Breaking news of more tragic gun death in America, as reported by the CBC:
“It’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights,” [Charlie Kirk] said during an April 5, 2023, appearance at the Salt Lake City campus of Awaken Church. “That is a prudent deal.”
[…]
Moments before Kirk was shot on Wednesday, numerous livestreams of the event showed an audience member asking him how many mass shooters in the last 10 years have been transgender Americans.
“Too many,” Kirk responded.
The person said five was the number, then asked Kirk if he knew how many mass shooters in total America had seen in the last 10 years. “Counting or not counting gang violence?” Kirk replied.
Seconds later, a loud crack that sounded like a gunshot rang out and Kirk was seen briefly moving his hand to his neck before falling from his chair…
The victim was known for speeches advocating mass proliferation of guns as the solution to gun violence.
How did we stop all the shootings at gun shows? Notice there’s not a lot of mass shootings at gun shows, there’s all these guns. Because everyone’s armed. If our money and our sporting events and our airplanes have armed guards, why don’t our children?
Because everyone is armed? That sounds like war, and there’s a lot of death in war. The end of killing is denoted by the point where almost everyone puts away their guns. This was the real history of the Old West as well, not the fantasy version, as towns strictly banned guns to keep the peace.
Dodge City, Tombstone, and Deadwood often required visitors to check their firearms with the sheriff upon entering town. Literally the exact opposite of what the victim had been telling his large crowds.
Dodge City formed a municipal government in 1878 and its first ordinance, for example, stated:
Any person or persons found carrying concealed weapons in the city of Dodge or violating the provisions of this ordinance, shall be fined in any sum not exceeding one hundred dollars or be imprisoned not exceeding thirty days.
Tombstone had similar laws, and even the famous O.K. Corral gunfight partially stemmed from the Earps enforcing the town’s gun ordinance, officials removing guns to keep the peace after the Clanton gang (like Charlie Kirk) had refused to disarm in town.
Typical American frontier town sign banning guns, above an ad for health drinks.
…in all our years together, he [Wyatt Earp] never described a gun battle to me. He considered it a great misfortune that he had lived in such a time and under such circumstances that guns had figured at all in his career.
Kirk’s argument that gun shows don’t have mass shootings because “everyone’s armed” reflects his philosophy that increased danger creates deterrence. This directly contradicts common sense and how actual frontier communities achieved peace, through regulation and control, not proliferation.
His tragic death from gunfire has drawn bipartisan condemnation from political leaders across the spectrum. This violence represents the breakdown of democratic discourse, regardless of one’s position on any particular issue.
The post-Civil War period, despite its many challenges, saw the end of the massive armed conflict precisely because one side laid down their weapons. Or, as the great President Grant put it:
President Grant’s tomb, so large the Statue of Liberty could fit inside, says it plainly for all to see.
Grant, the best General and President in American history, told us to choose peace over the escalation of armed conflict. Having seen more armed conflict than perhaps any American leader, his choice to memorialize “Let us have peace” rather than any celebration of military victory speaks volumes about what he learned from that experience.
Let’s talk about deep historical currents behind a new book called “The Singing Word: 168 Years of Atlantic Poetry“.
Walt Hunter’s “The Singing Word” lands today, and it represents far more than a simple anthology of American verse. This collection of 168 years of Atlantic poetry embodies a profound act of historical continuity, a legacy that traces directly back to one of the most shameful episodes of presidential overreach in American history.
President Jackson Assaulted Free Expression
Foundational DNA of The Atlantic comes from the postal crisis of 1835 that helped catalyze the magazine’s eventual creation. President Andrew Jackson, faced with the American Anti-Slavery Society’s “Great Postal Campaign”—an effort to educate and liberate the South with over 100,000 prints of abolitionist literature—responded with what can only be described as state-sanctioned censorship.
For example, on July 29, 1835, the Post Office was raided in Charleston by a white supremacist mob calling themselves “The Lynch Men.” They seized bags of newspapers and burned them in a massive bonfire, along with effigies of leading abolitionists, before a crowd of nearly 3,000 people. But the truly shocking aspect wasn’t the mob violence, because it was President Jackson’s response.
Rather than defending the American founding fathers’ beliefs in sanctity of privacy in mail and the First Amendment, Jackson encouraged and inflamed the censorship. His Postmaster General, Amos Kendall, was ordered explicitly to arm Southern postmasters with permission to refuse delivery of materials they opened and disagreed with, arguing they had a “higher obligation” to preserving slavery in their communities than to federal law. Jackson even included condemnation of the abolitionists in his 1835 State of the Union address, calling American freedom fighters the “monsters” who should “die,” and advocated for federal legislation that would authorize postal surveillance and censorship of “incendiary” anti-slavery materials.
This was America’s big test in federal mail surveillance and censorship a precedent that would echo through McCarthyism to modern NSA overreach in Room 641a.
The Literary Counterrevolution
Jackson’s presidency by 1857 had ended two decades earlier, but the intellectual wound he inflicted on American discourse had not healed. The transcendentalist movement, centered in Boston and Concord, had watched in horror as democratic principles buckled under pressure from slavery’s defenders and their presidential enabler.
When publisher Frank Underwood approached the New England literary elite about founding a new magazine, he found a receptive audience among writers who had lived through Jackson’s assault on free expression. The Atlantic Monthly, launched in November 1857, was explicitly conceived as an anti-slavery publication that would provide what one editor called “cultural leadership” to counter the “cultural leveling” they saw as inherent in Jacksonian democracy.
The magazine’s founding circle reads like a who’s who of American intellectual resistance to Jacksonian authoritarianism: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John Greenleaf Whittier. These were not merely literary figures—they were conscious architects of what they hoped would be a more enlightened American discourse.
Significantly, the magazine’s very first poem of national prominence was Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride,” which appeared in 1861. The timing was no accident: as the Civil War began, The Atlantic was deliberately invoking the Revolutionary War’s spirit of resistance to tyranny—a not-so-subtle rebuke to Jackson’s legacy and the Southern rebellion it had helped nurture.
Poetry as Political Resistance
The Atlantic’s poetry from its earliest years reveals a publication acutely conscious of literature’s political power. Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which appeared as the magazine’s lead story in February 1862, wasn’t merely patriotic verse—it was a direct answer to the Confederate appropriation of American symbols and a conscious effort to reclaim the moral authority that Jackson’s administration had ceded to slavery’s defenders.
The magazine understood what Jackson had proven: that controlling discourse meant controlling democracy. If the President could declare certain ideas too dangerous for the mailbox, then independent media became essential to preserving the “unfinished project of the nation”—a phrase Hunter uses to describe The Atlantic’s ongoing mission.
Contemporary Echoes
Hunter’s organizational framework for “The Singing Word”—dividing the collection into “National Anthems,” “Natural Lines,” and “Personal Mythologies”—reflects this historical awareness. The “National Anthems” section particularly resonates with The Atlantic’s founding purpose: providing alternative visions of American identity that could compete with authoritarian populism.
In his curatorial statement, Hunter explicitly connects past and present:
What emerged as I read was an optimism and realism—a sense that, however bad things are, the idea of America is worth fighting for, and worth questioning and scrutinizing in new ways.
This language deliberately echoes the rhetoric of The Atlantic’s founders, who saw themselves as defending American ideals against their political corruption.
President Jackson was one of the most, if not the most unjust, immoral and corrupt men in American history.
The anthology’s span from 1857 to 2024 encompasses not just the Civil War era that birthed the magazine, but also Reconstruction, the World Wars, the Civil Rights Movement, and our current moment of democratic stress. Each era has produced its own version of Jacksonian authoritarianism, and each has found The Atlantic publishing poetry that serves as both witness and resistance.
An Unbroken Line
When we consider poets like Robert Frost wrestling with American identity in “The Gift Outright,” or Adrienne Rich challenging power structures in her feminist verse, or contemporary voices like Juan Felipe Herrera expanding the definition of American poetry itself, we see the same impulse that drove Emerson and Longfellow to found The Atlantic: the conviction that literature must engage with democracy’s ongoing struggles.
Hunter’s collection thus represents more than literary archaeology. It documents an unbroken tradition of American writers using verse to contest official narratives, expand democratic participation, and preserve space for dissenting voices—precisely what Jackson’s postal censorship attempted to eliminate.
The Stakes of Literary Memory
“The Singing Word” arrives at a moment when democratic norms face renewed pressure. The anthology’s subtitle, “168 Years of Atlantic Poetry,” quietly asserts the durability of institutions that defend free expression against authoritarian assault. By bringing together voices from Longfellow to Limón, including poets “whose work has never before been published outside of the magazine,” Hunter demonstrates how literary institutions can preserve and amplify voices that might otherwise be silenced.
The collection’s price and wide distribution through major retailers represents another form of resistance to Trump/Jackson corruption and elitism. While Jackson used federal power to suppress abolitionist literature, The Atlantic uses democratic capitalism to ensure its counter-narrative reaches the broadest possible audience.
Donald Trump’s favorite president: Andrew Jackson as father of the “white republic”. Historian Matthew Clavin: Andrew Jackson was terrible, and likely would have despised Donald Trump for being just like him.
In this light, “The Singing Word” becomes not just an anthology but a manifesto: proof that American literature at its best serves as democracy’s memory, its conscience, and its most persistent hope for renewal. The poets collected in Hunter’s anthology didn’t just document American experience—they fought for the right to define it against those who would narrow its possibilities.
From the ashes of Jackson’s postal bonfires to the digital age of “The Singing Word,” The Atlantic’s poetry represents 168 years of resistance to the authoritarian impulse, which once again is closing the door on American democracy. In our own moment of political extremism and media manipulation, this anthology arrives as both historical witness and contemporary call to arms: proof that the republic of letters remains a reliable guardian of democratic expression.
“The Singing Word: 168 Years of Atlantic Poetry,” edited by Walt Hunter, was published by Atlantic Editions on September 9, 2025.
People are just asking questions. Earlier I wrote the history of Peter Thiel’s father Klaus, and asked whether he had refused to end WWII by deliberately sheltering his son in order to transmit Nazism. Now a German news site has continued the exposure, writing a brief summary of Peter’s time in college and early work. Here’s my interpretation through translation of their new article:
Until the early nineties, Thiel studied at Stanford, where his extremist worldview crystallized. The elite university provided an intellectual veneer for ideas he had absorbed through his father’s deliberate ideological transmission.
Thiel said he obsessed over the work of Carl Schmitt, the Nazi legal theorist who provided intellectual justification for dismantling democratic institutions and consolidating authoritarian power.
Thiel also used his studies to embrace the theories of René Girard, whose concept of “mimetic desire” and scapegoating mechanisms offered a framework that complemented his inherited authoritarian mindset. Girard’s focus on violence and the necessity of sacrificial victims resonated with someone raised to see democracy as an obstacle to proper hierarchical order.
This intellectual foundation appealed to Thiel precisely because it provided sophisticated language for the anti-democratic beliefs his father had carefully preserved and transmitted. “He was so out of step with the times, which naturally appealed to a rather rebellious student,” Thiel later said about Girard, revealing his attraction to ideas that challenged egalitarian principles.
Technology as Racial Supremacy: Thiel synthesized these influences into a techno-authoritarian philosophy that echoes his father’s belief in racial and technological hierarchy. “What distinguishes us humans from other animals is our ability to perform miracles. We call these miracles technology,” he wrote in 2014, promoting a vision of technological supremacy that mirrors the Nazi concept of superior peoples deserving to rule. In 2009, he explicitly rejected democratic governance, stating his understanding of freedom was “no longer compatible with democracy.
During his studies, Thiel’s provocation wasn’t mere intellectual rebellion—it was the expression of inherited extremist ideology. His former professor Jean-Pierre Dupuy recognized this, noting Thiel’s opposition to “women’s suffrage, equal rights and inclusion.” Dupuy identified Thiel as “an advocate of chaos—to destroy the system, democracy,” understanding that behind the friendly demeanor lay a commitment to dismantling democratic institutions.
After graduation, Thiel systematically worked to translate his anti-democratic ideology into economic and political power. His mockery of legal institutions and democratic governance reflected not Silicon Valley iconoclasm, but the fulfillment of his father’s project to undermine American democratic norms from within.
The 1998 founding of Confinity and subsequent creation of PayPal represented more than business success—it established a network of like-minded technologists committed to circumventing democratic oversight of economic power.
The self-described “PayPal Mafia” became a vehicle for advancing Thiel’s vision of corporate governance superseding democratic accountability, with alumni founding Tesla, SpaceX, YouTube and LinkedIn as extensions of this anti-democratic project.
This wasn’t entrepreneurial innovation—it was the methodical construction of parallel power structures designed to render democratic institutions irrelevant, apparently as his father had taught him through their strategic migrations away from every emerging democratic accountability.
How is my translation?
This German article to me carries a tone of “like father like son”, especially given scholarship about the transmission of Nazism.
Historians like Norbert Frei, Mary Fulbrook, and Harald Welzer have documented how Nazi beliefs persisted in post-war German families and communities. Welzer’s research on “communicative memory” shows how families transmitted Nazi-era attitudes through everyday conversations and silences, often without explicit ideological instruction.
Studies of second and third-generation Germans reveal patterns of inherited authoritarianism, antisemitism, and democratic skepticism. The work of researchers like Sabine Reichel (“What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?”) and Peter Sichrovsky documented how Nazi ideology was preserved through family dynamics, geographic choices, and social networks.
The student movement in 1968 explicitly aimed to force Germany to confront its Nazi past and break the silence surrounding war crimes and collaboration. Students demanded that their parents’ generation account for their roles in the Holocaust and Nazi regime. This new generation was specifically trying to prevent exactly the kind of ideological transmission that appears to have occurred in cases like the Thiel family.
Klaus Thiel fled Germany in 1967, just as his reckoning was intensifying, typical of Germans who sought to avoid this confrontation with the past. It places the Thiel family within a documented historical pattern of Nazi ideological preservation through geographic escape and institutional avoidance. This isn’t speculative – it’s applying established frameworks for understanding how extremist ideologies survive generational transitions.
What’s particularly revealing by German press is how Peter’s intellectual development at Stanford wasn’t random academic exploration, but rather the sophisticated articulation of beliefs his father had carefully preserved and allegedly transmitted. The embrace of Carl Schmitt (the Nazi legal theorist) and René Girard’s theories about violence and scapegoating reads very differently when understood as the formalization after intentional transmission of extremist ideology.
Thiel’s subsequent political activities – funding JD Vance, supporting Trump, advocating for corporate governance over democratic accountability – appear as the logical culmination of a multi-generational Nazi project that never accepted defeat.
Nazi ideology has been tactically laundered through Silicon Valley success and academic respectability. Peter left the legal industry a failure, he left the financial industry a failure, yet in the rapidly emerging unregulated technology industry he found the least resistance to expressions of Nazism. Twitter infamously worked hard to censor women for showing breasts (yet no men for the same), and delayed or refused restrictions on hate speech. In 2017, Twitter said they would finally ban Nazi swastikas, which in 2022 rapidly pivoted when they changed their logo to a swastika.
This artist’s rendering of the X brand was deleted from the platform by the self-promoting “free speech extremist” Elon Musk. Source: Ai Wei Wei
Klaus’s strategic positioning succeeded – Peter now wields enormous influence over American politics while his Nazi genealogy remains largely hidden from public discourse. Fascist ideology can persist and adapt across decades, using migration, economic success, and intellectual sophistication to avoid accountability while working to undermine democratic institutions from within.
This isn’t coincidence. Klaus created a record of deliberate choices that consistently aligned with authoritarian, racially hierarchical systems while avoiding democratic accountability.
Peter’s trajectory – from defending apartheid at Stanford to obsessing over Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt to explicitly rejecting democracy – follows logically from this foundation. His current influence over American politics through Vance and others represents exactly what you’d expect from someone raised with these transmitted beliefs.
Peter Thiel’s documented political activities – opposing democracy, funding authoritarian candidates, advocating for corporate governance over democratic accountability – are concerning enough on their own merits. These don’t require a Nazi genealogy narrative to be problematic.
That being said, it’s unmistakable the fight against Nazism didn’t end in 1945. Is Peter Thiel an example of how?
The uncomfortable possibility is that an insistence on conventional evidentiary standards may be part of the problem – that the very analytical frameworks designed to maintain objectivity could be inadequate for identifying sophisticated forms of fascist coordination that operate through simplistic plausible deniability.
There seems to be a petty grudge driving government attacks on Harvard.
Michael Velchik, the government lawyer, received both his undergraduate and law degree from Harvard. …as a senior at Harvard, Velchik turned in a paper in the voice of Adolf Hitler in response to a prompt in his Latin class asking students to submit an essay written from the perspective of a controversial figure. The essay rattled the instructor, who asked Velchik to write a new paper…. “[I]s it bad that my favorite class at harvard was nietzsche and my favorite book i’ve read this year is mein kampf?” Velchik wrote in the June 2013 email.
Favorite book? Come on. And now he’s back. And he’s still mad about being told to write that new paper.
Donald Trump’s second White House chief of staff tried to stop him praising Adolf Hitler…. “He said, ‘Well, but Hitler did some good things’…” …it was “pretty hard to believe” Trump “missed the Holocaust” in his assessment of Hitler, “and pretty hard to understand how he missed the 400,000 American GIs that were killed in the European theatre” of the second world war.
Is it harder to believe that Trump missed it, than this Harvard graduate Trump has attacking Harvard?
Missing it seems to be the point for these guys.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
