My Political Journey

May 25, 2020 Hunter Wallace Blogging 26

I’ve been doing some reflecting lately on my political journey.

I didn’t give any thought to politics until I was a college student at Auburn University. I was a normie when I voted in my first election. I voted for Al Gore over George W. Bush in the 2000 election. Pat Buchanan ran for president in that election, but I had no idea who he was at the time.

2001 was a watershed moment in my life. I had become a gamer and normie conservative who lurked on the Free Republic forum. I was becoming concerned about issues like immigration, affirmative action and reparations for slavery. In those days, I was reading David Horowitz books when 9/11 happened. I came across Pat Buchanan’s book The Death of the West which was published shortly thereafter.

It was Pat Buchanan who first alarmed me about changing racial and cultural demographics. I became concerned about the future of my own ethnic group. It was that same fall that I discovered Stormfront and fell down the rabbit hole into the world of White Nationalism. I developed a strong sense of racial and ethnic identity that has never left me down to the present day. I am proud to be a White Southern Anglo-Saxon and will go to my grave believing it is natural and right to do so. This decision to stand my ground on this issue, however, has put me firmly outside the bounds of “mainstream” society.

If you believe that there are natural differences between the races and sexes, refuse to be cowed by terms like “racist” and “sexist” and proudly identify as a European in our politically correct culture, you are put by the media into the “far right” box. A few generations ago, virtually all White Americans whether on the Left or Right believed this, but if you believe this these days you are “far right.” If you doubt the wisdom of the Brown decision and are skeptical of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement, you are firmly outside of the mainstream and are labeled a “far right” white supremacist.

From Pat Buchanan, I absorbed his paleoconservative views on immigration, trade, foreign policy and social conservatism. From Jared Taylor and others, I learned about the science behind race realism. From Kevin MacDonald, I was turned on to the Jewish Question. During the first term of George W. Bush, I was mixing these views together along with other people who were my age who felt like outsiders under mainstream conservatism. We were evolving into the proto-Alt-Right on an archipelago of online forums.

In the 2004 election, I voted for John Kerry out of sheer hatred of George W. Bush. By this point, I was firmly against the neocons and the Iraq War. I was against globalization. I was against George W. Bush’s push for comprehensive immigration reform. I didn’t vote in the 2002 or 2006 midterm elections. I was called a liberal at the time by conservatives who supported George W. Bush to the end when his disastrous presidency finally ended in the Crash of 2008. I refused to vote for John McCain in 2008 because he was a neocon warmonger. I voted for the Constitution Party candidate.

Over the next ten years, I continued to grow and change. The biggest change that happened in this period of my life was my views on religion and morality. I had started out as an atheist and something of a nihilist while I was reading Friedrich Nietzsche while in college, but later I became more interested in Aristotle, Alasdair MacIntyre and Martin Luther. I changed my views on Christianity and eventually became a Lutheran. I also came to believe in virtue ethics and the necessity of moral training.

Around 2010, I began to see the flaws of White Nationalism more clearly. Identity is a complex multifacted issue. I began to doubt that White people who do not share a common culture, history and ethnic background are homogeneous enough to unite in any sense of the word. As a result of this thinking, I moved away from anonymous online White Nationalism to real world Southern Nationalism. I never ceased to be pro-White. I just started to balance it with being pro-South and pro-Christian. I still think of myself first as a White Christian Southerner and secondly as a European. It just seems bizarre to me that some people think it is immoral for us to have a racial and ethnic identity.

In the 2008 and 2012 elections, I supported the Ron Paul Revolution in the Republican primaries. I voted for him the first time because he was antiwar which was a big issue for me. I supported him in 2012 until he compared the U.S. Border Patrol to the Gestapo and opposed building a wall on the Mexican border because it would keep Americans locked in or some such nonsense. In 2010, I proudly supported the Tea Party Revolution on this blog after moving away from White Nationalism, but a year later was bitterly disappointed when anti-immigration bills failed in Republican-controlled state legislatures.

In the 2012 election, I once again voted for the Constitution Party candidate, but I encouraged my Northern readers to vote for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan as a kind of shit test to see whether Northerners were capable of voting for two Yankees over reelecting Barack Obama. In hindsight, I later came to believe that the Yankees were right and that all things considered Obama was probably the better choice given the alternative which was to restore mainstream conservatism to power under Mitt Romney. After my bitter experience with the Tea Party Revolution, I didn’t bother to vote in the 2014 midterms.

By the time Donald Trump announced he was running for president in 2015, I had done an enormous amount of research in American history, particularly as it relates to the history of the South. Due to the fall of the Confederacy, I had developed strong views on a number of new issues: taxes, energy, infrastructure, health care, government regulation of the economy, public health and the environment. I knew that I wanted a strong state with a competent government that could deliver collective goods like strong borders and a more equitable distribution of wealth for workers. In fact, I would bore the BuzzFeed reporters who called me trying to get “gotcha quotes” in the 2016 election because I talked to them mostly about how I tentatively supported Donald Trump but was concerned about his tax policy.

During the 2016 election, I supported Trump to “move the Overton window” toward National Populism and wrote a series of articles called “The Case for Trump.” My stated reasons on the record to journalists at the time for supporting him were immigration, trade, foreign policy, campaign finance and political correctness. Trump was self financing his campaign to be free of the donors. He seemed to be breaking politically correct taboos. He promised to deliver a promising “America First” agenda. While Donald Trump certainly wasn’t my ideal as a Southern Nationalist, I went along with it because the Alt-Right had gained momentum and the positive energy online was attracting more people into nationalist politics.

After my bitter experiences with the George W. Bush presidency and the Tea Party Revolution, I was ALWAYS skeptical of Donald Trump. I was willing to give him a chance though. My attitude toward him in 2016 was “Trust, but Verify.” It quickly became apparent within two months of winning the 2016 election that Donald Trump could not be trusted. By the time of the Trump inauguration, I was already thinking we had been screwed by a conman. I didn’t even want to go to the inauguration in Washington, but we had already made plans to meet up with family so I bit my tongue and went anyway.

Over the last four years of the Trump presidency, my political views have continued to evolve and become more complex. I’ve thought a lot more about our social order and economic system and the impact it has had on our culture across American history. I’ve thought more about the steady expansion of freedom, equality, rights, individualism, tolerance and opposition to “bigotry” and how the envelope was pushed across generations and how these things were taken to ever greater extremes. The triumph of gay marriage and the mainstreaming of homosexuality on the Right under Trump has contributed to this. The manifest failure of the Trump presidency due to the power that big donors wield over public policy and the sweeping rollout of corporate tyranny has pushed lots of people in a more anti-capitalist direction. This was going on before Trump’s donors advised him to think of the coronavirus as the flu. In 2018, I sat out the midterm elections. Then n 2019, I briefly supported Andrew Yang’s campaign because UBI would put a floor underneath the working class and reduce extremes of wealth. I was also entertaining the idea of supporting a more moderate or centrist candidate after having given up on the idea that mainstream conservatism has anything to do with advancing social conservatism.

It is true that lots of people who supported Donald Trump in 2016 have changed their views and no longer support him today. I began my political journey around the time of 9/11 when the last Republican president plunged us into the Iraq War and went out of office in the Crash of 2008. I thought the George W. Bush presidency was a disaster because about 6,000 U.S. soldiers lost their lives in Afghanistan and Iraq. Speaking for myself, Iraq colored my views toward mainstream conservatism for 20 years. What should we make of this disaster when 100,000 Americans are dead on Memorial Day?

I don’t think it can simply be attributed to our health care system. The UK has the NHS and Britain has the second highest death toll in the world. It seems to me that the lesson we can learn from our present unfolding historical tragedy is that the countries that decided to “let it rip” like the USA, Britain and Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil have tragically lost the most lives. They all dithered because taking decision action at an earlier stage to stop the coronavirus would have disrupted their economies. The clique of billionaires around Trump wanted to “ride it out.” This is due to naive short term thinking.

By the time this is over, this country will be in a very different place. That much is for sure. It is too early to say what the long term consequences will be. The experts think we are in the “second inning of a nine inning game.” If we end up losing 1 million or 2 million people to this virus, it will be the greatest loss of life in American history. I would like to think we would be capable of looking back on the last 50 years after such an unprecedented loss of life and reflecting on whether most of the things we argued about in Clown World before this happened ever really mattered. Maybe this will set us down the path to becoming a serious country again. If not though, we will all know once and for all where we stand.

About Hunter Wallace 12392 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

25 Comments

  1. Good article. As a recovering gaming addict I need to know what your game/games were. Around ’00 I was playing Command and Conquer (multiple installments) mostly.

  2. I hear you man my 20s was my learning experience. 30s I’m honing who I am. Who knows what my 40s and beyond hold.

    • Very nice read. Mine is a little different, but all very important issues.

      I will say that whether or not all white people in a large country like the US can “come together” in whatever sense that may mean, it doesn’t matter terribly much. Because the important issues you’ve outlined are things that white people discuss and argue about. In a country with a white majority. Without them, you just don’t have anything at all to argue about.

      Hence why I am still a pro-white nationalist. White Southerner of European descent.

  4. I’m not sure exactly what he could have done beyond closing airports. And I’m not sure what compelled him not to do so. FOIA on the minutes in the cabinet meetings would be useful here. Also Kushner and Pence…will we ever see them in public again? They were appointed Covid19 Czars. Trump will transfer both blame and culpability onto his VP and son in law for the plague. So might the public.

    • Yeah, I’d love to have been a fly-on-the-wall in the oval office when Dr. Fauci ran into the White House in mid March screaming two million dead! Ferguson says so! Lock everything down!, when just a week earlier he was saying cruises were okay for healthy people, and gyms & movie theaters were okay barely a week before that.

      One extreme to the other virtually overnight.

      If I were Trump I would have pummeled the SOB so hard, the Secret Service would have been called in… to save Fauci.

    • I think someone else suggested it….American Worker Party would be a much better name. The Americans you want to attract associate radicals with communists and terrorists.

  6. I voted in ’88 – when I was 18 – for HW Bush, and that was the one time I voted – I realized the whole system was a scam shortly after that and have not voted since.

  7. I’ve been a Southernern Nationalist my whole life. I was raised to be one. My teachers taught the Southern Sweep of history. They taught us the culture and civilisation of the Old South and Texas. It reinforced what our parents and other adults taught us at home.

    The New England Moral-Political Paradigm was and is foreign. Along with the political correctness, Liberalism and egalitarianism that issue forth from it. Everyday life confirmed what my parents and teachers said, as true, and what Leftists said, as nonsense.

    As the decades wore on, I abandoned conservatism Inc, and generic White Nationalism, as foreign and un-Southern. After two terms of Clinton, I quit voting in national elections. It’s more important to protect our states from the Left’s relentless political attacks and support for the modern Liberal World Order. Than it is to pick a president that doesn’t represent us, anyway.

    Beyond this, I haven’t changed much, politically.

  8. I remember coming across Odessa Syndicate somewhere around 2006/7.

    That was a pretty good blog, until the author, one Prozium, started ranting incoherently about Tetragrammaton. That ended up crowding out any value in the place.

    I’m glad to see he’s recovered from all that.

    I also vaguely recall some sort of office and publication based out of Charlottesville, where Radio Free Northwest was listened to every week. I’d lived in Charlottesville myself some years earlier, so it struck me as a quixotic enterprise. But if you don’t try things, you don’t know what doesn’t work. Much like in 2017, or the Richmond rally this year.

    This is an endurance course, not a sprint.

    Here’s to the next 20 years.

  10. I don’t think American institutions will change their tune. But we will. It is time for us to get serious, and leave behind those that are not up to the task.

  11. HW, keep on keepin’ on. You have a good chance of surviving as does all the South. No region of the US has been under the hardship, stress as the South was put under for the last 150 years. The good part is that it has been prepared for the terrible things to come — to survive.

  12. My views are kind of like a conservative democrat, meaning i don’t like 100 genders, war mongering, talking about race instead of class in a way to make whites bad instead of the business class bad, but I agree with FDR style economics. I basically want to get rid of all the weirdos from the Democratic Party.

    I would support a revolution but I don’t think Americans are ready for it and I think American marxists aren’t serious marxists.

    I’d rather be a conservative Democrat than a anti big business Republican.

  13. I stopped voting in 1984 because I heard dozens of voters at a polling station say that they voted for Reagan (an actor) because they, “loved his films.” It was then that I realized that most voters have zero interest in researching the background of a candidate, or educating themselves on history and politics. Trump is just the latest example of the shallowness of democracy in general, but especially our democracy in which good looks, one liners, sales pitches, racial pandering, etc. count more than education, experience, virtue or a high IQ.

    In our future, look for more comedians, actors, game show hosts, etc. becoming governors, congressman, senators, and presidents. That is what the public wants: more bread and circuses delivered with a punch line and good optics. Nothing less with satisfy the fickle, hungry mob.

    I believe that our last chance to change things through voting was in 1964. Goldwater wasn’t perfect, but he was close to being a WN as anyone in recent memory. America had a clear choice in 1964, and they wanted, needed, and loved Johnson who delivered civil rights (high black crime rates) and unlimited immigration from third world sewers. This is what 90% of voting America wanted in 1964. We have never recovered from that fateful decision cast by a majority of voters.

    By the way, this speech by Edward R. Murrow in 1958 talking about TV in his day, could have been written today, in 2020 about our Jewish owned and operated media.

  14. I’ve gone from wanting Scandinavian social democracy to Spoonerist libertarianism to national populism. My political evolution has had a common thread throughout: What will significantly diminish the negative effects of the predatory elites? Whatever vehicle will best provide protection to the commoners from the selfishness and callousness of the managerial class is what I want to see come to fruition.

  15. Here is what I see: By the end of the century China will surpass the United States as the dominant economic and political power on planet Earth. Also by the end of the century Nigeria will be the third most populated nation on earth behind China and India. Nigeria cannot feed the people it already has. Where do you think all these excess Nigerians are going to go? The fact of the matter is the current Nation-State construct is becoming increasing obsolete and inefficient. Its time has passed. The answer is not a multitude of Ethno-States: one in the South, one in the Pacific Northwest, one in New England, one in the Ozarks….That merely dilutes our power. What we need is what I will call the Greater Albion Project. We need to unite the Anglo-Sphere as one metapolitical collective. Imagine if the remaining white areas of the United States and Canada merged into one nation called United Albion. (Or Albion United) then there would be sufficient land to grant non-white areas (American Southwest, the black belt, Native American areas) self-autonomous rule and in time complete independence! Is that not much better than reparations for the sin of slavery? Then phase two is to unite the rest of the Anglo-Sphere into one United Anglo-American Confederation with global outreach as our answer to the rise of China.That way we could cooperate on joint ventures( the search for clean and renewable energy, the exploration and colonization of space, total economic autarky,over population, the genetic improvement of our stock…) If you are going to dream, dream big! Don’t isolate yourself in mini-Ethno-States! Imagine Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Great Britain, all merged into one united Anglo-Sphere! After all in D-day these nations all worked together and each nation has a certain area of the beach in Normandy assigned to them. How much more so is cooperation expected when our whole race is in danger of global extinction? Besides, we southern boys love a girl with a British accent! Obviously I see politics changing radically in the years and decades to come as politics becomes existential. We are about to enter existential times. Existential times demands existential politics! Or as Shakespeare said: To be or not to be!

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