Listen to Zooming In at The UnPopulist in your favorite podcast app: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | RSS | YouTube
Landry Ayres: Welcome back to Zooming In at The UnPopulist. I’m Landry Ayres.
The MAGA movement was once an insurgency within the Republican Party. Now, it is the party. But more than just a political takeover; this shift is the result of the consolidation of a movement defined by hostility toward its opponents and a vision of America based on a largely imagined past. Its intellectual and political leaders have a clear, authoritarian blueprint for reshaping the country.
In this episode, The UnPopulist's senior editor Berny Belvedere is joined by journalist Jason Wilson, author of the newsletter The End, who recently covered the fifth National Conservatism conference for The Guardian.
Through the lens of the conference, they map the entire MAGA ecosystem—from committed Trump loyalists to the ideologues pushing Christian Nationalism and other anti-democratic visions.
A transcript of today’s podcast appears below. It has been edited for flow and clarity.
Berny Belvedere: The National Conservatism conference, or NatCon 5, took place earlier this month. Jason, you had a really good write-up of it in The Guardian. What did this year’s conference in particular suggest to you about where things stand with the movement?
Jason Wilson: The conference exemplified something you can see happening at pretty much any right-wing gathering in the United States today: increasingly naked expressions of nationalism and of an open, sometimes even eliminationist hostility to these folks’ perceived political enemies. We’re increasingly hearing speeches that verge on white nationalism or head in that direction; there’s a growing assertion of white identity as the basis of American identity. These are events attended by high ranking members of the Trump administration.
In previous years, the NatCon movement and the Republican Party benefited from pretending that they were slightly different things, that they were at arm’s length from one another. But the interesting thing about this year’s conference was that it gives us a really good indication of where the conservative movement and the Republican Party are now. It’s an ultra-nationalist party that seeks to resuscitate a largely imagined past on behalf of an American citizenry whose truest representatives are white people, and white men in particular.
The MAGA movement has completely displaced its internal opponents within the conservative movement and the Republican Party. I mean, that’s all over—and, really, it was over when Trump was nominated after defeating Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley and the rest of them. Haley’s defeat in particular was the last gasp of an older, neoconservative, fusionist conservatism in the United States. That formation no longer has any real political power. Actually, to the extent that it does still have power, it has power as an entity entirely outside of the conservative movement—as a constituency that has been wooed by the Democratic Party as a kind of centrism. —Jason Wilson
Belvedere: In the beginning of Trump’s ascent into politics, the burgeoning MAGA movement was a kind of insurgent force within the Republican Party. Little by little, he began taking it over and his hold on it became increasingly more complete over time. And now, MAGA is the party. So, at a conference like this, it’s not just the intellectuals and the activists gathering together, but there’s also significant representation from the government.
That doesn’t, however, mean that the MAGA movement is a monolithic entity. We sometimes think of it that way. And that can be fine when we’re speaking very broadly. Because there is, in fact, a MAGA movement—one with shared goals and objectives, one that, as a kind of political organism, has had electoral success and has been massively consequential in recent American history. But to really understand it, we need to understand the various elements that make it up, because there are many different layers to it.
One way to carve it all up is by role and function. So, MAGA has an intellectual class, and they were present at the conference. The movement also has a set of prominent influencers and public proponents—they were there as well. They also have a number of political figures and elected officials who are committed to the cause.
But this is not the only way to carve up the MAGA movement. In addition to that distinction having to do with area of focus and role within the broader movement, you can carve up the MAGA world in terms of all the various groups who, despite having that core belief that they share that liberals and leftists are pure evil, also have differing ideological emphases.
Can you say a little bit more about the various sub-movements—about the variety of right-winger—that you saw when you watched the conference?
Wilson: The MAGA movement has completely displaced its internal opponents within the conservative movement and the Republican Party. I mean, that’s all over—and, really, it was over when Trump was nominated after defeating Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley and the rest of them. Haley’s defeat in particular was the last gasp of an older, neoconservative, fusionist conservatism in the United States. That formation no longer has any real political power. Actually, to the extent that it does still have power, it has power as an entity entirely outside of the conservative movement—as a constituency that has been wooed by the Democratic Party as a kind of centrism.
For a long time, liberals and leftists consoled themselves with the idea that once Trump goes, this will all be over and there won’t be a similarly charismatic figure for them to center their movement on and rally around. That may or may not be true. But if the movement endures, whoever follows Trump will likely be worse from an ideological standpoint. Trump is not, even to this day, an ideological creature. Yes, he’s dismantling the Constitution and his gut instincts are anti-democratic, authoritarian, personalist, self-aggrandizing. But there are people in his movement who are truly intellectually and ideologically committed to anti-democratic authoritarian, even eliminationist, forms of government, committed to using state power to carry out authoritarian and eliminationist actions.
Certainly, these folks have a lot of common ground with each other, but a dominant strand within the MAGA movement is nationalism, and specifically Christian nationalism. They are fiercely patriarchal, fiercely anti-LGBTQ, theocratic. Douglas Wilson, whom I’ve written a lot about in the past, was there. He’s a pastor at Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho. He’s attracted a lot of coverage over the years for appearing to endorse slavery, for the way his church has dealt with—or not dealt with—sexual predators inside the church, for his conflicts with the local community. He thinks that a democratic, constitutional state that operates under laws that aren’t Biblical laws is illegitimate. So he’s looking forward to a time when the United States—the world, even—is governed by Biblical law, and his vision of Biblical law includes capital punishment for moral offenses. He’s a leading light for a lot of Christian nationalists, but he’s just an example of that mindset. So that’s definitely one strand within it.
There’s another slightly different strand—although still authoritarian, still patriarchal, still anti-LGBTQ, still characterizing political disagreement as a kind of a war that there’s no room for in the United States—centered on the Claremont Institute, which has increasingly become important as an intellectual reservoir for the Trump administration. It’s generously funded by Tom Klingenstein, its single largest funder and the chairman of its board. Claremont has produced a lot of authoritarian intellectual output during the Trump era, which has directly fed into the political expressions of the MAGA movement.
Then there’s another strand more centered or aligned with Trump directly—the Trump inner circle and the Trump family. This is a group whose ultimate loyalty is to Trump himself.
I’ve been reporting on this movement for a decade now. And I’m still shocked every day at how large all of this has grown. The reality is that Christian nationalism isn’t going to dry up and blow away when Trump’s no longer around. The American para-fascism movement, or whatever we want to call it, just has too much momentum now, too much institutional support, too much money, to just kind of blow away. And, of course, why would it? There’s no real opposition within conservative politics anymore to this authoritarianism and this desire to eliminate any and all political opposition. Trump’s got Congress in his back pocket. No one on the right is winning primaries who isn’t signed up to some version of these ideals now.
“For a long time, liberals and leftists consoled themselves with the idea that once Trump goes, this will all be over and there won’t be a similarly charismatic figure for them to center their movement on and rally around. That may or may not be true. But if the movement endures, whoever follows Trump will likely be worse from an ideological standpoint. Trump is not, even to this day, an ideological creature. Yes, he’s dismantling the Constitution and his gut instincts are anti-democratic, authoritarian, personalist, self-aggrandizing. But there are people in his movement who are truly intellectually and ideologically committed to anti-democratic authoritarian, even eliminationist, forms of government, committed to using state power to carry out authoritarian and eliminationist actions.” — Jason Wilson
That’s why events like CPAC and the NatCon conferences are important and indicative of what’s going on inside the conservative movement. These events are becoming more and more central and more and more emblematic of what right-wing politics in the U.S. is right now. And there may be disagreement on the margins, but really what you’re seeing is a productive dialogue between people who don’t maybe start in the same place but who are all looking to take power together and eliminate people who they see as their political opponents.
Belvedere: Let me stay on Douglas Wilson for a second. You mentioned that he has a congregation in Moscow, Idaho, and there’s even a term associated with his approach to Christianity in the public space within Christian discourse: the “Moscow mood.” The approach is confrontational, provocative, using trolling as a way to aggressively push back against what Christian nationalists and others within his movement see as the encroachments of liberalism. Did you get a sense from the conference that, out of all the different strands of the Trump or MAGA coalition, Christian nationalism has become the dominant one?
Wilson: Five or six years ago, when I first started reporting on Douglas Wilson, he was a much more marginal figure than he is now. He’s really come into his own as a kind of North Star of Christian nationalism, in many ways. That’s because he has been an exceptionally skilled institution builder. So, he’s got his congregation; he’s also got a denomination, the [Communion] of Reformed Evangelical Churches, and they’ve got congregations around the country who are bound together.
He’s also been instrumental in creating this institution of the classical Christian school. Of course, there are a lot of classical Christian schools that aren’t affiliated with his denomination. The ones affiliated with Wilson teach a theocratic, anti-secular view of the world to young people, many of whom later attend the university Wilson established in Moscow: New Saint Andrews College. It has provided a lot of personnel to aligned companies, to think tanks, in Washington D.C. and elsewhere, and to the lower levels of the Trump administration.
I think the thing that people miss about Christian nationalism is that it’s militantly anti-secular. It’s militantly opposed to the idea that social and political institutions can be neutral—or above, or apart from, religion. They see secular institutions not as neutral, not as inclusive, not as a way in which we can negotiate differences in values, but as dedicated to a false god, the false god of liberalism, of democracy, of feminism, of equalitarian movements. That is the spirit of the “Moscow mood” that I don’t see discussed so often because that’s a kind of destructive impulse. It’s not projecting some future where every Christian or perhaps even Abrahamic faith tradition will be reconciled and the just will be rewarded and the unjust will be punished. In some versions, that can be a pretty harmless expectation. But in this case, it warrants and demands the destruction of institutions, which they see as, if not idolatrous, then demonic.
I’ve written about a podcaster who is aligned with the church where Pete Hegseth goes, which is also in Doug Wilson’s denomination, and folks in that church explicitly talk about secular institutions like public schools being full-blown demonic. That posture, that destructive impulse, the idea that “the regime” or current institutional apparatus needs to be destroyed, suffuses contemporary Christian nationalism. And, you know, look around you. That’s what’s happening.
Belvedere: I think you’re right to put your finger on this huge chasm between faith-based traditions that have an eschatology, or a theology of the last days, that is more on the harmless end of the spectrum and ones that are quite apocalyptic and require, for their final realization, a purging of a lot of what we know of as modern society.
So, I’m a Christian, and like every other Christian I have an eschatology, or theology of what will happen in the end. But I’m quite happy to say that the particular eschatology I subscribe to doesn’t have, as a theological prerequisite, remaking America into a theocratic state. That’s just it: The problem with “Christian nationalism” isn’t so much the “Christian” qualifier, since there are many manifestations of Christianity that don’t go the Douglas Wilson route, but the combination of the two words together, which selects for an aggressive and deeply illiberal public policy program, and has society-reshaping ambitions along authoritarian lines.
On that note, I wanted to ask you about one particular speech from the conference that went semi-viral: the one given by Eric Schmitt, the U.S. senator from Missouri. His speech attracted a ton of attention online, mainly from people rightly horrified at its patently illiberal vision for America. But it also elicited fist-bump enthusiasm from the hard right online. What did you make of it?
Wilson: I thought Sen. Schmitt’s speech was a rhetorically skillful presentation of white nationalism, really. And, in that sense, it was emblematic of the transition that the broader conservative movement is currently undergoing
If you want to really boil down what’s happened to conservatism over the last several decades, especially the last 10 years, the answer is that it has undergone a transition away from a kind of civic nationalism, which excluded people who it saw as insufficiently patriotic and at times at least implicitly claimed that Christianity has something to do with being a good American and Islam is maybe incompatible with being a good American, but really ultimately agreed that, to put it very crudely and simplistically, if you say the pledge of allegiance and mean it and you’ve gone through all the right channels and completed all the right paperwork, anyone can be an American.
Now, I don’t want to give a false impression of the past. American conservatives did go through a period of being pretty explicitly racist and antisemitic before the Second World War. But after that war, there was a sense that an explicitly racist politics was illegitimate, had been delegitimized by what we saw of National Socialism in Europe and the way it implemented racial policies.
And conservatives were actually sensitive for a really long time of being accused of racism, and did try to adhere to that view of civic nationalism, of America as an idea, one that everyone and anyone can subscribe to. They could say, “We may have our differences about how much immigration should be allowed, but immigration is legitimate and anyone who lawfully immigrates to the United States and is a loyal citizen is as American as anyone else.” That's gone by the wayside. We’ve transitioned pretty much completely from civic nationalism to white nationalism and, Sen. Schmitt’s speech really kind of … JD Vance gave a very similar speech just a few weeks back in which he set up a number of tiers regarding who actually is a real American. The realest Americans, it turns out, are those who can trace their ancestry to the colonial period. The earlier in the colonial period, the better. And amongst far-right groups, I’ve even seen tiered lists that suggested that it’s better to have come over on the Mayflower, or to have been in Jamestown, than to have arrived in the early 19th century. There’s a whole hierarchy that they have of who’s the realest. But the main point is that, on the right, America is not an idea—it’s a people, it’s a nation. And that means white people and white men in particular should be in charge—and certainly no one who’s come since the Hart-Celler Act in the ’60s and the reforms of immigration law to make sure that it wasn’t explicitly racist should be in charge. Anyone who’s come since then is not as real an American as “Heritage Americans,” as they sometimes call them, are.
So, that’s how I saw the speech.
“I’ve been reporting on this movement for a decade now. And I’m still shocked every day at how large all of this has grown. The reality is that Christian nationalism isn’t going to dry up and blow away when Trump’s no longer around. The American para-fascism movement, or whatever we want to call it, just has too much momentum now, too much institutional support, too much money, to just kind of blow away. And, of course, why would it? There’s no real opposition within conservative politics anymore to this authoritarianism and this desire to eliminate any and all political opposition. Trump’s got Congress in his back pocket. No one on the right is winning primaries who isn’t signed up to some version of these ideals now.” — Jason Wilson
Another thing I pointed out in the article is that Nate Hochman works for Sen. Schmitt now. Hochman was a rising star in the conservative movement, but he washed out at a time when his racist associations were still kind of a problem. He had done a Twitter Space with Nick Fuentes, and he praised him when he thought it wouldn’t come out that he had. He then lost a prestigious journalism fellowship over it and also left his job at National Review. He then went to work for the DeSantis campaign but got fired after circulating a video with neo-Nazi imagery in it. He then worked for a think tank established by Marco Rubio’s former chief of staff where he created and circulated videos with conspiracy theories, some of them implicitly antisemitic and certainly racist. In fact, he went to Charleroi, Pennsylvania during the election to try to export the “eating dogs and cats” narrative from Springfield, Ohio over to Charleroi, where there’s also been a lot of Haitian immigrants. And now he’s working for Sen. Schmitt.
I actually wrote to his office and asked if he had a hand in writing the speech. They didn’t reply, of course. But I asked because it struck me as a speech attempting to articulate white nationalist politics in a way that is not so explicit that people who aren’t clued into this sort of stuff will notice. I’ve got no doubt that they would deny that that was the intention, but it seems to me that that’s what was being said. And, again, it is emblematic of the transition that has happened to the conservative movement.
Belvedere: I remember Hochman. When the Springfield hoax about Haitians eating their neighbors’ pets came out and everyone understood fairly quickly that there weren’t any instances of this happening, it would’ve been one thing to have wanted it to be true but after realizing that it wasn’t, to simply keep quiet about it. But Hochman was part of a group that didn’t care that it was a hoax. Because, to them, the deeper narrative about immigrants being bad for America was true, and that justified running wild with absurdly false stories about immigrants doing heinous stuff. He actually tried to replicate the hoax in other cities. I watched a couple of videos of his in which he talked to people on the street and tried to paint a picture of a city in ruins because its water supply was being stretched due to immigrants. Immigrants were creating such a strain on resources, he argued, that the only reasonable response was to get the immigrants out. And I just found that studied disregard for the truth emblematic of the right’s new approach to politics.
It used to be that this mixture of conspiratorial lunacy and unabashed vice-signaling was cordoned off to the worst corners of the internet and kept there. They would bubble up sometimes, but there was more gatekeeping, in the past. Hochman actually wrote a semi-viral thread on X exulting in the fact that now, on the right, there’s this bottom-up phenomenon where instead of these unaccountably awful theories remaining in the dark corners of the internet where they were spawned, there is now a reliable pipeline and channel through which they reach the highest echelons of the right’s public officials and government figures—culminating in Trump, on the debate stage, sensationally regurgitating the “Haitians eating pets” hoax.
So, in Hochman’s thread, he lists a bunch of examples of this new bottom-up information reality. But what's particularly striking to me is that instead of cataloguing these instances and seeing them as examples of informational failure—he sees them as successes.
This crowd, which has adopted a hard-right populist frame for politics broadly, will argue that the examples show that now, finally, it’s “the people” who are dictating what their leaders should focus on, rather than the leaders ignoring causes that this righteous volk want highlighted and amplified.
But, again, to me it’s a horror story, because what he’s actually lauding is the right’s informational failure on a deep, structural level. He is exulting in the fact that the completely baseless panic about Haitians was picked up by and mass-amplified by the president of the United States. That’s, of course, a marker of informational backwardness; not one that bespeaks a healthy discourse culture for conservative activists and thinkers.
It's an upside-down information ecosystem. The tail is wagging the dog. The right-wing discourse is dominated by unscrupulous, conspiratorial, inflammatory voices, and they pick up their signals from people even worse than they are, and then the movers and shakers tap into those growing narratives and by then the narratives are running riot in our national discourse.
So it doesn’t surprise me at all to discover that Hochman is now part of Schmitt’s policy team.
Did the speech feel like an outlier relative to the rest of the conference? Or did you get the impression that its sentiments, its ethos, was in line with everything else that you saw?
Wilson: I think the reason that it got the applause that it did, and the reason that the conference promoted it, and the reason that, as you said, it went slightly viral is that it was right bang in the middle of where the sentiments at the conference were. I didn’t see anyone speaking up for civic nationalism. Many there would likely agree that authentic, real Americans are white Americans, and ideally white Americans whose families arrived sometime in the 19th century or even earlier—the earlier, the better. That includes those who, as Vance said, fought in the Civil War. (He didn’t say which side.) Those who participated in that era of American history are the real owners of the United States, right? And everyone else is impinging on their rights just by being here. I don’t think that that’s an exaggeration—I think that that’s a fair paraphrase of what Sen. Schmitt was saying. And I think few at the conference would disagree with that. I think that that is a prevailing opinion.
Just harkening back to what you said about Nate Hochman ... what you’re seeing there is an incentive structure. Yes, the material is coming from the bottom up. But someone like Hochman is responding to what he very clearly can see that the upper echelons of the party want, especially in a campaign context.
To come at Sen. Schmitt’s speech in another way, there was a U.S. Rep. from Iowa by the name of Steve King who is no longer in Congress. He had been ventilating white nationalist sentiments. But that was a different time, a time when Republicans saw someone like that in the party as a problem. But the substance of what he said is not very different from the substance of what Sen. Schmitt said. And Sen. Schmitt isn’t seen as a problem. He’s seen as a leader. So that’s where they’re at.
I mean, it used to be that, as a reporter, if I unearthed some racist thing that a congressional staffer or someone like that had said, that would be embarrassing, a scandal. I still bring that stuff to light when I can, but Republicans don’t care at this point. They have fully transitioned to an older form of right-wing politics, one that is more explicitly racist, white supremacist, and one which regrets that white supremacy is less explicit and powerful than it used to be in their view.
Belvedere: Let me ask about a couple of other figures from Trump’s administration who were involved in the conference. Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant AG for civil rights in Trump’s DOJ, was there. What was her speech about?
Wilson: Her speech was slightly less coherent than Sen. Schmitt’s.
Her history is that she was a RNC committee woman for California for a long time and actually challenged Ronna McDaniel for the RNC chair in a failed effort. But she made herself very useful to Donald Trump in his wilderness years, acting as his lawyer in several actions. She ran a very ideological nonprofit that I did some reporting on called the Center for American Liberty. Their first big moment in the limelight was when they took on the case of a guy called Andy Ngo, a right-wing provocateur who got milkshaked and beaten up at a right-wing rally in Portland by some anti-fascists. And she took on that case and they tried to sue Rose City Antifa. During Covid, she sued the government of California, and Gavin Newsom personally, over Covid restrictions on churches and stuff like that. Then later they transitioned into suing school districts and healthcare providers on behalf of either parents of transgender children or on behalf of individuals who had done some gender transitioning and then had de-transitioned and developed grievances about the way all that happened. So very culture war type stuff. She was a frequent guest on Tucker Carlson when he was on Fox News. She actually acted on behalf of Carlson when he was threatening legal action against Fox.
“Recently been the focus of enormous attention on the right and the far right is the alleged murder of Iryna Zarutska, who was a Ukrainian immigrant and was apparently randomly stabbed to death—horrible situation—by a 34-year-old Black guy who allegedly was fare-jumping at the time of the killing and seemingly attacked this person unprovoked. That has been obsessively discussed. And the urgency there, for example, is they really want to somehow institutionalize and reorient law enforcement around their understanding of race and crime. They want law enforcement to racially profile people, to proceed on the assumption that Black Americans are more prone to crime than white Americans are.” — Jason Wilson
So, she’s been appointed deputy attorney general for civil rights. In Trump’s first term, the deputy attorney general for civil rights did some strange stuff. But she’s really doing what Trump claimed that the Biden DOJ did, which is weaponizing prosecutions against political enemies of Trump. And, in the speech, she was just advertising and boasting about that and talking about all the people whom they prosecuted and who they’re planning to prosecute—you know, all the “woke” college administrators that she’s planning to go after. To me, it was just an effort at displaying her undying allegiance to President Trump.
We were talking about the different kinds of NatCon people earlier—she’s a good example of someone who is principally a Trump loyalist and something of a careerist. She actually ran for the California state house, and once for Congress as well, in the Bay Area where she presented herself as something of a moderate, because you would if you were trying to get elected in the Bay Area. And during the War on Terror period she did some legitimate civil rights work—she’s a Sikh, and she acted for Sikhs who had been discriminated against in various ways or subject to racist attacks because they happened to be wearing a turban at a time when Americans were confused about the difference between Sikhs and Muslims. At the Republican National Convention last year, she was a speaker and she actually led a Sikh prayer. It was quite a moment. She was in her traditional dress and she offered a Sikh prayer on stage and she was subjected to all kinds of awful, horrible, racist abuse from right-wingers on X. So she cuts a slightly strange figure in the contemporary Republican Party.
But she’s a Trump loyalist and that’s really what she was trying to get across in the speech— how loyal she is to Trump and how effective she is as an instrument of vengeance for Trump and for his movement.
Belvedere: But she is emblematic of this remarkable turn in the executive in which personnel—both appointed and hired—see their duties and their jobs almost exclusively as serving the personal whim of this singular figure, the president. I mean, consider her own description of the DOJ’s civil rights division: “We are the president’s shock troops. We are the front guard.” That’s an absurd way to view your charge as the leader of a civil rights division. Instead of viewing the job based on civil rights considerations, it’s, “Let me let you define what I should pursue and then I’ll turn this office into that.” And I think that is microcosmic of the way that everyone else in the administration also views their role.
Wilson: I think that’s largely correct. In his first administration, Trump got frustrated because he expected the attorney general to basically be his personal lawyer. His frustration was that, to some extent, his various AGs were independent and did refuse to go along with some things. Even Bill Barr wasn’t ultimately loyal enough in Trump’s view.
But I also think that there are others in the administration—I’m thinking of someone like Russell Vought—who are doing things that they have wanted to do for a while, since even before Trump was around. Loyalty is certainly a prerequisite for Trump. But I think with someone like Harmeet Dhillon, all she’s there to do is display loyalty. Russ Vought, by contrast, has displayed loyalty and now he gets to do what he wants. And I think that that’s a subtle difference.
That’s also something that we saw playing out at NatCon. There are committed loyalists and there are committed ideologues.
Belvedere: Vought was there at the conference, right?
Wilson: Yeah, he was.
I know it’s funny to say, but I still don’t really think of Trump as ideological. His gut instincts are authoritarian and anti-democratic, but there are people who have a much better developed anti-democratic and authoritarian ideology, whether it comes from Christian nationalism or fascism, which is as good a word as any. And then there are just the pure loyalists.
There are also people who have displayed enough loyalty, or themselves see Trump as a sympathetic enough figure that they’re prepared to sort of go along for the ride. I mean, we could talk about Yoram Hazony, who established the NatCon conference. He’s Israeli, which is interesting, because the right’s attitude to Israel is kind of changing. I think there’s tension there. You saw Tucker Carlson and Ted Cruz a few months ago—they were having a bit of a tiff about Israel, to whom Cruz remains completely committed, while Carlson represents a more skeptical, America First kind of suspicion about Israel. So, Hazony is not an American nationalist—he’s an Israeli nationalist who has lived in settlements, who has a very different set of priorities than the America First nationalists that Tucker or Nick Fuentes represents.
But this collection of people gathered by Hazony will outlast Trump. It may or may not be popular in the absence of Trump. It may or may not command electoral majorities in the absence of Trump. But it’s a lot bigger than it was. And I just don’t think it’s going to disappear when Trump does.
Belvedere: That’s an excellent distinction that you made between figures within the administration whose first and really only function is to display loyalty and to take their cues from the whims of the president versus these other figures who have a kind of antecedent politics or an independently formed social vision that they see Trump as a vehicle by which to begin to implement it and realize it. This latter group absolutely views the project as having a longer tail than Trump’s own timeline. I think the highest figure in the administration who can be characterized this way is JD Vance, whose loyalty to the president is something that allows and enables him to craft the MAGA movement in his image—partly now but much more so in the future. Vought is another example of this.
Wilson: I think Stephen Miller also is. Miller didn’t start out in life as a Trump guy. Trump kind of poached him from Jeff Sessions who, at that time, was the most anti-immigrant kind of senator that he could find. His entire politics are really an anti-immigrant politics and a kind of a white nationalist politics. And before Donald Trump ever entered politics in any serious way, that was Stephen Miller’s perspective. Now, obviously, he has been extremely loyal and stuck by Trump even during the wilderness years and he established think tanks that promote a right-wing populist perspective on a range of issues, including immigration, and his America First Legal was suing people, government agencies, on more or less Trumpist or right-wing populist grounds. Clearly he was betting that Trump would make his way back into power or someone like Trump would make their way back into power at some point. So he has been loyal. But his political perspective is not derived from Donald Trump.
“I think the thing that people miss about Christian nationalism is that it’s militantly anti-secular. It’s militantly opposed to the idea that social and political institutions can be neutral—or above, or apart from, religion. They see secular institutions not as neutral, not as inclusive, not as a way in which we can negotiate differences in values, but as dedicated to a false god, the false god of liberalism, of democracy, of feminism, of equalitarian movements.” — Jason Wilson
I think JD Vance might be slightly different. It’s hard to say with him how much of his politics is sheer opportunism. And to the extent that it’s sincere, how much of it comes from, say, Peter Thiel and how much of it was awakened by Trump. I mean, that’s his story, right? That he just changed his mind and came to came to his current politics by that sort of anti-anti-Trump route? It’s hard to say.
At some point, if he doesn’t already, Vance might feel like Trump is actually getting in the way of what they would really like to do. When Trump is no longer around, there are people who will be hoping that they can pursue their own political vision in a way that is no longer restrained by Trump or no longer subject to Trump’s approval and therefore can pursue a purer form of that politics. I guess I put Vance in that category. Miller’s said some interesting things. He said that this is the only chance they’re going to get to do mass deportations. So I wonder if he actually sees a time limit, a shelf life on this stuff.
Belvedere: Let me ask you about that. There have been some really alarming reports about the MAGA movement, broadly defined, ramping up into an accelerationist version of itself. It knows that the next electoral window can bring the opposition into power, which can lead to Trump’s movement getting less of what it wants. So it’s ramping up the need to radically reshape American government and society now, while it has the most favorable conditions it might get for a while, if ever. Is that sentiment, that urgency, one that you saw in a lot of speeches at the conference?
Wilson: A lot of the conference was fairly triumphalist, actually. Like, “We won, and here’s what we’re going to do next. And this is what things are going to be like in the future.”
I mean, they’re very confident. But it’s also a very mercurial movement. So from one week to the next, the mood can shift depending on events and depending on whether they encounter any adversity.
Belvedere: Axios reported that Vought in his speech said, “Don’t think that the minute the president is out of office, this town will not try to pivot back to the form of conservatism that I believe national conservatism is a response to.” And Axios’ gloss on this was that there was “a palpable urgency on display at the conference, which reflects a movement that knows its window is short.”
Wilson: Yeah, in addition to the triumphalism, there’s an urgency, sure.
The other thing that’s recently been the focus of enormous attention on the right and the far right is the alleged murder of Iryna Zarutska, who was a Ukrainian immigrant and was apparently randomly stabbed to death—horrible situation—by a 34-year-old Black guy who allegedly was fare-jumping at the time of the killing and seemingly attacked this person unprovoked. That has been obsessively discussed. And the urgency there, for example, is they really want to somehow institutionalize and reorient law enforcement around their understanding of race and crime. They want law enforcement to racially profile people, to proceed on the assumption that Black Americans are more prone to crime than white Americans are. That they are genetically predisposed to crime—they get into eugenics pretty quickly in this discussion. They will seize on something like that, or the assassination of Charlie Kirk, in order to urgently remake American institutions as quickly as possible along the lines of their prejudices, their narratives, their racist or even politically eliminationist view of the world.
In light of their sense that Black people are inherently or genetically predisposed to crime, instead of social programs to lift people out of poverty, we should just be orienting most of our policing resources to cracking down on Black people. And they use an incident like this to push things in that direction. And speaking of Harmeet Dhillon, she reposted a post about the Iryna Zarutska incident on X, adding that this is a civil rights issue and, I mean, it’s a criminal issue.
Belvedere: Yeah, the post she reposted was from Matt Walsh.
“If you want to really boil down what’s happened to conservatism over the last several decades, especially the last 10 years, the answer is that it has undergone a transition away from a kind of civic nationalism, which excluded people who it saw as insufficiently patriotic and at times at least implicitly claimed that Christianity has something to do with being a good American and Islam is maybe incompatible with being a good American, but really ultimately agreed that, to put it very crudely and simplistically, if you say the pledge of allegiance and mean it and you’ve gone through all the right channels and completed all the right paperwork, anyone can be an American.” — Jason Wilson
And, to your point, how does she know already that this is a civil rights issue? So, this is supposed to be her speaking from her institutional perch ... how does she know that this isn’t a mental health issue or something else? How is she already declaring it civil rights issue? Because they’re ready to pounce on anything that could help them implement the heavy-handed measures toward remaking society in their image.
Wilson: Exactly.
So this definitely speaks to an urgency. The urgency of getting cops to embrace the idea that what they really should be doing is cracking down on Black people, getting the FBI to embrace the idea that the most serious danger and the biggest source of violence and terrorism in America is the Democratic Party. This is literally what some of them are saying. That’s the urgency. And I guess that they think that the further they can push things in their preferred direction while the opportunity’s there, that will somehow and somewhat tilt the scales towards them in the future.
Belvedere: Tulsi Gabbard was there too, right? This is Trump’s director of national intelligence, who recently gave a conference basically—and I’m not exaggerating—accusing former President Barack Obama of a treasonous coup on the American government. That’s wild. Yet, in the current news cycle, there’s about 100 items per day that in any other era would have dominated an entire week’s worth of television and print coverage. Today, they come and go without much incident. So Gabbard does that. And people are barely talking about it, because there are so many things coming out of this administration.
Wilson: I find her a very puzzling figure. I don’t think she’s a committed Trump enthusiast. I mean, I get RFK, right? He’s actually getting to do stuff. But she seems to be in a position where she can only get into trouble.
In her remarks, she talked a lot about the deep state and this kind of ongoing live conspiracy inside the American government against Trump. She really thinks that there is a sort of hidden power with mysterious motivations inside the American government. She has always been suspicious of who or what is orchestrating U.S. foreign policy. And, for a long time, she came from that kind of politically ambiguous anti-war movement that came to prominence during the War on Terror which, to be sure, included a lot of liberal Democrats, but it also included Ron Paul. And I think people got a little bit confused by that and Tulsi comes out of that history and that formation. And she’s still saying the same stuff, really. She’s saying that, somehow, U.S. foreign policy is still directed by deep state propaganda and somehow the deep state is still frustrating president Trump’s desires for foreign policy. It just doesn’t hold water.
Belvedere: There were multiple reports that the conference had seriously lackluster attendance. What did you make of the energy at the conference?
My own take is that something like National Conservatism, and its attendant conferences, works really well as an outsider-y phenomenon. But the moment your movement is ascendant or on top, your function, which for the longest time was to offer a critique of the deep state or the Washingtonian establishment or the status quo or liberals and Democrats, can no longer draw the same energy when it’s your team that is ensconced in power. Is that possibly a reason why it maybe didn’t draw the same kind of energy? What do you make of all that?
Wilson: Yeah, a lot of what drew people to the right-wing banner during the Biden years was that kind of oppositional energy, often based on false ideas. I don’t think anyone on the right remembers that most of the Covid restrictions were initially implemented under Trump. And that Trump was on board with and drove the development of vaccines. They benefited from that kind of oppositional energy throughout the Biden years. And that’s kind of disappeared.
One reason the right seizes on crime in the way that they do is as a way of resuscitating the idea that there are these shadowy, dark, powerful forces arrayed against them. When, actually, Trump is rapidly turning the entire federal government into an instrument of his will.
Belvedere: The Trumpian populist movement seems to need to, even when it’s in power and has all the levers of power of government, discuss itself and its role almost like an insurgency against dark, shadowy forces that are still extant or at least that had until recently been doing a lot of damage to the American public and to society and now need to be punished.
So, for example, there’s still a lot of energy about going after Fauci. You mentioned how the Covid policies were implemented by Trump and fell within the purview of his presidency ... well, they’ll find a convenient way to inoculate Trump from it by going after others whom they’ll say Trump was bamboozled or misled by.
Wilson: Yeah, and another example is the terribly confused and incoherent way that they’re dealing with the Epstein stuff. Because the other part of this is the whole thing runs on conspiracy theories and it’s kind of hard to sustain conspiracy theories when your guy is in charge of everything. And it’s hard to keep running the Epstein conspiracy theory when clearly Donald Trump was one of his best friends and knew everything that he was up to.
I mean, look at poor old Dan Bongino and Kash Patel. They were railing against the FBI’s supposed perfidy and concealing all this stuff. And now they’re the guys concealing it.
© The UnPopulist, 2025
Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.
We welcome your reactions and replies. Please adhere to our comments policy.
