See also: Michelle Malkin At AFPAC: The Charge of the America First Brigade, March 2020; and from March 2019: "CPAC AT THE BRIDGE"— Michelle Malkin's Great Immigration Patriot Speech, With Links And Video
VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow writes: Michelle Malkin has emerged as an extraordinary force in U.S. politics, transitioning from a brilliant career in conservative journalism to becoming a genuine political leader. And, much as I respect the unique phenomenon that is a Trump rally, I have to say that Michelle’s speeches come closer to classical oratory in their intellectual force and sheer beauty.
What follows is adapted from her remarks at Nick Fuentes’ AFPAC conference, February 26, 2021. Congratulations to all concerned.
See her on video here.
Good evening, America First-ers. Mommy’s home!
Mr. Potato Head has been neutered. Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben have been erased. Statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Confederate generals, Catholic saints, and Columbus have all been torn down. Our last legitimately elected president, Donald J. Trump, has been deplatformed everywhere. But the authentic America First movement is alive and kicking, growing and spreading.
We are the world’s healthiest, most viral virus. Nothing and no one—no masks, no vaccines, no amount of censorship, not the SPLC nor the ADL, not the snot-nosed tattletales at the Washington Examiner nor the smear merchants at the Huffington Post and NBC News, not that one sniveling soy boy at the Daily Dot nor his feckless counterparts at the Young America’s Foundation and TPUSA—can keep us at bay.
The title of my speech tonight is “AFPAC II: Bloody, but unbowed.”
For the last several years, I’ve written my major national addresses around classic poetry. It’s important to read and memorize beautiful things. We stand for beauty. We should embed beauty in our minds, hearts, and souls. I was reminded of this as I listened to the clunky, pedestrian black “youth poet laureate” at Biden’s inauguration—a Jesse Jackson/Maya Angelou knock-off whose prose has the aesthetic effect of nails on a chalkboard.
Last year at the inaugural AFPAC, I chose Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade.” The year before that, at the snoozefest pay for play racket known as CPAC, I sounded the alarm over the existential threat of mass migration using Macaulay’s “Horatius at the Bridge.”
This year, for you, I chose the Victorian poet William Ernest Henley’s famous and enduring 1875 ode to resilience, “Invictus,” which means unconquerable in Latin.
Henley was chronically ill and wrote his battle cry while hospitalized with crippling tuberculosis as he awaited amputation surgery. In the second stanza, he described his stoic response to adversity. And it is that stiff-upper-lipped defiance that we dissidents must channel as the going gets tougher in the ever-oppressive age of COVID lockdowns, Big Tech censorship, anarcho-tyranny, and the twin weaponization of Nov. 4 and Jan 6.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
The fourth and last stanza of Invictus, contains one of the most famous concluding couplets ever written in the English language:
It matters not how strait the gate
How charged with punishments the scroll
I am the master of my fate
I am the captain of my soul.
We live in frightening times. This is not a drill. The phrase “Cancel Culture” trivializes how high the stakes are and how stiff the penalties and punishments for our people have been.
Lee Keltner is dead at the hands of a local Denver media security bodyguard who marched for Antifa. Aaron Jay Danielson is dead at the hands of a Portland Antifa stalker. Jake Gardner is dead by his own hand after being indicted in Nebraska for defending himself and his business against a violent Black Lives Matter rioter. Hundreds of MAGA loyalists have been hunted down by the FBI over the past two months and face years in prison.
But we must hold on to hope and faith, and refuse to bow down.
Make no mistake. Our Father above is sovereign over all of us. But he gave us free will to choose how we serve him on earth.
Each and every one of you in this room has exercised that divinely-gifted agency to be here tonight. This in itself is an act of courage…and an act of faith. To practice such self-determination and to reject fatalistic apathy is not to deny God, but to honor Him.
Our gathering is a means, not the end itself. We aren’t here to debate “Cancel Culture” for show. We are here to obliterate it. We aren’t here to bow and scrape before the Social Justice mobs and the criminal apologist club. We are here to unite and organize in defense of our endangered homeland. We espouse domestic tranquility through law and order. Those who seek to suppress and oppress us are the real domestic terrorists.
Unlike the con artist clowns preening across town under the guise of conservatism, we aren’t here merely to pay lip service to nationalism and populism for clicks and jollies. We are here committed together to expose and destroy the Globalist phonies on both the Left and the Right who are decimating our past, oppressing our present, and abrogating our future.
Over at CuckPAC—CPAC—the Swamp agenda is the same old same old same old. I forced myself to read through the events schedule [PDF] and it might as well be 2011 or 2001 or 1991.
The number of mainstage presentations focused on demographics and the impact of unrestrained illegal and legal immigration on American workers is precisely…ZERO.
On Birthright Citizenship? ZERO.
On the Refugee Resettlement Racket? ZERO.
On H-1B, H4EAD, F-1, OPT, J-1, and the need for a total, immediate, and complete immigration moratorium? BIG FAT ZERO.
The number of breakout side panels dedicated to the southern border crisis is exactly one. It was hosted tonight by Matt Schlapp’s Beltway lobbyist wife Mercedes Schlapp. She’s the same crapweasel who blocked American families of illegal alien crime from meeting with President Trump, according to my Angel Mom friend Sabine Durden, whose son was killed by a serial illegal alien drunk driver and previously deported repeat criminal.
The Schlapps are Koch operatives whose DC firm Cove Strategies raked in millions of dollars lobbying for low-skilled foreign non-agricultural workers. If you’ve ever wondered why so many of you young AF-ers couldn’t find summer jobs at your local resorts or amusement parks, you can thank the Schlapps’ pet H-2B program. While President Trump was crusading to Hire American, the Schlapps at the Trump Department of Homeland Security were jacking up H-2B limits for foreign laborers, many of which were dispensed to the Trump Mar a Lago hotel not too far from where we are meeting tonight.
Joining Schlapp on the panel she hosted tonight at CPAC about the “humanitarian crisis at the southern border” were the former US ambassador to Mexico, some obscure Mexican actor, and the Lt Gov of Florida, Jeanette Nunez.
Nunez’s legislative claim to fame is her role as the lead sponsor of Florida’s SB1400, the bill giving in state tuition discounts to illegal aliens. That bill was signed into law by former Republican governor and now US Sen. Rick Scott.
But hey, let’s do another panel on how socialism is our greatest enemy and the Uighurs must be saved and Dems are the real racists!
Not much needs to be said about the audacity of CPAC choosing “America Uncanceled” as its theme. All I can do is marvel at the incredible experience of being here among you Groypers, Groyper parents (they’re the silent majority)…Nick [Fuentes]’s dad is here. And sitting at a table in an incredible constellation, an alliance that is very remarkable: Vince [James], Jon [Miller], Nick, his dad; Steve King and his beautiful wife; Congressman Gosar, Laura Loomer. What a coalition! And it’s growing.
Look, we’re not always going to agree on everything. But we must always do is maintain a coalition of integrity with a singular purpose: AMERICA FIRST. PERIOD.
What we’re seeing now in the Swamp, among all of the strategists, is a very cynical attempt to coopt our movement, our principles, and our motto. There’s a lot of deep fakes out there and legions of shallow fakes. Everybody’s America First now. And now they’re all crusaders for free speech, while CPAC organizers have canceled half the people in this room. At some point, the canceled will outnumber the cancelers.
The co-opters give themselves away though because they can never quite get themselves to fully name the names of our enemies and notice the things that need to be noticed. They dance around the issues, pretending to confront them.
Here’s an example. On Fox News, you are allowed to talk about “Critical Race Theory.” It’s the new hot thing.
But really, those still-veiled discussions are the cowards’ way of talking about ANTI-WHITE toxicity. That’s what it is. Just say it. Just name it.
Being white is not a crime. Rejecting collective guilt is not a crime. Refusing to acknowledge “white privilege” when you were born poor, or in a broken home, or with physical or psychological challenges, is not a crime. Embracing the Historic American Nation, instead of erasing it, is not a crime.
The good news is that the “normies” that so many thought were hopeless are fighting back. It’s the working-class Irish, German, and Polish-American men of Fishtown, the northeast Philadelphia suburb, banding together to defend themselves and their neighborhoods. It’s the gym owners refusing to bend, standing muscle-bound and honor-bound on their feet, not on their knees.
Confessing sins for which you bear no guilt is not noble. Few things made me sicker to my stomach this past year than watching virtue-signaling police chiefs kneeling before barking rioters calling them “pigs” and sobbing white people groveling for forgiveness in front of sadistic Black Lives Matter demagogues—as if this will appease the unappeasable. It will not and never will.
Proud and good people hold their chins and guns up in a crisis. Who else am I talking about? Yes, whites. But also the ROOFTOP KOREANS in Los Angeles.
Proud people in a sovereign nation understand that weakness is not strength. Americans must straighten your spines. Unbow your heads. No home or nation was ever saved by kowtowing to invaders or ransackers. Unless you are praying to God, get the hell up off your knees.
Before Nick and the bold men of the America First movement made Groyper a household word, before they struck fear and loathing among the dead souls of America Last operatives on college campuses, there was no viable alternative movement/organization for young Zoomers who have noticed and named all the lies, double standards, hypocrisy, and sellouts of ConInc.
Once you see, you cannot unsee. Once you name, you cannot unname. Once you notice, you cannot unnotice.
As every based and red-pilled American in this room or watching online knows, this clear, unobstructed vision is both a curse and a blessing. The gift of insight, of free thinking and uncontrolled opposition, inevitably inflicts suffering.
The consolation is that you no longer have to suffer in silence or suffer alone. We are triple the number we were last year. Steve King and Paul Gosar in the room standing with us. There are growing pains of any movement: There will be dissent, dissension, disloyalty, deceit, and betrayal. You have to stick together. Like glue. Be inspired to act by the America First veterans, the elders, in this room who suffered the slings and arrows before you.
Be emboldened. Be unconquerable. Onward with America First!
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
Michelle Malkin [Email her] is the author of Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s review. Michelle Malkin is also the author of Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild, Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies, ,Who Built That: Awe-Inspiring Stories of American Tinkerpreneurs, and Sold Out: How High-Tech Billionaires & Bipartisan Beltway Crapweasels Are Screwing America's Best & Brightest Workers.
Malkin is author of the book, "Open Borders, Inc.: Who's Funding America's Destruction," available directly from VDARE.com in hardcover.
Malkin can be contacted on Twitter, Gab, and Telegram.
