticed or cared. It has also been a thematic staple of Viktor Orbán’s rhetoric in Hungary, reinforced in 2019 by a large-family tax-break policy that in February became an income tax exemption for mothers of two or three children.The ideas factories pushing birthrates have always been much more opaque about their politics; often, they frame their ideas to suit whomever they are talking to. When I interviewed Simone and Malcolm Collins, venture capitalists turned pronatal advocates, a couple of years ago, their line was that progressive politics needed higher birthrates. Political persuasion was “40% to 70% heritable”, Malcolm told me. “If you systematically delete everyone who cares about the environment from the gene pool, that means, within a couple of generations, you’re going to see a dramatic drop in the number of people who care about the climate, even as the collapse becomes more intense.”At the last count, the Collinses had four children, plus a number of frozen embryos, which Simone intends to incubate at 18-month intervals. “We’re going to keep going until physically I can no longer have kids – and that will be when they forcibly remove my uterus,” she said. It was a dystopian image with a number of obvious follow-ups, the first of which was: who are “they”? But I didn’t ask any of them, because her perception of force, authority, uteruses, children and the world seemed dark and personal, like a subconscious gaping open.Nor did I pursue whether Malcolm could possibly believe that you could sell to people who care about the environment the idea that only their biological children would be genetically capable of caring about the environment. It could be the child of someone who arrives on a small boat that solves our political malaise. What about the heritability of staunch determination? Did they ever think about that?But, all too often, ethnonationalism is implicit in the pronatalist narrative: a low birthrate can’t be offset by migration, because they are not talking about people in general. They are talking about the right kind of people.In the intervening years, Musk has had a bunch more children, often boasting of the example he is setting. Trump started saying: “You have good genes, you know that, right?” to his followers. Last week, the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, floated the idea that “if you are healthy, it’s almost impossible for you to be killed by an infectious disease in modern times”, which medics rebutted because it’s not true. But we should all fear its drumbeat: good stock is different; anyone who succumbs to an infectious disease wasn’t “healthy” to begin with.These connections are often intellectually baggy – Musk’s desire to populate Mars with his own seed doesn’t map neatly on to RFK’s anti-vax agenda, while Orbán’s pronatalism sounds like socially conservative gender oppression, yet pronatalist forums tie themselves in knots trying to sound “woke”. But if this isn’t about ethnonationalism, then why aren’t the pronatalists crying out for countries with low birthrates to receive refugees with open arms? Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnistDo you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More