Over the past decade, conservatives have railed incessantly against “woke” educators for indoctrinating young people into believing that the United States was forged through conquest, racial domination, and imperial violence, all of which is historically uncontroversial. In red states, legislators have introduced and passed bills to restrict what can be taught in the classroom about the country’s history, barring discussion of concepts related to race, ethnicity, color, or any topics that promote a “negative account or representation” of the country’s history. Just last March, President Donald Trump issued an executive order that denounced all historical perspectives casting US history in a “negative light,” declaring that historical education should instead focus on the country’s “unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness.”

Yet a noticeable shift has taken place in the year since then. Where conservatives once sought to obscure or soften America’s shameful history of conquest and subjugation, many now appear eager to reclaim it instead. Indeed, a growing faction on the Right now celebrates these historical realities openly while recasting empire not as a moral failure but as a legacy worth resurrecting.

This process has accelerated amid the Trump administration’s open embrace of what Matt Huber calls “gangster imperialism,” which many on the Right appear to have taken as permission to openly celebrate the country’s violent imperial past. Consider recent comments from right-wing pundit Matt Walsh during a recent podcast discussing the possible annexation of Greenland with fellow conservatives Ben Shapiro and Michael Knowles. It was amusing, Walsh observed, that people would get so upset by the United States attempting to “grow the empire . . . by force.” After all, the country as it is “currently constituted” became what it is