Review: The Political Cesspool 2025 Will To Power Conference

The Political Cesspool’s 2025 Will To Power conference, which was sponsored by the Conservative Citizens Foundation and organized by James Edwards, was several months in the making.

A year ago, we held the 20th anniversary conference in South Carolina at a moment of both growing clarity and great uncertainty. We were encouraged by the direction of Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, the nationalist populist Right and cultural shifts reflected in multiple polls. Looking ahead though, the future was cloudy. We didn’t know what kind of environment we would be facing in the 2025. It was possible that Donald Trump could be dead or imprisoned under a Joe Biden or Kamala Harris presidency and that the country could have descended into either violence or some type of authoritarian crackdown.

After Donald Trump handily won the presidency and was sworn into office in January and began to swiftly deliver on his campaign promises with minimal resistance, we decided that we needed to gather again this year to collect our thoughts, process what was happening and decide where to go from here in our new political reality. We knew from experience that we would have a better grasp of what Trump 2.0 holds for us after the first 100 days. We needed some time to organize this event and the end of May / beginning of June was the date that worked best for us. Thus was born the Will To Power conference which was the fruit of months of private conversations and public discussions with guests on The Political Cesspool.

For the first time in the decade since Trump came down the escalator, we have a clear aim and sense of direction. We want to reemerge as a viable force in state, local and federal mainstream politics. We want to rebuild our shattered organizations after the disruptions of the last decade. We want to leave behind the days of being an underground political movement and the image of a fringe subculture. We want to fully normalize White identity politics as part of the mainstream political landscape. We want to move beyond the old taboos on the Right that kept us marginalized for decades. We want our seat at the table.

It is important for us to visualize what this looks like. It looks like the meetings that the Council of Conservative Citizens had several decades ago when state senators and state representatives from across the South frequently spoke at our events which were held in public without disruptions. It looks like the grassroots Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul and Donald Trump presidential campaigns. It looks like being able to express our political views openly in public without having to hide behind pseudonyms. It looks like the days when rightwing populists like George Wallace and Jesse Helms were ubiquitous in Southern politics. It looks like what President Trump and Vice President Vance are saying now. It looks like what European nationalist parties like Vlaams Belang are doing now. It looks like having our own champions like Rep. Steve King or Tom Tancredo in Congress. It is a realistic goal of reversing the last thirty years of being steadily pushed into the political darkness by a bipartisan liberal consensus. Donald Trump is mainly a useful instrument who is creating the conditions for us to get our own people elected. Just as Trump fought his way back to the White House, we must recover our former political standing.

Ideas about how to succeed in nationalist populist politics have always flowed back and forth across the Atlantic and have long been a staple of our conferences. We were fortunate to be joined this weekend by Filip Dewinter, a leader of Vlaams Belang in Belgium and a member of the Flemish parliament, who gave our keynote address which was about the urgent need for remigration in Europe. It was a timely speech in that the Trump administration established an Office of Remigration in the State Department while Dewinter was enjoying his visit to the United States. Dewinter had nothing but praise for Vice President J.D. Vance who all but endorsed our political worldview at the Munich Security Conference in February where he raked European politicians over the coals for censoring, jailing and living in fear of their own citizens. Vance has repeatedly criticized the so-called Democracy Defenders of Europe for among other things rigging the recent Romanian election, leading a witch hunt against Marine Le Pen in France and for maintaining a cordon sanitaire against the AfD in Germany. Elon Musk and Vice President Vance plunged into European politics on behalf of the AfD in Germany which doubled its share of the vote.

Nick Griffin, the former president of the British National Party and member of the European Parliament, spoke to us via video on the first night of the conference. He addressed our conference last year as well. Mr. Griffin, who is probably a distant cousin of mine, is an old warhorse who has been in this fight for many years now and who has long been focused on practical politics. Former Congressmen Steve King of Iowa and Steve Stockman of Texas are both longtime friends of James Edwards and each gave rousing speeches at our event. Mr. King was purged from Congress by Republican leadership for the audacity to speak in defense of Western civilization and the need to have more European babies at the height of the George Floyd mania in 2020. Lew Moore, Ron Paul’s former campaign manager and the author of Forerunner: The Unlikely Role of Ron Paul, spoke about a key chapter in the pre-Trump days of our movement when many of us supported the Ron Paul Revolution in 2008 and 2012. I enjoyed meeting all of these fine men this weekend and talking with them about our past, present and future. I gave my own speech, which was a strong defense of the actions of the president, and so did several other notable figures who were in attendance. We were mainly there to listen to good advice this year though.

My friend James Edwards, our esteemed host, spoke eloquently again about his own journey through this season of life since he got his start in politics supporting Pat Buchanan’s 2000 presidential campaign as the candidate of the Reform Party. At last year’s conference, I devoted my speech to showing how Pat’s ideas and themes had gestated and arrived on the Right. At this year’s conference, I was delighted to talk about how President Trump was wielding power to transform those ideas into policy victories. I should add here that the conference was not an uncritical celebration of President Trump and MAGA. Everyone in attendance recognizes how far we still have to travel on the road ahead even as we pause to reflect on how far we have come. The direction and trajectory of the mainstream Right, however, is now generally positive under Trump. We need to get to work scoring as many political victories as possible.

Yesterday, we wrapped up the conference with a bus trip over to Dixie Republic where we loaded up on pro-South merchandise. Filip Dewinter practiced throwing axes. We all had a great time and enjoyed each other’s company. I want to give a shoutout to our book vendors and authors for their excellent selection of books at the conference. I have several months of reading ahead of me. I also loved meeting and reconnecting with old friends who are on the same journey and seeing how their families have grown which is always the highlight of these events for me. Now that I am a parent, I brought all three of my own children to meet, interact, grow up and bond with their children. We had lots of young mothers with children in the audience who are the heart and soul of a healthy movement.

I said something to this effect to James and several of our friends who were in attendance. We ought to start to thinking about the legacy we intend to leave behind. We can say that we kept the light burning during our darkest hour when times were hard and we were written off and pushed to the fringes of politics by overconfident liberals. We should aim for being able to say on our deathbeds that like the Redeemers we turned the tide, fought our way back from the fringe to the political center, left our cause in better shape than we found it and laid the foundation for our descendants to reclaim their birthright.