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May 22, 2017 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
58:47
Nathan Damigo: Why We Fight
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Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to our latest edition of Radio Renaissance.
It's my pleasure to have as our guest, Nathan D'Amigo.
Nathan D'Amigo is known to virtually all of you, I'm sure, as the founder and the president of Identity Europa, which is probably the most effective college-based racial consciousness group in the country, doing great work.
It's a real pleasure to have Nathan on the program, so welcome and delighted you could join us.
Hey Jared, how's it going?
It's great to be here and I've been a huge fan of yours for a long time, so it's awesome to get a chance to just sit down and talk to you for a little while.
Oh gosh, I feel exactly the same way.
I've been a huge fan of yours ever since you started doing these things, so that's great.
Can you tell me just, we'll start off with just a real, a brief thumbnail sketch of what Identity Europa is and what it's doing.
Yeah, Identity Europa is kind of one part advocacy group or pressure group and it's kind of the other part is kind of a fraternity and a couple years ago when I was just starting to get into this I realized that no one I knew shared my views and that had actually kind of caused in the past a little bit of depression and frustration and whatnot.
And I thought that there needed to be something that people could reach out to and find a way to get in contact with others.
And I think if anyone understands this, it's certainly you.
You've discussed how people like to be around others like themselves and that involves ideology and politics and worldview as well, not just simply race.
So I wanted to kind of create a magnet that people could come to and network with other like-minded people.
And those who wanted to get more active and more involved and find ways to bring about institutionalized change could make that possible, could find others like themselves to work together to make a long-lasting difference.
Right, so it's both a social and a political activist group.
Yes. Yeah, definitely.
Well, the social aspect is certainly very, very important.
Having a sense of belonging, having a sense of camaraderie.
And for years, before the internet, it was very, very difficult for racially conscious whites to have communities.
And so I'm delighted that you're offering this primarily to young people.
Is your membership exclusively college students or any young person or any person at all?
No, we are actually 18 and up.
Individuals who are younger than that basically just need kind of parental approval.
But other than that, we are very open to all ages, and we have people across the spectrum.
Now, we have a very young demographic.
I would say the average age of our members is somewhere between Perhaps 22 to maybe 32 or something like that.
So it is a very young group but we have a big distribution at IE. We do put a lot of our focus on college campuses because that's where the future managerial class is.
That's where the cognitive elite of our cohort are.
So that's where we want to be.
We want to win over the people with the greatest amount of agency and who are kind of situated to bring about the greatest amount of change in the future.
And say, if I were a mainstream reporter who had just no idea about racial consciousness or white advocacy, and I were to ask you, well, what is the long-term goal?
What is the purpose of Identity Europa?
How would you answer that question?
I would say something along the lines of ensuring that people of European heritage have a future.
And that is a pretty broad statement to make and could mean a lot of different things.
But I want to ensure that our people have a place where they can be themselves, where they can be around others like themselves, where they can preserve their heritage, their culture.
And where they can pass along something to future generations.
Well, that sounds almost exactly the way I describe the purposes of American Renaissance.
I might have been listening to you a little bit there.
Well, can you tell me, if you don't mind, about some of your background.
What were some of the experiences that led you to the realization that this was a vital task and that you would dedicate yourself to this task of providing a future for our people?
Well, a lot of guys in my age group have been calling me The conversion experience, taking the red pill, that's kind of what we've been calling it.
For me, my red pilling process was something that probably happened over a span of eight plus years.
And I think it really started with just growing up in a multicultural, multiracial city in the Bay Area in California.
And as a result of that, as a result of oftentimes finding myself the only white person in a situation, my racial identity was definitely heightened.
I was definitely aware Of race and aware of human biodiversity and differences there, not just in biology, but also in culture and so on and so forth.
I remember numerous times throughout my childhood being at birthday parties or things like that where I couldn't communicate with most everyone there.
Wait, because they were all speaking some other language?
Yes, yes. Whether it was Spanish or Tagalog or Vietnamese or something like that, it was very often I found myself in these situations when I was fairly young.
Were your parents trying to push you into a milieu of that kind?
That sounds a little bit unusual, even sort of multi-cultish cities.
The whites generally tend to go to the birthday parties for the other white kids.
You must have had parents who were really encouraging that kind of contact.
Well, they weren't...
Like liberals. My family was and is certainly more socially conservative in many aspects.
I actually went to a private Christian school growing up where, oddly enough, even whites there were a small portion of the student population.
And my family never really pushed it on me.
It wasn't like many of the stories I've heard with liberal parents or progressive parents where they were pushing it.
But that just seemed to be the situation I found myself in, the neighborhood I grew up in.
Was kind of on the verge of shifting from what used to be a white working class neighborhood.
And there were a lot of Hispanics, Latinos coming in, a lot of Asians coming in.
In fact, I was in the neighborhood because I still have some friends around there.
I was over there about six months ago and there's hardly any white people left.
What town is this?
This is San Jose, California.
This is Silicon Valley, where the silicon transistor was invented.
This is a lot of people, something I often get from individuals who have no clue of my background.
Usually, these are just people on the internet who don't know what they're talking about.
They'll call me some inbred redneck or something like that, but I grew up smack dab in the middle of a A major metropolitan area.
And so, well then it sounds as though at an early age, whether or not you had a really mature racial consciousness, you were certainly aware of different people and you didn't always feel comfortable being the only white guy, I gather.
Yeah, it was.
It was an experience that, I mean, obviously these people weren't bad people and they weren't out to pick on me or anything like that.
And I made really good friendships with a lot of people, otherwise I wouldn't be at their birthday parties and stuff like that.
But there was this feeling of isolation and this inability to connect the way I would see them connecting with their friends who shared their culture and And heritage and so on.
And it was something that I think really started to make sense to me more when I got into the Marine Corps.
I went into the Marines straight out of high school.
I was very influenced by 9-11 and what had occurred then.
And I kind of bought into the propaganda that was saying, hey, we need to deliver democracy to the rest of the world.
This guy, Saddam over here, he's just a mean bully.
Not to say that he wasn't a nice guy.
But the idea that we could actually bring about our cultural practice of democracy to the rest of the world now is fairly ridiculous to me.
But, you know, I went for that and I said, you know, I want to help these people out over here.
They've got this mean guy in power and I want to go out there on a fight for freedom and get these people, you know, Do you think that kind of idealistic, almost missionary impulse was common among people who went and fought at that time?
Yeah, to a large extent it was.
I mean, Marine Corps infantry is a little different.
I'm not sure if you've seen some of the movies like Jarhead that have done a fairly decent job at showing just the breed of Marine Corps infantry individuals, but there were a lot of people.
I think there were a lot of kids, too, who were just looking for adventure and had romanticized war to a great extent.
I think that's an impulse that is probably universal throughout the human species.
And so it was probably a combination of both.
But something I noticed while I was in was that Marine Corps infantry was much whiter demographically than Other areas of the military.
For the most part, and we would refer to people who were not in infantry as pogues, personnel other than grunt, you know, those individuals were much more likely to be people with other racial backgrounds.
And that was something that was, again, another step in my red pill process that I realized.
As I had conversations with these individuals, one of the things I did notice more of was that people of color, people of non-European heritage, tended to have the view that they were in the military just to get a paycheck, that they weren't going to fight and die for America.
It was very much a different attitude From from talking to many of them. And so that is why they
were in these other roles they were truck drivers or they were working in supply or
something like that and So that was another big step
And the other thing too was it was actually the first time in my life
I had spent a lot of time around other white people and I was like wow
This is like I feel really comfortable here I feel really comfortable around these guys.
You know, it almost feels like being at a...
I almost feel as comfortable as I would, say, at a family reunion, even where I don't know people because they're second, third cousins or whatever, but I just feel really comfortable around them.
And so I think that was another major step in the process for me and something that really, you know, just...
Took me one step closer.
Were you aware of any kind of racial animosity in the Marine Corps or was it just this sort of sense that it was the white guys who were really there to fight and die for their country and the other guys wanted a paycheck and maybe training as an auto mechanic or something like that?
that or was there real hostility as well? There wasn't as much as you you hear
people say there is but I did see it a couple times and and again this was
still before I was you know I was still open to having a multiracial democratic
society I was against mass immigration at that point in time.
I was kind of under the cultural assimilation theory with other civic nationalists.
But it wasn't as bad as I've heard other people.
I can only speak from my experience, but I only ever met, I think, two other gentlemen.
Who seemed to have a racial conscious, but I wouldn't say that their racial consciousness was like yours or mine.
I would say it was much more primal.
It probably was cultural.
They were both gentlemen from the South, and it seemed to be more kind of just this animosity more than anything.
It wasn't ideological or intellectual.
And so it was more just hearing, you know, racial epithets or something like that from a couple individuals.
Well, then it sounds as though the racial animosity that you were most vividly aware of was the animosity of these few white guys against blacks or non-whites rather than the other way around.
Yes, although there was a time where I was speaking to a couple guys in Motor Key who were also from the South, and they kind of gave me the cold shoulder, and I started to realize that it was largely for racial issues.
However, they never openly used racial epithets against me or anything like that.
So these were black guys or Mexicans or something?
Yeah, they were black guys who were basically from St.
Louis. A very rough area.
Right. Well, I do understand that the Marine Corps does a fairly good job of trying to make people loyal to the Corps.
In other words, beating some sense of other loyalty or individualism out of people and making them Marines first.
And perhaps there is a certain success as far as that's concerned.
Yeah, I think so.
There was, I would have to say, a great amount at that time of demoralization within the ranks I think a lot of that was caused by the war itself.
Many people, many of my friends became very disillusioned with what was going on over there.
The people didn't seem to want us there.
In fact, the first time I heard gunfire and we thought we were being shot at, it was actually just these different tribes who were having a shootout with each other in the street.
So there was a great amount of demoralization from that and just from the stress that's caused by the Marine Corps.
But there was actually one of the individuals who I was talking about who was white and he had at least expressed some sort of racialized thought.
He actually, I saw him become good friends with a black man who was In our platoon over time, and it was kind of interesting watching them become friends over time, whereas they initially did not like each other one bit.
So being out in certain conditions can actually bring a certain level of bonding that you might not experience in other ways.
Yeah, this is what you hear about blacks and whites who play on the same athletic team, for example, that athletics brings blacks and whites together in a way that very few other activities do, and I would imagine combat would have even more of that effect.
Yeah, yeah, certainly.
Well, I also understand that, well, you should probably describe the incident yourself briefly, but you ended up having a flashback and went to prison for a while, and I understand race relations in prisons are sometimes rather eye-opening.
They certainly were.
After I did two tours in Iraq, I just was having a horrible time reintegrating into society.
I was having a lot of issues with flashbacks and I was having chronic issues with not being able to sleep and so on.
And I even, unfortunately, I picked up some very bad habits of alcoholism and some other drugs at the time.
I found myself, after this horribly long binge, freaking out on a man who was of Arab descent.
I essentially just didn't realize where I was.
I thought I was at a vehicle checkpoint.
And it was very unfortunate.
I'm very glad I did not hurt this individual.
And unfortunately, I was armed.
I took some of his stuff and I left.
I walked away. I was confused.
I didn't know what was going on.
And I was picked up about 45 minutes later in the same area.
I'd been wandering around the same area at, I think it was like 3 in the morning, just kind of in this crazed state.
Unfortunately and and I ended up going to prison for about I think I did five years on a six-year sentence and That was I think When everything kind of started snowballing for me as far as race was concerned in California prison system It is probably one of the most segregated prison systems there is.
I, you know, upon getting in, you know, kind of some of the inmates were telling me, like, letting me know just kind of the politics in prison and stuff like that, and everything was broken down on racial lines, and it was very present when I was, even when I was in county.
So, It was an experience that got me thinking much more.
I started noticing even more things that I hadn't noticed before about race.
I think one of the things was that I noticed most of the blacks would not drink their milk in the morning.
And I asked someone, I was like, do they not like milk or something, or what's going on?
And he's like, no, blacks have a harder time digesting Not as many of them have the genes for lactose persistence.
And so that was kind of new to me.
I wasn't aware of that.
And so I think things started to heighten from there.
And I think more than anything, though, it was really a couple different things that started to do it for me.
I think one of which was there was a while I was working kind of as a tutor.
I was trying to help other people get their education, get their high school diplomas.
I already had mine, and so I was working taking college courses.
And I noticed that many of the white students, some of these guys who had dropped out at the age of 13, 14, because they were the only white person at, say, an all-black school or all-Hispanic school And they literally went to school every day and got beat up every day to the point where they just said, I can't go to school anymore and they dropped out.
Some of these individuals who hadn't been in school for 10 years picked up very fast.
Whereas I noticed that many of the African students I was trying to help out were having just a horrific time picking up any of the information.
That I was teaching them.
And it was about that time that obviously you're in prison, you have a lot of time on your hands.
It was about that time I really started to educate myself.
I kind of said to myself, I don't want to be that guy who 20 years from now is that homeless veteran on the street who's been in and out of prison You know, a zillion times, you know, I want to try to better myself and my circumstances as much as possible.
So I started like reading anything and everything I could get my hands on.
I was also very disillusioned.
So I was looking for answers outside the mainstream and I was asking different things.
Inmates, not only white inmates, but also Latino and African inmates, what type of stuff they were reading.
I was always very fascinated with political science, and so I was asking everyone I could, like, what should I read?
What's out there? And prior to prison, I'm kind of embarrassed to admit this, but prior to that, I don't believe I ever picked up a book that I wasn't forced to read.
So, for the first time, I found myself just looking through literature, and I discovered that I really enjoyed it.
It was something I actually was like, wow, I actually really do like this.
But by literature now, you mean fiction, novels?
No, non-fiction.
To this day, about the only non-fiction I'll read is something that has Some sort of message that goes with it, something like maybe, or philosophy to it, something maybe like Rand or George Orwell.
I think that's probably about the only fiction you can get me to read.
But yeah, no, mostly nonfiction.
I was curious about the world.
I was curious about Iraq.
I was curious about why we went over there.
I was curious about the the contradictions I felt that I was seeing and I wanted to know more.
Were you able to get your hands on any racially dissident literature or in prisons?
Is that essentially impossible?
Well, that's actually I guess where where things started.
I think among the first that I did manage to get my hands on was David Duke's My Awakening and I was just simply curious and and Something that's also very interesting is that I didn't even know who David Duke was and that's, I think, something interesting too because I'm 31 now and it almost seemed as if there's now this generational gap to where most people, they hear the name David Duke and you have that Pavlovian response where you just put up that wall and you don't listen to anything anyone says.
But that wasn't the case for me.
And I think that there's going to be more of that moving forward with younger individuals who just haven't been conditioned to have that response when they hear certain names.
And I just thought it would be fascinating to read what this guy had to say.
Was this in the prison library or was it an interlibrary loan?
I had asked an inmate, and like I said, I was asking inmates from all different backgrounds what they were reading.
I had asked an inmate who I knew was interested and racially conscious.
I said, what do you people read?
What do you guys read?
This sounds really fascinating.
Is this going to be literature of just 200 pages of racial epithets?
What do these people actually have to say?
For me, it was just a fascinating thing.
I ordered the book.
There are a number of cases that have occurred Throughout the court system, inmates have waged against the prison system.
Basically, at this point, there's enough case law and things like that there to where as long as the literature does not advocate violence or teach you how to make weapons or something like that, you're allowed to receive it.
I only had issues, I think, one or two times, and I actually I had books returned because of that and I actually successfully challenged that and was able to get the books.
So, was this some sort of public library you were able to get these books?
Where did the books actually come from?
I think there were multiple catalogs floating around, and there were some places where if you just sent in stamps or something like that, they would send them to you.
So I'm not sure exactly.
I don't remember where exactly I had ordered that from.
But I think there had been some pro-white groups at the time who did have some...
Some magazines and stuff like that at that time that would actually send literature to people who had ordered it.
So yeah, I had ordered that and I think just the first section of that book to me made so much sense.
I mean the first section he talks about racial differences in IQ. And just the different distributions of, you know, phenotypic characteristics of the brain and so on.
And he went through, like, all sides of the argument.
He talked about Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Kameen, all these guys who were pushing this kind of blank slate-ism.
And then he also talked about Arthur Jensen and J. Philip Rushton and all these other individuals who were pointing out these facts about it.
And I was like so shocked because what he was saying made so much sense, but I also felt that I just couldn't accept that without searching into it further.
And I think a lot of that was because being raised in a fundamentalist Christian home, I was raised to believe that the Earth was 6,000 years old and that evolution was false.
And one of the things I had started reading into prior to all this was I started looking at Richard Dawkins and a lot of his literature and studying evolution.
And once I realized, actually, once I actually figured out what a straw man was, I realized that that's kind of what had happened to me with my education, was that the arguments I had been taught about evolution were essentially strawman-style arguments.
So what I wanted to do was I said, never again do I want to fall for one of these strawman arguments.
I want to verify everything I can.
So after reading that, I went through probably about 30 different sources that he had cited in that book on both sides.
I've read all sides on what's called HBD, Human Biological Diversity.
I read both sides of that argument, and after going through all of the literature I could find on it, It was pretty clear to me that the reality of race was very real, that there are differences between people, and that was something that was hidden from me.
I felt that, unfortunately, the people who actually are doing this, who are kind of hiding this, are actually hurting people by doing this.
I think the CNN interview that you did fairly recently, you pointed out that what happens when we hide this information is that when we tell people, oh no, you are just as intelligent and you're just as capable as this other population over here, and then when that doesn't happen, what happens is that you create this huge animosity between populations.
And that has a severely negative effect for race relations.
No question about that.
Well, I'm quite fascinated that you had access to all of these books.
When American Renaissance was a print publication, we would sometimes get requests from prisoners to send copies of the magazine to them.
And I'd say about half the time, they were returned.
They were not accepted. And we'd have to go through some sort of procedure, and then maybe we could get them in, maybe not.
But there was this idea that this would be bad for prison relations, to have anything that talked about race and racial animosity or the problems of diversity.
But anyway, I'm very pleased.
Maybe California is particularly liberal in that respect, or liberated.
But isn't that interesting, that in prison you had this quite eye-opening education in racial realities, not just from looking around, but also from the literature?
Yeah. Actually, I think I may have written Amran at one point.
I'm not sure if that was before you guys stopped doing that or after.
I do not remember, but I think I may have written you guys at one point.
I do recall actually reading several of your books while I was in, and in fact, while I was reading White Identity, I was actually in one of the prison facilities that you mentioned in that book when you were talking about the attempted forced integration and I talked to other people who were there when it happened and they told me about the riots that kicked off and how bad they were and how upset they were that the prison officials would try to force that on them and it was just fascinating to me.
So you read my latest book, White Identity, while you were still in prison?
Yes, yes. That was right before I got out.
I see. About four years ago, I think.
I see. Well, for heaven's sake.
Well, when you got out, then you decided to go to university, right?
Or at least at some point you did, and found Identity Europa.
Yes, I had achieved an associate's degree while I was incarcerated, and I immediately signed up for college after getting out.
I am a student at CSU Stanislaw, which is part of the Cal State system, and it was probably about a year after that that I started getting Really involved.
I started figuring out how to talk to people on the Internet.
I was just horrible with social media when I was younger.
Even in my early adulthood, I was not good with it.
But I started figuring out how to use it and was countering a lot of arguments on YouTube videos and on Twitter and other social media platforms.
And I started meeting other people online who were doing the same thing and I would see them over and over again.
I would see their accounts and I would see them making comments on multiple videos.
And I started reaching out to people and talking to others.
And it was about that time that I saw a video from Generation Identitaire in France of them occupying a mosque.
And it was then that it said in to me, And I think a lot of this had to do with my understanding of going back to the academic debate about race and how, essentially, individuals such as Gould and Lewontin and other blank slateists had won Not due to their arguments being superior and more accurate,
but they won because they utilized these politics of intimidation and used these pressure groups to shout down and intimidate people.
It was that realization that I realized the only way there's going to be progress is to build a pressure group that fights for the right of people who have these ideas to speak at college campuses and to pressure schools into expanding the range of literature that they're looking at when they have classes on race and identity.
I've taken every class I could on race and identity and not a single one reviews any of the literature, any of the great literature that's out there or the counter arguments.
And it's pretty sad because it was very easy for me to cause a pretty big disruption in class by just poking some holes In some things.
And so, you know, I realized that we had to have something like that.
That was the only way that change was going to be brought about.
Because people on the left, cultural Marxists, they were going to continue to use force and violence and intimidation to ensure that their false narrative was not challenged.
Well, I would think that on most campuses they don't really need force and intimidation so much as the fact that they already are the overwhelming majority.
And you don't need much force if everybody on campus basically already agrees with you.
It seems to me that only when you have some outside force or outside speaker that wants to come and challenge some of those ideas That you have to round up the bully boys.
I sometimes wonder whether I could even stand it being on a college campus now.
When I was in college, I generally agreed with all the foolishness I was being taught about race, so it never much occurred to me.
But I think it would be very, very difficult to actually know the score and then be in the middle of such uniform orthodoxy.
It's been interesting.
I think it was very helpful that I was...
Very self-educated about race prior to actually delving into these classes, whether they were in the field of anthropology or philosophy or whatnot, which is something that gave me a great advantage in these classes, but it was also very helpful to To sit down and there was still some literature that I had not seen that was also...
I love reading the arguments of the opposition because if you don't understand them, you're going to look foolish, first off, because they're going to get you with something that you haven't come across before.
Maybe their rebuttal or maybe their gotcha Question or whatever is still inaccurate or wrong or something like that.
But if you haven't had time to sit there and contemplate about it, you're not going to be able...
Most often, you're not going to be able to answer it in an articulate and well-thought-out manner or counter-argument.
And so I actually really enjoyed these classes.
I would... I would be lying if I said I didn't also enjoy poking some holes here and there and watching the professor kind of squirm as I did.
But... Of course, now, at least in your higher profile activity as the president of Identity Europa, it's not so much the intellectual arguments as the in-the-street engagement for which you have become best known.
Was this something of your intention?
Does that reflect your personality as well?
The idea of really getting in the face of the opposition, making sure that their attempts to intimidate or To exclude us physically will not be permitted.
I gather that is sort of a part of the direction which your personality moves also.
I've always been a fighter and that's something, you know, from a very young age, I've always been an individual who didn't really back down when people were trying to intimidate me.
There were times where, you know, I would see someone bullied at school and there was one time I stood up to like, I think it was like eight kids and they all kind of backed away from bullying this guy.
And that's kind of just always been the type of person I've been.
But, however, when I started Identity Europa, I basically just wanted to create a magnet to draw people to and just to kind of make some noise in the general public so people would kind of turn our direction, maybe click on our website, read a book here and there, and just try to find ways to get speakers in.
Maybe I... I underestimated what was coming, but I never foresaw the amount of violence that we've seen over the last year or so, especially from the left. I never foresaw that, but I knew that when I started seeing that, that the more we grew, the more they were going to escalate things.
Because the more they felt trapped and threatened and they felt like they had no place to go.
And the culture is rapidly changing in front of our eyes.
There is no longer this hegemonic corporate media that's telling us what to think.
And students are pushing back even if they're not cognizant of race and the arguments.
I think many young people are very skeptical with many of the other aspects of cultural Marxism, this gender fluidity and all this other weird stuff, non-judgmentalism and post-modernism.
There is this huge cultural backlash against all of that that's going on right now that is causing the For the first time, kind of a new paradigm in which things can finally shift and pivot.
And I think many of those individuals in another two, four, five years are going to be right there with us.
And I think that the left and the people in academia, they're aware of that, I think, more so than the alt-light Or these other civic nationalists are themselves.
I knew that I would always be facing an uphill battle.
I did not see things going this quickly.
I thought that at most I might be the strange kid on campus, maybe get called some mean names or something like that, which was fine.
But I never foresaw the alt-right movement growing the way it had, and this has been very shocking and very surprising to me.
But we gotta go where the battle is, and right now I think the battle is being waged on college campuses, and it's being waged not even necessarily on race, but just for free speech, just the ability to engage in public dialogue without being violently assaulted.
It's certainly true that college campuses are just the worst examples of this kind of totalitarian thought that dominates the left.
And that's why your work, I think, is particularly important.
Throwing a hand grenade into the situation there.
Just any kind of disruption of this utterly uniform view of the world.
And I'm very glad to hear that, in your view, young people are finally getting fed up with all of this.
I know that when mainstream media ask me about the rise of this dissident movement, they all seem to think that Donald Trump sort of helped it all come out of the woodwork.
I don't think that's really necessarily true.
It seems to me that people were beginning to shuck these crazy ideas long before Donald Trump, and Donald Trump could never have appeared or he could disappear tomorrow.
And our movement would continue to grow.
What in your view has been, however, the role of Donald Trump in this rising up, as you see it, of a kind of consciousness that's prepared to overthrow all of this silliness that's being shoved down our throats?
The alt-right was definitely growing before Donald Trump even threw his hat in the ring.
In fact, one of the reasons why I was willing to kind of be public and put my name out there Was simply because I was seeing this change on the internet.
I had started off on Twitter several years ago, and I could only find maybe half a dozen other accounts that were pro-white.
And over a period of about six to nine months, I just saw one account after another after another, and I just saw this rapid growth.
And I said, you know what? Something's happening here.
I'm seeing something happen.
Now is the time.
I think social media has really changed everything.
It's creating a great disruption in the system.
It would have continued growing without him.
I would have to say I do think that he gave it a little bit of a boost.
Many young people do not get into politics until maybe the age of, say, 18 to 25.
And so I think for many individuals, it was the first political campaign they were very interested in.
And it was the first time they found themselves Reading a lot of articles on the internet and watching a lot of videos and becoming passionate about the future of society.
And I think that many who started there, and we actually, it's not just I think this, we actually saw this after the election, after Trump won, there were a lot of individuals who were very pro-Trump, That by the time he was elected, had made that full transition.
Not when he started, but towards the end, had finally started watching some of your videos, Red Ice and many of these other groups on the internet.
And they ended up joining Identity Europa shortly after.
That's an interesting observation.
When I was in college, it was Richard Nixon and Humphrey and all those candidates.
I would think that, as a matter of fact, the fact that we did have Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, who were different in so many respects, And there was so much frenzy about the possibility of someone like Donald Trump winning, that would have attracted the attention of young people in a way that a more humdrum campaign would not have.
And so, in that respect, Trump probably was useful in getting people interested in politics, and then he did have a tinge of the bad boy about him on some of these issues on which we're not supposed to have any dissident views.
So I suppose in that respect, if you are weaned onto politics at a particular age, and the political contest on which you were weaned to politics happened to be the Trump-Clinton contest, that really would perhaps add an impetus to going down the bad boy direction, going down the bad boy road.
I don't know. Perhaps you're right.
I think so, but I think it wouldn't be correct to say that the alt-right wouldn't exist without him.
We were definitely growing at a very rapid pace before, and we will continue to grow even without him.
I've told many people, as of right now, I'm off the Trump train.
I wanted to see him do more.
I think it's true.
Well, yes, we could spend a whole broadcast talking about the disappointments of Donald Trump.
But to get back to your activity, in the time left to us here, can you describe a little bit about your involvement in and what led up to what's been known as the Battle of Berkeley?
What's your role in that? What's your reflections on that?
And how you see this as perhaps a harbinger of things to come in terms of Antifa versus racial consciousness?
Yeah, Berkeley is a special place for me in particular because when we first launched Identity Europa, Richard Spencer was kind enough to come out with us and talk to students.
We went to Scroll Plaza, which has a plaque in the center of the plaza that says, whoever stands here can speak freely.
That was a huge moment for us and that was really what set things off and helped Identity Europa become the organization it was today.
We started having people join left and right.
So Berkeley has always been kind of a special place for me as well as it's very well known the culture of Berkeley is even several notches More nepotistic ideologically and politically than other universities.
And so that's where you want to go.
You want to take the flight to the enemy.
We had spent a lot of time putting up flyers at the college over the last year.
Actually, during the inauguration, I was covering for Red Ice.
While I was talking to a student of Hispanic heritage and one of Asian heritage, I was actually maced by one of these Antifa people at their counter demonstration there.
This is my own backyard.
This is a place that has a lot of meaning for me in particular.
I actually went to the Milo event that was shut down where these Antifa people actually did, I think it was about $100,000 worth of damage to the college and the businesses in the general area.
I was there.
I was actually filming with a Japanese film crew.
And they were going to follow me around just like CNN had followed me around at UC Davis, another event here in Northern California that was shut down by Antifa.
And I knew it was going to be bad.
I figured it would actually probably be worse than UC Davis, which had about 50 to 100 of these Antifa people.
But I had no clue it was going to be as bad as it was.
And when we got there was right when they had lit the generator on fire in the middle of Sproul Plaza.
And I remember just seeing these flames shooting up probably about 40 feet in the air from the middle of the plaza.
And we were walking up on the back of the crowd and immediately I noticed all these Antifa people and they're waving their anarcho-communist flags and I look at our camera crew and I look at my guys and I'm like, it's time to go.
I've seen a lot in my life.
I've been to a war zone.
I've been to prison. And that night was something that will always stay with me.
There was certainly a bloodlust in the air.
You could smell it.
These people were out for blood.
And we left and I was very disheartened.
To see that happening, I mean, it really felt, for the first time, it was kind of like experiencing perhaps what people in third world countries do on the night of a revolution or something like that.
I never thought it would be that bad.
Well, so it felt like a defeat, in other words?
Yeah. Yes, it certainly was.
I was well aware of who Antifa was prior to that, but I was very concerned with the people who had showed up who didn't know who they were.
We saw the video and film coming out as we met at a local pub, and we were just watching the situation unfold.
And it was after that that I said to myself and I said to the other guys around me, we cannot let these people continue to do this.
We have to find a way to continue to push back, no matter how crazy or violent these people get.
And it was not long after that that there was a There was actually an event held for free speech at a park down the street from the college.
And the same thing happened. These Antifa people came out and used violence.
And I was actually unaware that that event was even going to happen.
Otherwise, I would have been there.
And after finding out about that event, I was like, okay, I'm not missing this next one.
I'm going to go there. I'm going to ensure that the people who are there can Well, so it was the experience at Milo's speech being shut down at Berkeley that, to some degree, tilted you into that kind of more confrontational direction, is that correct?
To the point where I realized, yes, we were going to have to make a stand.
It was now or never. And we were going to have to stand with other people who might not even share our views.
In most cases, they didn't.
But we had to ensure that they had the ability to speak because if they were unable to speak, then we certainly weren't going to ever have a chance to speak.
And we have been gearing up to kind of protect speakers at these events.
I think Auburn with Richard Spencer, we had a lot of people there who were ensuring his safety.
And we are adapting to this new climate and finding ways to overcome.
And we were able to actually Have the police at Auburn use anti-masking laws to disempower Antifa who feel emboldened by their anonymity.
Their whole thing is the black block and they wear nothing but black so they all look alike and they wear these masks so that they can just jump back into the crowd after assaulting someone.
We're finding new ways and new strategies to deal with these individuals, to find ways to move forward.
It's been very impressive the amount of success we've had.
Well, it's great. My approach has always been more educational rather than confrontational.
And it's great to see all the different approaches, not just in terms of groups, but in terms of what appears on the internet, all of the different...
Podcasting and video production, websites, articles, movements.
I think this is a really exciting time.
And again, I congratulate you on being part of the movement in a particular way that I think is attention-getting and effective and is probably bringing many, many people to our way of thinking all the time.
One of the best things that's going on right now that's different, I think, from the past, especially in the 60s and 70s with individuals like Arthur Jensen, when he was being shouted out and whatnot, was that nowadays the alternative media has exposed these Antifa people and has created among their ranks a horrible PR problem.
And if you look at any of these videos online, on the internet, of these people, if you look at the comments section, it is almost unanimously against them.
And so things really are changing and I truly believe that if we keep moving forward, every time we hold an event, it forces them to expose themselves and their ugliness and the fact that their ideas Can only exist in a world of censorship.
And so this is something that's truly exciting to be part of.
And I'm just truly honored to stand with other great men and women who are willing to take a stand and say, you know, enough is enough.
We're not going to take your bullying.
And it is time to talk about these truths.
Well, great. I absolutely salute what you've been doing.
I think it's wonderful. I wish you every success in the future, and I really appreciate you coming on this podcast.
It's been a real pleasure talking to you.
Definitely. Likewise. Thanks for having me on, Jared.
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