The Midwestern Führerbunker Driving the Right Off the Cliff

Editor’s Note: I’ve worked on this for weeks. Yes, it is long. I beg you to read it all. I’ve kept it as easy to understand as I can. Please read it. You guys always ask me to “name names.” Challenge accepted.

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A group of white guys have subtly inserted themselves into conservative institutions and church organizations. They all embrace racial grievances. To varying degrees, they embrace white nationalism, antisemitism, and even Nazi sympathies. They are getting added to conservative institutional boards, attempting to purge churches, and are desperate to indoctrinate young conservatives into fascist ideology. They even surround the Vice President of the United States. Some of them believe the United States is at a tipping point, and they want to push it over the edge and rebuild it in their image. You might think it does not affect you, but, in time, you will see their efforts in your church pews, in your kids’ brains, and in your politicians’ mouths. It begins with shampoo.

Charles Haywood made his fortune selling shampoo. He sold his Indianapolis hair care company in 2020, and he has spent the years since writing out, at length and under his own name, what he would like to do with your country. Rod Dreher, who is no man of the left, read Haywood’s online ramblings and described Haywood as pouring out vile from “deep in his Midwestern Führerbunker”.

In a document he calls the Foundationalist Manifesto, Haywood explained that his preferred government “will not be democratic.” The state “will have unlimited means,” because “properly viewed, the state is not constrained externally.” Women “will not be permitted to choose career over family.” Men “will not be permitted to choose not to have a family.” The state will seize the assets of “any citizen who views himself as a global citizen.”

That is not my characterization of his politics. Those are his words, from the manifesto that earned him a friendly sit-down with Tucker Carlson in September 2022.

Elsewhere he has speculated about serving as a “warlord” at the head of an “armed patronage network,” a model he says he drew from the groups of white settler farmers formed in southern African countries and colonies while black Africans were fighting for majority rule. Reviewing a biography of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, he wrote that his already favorable impression of the Spanish dictator had become positively glowing. He is not alone in that fixation. MAGA gadfly Jack Posobiec wrote a book called Unhumans, which Vice President JD Vance blurbed and which claims Franco and Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet are models for handling the American left. Josh Abbotoy, the executive director of American Reformer, has written that America is going to need a Protestant Franco. It is not a coincidence, but an attempt to shift the Overton window toward dictatorship.

A crank with a blog is a crank with a blog. The problem is that Charles Haywood is not on the outside of the conservative movement. He has used his wealth to get inside it and reshape longtime institutions that build the future of the right, pushing those institutions toward his vision of pushing our constitutional republic to its breaking point so they can rebuild it the way they want.

Jason Hart has documented that Haywood’s personal foundation has given the Claremont Institute $390,500 since 2022, and the foundation’s filings are public. Haywood sits on the publication committee of Claremont’s American Mind, one of four men who do. Claremont let Haywood’s fraternal order get itself incorporated under Claremont’s own nonprofit status. That order is the Society for American Civic Renewal, and Claremont’s president Ryan Williams confirmed he serves on that group’s board. Claremont’s Scott Yenor has been one of the group’s organizational leaders. Hart reports that the president of Claremont, the chief executive of New Founding, and the chief marketing officer of the Blaze are all members.

Membership records obtained by reporters show the order is open only to heterosexual men who are trinitarian Christians. In March 2024, getting ahead of a reporter he expected to write about the group, Nate Fischer published its internal mission statement himself. That document describes the members as “un-hyphenated Americans” who hold a Christianity unblurred by modernist philosophy, and it says they intend to make that inheritance permanently dominant in American political and social life. Its stated objectives are explicit: preferential treatment for members in business, coordinated action on hiring, contracts, and leadership succession, and a standing list of men ready to be appointed and hired once a friendly regime exists. The religious qualifications are a stand-alone clause in the document. The hyphen is there to screen for lineage, and it tells you the racial mindset of the organization. Haywood himself has repeatedly used a slur for Indians on social media, has argued that the Allies, not the Nazis, were the genuinely barbaric power in World War II, has insisted the war was not much motivated by the horrors of Nazi aggression, and gushed that Tucker Carlson and Darryl Cooper “boil down all my political plans.” Cooper argues that Churchill, not Hitler, was the villain of World War II. When a critic pointed out Haywood’s casual use of an ethnic slur, a senior aide to the chairman of Claremont’s board bragged that nobody cares.

Much of the right waves off groups like Patriot Front, the uniformed outfit whose leader marched at Charlottesville and thirty-one of whose members were arrested out of a U-Haul outside a pride event in Coeur d’Alene, as a federal setup or a Democrat dirty trick. Haywood, instead, praises the Patriot Front’s leader. On July 6 of this year, he shared a video of Rousseau delivering an Independence Day speech and told his followers, “This speech is very good. And this guy is very impressive.” Haywood is widely credited with originating the phrase “no enemies to the right,” which its adherents shorten to NETTR. In a 2023 debate that Christopher Rufo hosted to argue over it, Haywood raised the hypothetical of a real white nationalist with real political power, and answered that you should cooperate with that person in order to destroy the power of the left. Pressed in the same conversation about right-wing authoritarianism, he said of Franco, Pinochet, and the Portuguese dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar that they had killed people justly and unjustly, and that they saved more people than they killed. Rod Dreher had noticed Haywood’s radicalism a year earlier, observing that Haywood’s loathing of the left ran deep enough that he welcomed a Nazi sympathizer to his side. The street-level version and the lodge-and-foundation version are not strangers to one another, but one of them has the money.

Haywood’s debate partner in the Rufo debate was Nate Fischer, the chief executive of New Founding. Fischer has acknowledged his own membership in Haywood’s order. He is a Claremont Lincoln Fellow — and, more consequentially, the co-founder and chairman of American Reformer, an outfit whose stated purpose is to recapture existing Christian institutions and which Haywood’s foundation has funded with $20,000 in each of the last 2 reporting years. American Reformer in turn backs the Center for Baptist Leadership, run by William Wolfe, who calls himself a Christian nationalist and whose project is replacing the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention with men further to his right. Matthew Peterson helped Fischer start New Founding before moving on to Blaze Media. (Matthew Peterson reached out and said the underlying article citing him has him confused with a different Matthew Peterson. Striking that sentence)

Back in 2023, Christian writer Jake Meador of Mere Orthodoxy documented the business dealings Fischer and Abbotoy had with the writer then known only as Raw Egg Nationalist and called the man a Nazi pornographer. That description is accurate. His magazine runs pornography alongside fiction about murdering one’s girlfriend, and his books and his magazine’s annuals are published by Antelope Hill, a white nationalist publisher with ties to neo-Nazis. Meador noted in the same piece that the Protestant Franco line had originated with Abbotoy, and that Abbotoy had amplified a post about fixing the country with limitless authority and a rough mentality. My own denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America, barred American Reformer from its annual meeting, and it was right to do so. These are not five separate movements with a coincidental overlap. They are a small group of men, funded by a smaller group of donors, working through think tanks, a venture fund, and denominational conventions, with people at The Blaze amplifying their views.

Nearly all of this traces back to one man. Carl Schmitt was a German legal theorist who presided over the Association of National Socialist German Jurists and edited the Third Reich’s newspaper for lawyers, and who, unlike the German intellectuals who later pleaded ignorance, never repudiated Nazism. Schmitt taught that politics consists in the sorting of men into friends and enemies, and the enemy is defined by the genuine possibility of killing him. Christians have an obvious objection to this: Christ commanded us to love our enemies. Schmitt, working from the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible, argued Jesus separated private adversaries from public adversaries, and we were to love the private adversary, not the public one. In other words, the command to love your enemies says nothing about the people you fight in politics.

Haywood has embraced Schmitt’s perversion of Scripture. In his own treatment of Schmitt, he conceded he could find nothing from the early church fathers about our duties toward public enemies, and decided the silence existed because the distinction was too obvious to need stating. John Ehrett, writing in the Protestant journal Ad Fontes, dismantled the argument, pointing out that the New Testament was written in Greek rather than Latin, and the Greek word for enemy is used throughout Scripture for precisely the political enemies Schmitt insisted it excluded. Zechariah uses it of Israel’s enemies. Christ uses it to describe a king’s rebellious subjects. Peter commanded the church to honor the emperor, and Paul commanded prayers for kings, in the years when Nero was burning Christians to light the streets of Rome. Schmitt, in a fit of eisegesis, twisted Scripture to support his argument instead of realizing his argument is rejected by Scripture, and Haywood built on it anyway. The reasoning has spread outward to infect individuals and entities.

American Reformer has published the argument that Christians can no longer answer politics by quoting “love your enemies” and must instead set out to defeat those enemies. Claremont’s American Mind has published the argument that conservatives must now be willing to commit violence of their own. Andrew Isker, who has partnered on projects with Abbotoy and Fischer, wrote a book teaching that Christendom cannot return until Christians learn to hate the world, and that fathers must raise their children to hate what they hate.

Ehrett correctly notes that to carve out a zone of political life where violence governs and Christian obligation does not reach is to rebuild the logic of secularism inside the church. These men say they exist to tear that logic down. They have instead baptized it, and it has given them a permission structure for cruelty that their faith was supposed to forbid.

Haywood’s NETTR formulation has crept out of his writings and into the ordinary operations of the right.

Over the weekend, Bo French, the Republican nominee for the Texas Railroad Commission, posted a photograph of college students who, though American citizens, were of Indian ethnicity, celebrating the comeback against Ohio State and wrote that the problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined. Those kids assimilated exactly the way the critics of immigration always demanded that immigrants assimilate. They put on their school colors and stetsons and went to the game. One of them, born in Texas to an American father and an Indian mother, told a local station that the post misrepresented what was in fact a mixed crowd.

French did not retreat an inch. In the hours after John Cornyn objected, he doubled down and called the senator a RINO. Jack Posobiec — whose book the vice president blurbed — turned his fire on the Republicans who had objected and announced that the party now knew who its undercover enemies were. Posobiec was not a stranger riding to the rescue. When French chaired the Tarrant County Republican Party, it hosted Posobiec as a guest. Benny Johnson said he saw nothing hateful in any of it. The NETTR gang of the right, poisoned by Haywood’s arguments, rallied to Bo French and attacked any and all on the right who called him out.

Running alongside all of this, from a different direction and with different money, is Nick Fuentes. He has never been coy about his ambitions. “There’s groypers everywhere,” he told his audience. “There’s groypers in the administration. There’s groypers at Turning Point USA. There’s groypers at Fox News, at Daily Wire.” He has instructed his followers to infiltrate the Republican Party and Turning Point and change them from the inside, and he has boasted that his people are working their way into the highest ranks of that leadership. In 2023 he wrote that his “White Identitarian, race realist, ‘Jewish aware,’ counter-Zionist” views, once radioactive, were now pounding on the door of the mainstream.

I do not think Haywood, his compatriots, and Fuentes are coordinating. I think something worse is true. These are two separate projects, with separate donors and separate audiences, converging on the same destination, and the institutions of the right are absorbing both without resistance. One works by throwing money around to shape boards, publication committees, and institutions. The other works by radicalizing 19-year-olds on livestreams and then placing them in field offices. They arrive at the same place, which is a country where your ancestry determines your standing, and the state decides what your family is for.

Vice President Vance has refused to distance himself from the groyper movement and will not forcefully denounce the antisemites. Rod Dreher, who had been his friend and an early champion of his memoir, went to him last fall and urged him to draw that line. Dreher says Vance cut him off and the friendship is over. Unfortunately, the Vice President keeps all of it within arm’s reach. Haywood’s foundation is a recurring funder of American Moment, the staffing pipeline founded in 2021 with Vance’s support, which exists to place young conservatives in administration jobs. Vance has identified himself with the postliberal right on a stage with Patrick Deneen and Kevin Roberts, and told that audience there is no meaningful distinction between the public and the private sector in the American regime. That is not a slip of the tongue. He believes it.

Conservatives spent sixty years arguing that the family and the local community, not the state, should decide what the good life looks like. The socialist left rejected that because it loves the collective. The postliberal right now rejects it because it is certain it knows better than your household does. Haywood has written down what the second position requires and funded the intellectual enforcers to bully and silence dissent on the right. These men and their groups’ ambitions require a state with unlimited means that can seize a man’s property for thinking the wrong thoughts about his own country.

This is ultimately a spiritual problem rather than a political one. Inside the church, Satan spreads kinism, racism, and ethno-nationalism, and he does it by telling frightened men that their blood is their birthright. The groups Haywood funds and their related entities are spreading this malignancy in churches. Too few leaders on the right have been willing to condemn the rhetoric, and the ones who scrub a donation page when a reporter shows up are not among them.

Scripture says that on the last day God will separate the sheep from the goats. In the here and now, some of the goats have empowered themselves to separate neighbor from neighbor, Christian from Christian, and people from their own families, all to advance a perverted utopia where they can rule in their own image. They are as weird and malcontented as the AI freaks and their effective altruism. A shampoo fortune has bought funding for small conservative and Christian advocacy groups, which in turn comes with compliance, invitations, acceptance, advancement, and a great deal of acquiescence and silence. But it does not buy it all.

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For the first time, I used Claude to help me with this. I wrote the piece and Claude found the links relevant to my claims. When Claude thought I was making weak claims or arguments, it challenged me to improve and clarify my writing and claims to match information in provided linked. I think using Claude actually improved the overall piece and, frankly, definitely improved its readability as you all know I’m a terrible proof reader. Claude tells me my use of commas suck. All em dashes and colons are mine because I went to law school and I’ll defend their use till I die along with the Oxford comma.