Bad Moon Rising

Don't Go Around Tonight

The Turner Diaries is a 1978 novel written by neo-Nazi William Luther Pierce under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald. The book depicts a future where a white supremacist insurgency overthrows the U.S. government, annihilates non-white populations, and hangs "race traitors" in a ritual known as "The Day of the Rope."

I see the bad moon arising

I see trouble on the way

This article is meant as a public service and a signal flare. I do not want to believe this is the direction we could be going — but I see serious warning signs. My fear is that we may be approaching a genocide in the U.S. I feel we need to look at what is happening around us with very cold, very clear eyes. I find it surreal I am writing this while wandering around downtown Manhattan on a lovely summer day, sipping on ice coffees in fancy cafes.

A genocide in the U.S. would probably start by targeting ethnic minorities. But it could also be directed against a much broader swathe of liberals, Democrats, and urban progressives, eventually, which Trump and his followers have openly identified as their enemies. Religious or ethnic background would be only one factor if we descend into this kind of nightmare here.

I don’t think a genocide will happen today, or next month. But as we move rapidly into an increasingly totalitarian system, the likelihood increases, month by month and year by year. The $150 billion assigned to ICE in Trump’s cruel and destructive budget bill is almost beyond comprehension. It makes no sense unless they want ICE to become an extra-legal internal military force, like the Nazi’s Gestapo, to brutally repress the population here.

As the psychologists John Gartner and Harry Segal explore in this excellent MeidasTouch video, we find ourselves in a very bizarre situation in the U.S. Trump has the full support of the Republican Congress and the Supreme Court as he continues to gain dictatorial control. At the same time, he is suffering serious, accelerating cognitive decline. Along with this decline, he has rapidly decreasing impulse control, which makes the situation more dangerous. We can track his degeneration in his recent Executive Orders, his unhinged press conferences, and his Truth Social posts. He seems, increasingly, frenzied and unmoored. At the same time, Christian MAGA seems to have become a full-fledged death cult.

After the death of dozens of girls at a summer camp in Texas during the recent flood, many images spread across the Evangelical Right showing the girls going to Heaven, personally escorted by Jesus.

We are replaying the mytho-historical archetype of the “Mad King.” But in this case, our lunatic grifter monarch has access to the world’s most powerful military force, a vast arsenal of nuclear weapons, and the most advanced surveillance tools in world history. He has surrounded himself with sycophants and “yes men” who depend on him for their political survival. They will do anything he asks.

Genocide hasn’t happened yet. There may still be time to find some kind of “off switch” — some pattern-interrupt where our situation can shift in a different direction. But the warning signs are blinking red. Most people are oblivious and unaware, ignoring them. I am writing this with the hope that it will help more people become aware of the existential threat. Then I hope we can find a way to shift the discourse and the political momentum. But I am not at all sure that we can.

I. Introduction: Signs of the Unthinkable

In the U.S. today, there are signs that something historically familiar and deeply horrifying is underway. We see it in the language: Trump calls immigrants "poison" and his enemies "vermin," just as Hitler did. At a July 3 rally in Des Moines, Iowa, Trump said, “They hate Trump, but I hate them too. I really do. I hate them.” He wasn’t referring to fringe activists—but to all Democrats, as much as half of the U.S. population.

Both Trump and Vice-President JD Vance blurbed Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them) by Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec. The 2024 book praises Franco and Pinochet — including Pinochet’s helicopter killings — as a reasonable tactic to use against political opponents. Trump wrote: “The far Left murdered 100 million people in the 20th century and have repeatedly shown that they will stop at nothing to achieve their totalitarian goals. They have torn down countless societies using a sophisticated playbook of propaganda. The only way to stop them in the future is to use their own subversive playbook against them. Unhumans reveals that playbook and teaches us how to deploy it immediately to save the West.”

We see the potential for mass violence in the budgets: ICE, the domestic deportation force, will receive something like twenty times its current funding over the next few years, with the mandate to build more concentration camps and field more masked agents. We see it in the ideology: popular evangelical literature preaches an apocalyptic cleansing of the world while tech elites, gripped by an extremist and anti-humanist ideology, want to replace American democracy with CEO dictators, joking about turning the underclass into biodiesel.

The United States is not just polarized. We’ve entered a psychological and political liminal zone where, for many, mass violence is not only imaginable, but fully justified. This is the case even though the potential victims of this violence have, for the most part, done nothing to deserve it.

The argument I am making in this essay is painfully direct: the U.S. has already reached a proto-genocidal condition. Certain populations—liberals, immigrants, queers, intellectuals, racial minorities—are being rhetorically and structurally set up as enemies to be eliminated. The patterns are identical to those that preceded historical instances of mass violence: from the Khmer Rouge to the Taliban to the Nazis. The Rwanda genocide provides a striking parallel.

What seems like fantasy today can become policy tomorrow. The infrastructure, ideology, and mass psychology required for such a shift are already falling into place.

II. Historical Parallels: The Logic of Purification

Rwanda is a small, landlocked country in East-Central Africa, bordered by Uganda, Tanzania, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Known as the “land of a thousand hills,” it has a predominantly agrarian economy, with coffee and tea as its chief exports. Today, Rwanda is mostly known for the hideous genocide that occurred there in 1994.

The genocide in Rwanda was the result of a long history of colonial manipulation and social engineering. Before European intervention, the distinction between Hutu and Tutsi was fluid, based more on socio-economic roles rather than fixed ethnicity. Tutsis were generally cattle herders and wealthier; Hutus were mostly farmers. Intermarriage was common, and individuals could shift between categories. German and then Belgian colonizers imposed racialized identity cards, treating the Tutsis as a superior “race” and placing them in administrative roles. This laid the foundation for structural resentment that intensified over decades — not so dissimilar to the anger that populations in rural Red States in the U.S. feel toward more urban, college-educated people in Blue States.

Following independence in 1962, political power shifted to the Hutu majority, and cycles of retaliation began. By the early 1990s, Rwanda was a deeply impoverished country of about 7.1 million people—roughly 85–90% Hutu, 8–14% Tutsi, and a small minority of Twa—with an escalating civil war between the Hutu-dominated government and the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF).

The genocide was not based on an eruption of ancient tribal hatred: It was a state-engineered campaign. The Hutu-led government and military began planning mass extermination. Propaganda played a crucial role: the magazine Kangura published the “Hutu Ten Commandments,” warning against intermarriage and labeling Tutsis as traitors. Similarly the tech oligarch and Network State author, Balaji Srinivasan, envisions “Red” and “Blue” zones in cities like San Francisco, where Blues will need an identity card to pass through Red areas.

In Rwanda, Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM), a private station aligned with government elites, broadcast a steady stream of hate speech — much like many Far Right media sites and networks today. Tutsis were called “inyenzi” (cockroaches), and listeners were urged to “work” (a euphemism for killing) their Tutsi neighbors. This was not spontaneous violence—it was incited from above. Political elites used the media to reframe class resentment and wartime fear into genocidal rage. Rural and often poor Hutus, many with limited access to formal education, were conscripted—sometimes by force, sometimes by propaganda—to carry out the killings with machetes, clubs, and fire. Today, in the U.S., neo-Nazi militia are recruiting openly.

After Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane was shot down on April 6, 1994, killings began immediately. Over the next 100 days, between 500,000 and 1,000,000 people were murdered—mostly Tutsis, but also moderate Hutus. Entire families were slaughtered in churches, schools, and homes. The genocide was carried out with chilling speed and coordination, often by ordinary villagers under the direction of local officials and militias. It ended only when the RPF took control of the country in July. In the aftermath, Rwanda was left traumatized and depopulated, having lost ten percent of its population.

Scholars such as Mahmood Mamdani ( father of Zoran Mamdani) have argued that the genocide was less about “ancient tribal hatreds” and more a case of modern political identity formation manipulated by colonialists and local elites: “The colonial state turned social differences into racial differences, and then made these racial differences the basis of political identity.” The lessons are chillingly relevant to what’s underway now in the U.S.: when language is weaponized to dehumanize out groups, and identity is enforced via bureaucratic systems, ordinary people can be led to commit brutal massacres, entering a kind of mass trance.

History teaches that genocide is horrifying but internally coherent. It follows a logic of purification. The Khmer Rouge emptied Cambodia’s cities and murdered intellectuals and ethnic minorities, seeking to return to an imagined agrarian utopia. Mao’s Cultural Revolution mobilized youth to purge the old in service of ideological rebirth. Stalinist purges removed dissenters and "class enemies" in waves of bureaucratized terror. The Taliban enforced a vision of Islamic purity through gender apartheid and mass repression. Reactionaries in the U.S. also want to return to some fantasized past “utopia,” where men confined women in their traditional roles, and “family, God, and country” were core values.

Genocidal movements seek to destroy ambiguity, complexity, and eliminate any form of dissent. The goal is to erase the past, rewrite history, and reinvent language itself. In Cambodia, Pol Pot initiated what was called "Year Zero," where all prior culture and memory was to be abolished. Those who resisted, or who simply failed to fit in, were killed. According to scholar Craig Etcheson, the Khmer Rouge ideology was both utopian and genocidal. The Maoists sought metaphysical and material “purification” to cleanse society of the corrupting influences of capitalism, religion, and Westernization. Similarly, Evangelical fanatics and Christian theocratic fascists in the U.S. see secular liberalism as a destructive ideology that must be eliminated, erased, by any means necessary.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban promised order and divine law. They have tried to achieve it through a campaign of terror against women, dissenters, and destruction of their own cultural heritage. When they took Kabul in 1996, they publicly executed people in stadiums, destroyed ancient Buddhist monuments, and closed schools for girls. The justification was not practical governance, but ideological purity and religious fanaticism.

What links all of these movements is not their doctrine but their structure. Each had:

• An apocalyptic vision of a purified future
  

• A leader or vanguard endowed with mythic authority
  

• A defined enemy—internal or external—marked for removal
  

• A mass base of support conditioned / hypnotized to see violence as virtue
  

• A state or pseudo-state mechanism to carry it out
  

These conditions are all present in the U.S now. We have the apocalyptic rhetoric of Christian nationalism, the digital ecosystem of the Far Right (including Elon Musk’s “Mecha-Hitler” AI), and genocidal narratives circulating through paramilitary fiction and evangelical pop culture. Now we have a lavishly funded, extra-legal force, ICE, with no regard for due process or basic human rights. These systems have coalesced into a dangerous ideology, melding white grievance, religious millenarianism, and digital accelerationism into a bleak political theology.

III. The Mass Psychology of Fanaticism

Authoritarianism does not only arise from top-down conspiracies or cynical manipulation. It also draws upon deep psychological currents that recur during times of upheaval. Across multiple traditions—psychoanalytic, Marxist, and sociological—a body of theory has emerged explaining why large numbers of people become susceptible to violent ideologies that promise purity, order, and belonging.

In Escape from Freedom, Erich Fromm argued that modern individuals, cut off from traditional bonds and faced with overwhelming choices, often respond not by embracing freedom, but by fleeing from it.