American Civil Rights is now a “right-wing” cause.

It was apparently not enough that working out, liking hot girls, and eating red meat are all considered right wing.  Nor was it enough that liking America, being patriotic, or flying the stars and stripes are also now right wing by default.

In 2025 America, it is the political Right, not the Left, that aggressively aims to advance the cause of civil rights over the objection and protests of their moral and intellectual “betters.”  A new civil rights movement that appeals to the broader public on basic issues of all-American fairness and safety can be found not within or alongside the Democratic Party, but the Republican Party.  The best, loudest, and most prominent voices for civil rights are fiery conservative podcast hosts as well as architects of policy within the Trump Administration.  The Supreme Court has made controversy in recent years as a result of issuing bold civil rights decisions (and courting defiance from certain uncooperative states) with no signs of stopping.

And if it were not already apparent that America has entered a new civil rights era, an eloquent movement leader and devoutly Christian practitioner of non-violent political discourse was just assassinated by a .30-06 rifle before a large crowd in broad daylight, and made a martyr for that which he preached.

What does “civil rights” mean today?

Could it mean judging people not by sex or skin color, but by the content of their character?

Could it mean opposing race-conscious laws and practices in social and economic life?

Could it mean protecting vulnerable citizens from the violent trespass of others?

The answer to all of those, of course, is yes.

If that sounds no different from the old Civil Rights movement, you are correct in principle to say so.  But in the six decades since the movement burned itself out, there were various attempts to change the basic meaning of the term – to expand its reach to classes of people not previously considered or contemplated by those who sat in unwelcome places and marched in Birmingham.  Demand for racism exceeded supply.  Opportunists desperately tried, and in some cases succeeded, to recapture the momentum and the “glory” of the old movement.  Left-wing policy projects such as “equitable housing,” “healthcare,” and “climate change prevention” were labeled and touted “civil rights” and “racial justice” issues, as though calling them that meant that they had to be obediently supported no matter what.  Prominent old dinosaurs who participated in the old movement were trotted out every now and then to flatter Barack Obama and denounce Republicans, wasting whatever credibility they had left on a shrinking audience.

Time, distance, and consequences all explain the faulty memory of the 1960s.  As I explained a year ago in Johnson’s Wars, the decade has been romanticized and mythologized with willful blindness.  There are two “civil rights” movements of that era, not one.  The “Civil Rights Movement” you learned in school was merely the first – that pacifist underdog struggle against segregation from 1954-64.  It began with the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, and continued with Emmett Till’s open casket, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the 1963 March on Washington, and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  The second was the half-decade of violent, insurgent chaos from 1965-69, complicated and intensified by Lyndon Johnson’s dual wars – Vietnam and “Poverty” – initiated at the same time.

Over the past 60+ years, “civil rights” came to mean anything and/or everything depending on who you were talking to, and thus it meant nothing at all.

(SOURCE)

Today, however, civil rights has a tangible, robust meaning that amounts to its own movement.  Six decades ago, the Civil Rights Movement collapsed after coming into conflict with the larger public interest in “law and order. ”  Today, civil rights is law and order.

The American Civil Rights movement of today aims to liberate peaceful people from violent ones.  American citizens of all races living within or in proximity to dense, deep-blue cities under exclusive Democratic Party control have been systemically rendered second-class subjects with little to no recourse or capacity for self-preservation.  They find their neighborhoods, parks, and public areas under occupation by gangs and homeless encampments, their streets and walkways flooded with feces, used needles, and discarded trash.  They enter their pharmacies and convenience stores to find nearly all items of value locked up behind hard glass and inaccessible to them.  Their packages are stolen, their cars are smashed in and looted, and they find themselves meekly leaving notes begging the prowlers to leave them and theirs be.

The perpetrators of these crimes are the protected and privileged class of these cities’ justice system, and they know it.  They will be circulated out the revolving door of a precinct faster than they came in.  They will be subject to the most minimal of “processing” before their immediate release through a cashless bail policy.  Charges will be dropped or downgraded, sentences will be reduced; the media will not report the event.  And if any citizen attempts to defend himself or his store, or to protect the life of another endangered person, or otherwise does anything other than surrender, the enforcers of the same system – Soros DAs, politicians, the media, and everyone affiliated – will commit all resources and expenses to bear down upon them.  The result is a broken social contract where intimidated bystanders helplessly watch predators prey upon the unlucky, and where victims of crime have no realistic path to seek justice.

Mayors, council members, DAs, attorneys general, and even judges maintain the system against any possible public scrutiny over their criminal permission structure through juked crime statistics and repeated insistence that “crime is down!” Even worse, their power grows stronger and the system grows ever more resilient as residual benefits downstream from the advantage the Democratic Party has enjoyed for decades through partisan gerrymandering, and also through a skewed and manipulated census, as well as a redistricting and reapportionment procedure that counts the unlawful presence of illegals, and where districts are drawn in accordance with old racist judicial rulings permitting (if not effectively requiring) “majority-minority” districts.

In a prior era, violence against black citizens in certain jurisdictions occurred with impunity because their exclusion from the franchise resulted in their exclusion from jury participation.  In today’s era, Democrats have poison-pilled the representation and electoral voice of citizens of all races.  And the long overdue imperative to protect normal Americans of all races by dismantling this power structure can be called by no other name – a civil rights struggle.

President Trump has already attained a great victory for the civil rights of D.C. dwellers by his decision to deploy the National Guard to patrol the city and deter crime with its presence.  Thanks to the cooperation of Republican governors in Tennessee and Louisiana, the civil rights of the good people of Memphis, Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and Shreveport will likely be restored next.  These are merely some cities among many whose shambled states of being require federal intervention.

And although the President’s powers to federalize the Guard and send them to a city whose state governor refuses assistance are much limited, the playbook for deep blue sanctuary cities in deep blue sanctuary states has already been written.  President Trump is following the examples of two of America’s greatest presidents – Abraham Lincoln and Dwight Eisenhower – in his choice to aggressively deploy ICE and federal law enforcement agents, who have jurisdiction over the entire country, to enforce federal immigration law and policy.  As they carry out arrests and deportations of illegals and border traffickers in plain public view, they invite the potentially violent response from well-funded mobs, Antifa insurgents, and even city officials.  Once that occurs with sufficient inflammation, the President will have all the authority he needs to send the Guard to escort and protect those federal agents and officers, just as he did in Los Angeles.  Lincoln executed a similar maneuver in supplying Fort Sumter, baiting the South Carolina militia to open fire on it in 1861, and Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to escort the Little Rock Nine when Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus unlawfully obstructed their entry into the desegregated schools.  Civil rights are at stake here, just as they were in 1957.

It is also encouraging that the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, Harmeet Dhillon, recognizes public safety as a civil right, and tweeted accordingly.  Violence in the American transit system has skyrocketed since 2020.  Dhillon understands that the murder of Iryna Zarutska on that Charlotte subway was a landmark moment in the modern Civil Rights era.  It would dishonor her name, face, and memory not to treat it as such.

Today’s Civil Rights movement seeks to liberate women from autogynephilic and predatory degenerates brazenly intruding into their bathrooms and locker rooms and forcing them to bear witness to their “womanhood.”  It seeks an end to the grotesque injustice and demoralizing violence against female athletes and competitors.  It wages revolutionary warfare against a censorial regime of lies and mistruths about gender, and it attacks an unethical practice of modern medicine that chemically castrates and mutilates confused, vulnerable, and mentally broken children led astray from themselves by the pressures and institutional forces belonging to that same regime.  The Civil Rights movement of today recognizes transgenderism and the popularization of subjective gender multitudes as the violent, depraved ideologies and astroturf pathologies that they are.

And while the moment can certainly be thematically identified, where we go from here is anyone’s guess, but it will be determined by the actions and decisions of millions, especially those in positions of leadership and with powerful microphones, which will only get louder now that Charlie Kirk’s was violently silenced.  Legislation is needed on a nationwide scale – federal and state – to ban the administering of cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers, as well as transition surgeries, to children, and to codify Title IX’s protections of biological sex in schools and on campuses.  This will also have to accompany a cultural movement that makes a taboo of attempting to “socially transition” a child, especially without parental knowledge.  All of this goes hand in hand with the need to repeal old regulations, rulings, and laws that have destroyed merit-based practice and entrenched “race-conscious” madness in the false name of the old Civil Rights movement up through now.

But even if no new Civil Rights Act is enacted into law, there are a bevy of existing civil rights laws on the books that are ready to be enforced.  It takes only the courageous and willful exercise of federal power to do so, such as the enforcement of Title VI against college campuses that give administrative blessing to the junior varsity pogroms against Jewish students.  President Trump, Stephen Miller, Pam Bondi, Harmeet Dhillon,  Mark Paoletta, John Sauer, and Kash Patel are at the executive vanguard of this new movement.  Almost just as important are the prominent voices in media and podcasting whose influence has grown over the past decade.  Charlie Kirk was one of them, and perhaps none was more formidable.

Civil Rights succeeded in America largely because it was seen as an American issue, not a left-wing, right-wing, conservative, or liberal issue.  But over the years, the Left appropriated the term, acted like it owned it, and expanded and applied it to everything else.  Now the Right, with the White House, Congress, and with greater cultural strength than anything it has had in 30 years, is uniquely situated with an opportunity to lean into the issues that make for a modern civil rights struggle, and advocate for normal Americans of all races who have been systemically deprived of the blessings of their citizenship.

Now a conservative cultural, social, and political movement; like all other good things in America today, civil rights is right wing.

– Vivek