Credit: Nathaniel Ward

Adapted from remarks given at the VDARE Spring Conference, April 27, 2024. A video of the speech is available here.

When I started out, when I was essentially just a kid, I got my first job in the conservative movement at a place called the Leadership Institute. It gives you a survey about your beliefs, and one of the questions it asks is what you think the most important issue is. Even then, I said immigration. The reason is because immigration defines what the country is. Besides, from a purely tactical standpoint, if you do not win on that, you will not win on anything else.

I am tempted to say there is nothing else to talk about. However, long experience in this movement tells me it is not that simple. Human psychology is complicated. It is a temptation for us to believe that our lives have cosmic significance, at least the time in which we were born does, and the predominant religious impulse of our time comes from the Left. Leftists call themselves secular, but they are not secular. The predictions of a Marxist classless society, climate change, the General Strike — any and all of these things are eschatology by another name.

And yet, there is an illusion of permanence. Very few people in 1900 would have expected that the European world order was about to collapse in a genocidal and pointless war in about 20 years. And yet, the world that emerged in 1945 is essentially the same world we live in now. We still live in what’s called the postwar order. The moral norms and the true religious impulses of our time come from that conflict.

Yet, it is also a mistake to say that nothing happens. Iran and Israel are trading a few bombs and drones? Who cares? The overall structure has not changed. Not much really has changed since 1945, except the end of the Cold War. However, eventually something happens. There are decades where nothing happens and weeks in which decades happen. We may be approaching a point where something will happen, but it may not be in the form we want. We may yearn for a heroic last stand, but those are very rare in history. The most tragic was the fall of Constantinople. The idea of charging into the fray like the last emperor, crying that the city has fallen but I live, and dying gloriously to be remembered by — well, somebody — has a certain appeal. Yet it does not usually work that way.

People get along under just about any system. Hope is a poison as well as an inevitable support. Most people are going to say that things worked out, even if they didn’t. Most rich white South Africans might well say that the end of apartheid and black rule were good things, even though so many have moved away. People don’t actually learn because sometimes the truth is too horrifying to bear. If you realize the truth your whole identity goes away. There have been many doomsday prophecies over the years, none of which were fulfilled. How did those prophets go on after admitting their whole lives had been lies?

There’s a great line in Reds, the film about the Bolshevik journalist — but I repeat myself — John Reed. He is talking to Emma Goldman and the anarchist is complaining about all the abuses of the Soviet government. He asks her indignantly what she thought was going to happen. More to the point, if the Revolution has come, and she hates it, what was the point of her entire life? That is a very good question. Very few people will answer that question honestly; maybe none of us.

Ultimately, it is a question of faith. There is a quote by a Ernst Jünger, one of the best writers of the last century, a decorated German soldier in World War I:

When the time comes that it is no longer possible to understand how a man can give his life for his country, and that time will come, then the time for that faith is done also, and the idea of the Fatherland is dead. And then perhaps we shall be envied, in the same way we envy the saints their inward and irresistible strength.

Faith is fragile. One of the reasons I think we are so angry about what has been done to what used to be our country is that you have this beautiful naive patriotism, this faith in something that is akin to a god, something that is larger than the sum of its parts. That is what a nation is, an ideal. You see it squandered. You see it taken advantage of. It is precisely the people who have the greatest faith who are the ones who are betrayed the most. It is precisely the cynics and the sociopaths who are rewarded. If that process goes on long enough, faith itself dies, which is what happened to certain churches and most Western nations. Then one is left with an impossible question: What was it all for? How can we even understand the people who came before?

The most common rallying cry in the postwar era from nationalists is whether the sacrifices were worth what they brought. Jonathan Bowden made a speech in which he asked whether the Tommies really died for multiculturalism and mass immigration. They did not think that was what they were dying for, but that is what they died for.

It is tempting to be cynical, but at the same time, one needs faith. Faith is necessary, but it is also a crutch. There is a certain doublethink required to get anywhere. You cannot go forward without the idea that you are going to win, and that there is nothing on earth and nothing in the heavens that can stop you. At the same time, one must also know at some level that defeat is possible. Understanding that one must actually believe two contradictory things at once sometimes has been my hardest lesson in politics.

I mentioned the Fall of Constantinople. When the Turks broke into the city, a lot of the priests, women, and retreating soldiers ran to Hagia Sophia. They conducted a Mass and there were prophecies that the Virgin Mary would come down and save them. They were not saved. There are legends that the priest disappeared into the wall of the church and that he will come out when the city is liberated so he can complete the Mass. I have my doubts.

At the same time, the only people who will fight to the end, who will give all, are those who believe in things so passionately that they are irrational. This is another hard realization we must come to terms with. If you are calculating, rational, and bourgeois, there is never a reason to take a major risk. It is precisely because the West is rational and calculating and obsessed with economics and short-term interests that our people are deconstructing themselves, or letting others deconstruct them.

Yet there are surprising signs of hope. There was a poll recently that found that most of the American people now favor mass deportation of illegals. This includes the overwhelming majority of Republicans, most white people, about 45 percent of Hispanics, even about 42 percent of Democrats. Try getting 42 percent of Democrats to side with the Right on anything else. This shocked me — if I were running for office, and maybe I will eventually — I would not lead with the proposal for mass deportations. What do I know? These are the results. Yet this is still outside the Overton Window, even though people want it. Why?

Steve Sailer said years ago that the Republican Party is like a phalanx. It is a relatively united white middle-class political coalition, and that’s why it was relatively successful in the George W. Bush years, despite everything against it. I think that’s backwards. Kevin Phillips, a Republican strategist who eventually became a progressive, invented the Southern Strategy. He said the secret to politics is knowing whom you hate. I am not happy about this, but I think negative emotions are stronger in politics than positive emotions. A common enemy is a greater unifying force than anything else. Democrats win because they have a common enemy: whites — what Steve Sailer calls the “KKKrazy Glue” that holds their diverse coalition together.

If we look at these protests that are happening on campuses all around the country over Israel, we could say this is a fracture in the Democratic base. Some, such as Speaker Mike Johnson, think this is an opportunity. If we oppose anti-Semitism, we will break the Democratic coalition. I doubt it. All the leftists on both sides of these protests is going to vote for Joe Biden. No one will vote for Cornel West. The only thing everyone is arguing about is whether Israelis or Jews count as white, and almost no one is opposed to the premise that being white is automatically a bad thing. Republicans are trying to fight for one side of these protests instead of taking the side of their mostly white constituents, of taking the side of America First, because that is the one thing we can never do in American politics. We cannot do it anywhere in the West.

Yet how do we define “our” side? That is a big question, but we do have an issue that solves the problem for us. If we return to that mass deportation poll, immigration is the one issue with a mass constituency. We do not have to explain things. We do not have to ask people to read countless books or believe in a certain faith. Carl Schmitt was right: Politics is about us and them, friend and enemy. The Left wins because it knows who its enemies are, while white people lose because they pretend they do not have any enemies. Yet we have enemies all around us.

One thing we have going for us is that we are nearing an end to illusions. Very quickly in debates over immigration, proponents abandon claims that it is good for the country or economy and begin bragging that it is harmful punishment that we deserve. It is about revenge. Revenge for what, I do not know — maybe bringing them plumbing — but they think it is revenge.

The people are ahead of the leadership on this. Few at the top are talking about mass deportation, even though that is the majority position. You certainly do not see the congressional GOP talking about this. In deep red states, local leaders — who I am convinced are embarrassed by and resentful of their own constituents — are silent. I suppose it is a feature of democracy in practice that it is precisely the things outside the Overton Window that have majority support. A majority is not enough if we do not have dedicated leadership and activists. We lack them, largely because of repression.

What really matters in the end in politics? In the lead up to the Crusades, during the Islamic conquest, many eastern Christians whom some would have considered heretical welcomed the Muslims. They thought they would get a leg up or more lenient treatment from the people who were persecuting them. That persecution was not an illusion. Yet regardless of what temporary advantage they got, go and look for them now. What does it mean to be under occupation? It means the things that you hold to be meaningful no longer have any relevance to power. Whatever Christian doctrinal differences there were in that period ceased to matter, at least in temporal terms.

What matters to us? I do not mean what we think; what matters to power? There is something more important than national identity and citizenship. What matters when you are trying to get into school? What matters when you are trying to get a job? What matters when you are confronted on the street by a journalist? Your race matters, and that is it.

It is not about what I think. I am not in power. It is about what power thinks. I believe politics is largely biological, identity is inherent, and who we are is not something we create or choose. Some people, including those like Julius Evola who had a big impact on me, would say race is spiritual. I disagree. I just reviewed The Deep Murmur by Renaud Camus, a term he used to define race. It is a mysterious force that binds people together in a shared sense of identity. This is the man who coined the term The Great Replacement, so he has credibility. Yet I must disagree because our biology, what is in our blood, is the hardware, and ideology, religion, and philosophy are the software.

What is truly mysterious is that it is not possible for us really to understand our own actions fully, but we can know who we are, and it is not something we just make up. It is not true that you choose your identity or that chosen loyalties are the most important — it is precisely the things that we do not choose that make us who we are — race, family, nation. I do not back away from the old Alt-Right slogan of “Become Who You Are.” It was correct then and it is correct now.

When politics becomes real, people sense this intuitively. During the George W. Bush years, we saw massive demonstrations by immigrants. Mexican flags flooded the streets. Americans were angry to hear cries that it was the last gasp of white America. Republicans rejected their own leader, George W. Bush, who wanted amnesty. It was right in front of their faces. You did not need to explain or sell an ideology. It was us and them. That is the magic of immigration — and I am not the only one who talks of us and them; open-borders supporters do.

I am not saying there are no other issues. Nor is there an explanation for what is happening that will satisfy everyone. Some will blame capitalism, saying that this is all about the free movement of labor. Some will say it is Communism and a push for global control. Others will blame this group or that group, or even whites themselves. It could be none of these things or all at once. Yet if you do not at least recognize that the process is taking place, and do not know intuitively which side you are on, the explanation doesn’t matter.

You may remember Erick Erickson a few weeks ago lecturing conservatives that they need to go back to Reagan. He said the tripartite stool of fiscal conservatism, traditional moral values, and an active national defense must define us. We may be past the point where we can tolerate these kinds of things. If one looks at the levels of debt that we have, what fiscal conservatism is possible in a democracy? What values define mainstream American culture today?

I am 41 years old, and I have never lived under “constitutional” rule, which makes it absurd to claim that a sacred document will solve our problems. Glenn Beck is wrong. Documents do not define our identity. Law and institutions are products of a culture and a shared understanding of the purpose of government, and that is partially a product of history and heredity. It is not transferrable. There is probably nobody alive who has lived under constitutional rule in this country, or who knows what limited government even looks like. What are these people talking about? They have no answers for the crisis we face.

The crisis we face is a racial crisis. The things many people like about America were the patrimony of a specific people, and if that people loses its sovereignty, those things die. Burn down every building, torch every flag, shred the Constitution — you can recover from all of that. However, if you lose the people, you lose everything.

Our people are in retreat. James Burnham, probably my biggest influence aside from Sam Francis and Jared Taylor, began his book Suicide of the West with an example of this. He said you can see the retreat of the West’s geopolitical borders over the last century. It is not a perfect measure, but generally, you are expanding or contracting, and if borders are contracting, you are losing power. Those lines have retreated further since he wrote that book.

Jared Taylor wrote years ago that there are certain cities or neighborhoods that have essentially ceased to be part of the United States. I agree. I do not consider these places American, I do not consider the people who live there to be American, and more importantly, they do not consider themselves to be American. Indeed, many come here because they are not American and want to make things worse. Incidentally, Jonah Goldberg stole Burnham’s title for his own Suicide of the West — he tells us that what defines the West is “individualism.” You tell me if he has our interests at heart.

I have said that the media are the regime. Media are more important than politicians. Power, money, and control of media is the key power in a democracy. The Alt-Right did not die — it was murdered, cut off from platform access and financial services. This was not a natural thing in a democracy. Perhaps the political strategies were wrong, but the ideas themselves were not. Today, we are wiser. We know that having a permit for a rally, or a contract, or a social norm for free speech means nothing. We know liberal democracy is jettisoning its own ideals to crush us. Free speech was an unchallenged American norm less than a decade ago. We have to change our tactics for this new environment, but we should never concede that our system plays by its own supposed rules. We want free speech, and do not need censorship, because our ideas are natural and reflect what I think most white people already intuitively know to be true. The system we have now depends on immense political and psychological repression and conditioning.

You can warp people dramatically. I am a father and so what keeps me up at night is what is being done to children, especially on the so-called trans issues. You can twist someone’s fundamental conception of himself, but again, identity is unchangeable, and that is just a distortion, a parody, and a mutation. It is not someone realizing his true identity, but someone consciously twisted so he can be a victim.

Sadly, those who have the most power in society do not want a functioning one. A successful, well-ordered, and prosperous society is not what the most educated or richest people always choose. If we take as a premise that liberals generally win in politics, it is those who are the most unhappy and neurotic who vote the most loyally for left-wing parties. If who we vote for has some relationship to who wields political power, we are governed by resentful neurotics.

I am fundamentally a conservative and therefore I can name several societies I would accept. America not long ago, Imperial Germany, England at various stages — they would not fully satisfy me but I would say it was good enough and do something other than politics. That is a weakness. What drives fanaticism is the impossible and the unreal. You will never get a classless society and we are equal only in the gave, but that is why the drive for egalitarianism may be ineradicable.

There is satisfaction in being in at the end. I am tempted to say that this is Ur-Leftism, what it is at heart, and that leftism is not even a political philosophy but just an expression of entropy. All our mythology is fundamentally about the doomed struggle to uphold some kind of Order against Chaos, but there will always be those who yearn for breakdown.

Most people in the way they live their lives do want good things, high status, order, comfort, beauty. If you could somehow empower everyone equally to participate in a democracy, we might win every time. Yet, this is not the way it works. Most Americans want mass deportations, no one in the West voted to be replaced, but Germany, England, and the United States will be mostly non-white in a few decades. Public opinion is not enough. We need people who are actually willing and able to resist, and for power not to be wielded by the most obsessed and malicious.

It will be hard. It may not be a glorious last stand. If we lose, there will be many squalid and pointless last stands. A final battle that flatters your ego is nice, but we face tedious work, hard fighting, and many compromises. One does not just develop the perfect ideology, put up a banner, and say follow me. What people believe is mostly downstream from tribal loyalty, so it is necessary at least to have a tribe. This is why I agree with Scott Greer that Donald Trump winning may be necessary. White advocates need a mass base.

It is not true that the pendulum always swings. It is not true that if people are betrayed, they eventually rise up. Sometimes you just lose. Sometimes, even when a program fails, people will tell themselves it is working. The Emperor’s New Clothes has a far too optimistic view of human nature. You must have a popular base and build from somewhere.

We do have that. What we do matters. When I began writing, there was a sense of talking to myself, but there were few obstacles. Censorship was unthinkable, financial deplatforming was a conspiracy theory, free speech was unchallenged. It is very different now, because we are actually threatening power. Free government was a short time in our history, something that happened in a homogeneous society.

The breakdown of media power in this country, largely because of the internet, has led to governments around the world claiming increased powers to censor and surveil. Controlling information is what now defines democracy. They say the purpose of a system is what it does, but the meaning of a word is how it is used. Democracy should mean government by the people and implementation of the the people’s will. It now means people at the top not just telling you what you can say, but what you can think. Despite that, people are thinking. They are speaking. That is why we face lawfare and repression.

The repression will increase. But our chances will improve. They can no longer restrain themselves, and the racial nature of politics is impossible to conceal. To take one example, the Biden Administration recently proposed a tax on unrealized capital gains, a crazy proposal because you do not actually have the money. What matters is the rationale — whites have too much wealth, so we must take it away.

Will the System prioritize empire? Not necessarily — the Biden Administration’s plans to increase domestic production of semiconductors — critical to defense policy — has been crippled by DEI policies. Advanced Placement classes are going. Why? Too many of the wrong people are in them. We must be dragged to the bottom, because Our Democracy requires it. If you have any standard, there will be racial differences in outcomes, and that violates civil rights law, so we must abandon standards.

Common sense will not stop this; not even self-interest will. These things take on a momentum of their own. Perhaps the most influential academic of the last century was Herbert Marcuse, who essentially called for the end of Western Civilization because it gave rise to fascism. He was not similarly concerned about Communism. Nonetheless, he was intelligent, and there was a notable incident in which his disciples were yelling at him that they did not want to read or know the classics. He asked them, didn’t they want to be smart? They said no. If knowledge comes from a toxic, racist source, why bother knowing it?

In the 1960s, that was a marginal position, but now, just look at our universities and credentialing institutions. Let us face it — these people are not that smart. That does not mean we will automatically win, but it does mean we have a chance.

About 20 years ago, there was a book called Stuff White People Like — in retrospect a marker of rising racial consciousness. It was a parody of white hipsters. Someone asked the author the obvious question of why it was OK to mock whites but not others, and he said it was because for white people, no bad ending is possible. The implicit white supremacy in that statement takes one’s breath away. It is not true — one look at the former Rhodesia should tell us that — but no one who matters learns any lessons from this. Indeed, just a few days ago, some people online criticized Rhodesian vets who marched in Australia/New Zealand veteran’s day celebrations. They were “war criminals,” because they fought for the “wrong” side, albeit one fully redeemed by history. Here is the key: There is no point at which most people self-correct. Even if you are living in ruins, some will build themselves a crown out of the filth, put it on their head, and call themselves a king. Destruction is the point.

The people we face can be called many things — anti-white, spiteful mutants, radical egalitarians — but what matters is that most will not change their mind. They must simply be defeated and we cannot allow ourselves to be held hostage by them. The main issue we face is awakening our people to the idea that there is a battle going on at all. Immigration is the skeleton key to every other issue, because the Left today tells us quite clearly what the battle is really about, what its intentions are, and what is the price for defeat. All politics is identity politics, and despite egalitarian pretensions, leftists know this, practice it, and win. The Right must too.

Everyone here has something he would consider the supreme value. I have no illusions my idiosyncratic ideology is going to take over the whole right wing. It is not true that everyone must believe exactly as I believe, and then we win. Infighting will never end. This is part of the struggle. However, the reality is that within about a century of the end of the Second World War, Western Civilization itself will end. Without white majorities in our historic homelands, nothing else matters. It does not get worse, it simply ends. Whatever you believe, whatever you value, we must fight on behalf of our identity. Immigration reveals the struggle in its simplest terms, and that is why it is the most important issue. No one builds a monument to the defeated. Without winning on immigration, no other victory is possible. Without white identity, nothing else matters. We fight this as one movement and win, or we cease to exist. The rest can wait.