James Fishback is Redefining American Populism
“If you’re allowing Blackstone to come in and outbid a family of four from buying their home, now they get trapped in a one-bedroom apartment on the wrong side of town. Their entire life trajectory has been upended because a private equity institution came in and outbid them.”
– James Fishback, GOP candidate for governor of Florida, speaking to Pirate Wires
What Fishback is describing is indeed, as he puts it, “the number one problem in America: affordability.” He goes on to explain what is an inevitable premise of nationalism: “If you can’t buy a home, you can’t get married. If you can’t get married, you can’t have kids. If you can’t have kids, what’s the point?”
Criticizing a childless life and extolling the virtues and fulfillment of a life that includes having children is the point Fishback is referring to, but he would probably agree it is also the point, the reason, and the required element for preserving a nation. The interview he gave earlier this month to Pirate Wires’ Evan Milenko is an articulate expression of economic nationalism. Even if Fishback does not ultimately win his campaign to become the next governor of Florida, his influence will be felt.
There’s been pushback against the consequences of globalism to the American worker for years. For a brief moment around 2010, the distance between the left-wing “Occupy Wall Street” movement and the right-wing Tea Party movement was closing fast. But leftists were seduced and neutered by corporations embracing DEI and climate initiatives, unaware to this day that all those restrictions helped the biggest corporations destroy emerging competitors that lacked the economies of scale to comply. On the right, social issues became paramount, perhaps necessarily, as DEI’s virulent cousin, woke ideology in all its permutations, jumped out of academia and threatened to dominate the rest of society. But in 2016, and again in 2024, Donald Trump was elected U.S. President because, whether or not most voters had distilled their sentiments to this essence, the American people were rejecting globalism.
Fishback’s positions are being expressed at an important moment, as schisms form in the movement Trump catalyzed. What divides Trump’s supporters is overstated by a hostile media controlled by globalists, but with the 2026 midterms just around the corner, the goal of restoring full unity may be furthered if the populist faction, of which Fishback is a member, recaps their arguments with a measured tone and impeccable logic. Because they’re right, and the truth is persuasive.
For example, Fishback says, “I think the issue is that if you were to literally kill every single American and import everyone from Africa and put them in America, this would not be America anymore.” He continues, saying, “Is the person who got here from Haiti two years ago the same as my family, which has been here since the 1700s? That is an insult.”
He’s right. This is an insult. It’s an insult to our ancestors, and it dismisses our identity. It’s also an insult to common sense, and it’s good to hear this principle expressed by someone who has the intellect and wit to avoid being stigmatized for saying it and to not care if he is. To repudiate something so obvious violates logic. Of course, importing Somali tribesmen who have literally nothing in common with American traditions and values is not going to foster unity in our nation. Immigrants, no matter where they come from, are not helping “Heritage Americans” if they consume more in benefits than they pay in taxes, cling to their own culture, deliberately exploit our generosity, harbor hostility toward our very existence, and maintain high birthrates.
None of this is academic. In 2000, the nation of Somalia had 8.8 million inhabitants. By 2025, the population had exploded to 19.7 million. The average number of children per woman of childbearing age in Somalia is “down” to 6.2. Six children per woman. Average. The median age of a Somali is 18. Their population is exploding, thanks to forced marriages and near-total gender inequality.
These facts are not confined to Somalia. They’re just in the news these days. The total population on the African continent was 284 million in 1960. Today it is 1.6 billion. By 2050, it is projected to climb to 2.5 billion. For more than sixty years, foreign aid has reduced infant mortality at the same time as it has stunted internal development. Africa is a welfare continent, corrupted for the same reasons that welfare corrupts entire communities in the United States.
This is the overseas demographic and cultural reality that confronts the United States of America with its population of 340 million people, few of whom can afford homes because environmentalists have made home building a crime against the planet, politicians have imported millions of people into the country who all need a roof over their heads, and globalist investors are buying up every single family dwelling they can get their hands on, conveniently making a killing by supporting “green” regulations that constrain the market’s ability to increase the supply. To recognize all of these facts and want policies to change is to be an economic nationalist.
To pretend that concern over these facts is racist and claim that what matters most in America is a rising GDP and a soaring stock market is to be an economic globalist. Legal immigration can be colorblind, but we need to slow way down to give ourselves time to assimilate the millions of recent arrivals. And to whatever extent legal immigration resumes, it needs to be based on the skills we need and compatibility with our traditions.
Fishback didn’t express his views in quite this same way, although I would suggest they are consistent with his message. But I don’t agree with everything Fishback believes. Instead of eliminating H1-B visas entirely, why not just put a reasonable cap on the number to be granted, and base their issuance on the most politically incorrect yet most needed versions of merit imaginable: require them to take aptitude tests and skills assessments designed to fill carefully selected strategic gaps in America’s existing pool of engineering and scientific talent.
Similarly, while I like Fishback’s idea of allowing unrestricted entry of foreign students into American universities, provided they pay $1.0 million per year in tuition (in 2025 dollars, adjusted annually), why not also reserve at least several thousand slots for students selected based on outstanding academic merit, perhaps also via a blind competition.
The schism developing within the movement Trump started can be mended by approaching national and international challenges with logic. And to frame the debate as one between nationalists and globalists is useful, but would benefit from constant clarification. An American nationalism that values the interests of Heritage Americans is just a starting point and only one of many principles that are crucial to American success. Simply defining what it means to be a Heritage American—a definition that does not have to require European ethnicity—and the values and traditions it embodies is itself a challenge. Simply acknowledging we must address that challenge is progress.
Understanding that populist support to, say, prevent Blackstone and other private equity funds from continuing to strip-mine the American economy, condemning the vast majority of Americans to perpetual debt, does not make right-wing populists into communists or socialists. Nor does it make someone a racist to accurately observe that millions of people who will accept a much lower standard of living are being imported into America by economic globalists to replace Heritage Americans and all those pesky expectations they have for the middle-class world of their parents and grandparents.
And finally, it should not be impolitic to state plainly that until we resolve the issues of feminism, anti-white racism, anti-male and anti-masculinity bias, anti-family bias, and out-of-control environmentalism—all of it co-opted by globalists and combining to make childbearing by Heritage Americans a supposedly poor lifestyle choice and literally an economic impossibility—we are shirking the only challenge that matters if we are to continue as a coherent nation.
It may be that if right-wing globalists are calling them communists and left-wing globalists are calling them fascists, maybe populist nationalists are doing neither but instead are doing something we all desperately need, something that will attract all Americans regardless of their preexisting, curated preconceptions, who have realized that what really matters is affordability. Real affordability is based on genuine reforms that violate the institutionalized pretense on both the establishment left and the establishment right, the libertarian cliches, and the leftist scapegoating.
Ultimately, with unintentional and unearned irony, it may be that finding a productive nationalism for America will build the national vitality we need in order to set an excellent example of prosperity and freedom to the rest of the nations in the world, which is what any well-intentioned globalist might also want.
This article originally appeared in American Greatness.
Edward Ring is a contributing editor and senior fellow with the California Policy Center, which he co-founded in 2013 and served as its first president. He is also a senior fellow with the Center for American Greatness, and a regular contributor to the California Globe. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, Forbes, and other media outlets.
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