Texas
The overwhelming defeat of the Democratic Party in Texas ranks highly among the greatest spoils of the 2010 midterm elections. The GOP now has a near supermajority in the Texas state legislature. That means bills which have failed in previous sessions – notably, immigration bills – now have a much greater chance of passage.
A whole slew of important bills have been filed by Texas state lawmakers. This is real “comprehensive immigration reform”:
– Sanctions on businesses that hire illegal aliens.
– Allowing police officers to check immigration status on the basis of “reasonable suspicion.”
– Requiring state agencies to report on the costs of providing social services to illegal aliens.
– Requiring photo IDs at polling places.
– Denying state funding to sanctuary cities.
– Prohibiting state agencies from printing signs or documents in any language other than English.
– Requiring proof of citizenship to get a driver’s license.
– Requiring Texas employers to participate in the E-Verify system.
– A challenge to birthright citizenship.
Needless to say, the stakes are high. This is our best shot ever at achieving real immigration reform in Texas. We can’t afford to let this opportunity go to waste.
Whites are already a minority in the Lone State State. This legislative session could determine whether Texas follows the Arizona model of driving out illegal aliens or the California model of becoming a magnet for them.
Granted, these are only half measures. In Arizona, these half measures are working at making life uncomfortable for illegal aliens. Since 2007, hundreds of thousands of illegals have fled the state. Many more are expected to leave if SB 1070 (and its inevitable successors) is ultimately upheld in the federal courts.
If these bills are passed and signed into law, they will inevitably invite legal challenges from the Obama Justice Department, the ACLU, and Hispanic activist groups. The national controversy that was set off by Arizona worked to our advantage. An even bigger polarizing national showdown in Texas will embolden other states and active implicit Whiteness all across America.
Victory will encourage Texas state lawmakers to push the envelope even further. Defeat will have just the opposite effect.
The Heroine
A heroine has emerged in the Texas immigration debate. State Rep. Debbie Riddle, R-Tomball, camped out in the Capitol for 36 straight hours to file Arizona-style immigration reform in Texas.
“I would have waited a month if I had to do so,” said Riddle. “The overwhelming majority is saying that they want something done. They want their families to be safe. My constituents want to see that their representative is just as serious about getting the job done this session as they are. They’ve got a real fire in their bellies.”
Texas voters consider immigration the most important issue facing the state. 53 percent of Texans want to adopt Arizona-style immigration reform.
The Villain
The state cheap labor lobby is opposing all the immigration reform measures. “The bottom line is, Congress needs to act and pass comprehensive immigration reform. We’re sympathetic to the fact that Congress hasn’t acted. We’re frustrated, too,” said Bill Hammond, President of the Texas Association of Business.
As in other states, a coalition of Hispanic activist groups, big business, and labor unions are desperately trying to thwart the will of the people. Politically, their center of gravity can be found in the Democratic Party which is dependent upon the Hispanic vote. The conservative base of the Republican Party is united in its support for real immigration reform.
The Opportunist
Gov. Rick Perry, no friends of ours, stands in the way of pushing through several of the most important of these measures. Earlier this year, he went on record saying he opposed bringing Arizona-style immigration reform to Texas. Lately, he has refused to comment on whether he would actually veto popular legislation that crosses his desk.
Fortunately for us, Perry is nursing his own presidential ambitions of following Dubya to the White House. He has a new book out and has been trying to look tough on border security. When Obama landed in Texas over the summer, Rick Perry made national news when he confronted him over his handling of drug violence along the border.
Appearing on the Greta van Susteran show, Gov. Perry recently labeled Obama and the Democratic Congress “abject failures” for their handling of border security. His own record on that subject is rather unimpressive. The most we can hope for out of Rick Perry is that nursing his vain fantasy of becoming president will force this opportunistic politician to sign our bills.
In 2008, the Huckster signed the NumbersUSA pledge in a desperate attempt to court the restrictionist vote. His record on immigration was a sore point with the conservative base.
The Alamo
Get ready for a fight in Texas over immigration early next year.
We are going to invest a lot of time and energy in doing what we can to make an impact on the outcome of this debate. This is a practical way that our Texas readers can do something to move the political spectrum in our direction. The most likely course of action will be to bombard the dithering Rick Perry with faxes and emails to ensure we get our way.
White Nationalists were late to the party in Arizona. In Texas, we know the stakes of inaction. This time around we will have months to prepare for the final showdown on immigration.
The men who died at the Alamo were willing to give their lives for a free and independent Texas. It would reflect poorly upon White Nationalists if we are unable to spare a few minutes of our time to send an email or make a phone call.
How did you get that impression? Clearly, there are plenty of White Nationalists who have been persuaded by a radical message. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be having this debate.
You have great faith in this strategy of persuading ordinary people to adopt radical ideas. My point is that the effective result of this is that you are only succeeding in taking alienated people and making them even more alienated, hostile to their target audience, and unable to communicate with their peers.
You take people who might vote, organize, donate, influence their peers … and transform them into the White Nationalist equivalent of the Heaven’s Gate cult. You are only neutering their effectiveness.
Instead of waiting for an alien spaceship to arrive hidden in the Hale Bopp comet, the vanguardists form small cults around dynamic personalities (people like William Pierce) and wait for “the collapse” of civilization at which time they expect to rise to power by some mysterious process.
Their activities are counterproductive. The effective result of their influence upon White Nationalism is pushing a White ethnostate even further outside the realm of possibility.
More on this after the gym.
RE: The “Worse is Better” viewpoint.
I had to read a book on the Wiemar Republic for a class on European History I took. After Hitler was appointed Chancellor in 1933 the German Communists were estatic! They subscribed to the “worse is better” theory and eagerly wrote about how the revolution was near as Hitler’s appointment was “the final stage of capitalism.” They expected to be in power soon, instead they ended up behind barbed wire.
There is a lot of validity that Obama has put a hostile foreign face on the regime, still everytime I see people estatic about his election that passage about the Communists at the twilight of the Weimar regime comes to mind.
TX Republicans have been particularly bad on immigration.
Greg Johnson says: The small number of people who do know better — we White Nationalists — need to articulate our agenda; we need to reserve our scarce funds and manpower for pursuing our agenda; we need to engage and radicalize the mainstream.
Greg, You’ve won this point with me — that mainstream politics will move with or without us no matter what we do, maybe except in a few rare cases like close elections where an anti-immigration or pro-gun candidate might win or lose based on every vote or once of activist support.
From where I sit however, HW is beating you and Trainspotter like a drum on the lack of a practical plan to do what you just suggested — articulate a vision, reserve funds, organize, and push the WN agenda in a way that will resonate with mainstream people right now, rather than just write checks and wait around for a collapse.
Spreading ideas, building organizations, and moving discourse in our direction are good suggestions but too general to be useful to a mainstream-oriented racially conscious person like myself, someone eager to get onto the ground right now and start doing something effective — after especially after Tim Wise’s call for White genocide. If radical-oriented WN like yourself have no practical plan for such action, or no plans to develop one, well, it’s a major weakness in the radical approach in my opinion because few are going to sign onto that.
Pushing European Neo-Facism right now won’t influence anyone in my sphere of influence and will just drive everyone I know away from organizing around White identity — the exact opposite of what you say you want. I’m not suggesting that you refrain from pushing whatever ideas you feel are appropriate, but these ideas won’t help me and probably not other White Advocates heavily integrated into mainstream society at present and who want to stay there for the time being.
Perhaps using Linder in the way you just suggested is obvious to you because you’ve spent your whole career in WN. Using Linder in that way was not obvious to me, however, until you just said it. Radical-vanguadist isolation, misanthropy and in some cases real contempt for people in the mainstream is also a big problem. It makes me generally dismiss anything vanguardists other than you have to say because it suggests a real lack of compassion for people born into a historical context that makes it damn near impossible for them to be anything other than what they are.
You have written elsewhere that the WN movement needs both vanguardists, mainstreamers and WN front groups within the mainstream — a range of organizations pushing people in our direction. More specifics rather than generalities on what mainstreamers can do on the ground, in the real world, to accomplish those things and advance a pro-White message right now, but without using a hardcore radical approach or image would be helpful. There is really no WN I know of making practical suggestions other than HW, whose writing I greatly respect.
If you have written about these things elsewhere, let me know where I can go find it. Thanks again for responding.
There is a lot of validity that Obama has put a hostile foreign face on the regime, still everytime I see people estatic about his election that passage about the Communists at the twilight of the Weimar regime comes to mind.
That reminds me of something Nicolas Stix said before the midterms:
As soon as “Obama” was sworn into office, he sought to nationalize the entire economy, one sector at a time, while at the same time sandbagging energy production, throwing open the borders, and seeking to confiscate all of whites’ wealth. Republicans called him “incompetent,” but he knew exactly what he was doing: Destroying America’s economy, and destroying “the white enemy.” But all the self-muzzling Republicans could do was mutter about “Obama” being a “liberal” or a “socialist.” If only!
More recently, the “post-racial,” healing President has called on his alliance of blacks, Hispanics, and the young, to rally round in the 2010 election, and in an interview on Univision’s Reconquista TV, exhorted Hispanics to have the attitude, “we’re gonna punish our enemies.”
If he can’t steal the 2012 election, he’ll declare a state of emergency. This man has no intention of voluntarily leaving office. And Republicans like Byron York still have no blessed idea whom they are dealing with.
I was somewhat shocked by Stix saying that, though perhaps the Jewish fellow has a better handle on things than I do.
This point is indisputable.
As I pointed out above, the mainstream has shifted so far to the right on immigration that almost everything a White Nationalist could possible want on the issue can be now be debated openly.
If that is the case, what sense does it make to “stand firm” on a platform of anti-Americanism, anti-Christianity, and NS dictatorship? It is madness. Why call yourself a “White Nationalist” – for no other reason than the individual emotional satisfaction of doing so – and get instantly labeled and dismissed as a Neo-Nazi racist?
Instead, you could call yourself an “immigration reform advocate.” You could campaign openly in the mainstream on the full White Nationalist wish list on immigration: the border fence, militarizing the border, deporting illegals, ending sanctuary cities, cutting off legal immigration, attacking birthright citizenship, etc.
We could be scoring important victories right now … or we can listen to Greg Johnson, “stand firm” on the rhetorical radicalism, and make no progress whatsoever toward achieving our goals.
Did it really matter whether or not Martin Luther King called himself a communist or a “civil rights activist”? He advanced the same program on racial integration. MLK succeeded where the rhetorical radicals in the Communist Party USA had failed.
You’re comparing apples and oranges.
1.) You can “raise racial consciousness” and “radicalize our people” by posting anonymous comments on the internet. In doing so, you will reach the odd person who is already alienated and turn him into a White Nationalist. The effective result of “raising racial consciousness” that way is reaching people who are too geographically scattered to have any impact on their communities.
2.) Alternatively, you can work within the mainstream, push through moderate measures into law, and count on the Left to respond with a polarizing backlash that will infuriate Whites.
What is the effect result of that? Instead of reaching the odd person geographically scattered across America, the whole state of Arizona (or Texas) will be your stage, and the news media will be duped into broadcasting your message into almost every White household. What’s more, the sting of the “racism” charge will lose its cachet from overuse.
Arizona was hit with a national boycott for defending itself from an invasion. That did far more to polarize and radicalize Whites in Arizona on immigration (and those as far away as Pennsylvania and Michigan) than posting radical anonymous messages on the internet ever did.
My response is simple:
With the radical position on immigration now so well advanced in the mainstream, White Nationalists would be foolish not to reposition themselves to take advantage of this opportunity. This is an open invitation for White Nationalists to waltz into their communities and rise to positions of leadership.
All it costs is changing their rhetorical tune without abandoning the substance of their positions.
We have a shot at becoming leaders in our communities with the legitimacy necessary to lead our people in a more radical direction. When the shit does hit the fan, we will then be in a position of authority to push for more radical measures.
Translation: White Nationalists can sit on the sidelines and voluntarily choose to remain isolated on the fringe. Alternatively, they could position themselves as leaders in their communities on immigration. They can choose between renouncing the acquisition of power or grasping it in their hands.
How are you going to move anything – people, discourse, resources – in our direction? Who is going to read Counter-Currents who is interested in reducing legal immigration? How do you plan to radicalize and racialize these people when you are so far out of tune with their experience that they won’t even give you a hearing?
Good question.
You should answer it yourself: White Nationalists have the opportunity to become leaders in their states and communities on immigration. You would have them abdicate that opportunity for no other reason than “standing firm” on a rhetorical label.
Once again, Greg Johnson shows he doesn’t know the first thing about the immigration debate or mainstream politics. There are now over 70 congressmen in the House of Representatives who favor cutting legal immigration, ending birthright citizenship, and deporting illegal aliens.
The next chairman of the House Immigration Subcommittee is going to launch a full frontal assault on the 14th Amendment next year.
No, they don’t.
If everyone in the mainstream following your sage advice, and turned their back on the “system politicians” (friends of ours who are actually a majority in the House now), the effective result of that would be the complete and total victory of our enemies on immigration.
That’s why the realistic and responsible among our ranks just elected over 70 congressmen who support ending legal immigration. What have you done to end legal immigration?
This is true.
You are putting the cart ahead of the horse. We have to plug the leak in the boat before we can bail out the water.
The fact is, the struggle to end legal immigration and birthright citizenship will be so incredibly racially polarizing that it presents us with our best chance at radicalizing and awakening Whites.
If it were not for the 2010 midterm elections, Tim Wise would not have stumbled and declared a race war on White America. We flushed out one of our worse enemies. Who else can we flush out and expose to the light of day by following the same strategy?
The effective result of your proposal is that we blow our opportunity to gain respectability and legitimacy. We blow our opportunity to seize the initiative and emerge as leaders in our own communities.
Why? Because our time is spent so much more effectively posting thousands of anonymous radical comments on Counter-Currents and VNN Forum.
Where?
1.) You can “articulate our agenda” on Counter-Currents. In doing so, you are only preaching to the choir. The effective result of your agenda is that White Nationalists only become more alienated and unable to communicate with their peers than before.
2.) You can “articulate our agenda” on immigration openly in your state and community. You can infiltrate the Tea Party and other mainstream conservative organizations and position yourself as a leader. You can gain the legitimacy and authority in a geographically circumscribed area to move the goal posts on racial awareness. You can help pass laws that will polarize and awaken implicit Whites.
Why?
What do we gain from subsidizing VNN Forum for another ten years? Where has VNN Forum made an impact? Why subsidize failure?
Alternatively, you can make a campaign contribution to a state rep or senator. Scarce funds won’t have much of an impact on the presidential race. That’s not true of state legislature races, county sheriff races, city council races.
You can be a string puller in your state capitol. You can be a leader in your community.
… or you can hang out with Alex Linder denouncing the Jews in impotency for another ten years.
How?
Who in the mainstream is going to read Counter-Currents? Who is going to be influenced by your ideas? There is nothing on Counter-Currents about immigration. In fact, Counter-Currents doesn’t even talk America most of the time.
RE: “a plan.”
The first step in coming up with a plan is to clear away the bad plans or non-plans being peddled here. Hunter’s “plan” — namely let the system do the organizing for us at the cost of shutting up and blending in — is a prescription for oblivion, not progress.
If I were in your shoes, this is what I would do:
The most important thing is to know people in your area, meaning within a 30 minute drive of you. Depending on where you are in the country, I would seek out the WN or quasi-WN group that is organized in your area, whether it be A3P, European American United, National Alliance, the Council of Conservative Citizens, Northwest Front, or maybe a Friends of American Renaissance group. I would go to a couple of meetings and get to know the people there.
They might be people with whom you can work, which lessens your burdens and helps you avoid traps and duplicated efforts.
If there aren’t existing groups in your area, I would definitely try to find a way to meet and network with local WNs. Contact me through Counter-Currents, since I might be able to put you in contact with people in your area. I have a mailing list of about 2,000 WNs around the country. I will not send addresses to you, but I can contact people in your area directly and ask them to contact you if they wish.
I would also recommend that you go to Tea Party groups. Make friends with people, but don’t blend in too much. Cultivate a slightly politically incorrect reputation as well as practice being a good listener. You will be surprised how quickly you can spot fellow thought criminals, if any. In conversation, where appropriate, I would make a point of steering people to VDare and American Renaissance.
Honestly, I don’t think that any existing group out there has hit on the right message, organizational formula, or strategy. And there is no “one right message” or strategy anyway. That’s why it is important to experiment and try new things. I have been working on my own plan for an organization, and eventually I will unveil it.
But right now, the most important thing we can do is be honest with one another and ourselves about our objective situation: we are small, powerless, ignored or despised, poorly funded, and poorly led. Our leaders have wasted more than half a century. Given this reality, it is tempting to be seduced by fantasy talk of either the vanguardist variety or Hunter’s suicidal version of mainstreaming. But that is just a prescription for wasting more time, as our race keeps marching on to its programmed extinction.
Hunter writes:
Just for the record: I am not a policy wonk, and Counter-Currents/North American New Right focuses on philosophy, religion, political theory, history, the arts, media criticism, and metapolitics, including issues about the nature and aims of the White Nationalist movement, which is what we are debating here.
We don’t focus on science, policy studies, or the daily news cycle. There are other individuals and groups in our movement who are far more qualified for that than I am.
Counter-Currents/NANR is obviously not a “mainstream” publication. Nor were Partisan Review and the other “little magazines” that gradually came to exercise a vast influence on culture and policy in America today. Cultural change is largely a top down process, and we are aimed at shaping elite opinion.
Hunter used to understand the idea of the division of labor and of people working where their strengths lie. He even said that arbitrarily demanding that people work outside of their strengths is a sign of a <agent provocateur.
But now he is apparently so blinded by personal hatred that he has forgotten all that. Indeed, his last post on this thread is so hysterical and illogical that it sounds like he is losing it. I think I am stressing him out. I am going to bow out of this discussion so he can get back to his comfort zone, e.g., baiting Tim Wise and his ilk.
1.) I agree with your proposal that the first step toward crafting an effective strategy is to clean away the intellectual detritus that is unnecessarily handicapping our efforts to reach a wider audience.
We can start by ruling out the obvious albatrosses like anti-Americanism, hostility to Christianity, anti-republicanism, and the obsession with European fascism. Then we can move forward on cutting out the extreme alienation and hostile rhetoric toward White America that makes White Nationalism look ridiculous and unsympathetic.
Of course if we were do that there would be nothing left for Counter-Currents to contribute.
2.) The White Nationalist position on immigration: end legal immigration, deport the illegals, militarize the border, build the fence, end birthright citizenship.
The NumbersUSA checklist on immigration: end legal immigration, deport the illegals, militarize the border, build the fence, end birthright citizenship.
Greg’s “plan” — unnecessarily attach our platform on immigration to Neo-Nazism — for no other reason that the individual emotional satisfaction of clinging to a rhetorical label — is absurd. The substance is what matters, not the label, but the obvious will never register with rhetorical radicals who would rather run their mouth than score victories.
3.) When I was in Virginia, I attended CofCC, Volksfront, and Klan meetings. I drove across state lines to go to meetings. I was even planning to start a Virginia CofCC chapter. That was my learning phase.
The problem with explicit White Nationalist groups is that they have no legitimacy in their communities. They are not speaking for any mass constituency. This is a consequence of going outside of the experience of your audience and prioritizing towing a hard rhetorical line over organizing.
You can meet a few good people in these existing groups, but you aren’t going to move the political spectrum by working through them. To do that you have to start where your audience is today, not from your own ideological vantagepoint.
4.) I’ve been to lots of Tea Party meetings and events. I know these people quite well. If you want to infiltrate the Tea Party, you should go to a meeting, don’t attract attention to yourself, and listen to what they have to say.
Don’t open your mouth. Gain their confidence. Get involved in their organizations and work yourself into a position of power. Push completely mainstream ideas on cracking down hard on immigration.
5.) Dissolving into the mainstream is the most sensible strategy: we can already openly campaign for almost everything we want on the immigration issue. The same is true of affirmative action, multiculturalism, and political correctness.
There is no barrier to supporting state and federal candidates who want to end all legal immigration, deport illegals, and end birthright citizenship. Just call yourself an “immigration reform advocate” and get to work organizing and supporting campaigns.
6.) We are small, powerless, ignored or despised, poorly funded, and poorly led mostly because of our own terrible choices and a disturbing lack of realism in the White Nationalist community.
7.) There is nothing in the least “suicidal” about campaigning in the mainstream on issues like ending legal immigration and deporting all illegal aliens. The true “suicidal” position is to reject the “system politicians” and surrender the political field to our avowed enemies in the name of the ridiculous “worse is better” theory.
1.) Counter-Currents is the sum of Greg’s own eclectic interests in various topics like science fiction and neo-fascist European philosophy. There is nothing on that website about business topics like finance or the practical points of political organization. He is calling his own bookmarks and favorite flicks a “metapolitical struggle.”
2.) No one in the American elite reads Counter-Currents. In fact, the vast majority of White Nationalists have never heard of it. Granted, they have never heard of Occidental Dissent either, but we are not shooting for circles quite that high.
All I am trying to do here is attempting to persuade White Nationalists to become more practical.
3.) I haven’t said anything here about urging Greg becoming a political organizer. His strength is European neo-fascist philosophy. That’s fine. Wonderful. More power to him. Write a book about the subject.
Please note that I haven’t attacked Savitri Devi or Julius Evola anywhere in this thread or in any of the others. Their ideas aren’t the problem per se.
It is Greg’s fantasy that Middle America can be converted to those ideas and calling this a strategy is what is so objectionable. I shouldn’t have to point out that this is an unreasonable expectation. This is so obvious that is truly breathtaking that we are debating the issue.
Instead, Greg is arguing that “the system must be rejected” and that reviews of movies like Legally Blonde 2 and Batman Begins is a better path to the White ethnostate.
4.) I will note that exposing Tim Wise as a Jewish psychopath was a direct byproduct of voting for “system politicians” he dislikes.