John Solomon reached out to the New Jersey DMV software company that was blamed for a ‘software glitch’ that allowed over 6,600 non-citizens on the voter rolls, and they told him there . . .

If you missed Shmuel Klatzkin’s July 18 American Spectator essay, “The Nazis and the Mullahs,” please follow the link and take a moment to read it. It’s well worth your time. In our present historical moment, when leftists minimize the evil of the Iranian regime, he reminds us, in chapter and verse, of the mullahs’ historical alignment with the definitive evil of modern history. This is particularly important when our new generation of democratic socialists align themselves with radical Islam, while tossing the “nazi” label at everyone they disagree with — even, absurdly, at Israel. It’s likely not incidental that the unlamented Maine senate candidate Graham Platner got his Nazi tattoo while on leave in Croatia in 2007. As a one-time student of the Nazi period — I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the antecedents of the Gestapo — I was particularly struck by the essay’s accompanying illustration, a period photograph showing the notorious Grand Mufti of Jerusalem inspecting soldiers of the 13th SS division. The story behind this captured moment deserves telling, as it underscores just how deeply Nazism and Islamism were intertwined and — particularly — how much they hated Jews. Muslims were not simply aligned with Nazis. Some of them were active participants in the Holocaust itself. Which brings us to the curious history of the 13th SS Mountain Infantry Division “Handschar.” The picture used with Klatzkin’s article shows these soldiers in battle dress and wearing steel helmets. Had they been depicted in ordinary parade dress, they would have crowned their SS uniforms with a Fez, the cap associated with the Ottoman Turks, and, specifically, worn by the Ottoman gendarmes who’d once policed Bosnia and other Balkan regions during the time of Turkish rule. Nor was the division’s honorific title, “Handschar,” incidental. The term referred to a ceremonial sword carried by the Ottoman gendarmes. Casual students of Nazi history often assume that their notions of racial supremacy were rigid and built entirely based on the so-called “Aryan” race. This concept, confected of all manner of weird anthropological mumbo-jumbo, somehow conflated “Aryan,” a term with a basis in ancient India and Persia, with a race of blond, blue-eyed, Nordic supermen. The term never quite worked even in the realms of Nazi fantasy. Hitler was short and dark-haired while Goebbels was so diminutive that his enemies referred to him as the “Giftzwerg,” or “poison dwarf.” None of these figures, not even Himmler, the head of the SS, much resembled the Nazi racial fantasy. Over time, this scarcely mattered, since the concept itself proved almost infinitely malleable. At its most absurd outer boundary, Germany’s Japanese allies were redefined as “yellow Aryans.” When mounting casualties called for more widespread recruiting, all manner of compromises emerged in the name of drawing soldiers from the various subjugated populations. The SS itself ended the war as a veritable foreign legion; for example, some of the final defenders of Berlin in 1945 were French SS members. But the 13th SS belonged to something other than desperation, a fantasy concocted of a different kind of racialist absurdity. Himmler, ever given to weird obsessions, decided that the SS needed a Muslim division. Untangling his racialist justification for all this is too tedious and complicated for a short essay, but he soon fixed upon the Bosnian community as the perfect source, Muslims who’d demonstrated good fighting qualities in the First World War and who could be used to suppress the Serbs of Tito’s communist partisan army. Not all Bosnians bought into this, and recruiting didn’t proceed smoothly, but, eventually, enough Muslims volunteered to allow a division of mountain infantry to be formed. Importantly, the impetus to create a Muslim SS unit preceded the later desperate attempts to compensate for Germany’s massive losses in Russia, North Africa, Italy, and Western Europe. The placement of the 13th SS in the list of SS divisions is instructive. Only two of the first 12 SS divisions were foreign, the 5th SS Panzer Division, “Wiking,” and the 6th SS Mountain Infantry Division, “Nord.” As the honorifics underscore, both were based upon “Nordic” volunteers from the Scandinavian countries, which located them firmly within the Nazis “Aryan” ideology. A military division composed largely of Bosnian Muslims was something else entirely, and only Himmler’s capacity for tedious supplication wore down Hitler’s skepticism about the idea. In the end, Himmler prevailed, only to encounter a second problem, a shortage of Bosnian volunteers. This was eventually addressed through the direct intervention of Hitler’s friend the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, living in comfortable exile in Berlin, directing anti-British, pro-Nazi propaganda at the Arab peoples of the Middle East. In the final analysis, what bound the Grand Mufti and Hitler together and what would ultimately animate many of the operations of the 13th SS was hatred for Jews. While the 13th SS did perform the expected anti-partisan operations across occupied Yugoslavia, it also perpetrated repeated atrocities aimed at the region’s Jewish population, although it also committed atrocities against non-Jews. Pushed back into Germany by the Red Army, the division eventually disintegrated, and many of its member tried to hide their misdeeds in the usual manner; by effacing their SS blood group tattoos. Only a relative handful of its members were brought to justice in war crimes trials after the war, all too painfully typical for the postwar reckoning with such criminals. One who was executed was an SS Obersturmbannfuhrer (lieutenant colonel) by the name of Imam Halim Malkoc — make what one will of the combination of “Imam” with senior SS rank. Significantly, and undoubtedly with the connivance of the Grand Mufti, large numbers of 13th SS veterans relocated to Syria and Iraq, where they joined the Arab armies attacking Israel in 1948. Killing Jews, by this time, had become part of their ideological DNA, although one suspects they were shocked to encounter Jews who fought back effectively. After 1948, the Grand Mufti went on to spread his anti-Jewish poison throughout the Middle East, his influence waning only with age and the emergence of a younger generation of his disciples in hatred. The survivors of the 13th SS, never many in number, simply blended into their various new and old homelands, ultimately disappearing except again as the “seed corn” of new hatreds. It’s likely not incidental that the unlamented Maine senate candidate Graham Platner got his Nazi tattoo while on leave in Croatia in 2007. It’s almost certainly the case that the tattoo artist knew exactly what the tattoo represented. The skull and crossbones in question wasn’t some Jolly Roger pirate symbol, but precisely the one used by the SS on cap badges and collar insignia, and this is something that no one in the former Yugoslavia would fail to understand. And it beggars belief that even a drunken Platner would have missed the message in all its assertive transgressiveness. The salient point, however, is the ongoing unwillingness of the emergent Democratic Socialists —  indeed of large swathes of the Democrat party — to acknowledge the links between present day radical Islam and its Nazi-adjacent antecedents. This is not a matter of the facile Nazi name-calling that has become a commonplace of our current political discourse. No, it’s a matter of historical fact, a documented lineage that extends from the shadow of Nazi Germany to Iran’s IRGC and every other repository of Islamist fanaticism. So, the picture of the Grand Mufti inspecting a unit of Nazi soldiers tells an important story, but the most important part of that story is that the soldiers were Muslims serving in the SS. It’s a history that deserves to be remembered in all its fullness. READ MORE from James H. McGee: Peace Process, Meet Reality The Christian Slaughter the World Ignores ‘We Have Only To Be Lucky Once’ James H. McGee is a retired nuclear security and counter-terrorism professional. His most recent novel, The Zebras from Minsk, was featured among National Review’s favorite books in 2025. His next novel, The Cathedral of Sorrows, will directly focus on the plight of Africa’s Christians. You can find The Zebras from Minsk and his previous thriller, Letter of Reprisal in paperback and Kindle editions at Amazon. The Cathedral of Sorrow will appear this fall.

No one’s really sure how long ago the blind poet sang of that famous man of “twists and turns” whose cunning has captivated the centuries since. Eratosthenes claimed that Homer lived a mere 100 years after the events he described, which, by his timeline, would make the text almost exactly 3,000 years old today. Herodotus, the famous historian, thought that idea was hogwash and posited the text couldn’t have been written before 850 B.C. But there’s a problem with even Herodotus’s date: The Greeks didn’t even have an alphabet until the 8th century B.C., which at least makes writing the thing down a bit difficult. That wasn’t really a problem for Joseph ben Matthias (a Jew from the first century A.D. who is better known as Josephus); his assertion that Greeks were rather poor writers until relatively late in their history is the reason most of us are told that Homer’s poetry began as an oral work, rather than as a written one. Modern scholars are even more stingy. Perhaps, they say, The Odyssey wasn’t written until 650 B.C. Perhaps it wasn’t even composed by Homer.  No one is saying that Nolan needed to have his star-studded cast speak ancient Greek or Beowulfian Old English, but maybe we could have elevated things just ever so slightly. Bernard Knox (writing some 30 years ago) went with the most obvious read of the situation. Homer authored The Odyssey, probably not later than 700 B.C. (given that we have archeological evidence of the story from that era), and he did so by writing the thing down — archaic language, non-chronological order, and all.  But historical quibbles over dates and the manner of dissemination aren’t as important as the fact that this tale has captivated all of us so thoroughly that we keep retelling it millennia later. Petrarch actually tried to learn Greek just so he could read it (he failed, if that makes you feel better about your own linguistic forays). If you were to read into the weeks of squabbling we’ve had over Christopher Nolan’s portrayal of the tale, you might conclude that modernity still deeply cares about a text most of us haven’t touched since 9th grade.  At this point, you’d have to live under a rock (or at the very least, spend very little of your time on the internet) not to know the litany of things wrong with Nolan’s epic remake: Helen isn’t white, a Greek soldier is played by the 118-lb Ellen Page (a woman convinced her name ought to be Elliot), and the whole text is based on Emily Wilson’s “feminist” and dumbed-down translation of the work. Nolan, the critics complain, has given in to the demands of the woke mob, and he’s ruined the ancient tale as a result. The box office, however, doesn’t seem to care. The film grossed $124.5 million domestically in its opening weekend. After all, Christopher Nolan directed the thing, and it’s nothing if not cool to watch. The average moviegoer apparently doesn’t particularly care if the armor Odysseus is wearing isn’t a precise reconstruction of what we think a Greek might have worn in 2000 B.C.  So is all the hullabaloo just overblown squabbling by purists who were already planning on hating the film anyway? Well, possibly. But the purists might have a point. One of the reasons, for instance, that Nolan’s retelling of the story rankles purists is that his screenwriters did not shy away from modern vocabulary like “mum,” “dad,” and “f–k off.” At one point in the trailer, Odysseus yells to his Greek hordes of soldiers, “Let’s go!” There are no thees, thous, or archaic vocabulary.  From Nolan’s perspective, this isn’t exactly a problem. It makes his protagonist relatable — or in the words of the director: “It might bite me on the ass, but I wanted an earthy narrative. To me it was a no-brainer.” What his decision to Americanize and modernize the language doesn’t do is honor the original art.  Homer, you see, didn’t write (or sing, if we’re adopting Josephus’s theories) in a Greek that anyone ever spoke. He pulled words from all sorts of dialects around Greece and from ancient languages nobody spoke anymore. It would be as though Stephen King sat down to write an epic tale and decided to employ Old English terms like “heort,” the more Shakespearian “methinks,” and the Scottish “dreich.”  The difference is this: Homer’s approach shrouds his tale in mystery. The reader or listener always has the sense that he doesn’t quite grasp the meaning of the story. The more time he spends attempting to understand the text, the more he learns about man’s nature, the kinds of relationships we form, and what Homer believes should be our relationship with the gods. By stripping away that sense of mystery, Nolan’s approach risks tricking his viewer into thinking he’s understood everything about the story after just a first pass — which is tragic, because the story itself is a deeply instructive one. No one is saying that Nolan needed to have his star-studded cast speak ancient Greek or Beowulfian Old English, but maybe we could have elevated things just ever so slightly to remind people that, you know, this is an epic and ancient tale, not a Marvel movie.  This is why, unfortunately, modernity can’t tell these ancient stories convincingly. We have a bad habit of stripping away mystery to try to make characters “relatable.” Odysseus wasn’t supposed to be relatable, after all, the average Greek wasn’t getting hit on by an enchantress and being offered immortality. No, Odysseus was supposed to be a hero.  The result is this: Nolan’s film is breathtaking, but, as one reviewer at the Spectator pointed out, it just lacks depth. Perhaps someone else will come along and make the definitive cinematographic retelling of the blind bard’s ancient tale; unfortunately, Nolan didn’t.  READ MORE from Aubrey Harris: A Gay Couple Wanted to Abort the Baby. Now They’re Suing His Surrogate Mom. Just Defund Planned Parenthood Already The King Is the Defender of ‘the Space for Faith.’ Here’s Why That Shouldn’t Surprise Anyone.  

Last week, conservative writer Mark Judge officially announced the first annual Anti-Communist Film Festival — October 1-4 at the Victims of Communism Museum in Washington D.C.. With open or quasi communists taking over the Democratic Party and several American blue cities and states, the festival’s timing is perfect. I know which movie would win the top prize if it had been made already — Operation Cowboy: The Assassination of John Wayne, my Day of the Jackal-style thriller about a real 1950 Stalin plot to murder John Wayne because of his success flushing out Hollywood communists. For as more genuine historical sources rip through the cobweb of leftist media lies, two commie-exposing heroes have found new respect as framed victims — Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon. To requote The Daily Wire star Matt Walsh in his recent X post, “McCarthy was right and fully justified.” But it’s not the artistry of these films that counts for Hollywood. It’s the propaganda value, even on a small audience. For over 60 years, progressive filmmakers have depicted the communist investigations as the Hollywood Holocaust, wherein fascist officials and their studio-mogul acolytes silenced and persecuted Socratic screen artists. It began subtly enough in blacklisted genius screenwriter Carl Foreman’s High Noon. The classic 1952 Western depicted ex-Marshall Gary Cooper forsaken by the townspeople he protected ahead of four outlaws coming to kill him. It was clearly Foreman’s analogy for his abandonment by his peers during the blacklist. But when the Democrats took control of Congress in Eisenhower’s second term, and as studio power waned, liberal Hollywood filmmakers and the media got their revenge. They used all their propagandic powers to demean the anti-communist patriots inside and outside the entertainment industry. This included then congressman Richard Nixon, whom they never forgave for exposing FDR State Department darling Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy. And Hollywood led the charge. Every decade since 1956, Hollywood has made at least one film about the blacklist, so the public will “never forget” the obscure time that has little bearing on their lives, or — as non-woke historians are increasingly citing — the truth. There were one and a half exceptions — the James Bond 60s, when suave capitalist superspies outclassed drab Soviet mopes, and the Reagan 80s, when the American people and even auteurs like Clint Eastwood went all in on the Evil Empire vibe. But between the two and post-Reagan, the pro-communist arts flourished, another cultural decline you can partially blame on a Bush. Here are X films most likely to play at an Anti Anti-Communist Film Festival: Storm Center (1956). Bette Davis’s All About Eve comeback didn’t last long without a major studio contract, so an indie production company was happy to get her. Bette plays a liberal librarian who defies community pressure to ban the book The Communist Dream from the library. “Liberal” was as close to commie as you could commercially get in the Cold War fifties. The Way We Were (1973). Protagonist Barbra Streisand portrays an outright outspoken commie who spends two decades trying to sway more people to the cause. She goes ape over the Hollywood blacklist, which — to give director Sidney Lumet credit — proves too much for her writer lover — later husband Robert Redford. Redford’s putdowns of Streisand save the picture (see my article here The Way They Weren’t) The Front (1976). Both director Martin Ritt and screenwriter Walter Bernstein were blacklisted, but they couldn’t make a compelling film about it. Woody Allen is a bookie who agrees to hire out his name as a “front” for blacklisted writers. Fellow comedian Zero Mostel also plays it straight as a once star comic languishing after the witch hunts. Dull stuff. The House on Carroll Street (1988). Walter Bernstein went back to the blacklist well with a conspiracy thriller and worse results. Blacklisted magazine editor Kelly McGillis uncovers a government plot to import ex-Nazi scientists to work on anti-Soviet military technology. It’s actually a smart plan depicted as the depth of depravity — Russian weaponry being a good thing to challenge the evil United States. One of the biggest bombs of the 80s and the death blow to McGillis’s career. Guilty by Suspicion (1991). Director Robert De Niro gets blacklisted and loses his career and contact with his estranged wife and son. His only hope for a comeback is in naming his pro-commie comrades to HUAC. Instead, he defiantly lets them have it at the hearing and wins back Annette Benning. Too bad De Niro today has no problem naming one name as the source of all evil — Donald Trump. Another flop. The Majestic (2001). Jim Carrey plays a blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter with amnesia. I saw the film when it came out and it must have given me amnesia because I can’t remember anything about it. Trumbo (2015). Dalton Trumbo was a mediocre screenwriter, hence the subject of a mediocre film. Bryan Cranston does a fine job playing him. In one scene, he shares half a sandwich with his young daughter to explain communism. He should have given her a quarter of the sandwich then thrown away half of it for a more accurate explanation. But it’s not the artistry of these films that counts for Hollywood. It’s the propaganda value, even on a small audience. Joseph Stalin understood the mind-influencing power of cinema, as did his two main nemeses in Hollywood, John Wayne and Ronald Reagan, which is why he wanted John Wayne dead. In my script Operation Cowboy, Stalin explains the revelation he got watching Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. “I’d spent many sleepless nights pouring over the writings of Marx and Engels — hoping to persuade more allies to my side. Yet just two hours in a darkened theater put both those philosophers to shame. Giving me the spark I needed to destroy my rivals, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev.” Let’s hope anti-communist films can undo the damage his ideology is still wreaking in America. READ MORE from Lou Aguilar: Hollywoke’s Assault on Beauty The Death of Reading Another Nail in the Hollywood Coffin: George Washington Beats ‘Supergirl’  

Utter Goodness By Audrey Lee Farthest Heaven, 120 pages, $17 A Prisoner’s Cinema By Justin Lee Passage Press, 264 pages, $30 As a child, I spent an inordinate amount of time watching survival shows. I Shouldn’t Be Alive was the one that stuck with me the most. What fascinated me about them was how much they contrasted with my own life: I could watch a convincing reenactment of some poor sod struggling for his life on the top of a mountain or the bottom of a crevasse or deep in the jungle, all from the comfort of my warm blankets, often past my bedtime (sorry, Mom and Dad). This article is from The American Spectator’s summer 2026 print magazine. Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive the magazine. My curiosity also led me to learn some not-quite-fun facts. For example, if you’re ever buried by an avalanche, the best thing you can do is to spit. You’re going to be tossed and turned every which way by the force of the snow slide. You’re going to be trapped in a small pocket with very limited air, and you’re not going to know which way is up. You won’t know which way to dig, all while knowing that if you choose wrong, you’ll suffocate. That’s why spitting is useful: gravity always works, even under the snow. In other words, to know which way is up, you need to know which way is down. To seek the light, you need to know the darkness. And if you want to know which path you ought to take, you need to know which others are available to you. One of the advantages of stories is that you can, in some terribly impoverished way, experience the lives and struggles of others. I’ve found that conservative works often fail to measure up in this regard. In their (correct) assessment that stories should seek to inspire rather than deconstruct, they’ve allowed their righteousness to blur the line between is and ought. Without mortal danger, after all, one cannot truly have life-or-death stakes. The Sound of Freedom, a critically acclaimed movie by many on the right, is the ultimate example of that. While nobody can doubt the nobility of the cause of ending child trafficking, one can certainly doubt the nobility of the characters portrayed in the movie. These are people with families and children of their own, casually embarking on a mission that could easily see them killed, or worse, on behalf of people they don’t even know. That’s heroic, but it’s also unearned. Why do these people value their lives so little in comparison to others? It’s not that one cannot come up with a compelling answer; it’s that the movie largely doesn’t try. The characters are not people as such; they’re idealized moral avatars of a cause. I don’t know many idealized moral avatars, but it seems tautological that they don’t require any further inspiration. In other words, The Sound of Freedom, like most conservative stories, was focused so much on being a conservative story, or frankly, a non-liberal story, that it lost focus on trying to be a good story. Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our summer 2026 print magazine. Two conservative short story collections, refreshingly, are a change from the usual tedium. These are Audrey Lee’s Utter Goodness (Farthest Heaven, 2026), the shorter and sweeter of the two, and Justin Lee’s (no relation, to my knowledge) A Prisoner’s Cinema (Passage Press, 2025). Beware, though: these are not age-appropriate stories, and they are not for the prudish or faint of heart. This is because they speak to the human condition in ways other conservative works simply don’t. Right-wing art often shies away from portraying life as it is. To show depravity, the thinking goes, is to endorse it. Many on the right are now thinking better of that. For example, Evie Magazine, a conservative women’s publication, recently published its “Sex Edition,” which covers exactly what you would expect. That it did so was panned by some social conservatives, but the wisdom of it was plain. The right, in essentially giving up talking about Eros beyond simple platitudes, had ceded commentary on a massive part of the human experience to the left. The results were both disastrous and predictable. Art can have many purposes: to inspire, to condemn, to illuminate. But to do anything, it first has to relate. To make people think of their lives as they ought to be, it needs to first reach them as they are. If conservatism is true — that is, if it speaks to the underlying nature of human beings and reality itself — it cannot be utopian. It cannot be clean and pure, because the world isn’t. Short stories are one of the oldest forms of narrative. The appeal is simple: unlike a novel, a short story can be read, or told, in one sitting. The tradeoff is that they must be, well, short. And yet at their best, their brevity can say quite a bit. One of my favorite details from my favorite short story, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s White Nights, is that you never learn the narrator’s name. So obsessed is he with his limerence, Nastenka, that he never thinks of himself. And she thinks so little of him that she never says his name, either. A longer narrative would almost certainly demand it at some point, but the short story facilitates the creative choice, which says so much about both of the characters. Utter Goodness is the more grounded of the two works. There’s nothing magical or fantastical about it, although it certainly has its share of allegories. The best single word to describe it is Americana. Lee puts you in the shoes of different Americans as they face all sorts of modern trials and tribulations. These range from a fitness instructor to a cult member to a battered wife to a horse to even, perhaps worst of all, a journalist. The most evocative, to me, was “American Girlfriend.” The title is deliberately euphemistic — the character and her entourage are, at best, gold diggers. And yet, it’s also a human story — of how the point-of-view character ended up there, her feelings toward the man who became her benefactor, and so on. It’s not something she intended; it just kind of happened. Despite the distinctly unrelatable subject matter, it was a very relatable feeling. It’s the easiest thing in the world to just go along with something, to take the path of least resistance. Because of that, it’s worth remembering that doing so is often perilous. Some of Utter Goodness’s stories are short even by short story standards — not even three pages. But they all evoke, in the positive, intended way, the question every author wants his or her audience asking: what does that mean? It’s a fair question, and sometimes it seems like there might not be an answer. The answer, if there is one, is likely to be found in the form of a Hunter S. Thompson quote before the beginning of the first story: “It’s our country,” he says. “[I]n a democracy, you have to be a player.” Though Lee’s characters include the virtuous and the vile alike, they all feel human. Yes, even the horse. A Prisoner’s Cinema is without question the darker book. That epithet is evoked by the title: prisoner’s cinema refers to a phenomenon in which a person kept in prolonged darkness will begin experiencing colorful, brilliant hallucinations. In a roundabout way, that’s what the book is. The characters of A Prisoner’s Cinema, to one extent or another, have their souls shrouded in darkness. All of them have something: addiction, resentment, narcissism, grief, or cynicism. All of them are haunted by it in grotesque, esoteric ways that explore the more ugly parts of human nature that are nevertheless all too human. It’s also highly introspective: intermixed with the stories are no fewer than three chapters of the author discussing the meaning of the book, as well as his own character and motivations, with a stand-in for Satan. If Audrey Lee’s book will make you cringe, Justin Lee’s will make your soul recoil. In particular, the titular story, “A Prisoner’s Cinema,” evoked Crime and Punishment in a more modern, depraved, and horrifying way. The story follows the stream of consciousness of a murderous pedophile, Cal, as he’s being executed. It also features the nonproverbial devil on his shoulder, who’s been egging him along to where he now finds himself. The character is given a surprisingly humane and believable story. This is not a person who was soulless or without a conscience, which makes his monstrousness all the more disturbing. And as with Raskolnikov, one couldn’t help but feel complicit in what the point-of-view character had done. While excellently written, I was relieved when that story ended and I could go back to being somebody who isn’t a murderer. And yet, I came away from this feeling like I learned something — about morality, about human beings, and even about myself. The obvious impulse is that this person is a moral monster and should be killed immediately. He is and he should, but that’s not interesting or informative. What we learn is that Cal did not become a monster overnight. He became a monster through small, repeated acts that accumulated until he had been twisted beyond recognition. A Prisoner’s Cinema is a scary book, but more importantly, it’s a horrifying one. The distinction is important. The first horror movie I ever watched was Halloween. While without a doubt it was very frightening to the 10-year-old me, it was only surface-deep. The horror in A Prisoner’s Cinema is internal, within the mind of the characters and, by extension, ourselves. You can’t just shoot it and make it go away. Well, I suppose you could, but that would be… counterproductive. The through-line between the two stories is the presence of religion and shame. While both works are neck-deep in characters who sin, especially sexual sin, this is always descriptive, not prescriptive. While we often understand them, sympathize with them, and see ourselves in them, it’s plain that they are violating a preexisting moral order and are suffering because of it. These characters, all of them, also have flashes of humanity. Of knowing what they should be doing and, all too often, failing to discharge it. That’s precisely what makes them feel relatable and human, and it’s what allows these works to credibly examine the darker aspects of human nature. Conservatives have long struggled in the arts. Those artists who are conservatives have therefore had to deal with significant hurdles in producing anything of national prominence. The talent pool is smaller, the means of distribution narrower, and the incentive structure weaker. That’s to say nothing of the financial difficulties: conservative donors, for whatever reason, seem to have less interest in the arts outside of narrow passion projects. The cultural zeitgeist on that may, at last, be changing. New conservative book publishers are publishing new conservative books that are aimed at popular audiences and are not ideological screeds. The rise of AI, combined with social media, portends the possibility of bypassing the institutional and financial gatekeepers to conservative film and animation. The latter Lee’s book might be especially relevant to the modern political moment because, just like his characters, the conservative movement has found itself in a rather dark place and is psychologically tearing itself apart in rounds of inwardly directed recriminations, infighting, petty feuds, and conspiracy theories that have failed to cease even after the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. It’s unlikely any conservative art, regardless of its quality, will make an immediate impact on the prospects of the second Trump administration and the MAGA movement. But just like the art found in the ruins of Rome inspired the Renaissance, so too might this conservative cultural capital, created in a perhaps fleeting moment of hegemony, inspire whatever form the American right takes after Trump. READ MORE from Stephan Kapustka: One and a Half Cheers for the Empire State Building Daredevils Why Go to Mars? Let’s Count the Reasons. Why JD Vance Told Me to Run for President