White fear in the hour of Hardcore

How rightwing emails reconcile Trump worship with the Trump collapse

I don’t go in so much as I once did for considerations of Hardcore — which some of you will remember as our term of art for ragebait emails that lure your senile relatives to rightwing garbage sites. Its purveyors are still out there begging for clicks, of course. But the form is taking a peculiar turn.

Some Hardcore venues are doing the usual shtick in the usual way. Conservative Zone, for example, is trying to rile the rubes with a story about Charlie Kirk. Talk about yesterday’s news: After a brief ragestorm, the tiny-faced hatecaster’s assassination and attempted deification resulted in zero electoral effect and yet another embarrassing JD Vance event, so he’s mostly drifted off the radar, except as a bloody shirt in rightwing fundraising.

To give you some idea how little he matters otherwise, currently the big CK-related news story is how his widow “prayed she was pregnant with third child when husband Charlie was killed.” The widow Kirk tells young women the moral of the story is to get pregnant tout suite: “You can always have a career, you can always go back to work. You can never just go back to having children.” And what young woman doesn’t dream of having three kids, a dead husband, and no job?

Conservative Zone opts for an investigative journalism angle, about how “surveillance video showing accused killer Tyler Robinson turning himself in to the Washington County Sheriff’s Office has disappeared into the Utah desert air.” This, they claim, is “The One Video That Could Expose the Truth About Charlie Kirk’s Killer.” We’re not told what truth would be exposed — maybe suspect Tyler Robinson crying out “Screw my lawyer, I want my one phone call to go to George Soros” — but we are told that when local station KATU asked to see the video, “that’s when the story snapped in half,” an unexpected turn of phrase (why not “the story squeezed itself into a ball and rolled away”?). Then come the traditional time-on-page-extending perorations:

Think about it:

• The suspect turns himself in.

• The video of that moment — gone.

• Never given to investigators.

• Never preserved.

• A political murder case with MASSIVE national implications… and the crucial evidence is wiped like it’s nothing?

Nobody believes that.
Not in 2025.
Not after everything we’ve seen.

As it happens, KATU reports that the missing footage, which they say is of “Tyler Robinson walking into Washington County Sheriff’s Office,” has been located, so prepare for the dominos to fall.

But the new breed of Hardcore goes another way.

Lately I’ve received a ton of emails from something called Capital That Works, all of which talk about how everything is going to shit and how you can be saved from it if you ACT NOW.

One, for example, warns that “Major US banks are on the edge, drowning in $517 BILLION of unrealized losses. Interest rates are skyrocketing, and these institutions are cracking under the pressure. Could YOUR bank be next?”

They send you to a form with which you can Claim Your FREE Retirement Defense Guide from sanctuarymetals.com, a company that will allow you to pull your money out of those mutual funds your smartass nephew said was safe and invest it in gold and silver pieces that you can bury in the backyard.

Many of these pitches refer overtly to Donald Trump — but not, as one might expect of Hardcore emails, as your savior in these catastrophes. For example, one warns about “new ‘digital dollar’ frameworks being quietly rolled out” that could freeze “Your retirement nest egg/ Your monthly income/ Even your ability to buy essentials like gas and groceries” unless you read and heed their new report from Reagan Gold Group IRA about “7 secrets you need to know to start investing in physical gold and silver.” The link button is presented thus:

And the subject line on this email is “Trump’s allies launch ‘frееdom bank’ for digital assets.” But this is the same “digital dollar” shtick that Waxy Jim Rickards was telling us in 2022 was the result of President Biden signing “the death warrant on American freedom.” The president now is Donald Trump, presumably the hero of all the oldsters who, like me, are on multiple rightwing mailing lists. So why, you might ask, is this digital dollar thing still happening? And why is Trump in the mailer? And why, if Trump isn’t stopping it, are we counting on his “allies” and their “freedom bank” to save us?

Here’s another one about how “Elon Musk just humiliated Donald Trump in front of millions — live on X,” accompanied by this link illo:

The authors warn of a “fight [that] could reshape the future of the GOP — and America” and send readers to a video called “MIDNIGHT IN AMERICA… The Stock Market Will Crash 50%... Real Estate will drop 40%... Savings Accounts will lose 30%... And unemployment will triple.” (The relevance of the Musk-Trump internet slap-fight is not readily apparent.)

In the video we are told: “What may shock you is this problem was indirectly caused by President Reagan. His greatest triumph has turned out to be our biggest curse.” (Nutshell: high government debt, American goes bankrupt.) “You can’t trust the so-called ‘Elites’ in Washington anymore,” the narrator warns.

Again, this is a rightwing pitch. Why are they associating Trump, Elon Musk, and Ronald Reagan, for heaven’s sake, with the collapse of the American economy?

The doombeat drums on in other emails: “Over 100 banks already rigged against Americans,” “This Nеw Rule Gives Washington Control Over Your Сaѕh,” “Trump’s Tweet Just Breaking the Internet.” That last one has my favorite lede:

Trump dropped 9 words that sent shockwaves through the financial world:

“He who has the gold makes the rules.”

Wait’ll he tells them “Make hay while the sun shines” and “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.” (This one also warns you to buy a bunch of gold before the economy collapses.)

I have a theory about this. While sometimes the appeal of Hardcore is the opportunity to lasciviate over the triumphs of Trump and the humiliation of his enemies, nowadays the triumphs are fewer and farther between and more likely to end in humiliation.

Anger is another potential appeal — but just as, after its brief explosive season in the sun, the Charlie Kirk murder quickly lost its salience, all such outrages against Enemies of the Reich are hard to maintain in the present news environment.

And so Hardcore leans into its most reliable appeal: fear. Everything is collapsing, the Elites are after your money, act now and let us guide you to safe havens.

This may seem like a repudiation of Trump and conservatism, since the target reader is presumably a Trump voter who expected to get from his return to office a Golden Age rather than Great Depression II. But for these readers, reality is bifurcated: There is Trump, who represents everything they admire (racism, misogyny, brutality), and there is America, the country they pretend to love but which has actually so disappointed and disgusted them that, they are convinced, it could only be redeemed by a miracle — which in their heart of hearts they know the con man from Queens could never deliver. Voting for him was just an expression of their contempt and despair. So even as they fear and loathe the country he leads, they celebrate him; he’s like a household god they stick on the wall, and pray to even though he obviously can’t do shit for them.