Against Conservative Cowardice

According to William F. Buckley Jr., the role of a conservative is to stand athwart history shouting “Stop!” But it seems Bill’s successors have abandoned even that defensive posture, and now call for a full retreat instead. It is this unwillingness to take responsibility for the failures of their ideology, and lack of solutions except surrender or consolidating the gains of the left’s last revolution, which has rendered a whole class of conservative pundits no longer credible to my generation.

When Ben Shapiro appeared on the Triggernometry podcast last week, it wasn’t anything he said about New York’s new third-worldist Mayor, Zohran Mamdani, nor his ongoing feud with Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, that caught X’s attention. Rather, it was his advice to young Americans being priced and pushed out of the cities in which they were born and raised: “If you’re a young person and you can’t afford to live here then maybe you should not live here.”

“I know we live in a society that says you deserve to live where you grew up, but the reality is that the history of America is almost literally the opposite of that. And if the opportunities are limited here and they’re not changing, then you really should try to think about other places where you have better opportunities.”

Shapiro insisted that his words were benign taken out of context. He suggested lawmakers should cut regulations and abolish rent controls. which limit housebuilding and discourage landlords from leasing eligible properties, to make housing more affordable. And all of that is reasonable, given the Biden administration’s inflation made homes prohibitively expensive, and punished those with good credit in pursuit of financial “equity”.

But conspicuously absent was any mention of the pressure placed on jobs and housing by immigration. Things became more incredulous when Ben paired his response to his critics with a defence of the 85,000 H-1B visas issued every year to foreign workers. It was prompted by the President’s clash with Laura Ingraham over H-1Bs and a potential 600,000 visas for Chinese students, where Trump said “No, you don’t [have the talent]” the economy needs among the American people. This contradicted the President’s Executive Order attaching a $100,000 penalty fee to each H-1B visa, which he signed in September. It prompted a chimp-out among the MAGA base; but Ben Shapiro saw fit to advocate for the continued replacement of American workers with cheap foreign labour.

“One of the fascinating things that’s happening on the right is that there are a lot of people on the right who seem to simultaneously complain about affordability, but also want to restrict the factors that lead to affordability”, Shapiro said. It must have slipped Ben’s mind that those 85,000 additional entrants each year — accompanied by 400,000 annual renewals, thousands more of their family members on H-4 dependent visas, and compounded by record citizenship grants over the last decade — all need somewhere to live too. Those houses are not made more affordable to young Americans who can’t get a job either, because they’re competing with a worldwide labour pool.

The unemployment rate for Americans aged 20—24 was 9.2% in September; up by 2.2% compared to September 2024. This figure will continue to rise as large firms make layoffs to replace positions with AI. One-in-four unemployed Americans holds a college degree, from colleges superior to their foreign counterparts. STEM sectors have seen a decline in overall headcount in 2025, making positions even more competitive. Such sectors are the dominant recipients of H-1B visas; and many corporations use the profits generated by Americans as political donations to lobby parties to make it easier to import their cheaper replacements.

H-1Bs are not issued to those with irreplicable skills, needed to fill jobs that Americans can’t do themselves. They are abused by foreign visa lottery mills, and some of the US’ largest employers — Amazon, Apple, Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Walmart — to replace American workers with cheap foreign labour. 80% of H-1Bs are issued for entry- or junior-level jobs, paid at a rate 36% less than their American counterparts. 71% go to Indian applicants — who, for some reason, India itself are not eager to retain. Ethno-nepotistic hiring practices have led Silicon Valley to be dominated by Indians, from CEOs to junior coders. They did not found these companies, but rather supplanted the executives of Microsoft, Google, Twitter, YouTube etc., fired the staff they inherited, and replaced them with co-ethnics from the Subcontinent. One egregious example was a software company awarded >5,000 H-1B workers, while firing 15,000 domestic staff at the same time. H-1Bs are an ethnic racket, and must be abolished.

Ben’s argument was that, “if you do not bring in the labor supply, particularly to tech, tech will go find the labor supply”. But the idea that tech startups, competing with the sclerotic will permanently outsource itself to Calcutta, when India ranks in the bottom percentile in per-capita inventions throughout world history is absurd. Ask yourself: if GDP rocket-fuel is being reliably produced by the Subcontinent, then why has India not surpassed America as the global superpower? If more Indians are the answer to America’s problems, then why does India have any problems at all? And if the choice is either to employ millions of Indians in America, or millions of Indians in India, the majority of Americans will choose the latter rather than drive their culture to extinction within a generation.

Some noticed that Shapiro would never tell Jews to sever their ancestral roots and move away from Israel, should the United States revoke its aid Memorandum and make the region indefensible. That’s because nations are bound together by more than economic interest. If thousands of Indians are of such benefit to America’s economy, why is Israel not importing thousands of Indians also? Because it would seem that Israel prizes its demographic integrity, and prioritises the interests of its people over GDP growth-at-all-costs. Countries are homes, full of families with irreplaceable members — not opportunity zones. If a people’s claim to indigeneity is legitimate despite almost 2,000 years of exile, then heritage Americans, who have resided in states since their ancestors arrived on the Mayflower, also deserve to live in the cities their forefathers built. And it is no less a tragedy for Americans to become a diaspora in exile in their own homeland than it was when Jews wandered the desert and Europe awaiting a return to the Promised Land.

But Shapiro treats Americans and foreigners like fungible economic units, who can slot seamlessly into a GDP-generating machine like so many cogs. He decries the antisemitism of Mamdami and “globalise the intifada” movements, while saying he doesn’t “give a good damn about the so-called ‘browning of America’”. Immigrants seldom leave their cultural baggage at the airport. Encouraging young Americans to move away from their hometowns and cities in pursuit of economic opportunities perpetuates this demographic churn, and renders their culture unrecognisable.

Christopher Lasch wrote scathingly of such blasé punditry, and “politicians who praise ‘family values’ while pursuing economic policies that undermine them”, in his posthumous book Revolt of the Elites (1997) (p.100-101). Concerning the corrosive effect of capital on community and culture, Lasch wrote:

“Self-reliance does not mean self-sufficiency. Self-governing communities, not individuals, are the basic units of democratic society… It is the decline of those communities, more than anything else, that calls the future of democracy into question. Suburban shopping malls are no substitute for neighborhoods. The same pattern of development has been repeated in one city after another, with the same discouraging results. The flight of population to the suburbs, followed by the flight of industry and jobs, has left our cities destitute. As the tax base shrivels, public services and civic amenities disappear. Attempts to revive the city by constructing convention centers and sports facilities designed to attract tourists merely heighten the contrast between wealth and poverty. The city becomes a bazaar, but the luxuries on display in its exclusive boutiques, hotels, and restaurants are beyond the reach of most of the residents…

The new elites, which include not only corporate managers but all those professions that produce and manipulate information—the lifeblood of the global market—are far more cosmopolitan, or at least more restless and migratory, than their predecessors. Advancement in business and the professions, these days, requires a willingness to follow the siren call of opportunity wherever it leads. Those who stay at home forfeit the chance of upward mobility…

The new elites are in revolt against “Middle America,” as they imagine it: a nation technologically backward, politically reactionary, repressive in its sexual morality, middlebrow in its tastes, smug and complacent, dull and dowdy. Those who covet membership in the new aristocracy of brains tend to congregate on the coasts, turning their back on the heartland and cultivating ties with the international market in fast-moving money, glamour, fashion, and popular culture. It is a question whether they think of themselves as Americans at all. Patriotism, certainly, does not rank very high in their hierarchy of virtues.” (Lasch, p.8, 10-11)

For a republic to be sustained, the population must be stable and their culture coherent. For democracy to function, and reasonable compromises reached to redress grievances, voters must consider themselves what Roger Scruton called a pre-political “We”: a community with a shared frame of reference, and consideration extended to members with whom they disagree on logistical and economic matters. For politics to be based on issues, the existential questions of identity must be settled.

Prioritising economic growth cannibalises the families and culture which sustain prosperity. Economies are the aggregated activity of homes (oikos), composed of the people who comprise the nation, and whose children inherit the culture through a generational chain. And a home ceases to be a home if strangers outnumber and evict the homeowners. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, conservatives who trade the demographic security of their country for expedient economic growth conserve neither their country nor economic growth. If you aren’t conserving the nation’s people and their culture, by ensuring they can own homes, have jobs, and raise families, then the only thing you’re conserving is the GDP.

By importing millions of immigrants and encouraging young Americans to move to wherever is most frugal, estranged from their extended families, Shapiro is undermining the cultural givens upon which the American republic rests. Identity is thrown into flux. The economy produces more of Ben’s ostensible progressive enemies, by linking upward mobility to membership of the transient professional managerial class. Progressivism is as much a consequence of the market dislocating young people from the families, communities, and congregations which shield them from predatory ideologies as it is ideology itself. It provides the ethnic and economic grievance politics of Zohran Mamdani demographic and cultural fodder. Shapiro’s advice only accelerates this process, and proves both self-defeating and ruinous for the country at scale.

Such cognitive dissonance is typical of legacy conservatives: with their characteristic dismissal of conversations about demographics and immigration as icky, or easily remedied by economic opportunities and osmotic “integration”. They have been called Con Inc. by young renegades who recognise the consensus on culture and identity has been unsettled by mass migration and liberal economic policies. Turns out, “If you’re being replaced, just move” is not an attractive sales pitch to the next generation.

Older conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic get misty-eyed reminiscing about Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, whereas Zoomers are more likely to admire Enoch Powell and Pat Buchanan. But what exactly did the Reagan generation conserve? Reagan passed the nation’s first no-fault divorce law while governor of California; and his 1986 amnesty bill for illegal aliens meant the last Republican to win the state was Arnold Schwarzenegger. His victory over the Soviet Union made global neoliberalism a bipartisan consensus. Reagan’s successors, George Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton, negotiated and signed NAFTA, his initiative, inducted China into the World Trade Organisation, and outsourced manufacturing overseas in pursuit of cheaper consumer goods. His support for anti-communist colour revolutions continued the failed doctrine of liberal interventionist nation-building, begun by Woodrow Wilson, escalated by Henry Kissinger, and continued under both Bushes, Clinton, Obama, and Biden.

By offshoring manufacturing, free-market neoliberals hollowed out the American middle class, desolated the job market, and abandoned their countrymen to deaths from drug abuse and despair. They made the populist economics of Trump and Vance possible — which is why many are rewriting their Never Trump records to stay relevant. But lessons have not been learned, and the same figures fought an imprudent proxy-war against Vance becoming heir apparent come 2028, using Tucker Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes, a week out from state elections in New York, New Jersey, Minneapolis, and Virginia. Unsurprisingly, after spending a week declaring their party is just as full of Nazis as their opposition has accused, Republicans lost across the board. Con Inc. succeeded neither in cancelling Carlson or Fuentes, nor in keeping its opponents out of power. By making concessions to be seen as polite by their progressive opponents, conservatives only ever cleave allies away from their right, and gain neither respect nor power.

What, again, have they conserved? When Gabe Guidarini asked that same question about the Reagan generation, Dinesh D’Souza vowed to “wipe the arrogant smile off the faces” of ungrateful young Republicans who dare revisit his legacy. What casus belli could they have, living in an America with record debt, frequent race riots, political assassinations by leftist perverts, and the impending prospect of whites becoming a minority?

D’Souza is another shareholder in Con Inc. which many Zoomer reactionaries, myself included, watched in the nascent years of our interest in politics. D’Souza famously cancelled Pat Buchanan adviser Sam Francis from The Washington Times in 1995, accusing him of playing white identity politics. Many quotes attributed to Francis in D’Souza’s book The End of Racism were fabrications; and after legal action by American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor, the publisher pulled and pulped the first print run. But Francis’ cancellation stuck, and just like Bill Buckley before him, D’Souza succeeded in gatekeeping those to his right out of the coalition calling itself conservative.

But on the same week that Shapiro picked his fight with Fuentes, and estranged young men by telling them to move away from their hometowns because Indians deserve their jobs, D’Souza dropped the decades-long advocacy for colourblind meritocracy to side with Indians who harassed travel blogger Tyler Oliveira for filming their excrement-throwing festival, Gorehabba. “It seems like the future belongs to the poop-throwers”, D’Souza posted beneath Oliviera’s statement that death and rape threats against him and his family had made him reconsider releasing the footage. Why did Dinesh, a Christian who spent fifty years policing white identity politics, come to the defence of vicious Indians who consume cow faeces to cure cancer rather than his ostensible fellow American? Why does Dinesh support the H-1B scheme, when it benefits India instead of America? As his nemeses in VDARE have observed, it turns out everyone is a blood and soil nationalist for somewhere.

The reason why the next generation of conservatives is playing identity politics is that every group except the indigenous white populations of the West have been allowed to, at their expense, for decades. Resorting to a politics of identity, rather of issues and policies, is the natural consequence of rendering our pre-political “We” incoherent with unprecedented demographic change. Decry them though they might, the legacy right fails to recognise that, without immigration, both America and Britain would not have ethnic identity politics. And the willingness to engage in identity politics for Jews and Indians, while denying collective bargaining for Englishmen and Heritage Americans, is a contradiction that cannot be sustained. Young conservatives refuse to play that rigged game. They see Con Inc. as hypocrites; or worse, as being willing to side with the anti-white left against those practicing white identity politics. This defeatism and double-standards have rendered Con Inc. irrelevant for a generation.

No better example of this Boomer / Zoomer divide exists than Britain’s most famous curmudgeon, Peter Hitchens. The congenital contrarian has spent his career journaling the decline of Britain, from its education standards, to its imperial power, to its uglified window-panes. His diagnosis is correct, but when pressed for solutions, he tells enterprising young Brits to abandon their ancestral homeland and live in more economically prosperous exile. Hundreds of thousands are already heeding his prophecies of doom: with falls in net migration driven by record numbers of millionaires and British citizens (257,000) leaving the country last year.

“How tiring it is to listen to political rubbish about immigration”, Hitchens writes in his most recent column, encouraging Zoomers to join Britain’s demographic revolving-door by leaving “before it’s too late…” Grumbling like a stone face from Labyrinth, Hitchens laments, “There is only one end to this sort of mess”: economic catastrophe, “horrible levels of inflation, a catastrophe that leaves its victims alive, dwelling on in a blasted society as ghosts of their former selves.” Nowt to do but accept your banishment, before Britain “turns away from democracy altogether in disgust and dismay”.

This omnicrisis, as Auron MacIntyre argues, makes the arrival of a Caesar figure inevitable. Just as in Rome, our ruling elite have debased our currency, imported a mercenary slave class, and put property out of reach for the plebs. Birth rates are at record lows, a third of pregnancies are aborted, and contraception has made many sterile. Sex acts are streamed to the smartphones of ten-year-olds that would make Empresses Messalina and Theodora blush. The bread is stale, and all the clowns have left the circus for Congress.

Such emergencies require an executive figure willing to wield power with virtue to break the cycle. I don’t entertain delusions of being “Zoomer Napoleon”, but if Britain’s Bukele did appear, pressed the “Fix Everything” button, and was willing to incarcerate any miscreant who smokes a spliff or rides an e-scooter, Peter would still find a poem to quote to poke holes in his plan. Actually doing something about the problem would be intolerable, because it would require forgoing the procedures and norms that men like Hitchens hold sacred, despite them doing nothing to prevent the destruction of their nations.

Simultaneously, Hitchens is advocating for ISIS bride Shamima Begum be brought back to Britain to stand trial. The British-born Bangladeshi absconded in 2015, married Dutch convert Yago Riedijk, who fought for Islamic State, and joined its Sharia morality police. Begum birthed and lost three children. She was stripped of her British citizenship by then-Home Secretary Sajid Javid in 2019, on the grounds her return was “not conducive to the public good”. The ruling was upheld by the High Court, because her eligibility for Bangladeshi citizenship by heritage meant she would not be left hypothetically stateless. This provides a government with the sufficient will with the legal precedent to denaturalise and deport any criminal, welfare dependent, or unwanted immigrant of foreign heritage, provided their home country’s laws or bespoke returns agreements permit it.

Instead, the ostensibly Independent Commission on UK Counterterrorism’s review concludes that Begum should be repatriated. Notably, its members include Dominic Grieve, the former Conservative Attorney General, who is currently formulating an Islamophobia definition for the Labour government; and Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, the former chair of the Conservative Party, who wrote the book Muslims Don’t Matter, accused the Tories of institutional Islamophobia, and liaised with Muslim groups that she said are “although not illegal, are clearly illiberal”. Warsi’s deputy, Richard Chalk, ran the Home Office’s “Don’t Look Back in Anger” department, RICU, which gaslights the British public in the aftermath of terror attacks to deflect blame away from Islam. It goes without saying that they should be ignored.

But when I objected to extending grace to Begum, who sewed suicide vests and spoke remorselessly about seeing bins of decapitated heads, Hitchens accused me of being un-Christian, un-British, and rejecting the rule of law. “Big noisy men, shouting bravely on the internet for the limitless punishment of a lone woman, do not remind me very strongly of Christ”, Hitchens wrote. Said lone woman is a self-declared member of ISIS. Nowhere in the Gospels are we called to extend limitless toleration to our enemies who deny the divinity of Christ and commit violence against the innocent. 1 Corinthians 5 commands Christians to confront immorality within the Church. We have enough problems of our own already in Britain without importing more of them.

Hitchens believes this is “necessary”, saying “Justice costs money.” I believe this is neither justice, nor necessary. Laws are legitimate only insofar as they are just; and any law which inflicts avoidable costs on innocent people to the benefit of foreign terrorists is not worth respecting. And I resent the repatriation of Shamima Begum, especially while Hitchens advises young men like me to leave the country they love and want to save.

Like Denethor in the film adaptation of Return of the King, Hitchens tells the men of the West to abandon their posts, flee for their lives, and let the Orcs take Minas Tirith. When the denizens of Mordor commit the murders that come naturally to them, he will bemoan and blame their hypothetical weed habit instead — as he did, without evidence, for Axel Rudakubana and Jihad al-Shamie.

There’s a reason that Elon Musk uses Lord of the Rings analogies to describe the condition of Britain. Tolkien captured the magic of our country in his mythology. We don’t want to hear from Denethors, telling us all is lost. We want Sam Gamgees, Gandalfs, and Aragorns, who encourage us not to grieve for the time we are given, that there is good in this world worth fighting for, and who untie the men of the West to scour the Shire free from Orcs. They want a call to adventure, not an excuse to quit. And they’ll listen to whoever gives them an enemy to vanquish, and a birthright to reclaim.