Wake in Fright: Evaluating President Trump's remarkable first 6 months
"There is great chaos under heaven - the situation is excellent"
We made it! It’s been a very long six months since Donald Trump took the oath of office. Lots of people, including myself, have lots of thoughts about where we are and where we’re going next. I recommend that you listen to this using the Substack App’s excellent text-to-speech feature because it’s going to be a long one.
I won’t bury the lead: Trump’s first 6 months represent, without a doubt, the most positive momentum that the American Right has seen in my lifetime. Problems that seemed unsolvable before Trump are now being solved. The unthinkable is being thought at a wide scale and expressed in public policy. The unmitigated decline and threats of total annihilation that defined the Biden years are now a distant memory, so distant a memory, in fact, that many rightwingers have already lost sight of just how far we’ve come.
First, the failures. As happy as I am, it hasn’t all been roses for Trump and team. The biggest disappointment has been Trump’s attack on Iran. I think the best way to ensure long-term domestic stability is to prevent foreign wars. Although the US shouldn’t shy away from defending itself (ridiculous attacks on the Trump admin for bombing the Houthis after they attacked US ships emerged from the usual chorus of bad actors), but we should not be engaging in risky and unnecessary overseas interventions, especially to back the plays of unpopular rogue states like Israel.
I was genuinely surprised by Trump’s decision to bomb Iran’s nuclear program. I didn’t like it at all. Even though Trump navigated the situation in the best way he could have, engaging in a risky but successful fake ritual combat with the Iranian government where both parties gave advance notice of their limited strikes so that no one would be killed, we should have never been in that situation to begin with.
The Israel lobby is one of the greatest blights on American conservatism. It pushes for unpopular policies that distract from and serve as a major impediment to the implementation of Trump’s popular (and far more important) domestic agenda. Everyone under 40 hates these people for good reason. No one believes the usual explanations for Israel’s constant bad behavior anymore.
Israel’s goals would be best served by Americans not having to think about Israel at all, because if Republicans are dragged down by Israel’s radioactivity then Israel will likely be faced with an American regime far more hostile to its interests.
I would like to see all aid to Israel ended, Israel’s wars brought to a close, and a larger strategic decoupling of America from Israel, including the removal of troops and military equipment. The best Israel should hope for long term is the neutral acceptance of an American regime committed to peace (both for Israel and from Israel) in the region. If Israel’s surrogates aren’t willing to accept this, they will likely trigger something far worse for everyone.
Another tangentially related failure of the second Trump administration can be found in its handling of the Epstein files. Although I’m sympathetic to some of the explanations presented for why the files were not publicly released in their entirety—namely claims that many figures named in the files merely had dinner or phone calls with Epstein so it would be inappropriate to permanently implicate them in a pedophilia scandal and that sensitive reports put together by the Obama and Biden FBI and DOJ aren’t necessarily reliable—the Trump Department of Justice’s handling of the files has turned into a national embarrassment that must be addressed.
Attorney General Pam Bondi publicly promised that the Epstein files would be released and then invited conservative influencers to receive “the files” at a public ceremony. When the material was examined, critical information had obviously been removed and what remained was largely a retread of what had already been released. It was an empty PR stunt that made everyone involved look terrible.
Even more damning, Bondi was discovered to have privately claimed that the material recovered from Epstein’s home contained massive amounts of footage of children being abused. After all this, the FBI issued a statement claiming that they simply did not have any damning files to release, and that Epstein was not involved in any kind of blackmail scheme. Even if the real-life Epstein network isn’t as outlandish as it is often presented online, the constant mixed messages and atmosphere of chaos have destroyed any faith that the public might have in justice being done in this case.
I don’t know what happened with Epstein. My impression (I haven’t looked into it closely) is that Epstein was the front man for a blackmail ring that targeted wealthy or politically influential people, in communication with Israeli intelligence and likely operating with the permission (or at least acceptance) of the American intelligence community and/or law enforcement. Epstein (and any handlers he had) extracted money and favors from the targets after the targets had consensual sex with almost of-age teenaged girls, which was recorded. It’s very good that Epstein went to jail. A lot of other people probably need to go to jail too.
I doubt that the Epstein blackmail ring was as extravagant as it is described online, and I’m confident that there was some kind of response behind the scenes that we don’t and probably will never know about. We’re in state secret territory here. I don’t expect and don’t need to know all the details. Everyone should be willing to admit how little they actually know about this. With that in mind, people should trust Trump when he says there are parts of the case files that are not reliable or that he just can’t talk about. I don’t think any country would allow this kind of scandal to play out in public.
Whatever happened, it is not acceptable for the US to remain passive, or even to be perceived as remaining passive, if children were actually being abused by Epstein’s associates. I have no idea if Bondi was telling the truth or speaking from direct knowledge in her private remarks, I suspect she was not, but she needs to provide an explanation. It’s also not acceptable for this kind of scandal to be allowed to undermine the entire American justice system due to catastrophically bad messaging. I think the best way to proceed at this point is to fire Pam Bondi as AG and launch an independent investigation of the badly botched roll-out of these files.
I don’t think Trump would tolerate pedophiles or ongoing foreign intelligence operations, I doubt he was involved in the scandal or the cover-up, and I trust that he’s doing the right thing for the country, but there’s something wrong going on here, ultimately under his watch, and it has to be addressed firmly if the public is to remain confident in American justice.
Finally, I’m not thrilled about the often unofficial tone that many official government social media accounts are taking. I’m not at all offended by government agency Twitter accounts using memes in rapid response, I’m not bothered by the supposed cruelty of it or whatever, but I do think people should not get too attached to this practice. It’s getting a little too “online.”
Government relies on trust and the perception of legitimacy, especially when you have to color outside the lines a little. Government communications should be a bit boring. If Trump officials are seen as hamming it up too much online, the public might conclude from this that they aren’t taking their jobs as seriously as they could be. It’s easy to brush those concerns off now, as the Trump administration is delivering nonstop wins, but if things ever do take a turn for the worse (whether or not Trump is at fault) I think it will be very easy for the public to latch onto a few online jokes as reflective of far larger issues. Save it for campaign or GOP accounts.
Of course, Israel, Epstein, and the tone of government social media weren’t even in my top 20 concerns during the election. I was most concerned about Trump’s domestic agenda and in that arena he has exceeded even my wildest expectations.
Never forget how far we’ve come. Think about (if you were around back then) what conservatism was like in 2015 before the rise of Trump. Think about the confusion and total resistance that Trump faced during the chaotic early days of his first term. Think about how close we came to the brink after 2020. Think about how bleak most important trends were and how impossible progress on important issues seemed.
When you compare the situation back then to that of today, not just what is happening in government, but what modern conservatives (or even Americans more generally) think is important or acceptable, it is obvious that we have experienced a huge positive sea change since the start of the Trump Era. Only the most cynical, dishonest, or delusional could (and do) ignore how much better a place we are in.
The second Trump administration is taking full advantage of the vastly improved climate that Trump has created for conservatives. This goes deeper than pure policy: More than it was at any point in the first term, the Trump administration today seems energetic and creative. It is taking bold action, fighting on unfriendly territory, and not falling apart when it encounters resistance. This is something that can last.
Of course, there have been plenty of missteps, mistakes, and even blunders (I’ve heard a great problem in every department is finding ideologically reliable, experienced, and/or competent personnel), but the wily and determined Trump Admin 2 seems like an actual political force capable of moving the situation in America in a positive direction over the long term. Only a movement that believes in itself in this way, to not just go through the motions but rather fight and fight hard in pursuit of its goals, can lead and convince others to follow.
The centerpiece of Trump’s second first 6 months is the recently passed Big Beautiful Bill (BBB). The bill contained a historic funding increase for immigration enforcement, granting ICE a larger budget than the Marine Corps. It is hard to believe that Trump would have gone to such great lengths to secure such a titanic increase in funding if he was planning on backing away from mass deportations, his most important policy.
This new funding means 10,000 new ICE agents to make arrests, along with desperately needed new space to hold arrestees and new prosecutors to handle deportation cases. The huge funding increases are important. Attracting high quality people to these roles requires high pay and opportunities for advancement, things that are often missing from government work. Although the Biden regime spent years dismantling America’s internal immigration enforcement infrastructure, the Trump administration seems committed to rebuilding it better than ever.
Trump also deserves enormous praise for successfully securing America’s border after decades of claims from liberals and conservatives alike that this was impossible. Illegal border crossings are currently down by more than 99% from their height during the worst days of the Biden years.
The most revealing aspect of this achievement is that Trump did not just turn the light switch back on and resume normal operations after Biden’s open borders officials were kicked out of office. He used new tools to bring the crisis to a close, deploying actual military combat units to the border and working with friendly state governments to shore up problem areas, and didn’t stop in victory, pursuing funding for an actual border wall to make the already difficult process of illegally crossing the border even harder.
Trump has visibly strengthened the power behind US internal immigration enforcement, even if the pace of removals still needs to increase by a great deal. In the absence of the resources needed to achieve the truly large-scale deportations we need. Trump’s immigration officials have wisely decided to stage pitched “battles,” high visibility enforcement actions guaranteed to have a wider impact on the immigration discourse than any direct deportations that might result from them.
A great example of these set pieces can be found in a joint ICE and Marine Corps raid on an agricultural area in Camarillo, CA earlier this month. The immigration raid was conducted with military precision, seizing dozens of illegal immigrants in the fields where they worked. When a large mob confronted the immigration officers, the Marines and ICE not only stood their ground but also called in a show of force, landing a Blackhawk helicopter in the middle of the farm to “deliver water.”
The images that came out of the event were great: Uniformed Marines standing against an angry mob of foreigners waving foreign flags. One of the Mexicans was even caught on video firing a gun at the raiders as he was running away (fortunately no one was injured). It was impossible to characterize the mob as anything other than foreign invaders, against whom a swift and severe response was obviously justified.
However, the real cherry on top for ICE came after the raid had been completed. California Governor Gavin Newsom and many other prominent Democrats began to condemn ICE, claiming it was targeting helpless farm workers picking strawberries. Several hours later, it was revealed that the farm was actually a marijuana grow operation and that nearly a dozen children had been captured working on the farm, most of them unaccompanied by their parents.
The ICE raid was really an operation to shut down a drug farm, guarded by armed men, that used child labor. This kind of arrangement is commonplace with illegals and indefensible in the eyes of the public. People just don’t hear about these things; the situation was so bad it sounds like a joke. ICE managed to not just stop the operation but also to bait various major Democrats into defending it.
In general, the Trump administration has done a good job generating uncertainty in the lives of illegal immigrants. They are increasingly cut off from state-provided resources and services. Illicit employment at otherwise above-board institutions has become a lot more complicated. Their fake exemptions from deportation are being tossed out administratively.
Although the courts and open borders lawyers are fighting Trump on immigration at every turn, they now have to fight constantly (expensive and attention-consuming), and fight with the knowledge that the Trump team is in it for the long haul and thinking outside the box. It is much easier to convince illegal immigrants to self deport, the easiest and cheapest way to get these people out of the country, if they are far poorer, more isolated, and know that going outside carries the non-zero risk that they might be subjected to a Byzantine multi-month sequence of events that ends with them being shipped to South Sudan.
We still don’t have reliable data on how many arrests and deportations the Trump administration has carried out so far, but they seem to be accelerating. What’s more, there seem to be huge downstream effects of the relatively small number of deportations we’ve seen—illegals are increasingly withdrawing from the workforce and many appear to be leaving the country entirely. This positive change seems to even extend to legal immigrants. Foreign job numbers are down, native job numbers are up. This might be the first year in decades that the number of foreign-born residents in the US actually decreases. It’s incredible how much progress has been made.
It hasn’t all been perfect on immigration. Trump occasionally announces proposals for new visas to students or agricultural workers, both of which I oppose, but it’s unclear if these are actually being acted on, and, if they are, these programs will be implemented by Trump’s team rather than people looking to back-door open borders.
As disappointing as many of these statements seem, I encourage other immigration restrictionists to hold off on passing judgment until the actual immigration numbers come in. Trump has earned trust on this issue more than any other. He has appointed immigration hardliners to every prominent immigration role. He expended enormous political capital to fund years of aggressive enforcement. He would not be doing all this if he planned to back away from mass deportations. Trump announcing something doesn’t mean it will happen or that it will happen in the way that people online expect. People should give Trump room to maneuver and let his plans play out before they condemn him as hopelessly compromised.
Ultimately, the success or failure of Trump’s immigration policies will be reflected in the numbers: Housing costs, insurance prices, emergency room wait times, wages, arrests, and, of course, deportations, not in this or that spur-of-the-moment headline or quote.
JD Vance identified the figure of 1 million deportations in the first year as the Trump campaign’s target before the election, and I think the Trump admin should be held to that in spite of all the obstacles it has faced. If they fail to hit 1 million total annual deportations within the next 6 months, it will represent a major failure. I’m optimistic that the Trump administration will be able to meet this challenge.
There are hundreds, even thousands, of other achievements outside of immigration that Trump’s victory has delivered. These wins touch nearly every aspect of American life. It’s hard to think of a quality of life metric for Americans that has not been improved by Trump winning and Kamala losing. I think people will be surprised what another 3 and a half years of this kind of progress will bring. I will name only a few of my favorites below:
Freeing the January 6 hostages on the evening of the inauguration, and blanket ending all pending prosecutions related to January 6 in response to the pervasive prosecutorial and judicial abuse that had surrounded these cases
Gutting the Department of Justice’s activist Civil Rights Division and closing its Community Relations Service, which encouraged white parents to make pathetic calls for unity after their children were targeted with anti-white racial violence
Shuttering USAID, which distributed hundreds of billions of dollars of fraudulent payments to liberal activist groups domestically and abroad
Proposing a new rule to remove pseudoscientific and permanently disfiguring transgender procedures and drugs from Medicaid coverage, greatly reducing their availability
Aggressively targeting universities and businesses for systemically discriminating against white people, especially white men, through DEI and affirmative action programs, severely curtailing these practices nationwide
Dismantling the Department of Education, which had become irrecoverably politicized in recent decades, returning responsibility for education to the states and dramatically reducing funding to various liberal activism NGOs
Firing or forcing out thousands of government employees in the State Department and other important agencies in order to decrease institutional resistance to the implementation of Trump’s lawful policies
Ending numerous “agreements” between the Department of Justice and various police departments targeted by liberal federal prosecutors that prevented local police from doing their jobs
Condemning the South African government for policies that target South Africa’s white minority population, which amount to an ethnic cleansing campaign
Achieving a historically abnormal budget surplus from tariff revenues, with the promise that government revenues will be increasingly reliant on tariffs rather than taxation of normal Americans
Depoliticizing the military by both ending leftist ideological indoctrination programs and removing the compromised officers who pushed them (I was sent an extremely entertaining description of this process taking place at a service academy, it can best be described as “shock and awe” targeting activist professors and staff)
Very revealing moment for me: Towards the end of this article, in the section where I provide recommendations for future actions, I had written that Trump should use the federal government to rid America of its growing and obviously mismanaged homeless problem in order to reduce national stress levels and encourage better decision-making.
As I was finishing this article (it’s been in progress on and off for about 3 weeks) Trump announced a new Executive Order stripping funds from ineffective homeless advocacy programs, which perpetuate the problem they nominally exist to solve, and removing various federal restrictions and consent decrees that prohibited arresting or forcibly institutionalizing the homeless.
We are in BasedWorld now. We have the opportunity to fix our problems. The moment has come.
The first 6 months of Trump’s second term mark the most positive shift for rightwingers in several decades. The progress made since the beginning of the Trump era is undeniable. Everyone who claims that there would have been no difference in outcomes if Kamala had won, or that somehow Kamala winning would be better, is either extremely stupid or, more likely, extremely dishonest. The American Right’s hard work paid off. We have a fighting chance instead of no chance at all. Everything that follows from here was only made possible due to the deft maneuvering and superhuman will of our beautiful President Donald J. Trump.
Although President Trump deserves very high marks for so elegantly threading the needle, the same cannot be said of the “Online Right,” an amorphous chorus of commentary and criticism that for a very long time moved rightwing politics in a positive direction.
The Online Right is inexorably linked to the Trump phenomenon, fueling much of his rise during the lonely months and years of total resistance from the Republican establishment, along with fundamentally restructuring how conservatives thought about politics, and yet it has been rendered largely superfluous in victory.
As their policy proposals are implemented at the national stage and their good ideas become unspoken pillars of political thought, the personalities and norms that define rightwing online spaces have begun to conform to every negative criticism that was once only unfairly directed their way.
The Online Right, having undergone its own Great Replacement, sitting with very different demographics (both older and younger, and a lot less white) and priorities than it started the Trump era with, has become unstable, dishonest, out-of-touch, and fundamentally useless in practical politics. I feel compelled to write about it because I came from these places and they improved my life and I think the country as well. What has happened is a loss.
Perhaps no better exemplar of this failure can be found than the ignoble end of Elon Musk’s political career. Musk, already famous before he entered politics for his futurist projects and business acumen, was catapulted to the center of the national spotlight after he belatedly endorsed Trump following Trump’s miraculous survival of an assassination attempt in Butler, PA.
Musk contributed hundreds of millions of dollars in political donations and lifted the veil of censorship that had impeded right-wingers on Twitter for years. I believe these contributions played a decisive role in the 2024 election. It might not be convenient to admit, but Trump would not have won without Musk’s assistance. We certainly would not control both the House and the Senate, essential for our present success, without Musk’s massive intervention.
Musk was rewarded for these substantial contributions with his own new government agency, collecting a (very cool) mandate to reduce government waste through extraordinary measures, and was allowed to take an unusually prominent role at public events.
Upon reaching the height of his political success, Musk proceeded to stumble from embarrassment to embarrassment. He seemed to be on drugs in many of his public appearances. He dramatically underdelivered on his promised cuts to government spending. His bizarre paternity scandals generated headlines nationally. Musk insulted Trump’s base while defending the corrupt H1B program, a key driver of mass immigration. He even seems to have physically attacked Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent after losing an argument in the White House. It should not surprise anyone that Musk was eventually shown the door for his behavior. Not ready for primetime.
Musk responded to his embarrassing failure in the way nearly all online figures do: He took a disingenuous stand on principles that he does not actually hold, permanently ended any chance of a real reconciliation, and then threatened to help liberals win if he didn’t get his way, all while begging anyone to work with him as though he had merely offered a different point of view.
Although Musk’s attempted coup imploded quickly and only benefitted the Left, he has failed to admit any wrongdoing and is obviously just waiting for the next opportune moment to do maximum damage to Trump and Republicans more generally.
This pattern plays itself out constantly among figures big and small. One grim reality that everyone must face if we are to succeed is that the decline of America was caused in large part by a decline in Americans. We can’t blame it all on outsiders. The American public, propelled to the highest heights in history by the incredible quality and dynamism of its members (I strongly recommend reading Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: A Narrative if you want to understand just how great a people Americans are), collectively lost the skills, will, and ultimately worldview required to fight for control of its systems. Trump represents the first turning of this grim tide, a true positive vision for America, and all the people who could not be bothered to fight the decline overtaking our country are planning on fighting his efforts tooth and nail.
One revealing example:
Language made it into the Big Beautiful Bill (BBB) that would have ended most federal regulations on suppressors. I support removing these regulations and it represented incredible progress on this issue that such a measure was even being considered. Unfortunately, the Senate parliamentarian removed most of the language deregulating suppressors from the bill, leaving in only a provision to drop the $200 fee associated with the “tax stamp” required for suppressors.
This was disappointing, but the reaction of gun enthusiasts online was a pure tantrum. Many claimed that they had received nothing at all, even though the $200 tax stamp fee had been removed (legal experts suggest this might render the entire federal registration scheme for suppressors unconstitutional, allowing it to be thrown out by the courts). Others insisted that there was no difference between the parties and that they would be staying home during the midterm elections to protest the GOP’s “betrayal.” Some began declaring that anyone who did not support removing the Senate parliamentarian was a coward and a traitor. I strongly suspect that most of these people had never heard of the Senate parliamentarian before this controversy.
It was the retarded screeching of useless men. The BBB passed by an incredibly narrow margin—one tie-breaking vote from the Vice President. I don’t know anything about Senate parliamentary procedures, but I do know that suppressor deregulation was not even a tiny fraction as important as the unprecedented budget increases for deportations contained in the bill. If Republicans in the House and Senate thought the best way to push through the bill at this time was without the suppressor provisions, that was probably the correct decision, especially since it has literally never been easier in modern America to own a suppressor if you want to (I read online recently that the wait time for paperwork approval has shrunk to about 5 days).
I know all the arguments for why suppressors should be deregulated; I agree with them. The arguments don’t really matter, though. It’s important for everyone to understand that there is a limit to how far being right will get you in this world.
We had a narrow window to pass this huge funding increase for ICE and only one way to do it. Politics involve deciding what is and isn’t important at the moment, and suppressors just weren’t that important. There’s still plenty of progress to be made on this issue but not at the potential expense of existential matters like immigration, which determine the fate of our country far more than an individual’s ability to legally own a suppressor without paperwork ever will.
Gun rights activists have enjoyed enormous wins lately, including ATF tolerance of devices that effectively circumvent existing laws regarding short-barreled rifles and even machine guns (although you’re limited to the growing number of devices that can accept a forced reset trigger). The entire gun rights discourse online, beyond very necessary efforts to overturn various state bans on “assault weapons” and concealed carry, is kind of a sideshow if you’re being even a little bit honest.
All gun rights activists did during this episode was demonstrate that they were willing to behave unreasonably over relatively minor issues. If they actually did carry out their threats and successfully tank the GOP, it would not only make deregulating suppressors impossible, it would also guarantee the implementation of new gun control laws. Many rightwingers today care far more about the social rewards that follow from making online arguments for why suppressors should be deregulated than they care about actually deregulating suppressors in the real world.
The overwhelming majority of criticism that such people have to offer is not even a little bit productive. They bring up unrelated issues or old grudges. They make blanket statements about betrayal or the hopelessness of politics. They threaten to kill themselves. There’s no way to dissipate the negative feelings after these flare-ups, they’re guaranteed to do it over the next thing and the next thing after that. They’ll chimp out over things that aren’t even real because they’re just waiting for an excuse to react and overreact. This volatility is eagerly exploited by the Left and various bad actors on the Right.
Is it a good idea to negotiate with people like this or incorporate them into your coalition at a structural level? Are the few thousand theoretical votes they have to offer worth sending the message that these hostage situations are an effective way to communicate? Can you trust them not to do the same thing next week over an equally minor issue? Does this kind of online voter even reliably show up on Election Day, much less in important districts? I really don’t think so.
One phenomenon that has become very noticeable is that people online today often think of “arguments” as mere slogans to signal their affiliation with the broader online rightwing subculture rather than responses to real world events. Although the words might have originated in online rightwing spaces, there is no longer any real meaning behind them.
I was taken aback when I said that calls to split the vote in protest or otherwise allow Democrats to win during the 2026 midterms in order to disrupt the GOP were stupid, only for someone to respond to me (roughly, he deleted the reply) “To play Devil’s advocate, hasn’t the GOP Congress blocked Trump’s every move?”
I was taken aback because this is something that would have seemed true during the first Trump term, when online rightwing spaces gradually began to dominate discourse, however, it is not true at all today. Trump has accomplished an enormous amount through executive action alone, and then successfully passed landmark legislation through Congress to direct unprecedented levels of funding towards his deportation agenda. Even if you were disappointed by the second Trump administration for whatever reason, there is no way that anyone could claim that Congress has blocked “every” or even “most” moves that Trump has made.
What this person said was not even plausibly true, but he seemed to earnestly believe it, or at least earnestly feel it. Although there are plenty of people who make these false claims in bad faith, I don’t think he was one of them. That’s one of the main issues facing conservatives, I guess: It would be easy to dismiss these people as secret liberals or bad actors etc. They’re not, or at least most aren’t. The American mind has just been damaged by the decades of accelerating dysfunction and decline society experienced before Trump. This guy was lying for a reason, what was it?
Rightwingers often (or at least used to back when discussions online were a little more substantive) cited Cristopher Lasch’s book The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations in their critique of Boomerism and its disastrous fruits. Unfortunately, it’s clear that the would-be replacements of the Boomer generation have fallen victim to the exact same culture of narcissism that led our country to disaster before Trump.
A friend remarked that early online “redpill” culture was about acknowledging unpleasant truths whereas its vulgarized modern iteration is about therapy and self-esteem. I think that cuts to the core of the phenomenon, at least online. As more and more people become aware of our world’s unpleasant truths, it’s obvious that many are more excited about the new status and accompanying opportunity to signal the virtue that this knowledge provides to them than anything else.
People are very pleased with themselves for noticing the obvious, which is what most far right critiques of society actually are. I cannot tell you how many big figures I see these days smugly saying “You’re not allowed to talk about this” when referring to an issue that actually people talk about all the time and have been talking about for years. It might even be an issue that the government is now taking positive action to address. These self-satisfied figures fail to recognize that the only value that flows from seeing the world as it actually is comes from the accompanying ability (and responsibility) to change it.
I support an immigration moratorium because I think Americans are being replaced in their own country, which is the greatest country in the world or at least the only country I will ever have. I don’t think an immigration moratorium is politically realistic right now, though, so I support Trump’s other efforts to reduce legal and illegal immigration in order to reduce the number of foreigners and create a broader climate of immigration skepticism that might make an immigration moratorium, along with other drastic measures, possible.
There’s actually zero value in knowing that Americans are being replaced in their own country if that knowledge leads you to demand an immigration moratorium and then, when you don’t receive it because it’s not feasible at the moment, begin opposing Trump or otherwise attempting to scuttle the biggest and best opportunity we have to reduce immigration in modern history. I just don’t care if you can make an argument that I agree with on this. No one should. Lots of people have said the same things before. It’s obvious. Being right doesn’t matter nearly as much as people think it does. People are so obsessed with being right that they end up being very wrong.
You don’t get points for believing the right things if you conclude from this that we should lose. If you think in this way, it’d be better if you didn’t know about any of these online issues and just casually supported Republicans because Democrats broke the country and want to kill you, or even because of one of the tenuous and kind of quaint outmoded justifications for voting Republican: Small government, balanced budgets, the Constitution, etc.
Today online rightwingers just get a sign and then they deploy an appropriate online right countersign to show that they’re part of the awakened. Sometimes it makes sense. Oftentimes it doesn’t. There’s no longer any thought or plan or desire to achieve anything behind the words. These people feel scared and then they break out slogans like “Trump hasn’t done anything,” or “There’s no difference between the parties,” or “The GOP is worthless,” or “It’s over,” all of which may have been or at least seemed true at one point but are just delusional and harmful now.
These are slogans people repeat because they’ve seen them repeated thousands of times before. The words are just group identity signifiers now. Good news, bad news, it always leads back to these platitudes. You’re not arguing about reality when you disagree with people trapped in this discourse, you’re arguing about their emotions and self-perception. You will never win that kind of argument no matter how absurd what’s being said actually is. People are unwilling to adapt to their new situation, as a part of the ruling coalition, with the accompanying responsibility to not just point out problems but to do something about them.
I can already tell you how the Ohio gubernatorial election is going to go: Rightwingers online will make a bunch of (perfectly accurate) criticisms of disgraced DOGE alumni Vivek Ramaswamy, but fail to voice support for an alternative candidate (much less provide that alternate candidate with any kind of real world assistance) or really do anything beyond making the argument.
When Ramaswamy wins the Republican primary in Ohio, these rightwingers will either begin supporting the victory of the liberal candidate, (who would produce far worse real-world results for them than Vivek, however accurate their criticisms of Vivek may be) or conclude that their, realistically very limited, political participation was pointless and propose withdrawing from the system entirely, cycling through the usual platitudes that such people deploy whenever any setbacks are encountered.
None of this should be taken as an endorsement of Vivek. I’m proud to say that I’ve been skeptical of and hostile to him since he first appeared on the scene during the 2024 primary debates. The last time I mentioned him, I was suggesting that he cut his own finger off to apologize for his role in Musk’s Christmas H1B debacle. However, rightwingers online simply have no idea how to solve their problems, or even that their problems actually need to be solved rather than merely pointed out to applause.
Opposing this behavior has nothing to do with support for bad policies. This is not how adults achieve their goals, and yet it is seemingly the only way that many rightwingers online know how to act as nominal members of the ruling coalition. Tantrums are not an expression of power, they are a cope for the lack of it.
In general, it’s a bad idea to chimp out all the time because chimping out usually takes the form of generalized attacks on Trump or the GOP, which, as support for and from these parties is required to pass legislation, ultimately only diminish your ability to actually do anything. Constantly creating hostility towards Trump and the GOP is simply not a sustainable strategy when the implementation of policies you support totally depends on Trump and the GOP’s political power.
If there’s one surefire method to get people to stop listening to you, it’s by attempting to negotiate through ultimatums, unrealistic demands, and threats that you might allow shared enemies to win. People repeat “always chimp” as if the world did not just watch Elon Musk, the richest man on the planet, destroy his political career and public good-will by chimping out.
What is at the root of all this dysfunction? I tried to come up with a good name for the people who flip out all the time as a hobby. Pisspants Conservatives? The Raped Right? Nothing quite fits. There are too many dimensions to the problem.
I guess, going forward, it’s important to sort out who you should or even can actually criticize.
As annoying as younger people often are about politics, they deserve absolutely zero blame for any of this. They were brought up in extremely bad conditions. Previous generations threw them into a social, economic, and political nightmare with few, if any, models for good behavior. It’s not surprising that young people don’t have much trust in the system or older people, many of whom obviously just hate the young because young people are aware of their many inadequacies.
There’s also the natural bias of the young, for whom power seems to be remote and who usually aren’t taught how we got here, towards ideology and utopian thought. They’re still learning how the world works and what they are and are not capable of. It’s often a strength, because they are frequently underestimated, but can be a huge weakness. You don’t win smart young people over by yelling at them or calling them stupid, even when they’re wrong. You have to deliver the only thing that matters: Results. A country worth living in.
There are also a bunch of people nominally on the Right today who you can’t or at least shouldn’t want to win over. First and foremost, are foreigners. The US has had massive amounts of immigration over the last few decades. Tens of millions of people are in America who shouldn’t be. It’s not a bit or throwaway talking point. Although these newcomers and their progeny might align with the American Right on this or that individual issue, long-term cooperation is ultimately impossible because they have fundamentally different priorities.
Many of the new arrivals genuinely hate America and want it to be destroyed and replaced with something that they can more readily fit into. It’s not surprising when these people turn on Trump under this pretext or another as Trump’s grand vision to save America runs against their individual and group interests. Even the accurate criticism that these people have to offer is ultimately just concern trolling that the American Right shouldn’t try to glom onto because it will always end in an unacceptable place. There’s actually very little benefit to expelling Zionist influence from New York City politics if you end up with a foreign socialist who openly hates white people in charge of America’s largest and wealthiest city. You’re never going to win by pretending someone else’s interests are your own.
Finally, there are many bad actors whose personal brands ultimately depend on our collective failure. A lot of internet commentators don’t have any real goals beyond obtaining vindication over their various rightwing rivals or creating more streaming content and more streaming content consumers. Some, perhaps most, are just stupid, but others have backed themselves into a corner after years of flipping positions and betrayal.
It’s remarkable how many once unfairly maligned people there are from 2015 and 2016 who, if they hadn’t radically changed their positions and allegiances and behavior over the last decade of chaos, would be enjoying mainstream political acceptance today. No one in normal politics will or should work with these guys for very sound non-ideological reasons, and any good ideas they might have had are being implemented without them, so their only real path to continued relevance or at least self-esteem is helping liberals obstruct Trump’s agenda.
It’s almost tough to blame these people. They’re at least acting out of crude self-interest however malignant a presence they may be. They’re not even really part of the rightwing space anymore, they’re in effect just advocating for Democrats full time. It’s not worth having any kind of internal argument with outsiders.
I was bewildered when New Right Post, who I don’t think is a bad actor, approvingly referenced my article Vibelash: Reflecting on the disintegration of the rightwing public mind in his fawning interview of Pedro Gonzalez, who definitely is a bad actor and is one of those guys who just reflexively attacks Trump and anyone on his bugaboo list using any pretext, no matter how dubious. He was expecting Pedro to agree with my criticisms of online circles today, which mirrored some of his own.
There was a really funny afternoon like two years ago when Pedro began insisting that my postmortem of DeSantis’s doomed primary campaign condemned DeSantis’s otherwise very successful governorship (I’m approximating, the exchange has been deleted). It was obvious that Pedro didn’t even bother to read my article, he just doesn’t like me and so decided to invent a logic to justify an attack.
When I pointed out that what he was saying about the article was just objectively not true, regardless of how he felt about the article or me personally, he deleted the condemnation, posted two different, slightly rephrased, tweets over the next hour that also condemned the article, and then deleted his posts on the matter entirely.
There are like 5000 exchanges that rightwingers online have had with Pedro exactly like this. He doesn’t care about what he’s saying, he left his dignity behind a long time ago. Pedro just wants Trump and his allies to lose as part of his tedious Latinx psychodrama to avenge the injustice he feels he has suffered.
What was most bewildering about the interview was that New Right Post seemed to be taking Pedro’s criticisms of Trump, the Trump movement, and online circles more generally at face value. Didn’t he know that Pedro did not actually believe that Kamala’s Gen Z Brat meme warriors were paving the way to her victory? Didn’t he know that Pedro does not believe virtually any of the shifting criticisms that he makes of Trump and the other people who he feels have wronged him? Does Pedro actually think that we are at war with Iran? Who gives a shit what this person has to say?
It’s kind of crazy. There’s this figure who lies constantly and worked to secure trans surgeries for little kids and open borders during the 2024 election, and he’s treated like a normal participant in rightwing discourse rather than dismissed out of hand. Why is anyone interacting with this guy without hostility? There are lots of figures like Pedro who are soberly indulged to everyone’s detriment.
I cannot overstate how retarded and/or despicable every single person “on the Right” who discouraged people from voting for Trump before the 2024 election is. Whatever Trump’s failings may be, these people are not worthy to kiss the ground that Trump walks on. They were pushing for total defeat. They wanted thousands more kids to be trans-ed. They wanted the border to remain open and for illegals to be amnestied, along with every other bad thing that Democrats being handed an unassailable electoral majority would have entailed. America experienced uninterrupted decline during the Biden years, virtually everything got worse, and these guys wanted to make that permanent.
Shortly after Biden was elected, Twitter user Ricky Vaughn was arrested and railroaded under an anti-KKK “voter suppression” law that hadn’t been used in more than 100 years for his Twitter posts four years prior. They had to invent a novel legal theory to even charge him, but he was still unanimously convicted by a New York jury. The conviction was only recently, years after the fact, thrown out on appeal. According to the appeals judges, not only was it debatable if what Ricky Vaughn had been accused of was actually a crime, the state had failed to provide literally any evidence that he had even done what they claimed. He had been convicted merely because he was in a groupchat where someone else said something. They were going to throw him in jail based off of nothing. Everyone on the Right who opposed Trump before the 2024 election wanted all of us to live under that kind of system.
It is bizarre that anyone tolerates these people. If you throw them lifelines, if you humor them or promote them or give them credit when they say the sky is blue, you’re just another part of the problem. Even now, they spread constant lies and demoralization, doing everything in their power to convince people to throw up their hands and walk away right as we finally have a real and limited opportunity to change the situation for the better. Bad actors are enabled only by a total lack of standards and discernment on the American Right. If you don’t have enough spine to avoid indulging in this kind of bad faith idea game, there’s not much to be done with you.
Many people today are so wrapped up in discourse that they are kind of oblivious to whether or not the discourse matters or if the discourse is even real.
For me, the people who deserve the most criticism as we sit at the end of Trump’s first 6 months are those on the Right who are just sitting around waiting to be convinced by bad actors to surrender or go insane. In other words, the Panicians.
I think at a fundamental level many people on the Right just aren’t ready to take responsibility for themselves and their country. It’s scary to win and to be in charge, when what you do and say actually matters, or at least it could. Having tagged along with Trump on his path to victory, online commentators dramatically overestimate their influence, insight, and abilities. Rather than trying to grapple with the failure and compromise that are inevitably a part of governing imperfect systems full of imperfect people, or take charge of their limited powers and influence, they prefer to take a more comfortable position outside all the nastiness. They want to run away.
There is a self-involved defeatism that underlies the Panician phenomenon. I cannot be the only one who has noticed that most of the people who do this stuff tend to be older, usually in their 40s or above, and subscribe to apocalyptic fantasies like civil war, national divorce, or collapse more generally. None of these things are realistic or even remotely likely, and all of them would be very bad: In the unlikely event they happened, the result would almost certainly be total liberal victory.
I’ve been following the above account with a kind of grim interest for the past year and a half or so. During the run-up to the 2024 election he very undiplomatically demanded that Trump prove that the Butler, PA assassination attempt had not shaken Trump’s commitment to gun rights. Later, he condemned Trump’s immigration policies, which might see the deportation of illegal immigrants who hadn’t committed any crime (beyond illegally immigrating) as too harsh. Why would someone who was a professional gun rights activist feel compelled to say any of these things before an election during which Trump’s opponent was promising an assault weapons ban and gun confiscation?
At some point during the last few months, he seems to have gotten divorced and read one too many /pol/ infographics about the Jews. He lost his political lobbyist job due to his internet posts and now just loses his mind online all day in between posting affiliate deals for guns and ammunition. During the Iran strikes he claimed that the USS Enterprise was being sailed out to the Persian Gulf to be sunk in a false flag attack (once people learn this term they tend to throw it at everything. One of the lowest things I’ve ever seen online was Stew Peters claiming that that genderqueer illegal immigrant shooting up a church in Texas to free Palestine was actually a false flag) to draw America into WW3. When the war didn’t happen and everything went back to normal, he just moved onto the next thing to be angry about.
What I like most about his account is that there’s no guile or cynicism there, just his unfiltered thoughts. He’s not one of these guys who’s just trying to accumulate a larger and larger streaming audience by engagement baiting. Look at his post: “Please stack up while I’m young enough.” He’s afraid of getting old, one of the most eternal fears in human history. He is really just waiting for affirmation of his concerns or permission to “do something” about his unhappiness, as if anyone will ever give him permission to solve his personal problems, much less permission to commit terrorism.
This person does not actually want to commit violence. If he did, he would go out and do it. Like many people on the Right today, he really just wants to feel heard and understood more than he wants to achieve anything. Liberals are organizing terrorist attacks and shooting people right now, meanwhile rightwingers who call for political violence constantly online in practice are perfectly peaceful. Their only real plan is to give liberals total political control so that theoretically they might be able to act on their power fantasies at some point in the future.
Intentionally losing through inaction or spreading demoralization is an effort that these people, who are not ideologically or temperamentally equipped for meaningful political participation, might realistically be able to contribute to, so that’s what they pursue. People love to say “We’re not voting our way out of this,” as if we’re going to Tweet our way out of it instead. Unconsciously aware of their impotence, they only want to express their power in some way, and it’s much easier to farm that expression out to your enemies than it is to build something of your own. It’s pathetic, but a lot of rightwingers today are just pathetic.
If pull the curtain back far enough on all the apocalyptic fantasies pushed by these rightwingers, you will find a similar internal defeat. It seems like all of the middle-aged men who engage in obviously counterproductive behavior that makes political success more difficult, who push stuff that has been tried before and proven to have a very low ceiling, who constantly say “it’s over” or who propose taking actions that would make us lose, already have an almost religious belief that victory is impossible, or even that defeat would represent some kind of cosmic justice. They think that a civil war or some other destruction of America is not only likely, it’s inevitable.
When someone comes to believe these things, they stop actually trying to win or to avoid self-indulgent mistakes. To them, it no longer really matters what they do, they’ve already lost. They usually aren’t honest enough to admit this to themselves or others, though, and gradually transform into unwitting full-time saboteurs. They’ve made the prediction, now they want to see it come true. If it doesn’t come true, they might feel embarrassed. They might have to admit they saw things the wrong way.
Even before Trump was inaugurated, we have had certain people insisting that X, Y, or Z decision, which no one is talking about anymore, was going to cost Trump the midterms. These people say the same thing every single month, every single week, always about a new issue. They are never phased when their dire predictions fail to come true.
Do you remember all the people who panicked after Trump’s botched tariff rollout? They said we were going to be plunged into depression and that the second Trump administration was already over. In reality, the stock market just hit all-time highs. If there are problems, we can solve them. It’s not theoretical anymore. During the Spanish Civil War Franco’s Foreign Legion chanted “Death! Death! Death!” to celebrate their indifference to their fates. Today rightwingers obsessed with collapse trip over themselves to propose what amounts to total surrender when they see the market get shaky.
At a certain point, it’s obvious that the people who declare that we are going to lose all the time actually just want us to lose.
I have mercifully refrained from referencing the Russian Civil War up until this point in the article, but a great example of this mindset can be found in Always with Honor: The Memoirs of General Wrangel. The Whites suffered a major blow when Denikin’s risky March on Moscow collapsed. Although defeat on the battlefield was bad, the real problems came after Denikin failed to make any real effort to organize a proper retreat.
Casualties and loss of war material during the retreat were very high and could have been reduced by taking basic steps expected of any military commander during a withdrawal. When Wrangel approached Denikin with a list of moves to make in order to salvage the increasingly dire situation, Denikin examined the list but didn’t comment on its contents. He just looked up at Wrangel despairingly and said “All the same, we must go on with it.”
In other words, Denikin thought it was already over. He viewed his leadership of the White Army as an unpleasant chore that he would soon be done with. He did not feel compelled to take any steps to mitigate the damage because he considered it pointless. Why bother with the complicated and unpleasant tasks that might offer a slim path to success when you can do nothing and end up in the place you already think you’re going?
This attitude is dangerous. Rights are accompanied by responsibilities. We all have responsibilities to our country and each other. That’s how countries work. When someone is the head of a military, they have a responsibility to pursue the best course of action even when the situation looks grim. Peoples’ lives literally depend on it. People died needlessly because Denikin gave up while he still had the wheel.
The White Army might have had a chance to recover from the loss, but Denikin threw that away. He didn’t even have the nerve to step down after he had accepted defeat, allowing someone else with a different plan to take command. Denikin had to be forced out, but not before he engaged in a destructive feud with Wrangel during which he had Wrangel exiled and his associates arrested on bogus charges. It was all obviously harmful if you wanted to win, but I don’t think he really wanted to win anymore.
If you are an American, you have a responsibility to pursue the best path forward for America. That doesn’t just mean having the correct views about immigration or gun rights or foreign policy or whatever, it means working to solve your problems in the real world. You have to fix the problem. You can’t make the problem worse even if doing so makes you feel good or allows you to preserve your ego. You do not get any credit for doing bad things while having the right ideas.
Whenever I see people declaring that there is no hope, or suggesting that we should give liberals power to teach America a lesson, or harping on issues that there is no way to solve at the moment (usually making harsh, perhaps even valid, criticism of the Trump administration without offering any alternative), or spreading fake rumors and panic, I am taken aback by how selfish it all seems. What are you here for? If you really felt this way, why wouldn’t you just go do something else?
There is a small-mindedness that you see everywhere in rightwing politics now. I’ve already shared a selection from Richard Pipes’s The Russian Revolution that describes the attitudes of the Russian peasantry during the revolutionary period. My argument in the piece was that, without regard to their wealth or intelligence (in other words, there are plenty of wealthy and/or intelligent people who make this mistake), many Americans were adopting a new distinct mindset that resembles that of peasants.
I couldn’t help but notice parallels between the short-sighted “Green” (unaligned militias with exclusively local concerns and a loosely libertarian ideology) peasant uprisings that crippled the Whites in the face of a renewed Bolshevik offensive and the kind of thinking that is commonplace in rightwing spaces today. Kenez writes:
The peasants could harm their enemies, but could not establish a government capable of defending their interests. Peasant risings in the Ukraine in the fall of 1919 and in the Black Sea province in the winter of 1920 ultimately helped only the Bolsheviks. The peasants achieved quick victories because the Whites had been unable to establish a functioning administration in the villages, but then they lost power for the same reason: they, too, had no remedy for disorganization. Of course the sources of White and Green administrative failures were different: the Whites failed to penetrate the villages; the Greens did have grassroots support, but they had neither the personnel nor the ideology necessary for administering the territory under their rule.
The Greens of today are not capable of fighting the decline overtaking America, they are the decline: Adults who can and should do something productive but are too wrapped up in themselves to shoulder the responsibility that has been thrust upon them.
Defeatism is about running away from responsibility. Helping the enemy is about running away from responsibility. Endless debates in a time for action are about running away from responsibility. Despair is about running away from responsibility. Everyone just wants to run away! Unfortunately, we’re not going to get bailed out by the apocalypse. We either solve our problems in the real world or we suffer.
Although rightwing online spaces had enormous value when they were used to raise awareness of important issues, push back against tired mainstream narratives, and introduce new (or old) good ideas into conservative discourse, they are worthless as a hysterical echo chamber or hostage taker.
If you are an important person reading this, do not listen to the prevailing “wisdom” on Twitter. Do not attempt to mollify or pander to the people flooding your replies or quote tweeting you with this or that threat to kill themselves. These guys will steer you off a cliff. They have very little to offer you beyond their votes, if they even live in America, and people who behave in this way can always find a new excuse to obstruct whatever you’re trying to accomplish. All concessions will only be followed by even more unreasonable demands.
There are a few exceptions to this trend online who have risen to the occasion recently. I think one man in particular deserves highlighting: Braxton McCoy (@braxton_mccoy on Twitter).
I had been a critic of McCoy a few years ago for some of his old takes on immigration and a bunch of other topics, mostly related to the (truly pointless) Urbanite-Rutalite discourse. Looking back, I was way too nasty. McCoy has not only come around on a lot of important issues (he was recently criticized for very old tweets about shooting ICE agents, which is a position I genuinely don’t think he holds anymore and is bizarre that anyone would feel compelled to defend today), he took decisive leadership during the important debate surrounding controversial public land sales in the American West.
The debate over the public land sale provisions in the BBB, which would have opened up pristine wilderness, Americans’ birthright, to a variety of shady developers, was an unambiguous win for the Online Right. Although you had many stupid and lazy rightwing commentators respond to the initial announcement of the land sale proposal by claiming that it was over and there was no difference between the parties (in other words, telling people to give up), McCoy went on the offensive.
He voiced reasonable and well-informed concerns, calmly rebutted PR spin deployed to defend the land sale, and gave high-profile interviews to raise awareness of the issue. As this debate was going on, McCoy remained positive and confident in his eventual success. “We are going to win” he repeated over and over again, and he was right. In the end, McCoy and other online figures managed to rally enough support to kill the land sale provisions. McCoy was aware of his power and used it for good. This is a model for how it should be done.
Ultimately, I think online spaces have become a victim of their own success. They’re now awash with the same normgroids who people used to go online to get some distance from and sadly many longtime fringe figures are fundamentally unable to adapt to their new circumstances. Online political and cultural wins have ensured that the interesting stuff isn’t happening online anymore, it’s happening in the federal government.
I’m taken aback by how little most of the political stuff you see online seems to matter anymore. Politics became culture and now both suck. Christians versus Pagans again? Now Protestants versus Catholics? OnlyFans whores owned with facts and logic. Fear of our Chinese future. Another decade of relitigating WW2 but with Rumble streamers and crypto scammers? Another riff on the 1990s compound wave? Are people going to start talking about White Sharia and the Big Igloo again?
It just seems like playtime now. The State Department is about to open an Office of Remigration. Trump is condemning white genocide in the Oval Office. US Marines are getting shot at during high-risk deportation raids. They’re reopening the asylums and building the wall. It’s time to put up or shut up, and a lot of people can’t do either. At the same time that online circles are joining hands as one to call Trump a Jewish slave and pedophile, Trump’s approval ratings are higher than ever. The state of emotional crisis you see online does not exist in the real world, where everything is actually improving. The general public is being taught to tune this stuff out, for better or for worse.
I think it will be for better and for worse. On the one hand, I’d much rather be in this situation, where the retards are louder and more numerous and places that were once smart and fun are a lot less so, because many good ideas are closer to power than ever before. We get to actually see the stuff we talked about happen in the real world.
At the same time, online spaces genuinely did move politics forward for the better and there’s still a long way to go. The Trump moment is still misunderstood, even by some of its strongest boosters. People still do not know why they were right or how we got here. The critiques of mainstream thought (even as it shifts) and figures you see online are often accurate and should be acted on. They actually can be acted on now on if people bother to show up and try. It really would be a loss if everyone decided to make their good ideas radioactive or irrelevant in the one political force where they might actually matter. I worry about what might replace these influences once they’re gone.
So, what should be done? What should Trump prioritize in the next six months, and the three years after that? Below you will find a few suggestions:
Mass Deportations
There is no substitute for results on this issue. Trump has an unprecedented mandate to end the demographic displacement of Americans, deliberately engineered through mass immigration policies. Deportations of illegal immigrants (and incentivized self-deportations of legal immigrants) are extremely popular and improve the lives of Americans. The Trump administration must pursue this aggressively, especially with such a short time span before the impending midterms will make major disruptions unwise. Now is the time to create the New Normal for immigration.
World Peace
One of the biggest TBDs for the Trump administration is bringing the Ukraine War to a close. I think it’s pretty obvious that Trump wants peace and does not support the Obama/Biden policy of needless antagonism towards Russia. But, with millions of people involved, America’s nominal strategic partners concerned, and hundreds of billions of dollars committed, it’s not as easy as waving a magic wand to turn off the conflict. If there’s one person who can craft a deal for peace, I think it’s Trump. This should be a priority. No more Slavic snuff videos set in Rubbish Heap X or a dacha area where people used to live. It’s got to stop and hopefully soon.
As various right-coded defense contractors lean into reindustrialization and rearmament (which should be priorities after decades of dismantling American industry), it’s important to avoid the trap of belligerence. I don’t trust all the people who were cheering on the Iran intervention to manage a Cold War with China without turning it into a hot one. America needs decades of peace and stability to rebuild itself, the Trump Era is the start of that process. Curbing Chinese influence should be a major priority (this ties into immigration and law enforcement), but if we build a huge hammer, it’s likely that a lot of things will start looking like nails to the various people and interest groups in charge.
Rather than forever expanding the military, I think the priority should be major reforms to supply chains and discipline. The military has suffered decades of disastrous social engineering and affirmative action. which have altered at a fundamental level the composition and priorities of this important institution. Creating (through mass separations and higher standards) a small but professional and efficient force that can be scaled up in times of crisis is going to be a lot better the creating a large but unwieldly organization that might topple if you give it a push. During the Floyd Riots it seems as though many major figures in the military, and even a not-insignificant portion of the rank and file, supported the rioters. If you don’t get rid of those people soon they might do a lot of damage.
A Happy People
There are a lot of people who just fuck things up and make life impossible for everyone else. People don’t feel invested in themselves and society more generally if they live in a shithole or if shithole behavior is widely tolerated. The El Salvador miracle demonstrated that by jailing about 2.5% of its population a country can totally solve its crime problem and dramatically improve quality of life by every meaningful metric. The George Floyd Riots and BLM movement radically reduced the number of prisoners held in the US. It’s time to turn that switch back on. Americans need a break from the wreckers.
The BBB provided funding for 10,000 new ICE agents. It gave immigration authorities a bigger budget than the Marine Corps. There are a lot of law enforcement efforts that need bigger budgets than branches of the military. We need a new army of cops, prosecutors, and prison guards. People who commit low level offenses commit high level offenses at far greater rates, and low level offenses make life a little bit nastier anyway. The more we can pump up the prison population, the more violence we can prevent and the nicer we can make public spaces and normal life. It’s obvious that Americans are just stressed out, and there are a lot of stressors who can be removed with a little bit of effort.
Society just needs a good scrub-down after decades of deregulation and decline. Things are starting to look a little bit shabby. I go outside and I smell weed and see a lot of shitty tattoos on people who probably wouldn’t have had them in the past. That’s definitely a recent phenomenon and I think responsible for a lot of social problems that are difficult to quantify and that social scientists don’t like to talk about.
It’d be great if the Department of Health and Human Services became much more aggressive towards the tattoo industry. I’m sure that the ingredients in these inks are not exactly good for you. Require extensive new training and licensing and more heavily regulate tools and supplies. Try to drive up the cost of these procedures and related materials however possible and force these businesses to close.
It would absolutely be worth it for HHS to begin funding or heavily subsidizing tattoo removal. Spend billions of dollars, it’d generate greater returns than most government programs. At the very least, this kind of effort would reintroduce the taboo against drawing on yourself. There are many trends and behaviors that were once confined to small areas and groups that have become commonplace now. I cannot tell you how many strips centers I see that contain a new tattoo parlor and vape shop. Again, it’s tough to quantify the exact effect that these things becoming normal has had but I think everyone knows that it’s not good.
Speaking of vape shops, marijuana decriminalization has obviously failed. I see people high in public all the time now, and not just homeless wastrels. It’s bad to be in an altered state regularly, much less at work. It’s a path to other undesirable behaviors. I know many otherwise smart young people who have obviously been affected by regular drug use. Weed might have exploded so much recently that re-imposing real prohibition would be non-viable, but again I think the key here is to dramatically expand the federal enforcement actions against related businesses to reduce availability and increase costs. Hopefully this will shrink drug use rates among the general public enough to allow for an eventual ban.
A similar federal approach should be deployed against the porn industry, modeled on various new state age verification requirements. It’s kind of impossible to ban porn (at least in a desirable way, look at how the UK is using a porn ban to regulate internet speech). However, you can prevent people from making money off of it and raise the barriers to entry in order to greatly reduce production/consumption rates. Again, it’s difficult to quantify, but a society where all this stuff is commonplace is obviously worse off than a society where it is not. OnlyFans and other major providers should be regulated into oblivion using this or that pretext and Twitter and other social media services should be forced to moderate porn off their platforms/algorithms. This should not be something that normal people are encountering regularly.
Speaking of things that normal people should not be encountering regularly, it is nuts how much gambling has taken off in recent years. The government should curtail this behavior, which introduces unnecessary stress and financial volatility into normal peoples’ lives. The effect is particularly pronounced on young people. I don’t think there are many upsides to it becoming so easy to gamble everywhere and there are obviously a lot of downsides. Although the feds should avoid a politically unpopular outright ban, there are a lot of ways to make this stuff more inconvenient for gamblers and less lucrative for the companies behind it. These are levers that should be pulled as soon as possible.
It is easy to not care about the fate of a shithole. The Trump administration should do everything in its power to improve quality of life and stability for Americans. After decades of decline, it’s important to remind everyone that this is a nice country full of nice people.
Paydirt
Although Trump has delivered nonstop wins over the last 6 months, the job and housing markets still leave a lot of room for improvement. This moment is extremely brittle. As soon as the wins stop coming, people will start to come apart—online circles didn’t need much of a push to enter into their present panic-despair cycle.
The best way to ensure long-term stability for America (and political success for Trump) is to make Americans, particularly young Americans, more invested in the fate of their country. Young people need good jobs that they will want to keep for a long time and real property that they will want to protect.
Accelerated hiring and improved pay and opportunities for promotion in law enforcement and related roles is one way to funnel young people where they need to go. This has the added benefit of primarily benefitting individuals who are probably going to be more conservative.
It also remains important to continue attacking America’s high skilled immigration programs, forcing companies to hire and train American workers no matter the cost. Workers in low-skill positions would similarly benefit from having less competition in the labor market for these roles.
Breaking open the real estate market is critical to ensuring social stability over the long term. Desirable residential housing is unaffordable for young people, depriving them of an essential component of citizenship. The government should take steps to heavily disincentivize the use of residential housing as an investment vehicle. Houses should be for living in, first and foremost.
Large and mid-sized concerns should be forbidden from purchasing single-family housing and forced to sell their existing holdings. Absentee rentals should be capped at a set number of properties and incur heavy tax penalties. Foreign businesses and foreign nationals should be excluded from the residential real estate market. Do all this stuff at the federal level. If you want a young person to be invested in their country, they need to have a real place that they have a real stake in.
The Grand Spectacle
People need to be aggressively reminded that America is back. This is the Trump Era. There need to be defining events and monuments to reassure the public that we are not circling the drain anymore. Items like the inaugural military parade or America’s Semiquincentennial celebration seem like one-offs. What’s actually needed is for the federal government to expend great effort and expense on massive projects that are impossible to ignore or minimize.
Trump has suggested reopening Alcatraz Island as a federal prison and I think that’s a great idea. Things that are built in America should be around for hundreds of years. People need at a deep level to think that the systems and processes that they are a part of are going to outlast them, a civilizational mindset that was impossible to have during the chaos of the Biden years. Historical America should not be a museum piece to be gradually filled with jerk-off massage parlors and Guatemalans.
Items like the planned Global War on Terror memorial should be massive and inspiring. The MLK Memorial looks like cheap Chinese dogshit and the African American History Museum is a deliberate eyesore. They were produced by a country undergoing managed decline. New development needs to take on a more Trumpian quality. We have to reintroduce Americans to the visual language of success. Let’s build a big ornate bridge, fast. Let’s go back to the Moon and make the whole world watch.
One project in particular that I think is realistic and necessary is adding a new face to Mt. Rushmore, that of President William McKinley. McKinley was the most popular and successful President in American history, universally beloved in his day for the unparalleled prosperity and expansion that he delivered for America. It was under McKinley’s leadership that America truly became a global power.
Tragically, McKinley was killed by an assassin early into his second term. It’s painful to think about where we might today be if America’s path in the 20th century had been defined by McKinley. Adding President McKinley’s face to Mt. Rushmore would not only honor this truly great man, it would also reintroduce him and his ideology to the public at a mass scale, and more generally remind Americans that our history isn’t over. We’re not done with it. Regardless of what the excitable Gen X retards online are saying, America is still going to be here in 1000 years and so are Americans.
In general, I encourage everyone to stop being afraid. We don’t have to argue anymore, there’s not a lot to argue about. I really don’t get why people are hanging on to every new development as if there’s nothing to do but wait to see what happens. We already know what works and what doesn’t. We already know that winning is possible. There’s about a year and a half until the midterms roll around, which means we have roughly a year to shake up the system as much as possible in order to provide an opportunity for even greater and longer-term changes to American life.
We’re also racing against the clock in other ways. A large part of the decline you see online is people getting their brains cooked by Elon Musk’s new slop algorithm. This problem is only going to accelerate as AI use gets more and more common. We already know that LLM use causes cognitive decline. If you think people online are unstable and stupid now, just wait a few months. It’s going to get a lot worse.
Human capital decline for the foreseeable future is baked into the cake at this point, no matter how good we make things in the real world. Technological changes are too rapid and the public is not used to dealing with them yet. We’re at the climax of decades of social decline. There’s a nasty atmosphere online now. People are waiting for you to say the wrong thing so they can turn on you.
It’s actually really weird how quickly people today can go from delusional overconfidence to total despair. It’s kind of odd how easy it is for many to burn friends or longtime associates over nothing. It’s important to accept ahead of time: It’s all going to get worse. More people are going to crack. More people are going to betray. More people are going to be driven insane by fake info or magical thinking. Now, more than ever, is it important for good people to find each other, break outside the noise, and work towards something real.
Charlie Kirk (the best national figure for Rs other than Trump) said recently that we need more electricians and fewer sociology majors. Society was run for a while by sociology majors but it’s still not run by electricians. If you’re a smart young guy today, do not become an electrician. Do not buy a shack in the middle of nowhere to achieve the dream of home ownership. Do not run off to a public-facing radical community so that you can be gawked at by TV camera crews. Join ICE. Get an entry-level job in the federal government or law enforcement. Get a law degree and specialize in something bureaucratic. Formally research and write about serious topic that more people should know about. Go into local or state politics and be a reliable guy who can give good advice. Or just have a great life, it’s wonderful world out there. Do something other than play the idea game online, though. It’s our time. It’s your time. We have an opening to reshape things that have been broken for decades, but only if we show up.
The political situation in America is probably going to stabilize into a decisive victory for Republicans pretty soon if we don’t decide to kill ourselves first. I genuinely think that the Democratic Party will not exist as a national force in 10 years. Democrats are extremely unpopular and their internal disputes are unresolvable. An inability to move beyond anti-white hatred and woketardism give them a low ceiling outside of a few areas and Vance is going to reopen the suburbs for Republicans nationally, with Rubio poised to take over after that. Liberals already feel so hopeless that they’re resorting to terrorist attacks, which will only accelerate their radicalization and ghettoization spiral.
This is a real threat. They’re going to kill people, maybe a lot of people. I stand by the prediction made in my election night essay Project 2035: Building a Trump Movement to Last that America will face a systemic challenge from the Left in the next 10 years with a real chance to topple our system and replace it with a new one. However, I think if security services remain organized and determined they’ll be able to easily overcome any leftist uprising. The real challenge is preventing a collapse that might provide an opening for the Left to take power non-democratically.
With even greater victories ahead, the only way to ensure that Republicans don’t rubberband back to the horrific pre-Trump status quo is to steam forward at full speed. There’s a narrow window to define what this new thing is going to be and we need to take full advantage of it. Pile in, if you can. Anyone who is not politically or temperamentally capable of subordinating themselves to Trump and pursuing their goals through him for the time being is just kind of useless, or worse.
As this essay draws to a close (I really hope you’ve been listening to it on the Substack App’s text-to-speech feature), I’m reminded of this Trump tweet.
I get why everyone is so worked up all the time. Things are bad and the more you learn about our situation the worse it seems. The problems we face are older than we are and will probably outlive us. It might take decades before we see any light at the end of the tunnel. And yet, even if things look grim, reality should never break you.
There will always be lots of reasons why you should lose and none of them actually matter. However bad things have been and may be, you still have to live and win. You can’t think your way around that, or at least if you do, know that you’re doing yourself and everyone you know a real disservice.
I fully drank the Koolaid about a year and a half ago. I get that not everyone’s on board but it’s very tough for me to understand how anyone could be despairing right now, when there’s so much opportunity and so much to do. I really believe in this stuff. I think we are telling the truth and are going to make the world a better place. I believe that our victory is necessary and good, and that this is something we can will into reality. As I said in my election night essay: 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.
ctlr+f "pedro" "Wrangel" "Russian Civil War"
o yea another certified MG classic
A fantastic article as always. I really appreciate the specific point of the 2A crowd going absolutely bananas over not getting absolutely everything they wanted when the final BBB text still deals the first meaningful blow to the NFA since it was first passed in 1934. People I follow in the 3D printing 2A community were acting as if Trump was some sort of great betrayer, completely forgetting DNI Gabbard declassified a Biden-era memo declaring their intentions to chip away the 2A and terrorize the people exercising it, and it most certainly would've continued if Trump didn't win. There's plenty of things that aren't perfect about the current state of things, but now more than ever, people need to grit their teeth and push forward to the other side instead of declaring defeat and metaphorically crawling back into the womb, waiting for a totally preventable and ignominious death to come.
I live in a deep blue state in the Northeast. Many people I know, including family members, wish to move to a more 'free' state, but I'm choosing to plant my roots and stay for as long as I'm able, because someone has to stay behind and clean it all up. I don't want to give up my home to leftist insanity. I want to, and have to believe, that material conditions for my home can improve so that young men and women can achieve their dreams, live happily and in safety, even if those days only come to pass for descendants of mine, and the only way a future like that can unfold is supporting and having faith in my leader, DONALD J. TRUMP.