Victory is sweet, especially after nearly a decade of being ostracized, demonized, and maligned as racists, fascists, and Nazis. President-elect Donald Trump’s resounding victory in November heralds a new age in the U.S. and a renewal of the American spirit that once made this nation great.
However, it is crucial that conservatives recognize that Trump’s electoral victory is far from a completed conquest; it is, rather, the first battle won in what must certainly be a much longer war for the heart and soul of America. Amidst the victory celebrations and ensuing excitement, conservatives must remain wary, for there are enemies still afoot, and not all are easily recognized.
The “Make America Great Again” movement championed by Trump since he rode that golden escalator in 2015 has garnered significant support over the succeeding near-decade, especially as Democrats Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, along with their cronies in Congress, crippled the U.S. economy with inflation and destroyed the nation’s borders, eroding everything from public safety to cultural homogeny. With the country in such dire straits, it’s little wonder that so many Independent voters, political dissidents, and increasingly disgruntled ex-Democrats have climbed aboard the MAGA bandwagon. But, just as with open borders, the danger comes with those who genuinely want to be here but have no intention of assimilating.
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There are several prime examples just from the past few weeks. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has recently been praised by conservatives for changes he is making to social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Those changes, as The Washington Stand previously reported, include doing away with the left-wing “fact-checking” system long employed on the platforms and recalibrating the programs previously used to censor conservative political speech, thought, and even news.
While the end of Meta’s censorship regime is welcome news to be sure, it is worth remembering that Zuckerberg participated in the fraudulent promotion of Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign by not only censoring and demoting conservative posts and accounts but suppressing bombshell news stories regarding Biden’s political corruption. Meta has silenced pro-lifers on its platforms for years, banning discussion of the incontrovertible moral evil of abortion. Conservatives would do well to recognize that Zuckerberg is not some champion of free speech and his termination of the censorship regime he implemented is no act of heroism; rather, he is simply reading the room and astutely realizing that suppressing conservatives online may not be the best business model under a Trump administration empowered by both the electoral and popular vote.
The MAGA movement itself has its own internal concerns to address, too. Tech billionaire Elon Musk, of Tesla fame, was long an Independent and described himself as politically moderate. He made campaign contributions to both Democrats and Republicans and reportedly backed Biden in the 2020 presidential election and Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016. It wasn’t until 2022 that Musk announced he would no longer be supporting Democrats, and it wasn’t until after Trump boldly and defiantly survived an assassination attempt in July 2024, that Musk endorsed his fellow billionaire for president. Since then, he has seemingly become a trusted Trump confidante, speaking at campaign events, spending time with the president-elect and his family at their Mar-a-Lago home, and being appointed to a role in the new Trump administration.
Much the same may be said of entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, the former Republican presidential primary contender slated to serve in Trump’s administration alongside Musk. Until 2021, Ramaswamy was registered as politically unaffiliated and admits that he did not vote in presidential elections until 2020 when he decided to back Trump. But when campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination in 2023 and 2024, Ramaswamy practically declared war on wokeism, castigating everything from the LGBT agenda and COVID-19 cultism to climate change hysteria and open borders.
After years of having precious few allies, especially in the mainstream, it may seem instinctual or intuitive for conservatives to embrace some of the richest men in the world after they’ve devoted their influence, reputation, and even a fair share of their substantial fortune to ensuring a consequential conservative victory. But, as Trump himself might say, “Wrong.” Musk and Ramaswamy are not conservatives. They have distinguished themselves over the past two years or so as staunch opponents of the woke agenda, which is certainly to their credit, but neither one is a conservative. They do not hold conservative values. For evidence of this fact, one need look no further than Christmas.
On the day when Christians celebrate the birth of Christ, Musk and Ramaswamy, neither of whom are Christian, started a war on social media over H-1B visas. For those unfamiliar with the sprawling world of U.S. visas, the H-1B visa program allows U.S. employers to hire foreign workers for jobs that would otherwise go to Americans — and pay them a mere fraction of a decent wage. Musk insisted that a key part of making great again necessitated drastically increasing the number of H-1B workers an employer can hire per annum, comparing America to a professional sports team. Ramaswamy went a step further, arguing that American culture produces lazy workers — as opposed to non-American cultures, which produce hard workers.
“A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers,” Ramaswamy claimed. He continued, “More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less ‘chillin.’ More extracurriculars, less ‘hanging out at the mall.’” Ramaswamy explained his reasoning: “‘Normalcy’ doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we’ll have our asses handed to us by China.”
Over the course of the next week, Musk and Ramaswamy proceeded to burn through all of the goodwill and political capital they had accumulated over the past several years — all for the sake of hiring third-world laborers to replace Americans for poverty wages. Americans were outraged that Trump’s new allies would so quickly — and blithely! — betray the promise to “Make America Great Again.” America is not an economic zone, it is not a farm for foreign workers, it is a nation, a home, and men have fought and died for it over the past centuries. But why would anyone be surprised? Musk is not a conservative, he’s an agnostic tech billionaire who turned against woke ideology after it impacted his family. Ramaswamy is not a conservative, he’s a Hindu capitalist who opposes the extremes of woke ideology.
At its America Fest conference, the conservative activist organization Turning Point USA lined up conservative media names like Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, and Jack Posobiec alongside Republican politicians, including Trump himself. However, the conference also featured speakers like Nicole Shanahan, who was a Democrat until the middle of last year, and Danica Patrick, a racecar driver and lingerie model who voted for the first time ever last year. Why were these people — with no conservative credentials whatsoever — invited to speak by one of the most influential conservative organizations in the nation?
It’s easy to get drunk on victory, especially after years of not having a drop, but conservatives must remain sober. Achieving a sort of cultural ascendancy is invigorating, forging new alliances with powerful men is exciting, and there is definitively what the kids these days call a “vibe shift” across the country. But conservatives aren’t the only ones who sense the vibe shift. Influential leftists, keen to maintain at least a modicum of that influence, will adopt a veneer of moderate conservatism in order to fly under the radar for the next four years. Some will even infiltrate conservative organizations and institutions, intent on covertly promoting or even rebranding their progressive agendas, lending them an air of conservative legitimacy in America made great again.
Others, with no malicious intentions, will genuinely ally themselves with conservatives in the hopes of restoring America’s credibility. While their efforts should be welcomed, they should be welcomed warily. For the first time in nearly a decade, conservatives have achieved a meaningful victory. That victory must not be hampered by allies who do not understand conservative principles or objectives, momentum must not be squandered catching those allies up to speed, and time must not be wasted on fractious infighting with newfound friends with different ideas.
Conservatives must be cautious, even after such a resounding victory. We did not endure eight years of smears and slurs, of being called every nasty name in the leftist’s lexicon, of being censored and silenced, of being ostracized socially and harassed professionally, of seeing our churches infiltrated by federal agents and our school board meetings patrolled by police, of being arrested for attending events and imprisoned without even being charged, of watching our president-elect get shot in the side of the head on live television — to have our attempt to reclaim our nation hijacked by newcomers, no matter how well- or ill-intentioned they may be.
Like our forefathers, we have endured much and fought a hard fight. Enjoy your win, appreciate your new friends and allies, but remember that there is much work yet to be done. Be cautious, or else this hard-won victory will all be for naught.
Originally published at The Washington Stand.
S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand. He has also been published by The American Spectator, Real Clear Investigations, and Crisis Magazine. He graduated from McDaniel College in Westminster, Maryland with a degree in English Literature and Communication.
