The Apocalypse of Don: Trump, Nietzsche, and Antichrist America

Why far-right Christians turned to the world’s most infamous atheist

This is the first of a two-part essay on how Friedrich Nietzsche became the lodestar of reactionary Christianity. Please subscribe to stay in touch! Check out more content in the How This Happened series.

The world is on fire. Inside the United States, chaos reigns and established institutions are proving utterly feckless in response. Despite running the most corrupt and incompetent administration in American history and despite instigating an armed mob invasion of the Capitol building, Donald Trump got re-elected and has once again become the president.

There are many different explanations for how this happened, but the most significant is that the United States, and humanity as a whole, is in an epistemic crisis which has sparked a political rebellion. Unlike military rebellions, the liberal order of the past 200 years has no idea how to respond. Political leaders, educators, and scientists have been unable to understand, much less ameliorate the situation.

While the global epistemic crisis began among religious fundamentalists, it has spread to societal institutions which have become so far removed from common experience that they cannot even grasp the nature of the problem.

It all comes down to this: Willful ignorance and skepticism are functionally the same thing. They differ only in purpose. Willful ignorance seeks to preserve existing knowledge and existing hierarchies. Skepticism, by contrast, seeks to reevaluate existing knowledge and discover new ways of thinking and being.

Not having the ultimate answers is not nihilism; it is an invitation to discover and create shared moral viewpoints that work for everyone—whether through democratic consensus, ethical philosophy, or cultural traditions that foster collective understanding and cooperation.

While some of us may not like it, we can know that there is no evidence that Noah’s flood happened, or that many early Christians did not view Jesus as divine, just as we can know that there are thousands of transitional fossils that have been discovered and that gravity behaves in ways that are predictable in our slice of reality.

While we can never definitively prove that gravitation will always and everywhere behave according to the equations of Isaac Newton, we can demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that gravity behaves the same way in the area of space-time we inhabit. Likewise within the realm of ethics, while there are no absolute principles on which to base moral beliefs, we can strive to make societal and individual choices which maximize collective and individual freedom. Uncertainty can thus be the basis for democracy, if properly understood and respected, as it allows for adaptability and the continuous reevaluation of policies and governance structures.

Historically, the democratic process has thrived on this principle of moral relativism, beginning with the deliberative assemblies of ancient Greece, where open debate was essential to governance. The Magna Carta of 1215 represented a crucial shift in the relationship between rulers and the ruled, establishing the foundation for legal constraints on monarchical power. The Swiss cantons, which began developing their system of self-governance in the 13th century, later reinforced these ideas through their decentralized and participatory political structures, demonstrating how local governance could function within a broader democratic framework.

The Constitutional Convention of 1787 in what later became the United States further enshrined this principle. Finally, the black civil rights movement of the 1960s demonstrated the necessity of uncertainty and struggle in ensuring democratic rights, as activists challenged and reshaped the moral and legal landscape of American society through protest, legislation, and civic engagement.

Skepticism and moral relativism are powerful tools for freedom. But at the same time, the skeptical posture can very much be destructive or tyrannical. If facts and values cannot ever be true, couldn’t we treat ethics and science as matters of personal opinion? What if truth is more a question of power than of argumentation? Answering yes to these two questions was the central moral thesis of Friedrich Nietzsche, the first postmodern reactionary.

Nietzsche’s rebellion against democracy and facts

Living at the beginning of modernity in mid-19th century Germany, the flagrantly profane Nietzsche realized sooner than almost anyone that the West was facing a crisis of nihilism now that Christianity’s truth claims had been disproved through Biblical scholarship, the research of Charles Darwin, and the philosophizing of David Hume and Immanuel Kant.

“God is dead,” Nietzsche proclaimed, but now that Christianity had been factually and philosophically deconstructed, the ethical and factual order it had created would still remain, but in a permanently damaged state. He was correct.

Humanity needed to find a new basis for meaning, Nietzsche urged, since the West’s former one had been so thoroughly destroyed. But that never happened for many people, particularly in the United States where a large cadre of highly professionalized fundamentalist churches has kept the old superstitions very much in the public mind.

According to a Gallup poll from last year, 37 percent of Americans believe that humans were divinely created in our current form rather than evolving. This absurd viewpoint has been the plurality American perspective since Gallup began asking the question in 1982. In 2021 Ipsos found that 36 percent of Americans believe in ghosts or spirits.

People with these false beliefs know that they are untrue, however—especially within the political realm. As the Washington Post’s Philip Bump has noted, Republicans’ opinions about the economy do not correspond at all to its actual state. Irrespective of what’s happening, they think it’s great when a Republican is the president and terrible when a Democrat is in the White House.

The massive bias that Republicans exhibit when asked about politics or the economy derives from fundamentalist religion, which has groomed them for decades to willfully push aside inconvenient truths. As the late Latter-day Saint leader Boyd K. Packer once put it: “There is a temptation for the writer or the teacher of Church history to want to tell everything, whether it is worthy or faith promoting or not. [...] Some things that are true are not very useful.”

Evangelical Christian apologist William Lane Craig frequently emphasizes the same point in a different way, arguing that faith is more important than evidence or sound argumentation when it comes to theology. As he wrote in his book Reasonable Faith: “the role of rational argumentation in knowing Christianity to be true is the role of a servant. A person knows Christianity is true because the Holy Spirit tells him it is true, and while argument and evidence can be used to support this conclusion, they cannot legitimately overrule it.”

The crisis of meaning in which we are currently living is the product of far-right political and religious movements agreeing with Nietzsche that truth is relative. But rather than making this realization a means to promote civic engagement, they are using it as a tool to manipulate the masses into voting for an overthrowing of democracy itself.

The Apocalypse imagined by John the Revelator is never going to happen; but the Apocalypse of Don is very much underway.

Fred Nietzsche, noon to three on weekdays

No one reads philosophy except for loser Substack bloggers like yours truly, but to the extent Nietzsche is read by anyone else today, it’s mostly by angst-ridden teenagers pissed at mom for not letting them wear a Satan shirt to church. He’s often compared to Ayn Rand in his virulent atheism and hatred for altruism, but probably the more apt comparison is to Rush Limbaugh, the bloated asshole who turned right-wing talk radio into a malignant tumor in the early 1990s.

Fred Nietzsche was a much better stylist than Rush of course, but both figures had the same acerbic hatred of democracy, women, and having to prove their viewpoints. “That which needs to be proved cannot be worth much!” Nietzsche screams at one point in his Twilight of the Idols.

Unlike Limbaugh, some of Nietzsche’s ideas are original and somewhat profound, but the level of argumentation he put into them is reminiscent of the absurd debates that right-wing YouTubers are endlessly seeking with college sophomores.

While Limbaugh was almost certainly an atheist, during his life he never copped to it. Nietzsche, meanwhile, reveled in shitting in the Christian punchbowl, absolutely shocking even the people who agreed with him about religion. In fact, Nietzsche’s anti-Christian iconoclasm made it so that many of his contemporaries could not see his fundamental authoritarianism. For this reason, even today, some French post-structuralists—who’ve only skimmed Nietzsche in slices—falsely insist that he’s a secret shitlib.

Actually read Nietzsche after his early libertarian phase, however, and you’ll have no doubt that Fred Neech was Limbaugh avant la lettre; his German is teeming with peevish asides, petty nicknames, and ancient grudges. And just like Rush, Fred was obsessed with people engaging in “decadent” behavior. Read his physiognomy rants long enough and you half-expect him to start going off on “Woke Neo-Marxists.”

Like his successor, Nietzsche was fond of making statements rather than arguments, always insisting that no one could understand his absolute brilliance except his fans—who, naturally, were just as amazing and intelligent. Hyperboreans were the original dittoheads.

The one key difference? Rush at least pretended to care about Joe Sixpack. Nietzsche said he deserved slavery.

But as Limbaugh’s corpse rots next to Yahweh, his reactionary successors like Peter Thiel have eagerly moved into Fred’s slot. (I’ll have much more about this in part 2 of this essay so please subscribe if you haven’t already.)

Nietzsche contra wokeness

Reactionaries have always been known to hate the same people—professors, pundits, pornographers, and others—but one thing they’re less famous for is their hatred of facts. Republican presidents like Nixon and Reagan turned deception into an art form, but even their falsehoods were quaint compared to what was coming.

Perhaps no one has understood this point better than the comedian Stephen Colbert who invented the term “truthiness” to denote Republicans’ belief that their ideas were true because they believed them, not because they could be proven.

It was a perfect satirization of the dynamic uncovered in 2004 by the journalist Ron Suskind who recounted an anonymous official in the George W. Bush White House who argued that while liberals and every else lived in the “reality based community,” Republicans created their own reality:

“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality,’ Suskind wrote.

“‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore {…} We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’”

To Nietzsche, the death of God was an opportunity to return to an older moral tradition he called “master morality,” in which powerful people did what they wanted and thus lived in accordance with nature, just like animals. When bears need to shit, they shit right there. And when they want to steal, they fucking steal.

Humanity, Nietzsche argued, didn’t just need to go “beyond good and evil” but to transcend the concepts of true and false—through sheer willpower.

This is the way things used to be, Nietzsche said, but Judaism and Christianity had overthrown the old ways by foisting a “slave morality” onto the world which was more concerned with resolving the grievances of lower-class people, thereby fundamentally weakening humanity. This “transvaluation of values” turned freedom from a tool of the superior into a prison of democratic civil rights, shackling the rich and powerful from Saving Humanity’s Future!!?!

With God dead and buried, all that remained was the empty husk of Christianity’s SICKENINGLY WOKE moral system which pushed the “deadly poison” of equality, Nietzsche argued. “Never make unequal things equal,” he raved in Twilight of the Idols.

He got more detailed in Beyond Good and Evil:

The democratic movement has come into the inheritance of the Christian movement. But the fact is that its tempo is still much too slow and drowsy for the impatient, [...] the increasingly open snarling fangs of the anarchist hounds who now swarm through the alleys of European culture, apparently in contrast to the peacefully industrious democrats and ideologues of the revolution, even more to the foolish pseudo-philosophers and those ecstatic about brotherhood, who call themselves socialists and want a “free society.”

But in reality, these anarchists are at one with all of them in their fundamental and instinctive hostility to [...] a justice which punishes (as if it were a violation of the weaker people, a wrong against the necessary consequence of all earlier society); and equally at one in the religion of pity, of sympathy, wherever there is mere feeling, living, and suffering (right down to the animals, right up to “God:” — the excessive outpouring of “pity with God” belongs to a democratic age -); at one collectively in their cries for and impatience in their pity, in their deadly hatred for suffering generally, in their almost feminine inability to stand there as spectators, to let suffering happen.

Christianity wasn’t Nietzsche’s real enemy

While Nietzsche’s rants against Christianity as weak and destructive are famous worldwide, if you read him more closely, it becomes obvious that his actual quarrel was with Christians and Jews who had brought the slave morality into their faith through the ideas of ancient Greek philosophers, and in the process destroyed the “aristocratic value equation” which they had inherited from the Romans.

In his essay On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche stated that Hellenized Jewish priests had corrupted the original life-affirming and aristocratic belief system of the Hebrew Bible in which God was both good and evil—and also the embodiment of the Jewish people’s will to power. Under priestly pens, the flagrantly amoral Yahweh was transmogrified from a divine Übermensch into a “life-denying” psychological defense mechanism to preserve Jewish identity in the face of persecution.

Despite his endless tirades against Jews and Christians, Nietzsche’s real enemy was Socrates, whom he saw as a physically deformed, morally ugly disruptor who sought to dismantle natural aristocracy and replace it with an endless bullshit session, where weakness was tolerated instead of violently suppressed.

As he states in his essay “The Problem of Socrates,” Nietzsche viewed the ancient Greek philosopher as the original propagator of slave morality:

Before Socrates, the dialectical manner was repudiated in good society: it was regarded as a form of bad manners, one was compromised by it. Young people were warned against it. And all such presentation of one’s reasons was regarded with mistrust. Honest things, like honest men, do not carry their reasons exposed in this fashion. It is indecent to display all one’s goods. What has first to have itself proved is of little value. Wherever authority is still part of accepted usage and one does not ‘give reasons’ but commands, the dialectician is a kind of buffoon: he is laughed at, he is not taken seriously.

Socrates was the buffoon who got himself taken seriously: What was really happening when that happened? [...]

Dialectics can be only a last-ditch weapon in the hands of those who have no other weapon left. One must have to enforce one’s rights: otherwise one makes no use of it. That is why the Jews were dialecticians. (“The Problem of Socrates,” R.J. Hollingdale translation)

Nietzsche developed this argument even further in his final composed book, The Antichrist, explicitly stating that religious beliefs were positive, and that the real problem with Christianity and Judaism was that they had turned God into a wimp:

A nation that still believes in itself holds fast to its own god. In him it does honour to the conditions which enable it to survive, to its virtues—it projects its joy in itself, its feeling of power, into a being to whom one may offer thanks. He who is rich will give of his riches; a proud people need a god to whom they can make sacrifices.... Religion, within these limits, is a form of gratitude. A man is grateful for his own existence: to that end he needs a god.—Such a god must be able to work both benefits and injuries; he must be able to play either friend or foe—he is wondered at for the good he does as well as for the evil he does. But the castration, against all nature, of such a god, making him a god of goodness alone, would be contrary to human inclination.

Mankind has just as much need for an evil god as for a good god; it doesn’t have to thank mere tolerance and humanitarianism for its own existence.... What would be the value of a god who knew nothing of anger, revenge, envy, scorn, cunning, violence? who had perhaps never experienced the rapturous ardeurs of victory and of destruction? No one would understand such a god: why should any one want him?

True enough, when a nation is on the downward path, when it feels its belief in its own future, its hope of freedom slipping from it, when it begins to see submission as a first necessity and the virtues of submission as measures of self-preservation, then it must overhaul its god. He then becomes a hypocrite, timorous and demure; he counsels “peace of soul,” hate-no-more, leniency, “love” of friend and foe. He moralizes endlessly; he creeps into every private virtue; he becomes the god of every man; he becomes a private citizen, a cosmopolitan.... Formerly he represented a people, the strength of a people, everything aggressive and thirsty for power in the soul of a people; now he is simply the good god.... The truth is that there is no other alternative for gods: either they are the will to power—in which case they are national gods—or incapacity for power—in which case they have to be good.’ (The Antichrist, Section 16, H.L. Mencken translation)

The greatest crime of Christianity, Nietzsche believed, was that it was no longer willing to independently elevate superior people from the masses. Whereas the imperial Christianity of Constantine flagrantly imposed its will and never even thought about democracy, modernized Christians had become flaccid and weak, reveling in a morass of constant debate in which nothing Great was ever accomplished. Society had devolved into mindless rule-following, a complete surrender to what he called the Apollo instinct, after the Greek god he insisted was the inspiration of art that was disciplined and orderly, in contrast to Dionysus, whose style he claimed was always chaotic and unconventional.

It’s a hilarious irony that while The Antichrist’s title will surely lead to it being banned by some Floridian piece of shit, within the book, Nietzsche actually shifted his philosophical focus away from explicit anti-Christianity to trying to reclaim Jesus from the woke mob.

Subtlety was never Nietzsche’s shtick, but the German title of the book, Der Antichrist, also means The Anti-Christian. Jesus, he argued in the text, wasn’t such a bad guy compared to Paul the Apostle, the simpering codswallop who turned Christ from a Jewish Buddha into a feminized soy boy. Nietzsche’s Antichrist thus wasn’t some mythical figure from John the Revelator’s shroom hallucinations, he was the Übermensch, the guy who is gonna set humanity free from slave morality and the woke mind virus.

Nietzschean Christian Nationalism?

If you’ve made it this far into this essay, rest assured that I do not want to hear about your shitty philosophy blog. Just hit the subscribe button and take your pellet.

While we’re here though, I wanted to talk about your ackchyuallying that there’s no way that today’s Christians would be so stupid as to import a totalitarian atheist ideology into a religion about a god who lets his own creations kill him. Yes, it’s fucking insane. But that’s exactly what they’ve done.

Unsurprisingly, the man behind the curtain is one of those French post-structuralists, a guy named René Girard, who, instead of trying to transform Nietzsche’s ideas into Woke Neo-Marxism, flagrantly ripped them off to create a grotesquely disfigured apologetic that actually undermines core Christian doctrines.

Girard’s intellectual theft is so brazen that it’s actually funny. Nietzsche’s “ressentiment” became the Frenchman’s “mimetic desire” which could only be resolved through will to power “the scapegoat mechanism.” The only difference was that Jesus wasn’t a worthless sissy that the Antichrist Übermensch would totally bodyslam into oblivion. Instead, he was the ultimate sacrifice, something so obvious that anyone could perceive it—after enough tokes on the sacramental bong.

According to Girard, the stories of Jesus’s sacrifice were foretold throughout all human myths, almost as if Yahweh had pulled himself up by his decayed bootstraps and started leaving little National Treasure clues inside of every religion—without any of their scholars noticing it. Nietzsche thought Jewish priests were clever and powerful in rewriting their religion, but he had it all wrong. It turns out God was rewriting everyone else’s religion to prove Christianity!

It’s absolutely perfect that the way Girard “proved” this thesis was by using Nietzsche’s same low-effort scholarship. For Nietzsche, all of humanity’s motivations and history could be perceived perfectly just from reading the Bible and some ancient Greeks and Romans. He was so proud of his very limited technique that he dedicated an entire book to his great discovery, “the Genealogy of Morality.” Besides ignoring all the ancient Egyptian traditions, Shintoism, Confucianism, and most of Hinduism, Nietzsche didn’t seem to have read much of anything how Zoroastrianism seems to have been the originator of the mind-body duality that he hated so much in Christianity and in Plato. Nor did he notice that the Greek Sophists whom he loved were almost entirely pro-democracy, even as they reveled in their moral relativism.

Just as Nietzsche claimed to true insight into all cultures while holed up under the covers with his Bible, Girard claimed that all religions had “scapegoat mechanisms” that pre-figured the sacrifice of Jesus.

This is bullshit. There’s exactly one that does. And it’s Judaism which literally had a scapegoat sacrifice offering in which a priest let a male goat wander off into the desert to die for the sins of the people. Hilariously, Girard seems to believe that he thought of this parallel himself rather than it being a bog-standard Christian apologetic argument. Don’t believe me? Google it. There are millions of results for this stuff. And of course, none of the Christians bother to ask Jewish people what they think of the idea that their religion is ackchyually just the pre-game for Jesus. Hint: It’s pretty similar to what Christians think about their religion being labeled as a prophecy of Mohamed.

Needless to say, just like Nietzsche, Girard didn’t bother to learn anything about ancient Egyptians, Shintos, Confucians, and Hindus. Had he done so, he’d have learned that none of them engaged in human sacrifice or ritualized murders of “scapegoats” or other animals.

Girard’s theories and his fake anthropology are totally absurd. His ideas are based on reading fiction rather than experimentation. But it all makes sense when you remember the desperation that smart Christians have been wallowing in for two centuries. It’s obvious to everyone, including them, that the Bible’s factual claims are false. Moses didn’t exist. Yahweh had a wife named Asherah. And the earliest Christians thought Jesus was just a really great guy.

Why did he do it? Because this is all reactionary Christians can do unless they want to admit the obvious: The Bible has some great moral teachings in it—alongside a bunch of fables and horribly immoral stories like the prophet Jephthah who killed his daughter for God. Lots of Christians have admitted the truth and moved on. They still go to church. They still pray. But they don’t cling to obvious nonsense.

To Nietzsche and Girard though, this is the exact kind of Christian they don’t want: someone who thinks for herself and values compassion. The filching Frenchman did what he did not because he necessarily believed that Christianity’s factual claims were true, but because he believed its theology was unique in creating a social order which could resolve disputes and create hierarchy that would be stable in the long term. In this way, he reconciled the Nietzschean Will to Power and post-structuralism with the public face of Christianity.

Whether Christianity is fake or not is immaterial. It’s true because Girard sees it as psychologically and politically necessary to end the chaos supposedly brought upon by ressentiment mimetic desire.

Since Nietzsche was not actually opposed to religion, superficially reconciling his ideas with authoritarian Christianity was far less difficult than it may have seemed. All it took was a little carving up and dumbing down. Girard wasn’t an anthropologist, he was a necromancer.

Your obedience is what reactionary Christians want. They don’t care about truth. They don’t even believe it exists. The only thing that matters is that you submit to them as they shamble through their intellectual remains, sucking the bones of the man who desecrated their Christ. Too cowardly and lazy to think anew, they have grafted the head of an atheist onto the corpse of a god.