Why We Still Whisper

By Tim Chapman

Saturday, October 18, 2025

 

When President Trump was reelected in 2024, jokes abounded about how we could once again say, “Merry Christmas,” as well as many other words that once could have gotten you canceled. There was some truth behind all the quips and memes. Trump’s election signaled a rejection of political correctness and other woke excesses of the left. For a brief time, Americans felt free to say what they thought. But as the saying goes, “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”

 

The rise of the populist right has brought passion, new voters, and a fighting spirit that cannot be dismissed. Yet alongside this energy, a new political correctness has emerged on the right that demands political conformity and punishes dissent with the same ferocity that defined progressive cancel culture. Traditional conservatives who once felt liberated by Trump now find themselves whispering in the halls of power. The left’s political correctness was based on progressive ideology. The right’s political correctness is not about ideology but perceived loyalty to the president.

 

When I take private meetings with conservative leaders, I typically hear something like: “We agree, but we can’t say anything publicly right now.” These are thoughtful, patriotic men and women. Yet their silence, however understandable, concedes the field to those who would redefine conservatism in ways alien to its roots.

 

Conservatives used to have a lot to say about this. Like many of his conservative colleagues, Senator Jim DeMint once warned that Americans with traditional moral convictions were being driven into silence by the left’s stranglehold on culture and politics. “They are too intimidated to speak out, so their complaints are reduced to whispers,” he wrote in Why We Whisper: Restoring Our Right to Say It’s Wrong (2007). Back then, the threat came from progressive elites eager to banish expressions of faith and family values from the public square.

 

Eighteen years after Why We Whisper, traditional conservatives are whispering again — but for a different reason. The fear now comes not only from the left but from within our own coalition.

 

Why We Whisper warned that “traditional ideas of right and wrong have either been declared illegal or have been pushed out of public life into the corners of private life where they are only mentioned in whispers.” In 2025, the whisper is no longer confined to debates about marriage or morality. It now muffles conversations about constitutional government, economic freedom, and America’s leadership in the world.

 

Look at the reticence of congressional Republicans to speak out on the economy. For decades, conservatives recognized that free markets were central to prosperity. Today, universal tariffs — an enormous hidden tax on working families — are treated as a litmus test of loyalty. Conservatives once resisted Washington’s heavy hand in private industry. Now, the New Right cheerfully embraces government stakes in companies like Intel, profit-sharing deals with Nvidia, and price controls by executive fiat. For every outspoken Rand Paul, there are scores more who choose to wait and whisper.

 

Or take the sanctity of life. The pro-life cause animated the conservative movement for half a century. Yet when the most recent GOP platform removed strong pro-life language, many conservatives simply bit their tongues out of fear of reprisal. In 2025, they have done little more than twitter as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has let the supposed risks of Tylenol use during pregnancy displace the previous Trump administration’s important efforts to address the deadly consequences of the abortion pill.

 

Foreign policy reveals another fault line. America’s strength abroad has always been rooted in our willingness to lead. But in certain populist circles, skepticism toward allies has hardened into a reflexive isolationism. Those who still believe America is the indispensable nation speak in hushed tones, while those who counsel retreat shout from the rooftops.

 

Parts of the right have increasingly adopted the left’s most illiberal habits, including the very logic the left once used to muzzle conservatives. When Attorney General Pam Bondi recently declared, “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech,” it was a disturbing echo of the speech-policing conservatives once fought against. Though she wisely backed down, the instinct to police speech with government power betrays the very principles conservatives once championed.

 

And so the whispers multiply. But courage is still contagious.

 

Our task is to summon the courage to remind our movement that conservatism is more than fleeting passions and personalities. It is defined by fidelity — to the Constitution, to free enterprise, to moral truth, and to America’s calling as a beacon of liberty.

 

If we continue to whisper, we will cede the future to those who shout. It is time, once again, for traditional conservatives to speak — clearly, confidently, and without fear.