Evaluating the First 12 Months of the Second Trump Administration

“Tactics is knowing what to do when there is something to do. Strategy is knowing what to do when there is nothing to do.”

We made it. It seems like Election Night 2024 was decades ago. I will never forget just how relieved I felt that evening, even though my extremely pessimistic “Trump victory” essay (very proud that I never bothered to write a “Trump defeat” variant), released the moment the election was called, predicted grim tides on the horizon. Winning really was like coming up for air.

And yet, the grim tides are still here. Things are better than I could have hoped and worse than I could have possibly imagined. In this essay I will try to evaluate the failures and triumphs of our Trump administration, and the conservative movement more generally, after being handed what is perhaps the largest mandate in American political history, as well as offer suggestions on where to go next.

Before we get into the slog (I highly recommend listening to this essay using Substack’s text-to-speech program), you might want to check out my previous essays on politics. My views have been mostly consistent over the last 12 months, and, although certainly there have been many developments that I could have never anticipated, my predictions for the future remain pretty much the same.

Project 2035: Building a Trump Movement to Last – Election Night 2024
Navigating the era of High Trumpism – February 2025
Vibelash: Reflecting on the present disintegration of the rightwing public mind – April 2025
Wake in Fright: Evaluating President Trump’s remarkable first 6 months – July 2025

I hate writing these things. They’re all way too long and often repetitive. It usually takes me a month to put these together, so new developments often force me to rewrite or restructure things and really mess up the flow. That said, I do think I have a pretty good track record as far as these things go. I predicted a bunch of people would go crazy and they did. I also think I’ve correctly diagnosed what’s causing this phenomenon as well, though sadly it’s only gotten much worse. However, I still don’t think it matters that much, and that we’re going to win anyway.

I’ll start with the big failures of Trump 2, of which there are many.

My first and primary complaint is a lack of deportations. In my last essay, I pointed out that before the election JD Vance had set a target of 1 million deportations in the first year, and that failing to hit that target would constitute a massive failure for the Trump admin.

According to the latest data I’ve seen, actual deportation numbers are around 650,000. This is a massive failure. I can put that failure in context with the many major successes that the Trump administration has had on immigration (namely, the 2.2 million estimated self-deportations and first net decline in foreign-born population in more than 50 years), but it’s still a failure that the Trump administration must address.

There can be no backing down on the policy of mass deportation. No compromise solution is going to be acceptable. The only way to save our country is by moving tens of millions of people who shouldn’t be here, out. This is something that can and must accelerate. There is no substitute for results on this issue.

Another major problem emerging from the Trump administration is the normalization or proliferation of great (and federally regulated) public harms like gambling, drugs, and even pornography. The Trump administration has backed down from the Biden administration’s legal challenges to various “prediction market” apps, which have fully embraced sports betting, rescheduled marijuana in federal law (opening up tens of billions of dollars for the businesses that push these drugs), and even ordered banks to stop discriminating against “adult entertainment” businesses like OnlyFans.

I wrote a long piece about the problems caused by the normalization of tattoos: Chronic health problems, close association with all manner of antisocial behavior, a general societal laxing that has millions of little negative effects on Americans’ quality of life. The harm is all optional. This stuff used to be taboo and is well within the government’s regulatory powers. We do not need more tattoos. We do not need more gambling, we do not need more drugs, we do not need more pornography. My objections are first and foremost practical: These things harm the public when they become mainstream and widespread. If you have a shithole public, you will eventually have a shithole society. It is easy to not feel strong connections towards people who don’t seem to care about themselves or places that others don’t seem to care about.

The extent to which this laxity towards vice is a concerted effort on the part of the Trump administration as opposed to isolated decisions made by various actors in the federal government remains unclear (Trump certainly was closely involved in the marijuana rescheduling decision). Whatever the case may be, President Trump is ultimately responsible for these failures. The fact that there was almost certainly a lot of lobbyist money changing hands before, during, and after many of these decisions were made makes the failures that much more severe.

Tangentially related: President Trump’s pardon program has turned into a huge embarrassment, granting pardons or clemency to a rogue’s gallery of white-collar criminals, the guilt of whom doesn’t seem to really be in dispute and who also happen to have close ties to major Trump donors. It is impossible for the public to believe that this kind of behavior represents legitimate authority. It seems way too similar to the arbitrary injustice that defined America under liberal tyranny. There have been many very good pardons granted by Trump, the best of which were the blanket pardons issued to free the January 6 prisoners on day of Trump’s inauguration, but these bad pardons undermine the entire system.

My final big complaint is the perception of instability that often creeps into some of Trump’s more extravagant plays. The initial tariff rollout, for instance, was a huge failure not because tariffs weren’t a good policy, in fact they seem to be working out very well now, but because the rollout seemed poorly planned and messaging was incoherent and sometimes contradictory. You saw the same thing looking at Trump’s Greenland negotiations, where the messaging didn’t seem particularly well thought out and was often needlessly alienating. I strongly support the policy (acquiring new territory would be the crown jewel of Trump’s 2nd term, the one thing everyone would remember), I have total loyalty to my leader Donald Trump, but it often gets a little difficult to believe that there is 5D chess occurring here. Trump knows deals far better than I do, and seems to have already achieved good results, but I think making the sausage in public is not the best approach if you want to create the perception of durability. I recently read an article that describes the objections to this phenomenon in the Trump administration better than I ever could, you should read it now.

The most important thing that the Trump administration can do in the coming year is demonstrate that it is the new normal. Trump has a legitimate claim to power and a public mandate to execute on his agenda. He is in charge. This is not a state of exception. This is not a prelude to dictatorship or civil war. What is happening now, the destruction of progressive consensus in government and broader realignment of the American state, is going to be happening for a long time. The people you are talking to today are probably going to be mostly the same people who you are talking to in 10 years. If you want to succeed at anything, you’d better make peace with it.

How can Trump best achieve this? By delivering on what voters actually care about: Economy, jobs, affordability, crime, immigration. These issues (immigration often fluctuates in the rankings but is one of those existential things where the public’s preferences should just be ignored) are what pretty consistently dominate voters’ priorities, not the stuff you see online constantly. People did not elect Trump to be based, they elected him to solve their problems and improve their quality of life.

I’m not an economist, I can’t provide recommendations on how to fix the economy or raise wages or make housing more affordable beyond arresting more criminals, deporting more illegal immigrants, and forcing legal immigrants to leave however possible. These are probably pretty good suggestions, though, all things considered.

I’ve heard firsthand reports about Trump’s Memphis Safe Taskforce, the Trump admin’s surge deployment of National Guard troops and hundreds of federal agents to Memphis, TN, which was once the US’s most dangerous city. The results of this surge after only a few weeks have been wonderful: A huge drop in violent crime, nearly 5,000 arrests of known criminals and fugitives, with ICE agents on site to process any of the arrestees with pending deportations or, significantly, any unrelated illegal immigrants who law enforcement happens to come across during their investigations.

You can feel this on the ground. There are neighborhoods in Memphis where you used to not be able to go without worrying about getting robbed, maybe killed, or at least having your car window popped out, that you can now live in and travel through like you would in a normal country. There are lots of areas in major cities that should offer desirable housing and a nice place to live but for decades have been rendered uninhabitable, often by problems that were subsidized by the government itself. That’s starting to change in a big way.

I think the best thing Trump admin 2 can do this year is hire as many young people as possible to help with this change. There is a huge jobs crisis right now and the youth is most affected by it. They don’t have the wealth that would allow them to take the hits or the experience and connections that would soften the blow of a career disruption. Young people did nothing to deserve any of this. Young white men in particular have been subjected to decades of illegal discrimination from government and private employers and have been forced out of many critical sectors. The Trump administration can and must do more to step in. Bring more of our people inside the system and set them on a path that they can follow for the rest of their lives.

I came up with the very brilliant plan to reactivate the Civilian Conservation Corps, a Great Depression era program that hired unemployed young people first and found jobs for them later. CCC enrollees built national parks, backwoods roads, things that generally aren’t that economical to build unless you have a huge surplus of manpower. It ended up being FDR’s most popular New Deal program. People associated it with good things in their lives.

Don’t just use the revived CCC’s enrollees for manual labor (though there is an enormous need for more wilderness firefighters and new infrastructure), give them education and training so that they can go on to do much-needed work for the government. To fix our country we are going to need thousands of new bureaucrats, administrators, police officers, prison guards, prosecutors, auditors, and countless other jobs that don’t seem particularly glamorous but make society work. I promise that the pre-selected and pre-trained pool of candidates that would be consolidated in a revived CCC will provide government hiring professionals with all the material they need to fill these positions.

Get unemployed and underemployed young people paid immediately and then provide them with a pipeline into long-term government service. Even if such a flashy program would be too politically expensive to create, the government should still be stepping in to hire as many young people as possible for federal service and make a big show of these efforts: The Trump administration always has your back.

The best way to get young people to feel invested in society’s success or failure is to give them good jobs that they will want to keep and real property that they will want to protect. They need to have a real stake in society’s future, and to feel that they are responsible for something good. You need to give them a world that is worth living in. These are all very reasonable asks, and I think Trump can deliver on them.

There’s one seemingly minor policy change that the Trump administration has made that I think represents an underexamined core appeal of Trump: You no longer have to take your shoes off at the airport.

The shoe thing was always really annoying. It caused huge delays in security lines and seemed to be motivated by an extremely small threat. You just don’t have to do it anymore now. You can get to most airports an hour before your flight and probably be fine. Trump took something that people used to have to worry about and made it disappear. He gave Americans their time and attention back.

Little changes like this are happening all over America. In real life I see bathroom door codes disappearing and toiletries being moved out of locked cases. Bidencore decline is not happening anymore. The National Park Service just announced that it was going to be spending millions to restore and reactivate Washington, D.C.’s historic fountains. We live in a nice country. Water comes out of our fountains. Washington, D.C. is a world class city, the capital of a superpower. If liberal-captured local government is unable to maintain basic security and quality of life for residents and visitors, the wily and determined Trump admin 2 is going to do everything it can to step in. If Trump does a good enough job, he could probably get away with just dissolving local government (totally possible and legal under our system).

Trump admin 2, and whatever elected rightwing government is to follow, is going to have to color outside the lines a lot in coming years. Liberals have destroyed the court system. Judges twist and ignore the law. Juries refuse to convict even in the most outrageous situations. Our problems are decades in the making and will take years to solve. Tens of millions of people have dangerous delusions that they will try to kill you over if (and when) push comes to shove. If Trump and his agents are viewed by the public as anything other than the representatives of legitimate authority, and their goals are seen as anything other than delivering the tangible real-world gains that people actually care about, all attempts to deviate from the current unsatisfactory status quo are going to fall flat on their face. This is the new normal. Say that 1000 times and don’t say anything else.

I was going to spend a few more paragraphs here talking about other things I like about the second Trump administration, but I don’t really feel the need to. There’s a long list of achievements towards the bottom of this essay but that was only included for dramatic effect. Everyone knows about this stuff. I know you know. Illegal crossings lowest since 1970s. Foreign born population declining for the first time since the 1970s. Legal immigration projected to be cut in half in 4 years. Minneapolis under goon squad occupation. Don Lemon arrested by federal agents.

People who say “Trump isn’t doing anything” or who claim that there would have been little difference between Trump and Kamala are simply lying. Sometimes these people are too dumb or self-absorbed to even know they’re lying, it’s just a style of communication that they’ve come to adopt, but I think most of the time they are aware that things are getting much better. It’s kind of impossible not to be.

If you believe, or at least claim, that Trump’s second term is anything other than a massive step forward, you are not worth talking to or arguing with. You are either a liar or a moron. People should laugh at you and exclude you from discussions. No one should tolerate or indulge you. Interacting with you without hostility is always a net negative.

What I really want to spend the rest of this essay talking about is the death of online rightwing discourse and the need to retire the “Influencer Right” (or at least most of it), that eclectic scene of commentators and independent journalists who, in close concert with real-world politicians and activists, changed the world for the better by popularizing once taboo ideas and helping to fuel Donald Trump’s electoral victories with grassroots online enthusiasm. These are the figures who turned politics into culture, to great success.

For most of these people my objections are not personal. I actually think a few influencers have not disgraced themselves and are still essential to our current success (I won’t include their names in this to avoid tying them to the criticism that follows). However, it’s still clear that something has been going terribly wrong with the scene for a while, and the last few months have demonstrated that the entire arrangement as it stands is unsalvageable. People need to start tuning out.

To make the case for this, we first need to go back to early 2025: Around this time last year, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, granted a prominent role in the Trump administration, decided to Roman salute at the end of his speech during Trump’s inauguration.

I don’t think that Elon Musk is a Nazi. He definitely meant it as a joke and probably saw it as a nod to the Roman Empire memes that are sometimes popular in online rightwing circles. In his head, the salute was likely intended to be far more subtle than it appeared on camera. Perhaps he hoped that it would create a viral moment of ambiguity: The libs would be triggered, normies would be bewildered by the outrage over such an innocuous gesture, and the broader online rightwing subculture whose approval Elon Musk obviously craves would wink back. “Based!”

Whatever Musk’s intent may have been, the natural reaction of observers (I received several texts to this effect when it happened) was that Elon Musk had intentionally thrown up a Roman salute at Trump’s inauguration. When I saw the footage, I thought the same thing. I think it’s the only conclusion that a remotely honest person could come to upon seeing what happened. That day, I made a post saying that Elon Musk had terrible judgment, and the response I received only confirmed my reaction, recorded in my election night 2024 essay, to Kyle Rittenhouse announcing that he couldn’t vote for Trump in good conscience: “There is something wrong with people.”

Many insisted that I was participating in cancel culture or denied that the salute had even occurred. Others defended Musk’s behavior, arguing that doing a Roman salute, a centuries old (I read that it was actually first popularized during the French Revolution) gesture that has become inexorably linked with Nazi Germany, at Trump’s inauguration was “shifting the Overton Window” by de-stigmatizing the aesthetics of the 20th century far right or something to that effect. Some even pointed to the “Bellamy salute” that accompanied the Pledge of Allegiance in American schools from 1892 to 1942, a very funny piece of trivia that I’m confident Musk was not thinking about at all when he lifted his palm up towards the invincible sun of victory.

The most revealing pushback I received for criticizing Musk was someone replying (roughly, I forgot to screencap it) that “Americans can salute however they want to.”

This is very true: It’s a free country, man. There is no law (at least that would stand up to Constitutional scrutiny) against Roman saluting. The stigma around Roman saluting in America has been extremely harmful for decades. Countless college students and high schoolers have had their lives upended by a moral panic over what amounts to edgy jokes. It was horrible. Attitudes are changing, the hysteria that existed around these topics is subsiding, and that’s definitely for the best. It’s obvious that the American Right is increasingly comfortable with questions over whether or not you can do something. However, it has become increasingly clumsy in dealing with questions over whether or not you should do something.

Very few people responding to me seemed to be grappling with the obvious: It is stupid to do something that’s bound to be controversial at someone else’s solemn event. It is selfish and disruptive and disrespectful. When that someone else is the President of the United States and that solemn event is accepting the sacred mantle of leadership over our country after four years of turmoil and decline, occurring before an audience of tens of millions, the move seems all the more stupid.

Even using the most charitable interpretation of Musk’s actions, that he merely accidentally did something that looked exactly like intentionally throwing up a Roman salute at Trump’s inauguration, Musk still should have tried to guard against creating this kind of appearance however he could and, having somehow failed to do this, really let everyone down.

Whatever happened, Elon Musk served up a shit sandwich for his political coalition partners. The fact that there was a national dialogue over whether or not Musk had Roman saluted, intentionally or otherwise, the roots of the Roman salute, and the gesture’s role in our society today in response to Trump’s inauguration, which has nothing to do with Roman saluting, represented a massive embarrassment and failure in of itself.

Rightwing influencers responded to this embarrassment and failure the only way they knew how: By lying. The consensus became that it didn’t happen but that it was great. Musk became emotional in his denials and threatened lawsuits against journalists who pointed out the obvious. Several prominent conservative figures gave very unsubtle Roman salutes of their own during speeches in the following days to, I guess, show how easy it was to “accidentally” create this kind of gesture even though they were obviously doing it intentionally.

If you were on the outside looking in at this behavior, I don’t think you would have been offended by the Roman salute, I think you would have thought that all these people were retarded. They looked stupid and dishonest, not like people who should be “in charge.”

Musk decided to Roman salute at the Inauguration for the same reason he later attacked Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent in the West Wing: He is unstable, likely on drugs, and has slotted himself into the broader culture of meme-brained delusion that has overtaken online rightwing spaces.

All the talk of principles and history and cultural change after the salute was pure shuck and jive: The objections to Musk’s behavior were and are obvious. You would make the same objections to someone Roman saluting at your niece’s birthday party or a business meeting: Sure, you can, but is it a good idea?

I think it would be pretty understandable to not trust someone who behaved in this way. You would not throw them in jail and might not even mention it to them, but you probably wouldn’t invite them to the next thing or the thing after that. If they were to behave in obnoxious or counterproductive ways forever, it might interfere with the actual important parts of your events or push away anyone who doesn’t want to deal with a clown show. Tolerating this sort of thing could even end up attracting more clowns whose bad behavior you’ll also end up having to manage.

Do I think the Roman salute was a big deal? Despite the many minutes of my life I have expended writing about the topic, no. I have Roman saluted before, just like Musk. I assume tens of millions of people in America have done the same. I am not squeamish or offended or outraged. I strongly suspect that most of you reading this had forgotten that the controversy had even occurred. What I do think was a big deal, though, was the inability of rightwing circles to confront reality and say “this was not very helpful” or “you should not act like this” that the incident revealed.

Musk did not calm down or learn anything after everyone swept up for him on Inauguration Day. Instead, his behavior only escalated and spiraled until he was getting into fistfights in the White House (and losing), implying Trump was a pedophile, and threatening to create a 3rd party to split the vote before the midterms, all before backing down and giving Trump tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions.

If a bunch of people who don’t have tens of millions of dollars worth of apologies to throw around acted like this constantly, it would be impossible to get anything done. Americans face many problems that are far more important than dealing with Elon Musk’s faggot psychodrama. It’s still not clear exactly how much damage Musk did and whether or not it has been repaired. Certainly, behavior like Musk’s has only become more commonplace since his big public outbursts.

Rightwingers have developed far too high a tolerance for stupid and counterproductive behavior. The influencer class has popularized several thought-terminating clichés that not only discourage people from pointing it out, but also create a false moral obligation to defend it. The result has been a really horrible climate, where the worst actors are indulged and the real-world gains that Americans actually want to see are treated as an afterthought compared to circular (and increasingly dishonest) online arguments.

In attempting to craft a new rightwing discourse around everyone playing dumb, the Influencer Right has only succeeded in creating a new rightwing discourse around everyone being dumb. People can’t keep acting like this if we want to succeed.

One of the most shameful things I witnessed in recent months (which is saying a lot) was Tucker Carlson’s defense of Candace Owens on the Theo Von show. At the time of Carlson’s appearance on Von’s show, Owens was waging a campaign of innuendo and harassment against Erika Kirk, Charlie Kirk’s widow, and the senior staff of TPUSA, who were Charlie Kirk’s close friends.

Under the guise of “investigating” Kirk’s murder, Owens was throwing out an unending torrent of unsupported or easily disprovable (and sometimes contradictory) accusations, insinuating and then outright stating that Kirk had actually been murdered with the help, or at least foreknowledge, of those closest to him.

The impact of this genuinely demented behavior, beyond the personal strain I’m sure it put on the people who she was targeting at what must have been the worst and most confusing time of their lives, was totally negative: I saw a poll that found only a minority of Americans today believe that Charlie Kirk was murdered by a leftist, even though the radical leftist assassin was captured alive, turned in by his own parents, and confessed. More people say they believe that Kirk was murdered by a Republican than by a Democrat (I don’t think they actually believe this, I just think the apparent lack of consensus on the Right caused by endless conspiracy theorizing makes liberals and moderates feel they have license to be tactically dishonest). Owens was contributing to noise that gave cover to horrible people and might even end up interfering with the killer’s trial and conviction. The whole thing is sick.

When Carlson was asked about Owens’s accusations by Von, Carlson admitted that she wasn’t always right but defended her intent as an honest truthseeker. Carlson then said that one of Owens’s more extravagant claims, that Egyptian aircraft had been following Erika Kirk for years for reasons unknown, was “factually true.” Carlson, of course, couldn’t and wouldn’t speculate about what this piece of information meant. However, he implied, all right-thinking people had to admit there was something there to what Owens was saying.

There was nothing there. The spreadsheet of Egyptian plane flight times that Owens used to make her claim was soon revealed to be riddled with errors. More than 60% of entries involved flights that didn’t even happen on the same continent where Owens had claimed they had. There also doesn’t seem to have been any attempt to establish where Erika Kirk was at the time of these flights, either. This claim could not stand up to even basic scrutiny, and yet it was blasted out to millions of people in an earnest tone by a beloved figure in order to defend someone engaged in indefensible behavior.

To be clear, my issue isn’t that Carlson was wrong. People are wrong all the time. I certainly am. The issue was that Candace Owens was doing something truly terrible, she still is (last I checked she was claiming that Kirk was a time traveler, I go back and forth on whether or not she’s intentionally acting crazy to try to duck the massive defamation suit that’s coming her way), and Tucker Carlson’s instinct was to defend her and insist that her lies were true. It was really crazy to cosign this stuff as Charlie Kirk’s widow was being targeted, and, what’s more, to send the message to a massive audience that this is acceptable behavior. If a bunch of people behaved like this, it would be impossible to get anything done.

If you act this way, you are no longer merely commenting on the bad behavior, you are participating in it. Any political movement or even social scene where this sort of thing is tolerated and excused, much less is as commonplace as it has become today in rightwing circles, is not going to last for very long.

Megyn Kelly, once a respected journalist, similarly disgraced herself during this ordeal. She denied that Owens had ever claimed that Erika Kirk was involved in her own husband’s assassination, even though the implications of what Owens was saying were obvious, and defended Owens’s character against attacks from Ben Shapiro who, whatever you may think about his other views, was delivering completely accurate criticism of Owens and her enablers at the time.

Weeks later, Kelly patted herself on the back because her shameful conduct allowed her to broker a détente meeting between Owens and Erika Kirk, as though she were acting like Henry Kissinger rather than running cover for a schizophrenic Youtuber who lies constantly and makes millions of dollars doing so. Unsurprisingly, Owens resumed her attacks on Erika Kirk and TPUSA soon after the meeting.

I was struck by Megyn Kelly’s response to the criticism she received. “Fuck you,” she said with incredible poise and indignity (she really is beautiful). It was a perfect encapsulation of rightwing discourse today: Everyone is very self-righteous, but also a moron and a liar. If you mention that their behavior is distasteful or, God forbid, not very helpful, then they will conflate this with censorship or cancellation or the other mechanisms of control that obviously are not as powerful as they once were.

Weeks after all this unfolded, Carlson and Kelly chuckled about how Owens really drives certain people crazy and mischaracterized her smear and harassment campaign as just “asking questions” about Israel’s potential involvement in Kirk’s murder (I have still not seen literally any actual evidence to suggest that Israel was involved in the murder). Their forced laughter was a perfect final punctuation mark to one of the most shameful sagas in recent memory: No one actually gives a shit. It’s not going to stop. Everyone’s going to pretend like this is normal.

If someone is behaving badly in rightwing spaces, I now assume that the influencer class is not only going to fail to offer the obvious objections to the bad behavior, but also that they will go out of their way to ignore it, help them, and even actively defend them from criticism. They really have to hand it to them, and in the interest of fairness will expound about how talented they are and how much they love them while the worst stuff continues unchecked and often even unacknowledged. They’ll cite some kind of principled stand they’re taking and congratulate themselves on their many virtues when really everything can be reduced to cynical rhetorical games, delusions, or a general lack of standards. The present environment offers a neat parallel to the time in recent memory when liberals tried to restructure all society in order to accommodate homeless black guys who shove people in front of the subway.

The result of mainstreamed apathy towards the fringe behaviors that often accompany fringe politics has not been an expansion of rightwing discourse, people have been talking in circles about all manner of controversial topics for more than a decade now, but rather the death of it. It is impossible for the trust and respect and discipline and unity of purpose necessary for any successful collaborative effort or even productive dialogue to develop under these conditions. It’s obvious that these people don’t really care about achieving things in the real world anymore, discourse exists solely in service of more discourse.

It brings me no pleasure to write any of this. I genuinely think it’s sad. Every time this sort of thing happens, and it happens a lot now, it really takes the wind out of my sails. I had high hopes for Carlson, and Kelly, and many other people who have ultimately succumbed and come to contribute to the current horrible climate in different ways. I defended them longer than I should have, though I like to think that at any point in this process they could have simply stopped and gone in a better direction. They still might, I’ve made too many mistakes to condemn anyone forever, and I sincerely hope every day that that becomes the case.

At this point any good ideas, and there are quite a few of them still floated by these characters, that manage to slip in are harmed by association with objectional behavior and a total lack of discernment and discretion. If the displacement of white people in their own countries is treated as a topic in the same league as chemtrails, if some guy who began a grotesque discussion about whether or not Charlie Kirk has been buried is consulted for his expertise on the Las Vegas massacre, then the public is going to begin to think of important stuff as just more of the woo-woo shit that drives their annoying coworkers or distant relatives crazy.

Even for those who haven’t been overcome by conspiritardism (or merely tactically embraced it as it hits its fever pitch), there’s obviously something that has just gone haywire among rightwing influencers. I had been pretty dismissive of discourse for a long time, but the January 3 raid on Venezuela seemed to start a chain reaction that revealed that the whole influencer scene doesn’t serve much of a purpose anymore.

First the peanut gallery began DEMANDING that Trump not accept any Venezuelan refugees, as if Trump hadn’t already set the 2026 refugee limit at 7,500, with virtually all of the slots in the refugee program already reserved for white South Africans. Trump has also already effectively ended illegal border crossings, so there was not much chance of Venezuelans getting in any other way. All that seems beside the point, however, because, if anything, the kidnapping of unpopular dictator Maduro seems far more likely to reduce the outflow of Venezuelans from Venezuela than to increase it. Venezuelans in the US are poised to return to their home country in large numbers. What the fuck were these people talking about?

After the Influencer Right’s bold ultimatums over imaginary Venezuelan refugees went nowhere, they soon settled on a new line: Pointing out the incongruity that the American President could use the military to arrest a foreign country’s leader but couldn’t do that to a rogue federal judge or Democrat politician. No shit! The President has more unambiguous powers in dealing with foreign policy than he does with domestic policy. This is Civics 101.

I don’t know what these people really hoped to achieve with this line of criticism beyond generating vague hostility to Trump for not overthrowing the system of government that he is at the head of. In fact, I think that’s all most of these influencers hope to achieve now: Generating vague hostility towards the Trump administration, our only hope of real-world political success.

Would a military coup even work? I don’t think so. Trump has saved America twice and yet won the most recent Presidential election by only a few million votes and retains very narrow legislative majorities. State representatives in deep Red states cannot be persuaded (or coerced) into not handing Democrats free Congressional seats. The institutional or population power that might support such dramatic moves does not exist, however strong the theoretical case for them might be (the theoretical case these people make usually isn’t very strong). We’re also winning, as frustratingly slow as that process sometimes seems, so I’m not sure why dramatic moves would even be necessary. What are people talking about when they pretend like there is any public appetite to destroy democracy and our system of government? I suspect they are just talking about themselves and their personal brands and their memes.

This kind of nonsensical hostility toward Trump was being generated in response to him doing what is probably the coolest thing ever: Kidnapping the leader of a large hostile foreign country using overwhelming military force without a single American death. Even if you have some kind of objection to that, you should at least understand that normies are going to love it. If people don’t approve politically for whatever reason they’re still going to think it’s cool. I genuinely struggle to come up with a reason why an American shouldn’t celebrate this kind of limited engagement if it works, which it seems to have for now. The perception of American prestige and power lost during the years of decline under the Biden administration returned in an instant.

A lot of influencers claim that Trump lost touch with his base when it’s obviously more the case that whatever the influencer class is talking about is increasingly far removed from the base’s actual concerns. The influencers were previously useful because they made complex developments legible to normal people and oriented their audiences towards real world political victory. Today they obscure far more than clarify and teach their audiences that losing is winning.

Bigger humiliations were in store for the Influencer Right in January 2026. Operation Metro Surge represented the centerpiece of Trump’s revamped immigration efforts. In response to revelations of massive immigrant-led fraud from a citizen journalist, the Trump administration deployed upwards of 3,500 federal agents to Minneapolis. It is the biggest DHS operation in history, and is still ongoing as I’m writing this.

At literally every stage of Operation Metro Surge, large portions of the Influencer Right demonstrated that their instincts are terrible and that they are totally unsuited for the imaginary leadership/advisory role that they have assumed for themselves. Not everyone got everything wrong at all times, but it was obvious that these idiots generally had no idea what they were talking about.

From Day 1, the influencer sphere was near-united in demanding that Trump send the military in to handle the situation, either by invoking the Insurrection Act (last used during the 1992 Rodney King Riots, which saw 2000+ injuries, 62 deaths, and more than a billion dollars of property damage) or by some kind of vague extralegal means that involved fantasies like having the Marines mow down crowds of liberal activists or sending in Delta Force to arrest federal judges.

Although opposition to the Feds was intense, there was no indication that the situation on the ground was a military problem. In fact, sending in the military would probably have only intensified resistance because it would have signaled that federal law enforcement had lost control of the situation. The agents in Minneapolis were doing great work despite the truly massive and well-organized activist groups they faced. I think they’ve made more than 3,500 high-risk arrests in a few weeks. That’s pretty good when local opposition necessitates that even minor encounters involve more than a dozen agents at a time. There was nothing that liberals would have liked more than to shift conversation away from popular policies like mass deportations or squashing fraud and towards existential issues like civil war, our democracy, fascism, etc.

Basically, what the Influencer class did was make an unreasonable demand, totally divorced from the real-world situation, and then used failure to satisfy that demand as a cudgel to attack the Trump administration with. This was in response to the Trump administration doing something good that would have seemed fantastical a few years ago. We could have the biggest DHS operation in history and still influencers would be repeating memes that amount to “The Trump administration isn’t doing anything.”

During the controversial but justified law enforcement shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, large portions of the Influencer sphere further proved their uselessness. Either these influencers waffled at the first sight of blood or, perhaps more insidiously, the various unreliable figures who these rightwing influencers had introduced to their audiences did so in major ways.

For more than a year now, rightwing influencers have been opening the Gates of Toledo, injecting figures who are not even plausibly rightwing, who try to secure real world political victory for liberals, and who in every ambiguous situation will always take the side of the Left, into the highest levels of rightwing discourse. Virtually every phony centrist or podcast retard elevated by rightwing influencers, usually over the Israel issue, began repeating leftist lies as soon as the going actually got tough.

I don’t think any of these figures publicly walked back their condemnations after video inevitably emerged to vindicate the law enforcement officers who fired in self-defense. It’s not clear exactly how much damage this arrangement has caused, but it’s certainly not good that for years people “on side” have been encouraging their audiences to trust these obviously untrustworthy people. Some of the lies are bound to stick eventually.

Fortunately for everyone, the Trump administration stayed the course and ignored the rightwing commentariat. Liberals quickly bit off more than they could chew with a disastrous BLM raid, led by former CNN host Don Lemon, on a local church whose pastor was suspected of working for ICE. It seems very unlikely that liberals would have chosen to escalate in this way if Trump had decided to trigger a standoff between local leftists and the military. The Trump administration immediately promised criminal charges for the raiders, even sending high level officials like Attorney General Pam Bondi and DOJ Civil Rights division head Harmeet Dhillon to directly oversee the case.

In this golden opportunity, possible only because the Trump administration had ignored the advice of rightwing influencers, when the public was united in disgust at the behavior of the Left, the influencer class once again demonstrated that it had no value to add.

Attacks on the Trump administration for failing to file charges began before the local federal courthouse was even open. There was an unending series of ultimatums: The Trump administration MUST do something before some arbitrary time limit in order to prove it was “serious.” It became increasingly obvious that people didn’t know or care about any aspect of what it actually took to file federal criminal charges, much less to win a complicated criminal case involving Constitutional issues. Yet again, the influencers decided to take a positive development that would have seemed impossible a few years ago—Don Lemon facing imminent federal charges for his role in a BLM takeover—and spin it into an opportunity to turn their audiences against the institutions and people that were actually achieving real-world success for them.

After weeks of turmoil, the Trump administration prevailed in Minneapolis: Although the initial stance of state and local officials was to refuse all cooperation with the Feds, basically allowing liberal activists to break the law with impunity as part of their obstruction efforts, gradually Democrat politicians reversed course. Local police began to control crowds out front of the federal building and even make rough arrests. At one decisive moment, state police completely cracked a leftist mob that had formed outside a hotel where ICE agents were staying, while the ICE agents looked on drinking beer from the windows above. The fight had gone out of the enemy.

Liberal officials understood that the situation was a complete disaster for them and backed down. Protests disintegrated into embarrassing noisemaking exercises. State officials even signaled that they would allow federal agents to access their jails to deport illegal immigrant criminals on release, ending one of the most odious parts of “sanctuary city” policy. There was a decisive confrontation and we won.

The rightwing influencer class by in large started doing cartwheels to spin this victory into a failure. Every little ambiguous quote or shift in rhetoric was latched onto and interpreted in the worst light possible. Relatively minor issues like the status of heroic Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino, who was apparently just reassigned to his normal duties in Los Angeles, became the main topics of discussion. While bigtime rightwing influencers were rushing to declare defeat, leftwing activists on the ground were complaining that federal operations were continuing as normal, even escalating, with far more support from state and local law enforcement than before.

There is a massive fifth column that has formed in rightwing spaces, and the influencers are at the center of it. I hope that everyone realizes that, whether intentionally or unintentionally, the influencer class has become committed to engineering defeat. The people who constantly predict victory for Democrats in the upcoming midterms over XYZ failure are simply trying to make that outcome happen.

It’s probably not obvious from a distance, but many of the loudest and most aggressive critics of the administration are likely only lashing out because they’ve already alienated their contacts with any actual authority. Their texts probably aren’t getting returned or receive the dreaded thumbs-up emoji. The bridges are burnt and not getting rebuilt. We’re getting nonstop claims that the administration isn’t serious from people who issue dozens of ignored public ultimatums every week.

Today the Influencer Right has eagerly assumed the role of both arsonist and fireman, bemoaning that rightwingers online are demoralized while simultaneously doing everything in its power to demoralize them: Embellishing failures, minimizing successes, redirecting attention to side issues, setting unrealistic expectations and catastrophizing when they are not met, elevating obvious bad actors, indulging in and spreading despair, excusing the worst behavior, uncritically accepting enemy propaganda and then spreading it as though these influencers were simply another part of the machinery built to destroy our country—which they have in effect become, through no one’s fault but their own.

As it stands, the whole arrangement is worse than useless. The great and only talent of the Influencer Right appears to be taking low propensity voters and turning them into lower propensity voters. There are exceptions to this, of course, but it’s a grim scene. This dynamic cannot be allowed to continue because whenever there is a crisis, these people can only be counted upon to try to make bad situations worse.

Oftentimes the problems that these people are reacting to are very real, but they certainly won’t be the ones to solve them. The issue is no longer what these influencers are saying at any given moment, but that our peculiar rightwing influencer class even exists. Good things happen only in spite of them now.

What’s to be done? Having dealt with difficult characters in fringe spaces for a long time, my advice is to simply cut them off, or at least start being more confrontational when they lie or behave badly. You can’t debate someone out of being crazy or argue someone out of a view that they don’t sincerely hold. Any attempt to mollify these people with concessions will force the admin to adopt positions that are unlikely to succeed or at least guarantee that these people come back with even more unreasonable demands and bad behavior in the future. The only message the Trump administration can send is: “You will never achieve your goals in this way. If you are going to act like this, you are going to have to do it outside the thing we built.”

It’s not going to be easy to decouple from the influencer sphere. The audiences that these influencers command seem massive, at least at first. I don’t think anyone should play the denunciation game, but we are well past the time when these people should start getting real consequences for their stupid and counterproductive behavior. The big figures are not going to stop doing it no matter what happens. Their audiences, however, need to start seeing that this is not an acceptable way to behave, and that these people actually don’t know what they’re talking about. I think that’s a fight the Trump admin can win.

One of the best moments of the Minneapolis operation was when DOJ Civil Rights Division head Harmeet Dhillon simply started replying directly to various influencers, asking why they wouldn’t just ask her to explain what was going on before they started lobbing ridiculous criticisms of the handling of the case against the BLM raiders. What were these people even talking about? The stuff they were saying was divorced from reality. They were obviously criticizing just to criticize.

Panic is like a disease. I cannot tell you how many former friends and longtime associates I have watched fall victim to various mass psychogenic illnesses and become malignant or hopelessly insane. I watched this same process occur in 2017 and 2021, and it hasn’t gotten any easier.

Normally it’s bad associations that cause this sort of collapse: These people will see a bad actor who they should know they shouldn’t trust, who lies constantly or has done really terrible stuff, and, instead of just ignoring what they have to say (without regard to whether they agree with it), they will tolerate and indulge them. It might not happen immediately, but eventually they will encounter a lie or obviously self-defeating sentiment pushed by this bad actor, and they won’t be able to tune it out like they should. They lose the ability to filter between good and bad, to discriminate. This little failure will eventually suck them into a universe of bullshit that they never escape from.

When someone says, “If Trump doesn’t do X, then MAGA is dead,” the response needs to be “OK, then go be a Democrat.” When someone decides to go out of their way to defend someone who is pushing to hand our country over to liberals, the response needs to be “Go with your friend, get out of here and don’t come back.” It’s obvious that a lot of these people are trying to commit figurative suicide by cop and force a messy political break. The Trump administration can only continue tolerating constant sabotage and bad faith criticism or send them on their way.

When you get to the point where you to have to try and argue someone out of being retarded or helping the enemy, you’ve already lost. I promise you that these people are going to do whatever bad thing you think they’re going to do with or without your input. You can either tell them to buzz off or ignore them, but don’t pretend like they’re still on the team once they cross certain lines that were crossed a long time ago. And, what’s more, stop tolerating the people with less egregious behavior who can’t stop treating these people as though they’re still on the team. They are still going to be throwing these guys lifelines in any worst-case scenario.

The Trump administration should be more confident when dealing with its rightwing critics. It will win any big confrontation with the influencers because ultimately the public isn’t actually that interested in the “based” rhetoric influencers provide, the public is most interested in real world success. Only the Trump administration can deliver that to them. There is no real-world political constituency for the dysfunctional stuff you see online. Zero. 5,000 likes is not a lot. 50,000 likes is not a lot. 500,000 likes might be something, but probably not. The online rightwing subculture has faceplanted its jump into actual culture. Most of this stuff is not real or wafer thin.

People want to win. Conservatives need to win. They don’t want to hear about how they’ve already lost, especially if that’s not even true. I suspect the public is already a little tired of the influencers as the situation in America stabilizes after years of chaos, in the same way the gun industry is collapsing now. The market has fundamentally changed. These guys are not going to regain the prestige or mystique they once held. It’s not always obvious to older people especially, but a large portion of the political streamer audience is only watching these guys as lolcows or engaging with short form video in the most casual and superficial ways. When these influencers stumble onto the correct position, usually for purely cynical or deeply incoherent reasons, it only makes the truth matter less. None of these figures could survive Trump saying, “This guy is kind of a retard now.” It’s time for the admin to start acting like it.

In the conclusion of Richard Luckett’s The White Generals, the best overview of the Russian Civil War that I’ve come across, Luckett’s identifies why the counterrevolutionary White Army failed to defeat the widely unpopular Bolsheviks, despite the Whites’ initially massive military advantage:

[The White Army’s] failure is, to an extent, understandable: The business of revolutionaries is revolution, but the business of counter-revolutionaries is seldom counter-revolution. Revolutionaries are born into their condition. Counter-revolutionaries have it thrust upon them.

It does not follow from this that counter-revolution is doomed, or that the Russian counter-revolution, in particular, was doomed. To accept this is to accept a deterministic view of history for which there can be no warrant in any account of the events. The Whites failed as much as a result of their military mistakes as anything else, and these military mistakes were frequently the product of stupidity and carelessness. The Reds made mistakes also: in exclusively military matters they made far more than the Whites. Their greater degree of political organization permitted them more latitude in this respect; in contrast, the Whites sacrificed political consolidation for the lure of immediate military gains, and then proceeded to throw away the advantages won in the field.

In Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: A Narrative, the best book on the American Civil War, Foote identified a similar lack of political consolidation as contributing to the Confederacy’s defeat and the South’s ensuing devastation:

“Away with the idea of getting independence first, and looking after liberty afterwards,” [Confederate Vice President] Stephens had said. “Our liberties, once lost, may be lost forever.” “Why sir,” a Georgia congressman exclaimed, “this is a war for the Constitution! It is a constitutional war.” It was also, and first, a war for survival; but the ultra-conservatives, including the fire-eaters who had done so much to bring it on, had been using the weapon of States Rights too long and with too much success, when they were members of the Union, to discard it now that they had seceded. They simply would rather die than drop that cudgel, even when there was no one to use it on except their own people and nothing to strike at except the solidarity that was their one hope for victory over an adversary whose reserves of men and wealth were practically limitless. It was this inflexibility that the bill came due for having launched a conservative revolution, and apparently it was necessarily so, even though their anomalous devotion to an untimely creed amounted to an irresistible death-wish. But that was precisely their pride. They inherited it and they would hand it down, inviolate, to the latest generation; or they would pray God “to sweep from the earth the soil, along with the people.”

You’ve just got to nuke the wreckers from orbit the moment they show up. Truly eternal type. Get them out of here before they find the right moment to do serious damage with a knife in the back. Everyone needs to be on the same page about how pushing these people out is necessary and good.

The stakes to this stuff are real. It’s possible to lose our country forever, we almost have several times. Anyone who indulges defeat, who is working towards anything other than victory, needs to be ejected as quickly as possible. It’s crazy to me that anyone tolerates the figures who were discouraging people from voting for Trump before the 2024 election. I don’t have much respect for you if you do. If you don’t have the mental barriers up to keep this sentiment and anyone who pushes it away, you are worse than useless. You’re going to crack at some point and it might hurt a lot of people.

There is an alternative to the current influencer sphere: One of the nicest moments for me during the 2024 campaign season was listening to Elon Musk’s Twitter space with Trump. The pair had a very funny and charming conversation. I was walking into a convenience store in some light rain listening to it on my phone and noticed that the Zoomer clerk had his phone on the counter, listening to it as well. This direct and unfiltered conversation made Trump seem “real” in a way that Kamala Harris never could have. He is real in a way that Kamala Harris never was.

There are many other figures in the admin who I’m sure could capitalize on this effect. The public is interested in them and they have interesting things to say. I don’t see people reflect nearly enough on the fact that JD Vance has already become a meme. It’s endearing. The public is laughing with him, not at him. Americans want their country to get better. They want to have normal lives. They want their time and attention back. FDR’s fireside chats charmed a generation of Americans by connecting them directly with their government. There’s little need for a middleman class when you have these dynamic people available.

The Trump administration should hire influencers who have not disgraced themselves and bring them inside in official roles. Help make this stuff legible to the public. Introduce them to the characters who are going to improve their lives. One of the main reasons our influencer class is so harmful is that these people don’t feel any responsibility for our collective success or failure. They already made their money and their place in the attention economy might actually improve if the situation were to start declining again. They are not thinking about putting wins on the board, they are thinking about their redpill journey or getting more eyeballs or winning an internet debate that doesn’t matter and might not even be real. A real job for influencers would create real responsibility, and responsibility changes people for the better.

You should only tolerate people working towards victory. That was another aspect of the Candace Owens-TPUSA debacle that was very frustrating: Aside from the fact that the behavior itself was extremely objectionable, TPUSA is also vital to our political future whereas Owens is a complete net negative. TPUSA does voter registration drives, rapid response, direct activism, organizing and training and all of the tedious real-world stuff that is way more important to winning elections and changing the political situation than a network of washed Youtubers will ever be. Charlie Kirk’s legacy will be felt for decades thanks to TPUSA, his winning machine. Candace Owens drives people crazy and actively tries to help liberals win. The choice between the two was very easy, and people still messed it up.

Whatever the Trump administration does, I hope that it remembers that it doesn’t have to put up with this internet circus stuff or the people who push it anymore. These guys are going to be indulging in freakshow behavior, repeating memes from 2017, or running through their greatest hits about the Rubicon forever. Tolerating this is not just the cost of doing business in rightwing circles, and in fact it can’t be if the Trump administration is to maintain the perception of legitimate and durable government it needs to survive the coming death struggle.

There’s a great moment in the 2010 film The Way Back, about the escape of Soviet gulag prisoners across hundreds of miles of inhospitable terrain, when the surviving characters are sitting safe at last in Tibet: Although the men have finally made it out of the Soviet Union, they still have thousands of miles to go to return to their respective countries. One of the characters, an American, reveals that he’s made plans to separate from the group so that he can continue home through an airbase in China.

There’s a nasty atmosphere in the room after this revelation. These men had been through the ringer. They only survived because they stuck together. Many of their companions died on the road. One of the remaining men chides the American: “Looking out for number 1, huh?” The American replies simply “We escaped.” That part of their lives was over now. There’s still a long way to go, but the state of crisis had ended. They’re going to have to do different things and act in different ways. It’s a great moment in the movie. You can see the tension melt away in the characters’ faces once they realize just how far they’ve come.

We escaped. Different things are happening. Online rightwing circles are populated by totally different people with totally different demographics and interests and priorities and relationships with the truth than they once were. Our culture has become their costume, and that’s actually fine. Who cares? We’re doing something else now.

We need a new rightwing discourse centered on my fantasy where I am a terrorist.

We need a new rightwing discourse centered on comedians who don’t tell jokes.

We need a new rightwing discourse centered on this thing I just learned about and obviously don’t understand.

We need a new rightwing discourse centered on voting Democrat.

We need a new rightwing discourse centered on single moms saying nigger.

I don’t think people actually care about this stuff even if they talk about it all the time. The online scene as we once knew it just seems kind of dead. We’re seeing retreads of retreads, dimly repeated by unfortunates with no pasts or futures. People are waiting around to be convinced to go crazy in the exact same ways, over and over and over again, forever. It’s spent.

There are times for spergs and times for normies, and we’re obviously entering a time for normies. Woe to the Twitter tyrants! As far right internet discourse’s wildly successful suicide assault on the highest levels of American politics and culture nears its grisly climax, one can only hope that there’ll be someone left to hit the lights by the time it’s all said and done.

What does all this actually mean? Not a lot, honestly. It’s certainly sad in many ways. I’ve probably spent thousands of hours of my life in these places, they were very entertaining and improved my life substantially and now they’re mostly gone, but my cohort of the online far right still got pretty much everything it wanted, at least that was realistic. We won, congratulations everybody. It was really touch-and-go there for a bit.

If you went back in time to 2017, during the early chaos of the first Trump Administration, and told people on rightwing Twitter that illegal immigration through the Southern border had dropped to its lowest level since 1970, the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division had been gutted, disparate impact liability was no longer government policy, ICE was conducting what amounted to terror raids on sanctuary cities, the EEOC was aggressively soliciting complaints about anti-white discrimination in the workplace, refugee admissions had been paused except for white South Africans, the foreign born population was declining for the first time since 1970, training of new border patrol agents had increased to all time highs, several American cities were being patrolled by federal anti-crime taskforces that were arresting thousands of criminals, the State Department had formal plans to create an Office of Remigration, the US had experienced the largest single-year drop in murder rate in recorded history, new Indian student enrollment was down 75% in just a year, the Treasury Department was targeting the funding of Antifa, which had been designated a terror network and was cut off from its traditional funding mechanisms, DHS was spending hundreds of millions of dollars on football field-sized detention centers in multiple states, legal immigration was on track to decline by as much as 1/2 by the end of Trump’s term, along with countless other developments that would have seemed like fantasies back then, they would probably think that Richard Spencer had become President. You’d have to explain that most big personalities from that period actually hate all the progress that’s occurring today and are pushing to hand political control back to liberals. Three more years of this, we’re in a different country. Eleven more years of this, we’re in a different world.

You’d have to be a complete moron to think that we shouldn’t continue down this path, as narrow and perilous as it often seems. You’d have to be a piece of shit to try to prevent us from doing so. No matter what new obstacles we face, whatever terror lies ahead, rest assured, when I stop needing to reactivate my account to drive new podcast subs and the @ finally expires, the bright disk of the sun will soar up behind my eyelids and explode, lighting the sky for an instant. We won so hard it’s crazy to think about. This entire thing was a huge success.

It was very nice that I got the opportunity to help republish and popularize those books (Always with Honor: The Memoirs of General Wrangel is the most special to me), but other people can and are doing everything I did better. I will forever be grateful for all the kindness and generosity that was shown to me, and all the friends I’ve made who helped me expecting nothing in return. It’s that impulse, I think, faith, charity, loyalty, selfless devotion to your country and people, that will define our future success.

The online moment may be over (at least the good parts of it) but the online moment was never really the important thing, the real-world goals were, and the major players online were never particularly important, Donald Trump was and is. Presumably there is something cool and smart and interesting that’s going on somewhere else and we all just don’t know about it yet. I can’t wait to see.

I think that we are leaving a transitional period in our country’s history. Things are getting better for the first time in a long time, and in non-trivial ways. We’re not going back to the bad old days unless we choose to. If the American Right decides to focus on winning elections and producing tangible quality of life improvements for Americans, we’re going to win. If we decide to focus on relitigating WW2 while working to elect Democrats to own our intra-factional rivals, we’re going to lose. I strongly suspect that most conservatives are going to choose to win even if that means dropping a lot of figures who used to be part of the solution and are now undeniably part of the problem.

As bad as things may seem for us, the situation today is far more grim for Democrats. Hatred of white people is pretty much the only thing holding their coalition together. They are running on destroying the country at this point, and have created a political situation where it’s impossible for them to moderate away from the most objectionable parts of their platform.

Shortly after Democrats achieved a political trifecta in the recent Virginia state elections, they immediately proposed bills to discriminate against white people in government contract bidding and lower mandatory minimums for crimes like rape, murder, and assaulting a police officer, while also introducing all manner of sure to be unpopular taxes. Outside a possible leftwing victory during the systemic crisis that I predicted would arrive before 2035 (which will hopefully instead be ruthlessly suppressed by federal security services), I don’t think the Democrat Party has very good odds of even existing 10 years from now, at least in its present form.

The only question that remains is whether or not we have the human capital required to maintain this moment over the long term. I think we do. The cream always rises back to the top. I meet smart young people all the time who are eager to help improve our situation or are already doing so.

I can’t overstate how much confidence I have in these young people. Much of the enormous contempt I feel for the Panicians or blackpillers or opportunists or whatever taking constant shots at the Trump admin while all this crazy stuff is going on comes from me seeing them, people who aren’t risking or adding very much, as stabbing young people who are risking a lot to help us in the back. They deserve better.

Traitors deserve each other. I promise that if you surround yourself with scum, you will live to regret it. We are watching thousands of Scorpion and the Frog stories play themselves out in real time right now. These guys are going to burn through each other and then the public is going to move on to another trainwreck to gawk at. Pretend like it’s real or substantive or something to engage with without hostility at your own peril, and the peril of everyone who’s counting on you.

Our Trump administration isn’t perfect, but it’s ours. We have never been better represented in government or had more opportunities to improve our situation. I think the path ahead is pretty clear, and that any deviation will end in disaster. The Trump administration must tune out the noise and stay the course even if it has to navigate by dead reckoning alone. The public will love this stuff when it comes out the other side. All-in. Fight!

It’s sometimes overwhelming to consider how bad it’s gotten in America. I go to get coffee and see a woman in her early 20s who cut off her breasts because of a social fad that might have been pushed on her by her own parents, kids who never stood a chance, a bazaar’s worth of people from across the world who should never have been allowed here and are probably going to cause problems for years, druggies destroying themselves and the neighborhood along with them strewn across the sidewalk, pure zombie zone. Everyone walks around like this is normal. I kind of understand why so many people on our side go nuts and become useless when they realize it’s not. The momentum of the perverse systems maintaining this world often seems unstoppable.

We are stopping it, though. Slowly but surely the terrible machine is grinding to a halt. You can see it in peoples’ faces now. We’re going to go back to the Moon. Although there are new disasters ahead, although there will be more betrayals, more insanity, more carnage, although there are things so bad we can’t even conceive of them yet approaching rapidly, none of it really matters. We’re going to win anyway, whether you like it or not. For the Trump administration and whatever is to come next, the only imperative can be to keep this thing hurtling across the tightrope, towards the final victory.

https://www.theconundrumcluster.com/p/escape-velocity-evaluating-the-first