Better in their words…

Postwar politics realign as social media shreds old orders; Britain’s scandal erupts; State Dept lashes EU; MTG exits; Fuentes rises; Dems scent blood; and Trump fires back with the American Dream. jchilders

A good analysis of Trump 1.0 vs 2.0.  MTG is really done with Congress and the Swamp more than Trump. mrossol

Source: ☕️ RECONSTRUCTION ☙ Saturday, November 22, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS

WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY

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The pandemic marked the opening shots of the Third World War, and Ukraine’s coming peace settlement will mark the beginning of its end. One era is closing. An ancien régime is slipping into the shadows; a novel one is inescapably rising in its place. The World has been here before, in seismic global reconstructions following both the First and Second World Wars, and the same pattern is repeating again now.

As always, technology is the accelerant. Now, ubiquitous digital access has turned every citizen into both archivist and publisher, with instant communication and an indelible public record only a thumb-tap away — all supercharged by AI. Thus, the relationship between governments and the governed is mutating. Secrets leak, seep, or simply evaporate; moods migrate and multiply faster than no-see-ums in August.

Old media, once the High Priesthood of the Approved Narrative, is collapsing, under the insultingly simple fact that anyone can now run a search and expose the trick. Institutions that long crouched behind elegant but deceptive verbosity find their spells suddenly shattered, when AI can instantly excavate the one incriminating sentence from a mountain of bureaucratic babble.

Ultra-accountability wasn’t their plan — but it’s the world they helped build, and now it’s the world they must survive.

🔥 Here’s an example. Yesterday, Governor Ron DeSantis mocked the New York Times by reposting its 1995 “science” article explaining that Florida’s beaches were “disappearing at an average rate of 2 to 3 feet a year” and would be completely gone in 25 years:

Ha! The beaches are still here! And the New York Times is still lying like an oriental rug. This kind of casual, real-time institutional debunking was literally impossible before a few years ago. Think about that.

🔥 The British grooming-gang scandal might be the clearest example of what happens when an entrenched system tries to suffocate a story in the age of crowdsourcing. Westminster’s every effort to tamp it down has only made it louder. Ministers slow-walked official reports, they diluted findings, and they lovingly lacquered the false narratives— yet social media instantly began tearing those narratives apart like a sweater with a loose thread.

Ordinary citizens didn’t wait for London’s carefully staged disclosures; they built their own parallel investigations.

Alert British volunteers cross-referenced documents, archived leaks, mapped patterns, and shared their results faster than Whitehall could schedule a press conference. And now, the fallout is politically overwhelming: Starmer is the least popular prime minister in modern British history, and this scandal alone has enough kinetic energy to bring down his entire government.

The story surmounted every institutional effort to bury it, because the institutions no longer control the shovels. In this era, truth doesn’t stay suppressed— it crowdsources its way to daylight.

🔥 Washington has also noticed. This week, the State Department astonishingly announced it will begin treating governments that permit mass migration as potential human-rights violators — a geopolitical response driven by citizen-exposed failures like Britain’s. Newsweek, yesterday:

The announcement arrived one day after the citizen-led grooming-gangs scandal re-erupted in the UK and shamed Whitehall. The U.S. flipped the script.

Progressives used to call mass migration a humanitarian issue. But as Newsweek explained, “the State Department has ordered its embassies to report on the ‘human rights implications and public safety impacts of mass migration’ across U.S. allies, highlighting notorious sexual assault casesinvolving migrants in the U.K., Sweden and Germany.”

On X —i.e., on social media— the State Department called mass migration an existential threat to Western civilization. It continued, warning European government to stop censoring citizens who are doing the work their government won’t:

See? State isn’t responding to any official European government finding or to any mainstream media report. They’re responding to crowdsourced citizens, digital protests, independent researcher-archivists, viral documentation, AI-assisted investigations, and massive public disgust.

The grooming-gang scandal, once neatly “contained,” is now a stress fracture visible from orbit. In one very keen sense, when citizens can crowdsource the truths that governments once buried, global power structures must rapidly adjust or they’ll be yanked offstage by a giant hook.

🔥 The old Chinese curse whispers, may you live in interesting times. And here we are — knee-deep in a global transition that is exhilarating to watch but often painful to live through. Yesterday delivered another jolt: Georgia’s pandemic warrior and fiery peach, Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), abruptly holstered her feud with President Trump and announced she will retire on January 5th. BBC, last night:

Marjorie carved herself a permanent niche in our hearts during the pandemic for her stubborn refusal to kneel to mandates, bureaucratic nonsense, or the high priests of “The Science.” I’ll always count myself an MTG supporter.

But her departure is more than personal disappointment— it’s structural. Marjorie was the engine behind the House Freedom Caucus, the indispensable corral for establishment Republicans that helped secure Trump’s return to the White House. Her chief co-conspirator and fellow rebel, Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), is likewise now a former congressman.

Two of the movement’s most disruptive talents are exiting the stage at the very moment the curtain is rising on a new political era. As I said: the old orders are ending.

Marjorie announced her resignation yesterday with a Christmas-themed video and a five-page letter to America. Read it here. Her main theme was “America First” —and we’ll return to that shortly— but this particular paragraph felt like the beating heart of her farewell:

“My bills,” an exasperated MTG said, “just sit collecting dust.” That line said it all. Her frustration isn’t really with Trump; it is with Congress itself — the calcified, useless, slow-walking, self-protecting institution she’s been at war with since the day she arrived.

In business terms, Marjorie was never a consensus builder. She’s a change agent. A wrecking ball, just like President Trump. Her instinct has always been to resist the machine, not harmonize with it. That’s who she is, and that’s why her departure lands like another loud crack in the collapsing rafters of the old political order.

But here’s the harsh reality: Trump doesn’t need the chaos wing anymore. His first term was about demolition. The second term is about reconstruction.

Trump isn’t an insurgent president anymore; he’s an incumbent emperor with a bureaucracy to bend and a political class terrified of another round of tweets naming names. Marjorie and her chaos crew did their job spectacularly. They broke through the ice. They showed Republicans what a spine looks like. And now, the movement has matured beyond the need for constant fireworks.

History, as always, shows us the script. As the Psalmist said, there is nothing new under the sun.

🔥 The moment the Civil War ended, many of the most fiery, uncompromising abolitionists were quietly pushed out of power, neutralized, or politically retired, as the nation shifted from destroying the slave system to rebuilding the Union.

History provides a sharp parallel in Thaddeus Stevens, one of Lincoln’s fiercest and most indispensable wartime allies. Stevens was the Radical Republican firebrand who did the political demolition work Lincoln couldn’t do openly— pushing emancipation faster, hammering the slave power harder, and keeping Congress locked on a war footing.

But once the fighting stopped, the partnership dissolved. The country wanted rebuilding, not more TNT. Stevens, the conflict’s indispensable battering ram, suddenly became an obstacle to the calmer, negotiated work of Reconstruction. (For example, Stevens demanded that Southerners’ land be confiscated and given to Northern citizens in a ’40 acres and a mule’ type lottery system.)

Stevens’ sidelining wasn’t a repudiation of his wartime value; it was the classic post-conflict pivot. The firebrands who tear down the old order rarely get invited to design the blueprints for the new one.

We cannot know for sure. We’re far too close to the premises to have any historical perspective. But it seems like we’re now engaged in a similarly inexorable postwar reset, with MTG playing the modern role of Thaddeus Stevens.

But what is next? What does the postwar party look like?

🔥 Democrats smell blood. Yesterday, CNN reported that, in some polls,President Trump’s popularity is waning among independents. “Whatever he is doing with independents, it ain’t working. They despise him at this point,” CNN pollster Harry Enten said.

CLIP: CNN shows Trump -43 with independents (0:53).

On Thursday, Axios ran a story dramatically headlined, “Behind the Curtain: Republicans see dire 2026 warning signs in these 5 polls.” It began: “Everywhere Republicans look, they see big political trouble. Worse, they think things will get much bleaker before better.”

The article was slightly exaggerated, but it focused on a single factor driving the polls: perception of the economy. It’s not the actual economy, mind you. Axios didn’t even try to dispute that the economy is improving. And the article is schizophrenic; it first argued independents will vote against Trump, but later it also argued Trump can’t help Republicans win because the President isn’t on the ballot.

Well, which is it, Axios? Oh, never mind.

I won’t bother to debunk Axios’ overly hopeful political prognostications, because they will all change next week. The point is, there is a perception of midterm weakness built on a fake foundation of supposedly bad economic news and a “ MAGA split” over intractable issues like Israel, Epstein, healthcare, you name it.

And that was before MTG peaced out. The progressive Sunday shows tomorrow will be jubilant.

The stakes could not possibly be any higher.

🔥 I might have heard his name, but before last week, I had no idea who Nick Fuentes was. Suddenly, he seems to be everywhere. His visibility exploded right after Charlie Kirk’s assassination. It’s not just optics; the Heritage Foundation’s president (and key Project 2025 architect) was forced to resign last week after refusing to condemn Nick. “I disagree with and even abhor things that Nick Fuentes says, but canceling him is not the answer, either,” Kevin Roberts said, just before being blasted to smithereens by friendly fire.

Roberts wasn’t even defending Fuentes, not directly. He was sticking up for Tucker Carlson, who recently interviewed Fuentes and faces right-side cancellation for it. The Washington Post, on Halloween:

It’s hard to say just how influential Nick really is. His Twitter account boasts over a million followers, but even usually hyperactive lefty data sites claim those numbers are greatly inflated. For example, Open Measures, last week:

On the other hand, on Fuentes’ America First Rumble channel, a recent video got over a million views in just four days. Maybe Open Measures wasn’t looking in the right place.

🔥 As far as I can tell, Nick Fuentes is a twenty-something online influencer who apparently leads a fringe Gen-Z movement calling itself the “Groypers,” a kind of ultra-populist youth faction trying to yank the America First banner into furiously controversial territory.

The term “groyper” comes from a meme of a chubby, reclining cartoon frog meant to signal that these aren’t your grandfather’s conservatives, but an edgy, near-nihilistic, terminally online generation that delights in provoking both liberals and mainstream Republicans alike. It is the apotheosis of single-issue politics.

“I don’t give a sh–t if Republicans lose,” Nick said recently, “since they don’t work for us anyways.” Last week, the UK Telegraph reported about the Fuentes phenomenon, with this enthused headline:

Fuentes influences a sizable digital audience —mostly young Gen-Z men— through livestreams, Rumble shows, and social media bursts, blending anti-immigration absolutism, Christian-nationalist (Catholic) rhetoric, and theatrical denunciations of the GOP establishment. He has no actual institutional power, and no real foothold in Trump’s governing coalition, but he exerts cultural pull on the outer edges of the movement, shaping the mood and vocabulary of the most radical America First die-hards.

He seems especially influential to the critical young, male demographic.

Nick seems delighted that he’s been called all the -isms. In that sense, he represents a kind of understandably frustrated Gen-Z spirit: if you keep calling us that and canceling us anyway, then fine, we’ll be that. He’s been accused of being a fed or psyop designed to divide the party, and even if that isn’t technically true, there’s no way to tell how much his current surge results from deep state assistance.

🔥 Fuentes and Ben Shapiro are in open war. It’s a conflict extending back to Trump’s first term, in 2016, when Fuentes supported Kanye West for president. Fuentes claims the Daily Wire tried to entice him with travel to Israel for “education,” and Fuentes refused. Now the two are opposing generals in a culture war that tilted over into the mainstream right after Charlie Kirk’s killing. The Verge, November 6th:

Nick Fuentes has managed a feat that once seemed impossible: he’s made Ben Shapiro look like an establishment figure. Remember, Shapiro built his brand as the rebellious wunderkind skewering GOP elders and mocking “the regime media.” But Fuentes has dragged the political spectrum so far into the ideological badlands that Shapiro’s constitutionalism and classical-liberal instincts now read like Heritage Foundation boilerplate.

When Fuentes denounced Ben after the Tucker interview dust-up, Shapiro responded with the kind of boundary-policing rhetoric — “dangerous,” “fringe,” “beyond the pale” — that only confirmed the optics. Next to Fuentes’ racially-charged authoritarian cosplay and gleeful demolitionism, Shapiro now looks like the grumpy, boring, designated adult in the room.

And that’s without even invoking the spectre of Shapiro’s religious identity.

🔥 Unsurprisingly, Fuentes’s generational complaints center around affordability. Gen-Zers rightfully grumble that they’ve been structurally locked out of the American dream. Nick rightly complains about Republicans sayingone thing —“America First”— but then appearing to be preoccupied with foreign interests in the Middle East, Ukraine, their own self-interested stock trades, and so on.

In other words, Fuentes criticizes Republicans for appearing to put a lot of other stuff first, instead of young American white males. He doesn’t care if he’s not being even-handed. He’s not interested in talking about what the Trump Administration is actually doing. He doesn’t want to discuss 4-D chess, checkers, or even Chutes and Ladders.

He wants student loan slavery ended, a decent job, and an affordable house. And if he doesn’t get it, he’ll burn down the house.

Atop his more rational requirements, Fuentes delights in squirting on the lighter fluid: white people need equal rights, too many Jews are running things, women and gays have ruined America, and so on. He’s smart and well-spoken. He insists he is not racist or antisemitic.

But he tosses more rhetorical bombs than a cartoon anarchist. To give you a taste, scorching nearly every progressive red line and jamming his thumb in the eye of every older conservative in a single phrase, Fuentes recently called Vice President JD Vance a “fat, gay race mixer who’s married to a jeet.”

However sympathetic one may be to Fuentes’ underlying issues, however much one understands that Nick is “only” being provocative and “just” intentionally triggering liberals with “forbidden vocabulary,” it is devilishly tricky to defend something like that. Even at a distance.

Just ask former Heritage President Kevin Roberts.

🔥 The Trump Administration has not publicly weighed in on the Fuentes phenomenon. All he’s said publicly is that, “if Tucker wants to interview Nick Fuentes … then people have to decide for themselves.” But behind the scenes, the signals are flashing bright enough to illuminate a runway. Yesterday, President Trump posted his “American Dream” video clip:

CLIP: Trump— the American Dream (0.58).

The high-production-value video closes with the line, “Let’s make home buying great again.” It’s powerful, patriotic, conspicuously non-diverse, and aimed directly at the beating heart of Gen-Z frustration: housing affordability. Under cabbage-brained Biden, the median age of first-time homeownership rocketed to 40. Fox’s headline, three days ago, said the quiet part out loud:

It doesn’t take much imagination to connect the dots between Nick Fuentes’ surging influence among disaffected young men and Trump’s sudden decision to plant a flag on “the American Dream.” Trump didn’t name Nick, but the subtext was unmistakable: the Administration can see where the youth energy is flowing, and it intends to reclaim that terrain before the radicals can colonize.

What Trump is doing here isn’t subtle: he’s moving to head off a generational rebellion before it finds a real commander. Fuentes has tapped into something real and raw — the anger of young men who feel locked out of adulthood, priced out of homes, and mocked by the institutions that once promised them a future but gave it away to illegals and race hustlers.

That’s fertile ground for radicals.

Trump’s “American Dream” is a signal of his early effort to reclaim the conversation before the fringe can weaponize it. He’s telling Gen-Z, I hear you, I know your pain, and I intend to deliver the future the last era denied you.

🔥 We are living through the hinge of a revolutionary era. The Third World War opened with a pandemic and is beginning to close with a peace settlement in Ukraine, and the old political architecture is groaning under the strain. MTG’s departure is emblematic— one of the great demolition artists of the last decade is stepping off the stage just as the rubble clears.

At the same time, a new insurgency is probing the edges— the chaotic Fuentes–Tucker collision that suddenly made Ben Shapiro look like a member of the brass-buttoned establishment. That skirmish didn’t just expose an ideological rift; it revealed the vacuum left behind after Charlie Kirk’s assassination and after the Freedom Caucus shock troops retire, and a restless younger generation raised during lockdowns and medical mandates goes looking for a strongman who sees the world as they do.

Into that space steps Trump, not as the insurgent, but as the builder of a postwar political order. His “American Dream” clip wasn’t a victory lap; it was reconnaissance. A probing signal that says he recognizes the battle lines, the grievances, and the generational fractures, and he intends to shape the reconstruction before the extremists or the bureaucrats do.

The old order is fading, its strategies exhausted. A new order is forming under the pressure of transformative technology, radical transparency, shifting geopolitical alliances, collapsing institutions, and a restless, demanding youth that refuses to wait politely for empty promises that never actually arrive.

The demolition phase is ending. We have begun our reconstruction. And history, as ever, is choosing its next architects. How it will look once it is finished is up to us.

Have a superlative Saturday! Let’s regroup on Monday morning, to kick off the week of gratitude as we prepare the turkey friers and consider everything we have to be grateful for this year. See you then.

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