Peter Brimelow: Ladies and gentlemen, as Richard [Spencer] very kindly pointed out a little while ago, I’m incredibly old! In fact, I was born in the same month, within a few days, as Hillary Clinton—so you see how serious it is! I shouldn’t really be here at all.
But I’ve been involved, in spite of my accent, in the American Conservative Movement since 1972, when I worked for John Ashbrook—Ashbrook, not Ashcroft—against Richard Nixon. So I’ve been on the Dissident Right for a long time. The 
reason I’m here is that, just over 20 years ago, I wrote a book on immigration, Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster, which essentially ended my career in the Main Stream Media, although that took some time to become clear. It basically argued that immigration was a big problem that was kicked off by the ‘65 Act, and that it should be stopped.
My conclusion was, actually, exactly the same as Ann Coulter’s conclusion in her book, Adios America, almost 20 years later. Nothing had changed. It has just gotten a lot worse. So I founded this website, VDARE.com, because at that point there was nowhere, on the Left or the Right, where you could discuss facts and arguments about immigration.
VDARE.com is a forum site, we accept people from any point of view, we’re Equal Opportunity editors, any color or creed, as long as they have something to say about America’s post-1965 immigration disaster. We even have a few Democrats who write for us!
It happens that immigration is one of the issues that the Alt Right is deeply interested in. And because of that I have a number of writers who are members of the Alt Right, and very prominent members, obviously much younger than I am: James Kirkpatrick, Alexander Hart, Washington Watcher, for example.
These people all live in Washington. They work in institutions in Washington. They may be your colleagues. They may be sitting next to you at this conference. But they do not wish to show their faces. These are people who have careers, who have families to support and so on, and they simply cannot speak out on this issue of public policy and expect to go unpunished in the Land Of The Free.
So that’s why I am here—to speak for them. I’m too old to care!
I want to make three points about what we call America’s Immigration Disaster, and its relationship to the Alt Right.
First of all, what’s happened here—the fact that Trump has been able to take this party away from the professional politicians—the most extraordinary thing I’ve seen in American politics, I can’t think of any parallel—and the fact that the immigration issue has gotten out of control and has gotten into politics in an uncontrollable way— this is entirely the fault of the political Establishment and particularly what we call Conservatism Inc., the corrupt parasitical development that occurred after Reagan was elected and after there were jobs to be given out.
I should say, by the way, that one of the advantages of being old is, I actually remember when the Conservative Movement worked. I remember when politics worked.
I’m not like Richard [Spencer], who wasn’t even born when Reagan was elected. I was working on the Hill then, for a U.S. Senator, who I won’t name because I don’t want to get him into trouble. I think Reagan was a great man. He solved a lot of what were then very serious problems, above all the Cold War. I take the Cold War very seriously.
But that was then and this is now. Now we’re confronted with a whole new range of problems. And the fact is that these younger people, people younger than Richard particularly, have never seen politics work. They’ve never seen the Conservative Movement do anything for anyone—except, of course, for its donors.
So that explains the extreme cynicism of the Alt Right—and its willingness to take a gamble on a character as wild as Trump.
Twenty years ago this summer, there was a bill in Congress, which was official Republican policy, called the Smith-Simpson Bill. It embodied the recommendations of a thing called the Jordan Commission, which was headed by a black Democratic Congresswoman, Barbara Jordan. And many of these recommendations are exactly what Trump is saying today. In particular, it wanted a serious cutback on legal immigration. Had that bill gone through, the country would have been 10-15 million people smaller and we would not now be quite so deep into the problem that we’re in now.
But it didn’t go through because of a coup within the Conservative movement. There was a Civil War within the Conservative Movement. And we lost, those of us who were in favor of what we now call immigration patriotism, patriotic immigration reform, to distinguish it from the other kind of “immigration reform”—they came along and stole the word about ten years ago. We lost, and Buckley purged National Review, it became a cuckservative operation. And it became impossible to discuss immigration for a long time. They were able to keep it out of politics by yelling “racist” and all that kind of thing.
So they got Trump. And they deserve him. They deserve him—for not responding to what obviously was a real and profound concern.
The second point that I would like to make is that this immigration issue, and the Alt Right, generally, is an international phenomenon. The end of the Second World War was in some ways the high point of the nation-state—because all the nation states of Europe were nation-states. They had been ethnically cleansed by the Germans and Russians. And so they all represented specific nations.
And then they set about dismantling that, and going back to the chaos that had prevailed, in some ways, before. In Britain, immigration became a problem in the late 1940s and got worse and worse until Enoch Powell made his great speech in 1968; and that stalled it for a long time, until Tony Blair came along. But it’s also happening everywhere else in the First World.
And we see exactly the same reaction everywhere else. The political elites will not deal with this problem. And anyone who attempts to deal with it, the elites try to anathematize. And in the case of Britain and the Continent, and in Canada, they actually put people in prison for pointing out obvious facts like "black immigrants commit disproportionate amounts of crime."
So the elites are not backing down. And the problem is getting worse and worse.
In fact, it’s reached its ultimate expression point a couple of years ago with Angela Merkel, who suddenly started to bring in vast amounts of “refugees,” really quite equivalent, if you look at the numbers, to the number of Germans who are born every year. The natural birth rate of Germany is practically matched by the number of “refugees” that she is bringing in. I used to say, when I was on the road promoting my book, Alien Nation over 20 years ago, that what was happening in the U.S. was a demographic transformation unprecedented in the history of the world. But now Merkel has surpassed it.
The fascinating thing about Merkel, of course, is that Hillary Clinton is going to do exactly the same thing. She’s openly said that if she gets into power she’s going to pass what they call “Comprehensive Immigration Reform,” which is basically Amnesty plus an Immigration Surge. They are going to stop enforcing the law at the border. They mean to knock the Republicans out, demographically.
They of course constantly say any opposition to this is “racism.” But what their policy is, of course, treason.
The third thing I want to say: there’s going to be a hard landing here.
There’s going to be a hard landing. Twenty years ago, the Republican Party could have saved itself by defending and protecting its base and cutting off immigration. And now America could save itself with an immigration moratorium.
But I don’t know that that’s going to happen. I don’t see, looking at the reaction to Trump, that there is any conversation going on about immigration at all in the elite. They just want him to go away.
And there are extraordinary amounts of people saying things like—what was that guy’s name, not E.J. Dionne, that other nogoodnik—that “adults won’t allow Trump to be elected.”
[“So how do we talk to children about Trump? We tell them what Holocaust survivors have told me: that what Trump is doing reminds them of 1930s Germany, and that grown-ups are not going to let that happen here”—The singular danger of Donald Trump, by Dana Milbank [Email him] Washington Post, August 27, 2016].
What does he mean by that, exactly? What are they going to do?I don’t see any signs that they’re changing course at all.
So I have kind of a bleak outlook. Someone asked Richard Spencer, did he regard himself as a loyal American. [Spencer says he is "deeply ambivalent about being American."]
Well, I actually do regard myself as a loyal American. My son served in the Marine Corps. I was very happy with America as it was when I came here in 1970. But I’m not making a normative statement here—I think it will break up.
And in some ways, that’s the best I think that’s the best we can hope for—that it breaks up. Because otherwise it’s going to move to a Third World tyranny.
This is very annoying to me, particularly because I went through so much trouble to get here. And at my advanced age, I have three little girls—one of them a brunette!
[PB: This was me teasing Richard Spencer, who had referred to blond children in his rhapsodic introductory comments on what an Alt Right America would be like. Nevertheless, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, which noticed I "paused and eyed Spencer," described the "inside joke" as "weird to disturbing...They both laughed." These people are BORES.]
And all I can say is I’m very glad that my young wife is a Texan and knows how to shoot.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.
