Manifest Destiny Is Born Again Among Young Conservatives On Social Media
Canada? Ours. Greenland? Ours. Mexico? Ours. The World? Ours. Or at least that's what one conservative trend on a rapidly growing media platform is suggesting.
Francis Kapper · Sep 20, 2026 · 5 min read
Canada? Ours. Greenland? Ours. Mexico? Ours. The World? Ours. Or at least that’s what one conservative trend on a rapidly growing media platform is suggesting.
Instagram Reels is rapidly becoming a focal point for politics in both conservative and liberal circles, pushing ideas further than X ever did, with visual pomp and circumstance. Hundreds of posts with thousands of likes have begun circulating on the platform calling the United States an “empire,” even comparing America’s power to that of the Roman Empire.
“Perhaps, still invade Canada. Think about it. Why not? We have the manpower. We have the arms. It’s our Manifest Destiny,” one video on the platform claims.
The idea of the U.S. military preparing to fight Canada is not entirely new. During the interwar period, American planners developed War Plan Red, a contingency plan approved in 1930 for a hypothetical war with the British Empire that envisioned U.S. forces invading Canada, seizing key ports and transportation hubs and preventing Britain from using Canadian territory as a base for attacks on the United States, according to the National Archives.
The memes are landing at a peculiar moment in American foreign policy, when jokes about annexation, conquest and an American empire have increasingly borrowed from actual events.
Trump has repeatedly argued that Canada should become the 51st state, telling Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in the Oval Office in May 2025 that he still believed in the idea before responding “never say never” when Carney insisted his country was not for sale, Reuters reported.
Relations remain strained more than a year later, with Ottawa looking to deepen economic and defense ties with Europe amid an escalating trade dispute with Washington.
Although many posts among conservatives on social media are critical of President Donald Trump’s decision-making in the Iran War, some take a humorous angle while quoting Trump’s bombastic rhetoric about American military might.
“Iran knows that. And they’ve been put on notice: if you fuck around with us, if you do something bad to us, we are going to do things to you that have never been done before,” Trump said during a Oct. 9, 2020 interview with Rush Limbaugh on The Rush Limbaugh Show.
