First, the Justice Department announced its lawsuit against the Southern Poverty Law Center for funding right-wing informants. This inspired claims that the group created the Alt Right to hurt the rest of the Right.

Second, a crazed leftist tried to kill President Trump, which prompted liberals and right-wingers to assert it was a “false flag.” This notion instantly gained traction online and seemed to get more notice than the official narrative.

Both events illustrate how popular conspiratorial thinking is in America. Some may think this is a good thing. If more people question everything, that creates more grounds to challenge the status quo and push for radical change—or so it’s claimed. But the spread of conspiracy theories isn’t really doing that. It functions as entertainment rather than instigation. People may think everything is a false flag, but it doesn’t change anything about how they live their lives or what they do politically. It just makes the news more fun.

Conspiracies do have a real effect on those folks who are already hyper-partisan, particularly right-wingers. Instead of creating a narrative to rally people to their cause, these theories serve to encourage paranoia, division, helplessness, and even support for their enemies. These notions undermine the Right and its ability to create political change.

It’s easy to see this play out when much of the Right finds ways to get mad at the DOJ for suing the SPLC while claiming the president stages false-flag assassination attempts. These aren’t signs of a movement turning conspiracy theories into political action—they reveal an entertainment structure dedicated to clicks and unrestrained resentment. It’s no wonder that cheering on the Democrats is now a favorite political option for certain corners of the Right. The effects of popular conspiratorialism aid the liberal establishment and retard the Right.

It’s the true harmless persuasion.

The DOJ’s lawsuit is a major win for the Right. Conservatives are finally using state power to go after one of the worst leftist groups in the world. The SPLC deserves to have the skeletons in its closet uncovered. Even if the group wins the case, the cost and embarrassment of it will permanently damage its reputation and put others on notice.

Most of the Right was thrilled at the news, but maybe not for the best reasons. The DOJ alleges the SPLC paid big money to prominent white nationalists, including nearly $300,000 to a Charlottesville rally organizer. This allowed conspiracy theories to run wild and encouraged right-wingers to accuse rivals of working for the enemy. Many conservatives now believe the whole Alt Right was an SPLC op to discredit the rest of the Right. Others disagreed and offered their own competing op narratives. Some claim the SPLC planned Cville to tarnish the Alt Right. Others argue the lawsuit is a MAGA op to sully the good name of white nationalism. (A curious argument, to say the least.)

The truth is that there is no op here. The Alt Right was not the creation of the SPLC. This informant was not one of its chief leaders. Its leaders decided on the Unite the Right rally on their own. The informant didn’t plant the idea, nor was he responsible for what happened. Genuine stupidity, rather than intentional subversion, explains the thought process behind the rally.

But the op theory was too good for conservatives to pass up. It’s long been a popular meme for conservatives to think any white nationalist march is an FBI meetup. This story was catnip for influencers who believe in this idea. There’s of course plenty of evidence that feds and antifa infiltrate these groups, but that’s different from thinking the FBI or the SPLC created them simply to hurt conservatives or whatever. As someone who has a book on the Alt Right coming out, this notion is really stupid and doesn’t address how this movement emerged in the wake of conservatism’s failures. It’s a convenient explanation to entertain your audience and pretend anyone who disagrees with you is an op.

A similar self-serving dynamic operated with the other theories. Claiming the informant vindicates the Alt Right allows its leaders to think the rally was a great idea and it only went bad thanks to this one guy. That’s delusional. Even more delusional are those WNs who think the lawsuit is bad because it’s a MAGA op designed to besmirch their movement as an SPLC op. This allows them to indulge in their all-consuming anti-Trumpism and think everything the president does is a betrayal. It demonstrates how resentment toward others on the Right motivates some more than hostility toward the Left.

A proper response would be to praise the DOJ for going after a powerful leftist group and to encourage the administration to do more like this. But conspiratorialism proved too strong and animated much of the Right’s response. As a result, people began to believe utter nonsense and even convinced themselves to be angry over the feds cracking down on their enemies.

The false-flag assassin accusations are even more egregious. It’s pure slop to get engagement on X and TikTok. There’s zero evidence it was a set-up. It also imagines there are no crazy leftists who would be willing to kill Trump—a strange thing to believe considering the amount of support Tyler Robinson and Trump’s previous wannabe assassins received. But with Trump’s declining support online, it’s apparently necessary to believe that no one would ever try to assassinate him. It’s all an op to bamboozle people into backing Trump.

Belief in the false flag creates solidarity with resistance libtards and reinforces the impression that a good chunk of the Online Right is just Alt MSNBC. There’s nothing gained for the Right by pretending the Left is incapable of carrying out assassinations and other violence against its enemies. It exonerates our foes and makes us stand in solidarity with them—all because we can’t resist idiotic conspiracy theories.

At least for liberals, the false flag theory has utility. It gives them a reason not to sympathize with the president and claim he made it all up to gain support. It’s brainrot, but you can see how it works in their favor. Rarely do conspiracy theories on the Right have this effect.

There’s no chance of these notions causing some kind of mass revolt. They sow division on the Right and encourage some right-wingers to want Democrats to take power again. This hardly threatens the status quo. In fact, it reinforces it.

Sam Francis famously called neoconservatism the “harmless persuasion.” The term applies even more to conspiratorialism. People are encouraged to speculate about false flags, UFOs, fed ops, elaborate plots, and other fantastical ideas because it leads to little practical change. It’s just entertainment for many people and doesn’t lead them to organize or do anything in the real world. If anything, it makes them think all politics is fake and they’re better off doing nothing. For the Right, it has even more pernicious effects. It divides “regime opposition” and makes right-wingers retarded. But the influencer economy is dependent on conspiracy theories. They’re pumped out incessantly because it’s what the audience wants.

They make for good entertainment, but little else. Cranks who believe everything is a false flag and their own side is completely compromised pose no threat. They’re far too disagreeable and paranoid to organize. They’re too busy chasing the “truth” about historic events and news items to affect change.

Kookery may imagine the worst things about those in charge, but those same notions negate any ability to challenge the powers that be.

It can be a great thing if people are skeptical of official narratives—if it leads them to truth and a serious desire to change things in the right direction. But that’s not how conspiratorialism functions on the Right at the moment. It simply persuades people to embrace every far-fetched idea to maximize their entertainment or to satisfy their petty grievances. From Charlie Kirk theories to the latest false flag accusations, it functions to undermine our own side and makes us equivalent to homeless schizophrenics.

It’s the real harmless persuasion.

You can now preorder Scott Greer’s new book, “Whitepill: The Online Right and the Making of Trump’s America,” from this link.

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The data shows that belief is grossly mistaken, as I argue in my latest American Conservative column:

The open borders enthusiasts at the Cato Institute made a shocking discovery last week: The Trump administration has apparently cut legal immigration even more than it’s reduced illegal immigration. That seems incredible, considering there is virtually no new illegal immigration.

But Cato’s immigration studies director David J. Bier believes this is the case, claiming illegal entries were already dramatically falling before Trump took office. “The falloff in illegal immigration continued a prior trend, while the cuts in legal immigration broke the trend of rising legal immigration from 2021 to 2024,” Bier claims, noting that “the cut to legal entries was 2.5 times as large.”

The report counters the false impression among certain parts of the right that the administration is doing little about immigration beyond closing the border to illegal aliens. The data shows a completely different picture, revealing a White House trying to reverse legal immigration independent of Congress.

Read the rest here.

Today we have questions on whether Democrats can make DC and Puerto Rico states, the fate of the Supreme Court, what America will look like in 50 years, the future of local politics, Rand Paul 2028, and much more!

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That’s what many people seem to believe. It’s a common theme to think racial harmony was upon us in the not-so-distant past, but Obama or “elites” came in to destroy this. One frequently encounters this theory with the Occupy Wall Street meme, which imagines a colorblind populist movement was about to take down the corrupt system until the elites invented identity politics to destroy it.

Many want to believe that a post-racial America was within our grasp–until it was stolen from us. This is a crucial part of the popular nostalgia for the 90s/2000s.

Like all myths, it’s not quite true. One could even argue that race relations are better today than ever before. What’s different is America’s racial demographics and dynamics. In the ‘90s and 2000s, the black-white dynamic was still the norm and there were more whites. Today, demographic change has scrambled America’s old culture and upended expectations. The threat of race riots and conflict between whites and blacks may be lower today, but you’re also more likely to be surrounded by foreigners at your local Costco.

America wasn’t close to post-racial harmony in the pre-Obama era. Its racial dynamics were just more comprehensible and less disorienting than they are today.

Neither the ‘90s nor the 2000s were the Golden Age of race relations. In the ‘90s, you had numerous race riots–with the LA riots being the most well-known example–high crime, the OJ Simpson trial, growing unease with immigration, battles over campus political correctness, and white backlash. In the 2000s, you had the Cincinnati riots, Hurricane Katrina, the Duke Lacrosse case, the Jena Six case, and the Knoxville Horror. We may have elected a black president in 2008, but the racial tensions were still there.

As I argued in both my podcast and article on the Duke lacrosse hoax, the fake rape claim served as a preview for many of the race and gender battles of the 2010s and 2020s. A country eager to crucify innocent white men over the preposterous claims of a deranged black criminal was not one living in post-racial bliss.

It’s true race relations were aggravated under the Obama administration. Race riots, hysteria over police shootings, and anti-white racism all became more common while the first black president sat in the White House. We didn’t have Black Lives Matter in the 2000s, nor were cranks like Ibram X. Kendi mandatory reading. Woke came to dominate American life, imposing white privilege training on employees and DEI on first-graders.

Race was far harder to ignore in the 2010s and early 2020s. But it wasn’t that this brand of aggressive identity politics came out of nowhere or was conjured up by Barack Hussein Obama. It was based on trends that were already apparent in the 2000s and were able to get a wider audience thanks to the new media environment of the time. An insensitive comment from a random person could be blown up on Twitter and rally a hate mob against the offender. A false allegation of racism could generate worldwide outrage. A niche academic theory could become the rule in newsrooms thanks to activists and other journalists. Backlash towards Trump inflamed these tendencies and made them more noticeable.

But we’ve seen a retreat from peak woke. Social media is largely free from censorship. It’s never been easier to express right-wing views in public. DEI has been pushed back. Affirmative action has been truncated. Black Lives Matter is now a bad memory. It’s far harder to make a hate hoax go viral. There hasn’t been a race riot in years. Black cultural dominance is receding (to an extent). A sizable majority of white adults now say race relations are good.

High crime helped inspire the white backlash in the ‘90s. Last year, America experienced the lowest murder rate since 1900 and 2026’s figure could be even lower. Declining crime means better race relations.

A Brookings Institution study released in February found overwhelming majorities of Americans approach personal interactions race-blind and 72 percent report having a friend of another race. Interracial marriage is more common now than it was 20 years ago. The Brookings study reports over half of Americans have dated someone of another race. Ninety-four percent of Americans say they have no problem with it. A majority of Americans still didn’t approve of interracial marriage at the beginning of the ‘90s.

Anti-white racism is still a problem and there’s still strong evidence of discrimination against whites in college admissions and job hirings. But race relations, at least between whites and blacks, are probably the best they’ve been in recent memory. Something like the Duke lacrosse case is far less likely to gain traction in our time.

The conflict of our time is less black vs. white but native vs. immigrant. This isn’t something new for America. But what’s different today is the introduction of new racial elements and how pretty much nowhere in this country is immune from it. In the past, the migrant waves were kept to the major cities and factory towns. Now they’re everywhere. You can find plenty of Haitians in small-town Pennsylvania and plenty of Hispanics in rural Alabama.

It’s reshaping the country in ways people don’t like. Hence, Trump winning the 2024 election on the most anti-immigration platform since Calvin Coolidge. Immigration is the dominant cultural issue for modern conservatism and animates many Republican election campaigns. There’s little sign it will disappear as a major issue anytime soon.

Many Americans feel like a stranger in their own country. That’s why they look to the recent past as a better time for race relations, even if the race relations were in fact worse. America’s racial situation was more understandable and our demographics were whiter. The suburbs solved most of the racial problems for whites. That’s not the case anymore. These enclaves kept out urban crime, but not immigrants.

Mass immigration threatens America’s identity and social fabric more than the racial conflicts of the ‘90s and 2000s. Many people would take the high crime and idiocy of the OJ case in exchange for a whiter, less complicated America. Demographic change, however, makes that model impossible.

The fantasy of a pre-Obama racial utopia may be based on faulty memories, but there is something to it.

You can now preorder Scott Greer’s new book, “Whitepill: The Online Right and the Making of Trump’s America,” from this link.

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Trump declared these four, along with Marjorie Taylor Greene, to be the “opposite of MAGA”

Many of these names were once Trump’s most ardent supporters, which drew complaints that the president was now turning on his “most loyal” followers. But none of them would count as pro-Trump anymore. MTG and Jones support invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office. Owens has long alleged that the admin is covering up the Charlie Kirk assassination and hasn’t proven to be that friendly to Trump 2.0. Tucker implied Trump may be the Antichrist in a podcast last week. Kelly was never much of a Trump supporter herself. She was the face of Never Trumpism at Fox in 2016 and became a standard lib during the first term. The former Fox News host only became a Trump supporter as a conservative podcaster in the lead-up to the 2024 election.

It’s not a great sign for Trump to expend 500 words trashing commentators who were previously MAGA. The Iran War is not going well for the 47th president and it’s vigorously supported by neocons who hated Trump in the not-so distant past. Exchanging Tucker Carlson for Mark Levin is a concerning development for MAGA. Then again, it’s hard to say you’re still MAGA if you think Trump needs to be couped.

This all shows the next stage of the ongoing “MAGA civil war.” For months, factions of the Right have been at each other’s throats over the future of conservatism. Last year, both sides were pro-Trump and they fought over who was really MAGA–the old guard of conservatism or the New Right. Now the picture is different. The argument is no longer over who’s really pro-Trump but over Trump himself. Most of the Old Guard is now pro-Trump, while significant parts of the New Right are now anti-Trump. (We’ll describe the side wanting to secede from MAGA as the Rumble Right.) If the civil war were supposed to be a battle over MAGA, then the anti-Trump elements have ceded it to their opponents.

It’s less of a civil war and more of a divorce. Both sides go their separate ways and choose to focus on different things, with the Rumble Right deciding to give up on ordinary politics and focus on internet entertainment.

There is a common argument that the influencers who’ve turned on Trump have no influence at all. They’re irrelevant and Trump can ignore them without consequence. That’s not really true. Their audience and sway over the MAGA base are often exaggerated, but they do still have influence. They are listened to by hundreds of thousands of people and they’re particularly relevant to the “elite” class of conservative intellectuals, operators, and staffers in the administration. The views of Republicans under 35 owe more to the influencers than they do to Fox News. They are relevant–to a certain degree.

We will see how much they impact elections this year. There are plenty of Republicans running as influencer-touted Trump critics. Thomas Massie and James Fishback are two examples. If Massie can win and Fishback pulls off a respectable showing in the Florida gubernatorial primary, it will demonstrate that this faction can impact real-world politics. But if Massie loses his primary and Fishback gets single digits, it will undermine claims of political power.

This faction could still claim electoral influence if the GOP does poorly in the midterms. Many within this crowd want the Democrats to win in a landslide to illustrate how MAGA can’t survive without them. How much a potential loss will be the direct result of MAGA dissidents is a matter of debate.

The real test for political power will be the 2028 primary. There will be at least one candidate who runs to appeal to the Trump-critical onlinesphere. How this message plays out in the primary will determine how much support it has among the base. An Insane Clown Party candidate who struggles to poll well enough would obviously not signal political strength.

But this faction doesn’t need to demonstrate electoral strength to remain popular. They can still have large audiences and create news while being unable to sway elections. Their viewers aren’t going to suddenly turn to Ben Shapiro if these influencers can’t get James Fishback elected. Many people will still watch them.

The MAGA divorce could result in the two sides living in separate universes. In this scenario, the old guard takes back the GOP and creates a different coalition from MAGA, but retains admiration for Trump and some of his signature policies. The influencers retreat from normal politics, gain large audiences online, and imagine a world where the top issues are chemtrails, UFOs, demonic possession, and other topics not addressed by lawmakers. One side may not have many fans on X, but they will have serious influence over electoral politics. The other will be very popular on the internet, but lack real political influence.

The Rumble Right has an audience but not a constituency. And that’s perfectly fine for a media operation. They can sustain themselves as entertainers who discuss politics independent of results. There isn’t a need to demonstrate a direct electoral impact. Prior to Trump, Alex Jones built a big audience without ever impacting American politics. Most influencers will follow this model.

It’s what a lot of their audience wants. It’s hard to convince people who believe the government is run by pedophiles to vote for some bland Republican. It makes for boring content. They’d rather hear about how a collapse/civil war/revolution is just around the corner and you don’t need to worry about ordinary politics. This makes for entertaining content, even if it is divorced from reality. But that’s what matters most–entertainment. That can still be provided absent political influence.

Real politics is often boring and dispiriting. Internet politics is way more fun and exciting. Every feud, no matter how small, is raised to civilizational stakes. The apocalypse is always around the corner and some grand adventure is always at hand. It’s more like a video game than campaigning, and that’s what makes it more engaging. Influencers aren’t stupid for choosing this path.

The Rumble Right has an audience, but not a constituency. They are not an interest group like labor unions or the old Religious Right. They don’t command voters in a demonstrable fashion. They certainly influence opinion at the “elite” level in terms of think tanks and media outlets. But they don’t sway voters in the way interest groups or traditional conservative media do. The average Republican still turns to Fox News rather than podcasters.

The MAGA divorce doesn’t end up with two factions competing in elections. It results in one faction with a large internet audience that’s gradually removed from standard politics while the other faction gains greater influence over regular politics at the expense of an internet audience.

The Rumble Right won’t be entirely ignored, and they may regain a degree of political influence as part of the opposition to a Democratic administration. But it will never have the same level of influence it does as with Trump. The 47th president presented a unique opportunity for forces previously excluded from the mainstream. That opportunity may never arise again. There’s not another figure like Trump waiting in the wings to challenge MAGA, nor will there be one in 2028. Whoever these influencers back in 2028 against the MAGA-supported candidate will lose in the primary. That’s a fact.

That setback won’t lose the Rumble Right any listeners. But it will demonstrate the limits of their political engagement and what the MAGA divorce means for them. One can have a massive internet audience and hardly matter in elections. A faction needs more than a large internet following to change American politics.

You can now preorder Scott Greer’s new book, “Whitepill: The Online Right and the Making of Trump’s America,” from this link.

Prior to his cancellation, Chavez was a favorite among immigration hawks because the labor organizer, at times, opposed illegal immigration. It made sense to adopt one of the Left’s own heroes as a border hawk. Some, such as Center for Immigration Studies director Mark Krikorian, persist in believing Chavez was a border hawk.

But that image is grossly mistaken, as I argue in my latest American Conservative column:

It’s a common meme for immigration restrictionists to point to Chavez as one of their own. The Hispanic activist did at times oppose illegal immigrants taking jobs from the farmworkers he represented. It makes political sense to claim a left-wing hero as an advocate for sensible immigration policies, to give the position broader appeal. That’s why immigration hawks are also eager to put forth liberal Democrats Barbara Jordan and Eugene McCarthy as prominent exemplars of immigration restriction. No one would call those two reactionary bigots.

But unlike Jordan and McCarthy, Chavez did not remain an immigration hawk. He came to embrace illegal immigration, and his one-time opposition was only concerned with the immediate interests of his labor union. When those interests changed, he came to see illegal immigrants as potential members of his union and defended them.

With his cancellation, conservatives can finally be honest about Chavez’s opinions. We gain nothing by pedestaling a child sex abuser as an immigration patriot.

Read the rest here.

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It’s clear now that this war was a grievous mistake. We did not achieve regime change, nor did we even get a more amenable leader to deal with Iran. The Islamic Republic isn’t going to give up its missiles or nuclear program. While Iran has lost many of its leaders and military installations, it’s still able to shut down the Strait of Hormuz and strike critical infrastructure throughout the Middle East. With these advantages, the Islamic Republic has upended the global economy and world oil supply. It’s more likely America and its allies will make serious concessions to open the strait than it is for Iran to meet Trump’s initial demands.

Even if the war ended tomorrow and the strait opened up, it would still stand as a costly and unnecessary attack. What did we accomplish here?

The Iranian navy may be sunk, but that doesn’t hinder Iran’s ability to block global oil shipments. America and Israel may have significantly depleted Iran’s military capabilities, but they can still fire missiles that wreck Gulf oilfields. The ayatollah may be dead, but hardliners still rule in Tehran.

It’s hard to see what was gained here in exchange for straining our relations with the rest of the world, damaging the world economy, creating political blowback, and potentially jeopardizing our footprint in the Middle East.

The admin has failed to make a compelling case for the war. Trump and Marco Rubio have even admitted Israel dragged us into it, further undermining the case for the strikes. The president’s public statements about the conflict have been some of his worst comments in his political career. His primetime speech last week offered little of substance besides a 2-3 week timetable to end the conflict and dubious threats to send Iran back to the Stone Age. His Sunday post promising to destroy Iran’s civilian infrastructure, along with an F-bomb and a bizarre “praise be to Allah,” persuaded no one of the conflict’s necessity.

The only case is “trust us.” This is the first American war where there hasn’t even been an attempt to justify it.

But the results of it aren’t going to look good for the admin. The best case scenario is we, or Europe, makes concessions to Iran to get them to open up the strait. The worst case scenario is that Iran establishes a permanent toll through the critical passage and many of our allies turn on us as a result.

The war has already made a joke out of NATO, with our European allies refusing to allow us to use their airspace or bases for the mission. Only Israel, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia support the strikes. Europe has been loud and clear that it opposes them.

Some Trumpists would argue it’s good that the Europeans show their true colors, but it’s not a smart thing to alienate our most reliable allies over a poorly thought-out military action. Even if NATO needs to be reassessed, pushing Europe further away is not in America’s interest–especially when we’re left with suspect Middle Eastern allies.

Many American nationalists don’t care for our “global” reputation as it’s often dictated by how libtarded we are. According to much of the world, Barack Obama was our best modern president. They also seemed to like senile Joe Biden, in spite of his many faux pas. It can seem that the only way to get world approval is to have a liberal in the White House. Still, it’s important to maintain America’s reputation for diplomacy. Trump’s effort, which seemed to dupe Iran with phony negotiations, is not going to help us build better relations. Other nations will be more suspicious of our word and potentially look to other powers to settle disputes and provide security guarantees. As was the case with Trump’s reckless threat to throw away the EU trade deal to get Greenland, it’s very stupid to be incapable of sticking to promises. If the world perceives discussions with America as possible traps, they’re not going to engage in them in the first place.

The war has damaged the Right throughout the West. Despite the Trump administration’s unprecedented outreach to European nationalists, these parties are rushing to condemn the president and the war in Iran. It makes political sense. The conflict skyrocketed gas priceshigh and hit the continent’s economy hard. There’s virtually no support for the war in Europe. Electoral considerations forced nationalists to distance themselves from Trump to save their chances. We will see if the disavowals were enough to persuade voters to still support these parties.

In America, the war has further diminished the GOP’s chances in the upcoming midterms. It always looked to be an uphill battle to retain the House, but polls show the GOP may even lose the Senate in November. The war is unpopular here. An imminent conclusion to the conflict that brings down gas prices could be enough to wipe out its electoral side effects. Democrats aren’t exactly campaigning against the war, either. But even a positive conclusion to the war (whatever that may look like) won’t do any positive favors for Trump besides mitigating the negatives created by the conflict.

The conflict has largely alienated the Online Right from MAGA. The Online Right doesn’t quite have the power to sway elections, but this faction does punch above its weight in influencing the Trump admin. The White House’s meme strategy is shaped by the onlinesphere, and many policies the administration implemented were derived from anons. There were already sharp divisions within the Online Right over Trump before the conflict. They’ve gotten far worse since the war broke out. It’s no longer popular to be pro-Trump on the internet. One will get more engagement calling for Trump to be removed from office than praising the president. Many influencers have followed those incentives.

The conflict has also convinced popular influencers such as Tucker Carlson to move into an anti-Trump direction, which could narrow the MAGA coalition. The administration seems to not care about these losses. Trump, at times, seems to indicate MAGA is now just Fox News, Mark Levin, Laura Loomer, and Catturd. There’s no need for anyone else. That obviously makes for a weaker political movement.

Some of the dire claims about the Iran war are greatly exaggerated. The American Empire is not going to collapse, regardless of how the conflict ends. The dollar will still reign supreme, as will our economy. No other power will step into our role as the protector of the seas. This will not be a worse debacle than Iraq or Vietnam. America survived both of those conflicts and it will survive this one. The Empire is strong enough that it can make mistakes and not pay a heavy price for them.

But survival isn’t the same as victory. Just because we can get away with errors doesn’t mean we should shrug our shoulders and move on. We should learn lessons from it. We have to realize the limits of what we can do in the Middle East and stop giving Israel carte blanche to do as it pleases.

Mistakes can be useful if one learns and improves. It’s Trump’s job now to take these tough lessons to heart and get his administration back on track. The Iran war stands as his biggest failure so far. He can still ensure that it stands only as a black mark on an otherwise impressive administration.

You can now preorder Scott Greer’s new book, “Whitepill: The Online Right and the Making of Trump’s America,” from this link.

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The Right has to give their foes a name they don’t identify with. Calling them progressives is too dull and unthreatening. Woke has been the favored term, but its users often struggle to define it and it’s been diluted enough to even attack the Right. Some conservatives revive old enemies to describe their new foes, with “communist” seeing a resurgence.

The goal is to paint a frightening picture of the Left, one that sees our foes as hel-lbent on civilizational destruction. Woke no longer conveys that sense of danger, and conservatives struggle to find a replacement term.

Some conservative intellectuals have settled on two competing labels to solve this dilemma: “third worldism” and “race communism.”

The chief advocate for third worldism is Hudson Institute fellow Zineb Riboua. The primary proponent of calling the Left race communists is author Helen Andrews. Both terms seek to describe the same thing and convince conservatives to replace woke with either label.

Both are fine as attack slogans against the Left, but both still lack enough popular currency to replace woke as the preferred epithet. Woke, for a lack of a better alternative, will stick around for the time being.

What’s needed is to define the traits the Right opposes and to make whatever term apply to these developments.

These are four core features supported by the modern Left that threaten our civilization:

1. Support for mass immigration that demographically replaces the majority population of America and other western countries.

2. Support for policies, such as affirmative action and DEI, that intentionally discriminate against whites.

3. Support for ideas, such as the 1619 Project, that subvert America, paint the founding population as villains, and imagine the country has always been a multicultural state defined by minorities.

4. Support for massive wealth redistribution and other radical proposals to correct the “structural inequalities” of American life.

These are the traits that animate the Left. One could call this woke, third worldist, or race communist. But all terms have their issues.

Woke is, by far, the most popular and it’s the one the Left actually called themselves–until it became a political liability. It’s still a common term for the Right, as I can attest. In order to generate attention for an article about Iran’s appeal to western leftism, I titled it “Woke Iran.” The Islamic Republic isn’t actually woke, of course. But its propaganda repeats many woke talking points about Indians and Black Lives Matter to gain western sympathy. Its leaders are also heavily influenced by left-wing, third worldist intellectuals. “Woke” here doesn’t mean liberal.

But that’s part of the problem with woke. It’s an amorphous term that conservatives often struggle to define. Conservative Bethany Mandel famously couldn’t define it during an interview about her book on wokeness. For many on the Right, woke just means a worse version of political correctness. The overuse of the term has diluted its potency as a barb. Calling something woke in 2026 is just as likely to draw eyerolls as concerns. If everything is woke, nothing is.

It’s felt there’s a need for another term to better describe the traits listed above. Enter third worldism and race communism.

Zineb Riboua gives a clear definition of third worldism, giving it an advantage over “woke.” She defines it as “a postcolonial moral project born in the mid-twentieth century that recast politics as a global uprising against Western hegemony.” Its chief characteristics are anti-imperialism, anti-bourgeois, anti-capitalism, and antisemitism. The “world’s oppressed peoples,” rather than the western working class, becomes its revolutionary proletariat. Riboua sees Zohran Mamdani as one of the western exemplars of this ideology. She also uses this framework to connect these western leftists to Iran, Hamas, and Venezuela.

Aspects of the modern Left resemble this description. It’s also fair to call Iran and Venezuela third worldist. But, as I argued in The American Conservative last year, it’s too concerned with foreign affairs to accurately describe what we face. Unlike Iran, Mamdani and other American leftists support western hegemony. They just want our domestic and foreign affairs to be “woker.” Iran and Hamas are separate from what we face in domestic American politics. As we’ve seen in the current conflict, many of the Islamic Republic’s biggest fans come from the Online Right rather than the Woke Left.

Third worldism is still useful to describe elements of the Left, as well as western decline. But it’s not the most accurate term for our domestic opposition.

Helen Andrews offers race communism due to her own issues with third worldism and woke. Third worldism is inaccurate because:

1. Its enemy is not just the West but white people explicitly.

2. “Third Worldism” sounds foreign and it’s not. It’s the ideology of the American empire.

I disagree with the assertion that it’s the ideology of the American empire as there are multiple ideologies in conflict over control of the empire. Andrews asserts it was inherently decolonialist, but that ignores America’s support for certain colonial governments and white settler states in Africa. However, it is true the leftism she opposes did at times shape American foreign policy. In any case, that’s a topic for another article or podcast.

Andrews doesn’t like woke because “it sounds frivolous. It makes you think of diversity seminars and college professors.” She prefers race communism because it accurately illustrates the dire threat the modern Left poses to our civilization:

The ruling ideology is just race communism. Taking stuff from the bad class and giving it to the good class is its central purpose as much as it was for the Soviets. Who gets board seats, jobs, college spots, loans, housing—it’s all about the allocation of resources by race.

Just like the other terms, there are issues with it. Race communism doesn’t actually derive from Marxism but liberalism. It’s also touted by a number of people ostensibly in support of capitalism. Highly Respected guest Peter Nemets contends that it’s a poor term because:

[I]t implies formal, hierarchal, & centralized structure parallel to & integrated with regular political & economic structures. Actual phenomena we see are results of distributed, non-hierarchal structures created to mitigate legal risk.

But out of all the choices, it’s probably the best. It’s more accurate than third worldism and has a clearer, more threatening meaning than woke.

We’re never going to settle on a perfect term. Our enemies refuse to give us one and we’re going to have come up with something on our own. All three terms are fine to use, so long as they’re describing the four principles listed above. We’re not going to wean people off woke for the time being. It’s important to give them a clear framework for what it means in order to make conservatives build a coherent agenda to counter the leftist agenda.

The Right needs to be clear about what it stands against. It’s a race-based ideology that wants to transform the West through mass immigration, anti-white discrimination, cultural policy, and wealth redistribution. You can call it woke, third worldist, or race communist. What matters most is understanding those key points.

You can now preorder Scott Greer’s new book, “Whitepill: The Online Right and the Making of Trump’s America,” from this link.

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Most conservative commentators recognize there’s a problem and wish to restore the coalition that won the 2024 election in a landslide. Writer Auron MacIntyre argues the best way to heal MAGA is to kick out all the neocons. This idea would be great, except it assumes that people not named Trump can decide what’s MAGA and what’s not. For both good and ill, Trump is the only one with that power.

This presents obvious problems for a political movement that plans to continue after the Donald leaves office. A personality cult can’t survive without its personality in the arena.

It’s clear the 2024 MAGA coalition isn’t going to return. Something else will take its place once Trump leaves office. The successor coalition will bear similarities with Trumpism and its policy agenda. It’s unlikely it will be anti-Trump in either a Never Trumper or Insane Clown Party way. Beyond that, its exact character still remains a battle waiting in the future.

There are a few facts to establish in this debate:

1. Trumpism is still very much alive. His core supporters, as every poll shows, are sticking with him. There’s no viable challenger on the Right to its hold over the GOP and conservatism.

2. Trump’s coalition besides his core supporters has suffered losses. Polls show independents, Hispanics, and young men have soured on Trump and are unlikely to vote for Republicans in the same numbers they did in 2024.

3. The reasons for this dissension are primarily due to the sluggish economy, the Iran war, and the ICE raids.

4. The Online Right is also upset with Trump, but their disagreements–besides the war–don’t align with the majority of voters turning away from MAGA. This sphere is upset with Trump not deporting enough migrants. With independents, it’s the perception the president is deporting too many. In general, elements of the Online Right have turned on Trump for not being radical enough while real-world voters think the president is too radical.

These points can explain how the MAGA coalition is an unwieldy beast with multiple conflicting interests and priorities. Even prior to the Iran war, it looked to be in trouble for 2026 and 2028. The war only furthered the discontent. But it must be remembered that the onlinesphere doesn’t properly represent the electoral troubles the coalition faces. The “moderate” opinions of those fleeing MAGA are better represented by Joe Rogan and brocasters, who equally attack deportations and foreign interventions.

This is not an argument to cater to the mercurial whims of the brocasters. Far from it. Their political opinions are poorly formed and too often shaped by media outrage. But one must acknowledge that they reflect dissent within the coalition. This demographic had largely ditched MAGA before the Iran war. It was going to be extremely difficult to keep this sphere loyal to Trump.

It would be a wise political decision for Trump to end the war as soon as possible. The midterms could turn into a bloodbath if the conflict wrecks the economy. But no matter what happens, the 2024 coalition is probably not coming back.

Purging or sidelining the people who egged on Trump’s Iran mistake would be great, but it will still be insufficient to restore the coalition to its old state. Many of the new voters Trump drew in 2024 would still have their issues with the MAGA agenda, as would the anti-Trump elements of the Online Right. The chief problem with MAGA for these two sides is increasingly Trump and his agenda, not just with one bad policy or bad elements within the coalition.

The influencers fantasizing about impeaching Trump and repeatedly shouting “MAGA is dead” indicate their lack of desire to rejoin the movement. Their conditions for returning is to remove Trump. That’s not going to happen.

MAGA was able to unite all these different elements together in 2024 due to opposition to woke and the disaster that was the Biden administration. It was easy to gather support when there was a clear enemy. But once people forgot about Biden’s open border policies and oppressive wokeness in the culture, the glue keeping these various elements within MAGA dissipated. Without the common enemy in sight, everyone could focus on what they don’t like about the current administration. Thus, we get the divisions within the MAGA coalition.

These problems weren’t apparent in the first term when Trump wasn’t really doing anything and he had weaker control over the Right. But the average voter prefers a president who doesn’t rock the boat, and the great economy of the late 2010s was enough to keep MAGA voters relatively happy. In addition, there wasn’t much space for criticism of Trump from the Right for a variety of reasons. It’s a different situation today.

The 2024 MAGA coalition is unlikely to be replicated. Winning elections and governing the country will probably require a different style that can draw in new voters. We’re not going to get another personality to rival Trump’s charisma. The future right-wing coalition will need to build a coherent-policy agenda that dispenses with past failures and attracts a broad array of voters. It won’t be a replica of pre-Trump conservatism, nor will it be the Insane Clown Party. It will build off Trumpism to make a movement that can sustain itself beyond one man.

For now, MAGA is the only real game in town for the American Right. It may have lost its charm, it may have lost some of its supporters, and it may be popular on the internet to attack. But there’s no other vehicle for advancing a right-wing agenda. It’s obvious it’s heavily dependent on Trump himself. But as long as he’s the president, he–and no one else–will decide what it is.

You can now preorder Scott Greer’s new book, “Whitepill: The Online Right and the Making of Trump’s America,” from this link.