Memphis Address: The Rise of Nationalism

Editor’s Note: Here is an edited transcript of the speech I delivered at the Memphis Forum.

I would like to thank James Edwards and the folks of The Political Cesspool for inviting me to speak to you today. I’m honored to be here among such fine men and women many of whom I have known for years now. If you are here in this room, you were invited to be a part of something special. You are the tip of the spear of our movement. Give James a round of applause.

As I was driving up here last night, I heard the news that former president George W. Bush had given a speech on the rise of nationalism and the waning legitimacy of the American-led liberal world order which was created after the Second World War. I searched for a video of W.’s speech and watched it on YouTube. It was an amazing experience to watch the man who did more than anyone else in the world to shape my political worldview deliver a rebuke of the movement of which I have been a part of for the last 15 years. George W. Bush’s speech was a passionate defense of open borders, free trade and global empire and an attack on the rise of nationalism and populism in Europe and North America.

Having left Gainesville, FL, I had to drive through the night to get here. Less than 48 hours ago, I was in a van with Identity Evropa and reporters from the New York Times who were filming Richard Spencer’s speech at the University of Florida. Gov. Rick Scott of Florida had declared a “state of emergency” in Alachua County in anticipation of Spencer’s arrival in Gainesville. We’re on the same level now as a major hurricane strike. We’ve reached the point where we everything we do is national and international news.

This is why I am here today. When I was last here three years ago, we hadn’t risen to anywhere near this level of prominence. It was much easier back in those days when we were toiling away in obscurity. We could hold conferences in hotels without attracting much interest from the media. We could hold street demonstrations all over the South without generating much opposition. We could raise money rather easily and use social media without much censorship.

The world has changed tremendously over the last three years. We used to be ignored by our cultural and political elites and dismissed as irrelevant. Now we are perceived as a threat and the establishment is fighting back against us. Donald Trump ran for president and won the 2016 presidential election. Brexit happened. Nationalist parties have continued to gain ground all over Europe. The political, corporate and media establishment can now envision a world in which they have lost power.

In the last two months, three separate public opinion polls have shown that the Alt-Right or White Nationalism now has the support of 6% to 10% of Americans, which is about 13% to 17% of White Americans. A recent University of Virginia poll revealed that 31% of Americans strongly or somewhat agreed that the country needs to “protect and preserve its White European heritage.” The same poll found that 39% of Americans strongly or somewhat agreed with the statement that “white people are currently under attack in this country.” In a country that is only 63% White, this shows that our ideas have made deep inroads into White America and still aren’t close to hitting their ceiling.

To put this into perspective, the Pew Research Center has found that 10% of Americans are Business Conservatives (the sort of people who would vote for Marco Rubio), 12% are Steadfast Conservatives (the sort of people who vote for Ted Cruz) and 15% are Solid Liberals (the sort of people who would vote for Hillary Clinton). If the Alt-Right or White Nationalists are now 6% to 10% of Americans, the panic of the political establishment becomes understandable. We are not a “fringe group.” On the contrary, we’ve grown to the point where our self-identified explicit supporters are now one of the largest rightwing factions in America and our pool of sympathizers is roughly half of White America.

As in France or Germany, we’ve become a large enough force to destabilize the political system. This is harder to see in the United States than in Europe where nationalist parties are organized under their own banner under the parliamentary system. In the United States, nationalist and populist leaning Americans are folded in with the other rightwing factions in a coalition of unequals in the Republican Party, which makes us appear more marginal and invisible than we really are in the American electorate. There are about 19 to 32 million Americans out there who are willing to tell a pollster that they either strongly support or somewhat support the Alt-Right or White Nationalism. If everyone in the United States who shares our racial and cultural views moved to the same state, we would be about the size of Texas.

There are 198 million White Americans. This means that over 1 out of 10 White Americans who you see in everyday life explicitly identifies with our movement. Nearly 2 out of 10 will explicitly tell a pollster they oppose racial intermarriage. You can see how this is a major problem for the Republican Party which is under pressure from the growing share of the non-White population and the rise of White racial consciousness among their own voters. The Republican Party can’t win a national election anymore without our support, but it can’t win one by explicitly appealing to us either.

The old taboos have become unstable. It is challenging to convince 26 million people that they can’t organize to have a voice in a democratic political system. There are now more Americans who support the Alt-Right or White Nationalism than Jews and Asians combined. It used to be much easier to control us and distort our culture when the mass media was controlled by a tiny elite, but now the smartphone and social media have given dissidents all the tools we need to organize and disseminate our message. The mainstream media has also lost its legitimacy and is no longer trusted by most White Americans.

We know from sociodynamics that taboos crumble when just 10% of a population comes to hold an unshakable belief. This is the tipping point when an idea hits a critical mass and begins to spread rapidly through a population on its way to becoming the new majority opinion. This is what is happening now with the rise of nationalism in Europe and North America. The old establishment conservative parties are losing ground to insurgent nationalist challengers. George W. Bush and John McCain can decry “half-baked, spurious nationalism” and defend so-called “American values” and “American leadership in the liberal world order,” but they are the ones who are the fading force in American politics.

I realize this sounds somewhat hard to believe. There aren’t any Alt-Right or White Nationalist websites that get anywhere near that level of traffic. We’ve never seen all these people at political conferences. They aren’t coming to demonstrations. And yet, we know from the polling data that this stratum of the White American population is out there. Unlike the cosmopolitan, business oriented moderates who live in the suburbs, it is nationalist, populist, culturally anxious and racially conscious. It is more middle class and working class and concentrated in small towns and rural areas. We can see it in elections. If it didn’t exist, President Donald Trump would have never made it to the White House.

As we hover around this tipping point, things are getting weird. President Donald Trump’s election has caused a mental breakdown on the Left. It has created a reaction which has radicalized liberals and progressives and swollen the ranks of Antifa. The political, corporate and media establishment has come to rationalize and embrace political violence in a way which wasn’t true just a few years ago. The same UVA poll which revealed that 8% of Americans support the Alt-Right or White Nationalism also found that 8% support Antifa and 32% support Black Lives Matter. The liberal center is hollowing out and bleeding supporters to the Right and Left as our cultural polarization intensifies.

President Trump has struggled to advance the Make America Great Again agenda of sweeping, dramatic change he was elected on in the 2016 presidential election. He has been hamstrung by an uncooperative Republican Congress, Deep State machinations and a Cabinet in thrall to the failed ideas of the 20th century conservative movement. He has had to deal with a radicalized Left and a media which has flat out abandoned the ethics of journalism in order to drive politically charged narratives. The stalled legislative agenda on Capitol Hill has forced him to resort to culture war by Twitter in order to keep his nationalist supporters interested and invested in his presidency.

It was in this context that Charlottesville happened. President Trump’s election renewed the attack by anarchists, Black Lives Matter activists and local Democratic politicians on Confederate monuments. We organized the #UniteTheRight rally in response. The purpose of that rally was to protest these attacks on the identity, heritage and rights of White Americans. In Charlottesville, this took the form of the black supremacist Vice-Mayor Wes Bellamy, his campaign against the Robert E. Lee monument and a city government which had drifted so far to the Left that it was in thrall to an anarchist mob.

We had several objectives in Charlottesville:

– We wanted to shift from raising awareness on the internet to real world activism and organizing.
– We wanted to unite the fractious pro-White movement in America and transform it into a cultural vanguard.
– We wanted to challenge the weakened taboos by holding the largest pro-White rally in a generation.
– We wanted to advance our own movement rather than betting everything on President Trump’s success.
– We wanted to use social media to create and drive our own narrative and recruit new followers.
– We wanted to create and build on real world networks in the South and kickstart their development in other regions of the United States.
– We wanted to show our enemies that we would no longer be content to gather in secret. We are honorable men who are willing to stand up and defend our rights, the heritage of our fathers and the birthright of our children.

The plan was to hold a European-style torch march to the Jefferson monument on the UVA campus. This would highlight the connection between attacks on symbols of Southern identity and impending ones on White American identity. We wanted to hold the #UniteTheRight rally in Lee Park and went to federal court to get the permit that would allow us to do so peacefully. We wanted to hold an afterparty to build trust and social bonds within our largely anonymous movement. As American citizens, we had every right to do this and with any other group it wouldn’t have been a problem.

In hindsight, we underestimated the fear and determination of our opposition: the commitment of Antifa to their violent doctrines, the intensity of #TheResistance mentality on the Left, the spinelessness of conservative politicians, the willingness of Gov. Terry McAuliffe and Charlottesville’s elected officials to defy a federal court order, the lengths to which the media will go to lie to the public and the raw power of Corporate America. The result was a comprehensive political, corporate and media crackdown on the Alt-Right and White Nationalism. It had been brewing since Trump’s election, gaining steam for months and it was underway before we even arrived in Charlottesville.

We unveiled our power level in Charlottesville in an unprecedented way. AirBnb cancelled our reservations and dehoused over 100 people. Expedia cancelled plane tickets. Uber banned several people using their app for transportation. Hotels began cancelling reservations for unrelated events. Domain registrars and hosting companies pulled websites in an unprecedented wave of censorship. Social media websites banned our accounts. Payment processing services like PayPal and Stripe escalated their defunding of our websites. This was going on before the dust even settled on August 12th.

We witnessed a total breakdown in American institutions in Charlottesville: a governor who issued a preplanned “state of emergency” to violate our First Amendment rights, the ACLU crumble under pressure, local officials conspire to unleash anarchy in their streets in order to shutdown a rally, police stand down and fail to do their jobs, the media edit footage of violence in order to mislead the public. There are powerful forces in American life which were determined at all costs to stop the #UniteTheRight rally from happening. They succeeded.

Now, we are being sued by the City of Charlottesville and several other actors whose intent was to create havoc and disruption in state and federal court. The goal of these high profile attorneys who have worked “domestic terrorism” cases is to use “creative litigation” based on Rconstruction era anti-Klan statues to strip us of our First and Second Amendment rights in order to prevent us from ever gathering again in public in such large numbers. The opposition had been content for decades to allow us to vent our frustrations in the anonymity of cyberspace. Griping about the unfairness of the world under anonymous pseudonyms isn’t a threat to their power. They are determined, however, to prevent us from doing so as proud, unreconstructed White men in the public square. We can look at PEGIDA in Germany and see how something like that can snowball into a mass movement.

Why is that? It’s because they want to keep you isolated and intimidated. They want you to feel like you are marginal and alone in your communities so you will keep your mouth shut, censor yourself and maintain their customs and norms. They want the public which increasingly sympathizes with our grievances to perceive us as these violent, fringe characters portrayed in their Hollywood movies. Above all else they don’t want us to realize how large we have grown or how powerful we could be in American politics if we were more active and organized than we are today. If we started challenging their norms in this environment, they might be weak enough to crumble.

We saw another example of this in Gainesville. An individual wearing a t-shirt covered in swastikas marched into a crowd of Black Lives Matter supporters and was punched outside of Richard Spencer’s event at the University of Florida. After the Nazi was punched, he was embraced and befriended by a black guy who just happened to be there and learned to choose love over hate. It has gotten to the point where the media is so determined to harm our public image that it will use stock photos from unrelated Klan events, as it did in Charlottesville, or even shoot photo ops and movies outside our events with actors who were hired to play their role in an anti-White narrative, as it did in Gainesville.

We’re trying our best to move forward in the real world while navigating around all of these obstacles which no other minority group in America has to put up with. At last count, we need our own private security force, hotel chain, social media platforms, crowdfunding and banking system, legal defense team and domain registration service. Supposedly, this is a free country, but as we have seen none of those rights really applies to our community. It is an ordeal to organize so much as a pro-White backyard BBQ or public meeting in the United States. I’m sure Jared Taylor and James Edwards can attest to this. Richard Spencer paid $10,000 to be allowed to speak at the University of Florida to be shouted down by a clenched fist mob screaming “Black Lives Matter” for two hours.

The only thing we can really do in response to this is grit our teeth and soldier on. We can organize flash rallies and private conferences for those of us who already know each other in the real world. Richard Spencer is going to continue his college tour and adapt the lessons learned at Texas A&M, Auburn and Gainesville. The League of the South will continue to hold public demonstrations in friendlier territory like the upcoming rallies in Shelbyville and Murfreesboro, TN next weekend. James Edwards will continue to broadcast great content on The Political Cesspool. We have bright people who are creating alternatives to Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. We’re even developing our own alternatives to PayPal and GoFundMe and will soon be fighting back in court against Charlottesville.

It is going to be hard. We’re taken seriously now as a force in American politics. We’re facing more resistance. As the old saying goes, we are taking flak because we are over the target. It will all be worth it one day when we can bask in the glory of the role the few of us played in saving our entire race and civilization at a critical juncture in history. It is important to understand that we are never going to win without making mistakes. We are also never going to win without a fight with the people who are in power now. We must persevere, continue to stand up for ourselves, constantly learn from our experiences and always strive to fight our enemies more effectively next time.

It is important to remember this is normal. We are a demonized minority that has grown too large for the system to contain. It is going to attack us and punish us in order to steer us from the path we have chosen. The screaming mobs you see on television are human beings responding to social change. We’re making these people uncomfortable by publicly rejecting their values and that will continue until either we give in or they give up. The question is whether we have the inner strength to survive this trial. Are we capable of pushing our cause across that cultural tipping point where resistance will dissipate?

I don’t think we have a choice. It will either be us or those other guys out there in the streets who come out on top in the long run. I don’t have to remind you what those anarchists and communists believe in and the changes that they want to see in this country. So for now, I ask you do what Dr. Michael Hill asked you earlier: to stand at your post, push forward, put your faith in the LORD and do your duty, come what may. These aren’t the times where we have the luxury of rest. We can’t rest when the fate of our race, our wider civilization and our own people, who are nearest and dearest to our hearts, hangs in the balance.

I’m not exaggerating when I say much depends on US. Thank you.