Warren Balogh: 20th Anniversary Speech

Editor’s Note: Warren Balogh delivered the following speech at The Political Cesspool’s 20 Year Anniversary Conference. I had a wonderful time meeting him and his lovely wife Emily.

Before I say anything else, I want to congratulate James on his monumental achievement of 20
years of The Political Cesspool. I also want to congratulate Keith Alexander and every other
person who’s been involved with co-hosting or helping to produce or has been a part of
keeping TPC going over the years – especially Dani. “Behind Every Great Man There’s A Great
Woman.”

I also want to just say, in the few years I’ve gotten to know James, I’ve seen what a great man
he truly is. He created and maintained a radio program that has been and continues to be one
of the foundational pillars of pro-White media in the 21st century. In so doing, he’s built up an
invaluable record of these historic times, a radio archive cataloging the events of the past 20
years, that will be of great historical significance to future generations, as long as there are
White people still living in North America.

And not only has he managed to achieve this while being a good husband, father and family
man, but also – incredibly – while staying on good terms with almost everyone in the
movement. When I had James on my show Modern Politics a few weeks ago, it struck me for
the first time that James Edwards is perhaps the only person I can think of in this entire thing –
who has been involved as long as he has – who hasn’t taken sides in any “movement beefs,”
who has never fallen out with anyone, who doesn’t have a history of broken friendships, feuds
or rivalries.

James is someone who people only always speak of positively, and this is because in addition
to his passion and courage and high energy – as a man, James always radiates warmth and
positivity, as well a sincere humility, always willing to find the good in other people’s work and
to encourage and help others, thoroughly trustworthy and loyal to his friends. And this is an
area where many in the movement would benefit from his example.

So congratulations, and here’s to another 20 years of The Political Cesspool!

I also want to thank James for privilege and honor of speaking to such a group as this.
The different personalities and activists we have here in this room are a testament to James’
ability to be a positive force in this movement, to work well with others and bring people
together.

If you were to add up all the work and sacrifice and effort of all the souls gathered in this room
at this moment, it would be the equivalent of many centuries of pro-White effort. And I want
to assure all of you, it has an effect and will continue to have an effect, we’re seeing that play
out in the world today.

And that’s really what I want to talk to you about: how the efforts of the past have impacted
the present – and how the efforts of the present will impact the future.

Specifically, I want to talk to you about the Reform Party presidential campaign of the year
2000, where at least three people cut their teeth politically for the first time: James Edwards,
myself… and another person you might’ve heard of by the name of Donald John Trump.

Many people are not familiar with this history. At the time, the Reform Party presidential
campaign of Pat Buchanan went down as a minor footnote in the much bigger story of the
contested Bush-Gore election, which was decided by the Supreme Court. Even among third
parties, the story of the Reform Party in the 2000 election was far less noteworthy at that time
than that of the Green Party, whose nominee Ralph Nader has been blamed by Democrats
ever since for costing Al Gore the election.

Of course, for my 18-year-old self – and for James, who was 20 years old at the time – the
Reform Party campaign in 2000 was of huge, life-changing personal significance.

But in recent years, journalists and historians have increasingly come to view it as the
precursor of Donald Trump’s successful 2016 run for the White House, as well as a campaign
that essentially defined the politics of the Trump era.

What happened in that year was a fight for control over the Reform Party. If you remember,
the party was founded in 1995 by Ross Perot, the Texas billionaire who ran an unorthodox
independent campaign in 1992 and won 18.9% of the vote against the two major party
nominees, Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush, arguably costing Bush the election.

Perot ran again in 1996, this time forming a third party – the Reform Party – which focused on
issues the two major parties ignored, like trade. Perot came out strongly against NAFTA,
famously debating Al Gore on the subject in 1993. After he got 8.4% of the vote in 96, the
Reform Party qualified for federal matching funds in the 2000 election, and this set up a battle
over who would be the nominee.

This was the first time Trump ran for president. It was the third time “Pitchfork Pat” Buchanan
ran for president, and he brought with him what were called the Buchanan Brigades, the
passionate throngs of volunteers and followers who had backed him in the ‘92 and ‘96
Republican primaries.

Trump’s platform in 2000 looked very different than the platform he won on in 2016. Trump
ran as a centrist, and demonized Buchanan as far right. In an October 24, 1999 interview on
“Meet the Press,” Trump told host Tim Russert that the reason he wasn’t running as a
Republican was the Republicans were “too crazy Right.”

I saw this interview live when it aired, and it was the first time I’d heard of Donald Trump, and
I never forgot what he said about Pat Buchanan. He said: “Look. He’s a Hitler lover. I guess he’s
an antisemite. He doesn’t like the Blacks, he doesn’t like the gays, it’s just incredible that
anybody could embrace this guy… maybe he’ll get a really staunch, Right, wacko vote – I’m not
even sure if it’s Right, it’s just: a wacko vote, and I just can’t imagine that anybody can take
him seriously.”

In the same interview, Trump said he would be willing to launch a preemptive strike against
North Korea. He also described himself as “very pro-choice.” When asked if he would ban
abortion or partial-birth abortion, third trimester abortion, he said “No. I am pro-choice in
every respect.” Around this time, he told the Washington Times he’d love to have Oprah
Winfrey as his running mate: “If she’d do it, she’d be fantastic. I mean, she’s popular, she’s
brilliant, she’s a wonderful woman.”

What happened in the 2000 election, if you’ll pardon my language, was Trump got this ass
handed to him by Pat Buchanan and the Buchanan Brigades. We were better organized, we
were more highly motivated, we were ideological, and Trump never stood a chance.
Now you have to put yourself back in the late 90s to understand how far the issues that
Buchanan and the Reform Party were running on were outside the mainstream: we were
pushing fair trade over trade, at a time when globalist free trade dogma, including Most
Favored Nation status for China, was the undisputed orthodoxy of both major parties.

We campaigned on an anti-immigration platform, when both George W. Bush and Al Gore
were agreed on a policy of open borders.

We campaigned on national sovereignty –Buchanan had already revived the WW2 non-
interventionist slogan “America First” – and were called isolationists by the establishment in
both parties.

This was the time described by Francis Fukuyama as “The End of History,” when America came
out of the Cold War as the world’s only superpower – before 9/11, before the Iraq war, before
the recession, when both major parties were totally dominated by neoliberals or
neoconservatives: globalist, open borders, liberal interventionist.

What I think happened is Trump, who has always been good at spotting an undervalued
property and picking it up at a steal, realized when he was beaten that there was a huge,
untapped source of political strength in America that neither party establishment wanted to
touch: the big core of White middle America, the White working class, who had been screwed
over by the policies of both parties and were desperate for a champion.

Trump also recognized that in the so-called far right, there was an enormous untapped source
of passion and political activism.

And I’ll just say it: like Trump’s 2016 campaign, Buchanan’s 2000 effort was filled with White
nationalists and National Socialists. There was a big hit piece about this in the Washington
Post in July of 2000 called “Buchanan’s Bid Transforms the Reform Party.” There were so
many White nationalist activists powering the Buchanan campaign that Buchanan actually
selected a Black woman running mate, Ezola Foster, as a way to clean up the bad optics this
was causing.

Nevertheless, the dedication of hard core White advocates like James and myself was a huge
part of why Trump never stood a chance against Buchanan. We put in hundreds of hours,
gathered thousands of signatures, and stuck with Pat all the way through the ballot access
campaign of the summer and the delegate fight at the Reform Party convention in August.

If you just read or watch Buchanan’s acceptance speech from that convention, much of it
sounds strikingly like how a Trump speech would sound today – but it’s worlds apart from the
rhetoric of a George W. Bush or a Dick Cheney, or for that matter a Mitt Romney or a John
McCain. < August 12, 2000 >

Now as I said, journalists and academics have long noted the legacy of Buchanan’s 2000
campaign in the Trump movement, and I want to give you guys a few examples.

Buzzfeed News in 2016 first noted, “Buchanan’s 2000 platform was identical to Trump’s in a
number of ways. Buchanan was a protectionist on trade, used harsh rhetoric on immigration,
wanted to limit donor influence in politics, and spoke loudly against Washington corruption.”

In VOX, April 2016, Matt Grossmann observed: “Donald Trump learned overt nativism from
losing his first campaign to Pat Buchanan”

He wrote: “Donald Trump has earned six times the media coverage of any other Republican
candidate, so it might seem that there are no stories left to be told about his presidential
campaign. But one fact has gone surprisingly ignored: Trump lost his first presidential
campaign to Pat Buchanan — and learned to copy Buchanan’s nativist appeal in the process.

“Trump voiced interest in the Reform Party nomination starting in July 1999 and did not bow
out until February 2000…. Buchanan beat Trump from start to finish, consistently leading
Trump in polls and securing far more support from party leaders and activists. When then-
Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura (Trump’s main supporter) left the Reform Party because he was
convinced Buchanan would win the nomination, Trump ended his campaign rather than face
certain defeat.

“One aspect of [Trump’s] first campaign was decidedly different [from his 2016]: He declined
to pursue a nativist appeal. In fact, he repeatedly accused Buchanan of racism, calling him a
‘neo-Nazi’ and ‘Hitler lover’ with ‘prehistoric” views allied with the “lunatic fringe,’ citing his support from former Ku Klux Klan member David Duke…. [Trump’s] book reported that ‘Buchanan has written too many inflammatory, outrageous, and controversial things’ and ‘has
systematically bashed Blacks, Mexicans, and Gays.’ Buchanan’s 2000 general election
campaign indeed focused on opposition to immigration and support for English under the
banner of ‘America First.’”

Grossman asked, What did Trump learn from his first presidential campaign?

“His new campaign retained his anti-trade and anti-elitist message but added Buchanan’s
warnings of losing the country to ethnic and religious minorities. He lashed out against
undocumented Mexican immigrants in his announcement speech and made opposition to
Muslim immigration the centerpiece of his winter campaign, earning the support of Buchanan
and Duke. He even resurrected Richard Nixon’s ‘silent majority’ rhetoric, phrasing suggested to
Nixon by Buchanan.

“In retrospect, the changed approach does not seem like an accident…. Many political
candidates learn from their first loss, sometimes overcompensating in an effort to remedy
their biggest difficulty from the prior campaign. In losing to Buchanan, Trump learned that
many disaffected anti-establishment voters shared Buchanan’s ethnocentric views. In his first
campaign, he avoided nativism and never led. This time, he began with Buchanan’s message
and led from the beginning. Perhaps losing to Buchanan taught Trump some new tricks.”
In October 2016, Jeff Greenfield in Politico wrote an article titled: “Trump Is Pat Buchanan
With Better Timing.”

In April 2017, Sam Tannenhaus in Esquire Magazine wrote a piece called: When Pat Buchanan
Tried To Make America Great Again

Of Buchanan’s presidential runs, he said: “He never came close to winning, but each time he
nagged at something, rubbed a nerve in just enough voters of a particular kind—what he
called ‘peasants’ and we call the white working class—to send ripples of panic through the
Republican party. The echoes of Buchananism in Trump’s campaign were a pet theme during
the election and its aftermath. But if anything, the debt has been understated. Put most
simply, Buchanan begat Trumpism as his former ally William F. Buckley Jr. begat Reaganism.
The also-ran of the Republican hard Right is the intellectual godfather of our current
revolution.”

POLITICO Magazine – May/June 2017, Tim Alberta wrote: “Buchanan’s boldest
achievement—and perhaps the most lasting aspect of his legacy—was being Trump before
Trump was Trump.” He quoted Buchanan as saying: “The Ideas Made It, But I Didn’t”

Steve Kornacki writing for NBC News, Oct. 2, 2018: When Trump ran against Trump-ism: The
1990s and the birth of political tribalism in America – The version of Trump who dipped his toe
into the presidential ring almost two decades ago was a jarringly different man ideologically

Kornacki began his article: “He wanted a wall along the entire southern border and a pause on
all immigration. He vowed to rip up trade deals and revive manufacturing. He hated political
correctness and warned of the decline Western culture. He railed against a ‘rigged’ system and
fomented a populist uprising that terrified the Republican Party’s leaders. He was endorsed by
David Duke. And he was denounced and labeled a racist — by Donald Trump.

“His name was Pat Buchanan, and when he set out in 1999 on his third presidential campaign
of the decade, it was under a new banner: The Reform Party, which had just been built from
the remnants of Ross Perot’s two independent White House bids. But Buchanan encountered
unexpected competition from Trump, a bombastic New Yorker who turned the race for the
Reform nomination into an insult-heavy pop culture spectacle. In style and tactic, this Trump
was indistinguishable from the man the world knows today. But on substance, he was jarringly
different man, running against a worldview he would a few years later embrace.”

Finally, as recently as this past April, Ari Berman wrote for The Atlantic: The Conservative Who
Turned White Anxiety into a Movement with a subheading: Pat Buchanan made white
Republicans fear becoming a racial minority. Now Donald Trump is reaping the benefits.“

Buchanan never came close to winning the presidency, but the fear he incited of a majority-
minority future has become integral to the Republican Party and Donald Trump’s 2024
campaign. Like Buchanan, Trump has made opposition to undocumented immigration the
cornerstone of his presidential bid. Although he and his supporters try to portray this as a
matter of law and order, they often admit that their chief concern is America’s shifting ethnic
composition….

“The fact that Trump has found so much more political success than Buchanan did 30 years
ago in exploiting white anxiety suggests that it will worsen as the supposed majority-minority
tipping point approaches. That’s coming sooner than Buchanan once feared; white Americans,
census data now suggest, will technically be a minority by 2045. Buchanan may have failed to
hold back demographic change, but the backlash he sparked is only getting stronger.”

Now James Edwards has said: “there would be no TPC without PJB.”

I just recently learned the story of how he met Pat for the first time at Andrew Jackson’s home
The Hermitage. James did as much for anyone for Buchanan, organizing what was at the time
the largest state meeting for the Buchanan campaign, ballot access petitioning, serving as a
delegate and later hosting the 2001 Reform Party convention in Tennessee. For James, as with
myself, that experience was the beginning of our political careers.

Now of course, Donald Trump didn’t borrow everything from Pat Buchanan. Most importantly,
Pat was always deeply critical of AIPAC, the ADL, and Israel’s influence on our government –
while Trump has embraced a cartoonishly extreme philo-semitism.

And despite his adoption of Buchanan’s issues, it’s hard to disagree with the verdict of Pat
Choate, Perot’s old running mate, that Donald Trump is simply an opportunist.

But this gets at a deeper question: has the system been transformed, so that people in
government today are closer to us on these issues? Or has the system simply been forced to
adapt to a position closer to ours on these issues, because the general conditions in the
country has grown that much worse?

The people in power then, are still in power today. They didn’t want to have to move from free
trade globalism to trade protectionism. They didn’t want to have to make protecting borders
into a central policy of the populist right all over Europe and America. They didn’t want to
have to shift from a nakedly imperialist foreign policy to one that at least pays lip service to
putting America first. Figures like Marco Rubio have had to adapt themselves, and in many
cases simply reinvent themselves, from free-trade, open-borders globalists to pseudo-
nationalists and populists.

I think the reality is, what many of us saw coming a quarter of a century ago, has simply gotten
so bad that system politicians can’t afford to not pretend to care about it.

Pat Buchanan called his 1988 autobiography “Right from the Beginning.” On these issues,
Buchanan was on the right side of history. James and I were on the right side of history. All of
you who are here who spent decades fighting for these causes, without ever tasting the fruits
of victory, were on the right side of history.

I’m extremely proud of the fact that we were right. And I would much rather have been a part
of cutting edge movements, parties and campaigns that moved the needle, or shifted the
Overton window – laid the groundwork for a future victory – than to have spent my life riding
the coattails of successful movements and campaigns that only played to the fashions of the
day, that had no lasting significance or impact. Who for instance, can be proud of being a part
of the Bush campaign in 2000 or 2004? Being a dissident far ahead of your time is frustrating,
difficult, and it can break you – but in the end you’ll have a life you can be proud of, your
grandchildren and great-grandchildren can be proud of it.

But make no mistake: being right is not enough.

We still have to win. As I said, the people who were in power then are still very much in power
today. In many ways, they’ve significantly tightened their grip.

America has always been a plutocracy, but right now the rich are richer, and the gap between
them and everyone else is greater, than in 100 years or more, longer than anyone here has
been alive. The middle class is gone. Big money dominates our politics to an extent that
makes the 1990s seem mild by comparison. While the power of traditional media has waned,
the opportunities for free speech and free thought presented by the internet have been
ruthlessly locked down by the mostly Jewish owners of Big Tech, and the free speech that does
exist online is extremely fragile. It depends totally on the whims of eccentric billionaires like
Elon Musk, who recently saw fit to allow Nick Fuentes to return to Twitter, yet still stubbornly
bans James Edwards and The Political Cesspool from the platform, along with
academics like Jared Taylor and Dr. Kevin MacDonald.

And of course, we all know the free speech proliferating on Twitter could vanish overnight, if
Elon Musk sells the platform or if he wakes up on the wrong side of the bed. Facebook,
YouTube, Instagram are still on ultra-lockdown, and Congress recently passed a law banning
Tiktok because of the proliferation of anti-Zionist narratives among young people on that
platform.

Worst of all, the demographic situation for White America has deteriorated faster than the
worst doomsayers of the 90s could’ve predicted. Part of why the idea of the Great
Replacement has gone mainstream is because it’s happening so fast and it’s so noticeable
everywhere that it’s just ridiculous to deny it – like denying that temperatures drop during the
wintertime. You can perhaps plausibly doubt that summer is really coming to an end during
the first cool evenings of mid-September, but by late December there is no doubt the summer
is gone.

Sadly, that’s our situation with White demographic replacement in the West – and this is our
enemies’ greatest achievement over the past quarter century, because it makes any solution
to this crisis much more painful and difficult.

During Buchanan’s presidential campaigns, the old America could’ve still been saved.

But I recently heard even Jared Taylor say that this country can’t be saved in its current form.
Principled conservatives are starting to sound more like William Pierce writing in the 1970s
about the future prospects for this country – that the solution is not going to be a return to
any past form of this constitutional Republic, but is going to require some kind of monumental,
revolutionary break with the past – and that’s a chilling sign of how bad things have gotten.

Nevertheless, we’re still we’re much closer to a real victory today than we were in 1999 or
2000 – or at least, our enemies in power are much closer to a real defeat.

They’re slipping and grasping to hold onto power. They’ve lost so much legitimacy, they’ve
lost their ability to persuade people, they don’t have any passion or enthusiasm for their ideas,
the public has largely rejected them.

All they have left is brute force: censorship, de-banking, money power, lawfare, the police
state. And if you’ve been on the receiving end of any of that, you know it’s nothing to scoff at.

But a system relying on brute force to stay in power, is not long for this world. And looking at
the trajectory of the last 24 years, I can say with absolute certainty that the fall of this anti-
White system is closer than we all think.