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Sept. 21, 2020 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
44:28
Nick Fuentes: "Generation Z: The Answer to the Boomer Problem" (2018)
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Our next speaker may very well be the youngest person who's ever addressed on American Medicine Arts Conference.
I believe he is not yet 20, is that correct?
That he is not yet 20, 19 years old.
Nicholas Fuentes, and he has a nightly YouTube commentary program called America First.
I'm lucky to get one video out a week.
He does it nightly.
Hats off to the energy of you.
Well, Nicholas Fuentes will speak to us today about Generation Z, his generation, as a problem, as a solution to the problem of the boomer generation.
Well, as a member of the boomer generation, I do plead guilty.
We have made a terrible mess of just about everything we laid our hands on.
And so I very much look forward to the solution and please welcome Nicholas Swain.
Thanks so much.
Before I get started, I just want to say, what a really great conference.
I mean, driving up here, it's a great property, a great facility we have.
And I remember I went to a conference earlier this year in March.
I went to CPAC, and if any of you guys went there, it was at the National Mall, or excuse me, the National Harbor in Washington, D.C. Really friendly people.
At the National Harbor, it's like Disneyland.
It's something that would make Roger Scruton cry in terms of postmodern architecture, Ferris wheel, lights.
It's also like Pakistan in terms of the population.
It really is great to be here on a beautiful property.
And also before I get started, I want to give a big shout out to Jared Taylor and really say thank you.
He's over there for everything that he does.
Thank you.
I think we really take for granted something like American Renaissance, where it's not flashy, it's not the most sexy thing in the world, but it's something that's robust, it's stable, it's durable, it's there.
And we've had a very rough year, I think, since Charlottesville and in the past couple of months, and American Renaissance is here charging on every year.
There's no boxes, there's no other issues, and so we really are appreciative of what Jared Taylor does.
To get into my speech, my talk today is about the generations.
My talk today is called Generation Z, The Answer to the Boomer Problem.
And admittedly, it's a bit of a risky title, given the audience here.
I know you can look to the left and right.
There's a lot of boomers here.
And so then I'm calling them a problem.
It's a little bit...
You can look at the person that runs the conference.
Also a boomer.
And so...
A little bit difficult.
But nevertheless, we're here to talk about the generations and why Generation Z presents, I think, a really great opportunity to answer a lot of the pernicious social trends that have been started by the boomers.
And before I get into that, I will say it's very striking how, in this movement in particular, you really do see the juxtaposition of these two generations.
You see in this audience, I think in a lot of...
Alt-right, dissident-right audiences, people who are aware of these issues.
You really do see, I think, a lot of people that cluster towards the older side, a lot of people that cluster towards the younger side.
We have a lot of the old guard, people who remember what it was like before what has happened, which has been a real disaster in the last 50 years, and a lot of young people who wish they remember what it was like before this terrible disaster.
And I think that speaks to...
The cyclical nature of the generations.
This is something that Strauss talked about.
This is something that many historians, Hegel, I think, started at talking about the cyclical nature of history.
How we have a lot in common.
I think Generation Z and the generation which immediately preceded the boomer generation, which was the silent generation.
I think that's why it's such a great contrast between the boomers.
And Generation Z. They are the beginning of a cycle and the beginning of a new cycle, or the end of a cycle.
They're opposite ends of the spectrum.
Now, I will say, before I get into it, because I'm going to say some pretty nasty things about the boomers.
We have to lay at their feet, I think, a lot of responsibility for what has gone on socially, culturally, economically.
But I will say, you guys are cool.
If there's any boomers in this room...
You guys are the good ones.
You guys are cool.
Not a problem.
With that said, we have to acknowledge the elephant in the room, which is the boomer generation and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
And it's not all of you, but it is a lot of you.
We've seen with the boomer generation born between...
1946 and 1964, this is classically defined.
This 18-year gap is when the baby boomers were born.
We've seen the destruction of the country demographically.
We see mass migration.
We see the pillaging of our economy.
With free trade, we saw this with NAFTA.
It was attempted with the TPP.
We saw it with bubbles, housing bubbles, the Great Recession, centralized banking.
They've done all this harm to the country.
I think a lot of it can be pinned on them, the infiltration of the media and academia by liberals.
And if all of that wasn't enough, I mean, that's a lot.
And if all of that wasn't enough, now they're going to be annoying online.
Now they're going to be responding to videos, Facebook posts.
With the caps lock on in all capital letters.
They'll still be using impact text memes from 2005.
And so it wasn't enough.
They ruined the country, and now they're going to comment on your Facebook page, you know, I love my beautiful grandson in all capital letters.
And, you know, we love him.
We love him.
We look at the boomer problem, and it's not really a people problem.
I think this is one of the big mistakes people make when they talk about it.
The boomer generation, when we talk about them as a group, this is a big group.
This is everybody born in the United States of America for an 18-year period.
That's a lot of people.
And certainly there are, I think, a big amount of diversity between the boomers geographically.
Economically, in terms of urban versus rural.
We can look at a lot of boomers, I think, from around Tennessee.
Very different from the kind of boomers you get in the suburbs of Chicago, where I'm from.
A little bit different.
So it's not so much the people we're looking at, not so much individual boomers.
So much as it is, we're looking at the social trends started by the boomers.
And the reason I don't totally say it's the people's fault is because a lot of this is a consequence of communication, technology, all kinds of innovations that have happened as a result of history.
And we are, I think, in many ways, slaves to destiny, to the slow march of history in all kinds of elements and all kinds of regions.
So we're going to look at three big social trends started by the boomers.
We're going to talk about that problem and then why Generation Z is a solution to it.
So the first thing, the first boomer problem, the first issue that they've caused is the destruction of racial identity in the country.
And we're going to start from very broad conceptions of identity and then go all the way down.
And the biggest, of course, is race.
We all know what's going on in the country.
We've all seen the same statistics.
We're all worried about the same future.
Where if present trends continue, depending on which statistics you look at, by 2050, by 2065, by 2072, the white population will be less than a majority of the country.
Again, it varies by which estimate you look at.
It could be 43%, it could be a little less.
Some say in Canada, within 100 years, they could be less than 20% of the population.
We understand very clearly in this room, I think all of us, what's going on with race.
And a lot of people will boil this down to the 1965 Immigration Act.
And of course, this is what inaugurated mass migration.
This is the reason why the amount of immigrants, the volume of immigrants, and the kind of immigrants has changed so rapidly.
It's a direct consequence of this law.
And a lot of people go back to it.
A lot of people understand this.
This is really ground zero.
Of mass migration.
But of course, this was not the responsibility of the boomers.
The sponsors of this bill, the people that wrote it, the people behind it, the intellectual backing behind it, was not created by boomers.
But really, the 1965 Immigration Act was not the decision point.
We understand, and if you know anything about the 1965 Immigration Act, This was sold under false pretenses.
This was not something that was popularly supported.
The sponsors of it had to lie to get it through.
You look at Ted Kennedy, and he explicitly lied about what would happen.
He said the amount of immigrants, the kind of immigrants would not change.
And of course, both of those were untrue.
But really, we didn't see the spike in immigration from the third world until several decades later.
It didn't really take on the character it did until a few decades ago.
And so I traced the real...
The real problem back to the culture wars of the 1990s.
It's often talked about the 65 Immigration Act, not so much the culture wars of the 1990s.
Now, I was born in 1998, so I just missed it.
Just missed the Pat Buchanan brigades and all the rest.
But there are some very troubling statistics about this that tell us something about the nature of our society, that there were many referendums held in the 1990s, between 1990 and the early 2000s.
Referendums about affirmative action.
Referendums about making the English language institutionalized into the law, into state constitutions, into state law, making it so that people are required to speak English in public schools.
And with the exception of one single referendum in that period of about 15 years, every single one of them, a majority of voters, voted against mass migration, these cultural trends.
Voted in favor of English, voted against affirmative action.
And despite this, the governments, the corporations, the state legislatures and assemblies, the constitutions, all changed with the corporate interest.
And so this is why we don't totally pin it on the boomers.
It wasn't an active thing by the boomers that they inaugurated this.
They were teenagers when the law passed.
But they fell asleep at the wheel.
They fell asleep at the wheel.
And these kinds of trends which informed these...
These legal changes, these demographic changes, they go back to one very troubling, very disturbing lie about race.
And we've all heard it before when we talk about differences in race, when we talk about immigration, when we talk about affirmative action.
We always hear that we are ignorant.
We are the naive ones.
Because, of course, race is only skin deep.
This is the most pernicious lie of the boomer generation.
That race is merely skin color.
And this is one of those social trends that has been really problematic.
This is one that has been accepted by the boomers and indoctrinated by them into the young.
That we're all the same people, all pink on the inside.
We just come in different colors.
And who could be so ignorant?
Who could be so bigoted that we could hold these different views about different people just because they look different?
Not because they have different characteristics.
Not because they have different identities, different histories, different heroes, different cultures, different biologies.
And so this is one of the big problems of the boomers, is this lie about race, which is carried through into all kinds of consequences, legal in terms of immigration, in terms of demographics, in terms of culture.
The next biggest problem is that the boomers let go of the nation.
And we have to distinguish between the race and the nation.
The nation, in the classical sense, when it came to the English language, In the 18th century, into common parlance, now we see the nation as almost synonymous with the state, the country, similar words like that.
But the nation started out meaning something very specific.
The nation meant something very specific in terms of your biology, in terms of your ancestry, in terms of your culture, your language, your religion, the kind of art you created, the kind of music you listened to, the kind of customs and mannerisms that you had.
Now we don't see it so much that way, but that's classically how the nation was defined.
And we look at boomers as custodians of the nation, custodians of their communities and of their families.
And whether we see good families here today or good people here today, by and large, the boomers failed in their stewardship of the nation.
We look at communities, and if you've read a really great book, which I encourage everybody to read, I'm sure many have read in this room, a book called Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam.
He talks about how the civic institutions in this country, religious institutions, fraternal institutions, organizations in the community, the PTA, bowling groups, All went on to decline, starting around the middle of the last century.
So we really saw the destruction of the community.
And you start to see how, in many ways, all of these issues really are reciprocal.
We look at the mass immigration trend, the destruction of race, and can we see how it informs, how that has influenced the destruction of the community?
For example, you look at a city like Chicago, or a city like New York City, or Los Angeles.
In Los Angeles, you have hundreds, thousands of languages being spoken by many different racial and ethnic groups.
In the various enclaves in Los Angeles.
And we see how these are reciprocal in that it is very difficult to build a community.
It is very difficult to build a fraternal organization, a PTA, a soccer league even, if you don't even speak the same language as your neighbors.
If you don't even share the same customs, you don't go to the same church, you don't share the same artwork.
Maybe if you say a certain word, that could cause a very big falling out between people.
So we see how these various kinds of identities are.
Reciprocal. So they saw the destruction of the community.
In many ways, America was built on these civic, secular institutions away from governments.
Tocqueville wrote about this in Democracy in America, how the strength of the American Republic was found not in the state, not in the broader nation like in France or in Germany, but in these local organizations.
And these all came apart around the middle of the century.
The other part of the nation, the foundational building block of the nation that the boomers failed in their stewardship of was the family.
We see in the 1970s and the 1980s divorce rates skyrocket.
And actually, curiously enough, if you look at any of the data on divorces or marriages in the country, the divorce rates have actually leveled out in the past decade or so.
They've gone down for the population at large.
They've gone down for the younger generations.
And surprise, surprise, this fantastic generation of baby boomers, they've seen their divorce rates double and triple in the last 10 years, whereas it had been a very big problem for a long time.
We start to see it fade away.
They're actually going up as they go older.
And we see why.
We see why communities have gone away.
We see why families have gone away.
And we see, and I'll talk about in a moment, why that's such a challenge, why that's such a trouble.
And the biggest problem is because the boomers were centered on the self.
Marriage is unhappy.
You're having a tough time with the wife.
You're staying a little bit too late at work or you're going to bars.
The spark just isn't there.
Well, neither partner's really happy, so let's call the quits.
We're not happy now.
We don't have this transient experience of happiness or pleasure or satisfaction, so we're done.
We made a commitment.
Until death do us part, but we don't like it right now, so we're calling the quits.
Never mind the kids, never mind the commitment, never mind an allegiance to a higher creator, we're calling the quits.
And this is one of those trends I think we'll see is the me part, and we'll get into that in the next phase.
But the reason why the family destruction has been so horrible, so destructive, you think about a society in terms of a very clinical, very abstract analysis.
We can talk about fiscal policy, we can talk about immigration, we can talk about the banks.
But at the end of the day, a society is only as strong as its families.
A society is the individuals that comprise it.
And every individual is only as strong as the parents who raised them, the parents who gave them virtues, the parents who gave them education, who taught them right from wrong, what it means to be a man or a woman, what it means to be an upstanding member of Knoxville, Tennessee, or Chicago, Illinois, or the United States of America.
So as the boomers have seen the destruction and the decline of the family, we really see these ripple effects where the boomers and their children are probably a lot worse off given this compound effect.
The boomers don't raise their children adequately, these parents don't raise their children adequately, and so on and so on.
And you see this ripple across time horizontally and vertically where this is having a lot of adverse consequences.
The last major issue, the last worst, I think the worst and the narrowest, We talk a lot about race in this movement,
and I think that's because it's very visible, and I think it's a very secular component of what's going on, but a big problem is the destruction and the decline of religion in America.
And I think very few people are willing to say this, but I think you see the destruction of the race, the family, the nation, all of them are rooted in the destruction of the spirit.
With the boomer generation in the 1960s and 70s, we see things like the sexual revolution.
We see sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
We see the rejection of the church, the rejection of its restrictive, constrictive, and oppressive social morals and customs.
You look at any graph about church attendance, regular church attendance, and it goes from the greatest generation and the silent generation up here.
Down to the boomers all the way down here.
Something like 23% of boomers in their younger adulthood said that they attended church regularly.
And you think about this loss of communion with God.
You think about the loss of the nucleus of the society.
And think about it in terms of the other levels of organization.
You think about it in terms of the community.
Very difficult to have a community when you're not able to have reconciliation, when you're not able to have communion with them every Sunday.
Right on time at church, where you say, in the Catholic tradition, peace be with you, you shake hands, you get all dressed up and you talk.
It's very hard to have communion when you lose that kind of organization.
It's very hard to have families.
It's very hard to find a good justification for families, for the individual, if not for religious values.
Of course, when boomers go off the reservations, away from sexual morality, they say, that's all stuffy, that's all oppressive.
We just want to dance.
We just want to do our drugs.
Have a little fun.
Hang loose.
And I saw on Twitter, Christina Hoffsommers tweeted something like this.
And Christina Hoffsommers, you could say she's kind of right-wing, relatively right-wing.
She fashions herself as kind of a right-wing free speech icon.
But she tweeted sometime in the last month, To my generation, to the younger generation, let loose.
When we were kids, we had sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and you guys are so stressed out.
Chill out, man.
And you think about that kind of mentality, and maybe we can say, we can watch our movies, we can listen to the Rolling Stones and the Beatles.
We can say, hey, does it really do anybody that much harm if we're just having a good time?
The saints are the boring people there in heaven.
We'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints, as Billy Joel said.
But you look at how society has become completely unmoored from the social, particularly religious norms and the consequences it has on the family and on the community.
Lastly, you look at race in terms of religion and what has bound together European and American civilization in the last millennium quite like Christendom, quite like Christianity.
We've seen the Great Crusades.
We saw the Siege of Vienna in 1683 when the Polish came to the rescue of the Austrians.
We look at the defense, the shared virtues, values, customs that had to be defended from the Ottoman Empire, from the various caliphates.
We look at in the Cold War, you know, a lot of them were, I mean, of course, they were orthodox in the Soviet Union and traditionally orthodox, but there was a great deal of unity in this country rallying around a moral cause.
It wasn't just about ideology.
At the end of the day, it wasn't about what kind of economic system you wanted.
It was about the fact that we were fundamentally good.
We were a Christ-loving people.
And the people in the Soviet Union were butchers.
They were not humanitarians.
And so we look at the loss of God in the individual.
And in many ways, we can attribute that to these higher levels of identity, whether they be family, community, nation, or race, which have been lost.
And this is because of materialism and because of the idea of the me generation.
The boomer, you know, we have these stereotypes online that the boomer is concerned about the gross domestic product.
The boomer is concerned about the money.
The boomer is concerned about the taxes, about the management of the fiscal policy and the state.
But, of course, all these things mean nothing to us.
The boomer is concerned about himself.
The boomer is concerned about we're not happy in our marriage, so we split.
We're not happy in our community, in our town, so we split.
We're not happy with our country, so we go somewhere else.
But this generation, Generation Z, is re-embracing what it means to have a community-oriented mentality, to have a community, a racial, a communitarian consciousness.
And so a lot of it can be attributed to that loss of God for the individual.
And this, I think, encapsulates the problem with the boomer.
You see the loss of these identities at every level, from race to nation to community to family, down to the individual.
We see where this comes from at the root causes.
And this is where we are today.
This is the problem where we are.
I think many people oversimplify it when they say it's simply a policy issue.
If we only passed this law, if we only passed this immigration law, if we only passed this tax law, if we changed the immigration composition this much, then we could save this statistic or that statistic.
We could get the demographics just right.
But, of course, it's a much deeper-seated problem than all of this.
Our task is nothing short of rebuilding our civilization from the ground up, from the very and the most fundamental levels of individual human identity, which is spirituality all the way on up.
And that's the problem.
But we are here to talk about solutions.
We all know about the problem.
We all know about the boomer.
And, of course, I will reiterate, I think we're concluding with the boomer bashing segment.
So I will come back and say, remember, the people in here, the boomers here, the asterisk is not you guys.
Of course, you guys are the good ones, and we like you.
But we're here to talk about solutions.
And the solution lies...
And Generation Z. There's been a lot of debate in this movement about how viable Generation Z will be for the country.
I think this has been a meme for a long time, and lately it's taken a lot of hits because of the Tide Pod challenge.
That's been a real obstacle to this generation.
David Hogg and the Parkland shooters, they have set us back.
I think Tide Pods, Fortnite...
David Hogg, these are the horsemen of the Generation Z apocalypse, really set us back a long way.
But if I can give you, I think, a little bit more of a contextual analysis of Generation Z and why I'm so optimistic about them, and I'm from Generation Z, I come to you as a representative of Generation Z, I think we can look and find that there's a tremendous opportunity here.
And the first reason I think that is because if you look at any of the statistics on Generation Z, they're very different from the preceding generation of Millennials.
The Boomers don't like the Millennials.
This is the perpetual war.
You talk about warfare that goes on forever.
You talk about the 100 Years War.
I don't think there's been a nastier war in history than this dialectic between the Boomers and the Millennials.
The Boomers who shake their fists and say, get a job.
Get out of your mother's basement.
Put down the video games.
Time to grow up.
And the millennials just say, you know, you just don't understand.
It's pretty rough out there.
But Generation Z is very different than the millennials.
If you're looking at any of the data, Pew Research, Gallup, any of the data, very encouraging signs just in the numbers.
For example, you look at church attendance.
We go back to spirituality is a big problem.
Whereas for the boomers, you had this tremendous decrease from greatest generation and silent generation down to something like 21% for the boomers.
Say they go to church on average as young adults.
For Generation Z, that number is more than 40%, more than double.
Every generation since the boomers goes down and down and down.
Generation Z is more than double before the degeneration started.
So in that regard, it's already a more religious generation.
We look at any of the numbers about risk aversion.
We look at any of the numbers about their attitudes on pot, on social issues like transsexuals, homosexuals, anything like that.
And although it's difficult, we have tended to not be so successful in the culture wars.
Although Generation Z is much more open to those kinds of things than previous generations, they're a lot less enthusiastic about it.
A lot less enthusiastic.
And I think that's something to work with there.
Perhaps the most white-pilling, the most optimistic number that I've come across, and maybe you've seen this number as well, there was a survey that was conducted by the Hispanic Heritage Foundation after the 2016 election.
And they surveyed high school students around the Generation Z generation, people who weren't old enough to vote yet.
And they said, how would they have voted in the 2016 election if they were of age?
And strikingly, if you look at...
White voters.
White Generation Z high school voters.
This blew me away.
I had to go in and check with the mainstream sources because it was almost too optimistic to believe.
48% said they would go for Trump.
11% said they would go for Hillary Clinton.
And you think about what that represents in terms of Trump versus Hillary, in terms of Republican versus Democrat.
In past years, I wouldn't have said that would have meant very much.
If 48% of young people said they would have gone for Mitt Romney, that doesn't really mean anything to me.
They go for low taxes, you know, big whip.
They go for hedge funds and the stock market getting richer, and big whip, but they're for amnesty.
With Donald Trump, we see a candidate who represented something different.
With Donald Trump, whether he was totally on our side, and many people have talked on this issue, Jared Taylor is one of them, Spencer, others talk about this.
Donald Trump was implicitly, almost intuitively, calling back to that traditional America.
It was about revanchism.
It was about nostalgia for the way America used to be, and all the ways you're not allowed to say.
And so I think you look at a number like that, 48% versus 11%, and the numbers are all there.
Additionally, not just on the quantitative side, but on the qualitative side.
You look at the formative events of Generation Z, the formative historical events in their lives.
And this is what really, really made me optimistic about this generation.
You look at the boomers and why things have gone the way they have in terms of immigration and demographics.
And it's not surprising to see why they believe the things they do about race.
When they were growing up in the 1950s and the 1960s, even the 1970s and 80s, They saw real racial discrimination, real injustice.
And it's debatable how long that's gone on.
I think we saw the worst of it in the 50s and 60s as the civil rights era took on a very successful tone.
But they really saw the real kind of racism that we here talked about on BuzzFeed, on MSNBC.
That was when it was really happening.
And so you talk to an older generation, somebody from an older generation today, about these racial issues.
It's a lot harder, I think, for them to sympathize with us because they've seen the other side of the coin.
They've seen the actual not-so-good part of it.
They've seen the excess of it.
Additionally, they grew up in a country that was demographically homogeneous.
It's very difficult to communicate to the boomer these kinds of projections that we see in the future because it is so outside of their experience.
People who grew up in a country, it was built by small towns, it was built by people who looked the same, talked the same, had the same mannerisms, and the idea that America would ever be not that way, the idea that it would be so radically transformed, I think is so outside their experience,
it's difficult for them to relate to that, to sympathize with that.
Generation Z, on the other hand, if you look at the formative events in our lives, this is the first generation that is one generation removed from any kind of real racial discrimination.
The racism we hear talked about all day long on television, in the media, on the internet, by the liberal politicians, never seen it.
As somebody was born in 1998, when I went up through kindergarten, through grade school, through high school, there was no talk about white teachers discriminating against black students.
There was none of that.
It just didn't exist.
And so when you look at the formative events for the young people, you have this rhetoric on the one hand.
Which says the society is one way.
And you have every single one of our lived experiences, which is increasingly we're coming face-to-face with real diversity and all its consequences, and we know what it means.
This great dissonance between what we're told and what we experience, I think there is the hope in this gap of how Generation Z can come to understand what's going on.
Thank you.
And it's difficult because we see a lot of Generation Z and a lot of them are very liberal.
But as they grow up, as they come of age through college, as they get acquainted with our new neighbors, our new friends in the country, I think they will come to understand through personal experience just the way the world works.
Now, the last point on this, we see very encouraging signs.
We see very good things.
About the country in terms of the statistics, in terms of the formative events.
A lot of this is theoretical.
A lot of this is projected in the future.
But by no means is it a guarantee.
What we have is an opportunity, not a guarantee.
And so while this generation is primed for reform, this generation is primed for, I think, a real counter-revolution in terms of ideology, in terms of race, in terms of all these other things.
It has to be actualized.
We have to keep our foot on the gas.
We cannot fall asleep at the wheel as the previous generations have.
I will say I'm especially encouraged by exactly what we're fighting for in the sense that this is a cause that speaks to us.
This is our home turf.
What we're fighting for is our families.
We're fighting for our God.
We're fighting for our ancestors.
We're fighting for posterity, for our children.
We see what has gone on in this country for 50 years.
It's not mismanagement.
It's not neglect.
It's not unintended consequences.
It is evil.
It is deliberate.
it is by design.
Thank you.
And that is something that is worth fighting for.
You look at the young people that are gathered outside.
You look at the real winners outside.
And I guess not very many of them showed up.
Fortunately, we have very robust security.
What are they fighting for?
What are they fighting for?
Some ethereal, abstract concept of postmodern, liberation, theological justice.
I'm sorry, I don't see that as a very strong motivating factor.
We are willing, at the end of the day, I think we are and we must be willing, to give our lives for this cause because it is meaningful, because it is important to us.
They do not care.
They do not have a great motivating cause.
And lastly, I will end with a personal anecdote.
No secret the reputation of this conference, because we have kind of this occupied media, this occupied country.
It has become a liability to many of us to be involved with these kinds of organizations, these conferences, these groups, with our real identities, our real faces attached to it, because there is such a stigma to telling the truth.
And to speak on the point of things that we're willing to fight and really die for, I was told by just about everybody I knew, and I have some connections, In this movement, I have many connections in the establishment as well.
Many people begged and pleaded, Nick, you have no idea what you're doing.
You can't go to the American Renaissance Conference.
These people, we may agree with them, we may like what they're saying, but not a good career move.
It's not a good look.
We've all heard this kind of thing.
You'll never be a Fox News intern.
You'll never be a pundit.
And can you believe it?
I was at the Leadership Institute just last year trying to climb the ranks.
I was with Cassie Dillon trying to get a job at the Daily Wire and Ben Shapiro.
Do you know how much Paul Ryan would love somebody like me with my last name?
I am the dream.
Of these conservatives, the pro-amnesty, they talk about natural conservatives.
If I were up there on Fox News talking about how we should gut the middle class with low taxes and free trade, I come on with a mariachi band and my Hispanic last name.
I'm the biggest selling point in a hundred years.
But I rejected the establishment, and I came here, and I think all of you came here for the same reason, because we don't have the luxury.
We don't have the luxury to worry about money.
We don't have the luxury to worry about the material.
Because time is not on our side.
And if we don't succeed, if we don't win, the consequences will be catastrophic for ourselves, for our people, for everyone that we love.
And so I'll end with a quote right here by the Venerable Fulton Sheen, who was a great Catholic Archbishop back in the day.
And he said something very poignant in his book, The Life of Christ, and I think it speaks to what motivates us all to be here, where we should aim, how we can bring Generation Z up, the kind of fighting spirit we need.
He said, quote, And I think the cause is just enough that we can do that.
Generation Z, you are our last hope.
I will lead you, but it will be a fight.
Thank you.
Thank you.
What a tremendous promise you have.
It's really remarkable.
It's not a compliment, it's simply a statement.
I think it was Evelyn Wall who said that every generation is a conspiracy against the previous generation.
And so, you know, this is a natural phenomenon.
But you both overestimate and underestimate the guiltiness of the boomer generation.
You said that they...
They embraced their idea because they saw discrimination.
Well, first of all, that's largely false.
But also, no, they did what they were told, as most people do.
One of the myths found in sustaining us of the system is that each generation is told that it's being given new ideas, that the previous generation believed all these bad things.
That's not true.
When I was in high school, elementary school, I heard exactly what you and other students heard.
It was their leftist.
They also embraced these things, not because they saw discrimination, because we lived in a very segregated and happy society.
They embraced it because they didn't actually have to experience mixing with other races.
They embraced it out of ignorance.
I think it's fine to copy our enemies and engage in a selling technique of presenting a Z generation with the idea that they're different.
Just in my generation, the new left is a generational thing by saying don't trust me when we're 30. The fact is, this is not a generational thing.
This has deep, deep pathways.
It goes deep into American history.
Way back to McKinley and Lincoln and the revolution.
We can't go back and start to go.
Anyway, I don't mind the use of a generational gimmick, but I think you really have not gauged where we come from.
Thank you.
Thank you.
First of all, congratulations on an amazing speech.
You're one of the ones I take away with me.
I'm obviously a boomer.
I know something about boomers.
I also know something about millennials, because I have kids.
I know nothing about Generation Z, and I don't think I was quite aware of what it was until this afternoon.
You made the point, and I completely agree with you, that There needs to be some kind of restoration of a national religion, and I mean in a structural sense, not a theological sense.
That's late for somewhere else.
But what do your generation really think about religion?
Is it going back?
You're obviously a Catholic, but you probably said that.
But are you going back to the old conservative church, or is there something new?
And the reason I ask that is I think inevitably it's going to have to be something new.
We're in a different world now.
And I'm not saying you couldn't, you know, bake in traditional Catholic values, traditional Protestant values.
But, I mean, how do you see that?
Yeah, that's a great question.
That's a really great question.
And it's difficult because we see modernism everywhere in terms of the technology, the social trends, where religion is almost on another planet for a lot of young people.
What's motivating, I think, is the fact that young people are looking, they're really striving and searching for a greater sense of purpose and identity.
And I don't think they'll find it anywhere but the church.
Now, I don't think it's inevitable that young people will come back to the church, but I think that's one of the things we have to push on them.
Because you see young people, they go into college, they're in high school.
And there are not meaningful relationships between friends, between, you know, in terms of romantic relationships, you have this hookup culture, this degenerate kind of sexual revolution ruins we're exploring.
And I don't think they're finding real existential meaning in their lives.
I don't think they'll find it economically in this world.
I think they'll have to search for it in the other realm.
The question is, will they fail?
Will they find a substitute and not be satisfied?
Or will they?
Come back to Mother Church.
I think that's largely a big question mark at the moment.
Yeah, sure.
Thanks, great question.
Yeah, that was an excellent speech.
You talked to him about Strauss, William Strauss in your book, "How to Port a Third Language on the Wire." That book has changed my life, I have to say.
I think it's very informative.
And,
How, like, they talked about Europe in 1997, I guess, and how...
In 1997, and so in...
They talked about the 1990s was a third turning and unraveling.
And then there's going to be a fourth turning, which is now in a crisis, which leads to a first turning high where people really do come together.
And I really do think it's coming to pass.
I don't know if you have any comments on that.
Well, yeah, I think it's almost inevitable.
I think a lot of the projections that are about the future, about the generations, about population, there's a lot of doomsday talk.
And granted, the stakes are very high right now, and it's looking very difficult in more ways than one.
But I think this assumes that things will be static.
When, in fact, you look at these transformative elements in our society, whether it's technology, whether it's social trends, it's moving at such a rapid pace.
I don't think anything will be very much the same as it was now in 5, 10, 15 years.
So I really do believe that all this disruption that's happening with the election, with, you know, artificial intelligence, and I'm not really an expert on that, but, I mean, you see all these things happening, all these changes happening.
I think it almost has to happen that there'll have to be a fourth turning.
So, I agree.
Sorry, that there will be a fourth turning or that we are in a fourth turning?
I think we are in a fourth turning.
I think we'll see the manifestation of that, I think, later on.
Obviously, right now, they still control the media.
They still control a lot of the institutions.
I would say I think we're in a fourth turning, and I think Eastern Europe is in a first turning, and I think it all makes sense.
Yeah, sure.
Thanks. Hi.
John Jones from San Francisco.
I'd like to congratulate you on your excellent talk.
I'd like to tell you what you don't tell us.
You don't tell us how this is going to get off the ground.
I doubt that you could, perhaps, but you don't.
And I think that's something that your speech, your talk, would be much more interesting if you could give us more of substance.
Thank you.
It's a lot of constructive criticism, which I appreciate.
But if I could answer that general point, I will say it's difficult because there is not a game plan here.
There's not one road map.
There's not a grand design that will tell us how we're going to get out of this.
We've never been in a situation quite like this before with all the factors in front of us.
But I will say it's not going to come from a mass movement.
I really am skeptical when you hear people talk about grand designs, grand nation-changing, regime-changing, organizations, movements.
It's going to come from individuals.
One of the biggest problems with the boomers was also the embrace of ideology, the embrace of Spanglerian socialism.
Oswald Spangler wrote a lot about this in Decline of the West.
He talked about socialism not as an economic system where the state controls the means of production, but socialism in the West as a social consciousness, that we are crusaders, we're reformers.
When we talk about what ought to happen, we're talking about progress, and we say people ought to do this.
For example, we talk about environmentalism.
It's not, I want to take care of litter.
It's society ought to make changes as to how we function.
It's not...
I want to give money to the poor.
Society has to fix things for the poor.
I think a large measure of how we get out of this is getting away from that mentality that if we just embrace this ideology, this movement, we're going to get out of it.
We have to rebuild virtue for individuals, individual families.
We all have to take responsibility for this revolution in our own ways.
That could be as simple as...
Having a big family, going to your PTA meeting, and living out a reasonable life in an unreasonable time.
But anybody tells you it's a big design or anything like that, I'm just very skeptical of it.
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