Joseph Munoz

As I've said many times, in time, every principled conservative and libertarian will be ejected from the Republican Party. In 2026, the only people who can and will remain are sycophants and cultists.

Susan Collins says she “doesn’t understand” Trump’s decision to back Paxton, who she called “ethically challenged.”

Simplifications and omissions in the grade school telling of US history (a very partial list): 1. Roosevelt believed of Stalin that, and I quote, "if I give him everything I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won't try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace." Following this strategy, he consigned millions of Eastern Europeans and Asians to suffer under Soviet rule while America prospered in the wake of the second world war. 2. Here's one missed in my own Utah schools. In order to root polygamy out in Utah, the country arrested prominent Mormons en masse, stripped the vote from Utah women, allowed neighboring states to strip the vote from all Mormons, disincorporated the LDS church, and seized millions of dollars of the property its members had worked to build. The actions were a flagrant violation of any modern standard of religious liberty. Mormonism was tamed by actions just short of outright war, and now that Mormons have assimilated and dislike polygamy, they don't want to look head-on at their moment of greatest persecution. 3. The Union won the Civil War. The Confederacy won the peace. Following the Civil War, the South engaged on an explicit, generations-long campaign to unite North and South around white supremacy. This crested when Birth of a Nation brought passionate white supremacy into the White House, the Supreme Court, and around the country in the biggest blockbuster the country would see until it was surpassed decades later by Gone With The Wind's tamer romanticization of the antebellum South. We unified white Americans by turning a blind eye to black ones, and for a long time only black people and socialists really objected. I could keep going for a while, diving down different rabbit holes and ferreting up oddities and complications of history that don't really serve anyone's frame these days. But let's get to the Civil Rights movement. The Rosa Parks story isn't a great example. The "way home from work" mythologizing spread and was more palatable to her contemporaries than the understanding that she was explicitly an activist, but she was open and honest about her activist goals, she chose a worthy cause, and she executed a worthwhile protest well. But there are plenty of complications if you look. The elementary school version is that we had Racism in the South, we expunged it with Brown v. Board, I Have a Dream, and the Civil Rights Act, MLK and Thurgood Marshall and Rosa Parks are heroes, done. Gone is the Days of Rage chaos of the late '60s and the '70s when the movement splintered into increasingly niche and violent leftist causes. Gone is the reality that Civil Rights leaders were objecting not just to the South but to the slums, not just to segregation but to material impoverishment, and intervention after intervention either came up short or was left untried. Gone, or sanitized, is Malcolm X, the Nation of Islam, black nationalism more broadly. Leftists have long objected to this in an uneven sort of way, wanting to highlight America's failings while burying leftist failings. Reactionaries who pay attention object because many American heroes were in fact radicals, and while that radicalism is tamed over and made palatable to enter the mainstream, its moral thrust makes many schoolchildren sympathetic to radical moral claims. Now Matt Walsh is getting in on things. He can't actually defend segregation like people further right can, but he can nod along as they point out that the Civil Rights movement was full of socialists and activists. It was! And because elementary school history was sanitized, They lied to you. Why? Why did They lie to you? Because elementary school history has traditionally followed the small-c conservative message: America is good, we've had troubles but we triumphed over them, history is full of heroes all pursuing the American dream, the past is in fundamental continuity with the present and we are upholding a noble tradition. We founded a nation on liberty. Pioneers built the west. We fought to end slavery. We beat the Nazis. We ended segregation and assured racial equality. We beat the Soviets. The arc of history bends towards America being heroic and towards all of its competing and conflicting forces converging into tidy noble figures we can all be proud of. Conservatives wanted Martin Luther King, Jr. to be a hero who ended segregation and ushered in an age of colorblindness, then died fulfilled wanting nothing else. Liberals wanted Roosevelt to be a hero who defeated the Nazis and brought us out of the Great Depression before we smoothly and naturally transitioned into the Cold War. Things nobody wanted, they just sort of fell by the wayside. The story wasn't made to serve Them, not really. The story was made to give Us a history we'd unite around and be proud of. And a lot of the details didn't really work and a lot of things got sanded down and a lot of notes that didn't really serve anyone's narrative were just left out because after all history is very large, but the zeitgeist mostly did its job. Eventually, as the old left aged into the position of being college professors, a lot of them poked at the parts of the narrative that conservatives were fond of, and as conservatives absorbed the hostility of professors they soured on the poking and eventually on the Mainstream narrative as a whole. At some point, Us fell apart. Where does that leave us now? An age of disillusionment all around, I suppose. Liberals went through it a while ago. I guess Matt Walsh is going through it now learning that Rosa Parks was an activist. We all have our moments where the complications seep in. Disillusionment about history might be inevitable for anyone paying attention. Leftists have a pretty long head start in picking at history and finding complicated seams, and I guess it's inevitable that right-wingers will reexamine even moments like Rosa Parks where left-wing activists were just straightforwardly right. But if you go in thinking that all the smoothing-over and all the omissions and all the niceties were left in to flatter liberals, you'll miss a lot of the picture. Your elementary school teachers were teaching you a shared civil myth you no longer believe in, but that civil myth wasn't Liberal, not really. It was American.

I know some of you aren't happy with the prospect with either Vance or Rubio If that's the case, who would be preferable? Where does the GOP go after Trump?

BREAKING: JD Vance and Marco Rubio are now tied to win the 2028 presidency

A flag featuring swastikas and a Star of David flew over NYU during graduation today. The specific building it was flown over was named after a Jewish donor to the school. Does no one feel shame anymore?