[Adapted from VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow’s address to the American Renaissance Conference, May 21, 2016]
American Renaissance Editor Jared Taylor:
Our next speaker is a naturalized U.S. citizen, and therefore, unfortunately, ineligible to run for the presidency. He is, however, one of the very rare recent citizens that fits the original 1790 criteria for naturalization: namely, a free, white person of good character. I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt about character. [Laughter],
Of course, I am speaking of Peter Brimelow, the presiding genius of VDARE.com. Before he started VDARE.com, Peter Brimelow had a brilliant career as a financial journalist, but brilliance will not save you if you start speaking the truth. Of course, National Review’s loss has been very much our gain because Mr. Brimelow has built his site up into an indispensable voice of sanity.
An indispensable voice of sanity that, of course, the Southern Poverty Law Center calls a “hate group.” Well, the $PLC is wrong. And I can prove it.
The Brimelow family was at home and a country music song came on over the radio. One of their little girls [Karia, right] piped up and said: “What’s this song about, Momma?” And Momma explained that the singer was sad because she loves a man who doesn’t love her.
Well then, the little girl said, “Daddy will love her. Daddy loves everyone!” [Laughter]
“Hate group” indeed!
Well, today, Mr. Brimelow will speak to us about “The Trump Tsunami And The Future Of The Historic American Nation.” Please welcome Peter Brimelow.
VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow:
Thank you, Jared, and congratulations on this triumph here.
As Jared said, I have children more or less the same age as [Political Cesspool’s] James Edwards, 5, 3, and 1. And I worry what’s going to happen to them after I’m gone.
When I spoke here last year, I made a bold and radical assertion that nobody believed and it turned out to be…wrong.
I predicted that Jared Taylor would run for Congress in his home 10th District of Virginia against the useless Rubio-endorsing RINO, Barbara Comstock.
Do you realize, Jared, that she returned Trump’s $3,000 campaign contribution as late as March? [Rep. Barbara Comstock Gives Away Trump Donations, NBC Washington, March 30, 2016]
You could tell that the Evil Party was scared. The spy that the SPLC had here—and whoever it is may be sitting next to you, ladies and gentlemen— had various nasty things to say about my talk. But the spy was afraid to mention the impending threat of a Taylor tsunami.
Well, Jared didn’t run. One of his reasons was legitimate—sort of. Getting on the ballot in Virginia turns out to be a real bureaucratic hassle. It is a case study of how the managerial state represses dissent (and he actually owes me an article on that, I’ll be waiting for it to come through as soon as he’s gotten through with this conference).
But the main reason was that Jared was entirely focused on getting out this year’s edition of The Color of Crime. I assume The Color of Crime is available somewhere in the back? It’s a great work on who actually commits crime in America and it’s well worth buying [Also available as free PDF download].
So you can see the urgency. I mean, the color of crime might change! And all this work would be wasted!
Now, it really infuriates me when people don’t do what I say. And as revenge on Jared, I am going to reveal one of his most shameful family secrets. As you know, he is very proud of his Confederate ancestors. Well, I have to tell you that on his mother’s side, he is directly descended from General George B. McClellan. [Laughter].
That’s an “in” joke for those of you who haven’t been bitten by the Civil War bug. (By the way, James [Edwards], as you know [Confederate General] Patrick Cleburne [whom Edwards had just quoted] was a British immigrant! He’d served in the British Army. [Laughter]).
Well, I did make another assertion that turned out a bit better.
To put this in context, the AmRen conference was in mid-April of last year, 2015. It wasn’t completely clear that the Congressional Republicans were going to cave in on their campaign promise to reverse Obama’s Executive Amnesty—but it was fairly clear.
And that was very bad, because it meant that there would be no longer any conceivable chance of stopping the Left’s drive to Elect A New People. Somewhere in the decade after 2040, federal immigration policy will reduce American whites (that is to say, the people before the 1965 Immigration Act who were known as “Americans”) into a minority. And America won’t survive without them. Which is why I am worried about the future of my children.
My talk last year was called “Immigration: Is This The Breaking Point?” And most of it was devoted to what I called “Plan B”—what the Historic American Nation, that is, the American nation as it had evolved by 1965, should do if the breaking point broke the wrong way—if they find that they have lost control of their polity, their nation-state. And there a lot of things, such as subdividing the existing states to reflect actual ethnic realities, that I think will have to be done eventually.
And I was speaking, obviously, before Donald Trump announced his run for President—on June 16, 2015—incredibly, still not a year ago!
At VDARE.com, we had just posted an article by one of our writers, Matthew Richer, predicting that Trump would run and that he would run on the immigration issue. I edited this article, we posted it…but I can’t say that I really believed it. I’ve been writing about immigration for nearly a quarter of a century (my cover story on immigration in National Review, which eventually grew into my immigration book Alien Nation, came out in 1992). We’ve seen a lot of false dawns.
So I’m going to take the liberty of reading out what I said last April to give you the argument that laid behind my assertion.
To quote me:
Now I want to say, to emphasize here, that I haven’t given up on the idea of Patriotic Immigration Reform happening—of immigration being cut off.All it would take to get this issue into politics is one speech.
In Britain—the British people in the audience will testify to this—the impact of Enoch Powell’s 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech was absolutely enormous. And it did stave off mass immigration for a generation. He was denounced, of course, but at the same time the politicians were too frightened to increase immigration—until Tony Blair was elected in 1997. That’s when the floodgates were really opened in Britain.
Similarly in the U.S., the issue of Communist subversion—which was a genuine problem, even if no-one under 30 has heard of it—really exploded after Joseph McCarthy’s speech in 1950 in Wheeling, West Virginia.
Note that, in in both cases, in Powell’s case and McCarthy’s case, the preconditions were already forming. Quite a number of people had been talking about immigration in Britain for a long time before Powell, they just weren’t as prominent. In McCarthy’s case, people forget that Alger Hiss was already in jail, for perjury related to his testimony about his activities as a Soviet agent, before McCarthy spoke.
It’s just that suddenly one spark starts the conflagration. And that could still happen in the U.S. All it needs is a spark—and all it needs is one ambitious politician.
For example, I was very impressed by the fact that Scott Walker has said he’s changed his mind on Amnesty and that he’s also now critical of legal immigration. It’s not clear how far he’s changed his mind, or if he’s changed it back, but he did say it.
It’s at least the homage that vice pays to virtue He can see that this is a good issue to get around Jeb Bush with.
Does anyone remember Jeb Bush? [Laughter]. He was the inevitable nominee this time last year.
I went on:
So I still think it’s possible that, in this Presidential election cycle, someone (Walker? Rick Santorum?) will decide to drop the bomb on the immigration issue.In that case, the sense that this is the “breaking point” on immigration could be optimistic. I don’t want to rule this out.
Well, this is why I’m rich and famous! [Laughter].
In fact, it didn’t even take a speech. It just took a soundbite, a few sentences in Trump’s declaration announcement.
Is anyone here from Washington State? [Yes]. Right, well, you know that the reports right now that there are so-called earthquake swarms gathering around Mount St. Helens in Washington State and that another eruption may be imminent. That gets everybody’s attention because of the huge mess that the 1980 eruption caused.
Well, there have been “earthquake swarms” around the immigration issue in the U.S. dating back more than 20 years. Jared and I and others have been saying for more than 20 years that the American political order is built on an increasingly stressed seismic fault. The political elite, Left and Right, just went on building. Now they have Trump. They deserve him.
(The moral of this story, by the way, is: Listen to the Alt Right! Or the Dissident Right as John Derbyshire calls it).
Trump didn’t say much in that soundbite. He hasn’t said that much, actually, about immigration at all. He doesn’t have to.
He often fails to bring the issue up in speeches and debates. In Wisconsin, for example, Senator Ted Cruz, who really came a long way on this issue during the campaign, actually gave better technical answers on immigration than Trump in the debate. He talked about the labor market impact of immigration and he talked about the possible substitution of mechanization for cheap labor.
But we can’t judge Trump like a normal politician. (I guess that’s obvious!)
How many of you have been to a Trump rally?
I’d say at least a quarter of the audience.
Well, as you know, it’s a phenomenon. He doesn’t give written speeches. He just gets up and talks, extemporizes. Sometimes, he forgets his lines. Sometimes he gets excited, the crowd gets excited, and he decides that he’s gone far enough and he stops, gets on his plane, and goes home. [Laughter].
Sometimes he just gets flat-out bored—for example, when he is asked for the 35th time how he feels about David Duke. (They have to ask him about his feelings because no one has ever proved a connection between him and David Duke).
And above all he simply will not prepare for debates. Specifically, from VDARE.com’s point of view, that means that he often fails to point out the immigration dimension of the various questions he’s asked about—such as the minimum wage. (The answer: tighten up the labor market with an immigration moratorium).
I do think that this lack of preparation could be a problem for him in the general election.
But what do I know? What does anyone know about the Trump phenomenon?
What Trump does do in compensation, though, is that he will periodically put down a hard formal marker on issues he really wants to claim. So on August 15 of last year, he issued a policy statement on immigration, prepared with Senator Jeff Sessions that was simply stunning. I have been in this business for 25 years and I was amazed.
He wants to end birthright citizenship. He wants to pause legal immigration. He wants to tighten the labor markets. He wants to have E-Verify, the whole thing. Jared and I actually did a podcast about it. [Jared Taylor And Peter Brimelow: Let’s Put A Cherry On Top Of The Trump Immigration Plan!, August 17, 2015]
Here’s what Ann Coulter—and I have enormous respect for Ann, don’t be deceived by her bimbo stereotyping—said about Trump’s immigration statement: “It’s the greatest political document since the Magna Carta.” [Laughter] “and I don’t care if Donald Trump wants to perform abortions in the White House after his policy paper.” [Laughter]
I would say that that was qualified support from Ann! She is pro-life, of course.
For reasons that bear analysis, you still don’t often see the immigration issue mentioned in Main Stream Media analysis of Trump’s triumph. The blogger Mickey Kaus, who is a very fine fellow, has even started what he calls the Omerta Olympics, listing the MSM thumbsuckers that don’t mention immigration.
But Trump knows that immigration is an issue, and that it’s an issue that is working for him, because he hears his crowds spontaneously chanting, “Build The Wall!” It’s a regular feature at Trump rallies.
Recently, I’ve seen the role of the immigration issue resurfacing even in the MSM. For example, this week in Vanity Fair the writer T.A. Frank, published an article which I recommend to you headlined The One Issue that Could Destroy Hillary Clinton. [May 17, 2016]
He used FiveThirtyEight’s interactive Swing-o-Matic feature, which allows you to make various assumptions about electorate, and he concluded:
Fundamentally, then, a small percentage of white voters hating Clinton’s stance on immigration could outweigh a large percentage of Hispanic voters liking it.
(Emphasis added). That’s because in spite of all the hype, there are many more white a.k.a. American voters—about 6 or 7 times more—then there are Hispanic voters.
Of course, we like this article particularly because at VDARE.com we did essentially the same calculations, using the same feature, back in December.
People should listen to the Alt Right.
So what now? I’m going to ask four questions.
First: can Trump win?
Well, as I said when I appeared on James Edwards’ Political Cesspool back in September: in this crazy system, of course Trump can win! [September 25, 2015]
The big GOP problem—and I mean here not the party of Paul Ryan, but what we at VDARE.com sometimes call the GAP, the Generic American Party, the default mode political expression of white Americans, of the historic American nation—is 1) low white share and 2) low white turnout.
It’s not absence of minority outreach.
White turnout actually fell in the last two presidential elections. It fell! Overall, the GOP generally get somewhere between 50 and 60 percent of the white vote. In 2010 and 2014 Congressional elections, it got about 60 percent.
But there are enormous sectional variations. For example, Mitt Romney actually lost the white vote in Iowa. He lost the white vote in Iowa—extraordinary.
So what the GOP basically needs to do is to Southernize the white vote. It needs to have everyone in the country voting like Southern whites vote.
For example, as you all know, there are a lot of lamentations about how California is unwinnable for the GOP right now. Well, the demographics of California are really no different than the demographics in Texas. It’s just that in Texas, the whites vote almost 70 percent for the GOP. They vote together. And that’s not high by Southern standards.
The GOP (or the GAP) needs the white vote to tip like residential neighborhoods—once the minorities reach a certain point, whites leave.
And that’s actually happening at the state and local level. The GOP is very strong on the state and local level. It controls a historically high share of state governments. Not that it’s done anything to deserve it, it’s just happening spontaneously.
Now the Democrats can rile up their base very easily by screaming about white racism. And that’s what all these MSM campaigns about Black Lives Matter and Ferguson and Trayvon Martin [and Roots] are about—riling up the minority base.
But the GOP has not been able to figure out a way to rile up its base really since 1988, since George Bush won against Dukakis, when it used the Pledge of Allegiance issue, Willie Horton, and so on.
However, I think that this year that Hillary is going to solve the GOP/GAP’s problem—because, quite unnoticed by the MSM which doesn’t report this sort of thing, she’s moved very far to the Left on immigration. I’ll come back to this.
Now, of course, the big news last week is that the gap between Trump and Clinton has been closing very dramatically. Rasmussen and Fox are actually showing him ahead. But these polls, interestingly enough, show that he is still is not in the historically high range of the white share. He actually seems to be doing better than Romney did among minorities—which is a reason why some people don’t believe the poll.
What this says to me is that if Trump does start to move the white vote into these historic high levels, even 60 percent or so, we’re looking at a landslide.
But anyway, for the Republican Party, as Mrs. Thatcher used to say, “There Is No Alternative.” GOP/ GAP can never out-pander the Democrats and go after the minority vote. So they have no alternative.
Also, I think it’s important to note that, even if Trump loses, he’s already shown that immigration and the whole concept of “America First” works electorally.
There are some elections where losing candidates blaze trails for the future. The obvious examples: Goldwater in ’64; McGovern in ‘72. They transformed their parties, and showed their parties new ways to move forward.
Generally speaking, with campaign consultants, you can talk to them all you want and you can show them all sorts of numbers, but you can’t get through to them until they actually see an election that’s worked. And Trump of course, in these primaries, has shown that the immigration issue does work.
Well, the second question: can he be trusted if he wins?
And the answer is: absolutely not! You can’t trust any of these characters.
It’s entirely possible that he could be another Schwarzenegger, that he could be content to reign rather than to rule. We don’t really know what he’s going to do when he gets into the White House.
But we did know what Jeb Bush was going to do. And we did know what Marco Rubio was going to do—even if he had the grace to lie about it in the campaign.
You know, I wrote an article saying that Trump was a wrecking ball because I was very struck by a comment in the National Review comment thread—in those days NR used to allow comments, they were 100% hostile to National Review’s line so they had to shut them down!—the writer said: “After 30 years of duplicity by the media and cultural elite and the corrupt governing class [which of course includes National Review], we’ve seized upon, quite consciously, a wrecking ball.”
That’s what Trump is: a wrecking ball.
On the bright side, I think we can take some comfort in Trump’s personality. He doesn’t seem particularly drawn to the quiet life [Laughter].
And forcing the Beltway Establishment to face the immigration issue—that’s a pretty good way to not have a quiet life!
And he does like building things! I think we can count on the wall. [Laughter and applause].
So, the third question: if he can be trusted, can he actually do anything?
Now here, I want to offer a word of comfort to the Left.
People get very apocalyptic at the idea of Trump in the White House. But the fact is that the American presidency is inherantly a very weak office. It’s much less powerful than the Prime Minister in a parliamentary system like Britain or Canada, who by definition controls the legislature and certainly can count on his own party.
Trump’s own party will be utterly shell-shocked if he wins, and quite possibly hostile.
(Unless there is a landslide. And, as I said, I think that is possible).
So Donald Trump could be like King Kong in the old movies: the curtain goes up, he’s on the stage, he’s got this metal frame that goes up to his waist to hold him down, and he’s roaring a lot—but he can’t move.
You can picture that, can’t you?—particularly the roaring?
But, you know, King Kong got free.
Even without Congress, there’s a lot that Trump could do. Famously, the presidency is a bully pulpit. Supposing Trump started showing up at the funerals of the victims of illegal aliens like Obama and his officials have to publicize the #BlackLivesMatter scam.
He could take a lot of (legitimate) executive actions. The Center for Immigration Studies has listed 79 different executive actions that would tighten up enforcement. And then you would get attrition through enforcement—what Romney called “self-deportation.” The illegal stock would slowly start to diminish.
At VDARE.com, we are very fond of what we call “strategic deportation.” That is to say, you arrest and deport extremely visible illegal aliens—and they are not “in the shadows”—and Send Them A Message. So next time there is a big illegal alien demonstration, round them up and ship them out. Send a message! [Applause].
And I think that would start an avalanche. You know, the last time there was an illegal alien crisis, President Eisenhower solved it in just a few months after he came into office with Operation Wetback. But he actually only deported a couple hundred thousand people. Over 1 million people just up and left. And that’s what would happen now.
And then there is legislation.
Unlike Richard Spencer—where’s Richard Spencer in the audience?—and many people under 30, I take Reagan very seriously.
And I think that Reagan pointed the way for Trump on what to do. He focused on only a small number of things—Star Wars, tax cuts, defense build-up, that sort of thing.
So I would say that Trump should also focus on a small number of things. My favorite is: things that would reduce the political impact of immigration. And that would allow us to do more things in the future.
My favorite is abolishing birthright citizenship. It removes right away the incentive for people to immigrate illegally because their children won’t be citizens. And it removes the Democrats’ incentive to encourage illegal immigration.
The great prize, of course, is an immigration moratorium, a cut-off of all legal immigration.
But I would also be interested in an Official English amendment because I think that it’s immensely popular and it sends a very important symbolic message.
There’s a report this week of some poor Milwaukee custard shop owner who’s been hassled because he ordered his staff to talk to his customers in English, and he was immediately threatened with federal legislation—he’s allegedly violated some federal labor code or something. And he had to back down.
Well, imagine if the federal labor code worked in the other way and said that you can’t insist on having people who speak Spanish, which is common now in large parts of the country, which in effect discriminates in favor of immigrants against native-born Americans.
That’s what the Quebecois did. They made it illegal for employers to specify that they wanted to hire bilingual people. And it worked for them. They got control of Quebec.
Now, the fourth question: What if he loses?
Ann Coulter gave a very affecting interview on BBC a day or so ago. She said that if Trump doesn’t win, “it’s over We’re going to be homesick for the rest of our lives, because America’s gone.”
I think that if Hillary wins, there’s a very real danger that she will launch Merkel-type immigration surge.
There have been several immigration surges through Executive Action right now. Obama has encouraged Central Americans to come in; he’s encouraging right now a lot of Cubans. He’s essentially dismantled border control in his last two years.
But I’m talking about a large legislated surge.
The executive editor at National Review, Reihan Salam, is a very interesting figure. And I’m going to get him into trouble here, because I think that he is one of these Conservativism Inc. operatives who actually gets the message about immigration but doesn’t want to say so, out loud, very much. There’s a lot of these people out there. Salam, for example, has written, very discreetly, about the need to abolish birthright citizenship.
He wrote an article just recently called Trump’s Immigration Disaster [National Review, May 9, 2016]. He blamed everything on Trump, of course, and that’s why they allowed him to publish it, I guess.
But if you read it closely, he was actually saying that Democrats have moved very far to the Left on immigration, as a culmination of a process that has been going on for many years, long before Trump.
And now they’ve completely gone overboard. They are against enforcement of all types. Hillary has made it very clear that if anyone can get into this country, they can stay. And, of course, they want to expand immigration in various ways.
So Salam said this:
If Hillary is our next president, an outcome that is all but ordained if Trump is the nominee—
We’ll see about that!
—it is a safe bet that her first big legislative push will be on immigration. She will characterize her victory over Trump as a repudiation of the restrictionist cause and a mandate for immigration legislation more permissive than the comprehensive immigration-reform bill backed by President Obama. Unlike Obama and George W. Bush, who felt obligated to make their pathways to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants seem onerous, Clinton has made it clear that she intends to make her pathway to citizenship as cheap and easy as possible…
He goes on:
So far, conservatives haven’t given much thought to Hillary Clinton’s immigration agenda. To the extent that her views have been addressed at all, they’ve been treated as little more than campaign bluster. That is a mistake. Donald Trump’s success has made it far more likely that she will be our next president, and we need to start thinking very hard about what that means.
Now by “conservative,” of course, Salam means National Review-type Cuckservatives—who are actually doing their best to get Hillary elected right now, and have all of these awful things happen to America.
So I think Salam is subtly undercutting the National Review editors. They’re just too stupid to notice.
Nevertheless, the fact is that in this election Trump is capable of using Hillary’s extremism against her. Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, they just couldn’t do it.
What we are looking at here is the climax of a mortal struggle between, what we call at VDARE.com America and Anti-America—between the historic American nation on the one hand—the nation that emerged at the time of the 1965 Immigration Act, basically white—and the so-called emerging America, which is basically minority and very heavily post-1965 Immigration Act stock, with a veneer of various types of renegade whites.
Hillary wants to deliver the death blow in that struggle.
As I was packing to trek out here from Connecticut, I found a May 19th article in New York Magazine by Jonathan Chait, a real nogoodnik [Donald Trump Hasn’t Killed the Tea Party. He Is the Tea Party.] Chait [Send him mail] was basically twisting National Review Editor Rich Lowry’s tail because Lowry had been whining about how Donald Trump had hijacked the Tea Party movement. And Lowry said the “animating concern” of the Tea Party movement was “limited government and Constitutionalism.”
Chait said that this was totally untrue. There’s actually deep polling data on what the Tea Party people thought about things. And Chait said:
The Tea Party was an ethno-nationalist revolt against Obama rooted in fear of social change. Conservative leaders
—by which he meant Cuckservative leaders, in other words the Conservativism Inc. people—
pretended this revolt was a demand for their agenda, but the dissatisfaction of the base implies that the Conservative agenda was never the thing that motivated it. Trump hasn’t hijacked the Tea Party. He’s un-hijacked it.
Now, I particularly like this because I said the same thing in 2009!—also looking at deep polling data. I wrote a piece about the contemporary attacks on the Tea Party over race and I said Yes, It Is About Race. Quite Right Too.
Of course, these Tea Party people were not “racist” in the sense that they were hostile toward other races. They weren’t even proposing anything that had anything to do with other races, or even immigration. But what was telling was the deep polling. You could see these were overwhelmingly white people and they were very concerned about the way America was going.
(I may have said this before—but you should listen to the Alternative Right!)
So Chait and I agree. The difference is that I just think the American white “ethno-nationalist revolt” is a good thing. I think American whites have rights.
As Trump said in his foreign policy speech: “The nation-state remains the true foundation for happiness and harmony.”
I just think the Historic American Nation deserves a state.
(That foreign policy speech, by the way, was reportedly written by one of Trump’s Jewish aides. He is completely surrounded by Jews. This attempt to make him appear anti-Semitic is weird.)
Well, I said a year ago, it will only take one speech. My prediction this year: it will only take one election.
And then Mount America will really blow.
Thank you very much. [Applause]
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.
