Ideas don’t just appear in policy documents. They move through networks until they become doctrine. Two things this week made that pipeline unmistakable: 1. the White House released its 2025 National Security Strategy (https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-National-Security-Strategy.pdf), 2. the Supreme Court granted cert to review President Trump’s Executive Order restricting birthright citizenship, specifically asking “whether the Executive Order complies on its face with the Citizenship Clause and with 8 U.S.C. 1401(a), which codifies that Clause.”

Race science frameworks from mid-century move into New Right political networks. Those networks translate them into moral language. Christian nationalist organizations add religious legitimacy. Heritage Foundation converts it to policy. Then it appears in official government documents.

Not conspiracy. Institutional evolution.

The National Security Strategy doesn’t cite this lineage. But read what it contains:

Europe faces “civilizational erasure.” America needs “spiritual and cultural health restoration” as security priority. Immigration is “invasion.” “Strong, traditional families” are strategic imperatives. Government must protect “God-given natural rights.”

This isn’t standard security language. This is worldview dressed as doctrine.

The same architecture is being tested in the Supreme Court.

The question: Can a president erase birthright citizenship by executive order, even if the Constitution says otherwise?

For 126 years, the 14th Amendment has guaranteed citizenship to children born here, including to undocumented parents. No president has ever had power to change citizenship unilaterally.

If the Court says yes, they create America’s first stateless population: babies born on U.S. soil but denied citizenship.

Can presidential immigration authority override constitutional citizenship guarantees? Can border control power extend into deciding who counts as a person under the Constitution?

If yes: the largest expansion of presidential authority over human status in American history.

The NSS frames it as civilizational defense. The executive order enacts it as enforcement. The Court decides if the Constitution bends to match.

Same worldview. Different applications.

When “national security” means demographic purity. When “sovereignty” rejects international law. When “spiritual health” becomes state doctrine. When “invasion” describes asylum seekers. When citizenship becomes presidential discretion.

Ideas that incubated in specific networks for decades becoming the framework that defines “reasonable.”

The battle isn’t over individual policies. It’s over whose moral vision gets to define what “American” means.

And most people won’t recognize it as a battle at all.