What’s next for the American right? That’s the question the sharpest conservative minds are seeking to answer after the midterms, from Vice President J.D. Vance to The Spectator’s next cover writer, Michael Brendan Dougherty, who thinks “MAGA is rebooting into its own 2.0 version.”
“Now,” writes Dougherty, “we are in the postmortem midterm phase, and the party is at last speaking honestly about its failings. Each part of the coalition is preparing for the end of Trump, assailing the administration for broken promises, or its own forms of corruption.”
Already young upstarts are seeking to address the GOP fall-off. This week Ryan Neuhaus, formerly Kevin Roberts’s chief of staff at the Heritage Foundation, launched American Ascent, a new 501(c)(4) with the aim of replacing older Republican members of Congress with a “younger crop of America First-aligned lawmakers.” “The American people told us pretty clearly that they want to see younger, more energetic politicians leading in America, representing them,” Neuhaus told Politico.
As part of his press tour launching the nonprofit, Neuhaus headed to podcast with noted public intellectual Tim Pool. Pool had a different theory about where the GOP is headed. “I do think the groypers and Nick Fuentes are going to be the future of the Republican party,” said Pool, “and that is not to condemn or condone; it is to point out that there was an outsized group of young people that voted in this midterm election that were 18-24, so there’s a huge spike. This group of young men: right-leaning and politically active, anti-war, very pro-America – and their political views are akin to like the 1950s, 1960s America, for better or for worse.” Cockburn believes that the beanie is there to keep all his ideas in.
Neuhaus pushed back with a different interpretation of the same data point. “The future of the Republican party are young energetic men that want to get into office, I completely agree with that,” he said. “But I think they’re individuals like Brandon Gill, Riley Moore, Senator Eric Schmitt. They’re competent, they’re capable.” Neuhaus also warned against “ascribing the future of the Republican party to the influencer cadre.”
And for good reason: Nick Fuentes has been raging against J.D. Vance, Tucker Carlson, the tech right and, now, American Ascent, on his stream all week. Enjoy the following rant:
They are trying to get all the young people on board with Vance. They even started a new nonprofit. They call it American Ascent. Run by Ryan Neuhaus, I think is his name. Ryan Neuhaus, who resigned from Heritage after Tucker interviewed me. And the head of Heritage, Kevin Roberts, defended Tucker. So Neuhaus running American Ascent. He was so offended that his boss defended Tucker for talking to me that he quit. That’s who’s running American Ascent. And they go and say, “we’re going to find the America First candidates for ’28. We’re going to pick the America First leaders for ’28.” And look who’s behind this new initiative. It’s Tom Klingenstein. It’s the Claremont Institute. It’s American Moment with Saurabh Shawarma [sic]. They’re trying to steal it from us. They really are. In the same way that MAGA was stolen, they’re trying to now steal America First. This is what these people do.
Fascinating insights, if only were they true. First, Neuhaus did not resign because he was “offended that his boss defended Tucker.” On the contrary, per the Hill story about his resignation, “Neuhaus had angered Heritage staff and other conservative movement allies after he had reposted a number of messages of support for Roberts and his defense of Carlson on social media.” Second, American Moment is a similarly named and aimed 501(c)(3), with no connection to American Ascent whatsoever. No staff overlap, no board overlap. You’d hope the “future of the Republican party” would be slightly better informed…
On our radar
BARKING UP THE RIGHT TREE Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has announced $4.9 million of federal investment in developing ibogaine as a potential treatment for veterans’ traumatic brain injuries. The psychedelic drug is derived from the bark of a West African shrub.
IN THE DEEP END Politico was once again blocked from fulfilling its print press pool duties by the White House today.
ROUGHING THE PASSER Sam Hartman, the former Wake Forest and Notre Dame quarterback currently on the Washington Commanders practice squad, will be the titular “Bachelor” for the 30th season of The Bachelor.
Hobbled lobby
Out with the old, in with the new. After speculation about Susie Wiles and her close friendships with DC lobbyists, her successor Stephen Miller is cracking the whip. In a memo, the new chief of staff said that White House staff would now require prior approval to meet with a lobbyist.
“No President in history has fought more relentlessly, selflessly or courageously for the American People than President Trump. Following his example, White House staff are expected to dedicate their time unwaveringly to the working people of the nation,” the memo reads, according to Politico.
Pour out a shot of rakija for the poor people of Republika Srpska, whose voices will now go unheard in the West Wing…
Economical with the truth
The favor of the press is a fickle thing. Take the peculiar behavior of the Economist magazine during the saga of Jensen Huang, who resigned yesterday as CEO of Nvidia.
In September the British weekly ran a rather glowing profile of the chip mogul, dubbing him “The Sorcerer of AI” with the headline “Nvidia is driving the AI boom. Good.” That same month it would call him “AI’s Taylor Swift.” The magazine’s articles acknowledged his difficult position in the US-China rivalry, but seemed to treat it as a problem to be managed – a cost of doing business that someone of Huang’s caliber could surely deal with.
Imagine Cockburn’s surprise, then, to see the unusually strident tone of the Economist’s latest leader: “Jensen Huang must go.” “Jensen Huang is a brilliant man – and a fool,” it declared. Of his failure to disclose his relationship with Alice Huang, it said that the Nvidia CEO had shown:
“[A] catastrophic failure of judgment… given his position as the steward of an American technology that China desperately covets, Mr. Huang should have been extra wary.”
The author offers no evidence that the affair affected company policy or led to any attempt to circumnavigate the ban on exports of the company’s chips to China. It references Megaspeed, Alice Huang’s employer, which routes compute power to China through data centers in Malaysia, but then acknowledges that it was Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s job to deal with this loophole, not Huang’s. US officials are not even sure that Alice Huang was a spy anymore; she is now being spoken of merely as a “risk.”
Other figures in public life will wonder whether they too will someday be subject to an unnerving about-face from a title that once praised them.
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