By VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow writes: Like other participants, I’m furious with National Policy Institute President Richard Spencer forundercuttingNPI’s D.C. conference triumph with his “Hail Victory” final words (see his defensehere). This inevitably detracted from the important things the rest of us had to say, such as my own address, which follows.
Thank you, Richard. And thank you, ladies and gentlemen.
I’ve been here a lot longer than most of you! [Richard had just established that most attendees were under 30]. I came to the U.S. in 1970 to go to the Graduate School of Business at Stanford. But I’ve learned from bitter experience that I must give up any hope of people understanding my accent! So if you can’t understand me, or if you think I should speak more directly into the microphone or anything helpful like that, please raise a fiery cross or some other cultural symbol, and I will redouble my efforts to assimilate acoustically.
Of course, I can’t claim to be a member, really, of the Alt-Right. I’m too damned old! I’m actually the same age as Hillary, within a few days. (But I’m not quite as old as Trump!)
And the second reason I can’t really claim to be a member of the Alt-Right is: I don’t like haircuts!
But I do think I can claim to be, not a godfather of the Alt Right, but sort of a god-uncle or something like that — for reasons I will go into in a minute.
Now, I pried the the subject of my talk out of Richard about 36 hours ago and he subsequently changed it, but the subject he gave me was “Trump’s America.” So that’s what he’s going to get.
But Trump has, and Bannon with him, opportunistically grabbed powerful issues that the Alt-Right and white nationalists are interested in — and no one else is interested in them, certainly no one in the Republican Establishment: for example, immigration and Political Correctness.
And with those issues, he slaughtered his way to the Presidency. He’s left a trail of bodies behind him extending back 17 months now. It’s the most extraordinary thing that I’ve ever seen. You’ll never see another election like this.
What Trump has done, what he has assembled, his America, is a civic nationalist coalition. But it does have a white core that is implicitly ethno-nationalist. And I’m going to say, this is just the beginning.
Kevin Macdonald has this concept of an implicit community, communities that get together for reasons that they do not articulate and probably do not fully understand. The granddaddy of implicit communities, of course, is the Republican Party, which is fundamentally a white organization. Whites have been gravitating to it, even though it makes no explicit appeal to them, and actually didn’t do anything to deserve their support.
At VDare.com, we have this concept of GAP, the Generic American Party, instead of GOP, Grand Old Party. It’s the party that the Historic American Nation votes for in default mode, without it making any particular attempt to appeal to them.
But this is what Trump has done: his party and his coalition is still only implicitly white, but he has discussed issues that come close to being explicit — above all, immigration and Political Correctness, which is intrinsically anti-white.
Disturbingly, leading white supremacists, like the former KKK Grand Dragon David Duke, American Nazi Party Chairman Rocky J. Suhadya, Richard Spencer, Peter Brimelow, and Brad Griffin [Editor of the Southern Nationalist site Occidental Dissent] have praised the news of Mr. Bannon’s appointment. We believe it should concern you that civil rights groups, including the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center, are widely opposed to Mr. Bannon’s appointment. [Links added]
One hundred and sixtynine Congress-things, including my own Congress-cow, Elizabeth Esty (right) from the whitopian 5th District of Connecticut, up on the Massachusetts border in the Litchfield Hills, signed this thing.
Now, I’ve never met David Duke. Or, for that matter, Brad Griffin. And I’m ashamed to say that I’ve never even heard of Rocky Suhadya — whom I assume is an FBI agent.
But I’m quite sure that none of us have ever had any significant contact with Bannon or Trump. I met Bannon once, earlier this summer, before he was translated onto Olympus. I spoke to him for 30 seconds, I told him he was doing a great job with Breitbart. He agreed. That was the extent of our conversation.
As for Trump — I’ve actually always had a soft spot for him. My only contact was about 30 years ago. Tom Bolan, who was Roy Cohn’s law partner, used to have a conservative affinity group meeting in Manhattan. This was way back in the 1980s, when the conservatives just stumbled out of their catacomb into the light after the election of Reagan and they hadn’t had enough time to degenerate into cuckservatives. We used to go to this thing. One year, we were there and for some reason they had the comedian andNew York Post columnist Joey Adams doing the warm-up.
Now, unlike Richard (but like Jared Taylor), I’m a prude. I don’t like off-color humor, probably because I never get the punchlines. I found Adam’s Borscht Belt routine excruciating. But after a few minutes of grimly studying the tablecloth, which I seem to recall was actually paper, I glanced up and saw Donald Trump, at the head table, laughing at me.
Well, he wasn’t actually laughing at me. He was radiating good humor, amusement and discreet sympathy. He seemed to be saying that he thought Adams was awful too.
George Will described Donald Trump last year as “incorrigibly vulgar.” But on the basis of that simple human contact, I don’t believe it.
By the way, this story is also evidence that Trump was already, 30 years ago, active in the conservative movement, in a discreet way, which was a dangerous thing to do in Manhattan, particularly in the world that he lived in.
Well, I’m sure there are enough people in this room who would be happy, and indeed eager, to testify that VDARE.com, far from being “white supremacist,” is really positively wimpish about race.
We also publish on VDARE.COM a few writers, for example Jared Taylor, whom I would regard as ‘white nationalist”…
I should say that Jared has now abandoned this term because he thinks it is hopelessly contaminated. And I should also say that, because we publish people across the spectrum on the immigration issue, we do have people on the site who I would regard as Alt Right, for example, James Kirkpatrick, Alexander Hart, and Ellison Lodge.
So I went on further:
…in the sense that they aim to defend the interests of American whites. They are not white supremacists. They do not advocate violence. They are rational and civil. They brush their teeth. But they unashamedly work for their people — exactly as La Raza works for Latinos and the Anti-Defamation League works for Jews.
That’s the ADL that the Democratic congressthings described as a “civil rights organization” when they denounced Bannon.
So maybe we should describe ourselves as a “civil rights organization”!
And then I went on:
Get used to it. As immigration policy drives whites into a minority, this type of interest-group ‘white nationalism’ will inexorably increase. You read it first on VDARE.COM — and if you don’t like it, let’s have an immigration moratorium now.
Well, I have the distinct impression that these 169 Democrats didn’t read this Frequently Asked Question statement.
I wrote it originally in 2006. It was part of a column I did for the late lamented Rocky Mountain News. But it is, of course, a description of what elected Donald Trump in 2016.
A few years ago, on VDARE.com, we actually had a debate on the issue of Citizenism vs. White Nationalism. This was in the days when Jared accepted the term “white nationalist.” He debated Steve Sailer. Sailer made the argument that a nation is an ethno-cultural entity and the cultural aspect means that you can assimilate people who are not of the same race into the nation-state. Jared was more pessimistic.
Now, my heart belongs to Steve Sailer on this issue — because I’m a wimp. But my head belongs to Jared. Because of the Poltical Class’s fanatical determination to Elect A New People, I do think that politics will precipitate out on racial lines.
But the point is that all of this nuance was totally lost on these 169 Democratic idiots. They just think that anyone who disagrees with them is a White Supremacist.
Now, this attack on Steve Bannon was quite obviously coordinated. It’s an Alinskyite thing, they’re trying to “personalize, freeze, and isolate” part of the Trump Administration.
But, you know, they actually do think this. They really do believe their own propaganda. They really do think that there are Klaverns out there of white supremacists conspiring with Trump and they think the disorder in the country is entirely caused by militant Trump supporters beating up Muslims. That’s what they actually think; they’ve convinced themselves of this stuff.
There’s a famous saying from the old movie Love Story: “Being in love means never having to say you’re sorry.” I don’t understand what that means, actually, because I spend quite a lot of my married life saying I’m sorry.
But, if you’re on the Left, you never have to confront opposition. We get it all the time; you just have to open USA Today or switch on the television; we see it all the time. But they live in a warm bath of total support. And they’re horrified and deeply shocked when they are finally confronted with dissent.
In other words, these 169 Democrats are stupid.
And that’s another reason why the Democrats are going to lose this war.
And I think you see that, by the way, in the Clinton campaign. She made no effort to maneuver on the subject of immigration. I don’t think that Trump used the immigration issue enough (but of course I wouldn’t). But the fact is that Hillary openly said that she was going to go for Amnesty in the first 100 days, even though Amnesty was defeated three times in the last 15 years by massive popular opposition. That didn’t make any difference to her: She still said she was going to do it.
I think Mitt Romney would have done it too, but he at least pretended that he wasn’t going to; she said that she was going to. She’s just a fool.
So much for white nationalism.
When we look at the coalition that Trump assembled, it’s been 16 years since Steve Sailer wrote for VDARE.com an article called “GOP FutureDepends on Winning Larger Share of the White Vote” that flew directly in the face of the Karl Rove dogma that animated George Bush’s campaign in 2000, which damn near lost. And in it he argued that inreach to the GOP’s white base is, as a matter of simple arithmetic, more important than outreach to Democratic dependent minorities. I was immediately fascinated by this article because it extended the static analysis of immigration-driven impending GOP doom that Ed Rubenstein and I had developed in our 1997 National Review cover story, “The Emerging Democratic Majority.”
We had argued that extrapolating immigration-driving demographic changes forward and assuming that ethnic voting patterns, the GOP was doomed to go into opposition in three to four election cycles. It varies a bit because voting shares sway back a bit and forth in tandem according to whether it’s a good GOP year or a good Democratic year, but the major trend was inexorable.
In a day before the internet, we absolutely got no reaction to this article, unless you count the fact that a couple of months later, Bill Buckley suddenly fired the editor John O’Sullivan and purged the magazine of immigration patriots.
Steve added a dynamic dimension. He said that if the GOP increased its share of the white vote by even a small amount, just a couple of points more, to the level that George W. Bush’s father had gotten in 1988, that would have easily swamped any inconceivable increase in the GOP share of the minority vote. Now the contemporary debate was so bizarre in those days, 16 years ago, that Steve’s making this simple arithmetical point caused us to be banned from the cuckservative site Free Republic, which back then was a big deal.
The owner, Jim Robinson, claimed that simply making this argument was “divisive” and “promoting racism.”
I have a very close friend who worked on Senator Jesse Helms’ staff. I talked to him about this matter back in late 2001. I explained to him what Steve’s argument was and he said: “Peter, if you made that argument in this town, you would not only have been denounced, you would have been shunned from all parts of the political spectrum.”
The Republicans were afraid to appeal to their own base!
Well, nevertheless, Steve continued exploring the issue. We named it “The Sailer Strategy.” There are many articles on VDARE.com with that tag. After the last election in 2012, he posted an article that we headlined ‘Slippery Six’ Mid-West States Doom Romney — Because Of Low White Share. That was after the Romney loss in 2012. There, Steve outlined exactly the Rust Belt strategy which has brought Trump to victory. Quite astonishing.
Even more astonishing was that Steve then got bored with the argument and wandered off to other things like disproving the University of Virginia Rape Hoax. But I’m trying to get him back on track!
So, anyway, it’s really a matter of whether the glass half-full or half-empty. This is a civic nationalist coalition, but it does have a white ethnic core.
It’s easy to miss how extraordinary Trump’s triumph was among whites. He got about 58% of the white vote, which is roughly about what Romney got. But there’s a paradox that masks Trump’s true effect.
For one thing, you have to consider the effect of Third Parties. Quite often you hear people say that Reagan got 59% in 1980 and he won in a landslide and Romney got 59% and was defeated, and that this is a measure to the extent to which the country has changed.
Well, that’s not exactly true — because there was a Third Party candidate in 1980, John Anderson, who got 6.6% of the vote, all of it white. So the Democrats were more damaged by John Anderson and by Reagan in terms of the white vote,
And that’s exactly what happened here. [Green Party candidate Jill] Stein and [Libertarian Party candidate Gary] Johnson, between them, got close to 5%, There were several states where that was would have tipped the balance.
The second reason Trump’s achievement is masked: he’s a Scotch skinflint. He made no effort to campaign or advertise or do anything at all to run up the vote in heavily white states where he was far ahead — for example in Texas. He didn’t campaign at all in California. All this would have increased his white share.
And the third reason for why Trump’s triumph is masked: the effect of the #NeverTrumpers, particularly in California.
In California, Trump only got 45% of the white vote. Now, that’s not as bad as it sounds, because there’s no recent Republican candidate for state-wide office has carried the white vote in California, with the exception of Romney who got about 51-52%, as far as I can tell.
In other words, the problem with California is not that it has too many Third World immigrants and Hispanics (many of them can’t vote anyway). It’s that the GOP is not mobilizing the white vote.
California was the center of #NeverTrumpism. Look at Meg Whitman, who ran for California governor in 2010 — she was actually part of the real Republican War On Women, which consists of Republican consultants going to wealthy women and persuading them to run for office when they can’t win, spending millions on ads, which they get commissions on, and then abandoning them. And that’s what they did with Meg Whitman. She spent over $100 million on her gubernatorial race in 2010 — that’s about half of what Trump spent on his entire presidential campaign — and she lost.
Meg Whitman campaigned for Hillary. And that has to have some effect. There are respectable Republicans who feel they couldn’t vote for Trump.
So, what we see with the Trump vote is a sort of rotation among whites. He lost ground among the upper class, but he gained it among the lower classes.
In my area of Connecticut, for example, there was a great emergence of blue-collar workers wearing Trump shirts. The guy who gets ice off our roof, mows our lawn, and stuff like that appeared wearing a Trump shirt. He said he’d never voted in a presidential election. He’s a Colonial stock Yankee blue-collar worker (there’s still a lot of them up there in that part of New England). He’s in his 50s, but never voted in a presidential election. So there’s a rotation.
Trump got 63% of white men, a good number, but he also carried 53% of white women, despite all the propaganda. He carried all age groups, including the millennials. The only group that I can see that he didn’t carry is college-educated white women. But even there, he got within six points; he got 45% versus 51%.
And in terms of Trump’s coalition, the other aspect of his campaign, which is truly amazing, is that he actually did better among blacks and Hispanics than Romney did. There’s some dispute about Hispanics, but I’m persuaded that he did get about 29% of the Hispanic vote. Romney got 27%. Now that’s especially astonishing because, first of all, Trump was running against illegal immigration, which all the Wise Men said would destroy any Republican, and secondly he spent not one red cent on Spanish language advertising. He didn’t even have a Spanish language website.
So my analysis is that it is very possible that the next shoe may drop in 2020. In 2020, we could see a real landslide to parallel Roosevelt’s victory in 1936 when he consolidated the New Deal in what I believe was the second-greatest electoral victory in American history.
And I think I can see where this is going to come from. Where is the next big Rust Belt? It’s basically Greater New England, from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon. These are areas that are heavily white, and yet they are still substantially controlled by Democrats.
If you look at the case of Oregon, there was one of these spontaneous uprisings of the electorate in 2014 that, in the face of intense Establishment opposition, put an initiative on the ballot to reverse the Democratic governor’s attempt to give illegal immigrants driver’s licenses. And this thing carried 2 to 1. It swept Democratic areas.
There was a Republican candidate, Monica Wehby, running for Senate that year. She ran away from it; she didn’t mention it. She lost.
You may think that you could never get these Californians to vote so heavily Republican. But Arnold Schwarzenegger did. He won the gubernatorial race both times, getting over 60% of the white vote in 2006. Of course, he did absolutely nothing when he got in, but that’s another story.
So, my conclusion: what is happening here is the parties are tipping. The Democrats are becoming the Minority Party and the Republicans are becoming the Majority — white — party. And that tipping process is driven by immigration, by public policy causing the immigration influx. And it’s most obvious for Republicans on the state and local level, where they are now at a level of unprecedented dominance.
Now, maybe, eventually, with continued immigration, a Democratic majority will emerge. But it’s got some time to go.
Steve Sailer did a calculation for us at VDARE.com showing that even without any immigration cutoff at all, the GOP — or more accurately the GAP — could continue to win national elections until 2050, just by increasing its white share within conceivable limits.
But that leaves us with the interim. And I think we have a real problem here. We have “two nations warring in the bosom of a single state.” There’s America on the one hand and Anti-America on the other.
If you look at Hillary’s coalition, it’s barely half white now. If you take out the Jews and homosexuals (maybe 3-4% each), less than half the party is what we might call generic Americans. Trump appears to have lost Jews by about 70% and homosexuals by 70%, despite having Jewish grandchildren and despite pandering to gay marriage. It did him no good at all, but that, too, is another story.
One issue that I think will come up very soon: I think the Democrats are very hungry to impeach Trump. When Obama put through his Executive Amnesty, stopped enforcing the law at the border, and virtually invited Central Americans to come as long as they brought children with them, we posted a whole series of articles at VDARE.com saying that this was treason and the answer was impeachment. That’s the answer when the President refuses to uphold the law: impeach him.
We got all kinds of counter-arguments: “No, no, he’s got to commit an actual felony,” which is quite untrue. Well now, suddenly, we’re going to find that impeachment is very possible. and that in fact they want to do it.
Of course, had the Republicans actually impeached Obama before the last mid-term and made it a political issue, they wouldn’t be facing complete dispossession by Donald Trump. They deserve him.
I have a kind of note to myself saying: Don’t be totally apocalyptical.
The reason I say this: in the mid-1970s after the fall of Vietnam, the Republican Party, the conservative movement, was incredibly depressed. They really did think that all was lost.
I had National Review publisher Bill Rusher tell me in early 1976 that he really thought that all was lost and the red flag would wave over the world. But he said: “We keep on going because you never know what is going to happen next and there are theological injunctions against despair.” Four years later, Reagan was elected.
But, if I had to guess, I would say that we’re in for a hard landing.
Some of you may have seen the news this morning that Vice President Pence, a complete wimp, went to this show Hamilton in New York last night. This Hamilton show, under different circumstances, would be called “cultural appropriation” because they have taken the achievements of the Founding Fathers and acted them out with a completely minority cast.
Well, anyway, Pence was booed repeatedly by the audience and at the end the cast got up and read a statement denouncing him and denouncing Trump. They said:
We, sir, we are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights, sir. But we truly hope this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and work on behalf of all of us. All of us.
Apparently, Pence just stood still for this.
Now the arrogance and insolence of this is completely insufferable. If anyone had done anything like this to Barack Obama, the Main Stream Media would have lynched them. (We can use that word now, “lynch,” because we don’t have to worry about political correctness).
There is no “diverse America.” There’s only white America — the people who voted for Trump. They are America. Everyone else is just along for the ride.
So in conclusion, I want to say — Merry Christmas!
One of my few claims to fame is that I was an early actor in the War Against Christmas. I actually started a competition in the National Review in the mid-90s to find the most egregious attempt to abolish Christmas. Of course it was dropped as soon as Buckley fired O’Sullivan, along with the immigration issue, not coincidentally.
The reason I am in Wikipedia is basically because a few years ago Max Blumenthal, the son of Sidney Blumenthal, then writing for The Daily Beast, called me up and talked to me about it because he wanted to smear the War on Christmas with white nationalist connections, just as they want to smear Steve Bannon now.
So I guess I’m quite useful!
Trump, and no other Republican candidate, has been using that Christmas issue. He has repeatedly said that we’ll be saying, “Merry Christmas” again. I think that’s a key reason why he got an overwhelming majority support among white evangelicals, to everyone’s great amazement given to his distinctly unevangelical lifestyle.
Well for me, for all of you, and for America, Christmas came early this year.
