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May 11, 2021 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
40:53
America at the Crossroads
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Hello, I'm Jared Taylor with American Renaissance.
Today, I'm delighted to have in the studio a guest.
The guest is Peter Brimlow.
He's well known, probably to all of you, as the founder and presiding genius of vdare.com.
He's also the author of an excellent book on immigration called Alienation and has been active in the patriotic immigration reform movement, as he calls it, for many years.
So, welcome to the studio.
Thanks very much for being with us.
Thanks for having me, Jared.
And if I could, could you start off by telling us a little bit about the founding of Vidair?
Where does the name come from?
How long have you been in business?
It was launched actually on Christmas Eve of 1999.
I brought my then four-year-old over my shoulder and got into bed and back from the party and I'd gone to bed and then I went down and did the plink, plink, plonk and sent out the first...
You know, we went live, basically.
The name derives from Virginia Dare, who was the first English child born in the New World.
And I chose it because, you know, I was 40 years in the mainstream media, and I came to the conclusion of this marketing thing.
Everything called American is confused with everything else called American.
Everything called national is confused with everything else called national.
Everything with the name conservative in its title is confused with everything else conservative.
I work for both Forbes and Fortune, and people used to confuse them because they both start with F. People are extraordinarily stupid about names, you know.
You, of course, have...
Branded American Renaissance, so you don't have to worry about it.
But I wouldn't have chosen that to start off with.
And so I just chose something that's completely unique, V. Dare from Virginia Dare.
And it made the point, really, that, you know, the U.S. is an organic nation.
It stems from English settlements.
And it had a cultural reality.
Now, of course, the left always says, and the mainstream media, to the extent that they can be distinguished, always says she was the first white child.
It's racism, you see.
Of course, she wasn't the first white child.
The first white child, as far as we know, was Snorri Porfinson, who was born in the Vindland settlement.
Even I couldn't call a webzine Snorris.
I see.
Well, what are the Viking settlers?
I see.
There had been no white children born in Florida, St. Augustine, in that area.
Well, that's the point, really.
We're talking about America.
America's a cultural reality.
And so it's not just a question of finding people born in the geographic area of what is now the United States, but what the cultural hearth was.
I see.
I see.
Well, tell me about some of the activities of Vidair over the years.
Well, fundamentally, I'm a print journalist, so I basically focus on, a pixel journalist now, I guess, I basically focus on publishing facts and analyses about the immigration disaster, the post-1965 immigration disaster.
And I started VDA because, as you know, I worked for National Review for some time, and we did a cover story on immigration in 1992.
Which Ann Coulter has said is what changed her mind on immigration.
Congratulations. I'm a footnote in history.
But then after Buckley Purge National Review, there was really nowhere at all to get facts analysis about immigration out.
It was a real dark age.
It was very difficult to get any kind of rational discussion of immigration at all because of the political correctness both of the left and of the so-called right.
So that's why we started it.
And it's always been an online publication.
Yes. But you do produce compendiums, hard copies, hard copy compendiums of your article.
We experiment with compendiums.
We've done various things over the years and we also publish...
Companions of particular authors, notably John Derbyshire, who is extremely popular.
In the last couple of years, I've been forced by...
Management to start producing a V-Dare quarterly, which is a compendium of what we've run that quarter.
And to my great surprise, that's been very successful.
I thought tree zines were dead, but it turns out that there are people who really want hard copy, even when they can read things online.
Well, my staff recently more or less broke my arm and made me come up with a compilation of what I think is my best work over the last 25 years.
All of which is available online, but it's quite popular as a book, as a printed book.
Do you have it as an e-book as well, Jared?
Yes, it's an e-book as well.
And that's the interesting thing.
I mean, all these different formats require to find their own market.
I don't think I will ask you to record the books on tape version, however.
But maybe that's next.
As you've pointed out, many people like to get the information in a variety of different ways.
I'm very much a reader rather than so much a video watcher or a podcast listener.
But people have very, very different approaches to how they absorb information.
So we have to cater to all of those interests.
You and I agree on this, of course.
But the fact is we've lost this battle.
The younger generation watch videos.
I guess we all have to move in that direction.
We don't do any videos at all at the moment.
Your time will come, I'm sure.
But anyway, you're something of an expert critic and observer of Donald Trump, and you've spoken on this subject not only at an American Renaissance Conference, but you've expressed yourself eloquently on our current president.
Give me sort of the thumbnail assessment up to now.
He's been in office for about a year now.
What's your sense of what he could have done, what he should have done, what he has done, what he will have done?
Well, the great thing that Trump has done is it's not Hillary or Jeb Bush.
And it's easy to forget how utterly awful things would have been if Hillary had won.
For one thing, we'd all be in jail.
Or at any rate under litigation from the IRS and everybody else.
In my case, probably ICE as well.
So that's a very substantial negative achievement.
Of course, he's not been able yet to pass any legislation, which is what is ultimately necessary to cut off and reduce the immigration flow.
But he has endorsed the RAISE Act, Senator Cotton's RAISE Act, which is a major step forward.
You know, I'm annoyed, of course, that these prioritised or typical Republican priorities like health care and taxes.
But, you know, on legislation, I think you will get there.
What's really amazing is the extent to which they've changed enforcement.
And that's having a real dramatic effect.
Every month...
We publish, Ed Rubinstein does an analysis for me of the Labor Department employment numbers and jobs data.
We were primarily interested in the extent to which immigrants were displacing Americans in the workforce, which is substantial.
It was a consistent pattern throughout the Obama years.
But we also look at the growth in the immigrant workforce.
In the last few months of the Obama regime, it was running at over 1.5 million, higher than 1.7 million.
In October of last year.
That was an increase?
A year-over-year increase in the workforce.
And that's far in excess of what legal immigration is.
So he spoke to a dramatic surge in illegal immigration that was going on directly before the election.
They obviously all expected amnesty.
Now that collapsed after Trump was elected.
And now, the last three months, I'm going to publish the last...
I'm going to publish the...
Last month's numbers came out last Friday, so we were pushing that next day or so.
For the last three months, the immigrant workforce has actually shrunk.
And that's really going to tighten up the labour market.
If that continues, it will tighten up the labour market and it will go straight to benefit the people, the working class people who voted for Trump.
That's a significant achievement.
And it's been achieved without any legislation at all.
Well, has there not...
There's been, though, an enormous amount of assistance from the mainstream press.
I remember when Trump was elected, we had all of these scare-mongering articles about all Hispanics cowering in their corners.
Absolutely. You know, there's a phenomenon in economics called jaw-warning, whereby people, presidents used to believe they could threaten and bully companies into not raising prices.
To some extent, it's true.
I'm sorry.
Well, yes, these people absolutely believe their own propaganda, and they succeeded in terrifying these illegals, and they started to leave.
We ran articles in Videra about the situation on the border, the tremendous exodus of people, of Mexicans, driving pickup trucks with washing machines on them, taking all the worldly goods back to Mexico.
The immigrant workforce population is a stock, it's a net number.
So even though there's some reports that illegal immigration has started to creep up on the southern border, although it's well below where it was under Obama, it's still swamped, obviously swamped by the net outflow.
And that's a really fascinating thing.
As I say, it's partly jaw-borne and partly there really are differences.
For example, we've run articles, VDARE.com has run articles from police officers in the Midwest who report that whereas under Obama and Bush, if they found an illegal and called ICE, the Federal Immigration Agency, they wouldn't even pick up the phone.
Whereas now they do pick up the phone and they also come and pick up the illegal one they can.
Well, this just goes to show you the tremendous difference that can be made at the administrative level.
The laws don't even have to change.
But someone like Jeff Sessions, I assume that Jeff Sessions is behind some of this, Homeland Security people, they have simply decided to start enforcing laws and make sure that people who get benefits, for example, actually qualify for those benefits rather than looking the other way.
And all of these things that can be accomplished without any kind of legislation really send a message.
That's the key point.
It sends a message.
You don't actually have to confront every individual illegal.
They just get the message and they leave.
Right, right.
Now, I have had a certain fantasy about a number of, I can imagine, well-publicized raids on illegals who are not necessarily lawbreakers.
They're all lawbreakers, but they're not criminals.
I beg your pardon.
Otherwise, not lawbreakers.
And I can imagine the television cameras focusing on these weeping children being taken to the border.
All you would have to do is, it seemed to me, a half a dozen such cases that were well publicized and all the other illegals would get the message.
The message would be, you can leave at the time of your own choosing or wait for us to uproot you.
We call this at vdare.com strategic deportation.
And we've advocated for a long time that you simply go into the Democratic National Convention when it's being held and seize the illegal of the month who happens to be speaking to the Democrats.
I mean, it's the most outrageous situation in the world.
Obama actually had illegals come to the White House to talk to them.
Of course, you need to grab one of these Democratic speakers and take a speaker at a Democratic convention and throw them out.
That would be very dramatic.
But those people...
The fact that they are in the audience when Obama is giving his State of the Union address, for example.
This is incredible.
It's treason.
Yes. And that, getting rid of those people, of course, would be hugely symbolic.
But I think even more symbolic, even more serious and effective, would be getting rid of people who are not in a position of prominence like that.
Ordinary folks just doing what they do.
A few of them...
And then, as I say, the others would get the message.
I think we know this would work because that's what Operation Wetback was.
You know, Eisenhower, when he came into office in 1952, with a very short period of time, they moved over a million and a half illegal aliens out of the country with Operation Wetback.
But they didn't actually deport all that many.
I think they only deported a couple of hundred thousand.
The others just left.
That's right.
They got the message.
So we know this would work.
So why hasn't it been done?
And why do we all hear all this nonsense about why?
We can't deport them all.
And George Will writes ridiculous articles about how many buses it would take end-to-end to move them out.
They came, they can go.
Yes, yes.
Well, the attitude of the left, the pro-immigration, anti-American left, is similar to the arguments about the death penalty, for example.
They're just opposed to the death penalty, period.
And so they will come up with all kinds of peripheral arguments.
Oh, it can't be done humanely.
Or sometimes it's done in a racially disproportionate manner.
This is all smoke screens.
They just don't like the death penalty.
And I think in the case of deportation, they want those people here.
And that's why they try to pick holes in any kind of practical approach to it.
The reverse of this is, or the other side of this, is that we have to see legislation because we have to get legal immigration down.
And that has to be done at some point in here.
I have occasionally, I fantasize that Trump actually knows what he's doing and has plans.
Really, I think he operates entirely by instincts.
What great instincts he has.
Well, supposing he was to raise, you know, he spent the first year of his being in office on all these ridiculous Republican wonkery things and spends the second year working on them.
immigration legislation, which you may not be able to pass, but that's an election year.
And so let's have an election on these issues.
Let's hope that his heart is in the right place in those respects.
In fact you've answered the question I was going to ask you, which is a very very difficult one.
And what ones read on what Trump really believes is.
I have a very, very difficult time myself getting any grasp on what is solid there.
It's sort of like whack-a-mole, you know.
Some idea will appear and then it disappears and some others will appear.
Then the same one will reappear.
I think, as I've said before, it seems to me the only thing he's ever thought really seriously about in his life, probably, is sex and New York real estate.
And I don't think he's thought about the demographic future of the United States.
He has some sort of instinctive sense that some people assimilate better than others, and that's about the long and the short of it.
And he doesn't like people coming here illegally and going on welfare.
All, as you say, sort of instinctive things.
They're not thought out in any systematic way, and I believe that's why he tends to carom off one idea and off to another in this inconsistent way.
He's obviously a very unusual...
He's phenomenal in politics in the way he approaches issues.
But, you know, how many times now?
There's at least half a dozen times where the mainstream media is full of reports that Trump is going to back down on immigration, he's going to do a U-turn, and he never does.
He always, in the end, comes back to what he apparently believes in.
Even with DACA, the Deferred Action Childhood Arrivals thing, where he obviously does have some kind of a soft spot for these people, or maybe it's a banker or something.
The Democrats thought they had to deal with him.
And then the next thing they learn, he wants to end chain migration as a condition for letting these illegals stay.
And that, of course, cuts the heart out of the 1965 system, the 1965 Act, which Democrats are absolutely relying on to elect a new people for them.
So he always comes back.
I think one of the interesting things about Trump is in this new Bannon book that came out.
I mentioned it at the Amman Conference.
Trump actually was quite right when he said he was very popular among blacks and Hispanics because The Apprentice was immensely popular among blacks and Hispanics.
That's one reason why it was such a huge commercial success.
It was a very easy buy.
You got everybody.
And so what that means is that in like about 2,000 or so, Trump was the answer to the Republican establishment's prayers.
First, he had lots of money, which they like because they like spending money on the campaigns.
But secondly, he could have made...
An appeal to blacks and Hispanics.
And he could have been Michael Bloomberg.
He could have made an absolutely conventional Bush-type appeal.
And he did, in fact, say one stage in his weird way that Romney made a mistake to talk about self-deportation.
So he could have run on the left, and they would have loved that.
But he didn't do it.
Instead, he started talking about Obama's not releasing his birth certificate.
You know, he obviously has, he could have run on the left and the media would have loved him, but he chose not to do that.
So I think he does have deep instinctive sentiments about the country.
I think there's nothing he could have done and have the media love him.
Absolutely nothing.
I think, in fact, Donald Trump is...
Probably the most hated, the most furiously hated man in all American history.
In Wilkes Booth, Benedict Arnold.
I think all these people pale.
Yes, but don't you think that if he'd actually come out for amnesty, if he'd run as Michael Bloomberg, that this wouldn't have happened?
They may have made fun of him, but they wouldn't have hated him.
It's the immigration issue that really drives the hatred.
And, you know, the fact of the matter is you couldn't have had more of a gentleman and scholar raising this issue than Pat Buchanan.
Or for that matter, Enoch Powell before him in England.
That's true.
And they were hated just as much.
It's the issue.
It's not the messenger.
It's the message that caused the hatred.
In his case, though, there is, I think, a kind of a visceral contempt that goes beyond anything having to do with the message.
But anyway.
Well, I'm glad to hear that you think at least he has, he sort of is going to come back to these ideas.
I certainly hope that he does.
And he does have three more years.
But on the subject of the birth certificate...
Isn't it seven more years?
Of course it's seven more years.
I think he can easily be reelected.
Well, we'll see about that.
On the subject of the birth certificate, I suppose you saw those signs when he visited Hawaii on his way to the Far East in his latest trip.
They're walking around carrying signs saying, Welcome to Kenya.
You have three people with signs like that and then the media all pounce on this as if this is the universal sentiment of every Hawaiian.
Of course, Hawaiians don't like him very much, but they'll take every opportunity to suggest that local people can't stand the guy.
Well, you know, Steve Bannon is right.
The mainstream media is the opposition party.
It's responded to us.
It's responded to the internet.
The fact it no longer has a monopoly of...
It no longer has its gatekeeping function.
Really, In a very paradoxical way, it's not made them more honest.
It's made them more dishonest.
They just lie harder.
It's a really odd thing.
Of course, perhaps they're counting on deplatforming someday.
I don't know.
I'm sure they would love to go back to the era when you had to have something in print in order to get it before the eyes of the American public.
And if they have their way...
Vidair, American Renaissance, and every other dissident site is simply going to be knocked off out into the outer darkness.
If she would have been elected, she would be working on that right now.
I think she would have.
She would have been working very hard on that.
And I think she would have been also appointing Supreme Court justices who would have creatively read the First Amendment to outlaw speech of the kind that you and I are so frequently guilty of.
But anyway, well, moving on from Donald Trump, the great white hope.
You've spent time in Canada.
Tell me, what's your sense of developments there?
Justin Trudeau seems to be just about sort of the Angela Merkel of the Western Hemisphere, as far as I can tell.
Yeah, I did spend time in Canada, and I actually wrote a book about Canadian politics.
I keep meaning to reissue if I ever get the time.
And Canada, you know, all modern political diseases were invented in Canada, multiculturalism, bilingualism, and they do now present an awful warning because, exactly as I predict in my book, A third party did arise.
It was an insurrectionary third party.
It actually, in the end, succeeded in taking over the Maribond Conservative Party.
And it actually eventually won the majority government.
But then it did nothing.
Stephen Harper didn't institutionalize itself.
It should have cut off immigration.
This is a very Canadian issue, but it should have made sure that it had a true Senate in that system.
That was Steve Harper and the Conservative Party.
Yes, that's right.
But it didn't do anything.
And eventually, of course, it just fell victim to the normal ills that overcome every government.
It still would have been just about elected out of English Canada.
One of my recommendations in this book was that they simply throw Quebec out of Confederation.
And on the one occasion when I actually talked to Harper at some length, he said that this was unimaginably unthinkable and Canadians didn't really want it and all this kind of thing.
So he obviously just hadn't got the message on that.
Well, isn't that what all so-called conservative governments do?
They run on a fairly attractive, semi-nativist, nationalist platform, and then they betray their voters.
There's nothing unique about Canada in that respect.
Well, what's unique about Canada is that they did succeed in having a revolution.
They did overthrow the party, just as Trump has overthrown a Republican establishment.
It would be like Trump serving out eight years, but not stopping immigration.
And not making various all the changes that need to be made.
Because Trump would have the excuse, of course, that the American presidency is inherently a very weak office.
You know, you don't necessarily command the legislature.
But a parliamentary prime minister, by definition, controls the legislature.
So he was virtually a dictator for five years.
But he simply didn't institutionalize himself.
That's why I say it's essential that we get legislation passed to restrict illegal immigration.
Oh, I agree 100%.
The laws have to be changed.
Enforcement is one thing.
Administrative tinkering is one thing.
Executive de-amnesties, those are one thing.
But I agree 100%.
You have to get the laws changed.
And let's hope that he certainly puts a lot of effort into that.
Canada is an interesting example, though, of a country in which I see Practically no political representation of our views, but there is a sort of cultural representation.
Some of the video bloggers today, Stefan Molyneux, for example, what has he got, 700,000 followers now?
He's a Canadian, and he's come a very long way.
He used to be almost a libertarian on some of those questions.
But also, some of the, I mean, there have been some lonely, lonely voices for some time, like Paul Fromm, but now you've got Ricardo Duchesne, and some of the other...
This woman, what's her name?
Faith Goldie.
Yes, Faith Goldie.
And there's Laura Southern.
Laura Southern, yes.
There's quite an attractive and capable contingent of Canadians who have, at least on the individual level, begun to promote our ideas.
You know, I spent nearly ten years in Canada and I gave a great deal of thought to the plight of the Canadian Conservative.
And one of the problems is that, you know, Canada is really like one of these curious sea creatures which has all of its vital organs outside of its skeletal structure.
You know, if you're a Conservative in Canada, what you do is you watch American politics.
I mean, every convention that we've had, that we've been to, there are always Canadians there.
And they're fascinated by American politics and they're bored sick by Canadian politics and often don't pay any attention to it at all.
So that's kind of a big problem for them.
In other words, the Conservatives model themselves on American Conservatives.
Well, they just spend more time thinking about American politics.
Well, they have to.
We have to.
We're the giant next door.
Yeah, but, you know, they have specific problems up there.
I mean, the problem that I was most concerned about when I wrote my book, which was called The Patriot Game, i.e., was Quebec, the Quebec problem.
I think Quebec is a nation, and it should have its own state.
And they just simply don't think about it at all.
It's not at all unusual to have...
To have, in English Canada, that they will discuss politics entirely as if they were Americans and didn't have this national question problem in their midst, even though it was Quebec that was responsible for the Liberal government's, the Liberals' long electoral hegemony.
Well, I must say, there is a certain degree to which the Canadians have actually taken bilingualism, for example, seriously.
I visited Ottawa on a number of occasions on sort of semi-official business that I won't go into now.
But I met a number of government bureaucrats.
They all have to, in fact, be bilingual.
Of course.
And I speak enough French to be able to test their French.
And I was very surprised at the number of English-speaking Canadians who, in order to get in the civil service, they have gone to the effort of studying French.
That's right.
And I guess that reflects their desire to keep the French in.
The argument I made in the Patriot Game was that this was a device by which the left in Canada was maintaining its hegemony.
In fact, there were very few English, Anglo-Canadians who speak French.
That's my understanding.
But they're all heavily concentrated in the upper classes and in Ottawa.
What it has done is, it has powerful public choice consequences by official bilingualism.
It means that you can't, as a practical matter, you can't have a career in the civil service.
If you're an Anglophone, because most Anglophones don't speak French, don't grow up hearing French at all.
There are almost no French speakers west of the Lakehead.
And that's what's going to happen here.
We're going to see people saying, oh, well, we've got to have bilingual police and all that kind of thing.
What that means as a practical matter is that you're going to recruit disproportionately from this Hispanic community.
Oh, that's definitely already happening in certain parts of the country.
I think in Miami and Los Angeles, if you don't speak Spanish, you're really at the back of the line.
I know a woman who couldn't get a job as a teacher in Arkansas.
In Arkansas.
Because she couldn't speak Spanish.
And so, of course, what we need to do here, and this is something that Trump...
We've got to have an official language policy like the Quebecers had.
They've done exactly the opposite.
Employers can't discriminate against monolingual French speakers in Quebec.
They insist on suppressing manifestations of English in the public square.
And all that stuff has got to be done here.
It amazes me the patience with which Americans put up with this press one for English.
And not just that, but the assault on our ears every day of people in national public radio and other lefty media insisting on pronouncing Spanish names with a Spanish accent.
We got used to hearing about Nicaragua.
Why don't they ever talk about France or Deutschland?
No, no, no.
They perfectly have to talk about France and Germany.
My first wife, who was from Newfoundland, who you knew, Jared, had gone through this process.
Her father had insisted on her learning French, and she studied French at university because he thought she'd want a job in the federal civil service.
And it didn't have any of the effects it's supposed to have.
She retained all the traditional Newfoundland attitudes towards Quebec, which is to say that she thought they were thieves and should give back the Churchill Falls.
That's the end joke in Canadian politics.
But, you know, my daughter, her daughter, after mother died, was very eager to learn French, to keep learning French.
It was almost impossible to do, because the pressure on school kids in this country to learn Spanish rather than French or any other language is so enormous.
She was being educated in the United States.
Yes, that's right, since after we came to the US.
And, of course, the fact that Spanish is a world language, but it's not French.
It's not a first-class language in the sense that French, German or English are.
There isn't literature or the science in there.
This catering to the demands of Mexicans and Central Americans, which is what it boils down to, really quite disgusts me.
But no, it's as you say, try to learn Italian in high school.
Practically impossible.
In fact, I believe that Italian was one of the SAT AP tests that's been abolished because no high school students are studying Italian anymore.
Despite the vast number of Italian Americans.
Yes, yes.
It's just gone the way of the dodo.
They're using, the left in this country is using, they're hoping to use the Hispanics in the same way that the left in Canada used Quebec.
That is kind of a reserve army they can call on to break, to overwhelm the Anglo community.
Oh, I think they will be certainly loyal foot soldiers in that campaign.
No question about that.
But, well, moving on from Canada, if we may.
I'm very encouraged by what I see happening in Europe.
I just got back from a lecture tour, I suppose I could call it, in a grandiose sort of way.
I gave two talks in Europe, one in Dublin and one in Rotterdam.
And one at Rotterdam was at a meeting organized by a new organization called Erkenbrand.
And they had a good 150 people there from really all around Europe, all very, very high quality.
And they even had a few Euro MPs traveling very much incognito.
And they would have had a vastly larger audience, except that they have such an antifa problem there that they felt it necessary to vet absolutely every single person.
They advertised the event openly, but if you wanted to go, you had to be interviewed, you had to have someone vouch for you.
And then they had a redirection point to make sure that the actual site was not exposed.
These are the constraints under which they work.
But it was a very, very impressive gathering of mostly men, of course, young men, and just speaking all the languages, all the languages from Europe.
It was really quite a lovely little European Union, if you will.
I was sitting at lunchtime with a Fin, a German, Two Italians, and I'm an American, we found that the best language we had in common was French.
There wasn't even a Frenchman at the table.
I'm reading that.
Louis XIV would have been so pleased.
Right, right.
But no, the quality of the people, the quality of the speakers, it was really a very, very encouraging thing.
And they're going to be doing this annually.
And this reflects, I think, the real progress that's being made in Europe.
All of the political parties that are waking up and taking an explicitly nationalist line.
I think that, well, I fantasize about American political parties or parties in the UK.
I mean, UKIP is sort of in that direction, but UKIP has sort of given up now that Brexit has been achieved.
I would love to see that kind of political effort in the United States.
And I'm just not sure what's holding it back.
Of course, here you can run as a Democrat or a Republican without much litmus test.
And I keep hoping that at the local level...
Racially conscious, attractively packaged whites will start running for, why not, school board, town council, county commission, all of those things.
Those are wide open seats, I think, and I believe that there are receptive areas in which you could succeed on a well put together, thoughtful, racially conscious package.
Do you not agree?
I think there's a distinction that you have to make between explicit and implicit whiteness.
And I think an implicit whiteness, that is to say, that somehow signals to whites without actually being overt about it, is very powerful and effective.
And I think that's, in fact, what Trump was.
Trump succeeded in countering the Democrats' identity politics mongering by, in some peculiar way, appealing to American whites without actually saying very much that was racially explicit.
The problem we have in this country is, you know, we have a totalitarian left in this country.
And it's well entrenched in the mainstream media and so on.
And it will punish people who put their heads above the parapet, you know.
I don't know whether we're going to see explicit white politics at the local level and so on.
I think it's likely to remain implicit but nevertheless decisive.
Maybe I'm optimistic.
Maybe it's because I see such an enthusiastic reception to my explicit whiteness in the kind of email messages we get, in the turnout at our conferences, just the excitement that's built up around the idea of whites actually...
You're talking about York, about Amherst?
Yes, American Renaissance.
Oh, I think that's right.
I think a lot of people think in those terms.
It's just a question of how is it going to be to surface in the public square?
Well, that's right.
It's a very tricky thing.
Of course, you remember Frank Borsleri, who ran for school board in the Bronx, of all places.
You would think that that would be the least receptive part of the United States for any kind of explicit.
And he was pretty doggone explicit.
He would speak at American Renaissance conferences, and he was re-elected with increasingly large majorities.
And, of course, he was the most famous school board member, perhaps, in American history.
I think that kind of thing is achievable.
And when it happens, it would be hugely encouraging to everyone else.
But I've been sort of beating that drum and resisting blandishments from others who would suggest that I myself run for office.
That's another in-joke.
I think you should have run.
And Virginia 10, and you should keep on running.
I think you made a big mistake in not taking my advice.
Well, Peter Brimelow thinks that anyone who refuses to take advice is making a terrible mistake.
I hope you all understand that.
Anyway, to me...
And this is a real question as to what the future holds for us.
But I find very, very encouraging signs in Europe with the alternative for Deutschland, the Austrian elections recently.
And I was disappointed that Marine Le Pen didn't do as well as she did, but there's still the identitarian movement that was birthed in France and is now spreading.
When I was in Ireland, I met with the people who are starting a generation identity for Ireland.
And I think that the question is, will enough of us arrive at a sane understanding of what's at stake before it's too late?
We published an article on Vida a few years ago analyzing our current situation in terms of the Civil War, the period leading up to the Civil War.
And the author, of course, was anonymous, distinguished several different types of people who went into building secession in the South.
I mean, they organized it.
It was very effective.
They organized themselves very quickly and they thought out what they wanted to do and they did it.
You and I are what he would have called rhetorical radicals.
In other words, we keep saying these things.
The people who actually benefit from this are sort of last-minute opportunities to get on board when it's about to be achieved.
We're actually going to come to power ourselves, Jared, but our political great-grandchildren might.
That's all right with me.
I'm prepared to pave the way so long as the way leads someplace, so long as there is a destination.
You know, there's a principle.
Herb Stein, who was Nixon's economic council chief, invented Stein's law, which is that things that can't go on forever don't.
Very important in the stock market.
The stock market often remains under or overvalued for long periods of time, but ultimately it reverts to where it should be.
And I think that's true in politics too.
I mean, in Canada, for example, it was obvious that they couldn't go on abusing the West the way they were doing without a third party reaction.
And that did happen.
And similarly, I argued in my book that they couldn't go on, the liberals couldn't go on exploiting Quebec without eventually a nationalist party rising at the federal level in Quebec.
And that also happened.
There are many ways in which I think the left has overplayed its hand.
All this stuff about white privilege, all this stuff about taking young white men from kindergarten on and telling them that they are the cause of everything that's ever gone wrong, anytime, anywhere, for people who are non-white.
And the fact that they're heterosexual is horrible.
The fact they were born men and think they're men, this is all horrible.
This has just gotten intolerable.
That alone is going to push more and more people into a sensible understanding, not just of race, but of all kinds of...
Humanitarian orthodoxies that are destroying the country.
And Black Lives Matter, making heroes out of these thugs.
All of this, I think, is clearly pushing more and more people our way.
I think far more than Donald Trump.
To use sort of this trendy new terminology, as far as red-pilling is concerned, I think reality is the greatest red pill.
People need simply look around and see that everything they're being told about these questions is a bunch of baloney.
I mean the problem is from the left standpoint is that they've really created a monster in the form of identity politics because after manipulating the various minorities as effectively as they have done.
Of course, it gets to the point where whites start to think, well, what about us?
Why can't we have an identity too?
Well, it does irritate me, on the other hand, when people will, from their lofty heights of objectivity, describe American Renaissance or V-Dare as simply a reaction to non-white identity politics.
No, no, no, no, no.
We go back a long way.
We go back all the way to Virginia Dare, for heaven's sake.
We are the mainstream in terms of thinking about the United States and about its tradition.
So it is an insult to me to be told that, oh no, no, you're just reacting to the excesses of Black Lives Matter.
However, I think electorally, that is what's happening.
That could very well be.
I think when blacks were pulling whites out of cars and beeping them up in Charlotte in North Carolina directly before the election, because there was a Black Lives Matter riot going on, a lot of people in North Carolina drew conclusions from that.
Oh, I think unquestionably they do.
All this stuff about Ferguson, for heaven's sake.
I think more and more white people, they are noticing that they can look at something, blacks can look at something, and we draw completely different conclusions.
Increasingly, I think there'll be this kind of sharp contrast with Hispanics as well.
We simply live in different worlds, psychologically.
So we should leave in different worlds physically.
That's my view.
But anyway, well, let us hope that Stein's law...
Is an iron one.
Because, you see, it's all very well to say that what cannot continue forever will stop.
But you could imagine all of these horrible things in fact continuing forever if there were not people like you and me and increasingly more and more hundreds of thousands of people standing up and saying, you bloody well better stop that stuff.
It could go on.
We could turn into Brazil if we are asleep at the switch.
But anyway, let us hope that you're right about that.
Well, Peter Brimelow, thank you so much for coming into the studio for this interview.
We'll have to have you back very soon.
And I wish you every success in all of your ventures.
It's been a real pleasure.
You too and yours, Jared.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
And thank you very much for watching.
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