Trump Won. What Now?

How Trump and Elon Musk's Efforts to End Censorship in America Will Help Britain Too

President Donald J. Trump defied all expectations on November 5th, becoming not only the second person to win two non-consecutive terms in office but also winning the House, Senate, majority of Governors, and the popular vote. Trump’s mandate to rule is unrivalled, uncontested, and undoubtedly legitimate.

I haven’t stopped smiling all week.

Over at LotusEaters.com, we covered the election live all night as the results came in. You can catch the highlights of my time on the panel here — including conversations with former Deputy Assistant to President Trump, Sebastian Gorka, Count Dankula, and Fr. Calvin Robinson.

Having been burned by 2020, and all the “fortification” efforts which delayed the final vote tallies, we hadn’t expected Trump or Harris to be able to declare victory on the night. But when Pennsylvania was declared by Decision Desk for Trump, it felt as if all his supporters breathed a collective sigh of relief. Despite declaring Trump an unprecedented “threat to democracy”, architect of cliche dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale, and the reincarnation of Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini combined, Kamala Harris’ scaremongering was seen right through by a majority of Americans. Trump increased his vote share with women 18-30, Black men, and Hispanics; and won majorities among White men and women. 3 in 10 Black men under-45 voted for Trump — double the number in 2020. According to the Associated Press analysis:

Only about 1 in 10 women said electing a woman president was the top factor in their votes, and 4 in 10 women said it wasn’t a motivator at all. Black women were the most driven by the possibility of the first woman president, with about a third saying it was the main factor in their vote choice.

So, anyone not taken in by the non-White, feminist grievance politics peddled by Harris broke for Trump.

It is important to understand how this unilateral anti-White misandry motivates our opponents. The Harris campaign’s contemptuous perception of what motivates White men was a caricaturish mimicry of hunting, gaming, and football hobbyism by real-life Muppets character, Tim Walz; and a series of adverts which threatened to deprive men of additive internet pornography and sterile, emotionless hookups if Republicans won state legislature. Nor did ads encouraging women to lie to their husbands about who they voted for do wonders for attracting women who don’t hate the men in their lives either.

No wonder Harris / Walz’s campaign strategy didn’t work: as X account Reddit Lies revealed, it was run by terminally online Reddit users out of a Discord server, used to artificially boost the circulation of pro-Harris posts.

I covered how these campaign staffers and agent provocateurs tried to exaggerate Kamala’s crowd sizes, fabricate online meme-momentum, and may possibly orchestrate protests throughout Trump’s second term on the Podcast of the Lotus Eaters on Friday.

The contempt for political opponents on the grounds of their race, sex, and sexuality is purely coming from one side here. So what is the appropriate response?

Despite Trump building a broad coalition, encompassing left-behind-liberals such as James Lindsay and my friend Konstantin Kissin, the MAGA agenda has become a determinedly Schmittean beast: unafraid of distinguishing between political Friends and Enemies, and discriminating against them accordingly.

Anything but a procedurally liberal refusal to use power against one’s power-hungry enemies, for purely defensive reasons, has been labelled “Woke Right”. This new pejorative lacks a clear definition, but tried to steelman one in this article for the Critic — and proceeded to explain why “Woke Right” is a philosophically and tactically unsound term.

Telegraph journalist Michael Murphy has suggested the following [definition]: an interest in revising historical facts to depict one’s identity as an aggrieved constituency; and subsequently acting as if in possession of hidden knowledge. This shares elements with Kisin’s definition: “an ideology obsessed with victimhood identity and the falsification of history to suit today’s political agenda” — but in a right-wing way. […]

In the absence of a solid definition of Woke Right, what say we return to the definition of Woke proper, and see if it fits? 

Eric Kaufmann defines Woke as making “sacred totems [out] of historically marginalized race, gender, and sexual identity groups.” Literal communist Ash Sarkar agrees: “Woke culture is […] the redistribution of power, wealth, and land along race, gender, and class lines.” (A tautology when Sarkar redefines “working class” to mean “diverse” students.) Intersectionality, oppressor/oppressed, cultural Marxism… All these terms overlap. But Tucker Carlson phrased it most pithily: Woke is “LGBT Race Communism”. [...]

The challenge for Carlson’s critics is to dispute this working definition of Woke, in order to make the pejorative also stick to him. […]

Without a clear definition, Woke Right begins to look like an attempt by yesterday’s Left to tone police, gatekeep, and redefine the Right. That way, heterodox liberals position themselves as the sensible centre between two extremes, and maintain their positions of intellectual credibility no matter how far the Overton Window shifts. Antagonism will arise from left-behind-liberals seeking to rearrange the furniture on their new political side, without examining how their first principles rendered them vulnerable to Woke subversion in the first place. 

You can read and listen to the rest of the article here, at the Critic.

Point being: Trump must acknowledge his enemies are motivated by a hatred of White people, an inability to see men as anything but toxic, and a dangerous and fantastical view of human nature as subject only to economic circumstances and education.

As I wrote in a previous essay on what Democrats mean by “democracy” for Courage Media:

What we must understand is that “democracy” to Democrats means something very different than one man, one vote. As Emily Finley explains in The Ideology of Democratism, those who exalt democracy as a shared ideal are “enchanted with an imaginative vision of democracy that at times is almost indistinguishable from religious belief”.

Democracy is premised on the belief that human beings share an egalitarian nature, and are equipped with rational faculties to reach the same conclusion about what is in their best interest. Therefore, mass enfranchisement will produce a uniform, predictable, progressive outcome. Hence why Democrats abhor anyone imposing identity verification requirements, proof of citizenship, civics tests, or other criteria on access to voting.

Democracy, then, to Democrats, means: the system by which man’s free and equal nature is revealed to him, and expressed in identical fashion. As such, voting in a democracy is thought to be an exercise of everyone making the same choice over and over.

Anyone who disagrees with their fairy-tale vision of all mankind having equal outcomes, and free from the recognition of differences, is “a threat to democracy”. This is why Democrats’ rhetoric has led to efforts to censor, imprison, and even kill Donald Trump.

Hence why the likes of Steven Colbert have declared, without a hint of irony, that:

The majority has spoken and they said they don’t care that much about democracy. And I want to take a moment to congratulate Kamala Harris & Tim Walz on running an amazing 107-day campaign.

Democracy is just the mechanism of achieving Kamala Harris' favourite word: Equity.

This stems from a secular Enlightenment view of the world — liberal and Marxist alike. Whereas Christians have a much more constrained view of how both human nature and power operate. Christianity holds that innocent human life has innate worth, imparted onto us by our Creator, in that we are made in the image of God (Imago Dei). Therefore, a violation of the life, liberty to pursue the good, or property of an innocent person is an aggression against the moral order God has laid out — and therefore an aggression against God Himself.

No wonder, then, that Trump gained the support of 81% of white Evangelicals, 56% of Catholics, and 60% of Mormons. (How the remaining 19%, 44%, and 40% countenance supporting a candidate in favour of abortion and transgender operations is beyond me.)

Trump is an imperfect candidate for Christians, there’s no doubt about it. So why did they choose to make incremental gains on issues like abortion, transgenderism, and religious freedom, rather than withdraw from the electoral process in protest?

In an Election Day essay for Courage Media, I explained,

Under the Biden/Harris administration, the Department of Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network monitored the purchase of Bibles as “Lone Actor/Homegrown Violent Extremism Indicators”. FBI whistle-blower Kyle Seraphin alerted the House Judiciary Committee to an FBI-wide memorandum from the Richmond Field Office, which profiled “radical-traditionalist Catholics” as violent extremists. The memorandum instructed agents to infiltrate Catholic churches as a form of “threat mitigation”. It cited an Atlantic article, which said the rosary has been “woven into a conspiratorial politics and absolutist gun culture”. Recently, at a rally in Wisconsin, Harris expelled men who shouted “Jesus is Lord”, telling them, “Oh, you guys are at the wrong rally.” If the mobile abortion vans outside the DNC hadn’t made it clear, Kamala Harris thinks Bible-believing Christians are unwelcome in her version of America.

This is because Harris’ version of “Freedom” is one of total autonomy from limitations — including the burden of caring for a new-born or unborn baby. Abortion has become a sacrament, a sacred rite, in support of women’s freedom from constraints. As Mary Harrington writes, the “dependency of an unborn baby is less something sacred to be preserved than a threat to something sacred: the mother’s freedom”. […]

Trump’s stance on abortion is more agnostic. Despite being the first sitting President to attend the March for Life, Trump removed the call for a national abortion ban from the GOP platform. Both Trump and Vance said they would veto a national ban, and leave term limits up to individual states to decide. […]

Trump’s position has aroused ire from Christians, who point out the hypocrisy in allowing one state to treat unborn children as inviolable human lives, and a neighbouring other to kill them up to birth. […]

The issue for Christians, then, is not whether to vote for Trump or Harris; rather, whether to vote for Trump when his first presidency failed to prevent the loss of unborn lives. […]

A Harris administration is guaranteed to continue the on-demand abortions, persecution of pro-life activists, and mutilation of abused, confused children we have seen for the last four years. For all Trump’s flaws and embellishments, he does get issues — from immigration, to economics, to crime — correct. On abortion, where he provides an uncomfortable compromise, Trump presents an opportunity for Christians to make gains in the coming years. He keeps Christians as counsel, and lends a listening ear to those who bring their concerns before him.

I don’t know if this piece reached any undecided Christians among the thousands who read it, but if it convinced someone to leave the house, join the line, and cast their ballot for Trump on November 5th, then I feel I did all I could to help a country I love from across the Atlantic get back on its feet.

So what should Trump do next?

As RFK Jr. shared today, one of the Day One agenda items for the Donald will be ensuring First Amendment protections are extended to every American. He will pass an Executive Order preventing any federal agency or employee from interfering in the lawful speech of American citizens; prosecute those who have already done so; ensure Silicon Valley tech companies operate with sufficient transparency and cease censorship and shadowbanning in order to qualify for Section 230 protections; and implement a “seven-year cooling off period” for any employee of a three-letter agency (FBI, CIA, DoD, etc.) before they can enter an industry which handles vast quantities of U.S. user data. JD Vance has also suggested that the US will leverage its privilege as the leading nation in NATO to prevent European Union nations from targeting Elon Musk’s X with “misinformation” legislation.

Under the Biden / Harris administration — with the pretext of policing mis-,dis-, and malformation — the intelligence agencies and administration staff like Jen Psaki lobbied social media platforms and used custom portals to target specific posts and account for suppression and suspension. I covered this back in October 2022, on the Podcast of the Lotus Eaters — after the expose was published in the Intercept. We also know, thanks to sworn testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, that the 51 intelligence officials who put out a letter before the 2020 election calling the Hunter Biden Laptop story “Russian disinformation”, knew the story was authentic — and yet called it a hoax anyway.

During Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss & Michael Shellenberger’s Twitter Files, it was revealed that the FBI were in frequent contact with Twitter’s “Trust & Safety” team — the censorship node in the company. More than 150 emails were exchanged between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety head Yoel Roth. This should surprise nobody, as Twitter was also populated with former intelligence officials: including James Baker, the FBI’s former general counsel, senior supervisory intelligence analyst Matthew Williams, deputy chief of staff to FBI boss James Comey (of refusing to prosecute Hillary Clinton fame) Dawn Burton, and intelligence officer for the US Marines Jeff Carlton. During the Biden/Harris administration, social media was an outfit for the government, manufacturing consent for their policy agenda and silencing critics (especially during the COVID pandemic).

Elon Musk did the world a service by purchasing X, ridding it of 80% of useless staff members, and (as of this election) turning it into a tool to accurately gauge public opinion. His role in Trump’s administration means he is best positioned to both prune the weeds of American bureaucracy, and to continue his cold war against the UK’s Soviet premiere, Prime Minister Keir Starmer. The House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government has already demanded that the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, founded by No 10 Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney, hand over

“All records, notes, and other documents of interactions between or among CCDH and the Executive Branch referring or relating to “killing” or taking adverse action against Elon Musk’s X social media platform (formerly Twitter).”

“All communications and documents between or among CCDH, the Executive Branch, or third parties, including social media companies, relating to the identification of groups, accounts, channels, or posts for moderation, deletion, suppression, restriction, or reduced circulation.”

This followed an expose by Paul Thacker & Matt Taibbi which found the CCDH met and conspired with Democrat Senator Amy Klobuchar’s team to "Kill Musk's Twitter". They also met, on August 16th, with members of the UK Home Office, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, Ofcom, and the counterterrorism internet referral unit at the Metropolitan Police to demand “emergency powers” be granted to police “misinformation online”. This was while the government, police, judiciary, and Keir Starmer himself actively suppressed details about the charged suspect of the Southport massacre, Axel Rudakubana.

If Trump, Musk, and Vance can prevent the global effort to trap lawful discourse beneath a dome of censorship, then both the US and the Trump administration’s supporters in the UK and Europe will benefit.

The UK already suffers from multiple thought-crime laws — and the Labour government is intent on expanding existing legislation further to ensnare more political opponents in the nebulous net of “legal but harmful” speech.

As I wrote in The European Conservative:

Non-Crime Hate Incidents are defined as “an incident or alleged incident which involves or is alleged to involve an act by a person (‘the subject’) which is perceived by a person other than the subject to be motivated – wholly or partly – by hostility or prejudice towards persons with a particular characteristic.”

NCHIs are recorded whether or not the allegation of hostility or prejudice is supported by evidence. The burden of proof is placed on the accused, who is not required to be informed by the authorities when a NCHI is placed on their permanent record. The College of Policing’s latest guidance says, “Under the code, if an individual’s personal data is processed as part of a NCHI record they should be promptly notified unless the notification presents a safeguarding risk to the complainant.”

With the complainant considered a priori a victim, purely by claiming offence and membership of a “protected characteristic,” they are more often than not anonymised, and the recipient never informed. This scarlet letter can go undetected for decades—despite showing up on enhanced Disclosure and Barring Service checks, which can prevent NCHI recipients from getting gainful employment. NCHIs are not policed indistinguishably from crime, but rather more aggressively, as no evidence is required to de facto convict someone, and at no point in the recording process is the accused treated as merely a suspect.

34 police forces across England and Wales recorded 119,934 NCHIs between 2014 and 2019. The Free Speech Union believes this has doubled in the five years since Miller v College of Policing, to over 250,000—an average of 66 recorded per day. No wonder these same police forces have failed to solve 90% of crimes, including not one single burglary across half of all neighbourhoods in England and Wales.

You can read about how the last Conservative government’s efforts to improve NCHI law and guidance actually led to an increase in the number of NCHIs recorded every year in this essay, now on The European Conservative.

Cliched though it might be to compare all censorship to Big Brother, Starmer’s increasingly unpopular government is taking on the most jackbooted characteristics of Orwellian IngSoc. But they have long had allies embedded in the Home Office, working to thwart the agendas of government ministers who had hoped to do some actual conservatism for once. To wrestle control of the wheel of our self-driving woke state would require a complete clearout of the civil service, College of Policing, and the judiciary. It would also necessitate a repeal of the guidance, laws, and legislation which have legitimised criminalising the private thoughts and conversations of the British public. As of yet, no aspiring insurgent political force has committed to such a task. Until it does, each of us awaits our turn in Room 101.

Suffice it to say, the UK has its problems. America has counterpart legislation — like the Patriot Act and Biden’s National Security Memorandum on Partial Revocation of Presidential Policy Directive 28 — which enables intelligence agencies to spy on American citizens at home and abroad, which must be repealed in due course. But the modus operandi of Musk and the Trump Presidency makes more room to manoeuvre here in Britain, and means we aren’t alone when resisting tyranny by our own unpopular government.