Can populism break America’s two-party system?
On a recent episode of “Kibbe on Liberty,” Matt Kibbe sat down with nationally recognized political changemaker Steven Olikara, senior fellow for political transformation at the USC Schwarzenegger Institute and the founder of Millennial Action Project (now Future Caucus), the largest nonpartisan organization of young elected leaders in the U.S.
In their conversation, the two expressed their hopes that populism — a political approach that aims to represent the interests of commoners against a perceived elite or establishment — will eventually conquer the two-party system that crushes the voice of the people.
The current political culture in America, says Olikara, has both Republicans and Democrats saying, “We know what's best for you,” but what they should be saying is, “We want to hear from you.”
Kibbe, a self-described “libertarian populist,” agrees, arguing that populism is "the right side of history because the other side is the machine” — “a collusion of government power and corporate power.”
The question is, can populism garner enough support to break the political establishment?
The answer, says Olikara, is yes. Support for populism is high. The issue is the entrenched elites who rig the system to snuff out any non-establishment opponent.
In his experience campaigning in the 2022 U.S. Senate primary in Wisconsin as a Democrat with a strong bent towards populism, his team would “get the most applause out of all the candidates” at campaign events, and yet they could rarely secure a debate to get their “ideas out to a statewide audience” because “all the other campaigns in the party were making an extra effort to make sure there were no debates.”
On the rare occasion he did secure a debate, he was often declared the winner. However, “just as those sparks were flying, the Democratic establishment effectively ended the race 10 days before the election,” says Olikara. “They said, ‘We don't want to wait to hear what the people have to say. We're going to violate our bylaws and endorse the establishment candidate."’
Despite Olikara’s popularity, Mandela Barnes, a well-known Democrat with strong party support, was endorsed by key figures, making his win in the primary nearly certain.
“I got phone calls from a number of senior Democratic leaders calling to apologize to me why they're not only breaking their bylaws but breaking their promise that they had made to me to be neutral in the primary,” says Olikara, noting that these leaders will admit they’re more concerned about money and control than the people’s voices being heard.
“If you just let ideas breathe a little bit, if you let people express their voices, that's the kind of democracy I believe in,” he says.
Kibbe shares Olikara’s sentiments, comparing the current two-party system to having “Taylor Swift” or “the most obnoxious country musician” as your only options for music. “I like the democracy that is Spotify, where I can listen to my weird, very fringy ... versions of music that I like,” he analogizes.
Unfortunately, for now it’s Swift or honky-tonk. “They make it so that you have to choose their candidate or that really bad guy on the other side,” Kibbe laments. “We go through this cycle every two to four years, and it's pretty disheartening for anybody that imagines that we could give people in democratic America choices that they would actually be proud of.”
However, President Trump’s 2016 rise to power as a system-breaker is proof that populist movements can challenge the two-party establishment.
“He's the first guy to sort of take over a party, at least since maybe since Abe Lincoln,” says Kibbe. “Now he is the party, so it was impossible to run against him in his last primary.” But even though Trump proved the system could be broken, “the Democrats seem still hell-bent on preventing a real primary.”
Olikara is hopeful that in 2028, Democrats will allow “the first truly open democratic primary since 2007 and 2008,” when Barack Obama — “not the establishment candidate” — “emerged and defeated the Clinton machine,” a victory he says is “on par with Trump winning the 2016 Republican primary against the establishment.”
“The moment is perfect for it — like there's clearly no field-clearing candidate. It's wide-open. Democrats are in the wilderness now, which usually means a new voice, a new movement, can emerge,” he says. “It's all set up for them, and yet there's a good chance they still shoot themselves in the foot.”
To hear more of the conversation, watch the episode above.
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Rubio, Vance outline the 'work of a generation,' next steps for the American renewal: 'This is a 20-year project'
Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio discussed ways forward for the country under the Trump administration and beyond at the American Compass New World Gala on June 3.
Although the two Republicans, who appear to be contenders in the 2028 presidential election, hit different beats, they were largely singing the same tune about prioritizing Americans, strengthening the country, and abandoning the failed globalist thinking that has undermined security, prosperity, and dignity in the United Sates.
Their outlooks on the future provided some indication of the staying power of President Donald Trump's vision as well as how it might evolve in the years to come.
Returning to reality
Rubio kicked off his speech by countering the progressive notion that human nature changes over time, stressing that "technologies change, the clothes we wear change, even languages change, governments change — a lot of things change, but the one thing that is unchanged is human nature."
Rubio suggested that this static nature accounts for why history often repeats itself and helps explain humans' unshakable "desire to belong," which naturally scales up to nationalism, despite nationhood being a relatively "new concept" in the grand scheme of things.
"If you put humans anywhere — a handful of people anywhere — one of the first things they start doing is trying to create things that they can join or be a part of," said Rubio. "The advent of the nation-state is a normal evolution of human behavior because people think it's important to belong to something, and being part of a nation is important. And I think that's really true, obviously, increasingly in how geopolitical decisions are made."
'We've undermined our position in the world.'
Despite man's immutable desire to belong and the naturalness of this desire's expression in nationalism, Rubio suggested that many in the West nevertheless entertained the fantasy that the dissolution of the Soviet Union meant the inevitable and imminent universalization of liberal democracy — that "the entire world is going to become just like us"; that "nationhood no longer mattered when it came to economics"; "that right now the world would no longer have borders"; and that it didn't matter where things were made.
Rubio noted that this idealistic outlook "became part of Republican orthodoxy for a long time," which accounts for why the GOP long proved indifferent to the outsourcing of labor and the offshoring of productive capacity.
The decades-long flirtation with liberal globalism "robbed a nation of its industrial capacity, of its ability to make things," thereby hurting the economy, hurting the country, robbing people of jobs, and eating away at the social fabric of the nation, suggested Rubio.
"What you find is because of all of those years of neglect, because of the loss of industrial capacity, we didn't just undermine our society, we didn't just undermine our domestic economy — we've undermined our position in the world," said the secretary of state, whose department recently signaled an interest in taking up the mantle of Western civilization.
'You can never be secure as a nation unless you're able to feed your people.'
Now that America and the rest of the world are facing a "crunch," the days of illusion are over, and geopolitics are adjusting accordingly.
Rubio indicated that the Trump administration is undertaking a reorientation of domestic and foreign approaches "to take into account for the fact that you can never be secure as a nation unless you're able to feed your people and unless you're able to make the things that your economy needs in order to function and ultimately to defend yourself."
Accordingly, Rubio suggested that the country moving forward needs to:
- make decisions with the nation-state in mind and engage the world "in a way that prioritizes our national interest above all else";
- guarantee America's access to the requisite "raw material and industrial capacity that is at the core both of the decisions that we're making and the areas that we're prioritizing"; and
- rectify trade imbalances with fully developed countries.
While this direction is possibly good news for the American people, it bodes poorly for stubborn champions of the globalist dream.
New York Times opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie, for instance, recently complained about the MAGA vision for the future.
The MAGA movement is waging war on the nation's economic future, rejecting two generations of integration and interdependency with the rest of the world in favor of American autarky, of effectively closing our borders to goods and people from around the world so that the United States might make itself into an impenetrable fortress — a garrison state with the power to dictate the terms of the global order, especially in its own hemisphere. In this new world, Americans will abandon service-sector work in favor of manufacturing and heavy industry.
After presenting the possibility of a powerful, indomitable, and reindustrialized America as a terrifying prospect, Bouie stumbled upon the truth of the project under way, stating, "The aim, whether stated explicitly or not, is to erase the future as Americans have understood it and as they might have anticipated it."
Kicking bad habits
Oren Cass, founder of American Compass, pressed Vance about the project of "reshoring and reindustrialization" that the Trump administration is pursuing.
Vance noted that at its core, the project is about addressing "stagnating living standards" affecting normal Americans "who just want to start a family, work in a decent job, earn a livable salary, and have dignified work."
'The complete disconnect between their views on foreign policy and economic policy made me realize, again, that we're governed by people who aren't up to the job.'
The vice president suggested that the offshoring of industry, an under-investment in technology, heavy industrial regulation, and high energy costs are among the factors that have made it difficult for "normal people who work hard and play by the rules to have a good life."
He also identified a "misalignment between the ... normal Americans and the talking heads in Washington" and an unworkable separation of the making of things from the innovating of things — a issue he raised in his March speech at the American Dynamism Summit — as problems warranting remedy.
RELATED: Vance: Trump’s growth plan ditches cheap labor for real jobs that will fuel American greatness
Blaze News previously noted that in his American Dynamism speech, Vance suggested that the Trump administration plans to help innovators wean off cheap foreign labor and begin on-shoring industry, partly by incentivizing manufacturing and investment inside the United States with tax cuts and other policy instruments; by erecting tariff walls around critical industries; by reducing regulations and the cost of energy; and also by enforcing immigration law and securing the border to drain the pool of cheap illegal alien labor.
In his conversation with Cass on Tuesday, Vance reiterated that America needs to effectively get innovators and labor back on the same page and in the same country and to ensure that educational institutions are equipped to supply them with talent.
Vance also criticized "pro-globalization" elements of the leadership class who are indifferent to "whether a given part of the supply chain existed here, or China, or Russia or somewhere else" yet frequently champion foreign entanglements fought with outsourced munitions and technologies.
"The complete disconnect between their views on foreign policy and economic policy made me realize, again, that we're governed by people who aren't up to the job," Vance told Cass, "until four months ago when the American people actually gave the country a government it deserved. And obviously we're in the very early days, but I think that we've done more in four months to solve these problems. But this is not a five- or a 10-year project. This is a 20-year project to actually get America back to common-sense economic policy."
When asked by NBC News' Kristen Welker last month whether he figured the MAGA movement could survive without him as its leader, President Donald Trump said, "Yes, I do. ... I think it's so strong. And I think we have tremendous people. I think we have a tremendous group of people. We talked about a number of them. You look at Marco, you look at JD Vance, who's fantastic."
Trump added that Vance is "a fantastic, brilliant guy" and "Marco is great."
A straw poll conducted at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February reportedly found that 61% of the over 1,000 attendees said they would support Vance as the future GOP standard-bearer.
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Trump-backed conservative wins Polish presidency, can torpedo Tusk's liberal agenda: 'Rebuff to the Brussels oligarchy'
Polish boxer-turned-historian Karol Nawrocki met last month with President Donald Trump and attended an event at the White House marking the National Day of Prayer. Nawrocki reportedly shared with Polish media that Trump told him he would win the Polish presidential election.
Trump was right again.
Nawrocki, backed by Poland's national-conservative opposition Law and Justice (PiS) Party, defeated the liberal mayor of Warsaw — whom Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem deemed a "train wreck" — in Poland's presidential election runoff on Sunday. The results, published on Monday, showed that Nawrocki beat Rafał Trzaskowski 50.89% to 49.11%, thereby securing a five-year term.
'You picked a WINNER!'
Upon taking office on Aug. 6, Nawrocki can continue former President Andrzej Duda's work of preventing Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk's "globalist liberal government" from simultaneously advancing its leftist, pro-European Union agenda and from undoing the reforms undertaken by the previous PiS government.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio congratulated Nawrocki on his "hard-earned victory," noting that "together, the United States and Poland will forge the most ambitious alliance in our shared history on defense, energy, and commerce."
Trump said in a Truth Social post, "Congratulations Poland, you picked a WINNER!"
Nawrocki noted in response that his top priorities are a "strong alliance with the USA, as well as partnership based on close cooperation."
In addition to opposing illegal immigration and the EU's ruinous migration frameworks, the former boxer made abundantly clear on the campaign trail his opposition to leftist social policies, promising to axe any legislation that threatens to weaken Poland's pro-life legislation or normalize non-heterosexual unions, reported the Catholic News Agency.
Nawrocki also emphasized that Poland's national culture is rooted in traditional Catholic values, telling supporters, "Poland's strength lies in its faith and family values."
'It's bad news for the EU, Ukraine and women.'
Homeland Security Secretary Noem likened Nawrocki to Trump last month at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Poland and suggested that under his leadership, Poland could "steer Europe back toward conservative values."
Various European conservatives and populists celebrated Nawrocki's victory, including Jordan Bardella, the president of France's right-wing populist National Rally party, who tweeted, "The Polish people have spoken and their free and democratic choice must be respected, including by the Brussels leaders who ardently hoped for their defeat."
"Faced with a European Commission whose authoritarian policies and federalist ambitions are brutalizing national sovereignty, Karol Nawrocki's victory in the Polish presidential election is welcome news," said Marine Le Pen, former National Rally president. "It is a rebuff to the Brussels oligarchy, which intends to impose a standardization of legislation on member states, contrary to any democratic will."
Hungarian Prime Minister Orbán Viktor called the election a "nail-biter," calling the outcome a "fantastic victory."
Western liberals, meanwhile, clutched pearls and ramped up their fear-mongering.
Adam Simpson, a lecturer at the University of South Australia, wrote, "Nawrocki's win has given pro-Donald Trump, anti-liberal, anti-EU forces across the continent a shot in the arm. It's bad news for the EU, Ukraine and women."
RELATED: Rubio wages war on foreign free-speech tyrants with visa ban
Simpson acknowledged that it's harder to frame Nawrocki as "Russia-friendly" — a framing routinely used by critics of other national conservatives and populists in the region.
'More anti-European, nationalist and pro-Trump.'
It'd be an especially hard case to make that Nawrocki is sympathetic to Moscow given he has called Russia a "barbaric state," recommended cutting off diplomatic relations with the Kremlin, and has personally been put on a Russian wanted list after leading efforts to topple Soviet monuments while director of the Museum of the Second World War and head of the Institute of National Remembrance, reported ABC News.
Nevertheless, critics have made hay out of the incoming Polish president's vow to oppose NATO membership for Ukraine and suggestion that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy "treats Poland badly."
Piotr Buras, head of the European Council on Foreign Relations' Warsaw office, told the Washington Post that Nawrocki will be a "much more radical politician" than his predecessor — "more anti-European, nationalist and pro-Trump."
Anne Applebaum, the Atlantic staff writer who smeared as propagandists early proponents of the pandemic lab-leak theory and wasted ink last year imagining parallels between Trump and various 20th-century dictators, made sure to repeatedly label Nawrocki as an "authoritarian populist."
In the wake of the election, Tusk, now facing some calls to step down, indicated the Polish parliament will hold a confidence vote on his government.
Jacek Sasin, a PiS parliamentarian, suggested that Tusk was a "completely frivolous man who got a red card from the Poles."
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Nate Silver: Young men's mental stability helps put them out of Democrats' reach
Nate Silver, an American statistician and founder of the now-shuttered political analysis blog FiveThirtyEight, recently dug into why men, young men in particular, don't like Democrats — a trend that has Democratic operatives scrambling both for answers and Joe Rogan-sized remedies.
Silver indicated that a big part of Democrats' problem might be that those young men beyond their reach are not mentally unstable or attracted to a mentally ill style of politics.
Losing men
Democrats — whom Americans largely regard as weak and ineffective — are right to be desperate.
'Young men's attachment to the GOP has grown.'
After all, in the 2024 election, President Donald Trump captured 60% of the white male vote, 54% of the Hispanic male vote, and 21% of the black male vote toward a combined total of 55% of the male vote overall.
Men ages 18-44 majoritively voted Trump. Firming up that figure were the young white men who previously supported former President Joe Biden but jumped ship and swam rightward, voting for Trump by a 28 percentage point margin.
Melissa Deckman, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, noted in a report last month that "since 2013, young men's attachment to the GOP has grown, but most of this growth has occurred among young white men, whose affiliation with the GOP went from 26% in 2013 to 36% today."
While young white men largely drove the trend, Deckman noted that "young Hispanic men saw a 6-percentage-point increase in Republican identification since 2021."
Meanwhile, "young women have consistently been less likely to identify as Republican and more likely to identify as Democratic than their male counterparts across racial groups," wrote Deckman. "In 2024, around one in four young white women aligned with the Democratic party (26%), compared with 18% of young white men."
RELATED: Democrats can't mock masculinity and expect men to vote for them
As with young women's leftward drift, young men's rightward orientation does not appear to be a flash in the pan, hence the recent efforts by Democrats — who failed to heed James Carville's pre-election warnings about the fallout of "faculty lounge" attitudes and the party's dominance by "too many preachy females" — to diagnose and correct for their problem.
Mental strength is Democratic kryptonite
Citing data from the 2022 Cooperative Election Study, a 50,000-plus person national survey administered by YouGov, Silver noted that higher self-reported mental health correlates with conservative political views.
"I think an underrated factor in the 'how can Democrats win back young men' debate is the effects of personality, which differ especially among younger voters [and] are quite strongly correlated with voting preferences," tweeted Silver.
Whereas only 20% of liberals reported having "excellent" mental health, 51% of conservatives said the same. On the bottom end, 45% of liberals said their mental health was poor, while only 19% of conservatives reported the same.
'Conservative ideology may work as a psychological buffer.'
"So the young men that Democrats have trouble with aren't necessarily the ones who have been captured by the conservative 'manosphere' or who are looking for a helping hand," wrote Silver. "Rather, it's those who report relatively high mental health and see Democrats as being too neurotic and perhaps constraining their opportunity to compete and reap the rewards of their work."
Silver suggested that compounding Democrats' problem is that they are seen as "nits," which he defined as "neurotic, risk-averse, sticklers for the rules, always up in everyone's business."
RELATED: The Democratic Party is not dying — it’s evolving
The link between ideological persuasion and mental or emotional well-being is well-documented.
For instance, a 2023 Columbia University study published in the journal Social Science & Medicine – Mental Health found that conservatives are generally happier than their leftist counterparts by a significant measure.
Epidemiologist Catherine Gimbrone and her co-authors found that "conservatives reported lower average depressive affect, self-derogation, and loneliness scores and higher self-esteem scores than all other groups."
"Beginning in approximately 2010 and continuing through 2018, female liberal adolescents reported the largest changes in depressive affect, self-esteem, self-derogation, and loneliness. Male conservative adolescents reported the smallest corresponding changes," said the study.
When attempting to account for the disparity, the researchers suggested that "conservative ideology may work as a psychological buffer by harmonizing an idealized worldview with the bleak external realities experienced by many."
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European Populism Is Rising Against An Oppressive Political Elite
Europe’s political class has turned its back on the people it was supposed to protect. The people have taken notice.'Woke right' smear weaponized by liberal interlopers against MAGA conservatives, populists — and Arby's?
James Lindsay. Photo by DOMINIC GWINN/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty ImagesOn his website, he stated:
Woke Right refers to right-wing people who have adopted the characteristics and underlying worldview orientation of the Woke Left for putatively "right-wing," "conservative," or reactionary causes. They are, as reactionaries, the image of the Right projected by the Left made real by players claiming to be on the Right. That is, they’re right-wing people who act and think about the world like Woke Leftists.
Lindsay echoed this definition in his written responses to Blaze News, in which he suggested that woke right "means using critical theories or Marxian analysis for right-wing or anti-Left causes."
"It is very specific," Lindsay continued. "Most conservatives do not meet this definition."
A sizeable portion of the MAGA coalition does, however, supposedly meet this or one of Lindsay's other definitions. Right-wing populists, for example, are on the liberal's naughty list, as are those who subscribe to national conservatism, which he dubbed "the Woke Right final boss."
The application of "woke right" to national conservatives amounts to the more tactical smear, as it not only cuts through the MAGA coalition but deep into the Trump administration and the Republican Party.
Past speakers at the National Conservatism Conference, which is run by the Hazony-led Edmund Burke Foundation, include Secretary of State Marco Rubio; Michael Anton, another senior State Department official; Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby; White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller; Trump border czar Tom Homan; and Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Rick Scott (R-Fla.), Ted Cruz (R-Texas), and Roger Marshall (R-Kan.).
Of course, there's also JD Vance, who underscored in a NatCon speech — given just days before President Donald Trump chose him as his running mate — that while America was founded "on great ideas," it is not, as some have suggested, reducible to "just an idea."
James Lindsay and a bunch of his friends tried to pump the hatred higher because the term 'illiberal' — it just didn't succeed in sufficiently tainting and de-legitimizing conservatives.
While Lindsay has danced around labeling Vance "woke right" for daring to express such thoughts, stating in December, "I haven't called JD Vance Woke Right anywhere yet," he has implied as much — calling him a "post-liberal" with a predominantly woke right team, who not only entertains the woke right definition of "nation" but did the unspeakable: speak at a National Conservatism Conference.
In fairness to Vance and his fellow NatCon alumni, it is apparently easy to find oneself labeled "woke right." After all, even a fast-food chain has been tagged.
Lindsay recently indicated online that Arby's had veered into woke right territory with its post, "Unlike dad, our ham & swiss actually came back."
In the much ridiculed post, which he has since apologized for and walked back, Lindsay noted, "That's curtains for them. Cringe af."
When asked why national conservatives warrant their categorization as "woke right," Lindsay suggested that while "not all of National Conservatism is Woke Right ... the general thrust of the movement meets the basic definition."
Final boss
Hazony, the author of "The Virtue of Nationalism" whom Lindsay has repeatedly targeted with the “woke right” smear, explained to Blaze News that the strategy behind the term is not new.
"The main people who are behind this — and James Lindsay is the one who's most explicit, but I don't think that he's at all the only one — they've been doing the same thing for many years, long before the term 'woke right' came out; at least as far back as Donald Trump being elected, you know, so it's almost a decade ago," said Hazony. "There was this game of saying that in between liberals and Nazis or racialist fascists — in between, there is no legitimate position. That is a standard argument of the anti-nationalist liberal camp that has been used by many, many different people, and it's always the same."
"When people started using 'illiberal' ... in the mid-2000s, what they were doing was eliminating the legitimacy of the word 'conservative,' because 'illiberal' is anybody who's an authoritarian or a Nazi or a theocrat or a fascist, plus anybody else who's not a liberal," continued Hazony. "So that strategy, using the term 'illiberalism' as a way of saying, 'No, I'm not going to recognize that there are any legitimate conservatives or nationalists' — that's been around in that form for at least 15 years."
Hazony noted that more recently,
James Lindsay and a bunch of his friends tried to pump the hatred higher because the term "illiberal" — it just didn't succeed in sufficiently tainting and de-legitimizing conservatives. So they switched to "Christian nationalism," and it was the same kind of thing, where, you know, you pick the absolute least palatable people who can be called "Christian nationalists," you quote them, and then you say, "Well, everybody who's a nationalist and a Christian all the way right up to the borders of liberalism — that entire sphere of conservatives and nationalists who are basically normal but they have criticisms of liberalism — no, they're all illegitimate. They're all totalitarians. They all reject the American Constitution." And so they tried that; that peaked in 2023; and it failed. It petered out. They didn't succeed in convincing the average, intelligent person who's paying attention that the political spectrum is only liberals and fascists.
Whereas previous attempts failed, Hazony indicated that "this time, they have succeeded in drawing blood."
"This term [woke] was designed to be humiliating by taking the term that we were using for the Maoist-style cultural revolution that was taking over America and Britain and other countries. And now they say, 'Those of you who are fighting against this, you're exactly the same. You're the same exact thing.' And it upsets people."
'You got dogmatic, fanatic liberals who thought that the whole world simply could be brought under liberalism either by persuasion or, if not, then by conquest.'
Hazony further told Blaze News that "it's deeply insulting at a personal level for people who've devoted their time to trying to save America and the West from the woke, and at the same time, it's incredibly effective at destroying the coalition that was built — the anti-woke coalition — by making the different parties despise one another."
"The idea that liberalism is about toleration was just thrown out the window and you got dogmatic, fanatic liberals who thought that the whole world simply could be brought under liberalism either by persuasion or, if not, then by conquest."
Playing with fire
Lindsay has tried tarring Blaze Media with the same brush he has used on Hazony and others, characterizing it as "the first captured stronghold" in his imaginative woke right "takeover" narrative.
'The term has little meaning other than as a slur used by people trying desperately to gatekeep this intellectual, cultural, and commercial majority movement.'
Blaze Media editor in chief Matthew Peterson, whom Lindsay has implicated as a key player in this supposed takeover, said, "I know Lindsay and we had a decent relationship until he suddenly lumped me and my tenure here at Blaze Media with his slur."
"Obviously, we have a wide variety of people and opinions at Blaze Media. We represent the broad MAGA-MAHA majority coalition, and I take that role seriously," continued Peterson. "But I do not need to say for the record that we are not 'woke right' because the term has little meaning other than as a slur used by people trying desperately to gatekeep this intellectual, cultural, and commercial majority movement."
Peterson suggested that the term's capricious usage has helped empty it of meaning.
"What's puzzling and ultimately discrediting about the term is that Lindsay and others lump disparate people and groups together into a wild, grand conspiracy," continued Peterson. "He and his associates refer a lot to abstract -isms like hermeticism, communism, and gnosticism and call all kinds of people followers of various schools of thought: 'Nietzscheans' and 'Schmittians.'"
The "Schmittian" smear lobbed around evokes Carl Schmitt, a German political theorist who critiqued liberalism, defined politics as the distinction between the categories of friends and enemies, and lent intellectual support to the Nazi regime in Germany.
Peterson noted that he once tried to explain his thoughts on Schmitt to Lindsay over text.
"As a student of political thinkers who were taught by Leo Strauss, who fled Nazi Germany (as opposed to Schmitt, who became a Nazi), I think Schmitt's writings are important to anyone who wants to seriously consider the nature of executive power, which is why they are still studied by people of all kinds throughout the world," said Peterson. "But the idea that this makes me a Nazi or that I agree with everything Schmitt says or believed is ridiculous. James recently asked me to 'denounce Schmitt' on X at his command, which sounds a lot like he's trying to initiate the very 'struggle sessions' he often decries."
Peterson emphasized the range of people and institutions that Lindsay and his fellow travelers have lumped into his "grand conspiracy," noting, for instance, that "they throw in institutions from the Roman Catholic Church to the Claremont Institute, countries from Hungary to China, and individuals from General Michael Flynn to Yoram Hazony to Peter Thiel in the mix as part of whatever the 'woke right' is."
"It becomes silly pretty quick," said Peterson.
Threatened liberals
The host of BlazeTV's "The Auron MacIntyre Show" — one of Lindsay's frequent targets — said that when it comes to Lindsay, woke right "seems to be more of a branding exercise and a political weapon than it does anything with definitive content."
"I think that's the reason so many people have had difficulty when attempting to have even a basic discussion about the term," MacIntyre said. "The guy who is most famous for coining and popularizing it himself has admitted that it wasn't a great one, and it doesn't really have a lot of content besides its ability to be used as a political weapon."
'The only thing that seems to actually link any of these people together is their willingness to win.'
MacIntyre suggested that woke right's apparent transformation in the wild from a denigratory term for anti-Semites and identitarians into a strategic full-spectrum put-down is “the real trick of this term.”
"A lot of people assume that [anti-Semites and identitarians] were the original targets, and because of that, many people thought that perhaps there could be some value in it because, you know, not all of those groups are particularly ones that people enjoy being associated with," said MacIntyre. "That said, it's become quickly clear that the expansion of the term has now come to encompass Orthodox Jews like Hazony, guys who are big fans of Israel like Tim Pool, and others."
"He's included a large number of very well-respected people who are obviously well outside of this — guys like Matt Walsh."
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"The only thing that seems to actually link any of these people together is their willingness to win, their willingness to fight back against the left, their willingness to say, 'Actually, we're going to take affirmative steps. We're going to take power. We're going to use power to win political battles.' And that seems to be the main violation," continued MacIntyre.
'What they're finding is actually, no, conservatives would like to be in charge.'
When asked whether this campaign might be, at least in part, the early stages of an effort to politically neutralize JD Vance ahead of the next presidential election, MacIntyre answered in the affirmative.
"Not only is that the case, I think he's been pretty explicit about that," said the BlazeTV host.
MacIntyre suggested that Lindsay and other "new atheists, rational-centrist types" feel threatened by Vance and the national conservatives, given their willfulness and refusal to "be ruled by people who hate them, hate their values, hate their religion."
MacIntyre suspects that while the "salience" of the "woke right" term has risen, the credibility of those wielding it has "plummeted."
"[Lindsay has] made many enemies of pretty high-profile figures with good reputations by throwing around this term and attacking people who clearly don't hold any of the nefarious views he's attributing to them," said MacIntyre.
The attacks have also served to expose bad actors who "ultimately were hoping to undermine the conservative movement rather than be a productive part of it," said MacIntyre. "That's something that's critical to know at this juncture."
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The Great Reset just got a North American enforcer in Ottawa
Mark Carney’s sudden rise to power in Canada didn’t come through a traditional political path — and that’s exactly what makes him so dangerous. He’s not a grassroots leader or a battle-tested public servant. He’s a seasoned progressive globalist, handpicked by the elites for a much bigger purpose: to serve as a North American enforcer for the Great Reset.
Now serving as Canada’s newly elected prime minister, Carney holds one of the most powerful political positions in the Western hemisphere. With deep roots in central banking and a long history of pushing radical climate and financial agendas, Carney sits atop one of America’s most influential allies, and his ascent couldn’t come at a more pivotal time for the future of Western freedom.
Mark Carney’s true allegiance lies with the globalist elite, not the people of Canada.
While critics might say his limited political experience is a weakness, the reality is quite the opposite. Unlike most career politicians, Carney has spent the past decade engineering massive shifts in global economic power. He’s been one of the Great Reset’s primary architects — and now, with control over one of the world’s most influential economies, he’s more dangerous than ever. Although Canada’s economy isn’t as large as many other global powers, its government holds influential seats in numerous institutions and international forums, such as the G7.
Carney’s unexpected political elevation isn’t just a development for Canadians. It’s a five-alarm warning for the United States — particularly for Donald Trump and the populist movement that threatens to upend the globalist order.
Master of ESG enforcement
Before entering politics, Carney ran two of the most powerful central banks in the world: the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England. He’s the only person ever to have led both. During his time at the Bank of England, he emerged as one of the loudest voices in the push for climate-based financial reforms, demanding that major banks and investment firms bake environmental social governance criteria and climate risk assessments into their decisions.
Carney also played a key role in launching and operating the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero — a coalition of financial giants in the banking, insurance, and investment industries dedicated to steering trillions in capital toward achieving the United Nations’ climate goals.
Under Carney’s leadership, the alliance didn’t just promote ESG; it attempted to weaponize private finance to crush the fossil-fuel industry and force ESG compliance across Western markets, including here in the United States. It wasn’t just about policy; it was about power — reordering the free world’s economy by manipulating the most powerful financial institutions on Earth.
A Great Reset foot soldier
Carney’s agenda doesn’t end with ESG. He’s also been a senior figure at the World Economic Forum — the think tank behind the radical Great Reset. That globalist initiative aims to redefine capitalism, prioritizing equity, sustainability, and “stakeholder governance” over prosperity, merit, and individual rights.
Carney has been parroting these goals for years, advocating for a model in which state and corporate power merge to manage society from the top down. It’s soft authoritarianism masked as enlightened progress.
Even more troubling for Americans, Carney has publicly pushed to dethrone the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency. While heading the Bank of England, he proposed creating a new synthetic global digital currency — what he called a “synthetic hegemonic currency” — that would diminish the U.S. dollar’s supremacy.
If this plan were ever implemented, it would send the American economy into a tailspin. Our reserve currency status underpins global confidence in the dollar and helps keep inflation at bay. Strip that away, and not only would international faith in America plummet, but moreover, the trillions of dollars now parked abroad could flood back into our economy and trigger a devastating inflationary surge.
Carney is also an outspoken proponent of central bank digital currencies, a deeply concerning form of state-controlled digital money. Critics rightly warn that such tools could be used to monitor, restrict, or even shut down individual financial transactions based on government or central bank mandates.
Trouble up north
Carney’s influence doesn’t need to stop at Canada’s border. With his deep ties to international banking institutions, radical environmental policy, and Davos elites, he’s uniquely positioned to rally foreign governments and multinational corporations against Trump’s America First policies.
Whether by pressuring U.S. allies to adopt anti-fossil fuel ESG mandates, working to isolate America financially through global monetary schemes, or helping to revive international climate agreements that punish U.S. industry, Carney could lead a coordinated global resistance to Trump’s efforts to restore American energy dominance, economic independence, and national sovereignty. In short, he gives the globalist left a new general to wage economic warfare from just across our northern border.
Let’s be clear: Carney doesn’t hold office in the United States, but his influence reaches across our borders. His rise to power is a signal flare for every freedom-loving American. His victory represents a trial run for the kind of centrally controlled society that the World Economic Forum wants to export across North and South America.
Carney’s true allegiance lies with the globalist elite, not the people of Canada. His presence at the helm of one of America’s closest allies gives the internationalist movement a powerful foothold just beyond our northern border. As President Trump fights to restore American sovereignty, he’ll face not only the entrenched bureaucracy in Washington but also an increasingly hostile global order led by figures like Carney.
This is not just a Canadian political shift — it’s a move in a much broader campaign to re-establish progressivism across the Western world.
The next American revolution is happening — will you be part of it?
These are remarks adapted from the closing keynote at the Heritage Foundation’s Annual Leadership Conference, which took place earlier in April in Naples, Florida.
Conservatives have been given a generational opportunity — a once-in-a-lifetime chance to shift our country’s trajectory back toward people and values that Washington has for too long left behind. The five values that Ronald Reagan espoused when he won the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 1980 are “family, work, neighborhood, peace, and freedom.” More than any time since Reagan, those values are making a comeback. “Rejoice in hope,” St. Paul tells us in his letter to the Romans. How could we not?
This is our moment to truly shape America’s future.
But this should be our rallying cry, not a victory lap.
Because the left’s counter-fight is coming, and our response will determine whether last November was the high-water mark of the new conservative movement or simply the first triumph in America’s greatest comeback — whether we squander this moment in history, or whether we seize it.
Conservatives have the opportunity, the mandate, and the plans to rise to the occasion. The only question is whether, in these turbulent days, we have the vision to put those plans into action and the grit to see them through despite doubts and adversity.
Mandates from the past
When I think about how the conservative movement should respond to this moment, I look for lessons from our past. And lately, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about one of my heroes from the founding era: Patrick Henry.
Two hundred and fifty years ago last month, Henry stood up at St. John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia, and delivered one of the great speeches in American history. Everyone remembers its most famous line: “Give me liberty or give me death.” That one always hits home.
But another sequence in that speech resonates even more specifically with us now. Henry’s speech was not just a call to revolution. In his mind, the colonies had already passed that point. “The war is actually begun,” he said, whether Americans realized it or not. He was calling for the courage to see it through — to push past fear in the face of a powerful adversary.
“They tell us, sir, that we are weak,” Henry said, “unable to cope with so formidable an adversary. But when shall we be stronger?”
The question still resonates: When shall we be stronger?
Six months from now, when the left throws everything it has in Virginia and New Jersey, or 18 months from now, when we head into the midterms, shall we gather strength while sitting on our hands? Will we stand by as our president weathers a hurricane of criticism? Shall we watch quietly as our majorities in Congress sidestep the most critical issues facing our country? Will we pass by the working families who wait for Washington to deliver them from a woke culture, a weaponized government, and a rigged economy?
Of course not. We have worked too long and too hard to squander this opportunity. Now is the moment conservatives can enact permanent policy change, not just half-a-loaf compromises: rebuild our economy, our military, and our local communities to answer the challenges of the coming generation.
This is our moment — not just to win elections or temporary 51-49 majorities — but to truly shape the future. This is our generation’s shot to secure a new birth of freedom. To write a new chapter in the American story — one that begins with courage and ends with victory.
The left is regrouping
But as extraordinary as this moment is, it will be just as fleeting. If we do not seize it now, it will slip through our fingers and won’t come back for a long time. And what comes next would be worse than anything we have yet endured.
The left hasn’t changed. Leftists may rewrite their talking points, but the writing on their hearts is the same. They’re still elitists who disdain the Constitution, globalists who scorn national sovereignty, and woke theocrats who reject religious liberty, parental rights, moral truth, and scientific fact.
They are already regrouping, re-funding, and reasserting their power. Their victory in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race was not a fluke. They still control the media and elite institutions, and they are going to weaponize both for as long as they can.
That is why conservatives cannot sit back. We must stay in the fight — and open new fronts in it.
Will we rise up?
Two hundred and fifty years later, Americans still face Patrick Henry’s question: When shall we be stronger?
At the Heritage Foundation, we have an answer.
We’ll be stronger every time we stand on principle — and for America and Americans. When we act with the urgency and courage this moment demands, when we realize the future is ours to win or to squander, when we understand that neither the left, China, media, nor any other adversary can defeat us, our only downfall is our own timidity and complacency.
Just consider: What do we think the other side wants us to be doing right now? What do Planned Parenthood, the teachers’ unions, George Soros, Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, and MSNBC want us to do right now?
Nothing. They want us complacent, fat, and happy — just like good establishment Republicans. They want us to think the last six months are all we need and all we can hope for. They want us basking in the success of 2024, eating popcorn, and watching Fox News while they storm the field.
Well, I’m sorry to disappoint them.
The Heritage Foundation is not sitting this one out. Donald Trump and JD Vance are not sitting this fight out. And I know you won’t either.
We can’t. The moment is too important. The stakes are too high. Last November’s historic victory was only the beginning. The next chapter in America’s history is ours to write. Whether we fight or not will be our generation’s story — what our children and grandchildren learn about us.
A time to act
I can’t help but think that if Patrick Henry were alive today, he would look at President Trump and his entire administration and be convinced that the American dream is still possible to revitalize. And that dream isn’t just about an idea, as noble as that idea is. It’s about a real place — where you were born and are likely to be buried. It’s a place our children and grandchildren and generations after us — God willing — will be born and buried.
This providential moment we’ve been given to save this republic and revitalize America gives honor to all those who came before us — wherever they were from — who, in their last moments, were as grateful as you and I are to call ourselves Americans.
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