Reminder that I was right about everything: My Election Night 2024 essay

Project 2035: Building a Trump Movement to Last

Currently working on my podcast review of 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, just wanted to repost my election 2024 night essay to take a victory lap. Crazy how well I called most of the developments that would emerge during the last year, and interesting to see where I got it wrong.

I strongly recommend listening to this (and all my other political articles) using the Substack’s App’s text-to-speech feature. You can check out my most recent essay on politics, reviewing the first year of the 2nd Trump admin, here.

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If you’re reading this, Trump has won.

This is cause for celebration. Few could have foreseen with confidence in January 2021 that President Trump, totally stripped of power following the violent full-scale insurrection of the George Floyd Riots, a dubious election, and an unprecedented conspiracy to remove or criminalize lawful powers of the President, would not only survive the titanic forces arrayed against him but return to office with perhaps the strongest democratic mandate in American history.

It was only through the enormous personal sacrifices and determination of President Trump, along with the selfless work of the men and women who contributed to his campaign, that our country has been spared a terrible fate.

Although Trump has provided America with an unprecedented opportunity, I believe the risk of disaster has never been higher than it is right now. As one Russian official said of attempts by the Czar to modernize Imperial Russia shortly before the Revolution: “The most dangerous thing you can do to a bad system is try to reform it.”

Americans want change. No one is happy with the current system or their opposites in it. Political divisions have never been more pronounced. Democrats ran on the most radical platform of all time: Abolishing the electoral college, destroying the Supreme Court, mass gun confiscation, censorship of so-called “misinformation,” and citizenship for the tens of millions of illegal immigrants imported into the country by the government itself, which would have provided liberals with a permanent electoral majority to rubber stamp their agenda.

The fact that this election was even close (and it was, never lose sight of that whatever the final results may be) reveals that America is already in a deep state of crisis. As I articulated in my earlier essay Political and cultural transformation in an era of massive psychic damage, the issue isn’t this or that candidate or policy, but that at a systemic level America has tens or maybe hundreds of millions of people who are either totally malignant or (more common) simply unable to navigate reality after decades of living under the most invasive propaganda regime to every exist.

Although I have long dismissed any suggestion that widespread rightwing political violence is imminent, I do believe that a violent leftwing revolution with a serious chance of overthrowing America’s Constitutional order and replacing it with a new system will arrive within the next 10 years. This presents an enormous challenge for the incoming Trump administration and whatever is to follow. The conservative movement of today is in a bad place to meet this challenge.

I have decided to write this essay (hopefully my last on contemporary politics) to explain what I think the problem is and propose solutions.

Although it seems like a distant memory now, the 2024 Republican Primary revealed that a significant minority of Republicans do not understand the peril we are in today. Trump’s victory in the primary process was always inevitable, and yet he managed to acquire a very serious challenger in the form of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. DeSantis gathered millions of supporters and an enormous war chest from those who believed that such an insurgent candidacy would produce a good outcome.

This candidacy did not produce a good outcome, or anything good, really. DeSantis, one of the most objectively successful conservative governors in the country, who has done an enormous amount of good for his state, burnt through his credibility as a national figure and more than 160 million dollars badly needed elsewhere before dropping out and endorsing Trump. Even though DeSantis (to his credit) eventually put himself out as a Trump campaign surrogate, large parts of his network of supporters continued to try to engineer a Trump defeat until the very end.

Many mainstream Republican influencers seemed committed to snatching defeat from the jaws of victory during this election cycle. From the professional pro-life movement to gun rights activists, attacks on Trump by rightwingers poured in from all sides. It was not just nobodies and obvious bad actors.

These attacks served no purpose: However dissatisfied these issue groups may have been with Trump’s policy (or at least his rhetoric), with the alternative they faced total annihilation. Kamala Harris had, without exaggeration, the most radical positions on abortion and guns of any Presidential candidate in American history. What these attacks did do was demonstrate that many professional conservative “activists” are largely unconcerned with the topics that they are paid to be interested in.

Perhaps even more disingenuous criticism emerged from the “far right,” which, though it has seen its ideas enjoy broader adoption than at any time in the last half century, began a series of shifting attacks on Trump on his two strongest issues: Immigration and foreign policy. These attacks were designed solely to damage Trump, though for some months many critics pretended as though they were trying to “help” the Trump campaign. As Trump’s lead became more and more pronounced these people began openly advocating for total defeat in the present to allow for the theoretical future victory of a “more pure” candidate.

Although there certainly was a degree of coordination and institutional funding behind the various attacks on Trump from the Right (interestingly, one major node of anti-Trump activity was indicted for taking large amounts of cash from Russian agents), I believe that the overwhelming majority of participants earnestly held these objectively stupid and harmful beliefs. They could be convinced to allow the enemy to win. They could be convinced to help the enemy to win. As I said to myself after Kyle Rittenhouse inexplicably declared on video that he could not vote for Trump in good conscience: “There is something wrong with people.”

There is something wrong with people. I have watched online rightwing spaces (which for nearly a decade have shifted discourse in a positive direction) gradually transform into a complete sewer, with this process greatly accelerating over the last year or so.

As dissatisfaction with the current system has expanded, online rightwing spaces became much larger and more diverse. With this diversity came new priorities and new ways of interacting with each other. The greatly expanded audience for rightwing-coded content also attracted an endless blight of grifters, self-promoters, and rejects from the old system.

Virtually every mainstream institution has shredded its credibility to oppose Trump over the tumultuous last few years. The massive (and long-running) failures of the education system, medical establishment, news media, and other pillars of our society have never been more visible. Although this presents opportunities for dissidents and revisionists of all kinds, it is obvious now that the total unreliability of mainstream institutions has led to broad ignorance and nihilism among the general public.

You can see this on the Left with the massive embrace of obviously harmful and pseudoscientific social fads like childhood transgenderism. Although these things were roundly mocked by leftists just a few years ago, they now enjoy near-universal acceptance on the mainstream Left in response to conservative opposition. Leftists get their marching orders and run with them, no matter how absurd.

The Right faces a neat inversion of this absurdity: In response to total dishonesty from the mainstream, rightwingers have begun to question nearly everything. This is good in many ways, leading to the replacement of long-held maxims that were clearly not true and directing attention towards critical issues, but it has also fostered many destructive habits among modern conservatives.

The first is credulity. Although rightwingers now correctly question mainstream narratives, they often reflexively accept dubious “revisionist” narratives without any scrutiny at all. I see people latch on to claims that aren’t even plausibly true all the time now, and not dumb people, either (though there certainly are a lot of those, too). Lies have become so commonplace in our society that smart people often don’t even know what the truth might look like, or how one might arrive at it.

This goes double when dealing with “forbidden” topics of which mainstream treatments are clearly inadequate. Alternate perspectives on these topics are often instantly accepted merely because they are alternate perspectives. Widespread motivated reasoning and lack of discernment have created a situation where “redpilled” people frequently develop views of topics that are even more distorted and inaccurate than those they held when they were merely clueless.

Contributing to this problem is the total (and accelerating) ignorance of the public. No one knows anything. The education system has failed. The media lies. People lack basic background knowledge through which they can frame their thinking. In its place, they are left with a smattering of trivia, moral parables, and atrocity narratives.

Without adequate mental models of how the world operates, the American Right has become fixated on conspiracy theories yet often seems clueless as to what a conspiracy looks like: How one would be carried out and what the participants might hope to achieve.

The lack of these models generates enormous amounts of magical thinking, which in turn cause shortsighted or counterproductive behavior. Even those with mostly good views who are otherwise intelligent don’t seem to know much and aren’t interested in learning more. People will get two or three bits of trivia, which are often just corrections of mainstream errors, and think they have a good understanding of a topic. This sometimes leads them to totally incorrect conclusions even if what little they “know” about a given subject is kind of true. You can never predict when this might become a problem, but it always will. Bad programming. Bad reflexes.

The second major problem we face is argumentativeness. I don’t mean that arguments are bad or anything like that, but rather that people today have become addicted to arguing. Because modern American life involves disputing clearly fake claims on all manner of topics emerging from mainstream institutions, arguments have become almost reflexive among rightwingers to the point where many behave as though arguments are the point of discourse.

In the case of recent opposition to Trump, some criticisms launched at him were actually valid (though many more were not and were in total bad faith), these criticisms were always just irrelevant because whatever the case may have been, we would still need Trump to win over the disastrous alternative. Again, there is a values crisis, and I don’t mean that in a moralizing way: Rightwingers are very often disoriented and unable to assess relative importance/unimportance.

Internet culture encourages a constant state of excitability. People are always being exposed to a new narrative or new development to react to. This harmful phenomenon has financial incentives through the popularity of streaming and the now direct association between engagement and cash payments.

It seems like people react and overreact all the time now. It was surreal to see so many rightwingers get sent into complete hysteria by the obviously astroturfed enthusiasm for Kamala Harris that followed her initial announcement.

Panic is contagious. Despair is contagious. People could not understand that what they were seeing was fake, and that, even if it hadn’t been fake, it would still have been harmful to publicly respond in that way. After all: They’re just thinking out loud. They’re just engaging in “the discourse.” These pisspants conservatives make minor problems worse and turn fake issues into real ones.

Exacerbating this confusion, pettiness and personality feuds often lead rightwingers to adopt nonsensical or counterproductive positions solely to “own” their online opponents. I will always remember seeing rightwingers defend the L.A. Times Bombing, an incident in 1910 during which leftist terrorists blew up a conservative newspaper and killed dozens of people, because they objected to me personally. It soon became clear that they had no idea what the L.A. Times Bombing even was, they just supported it because I opposed it. I don’t know who those people were or why they might have disliked me (there are many valid possibilities), but that kind of dishonest thinking is commonplace now.

It is a kind of nihilism. People no longer discuss the truth or even their earnestly-held but untrue beliefs, but rather try to engineer situations where they can signal their affiliation with or opposition to this or that personality, or “win” an argument that is not important or maybe not even real. There are many people in rightwing spaces now who are simply pathologically disagreeable and want a sense of vindication or validation more than they want to achieve any positive real-world objective.

This leads us to the final aspect of the problem: A general apathy towards dishonesty and other bad behavior. If a real-life acquaintance lied all the time or constantly behaved in self-serving or counterproductive ways, you would probably not talk to them any more. Despite this, I see the continued indulgence of malignant or extremely stupid figures merely because they are in opposition to the current system or engage in taboo behavior. People will know that a person is being dishonest, and is constantly dishonest, and yet go along with whatever canned discourse of the day is being pushed as though they were watching a television show.

Recently a far right streamer (@Black_Pilled) made a post pointing out that I had blocked him on Twitter. I have no idea when or why I blocked him, I’ve never interacted with him before. Soon after, he made another post claiming that I was Jewish. Later, on a stream, he said that the block was part of a Jewish conspiracy. There was no real reason to think that I was Jewish, and, in fact, I’m not Jewish. This person just felt personally slighted because I blocked him and began insisting I was Jewish because he knew that it would cause others to attack me.

Dozens, then hundreds, more soon joined in calling me Jewish. I was asked to disavow the Talmud. People falsely claimed that my series on the Russian Revolution didn’t discuss Jews at all as part of a larger plot to obscure the truth. Others argued that I was a Zionist and dismissed demographic issues in the United States. I was repeatedly told that I had blocked this person because he was too “pro-white.” None of these things were true or motivated by anything other than me blocking someone on Twitter. It was obvious that the people making these attacks didn’t have even a casual familiarity with me or my views.

This kind of group dishonesty is commonplace today (I assume it was being coordinated on Discord), but the strangest response came from people who were nominally “on my side” in the feud and disapproved of what was going on.

Multiple people told me what a “good guy” this person was because they had enjoyed his previous streams. Others described the event as just another pointless intra-rightwing slap fight and wondered why we all couldn’t just get along. All this, even though the attacks were coming from a person who openly advocated for a Trump defeat, which would have meant our total destruction, and was lying about me for the most petty reasons. I often find myself wondering “What is it going to take?” to get people to simply dismiss these characters for good.

I am sure the annoyance I felt during those few days will pass, but still I am constantly taken aback by the behavior people will tolerate as a mere quirk. I see stuff all the time now that would have made someone radioactive just a few years ago: Casual dishonesty, leaking, blackmail, betraying confidences, collaborating with self-admitted federal informants, proposing that we should lose and doing everything in their power to make that happen. People will adopt ridiculous positions and attack anyone who disagrees, then suddenly drop those positions and begin advocating for the exact opposite view. It seems like everyone just goes along with this. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s all content. They will know that someone is a liar or bad actor and continue engaging with them and what they’re saying as though nothing has happened.

In short, this is not material that can be worked with, at least not towards anything good. The modern Right is not unified by any larger ideology or disciplined structure, but rather generalized, often incoherent, opposition to the threat posed by liberals.

I think the victory we enjoy today is not due to the strength of the conservative movement, but rather due to conservatives being gifted a world-historic figure, President Trump, who was then saved from assassination by what I can only describe as divine intervention. More significantly, perhaps, Democrats put forward very bad candidates this year. I genuinely can’t think of national politicians who are less impressive or charismatic than Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.

None of these gifts can be counted on in the future, which is an issue because large sections of the rightwing coalition that has just re-elected Trump would be useless in any time of crisis, or worse than useless: They could be counted on to directly or indirectly help the enemy. Standards are collapsing across the board. Petty crime and deaths of despair are commonplace. The population is ignorant, excitable, and primed for great change.

President Trump will eventually grow old and die. His replacement as frontrunner, likely J.D. Vance, will not have the same superhuman charisma that once seduced a nation out of seemingly endless decline. As the United States enters its next existential crisis, which I believe will begin within the next 10 years (before 2035, hence the title of this essay), the challenge facing conservatives today is to transform the Trump movement into a professional force capable of working in concert towards realistic objectives over the course of years and decades to come.

With this in mind, I believe the best steps for the Trump movement are (in no particular order, ideally these would occur simultaneously) as follows.

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1. Consensus Group

Trump has come a long way from the early days of total war against the GOP establishment. Trump has won the war. His family members now control the RNC. His critics (still numerous) must hold their silence if they want to keep their jobs.

And yet, this is not enough. Populism as a political strategy has limitations in a time of great dissatisfaction with the system. Liberals will always be able to promise more handouts, they will always be able to promise more change, they will always be able to promise more revenge. Radical leftist candidates like John Fetterman will likely easily be able to gather a large number of crossover Trump supporters in 2028 by simply “saying the right words” and playing into the public’s existing resentments.

Now that the GOP is effectively the Trump Party, Trump should create a separate formal “Inner Party” loyal to himself alone. Trump is a true believer in America. Running for President was a real sacrifice for him. It was only his great devotion that saved our country. This great devotion needs to be harnessed, organized, and put into practice at a wide scale.

The goal of this Inner Party should be as simple as possible: Preserve America in roughly its current form. We have a system, we want to protect the system. This simplicity is critical. Everyone must have the same clear and achievable goal that they can work towards in concert. As the Russian Civil War illustrated, it is impossible to stop a revolution when the counterrevolutionaries can’t even agree on what they are fighting for. Everyone on the Right today is full of whizkid ideas about “what to do next” if our system collapses but, given the Left’s great advantage in numbers and organization, any fundamental change to the Constitutional order or prolonged civil conflict will certainly end with a decisive leftwing victory.

The good news is that positive change is possible within our system. Florida was once a swing state. However, under the energetic administration of Gov. DeSantis (whatever his mistakes during 2024 may have been) the state has a perpetually expanding Republican majority and skyrocketing quality of life. Even something as miraculous as Donald Trump’s political comeback in the face of a coup and an avalanche of bogus charges from federal and state prosecutors didn’t happen with a violent revolution or civil unrest. Rather, Trump simply refused to quit and engaged in smart politics even as the situation looked grim. His determination paid off, ours can too.

The Inner Party must cultivate a small core of the most capable Trump loyalists and provide them with organization and training. In 1940, the NYPD was faced with a huge surplus of applicants and a shortage of positions. It was decided that they would filter candidates simply by only hiring those who had scored at the top of the Civil Service Examination. This gamble paid off, the 1940 recruit “Superclass” produced a greatly disproportionate number of officers who would go on to become Chief of Police or achieve other high rank. A Trump organization should mirror this approach, making a test (with real world subject-matter and generalized IQ-adjacent questions) available to the public and recruiting only among the highest achievers. Think the Manhattan Project or Apollo Program: The best of the best. Membership should be limited to just a few thousand total, maybe less than a hundred at first.

There are many benefits to using a private Trump-led organization to concentrate such people. The first is the maintenance of discipline and standards. Once you have an organization, you can kick people out of the organization if they do bad things or fail to maintain the party line. Organizations have norms and rules and hierarchy, things that are essential to achieving goals in the real world. Organizations have expectations of discretion and privacy, and ways to resolve disputes internally. Forcing people together in a real-life organization also has the tendency to moderate their personal behavior, as the individuals they’re interacting with are no longer abstractions on the internet, but rather people who they know well or at least will be forced to work with in the future over a long time horizon.

Public jockeying for power and attention coupled with the harmful incentives of streaming culture has had a decisive negative impact on rightwing politics. Everyone online is always one mental breakdown or personality feud away from publicly burning their longtime associates to the applause of countless spectators.

This phenomenon is antithetical to movements that actually change the world, which are inevitably powered by institutional knowledge, longstanding relationships, and, most importantly, trust. The goal of this Inner Party should be to take disputes private, allowing for the development of a single plan under a single leader, the presentation of a unified public front, and the pursuit of objectives over the long term.

Another problem that a formal Trump Inner Party could solve concerns education. People know nothing now. History is fake. The media presents a distorted view of the world. On the internet, where people “learn” the most today, it’s the blind leading the blind. This phenomenon is just as present in people with good views who are otherwise intelligent as it is in the most wretched and braindead liberal.

An Inner Party could create a planned curriculum to equip members with the critical information they need to navigate reality and improve their lives, and require completion in order to achieve membership. Most people today, even conservatives, are unconsciously drawn towards liberal politics because they have been indoctrinated with a liberal worldview since birth. Although it’s difficult to argue with messages that people have received for decades, a “crash course” in history, politics, and practical matters could at least provide building blocks for future growth. This curriculum could be delivered in a single setting over the course of a few months, like a finishing school, and even be expanded into a mandatory “continuing education” program like doctors and lawyers have.

Bringing people together in a demanding environment for an extended period would help form the bonds of loyalty that enable successful systems. It would also orient people away from the frequent dead-ends found in rightwing politics.

Although it is good in many respects that the public taboos around religious faith are disappearing today, the injection of religious language into mass politics has allowed for many charlatans and/or morons to insert themselves into discourse and engage in some of the worst behavior imaginable.

It seems like everyone who attacked Trump and advocated for defeat in the last election cloaked their attacks in dubious moral language. To outside observers, when you dismiss or respond to these people, it can often incorrectly seem as though you are attacking their religion. This false perception is always cynically exploited. I’ve found that moving political discourse away from purely secular matters derails discussions far more often than it enlightens them. Advocacy for things like a Kamala victory would be even more immediately and obviously harmful without phony moralism.

A rejection of phony moralism is important. The goal in politics is to win and make the world a better place. The carnage isn’t going to stop when people come up with the right arguments, but rather when they master working within the world as it exists today in order to achieve their goals. This kind of fluency, the ability to accomplish the impossible while leaving the system intact, is extremely difficult to cultivate but absolutely critical to resolving our current predicament. It is savvy and ruthless figures like Nixon fixer G. Gordon Liddy or Trump mentor Roy Cohn whom modern conservatives should be taking their cues from rather than an endless stream of interchangeable talking heads seated in gamerchairs.

The Inner Party should instead be oriented around the most important (and popular) pillars of Trump’s platform: Immigration, crime, and the end of foreign wars. It seems as though professional advocacy around these issues is still relatively primitive, uncoordinated, and underfunded compared to more prominent mainstays of “Conservatism Inc.” This can change and must change, and members of the new Trump Inner Party are the perfect people staff these organizations.

Japan’s highly-successful modern nationalist movement was spearheaded by a semi-secret society known as the Nippon Kaigi, created in 1997. This group didn’t embark on a terrorist campaign or guerilla movement, but rather engaged in smart politics while creating a constellation of advocacy groups, charities, and friendly outposts. These are all things that are achievable without breaking the law or killing anyone or going off into fantasy land. We need to start doing them if we want to make it through the enormous struggles ahead.

I doubt I’m the first person to have this thought. I ended up cutting a bunch of my proposals for instilling a sense of tradition and permanence into this group’s members (rituals, ceremonial uniforms, a Trump Boy Scout-successor youth organization, a golden 40-page book of Trump Hadiths that must be memorized by all, etc.) because they would be mocked as too LARPy. Rest assured, I still think all these are very brilliant and good ideas but will keep it to myself. Perhaps such an organization already exists and I’m simply not invited (I get it), but there really needs to be a formalized core of elite loyalists to carry the Trump movement into the future. You must construct a little world that can continue humming along no matter what happens in the real one.

2. Total Mobilization

As much as leftwing movements are driven by the whims of a small group of professional activists, these movements have also always relied on a significant advantage in number of active supporters during any social shakeup.

The word “active” is important here. Most people can be counted on to do nothing. Doing nothing is usually a pretty safe bet during political turmoil, or at least it’s easy to do. There are millions of reasons to do nothing while usually working up the will to do something, much less something difficult and dangerous, requires years of motivation or heavy incentives.

Leftwingers have a much easier time activating large numbers of people because they have enjoyed nearly uncontested control of mass media and the education system for decades. People are taught to care about liberal causes and receive social and financial benefits for doing so. Indeed, leftists have developed an extremely large class of professionals both in and outside of government whose sole job is leftist activism. They’re going to show up because their livelihood and self-worth depends on it, and they are experienced at getting others to show up as well.

Complementing this professional organizer class is the total confusion of the public. People want to be part of *something*, and leftists can always offer a socially approved *something* to be a part of. Leftist politics are a way to make friends and feel as though you are making a difference in a world that often seems totally beyond your control. This can draw many otherwise apolitical people into political conflicts.

Finally, there is the massive number of violent criminals and mentally ill-types who have managed to find their way into every popular leftist movement in history. For a formal academic treatment of this phenomenon, I strongly recommend Anna Giefman’s book Thou Shalt Kill, which studies participants of the Russian Revolution of 1905 (many of whom will seem familiar today). To summarize: The reason that leftists commit far more political violence is that leftist groups inevitably attract people who have pathological antisocial tendencies, which can be laundered as passionate political views. People willing to break some taboos are often willing to break others, including those against violence. The barriers that normal people have do not exist for them. The feeling of being right can be used by leftists to justify any kind of behavior against those who are “wrong.”

The leftwing activist army that shut down the country and inflicted billions in damages, thousands of injuries, and dozens of deaths during the 2020 George Floyd Riots is still dangerous and still intact. Conservatives will never be able to match it in numbers. However, it is possible to meet this threat with organization, discipline, and training.

Every Red state must dramatically expand its police manpower. Leftist street violence depends on one simple fact: It is impossible for outnumbered police to control very large crowds without using lethal force. Lethal force should be avoided at nearly all costs (more on this later), which means the numbers disparity must be diminished.

An elegant solution would be the creation of state emergency forces whose members could be deputized as auxiliary state police when needed. Even if these men were only used to block escape from or access to certain areas, freeing up full-time police to engage in more dangerous activities, such forces would have an enormous positive impact during rioting. I’m sure thousands of new trained and organized personnel would make a big difference with natural disaster relief as well.

The commitment could be similar to the National Guard: Training once a month, with mandatory mobilization in times of crisis. Members of these new non-federalizable state forces, outside of a small full-time staff to handle command, transportation, and logistics, could be “paid” for their service with tax benefits/waivers and compensated for any time spent away from their jobs. I am certain that every state has tens of thousands of veterans and other reliable well-meaning people who would be happy to directly stand against leftist rioting if they were given a clear and legal path to do so.

The events of the Boston Police Strike of 1919 illustrate the necessity of numbers, training, and organization (especially with the legal authority and will to use force) when faced with widespread civil unrest. These problems only get worse. Every state should begin building a large body of trained, disciplined, and pre-vetted men (read: more than 30,000 auxiliaries per state, even in small states) immediately.

Prevention is I think the most important aspect of all of this. Leftist pressure campaigns work by making normal life impossible by illegal means until society is forced to either kill them (this doesn’t happen in civilized countries) or surrender. In essence, they try to overwhelm systems until they collapse. The only way to short-circuit this process is to take away the ability of leftists to collapse society. State governments must be prepared to detain, prosecute, convict, and jail with long sentences extremely large numbers of criminals in relatively short periods of time.

This will require an overhaul of state laws and courts. Another challenge of leftist rioting is that controlling it involves arresting and prosecuting so many people that it becomes effectively impossible to punish even a small fraction of participants under the normal criminal system. Usually rioting occurs in areas where local authorities are simply unwilling to prosecute liberal rioters to begin with or local juries are unwilling to convict, even in cases where the accused is unambiguously guilty.

To counter this, state legislatures must pass extremely clear riot laws that pose simple yes/no questions to jurors, taking into account the increasingly sophisticated tactics employed by professional leftist rioters on the ground. Merely being part of a street blockade should carry a lengthy sentence. Planning an armed one should get you a terrorism conviction. Leftists are very experienced at creating ambiguity where none exists and providing fake evidence and witnesses to help their militants escape justice. They have professional legal teams that exist solely to ensure their members are not punished, often acting as parts of the conspiracy themselves. Normal criminal codes were not written with this behavior in mind, which means new laws must be drafted.

Furthermore, states must move riot trials to areas not affected by support for criminality. Most riots take place in areas already controlled by liberal elected officials and populated by large numbers of liberals. Any trial should happen far away, in more stable parts of a state. If someone is guilty, they need to go to jail even if they live in a locality that broadly supports their behavior. Political violence cannot be allowed to become a part of everyday life anywhere or it will grow and fester into something uncontrollable.

To process these riot cases quickly, special courts, supervised directly by a state’s Supreme Court, should be created solely to handle cases involving civil unrest. Additional prosecutors should be hired solely to handle these cases. Motions and appeals should be decided in a matter of days, not years. This is not incompatible with due process or fair trials, it simply ensures that the normal criminal justice system can’t be overwhelmed by organized political violence. If someone is on video participating in an armed street blockade, it should be just a monthlong process to have them locked up for a decade. Our society must be willing to make clear that: “You will never extract concessions in this way.”

I’m sure this will be controversial, but I think openly carrying firearms should simply be banned during demonstrations. Too many American cities looked like 3rd world countries during the George Floyd Riots. The presence of leftist (and occasionally moronic rightwing) gunmen was used to constantly menace police, slowing and even preventing the response to organized rioting. If someone is breaking the law, riot police should be able to arrest him without concern that they might be killed if the gunman looming nearby thinks for a split-second that he could get away with it.

The only people carrying around rifles during a riot should be police. I’m sure states can create legal carveouts for people defending their homes or businesses (like the group that Kyle Rittenhouse was a part of in Kenosha), but this is America, not Beirut. Groups of unknown armed militants wandering the streets during civil unrest should not be tolerated. I think it harms people mentally to see the places they live or travel through every day transformed into warzones. Carrying a gun as part of a riot should get you arrested, brandishing one against police should get you killed.

I genuinely dislike violence. I think it’s important that controlling riots be kept as non-lethal as possible because that absence keeps the stakes low even when “casualties” are very high. Deaths have a very different effect on the public mind than arrests or injuries. As I said before, seeing widespread violence harms people mentally. This is a process that accelerates over time. The carnage opens a Pandora’s Box in their heads and the unacceptable soon becomes accepted. That said, it’s important that police use far more force against rioters resisting arrest. It is essential that when people engage in rioting, they suffer immediate and severe consequences for it.

It seems like in every video of a riot I see today, police will try to make an arrest and then a mob of rioters will try to drag the arrestee away. Unless the police already have overwhelming numbers, oftentimes someone who was just caught in the act of committing a crime will be able to escape.

Police should be authorized to use greater force, including lethal force, to prevent criminals from escaping. Shooting to kill in these situations should be explicitly allowed in state criminal codes, and the identities of police officers should be protected to prevent reprisal. Officers should be fired for letting these matters be resolved in a tug-of-war. The mob, and professional activists leading it, should never be the ones to decide who gets arrested on any given day. Someone willing to use force against a police officer to achieve their political objectives would certainly be willing to do the same against a normal person. You can’t have those people running around, especially when they have become accustomed to getting away with political violence. It is behavior that only escalates into something terrible.

Furthermore, there should be explicit criminal laws written to target the passive participants in leftwing rioting. Most rioters just stand around doing nothing. It is only a very small group that is actually willing to burn things or attack police. A larger minority, however, are those willing to act as human shields during these riots. Again, I’m sure everyone has seen videos of a wall of “protestors” confronting police, with one or two members emerging from the wall to throw things or engage in direct violence. Usually the wall is full of women or old people, those who, if police used force against them, might arouse sympathy from a television audience.

It is important for state legal codes to recognize that these people are facilitating the violence just as much as if they were throwing the bricks or punches themselves. Police should be authorized (and even required) to arrest these people as well. Once a protest becomes a riot, anyone obstructing police needs to go to jail. Although the optics of this might seem bad at first, securing convictions for even a small number of these people (who are usually not hardened criminals), accompanied by life-disrupting jailtime would cause the behavior, and the violence it enables, to disappear entirely.

The big lesson of the Russian Revolution of 1905 is that revolutions only end when the revolutionaries are all dead or in jail. It’s just a relatively small number of people who are actually willing to go out and commit antisocial political violence. Once those people are gone everyone else can live their lives in peace. Every single Red state must have a streamlined process for throwing these people in jail in very large numbers, removing them from society for lengthy periods. You must take them off the board.

It’s only through planning and organization that states will be able to achieve this. The Floyd Riots showed that nearly every major city has thousands of potential leftist militants. You know they’re there. The overwhelming majority who participated in the Floyd terror were not punished and those who were received slaps on the wrist. They’re all just waiting to be activated again, and they will be eventually. You’re not going to be able to recruit, train, and equip tens of thousands of auxiliary policemen after the crisis has already begun. You’re not going to be able to build a new low-security jail to handle overflow when there are hundreds of thousands of people in the streets. You’re not going to be able to set up a functional riot court system that can withstand Constitutional challenges when the nation is embroiled in political turmoil.

All of these things will need to happen well in advance, but the good news is that they all can under our current system, and all of this can happen with very limited upfront investment by state governments.

3. Massive Damage

The last few years have shown that the people killing our country cannot be reasoned or bargained with, there are no norms you can appeal to, they just have to be stopped. They must no longer be in a position to do damage. As such, victory is going to be measured in real-world removals: Terminations, deportations, and imprisonments.

The goal in these first few months should be to disorient and disrupt liberal networks as much as possible, to strain their resources and their attention until those break and they are unable to respond, or become so desensitized that they no longer feel the need to respond. Hit them everywhere, at once. Force them to move (often literally).

First, the traitors. Trump must deal with the internal threat presented by the many conservatives who opposed him until the very end. There can be no quarter for those people, they simply have to leave politics after putting everyone at risk. Organizations unwilling to dump these people should be considered complicit. Anyone still willing to associate with them should be cut out as well. Betrayal must have consequences.

This need is doubled for politicians like those in Nebraska, who refused to reform their electoral college system in order to give Trump a better chance of winning. It was only a few GOP legislators holding the process up. That kind of failure of judgment at a critical moment cannot be tolerated. Everyone involved needs to go. These people need to face primaries, with no golden parachute for them after defeat.

After this, conservatives must take advantage of what institutional high ground they have while they have it. Trump has proposed making Elon Musk the head of a Department of Government Efficiency with the mandate to reduce waste of all kinds. My hope is that Musk will do something to the federal government akin to what he did with Twitter: Trim the fat until the organization operates more or less the same, albeit with 90% of the employees gone.

Federal bureaucrats have proved to be a persistent obstacle to the implementation of Trump’s lawful policies. Removing people who are unable or unwilling to perform their duties should be priority number one. It is likely that entire departments can be shuttered and hundreds of billions of dollars can be saved. Tens of thousands of federal employees can be fired without affecting the lives of normal citizens.

I am skeptical that the courts will be an adequate avenue to deal with the corruption problem beyond a few targeted prosecutions. Juries are unreliable. Judges are compromised. The best path forward is removing as many of these people from their positions of responsibility as possible and locking the door behind them.

Turning off the money spigot will go a long way towards reducing bad behavior. Not only could unreliable federal and state employees be fired, seriously disrupting their lives, but the end of dubious federal grants would force many liberal organizations to shave staff and reduce services, if not shut down entirely. Millions of liberals need to lose their government-supported activism jobs and move into the real economy.

Particularly alarming is the clear decrease in professionalism within the military. Dramatically reducing the size of non-combat sections of the military, including mass terminations of politicized officers, should happen fast. It’s likely that removing these people would increase the American military’s strength even as its size shrinks. A compact and disciplined force will be far more valuable in times of crisis than a large unruly one. It will always be easier to scale up something small and good in an emergency than “reform” something large and bad when everything is coming apart.

There is one high-level prosecution that I would like to see: That of former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley. During the tumultuous events that followed the January 6 Riot, Milley made the inexplicable decision to contact his counterpart in the Chinese military and tell him that the US was not about to launch a nuclear strike. This bizarre message was intended to convey that President Trump was no longer in command of the military. In essence, Milley shared extremely damaging information (internal disputes had caused the normal chain-of-command to break down) with a rival foreign power during a time of huge political turmoil.

This was a clear breach of America’s vital tradition of civilian control of the Armed Forces. Such a breach cannot be tolerated, especially from someone at a high level. By sending such a strange message (there was zero risk of Trump starting a war at the time), particularly one invoking nuclear weapons, Milley put American security at grave risk and could have triggered a sequence of events that threatened our allies or even destroyed the world. I can only guess that Milley thought that, by signaling to China that Trump did not have the support of the military, it might benefit Milley’s preferred political faction somehow. Whatever his reasons, his actions constitute treason and he deserves the highest penalty.

Coupled with this removal of bad actors from government and government support must come mass deportations. J.D. Vance has stated the (very reasonable) initial goal of 1 million deportations in the next year, with criminals and gang members targeted first. After dangerous criminals, illegals granted Temporary Protected Status or who participated in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals should be deported swiftly. The fact that these people have spent so much time here and “legalized” their status in some way, yet were still deported, will send a message: “No matter how long you’ve been here, you’re still going home.” Illegal immigrants must learn not to trust the government in order to discourage future arrivals.

Aggressive deportation measures and the elimination of government subsidies for private organizations that fund and facilitate illegal immigration can be coupled with new laws criminalizing employing or providing services to illegals. This combined front will cause a very large number of illegal immigrants to voluntarily self deport.

Although the number of direct deportations will likely just be a drop in the bucket compared to the total number of illegal immigrants in the country, I think skeptics underestimate the impact that 1+ million high visibility deportations in a relatively short amount of time would have on all illegal immigrants. This impact would be far more pronounced if the illegals were deported in good order, which would demonstrate that the process is repeatable.

Finally, Trump should launch a massive War on Crime, redeploying federal law enforcement to combat street criminals and gangs. By imprisoning tens or, preferably, hundreds of thousands of “low level” criminals, Trump can not only dramatically (and visibly) improve quality of life for normal people, but also greatly diminish the pool of violent individuals who might pose a systemic risk during future periods of unrest. This roundup should be conducted like a military campaign, with thousands of federal agents descending on high-crime cities one at a time to clear them of criminals, illegals, and anyone who might interfere with normal life.

This is I think the most important aspect of any future moves: The perception that the Trump-led government is always in total control. Overwhelming professional force should be used for everything, not to punish people, but to ensure that no resistance occurs. Preventing a fight and any widespread public disruption is vital. This requires enormous discipline and pre-planning, but, again, it’s possible.

By hitting liberal activists everywhere at once, Trump will be able to delay or blunt the counterattack that will surely follow as people forget the horrible 4 years we have experienced under Biden. This retaliation campaign will restore certainty to American life: If you fail to obey Trump’s orders, you will be fired. If you break the law, you will be arrested. If you illegally immigrate into our country, you will be deported. These should be facts of life as certain as gravity.

I think the last few years have warped perceptions of what living in America should be like quite a bit. The challenge of Trump in his first term (more specifically, in the first year and a half before the midterms) is convincing the average person that we don’t have to live this way, that decline was always a deliberate choice. Hopefully people can be helped to make the right choices after Trump has left office.

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I’m hoping this will be my last effortpost. I really don’t like contemporary politics. I don’t think I will be a part of any of the things I’m describing. I don’t think anything good is going to happen to me. I just want things to get better here.

It was depressing to write this. I hope I have done a good job conveying to you that, for the American Right, this is the eye of the storm. We could go into a new Golden Age and reach higher than anyone else has done before (Americans are good at that), or we could collapse into despair and passivity in just a few years. It really is up to us. We get to choose whether we win or die. That’s the only choice.

I am deeply moved by Trump, particularly his journey over the last few months following the first assassination attempt. I don’t talk about religion often and have contempt for those who do but I feel genuinely spiritually affected by all this. There’s something very evil going on in our world right now, and hopefully after today it’s coming to an end.

Trump will preside over America’s 250th anniversary celebration. This is a significant milestone for our country because of the (false) pop history maxim that states most empires only last for 250 years. Even though the proverb is fake, many want it to be real. They want it to all go away. Everyone is so unhappy. Everyone is so stupid and angry and ungrateful and insane. It has to stop. It will stop. We will stop it.