I'd Salute Trump Too

The Satisfaction Of Seeing Justice Restored, And Woke Comeuppance

A staggering upset in the world of collegiate wrestling last night as Wyatt Hendrickson, an Air Force officer, defeated Gable Steveson to win the NCAA championship. This story explains what happened:

To put Hendrickson's remarkable feat into context, Steveson made history in the 2020 Olympic Games when he stunned the field at just 21 years old to become the youngest freestyle super heavyweight wrestler to ever win gold. Steveson then cruised to his second NCAA championship in 2022, as well as a second Dan Hodge Trophy, establishing himself as one of the most dominant amateur wrestlers ever before departing the college ranks to capitalize on his success.

However, after failed runs with the WWE and the NFL's Buffalo Bills, Steveson returned to University of Minnesota this past year to fulfill his final year of eligibility and win another NCAA title. And for much of 2025, that third championship appeared to be a mere formality — heading into Saturday's finals, Steveson's dominance was so unparalleled that he hadn’t even given up a single takedown throughout the NCAA season and tournament.

But that all changed with 30 seconds left on the clock in the final match of the season, as Hendrickson grabbed hold of a desperation leg, transitioned to a double-leg, then bulldozed his way to one of the most shocking, buzzer-beating takedowns in NCAA wrestling history, leaving Oklahoma State legend and former two-division UFC champion Daniel Cormier breathless in the ESPN mat-side commentary booth.

I’ve cued up the match to its final seconds, including the young man’s salute to President Trump, who was in the audience. Hendrickson used to wrestle for the Air Force Academy, by the way. Watch this, and the salute. Maybe it’s just me, but I got chills:

I’ll tell you why this is iconic for me. I’ve been thinking real hard about the discovery that the publishing industry has systematically excluded young white fiction writers for years. From that Compact magazine article:

I second this commentary on the Compact piece:

It damn sure is. Donald Trump is part of the reckoning. At least it feels that way. I was lucky enough to establish my career just before the Great Awokening (and in any case, I don’t write fiction). But as I mentioned yesterday, I was denied consideration for a job because I am a white male — at the Austin American-Statesman; the publisher (at the time) was open about it. This guy — a white man himself — didn’t feel bad at all about openly discriminating against me. I am white. I am male. I am the Enemy of people like him, in his eyes. I begged that man for a chance, just an interview. I offered to pay for my own flight and hotel to Austin. The section editor had told me already that he wanted to hire me, that my clips were great, and all the things. He was forced to back down by the publisher. Just sit down and talk to me, I emailed the publisher. I’ll pay for it. Just give me a chance.

Nope. You’re white and male. “We are going to do a diversity search,” said the publisher. When he came back to me months later to say they found no woman or minority that was as good as me in terms of writing and analysis, they asked me to fly in for an interview. I had only one hour earlier been hired by the New York Post. I wish in retrospect I weren’t so damn Southern, so that I could have mustered a hearty f-you.

As I said the other day in this space, it all worked out well for me. But how many talented white men did it not work out well for. Men who deserved — like everybody else — to be judged not by the color of their skin or their sex, but by the content of their work and their character. That’s the only way. It was wicked when we denied that chance to women and racial minorities, and it was wicked when it was done to white men. People aren’t abstractions, you know. They are individual souls with hopes and dreams, and talents. And these bastards in publishing — mostly liberal white women, is my guess — crushed them.

(And they also crushed the dreams of young female athletes, who had to compete against biological males identifying as women, and lose the glory and the scholarships that were rightly theirs — all because of this stupid ideology. Oh, there should be a reckoning!)

This morning I’m seeing that in South Africa, the black Communist politician Julius Malema led an entire stadium of his supporters a couple of days ago in a chant calling for white genocide. Why doesn’t our media care? Come on, we all know. Obviously President Trump has been active on the issue of South Africa’s racism in power because he’s close to Elon Musk. Still — great! Genocide is evil! But The New York Times’s correspondent in South Africa has been downplaying Malema and his malignancy. I don’t know if the other major media are even noticing what’s happening there. They don’t care. These are white people. Half of them are men. Screw them, say the elites who run our institutions.

The NYT reports on what’s going on at Columbia, after Trump twisted their arm hard:

Many professors saw it as surrender, a reward to the Trump administration’s heavy hand. Conservative critics of academia celebrated it as an overdue, righteous reset by an Ivy League university.

Columbia University’s concession on Friday to a roster of government demands as it sought to restore about $400 million in federal funding is being widely viewed as a watershed in Washington’s relationships with the nation’s colleges.

By design, the consequences will be felt immediately on Columbia’s campus, where, for example, some security personnel will soon have arrest powers and an academic department that had drawn conservative scrutiny is expected to face stringent oversight. But they also stand to shape colleges far from Manhattan.

“Columbia is folding and the other universities will follow suit,” Christopher Rufo, an activist and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, wrote on social media after the university’s announcement on Friday.

More:

Mr. Rufo’s comments came in a New York Times interview published the same day that the Trump administration struck at Columbia’s checkbook because, the administration said, the university had not protected students and faculty “from antisemitic violence and harassment.” The government later sent a letter of demands that leaders at other universities privately likened to a ransom note, especially because it effectively threatened a sustained funding freeze regardless of the school’s initial response.

Academia braced for a pressure campaign from President Trump soon after he was elected in November. But Washington’s tactics against Columbia during the past month have shaken university leaders from coast to coast.

Many worry that the administration’s pursuit of Columbia was a test drive — a way to gauge public reaction, assess the prospects of legal pushback and develop a precedent. On Wednesday, the administration seemed to bring another test case, saying it would withhold about $175 million from Penn because the university had allowed an openly transgender woman on its women’s swim team in 2022.

Good. These people have trampled on the groups they disfavored for so very long. They thought they were invulnerable. They were wrong. Notice that the Trump administration is not punishing them for the sake of punishing them, but to force Columbia (and other universities) to cut that shit out!

Is this ressentiment? Yeah. Like my man Tony, don’t care.

Because writing is one of the most important things of my life, that Compact article really landed with me, hard. When I lived in Philly for a year and a half, for most of that time I was not permitted by my employer to write for anybody else — a job requirement that was not revealed to me before I signed on. It was one of the most miserable periods of my life. It was very, very painful. So, the thought that young white men who might be really talented in fiction were systematically kept from writing by these liberal commissars — man, it just fires me up.

Once again: anybody who is talented, and who has promise, who is denied an opportunity to show what they can do, because of their race, sex, religion, or whatever — that is unjust and must be ended. It is never right. I do not want a system that privileges white men. I want a system where everybody is given a chance to succeed based on their talent and willingness to work hard. As Lomez observed, we have no idea what these white men who were not allowed to publish, because of their race and sex, might have given to all of us. Similarly, in days past, we will never know what racial minorities, and women, who were systematically marginalized, might have given to us all. Those days were bad. These days are bad. As I see it, Trump is not punishing them per se, just restoring proper balance to the illiberal left-wing system.

These commissars never thought that they would have to be held accountable for what they have done to so many white men (and others who didn’t meet their standards), and to the institutions they ran. Well, now they do.

I’d salute Trump too for it.

But.

Last night, I was talking with a retired military officer. He was telling me how happy he is that Trump is righting so many woke wrongs. Yet, he said, “This is all happening so fast and so powerfully that I can’t help wondering what’s going to happen when the other side gets back into power. Are they going to come at us like this?”

I invite you to watch this first episode of the Granada TV documentary from the 1980s, about the Spanish Civil War. That dynamic is exactly what happened in Spain prior to the outbreak of fighting: