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Glass Empires investigates the architects of constitutional rot. Free subscribers receive every article. Devoted readers who became patrons sponsored today’s work. Across the country, American children are learning to cheer executions as an act of faith.
From a church pageant to a military academy board, the movement is drilling a generation for holy war, and 39 percent of Americans already believe the end is near.
Artwork: Pablo Picasso, Massacre in Korea, 1951, oil on plywood. Picasso divides unarmed civilians from anonymous executioners, reducing violence to an organized procedure. The composition exposes how political authority turns dehumanizing classification into sanctioned killing. Republican organizers, religious leaders, and allied institutions now rehearse a civilian war script. Political speakers identify enemies, while church leaders teach children to celebrate their destruction. Erika Kirk, Turning Point USA’s chief executive and founder’s widow, described an imagined aggressor. She named “a trans, gender confused person,” “a Muslim,” or “whoever else” spitting and cursing. Kirk instructed followers to remain “happy warriors.” By July 13, 2026, users had circulated the clip nationwide. Two weeks earlier, children gathered at Mt. Olivet Baptist Church in Lexington, Kentucky. Men calling themselves “Commandos for Christ” carried air rifles toward a figure representing the Devil. Pastor Dewayne Walker led the chant: “Take him out. Blow him up.” Performers simulated gunfire while children cheered. Kirk teaches followers which identities they should interpret as threatening. Walker teaches children to support violence after religious authorities condemn a target. Both leaders follow the same sequence by assigning an enemy before directing an approved response. The comparison requires specifics, and the Army provides them. Its Training and Doctrine Command governs Basic Combat Training, a ten-week course that turns volunteers into disciplined soldiers through marksmanship, fitness, and combat drills. Drill sergeants control every hour and reward conformity with belonging. Three elements define the course: enemy identification, emotional discipline, and rehearsed destruction under command. The Army aims these skills at lawful defense under civilian control and codified rules of engagement. The Republican movement aims the same skills at domestic minorities, congregations, and children. The movement creates the danger by transferring the method, not the pedagogy. Dispersed movements coordinate without common orders. Kirk assigns minority identities to imagined aggression. Walker leads children to endorse destruction after he names the enemy. Neundorf and colleagues define indoctrination as regime-led socialization through controlled institutions. Authorities produce indoctrination when they dominate education and media and teach one coherent worldview through those channels. Both episodes fall short of that standard because each precedes government control. An assassin killed Erika Kirk’s husband Charlie at a Turning Point event on September 10, 2025, and the board named her chief executive eight days later. She converts that single attack into a standing forecast against entire minority groups. In March 2026, Trump appointed her to the Air Force Academy Board of Visitors, the seat her husband held before his death: a woman who teaches followers to expect persecution now helps oversee officer formation. Turning Point USA reported $85 million in revenue for the fiscal year ending June 2024. Fortune counted roughly 3,350 chapters — 850 college and 2,500 high school — plus 700,000 members and 500,000 donors, and the affiliated endowment grew from $7.2 million in 2020 to $64.3 million in 2024. Kirk instructs a national student body, not a fringe audience. Kirk’s viral statement deserves full quotation: “I don’t care if it’s a trans, gender confused person, if it’s a muslim, if it’s whoever else that’s standing in front of you that’s spitting on you, cussing at you, throwing your buttons everywhere – you are what, you are a happy warrior, that is what you are.” Kirk names the identities before the aggression, and she converts social categories into danger signals. She cites no documented encounter, so she supplies invented evidence. No one can correct the scene, because no records, witnesses, or footage test a future that never happened. Through that invented scene, Kirk hands followers a template before any real contact with targeted communities occurs. She casts followers as victims of spitting and cursing before any encounter, and a speaker who convinces a group of coming attacks authorizes preemptive hostility. With “happy warrior,” Kirk imposes emotional discipline and excludes hesitation from the approved posture. She presents anticipated hostility as confirmation of righteousness. Supporters gain standing by displaying cheerfulness during conflict she has defined as persecution. Kirk supplies the training’s mental half through rhetoric, and the Lexington sanctuary supplies the physical half. Mt. Olivet’s Vacation Bible School conducts the behavioral rehearsal. Participants enact authorized punishment before a child audience. News outlets circulated the Lexington footage nationally by June 29, 2026, and Walker’s church repeats the rehearsal every year. Walker called the skit a 32-year tradition and described the intended message as spiritual warfare. Across three decades, the church converted a single skit into recurring curriculum, and each cohort of children learns the same progression from classification to destruction. Walker assigned each participant a distinct function: he classified the enemy and issued the fire command, children supplied collective authorization through repetition, and armed adults enacted destruction while the congregation rewarded obedience. He later called the prop a “gospel gun” and described the scene as “simply killing the devil.” Walker linked theological authority to elimination language, delegated force, and communal approval. The stated target remained a religious symbol, not a human population. Psychologist Albert Bandura documented how ordinary people authorize harm through euphemistic labeling and moral justification. Walker executed both maneuvers: he renamed a rifle a “gospel gun” and framed simulated execution as devil-killing. Bandura showed how a person uses that shift to disable self-censure before any harmful act. Child psychologists have measured what watching a staged killing does to a young mind. Building on that concern, the American Academy of Pediatrics extended Bandura’s finding that children copy the violence adults perform before an audience. From decades of studies, the Academy documented four measurable outcomes in children exposed to simulated killing. Exposed children grow desensitized to suffering, lose empathy for the wounded, and turn aggressive toward other children. They also misjudge the ordinary world as lethally dangerous. Realistic violence worsens each outcome, and adult praise worsens it further. Pastor Dewayne Walker’s skit met every one of those conditions. Costumed adults carried real air rifles and marched a cowering victim down the aisle toward waiting children. Three weapons fired for ten seconds while the victim convulsed on the floor. The congregation cheered each shot and applauded the children who chanted the killing. The movement’s defenders call the scenes hyperbole. Greitens’ campaign manager named the raid symbolic. Walker blamed “extreme measures in this generation,” apologized, and declined further comment. Bandura anticipated the excuse: people deploy humor, metaphor, and theological framing to disengage morally. Defenders confirm the process rather than excuse the content. Readers should reject false equivalence and weigh transferability. Armies drill recruits on silhouettes before soldiers face living targets. Leaders who control evil’s definition can assign human opponents to the condemned position. Terrorism scholars Mia Bloom and John Horgan named this exact sequence. Studying the children ISIS calls “cubs of the caliphate,” they documented a fixed progression. Recruiters teach children to identify the enemy, dress them as adult fighters, and reward them with parental approval. Each child advances from watching staged violence to performing the violence, and belongs more deeply at every stage. The Kentucky children fired paintball rifles at a costumed symbol, not a bound prisoner. That difference holds. The methods do not differ: both classify an enemy, rehearse the killing before children, and reward the child who wants the kill. Greitens proved the transfer in 2022. The Missouri Senate candidate released a June 20 video: shotgun in hand, men in tactical gear beside him, announcing, “Today, we’re going RINO hunting.” He sold a “RINO hunting permit” with “no bagging limit, no tagging limit,” reworked from his 2016 “ISIS Hunting Permit.” Facebook removed the video after one million views. Greitens hunted fellow Republicans; militia members target the government. The Southern Poverty Law Center counted 52 active militias in 2023 and 92 in 2021, before prosecutors charged more than 1,200 January 6 participants. The survivors fractured into local units that rebrand as “minutemen” and train in paramilitary tactics. After Hurricane Helene struck in October 2024, armed groups reached western North Carolina, claimed disaster relief, and recruited. These militias completed the sequence: enemy identification, emotional discipline, and armed operations under command. Kirk and Walker teach students and children. The paramilitary wing trains adults who already believe. The movement builds none of this by accident. Turning Point describes the endowment as part of a “50-100 year plan” to reach generation after generation of young Americans. SPLC researchers likewise found extremist organizations building political power at the local level, including campaigns lobbying county governments to recognize militias through official resolutions. The movement plans in decades while critics respond to single viral clips. The movement’s training points toward a stated goal, and the movement’s most powerful figure has named the goal. Donald Trump opened his 2024 campaign at Waco, Texas, in March 2023. He told the crowd, “2024 is the final battle,” framed the stakes as surrender to “demonic forces” or total victory, and declared, “I am your retribution.” The believers take the promise literally and prepare. Late last week, at physical therapy, I overheard a MAGA supporter describe his family’s plans for biblical Armageddon. The family stockpiles weapons, food, water, medicine, and emergency supplies. Many believers prepare the same way, the supporter said. God appointed Trump for this precise moment, in the supporter’s account. When the reckoning comes, the supporter said, his family “will do what is required.” The supporter expected mass destruction within his lifetime and prepared his family accordingly. Believers in a coming apocalypse fill the country. Pew Research Center surveyed 10,156 adults in April 2022: 39 percent of adults and 63 percent of evangelical Protestants believe humanity lives in the end times, and 92 percent of evangelicals expect Jesus’ return to Earth. The man beside me at physical therapy belongs to a majority within his tradition. The same believers accept the weapons. In 2023, PRRI found 23 percent of Americans agreeing that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence” to save the country, up from 15 percent in 2021, including one-third of Republicans and 41 percent of party members who view Trump favorably. Fifty-two percent of the party affirmed God intended America as a promised land for European Christians. Officials now enforce movement doctrine through public institutions. Trump pardoned nearly 1,600 January 6 defendants and placed a persecution instructor on a military academy’s oversight board. William Null, tried and acquitted in the plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, filed in November 2025 to run for governor as a Republican. Lawmakers already wrote statutes against armed paramilitary training. All 50 states prohibit private paramilitary activity, 25 states criminalize teaching or practicing with weapons for civil disorder, and Congress made the conduct a federal felony under 18 U.S.C. 231, carrying five years in prison. In 2018, Georgetown’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy won court orders against 23 Charlottesville defendants that barred named militias from returning armed. Prosecutors who file these charges win convictions. The statutes reach the movement’s armed wing, and state attorneys general can invoke the laws today. Prosecutors cut militia ranks nearly in half after January 6. Americans have defeated this movement’s violence before, and they hold the same tools now: prosecution, exposure, and the vote. Prevention works alongside prosecution. Psychologists Thomas Pettigrew and Linda Tropp tested Gordon Allport’s contact hypothesis across 515 studies and more than 250,000 participants in 38 nations. They found that contact between opposing groups reliably lowers prejudice, and that the effect runs through reduced anxiety and greater empathy. The strongest results follow Allport’s conditions: equal status, shared goals, and cooperation toward them. Kirk’s followers fear “a trans person” or “a Muslim” in the abstract, yet rarely fear the specific coworker beside them or the cousin at their table. The work continues. Sources
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