If I were of an apocalyptic turn of mind, I’d be tempted to say that the late Charlie Kirk was something much more than a gifted organizer and sincere Christian apostle. The vicious infighting that has erupted on the right and in Christian circles since Kirk’s assassination threatens to hand the upcoming midterms to the rabid radical left—aborting President Trump’s term in office, turning the House of Representatives again into an impeachment circus, and stalling efforts at stemming election fraud.

The millions of illegals whom the Biden regime imported will continue to distort our politics. Votes will be cast in their names by corrupted election machines in key swing states in future elections (as happened in the 2020 presidential race, and many down-ballot races in 2024), until leftist control of America will be irreversible by peaceful means—akin to what we’ve seen in the United Kingdom. In that once-free country, thousands of foreign colonists arrive every month from bigoted Muslim countries, and dozens of native citizens are arrested every day for daring to complain about it.

Can that happen here? Read what one prosecutor appointed by the Biden administration, Jack Smith, dared to do to sitting members of Congress and virtually every conservative group in the country in his Arctic Frost crackdown after Jan. 6, 2021 and magnify it exponentially if the Democrats take back the White House in the 2028 election.

Given what has happened since Kirk’s murder, I’m wondering (at least half-seriously) if he was something like the Katechon referred to in Scripture. As one scholarly article explains it:

 And now you know what is now restraining him [τὸ κατέχον], so that he may be revealed when his time comes. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work, but only until the one who now restrains [ὁ κατέχων] it is removed.”… (2 Thessalonians 2:6–7)

The restraint that the katechon enforces is directly related to the forces of evil — the evil one — who brings about disorder and lawlessness. God’s historical agent, the katechon, not only tempers the eschatological enthusiasm for the parousia of Christ, but also by doing so, attempts to restore order in the midst of crisis and chaos.

If you consider our country’s survival critical to the future of faith and freedom around the world, then you won’t find such a comparison laughable. Peaceful conservatives in places as far-flung as Brazil and South Korea are suffering cruel repression in the wake of the left’s wins here. The fate of the American right has global implications—and Charlie Kirk’s removal has thrown it into chaos, as if he were the keystone blasted out of the Hoover Dam.

Kirk had rightly maintained a balanced, supportive, but constructively critical attitude toward Israel, and rigorously excluded from Turning Point USA events supporters of Nick Fuentes’s brand of untethered opposition. “Groypers” seem to be gaining influence, provoking a harsh reaction by one-time gatekeepers on the right, who falsely warned us that Donald Trump was a bigoted nativist and would-be dictator. Rod Dreher has appointed himself grand inquisitor of this purge—the same hysteric who once warned us that Trump was unleashing literal “demons” of racism when he jeered at foreign jihadist and immigration fraudster Rep. Ilhan Omar. (Dreher also mocked critics of election fraud in 2020-21, never apologizing, even when they were hounded into prison for nonviolent misdemeanors.)

Cry “Wolf!” often enough after every passing Basset Hound, and watch how little your words mean when the wolfpack really swoops in.

The wolves are all too real, regardless of how useless our hireling shepherds turned out to be. Young men, especially white men, have long been the group that dares not speak its name—demonized, pathologized, and subjected to legal discrimination as an “unprotected class.” Our conservative institutions did nothing to defend them—being hooked on abstract universalist ideas like “the market” and “equality.” Unsurprisingly, some of these abandoned souls ended up in a cult.

Make no mistake: What Nick Fuentes is running is a kind of online cult, one of those “ersatz religions” that Eric Voegelin warned against after fleeing Nazi Germany. His movement has all the ugliness and inhumanity we’d expect to find in a toxic subculture composed of abuse victims desperate for revenge. The fact that this movement has such a broad appeal among young people is perhaps the worst indictment possible of the churches, conservative groups, and other institutions that were meant to shape and form the always-vulnerable youth. Now some of those same institutions are lashing out at the people they failed, like an abusive father hitting his son with a belt, shouting, “You’re crying? I’ll give you something to cry about….”

Thus, we see purges and counter-purges in conservative institutions from the Heritage Foundation to Intercollegiate Studies Institute, as factions battle for institutional power like crabs inside a bucket, completely taking their eyes off the daily aggressions of the left. And the left watches gleefully, munching popcorn while sharpening its knives. The left never marginalizes even its most fringe extremists. Instead, it protects them, leaving no wounded maniac on the field. Weather Underground terrorists emerged from short prison terms to be handed cushy academic jobs, and gigs ghost-writing memoirs for future presidents like Barack Obama. Leftist academics teach the books of exiled Communist guerrilla Assata Shakur, while institutions on the right toss their wounded to the crocodiles. On how many reading lists does Sam Francis’ cogent work appear? Think what you like of his racial tribalism (I’m not a fan), but he never killed any cops.

The purveyors of stale, neoconservative ideology winked at the invidious tribalism among nonwhites and leftists but are now using the pathologies their callous neglect helped to create as a means to purge conservative institutions of every potential competitor. “You see what happens when you unleash populism?” they seem to be demanding. “Now just hand us back the keys and we can go back to the salad days of a movement led by Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and David French.”

I admit that I’m conflicted about this present conflict, since I’m equally repulsed by most of what passes for “postliberalism,” the flag waved by those now targeted in this round of aggressive neocon chemotherapy. I was one of the very first to warn against the divisive, futile ideology of Catholic Integralism, a kind of Catholic sharia now aped by some self-styled “Christian Nationalists,” albeit with different dogmas for the state to impose on those with uncooperative consciences.

But there’s little to attract either disgruntled voters, or rigorous thinkers, about the zombie so-called “Reaganism” claimed by today’s would-be gatekeepers. As I wrote back in 2019, commenting on the debates between Sohrab Ahmari and David French:

The “consensus” ideology that dominated most conservative institutions before the rise of Donald Trump was deeply unhealthy, and frankly dishonest. “Fusionism” was billed as a creative synergy between moral conservatism and its quest for the common good on the one hand, and classical liberalism’s concern for individual freedom on the other.

In practice? It yielded a conservative movement all too willing to … yield. Not just when the left attacked some venerable tenet of social conservatism, but also when it trampled all over basic tenets of liberty. It’s not fair to say that Fusionism, in practice, abandoned just the common good.

It sold out liberty, too. We didn’t just end up with drag queen story hour, same sex marriage, abortion on demand, ubiquitous porn, and a constant influx of (hostile) Muslims across our borders. On top of that, we got federal micromanagement of every employment and housing contract to police discrimination, a massive welfare state subsidizing every vice, incessant Whack-A-Mole efforts to seize our weapons, and a constant influx of socialist voters and welfare cases across the Rio Grande.

You can’t beat something with nothing. And that airy, abstract fantasy of free markets, the free movement of peoples, and freedom imposed around the world by U.S. intervention is less than nothing—it’s a dangerous delusion, whose ugliest fruit might just be the explosion of Jew-baiting and bitterness that washed over us, when the Katechon was removed.

Charlie Kirk, ora pro nobis.