American Taliban
The origins of fascist theocracy in the U.S.
I’m serializing my book, Why We Need an Esoteric Left, here on Substack. Its argument is simple to state yet difficult to fully grasp. The Left keeps failing not only for political reasons but for metaphysical ones. Grounded in scientific materialism, it can’t speak about meaning, death, or the sacred — and so it has ceded myth, transcendence, and cosmic significance to the Right, which exploits them ruthlessly. The Introduction argued that a renewed Left needs an ontology of its own: a consciousness-first, broadly idealist view in which every being shares a single field of awareness, so that solidarity describes reality rather than merely asserting a preference.
Chapter one, “Odin, Jesus, and the Far Right,” examines how the Right seized Christianity, Norse paganism, and the deep human hunger for initiation — and why the progressive majority still cannot understand what it is up against. (Below is an alternate cover — please let me know in the comments which you prefer!)
Chapter One: Odin, Jesus, and the Far Right
The Right draws its vitality from metaphysical currents and supernatural possibilities that the Left categorically rejects and disavows. Behind the Right’s political grievances and culture wars is an eschatological program that gives its adherents a connection to deeper meaning, a sense of mythic and cosmic significance, that policy debates can never satisfy. The faithful flock are willing sheep, sacrificing their own lives and their children on the altar of ancient scripture and the prospect of an imminent Rapture.
In Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, sociologist Arlie Hochschild studied poor Christian communities in rural Louisiana, visiting some of the most polluted regions in the country. People routinely die in their forties from cancers and other diseases linked to the toxic contamination. Yet local residents continue to elect Republican politicians who support corporate deregulation, even though the voters know it will curtail their own lives and the lives of their children. They are indoctrinated to believe they “get to Heaven” through blind obedience to the Church’s doctrine.
One of her interview subjects in Bayou d’Indie tells her: “We’re on this earth for a limited amount of time. But if we get our souls saved, we go to Heaven, and Heaven is for eternity. We’ll never have to worry about the environment from then on.” Local residents expect God to judge them based on their opposition to abortion. Eternal salvation eclipses earthly survival.
Key figures on the Right — the regime’s principal architect Russell Vought, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and many others — are born-and-bred Christian Nationalists who fully support the Fascist, oligarchic takeover. The Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority, rooted in Catholicism and linked to the powerful, secretive Catholic prelature Opus Dei, advances the same agenda. At this point, to call this movement a “theocratic-fascist death-cult” is hardly an exaggeration.
Progressives were very slow to understand the radical nature of the program and the far-reaching strategic and tactical plan the Christian Nationalist Right had assembled, laying the groundwork over decades to take control of the U.S. Democrats did not, for the most part, grasp the magnitude of the threat posed by these fanatics. This is partly because mainstream media outlets such as The New York Times downplayed the danger of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 before the election.
In retrospect, we know that Project 2025 was a carefully worked out plan to use every political tool available to systematically dismantle American democracy, crush the Constitution, and install a permanent Fascist theocracy. The strategy includes a total rejection of secular governance in favor of an inerrant, infallible interpretation of the Bible as the absolute foundation for human law and public morality. By packing the federal bureaucracy with loyalists, the goal is to bypass democratic consensus and voter preference altogether. This enables the regime to overrule legislation whenever it conflicts with their scriptural mandates, effectively forcing the entire nation to conform to a rigid, regressive theological order.
Writing for The Fulcrum, Andra Watkins, in “Project 2025: A Christo-fascist manifesto designing a theocracy,” notes that she was a product of Christian Nationalism and eventually rejected its tenets. “In the 1970s and ‘80s, my parents joined a Christian Nationalist church in rural South Carolina. They enrolled me in its kindergarten, and I spent 13 years studying history and science from textbooks printed by Bob Jones University and watching my pastor affiliate our church with Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority.” She was “indoctrinated in the Christian Nationalist belief system that underpins today’s Republican Party.” She defines the movement’s core beliefs:
America was founded as a white Christian nation.
The founders were Christians who steeped our Constitution in the Bible.
The Bible is the inerrant, infallible word of God.
Because it is inerrant and infallible, the Bible is God’s perfect law and the basis for their definition of morality.
Whenever a human law conflicts with God’s perfect law, it is a Christian Nationalist’s job to overrule the human law and replace it with God’s law.
Many believe God cursed Black and Brown people in the story of Noah, aligning followers with white supremacists. Southern proponents of chattel slavery promoted this idea, and Southern pastors continued preaching it after the South lost the Civil War.
They are indoctrinated to never compromise, making Christian Nationalists dreadful politicians. They believe everyone must follow God’s perfect law to the letter.
Within this framework, education, expertise, and the broader concept of human nature are radically redefined through the fundamentalist lens. The Heritage Foundation explicitly devalues advanced degrees and intellectual sophistication. They want a working class population that is easily malleable, under the control of a small elite of wealth-holders and political figures.
For these zealots, everything required for human governance and understanding is contained within the Bible—which they call the “book of human nature.” Because they view secular education as a threat to scriptural authority, their policies seek to degrade, defund, and eventually eliminate public school systems while undermining elite academic institutions. They elevate biblical literalism as the sole metric of truth, ensuring that the natural world, history, and science are taught exclusively to reinforce their specific religious doctrines.
As part of its radical agenda, Christian Nationalism seeks to redefine human happiness from an individual pursuit of personal fulfillment into a collective obligation toward what they term “Blessedness.” True liberty is not framed as the freedom to live as one chooses, but rather the freedom to do “what one ought” under God’s law. “Happiness” means conforming to a traditional, patriarchal family structure—a household of one man, one woman, and their biological children.
Embedding their coded language into benign political rhetoric, the Heritage Foundation ultimately seeks to suppress any expression of identity, family structure, or personal ambition that deviates from their “holy mandate,” transforming the state into an instrument that enforces a mandatory path to spiritual salvation. In other words, this is an American Taliban that seeks total control over the country and the destruction of all of our hard-won freedoms, including the freedom to dissent or to live in unorthodox ways. The dehumanization is increasingly open: Jack Posobiec’s 2024 bestseller Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them) casts the Left as “unhumans” who forfeit the rights of human beings and must be “crushed” — a text critics have read as frankly eliminationist.
While Christian Nationalists make up a minority of the population, they are tightly organized while the progressive opposition is fragmented and lacks a similar level of discipline or command-and-control structure.
