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Posted on 07/29/2026 4:45:29 AM PDT by MtnClimber
“Nixonmaxxing” — apparently this is a trendy new term in conservative circles. It refers to a rising level of interest in all things Nixon, particularly among younger conservatives.
Philip Wegmann and Vera Bergengruen report on the phenomenon in the Wall Street Journal of July 18:
The kids are “Nixonmaxxing.” More than half a century after Watergate, conservative youth are discovering the aesthetic, and adopting the attitude, of the late Richard Nixon. . . . Nixon is being recast as a forerunner of “America First” by a new generation of conservatives: a combative president loathed by the press and besieged by investigators who was brought down by the same establishment they believe targeted President Trump.
The Nixonmaxxing trend got a boost on June 25 when Vice President JD Vance appeared at an event at the Nixon Foundation in Yorba Linda, California.
“I think that his historical legacy is enjoying a bit of a renaissance,” Vice President JD Vance said last month at an event at the Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, Calif. “And I think deservedly so.”
In my own case, I have a strong natural sympathy for Nixon based on the extent to which he was loathed and hounded by the press. The press has loathed all Republican Presidents during my lifetime, but the loathing for Nixon was particularly intense, likely the worst until the current situation with Trump. You would think that the press would have liked many of Nixon’s most significant initiatives — détente with the Soviet Union, the opening to China, winding down the war in Vietnam. But the hatred was just too visceral to ever ease up.
After all he went through, I would like to think highly of Nixon. But unfortunately, my view is that his legacy is mixed at best. The thing where I would rate him most negatively is for the explosion of the regulatory state that took place on his watch.
If you look at the metastatisized regulatory state that Trump and his people are now trying to reduce a little, it is remarkable how much of that dates from Nixon’s five and a half years in office. Let me hit some of the highlights:
- You might think that the War on Drugs goes far back in our history, but in fact it only really began with the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, during Nixon’s first term. Prior to that Act, marijuana had only been made illegal through a back door scheme whereby the government levied a tax but made it impossible to obtain the necessary tax stamps. This scheme was declared illegal by the Supreme Court in 1969 in the Timothy Leary case, whereupon we promptly got the Controlled Substances Act. The Controlled Substances Act not only made marijuana directly illegal, but also brought in the entire regime of schedules of different classes of illegal drugs. At the time of enactment of the Controlled Substances Act, literally no one thought to ask how it could be that banning alcohol in 1920 had required a constitutional amendment, but banning large numbers of drugs in 1970 only took a statute.
- EPA was created by Nixon by executive order in 1970. The creation of the agency at that time coincided with the extensive Clean Air Act amendments of the same year, that transformed the CAA as originally passed in 1963 and added things like enforceable air quality standards. The Clean Water Act followed a couple of years later in 1972, still during Nixon’s first term.
- Also dating to 1970 is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, created by the Occupational Safety and Health Act of that year.
- The Consumer Product Safety Act and its associated Commission date from 1972, during Nixon’s first term.
- The Endangered Species Act dates from 1973, now during Nixon’s second term.
- The so-called Bank Secrecy Act dates from 1970. This is the Act that essentially requires your bank to spy on you and report to the government on request (and makes it illegal for the bank to tell you that the government has demanded information about you). The BSA is the law that underlies one after another shakedowns of financial institutions for doing business with bad guys, AKA “money launderers,” without ever slowing the bad guys down.
- And how about the National Cancer Act of 1971? That’s the one that declared a war on cancer. Fifty-one years later, in 2022, President Biden launched his “cancer moonshot” to “end cancer as we know it,” seemingly unaware that the government had already been conducting a totally futile “war on cancer” for decades on end.
And I’m sure there are some others that I’ve missed. Basically, Nixon was by no means a small government conservative. What’s remarkable is how much the press hated him even as he grew the government tremendously.
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Politicians HATED him.
They hated him for HUAC.
I noxious nixonmaxed out when he was in office.
They’ll name the dog checkers.
Watergate does not bother me.
Nixon brought in Kissinger, Klaus Schwabs mentor and godfather of the Deep State anti-Christ World Economic Forum to plague mankind and begin the economics of Satan’s coming ‘Beast’ system.
They got rid of Nixon right after he intimated he “knew Something” concerning the JFK assassination.
Gerald Ford, the one who whitewashed and legitimized the Warren Commission was installed in his place. Sending the clear message to any ‘elected’ politicians just who runs the place. Not dissimilar to how Reagan had to accept NWO Deep State Bush daddy to become President.
And, unfortunately, also a believer in govt done right means having many regulations, but being noble and efficient with them at least while he's in office. That's how Trump runs things and he's good at it. And Trump has removed a lot of regulations, but not as many as I'd like. Or put another way, not as many as Trump hasn't removed as many regulations as his the Dims before him added. When the next Dim is in the WH he'll have plenty of already existing regulations to use against Americans before adding more.
I watched Nixon leave the White House for the last time in 1974. I was watching through the White House fence.
Will say re the Clean Air Act, for those of us aware then, the smog in LA was terrible, the river/lake in Cleveland caught fire, people tossed trash everywhere and corporations dumped chemicals wherever they landed including creeks and rivers. It was time to change all of that.
~~~
Agree totally. I’m younger than a lot of people who post here but I still remember when almost every sunrise and sunset were red or orange from pervasive smog. I swam in those rivers and lakes, and survived, but that doesn’t mean I think they should be polluted.
A lot of people seem to think that conservatives are anti-environment. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. I have a powerful appreciation for nature. I would make the case that the word conservative is very close to conservation.
I just don’t buy into the myth that carbon dioxide is a significant greenhouse gas.
Taking us off the gold standard. Wage and price controls.
Yeah…those were the days.
Since the day Nixon was forced from the Presidency, I have never had even the smallest decrease of him in the measure of what he was as a man and what he tried to do in office.
He earned a great reservoir of tolerance from me for his actions in ending the Vietnam War, particularly the mining of Haiphong harbor and the December bombing of North Vietnam by B-52s, particularly Hanoi and Haiphong.
And that esteem I held him in only grew as I learned his role in his defense of Whittaker Chambers and against the likes of the scumbag Communist spy Alger Hiss that eventually landed him in in jail for the milquetoast charge of perjury instead of espionage, something he was wholly guilty of and should have been executed for.
I have always held Nixon in high esteem because he was so hated by people I despised, particularly on the Left, and in particular, the Hippie Left, whom I particularly disliked. I felt a particular need to defend Nixon because I had such contempt and dislike for those who were persecuting him.
But I admit that as I became more intellectually conservative as I grew older, I readily accepted that Nixon was not what I would consider a “Large ‘C’ Conservative”.
Too many things he had done were, as I learned more about governance and economic policy, disqualifiers that would ever after keep me from being able to view him as a Conservative in the light we define them in today.
I will keep this great and accurate article by Manhattan Contrarian to remind me of the fuller list of things that Nixon was wholly deficient in as a Conservative (in addition to the ones I fully realized and remembered) because to me, it is important to remember his faults, all of them, and remind myself, Nixon was not persecuted for those faults in his time.
Nixon was persecuted and crucified by the Left because he loved his country and didn’t have his own self-interest at heart, but his country’s interest. And that is in complete contradiction to the Left, whose interests have not changed a whit since the end of WWII, and who have done all in their power to destroy people like Whittaker Chambers, Joseph McCarthy, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and of course, Richard Nixon.
Times have changed, technologies have changed, but the tactics and end goals of the Left have not, and they still pursue those same ends with the same hypocritical and anti-American tactics.
That said, I still hold Nixon in high esteem, and always have, since I view Nixon as a man of his time, in that time. He DID love his country more than power, and the Left has not a single person, not one, of whom that can be said.
“Nixon. The GW Bush of the 1970’s.”
Like GW, Nixon did some good things.
But like George W, there were bad things, maybe worse than GW’s. He imlemented wage and price controls. He took us off the gold standard. But the absolute worst, which is causing a masssive amount of our problems today, he brought in “revenue sharing.” You know, where the federal government gives money to the states for programs state taxpayers wouldn’t vote for. So the states can shovel $$ out of helicopters with no accountability. Can you spell “Minnesota”?
Nixon would not be considered a conservative by todays standards...He put Harry Blackmun on the Supreme Court for the express purpose of legalizing abortion throughout the entire country
See my post just above.
I view Nixon as largely a man of his time. Sure, there were people like Barry Goldwater who were more true Conservative (as many of us view Conservatives today, especially if you read his excellent book “Conscience of A Conservative” which was published in 1960, long before people really put pen to paper to define “Conservatism”... but Nixon was not that far out of the mainstream of conservatism at that time in 1960 or even 1970, in my opinion. (That book had an outsized impact on me from a historical Conservative perspective when I read it for the first time just a few years ago)
Fortunately for Conservatives, that mainstream of conservatism has been re-routed more towards what WE see as “true” Conservatism today by the likes of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, and is closer to “Big ‘C’ Conservatism” today than it was back in 1970 or even 1980.
That is the lens through which I view Nixon. He did plenty of non-Conservative things, but we have learned many (though not all) lessons from those actions.
My mom insisted on listening to the Watergate hearings on the radio from beginning to end, with the volume up high.
This went on for weeks, and the only thing I remember is that the response to most questions was, “I don’t recollect.”
Also the whole “scandal” surrounding Watergate pales in comparison to things that have been perpetrated by Democrat Presidents since then.
Plants/trees need CO2, they make oxygen. Very simple.
‘Because he was not a member of the club. He was an outsider’
Just like Donald Trump.
Uh, kids. Nixon brought you price freezes, racial preferences in hiring and the EPA. He also ramped up the War on Drugs, which a lot of young people think is a heavy-handed disaster. He proposed (but it ultimately did not pass) federalizing Medicare and forcing a private employer mandate for health insurance that would make Obama blush. Those to stupid to understand history are doomed to . . . . whatever.
I think one thing that they are picking up on is how tough Nixon was, not thuggish, not crooked, but part of the world’s old school guys who knew how brutal the world was and Nixon played at that world level, in a way he was all intelligence and gristle who while I didn’t like him, he was pure American and he accepted leadership and his place in history, he was not a place holder or a privileged natural.
America would have survived if Nixon had won in 1960, and the Vietnam war, the 60s as they were, and this JFK immigration that conquered us, would never have happened, America would have stayed more on its course of advancement and space.
Carbon dioxide is a green gas. It promotes plant growth in a serious way. There is an argument that we were getting down towards carbon death of the Earth’s ecosystem due to *low* CO2 levels.
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