Are Young Americans Swinging Right?

Hi, I'm Ravi Agrawal, foreign policies editor-in-chief. This is F.P.Live. His America's Gen Z is swinging right. Numerous polls show that the youngest American voters are more conservative than previous generations were at the same age. 43% of people under 30 voted for Trump in 2024. And his previous two bids for the presidency, only 36% did. Young people are usually more progressive. So what's going on here? In a moment, I'm going to speak with a journalist and commentator who's built real expertise understanding the American right. But first, here's one thing on my mind this week. As I taped this on Thursday, October 9th, the big headline is that Israel and Hamas have reached a breakthrough. They've agreed to the release of all the remaining Israeli hostages in exchange for a much larger number of Palestinian prisoners. To say the least, it's encouraging news. If the exchange goes ahead as planned, if the deal holds, it could mark the end of a war that has devastated Gaza over the last two years, roped in several other countries, and polarized the world. President Trump likes to seek credit as a dealmaker. And one has to say, he deserves credit here. The terms of the deal itself are hardly new. President Biden put a version of this on the table last year. So did Trump several months ago. What's changed is the spate of recent diplomacy, which comes in the aftermath of Israel attacking Hamas leaders in Qatar on the 9th of September, an issue that we covered last month on FP lives. The attack failed, Doha was furious at what it saw as a breach of international law, and this is where Trump really stepped in. He extended new security guarantees to Qatar and forced Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to apologize to Doha. Now Israel could no longer target senior Hamas leaders in Qatar, and therefore, the idea of completely eliminating Hamas was no longer viable. For Hamas as well, it was becoming increasingly clear they couldn't keep hiding behind the hostages. If the deal didn't work, Trump had given Israel a carte blanche to go all out in attacking Gaza City. Now a lot could still go wrong. First, I'd be cautious about celebrating until the exchange of hostages in prison is actually goes through. Second, we shouldn't forget that this is just phase one of the plan. Hamas hasn't agreed to give up its arms, Israeli troops will pull back, but we don't know how much and for how long. Third, we're going to learn a lot more in the coming days. Remember Gaza is completely devastated, hopefully aid floods in soon, but so will new reporting and stories about what actually happened there. Fourth and finally, the future is still very murky. Hamas has not given up claims to governing Gaza in the future. Netanyahu's cabinet still includes far-right elements who want to claim all of Gaza. A plan to govern Palestinian territory still looks far away, as does the possibility of statehood. But I'm going to leave that for another day. For now, it's nice to have something at least slightly hopeful to report on this story. Let's get to our scheduled interview. I said I want to understand why young Americans are turning right. I also want to understand what American conservatism is today, and how it navigates Trump and MAGA. There are all these reports about divides within the right. What are they? Why do they matter? And crucially, what happens after Trump? My guess this week is Emily Jashinsky, an American journalist and commentator known for her work in conservative media. She's the DC correspondent for the media company Unheard. As always, our email is live at farmpolicy.com. Let's dive in. Emily, welcome to FP live. Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here. It's our pleasure. So I want to start just by learning a little bit more about you. You're often described as a conservative journalist. I mean, first of all, is that right and what does that mean? Absolutely accurate, I'd definitely feel open about where I come from on all of this ideologically. So I see myself as somebody who does the best job possible to bring new information to the forefront from a conservative perspective and then to analyze it from a conservative perspective and have worked with a lot of students. I've had multiple jobs in the kind of conservative youth movement, training young conservative journalists for several years. So it's definitely been a very interesting experience to go from what the conservative youth movement looked like in 2015 to what it looks like now in 2025. So there are all kinds of interesting things we can get into. Yeah. I'll spend one more beat on this because I mean, I'll confess, I'm a fair bit older than you, I think Emily. And one of the things that I think is new to me on this is this trend for journalists today to identify their political affiliations. I mean, so that's counter to what I was trained to do, for example. And I run a magazine that publishes people ostensibly on the left and the right. So just tell me a little bit more about why that is the way it is now. What's behind the trend? Yeah, that's a great point, especially on the right. We've seen this happen over the course of decades. And my own path was I worked at conservative organizations and jumped into media immediately on the opinion side. I was actually never doing sort of the shoe leather, neutral reporting. I jumped all the way from conservative activism right into having an opinion byline at the Washington Examiner and stayed on the opinion side from there. Though I had a great editor at the time who was really intentional about making sure we knew how to do kind of the basics of reporting. And that's been the trajectory of conservative media, which once the conservative movement sought to train young journalists who could go populate the newsrooms of legacy institutions, but be sort of secretly conservative and balance the media that way. But as I think technology democratized the media space, especially as blogs erupted during the odds, that changed. And it really shifted towards actually just putting more people who have open conservative voices into the media. That has advantages and disadvantages of course, but it's also almost inevitably part of where the media is going just because of the way the delivery systems for news are changing. And so I think that's also been part of the trend and part of it has also just been exasperation that it was becoming almost impossible for conservatives to find themselves in these newsrooms anyway. I was just going to say because when you said that there's this larger project of sorts to balance, and that comes from a place of feeling like it is not balanced, right? So there's a correction in that sense, or at least in the minds of conservatives, that needs to be the case. And I imagine this will be a through line in our conversation. Just one more question about you before we get to the meat of this. The right is not a model and there's a pretty diverse coalition of conservatives in America right now. Where do you fit within that spectrum? It's another great question. I consider myself sort of just a normal conservative, but I also did sign on to the national conservatism declaration and tend to side more, be more sympathetic to positions in the quote, new rights space, though I have plenty of disagreements with it as well. So that's the unique. What is the new right? Yes, this is the big question of course. My litmus test for what's new right versus old right because there have been other iterations of new right and old right, you know, 50 plus years ago as Charles Kessler has written about this a lot over at the Claremont Review of Books, but right now I think the best litmus test is if you are fundamentally sympathetic to the MAGA cause, if not Trump himself, but just sort of the realignment of the Republican party. If you're sympathetic to that, I think you're considered new right. It's very hard to categorize people because right now there are a lot of insincere MAGA folks who are saying they love tariffs, for example, but they don't actually love tariffs. They just love Donald Trump and they're sort of more old right figures. They don't like the tariff regime. They don't like industrial policy. They don't like changes to foreign policy, like anti-imperialist, anti-adventurous changes in along the lines of what JD Vance would advocate for it. So that line is still there, but it's kind of covered up right now by the Trump of it all. You still see some people who fall outside of that and do absolutely to test Donald Trump and think his voters are mistaken. They tend to now run in more never-Trump circles and spend more time, you know, like the bulwark crowd, Bill Crystal, David Fram over at the Atlantic, they're not really associated with the conservative movement anymore. Those lines, though, within the conservative movement, after Trump will be much more exposed. Interesting. So I'm understanding here the old right. I know the old right well. I mean, in the foreign policy world, they, of course, you know, our viewers and listeners will know them as the people who worked in the Bush administration or the ones who were advocating for the war in Iraq. And Newright also begins to make sense now. Where do you fit within that spectrum again? I mean, I would say I'm generally sympathetic to, like, quote, "Newright." This idea that the fusionist coalition of neo-conservatism, social conservatism, and fiscal conservatism, that Frank Meyer at National Review said, "Those are the three-legged schools of the conservative movement in order to defeat communism." I actually don't really think that coalition holds up anymore. So I find myself in that position, but also not particularly in love with everything that comes out of the Newright, either especially reorganizing government, executive branch, all of those sorts of things, tactically, I get uncomfortable with that. So it's just sort of, I have a hard time categorizing myself right now, but I think that's true of many people. OK, so given all of that, and with that backdrop, first of all, is it correct that young Americans are trending conservative right now? And if that is true, why? It's a great question. It's true that young Americans are trending conservative. A lot of that comes from young men, particularly trending conservative. These trends tend to be more acute with young men. And what we actually see sometimes is these numbers being dragged in the conservative direction by the movement of young men, even while young women are being nudged actually in the opposite direction, it's just that the shift among young men has been so dramatic. We start seeing these larger generational figures going up. Now, it's extremely complicated because even with votes for Donald Trump, if we use that as a proxy for being dragged right, which, you know, there are all kinds of complications of doing that, but if we were to do that, young women moved to away from thems. So that's a really interesting trend. I don't know if it's just because of Kamala Harris or just because of Donald Trump, but there are some ways in which I'm big cultural question. So like immigration is a good example. It's like 45%. This is from a poll in September, 45% of young men support Trump's immigration enforcement policies as of September, and that's about 21% among young women. And I think what's important there also is he's underwater with both of those demographics. Neither is over the 50% line. It's just unusual for conservatives to find themselves in this position where they have any level of support among younger Americans that's approaching the 50% level. But you know, one of the murky aspects of say immigration here is that I think there's a big gap between Trump's rhetoric and execution. And so for example, for all the talk of mass deportations, you know, I remember they were saying they might deport millions and millions of people. And we're nowhere near those numbers. Instead, the point of the rhetoric it seems to me is to put a giant do not come here sign, especially on the southern border, but also elsewhere through H1B legislation and other stuff like that. So that gap, the reason why I bring it up is it's unclear to me whether younger Americans adhere to the rhetoric or the policies as they are being enacted. I think that's a great point. I think that's true of the public more broadly. I mean, after Trump was elected in 2016, support for immigration peaked basically. That's where the Biden administration comes in and feels like it almost has a mandate on immigration. And so it's just really hard to know, especially with Trump, because so much, intentionally so much of his policy is about the performance. It's about the theater. And in the case of immigration, of course, to your point about the giant do not come sign. A lot of this is intended as a disincentive. A lot of it is also just trying to nudge the over-tune window into the position of Republican rhetoric on immigration being completely intolerant of gang of eight style, old right Republican politics, where, of course, Marco Rubio infamously joined up with Democratic senators to pass a, you know, what the Tea Party base at the time said was an absolutely intolerable immigration reform, comprehensive immigration reform bill. So I think it's, it's a little bit of both happening. And I will say, I mean, we've seen recently Zach Bryan, who's a popular country singer, especially with younger men. He's had a line. He has a lyric coming out in a new song about ice busting down your door. Joe Rogan has-- What does that mean? Sort of this idea that ice is acting authoritarian, like authoritarian bugs being in the song. And Joe Rogan has a couple of times expressed discomfort with Trump's immigration enforcement policies. And these are, I mean, these are interesting cultural signifiers for where we could see the attitudes going in the future. I didn't expect to bring this up, but Taylor Swift has a new album out. In this new album, do you detect some sort of a move towards the right there as well? This is actually a great example. It looks like a move towards the right. But I would say it's not necessarily right coded because she embraces marriage and sort of the white picket fence American dream vision. She talks about wanting a block full of kids who look like her and a basketball hoop in her driveway and really criticizes the decadence of Hollywood people who have dogs and some children of a year after she endorsed Kamala Harris by holding up her cat in an Instagram post as a nod to the JD Vance childless cat lady line. And so it does seem like Taylor Swift has been swept up in the vibe shift among younger Americans a bit at the same time though, it's, I think, would be a mistake for the right to claim Taylor Swift as some sort of conservative victory because I don't think there's any evidence that Taylor Swift's politics have shifted to the right. So much as maybe she's had a cultural lifestyle change over the last year or so. So there's definitely a distinction. There's overlap between those things but a distinction, I think, too. Okay. So that was a bit of a detour. I'm going to take us back to 30,000 feet and again, keeping in mind, we have many viewers and listeners around the world who do not understand America anywhere near as well as you do Emily, but coming back to the vibe shift and then also the trend of younger people being more attracted to the right. Why is that the case? Is it a broader sense that the system itself wasn't working? Is it a broader sense that America had just gone too far in a certain direction? What is it? Is it a backlash? I think it's totally a backlash and this is again where it becomes difficult for conservatives who interpret some of this as pro right when it's mostly anti-left. And that's a really, I think a more helpful way to look at it because when I talk to students, what I've found over the years is Charlie Kirk's a really good example and Charlie Kirk and I were both in the conservative youth movement at the same time coming up in the conservative youth movement at the same time and he believed that actually these cultural issues, this was very common coming out of the Tea Party era, were dragging the right down in the United States. By the time he was killed, Charlie was almost exclusively talking about cultural issues, not about tax rates and how, you know, debating rush, shetty and all of these questions that were super popular in the Tea Party era. What is the proper scope of government intervention in the healthcare industry? He was almost exclusively talking about marriage, children, religion, abortion, immigration. I think Turing Point USA at one point had a culture war tour and a lot of that started around COVID. So if you talk to young men, my experience talking to young men, it's that some of their earliest political memories are the Me Too movement, our cancel culture and then all of this explodes when COVID hits and young women too, but especially young men, that was a sort of paradigm shifting experience, completely formative for all young people across the board. I think in ways that we never quite reckoned with and it's a prize a lot of people when it showed up in support for Trump in 2024. I don't know that it's durable support for the Republican Party so much as it is, people are willing to support Donald Trump if it means not supporting Biden, Harris, the people that they in some sense blame for their experiences during COVID. This is very interesting to me because you're essentially saying what the ascendancy of the new right is about is anti-left. What I think the Democrats have also struggled with in recent years is that it is hard for them to articulate a strategy that is anything other than not Trump, and so what I'm hearing now is two sides that are essentially saying not the other, but what is the right stand for? What is it for? This is the challenge for the right in the Trump era because when we look at how Donald Trump approached the question of TikTok before he became president again, before actually he had donors like Jeffrey Yoss coming to him and saying you should save TikTok. This is just one example of many, where what Trump stands for is I think charitably called pragmatism. You could use your charitably called the pragmatism and not always ideological. That then means that people in the right kind of scramble to either get themselves from point A to point B because Donald Trump has and their politics are now becoming pragmatic like Donald Trump's or to go back to basics and figure out what they actually believe is Trump right or wrong on this. And so for me, because so much signaling comes down from Donald Trump to people on the right, I genuinely don't know where some people actually will go when Trump is no longer there to be the person signaling, I'm sure he still will from the sidelines, but to be the person signaling, this is what the right things about TikTok. This is what the right things about who should get H1B visas or asylum. It's amazing how those shifts I think are just papered over because people would say I just support Trump, I trust Trump, and then nobody has to kind of do get out because Trump had the final say. So honestly, I don't think the right has a good understanding of that now at all either. Yeah, and I'll just spend one more beat on this going back to where we started because when you said a lot of the growth of the media of the right conservative media was to balance a perceived kind of imbalance in the system, in the media system. And this is why it strikes me as relatively new that journalists and commentators are describing themselves as right and filling that vacuum because when you do so, it is harder than to critique the leader in power who is representing the right is not. And so I guess the question I want to unearth out of that is how does the right grapple with elements of their leadership that they might disagree with? And again, I'm trying not to portray any group as a monolith, right? So a lot of the people who support Trump, they're things they agree with, they're things they disagree with. How do they grapple with the things that they disagree with that they hear? I love this question. And it's actually one of the reasons that I'm in journalism is that when you spend time in activist circles, movement circles, and you're somebody who is kind of more interested in the real story than, you know, I don't even know how to say it, like, wins and losses or, you know, playing shirts and skins, it's really, really hard. It would be really hard to just work in the nonprofit world. And I think a lot of people who find themselves in influencer spaces, we see it on the left too, don't really get that balance right and to their detriment actually because I think their audiences want to trust them and have some sense of authenticity and ability to believe what they're saying is not paid propaganda. That's been a huge explosion in different controversies as the fact that people are getting paid has emerged in media reports over some period of time. But even if you're not in that predicament as an influencer who has like some media platform but isn't technically a journalist, you still have trouble in the Trump era on the right because there's nobody more sensitive than Donald Trump himself to these loyalty litmus tests. And so, there's, I've literally been part of conversations where people are discussing how on earth when Trump came back into the office are conservative supposed to offer was the right word for it like a helpful feedback or something like that. Constructive criticism is the phrase that I was looking for in the Trump era when there are so many litmus tests for if you're with us or if you're against us and that happened, I mean, that crystallized after the 2020 election is that these litmus tests became even more important for Donald Trump and the people around him. So I do think that's been a problem. I do think downstream of that we've seen less criticism on, for example, genuine free speech problems in the Trump administration for people on the right who stake their careers in some cases on free speech battles against the Obama and Biden administration. So it's definitely a challenge in with Trump almost unlike any other politician ever would be because he has these loyalty tests in place of ideological tests in many cases. And so it's become difficult for people who don't just sort of who aren't able to let go of any concern. And that's why it's great to be in journalism because you don't have to worry about playing on a team, but a lot of people who step into these new media spaces still feel like they're part of a team and that makes it really hard for them to have honest conversations. And you are listening to Foreign Policy Live. Remember, you can catch these conversations live and on video on foreignpolicy.com. Love is get to send us questions in advance in addition to a range of other benefits including our magazine. Sign up. This episode is sponsored by ClearPath. ClearPath is a conservative energy advocacy organization that works on accelerating American innovation to reduce global energy emissions. ClearPath CEO Jeremy Harrell joined FPs Energy Forum on the sidelines of this year's UN Annual Meetings. Stick around after the episode to hear more. I'm going to take some subscriber questions. One of our subscribers is Krish Bulak and he wants to know if there are any regional or socio-economic features that distinguish the typical young Maga Voter. I mean, I think we find the young Maga Voter like many of the swing Maga Voters in 2016 and 2020 and 2024. People who voted Obama Trump, Biden Trump or Obama Trump Trump Trump in some cases in the rust belt and in places where there is real economic suffering. I think we can expect that to expand to be more of a nationwide phenomenon because when you look at some of the polling, one of the things we do see is that alienated young men, unhappy young men gravitate towards populism and that is now not a regional feature necessarily. It's something that is happening to people, I mean, the alleged assassin in the Charlie Kirk case. This is a person who came from a two-parent family and seemingly a happy household and we're still spending almost all of his time, ostensibly in these online spaces, radicalizing online spaces. So it's coming to every neighborhood regardless of sort of de-industrialization. But I think you do see these patterns clustered as of right now, I just expect that to grow. You know, the psychologist Jean Twenge argues that young people aren't really more conservative. They're just rejecting the establishment in a way that is very radical. Do you agree with that? Because when you were just talking about the voting patterns to be able to vote for both Obama and Trump, something very deep has changed there because whatever you say about Obama or Biden, they were creatures of the system in many senses, whereas Trump is a complete outsider. I love that point from Jean because it reminds me of Taylor Swift, right, and that some of what's seen as being anti-establishment, then get seen as being pro-conservative, but it isn't always because sometimes what's anti-establishment is the creepy cult of Luigi Mangione that's popped up and become a meme in Gen Z circles. And that's hardly conservative, but it's definitely anti-establishment. And so when, you know, I was growing up, Taylor Swift was growing up, there was this movement in the Glossy magazines to say it's okay for women not to get married, which of course is true, but it's okay to find your fulfillment and your purpose in the, quote, like, childless cat lady lifestyle that was sort of embraced. And I think what, when you see Taylor Swift rejecting that, it is kind of a rejection of this perceived establishment position, but it's to categorize it as conservative. I do think is a mistake because it is, I think, probably a backlash more than anything else. So I think Gen is like nail on the head in that way. And in many senses, the, I mean, this is the harsh shoot theory, right, where at times now, it is hard to distinguish between the new left and the new right where both drawn populism, both drawn and narrative that the system itself isn't working. You need radical, dramatic change that many of the forces of the last four decades, whether it's globalization, urbanization, technological shifts, all of that has gone too far. And if that was a backlash, then we need a new backlash to the backlash. I hear this from, you know, the Bernie Sanders left and from the MAGA right. But as you cover and report on the right, is there a cognizance on the right that a lot of what they say can often sound like a lowercase L left? Yes. And that's part of where you see people who are united under the banner of Trumpism for now on the right, having these conversations in private, mostly in private, sometimes it bubbles up, but they're really uncomfortable with some of the young Trumpism that's come into the mix. Israel is the best example of this privately, and we're sadly seeing this layout in public right now. But privately, there is so much discomfort and I think really ugly tension on the right because young people on the right are so, so polarized from older people on the right when it comes to their beliefs about Israel. And that has created this very fraught internal battle over the question itself. And the young right actually is not that different from the left. There are some important differences, but especially in the ideological, if we're talking about like a really hard and conservative ideologue versus a very hard and young liberal ideologue, there are obviously important differences, but when it comes to what US involvement should be in that conflict, there's so many similarities. And that makes people on the right extremely uncomfortable in private, some of it's playing out publicly, but that battle has been really, really better internally for a couple of years now. So let's talk about foreign policy more broadly now. You know, I think you're absolutely right on Israel. There's been a real shift in the American mood, but be in the Republican Party mood, especially among younger voters. And it's very telling that Marjorie Taylor Greene, I think was the first Republican in Congress to call what's happening in Gaza, genocide, she's been very open about this. And again, an outlier initially, but you can tell that people are rallying around her. What is the through line of what a Republican foreign policy is today? It's the two simple words America first. Everyone will agree with that in theory. But what does that mean, right? So does that mean colonizing Greenland, taking Canada and then doing a sort of targeted regime change operation in Venezuela as seems to be on the table right now with the Trump administration. Nobody knows. And that's why, you know, some of these questions, they're great questions. It's just nobody has the answer because so many people take their cues as to what America first is from Donald Trump himself, I just saw this debate playing out on X with, I think it was Dinesh D'Souza yesterday, who was saying Donald Trump defines what America first is. Donald Trump defines what MAGA is. And so your, it was about foreign policy. So your interpretation of what's America first towards Israel or your interpretation of what's America first towards Venezuela is completely secondary to whatever Donald Trump thinks it is. And that makes, again, what happens after Donald Trump leaves office? I genuinely, genuinely don't know. I can say that the trends are, you know, not towards rubber stamping more. If I may, Emily, even before we get to when he leaves or after he leaves office, how do you, as a conservative, commentator, feel about that one thing that the articulation of America first is what one man thinks and that it is essentially a vague articulation because, you know, I mean, self-interest has always been the driver of foreign policy. So the idea that you would place a country self-interest first is not new at all. So it's a branding tool at some level, right? So how do you feel about that? How does the right feel about that? Yeah, I know. It's absolutely a branding tool. And to that extent, it's better than what came before. I think that much is. It's set a tone that is definitely an improvement both politically and in substance from the everyone that was on the stage in 2015 running against Donald Trump in the Republican primary. My perspective is that he has shifted the over-tuned window on foreign policy in a way that is much healthier, both for the right and for the country. So that much, I think, is good. On the other hand, the fact that there is more of a pragmatism, Trump's ideology is more pragmatic than it is sort of political in the sense that he's coming from, as he sees it, he will define America first as the terms of any negotiation that he's entering into that might be. Greenland is a really good example of this. Is America first this Monroe doctrine, as some people have tried to cast it, or is it smart adventurism, smart, these questions are hard to resolve because Donald Trump defines them bit by bit. And I think that is genuinely difficult. At the same time, though, the pragmatism is an improvement over this template that gets applied, whether it's to Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, different places in Africa, in these sort of global war on terrorism moment. So again, it's a good starting point. I don't know where it goes as somebody who is definitely more sympathetic to the JD Vance approach to foreign policy. I don't know if JD Vance is what defines America first after Donald Trump or if it's Marco Rubio. Interesting. So I have a lot of sympathy for the argument that what happened before was not ideal. And I think that that is a great debate to play out. On Trump himself, however, and especially for viewers of this show, for example, if you threaten to take over another country, I mean, they're real sort of, we've been describing this as vague so far, but those are red lines. That's international law. It breaks international law. There are real global consequences to that. You pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement. There are real global consequences to that for climate change, et cetera. I'm not going to get into all of that here, but one of the things that you mentioned about Dinesh D'Souza earlier about this articulation of, you know, what Trump thinks is the manifestation of American foreign policy today. How does that play into another big ticket issue? And that is growing fears of authoritarianism with consolidation of power and the executive, federal troops in American cities, some detentions of op-ed writers for criticizing Israel, investigating firing political opponents. Again, I'm not saying that some small part of these things haven't happened before. I'm not going to play the left or right card, but how does the right accommodate these things that on the face of it seem very problematic? I came of age during the Obama era where the right was constantly criticizing the executive for being overly powerful, over things like DACA, one really good example of that. And abusing this concentration of executive power for political goals. And what we've seen is, in some cases, this very sincere, well-thought-out ideological plan from people like Russ Vote, who are troublemakers, kind of the tea party moment, and really actually disagree with things like Humphrey's executive, which limited Franklin Delano Roosevelt, obviously as he was trying to encroach on the powers of, like, these, quote, independent agencies. And I personally actually think some of that is completely fair, helpful, and have had conversations with folks on the left, who also, when you give the example of a Democratic president wanting something to happen at the EPA and a former Chevron lobbyist, actually having the powers to just sort of go by and the president's back and do what they want to do, I think some of this can be really, really healthy. But, and this is where it's always difficult with the Trump administration, because the president himself is a real-politic, raw-powers politician. That then manifests in ways that go beyond the sort of conservative vision for architecture of separation of powers. And so, I mean, I think people should absolutely be, and this is part of the problem we discussed earlier about the kind of new media influence or class being more team players than they are journalists, even if they act as journalists and think of themselves as journalists. There's serious questions about civil liberties, free speech that are being raised right now, by the way the Trump administration is prosecuting Trump's domestic policy vision. And there's just very little pushback to it, because people are afraid of failing that litmus test of loyalty. What is the point of publicly or even privately raising issues when you support this broad effort to take down the left, to crush the left, even though there are some obvious signs of cracks in the foundation. So, again, there's also this question of, people do genuinely trust Trump. That might sound odd, but there are people who genuinely just trust Trump's instincts, because he's proved them wrong in different ways. You know, there are people who said, we have to moderate, conservatives have to moderate on immigration to everyone in election again. Trump comes in on a build the wall platform and trounces their Republican primary. So, some of it is people genuinely deferring to Donald Trump. A lot of it is people being afraid to fail the litmus test and push back on what would be seen otherwise as excesses of government power by a small government movement. Isn't your sense then that if a lot of this movement right now is built around one person, one person's views and loyalty to that person, after Trump, is there a movement then to accommodate some of these contradictions and maybe sort of smooth them over into a through line of, this is what the new new right actually stands for, principles beyond one person. Right. Yes. And I think that was sort of what Project 2025 was intended to do by the Heritage Foundation. Which Trump disavowed and now does not disavow. Yeah. And it was, you know, this like wonky white paper adventure that was happening behind the scenes and bringing together a lot of different conservative groups to think through what does the conservative movement believe on all of these important policy questions, some of which were really in the weeds, for example, how to use the powers of the FCC if there's another conservative administration and how much Donald Trump is actually holding to some of these conservative visions for what the government should look like. We're only a year in and there is again, not even a year in. There's so much just deference given to Trump. Like, I actually don't know how this tic-tac deal ultimately ends. I don't know how the Israel deal ultimately ends. And I don't think many people do know how it ultimately ends, how long does he keep troops in these cities? How far does he go on that? I have no idea. My guess is that it's going to go beyond what a sort of limited government conservative movement would otherwise be comfortable with. We're foreign policy. I have to just try to connect the dots here a little bit globally. How does the rise of the American right fit into or dovetail with the rise of the right more globally? Think of Orban and Hungary, also strongman leaders in places like Turkey, India, Duterte when he was in power in Philippines was also a name that got cited a lot. How do you think about the connections between these? Is there a feedback loop? How does that work? One of the reasons this is also interesting is the backlash versus, I don't want to say pro-lash question, but whether this is an anti-left movement or a pro-right movement, and I do think that's one of the through lines we see, especially in Western populism, whether it's AFD, popular front, or reform, or MAGA, is so much of that coalition is held together. I mean, part of what's difficult to talk about all of this is because the coalition is so diverse in a way the old American conservative fusionist coalition under the anti-communist banner wasn't, I mean, they were able to find so much common ground for so long that tied together neo-conservatism, fiscal conservatism, and social conservatism, to the point where rarely, if you were at CPAC, these big conservative gatherings for decades, yes, there were some moments of discord, but it was rare. There was a lot of unity on those questions, and now I think part of what makes it difficult to even talk about this is the rights coalition. It's such a big chunk of it is what in America has been dubbed "barstual conservatives" by the great writer Matthew Walther, people who are largely socially left on a lot of these different policy questions, but have this almost instinctive reactionary politics that is stemmed in nationalism, I think is rooted in nationalism, if you look at reform or France in Germany, it's something very similar to that. So I do think, as you were pointing out, one of the important throughlines here is just having a huge chunk of your coalition being more anti-left than pro-right. The Trump coalition, for example, is not this massive tea party limited government movement. That's just not what the mega coalition is part of. And maybe you can make that argument better if you're Nigel Farage or to the extent you would want to, or someone overseas, but that's really similar, I think, is when you're bringing in so many anti-left people to the coalition. What does that look like in Hungary when Orbán has to hang onto power? But it's a great question, and one that he is obviously confronting right now. Yeah, one last question. I'm going to channel some of our subscribers, Kate Acker, Sidney Fried, many others. We haven't talked about religion much so far, and I'm interested in your take on the correlation between the popularity of the right and of religion. And it strikes me that, you know, young people, for many decades now, the trend was that they were becoming less and less religious, fewer people were going to church in America. And again, keeping a global lens on this, this is not just an American issue. It's the same for many other religions and many other parts of the world. What is happening now in terms of the new attraction to the right among young people? And how is that correlated to a re-attraction to religion, if at all? Yeah, it's exactly what we were talking about earlier. In my experience, at least talking to younger men, in particular, also younger women on the right. But what COVID did was make people question the foundations of civilization. That sounds dramatic, but I think it's absolutely true. It really sent people back to basics. And part of that was the sort of psychological ravages of technology in our everyday lives, kind of thinking about that in ways that if we put ourselves in the shoes of Gen Z, people who grew up, they were born into a world with smartphones and Wi-Fi, like oxygen. So being isolated during the pandemic really did send people reeling and questioning some of these absolutely foundational principles that we had just been conditioned to accept or tolerate as pillars of everyday life in the 21st century. And with that came this craving among some people, not all people, because again, we're seeing the split in different directions, young women becoming more liberal as young men become more conservative. It shows up when you talk to people who run churches, parishes, they're really, really seeing more young men. And what the young men are looking for is, as they tell it, some sense of sort of meaning and purpose and order. And it's very easy, I think, to connect the dots between the pandemic. And, you know, 2024, 2025, young men returning to more traditionalist churches, not necessarily going to the politically moderate congregations, but actually going to, for example, parishes that offer Latin mass or very traditionalist evangelical churches. Why? People who work in those spaces say that it really comes down to that desire to have a sense of order and the sense of a sort of transcendent purpose that feels much more ancient and feels much heavier than a lot of the ethereal media we consume through technology and a lot of the ways that it affects our lives. So it's sort of a predictable, in some sense, now looking back on it, it's a predictable trajectory, but it's happened so fast and furious that I think it did catch a lot of people off guard. Yeah, I agree with you in that, in hindsight, it's predictable that COVID would have created this massive reckoning, really, with our lives, our cultures, who we are, our traditions. The open question, I think, is whether that would have led people to the right or the left, because I think either side could have claimed it, but it seems like from this discussion, lowercase C conservatives have, Emily will have to leave it there, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. And that was Conservative Commentator and Journalist Emily Gisinski. As always, if you want to watch these live and on video, you know where to go, foreignpolicy.com/lives. If you live the podcast is produced by Rosie Joulin, the executive producer of the show is Donna Shurn, and I'm Ravi Agrawal, I'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored by Clear Path. Clear Path is a conservative energy advocacy organization that works on accelerating American innovation to reduce global energy emissions. Jeff Wilson, Senior Advisor for Energy Dominance at the Export-Import Bank of the United States, spoke with Clear Path CEO Jeremy Harrell at FP's UNGA 80 Energy Forum. It's important to understand that there are a number of tools throughout the federal government that can be deployed, XM being one of them, but we've talked about DFC here, we've talked about TDA and other parts of the federal government that can come to bear. But this isn't something that we generate on our own. This is something where we partner with the private sector and we partner with other nations and we do exactly what you talked about. We find the incremental value add for our ability to finance these projects that puts it over the hall. That makes it a little bit more competitive because what we do know is that private capital has a lot of places to go. Private capital is a coward and where we have strategic interest in having capital deployed, it's not necessarily where capital is most comfortable going all the time. That's the way we think about part of our role at XM is to come alongside companies like this and to say, "Hey, where are you having a little bit of problem with this off-taker? Where are you having a little bit of financing issue? It could be a credit risk perspective. We can't get over the hump, we can't get comfortable." Those are places where XM can really fill the gap and where we really lean on our partners across the federal government and we say, "Hey, look, this is a critical strategic interest for the U.S. government. This is a place we want to be and this is an industry that we want to be in and we just need to help make this happen. There's a gap that we can fill and it's an opportunity not to compete dollar for dollar with the Chinese, but to find that incremental place where we can really make a difference and unleash the private sector and it all comes back to us. We've talked about resiliency and we've talked about supply chains. We have a supply chain resiliency initiative that's built on that very premise that the stronger our supply chain is here in the U.S., the better that is going to allow us to project power and to build this influence and to build these relationships across the globe. We're going to enter into better economic partnerships when we or better ourselves. There's a huge opportunity there. Yeah, I was going to say there's probably not a greater example than nuclear where we've seen this administration try to drive all the tools forward. Everything from the way the tax code ended up playing out at the end of the big beautiful bill where tax incentive will until the early 2030s remains available for clean firm reliable technologies like nuclear, like geothermal energy storage, hydropower. The president has set a long-term 2050 goal and a short-term goal of over 8 reactors under construction by the end of this decade. You're seeing modernization at the NRC to improve the regulatory process so we can scale quickly. You're really seeing the DOD, the DOE, and other entities across government find nimble ways to support early-stage deployment and innovation so that we can build today and then ultimately promote US technologies abroad and make sure things like, "Geever, know of a small-moderi actor is a central part of meeting our rising demand in the US and an essential US offering globally to meet what is now a big global 3X of nuclear goal by 2050 by over 31 countries." If I could, I think there is a market demand signal for building more faster now. You've clearly seen from the administration and from President Trump, four executive orders on nuclear alone, I mean, energy, energy, energy, supply chains, more now, let's go. That's what we take as our mission is, our mission is to move forward faster and to not be an impediment to deploying the capital and the projects that we need across the spectrum. We don't want to be an impediment to this process because it takes a long time as it is. What we also know is on the execution side, there's a significant amount of risk in the execution side and what we know is that in nuclear in particular, some of these projects have taken longer than they should and they've cost more than they should and what we know is being on time and being on budget is going to be critical and it will make financing and unlocking financing for projects so much easier when we do that. We know that takes a lot of work and being the first serial number is always the most difficult, you know, but what we also know is that the more we do this, the more we're going to be able to standardize processes and make things more modular and make the supply chains more robust and so that we're not having to start from scratch every single time and that's one of the exciting things about financing things like nuclear for us is that it advances that ball and it gets us from a place of being slow and deliberative and to only getting a few projects done to really moving forward faster and to growing the economy here domestically. That's the key. That's what this is really about for us is about putting more money in taxpayers' pockets about putting more jobs in American's hands and about providing a better standard of living for the American worker. That's what we're doing and this is exactly how we do it. To learn more about energy innovation, visit clearpath.org.