A ProPublica investigation has found that most of these bills are part of a coordinated effort, orchestrated by a constellation of groups that share staff or have funding ties to the prominent conservative activist Leonard Leo.
Jackson Lahmeyer has made headlines for his inflammatory comments, including labeling the LGBTQ+ community as 'sick' and calling Black Lives Matter a terrorist organization. His provocative style has garnered attention and positioned him within the MAGA movement.
"It'll guarantee the midterms," he told Republicans gathered in the ballroom of his golf course just outside Miami on Monday. "If you don't get it, big trouble." Trump insisted that building on strict national voter identification laws, banning mail ballots, and restricting transgender rights would secure Republican electoral success.
Indeed, regional "divisions" - others might say "alarm" or "outrage" - had intensified during the fall of 2025 following the US's massive military build-up in the Caribbean, its air strikes against alleged drug boats - resulting in scores of extrajudicial killings - and the threats of a US attack on Venezuela.
Buckley's campaign was successful in re-energizing the conservative base. As Buckley biographer Sam Tanenhaus commented to The American Conservative, '[TAC Co-Founder] Pat Buchanan told me that after Goldwater's defeat in 1964 and before Nixon's victory in 1968, "Bill Buckley was all we had. He was the biggest guy."'
The US's clear military and economic dominance of the postwar world gave it an obvious claim to seniority; however, there was also a strong strain within English conservatism at the time that saw itself as Greeks in this American empire, in the words of former Tory prime minister Harold Macmillan. In other words, even if the Americans were to be the new Romans, extending their dominion over every corner of the globe, without the intellectual, cultural and political guidance of their wise old mother country they would quickly fall into ruin.
the rotting carcass of the MAGA era, its shrieking insecurities, its pathetic resentments, its festering hatreds, and that distinct, metallic tang of panic rising in the back of its throat behind the soft wattle.
The Department of Homeland Security's Facebook account recently posted a recruiting notice for ICE under the banner "WE'LL HAVE OUR HOME AGAIN"-the title of a white-nationalist anthem by the Pine Tree Riots ("By blood or sweat, we'll get there yet"). The Department of Labor recently posted a video montage referencing American battle scenes under the tagline "One Homeland. One People. One Heritage. Remember who you are, American"-a slogan close to the Nazi-era Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer.
The most notable, and perhaps most effective, ad of the 2024 presidential campaign featured footage of the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, voicing her support for gender-affirming treatment for inmates in federal prisons. "Kamala is for they/ them. President Trump is for you," the narrator concluded. The spot was a crisp, 30-second encapsulation of one of the key Republican talking points of the cycle: that "wokeness" was sweeping the nation and upending established ways of life, and that Donald Trump would fight against it.
Even after the especially chaotic events of the past few weeks, Trump supporters are sticking by their man. Second, faith in Trump's leadership is not driven by his adherence to a coherent political ideology. Trump, who, as part of his "America First" policy, once declared that he would be "getting out of the nation-building business," has now declared that the U.S. "will run the country" of Venezuela for the foreseeable future.
Six weeks after the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk in September, University of Mississippi junior Lesley Lachman was standing in a campus parking lot near her sorority, Pi Beta Phi, scanning the calendar on her phone. She had interviews coming up with PBS, a local radio station, and Fox & Friends, before which she needed to redo her nails.
Ben Shapiro is a conservative provocateur. Ever since he was a teen-ager at U.C.L.A. writing op-eds for the Daily Bruin, he has shown a penchant for the rhetorical grenade. Women who have abortions are "baby killers." Western civilization is "superior" to other civilizations. "Israelis like to build," he tweeted in 2010. "Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage. This is not a difficult issue. #settlementsrock." Shapiro is now forty-two, and his rhetoric has mellowed only somewhat.