You Never Left the Room

A word about the young men they're recruiting. I was handed the same trap once, from the other side.

Jun 18, 2026

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Some of you have known my voice since the summer of 2020, when I stood against the leftist mob that formed after George Floyd’s death. I was standing against that mob long before anyone was listening, for most of my adult life. And when this new movement on the right first stirred, I named it early, and the men I had labored beside to defang the left now called me crazy for it. Far be it from me that my voice remain silent now.

Several of you have asked me to respond to a particular post and the men behind it. I’m not going to. Not because I fear the argument, but because a debate is the one thing they cannot lose. Controversy is how they eat. Put my name beside theirs, and I’ve fed them whatever I say.

I’d rather talk about the men they are actually reaching. Not the ones whose names trend, but the nineteen- and twenty-five-year-olds who found these voices months ago and felt, for the first time, that someone had named what they were carrying.

These men start with something true. A young white man today is told to apologize for things he never did. His color gets read as an original sin. His manhood is a defect, his faith a bigotry to be managed. He watches courtrooms, and corporations size him up as guilty on arrival. This contempt is no figment; anyone who swears it doesn’t exist is lying. I understand the relief of finally hearing it named.

But I am not naming it from across the room. To some degree, you can sum up the past five years they’ve endured in a simple phrase: “Welcome to my side of the street.”

The offer these young men received came to me first, years ago, from the other side. As a black man in America, I never had to hunt for the victim story. It was the air in every room I came up in. At the holiday table, everyone understood the rule before anyone spoke it, and I knew which side I was supposed to take. At the barbershop, the talk drifted from sports to politics and landed, every time, on some version of, “You know how they are.” Nobody had to say who they meant; they always meant white people. The same lesson came in debates on public policy, and that ran in one direction only: the reflex that read crime as a wound of racism and the courts as one more machine white men built to keep a black man down. Sadly, the same impulse reached the church basement, too, which should have known better.

I knew that script cold because everyone around me was reciting it, and reciting it back was the easiest way to belong. I could have let my skin color do my thinking and never lacked for an amen. Instead, I turned it down. Refusing cost me what conforming never would, and the steepest part of that bill came due among my own: Uncle Tom, Jiggaboo, sellout, race traitor, the black face of white supremacy, and more that I wouldn’t dare put in print.

So I know this machine from the inside. What these men are selling is not a new animal. Mine came from the barbershop and the family table; theirs comes through a screen, and only the classroom has changed. It starts the same way, with talk that finally puts into words what a man has been feeling on the inside but is afraid to say out loud. But grievance is a bottomless pit. You cannot fill it. You only feed it. And feeding it means the targets must stay fresh, and the anger has got to stay hot. So the story darkens. The excuses multiply, the enemy list keeps taking in new names, and a movement that opened by naming real wounds ends up shrugging at Nazism because a grievance that ever stopped escalating would have to admit it was never hunting justice. None of that is hypothetical. Earlier this month, a publisher of Hitler’s speeches kept a booth at one of the movement’s largest conferences. When it was named for what it was, the men running it went on their own podcast and would not call it evil. They apologized only for a flyer handed out against the rules.

That is what these men have done. They took a true wound and handed back the lie I’d long refused. The catechism that called the white man history’s villain now calls him its victim. The same altar, a different idol kneeling on it. The young man never walked out of the room. He was only turned to face the other wall.

This is where they will say I have overshot, so let me be careful. Loving one’s own is not the sin. A man is right to love his family before strangers and his own people with gratitude, and Scripture tells him to provide for his household first. That instinct was not planted by the fall; it was planted by God. When these men speak of natural affection, for a moment, they are standing on real ground. The lie is in what follows. A love kept under God is a gift. The same love, lifted to the highest place, is the oldest idol there is. C.S. Lewis drew the line cleanly: love of one’s own people is good, right up until it hardens into pride and asks to be worshipped, and the moment it does, it turns against the very God who gave it. That is the line these men crossed. They took an affection made to sit under heaven and set it on the throne until a man’s blood decides his worth and the brother across the color line becomes the enemy. The young man was never asked to stop loving his people. He was taught, somewhere along the way, to kneel before them.

Here is the tell. These teachers will rage, rightly, at the man who preys on a child. Ask them to say just as plainly that the man who worships his own race is wicked too, and the room goes quiet. They cannot finish that sentence because they have made blood the highest thing, and once a man’s blood is his god, he has given up the only ground from which racial pride can be judged. A teacher who names one evil but goes silent at its mirror image is not protecting anyone. He is protecting an idol.

Try raising that challenge with them and watch what comes back. Not an argument, a verdict. You’re effeminate or gay, or soft, or secretly a coward, and probably halfway to hell for asking. The question becomes the symptom and disagreement the one sin they cannot forgive. That should stop any thinking man, because the faith they claim to defend has never been afraid of a question. Paul rebuked Peter to his face.

Notice, too, which way the words have been bent. Scripture calls gentleness and self-control the fruit of the Spirit; they call it effeminacy. Run that standard to its conclusion. The Christ of the Gospels called himself gentle and lowly in heart, and Paul wept over his churches like a nursing mother. By their own standard, their Savior comes out soft. An insult that would shame the Lord it claims to serve did not come from his house.

An older voice fought this war with better weapons than a podcast. “We are not waging war according to the flesh,” he wrote. “We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:3-5). Take every thought captive. He grants no exception for the flattering one a man keeps about his own kind, and I had to take mine captive, too. The frame is a stronghold, and the order is to tear it down, not to redecorate it and move in.

Here is what no grievance, left or right, can give a man. At the cross, the oldest ethnic hatred on earth was put to death. “For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility... that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace” (Ephesians 2:14-15). The blood that bought him bought a people out of every tribe and tongue, and made them brothers across the very lines these men would have him die defending. That is a belonging deeper than blood. It does not erase his manhood or the real wrongs done to him. It sets all of it under something that will not rot.

Over the decades, I have watched men reach the end of this road on both sides of it. It does not stop at posts and grievances. More than once, it has ended in blood, in a young man who took the rhetoric more literally than his teachers claimed to have meant it, and a manifesto reciting these same grievances in nearly the same order. The men who sell it disown the ending. Yet, the ending keeps arriving.

These men ask what it takes to be a man again. Good question, bad answer. A man is not measured by how loudly he names his tribe’s enemies. The strongest man on the field takes the blow from the left for refusing its lies and from the right for refusing its lies, and he bows to neither, because his knee is already bent before someone higher than any flag. I know what that costs, and I know there is no other ground worth standing on. It is the only ground the cross has ever held.

Virgil Walker

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