Prepare yourselves for the most unexpected story, perhaps, of all time. About two weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal reported, “Young Conservatives Have an Unlikely New Icon: Richard Nixon.” The subheadline explained, “‘Nixonmaxxing’ swag and TikTok videos have helped trigger a rethinking of the former president’s legacy among some conservatives.” It’s not a blip. Two days ago, the Free Press reported, “‘Nixonmaxxing’ Is More than a Meme.”

“The kids,” the Journal began, “are Nixonmaxxing.”

Apparently, more than half a century after the Watergate scandal that corporate media still won’t shut up about, young conservatives are discovering the “aesthetic and attitude” of our 37th president. Videos featuring archival footage of Nixon set to rap music are going viral on Instagram and YouTube. Influencers are wearing hats that say “Nixon Now More Than Ever” and carrying swag announcing “Pretty Girls for Nixon.”

The Journal quotes one bewildered commenter asking: “Is Nixon pulling off the greatest posthumous political comeback in history?”

Yes. Yes, he is.

And the corporate media is absolutely terrified. Why? Because if there’s one thing the establishment possibly hates more than Donald Trump, it’s Richard Nixon. They spent fifty years building the narrative that Nixon was the ultimate political villain. They taught it in schools, they made movies about it, they carved it into stone. They wouldn’t shut up about it. Nixon was the actual boogeyman.

But here’s the buried lede: the kids aren’t just wearing fanny packs ironically. They’re actually looking at Nixon’s record. They’re seeing the man who went after Alger Hiss. They’re seeing the relentless anti-communist crusader who actually understood the threat of Marxism before it was again fashionable to talk about it.

The irony is delicious. When young progressives wear Chairman Mao t-shirts, the media calls it “youthful idealism.” But when young conservatives start making TikToks about the guy who literally created the EPA, ended the draft, went to China, and forced the Soviet Union to the negotiating table? Break out the smelling salts. It’s panic in the streets.

Can you see it? This is the ultimate Boomerang story. The left spent decades trying to convince young people that all Republican presidents are basically Richard Nixon in disguise. And now the kids are looking around, seeing the absolute state of the country, and saying, “You know what? A little more Nixon sounds pretty good right now.”

As young conservative intellectual Christopher Rufo pointed out in his terrific 2023 City Journal piece defending Nixon, the left’s destruction of Nixon was essentially a bureaucratic coup. (Rufo platformed the concept of “counter-revolution,” which long-time readers will recall we’d been discussing since 2021 at least.)

Democrats weaponized his mistakes —difficult-to-describe peccadillos that the modern deep state makes look like he misplaced his cell phone— as a lever to remove a president who threatened the deep state’s authority. Conservatives weren’t prepared for that type of combat. It should sound painfully familiar by now. I’m not sure they really even understand it yet. Here’s Chris Rufo’s tweet reacting to the WSJ piece:

Nixon’s policy legacy is a mixed bag. The EPA, for instance, was downright disastrous. His ‘aesthetic’ is downright unique, all right, like when he wore a full suit and dress shoes on the beach.

But more than anything—and this is the real reason I think Nixon is becoming a hero our time desperately needs—Richard Milhous Nixon was a notorious anticommunist.

Before Nixon was the Watergate villain the corporate media spent fifty years teaching your kids about, he was something far more dangerous to the left: he was right. As a young congressman from California in the late 1940s, “Red Scare” Nixon sat on the House Un-American Activities Committee and did what the entire Georgetown establishment called boorish, paranoid, and beneath a serious man — he went after Alger Hiss, a senior State Department official and darling of the foreign policy elite, and refused to let go.

Late in the 1990s, the declassified Soviet Venona intercepts confirmed Nixon was right. Hiss was a communist spy, passing secrets to Moscow while hobnobbing with the progressive elites who ran American foreign policy. Nixon was right, and they never forgave him for it. That early battle defined his entire career— he understood, viscerally and early, that the Soviet threat was not a dinner party topic but an existential war being fought inside American institutions, and he fought it accordingly.

Nixon negotiated the first serious nuclear arms control treaties with Moscow from a position of strength, drove a strategic wedge between the USSR and China by opening Beijing before anyone else dared, and spent his entire career treating communism not as an abstraction but as the enemy it actually was. The left hated him for all of it. Which, if you think about it, is the highest possible character reference.

The Democrats did such a complete job of assassinating Nixon’s character that they forced him to become the only American president to resign and from there built an edifice of slander and defamation higher than the Obama Presidential Library. Nixon wasn’t perfect, not by any measure, but he won in a 49-state landslide because Americans hated communists, and so did he.

So Alice, we’ve gone all the way down the rabbit hole and come out the other side. The generation that grew up watching the establishment try to destroy Donald Trump is suddenly very skeptical of the establishment’s narrative about Richard Nixon. They see the parallels. They see the same media playbook, the same bureaucratic maneuvering, the same coordinated outrage.

And the kids aren’t buying it.

“Nixon hype edit was not something I knew I needed,” one young fan wrote. Well, maybe this is exactly the healing that the country needs. A reminder that before you can negotiate from a position of strength, you have to actually have strength. A reminder that fighting communism isn’t a cocktail party— it’s a down-and-dirty street fight.

So ladies, grab your “Pretty Girls for Nixon” hat and enjoy the show. If it continues, the media’s collective meltdown over this will be spectacular.