[Adapted from James Kirkpatrick’s address to the first VDARE conference, held at the Berkeley Springs Castle in Berkeley Springs WV, April 22-24, 2022]

We’re in a situation now that challenges many of the assumptions of the nation-state. The National Question has taken an unexpected turn. A nation is a people, and a nation-state is the expression of that people. However, the only real enemy the Historic American Nation has at this point is what we can inaccurately call “our” government. I would simply call them our rulers, our occupiers.

In theory, and certainly in the imaginations of Leftists, the state is teaching young Americans patriotism, nationalism, pride. Yet in the government’s schools, young people are taught self-hatred. A casual glance at the government’s own statistics on crime shows the reality that whites are disproportionately victims—yet we are told that we whites are the greatest threat. Not long ago, what the FBI would have called a Black Identity Extremist shot up a subway in Brooklyn. Not long before that, an almost unbelievably lurid case occurred when a black criminal, who casually posted his raps about how much he hated whites on Soundcloud, ran down white children and old women in Waukesha,WI. That case was quickly buried.

Between 2019 and 2020, the homicide rate increased by 30%. According to the FBI, this was the greatest single year increase in history. Many of these crimes were black-on-black violence. They seem to have no moral significance. In 2021, the murder rate actually increased in other major cities. No one cares—not the mayors, not the huckster preachers, not the federal government, not the NGOs, and certainly not, what we are incessantly called, is the “community.”

As far as I can tell, they seem to enjoy it.

What does this country offer a young white person? In law, in academia, in corporate America, among the church leadership who hate whites far more than they hate the devil, a white person is assaulted from the day he is born to the day he dies. If this were happening to any other ethnic group in any other country, the State Department would be considering it cause for invasion.

Economically, the country offers nothing. There was no money for border protection, no money for COVID-19 stimulus checks, no money for the basic responsibilities of government. Inflation, the most regressive tax, is far from “transitory.” It seems to be permanent.

Yet when it comes to foreign affairs, the federal government, both Republican and Democrat, moved with remarkable speed to spend $40 billion to the Ukrainian government. Let us never again hear any lecture from conservatives about fiscal restraint or the need to balance the budget. When it comes to the things they care about, wars that make our lives worse, they have no problem finding the money.

Many young Americans take it for granted they will never own a home. They will never have a family. In fact, they are told that having a family may even be irresponsible. Think of the damage to the climate, after all, or the risk that you might perpetuate white privilege through a poisoned bloodline.

The Left’s control over culture and education is all but total. Well-adjusted, wealthy, “normal” people are thrown into moral panics about the imagined plights of “transexual kids” or the possibility that kindergarten teachers might not be able to discuss their gender identity with their young charges. Insofar as we can measure such things objectively, Progressives have generated a culture of self-hatred, with substance abuse, deaths of despair, antidepressant use and other factors surging. The ultimate act of faith in the future, the creation of children and families, is actively discouraged. After all, we can always import more people from the Third World.

Over the last few years, we have increasingly heard of something called “Our Democracy,” something always said with a capital O and a capital D. It’s unclear what this means. We certainly have little control over what our government does. We never voted for a proxy war with Russia, but here we are. We did vote for the federal government to enforce immigration laws, but a Republican majority under President Donald Trump refused to enforce laws already on the books. The same federal government that can destroy your life for filling out a form wrong on Tax Day not only tolerates the presence of millions of illegal immigrants in our country, but actively encourages more invaders.

Let us be blunt. It is not true that our government does not care about us, or that our institutions are failing. Our institutions are operating as intended. Our Defense Department protects the borders of other countries, while ignoring our own. Our education system turns out students who are far more ignorant than when they came in. Our federal law enforcement seems to encourage crimes, like the invented scheme to supposedly kidnap the governor of Michigan or to let people into the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

It is not that we get nothing from these bodies that we pay so much for. Our lives are all worse because they exist. If the billions of dollars stolen from us every year were simply lit on fire, we would be in a better position than if they were spent on programs that exacerbate the problems they were supposedly intended to solve. After more than 75 years of this, I can no longer pretend that those who rule us are foolish, or misguided, or incompetent. The horrors that are being unleashed are the deliberate and intended results of public policy.

We would be safer without the Department of Defense.

We would be better educated without our current education system.

We would be better informed if the so-called free press, the volunteer commissars who seem to have no other role but to cry for censorship, was completely shuttered.

With the creation of an official Disinformation Board by the federal government, under the auspices of the Department of Homeland Security, even the suggestion that this country operates in a different way than Russia or China must be met with contempt and scorn. The sole difference is that the Russian and Chinese governments don’t seem to actively hate their own populations to the degree our rulers do. They want us gone. They want us replaced.

There’s that thing we aren’t supposed to mention—The Great Replacement. Now, we know the national media speaks about it all the time. President Joe Biden has called for “unrelenting” immigration and celebrated the inevitable result that whites will be a minority in this country. Certainly, this so-called conspiracy theory is hardly fringe—one only need read The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, or any other leading publications to read paeans to this forced demographic transformation.

This transformation was never voted on by the American people. In the few cases when they had a choice, as with Proposition 187 in California, Americans voted against it. But this had no impact on what actually happened in Our Democracy.

We have to ask ourselves—what exactly is the purpose of our national project? As far as I can tell, The Great Replacement is not only real, it seems to be the only priority of the national government, aside from waging and usually losing pointless wars.

In previous ages, Americans were called to the colors to defend the American Way of Life. Yet every military victory, every sacrifice, every death, every life lived in service, was pointless. The United States of America that exists today is not just different from the country that existed before but is an explicit repudiation. The destruction of monuments to the Founders or even to leaders like Theodore Roosevelt is just a visual representation of the systemic process underway.

America is not being “changed” but deliberately perverted into its opposite. To say this is still our country would be like a Byzantine cleric claiming that his Ottoman conquerors are his lawful representatives.

Let’s have no chest beating about “these colors don’t run.” The true flag of the regime, the ever-shifting intersectional flag that combines all those groups except the white heterosexuals who subsidize their own destruction, has far greater moral significance than Old Glory. If you don’t believe me, burn what we still quaintly call the American flag, and you will be met with indifference, if not celebration. Burn the intersectional flag, and the same government that tolerates murders and property destruction will leap into action to charge you with a “Hate Crime. “

I recall the days when America elected Barack Obama president with the assumption that this would end racial politics. Instead, it marked the triumph of what Peter Brimelow has called an “anti-America.”

Let me be clear, as President Obama might have said. America does not exist. Your military service, your flags, your nostalgia, your Constitutions, and flowery talk about your supposed rights are utterly irrelevant to the realities of power in this country. To speak of one’s constitutional rights is as meaningless as appealing to Canon Law or the legal code of the Holy Roman Empire. We may call ourselves nationalists, but we are nationalists without a nation. We are a stateless people.

Some might protest this, or say I overstate the case. I can only respond—what is America? Even those who say we are a “Proposition Nation,” defined by ideals—what are those ideals?

We cannot claim that we are free. Let me be blunt—the Eastern Bloc of the 1970s and 1980s was better, superior, and more noble than what has become of the United States. What is the Stasi compared to the DHS, working in tandem with journalists and watchdog groups to make sure people can’t get jobs because they want immigration laws enforced?

In this country, now, you can have your assets frozen or outright stolen, even without being charged with a crime. Officials of the state can claim that your children must be given hormone treatment to change sexes, and if you protest this, you are the one who will face state punishment.

Not only is America not a nation, but the random denizens who wander across this continent are not free.

I will go further. In any autocracy, there is at least the possibility of change. Sovereignty is clear. If there is a problem, we know who to blame.

We lack this under our system. No matter who you elect, no matter what people want, nothing can be changed within the system. We don’t know the names of those who rule us. What are disingenuously called NGOs, non-governmental organizations, have far more power than our elected representatives. This is not just tyranny, but a tyranny more insidious and despicable because it doesn’t even have the integrity to admit what it is. Our rulers claim to be our victims, and appeal to our lowest values. It’s a contemptible system, which renders everyone who participates in it—including us—contemptible.

Is there a Historic American Nation left? It’s important to remember that nationalism itself is not terribly ancient. Modern nationalism didn’t really emerge until the French Revolution. Before this, there was certainly a sense of being part of a people, and a civilization, and having roots. There was a sense of a chain of being, an order that you were a part of. There was something to look up to, something to aspire to.

Insofar as America has an identity, it is entirely negative. The Washington Post not too long ago ran an opinion article that said, Germany has come to terms with its harmful past. Why can’t America do the same in regard to slavery, or immigration restriction, or whatever sins will be newly invented in the future? [Germany faced its horrible past. Can we do the same?, by Michele L. Norris, June 3, 2021]

But if you’re familiar with the (current!) German system, it arrests political dissidents, bans political parties, and uses a domestic spy service to disrupt them. We call this liberal democracy.

Ukraine, the Current Thing, bans political opponents, arrests the enemies of the president, and even bans the speaking of certain languages. This is also liberal democracy.

We must develop a saving cynicism, the courage to see things as they are, and recognize that democracy is, and has always been, laundered oligarchy. It is a form of government in which elites, using both media and financial power, exercise more direct control over the people than in any other system while denying all accountability and responsibility. To tolerate this at home, let alone spread it by force of arms, is obscene.

Yet there is a moral framework behind it. Let’s consider what The Washington Post means when it urges the German system on the United States. This is a call for the United States to be governed as a conquered nation. Somehow, the Americans who fought in World War II have been retconned into fighting against themselves, against their own nation.

Peter Brimelow called this Hitler’s Revenge, how the fear of fascism and national socialism led to the victorious Western nations essentially deconstructing themselves to avoid anything that could appear nationalist, patriotic, or traditionalist.

The Soviet Union may have been Communist, but it at least celebrated its victory, and contemporary Russia continues to celebrate it. This makes our leaders uncomfortable—because the only victories we can celebrate today are those over our own past.

Take no false comfort in some vague idea of human nature, or that the pendulum will inevitably swing back. If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that conservatives are wrong when they say human nature is essentially unchangeable. The most fundamental aspects of people’s personalities, including sexuality or even biological sex, can be changed with a few years of sitcoms and educational curriculum.

The religious beliefs that our leaders solemnly proclaim change with each new media campaign. For example, Barack Obama, when he ran for president, opposed gay marriage, because he said, as a Christian, this is a tenet of his faith. He changed his mind about this a few years down the line, as the dictates of God are evidently inferior to what some late-night comics have to say.

I bring up the former president because he just gave a speech talking about the need for a greater censorship to control misinformation online. But who is to determine what is misinformation when even the most fundamental aspects of someone’s character can evidently be changed so swiftly?

As I was thinking about this speech, I noticed a new policy change form Twitter. It said the company will not accept advertising from organizations that do not the scientific consensus on climate change. I can’t help but wonder what the scientific consensus on racial differences is.

If truth means anything, those who promote objectively false things, like saying groups would perform equally on standardized tests without racism, should be kicked off for peddling lies.

But they are not. Under this system, it’s not just that free speech has value and we should reject state control of information. It’s that what the media-run state tells us to believe is wrong. They are liars. Their lies have consequences, as we’ve seen in the butchery of the last few years, the countless billions of dollars’ worth of properties destroyed, the culture that drives people to despair and suicide, and the casual annihilation of every accomplishment this country ever had.

The lie of racial egalitarianism, the deliberate, willful lie that non-whites only fail to achieve because of white racism, gets people killed. But it is preached by every institution with power, from the government bureaucrats working in diversity departments to the Christian churches who believe in egalitarianism far more than they do in the divinity of their supposed god.

And when we see the death toll in our neighborhoods, the crimes buried by the media, the disgusting embarrassment that American cities have become, we must never regard this as a mistake of judgment. It is the intended, deliberate, and celebrated result that those with power want to happen.

I am not mad at most people for going along with this. I am not mad at those who fall into a moral frenzy and who, I am sure, would gladly see violence unleashed upon us. I don’t deny the moral belief of these people. I simply deny that they have the capability to hold opinions. They are as flimsy as Barack Obama’s Christianity.

The bulk of public debate in this country is about who is to be censored. We are told, continuously, that despite the overwhelming control the Progressives hold over media, academia, and even corporate America, that our views “radicalize” people. People can’t be trusted to make up their own mind. They must be carefully fed certain information or else they will make the wrong choice.

If this is true, then the entire premise of democracy is destroyed.

Fine! Let us say it! If our opponents say we can’t govern ourselves, let us dismiss the farce of elections and campaigns. Why do we waste all this time and money? Why not just have the tech CEOs pick our leaders for us and be done with it? It would certainly save us a lot of trouble.

I suppose the people in charge would support that policy until Elon Musk buys Twitter at which point suddenly the rules will change again.

James Burnham taught us that there is always a formal argument and a real argument in political debate. The formal argument is the meaningless rationalization to cover for what a political actor wants to do anyway. Ideology is the mask that power wears.

Thus, when I see someone screaming or gripped by moral panic, I don’t feel anger or even pity. I feel nothing.

I’m not even mad at the people whom we think of as our opponents, the watchdogs and Antifa and journalists. They are acting according to their nature. To be mad at them is like being mad that a roach scurries in a dirty kitchen. There’s nothing to be mad at because there’s no actual moral opinion. It’s simply constructed. To even engage with such people is a waste of time because there’s no communication possible. It would be like trying to argue politics with a dog.

I suppose, in contrast to some of the people here, I just don’t believe it’s ever worthwhile to speak to journalists, because every journalist knows the story they’re going to write before they contact you. They are functionaries filling a role. We all occasionally curse at a computer or a printer if it stops working correctly, but we know it’s foolish because it lacks consciousness and independent thought. It’s just a tool. So too are journalists.

I have worked in politics for 15 years and I have yet to meet a journalist who didn’t already have a story written before they contacted me. Today, most of these stories are simply emotional declarations. Why engage with this?

As far as I’m concerned, we shouldn’t even complain about them anymore.

Of course, there are double standards and hypocrisy. It’s inherent to their nature, and whether they are cynics who knowingly do this or tools who simply are following the programming is irrelevant. To think about them, to be emotional about them, is like being mad that bacteria can infect a wound. It’s just an unpleasant, unconscious physical reality.

Who deserves anger? Where should our energy be directed? To see and not to speak is the Great Betrayal. All of this stops the second the American Right stops going along with this. It stops instantly.

There can be no forgiveness for the likes of David French, those who tell us that we have a moral duty to lose, those who lecture us that we can’t even call ourselves “conservatives.” Well, then let them have the word. There is nothing under this system, not one scrap of a dead Constitution, not one legal precedent that can be tossed out by an Affirmative Action judge, not one aspect of our education system, pop culture, or governmental structure that is worth preserving.

The Rule Of Law died about 10 million illegal immigrants ago. State institutions are not neutral or fair—they are actively hostile.

Let us stop pretending. Let us look each other in the face and be honest about our situation. Let us greet those who tell us America is still free, or great, or even alive with scorn and contempt. There is no more time for such games, nor any charity for those who gave our country away, knowingly and maliciously.

Not long ago, the mask mandate imposed by the CDC was tossed by a Trump-appointed judge. The Great and the Good had the nerve to complain about unelected judges setting policy for the entire country.

Well, where have you been in the last half century? Where have you been for every single major social change that’s taken place in this country, none of which came through the government, as the Framers intended it, but came through unelected judges?

We have to let go of our illusions; we have to let go of this idea that we still have something to defend. We must stop trying to save people and institutions who don’t want to be saved. Let’s take an objective look at our real situation.

In 2020, I’m not terribly concerned about claims of election fraud. I’m far more concerned about the open declaration by every powerful institution in this country, inside and outside government, in the press and in the military, in the Chamber of Commerce to the unions, to “fortify” the election and render the people’s will meaningless. The election was illegitimate not because of voting machines, but because the System deliberately rigged the flow of information.

It’s hard not to blame Donald Trump himself. I think the revolutionary potential of the 2016 Trump campaign, which may have done “extreme” things like enforce existing immigration laws, was squandered. It was lost very early, right off the bat with staffing decisions.

Yet perhaps it was necessary to show that the system doesn’t work the way we were told it was.

And in 2020, we saw a final State Conquest of the American nation, a fundamental reversal of our national story. The nation that began with Jamestown and the Pilgrim Fathers, the Declaration of Independence and the Revolution, has no connection to what exists today. We saw it purged, and we saw every institution and supposedly sacred norm—from freedom of speech to the “rule of law”—gleefully shredded. The destruction is accomplished. There is nothing more to say, and nothing more to be gained by trying to prop this up.

We are in a post-American age. And I think the longer that we pretend that the country still exists, the worse the price that we’re going to have to pay.

Let’s consider our best-case scenario. Republicans, despite not deserving it, take back Congress. Let’s say you even get the fantasy candidate of your choice as president in 2024. What then?

Friends, the demographic shift is already in. And if you look at the polls on opposition to immigration, for the first time, you no longer have the people on your side. There actually has been a shift in that issue, and it has not been our way.

The Great Awokening, as some have called it, has transformed public opinion. This predated Trump. We have huge percentages of people in this country who believe, and will always believe, that all racial disparities are due to white racism. White liberals even have a negative preference against their own race.

What conversation is possible with such people? What charts or graphs or clever arguments can be offered? Consider that these people think race relations became worse after we elected our first black president. What concession can possibly be given?

I still recall in those long-ago days, which seemed like another lifetime, when I was working at a conservative organization. The day after Barack Obama’s election, one of my friends came up to me and put his arm around me and said, “we lost.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I didn’t vote for Mitt Romney and voted Third Party. And then he said: “Well, we have a black president now. So at least no one will ever call us racist again.”

I know many people of goodwill, and I’m not poking fun at them. They can be forgiven for having thought this. They thought America could get past race, just like we are told we can get “past” the immigration debate.

But you don’t get past these issues. You don’t get past issues that cut to the core of who constitutes the polity, of who constitutes the nation. These things are with us forever. And there’s no way we can just settle it and be done, even if you have some insane fantasy of having your own homeland and everything is set up the way you want.

We’re in a castle right now. I know there’s some Catholics in here who want to restore the Stuarts. Even that wouldn’t solve the problem indefinitely. The peace that comes with liberal democracy fades very quickly, as do all the individual freedoms that we are supposed to have. What’s written in the Constitution has little to do with how the government works and how power is exercised. We must ask ourselves if modern America really allows you to express opposition to the government in power, to express your views peacefully, to control your own property, or to exercise freedom of association.

If you look hard at those questions, it’s very difficult to say there is still a free world. It’s very difficult to say that what exists now is worth sending people to kill and die for.

“America is a free country” is a lie. Another lie is this idea that the people are going to react when things get bad enough.

Now it’s no secret that President Joe Biden is not the most popular man. Joe Biden has the look of a man who’s not quite sure how he ended up in this place. Forget the jokes about oh, he’s senile, and everything else. I actually don’t think that. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. I honestly don’t think he knows how he ended up in this political environment. I think just today he said: “These aren’t your father’s Republicans. This is the MAGA party now.” This was meant to be an insult.

The idea that MAGA is radical or threatening, at least according to Joe Biden, is incredible because it’s to the left of then-Senator Biden’s crime policies. When it comes to Criminal Justice, we’d have to say he was to the right of President Trump. He, after all, was one of the leading guys who was pushing the Tough-On-Crime policies of the Clinton administration—I should say, the Republican Congress under Newt Gingrich and after the 1994 Republican Revolution. President Trump’s “Platinum Plan” for African-Americans offered blacks far more than Biden did throughout his career. But suddenly the Republicans are beyond the pale?

Joe Biden started his campaign specifically in response to Charlottesville. He said that Donald Trump has more in common with George Wallace than George Washington. I’m pretty sure that George Wallace, probably especially after he renounced his segregationist views and kept getting elected governor of Alabama with lots of black support, had more acceptable views than George Washington did when it comes to certain political and racial issues.

But we’re in this room because in this polity, one founded by men like Washington, Jefferson and Madison, you can’t favorably mention what those men actually believed and still get a hotel. Given the current values that we are told to believe in, you cannot reconcile the Public Religion of our time, the creed of egalitarianism that we’re supposed to believe in, with an actually existing American history. You cannot reconcile that with what leading historical figures actually said and believed.

Right now, when they tear down statues of George Washington, or Teddy Roosevelt or whoever else, conservatives have this reaction of, “Well, you shouldn’t do that.” But if you ask them why, it’s simply because it makes them uncomfortable, it’s shocking.

However, logically, they can’t defend these men. They’ve morally disarmed themselves. They either say these men were a product of their time, or you get silence, or you get outright lies.

I don’t know about you, but I’m very tired of hearing that Martin Luther King would be a Republican, or that he opposed Affirmative Action. He did not. I’m very tired of hearing that a lot of these other people would supposedly support the modern Republican party. They would not.

The Leftists who are talking about their own heroes know a lot more about what they are talking about than do, say, the editors of National Review. I hate to just pick on them. But they’re the most spectacular example, considering the kind of separate peace they tried to negotiate with the Left during the iconoclasm of 2020. They essentially held the position that taking down the Confederate statues was good, but ones to the Founders were fine [Will the Left Stop with Robert E. Lee? By Gregory Hood, American Renaissance, April 13, 2018]. It doesn’t work that way.

We’re seeing this on sexual issues, too. My point here is not to get into these issues except to note how quickly things that were once fringe have changed, and that the change occurred entirely from the top down. People like Andrew Sullivan are suddenly saying, well, the sexual revolution has gone too far. We went to where I wanted it to go, but now it’s time to stop, and we’re just going to hold it here. Some supposed centrists even warn their brethren and say that if they keep this up, they will end up undoing everything else.

Ideas, unfortunately, get taken to their logical conclusion. And that’s one of the biggest problems that we have to deal with, because people are ceding ground in arguments. If you give up certain territory, you’re inviting everything else that follows.

There’s a reason we must talk about things like racial differences. Frankly, I don’t find the statistics and graphs all that interesting. Yet we still must talk about it. If you don’t, you don’t have an explanation why you have different performances across different groups.

If you don’t at least entertain Race Realism, you don’t have an explanation why you have different performances across groups. And if you don’t have an explanation, the only thing left is “white racism.”

Once you concede that, how can you oppose reparations in good conscience? Wouldn’t redistribution of wealth be fair? Why should tributes to traditional American heroes be protected?

Whites aren’t even at the top of the heap when it comes to wealth, but nobody seems to notice that. Rarely do you see conservatives even talk about that part of history. Instead, you end up with ignorant or cynical Republicans saying Martin Luther King would be in their party. He wouldn’t be; he equated Barry Goldwater to “Hitlerism.”

Conservatives have been doing this for a long time. I think we can feel justified bitterness at those who led America down this dead end, especially in the 1990s, when there was a real chance of turning all this back.

Still, perhaps I’m being unfair. Perhaps they didn’t know what they were doing. I’m willing to say that maybe they didn’t know the total consequences of the 1965 Immigration Act, or not stopping Affirmative Action, or not stopping immigration in 2016. Maybe they’re just naive.

If so, the line has been crossed. After 2019 and 2020, when you have leading institutions openly saying the Historic American Nation is evil, we need to replace it, you can’t claim ignorance. When you have people pointing to Germany, where Germans are brought up from birth to despise themselves, as a model, you need to understand what that means. They really think America should be treated as a defeated, conquered nation. Perhaps we are.

At this point, there can be no more illusions. If we continue to go along with them, these lies, we really are a conquered nation and, frankly, deserve our fate.

This country was founded by people who rejected the orders that they were given. They said that there is something deeper, that there is something more important than our oath to the king, or our strong ties to Great Britain.

For Thomas Jefferson, the things that he thought were important were their traditional liberties that he found in the Anglo-Saxon people. And he had all sorts of writings about how our liberties don’t just come from nature, but come from the long history of our people extending back to the British Isles.

All the great patriots in American history didn’t just base their patriotism and ideas on abstractions. They based it on historical experience, they pointed to specific events and people so they could say: “These are our forefathers, they did these things, and that’s where our liberties come from.”

 Even Abraham Lincoln, whatever you think about the War Between the States, when he said, “Our forefathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation,” did something unacceptable today.

Lincoln suggested that Americans had direct ties to the Founders. That link has been severed now; there are no “mystic chords of memory” to pull on.

The American state wants to replace the Historic American Nation. If you don’t believe me, look at the books in your children’s public schools. Look at the editorials in our leading newspapers. Look at the content moderation policies on social media and algorithms that are used on social media, which increasingly determine election outcomes. The current American government is premised upon the explicit rejection of the nation that came before.

The closest thing I can think of is South Africa, where a new regime took power, and it justified itself in the name of undoing that which came before. It’s also not surprising that quite a few Leftists have argued for Truth and Reconciliation committees for the United States in which we would investigate all these different things, hold people accountable, come up with all sorts of fun new reparation schemes and everything else.

All of this is coming, and Republicans have no answer to it.

It’s not that I’m faulting them because they won’t fight. They will fight in an uncoordinated way. Unfortunately, they have no serious arguments why they should resist these things. They lack the vocabulary.

It’s our job, not just to fight, but to tell people how to fight. It’s our job to show why it’s not just morally acceptable but morally incumbent to fight back. We don’t actually have to go along with all this just because people with money and power say we do.

Some people online have taken to calling the current regime, the Global American Empire. I don’t like that term only because I don’t like giving them the term American. That’s our word. As some people say, we’re allowed to use that word and they’re not.

I usually use the term “Potomac Regime.” There is something foreign about that city on the Potomac. I say that as somebody who lived there for quite a long time.

There’s something almost uncanny, and horrific, something lying behind everything else there. And when you see these wild conspiracy theories, and when you see some ridiculous claims made about public figures, you don’t need to believe them. I don’t.

However, my view is probably that they are less horrifying than the truth. The truth is that the people who rule us are not indifferent to us. They know what they’re doing. Everything that’s happening is not an accident. They’re doing it on purpose. We don’t need to come up with ridiculous theories about why. They tell us. All we must do is look at what they’re writing now. All we need to do is look at The New York Times, or The Washington Post, or the White House Press Office. While Joe Biden himself may be hapless and not know what’s happening, I think his staffers know exactly what they are doing. They’re the ones who are pushing through policies.

It’s a tragic reversal of what happened with President Donald Trump. Donald Trump had thousands of people who would have done anything to work for him. They would have been burned alive before even speaking to a reporter.

However, there was sabotage from Day One. He hired from the traditional Republican Establishment and so he had people trying to undermine him from within from the beginning. Ultimately, that’s on President Trump.

But we can’t just keep looking back to 2016. We must recognize where we are now, even though that’s not a good place. The best we can do with the existing system is staunch the bleeding. However, even in this current system, we can make certain demands. I insist we frame them as demands that we are entitled to, not policy suggestions. If America really is the liberal democracy they claim it is, if this really is something different than this authoritarianism that they want us to fight and die for or die fighting against all over the world, than the burden is on them to prove it.

• First, and most importantly, is we need to insist on the absolute enforcement of all currently existing immigration laws. Every single illegal in this country needs to go—every single one, no exceptions.

And until that happens, I don’t want to hear about the Constitution, I don’t want to hear about the rule of law, I don’t want to hear about a rules-based international order. None of these things exist. These terms should be met with contempt and laughter. There’s no debate to have.

• The second thing we need to do is scrap Affirmative Action, all of it.

This may play out in interesting ways. At Harvard, if they only admitted the top 10% of students, you would actually see a decline in the white student population, along with blacks. You’d see a lot more Asians.

There are somethings when it comes to race that, frankly, I don’t like. However, in all the data that I’ve seen, it seems clear that Asian Americans earn more and do better on educational tests than white Americans do. That doesn’t make me feel great, but that’s just the way the world is. Dealing with the world as it is and not how we want it to be is what growing up is all about.

For the last seventy years or so, we’ve been living in a childlike fantasy. It’s brought us to the brink of disaster.

• This brings me to my third point, that of reparations.

These are inevitably coming. We need to flip the script and take the offensive on this.

We don’t need some commission to say, well, 100 years ago, this outrage happened. Or a bunch of white people bombed Tulsa just for no reason. All we must do is point to the cities all around this country, the infrastructure that’s been destroyed, the streets that look like something that a Ukraine. That $40 billion we’re sending to Ukraine is a lot of money, but a drop in the bucket compared to what has been lost at home.

I’d like the whites who had to flee the cities they created to be the ones getting reparations. They’re still alive to use them.

Forget the Great Migration, the riots of the 1960s, or white flight. If you look at just what’s happened in the last few years, just the property destruction from that alone, how many small businesses have been utterly ruined? How many people have been killed and have their lives annihilated? How many conservatives went out there to express their First Amendment rights or what they thought were their First Amendment rights, and then suddenly discovered that the rules don’t apply equally for all sides?

Burn a police precinct to the ground and that’s no problem, but take an unapproved walk through Statuary Hall and you’re going to jail for a very long time.

It’s not something we can just complain about anymore, because anyone who can see that it exists, has already seen it. There’s nothing more to say. There’s just a question of what is to be done.

I am of the opinion that any attempt to go back to the old ways is doomed to failure. I think some of the problems lie within our Constitution.

One is the Framers dramatically underestimated the power of the judicial branch, which is really how the Left has won its greatest victories, by judicial fiat.

The Framers didn’t anticipate the regulatory state, which as we learned with the Trump Administration, is where power really seems to lie. Unless our side abolishes the regulatory state by judicial fiat, which would require a lot of courage, I don’t see how to scrap all those bodies through Congress.

President Reagan ran on getting rid of something like the Department of Education, and he couldn’t do it. He was also acting in far more favorable conditions.

 So what can we do? Well, I’m not going to say LARP, and create your own fantasy nation, and then run around trying to make it happen. I’m not going to say that we need to embrace some extreme ideology, or extreme tactics. As a matter of fact, I would say a lot of that is counterproductive.

But mentally, we must start from where we are and accept some hard truths. If you are in an area where you can’t do anything politically through the existing system, you need to move to a place where you can.

We must think of ourselves as occupied. However, occupied peoples can resist. We can build parallel economies, we can build networks, we can even thank our foes for forcing us to build the institutions that we needed to build two decades ago.

We don’t need to discuss the specifics publicly. Just do it. The Revolution will not be online or in the press. It will the opposite of a Revolution, in some ways, by showing with direct experience that a different way of living is possible.

There are three ways that you can have a group.

One is based on ideology. That tends not to work because when you have an ideological dispute, the group breaks up.

Another is via money; we have no Soros or Ford Foundation on our side, so that’s a non-starter.

The third, and the strongest thing, and I’ve seen this in my own experience, is it must be something that is built on something deeper than just a social bond deeper even than just a religious bond. It must be a bond of brotherhood, it must be a bond of social solidarity, where you say that the people next to you are more important than you yourself, where you have a willingness to sacrifice, not for an abstraction, but for the people to the left and right of you.

That’s the kind of spirit that we need. That’s the kind of spirit that I see in some of you. And that’s the kind of spirit that I’ve seen in people who are doing this all across this country. If enough of us develop that kind of spirit, and if enough of us are willing to do what needs to be done, we win.

You don’t need to wait for a “collapse” or try to start something with some crazy, violent action. Do the exact opposite. The things we need to do now in terms of building groups and networks from the ground up will improve your life now.

You can’t rely on public or mainstream institutions to do their stated job anymore. We’re just a bit ahead of the curve in seeing this.

So we build the alternatives. It’s what the Founders did.

If enough of us do it, we will build power. And eventually, we will have something greater than just restoring some slightly better version of the United States.

We’ll have a country of our own. We’ll have a country that will move past the failures of our history.

And we’ll have something that pursues greatness instead of the false promise of equality.

Thank you.

James Kirkpatrick [Email him | Tweet him @VDAREJamesK] is a Beltway veteran and a refugee from Conservatism Inc. His latest book is Conservatism Inc.: The Battle for the American Right. Read VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow‘s Preface here.

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