System Error 2024
How Trump, the Paypal Mafia, and Alternative Media broke the Deep State
This election was a referendum against Orwellian Deep State technocrats and their bizarre Woke crusade, and the results are clear: Americans overwhelmingly reject the Left. Trump’s victory would not have been possible without two key developments which I believe will have the greatest impact on long-term success for the Right. First, his modernization of the RNC and outdated Republican campaign infrastructure. Second, the emergence of a new right-wing faction within the ruling class, allowing Trump and Vance to lean into what Vance has called the Post-Liberal Right. This latter development signals the beginning of a Conservative Revolution which will fundamentally realign the American electorate, and perhaps the prevailing world order itself.
The Infrastructure
Republicans have been at a distinct disadvantage in electioneering for some time. The Democrats have simply been far more innovative in how they reach voters, apply emerging technologies and organize their efforts. 2024 reversed that trend.
In March of this year, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) issued a clarification of its coordination rules allowing limited coordination between canvassing firms, Super PACs and candidates. The seemingly minor change allowed for the thousands of different outreach organizations and vendors to know where one another were operating, increasing efficiency and coverage in voter outreach.
RNC Chairman Michael Whatley is one of the unsung heroes of this election cycle. Whatley had served as Chairman of the North Carolina Republican Party where he built out a robust election integrity operation ahead of the 2020 election, narrowly carrying the state while similar states went in favor of Biden overnight. Trump took notice and ordained Whatley to chair the RNC for 2024. Whatley and Laura Trump made the highly controversial decision to liquidate the RNC’s field program and devote all resources to election integrity. This allowed the RNC to hire the best election attorneys in the nation and put them to work in battleground states, where they challenged hundreds of policies which allowed for fraud and abuse, scrubbing millions of fraudulent registrations nationwide. Volunteers with the RNC were trained to serve as poll-watchers instead of door knockers, ensuring that every precinct in the country would be manned by competent poll-watchers.
There was a great deal of hurt feelings in the industry, as many career field organizers had the rug pulled from under them, but Trump and Whatley had a plan. Field operations were farmed out to a number of existing canvassing firms who were able to expand their operations and hire up much of the RNC’s former staff. Thus, the vast catalogue of election related activities the RNC had previously tried to engage in were handed off to Super PACs and specialized firms across the country who could focus all of their efforts on that single task. This freed up the RNC to direct overall strategy without having to do the legwork while simultaneously building out an entirely new branch of operations in support of election integrity.
The results speak for themselves. This was the freest, fairest election in American history. That it worked so well further cements the great anomaly that was the 2020 election.
The Podcast Circuit: Retail Politics Reborn
I want to say it was 2022 when my wife and I ran into a Congressman from North Carolina in Greensboro. He mentioned how he had been traveling with Trump through Georgia when Trump decided he wanted some Waffle House. “You should see the way he worked that room. Everyone wanted to shake his hand, he cracked a couple jokes, paid for everyone’s meals. Smiles all around - and he does this everywhere.”
Lots of folks will say retail politics are dead, but they make an impact when done right. Trump took retail politics to the next level by appearing on multiple, popular long-form podcasts, meeting tens of millions of voters where they’re “at” every single day: their phones.
This humanized both Trump and Vance in a way a debate or SNL skit never could. It showed that they were real people, normal guys who had lives, loves, flaws, and a deep passion for the country. In short, it made neutral voters supportive and opponents into neutral voters. This has been confirmed by several dozen voters (both Trump and Kamala voters) I’ve spoken to.
It takes a different type of person to sit through a three-hour interview. Sure, you could know the general questions ahead of time, but unless you really know the issues, and I mean the type of knowledge gained through genuine interest and passion, and are a decent conversationist, there’s no way to pull off that type of interview. I firmly believe that the wild success of these podcast appearances has changed the game and will become the new normal for political campaigns. More than that, it will net a new class of political candidates - the type who can wheel and deal their way through a three-hour interview. At best, I think we get a far more sophisticated class of public servants; at worst, we get a much more sophisticated class of narcissists.
Time will tell.
MAGA 2024: The Last Gasps of Neocons Hegemony
We were in San Diego this past weekend for the winter quarterly board meeting for the Young Republican National Federation. I was speaking with some of my colleagues about cabinet appointees, Trump’s agenda, etc.. One of them said “but MAGA Republicans need to make some concessions, that’s just how this works. They won’t get anything done if they won’t make concessions.” To which I responded: No, we won’t get anything done if neocons obstinately refuse to accept that it’s not their party anymore.
The reality is that the American people did not give Neoconservatives a mandate to rule, they gave Trump a mandate to rule, based on his platform, his policies, based on his conservative vision. The fact of the matter is that if Americans wanted a business-as-usual Republican, they would’ve swept Nikki Haley into the nomination - but they didn’t.
What neoconservative party and elected officials need to realize that the reason a lot of voters will support Trump but not Republicans down ballot, is because they don’t like Republicans. They like Trump, Tucker Carlson, JD Vance, Elon Musk, Vivek, etc.. What do all of these people have in common? They represent a different conservative vision, at the same time a paleoconservative revival and the birth of a post-liberal Right; they are all firmly against the neoconservative establishment.
It’s precisely this group, this new faction of the American elite, which Americans voted for on election day. Not - I repeat, not the Republican establishment.
Let me be blunt: Neoconservatism is dead.
Trump has a lot of work to do. He has to wrestle the deep state into submission, revitalize the economy and housing markets, close the border and restructure the legal immigration system, etc.. but with Congress and the Supreme Court, we have a chance at seeing fundamental change in America. Unfortunately, some of the neocons in the Senate are overconfident and still believe this is their mandate.
Mitch McConnell immediately tried to launch a coup in the Senate almost immediately after Trump’s win - tell us you’re an establishment hack without telling us you’re an establishment hack. If the neocon establishment stonewalls Trump in hopes of controlling his agenda or preventing its implementation - as they did in 2017, two things will happen:
The base will primary them and put up more paleoconservatives and Maga Republicans.
They will have shown voters that they didn’t learn the lesson of the 2018 midterms, and we will lose the last, best chance we will get to turn this country around.
In such a scenario Democrats would run a slate of center-left, pro-worker candidates, likely veterans, as they can find - MAGA without the rhetoric and Evangelical twinge. In doing so, they would sweep up many of the Bernie turned Trump supporters, union and Biden voters who went for Trump, etc… But if Neocons play ball and allow Trump to implement his agenda, these people will be locked in as Republican voters for a generation. They’ve cast their votes, now they’re holding their breath - we must deliver.
Personally, I think Trump saw this coming and has picked appointments they won’t like so they have to burn up their favors getting new picks. Some of these appointments are just strawmen, with Trump’s actual desired appointees to be named as the “compromise” candidate. In this way, he repays favors to people who helped him in his darkest days and can say “hey, I tried. We’ll find you something else,” while burning up all the favors and concessions of the neocons in the Senate.
There is no reason to make the same mistakes we did in 2017-2018. We have a small window of opportunity to deliver actual results to the American people. Fortunately, Trump has helped to elect a lot of congressional representatives who will support his agenda and knows who he can and cannot trust.
The Conservative Revolution: Birth of the Post-Liberal Right
We have this idea that revolutions are driven by the people, but widespread public support in and of itself does not mean a revolution will be successful. Instead, successful revolutions require a faction within the elite to break ranks and support the opposition or revolutionary faction. The emergence of pro-trump elites is so significant because it grants the movement cultural legitimacy and institutional support. Furthermore, it confirms what we’ve been saying about the cultural pendulum swinging back to the right in a significant way. The post-liberal Right is here to stay.
This shift in the elites might not have happened had it not been for the Left’s obsession with cancel culture and censorship. Throughout the late 2010s, the Left attempted to cancel comedians and actors for making what had been normal material only a few years prior. This only escalated when the Biden administration and media went all in on censorship during the pandemic. This led to a reasonably sized community of comedians and commentators who had been cancelled simply for speaking their minds. They were presented with a choice, fall in line and quit speaking your mind, or side with the Right. Siding with the Right meant they would be ostracized and forced to accept, incrementally, a right-wing worldview - if only due to the same communal bias that led them to be center-left Democrats to begin with.
This is precisely what happened to Elon Musk. Elon went from center-left Democrat to being fully bought into the post-liberal Right within just a couple years. He was heavily engaged with online right-wing discourse, and by buying Twitter, he broke the regimes monopoly on information. Prior to this, much of the post-liberal Right had been banned and forced onto smaller platforms - small platforms founded or funded by other members of the Paypal Mafia. This group of tech bros and venture capitalists - including Vivek Ramaswamy and JD Vance, have since coalesced around Trump and Musk.
Everything was now in place for the emergence of a counter elite: financial and industry backing, an alternative media apparatus, and a leading spokesman in Tucker. That this group was had truly broken ranks and were supporting the opposition was confirmed when Trump announced JD Vance as his VP pick. This core of an alternative faction among the American elite allowed for others who were not necessarily conservative but had been disenfranchised by the Left, to break ranks. From there the dominos fell quickly: political figures like Tulsi and RFK; cultural and media figures like Andrew Shultz, Dana White, Joe Rogan, Theo Von; etc...
That all of these figures are coming together now is not a coincidence, nor is the new conservative vision they bring to the party their own. Instead, this new elite is the upper echelon, and a reflection of a much larger popular movement organized largely online and in church halls across the country.
We will cover the origins of this movement in depth at another time, but I do want to say (largely to soothe readers coming from a neoconservative or even liberal worldview) that this new right is distinct from that which seemed to be emerging in the wake of the 2016 election. The post-liberal right is not the so-called Alt-Right and comes from a different worldview. The Alt-Right was a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) political movement, fully within the Liberal-Enlightenment tradition. By contrast, the post-liberal right is more than anything else a wholesale rejection of the Enlightenment and Modernity.
But a nationwide movement emerged through the sharing of Substacks, podcasts, Telegram and Rumble channels, Discord servers, and on X - the very free-speech platforms Peter Theil, Vivek and JD Vance were investing and being influenced by. That a faction of the elite has bought into the post-liberal right and become the inner circle of the next president, got one of their own into the Vice Presidency in a landslide victory, have grassroots support, a large and legitimate social media platform and presence, and the most popular Conservative media personality in their ranks means that they will determine the direction of conservative thought and culture moving forward.
The Shifting World-Order
This election has huge implications not just for Americans, but the prevailing world order. Biden has fumbled through the last four years and severely hurt America’s ability to have a soft landing in the new Multipolar world order. On the other hand, within a day of Trump’s victory, Vladimir Putin released a statement of congratulations and expressing his desire for a reset in Russo-American relations; Xi Jingping likewise expressed congratulations and his hope for peaceful coexistence between the Chinese and American peoples. This is a breath of fresh air.
I think the BRICS Kazan Summit was largely a PR stunt to signal to a prospective Trump administration that the BRICS nations are willing to play ball. The resolutions released clearly indicate that the agenda to break from the American world order and form an alternative global financial order are on hold and open to negotiations, pending a thawing of relations between the Atlanticist axis and the Sino-Russian led Global South. We can safely assume that if it wasn’t clear to so many that Trump was not only going to win, but win big, this resolution would have read much different.
This next year will be crucial in defining America’s future role in the world order and the manner in which the United States, Europe, and the Global South define themselves.
While the Israel-Palestine question is unlikely to be answered in a satisfactory way in Trump’s second term, I do think this conversation is going to shift rapidly over the next two years, and we will see an actual solution to the problem within the next decade or so. I’m hopeful that the Russo-Ukrainian War will come to an end by summer 2025, and the suffering Ukrainian Orthodox Church will be freed. The real question is then: how much do we not know about the persecution of the Church, how much will our hearts ache when we learn the full extent of their suffering? Even what we know now is cause for national repentance.
All in all, there’s a lot to look forward to. Will we get everything we want? Of course not. That’s not how politics works - not even in a monarchy! So long as we continue to be obstinate purists, failing to grasp the limits of political authority and cooperation, we will fail to achieve our aims. But if we are realistic, if we formulate a coherent political philosophy to unite the post-liberal right and win converts, we will change the course of the nation for generations, we may even see the words of Saint Paisios come to fruition.
Time will tell.