☠️ THE POISONERS OF YOUTH

From Hitler’s Gustloff to MAGA’s Kirk, propaganda thrives by poisoning the young — and regimes sanctify its hustlers in death.

History gives us a chilling precedent for Charlie Kirk’s end: Wilhelm Gustloff, the Nazi functionary assassinated in 1936 by David Frankfurter, a young Jewish student who could no longer stomach the torrent of Hitler’s propaganda. Gustloff’s mission was to saturate youth with antisemitic venom, shaping a generation into tools of the Reich — and his killing abruptly silenced one of Hitler’s most effective mouthpieces.

Charlie Kirk followed the same dark path in America nearly a century later. He was not a thinker, nor a teacher, nor a leader. He was a hustler who discovered that if you dressed up cruelty as patriotism, and marketed grievance as freedom, there was an endless appetite — and profit — in preying upon the young. His rallies, podcasts, and campus tours were not about awakening minds, but about colonizing them. He taught kids not how to aspire but how to celebrate the suffering of others; not how to reason but how to chant for domination; not how to question but how to hunt the vulnerable; not how to empathize but how to despise. He turned adolescence into a commodity, and their futures into weapons.

Both Gustloff and Kirk reveal the same core truth: authoritarianism does not endure without its propagandists. The tank and the gun are blunt instruments; the real work of sustaining tyranny is done by the hustlers who capture the imagination of the young and poison it. Gustloff did it with pamphlets and party meetings; Kirk did it with livestreams and social media. One waved the swastika, the other the MAGA flag. But the method was identical: radicalize the youth, harden them against empathy, and recruit them to serve power.

It is right to feel relief that both were assassinated, their voices finally cut off. The damage they inflicted cannot be undone, but the further rot they sought to spread has been stopped. Yet the danger does not end with their deaths. The Nazis turned Gustloff’s assassination into theater — a massive state funeral, endless propaganda, even a cruise ship named after him, all designed to recast a hustler of hate as a martyr of the Reich. Today, the American right is following the same script. Already Kirk’s corruption is being scrubbed, his career polished, his hatred varnished into heroism. They will try to turn a cynical grifter into a saint.

That is the lie we must resist most fiercely. Gustloff was not a martyr; he was a propagandist who poisoned the future. Kirk was not a patriot; he was a salesman of cruelty. Their silencing is not tragedy but reprieve. What would be tragic is if we let their movements canonize them — and in doing so, hand their poison to yet another generation.

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