I’m not a political pro. I don’t claim to be. I’ve worked races. When Bob Livingston ran for governor of Louisiana in 1987, I was 17 years old and volunteered for him. Before it was over, the campaign had me supervising a crew putting up yard signs all over the New Orleans area. That’s how far back I go. I’ve written speeches, I’ve advised candidates in lots of levels of races. I run a PAC. I have political experience going back a while. But I’m a writer and a pundit by trade, not a political pro. So I don’t claim to know everything. All I can offer is impressions formed from years — if I say decades, that’d make me an old man, and I refuse to make such an admission — of watching the process play out, mostly from the outside but sometimes from the inside. And what I can say with as much certainty as anything I’ll ever put in these pages is that you can’t win elections with only the people who agree with you on everything. It doesn’t work. It never works. When America was a virtually homogenous country in which white-guy property owners were the only ones voting, getting even those people to create a consensus on the major issues of the day was more or less impossible. And it’s certainly not going to work in the America we inhabit now. Winning elections requires building coalitions. Winning elections requires building coalitions. And the Republican establishment, which seems to be hell-bent on recapturing the party now that JD Vance seems to be setting himself up as the leader in waiting in advance of the 2028 presidential cycle, utterly stinks at both. A couple of weeks ago, John Daniel Davidson knocked out a spot-on column at The Federalist identifying the attacks on The Heritage Foundation’s Kevin Roberts over the latter’s defense of Tucker Carlson — this was in the aftermath of Carlson’s more-or-less cordial interview of Nick Fuentes — as an effort to strip away allies of Vance and take him down. (RELATED: The Cold Civil War Is Now on Defrost, and the Right Still Isn’t Ready) Davidson had that perfectly correct, and everything we’ve seen in the Carlson-Fuentes-Ben Shapiro-Roberts free-for-all on the Right ever since has lined up with his theory. Particularly when you discount this kerfuffle according to the obvious context, which is that most of the people involved are podcasters and influencers who are trying to stay ahead of an algorithm that rewards controversy and nastiness, whether that algorithm resides on YouTube, Rumble, X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or whichever other social media platform through which these guys harvest their clicks. This has been blown up into a battle over whether “antisemitism has taken over the Right,” or whether Nick Fuentes is going to be the new Rush Limbaugh, as the conscience of the conservative movement. . @KevinRobertsTX aligns @Heritage with a demagogue who flatters dictators and scorns allies, and he muzzles Heritage fellows from speaking out. He is dismantling not just a think tank’s reputation but a generation’s work of conservative institution building. @TheSpectator pic.twitter.com/kXWSCxP9Hk — Joel Griffith (@joelgriffith) November 14, 2025 Quin Hillyer: In Tucker Carlson controversy, both sides must expel haters https://t.co/8IHW3HI7f4 via @nolanews Kevin Roberts failed. — Quin Hillyer (@QuinHillyer) November 14, 2025 All of this is fake. What isn’t fake, though, is that the Republican establishment residing in Washington is desperate to recover its relevance from the MAGA crowd, which makes up the lion’s share of the GOP’s voters. Most of the MAGA crowd are actually disaffected Bush Republicans. They joined Donald Trump’s coalition for various reasons, but the most prevalent of those is that Bush Republicanism was a fabulous failure. There was an interesting debate at X not long ago over whether Reagan conservatism failed… Did the Conservative movement flop, as many right-oriented populists claim? Just a few policy examples: In 1980, 1 state had a “shall issue” concealed carry law. Today “shall issue” (or no permit) is the rule in all 50 states. In 1980, the top marginal income tax bracket was… — Brad Smith (@CommishSmith) November 11, 2025 Limited government was not preserved, the rule of law wasn’t preserved, individual liberties weren’t preserved, and libertarian market absolutism was used as a shield to defend China methodically destroying our economy. Had “conservatives” made any major inroads in conserving… https://t.co/nZJKc6ZUgV — Wade Miller (@WadeMiller_USMC) November 13, 2025 But there’s a circle to be squared here, and it’s that Reaganism ended in late January of 1989 as the animating philosophy of the Republican Party, and the Bush “New Coke” version of what became known as conservatism took its place. And it took some time, but the Bush crowd gave away basically everything Reagan won. Which is why MAGA ate Bush Republicanism. And MAGA is a coalition of all kinds of people. Among them are young Americans and, particularly, young white male Americans. Lots and lots of them. If you’re Generation X or older and you’re white and male, what you remember about your teens and 20s is that you’d calibrate your politics in order to get dates. It wasn’t so hard to do, of course; you’d mouth a platitude or two about things like equal pay for equal work, and that would get you in the door most of the time. But over two or three or four decades of political, cultural, and even economic decline, everything has changed for the worse where this younger generation is concerned. And the millions of young white males who came together to elect Donald Trump in 2024, despite a profound, deep, and well-placed cynicism about politics and practically everything else, come from a very, very different set of experiences than we older folks have. Worse experiences. And at the hands, I’m sorry to say, not just of the Left but of the Bush Republicans. So it shouldn’t be a shock that the kids will vote for Trump, and probably for Vance, but not for Winsome Earle-Sears or Jack Ciaterrelli. And maybe not for your Republican nominee for Congress next year. Because, they ask, what’s the point? The sale hasn’t been closed with those kids, you know. They’d vote for Trump because the alternative, Kamala Harris, is the personification of every negative experience most of them have had in America. She’s the preachy, incompetent female who insists she’s as good as all the men, when she’s relied on men to elevate her at every stage of her career, not on merit but on something else. They didn’t call her Heels Up Harris for nothing, you know. She speaks in the kinds of jargony gibberish they’ve had to endure all through an educational experience that turns out to be wholly inadequate to the professional challenges they face in an environment where Corporate America is actively trying to price them out of the job market with foreign workers of every stripe and status imaginable. Not to exclude openly discriminating against them with woke DEI hiring and HR policies. You’ve got to be considerably more hard-working, smarter, and more technically competent as a white man just to get in the door of corporate America today, and once you’re there, you then have to immediately submit to endless arrays of diversity and sensitivity training, struggle sessions, and countless other digs at your character and identity. Interestingly enough, this has forced many, if not most of them, into the small business world where they then get to experience all the joys of being regulated and jobbed by an economy rigged by the same woke and failing corporations that rejected them in the first place. On Thursday, I had the Clay & Buck Show on the radio in my truck, and a caller — an unemployed engineer recently turned out of a corporate job — told the story of a former co-worker who had come to the Chicago firm where he’d worked fresh off the plane from Mumbai. This co-worker, said the caller, had worked it out based on what an apartment cost back home, and the exchange rates that a one-bedroom apartment in Chicago would cost him about $450 a month, and used that mistaken impression in his salary negotiations. So he was hired at a pittance, and an American lost his job. And the co-worker then found out he couldn’t make ends meet at the minimum wage salary he’d negotiated and unsurprisingly asked for a raise. The answer? Work at the rate you agreed to, or we’ll have you deported. This is what Generation Z is living with. There are 750,000 or so H-1B visa holders here, and in what should be lucrative white-collar jobs, they dominate because they work for almost Third World wages. H1B’s taking 55% to 86% of entry-level tech jobs. That’s not bringing the best and brightest. That’s hawking the first 3 rungs on the ladder. https://t.co/LRaeGesgKD — Peter St Onge, Ph.D. (@profstonge) November 14, 2025 6.1% of new Computer Science grads are unemployed. 16.5% are underemployed…meaning they’re in jobs that don’t even require their degree. Engineering grads? Even worse. 7.5% unemployed 17% underemployed And there is no law requiring companies to hire Americans before issuing… pic.twitter.com/TedRrN3FZz — Hany Girgis (@SanDiegoKnight) September 15, 2025 Palmer Luckey on H-1B visas: “You would not believe what I saw in Silicon Valley. The H-1B abuse is insane. It is obviously a scam to replace US workers with, basically, slave labor that can’t ever escape.” pic.twitter.com/aGBNGPJ1jx — Geiger Capital (@Geiger_Capital) November 12, 2025 This is a generation of young men that faces structural economic challenges that no Americans have seen since the Great Depression. Its experience with academia — run by an educational establishment which is monolithically female and feminist and which has buried masculinity with medication and “zero tolerance” discipline at the lower levels and a plethora of openly cultural Marxist, intersectional curricula at the higher levels, such that young men are increasingly checking out of college altogether — is more negative than any of the preceding generations. And culturally, it’s more disadvantaged than any of its predecessors. Gen Z males were denied a John Wayne, a Chuck Norris, a Sly Stallone, and an Arnold Schwarzenegger. They didn’t even get a Bruce Willis. More of them than any of their predecessors had to grow up without a father figure at all, and had to figure out their masculinity in a mine field. But they’ve got access to all the recorded media since Edison. They aren’t ignorant of history. In fact, they know all about John Wayne and Chuck Norris, and it’s not lost on them that those role models, and the American experience of the 1950s through the 1990s, which produced those icons, have been denied them. Of course they’re angry. And of course they’re resentful. And of course they’re questioning all of these “timeless truths” that the political establishment has insisted they bow to. So when an Andrew Tate or Nick Fuentes comes along and offers a transgressive challenge to that orthodoxy and is promptly shouted down and — I use this term advisedly, as I’m simply adopting the argument for conversational purposes — persecuted for the transgression, to many of these kids that’s a signal that the establishment which they blame for destroying the America their grandparents once had fears the transgressors. And they find that sexy. Because of course they do. Our generation used to thrive on rebels, not fear them. Some 40 percent of American women under 45 surveyed by Gallup say they’d leave America if they could. That’s the dating pool these guys live in. They’ve dealt with that kind of rejection all their lives, and it’s why they don’t approach women anymore. Tell them they should try, because the worst that can happen is she’ll say no, and they will give you a reasoned argument why you’re wrong. They can show you the countless TikTok videos of women screeching about the unattractive young man who hit on them and gave them the ick factor, and the social media destruction unlucky young guys lacking in game have endured. She can make it a lot worse than just saying no. And if you’ve been given few cultural tools and even worse signals, the chances of it being a lot worse are not zero. Throw in the dating apps and the horrific swipe left/swipe right binary dating culture is reduced to, plus the outrageous materialism of modern feminism which reduces men to payers of bills (and how the Zoomer guys priced from the workforce by foreign labor when not hunted out of existence in corporate America going to build the kind of equity which gets them on the right side of that equation?) and our Gen Z males are starting to run across the same experience their counterparts in China face, but for different reasons. China’s one-child policy resulted in the mass abortions of a huge portion of the female children in the past two generations, so the math doesn’t work out for its younger men. In America, it’s the culture and economics that increasingly don’t work out. Is it a lost generation? Miraculously, no. But it’s a generation of seekers. They want a way forward, and they’re committed to nothing. Why should they be? And to save America, we’re going to have to lock them into our coalition. By whatever means necessary. This column isn’t intended to defend Carlson against Shapiro. If that’s what you’re taking from the above, shame on you. Read it again. Nor is it intended to excuse poor attitudes or underperformance. But right now, we cannot afford to dismiss anyone as a loser. We need a very big tent. Our opponents in the civil war, which is defrosting in our national microwave, have made it very clear how this all ends if they win. (RELATED: The Four Rings of Terror — How Violence Targets Conservative America) It ends in a ditch. With a bullet. We’re the ones fighting to keep that all-too-common reality from happening. We sent Charlie Kirk — it’s much fairer to say he sent himself, but our side staked and supported him — to college campuses just to talk to people and win converts. They shot him dead for it, and now they offer wisecracks about “kirkholes” on social media as not-so-idle threats in an effort to shut us up. (RELATED: Demons and Demonization) This is a fight to save, and maybe restore, some semblance of the America these kids have been denied. And we’ve got to enlist them in this fight when our only real currency with which to do so is that their grievances against the Left are greater than those they harbor for the Bush Republicans. By a little bit. Talk to Kevin Roberts, and he understands this. But they’re trying to get rid of him, just like they’re trying to cancel these other people. Rather than engaging and converting — and then turning out in all the election cycles — the people our coalition can’t win without. And if we can moderate some of the excesses of our new friends, it’ll make us morally superior to the modern Left to boot. We don’t have to listen to the Bush Republicans anymore, and we shouldn’t. There is far too much at stake. READ MORE from Scott McKay: The Dog That Didn’t Bark and the Bombshell That Didn’t Explode Trump and the GOP Won the Shutdown. Let’s Make Sure Trophies Are Taken. Five Quick Things: The Mamdani Matriarchy Sets Up Shop In NYC