America Continues to Declare War on International Multiculturalism
Plus: My experience being disillusioned with centrist and donor-driven media.
A couple of days ago, Lucian K. Truscott IV wrote a blisteringly brilliant article about the November 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS). He didn’t just criticize it. He also dragged it into the historical hall of shame, right alongside the Wannsee Conference and the secessionist declarations of the Confederacy. His comparison isn’t just rhetorical flair. Like those infamous texts, this NSS is a formal articulation of racial supremacy dressed in policy language.
Truscott lays it bare: this is Aryan ideology updated for a new century. The document claims that the West is facing “civilizational erasure,” and it pins the blame squarely on immigration. It doesn’t name the Global South directly, but we all know who it means. The NSS frames the demographic shifts from south to north not as an economic or humanitarian challenge, but as an existential threat to Whiteness.
This is the same ideology that began in the fever swamps of anonymous forums and fringe-right manifestos, which used to be dismissed as online ranting. But then, when the GOP’s campaign meth started running low, they picked up the Great Replacement Theory and injected it straight into the veins of respectable Republican discourse. It went from meme to talking point to national doctrine.
The NSS isn’t subtle.
It includes a Trumpian update to the Monroe Doctrine, now dubbed the “Trump Corollary,” that frames the Western Hemisphere as a zone of exclusion for non-aligned influences, especially from the Global South. It obsesses over border control, warns of “cratering birthrates,” and pushes for a “restoration of cultural and spiritual health,” a phrase that reads like a church pamphlet from a 1950s segregationist pastor.
It even goes so far as to praise European nations that defend their “individual character and identity,” language that’s not even coded. This is ethnonationalism with a NATO-friendly font. And yes, in case you’re wondering, the Kremlin issued a statement saying they agree with the general direction.
Pushback has already begun. European officials have quietly (and not-so-quietly) voiced concern that the U.S. is abandoning democratic pluralism for something that looks a lot more like White Christian realism. Some in Brussels and Berlin are beginning to distance themselves from the NSS’s rhetoric, especially its support for far-right European parties under the guise of promoting “patriotism.” When the U.S. starts sounding like Viktor Orbán with nukes, people take notice.
And let’s be clear: this is what it was always about. The NSS confirms what the past decade has already shown us. America’s existential crisis isn’t about inflation or immigration or crime. It’s about a rising multicultural democracy colliding with a White, patriarchal order that thought it would always rule.
The reactionary base, and much of the political class that enables them, was conditioned to believe that history would always center them. That their dominance was destiny, and their worldview the default. When that hegemony started to slip, they didn’t turn to democracy. They turned to backlash.
The National Security Strategy is not just a document. It’s a mirror. And if you’re still seeing the reflection of a system that can save us with a little more bipartisan brunch, you might want to look again.
One of the central reasons the so-called “pro-democracy” coalition failed to stop Trump’s return, now more emboldened than ever, is because too many of its leaders, from neocons to neoliberals, sidelined progressives, fixated on a mythical middle-of-the-road suburban voter, and then reflexively blamed young people and “wokeness” when their plan failed. This lack of imagination is more than just a strategic failure. It reveals a refusal to reckon with American hierarchies, historical supremacy, and a politics of empire masquerading as democracy. Too many of these leaders still live in the Disney Channel version of America, a fantasy most marginalized communities never had the luxury to believe in.
During the first Trump term and into the early Biden years, I listened to a lot of centrist media from the Pod Save coalition to The Bulwark. I valued the expertise and the experience. But I couldn’t ignore the growing frustration, the blind spots, and the lack of perspective that often comes from never having to navigate the world as a person of color in America. That’s what happens when too much of the engine room is built without our voices.
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