Peter Brimelow writes: For various reasons, I have been delayed in adapting the talk I gave to the American Renaissance Conference, November 13, 2021. But that’s OK, because AMREN has not yet posted the videos and my accent sounds better in print. Plus the Biden Regime’s communist coup isn’t going away—and neither is white aka American resistance. We earlier posted F. Roger Devlin’s presentation “How Envy Causes Racial Conflict.”
JARED TAYLOR: Peter Brimelow is a friend of many years, very much a stalwart of our movement. I believe he has been the impresario and major domo of VDARE.com for 22 years now. And insofar as VDARE.com is fortified by impregnable walls in West Virginia, I suspect it'll be good for another 100 years. We're counting on that.
Now, staunch as Peter Brimelow is, I must tell you that there are deep political differences between him and myself. And I will illustrate this by quoting to you from our Wikipedia entries.
My Wikipedia entry states, right in the first sentence: “Jared Taylor is a White Supremacist”.
In Peter Brimelow’s case, you have to get to the second sentence. And there it says he is the founder of a website that is merely associated with White Supremacy.
Sounds like weak stuff here!
In any case, it's a great pleasure to have him here with us today
PETER BRIMELOW: Thank you, Jared. And thank you, ladies and gentlemen. I'm delighted to be here. And I really have to congratulate Jared and his crew on their heroic struggle against the State of Tennessee, in which they ultimately prevailed. This question of deplatforming, indirect deplatforming via government alliances with the Left and their refusal to protect us, is a huge issue that we're all having to face.
I'd also like to thank Roger Devlin for running overtime, which gave me more time to think about what I want to say!
I actually have good news. The New York Times just carried a “reportorial”—which is this new type of journalism, it looks like it's factual, but it’s actually opinion—called Menace Enters The Republican Mainstream [by Lisa Lerer and Astead W. Herndon, November 16, 2021]. And it says that "threats of violence are becoming commonplace among a significant segment of the Republican Party."
Now, of course, we all know that this is hogwash. Not just the threat, but the actuality of violence in this country, comes from the Left. That's why the Congressional baseball team was shot up. That's why America burned in 2020. And why Trump supporters were murdered in the streets.
And that’s why we have those nice young men outside armed to the teeth [Tennessee Park Police and State Police, who were in fact extremely polite].
They're not trying to keep us in. They're trying to keep them out.
But the good news is that the New York Times in this case is not talking about us. It's talking about Josh Mandel, who is a former state treasurer of Ohio and a Senate candidate. Mandel apparently said—and he's the grandson of a Holocaust survivor—"When the Gestapo show up at your front door, you know what to do.”
That's the threat of violence.
And the New York Times hacks talk about, of all people, Charlie Kirk of TPUSA:
When the Idaho man asked about “killing” political opponents at an event hosted by the conservative activist Charlie Kirk, Mr. Kirk said he must “denounce” the question but went on to discuss at what point political violence could be justified.
He “went on to discuss at what point political violence could be justified.” And that's all it takes.
Unfortunately, of course, our Ruling Class actually believes this stuff. They're saying this because they are really planning to put dissenters in Gulags.
But we're not going to be alone. We'll have GOP Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell with us! The New York Times reporters called Mitch McConnell, who courageously refused to comment!!
Notice that they didn't call Jared Taylor.
At least I don't think they did. Jared?
No, they didn't.
When Jared and I started talking about my presentation here this year, it was a dark moment. The 2020 election had been “fortified,” in the immortal words of Time Magazine's Molly Ball [The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election, Time, February 4, 2020]. Trump was no longer President. And the Biden Administration was immediately launching what we’ve called the ”Full Merkel”—importing as many Third Worlders as soon as possible, something we've been warning about here since 2016, when we said Hilary Clinton would do it.
And the Ruling Class was on the warpath about the Mostly Peaceful Protest on January 6th. The FBI was conducting “Garland Raids,” like the famous Palmer Raids against Communists in 1920—with the difference, of course, that the Communists were guilty.
And Biden Attorney General Garland was setting up what John Derbyshire has rightly called “The Garland Archipelago”—unprecedented incarceration of what are in effect political prisoners in atrocious conditions.
Now, as it happens, neither the American Renaissance nor VDARE.com were involved in the Mostly Peaceful Protests on January 6.
But VDARE.com did have a video crew there. And we posted a video about how Jan. 6 would have been reported if Trump had been a Democrat, which I strongly recommend to you. It's on Bitchute and on Gab TV. (Hint: it would have been called “democracy in action.”)
Of course, Jared and I knew from bitter experience that not being there would be no protection against the Regime’s Moral Panic, any more than not being involved in the Unite The Right Rally in 2017 was a protection. (VDARE.com was immediately deplatformed by PayPal.)
So anyway, we settled on this title: What The ‘22 Midterm Elections Could Mean For Us.
And the answer is: they could mean a lot.
When I spoke here in 2015, the first time I've ever spoken for American Renaissance, I said about the immigration issue, which appeared then to be moribund, that all it would take to get into political debate was one speech—one spark to start the conflagration. And that was before Trump declared for President.
So all it really took was one soundbite—about Mexico “not sending their best.” Trump went to the top of the opinion polls, and he never looked back. That's how powerful the immigration issue is.
Now, at the American Renaissance conference the next year, in 2016 before Trump was elected, I predicted that he could very well be elected. And obviously I was right about that. And I said it would only take one election. What I meant by that was once the Republican Consultant Class realizes they can win on this issue, they will start running on it.
Equally obviously, I was wrong about that—because Trump was wrong about it. He just didn't run on immigration in 2020—even though he had actually achieved a brief moratorium, ostensibly because of the COVID epidemic. And even though he (or somebody—Stephen Miller?) had erected what the immigration lawyers kvetch was an “invisible wall” against illegal and some legal immigration, through regulatory changes. Immigration was extremely low in 2020. And the Immigrant Workforce Population actually started to fall significantly right through the year.
(But, of course, no legislation passed—nothing statutory. So it could all be reversed. And it has been reversed.)
The columnist Michael Barone, who's one of the very few cases of an immigration enthusiast who's seen the light, was about the only Main Stream Media commentator to note the paradox that Trump's immigration and trade policies produced income gains for low-wage workers, something Barone said administrations of both parties have failed to achieve for a generation—but that, amazingly, Trump wasn't running on it [Both candidates' risky strategies, by Michael Barone, Northern Virginia Daily, October 24, 2020].
In fact, it seems like Trump simply lost interest in reducing legal immigration about midway through his administration. That's why he had that famous row with Ann Coulter in 2017. It was leaked because they were both shouting at each other so hard that the secretaries could hear it outside the Oval Office. She complained that he wasn't prioritizing immigration, that he was prioritizing tax cuts.
.@AnnCoulter on her "screaming match" with the President as reported by the Washington Examiner:
— Washington Journal (@cspanwj) November 15, 2019
"The one moment [Trump] got most upset was when I said, 'You're no better than Jeb exclamation point!' Then he just lost it." pic.twitter.com/QJmDqqBj2W
The fact is that Trump is fundamentally just a moderate Republican.
In 2017, he did endorse Senator Cotton's RAISE Act, which would have cut legal immigration by half. But subsequently he told New York Times reporters Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear, in an interview he gave for their book Border Wars, that he just didn't realize that bill would actually cut legal immigration. He thought it was about illegal immigration,
Of course, this is unbelievable. But this is Trump—this is how he is.
But you couldn't tell this from the Main Stream Media, which is carrying on as if he was Calvin Coolidge and had just passed a 1924-type immigration cutoff.
And that, paradoxically, has probably helped Trump with his base.
He just doesn’t deserve it.
I regularly force my colleague, James Fulford to transcribe Trump's speeches at his recent rallies to see what he’s said about immigration—because you can no longer find this out from the Main Stream Media.
And Trump does regularly talk about illegal immigration, because he knows Biden’s border betrayal is a hot issue—even if the Main Stream Media wants to bury it. But he never talks about legal immigration, and the need to curtail it.
I blame Jared! (I mean Jared Kushner.)
What this means, by the way, is that somebody, i.e., Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, could easily get around Trump's Right flank now, just by mentioning the dread term “immigration moratorium.”
That would cause a firestorm—just as Trump's soundbite about Mexico did in 2015.
So, when Jared Taylor and I were talking, it didn’t look like the GOP/GAP was going to bounce back anytime soon.
But it has—in recent elections.
In fact, recent polling suggests that the odds are three to one or four to one that the GOP will control both the House and the Senate after the midterm elections.
We sometimes forget what a tremendous release of ozone it is to win an election. It can change everything.
Of course, this works both ways. I have a very good friend for 30 years now, I’ve worked with him at National Review, Forbes and VDARE.com, who found himself attending the Women's March on Washington after the Trump's inauguration because his wife had forced him to go along with everybody else in their synagogue.
And it was actually very useful! He wrote something for me on it. He said there was absolutely no security whatever, it was obvious to everybody that there was absolutely no threat.
This was in complete contrast to the Trump Inauguration, which was paralyzed by security. That's why they didn't fill the bleachers in front of the White House. You couldn't get in.
What it tells us again, of course, is that the threat is not from the Right—it’s from the Left. And everybody knows that.
So I have here a wish list of things that could be done when the Republicans get control the legislative branch.
Of course, it would have been better if they'd done it when they also had control of the Executive Branch. But we'll take it.
And for those of you who say these proposals are politically impossible, I have two words for you:
This could be on the technical issue—the Biden Regime is not enforcing immigration law—or they could just flat out say that it’s treason. There are Supreme Court decisions that treason doesn't literally have to mean levying war.
The beauty of impeaching and convicting both of them is that the new Speaker of the House, presumably Kevin McCarthy, would then become president. (I'm not going to think about President Trump becoming Speaker!)
Of course, people will say: we’ll never get 60 senators to vote for that. Well, my position is: let's try it and see! Let's see how these Democrats in marginal states want to defend what Biden has done on the border!
Most American still just don't realize how bad the immigration situation is—how crazy the Democrats are.
You know, there were recently votes on this Build Back Better thing, which includes an Amnesty. Republicans on the Judiciary Committee tried to at least put some bounds on it [FY 2022 Reconciliation: A Pathway to Amnesty]. They say, well, maybe we shouldn't Amnesty people who are convicted child molesters. Democrats wouldn't go for that. They said, what about people who had nine or more convictions for drunk driving? The Democrats wouldn't go for that either.
The process of impeachment will show how nuts they are.
At one stroke, this would obviate the political purpose behind the Biden Rush / Full Merkel surge.
It can be done by statute; it can be done by a Constitutional Amendment. But it can be done.
I don't think President McCarthy would veto it. President Biden, if he's still President, or President Harris, might. But that doesn't matter. Make them vote on it.
Birthright citizenship is extremely unpopular, once Americans realize what's going on. And the great advantage of Birthright Citizenship reform is that it is in fact an internal fence. It ends the political incentive to enable illegal immigration.
Of course, it means that we'll have a large community of people in the country who are born here but are not citizens and therefore can't vote.
And that's just great. We don't want them voting.
In fact, I would still go further. I think Birthright Citizenship Reform should be retroactive. Anybody who came in since a certain point, maybe 1980 or so, since the last Amnesty, who's the child of an illegal immigrant, should be stripped of citizenship,
Why not?
The Indians are actually already doing this. They have a problem on the border with Bangladesh, because there's a serious illegal immigrant influx. And some of the illegals have been there for a couple of generations. So the Indian response to this is to find them and strip them of citizenship. And they've been doing this for two or three years now.
So you know, Diversity Is Strength! I think we should learn from the Indians. Where's Neil Kumar? Learn from the Indians!
You know, one thing about an Immigration Moratorium that people get wrong is it doesn't mean no immigration—it means no net immigration. We think that 2-300,000 people leave the U.S. every year. So two or 300,000 could come in and out, that'd be no net immigration. And that would take care of, you know, hardship cases, and Americans marrying of foreign spouses and that kind of thing.
Now, the ironic thing is that, although Trump didn't succeed in passing any laws on immigration, there was actually a very good bill—the more I look at, the more I realized how excellent it was—the Goodlatte bill, which failed in the House in 2018. Jim Jordan, the head of the Freedom Caucus, has just written a book that discusses it in a chapter. He blames the GOP Speaker, Paul Ryan, who just systematically sabotaged any kind of patriotic immigration reform, because he's a Chamber of Commerce cuck.
But that bill would have, over time, reduced immigration to well below half a million a year. So it's almost getting into moratorium territory. And it had a lot of other interesting features as well.
And let the Western Panhandle of Maryland join West Virginia! Let’s get this question off the table—because if the Democrats get enough power, they will create new states to get around the U.S. Senate.
You know, there's precedent for expelling Puerto Rico. The Czechs got fed up with the Slovaks after the fall of the Soviet Union and threw the Slovaks out. And the Slovaks are now actually doing well. And the same was true in Malaysia. The Malayans got fed up with the Chinese in Singapore so they threw them out. And they're doing well too. So good luck to Puerto Rico as an independent state!
In other words, a new Operation Wetback. Remember, about 3 million people left in the first years of the Eisenhower Administration, but only a couple of hundred thousand were actually deported. The rest just got the message.
Let's get serious about doing this again.
And then there are various minor things that I would like to do, such as extirpating Affirmative Action, and defunding the FBI.
Well, they can wait, We've got plenty of time to get around to them.
The great thing about the immigration issue, which of course is our focus at VDARE.com, is that it is a problem and a solution. if you can stop the drift of the white population, which is to say the American population, into minority status you are going to ensure the survival and success of liberty in this country.
Last year Ron Unz wrote a long article denouncing VDARE.com’s focus on the immigration issue, saying immigrants were all nice people, and we should really focus on Leftists and militant blacks. I didn't get around to responding to this personally, for various reasons. But the definitive response was written by David Cole—who may be asleep because he came in from California. [In fact, Cole was ill and missed the AR conference.] He said that yes, of course, Leftists and militant blacks are a problem. But we're stuck with each other—American blacks, American whites. We still don't have to import more Third World behavior.
Now, one of the advantages of being so damned old is that everything comes around again. When I was a young financial journalist in the early 1970s, I attended a lot of meetings where investment professionals tried to figure out what inflation meant. It wasn't clear, it literally wasn't clear to them, that, for example, owning a house is an inflation hedge, because the replacement cost for a house is very high because of inflation, so your house holds its value. Whereas being out of debt is not a good thing in a period of inflation, because you could pay off any debt with dollars that were actually worth less.
That was interesting news to me because my parents, children of the Depression, went to a lot of effort to pay off their mortgage, which of course was exactly the wrong thing to do in an era of inflation.
I remember speakers pointing out that the then-current inflation was actually higher than the Great Inflations of the past, for example in the 1920s or at various points in the 19th century. We just hadn't realized what was going on.
The Federal Reserve now calls the 1965-1982 period “The Great Inflation.” But current inflation is substantially above the level that caused President Nixon to impose Wage and Price controls in 1971.
Well, now, similarly, we have to recognize that we are in the early stages of a communist coup. It just crept upon us.
Now, there's some wimps around here who don't like us using the term “communist” to describe our Biden Regime Rulers. Isn't that right, Jared? [A loving reference to AMREN’s notoriously authoritarian—all libertarians are authoritarian—Style Sheet.]
In fact, I'm reliably informed that AMREN has banned the use of the term “Cultural Marxists,” which I experimented with for a while because I thought it just more precise.
I was actually converted on this matter by the great John Derbyshire. He regularly used the term “communist” to describe the mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio. And when I was looking this up today, I discovered that the de Blasio was actually involved in pro-Sandinista activities in the 1980s, when, of course, that put him on the wrong side of the Cold War.
And the term “communist” is gradually creeping into mainstream discourse. Someone who's done great work in this area is the podcaster Jesse Kelly, who's been using it for a long time.
The problem is that we've all been subliminally subverted by the McCarthy wars. We think that “communist” has to mean “card-carrying Communist”—that is, a member of the Party (although my understanding is that the party did not actually issue cards).
But in fact, the term “communist” pre-exists formally organized “Communist” parties. Marx used it in his 1848 Communist Manifesto—he said a specter was “haunting Europe—the specter of communism.” At that time, remember, he hadn't written Das Kapital.
I recently read a famous, really eerie Catholic triumphalist dystopian futurist novel, Lord Of The World. It's still in print, after over 100 years, and it's been praised by a number of recent Popes including, oddly, Pope Francis. The author, Monsignor Hugh Benson, was a son of an Archbishop of Canterbury, so it was a huge scandal when he converted. In 1907, Benson was talking about this war between the persecuted Catholics and what he unhesitatingly called “communists” just as a matter of fact. They weren’t visibly Marxists from economic standpoint—in fact, economic structure doesn’t figure in the novel at all. But they were fanatical totalitarians and anti-Christians.
And that's the point, I think. You occasionally hear people arguing that well, you know, you can't call these people “communists” because they don't know about the Labor Theory Of Value. But the Labor Theory Of Value wasn't around when Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto. The point is that they're Left Totalitarians. They go back to the Jacobins.
And there's a constant theme among them: anti-religious, not just totalitarian but Christophobic, and also distinct elements of sexual perversion. Andy Ngo has done wonderful work documenting Antifa in the Pacific Northwest, and it's astonishing how many of these people actually turn out to be trannies and other forms of deviants.
For example, some of you remember that one of our members got into a fight with an Antifa guy in 2017. Well, I've watched this case carefully because I want to see what happened to the perp. The answer was nothing. He turns out to be a tranny. Well, they're everywhere.
If any of you read Stan Evans’ great book about Joe McCarthy, Blacklisted by History, you end it with a feeling of despair—because McCarthy had been defeated and the Communists were still operating. It's actually a miracle that America won the Cold War.
And there was never a Reckoning for that. McCarthy, of course was vindicated by the Venona intercepts. The FBI actually knew who these people were and had been wiretapping them for years. That's news that emerged in the 1990s. But the transcription of those Venona intercepts was stopped during the Carter Administration—almost the last thing that Carter did. Why?
The truth is the Democrat Party has always been soft on Communism—because so many of them were implicated. The people that we see in Antifa, they are literally their children.
There's a whole concept of “Red Diaper Baby.” There's at least a score of books written about it. They are gloating about it. The fact that they're the children of Communists—and this case I do mean card-carrying Communists—is not a problem in American politics today. You can test this by looking at recent biographies. Look at Obama—one of his close friends, and people sometimes say his actual father, was Frank Davis, a black Communist. Obama’s book was reportedly ghosted by Bill Ayers, a member of the Weather Underground communist terrorist group in the 1980s. Ayers was of course, rewarded by being made a tenured professor at the University of Illinois—Chicago.
Look at Hillary Clinton’s running mate, Virginia Senator Tim Kaine. Kaine was also involved with the Sandinistas in the 1980s. That's not something you just did out of moral fervor. It you meant you were on the wrong side of the Cold War. But it's never been seriously raised by the Republicans. Tim Kaine‘s son is a member of Antifa; he was actually arrested for throwing explosives, firecrackers in an Antifa riot at the Minnesota Capitol in 2017. Needless to say he was let off with just probation.
But you know, these people in the January 6 Most Peaceful Protest are not going to be let off with just probation. We have a completely asymmetrical system of Unequal Justice in this country now.
And then there's the case of Chesa Boudin, the son of David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin, who went to jail for being involved in the murder of two policemen in a robbery. He was then adopted by Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, who were also members of the Weather Underground. And he’s now the District Attorney in San Francisco, where he's systematically not prosecuting criminals.
Michelle Malkin, who is also here today, for which she deserves congratulations—she’s got real courage—wrote a recent savage column, Coward Cuomo’s Last Act Of Treachery, pointing out that the last thing the governor of New York Andrew Cuomo did before he was driven out of office by Me-Tooism was to pardon David Gilbert. In other words, he pardoned somebody who had been convicted of murder and was involved in extensive terrorism in the 1970s and early 1980s—including, by the way, bombing the U.S. Capitol, something you never hear of when the Democrats go on about how terrible the Most Peaceful Protest was.
Why would he do that? I go back to what I said before—the Democrat Party has always been soft on Communism.
So these Communists are still there. They're still active. They're making public policy right now.
It's going to be a hard landing. A hard landing.
Well, I'm going to finish on a relatively optimistic note, and that optimistic note is what we call the Sailer Strategy. It’s alive and well.
The Sailer Strategy is something that Steve just started writing about on VDARE.com in late 2000, when Karl Rove was telling everybody that the Republicans need to reach out to minorities. Sailer pointed out that this was stupid and that Rove was innumerate. Even a small increase in the white aka American vote for Republicans would far overwhelm any conceivable increase that they could get by reaching out to minorities.
And Sailer said this consistently for the next 16 years, until Trump actually did it.
In my opinion, this is actually one of the great forecasts in political journalism. And Steve had a moment of fame—it wasn't 15 seconds of fame, it was more like two seconds of fame. He was discussed in New York Magazine, and he was referred to in the New York Times.
And that's it. Nobody's ever interviewed him since. It’s like they don't want to know what Steve thinks is going to happen next.
Well, the fact is this last election again vindicated the Sailer Strategy. Jared and I both use a writer called Patrick McDermott, that's not his real name, he's actually a Democrat, but he's very insightful on the question of the white vote. And he's consistently said that there's no limit to how far the white vote could go for Republicans, if they actually focused on it.
After the 2021 election, the New York Times published an article with this beautiful headline: Democrats Thought They Bottomed Out in Rural, White America. It Wasn’t the Bottom [by Astead W. Herndon and Shane Goldmacher, November 6, 2021].
It’s referring to the fact the vote for Glenn Youngkin, who as far as I can see is an absolute cypher, far exceeded what Trump got among whites in general and rural whites in particular. The NYT’s Herndon and Goldmacher quoted Ethan Winter [Tweet him], who works for the Leftist group Data For Progress: “In rural America, the bottom for the Democrat Party is zero. I'm serious about this.”
By the way, it's also true in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. We don't have exit polls in these states, but the excellent article in the City Journal, which basically analyzed the results in terms of districts and came to the conclusion, well, I’ll read the headline: Twilight of the Blue-Collar Democrat: In New Jersey and Pennsylvania, last week’s election marked the end of a crucial party constituency [by Charles F. McElwee, November 11, 2021].
I don't think that's because these people, the Republicans, did much to deserve it. But there is this remarkable case of the truck driver who defeated the New Jersey Senate Majority Leader. He didn't only spend $150, as was widely reported, but he did only spend a couple of thousand. And that's really some kind of an earthquake.
Look at West Virginia. As Jared said, I guess it was a year ago in February that my wife Lydia got fed up with being canceled out of all these hotels where we've been trying to hold conferences and bought the Berkeley Springs Castle, which is in the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia, about two hours from the U.S. Capitol next time we want to storm it [NOTE TO FBI: This is a joke J-O-K-E!]. And we're refurbishing it. We're going to have small conferences there and dinners and things and I hope that all of you come. Not all at once! But over time.
Now, West Virginia is a little over 90% white. For comparison: the U.S. itself was a little under 90% white in 1960, before the Immigration Act kicked in.
Every single county in West Virginia went for Trump. Every single one. It's actually quite heart-rending.
If you drive through the middle of the state, it’s really poor, trailer parks up in the trees, they like having a lot of land around them. And they’re flying Trump flags. They’re still flying Trump flags. And recently they’ve started to fly “Let's go Brandon flags.” Well, actually, not “Let’s Go Branden” flags, but words to that effect.
Now look at Logan County in southern West Virginia. Let's just listen to this from Wikipedia:
Logan County broke 72% of its ballots for Bill Clinton, 72% for Bill Clinton in 1996, 61% and even 52% for John Kerry in 2004. But by 2008 McCain flipped it to Republicans and in 2016 and 2020 it voted over 80% for Trump.
PB Note: For inscrutable Wikipedia reasons, this entry has been altered since I spoke, but the sense is still the same.
That's a huge change. So I think McDermott is right, there's a good way to go for the GOP/GAP with the white vote.
Similarly, there's Grant County, which is just a couple hours from Morgan County, where we live now.
Wikipedia (permalinked!):
Politically, Grant County is a massive outlier in West Virginia. While the rest of the state did not become a Republican bastion until the 21st century, having leaned heavily Democratic between the New Deal and Bill Clinton, Grant County has always been among the most strongly Republican counties in the country. Since Grant County was created, no Democrat has managed to receive 40% of the vote, even Democratic presidential landslide…. Notably, in 2016 and 2020, Donald Trump received the highest percentage of the vote ever cast for a presidential candidate in this county, holding Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden to 10% and 11% of the vote, respectively.
Now those of you who know the history of West Virginia will realize that what's going on here. West Virginia sided with the Union in the Civil War, of course, and actually seceded from Virginia (an interesting precedent!). But West Virginians fought on both sides of the Civil War, notably Stonewall Jackson, who was born in Clarksburg, WV.
So Logan County, in the South, was Confederate territory. And Grant County, in the north, was—as you can tell from its name—was Union territory.
But they're now voting the same way—over 80% for Trump.
And this is the point. It’s a very interesting cultural phenomenon, which some people on the Left have noticed.
Just recently, as Will Wilkinson wrote in a Substack article about what he called the “Southernfication “of rural America. And the signs of this, some of you will be particularly delighted to know, are what we're now seeing all over the country.
The article was illustrated by a picture of a trucker in Maine with a gigantic truck with a Trump sign and a huge Confederate Battle Flag on his front fender.
Good news (although writer hates it)! Confederate flags now fly in all parts of white rural America because it's "increasingly ethnocentric." This is Marc Pelletier from Maine.https://t.co/IPpiFi2gMW
— Peter Brimelow (@peterbrimelow) August 31, 2021
His name was Mark Pelletier.
I should say he's obviously francophone-descended, his people came down as part of the late-19th century migration from Quebec into rural Maine. So his connection with the Civil War is probably purely symbolic.
But it means white America, which is to say America, is on the move.
I don't know where it’s going—and neither does anyone else. Maybe state secession, redefining states and so on.
Personally, as outlined above, I favor a Reconquista.
Not that Reconquista—our Reconquista!
Thank you, Jared!
