[VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow writes: This is adapted from the talk I gave to the John Randolph Club conference in Cleveland, October 23 2015. The theme was “Nation And State” and the audio is available here. I spoke after Patrick J. Buchanan, and reacted somewhat to his gloom. Many thanks to Tom Piatak, president of the Rockford Institute, publisher of Chronicles Magazine, Editor Chilton Williamson Jr., and all our other friends.]

Thank you, Tom [Piatak] thank you, Ladies and Gentlemen. Wayne [Allensworth, also on panel] and I were just reminiscing about when we last appeared on a John Randolph Club panel together—New Orleans, 2003. That was the talk that SPLC claimed caused it to name VDARE.com as a Hate Group!

So, to the SPLC spy here now, I want to say: I am going to try harder! [Laughter]

It is also a great honor to be in the same program as Pat Buchanan. Some of you will know that Pat's 77th birthday is in about two weeks. I want to be the first to wish him all the best. [Applause]

Even though he did steal my speech! So I am going to disagree with him a bit here, on some of these details.

A friend of Pat and mine, Bill Rusher, wrote a book in the mid-1970s arguing that the Republican Party was hopeless and it should be replaced by a Third Party. (It’s still not clear to me that he wasn't right!) I came down from Canada, where I then worked for the old Financial Post, to interview him.

It's impossible to exaggerate the depression that lay over the American Conservative Movement in middle 70s, after the fall of Vietnam, the disaster of the Nixon presidency, and the defeat of Gerald Ford. After we had spoken for a while, Rusher realized I was a friendly and we went off the record.

He said to me: "You know, confidentially, all is lost and the Red Flag will one day fly over the world." In those days, people took the Soviet Union very, very seriously. The kids today don't realize this. Nobody under 40 has any idea how serious the Cold War was, and how seriously we took it.

Rusher went on: "But we keep on going—because, for one thing, you never know what is going to happen next; and for another thing, there are theological injunctions against despair!”

Isn't that right, Pat?

And I’ve never forgotten that. Because, of course, five years later Reagan was elected, the world turned upside down, the Soviet Union collapsed, and we had a few good years in there before it all went to hell again. [Laughter].

But still, things can turn around.

I'm going to disagree also with Pat about California and Texas. My wife is from Texas, as is Wayne [Allensworth]. Of course, California is in terrible shape politically. But the fact is that demographics of California are no different from the demographics of Texas. The white population of Texas is roughly about the same size as the white population in California. But Texas elects Republicans, and it’s a safe Republican state in the presidential election, because the Texas whites all vote together—actually, they vote 70% for Republicans—and the California whites don't.

Romney barely carried the whites in California; McCain lost them. That idiot Indian that the GOP Establishment imposed instead of Tim Donnelly, a fine immigration patriot, in the last gubernatorial race against Jerry Brown, got just 45% of the white vote in California. You are not going to carry California if you don't get more than 45% of the white vote.

So the problem is not simply demographics, but also ideas and enthusiasm.

Romney’s share of the white vote was actually not historically impressive. His share of the white vote that was significantly less than Reagan’s in 1984 and much less than Nixon's in 1972.

And remember, the point is not simply the white share, but the white turnout.

White turnout has fallen in the last two presidential elections. Masses of whites are simply not going to the polls.

Now, fortunately, masses of Hispanics don't go to the polls either. Their turnout is also disastrous, in spite of all the Main Stream Media propaganda.

The job of the Republican Party—or what I call it, the Generic American Party, because it's the party that the majority of the historic American nation votes for, without being given any particular reason—is to enthuse and mobilize its white base. It's simply not doing that right now. And it has no intention of doing that, because it's not what the donors want.

So the moral of this story: we can be pessimistic—but not that pessimistic.

Part of the reason for this is: I really think things could still be done.

And part of the reason is that, at my advanced age, as some of you know, I have small daughters. My youngest was born in February and her name is Victoria Beauregard because Lydia's family are Confederates and have a special devotion to General Beauregard and we don't care what other people think! [Laughter and applause].

This little girl will be 25 in 2040, when the white population in the US on current form goes into minority and the US will effectively cease to exist.

I used to say to audiences, as Pat just said about himself, that I won't be here in 2040. But Lydia says I’ve got to be here, and if I'm not, she'll kill me! [Laughter]. Still, I will be 93.

There are a couple things people always say when they talk about immigration, a couple of clichés that have done enormous damage. One of them is that the US is a “Nation of Immigrants.”

Well, the fact is that all nations are nations of immigrants. There is no known case where people grew up out of the ground. [Laughter]

This Nation Of Immigrants cliché is like the War On Christmas: it’s tempting to think it's unique to America because of America's history and the Constitution’s bar to an established religion. But if you actually look at the rest of the English-speaking world, there are wars on Christmas there too. The British are banning Christmas all over the place, even though they explicitly have no separation between church and state, they actually do have an Established Church.

It's a disease, immigration enthusiasm, and it's spread right through the First World. In Britain, people will say with a straight face that the British are a nation of immigrants. What they mean is, well, there were the Saxons! And the Celts! But for a thousand years, there was no significant immigration to Britain at all. And yet it is a cliché in Britain today that Britain is a nation of immigrants.

The other big cliché that you get: America is a “Proposition Nation.” Again, this is actually something that is common throughout the First World. Most First World nations think that they are Proposition Nations. The French they have a civilizing mission [Laughter]. [Recent events have shown it didn't quite take—much of France's Muslim immigration is from its former colonies in North Africa.]

Since Pierre Trudeau, Canada has been told that it’s a Proposition Nation. My first wife was an ardent Francophile. She was from Newfoundland in Canada and the social engineers in Canada make everyone learn French to create a “bilingual, bicultural nation.” And if you don’t speak French, you can’t work for the federal government, which is what almost all Canadians want to do [Laughter].

But it didn't work. It didn't work. Although she was a passionate Francophile, she still had all the traditional Newfoundland attitudes toward Quebec, which is that she thought they were all thieves and should give back the Churchill Falls.

So this Proposition Nation stuff just doesn't work as successfully as the social engineers think it will.

There is a very bright writer, Julia Hahn, at Breitbart.com, who is doing some excellent work on immigration. She recently dug up a video clip from Chicago in 2013 with Paul Ryan sitting with Luis Gutierrez, a raging Hispanic racist who explicitly says he has no interest except for the Hispanic community and has called for Amnesty. In the video, Ryan boasts he trying to get Amnesty through and says:

America is more than a country. It's more than Chicago or Wisconsin. It's more than our borders; America is an idea. It's a very precious idea.

Well, Sam Francis pointed out years ago that what this means is that if some Somali has this “precious idea,” he can come here. Whereas if an American doesn't agree with this “precious idea,” he presumably is going to be thrown out.

Well, they are working on that! They are going to send the Sam Francises out.

And again, as I say, all First World nations tend to think of themselves in this way. The first sighting of the Proposition Nation idea that I’ve come across was Peter Gay writing about Germany. Germany is a Proposition Nation!—that's what all his relatives in Germany thought in the 1930s. Well the Germans have been on the Rhine since before Christ, so it's not rational, there is something deeper going on.

A nation is an ethno-cultural identity. It's a culture, obviously—we are all speaking English here, even though many of us come from a non-English speaking country.

But it's also ethnic. The first citizenship law in the US explicitly said that citizenship was restricted to whites. The Founders were serious about it. And it's a question about how far that can be stretched.

The American nation is a true organic nation. It was just assembled a lot faster than most nations. Unfortunately, this means it can be disassembled as well.

America substantially grew not through immigration but through organic growth—what demographers call “natural increase.” Ann Coulter, in her wonderful book Adios America, repeatedly makes the point that America not a nation of immigrants, it's a settler nation. People came, and then America grew from natural increase.

In the part of the US that I am living in, the Connecticut Berkshires, a very rural area, when my son was in school, he would go off on the school bus up a hill called Tanner Hill, stop at Tanner Farm, and a kid called Tanner would come out whose family bought the land from the Indians in the 18th century.

People have been on the same land since they settled—even in the North East, which we think of as hostile territory. [Laughter]

In that area, northern Connecticut, the working class is still colonial stock, with some Italians mixed in. And those people came out here and they founded Cleveland. The Connecticut Western Reserve was founded by a man named Cleaveland (spelled with an “a.”) You can see Public Square here in the center of Cleveland is laid out like a New England town center. Long after they have gone and been forgotten, they continue to have this “Founder Effect.”

I said earlier that the US won't survive losing its founding population. Let me back up a second. The US will not survive as an institution. The historic American nation, the one that evolved from the founding to the middle of the 20th century, will have lost control of its state. But the important thing to realize, on the optimistic side, is that the historic American nation will still exist. It will still exist. It will simply have lost control of its state—something which happens to nations from time to time.

I think that what we see in America now is actually two nations. There is the historic American nation, which is white and votes Republican, and there is the other nation, which I call, for convenience’ sake, Anti-America. That consists of, basically, Democrats—fundamentally, all the minorities, with a veneer of white gays, and Jews.

Now, for the SPLC spy here, that's a Hate Fact!—it's true, but it's something that you’re not supposed to say.

I think that this conflict between these two nations for control of the state is why we have this intensified reign of terror that we see, particularly affecting the Dissident Right, at the moment.

The other side knows that it would be quite easy to stop the demographic shift from happening. All you need is an immigration moratorium, Operation Wetback, a reorientation in the immigration policy. It could be done very easily. So the Left is desperate that the immigration issue not get into politics.

When Pat had his quarrel with MSNBC, or more accurately when MSNBC had its quarrel with Pat, the president of MSNBC, Phil Griffin, actually said to reporters that: "I don't think the ideas [Buchanan] put forth are appropriate for the national dialogue, much less on MSNBC."

Now, this is a journalist saying that we're not supposed to discuss ideas.

What happened here? Well, what happened, of course, is that the MSM in the US today is an arm of the Anti-American nation. It's an oppressive mechanism. It’s not here to report news, it's here to penalize dissent.

I used to write a column for MarketWatch about highly technical financial issues. I never wrote about politics. But when the Census Bureau issued one of its periodic reports predicting when whites were going to be a minority (because it's not clear exactly when that is), the editor told me that a dozen people—my colleagues—approached him, came into his office or sent him an email, saying I must on no account be allowed to write about this. Because, although I never wrote about politics at MarketWatch, they knew about me because of the SPLC. And their immediate reaction was: repression.

That's the hallmark of the Left right now. They have to suppress this debate. They can't allow it to start.

But it is starting. And institutions like the John Randolph Club are examples. The historic American nation is simply reorganizing itself. It's simply finding new forms of expression. I think the Dissident Right websites like VDare.com are examples of this.

What happens next? As I say, I think the Historic American Nation will continue to try to find expression. One way in which it will try to find expression: we will see much more talk about secession, states breaking up. Texas has the legal right to break up into five, and I think that is something it should do immediately. They should float off the Mexican areas and regain control of the rest.

We have a book out at VDARE.com, Michael Hart's Restoring America, which goes into considerable detail on how this can be done. You can find it on our site. You are not going to find it in bookstores, needless to say. They are part of the repressive mechanism too.

This reorganization of the nation could take a number of forms. For example, the first time I ever got into conversation with Pat was over Canada. I wrote a book on Canadian politics in 1986 which predicted, among other things, that the separatists would rise to power in Quebec and the nominally conservative party would be replaced by a new right-wing party based in western Canada. Both of which actually happened!

Peter Zeihan, who used to work for Stratfor has an interview in the National Post talking  the new election in Canada—an election that was substantially driven by Third World immigrants. The leftist Liberal party has not gotten its French Quebec base back—but they have elected a New People. Canadian cities are full of Third World immigrants, who vote for the Liberals.

As a result of this new election, Alberta, in the heart of the Prairies, is in a very dramatic situation because it pays out tens of thousands of dollars a year by capita to the rest of Canada. He predicted that Alberta will start to think about seceding again. [Why leaving Canada makes sense for Alberta, and U.S. would likely welcome a new state, by Jen Gerson, March 18, 2015] It was an issue 20 years ago, he thinks it will come back. He thinks it will try to join the US. I think it may want to be independent of America’s disastrous immigration policy. But I do think there is a lot that can be done with Canada.

So Canada could be one solution to re-balancing and restoring the ethnic balance of American politics.

But I don't really want to break up the US. I want to reconquer it! [Applause]. And I think there are many ways in which this can be done.

Things like Official Language legislation. At VDARE.com, we get a lot of emails all the time complaining that you can't get jobs at some McDonald’s unless you speak Spanish. What that effectively means is that McDonald’s discriminates in favor of the immigrant community, because they are the only ones who are bilingual.

Now in Quebec, they simply banned that. You can't require English-language proficiency in Quebec. As a result, the English-speaking community in Quebec—and English-speaking immigrants built Quebec, Montreal was an English-speaking city at the heart of Canada, one of the biggest cities in the British Empire—has been destroyed. They have collapsed in the last 50 years, because of relentless pressure put on them by the Quebec nationalists.

Now, this not a pretty sight. But we didn't create this situation. As a result of the disastrous mistakes of the 1960s onward, a lot of nasty things are going to happen. And I would rather them not to happen to Americans—but to other people.

Another aspect of reorganizing the nation: the redefinition of the political community. Something has to be done about dual citizenship. When you swear your oath of allegiance in the US—and I've done it—you swear to “abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen.” But it's a joke. It's not enforced, because of a Supreme Court decision to accommodate some Israeli who wanted to retain his American passport. [Afroyim v. Rusk, 1967]

That could also, of course, be halted by statute, and it should be halted.

Now, some Americans are aware of this. My son, as some of you know, was, until very recently, a Marine. He went straight in after high school. When he was in Parris Island, we got a call, which is unheard of—you usually never hear from them from the moment they get there until they get out, you see them at the graduation ceremony.

But Alexander’s MOS [Military Occupation Specialty] was intelligence. And the sergeant wanted to know: did he have a British passport? He was also looking for a Canadian passport, because Alexander’s late mother was Canadian. He said: if he has a British or Canadian passport, he's not eligible to serve in Marine intelligence.

Well, as a matter of fact, Alexander didn't have these passports. Not as a political statement, by the way—I don’t have any compunction about him getting the passports, because I don't make these laws. But I just hadn't gotten around to organizing it. So the sergeant said that was fine.

I said: "Well, they are NATO allies, you know."

He said: "Sir, until recently, having a foreign parent would have disqualified him from going into intelligence."

So there is some awareness. But the Marines are a somewhat unusual section of American society [Laughter].

There’s some good news in this area: the Mexicans, in their greed to establish a Fifth Column in the US, have changed their citizenship laws so that anyone who is born of Mexican parents in the US is also a Mexican citizen.

So they have somewhere to go! And I think they should go there! [Laughter].

You know, those of us who have been in the immigration game for a long time do tend to find that we repeat the same arguments. Because the arguments are right—and the problems aren't going away.

So I'm going to repeat, in closing, the famous quote from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his 1970 Nobel Prize speech—which again, because of the Cold War and in the intellectual atmosphere of that time, was a complete revelation. To have someone from the Soviet Union, which was supposed to supersede nationalism, saying this was very striking:

The disappearance of nations would impoverish us no less than if all peoples were made alike, with one character, one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, they are its generalized personalities: the smallest of them has its own particular colors, and embodies a particular facet of God's design.

I think that America, the historic American nation as it had evolved by 1965, was a particular facet of God's design.

I think that what has been done to it is treason. And people should be shot for it. [Applause].

But Solzhenitsyn is also telling us that it is blasphemy.

Thank you.

Peter Brimelow [Email him] is the editor of VDARE.com. His best-selling book, Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster, is now available in Kindle format.