VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow at the VDARE.com conference April 27, 2024:
I’ve been saying today that one of the great things about getting old is that there’s a new crop of younger and better people coming along. Here we have TWO of them.
That’s an inside joke, actually. James Kirkpatrick has other identities! Can I say who you are? ...
Oh yes, he’s also Gregory Hood at AmRen. And he has another identity too, which I’m not going to reveal. He’s one of the most important writers that has emerged, I think we can say, on the Alt-Right, because that’s when he really came to power. And he continues to drive the agenda in very many ways.
James Kirkpatrick
James Kirkpatrick's April 27th speech at VDARE's Spring Conference: KIRKPATRICK AT THE CASTLE: “We Win This, Or No Victory Is Possible.” @VDAREJamesK pic.twitter.com/FRfrTGMpMa
I don’t know about that. I wish we could just spare the B.S. and everybody could just call me Kevin DeAnna.
There were certain strategies and there were certain ideas and certain things that made sense ten years ago which don’t make sense now. But the problem is, if you do something like that, then nobody knows who you are. I’ve been called like four different names just by people here.
When I started out, when I was basically just a kid, I got a job at a place called the Leadership Institute. They give you a survey when you start and they say, ”Well, what’s the most important issue? What’s the most important issue to a conservative?”
And even back then I said immigration. And the reason why is because I said immigration defines what the country is. And from a tactical standpoint, if you don’t win on that, you’re not going to win on anything else. I’m tempted to say that’s basically it, but long experience in this movement has shown me that things aren’t that simple and that human psychology is a bit more complicated and a bit more twisted than I think we would like it to be.
There’s a temptation, I think, for all of us, and this is for everybody, that our lives have cosmic significance, at least when we were born. I’m persuaded that the early Christians, for example, thought that the end of the world was coming very soon, and then 500 years later they thought it was coming again, and then after 1,000 years they thought it was coming again. There have been various doomsday prophecies over the years, none of which have particularly held back the sects that predicted these things.
And certainly the predominant religious impulse of our time comes from the Left, and they claim to be secular, but they are not secular. And the prediction of a Marxist society, climate change, or any of these things, is all just eschatology by another name. The religious impulse is ineradicable. And maybe there’s something to be said that we’re afraid that, maybe we were just born at a time that is just like any other time, that there’s nothing particularly special about when we were born.
Certainly there’s an illusion of permanence at every time. Very few people in 1900 would have expected that the European world order was about to collapse in a genocidal and pointless war within about 20 years.
Certainly very few people would have predicted that the world that emerged in 1945 is essentially the same world we live in now, and that we still live in what’s called the postwar order, and that the moral norms, and I would even say the true religious impulses of our time, come from that conflict.
But there’s also another error, which is the error that nothing ever happens. You hear this a lot. I mean, if you look at what’s happening in the Middle East, ”Oh, Iran and Israel are trading bombs. It doesn’t matter. Nothing’s really happening.”
And that’s basically true, because if the overall structure isn’t changed, nothing is really happening.
I would argue not much really has changed fundamentally since 1945, except maybe the end of the Cold War—but then eventually something happens. And there are in fact weeks where decades happen, and there are decades where nothing happens.
And we may be approaching a point where something will happen, but it’s probably not going to be in the form that we want it to be.
There’s something to be said for the yearning for a heroic last stand, but those are very rare in history. Probably the only one I can think of, probably the most tragic, was the fall of Constantinople. This idea of charging into the fray and saying, ”The city has fallen, but I die gloriously,” to be remembered by somebody.
But it doesn’t usually work that way. Usually what happens is people get along under just about any system. Hope is a poison, as well as an inevitable support. And people are going to say that things worked out, even if they didn’t really work out.
My friends say I don’t give black pills: I give something much worse—bleak pills. And if you want a bleak pill, I would say probably most rich white South Africans now would probably say that the end of Apartheid and everything that happened was probably a good thing, and that life may even be better now despite all these things happening.
People don’t actually learn from these things, because sometimes the truth is too horrifying to bear. And sometimes, if you realize the truth, your whole identity goes away.
I mean, to go back to those doomsday prophecies, the reason you stick with it, even when it fails, is because how do you admit your entire life has been a lie?
There’s a great moment in the movie Reds, is which about the Bolshevik John Reed, the Bolshevik journalist, but I repeat myself, where he’s talking to Emma Goldman, and Emma Goldman is complaining about all the abuses of the Soviet government. He said ”What do you think this is? And if we’re wrong, what’s your whole life been?”
That’s a very good question. And very few people are ever going to answer that question, honestly. Maybe none of us.
There’s a quote by Ernst Jünger , one of the best writers of the last century, a German soldier in World War I. He said
When once it is no longer possible to understand how a man gives his life for his country—and the time will come—then all is over with that faith also, and the idea of the Fatherland is dead; and then, perhaps, we shall be envied, as we envy the saints their inward and irresistible strength.
Faith is a very fragile thing. And one of the reasons that I think we’re so angry about what’s being done to our country is we have this beautiful, naive patriotism, this faith in something that is akin to a god, something that is something larger than the sum of its parts. That’s what a nation is, this ideal.
And you see it squandered, and you see it taken advantage of. And you see precisely those people who have the greatest faith are the ones who have betrayed the most. It is precisely the cynics and the sociopaths who are rewarded.
And if that process goes on long enough, the faith itself dies. That’s what’s happened to certain churches.
You can argue that’s what’s happened to most Western nations. Because what was it all for?
And that’s probably the most prominent dissident rallying cry that you hear in the postwar era. You see these incredible sacrifices from World War II. What was it all for? As Jonathan Bowden always said, ”Did the British people in World War II die for multiculturalism?” They didn’t think they were, but that is what they died for.
Faith is necessary, but faith is also a crutch. You can’t go forward without faith. You can’t go forward without the idea that you are going to win and that there is nothing on earth and nothing in the heavens that can stop you from winning.
But at the same time, there is a bit of doublethink involved. I guess that’s the hardest lesson I’ve learned in politics—that doublethink is inevitable. And that you sometimes do have to believe two contradictory things at the same time.
Because you have to believe that you are going to win, and that defeat is impossible. But also the awareness that if you really just believe faith is enough, then no bad ending is possible. And so what do you have to be afraid of? And you may say that’s kind of beautiful, but it also leads to tragedy, at least in a temporal sense.
To refer back to the fall of Constantinople, when the Turks broke in, a lot of the priests and a lot of the women and some of the soldiers were at the Hagia Sophia, where they were doing a Mass. And there were all these prophecies that the Virgin Mary was going to come down and save them. They weren’t saved. There were all these legends that the priests disappeared into the wall of the church and they’ll come out again someday. Maybe that’ll happen. I have my doubts.
At the same time, the only people who are going to fight to the end are those people who believe in irrational things. This is another hard realization we have to come to terms with. Because if you’re calculating and if you’re being rational and if you’re constantly doing cost- benefit analysis, why do anything?
It’s precisely because the West has become rational and calculating and focused on economics that our whole civilization is dying.
Let’s zoom in for a second. There was a poll, and I’m going to give you a little bit of a white pill anyway, there was a poll recently that talked about mass deportation.
And a majority of the American people now favor mass deportation of illegals in the United States, an overwhelming majority of Republicans. Most white people, a very high percentage of Hispanics, 45%. Even a pretty high percentage of Democrats, 42%. Try getting Democrats, 42% of Democrats, to support the Republican Party on anything else.
And I wouldn’t, if I were running for office, I would not lead with mass deportation. Even I would say, well that might be a bit of a hard sell right off the bat.
But what do I know? Because this is the poll, these are the hard results. And yet where’s the Republican Party on this? What are they talking about right now?
Steve Sailer had this thing a while back, years and years ago, where he said the Republican Party is sort of like a phalanx, because it’s got this relatively united political coalition, mostly white, mostly middle class. This was years ago, the era before Trump, there was such a thing, if you could believe that. And he said this is why it had been so relatively successful, despite everything against it.
I actually think that’s backwards. I think that Kevin Phillips, who was a Republican strategist, eventually became a progressive, and he talked about the Southern Strategy, and he said the secret to politics is knowing who you hate. I think negative emotions, and again, I’m not happy about this, I just think this is the way things are. Negative emotions are stronger than positive emotions in politics.
And I think a common enemy is a greater unifying force than a common faith. And I think the reason the Democrats win is because they have a common enemy. The common enemy, again, to cite Steve Sailer, are white people—it’s what he calls the KKKrazyGlue that holds together the Democratic Coalition.
And if we look at these protests that are happening on campuses all around the country over Israel, we could say, ”Haha, this is a fracture in the Democratic base, this is our opportunity.” And you see fools like Speaker Mike Johnson talking about, ”Oh, we’re going to oppose the anti-Semitism on these campuses.” And he probably thinks he’s going to gain something from this.
I’m telling you right now, everybody on both sides of these protests is going to vote for Joe Biden in November. Every single one of them.
Nobody’s going to stay home, nobody’s going to vote for Cornel West. None of this is going to happen. Because the only thing they’re arguing about is whether the Israels count as white or not!
And I have no illusions that defending or opposing these protests, as a lot of Republicans are trying to do and get in front of it, will give us anything either.
For once, I think we should actually take our own side.
And that’s the one thing that we’re never allowed to do in American politics, European politics, and Western politics. But until we take our own side, this is all a waste of time.
Immigration is the only issue where we have a mass constituency, where we don’t have to explain things, where we don’t have to ask people to read a thousand books, or to believe in a certain faith, where we can say, ”This is about us and them.”
That’s what politics is. Carl Schmitt was right. Politics is about friend versus enemy. The Democrats win because they know who their enemies are. The Republicans lose because they pretend they don’t have any enemies. White people lose because they pretend they don’t have any enemies. But the enemies are all around us.
And one thing that we do have going for us now is that I think that this is an end to illusions. One of the things I’ve noticed about the immigration issue is that very quickly, they’ll tell you that immigration is good for the country, or that it’s good for the economy. But within about two sentences, you get them pretty much to, ”Actually, it’s bad for the country. That’s why we support it. And it’s punishment, and you deserve it.”
It’s punishment for, I don’t know, bringing them plumbing or whatever it is that they can’t do on their own. But they want revenge for something. I’m still not clear on their revenge is for. They clearly think of it as revenge.
But as we’ve seen, the American people are actually ahead of the leadership on this issue. Nobody’s talking about mass deportation. Trump himself is, but it’s not really a heavy emphasis. You certainly don’t see the congressional GOP talking about this. You certainly don’t see anybody in Republican states, especially the Deep Red states, talking about this.
Who’s actually saying, ”Yeah, we’re just going to round them all up and send them back”? That’s crazy. That’s completely outside the Overton window.
But I suppose that’s the future of democracy, that it’s precisely the things outside the Overton Window that command majority support.
The hardest thing when it comes to politics, when it comes to life, I guess, is taking a step back and seeing where things can lead. And if you get it wrong, there are big consequences. Sometimes you get so wrapped up in the political fights of the day. And it’s certainly important because, especially in the news cycle that we have now, and especially when people are chasing engagement, you always have to have a hot take on every little thing. But a lot of these things really don’t matter very much.
Certainly, if you’re a writer, one of the frustrations is you spend an enormous time writing and thinking about things that you yourself don’t remember a week later, because the issue really wasn’t that important.
But there’s a bigger issue here too, which is that you have to think about what lasts and what really matters. And again, I’m going to give another example, a tragic example from history.
I was reading about the Crusades and about the atmosphere that led up to it. And a lot of the Eastern Christians, mostly of sects that probably you haven’t heard of, basically what the imperial church back then would have called radical sects, welcomed the Muslim invaders. And the reason is because it was kind of a leg-up against these people who were persecuting them.
And it was no joke. I mean, there were people getting imprisoned or killed or whatever else. I mean, they weren’t mad for no reason.
And they thought, yeah, this temporary advantage, this is what’s going to put us ahead. Go look for them now.
And ironically, some of them did hang on, up until the, what we have been assured was, the Christian foreign policy of President George W. Bush, wiped out Middle Eastern Christianity like no other government has in history. They did what the Muslims never could. For, again, to not being able to take your own side.
But it begs the question, what do we mean by “occupation”? Certainly, when you say, “we are occupied,” you always hear the phrase, one obvious question is, well, who is occupying us? Certainly, I have some ideas about that. But we also have to think about what it actually means.
And I think what it means is that the things that you hold to be meaningful, the things that define you, no longer have any relevance to power.
You can believe whatever you want. But it’s not really going to affect how you behave in everyday life.
I can be really mad about, say, Protestantism. But it’s not something that really gives me temporal power at the workplace or in politics.
Now, it wasn’t that long ago where it really did. I mean, up until the Kennedy presidency, you could argue that that was a big cleavage, an important thing in American politics.
Now it’s just not.
A lot of the things that people want to define themselves by have just vanished. What lasts? What’s relevant to all of us? What, I would argue, is even more important than national identity and citizenship. What matters to the government? What matters when you’re trying to get into school? What matters when you’re trying to get a job? What matters when you’re confronted on the street? What matters when some journalist is coming after you?
I’ll tell you what matters. Your race matters. And that’s it.
It’s not about what I think. Because I’m not the one holding institutional power. It’s about what power thinks. And more than that, I think power is right in this case.
I hold this as a premise, and people can disagree with me on this. Because it is a debate that there’s maybe not a definitive answer. But I believe this. So if you think I’m wrong, come at me.
Politics is largely biological. And identity is inherent. It’s not something we choose.
There were a lot of people in the past, including people who had a big influence on me, like Julius Evola, who would say that race is largely a spiritual thing. Because you can say, well, people all along the same group believe different things, or they have different religions, or a different sense of life. And so it’s kind of fuzzy, whatever.
Renaud Camus, whose book I just reviewed, The Deep Murmur. This was the term he used to define race. It’s kind of this mysterious force that binds people together in a shared sense of identity.
This is the man who coined the term The Great Replacement. So this is somebody who does have some credentials and relevance to everything we’re talking about.
But I have to disagree, at least slightly. Because I think that our biology, what’s in the blood, is kind of the hardware. And religion and ideology and the way we interpret reality, a lot of that is just kind of superimposed on top of us. And it’s not possible for us to really understand it fully.
I think if you fully understood the motivations for your own actions, it would probably drive you insane. I think that reality is serious, and our perception is limited, and we are who we are.
And the biggest lie of our time, perhaps the biggest lie of Liberal Democracy, is the idea that you just choose your own identity, or that the only allegiances that matter are those you have chosen.
Frankly, at a time when media indoctrination is so great, I question the very idea of choice, because I think choice is always downstream from power.
Your identity is not chosen. The allegiances that matter most are the ones that are not chosen. This is inherent.
There’s a reason I don’t back away from the old Alt-Right slogan of ”Become Who You Are.” That was correct then, and it is correct now.
Immigration is one of these things that brings it out.
Because when you see these protests, and I remember in the George W. Bush years, probably the first few years when I was going into demonstrations and stuff, we saw the Mexican flags in the streets, and you saw people screaming these were the last days of White America, and you saw people screaming that this was about reconquering the Southwest and everything else, that immigration was an attack on the United States, and that’s why it was a good thing.
And Americans intuitively understood that, and they rejected it, despite the wishes of the Republican Party leadership, because it was in front of their face, you didn’t have to explain it.
You didn’t have to sell them an ideology. When it’s us and them, it’s right there.
So those are the issues we have to lean into. I’m not saying there are not other issues. I’m not saying that there are more important issues. But why are these things taking place? Who is pushing these things? What are the processes that are pushing these things?
Camus would say that it’s capitalism and the free movement of labor. Others would say that this is all about Communism and push for global control. Others would say that it’s about this group or that group trying to enhance their power. And there may be many groups doing this at once.
But the fact is, if you don’t even at least recognize that the process is taking place, if you don’t even recognize what side you’re on, why do you even care? What difference does it make? You have to at least know who you’re fighting for.
Now, of course, there are voices within the GOP that are against this. You may remember Eric Erickson—probably not—but Eric Erickson had a thing a couple days ago where he said the tripartite stool of Reagan Conservatism is being forgotten, because we still need to talk about limited government and traditional values and everything else.
But I think we’re past the point where we can tolerate these kinds of things in good faith. I think we’re past the point where people who say these things believe what they’re saying.
If you look at the levels of debt that we have, if you look at how invasive our government is, if you look at the utter failure of constitutional rule in this country...
I am 41 years old. I have never lived under Constitutional rule. Frankly, there’s probably nobody alive that has lived under Constitutional rule in this country.
The Constitution? Glenn Beck was talking about this. These “sacred documents define our identity” don’t mean anything.
Law, institutions, culture, these things are passed down because of the patrimony of a specific people. Without that people, they mean nothing.
The nation is the people. Everything else can be sacrificed. You can blow up every one of your buildings. You can light every document on fire. You can burn the flag. You can do whatever you want. You can recover from all of that if you have the people. If you don’t have the people, you have nothing. [applause]
And it’s clear what’s happening to our people. James Burnham was probably the biggest influence on my thought, other than Sam Francis, of course. Oh, and Jared Taylor too, because that’s my boss and he’s here [applause].
Burnham wrote a book called Suicide of the West. And he talked about what he himself admitted was a very imprecise measure, and perhaps a bit flawed. But basically the line is on the map.
If you’re reading about the Roman Empire, you say, ”Oh, this is when it was at its height, now it’s withdrawing, things are going wrong.”
And people are already like, ”Well, that’s not really what it’s about.” It was actually stronger at this point.
But by and large when you see borders contracting, something’s going wrong. And when they’re expanding, things are going right. And if you look at the land that was controlled by the West over the course of the 20th century, it’s contracting.
And it’s contracting well after Burnham wrote his book. If you look at the former political borders, they’re contracting.
Something that Jared Taylor wrote years ago which stuck with me: He said there are certain cities, certain neighborhoods, certain parts of the United States of America, that have essentially ceased to be part of the country. I don’t consider these places American. I don’t consider the people who live there to be American.
And more importantly, they don’t consider themselves to be American. Matter of fact, it’s because they don’t consider themselves to be American that’s why they came here. It’s to inflict harm. It’s to consciously make things worse.
That is where we are at. And we see this all the time. You don’t have to dig for it. You don’t have to explain it. You just have to let our enemies speak for themselves. And I’m not calling them our enemies. They are.
Jonah Goldberg, I should point out, stole that title Suicide of the West. He told us that what really defines the West is individualism. Doesn’t define Israel, of course, but...
Now, some might say, well, you’ve also said the media is the regime. And I think that is true.
I think fundamentally that the media is more important than politicians. That the financial power behind the media is really what sustains the political order. And even more than personnel, because personnel can be replaced, you need the money behind it, the platform access.
One of my columns that I remain most proud of, and one of the things that I will always defend, is that the Alt-Right did not die. It was murdered. It was cut off from platform access. It was cut off from financial support.
This didn’t just happen. It wasn’t just a natural thing. You could argue that the Alt-Right strategies were put in place for a political environment that didn’t fit anymore. Because people were naive enough to think that, hey, if you’ve got a permit for a rally, you’ll be able to do it. Hey, you’ll never actually censor the internet because free speech was an unchallenged Western norm, which it was just a decade ago.
Now we know better.
And we have to change our tactics to meet that new environment.
But that doesn’t mean the essential ideas were wrong. It was just a mismatch for what we’re facing.
Certainly, people can be misled by media. And you can work people pretty dramatically.
As a father, I can certainly say that what keeps me at night is what is done to children, not least by media, not least by public schools, but even things that you consider to be fairly marginal, like Discord groups or people on YouTube.
I mean, you can twist somebody’s fundamental conception of themselves around, but I take it as a premise that that identity is unchangeable. And that if something is twisted that dramatically, like a trans kid, for example, the obvious thing, that that’s a twisted parody.
That’s not somebody realizing their true identity. That’s a mutilation. And that it’s done consciously as a mutilation. That it’s done to create a victim. That it’s done to create a dependent. That it’s done to create someone who’s unhappy. Because one of the essential things we have to grapple with is creating a successful and well-ordered and prosperous society. It’s not what people want. It’s not what they vote for. If we take as a premise that liberals win in politics over the last century, and I do, the people who are the most unhappy, personally self-reported, are also the people who vote the most loyally for left-wing parties.
And therefore, if we can see that we vote for or have some relationship to who wield political power, it’s precisely the most unhappy people, the most neurotic people, the most resentful people who have the most political power.
What do we do with that? There are plenty of societies you can point to as a conservative. And I’m not even saying as a particularly right-wing or extreme conservative. I can think of plenty of societies that if you said, ”What do you want, Kevin?” I’d be like, ”Yeah, that’s good enough.” I can list a host of them. America at a certain time, or Imperial Germany, or something like that.
Yeah, sure, good enough. It’s not everything I want, but I’ll take it. But that’s actually why we lose. Because what is realistic, what is attainable, what people want, that’s not what drives fanaticism.
And unfortunately, and I don’t want this to be true, but I just think that it is, and I wish it wasn’t, fanaticism and irrationality win.
That’s something we have to grapple with. Communism, to give the obvious example, is impossible. You are never going to get a classless society. You are never going to get an egalitarian society. You know when we’re equal? In the grave. That’s the only time we’re equal.
I’m tempted to say Leftism isn’t even a political philosophy or a way of thought. It’s just a process of entropy spread to political philosophy, and that’s all it is.
I mean, what is life but the struggle, ultimately you struggle, to uphold some kind of order against chaos? I mean, that’s the root of all our mythologies. And eventually chaos wins, but that’s not a good thing. But there are people who yearn for it, who yearn for the end, because then the struggle is over. And there’s satisfaction and being in at the end. I think that’s kind of the ur-roots of leftism. But it’s that fanaticism that gives them power.
Now, I don’t think that most people, in the way they live their lives and the choices they make, or if you could somehow empower everybody equally, as it would be under democracy, in theory, that the Left would win all the time. I’m not saying this is how democracy works in theory, this is just how democracy works in practice.
If you had a referendum, say, and you could somehow have everyone have a free choice without compulsion, we would win.
We know this for the mass deportation thing. Nobody voted for mass immigration in the United States or Ireland or in the United Kingdom. But yet Germany is going to be majority nonwhite by about 2065. England by 2064. America by 2042. A lot of these smaller countries, particularly in the Baltic and places like this, if they ever get kicked down the gate, that’s it. And it’s going to happen very quickly.
It’s going to happen against the will of the voters. But what people believe, and the people who are actually willing and able to put themselves out there to resist it and not be opposed by power, those are two very different things.
And unfortunately the people who are backed by power are the people who are the most resentful and neurotic. And that’s something we also have to grapple with.
The point is that we are nearing a turning point, though. And the turning point is, not that I think it’s going to be some glorious last stand. I think if we lose, it’s going to be a number of very solid and pointless and stupid last stands. It would be nice if you could get to have some final battle that you could flatter your ego with, like you want to do when you’re 17 years old and read Nietzsche for the first time and maybe listen to too much heavy metal music.
Probably getting too autobiographical here!
But that’s not how it works. It’s just going to be a lot of tedious, hard fighting. And it’s going to come with compromises because, and this is another thing I’ve learned to my sorrow, it’s not just a question of you develop the perfect ideology, you put a banner up here, and then you just say, ”Everybody follow me.” People don’t change their minds that way.
What people believe is usually a matter of tribal loyalty. And so what’s actually more important than what someone believes is whether they consider you one of them or not. Do you have a constituency? Do you have a People?
I want to back up what Scott Greer said, and it’s not because I have any particular use for Trump. I wanted to name him White Renegade of the Year in 2019 or 2020, which is essentially White Traitor of the Year. And I was prevailed upon not to do it. But I was that done with him. And I was certainly one of these people who was like, ”You know what? Whatever they do, he has it coming.”
I no longer believe that. And the reason is not because I’ve changed my mind about him, but because I’ve come to another realization. Sometimes you just lose. It’s not true that if things go wrong, there is inherently a reaction, and then you get to win. It is not true that the pendulum swings. That is not true. Power wins. You have to have some kind of a popular base. You have to build from somewhere. You have to have some kind of a constituency. Because if you don’t, you’re just talking to yourself.
And maybe this is something that relates to the situation we’re facing here now at the Berkeley Springs Castle. When I was writing 2013 or whenever it was when I started doing this stuff, often times, I said some pretty extreme stuff, which I also consider my best stuff. And stuff I believe in. But there was certainly an element of, I’m just talking to myself. You didn’t face any problems. You weren’t censored. If people wanted to send you money, they sent you money. If you wanted to go and speak somewhere, book a hotel. You booked a hotel. It wasn’t a problem. The idea of the government caring what I say? That’s crazy. It would never happen.
Very different now. It has to be that way. It has to be that way. We have entered into a phase where repression is going to happen. This is real politics.
And real politics means suffering. It means pain. It’s not fair. It’s not about principles.
Free government in the American context is a very, very small period in history. And it happened when America was extremely homogenous and, frankly, it may not have existed in any of our lifetimes. The breakdown of media power, largely because the Internet, was immediately followed up by a dramatically enhanced role of government censorship.
And the presumption, now shared by everybody who matters in this society, which unfortunately does not mean us, is that the essence of democracy is to control speech.
That’s what “our democracy” is, fighting “disinformation.” They say the purpose of the system is what it does—well, the meaning of the word is how it’s used.
What democracy should mean is governed by the people, and the people’s will being implemented. What it actually means is people at the top not just telling you what you can say, but what you can think. That’s how the people with power define democracy.
And that’s something we have to grapple with. And the repression is increasing. And here, I do want to offer real hope. The repression is increasing because they are under threat. And they are under threat because they can’t control their own creatures in terms of the arguments that they’re making.
For example, and this is something that I used to make fun of, you know, I be like ”Oh the Republicans, all they care about is capital gains tax and stuff like that.”
Of course, then you get older and start buying stocks. Suddenly you have an opinion on the capital gains tax!
But the Biden administration says they want to put a tax on unrealized capital gains. Now, what’s dramatic about that is you don’t actually have the money. An unrealized capital gain is a gain that just exists on paper. So there’s a tax on what you don’t even have.
And the rationale for this, and of course there’s going to be all sorts of bad effects, and you could say it’s tyrannical or whatever else, but the argument was, well, white people own stocks, and we need to undermine the wealth disparity. So therefore we get to have an unrealized capital gains tax.
You say, well, you know, they care about their empire. They care about military power. One of the most important things that the United States has tried to do is pursue semiconductors vis-a-vis China. So they tried to get semiconductors factories built in the United States. Well, those factories aren’t being built. Why?
Because they implemented DEI standards. And it turns out, like, a degree in ethnic studies doesn’t actually teach you how to build a semiconductor.
Is that forcing them to reverse their policy? No, it’s not. They’re getting rid of Advanced Placement classes. Why are they getting rid of Advanced Placement classes? Because you don’t have equal performance. And if you don’t have equal performance against racial groups, well, that violates Civil Rights laws. You have to get rid of it.
There’s no point where common sense or even self-interest is going to stop this. These things take on the momentum of their own. And there’s a point, too, where even the people who may have some intelligence, who may understand this is self-defeating, are defeated by the monster they created.
Probably the most destructive academic of the last century was a guy named Herbert Marcuse. I wish I was exaggerating it. I mean, he basically said Western civilization needs to be destroyed so that Nazi Germany never happens again. And then, you know, if you asked him, what about Soviet communism, it’s like, “well, that’s different.” Oh, OK.
But there was a famous incident in the 1960s where Marcuse was telling his disciples. who were screaming at him, telling him they didn’t want to learn about Plato or whatever else, and he was screaming at them, don’t you want to be smart? Don’t you want to know these things?
And they were saying no, because if you believe this knowledge is from a toxic source, you don’t want to be contaminated by it.
Now, in the 1960s, you could kind of put that down. Now, I think this rot is setting in where the people that we’re going to be facing, the people who have the credentials, the people who have the institutional backing, they’re not that smart.
But this doesn’t mean we’re going to win. And this is something that we have to really take to heart. Some of you, and again, I may be dating myself here, you remember the book Stuff White People Like. It was kind of important because it was a marker on the way to rising white racial consciousness. It was basically a parody of white hipsters.
And somebody asked the author the obvious question, which is why is it okay to make fun of white people, but not okay to make fun of everyone else? And he said because for white people, no bad ending is possible.
Now the implicit white supremacy in that statement, takes one’s breath away. I’m not sure even I would go that far. Sober, anyway.
But certainly it’s also not true, because if we look at something like the former Rhodesia, it didn’t work out for anybody, blacks included.
Nobody’s learned a lesson from this. Nobody said they were wrong. As a matter of fact, it was just a protest a few days ago because some Rhodesian vets were marching in Australia and New Zealand Veterans Day celebrations, and people were saying, well, they’re war criminals.
How are they war criminals? Because they fought for the wrong side.
Nobody’s given pause by this. These take on a momentum of their own. And here’s the key, guys. There’s no point where people, even if you’re living in ruins, many people will build themselves a crown out of the slop that accumulates around the gutter and put it on their head and believe themselves a king. And they’ll say, that’s what we wanted all along.
The people we face, you can say all sorts of things about them. People call them spiteful mutants, you can call them zealots, you can be charitable, you can be uncharitable. Whatever it is, there’s no point where, except for a very small minority, you can reason them out of it. They simply have to be defeated.
And to that end, the more clear-cut the battle lines are, the more we can distinguish between us and them, the more we can define the Right by the immigration issue as the skeleton key to every other issue, the stronger position we’re going to be in.
Because once you have those things, everything else follows. The Left wins because, despite its egalitarian pretensions, all politics is Identity Politics. The Right loses because it has not understood that.
The immigration issue is the way we transform that.
And I’ll close with this. Everybody here has something that they would consider to be most important. It could be their faith, it could be an ideology, it could just be their family. And I have no illusions, and this is perhaps the biggest thing from when I was in my 20s, I have no illusions that my idiosyncratic ideology is going to take over the whole Right and everyone will believe exactly as I believe and then we get to win.
I also have no illusions that infighting will ever end. I mean, it’s not like the Left doesn’t infight either. It’s just part of the game.
But I will say this. Within about a century after the end of the Second World War, Western civilization ceases.
It doesn’t degrade, it doesn’t get worse, it doesn’t get poorer. With the end of white majorities and historic white homelands, it ends. It’s over. That’s it.
Everything you believe, everything you value, whatever it is, whatever you think of me or anything else, none of it matters.
That’s what it is to be occupied. I’m sure there were some Indian tribes who lived here who had sacral meanings to groves and rivers and stuff. Nobody knows what those things are now.
I’m sure there were Eastern Christian communities living in Iraq and Iran and Syria that had all sorts of beliefs about things. Nobody knows what those things are now.
Nobody builds a monument to the defeated.
Nobody cares about anything but strength.
And egalitarianism is just another strategy for pursuing status.
We win this, or no victory is possible.
And in that sense, we have to fight this as one movement.
We can fight about everything else later.
Thank you.
James Kirkpatrick [Email him |Tweet him @VDAREJamesK] is a Beltway veteran and a refugee from Conservatism Inc. His latest book is Conservatism Inc.: The Battle for the American Right. Read VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow’s Preface here.
