Revere Signal

The War That Came Home

2026-10-02T21:30:00Z

The Personal Is Political, part one of five.

The first time he noticed something was wrong, his daughter looked exactly as she had when he dropped her off at college several months earlier.

She was home for a break during the school year, standing beside him in the kitchen while he made coffee. He was telling her a funny story about a Black guy at work, an old friend who had gotten himself into a ridiculous situation.

“Dad, you can’t say that.” “Say what?”

She explained that his language was problematic. He laughed, thinking she was teasing him. She wasn’t.

What followed was a lecture about race, privilege, and the harm caused by people who refused to examine their biases. He tried explaining that the man was his friend. She informed him that having Black friends didn’t absolve him of racism.

He stared at her. This was the little girl who used to follow him everywhere, who had spent half her childhood in the garage helping him fix things. He had worked hard to give her a comfortable life and paid for her liberal arts education because she wanted to help people and apparently that was the way to do it.

Now she was explaining that his success, their home, and even the life he had provided her were products of an oppressive system.

He asked what had happened to her. She asked why he was so resistant to accountability. Neither understood why the other was being so cruel.

Over the next few years, the changes were harder to miss. Her long hair was cut short, then dyed blue, then buzzed. There were new piercings, new identities, and the vocabulary to go with them. But it was her face that troubled him most.

The girl who once looked at him with adoration now regarded him with contempt, her expression hard and tired, as though managing his endless offenses were an exhausting burden. Eventually, she grew so icy that they stopped speaking altogether. For the next two years, she didn't come home during break.

She had arrived at college wanting to be a good person. By her second year she understood goodness as something that required constant vigilance. She had learned to see her upbringing as a source of unearned privilege for which she must atone. To be truly good, she was obligated to confront the attitudes that sustained it, especially in the white man closest to her. After all, if she couldn't hold her own father accountable, what good was all that education?

He started searching the internet for answers.

He found other parents whose children had accused them of bigotry or turned family gatherings into political tribunals. He listened to podcasts at work and watched videos after dinner. At least he wasn't alone.

He also discovered Charlie Kirk. The campus clips struck a nerve. Kirk went straight into the places where the father felt he had lost his daughter, invited hostile students to the microphone, and challenged their arguments. He was doing what Dad wished he could do: standing firm in his convictions without giving up on the people across from him.

In his favorite clip, a transgender student with blue hair and facial piercings approached Kirk's microphone and asked why he was there.

Kirk explained that when people stop talking and lose their human connection, violence becomes easier to justify. He wanted a culture where people could disagree without resorting to violence.

The student challenged him: wasn't his speech itself a form of emotional violence? Kirk pushed back. Wasn't the point of free speech to hear things that made us uncomfortable? The student said it didn’t make him uncomfortable. It made him angry.

The father sent the clip to his daughter, hoping she might recognize something of their own predicament. She replied with an article calling Kirk a dangerous white supremacist.

Not long afterward, on September 10, 2025, Kirk was shot and killed while speaking at Utah Valley University.

According to court documents, Tyler Robinson admitted to the shooting in messages to his transgender romantic partner. He reportedly told his father that Kirk spread too much hatred, while his mother described his increasingly left-leaning politics and support for gay and transgender rights.

To the father, the resemblance to his daughter's world was unmistakable. Here was another young person who regarded Kirk as an embodiment of hatred and, according to the messages attributed to him, believed some hatred could not be negotiated away.

The man who had tried to keep the conversation going had been killed in the middle of one.

But the father soon found himself listening less to the evidence against Robinson and more to Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens.

He knew them as familiar voices from Kirk's world, people who publicly described themselves as his friends. Before Kirk's death, he had watched them face accusations of antisemitism and admired what he understood as Kirk's loyalty to them.

The controversy had reminded him of his own experience. He didn't fully understand the arguments, but he recognized the accusations, the demands for accountability, and the implication that disagreement revealed some hidden prejudice.

Here we go again, he had thought. Someone asks an uncomfortable question, and suddenly they're hateful.

He wished someone had stood up for him like that when his daughter began calling him a racist. Because he associated Carlson and Owens with Kirk, and because he identified with what he perceived as their mistreatment, he trusted them.

After the assassination, he followed their commentary closely. Their questions and allegations cast suspicion on Kirk's associates, his organization, and people he had counted among his friends.

Some of it initially troubled him. But what if the people who had accused Carlson and Owens of antisemitism really were trying to silence them? He had already seen what looked to him like the same tactics that had torn his family apart. Why should he trust them now?

He started sharing podcast episodes on Facebook. At first, he posted them with a simple invitation to listen. Soon he was spending his evenings in the comments, defending Carlson and Owens as genuine friends of Kirk who were brave enough to pursue the truth.

When someone challenged their claims, he took it personally. He knew what it felt like to be called a bigot for asking questions. He wasn't going to let that happen to them.

He grew convinced that these trusted voices had uncovered a terrible secret about Kirk's death, an injustice that powerful people wanted buried. They weren't going to let Charlie die without answers. They would expose the truth and demand justice, and he would do his part.

Before long, he was repeating antisemitic conspiracy theories himself. He began treating criticism of Carlson and Owens by Jewish commentators as evidence of the very oppression the podcasters had alleged. His suspicions expanded from particular individuals to Jewish donors, the Israeli prime minister, and eventually Jews as a whole.

The father barely noticed how far his thinking had traveled. Every argument in the comments left him more invested in defending the public figures he trusted and the allegations they promoted. He had started out grieving a man who believed in keeping the conversation open. Now he spent his evenings attacking the people that man had called allies, convinced he was defending Kirk's legacy.

During her final year of college, she came home for one last break.

“Why do you keep defending Charlie Kirk online? He was a bigot who promoted hatred. People have a right to defend themselves. And now you’ve been radicalized by conspiracy theories.”

“That’s rich coming from someone who got brainwashed at college.”

“You’re literally blaming Jews for everything.”

“I’m asking questions. Apparently that’s not allowed anymore.” She accused him of repeating talking points. He accused her of doing the same.

Both reached for their phones.

“Just watch this,” they said, almost simultaneously.

They pressed play. Two competing voices filled the room, each trying to explain what the other had gotten wrong. They turned up the volume, talked over the videos, and argued about what the other wasn't hearing. Eventually, they stopped trying to make themselves heard at all.

They sat across from each other, listening to strangers explain why the person they loved most couldn't be saved.

Even though noise had filled the room the conversation had stopped. The daughter believed she was fighting oppression. Her father believed he was exposing it. Neither noticed how much they had come to resemble one another.

For millions of Americans, some version of this dinner has become painfully familiar. Families are estranged, friendships have collapsed, and people who once understood one another now seem to inhabit entirely different realities. Many are left wondering whom to trust, what to believe, and how the people they love became strangers.

This story illustrates how two people on opposite sides of the political divide can arrive at remarkably similar ways of understanding the world, each convinced they are fighting oppression and awakening the other to the truth.

This five-part series examines how the rise of the woke left and, more recently, the woke right has reshaped our identities, relationships, and understanding of the world. We will trace the intellectual roots of the ideology underlying wokeness, from Marxism to the revolutionary feminist declaration that “the personal is political,” and examine how similar frameworks of grievance and division have historically been exploited for ideological subversion.

We will then explore how these ideas have taken on new forms within the American right, where the movement dubbed the woke right increasingly mirrors the critical consciousness and conspiratorial thinking it claims to oppose.

The series culminates in the controversy surrounding Charlie Kirk’s assassination, where these seemingly opposing worlds intersect, offering a revealing case study of the ideological forces we have traced throughout the series.

The Silence Around Tucker Carlson

2026-10-02T15:30:00Z

There was a time when the conservative movement policed its own borders. William F. Buckley Jr. spent years pushing the John Birch Society to the margins, on the theory that a movement which could not say no to its cranks would eventually be defined by them. In fact, it was the Democratic Left’s inability to rebuke radical critical theory that hijacked the party, pushing the Overton Window so far left that it shifted national political debate away from essential conversations on taxation, foreign policy, and education in the age of AI to the debate on what is a woman and the fight to protect girls’ sports. The instinct to protect both parties' integrity is now gone. The proof is the Republican Party's inability to say a clear word against Tucker Carlson.

Consider how far Carlson has traveled from anything recognizable as conservatism. Reagan's movement held that American strength deterred tyrants. Carlson flew to Moscow, gave Vladimir Putin a largely unchallenged platform, and marveled at a Russian supermarket. Conservatives once treated Churchill as a hero of Western civilization. Carlson hosted a guest who cast him as the chief villain of the Second World War and introduced that guest as a leading historian. Conservatives defended free markets. Carlson has spent years attacking market capitalism and has praised Elizabeth Warren's economic program.

Then came October 2025, when Carlson sat down for a friendly conversation with Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier and avowed admirer of Hitler. Carlson did not challenge him so much as host him. In the same conversation, he spoke with contempt of Christian Zionists, a group that includes millions of the Republican Party's most loyal voters.

The response was instructive. The president of the Heritage Foundation, once the intellectual engine of Reaganism, recorded a video defending Carlson and attacking his critics. Staff and board members left in protest, and he later apologized, but the first instinct told the story. President Trump said nobody could tell Carlson whom to interview. Vice President Vance, a personal friend, declined to denounce him and argued against purity tests. A handful of figures, including Ted Cruz and Ben Shapiro, spoke plainly. They were treated as the troublemakers.

Why the reluctance? Three reasons suggest themselves, none flattering.

The first is fear. Carlson commands one of the largest audiences in right-wing media, and that audience overlaps with the primary electorate. A Republican who attacks him invites a monologue, a wave of online fury, and perhaps a challenger. Silence is cheaper.

The second is ambition. Carlson is close to the men most likely to inherit the party. He championed Vance for the ticket. Anyone hoping for a place in the post-Trump order has a reason to stay on good terms with one of its kingmakers.

The third reason is the most troubling: the party no longer has a standard to hold him to. Conservatism used to be a set of ideas about limited government, markets, constitutional order, and American leadership abroad. When loyalty to a man and hostility to the left replaced those ideas, Carlson no longer had a creed to violate. The slogan "no enemies to the right" follows naturally. If the only sin is helping the other side, then a man who platforms a Hitler admirer while attacking liberals has committed no offense.

That is the real cost. A party that cannot condemn this has told voters, and its own young activists, what is permitted. The young men in Fuentes's audience have noticed. So have Jewish conservatives, who are entitled to wonder whether their allies will defend them when it is inconvenient. And perhaps the audience watching Tucker Carlson and the influence he wields most closely isn't the IRGC or even Russia, but China. Over the last two years, Tucker has turned the party of pro-military spending and strong defense into isolationists who view American intervention as not just wrong, but spiritually evil. This pressure from within the party greatly restrained President Trump’s response in Iran, leading to a largely failed campaign in achieving its war aims. Now Tucker is claiming it is only fair for the U.S. to share power with China, and hopes that when China “inevitably” takes Taiwan, it rules it in an enlightened way.

The problem? Taiwan is the essential player in the United States' AI race against China. If China were to take Taiwan, the global economy would crash, key manufacturing would cease, taking out roughly 10% of the global economy, and the American middle class Tucker has convinced is worse off than ever before in history will actually experience the erasure of the middle-class American dream. But all of that is too intellectual for the redneck armchair experts Tucker has brainwashed, and those in D.C. seem too afraid to confront him.

Buckley understood that drawing lines is not censorship. Nobody proposes silencing Carlson. The question is whether elected Republicans and conservative institutions will say, without hedging, that he does not speak for them. So far, their answer has been a shrug. Movements are defined by what they will not tolerate, and at present the Right appears willing to tolerate a great deal.

The Man Who Once Warned About China Now Tells America to Fold

2026-09-28T14:00:00Z

For years, Tucker Carlson built his brand as the voice of forgotten America: the factory worker whose job went to Shenzhen, the family priced out of the middle class by a political class that sold the country to Beijing. He even ran a segment on the China threat. So it is worth pausing on how far his worldview has moved. Carlson insists that his newfound softness on Sharia law, on Russian aggression, and on China, where he now suggests we simply play nice and share power, is all in the name of America First.

Since October 7, Carlson has waged a campaign to convince the West that Judeo-Christian values are corrupt so long as the “Judeo” remains. He has echoed, or given a platform to, guests who openly claim Jews are an evil cabal controlling the world. The natural byproduct of this propaganda is that conservative Christian Americans now see not only their government as captured by the genocidal “Greater Israel” agenda, but their very way of life as under systematic attack. The implication goes one step further: America itself is fundamentally corrupt, a force for global terror and genocide. The American Dream is a lie, and the Jews are to blame.

From there, the leap is short. If America is the villain, then perhaps the great powers we were told to fear are, at least in part, the answer. Enter post-liberalism: the idea that America should adopt the very systems this movement once denounced as failures.

This manufactured fear, that there has never been a worse time to be a middle-class Christian American than 2026, is the lie that will move a once reliably pro-defense, pro-military constituency toward anti-war rhetoric. That shift in the Overton window becomes candidates, candidates become officeholders, and officeholders set policy, including the defense budget. Those electoral consequences will take years to fully arrive. What is changing now, and fast, is Gen Z’s sense of patriotism and its willingness to fight for the country if called upon. The lie they have bought is that every war advances Israel’s agenda, and that America has failed because they cannot afford a million-dollar home.

This grievance-based worldview mirrors the woke left’s. Dissatisfaction that often stems from one’s own mediocrity is recast as someone else’s fault, and blaming the Jews makes it easier to swallow. That is not to say economic policy is beyond critique. But here is the irony: the party’s drift toward isolationism is what restrained Trump from a full campaign in Iran that would have required boots on the ground. Because Carlson convinced Republicans that Iran would be Iraq 2.0, the response to the IRGC was limited before the U.S. ever acted. Meanwhile, Houthi pirates terrorizing the Red Sea, relentless aggression across the Middle East, Iranian-funded terrorism, and the war in Israel itself all feed the global volatility that drives up the cost of living at home.

Yet the redneck-intellectual reasoning holds that war is bad, so capitulate to the aggressors and hope they govern the world alongside the U.S. in some constructive, “enlightened” way. None of these illiberal powers has ever spoken or acted as a good-faith partner to the United States. It is as if Carlson has forgotten the Cold War, or decades of official Chinese rhetoric and policy aimed squarely at ending American hegemony. This isn’t America First. It’s America Last.

This spring, Carlson told The Economist that the U.S. has reached the limits of its power and is unable to defend the self-ruled island of Taiwan. His line to the magazine was blunt: “The US is not going to defend and cannot defend Taiwan.” He went further, saying he no longer sees Communist China as a major threat and calling for the U.S. to share power with Beijing in a new world order.

This is not a harmless contrarian take from a podcaster. Carlson speaks to an audience of 21 million followers on X and YouTube, and his message lands at the worst possible moment. American forces and resources are already stretched between confronting Iran and backing Ukraine. Analysts warn that U.S. commitments in Ukraine and the Middle East compete for the same weapons systems, logistics and political capital needed to deter China over Taiwan. Deterrence is not only ships and missiles; it is will. When a leading conservative voice tells Americans that the fight is unwinnable before it starts, he erodes the resolve that keeps adversaries guessing, in the Pacific and everywhere else. Beijing, Tehran and Moscow are all listening, and they read retreat in one theater as permission in the others.

And the stakes of Taiwan in particular could not be higher. The island is the beating heart of the artificial intelligence economy. TSMC accounts for 70% of global foundry revenue, powering customers such as AMD, Apple, Broadcom, Nvidia and Qualcomm, and Taiwan has produced more than 90% of the most advanced chips. Every serious American AI effort, the race that will decide which country writes the rules of the next century, runs through factories in Hsinchu and Tainan. There is no quick replacement: TSMC’s Arizona plant isn’t expected to reach 2nm volume production until 2030, and Samsung and Intel remain years behind. Hand Taiwan to Beijing, and you hand China the chokepoint on America’s technological future.

Then there is the bill. Bloomberg Economics estimates that a war over Taiwan would deliver a $10 trillion shock to the world economy, equal to about 10% of global GDP — a larger blow than the Ukraine war, the Covid pandemic and the Global Financial Crisis. The U.S. itself could see its GDP decline by 6.7% in a single year.

Here is where Carlson’s reversal collapses under its own logic. His entire political identity rests on the grievances of middle-class America: stagnant wages, vanished jobs, rising costs. Nothing would crush that America faster than a Taiwan crisis. Picture the chip shortage of 2021, when car lots emptied and prices soared, then multiply it many times over. Retirement accounts would crater. Manufacturing lines from Detroit to Ohio would stall for lack of components. The very workers Carlson claims to champion would pay first and pay most.

The surest way to invite that catastrophe is to signal weakness. Wars over Taiwan become likelier when Beijing believes Washington won’t respond. Every voice that tells China America has already given up makes the gamble look cheaper to Xi Jinping.

Carlson is right that Americans are tired of endless wars. But deterrence is how you avoid them. Strength in the Taiwan Strait is not an adventure abroad; it is insurance for the paycheck, the pension, and the price of everything at home. The old Tucker understood that China was the threat to middle America. The new one is advising middle America to surrender its future without a fight. The question is what happened to Tucker, and who happened to him. How does a man change so drastically while insisting his motive is still “America First”?

Image: photo by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, edited.

The Trans-Constitutionalists

2026-09-25T18:30:00Z

On September 16th, 2026, conservative radio host Erick Erickson published an investigation into Charles Haywood, the Society for American Civic Renewal, Claremont, American Reformer, New Founding, American Moment, and the network of donors and organizers bringing a whole new set of authoritarian ideas to the conservative right.

The backlash the article received could only be described as biblical.

I have spent two years in the trenches examining the phenomenon gripping American conservatism after President Trump’s 2024 victory, so I expected the reaction Erickson’s article received. In fact, I got the same reaction when I wrote The Long Game in March of 2026.

American conservatives still do not understand the convulsions tearing through the right, and this weekend on social media once again solidified this point. Many still think they can engage in a debate of ideas, but the other side is not interested in debate. The other side is engaged in a demolition project. Now, the project has many points of entry, and the people who enter on the second floor may not understand what is happening on the top floor, but that doesn’t change the project.

This is an existential battle over the ideological and theological DNA of the Republican Party’s base. A counterrevolution has been running through the Republican Party for two years, but the convergence point can be traced all the way back to 2019.

The counterrevolution has many factions. On the surface, there is Tucker and Candace, the more bombastic section of the demolition crew. Then there are the intellectual integralist thought leaders, such as Adrian Vermeule and Patrick Deneen. There are foreign-policy think tanks that convert Obama-style foreign policy into conservative-coded vocabulary, like the Quincy Institute. There is a Catholic integralist infrastructure and a corresponding Protestant one.

So pervasive is this hostile takeover that it has many factions that may or may not agree. There is no conspiracy, but there most certainly is a convergence. Though, if you point that out, you will immediately be labeled a neocon, a liberal, or an establishment hack, and those represent the kindest criticisms you will face.

The first mask came off in March of 2026, when the Catholic side of postliberalism was exposed at a large scale. The second mask came off this weekend, when Erickson traced the Protestant side of the postliberal project. The convergence is postliberalism, and while many in this arena like to dabble in what I call Nazism-lite, their danger actually lies in their love of all things authoritarian and the one thing they all seem to have in common: a desire to shred the Constitution.

One of the most telling responses to the Erickson article came from William Wolfe, the executive director of the Center for Baptist Leadership. Ignore the wholly unserious argument that this was “AI slop” and focus on one particular tactic used by Wolfe, because it really highlights what it means to be considered “woke right.”

Wolfe declared that anyone who dared to defend Erickson would be ostracized by real “Christian conservatives” and insinuated that a factual exposure of extremism was actual violence. This article will go into some of the important factual takeaways about the network at the center of Erickson’s article, but I would be remiss if I didn’t point out how important this response is to the overall heart of the problem.

The woke right derives its name from its love affair with leftist debate tactics. They do not engage with any of the factual claims asserted against members of their friend group. Instead, they redefine the debate publicly so they can run a long and vicious struggle session against anyone who dares to stand up to them.

They use all the woke left’s tricks during this struggle session. They redefine the terms of engagement, proceed with ad hominem attacks, threaten social extinction, and then make sure to insinuate that the person who reported on fact-based examples of extremism within the Republican ranks is actually responsible for any hypothetical violence that will ensue.

Their viciousness is directly proportionate to their guilt because the postliberal project can only survive if they trick conservatives into redefining what it means to be a conservative. So they circle the wagons around lies, gaslighting, and generally moronic authoritarian ideas. They do not defend the ideas. Instead, they attack the messenger.

The result is that regular conservatives are lost in a sea of online battles where the winner is decided by foreign bots, fake ratios, and a culture that rewards the meanest, most abrasive response instead of the one rooted in actual truth.

The rest of this article will lay out factual claims that prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that, in 2019, a hostile takeover of the conservative movement was initiated by people of different ideological beliefs. Some may dabble in a love of fascism, others dabble in the ideas of esoteric Russian pseudo-philosopher Alexander Dugin, and some even dabble in their love of feudalism and monarchy.

Where they all converge is the Constitution.

They must prove to conservatives that the Constitution is a product of secular liberalism, that individual rights are a product of Christian Zionists, and that America is a blood-and-soil nation that must be governed according to man’s vague notions of the common good, untethered from the idea of covenant.

Why?

Well, because America is a covenantal constitutional republic.

Classical liberalism was not the only thing that influenced the Founders. They want to make Christian conservatives believe America is secular, not Christian enough, and in need of authoritarians who will restore Christendom in America.

They are, of course, as delusional as they are childish.

America was founded on Political Protestantism™, the political doctrine that translates biblical covenant, individual conscience, limited temporal authority, and divided jurisdiction into a cohesive framework of constitutional government.

And for those who mistakenly attribute the separation of church and state to secularism, let me assure you: it is the political implementation of one of Christ’s most important commands.

“Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.” — Matthew 22:21 (KJV)

The future of the Christian conservative movement stands at a crossroads. For the entirety of this country’s existence, God has sat on the throne above government, but the new iteration of “conservatives” seeks to put government in that place.

Will enough conservatives move past their tribalism and stand up to stop them? That remains to be seen, but either way, real conservatives should care about facts, and the facts undeniably point to an infiltration of the American right.

The Birth of Postliberalism

The postliberal project did not suddenly appear after Trump’s second victory. Its intellectual foundations had been developing for years, but 2018 was an important turning point. That year, Patrick Deneen released Why Liberalism Failed and Yoram Hazony released The Virtue of Nationalism. The books were very different, but they shared an important premise: the problems plaguing America were not simply the result of progressivism gone wild. The problem went deeper. Liberalism itself had failed.

That distinction matters because constitutional conservatives had traditionally argued that government had become too large and powerful and needed to be restrained. The emerging postliberal right offered a different answer. Instead of dismantling that power, why not keep it and use it for different ends?

Tucker Carlson brought a version of that argument into mainstream conservative politics on January 2, 2019. In a monologue later published by Fox News under the headline “Mitt Romney Supports the Status Quo. But for Everyone Else, It’s Infuriating,” Tucker denounced a “ruling class of mercenaries” and rejected free-market capitalism as an end in itself. The economy, he argued, should be organized around strong families rather than shareholder returns.

Claremont immediately embraced the argument. Michael Anton responded in The American Mind with an essay appropriately titled “Tucker’s Right.”

A few months later, Sohrab Ahmari took the argument much further.

On May 29, he published “Against David French-ism” in First Things, a Catholic publication highly sympathetic to integralist ideas. The ostensible target was Never Trumper David French, but whatever you think about French is almost entirely beside the point. French was useful because he gave Ahmari a recognizable enemy through which he could introduce ideas the MAGA movement had never actually embraced.

Ahmari declared that there would be no return to the pre-Trump conservative consensus. He correctly identified many of the grievances animating MAGA and then redirected them toward a postliberal solution. Conservatives, he argued, should fight the culture war with the goal of “defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils” and creating “a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.” Civility and decency were merely “secondary values.”

But the target was much larger than David French.

Ahmari went after free speech, due process, religious liberty, pluralism, originalism, and limits on state power. By calling constitutional conservatism “French-ism,” he collapsed two entirely different arguments into one: opposition to French’s anti-Trump politics and opposition to the constitutional restraints French happened to defend.

It was an effective sleight of hand. Trump’s coalition wanted strict border enforcement, economic nationalism, deregulation, tax cuts, originalist judges, religious liberty, and an America First foreign policy. It had also spent years railing against the administrative state and the left’s abuse of government power.

Ahmari’s answer was not to restrain that power. It was to take it.

Two months later, many of these intellectual strands came together at the first National Conservatism Conference in Washington. The conference’s own description said organizers intended to establish an “institutional base,” develop “substantial ideas,” and create an “extensive support network.”

And that is exactly what happened.

Tucker Carlson delivered the keynote, “Big Business Hates Your Family.” Deneen and Hazony supplied intellectual arguments against liberalism. Peter Thiel brought access to donors. JD Vance represented a path into electoral politics. Oren Cass was developing policy infrastructure. Michael Anton, Ryan Williams, and Arthur Milikh connected the project to Claremont.

Not everyone in that room believed the same things. That is important, because the story of postliberalism is not the story of a secret group of people sitting around a table agreeing to a common plan.

It is the story of convergence.

At roughly the same time, another insurgency was developing on the ethnonationalist right. Nick Fuentes openly encouraged his followers to infiltrate conservative institutions. The resulting “Groyper Wars” targeted Turning Point USA events, where coordinated groups confronted speakers with questions designed to push the boundaries of acceptable discourse on the right.

The two movements were not synonymous, and National Conservatism initially tried to keep its distance. But the boundaries became increasingly porous. Rod Dreher would later estimate that roughly 30 percent of Washington staffers had some degree of infatuation with the Groypers.

Then the intellectual attack moved to the Constitution itself.

In March 2020, Adrian Vermeule published “Beyond Originalism” in The Atlantic.

“Originalism has now outlived its utility,” he announced.

In its place, Vermeule proposed common-good constitutionalism, an approach far more comfortable with authority, hierarchy, moral legislation, presidential power, and an empowered administrative state. He rejected the premise that constitutional theory should principally concern itself with maximizing individual autonomy or minimizing abuses of government power. Law, he wrote, “may act in a parental capacity, including against subjects’ own perceptions of their interests.”

This was almost the inverse of what Republican voters had been promised for decades. Conservatives were told that the purpose of originalist judges was to restore the Constitution’s original meaning and restrain government officials who exceeded it. Vermeule wanted the state empowered to pursue substantive moral ends, even against the wishes of the people supposedly benefiting from them.

And while these arguments were being fought out publicly, something more concrete was beginning to take shape behind the scenes.

Internal records later obtained by The Guardian show that the Claremont Institute fiscally sponsored the Society for American Civic Renewal and donated $26,248 to it in 2020. Claremont president Ryan Williams served on SACR’s board. Charles Haywood’s Howdy Doody Good Times Foundation also donated to SACR—at least $50,000 according to its 2021 and 2022 tax filings—and gave Claremont at least another $50,000.

Publicly, SACR presented itself as an organization dedicated to civic and cultural renewal.

Privately, the documents tell a different story.

According to materials reported by The Guardian, SACR sought men who understood “authority and its legitimate forceful exercise.” The organization planned to “collect, curate, and document a list of potential appointees and hires for a renewed American regime.” Internal plans contemplated preferential treatment for members, coordinated employment and contracting, leadership succession, and the cultivation of future public officials.

None of that appeared in the public-facing description.

A second set of reported vetting materials showed prospective members being evaluated on their views of Christian nationalism, Donald Trump, household authority, and the roles of husbands and wives.

The important point is not simply that a private organization had strong political beliefs. Plenty do. It is the discrepancy between what SACR publicly claimed to be building and what its own internal documents said it was building, particularly while the organization was cultivating economic relationships and assembling names for potential future government positions.

That discrepancy becomes harder to dismiss when placed next to what Claremont itself was publishing.

In 2021, The American Mind published “A New Conservatism Must Emerge,” describing American politics as a “regime-level struggle.” The competing regimes, its authors argued, could not coexist. “Hostile institutions” needed to be weakened, “recoverable institutions” reclaimed, and replacements built.

At almost exactly the same time, an organization Claremont sponsored was privately recruiting men and discussing personnel for a “renewed American regime.”

And then there was Charles Haywood.

The “Heritage America” Myth: How the Far-Right Hijacks American History

2026-09-25T18:00:00Z

If you spend enough time scrolling online, you’ve probably seen the so-called Heritage Americans. They cherry-pick quotations from old documents, remove historical context, and act like they’ve uncovered a secret code proving America was explicitly built as a white ethno-state.

What’s wild about this ideology is how much it copies the radical Left. Both sides look at American history through a completely warped, revisionist lens.

The Left claims the Constitution was designed purely for oppression, so we should burn it in a “mostly peacefully” inferno. The ethno-nationalist, “post liberal” groypers look at those same historic flaws, nod in agreement, and say, "Yep, and that means the country belongs exclusively to us white people."

They’re doing the same exact bad reading of history, only drawing opposite conclusions. “Heritage America” is merely the 1619 Project for nihilistic, incel Nazis on Twitter.

And when the actual historical facts don't fit their narrative? They use the exact same anti-American backup plan: talk about burning the system to the ground, or at least “suspending" the Constitution to force their vision onto everyone else. Of course, the far right does this under the guise of the patriotic slogan “America First.” At least the far Left is honest about the fact they just plain hate America.

Let's break this down point-by-point, dig into the actual historical record, and dismantle this ethno-state nonsense line by line.

Lie number one: The phrase "our posterity" in the Constitution's Preamble was code for "white people."

The Fact: In 18th-century legal writing, "posterity" simply meant future generations—or inheritors of the body politic itself.

The Founders were building a lasting system of self-governance, and they explicitly viewed it as a model for individual human liberty as a whole, not a pathway to preserve ancestral bloodlines. They certainly did not believe preserving “race” was some sort of moral imperative, as many seem to suggest today.

Alexander Hamilton laid this out in Federalist No. 1 in 1787. He didn't frame the country as a victory for one specific “race”.

He wrote:

"It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force."

Hamilton saw the American experiment as a test case for human nature, not an “blood and soil” ethnic club.

To see how radically the Founders rejected ethnic or religious blood-and-soil nationalism, look at George Washington’s relationship with American Jews. In August 1790, Washington visited Newport, Rhode Island, where Moses Seixas, warden of the Touro Synagogue, wrote to him asking if Jewish Americans—who had been persecuted across Europe for centuries—would truly enjoy equal rights in this new nation.

Washington replied with a landmark letter that completely shatters the ethno-state argument. He explicitly rejected the European model of simple "toleration," where a dominant majority graciously tolerates a minority. Washington insisted that citizenship in America is based on natural rights, writing:

"The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support."

Washington did not view citizenship through tribal heritage. He added: "May the children of the Stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants... while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid." Washington's test for who belongs in America wasn't race or religion; it was good citizenship under the Constitution.

Lie number two: The Constitution itself was built as a racial contract.

The Fact: The delegates at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 intentionally kept racial language out of the text. James Madison, the "Father of the Constitution," explicitly fought to keep racial property concepts out of the document.

During the convention on August 25, 1787, Madison recorded his own principled stance:

"Mr. Madison thought it wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men."

Abolitionist Frederick Douglass pointed out this exact strength in his 1860 speech in Glasgow:

"I undertake to declare that the National Constitution warrants no such conclusion. It so happens that no such words as 'African slave trade,' no such words as 'slave representation,' no such words as 'plantation,' no such words as 'negro,' no such words as 'property in man,' are to be found in that instrument... Its language is 'We the People'; not we the white people, not even we the citizens... If the Constitution were intended to be a white man's document... it would have been so expressed."

Lie number three: The Naturalization Act of 1790 proves America was founded strictly as an "Anglo-Saxon" nation.

The Fact: Conflating an early Congressional law with the Constitution is basic civics confusion. A statute passed by an early Congress is not the supreme law of the land, and statutes change over time.

Besides, the ethno-state crowd loves to slip in the term "Anglo-Saxon" here, but the historical text directly contradicts them. The 1790 act allowed naturalization for free immigrants from all over Europe—German, French, Dutch, Irish—groups that Anglo-Saxon nativists back then actually looked down on. In fact, Benjamin Franklin famously wrote essays complaining about non-Anglo German immigrants in Pennsylvania, proving that even early notions of "whiteness" were an unstable, shifting social construct rather than a unified founding design. It was never the basis for national identity.

On top of that, citizenship at the state level was already multi-racial at the time of the Founding. Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Curtis noted this historical fact in his dissent in the 1857 Dred Scott case:

"At the time of the ratification of the Articles of Confederation, all free native-born inhabitants of the States of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and North Carolina, though descended from African slaves, were not only citizens of those States, but such of them as had the necessary qualifications possessed the franchise of electors, on equal terms with other citizens."

Non-white citizens were voting and holding civic status in multiple states when the Constitution was ratified.

More broadly, while the early Republic contained glaring contradictions between its egalitarian principles and its daily realities—most obviously the horrors of chattel slavery—the constitutional architecture itself was designed with a trajectory pointing toward expanding liberty over time. The early body politic frequently failed to live up to its own standards, but the universal ideals enshrined in the Founding documents provided the precise legal and moral leverage used by subsequent generations to correct those failures. We see this same evolutionary trajectory in the history of religious freedom and civic inclusion.

At the Founding, several states maintained official state-sponsored churches and restricted public office to Protestants, effectively treating Catholics and Jewish Americans as second-class citizens. Yet, over the next few decades, the overwhelming momentum of the First Amendment’s principles dismantled these religious tests at the state level one by one. The story of American constitutionalism is not one of static, immediate perfection, but of a framework designed to continually pull the nation toward a broader, more consistent realization of its core principles.

When you strip away the bad memes and red arrows, the truth is simple: extremists on both sides hit the exact same wall. Real American history contradicts their goals.

The radical Left wants you to believe the Founding was irredeemably evil so they can tear it down. The radical Right wants you to believe it was a racial pact so they can exclude people.

Both are dead wrong, and both turn to the exact same anti-American playbook when they get called out. America isn't built on tribal identity or authoritarian power trips; it's built on a constitutional Republic dedicated to individual liberty.

When the Woke Right Starts Sounding Like Fidel Castro

2026-09-25T15:00:00Z

Something strange is happening on the American right: its loudest anti-Zionist voices are beginning to echo rhetoric Miami’s Cuban and Venezuelan Americans have spent generations associating with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez.

Anti-Zionism wrapped in anti-imperialism is not some new political discovery born on podcasts after October 7. We have heard this language before: Israel portrayed as an extension of American imperialism, Zionism blamed for conflict and corruption, and the United States cast not as a force for good but as the villain behind the world’s problems.

That history matters because anti-Zionism is increasingly becoming a political bridge, one that is bringing parts of the populist right into ideological territory long occupied by the anti-imperialist left.

To be clear, criticizing Israel does not make someone a communist. Questioning foreign aid does not make someone anti-American. Conservatives can disagree with Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli policy, or America’s role in the Middle East.

My concern is what can happen after that criticism becomes an entire political worldview.

There is a pipeline worth examining: Israel becomes the entry point. Then Zionism becomes the explanation for America’s problems. Then American foreign policy itself becomes fundamentally corrupt. Then American global power becomes something to dismantle. Eventually, people who entered the conversation from the right find themselves sharing political language and increasingly political spaces with people from the revolutionary left.

We don’t have to speculate about whether anti-Zionism has historically been part of that worldview. Fidel Castro told us himself.

Addressing the United Nations in 1979, Castro explicitly linked “imperialism and Zionism,” accused them of committing genocide against Palestinians, and blamed U.S. support for Israel for preventing peace.

This wasn’t an isolated disagreement over Israeli policy. Cuba’s support for the Palestinian cause existed within Castro’s larger revolutionary struggle against American capitalism and what his government regarded as Western imperialism.

Then came Hugo Chávez.

Venezuelans in South Florida should remember this history particularly well. Chávez severed diplomatic relations with Israel in 2009. He called Israel a “genocidal state” and later a “cursed terrorist and murderous state.” He also claimed Israel financed his political opposition and suggested Mossad operatives were trying to assassinate him.

For Venezuela’s Jewish community, the political climate had consequences beyond foreign policy. Jewish organizations documented antisemitic rhetoric and conspiracy theories during the Chávez years, while Jewish institutions were attacked. Chávez himself denied hostility toward Venezuelan Jews and said they had his “affection and respect.”

Now listen to some of the conversations happening in America in 2026.

This week, Tucker Carlson hosted Max Blumenthal for more than two hours. The discussion went far beyond debating aid to Israel. It included alleged Israeli influence over American politics, AIPAC, Iran, Christian Zionism, “The Fall of MAGA,” and what happened to Turning Point USA.

Carlson and Blumenthal certainly don’t have identical political philosophies. That’s precisely what makes their alliance interesting.

People who arrived at this debate from completely different political traditions are increasingly finding common ground through opposition to Israel, American interventionism, and established U.S. foreign policy.

And communist organizations recognize the opportunity, too.

The American Communist Party currently describes the United States as an imperialist power, calls Israel the “Zionist entity,” declares solidarity with Iran against the United States and Israel, and openly argues for Marxism and the destruction of the capitalist ruling order.

In an April post that captured this convergence rather bluntly, the organization declared, “Zionism is the enemy of the American working class,” and said the force capable of defeating it was an organized Communist Party.

That statement illustrates the convergence at the heart of this new anti-Zionist movement in American politics. By presenting Zionism as an enemy of the American working class, communists can attempt to attract right-wing populists who may share their opposition to Israel even while rejecting their broader economic ideology. What begins as common ground on Israel can become exposure to a much larger critique of capitalism, American power, and the Western political order.

That is where Miami’s historical memory matters.

Families came here after watching Castro and Chávez identify an enemy, blame imperialism, condemn American power, and present revolutionary politics as liberation. Did Cuba and Venezuela become utopias after their governments turned against the United States and kicked out the Zionists? No. Both countries experienced severe political repression and economic crises under their respective systems.

Today, many of the people who fled those governments live in South Florida. Their history provides an important reminder of what revolutionary political rhetoric has looked like before and why Americans should understand the history behind the ideas now resurfacing in our own political party.