The American Spring

Nearly 14 years ago, former President Bush warned about the rising tide of isolationism, protectionism and nativism on the right.

Alas, here we are. pic.twitter.com/rrAsrDftFB

— Maine (@TheMaineWonk) June 2, 2025

Editor’s Note: I delivered the following speech on May 31, 2025 at The Political Cesspool’s Will To Power conference in Greenville, South Carolina. This event was several months in the making and the planning and preparation for it is why I have been so busy for the past two weeks.

A year ago, I spoke in this room about the journey of paleoconservatism from the margins to the mainstream. My upbeat speech was about a paradox. At the level of metapolitics, we appeared to be a rising tide that was sweeping away our opposition on the Right. At the level of politics, however, nothing much seemed to be changing. I was vexed by the fact that the wars in Ukraine and Gaza were still raging and illegal immigration and anti-White discrimination were still at all time highs.

I’m probably best known to The Political Cesspool audience for tracking poll numbers. I have written dozens of articles and given several interviews and speeches over the past few years about trends in public opinion polls. It became crystal clear to me early in the Biden presidency that something was stirring in the conservative base. White racial attitudes were hardening on the Right. Tucker Carlson injected the term “anti-White” into mainstream conservative discourse in 2021. This was followed by the popularization of the Great Replacement in 2022. The polls began to show support for mass deportations by 2024. The whole tone of the mainstream conservative conversation has changed radically since around 2019.

As activists, we could boast about “moving the Overton Window” and laying the groundwork for real political change, but just a year ago during the Trump campaign this still felt very distant. It was difficult to imagine that the Trump administration would act on the new identity and priorities of the conservative base. Over the summer and fall of 2024, I wrote a series of cynical articles in which I made a cautious case for giving Donald Trump a second chance as president. Just a few months ago, the strongest argument that I could make for Trump 2.0 was that the Trump era would finally be over in 2028. My jaded view of Donald Trump was still colored by all the disappointments of his first term. I hedged my bets because I still couldn’t believe the president would do the things that he was talking about on the campaign trail.

In my lifetime, I have never seen a Republican administration attempt to implement a bold paleoconservative agenda. Pat Buchanan didn’t make it to the White House. George W. Bush and his successors were neocons. Donald Trump was hobbled in his first term by the Deep State, saboteurs in his administration and opposition in the Republican Congress. Trump talked a good game about pushing a nationalist populist agenda, but he failed to build the wall, withdraw from overseas conflicts, meaningfully change the global trading system, stop censorship or to punish his political enemies like Hillary Clinton. We had never experienced anything like what we have witnessed over the past 130 days.

Instead of sharing with you another list of poll numbers, I want to recap a list of actions that the Trump administration has already taken in order to convince you 1.) that political action is possible and 2.) that our priorities and positions as activists can be represented in mainstream politics. The cloud of doubt that has hung over this question, which I believe has only recently dissipated and which compelled us to convene this conference, has been a source of division in our movement for generations. It has been amazing to turn on the television or log into X and to notice that old black cloud is gone now.

Here is a short list of things Donald Trump has done as president on immigration which polling shows is the top priority of his political base and the glue that holds together his coalition:

• He signed the Laken Riley Act into law
• He declared a national emergency at the U.S. Mexico border
• He accelerated the construction of the border wall
• He signed an executive order to task the military with supporting immigration enforcement at the Mexican border
• He has threatened sanctuary cities with civil and criminal penalties
• He paused all foreign aid pending a review that aligns with stricter immigration enforcement
• He has deported illegal aliens to Guantanamo Bay with military aircraft and reopened Alcatraz
• He terminated the Central American Minors Program
• He reinstated the Remain in Mexico policy
• He imposed an immediate asylum ban
• He has begun revoking student visas for Chinese students
• He created a self deportation program to expedite the removal of illegal aliens
• He signed an executive order to end Social Security benefits for illegal aliens
• He ended Temporary Protected Status for migrants from Haiti and Venezuela
• He has ended the parole program for migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela and Nicaragua
• He has expanded 287(g) agreements to bring local law enforcement into immigration law enforcement
• He signed a presidential memorandum which established National Defense Areas at the border which gives the Department of Defense jurisdiction over federal lands along the border
• He suspended the refugee resettlement program
• He terminated federal funding for the refugee resettlement program
• He signed an executive order to end birthright citizenship
• He invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to expedite deportations
• He signed an executive order which restored the “extreme vetting” standards of his first term
• He signed an executive order to designate cartels and migrant gangs as foreign terrorist organizations
• He has doubled ICE arrests in the interior of the United States
• He had Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan indicted and arrested for obstructing immigration enforcement
• He offered asylum to Afrikaner refugees from South Africa
• His State Department has negotiated deals to reduce illegal immigration with Honduras and Panama and a deal with El Salvador to house illegal aliens outside the United States
• His Justice Department has sued New York and Illinois over immigration enforcement and opened a criminal investigation into New York Attorney General Letitia James who crushed VDARE with lawfare
• He has presided over a 93% reduction in illegal immigration since being sworn into office three months ago
• The “Big, Beautiful Bill” which recently passed the Republican-controlled House includes $47 billion to complete the border wall, funding for 3,000 more Border Patrol agents, 10,000 more ICE agents and 100,000 beds to expand detention capacity and scale up immigration enforcement and infrastructure to meet the administration’s mass deportations goals

In the realm of trade policy, President Trump has more authority and has taken the country on a roller coaster ride that has wiped out trillions of dollars of value in financial markets since Liberation Day on April 2. The president signed an executive order which declared large and persistent U.S. trade deficits a national emergency. He started major trade wars with the European Union, China and our NAFTA partners Canada and Mexico. He imposed a global minimum tariff of 10% on the world to foster domestic manufacturing and has imposed or threatened to impose tariffs on specific industries. He recently intervened to ensure American control of U.S. Steel on national security grounds. It is difficult to exaggerate how much of a sea change this has been from the Washington Consensus era of trade liberalization.

In foreign policy, President Trump has also been charting a bold new course and a vision of American future which prioritizes the Western hemisphere, the remigration of illegal aliens to their home countries and the annexation of Canada and Greenland. He recently mediated a fragile ceasefire in the India-Pakistan war. He negotiated a temporary ceasefire in the war in Gaza which has since been broken by Israel. He negotiated a separate peace with the Houthis in Yemen to protect American shipping in the Red Sea. Even before he was sworn into office as president, he worked to negotiate a ceasefire in the war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. President Trump has spent months trying to mediate and negotiate an end to the war between Russia and Ukraine. The Trump administration has also been trying to negotiate a new nuclear agreement with Iran. The president recently went on a tour of the Middle East where he made a point not stop in Israel and where he denounced the decades of chaos and terrorism sown in the region by the wars of his predecessors. He removed sanctions on Syria and ordered the withdrawal of American troops. In his first term, President Trump established a good working relationship with Kim Jong Un of North Korea and negotiated the American exit from Afghanistan with the Taliban. This has been a refreshing change from previous Republican presidents vowed to “end evil” and stamp out “tyranny” in the world and who deployed the military to slay evil dictators like Saddam Hussein.

To my surprise, President Trump has pursued a foreign policy of peace and prosperity, which has prioritized the American worker over Wall Street. He ripped up the USMCA free trade agreement that he negotiated in his first term which replaced NAFTA. He placed draconian tariffs on Chinese imports. Instead of quietly throwing American workers under the bus and prioritizing our relationships with our imperial allies, he has gone out his way to antagonize our allies. By prioritizing trade policy over foreign policy, he has turned the old status quo in Washington upside down. We haven’t seen a Republican president do anything like this since the days of Herbert Hoover and the Smoot-Hawley tariff. Also, the president has defied the expectations of his critics that he would start “a war with Iran” or that he would be a puppet of Israel. Instead, he has courted investment from Japanese banks, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. Meanwhile, Vice President J.D. Vance intervened in European politics when he condemned the Great Replacement and censorship and scolded our European allies to their face at the Munich Security Conference.

The most startling change of the second Trump administration has been on race which Republicans have tiptoed around for generations. President Trump explicitly condemned White genocide in South Africa. He humiliated the president of South Africa in the Oval Office in front of the world media by playing a video which illustrated the persecution and murder of White people in South Africa. He rescinded LBJ’s executive order which established affirmative action. He signed an executive order which ended the use of disparate impact racial liability. He ended DEI offices and programs in the federal government. He ordered federal agencies to end the use of statistics on race, sex, ethnicity and national origin in hiring. The Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff was fired for being a diversity hire who supported the George Floyd protests. Military bases like Fort Bragg and Fort Benning were restored to their original names and English was established as our national language. Black Lives Matter Plaza in DC was destroyed. The president has also been blazing a trail out of our hidebound culture of racial sensitivity through his remarks on Haitians in Springfield or how it was common sense that DEI was responsible for recent airplane crashes. He has bullied corporations and universities into dismantling DEI offices. He ended Joe Biden’s equity policies and fired thousands of government workers who were hired on the basis of race.

President Trump has wielded power to punish his enemies and reward his friends. I stunned when one of his first actions as president was to pardon or commute the sentences of virtually all of the January 6 prisoners. Trump’s animosity against the professional managerial class has been a defining feature of his second term. He has gone after Democratic law firms like Perkins Coie and Paul Weiss for weaponizing the judicial system. He has cut funding to Ivy League universities. He purged the CIA and Justice Department. He has dismantled and attacked liberal institutions like USAID, Voice of America and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He either fired or offered buyouts to nearly three hundred thousand federal civil service workers to claw back power from the bureaucracy. The Supreme Court recently confirmed the president’s power to remove agency heads and is weighing other cases.

Culturally, the Right is transforming before our eyes. Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently clashed with Sen. Tim Kaine over the Democrats’ anti-White opposition to the admission of Afrikaner refugees. This is the same man who once championed comprehensive immigration reform early in his Senate career. Less than five years ago, conservatives were allergic to talking about White people. Support for gay marriage on the Right collapsed during the Biden presidency. Nowhere has the change been as stark as on transgenderism where the Right fought and has arguably won a major battle in the culture. The Trump administration banned child sex mutilation, transgender service members from the military and ordered the government to recognize only men and women. Years ago, it used to be edgy to identify as a nationalist, but this is now the default identity of the Right in Trump’s second term. The term “racism” has been so discredited from overuse that the term “Woke Right” was created in a desperate rearguard attempt by gatekeepers to halt the march toward explicit White identity politics.

After decades of forced deracination, White racial consciousness is surging again and the signs of it percolating are everywhere on the Right. Tucker Carlson recently endorsed race realism on his show. Matt Walsh casually discusses black-on-White crime, White genocide in South Africa and celebrates the conquest and settlement of North America by White Europeans and their superior civilization. Charlie Kirk now talks about the Great Replacement, anti-White discrimination and attacks Martin Luther King, Jr. on his federal holiday. He has described the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a beast and anti-White weapon. The SPLC recently labeled Turning Point USA a hate group and added their chapters to their hate map alongside our websites. Bob Whitaker’s Mantra came out of the mouth of Joe Rogan in March. The Austin Metcalf murder provoked backlash the victim’s pathetic father in April. Shiloh Hendrix raised nearly a million dollars for dropping a n-bomb in a public park in May. This has all transpired since Rep. Steve King was hounded out of Congress for defending Western civilization and wanting White people to have more babies. Both causes have been loudly embraced by Elon Musk and Vice President J.D. Vance and have found their way into the reconciliation bill that passed the House. The identity change followed Twitter becoming X in 2022 and Mitt Romney leaving Congress in 2025.

Some people will point to the opposition that the president has faced to cling to their antiquated view that engaging in mainstream politics is hopeless. The Democrats are predictably wielding the filibuster to block reform in a polarized Congress. District court judges are predictably blocking Trump’s executive orders. The ACLU has predictably filed dozens of lawsuits. Independent voters are predictably fickle. It has been challenging for the president to convince Russia and Ukraine or Israel and Hamas to stop fighting. This is all besides the point. Over the past decade, we have gone from being a marginalized fringe movement completely shut out of the national political conversation to a powerful political faction in the president’s political base that has broken free of the old taboos. We have suddenly been thrust into the political arena where ideas and policies we have always championed are being implemented. We don’t always get our way, but we now face the same obstacles that frustrate other groups.

At least for the moment, eighty years of repression and having our backs pushed against the wall in the name of “antiracism” seems to have abruptly ended. Just a few short years ago we were being hounded out of corporate chain hotels, sued into oblivion, debanked, doxxed, cancelled and subjected to violence and our voices were silenced on social media for repeating what are now mainstream talking points. Statues of our greatest heroes were pulled down and were replaced by random black people on pedestals. Men pretending to be women competed in women’s sports. The border had been erased. June was Pride Month. Dylan Mulvaey was sponsored by Bud Light. “Misgendering” someone was taken seriously. The president was indicted on over 90 felony charges and activists turned the world upside down over a cold. The alt-right collapsed. We survived all that and have emerged stronger because of it.

In retrospect, 2020 and 2021 were the peak of the madness. I believe we have seen the worst of it and that awful period is now behind us. The reason we faced such intense resistance is because our message was gaining traction on the Right. We now have some cultural and political momentum. It remains to be seen how long it will last, but at least in this moment life appears to be getting better. The question now before us is what we should do with this historic opportunity. Should we present as normal Americans and work to reclaim our rightful place in mainstream politics at the state, local and federal level or should we remain satisfied with the stagnation and self destructive patterns of being a marginalized subculture?