Andrew (“Drew”) Fraser, longtime professor of law at Macquarie University in Australia and a too-infrequent writer for VDARE.com, gained public notoriety in 2005 for protesting mass immigration into Australia in a letter to his local newspaper. The scandal arose from his matter-of-fact reference to the increased crime that African immigrants could be expected to bring with them. He was immediately suspended from teaching, and a peer-reviewed academic article he had written—"Rethinking the White Australia Policy”—was hastily suppressed.

Fraser later recalled:

I received precious little support from fellow WASPS. Indeed, Anglo-Australians were well-represented among academic colleagues who did their best to foster a lynch-mob mentality against me among students and the public-at-large. This experience taught me that out-group altruism is seen by my co-ethnics as an occasion for moral preening. I began to wonder just what sort of ethno-pathology is at work among WASPs who refuse to take their own side in a fight.

His subsequent research resulted in publication of The WASP Question, a book well-received on the Dissident Right. Fraser came to see the problem with modern Anglo-Saxons as essentially spiritual in character. He learned that it had been the Christian Church, not the state, which presided over the birth of English nationhood. This suggested to him the possibility that the decay of Christianity, and more particularly of Anglicanism, might have something to do with the failure of Anglo-Saxons around the world to maintain a healthy sense of ethnic belonging.

The Anglican Church of Australia, for example, has been heavily involved in efforts to increase the number of foreigners granted “refugee” status in that country, something they justify by referring to the Good Samaritan parable. But unlike the Good Samaritan, the church itself is not making any sacrifice:

Church-run charities have been absorbed into the vast, sprawling administrative apparatus of the transnational corporate welfare state actively working to dissolve the ethno-religious identity of every European-descended people. Neither Anglican charities nor Anglican churches will shoulder the ever-mounting financial and social costs of refugee resettlement. The real costs are simply shifted to the taxpayers and working class neighborhoods in the outer suburbs.

Fraser, now retired and wanting to understand, in his own words, “why the church is so screwed up,” decided he needed a better grounding in Christian theology. Perhaps naïvely, he assumed the place to get this was a Christian divinity school. His experiences provide an autobiographical aspect to his new book Dissident Dispatches: An Alt-Right Guide to Christian Theology. [VDARE.com note: Currently only the Kindle edition is available through Amazon U.S., apparently because of legal harassment over the hardcopy’s use of Pepe The Frog in its cover art. The hardcopy edition is still available through e.g. Amazon Canada and also through Book Depository in the UK, which provides free worldwide shipping, and Barnes & Noble. More details from Arktos Press].

Fraser applied to Sydney’s United Theological College, associated with the notoriously liberal “Uniting Church of Australia.” It turned out to be a “hotbed of multiculturalist ideology.” “Life as a student at UTC,” he writes, “has taught me what it means to be a member of a (despised) ethnic minority” [The Cult of The Other, March 2, 2012]

A few weeks into his first semester, Fraser attended a seminar on “Myths of Whiteness” given by black liberation theologian Dr. Anthony Reddie. After being treated to hours of anti-white rhetoric, the audience was given an opportunity to ask questions. Fraser rose to ask how racism could exist when, as Dr. Reddie [Email him] asserted, there is no such thing as race. A senior lecturer at the College quickly placed a red dot on Dr. Fraser’s name tag— “a stigmatic ritual intended to signal to all present that I no longer had permission to speak.”

At the end of his first semester, Fraser was called in for a meeting with the college Principal and informed of complaints against him from both students and lecturers. Amusingly, one tutor had complained that “numerous other students seem quite taken with [Fraser’s] ideas and wanted to hear more about them. I fear that his views may harm the theological formation of the other students.” As a result, Fraser (along with one other older white student) was segregated from the rest of the class, meeting with the teacher separately. But no other action was taken against him at this point.

Toward the end of his first year of study, however, he was informed that he was under investigation as a result of allegations he had “demonstrated intolerance for female and ethnic students.” This time, he was shown the complaints against him and invited to respond in writing. One especially imaginative young woman claimed Fraser’s criticisms of Swiss theologian Karl Barth “implied that the Holocaust never happened.”

The legal heart of Fraser’s case was the Racial Discrimination Act of 1975, outlawing speech deemed “offensive” and “insulting” to a person because of his race, color, ethnicity or national origins. Section 18D(b) of this law attempted to leave room for academic freedom by protecting

anything said or done reasonably and in good faith…in the course of any statement, publication, discussion or debate made or held for any genuine academic, artistic or scientific purpose or any other genuine purpose in the public interest.

In practice, however, section 18D(b) has proven no protection at all. When Fraser was suspended from teaching at Macquarie University in 2005, the Vice-Chancellor simply found that his statements about black immigrants were not made “reasonably and in good faith.” When Fraser’s academic journal article “Rethinking the White Australia Policy” was suppressed, the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission provided legal cover by declaring that the arguments contained in the article could not possibly have been made “reasonably and in good faith.”

The same thing now happened at UTC. Evidence of Fraser’s “racism” was found in the concluding sentence of a paper he wrote on black theologian J. Kameron Carter[Email him]

Indeed, Carter is doing the devil’s work when he finds something Christ-like in black America’s descent over the past century into a dysfunctional and degrading culture of rampant welfare dependency, drug addiction, soaring rates of illegitimacy, escalating violence and chronic criminality.

Once again, the authorities ruled that Fraser’s words had not been written “reasonably and in good faith.” His defense was rejected; he was declared guilty on all counts and suspended for one academic year. An appeal was unsuccessful.

Fraser’s reflections on these tribulations deserve to be quoted at length:

Section 18D of the Racial Discrimination Act has effectively been nullified. [Australian universities] now assert the power to impose a speech code in its classrooms which empowers female and ethnic students to short-circuit academic debates and discussions simply by claiming to be “offended.”

But militant feminists and ethnic students are not solely or even mainly responsible for the collapse of academic freedom in Australian universities. They are merely “useful idiots” pressed into the service of a globalized system of higher education; their role is to identify and root out the few remaining pockets of dissent from the multicultural orthodoxy governing contemporary academic discourse. Other minority interests have an even more toxic influence on the corporate culture of Australian universities.

Most obviously, “progressive” academics are keen to set their current ideological hegemony in stone. But top-heavy university administrations (staffed largely by deracinated, other directed WASPs) are no less desperate to maximize the revenue generated by the orderly throughput of undergraduate and postgraduate clients in an increasingly competitive and ostentatiously cosmopolitan academic marketplace.

Fraser applied for admission to another theological college, but when it learned of his suspension at UTC, “the good Christians there wouldn’t touch me with a ten-foot pole.” So, after waiting out his one-year suspension, he “turned the other cheek” and returned to UTC to complete his studies.

He managed to avoid further suspensions, and obtained his Bachelor of Theology degree in 2015—but not before some run-ins with female professors during his final year of study. He has come to believe that female academics make more reliable servants of the multicultural regime than men:

The post-modern divinity school is a womanist’s world. WASP men studying or teaching theology are probably no less concerned than women to repress racism, sexism, homophobia and anti-Semitism, but they appear to be marginally more open to a well-constructed ethno-theological critique of the conventional academic wisdom. Prior to this academic year, none of my lecturers in theology were women. But in 2015 three out of the four units I studied were taught by women. All are WASPs and avowed feminists. As such, they appear singularly resistant to deviant theological ideas. […]  Typically, they ritually affirm the profoundly spiritual character of group identity among Jews and other non-white peoples while denouncing any suggestion that Christianity is the ancestral blood faith of the European peoples and must remain so if those nations are to survive. The spiritual gynocracy presently reigning over the mainline Protestant denominations has become a major obstacle to the reconstruction of Christian nationhood.

VDARE.com readers may be interested in Dissident Dispatches’ brief references to our Editor Peter Brimelow.  These occur in the context of Fraser’s (not unfriendly) critique of Jared Taylor’s White Identity, to which Fraser (who was born in Canada and educated there and in the U.S.) would prefer a more specifically Anglo-Saxon consciousness:

Almost all the many WASPs on the [American] alternative Right—for example, Peter Brimelow, Richard Spencer and Greg Johnson—hope “to salvage as much as possible from the shipwreck of their great republic.” [This is a quotation from Brimelow’s 1995 book Alien Nation]. But they owe it to their Anglo-Saxon ancestors to recognize at long last that the loyalists were right to oppose rebel colonists while defending the unity of the British race.

It is now obvious that the perpetual American Revolution has been an ongoing catastrophe for the Anglo-Saxon race. More than twenty years ago, Brimelow warned English Canadians that the “patriot game” is up; that they should unite with their co-ethnics south of the 49th parallel. He would do well to adapt that advice to the parlous prospects now facing American WASPs, standing alone, unorganized, and leaderless, in a globalized, multiracial empire.

Specifically, he should help to rejuvenate the British race patriotism that was second nature to the United Empire Loyalists. It was just such ancestral loyalty to throne and altar that led loyalists to settle in Canada after being driven, in their tens of thousands, out of the victorious and vengeful republic. [Links added]

Anglo-Saxons of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your moral preening!

Martin Witkerk [Email him] is an independent philosopher.