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Nov. 26, 2020 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
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Race and the Real United States Constitution - Sam Francis
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My name is Jared Taylor.
I'm the editor of American Renaissance, which is the publication that is sponsoring today's conference.
And anyone who wishes to get in touch with our organization is welcome to contact either the telephone number or the web page on the podium here.
Our first speaker today is perhaps the best known and perhaps the best beloved to this audience.
It's Dr. Samuel Francis.
This is the third time that he is addressed an American Renaissance conference, and it's only proper that we invite him back because in 1994, when he addressed the first American Renaissance conference, he said things that were so truthful and deviated so much from current orthodoxy that he was fired from his position as staff columnist at the Washington Times.
Such, I'm afraid, are the rewards of heterodoxy in the profession of journalism, which appears to pride itself on its two-fisted, crusading devotion to the truth.
Dr. Francis is a nationally syndicated columnist, and he writes what is probably the most popular column in Chronicles magazine, Principalities and Powers.
He's the author of Beautiful Losers, Which is a collection of essays about the failure of the American conservative movement.
And most recently, he is the author of Revolution from the Middle, which is a hard-hitting collection of his essays.
Please welcome the man that Patrick Buchanan calls the Klauswitz of the right, Dr. Samuel Francis.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
In December 1991, as Pat Buchanan announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination, the Republic was edified by the reflections of columnist George Will on the forthcoming campaign.
Mr. Will quoted from a column by Mr. Buchanan to the effect that Must we absorb all the people of the world into our society and submerge our historic character as a predominantly Caucasian Western society?
wrote Buchanan.
And then Will proceeded to explain what was wrong with Mr. Buchanan's reasoning.
Mr. Buchanan, he wrote, evidently does not understand what distinguishes American nationality.
And should rescue our nationalism from nativism.
Ours is, as the first Republican president said, a nation dedicated to a proposition.
Becoming an American is an act of political assent, not a matter of membership in any inherently privileged group, Caucasian or otherwise.
The, quote, Euro-Americans who founded this nation did not want anything like China or Arabia.
Or any European nation, for that matter.
The snottiness and pomposity of Mr. Will's prose are unique to him, but his assertion of the universalist identity of America as a nation defined by no particular racial or ethnic identity, and indeed by no particular content whatsoever,
is not unique.
The best-known formulation of the same idea is the phrase popularized by Ben Wattenberg, That America is the first universal nation.
And indeed, only this year, the new Washington editor of National Review, John J. Miller, has published a book called The Unmaking of Americans, in which he too asserts the universalist identity of the nation and uses that concept as the basis of his enthusiastic endorsement of virtually unlimited immigration into the United States.
The United States can welcome immigrants and transform them into Americans, Mr. Miller writes, because it is a proposition country.
And the proposition by which the American nation defines itself, in his view, is the sentence fragment from the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal.
And that this sentence means that, quote, the very sense of peoplehood derives not from a common language, But from their adherence to a set of core principles about equality, liberty, and self-government.
These ideas, Mr. Miller writes, are universal.
They apply to all man, humankind.
They know no racial or ethnic limits.
They are not bound by time or history.
And they lie at the center of American nationhood.
Because of this, these ideas uphold an identity into which immigrants from all over the world can assimilate.
So long as they, too, dedicate themselves to the proposition.
The idea of America as a universal nation is not confined to the contemporary right, however.
Historically, it is a core concept of the political left, born in the salons of the Enlightenment and underlying the French Revolution's commitment to universal liberty, equality, and fraternity to be imposed at the points of rather unfraternal bayonets.
And indeed today it continues to inform the American left as well as the right.
Bill Clinton himself last year cited the projected racial transformation of the United States from a majority white to a majority non-white country in the next century as a change that will arguably be the third great revolution in America.
To prove that we literally can live without, in effect, having a dominant European culture.
We want to become a multiracial, multiethnic society, the President said.
We're not going to disintegrate in the face of it.
We may disintegrate in the face of Mr. Clinton's administration, but...
More recently, in remarks at commencement exercises at Portland State University in Oregon in June...
President Clinton praised the prospect of virtually unlimited immigration as a powerful reminder that our America is not so much a place as a promise, not a guarantee but a chance, not a particular race but an embrace of our common humanity.
I readily bow to Mr. Clinton's expertise on embracing.
The idea of America as a universal nation, then, is an idea shared By an increasingly defining both sides of the political spectrum in the United States.
And the fact that the right in such persons as George Will, Ben Wattenberg, and Mr. Miller, to name but a few, share that idea with Mr. Clinton helps explain why the right today can think of nothing better to criticize the president for than his sex life and his aversion to telling the truth.
Any substantial criticism of President Clinton's globalist foreign policy, his defense of affirmative action, his policy of official normalization of homosexuality, his support for mass immigration, and in particular the national dialogue on race,
would involve a criticism and a rejection of the universalist assumptions on which those policies are based.
The common universalist assumptions of both left and right, then, are a major reason for the rapid convergence of left and right in our political life, the reason why there is not, in George Wallace's famous phrase, a dime's worth of difference between them on so many issues,
and a major reason why we are seeing the emergence not just of a one-party state in the United States, but also of a single ideology that informs the state and the culture.
As I discovered myself, those who dissent from the single ideology of a universal nation or proposition country are not allowed to express their views even in self-proclaimed conservative journals.
And it is hardly an accident that Mr. Miller himself accuses me in his recent book of what he calls racial paranoia.
Me, imagine.
And that, prior to his elevation to National Review, He had admitted that he had wanted to run me out of polite society for months, if not for years.
Nor am I the only journalist to discover that you get run out of polite society for departing from the single ideology of universalism.
Joe Sobran at National Review, the New York Post's Scott McConnell, National Review's Peter Brimelow have all met essentially the same fate for essentially the same reason.
Though all of them remain in society somewhat more polite than the one that I travel in.
But the most casual acquaintance with the realities of American history shows that the idea that America is or has been a universal nation, that it defines itself through the proposition that all men are created equal, is a myth.
Indeed, it is something less than a myth.
It is a mere propaganda line invoked to justify not only mass immigration and the coming racial revolution, But also the erosion of nationality itself in globalist trade policy and a one-world global political architecture, and indeed to justify the total reconstruction and redefinition of the United States as a multiracial,
multicultural, and transnational swamp.
Nevertheless, despite its obvious propaganda value, the myth of the universal nation or proposition country is widely accepted, and today it represents probably the major ideological obstacle to recognizing the reality and importance of race as a social and political force.
In the first place, it is simply not true, as Miller writes, that the proposition that all men are created equal and the ideas derived from it are universal and not bound by time or history.
If that were true, There would never have been any dispute about the propositions, let alone wars and revolutions fought over them.
No one has ever fought a war over the really self-evident axioms and derived propositions of Euclidean geometry.
Mr. Miller's propositions are very clearly the products of a very particular time and place, late 18th century Europe and America, and they would have been almost inconceivable 50 years earlier or 50 years later.
Nor have they ever appeared in any other political society at any other time, absent their diffusion from Europe or America.
And they are based on concepts of anthropology and history, including an entirely fictitious state of nature, a social contract, and a view of human nature as a tabula rasa, a blank tablet, that no student of human society or psychology took seriously after the mid-19th century,
or indeed takes seriously today.
Secondly, it is by no means clear what the proposition that all men are created equal does mean, either objectively or in the minds of those who drafted and adopted it in the Declaration.
Assuming that men includes women and children as well as males, does it mean that all humans are born equal, that they are equal, or that they are created equal by God?
If they are born or created equal, do they remain equal?
If they don't remain equal, why do the rights with which they are supposedly endowed remain equal?
Or do those rights remain equal?
If they are created equal by God, how do we know this?
And what does it mean?
We certainly do not know that God created all men equal from the Old Testament because most of the Old Testament is about the history of a people chosen by God and favored by him above others.
Does it mean that God created humans equal in a spiritual sense?
And if so, what does that spiritual equality have to do with political and social or even legal equality?
Or does it mean that we were created equal in some material or physical sense, that we all have one head and two legs and two arms and so forth?
If it means the latter, it is true but platitudinous.
In short, taken out of the context of the whole document of the Declaration and the historical context and circumstances of the document itself, The Equality Clause of the Declaration opens so many different doors of interpretation that it can mean virtually anything you want it to mean.
It has been invoked by Christians and free thinkers, by capitalists and socialists, by conservatives and liberals, each of whom merely imports into it whatever his own ideology and agenda demand.
Taken by itself, it has opened so many different interpretations That it has to be considered one of the most arcane, if not one of the most dangerous sentences ever written, one of the major blunders of American history.
Yet if the sentence is taken to imply that race and other natural and social categories are without meaning or importance, it ought to be clear that America as a historic society has never been defined by that meaning.
The existence of slavery at the time of the Declaration and well after, And the fact that no small number of the signers of the Declaration were slave owners themselves, and that some parts of Jefferson's original draft denouncing the slave trade were removed because they were objectionable to southern slave owners,
ought to make that plain on its face.
The particularism, as opposed to racial and otherwise, as opposed to the universalism ascribed to the Founding Fathers, The particularism that made the American people a nation was very clearly seen by John Jay in a now famous passage from Federalist No.
2. Providence, Jay wrote, has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people, a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion,
attached to the same principles of government.
Very similar in their manners and customs.
The racial unity of the nation is clear in Jay's phrase about having the same ancestors.
And with respect to the U.S. Constitution, although the words slave and slavery do not appear in the text until the 13th Amendment, when they were abolished, the Constitution, as historian William Wiesick of Syracuse Law School writes,
The Constitution is permeated with slavery.
So permeated was the Constitution with slavery, writes Professor Wiesek, that no less than nine of its clauses directly protected or referred to it.
In addition to the three well-known clauses, three-fifths, slave trade, and fugitive slave, the Constitution embodied two clauses that redundantly required apportionment of direct taxes on the federal number basis.
The purpose being to prohibit Congress from levying an unapportioned capitation on slaves as an indirect means of encouraging their emancipation.
Two clauses empowering Congress to suppress domestic insurrections, which in the minds of the delegates included slave uprisings.
A clause making two provisions, slave trade and apportionment of direct taxes, unamendable.
The latter providing a perpetual security against some possible anti-slavery impulse.
And two clauses forbidding the federal government and the state from taxing exports, the idea being to prohibit an indirect tax on slavery by the taxation of the products of slave labor.
Moreover, Professor Wiesek notes, with respect to the changes in the Constitution after the Civil War, Only by recognizing the extent to which the constitutional vision of Lincoln and the Republicans was a departure from the original Constitution can we understand the long struggles through the war,
reconstruction, and after to incorporate black Americans into the constitutional regime.
Freedom, civil rights, and equality for them were not the delayed but inevitable realization of some imminent ideal in the Constitution.
On the contrary, black freedom and equality were and are a revolutionary change in the original constitutional system, truly a new order of the ages not foreseen, anticipated, or desired by the framers.
But even aside from slavery, the persistence of clear and widespread recognition of the reality and importance of race throughout American history Shows that Americans never considered themselves a universal nation in the sense intended today.
Historian David Potter writes, The free Negro of the northern states, of course, escaped chattel servitude, but he did not escape segregation or discrimination, and he enjoyed few civil rights.
North of Maryland, free Negroes were disfranchised in all of the free states, except the four of Upper New England.
In no state before 1860 were they permitted to serve on juries.
Everywhere, they were either segregated in separate public schools or excluded from public schools altogether, except in parts of Massachusetts after 1845.
They were segregated in residence and in employment and occupied the bottom levels of income, and at least four states, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Oregon, Adopted laws to prohibit or exclude Negroes from coming within their borders.
Nor were blacks the only non-white racial group to be excluded from civic membership.
The first Naturalization Act passed by Congress under the Constitution in 1790 limited citizenship to white men.
And even after citizenship was granted to blacks through the 14th Amendment, Naturalization continued to be forbidden to Asians, to Chinese until World War II, and to Japanese until afterwards.
Racial and ethnic restrictions on immigration remained in federal immigration law until 1965 when they were removed, as Larry Oster has shown after sponsors of the reform assured opponents that removing them would not alter the ethnic and cultural composition of the nation,
an assurance we now know to have been false.
As late as the 1920s, Calvin Coolidge, then, I believe, Vice President of the United States, wrote in an article entitled, Whose Country Is This?, in the popular women's magazine, Good Housekeeping, that, quote, biological laws show us that Nordics deteriorate when mixed with other races,
unquote. Not only the white, but the northern European racial identity of the nation could thus be publicly affirmed by a leading national political figure in a widely read magazine as late as the 1920s.
What President Coolidge wrote then was by no means exotic or alien.
Thomas Jefferson's views of racial equality are probably well known to this audience.
In Notes on the State of Virginia, he discussed the significant natural differences between the races.
And while he was, at least in principle, opposed to slavery, he was adamantly in favor of forbidding free blacks to continue to live within the United States.
Nor did he favor non-European immigration, indeed even very much European immigration, into the country.
He stated in a letter that he looked forward to the day when our rapid multiplication will expand itself over the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people speaking the same language governed in similar forms and by similar laws.
Nor can we contemplate with satisfaction either blot or mixture on that surface.
Most of you have probably read Jim Lubenskis' excellent article in a recent American Renaissance on the American Colonization Society, a society that sought the expatriation of blacks to Africa and which included as members Henry Clay, James Madison,
Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, James Monroe, John Marshall, Winfield Scott, and many, many others of the most prominent American public leaders.
They may have held different views of slavery and of race, but none of them believed that free blacks should or could continue to live in the same society with whites.
Nor did Abraham Lincoln entertain egalitarian views of blacks, and his clearest statements on the subject are to be found in the course of his debates with Stephen Douglas during the Illinois senatorial campaign in 1858.
While opposing the extension of slavery to new states, Lincoln repeatedly assured his audience, In several audiences, that he did not believe in or favor civic equality for blacks.
In the debate at Charleston, Illinois, on September 18th, Lincoln said, I will say that I am not nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters of the free Negroes or jurors or of qualifying them to hold office or to intermarry with white people.
I will say, in addition, that there is a physical difference between the white and black races, which I suppose will forever forbid the two races living together upon terms of social and political equality.
And inasmuch as they cannot so live, that while they do remain together, there must be a position of superior and inferior, and that I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position being assigned to the white men.
And he repeated this and similar ideas throughout the debates.
Lincoln also was strongly in favor of expatriation of blacks and seriously explored the practicality of establishing a black settlement in Central America.
Indeed, he proposed what would have become had it passed the 13th Amendment to the Constitution permitting federal support for the colonization of blacks outside the country.
In his annual message to Congress December 1862, where Lincoln made this proposal, he said, that portion of the Earth's surface, which is owned and inhabited by the people of the United States, is well adapted to be the home of one national family,
and it is not well adapted for two or more.
Its vast extent and its variety of climate and productions are of advantage in this age for one people, whatever they might have been in former ages.
Obviously, during the war, he was thinking as a unionist of what he regarded as the inappropriateness of secession, but in the context of the proposal to colonize blacks abroad, he is also thinking of the inappropriateness of a different people or different race living in the same territory.
And his remarks are thus a fairly clear expression of what can only be called racial nationalism.
As for Stephen Douglas, he was even more outspoken on the issue of race than Lincoln.
And I read the following passage from his opening speech and the debates at Ottawa, Illinois, from the text published in 1991 by historian Harold Holzer, which has the advantage of incorporating into the text the audience's responses as recorded by the newspapers of the day.
Now I ask you, said Douglas to his audience, Are you in favor of conferring upon the Negro the rights and privileges of citizenship?
No, no, responded the audience.
Do you desire to strike out of our state constitution that clause which keeps slaves and free Negroes out of the state and allows the free Negro to flow in?
Never. And cover our prairies with his settlements?
Do you desire to turn this beautiful state into a free Negro colony?
No, no.
In order that when Missouri shall abolish slavery, she can send us these emancipated slaves to become citizens and voters on an equality with you?
Never. No.
If you desire Negro citizenship, if you desire them to come into the state and stay with white men, If you desire to let them vote on an equality with yourselves, if you desire to make them eligible to office, to have them serve on juries and judge of your rights,
then go with Mr. Lincoln and the black Republicans in favor of Negro citizenship.
Never, never.
For one, I am opposed to Negro citizenship in any form.
Cheers. I believe that this government was made on the white basis.
Good. Cheers.
I believe it was made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever.
And I am in favor of confining the citizenship to white men, men of European birth and European descent, instead of conferring it upon Negroes and Indians and other inferior races.
Good for you, Douglas forever.
Douglas, of course, was the winner of the election.
Nor even after the end of the war.
During congressional debates on the 14th Amendment, which today is considered the cornerstone of federal enforcement of egalitarian policies, even there, there is no endorsement of racial equality.
Thaddeus Stevens, whom historian Raoul Berger calls the foremost radical in Congress, was not in the least committed to black voting.
He was mainly concerned about perpetuating the domination of the Republican Party.
It suddenly began to dawn on the radicals that with the abolition of slavery, The result would be that Southern representation in Congress would be vastly increased to the point that the South,
just defeated in the war, would suddenly gain political dominance.
As Berger writes, And with the help of Northern Democrats, would have, as that is Stevens pointed out at the very outset of the 39th Congress,
a majority in Congress and the Electoral College.
With equal candor, Stevens said that the Southern states ought never to be recognized as valid states until the Constitution shall be amended as to a secure perpetual ascendancy to the Republican Party.
The 14th Amendment was passed in order to grant the federal government the authority to enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and the meaning of the language of the amendment is clarified by the debates over the earlier law.
The Civil Rights Act was mainly intended to overcome the so-called black codes imposed on blacks after the end of slavery and the war, and the act gave to the inhabitants of every race The same right to make and enforce contracts,
to sue, be parties, and give evidence, to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property until the full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property, and shall be subject to like punishment and no other.
In explaining the language of the bill to the House, Congressman James Wilson of Iowa, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, was quite explicit about the limits of the bill.
What do these terms mean?
Do they mean that in all things civil, social, political, all citizens without distinction of race or color shall be equal?
By no means can they be so construed.
Nor do they mean that all citizens shall sit on juries or that their children shall attend the same schools.
These are not civil rights and immunities.
Well, what is the meaning?
What are civil rights?
I understand civil rights to be simply the absolute rights of individuals, such as the right of personal security, the right of personal liberty, and the right to acquire and enjoy property.
Congressman James Patterson of New Hampshire, a supporter of the 14th Amendment, said much the same.
He was opposed, he said, to any law discriminating against blacks in the security of life, liberty, person, property, and the proceeds of their labor.
These civil rights all should enjoy.
Beyond this, I am not prepared to go, he said, and those pretended friends who urge political and social equality are the worst enemies of the colored race.
And Republican Senator Lyman Trumbull, Lincoln's old friend from Illinois, who drafted the Civil Rights Bill, concurred.
This bill, he said, is applicable exclusively to civil rights.
It does not propose to regulate political rights of individuals.
It has nothing to do with the right of suffrage or any other political right.
What the framers of the Civil Rights Bill of 1866 and the 14th Amendment were proposing, in other words, was simply to extend to the emancipated black slaves what is generally called equality under the law.
A concept of equality that merely recognizes the equality of citizens and does not rest on any supposition of the natural equality of human beings.
Equality under the law demands that the same fundamental civil rights belong to all citizens, what are often called the Blackstonian rights of life, personal liberty, and property, and which were generally agreed to be the content of the inalienable rights in the Declaration.
But these basic civil rights were sharply distinguished from political rights, such as voting or holding office.
The Blackstonian rights are fundamental because it is not possible for an individual citizen to function without them, to live without the security of being murdered or being abducted or imprisoned or enslaved or having his property stolen.
And if the black population was not going to be enslaved, And was not going to be colonized abroad, it was essential that they possess these fundamental civil rights simply in order to function in society.
But the Blackstonian civil rights have nothing to do with voting, holding political office, sitting on juries, racial intermarriage, getting a job or being promoted, or school segregation, which is what the concept of civil rights has come to mean today.
It would be possible to continue with an almost inexhaustible list of quotations from prominent American statesmen and intellectual leaders well into the 20th century, abjuring any belief in the equality of the races or any belief that non-white races should or can have the same political position as whites in the United States.
I will not rehearse all of them.
But my purpose in what I have said so far is not to invoke all of these institutions and ideas about race in American history as models of what we should seek to restore, or because I necessarily agree with all the views of race that have been expressed throughout our history.
Indeed, some of these views are more or less contradictory.
But I mention these facts to reinforce two points.
One, we are not and never were a universal nation or a proposition country defined by the Equality Clause of the Declaration or the bromides of the Gettysburg Address.
On the contrary, we, Americans in general and our public leaders in particular, repeatedly and continuously recognized the reality and importance of race and the propriety of the white race occupying the superior position.
And indeed, it is difficult to think of any other white majority nation in history in which recognition of the reality of race has been so deeply embedded in its thinking and institutions.
And secondly, whatever we think of that history and its recognition of race, we have to understand that the current propaganda line about being a universal nation is not only a totally false account of American history, But also is a prescription for a total rejection of the American past and the national identity as we have always known it.
Racial universalism is not simply an adjustment or a reform, let alone a continuation of the proper direction of American history, but a revolutionary reconstruction of the American identity.
In an article in 1996 in the Atlantic Monthly and later book on Thomas Jefferson, historian Conor Cruz O'Brien Demands that we eject Jefferson from our national pantheon precisely because of his views on race.
O'Brien has a point that is perfectly logical if you accept his premise that America should be, even if it never has been, a universal nation.
If indeed we are or should be a universal nation, then Thomas Jefferson must go.
If indeed race is a meaningless social construct, But let us be aware that Jefferson is not the only god who has to be dethroned.
If Jefferson must go, so must George Washington.
And indeed, Washington's name has been already removed from a public school in New Orleans because he was a slaveholder.
But Abraham Lincoln has to go as well.
And so must Theodore Roosevelt and the leaders of the American Colonization Society and the framers of the 14th Amendment and so must virtually every other president and public leader in American history.
You cannot have it both ways.
Either we define the American nation as the product of its real past and learn to live with the reality of race and the reality of the racial particularism and racial nationalism that in part defines our national history.
Or you reject race as meaningful and important as anything more than skin color and gross morphology and demand that anyone, past or present, who believes or believed that race means anything more than that must be demonized and excluded from any positive status in our history or the formation of our identity.
If you reject race, then you reject America as it has really existed throughout its history.
Thank you.
And whatever you mean by America has to come from something other than its real past.
That, of course, is exactly what President Clinton is telling us when he gloats that we literally can live without, in effect, having a dominant European culture.
We want to become a multiracial, multiethnic society.
And that also is what we are being told by contemporary liberals other than Mr. Clinton.
Last year, the New Republic...
Published an article by George P. Fletcher Cardozo, professor of jurisprudence at the Columbia Law School, in which Professor Fletcher argued that the republic created in 1789 is long gone.
It died with the 600,000 Americans killed in the Civil War.
That conflict decided once and forever that the people and the states do not have the power to govern their local lives apart from the nation as a whole.
The people have no power either to secede as states or to abolish the national government.
The reason the old republic died, according to Professor Fletcher, is that it was grounded in a contradiction that glorified the freedom of some and condoned the slavery of others.
The new constitution, he tells us, Begins to take hold in the Gettysburg Address, in which Lincoln skips over the original Constitution and reconstitutes it according to the principles of equality articulated in the Declaration of Independence.
As a matter of historical fact, Professor Fletcher is more or less correct.
The old republic and the new state that arose from it, the Civil War did destroy the old republic.
And the new state that arose from it is defined, at least today, as a universalist and egalitarian regime based on the equality proposition of the Declaration.
What he does not tell us, however, is how the new regime can be a legitimate one, since it is, by his own admission, simply the result of victorious military power and not of consent or legal authorization by the representatives of the old regime.
It is easy enough to destroy an existing constitutional order, but quite a different matter to construct and legitimate one.
Nevertheless, the significance of Professor Fletcher's article is that it makes perfectly clear what we are facing in the contemporary supporters of universalism, whether of the left, like Fletcher himself, or President Clinton, or of the right, like John Miller.
What we are facing and what they are advocating is in no sense a continuation of American history or the American national identity as it has existed throughout our history, but rather a revolutionary reconstruction of the nation,
a reconstruction that ruthlessly follows the logic of O'Brien's exclusion of Jefferson and excluding just about everything else characteristic of the old republic.
The old identity and everything associated with it have to be excluded because their embrace of non-egalitarian and non-universalist institutions are simply incompatible with the new republic.
Once we understand that, most of their actions, policies, and ideas are perfectly logical.
What they are aiming at is precisely what William Wiesek described in a passage I quoted earlier, a revolutionary change in the original constitutional system Truly a new order of the ages, not foreseen, anticipated, or desired by the framers.
And not desired by most Americans today, either.
At least not by those white Americans who grasp what is going on.
As Peter Bremelow notes in his book on Immigration, Alien Nation, Americans have simply never been asked whether they think it's a good thing for their nation to undergo the transition from a white majority to a non-white majority country.
They have indeed been lied to about the transition and being told in 1965 that it wouldn't happen.
But until President Clinton, that fountain of truth, embraced it last year, no president has even bothered to mention it.
And in the new Constitution, of which Professor Fletcher writes, there's no point in asking us about it, because the new Constitution, as he writes, explicitly does not permit the people to govern themselves.
If white Americans do indeed not desire the transition, they still have a short time to prevent it and to try to salvage what is left of the old republic and their real past, the past and the republic in which most of them still imagine that they still live.
And if they do wish to salvage it, they will have to reject, as clearly and firmly as the original framers did, the universalism and egalitarianism.
That now threaten to destroy them and their race.
Political philosophies and constitutional forms come and go.
But nations, peoples, races remain.
And without the common blood that made us a nation in the first place, there will be no American nation, no matter what abstractions and forms we vainly invoke.
Thank you.
Yes, I do.
I think Lincoln felt sorry for blacks.
He regarded them as an inferior race, and he wanted to help them, but he genuinely thought that...
Getting them out of the country would be a good way to help them.
He's fairly consistent about this, I think, both in the debates with Douglass and in what he told the delegation of black leaders in 1862 and some private remarks he made.
There's absolutely no evidence that I know of that he held any kind of egalitarian view of race.
Mr. Dixon.
Do you know, but I'm going to have a question to you about what it was going to be.
How do you swear your beliefs about Lincoln's position on race, when did the last acts of his administration, in which he was rebuking unionists, brought legislation to the South, who had drawn constitutions which did not provide for a Negro franchise,
and he wrote to them and said, out the Negro franchise, we did not control the nation.
And one final thing is that the famous quote you gave was under debate.
I would have to be proactive with such statements of Woodrow Wilson, that he kept us out of war.
In fact, in Roosevelt, his children will not be sent to fight the hard wars.
And certainly something that Lincoln would be required to say in order to get into office to carry out this program.
Well, on the latter point, I just don't see it.
I mean, he continues to make statements like that.
you know, there's the famous visit of the black delegation to the White House in 1862 where he told
He did propose the 13th Amendment that would permit Congress to raise funds for colonization abroad.
I think that his views were essential.
I don't know that he was a member of the American Colonization Society, but his views generally came out of a sort of Whig nationalism that, you know, most of the people I mentioned, people like Clay and Webster and several of those, they're all sort of Whig nationalists.
And I think Lincoln's views were a fairly conventional expression of that and a development of that.
What was your last point about Wilson?
: Oh yeah, about the board.
:...
......
...
You're talking about the Louisiana thing.
David Donald in his recent biography of Lincoln says that Lincoln did move sort of glacially toward a More, shall we say, progressive view of blacks in his last year or so.
And that he was willing, he very reluctantly came to the conclusion that some blacks should be allowed to vote in the Louisiana Constitution.
But he tended to qualify that by saying some of the more educated and property-holding blacks should vote.
That's my understanding.
Yes, sir?
Well, I'm not entirely clear.
He was not particularly interested in blacks voting.
He didn't consider the blacks had a right to vote.
His main concern was that the free blacks were going to be Basically still under the control of their former masters in the white population, and that would mean that the Democratic Party and the South with it would basically dominate the country,
and this is not what he wanted.
So you had to have something like, I guess, reconstruction or the Freedmen's Bureaus and union control of that in order to make sure that the Republicans and he himself stayed in power.
It was not a commitment to black equality or black political equality, as I understand it.
One of the problems Lincoln faced in his repatriation plans was the resistance of blacks to the idea of being relocated overseas.
Now at one point Lincoln suggested Texas Do I think blacks should be sent to Texas today?
I'm just saying that blacks somehow agree to want to do something, otherwise it would have been a forced relocation to proceed.
Well, you know, if that's true, I mean, you could, I suppose, have sort of coercive ethnic cleansing.
First of all, I mean, that's morally objectionable to most people, and to remove 12 million blacks, you know, it would take an immense amount of power to do that, and probably bloodshed, and I'm not advocating that.
And I think it's...
I think most proposals for racial separatism today are simply not practical for the very reason you mentioned that blacks and other racial groups are not going to want to go.
They have absolutely no reason to want to go.
Why would they want to go to a different country when they have as much political influence in this country as they have now and as many rewards as they have now?
I can't imagine why they would want to go to some African country or to Latin America.
Maybe even Texas, for that matter, when they can run Washington and New York or have as much influence as affirmative action and the civil rights laws give them.
I have no difficulty about understanding why liberals believe in what university mentioned, putting their jobs for it, all these jobs.
But I don't understand the business staff.
Supposedly, businessmen was, but like cheap labor, you're saying that every other business you get the same cheap labor, there's no increase in confidence.
I don't think that that's a thing that we understand.
The businessmen are supposed to be in touch, but we'll give them.
It's just kind of a colossal thing.
You assume that businessmen are rational and that they are not stupid.
And the evidence points to the falsification of your assumption.
Well, Professor Rushton is here.
He may have some genetic explanation for it.
I don't know.
I think businessmen tend to be culturally servile.
They tend to follow the intellectual fashion and the cultural facials of the day.
They simply don't challenge or have independent thoughts about the current intellectual fashion.
So they buy into what are the commonplaces of Ben Wattenberg or Bill Clinton or whatever.
I don't think they really believe it, but it's a convenient slogan to make them sound fashionable and acceptable and progressive.
I think businessmen, like politicians, are terrified of sounding unprogressive and someone might actually accuse them of being conservative or unenlightened or something.
That's the only explanation I have.
Other questions?
Yes, sir.
Dr. Francis, considering the relatively small number of your like-ranking brethren, and taking account such factors as differences in birth rates, that sort of thing, general intellectual ignorance in the fact of the very,
very, very, very history of the most American these days, aren't you sometimes inclined in your own inner depths to the view that perhaps we already reached the point of no return?
No, no.
Never occurs to me.
No, I'm not being sarcastic.
Yes, it does occur to me.
I think that's true, but I think, you know, the fact...
Oh, he says, given essentially the facts of our racial situation and the ignorance of young people and the smallness of the people who would agree with me, do I not sometimes think that it's all gone?
Is that essentially the question?
Yes, I sometimes think that, but...
You know, I recall that we have 75-74% of the population in this country and that if we wanted to, we could take the country back tomorrow.
It's simply a matter of will and of the desire to do so.
And as long as we have 75% of the population, I'm not willing to concede defeat.
When we're reduced to 40% in the next century or something, then I'm ready to negotiate.
But until then, I think we have to keep fighting for this.
Yes, sir.
Sam, given the fact that the main instrument in the transformation of the country to this universalist or multicultural utopia is immigration, and the primary overwhelming
sources of him
Yes. Yes.
and that polls show for the most part that black americans are more opposed to this than white americans even don't you see that
Black Americans are a natural ally in the effort to resist this transformation and this massive immigration.
Yeah, to some extent.
As Roy Beck argues in his book, there's no doubt that blacks, especially lower-class blacks, are especially hard hit by Hispanic immigration.
It takes their entry-level jobs away.
It interferes with what's going on in their schools.
There are many problems, like crime and indeed Hispanic racism directed against blacks.
I think that's true, but the fact is, Casey, there is no anti-immigration movement politically in this country anymore.
It's a non-issue in Congress.
I don't know of any prominent politician who, other than Buchanan if you count him, who will take an immigration reform position anymore.
And it may be that, I've argued against this for the last two years, but it may be that it's no longer politically possible to take an anti-immigration position or a restrictionist position.
Politically. That's what the Republicans think.
They think that they've lost the Hispanic vote, and if they continue to lose that, they're going to lose the majority.
They cannot possibly carry elections.
In California, that may be true, but I don't think it's quite true in the rest of the country.
But yes, I have no problem in that.
Conservative Republicans can appeal to blacks on the basis of their anti-immigration positions.
I do not think that that means that they should compromise on other issues with which blacks are going to disagree.
They should not endorse affirmative action, for example, or all the rest of the black agenda.
Any other questions?
Yeah, right here.
Do you have any insight into the paralysis of will in spiritual ways that seems to conflict in our people and defending ourselves?
Well, no particular original insights.
I think it's due to misinterpretations of American history and of Christianity and indeed of the concepts of liberalism.
That raises the question of why these misconceptions are predominant today.
As Dr. Foreman here pointed out, there are vested interests pushing all of these things.
There are business interests that want more and more immigration.
There are, in fact, religious leaders who want more immigration.
Labor leaders who want more immigration simply to fill up.
The churches and the labor unions and all that sort of thing.
Politicians, they want to import a new electorate, essentially.
Welfare workers want to import a new underclass.
There are all sorts of uses for an immigrant underclass that only it can fill.
Those interests probably drive these misconceptions in the sense that those who have the interests invoke these ideas of universalism to justify what they're doing.
They can't come out and say, I want more immigrants because I really need cheap labor so I can make more profits.
So they say, well, this is a universal nation, and they have a right to come.
One more question.
Yes.
I've got a percentage of non-whites in the United States.
You probably know that much better than I do.
But it must be a very high percentage indeed.
And what message have you got for non-whites in the United States?
Is it a declaration of war?
Or is it an offer of an alliance?
Or is it uninterested?
And what is the future?
If you had the chance, if you're rowing there into the White House, what are you going to do?
what would you do to return the American Constitution to the fundamentals of UCA, the correct fundamentals?
And what message will that have for non-white people?
Will they be included or excluded from the reformed constitution of the Constitution?
As far as I'm concerned, what these people I was quoting in my speech about the Blackstonian rights, I'm satisfied with that.
Non-whites can have these rights to life, personal liberty, and property.
As far as I'm concerned, everybody else in the country should have those rights too, and not just non-whites.
Those are the basic civil rights, in my view.
That's what I would want to restore.
I would want to get rid of most of the Supreme Court decisions on race since Brown v.
Board in 1954.
I'd want to repeal all the civil rights legislation going back to 1866.
The 1866 Act is signed with me because that recognized these Blackstonian rights.
But the'64 Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, most of the affirmative action, policies, decisions, all of that has to go.
Immigration has to be terminated totally and you have to look up...
It's not just a question of ending it.
You have to send some people back.
And that'll do for the first administration.
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