The battle over Covid-19 compliance was fought at the local level, often in grocery stores, as those who took part know. It was part of a broader civil conflict that included the FBI’s meddling in the 2020 election. It continues today with the partisan arrest of Donald Trump, who according to one recent poll, is the frontrunner in the 2024 election. But in his recent review of my book for Law & Liberty, Jay Bruce sees this as evidence of “the strength of the American experiment.”

Many young conservatives today reject Bruce’s assessment as naïve, along with many of the positions of the institutions he endorses. And those institutions know it. After Kay James’s pro-George Floyd statements, The Heritage Foundation whisked her away like a drunk uncle at a Christmas Party. Since Bruce defends these organizations wholesale while omitting my concrete criticisms, I’ll assume he agrees with Heritage’s past support of open borders and tech monopolies (Heritage has since changed its messaging), the Acton Institute’s endorsement of the outsourcing that devastated the Midwest, and AEI’s support for military interventions and the trans-movement.

Bruce claims Bush I and II were conservatives. The first signed the Civil Rights and Americans with Disabilities acts, labyrinths of legalized racial discrimination and lawless regulation. The second, using the falsehoods that Iraqi intelligence agents had met with 9/11 hijackers and that Saddam Hussein was actively building nuclear and biological weapons programs, started a twenty-year war and expanded the intelligence state that now collects data on every American. And Bruce is surprised by my focus on “free trade, immigration, and foreign wars.” Has he not noticed the hollowing out of the middle class, the seven million illegal aliens since 2021, the slaughter of 7,057 Americans (as well as 8,000 contractors and 30,177 veteran suicides), and 171,000 foreigners in worthless interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan?

As to Bruce’s review of my book, I must conclude that he exaggerates his role as an honest reviewer who “struggled to discern a distinct thesis.” My thesis is forthrightly stated on page six. I claim to delineate and describe the broad political movements that shaped twentieth-century politics and institutions, which include progressivism, liberalism, radicalism, and neoliberalism. While many scholars disagree with these categorizations, I argue that each is marked by broad trends in philosophy, psychology, political institutions, and economics. A good review would include those distinctions and add some criticisms. Bruce also suggests that I should have framed the book by beginning with a description of the problems of the twenty-first century. I quite literally do this, beginning on page one.

I’ll briefly reply to some of Bruce’s rather disconnected comments. He finds my claim about avocados “peculiarly strange.” I’ll explain. Under its agreements to participate in NAFTA and the WTO, the United States both increased trade with Mexico and outsourced its manufactures. This brought lower prices for avocados at the grocery store, but at a tremendous cost: a further hollowing out of the middle class in the loss of millions of jobs that disproportionately affected those in the Rust Belt. Bruce has made the same point himself.

Citing James Madison’s Federalist #10, Bruce says the Founders loved diversity. But he confuses diversity of property and talent with cultural diversity. The 1790 Naturalization Act limited naturalization to “free White person(s) … of good character.” Madison was a supporter and even president of the American Colonization Society. He warned of the danger of too much diversity, and he thought that one crucial role of political parties was to provide unity in the extended republic. John Jay described this national unity in Federalist #2: “One united people … descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.” As I say in the book, there is no going back to an all-white citizenry while preserving the American nation; rather, we must heed the Founders’ warning about the threat of diversity if we are to transcend tribal impulses and focus on the common good of the American citizenry.

Regarding the “revolutionary abyss,” Bruce first ridicules my suggestion that conservatives confront whether they are willing to oppose state overreach with violence, and then takes offense when I suggest Christians use violence to protect their churches from mobs: he calls this vigilantism. He shows that he missed the point when he says, “Surely the answer must be yes, depending upon the circumstances.” Bruce confuses human aggressive acts for an exercise in logic. The serf never asks whether he should obey or not, much less whether he should use violence in disobedience. What the Covid-19 mandates revealed was that despite many Americans’ stated beliefs, their own perception of circumstances was shaped by their habitual obedience to authority. They would not only wear a filthy, ineffective mask whenever they were told, but they would give up all freedoms and even sacrifice the health of their children.

This question that seems “bluster” to Bruce was relevant for millions of Americans (like myself), who disobeyed executive orders that violated our rights. The federal and state governments shuttered churches, businesses, and schools with lockdown orders, fired workers for refusing the vaccine, and censured and even conducted surveillance on those who questioned the official government narrative. Some forced those who violated quarantine to wear ankle bracelets, tased or arrested those not wearing masks (even outdoors), and denied funeral attendance to all but a few loved ones. Those same governments often failed to suppress the George Floyd riots, which caused at least 25 deaths and between $1-2 billion in property damage. Perhaps Bruce complied with the above mandates (masks or otherwise), or perhaps they seemed unobtrusive to him. However, some local governments and attorneys general refused to enforce these state orders. Some Americans refused to close their businesses. Some brandished AR-15s or used violence to protect their neighborhoods. Others threatened authorities who attempted to enforce unjust orders.

The term “AR-15 crowd” is descriptive. It doesn’t need to be vocalized. In rural Michigan, I see the symbols of black rifles, crossed muskets, and battle flags on T-shirts and hats everywhere: at wrestling tournaments, sporting events, restaurants, and certainly at gun ranges (maybe they don’t wear these in Arkansas). And these people voted for Trump. According to the Wall Street Journal, they constitute the Republican Party’s populist wing, which is closer to Josh Hawley than Mike Pence.

Though acknowledging that I say nothing untrue, Bruce accuses me of being racially insensitive and coldly abstract for not dwelling on the Trail of Tears and the Tulsa riots. While those are fashionable topics, I focused on the only acceptable form of racism today, anti-white racism. Bloomberg openly rejoices that 94 percent of new jobs at S&P100 companies went to minorities (true or not), and universities promise to continue to racial profile in college acceptance. Bruce denies that the Ivies discriminate against whites, illogically suggesting that this cannot be true because he himself attended one. Of greater concern, blacks made up 60 percent of known murder offenders in 2021 and committed 87 percent of all non-lethal interracial violent crimes. The excess number of whites murdered by blacks just from 2007–19 (3,514) totals more than all of the blacks lynched in US history, and more than ten times those killed in Tulsa. I chronicle some of those horrid details. I hope that Bruce can agree that those white victims and their families should not be intentionally discounted by the media because of the color of their skin.

Bruce hopes my book is “not very revealing of the state of the American right.” He thinks our problems are not serious and that conservatives may continue on as before. But if the current presidential election is any indication, the populist right may just be the American right.