And why it’s driving people crazy.

In 1972, Richard Nixon was re-elected with over 60% of the popular vote. Just a few years later, he left office as the most disgraced president in history.

His resignation cemented his legacy as one of scandal, and for half a century Nixon has been associated with Watergate: “I am not a crook.”

But something’s happening online that may once and for all disprove Fitzgerald’s dictum that there are no second acts in American lives. Across social media, Tricky Dick is blowing up — with memes, edits, and merchandise marketed at Gen Z. Thirty-two years after his death, America’s 37th president is popular again. And for the first time ever, he’s cool.

“It’s frightening and terrifying and sad,” Watergate prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks told Vanity Fair. “It’s part of the whole process of history being rewritten and obliterated.”

The Vanity Fair piece, titled “Richard Nixon’s Instagram Redemption Is Perfect for Our Post-Truth World,” is a pearl-clutching jeremiad straight out of Joe Scarborough’s Id. For 2,000 words, Wine-Banks and Watergate mastermind-turned-informant John Dean assert Nixon’s villainy while cautioning that the Nixon Foundation’s attempt at rehabilitation is some kind of conspiracy to make Donald Trump’s “lies” acceptable.

For those of us who only learned about Nixon as a historical figure — that is to say, at least half of the country — it’s not hard to imagine this conspiracy. After all, that’s what Nixon was about: Watergate, of course, but also the Oval Office recordings, Kissinger’s scheming diplomacy, and the Committee to Re-Elect the President, infamously abbreviated to CREEP. Surely some shadowy cabal of Republican elites were behind this social media blitz.

But the truth is simpler, and to the extent that there is a conspiracy, it’s among Nixon’s opponents. The guys behind the memes are just doing their job. They happen to be really good at it. And like the man whose legacy they steward, they’re now being attacked for their success.

James Byron was named president and CEO of the Nixon Foundation in 2021, at the ripe age of 28. A history major who briefly served as an advisor to the Archivist of the United States, Byron says this is his dream job. It’s clear when you talk to him that this is an understatement.

Byron is hardly alone. The Nixon foundation team is excited to tell the story about America’s most misunderstood president. Nowhere is this clearer than with Chris Barber, the Foundation’s 35-year-old marketing director and the man behind the memes.

Hearing Barber’s age is likely a shock to anyone who’s seen his videos, which are the most Gen Z things of all time. Smash cuts of Nixon speeches overlaid with TikTok rap and strobe light transitions dominate the Foundation’s Instagram page and are frequently shared on X. In the comments section, Zoomer argot abounds in praise of Dick.

“Aura farming from the grave is crazy,” writes one commenter. “Someone is on one at the Nixon foundation and I’m thrilled,” adds another. “This shit is in my Spotify liked list holy moly.”

Thanks to Barber’s edits, the Nixon Foundation has racked up 250 million views across social media platforms since October 2023. Subscribers climbed from 65,000 to 450,000 in that same window. Today, over half of the Foundation’s Instagram audience is under 35.

But the Nixon renaissance is not merely an online phenomenon. Nixon Library attendance is up 30% year-over-year. This May the Foundation sold more merchandise than they’ve sold in 10 years. When the Foundation dropped a line of “Nixon–Maxxing” hats, they sold out in 90 minutes. So did the second order the Foundation scrambled to release. They sold 200 hats in total, completely clearing the shelves.

It’s tempting to chalk this whole thing up to Gen Z being ironic. And of course, that’s part of it. But Vanity Fair isn’t dragging out John Dean to sound the alarm on a mere social media bit. Something else is happening here, something deeper — and it has people panicking.

Perhaps the best way to understand this is to migrate over to the Nixon Foundation’s YouTube channel, where memes give way to clips of Nixon’s speeches. Here the videos — which frequently amass more than 3 million views — are not cheeky or funny. They’re just Nixon: Nixon talking about Bill Clinton, Nixon being prescient on Russia and Ukraine, Nixon waxing philosophical about what constitutes a good life.

People may get pulled in by the edits, but Nixon himself is holding their attention. That’s not surprising. If one is interested in Congress, communism, and China, to say nothing of the presidency and the media, one is de facto interested in Nixon. He helped shape and was shaped by all of those institutions. It’s impossible to understand them, or our time, without understanding him.

For Nixon’s critics, this is the problem. Conventional wisdom and AP U.S. History textbooks hold that you’re allowed to say one good thing about Nixon: he opened China. Otherwise, it’s all stagflation, pancake makeup, and burglary. Americans cannot be allowed to appreciate Nixon the man in full because doing so would shatter the totalizing impulse that has dominated American politics since Woodward and Bernstein first went to press.

This point really cannot be overstated: the Nixon revival is a threat not because it gives cover to Trump to lie, cheat and steal, but because it could make Americans realize that the people they trust to render judgement on politicians are not always honest brokers.

And God forbid people start looking at Watergate with fresh eyes. They might learn that Bob Woodward never actually used the codeword “Deep Throat” for Mark Felt, and that his book agent made it up to sell more copies of “All The President’s Men.” They might learn that the reason Woodward and Carl Bernstein never revealed Felt’s identity was because he was a career FBI agent with an axe to grind against Nixon, who passed Felt over for the director job. They might learn that Felt was the mastermind behind COINTELPRO, a controversial FBI program to infiltrate and dismantle radical Left groups.

They might also discover that Washington Post publisher Ben Bradlee had serious misgivings about Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting. In 2012, New York Magazine — no Nixonian rag, to be sure — published excerpts from Bradlee’s personal papers in which he said “There’s a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight.”

“Dealing with Woodward and Bernstein became — as they became more skilled in subterfuge, as they became more skilled in double meanings and triple meanings and quadruple, it became quite hard to deal with … Their great habit was to come around about 7:30 at night to say they had a helluva story … because they thought the guard would be down and they could slip it into the paper without the usual sort of grilling.”

The author of that piece, Jeff Himmelman — who discovered the papers while writing Bradlee’s authorized biography — confronted Woodward about the quote. To put it succinctly, Woodward freaked out. Later Himmelman found that the tape containing those comments, one in a series of 13, had disappeared. He asked Bradlee if he thought Woodward had taken it. “Maybe,” Bradlee laughed.

That piece is 14 years old and I can guarantee you most Americans have never read it. The fact is, the media industrial complex has — in an ironic twist, given the subject matter — worked to keep the full truth of Watergate under wraps. Because Watergate is the modern media’s foundational myth. Before Woodward and Bernstein, journalism largely consisted of reporting facts, and investigative journalism meant exposing real scandals in the public interest.

Watergate changed that. From that moment on, investigative journalism became inherently political, and politicians became trophies to hunt. Journalists’ political sympathies being what they are, this necessarily meant that Republicans were always in the crosshairs. To interrogate Watergate is to interrogate the very foundations of our media and the way we see politics. There’s a reason political scandals get the “-gate” suffix. For the status quo to hold, Watergate must be a triumph, and Bob Woodward must be a hero. Which means Nixon must be the villain.

For a while, it seemed that this would always be the case. But then, during the first Trump administration, Americans saw for the first time what the “deep state” really was. Not some imagined rightwing boogeyman but an actual, active network of entrenched bureaucrats willing to subvert a president to push their own political agendas.

The veil dropped. If this happened now, people realized, it could have happened then. Suddenly old doubts became new. The idea that Nixon was targeted by the bureaucracy, which political scientist John Marini first argued in 1992, was back on the table. The fact that Nixon only set up his wiretaps because he discovered American military commanders were wiretapping the White House — which historian James Hougan first revealed in his 1984 book “Secret Agenda” — was put into the light earlier this year when James Rosen exposed the long-buried grand jury hearing where Nixon explained the situation.

In 2025, Bill Murray appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience. Years earlier, Woodward published a book about Murray’s friend, the late comedian John Belushi. Remarking on the book’s myriad falsehoods, Murray told Rogan “I read like five pages … and I went, ‘Oh my God. They framed Nixon.’”

Murray’s joke gets at something real. Pull at one thread and the sweater unravels. Start noticing and it’s hard to stop. The Nixon renaissance is about reevaluating the narrative we’ve been fed about our history, our government, and our media, sure, but it’s also the result of a curious drive that springs up naturally when something that for so long has been off limits is suddenly placed on the table.

It’s especially clear why Gen Z would be excited about this prospect. They learned the standard “Nixon bad” narrative from teachers who themselves only knew this one-dimensional Nixon. But more generally, Gen Z has every reason to question the “truths” they’ve been fed. They came of age during COVID lockdowns and peak woke, and have now seen those movements and the people who pushed them collapse in disgrace. Their generation’s drive to question authority and push the bounds of acceptable thought has led them to embrace people like Hasan Piker and Nick Fuentes, figures whose ideas threaten the foundation of our democracy.

But this has also led them to praise the aura of a self-made California Quaker who dedicated his life to public service and remained in the arena even after the people and country he fought for rejected him time and again.

Richard Nixon always seemed like something from a bygone age, always just a few steps behind where America was trending. But perhaps, like so much else about Nixon, we got it wrong. Maybe Nixon wasn’t a relic come too late, but a visionary come too early. Maybe his time is now.

By The Daily Wire – https://www.dailywire.com/news/how-the-kids-learned-to-love-richard-nixon

Most Americans understand the importance of oil. They understand the importance of steel. They understand the importance of food production and manufacturing. What many Americans do not realize is that the next great geopolitical struggle is being fought over a group of resources that most people have never seen, never touched, and perhaps never even heard of. These are the critical minerals and rare earth elements that power modern civilization. They are found inside our smartphones, our computers, our medical equipment, our satellites, our electric grids, and our most advanced military weapons. They are the hidden foundation upon which much of the modern world rests.

For decades, American leaders of both political parties embraced the idea that globalization would make the world safer, more prosperous, and more interconnected. Factories were moved overseas. Supply chains stretched across continents. Strategic industries that once operated within the United States were outsourced in pursuit of lower costs and higher profits. While many policymakers celebrated this transformation as inevitable progress, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) viewed it as a historic opportunity. Chinese leaders understood that economic power and national security are inseparable. They recognized that controlling the resources required to build the technologies of the future would provide enormous leverage over nations that became dependent upon them.

Today, China dominates much of the global processing and refining capacity for critical minerals and rare earth elements. These materials are essential for the manufacture of advanced fighter aircraft, guided missiles, radar systems, communications equipment, batteries, electric vehicles, artificial intelligence infrastructure, and countless other technologies. The sophisticated weapons that protect American servicemen and women rely upon supply chains that, in many cases, pass through facilities controlled directly or indirectly by the CCP. This is not merely an economic concern. It is a strategic vulnerability that affects every aspect of our national defense.

History teaches us that great powers rise and fall based in part upon their ability to secure strategic resources. During the Second World War, the United States became known as the Arsenal of Democracy because our factories produced the ships, aircraft, tanks, ammunition, and equipment necessary to defeat tyranny. American industrial strength was every bit as important as the courage displayed by our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines. During the Cold War, the United States understood that economic strength and military readiness were inseparable. Leaders in Washington recognized that strategic independence was not a luxury but a necessity. Somewhere along the way, too many policymakers forgot those lessons.

One of the most overlooked aspects of this struggle involves Afghanistan. Following the disastrous withdrawal of American forces in 2021 and the return of the Taliban to power, attention focused largely on the humanitarian consequences and geopolitical fallout. Much less attention was paid to Afghanistan’s vast untapped mineral wealth. For years, geological surveys suggested that Afghanistan possesses enormous deposits of lithium, copper, rare earth elements, and other valuable resources. Some analysts even described the country as the potential “Saudi Arabia of lithium” because of the scale of its deposits. While ownership of these resources did not automatically transfer to China when the Taliban regained control of the country, the new regime quickly sought foreign investment and partnerships to exploit these deposits.

Not surprisingly, Chinese interests moved aggressively to fill the vacuum left behind by the American withdrawal. Chinese companies began pursuing mining agreements and investment opportunities with the Taliban government. Beijing understood what many Western leaders appeared to ignore. The nation that secures access to strategic minerals secures influence over the technologies and industries that will define the twenty first century. China views Afghanistan not merely as a distant and unstable country but as a potential source of critical resources that could further strengthen its already dominant position in global supply chains.

The implications for the United States are profound. American military planners must now consider the possibility that a future geopolitical crisis involving China could be complicated by our dependence on Chinese controlled mineral processing networks. Economic coercion has become a weapon in modern statecraft. Nations no longer need to rely exclusively on tanks and missiles to exert pressure. They can restrict exports, manipulate supply chains, limit access to strategic materials, and use economic dependency as a form of leverage. The CCP understands this reality exceptionally well and has demonstrated a willingness to use economic tools to advance its geopolitical objectives.

President Donald Trump was among the first major American political figures to challenge the assumptions that dominated Washington for decades. He recognized that a nation cannot remain economically sovereign while becoming dependent upon strategic competitors for critical components of its industrial base. His efforts to rebuild American manufacturing, encourage domestic production, and reduce reliance on Chinese supply chains were often mocked by establishment figures who had become comfortable with the status quo. Yet events around the world have repeatedly demonstrated the wisdom of strengthening America’s economic independence and rebuilding domestic capacity.

The challenge before us is significant but far from insurmountable. The United States possesses extraordinary natural resources, innovative entrepreneurs, world class engineers, and a workforce capable of accomplishing remarkable things when given the opportunity. What is required is the political will to recognize the seriousness of the threat and the determination to address it. America has overcome greater challenges before. The same nation that built the Arsenal of Democracy, landed men on the moon, and won the Cold War retains the ability to secure its future if its leaders have the courage to act.

Every generation of Americans faces a defining challenge. For our grandparents, it was defeating fascism. For our parents, it was containing communism. Now, in the present day, the challenge is preserving American economic and strategic independence in an increasingly competitive world. The battlefields of this new Cold War are not found solely in distant oceans or disputed borders. They are found in mines, refineries, factories, laboratories, and supply chains that stretch across the globe. If America wishes to remain the world’s leading economic and military power, we must once again embrace a principle that previous generations understood instinctively. A nation that cannot provide for its own strategic needs cannot remain truly free.

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Thursday that federal prosecutors cannot charge a Texas man with a felony for possessing a handgun in his home while he occasionally used marijuana. Read the full opinion here.

The case involved Ali Danial Hemani, a dual U.S.-Pakistan citizen born and raised in Texas. In 2022, FBI agents raided his family’s home in Lewisville as part of a national security investigation into suspected ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. During the search, agents discovered a handgun, roughly 60 grams of marijuana, and a small amount of cocaine. Hemani told agents he smoked marijuana about every other day

Prosecutors charged him solely under 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3), the federal statute that prohibits “unlawful users” of controlled substances from possessing firearms. They did not pursue charges related to the cocaine or allege that he was armed while impaired.

Justice Neil Gorsuch authored the Court’s opinion. Lower courts dismissed the indictment. The Fifth Circuit held that the charge violated the Second Amendment under the framework established in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022). The Supreme Court agreed.  Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the opinion for the Court.

The government defended the statute by citing historical laws disarming “habitual drunkards.” The Court found these analogies to be unpersuasive. Nineteenth-century statutes generally required a specific judicial determination that the individual was dangerous or otherwise incapacitated.

In contrast, Section 922(g)(3), as applied here, imposed a blanket ban based solely on regular marijuana use, even when that use was not shown to be impairing, and without any evidence of a present risk to others. 

Gorsuch emphasized the distinction. 

While historical tradition has long permitted the disarmament of individuals whose extreme alcohol use rendered them genuinely incapacitated, the federal statute sweeps more broadly by reaching someone who uses marijuana regularly but shows no signs of impairment or danger.

The Supreme Court emphasized that its decision is narrow. 

It does not resolve whether addicts or individuals who are actively intoxicated may be barred from possessing firearms, nor does it foreclose other prophylactic measures Congress could adopt. 

The ruling also leaves unresolved whether the government could prosecute under §922(g)(3) when it provides individualized evidence that a defendant’s drug use creates a genuine danger.

This ruling is the latest in a series of Second Amendment cases following Bruen. With more states legalizing marijuana, the longstanding federal prohibition has come under increasing pressure. 

This ruling changes how millions of adults in states where marijuana is legal could face fewer barriers to exercising their gun rights, even as the substance remains a Schedule I drug under federal law. 

In April 2026, the Trump administration via DOJ/DEA order moved FDA-approved marijuana products and state-licensed medical marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III. A broader rescheduling hearing for all marijuana began in late June 2026, but as of the ruling date June 18, recreational/illicit marijuana remained Schedule I federally.

Gun-rights groups, civil-liberties organizations, and marijuana-reform advocates have found common ground in these challenges. 

The decision contrasts with the Court’s 2024 ruling in United States v. Rahimi, which upheld restrictions on firearm possession for individuals subject to domestic-violence restraining orders. Broad, categorical disarmament lacking strong historical analogues or individualized findings of dangerousness now faces stricter scrutiny.

Hunter Biden was convicted under the same statute in 2024 before receiving a pardon from his father.

The Court rejected the federal government’s argument that any marijuana use inherently makes someone dangerous. “We appreciate that drugs and guns can sometimes make for a dangerous mix, of course,” Gorsuch wrote, “but the government’s reliance on historical laws disarming habitual drunkards misses the mark.”

The ruling significantly limits how broadly the federal prohibition can be enforced. It protects the right of “regular” or occasional marijuana users to possess firearms when they are not shown to be intoxicated or addicted in a manner that creates a clear, present danger at the time of possession.

At the same time, the decision stops short of invalidating 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3) entirely. This leaves room for additional challenges that will test the outer boundaries of the statute in future cases. 

Lower courts nationwide will now start applying this precedent to the dozens of similar challenges already moving through the federal system.

The Supreme Court has once again upheld the Second Amendment right of law-abiding citizens to keep and bear arms for self-defense, while stopping short of lifting every federal restriction on marijuana users who possess guns. This ruling marks another incremental step in the Bruen framework.