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Aug. 8, 2015 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
46:48
Fire and Ice

Peter Brimelow joins Richard to discuss the 2016 Republican candidates, the Donald Trump phenomenon, the 20th anniversary of his book *Alien Nation*, and why the immigration reform movement failed. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe

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Let's put it this way.
If you look at Trump's statements on paper, and you put aside some of the rhetoric about, you know, they're sending violent criminals and rapists.
When you actually look at what he's saying, it isn't that fundamentally different from a lot of the Republicans.
He seems to endorse legal immigration, the problem is the illegals, and it's a problem of crime.
It's not...
Really a problem of demographics or race and culture and things like that.
But Trump says these things, says these in a way mundane things with such gusto and such visceral energy and toughness that...
That's why he's gotten under the skin of his critics, and that's why he's kind of inspired people like me, is because he gives us the impression that he gets it.
Maybe on a visceral level, and maybe not on an intellectual or policy level.
But he just seems to have, in his gut, he knows that something really bad is happening.
And the only way to articulate that...
Now, at least in the mainstream, is by talking about some crazy gang member who kills someone.
But that it's ultimately really about the future.
And that's why he's exciting.
It's kind of like Trump is interesting on a subliminal way.
But actually, if you listen to what he says, it's not too different from Scott Walker or whatever.
It's different than Jeb Bush, certainly.
But it's not too different from those who have...
I think that you're right.
What Trump has actually said is very moderate.
He simply doesn't like legal immigration.
He hasn't said anything about legal immigration at all this time around.
In the past, he has.
And he has said, for example, that he thinks they ought to bring in Christians from Syria rather than Muslims.
Some of these things don't get picked up for reasons which are worth speckling about.
He has in the past said, for example, that he thinks it's too hard to come here from Europe.
But he's not saying it now.
Now, I don't personally agree that what he's saying is, what he has said is particularly fierce rhetoric.
He simply says that the Mexicans are in a disproportionate crime committed by Mexicans.
And he's right.
I mean, we don't have good numbers on this because the federal government and every other aspect of the government doesn't want to know.
And the media doesn't want to report it.
But all the evidence that we have points towards, you know, excessive crime by, disproportionate crime by Mexicans.
And some very bloody and unpleasant crimes as well.
That, of course, is completely suppressed in the mainstream media and in political discourse.
So to that extent, he's bombed through it.
But he isn't saying anything particularly savage.
He said in his introduction, when he declared, he said, some I suppose are good people.
You know, that's put up for the reason.
I don't see what he said.
You're being too...
I guess I'll go back to what I said before.
You're being too literal.
You're looking at the words and not hearing his body language and tone.
When he said, and I'm sure some are good people, I thought that was hilarious.
But he did say that.
He did put that marker down.
He just doesn't get any credit for it.
I mean, I think you're right.
I think with Trump, there's a subjective aspect and an objective aspect.
Subjectively, he's not all that radical in immigration.
In fact, he's less radical than Santorum and Scott Walker are, both of whom have discussed reducing legal immigration, which he hasn't addressed at all.
But objective, of course, the fact he's got to fight on the issue, is all that really counts.
Scott Walker is just very, very boring.
He's almost like a parody of a boring Nordic from Minnesota or Wisconsin.
I mean, sorry to insult my fellow white people, but you just look at him.
I can't imagine someone like that would be a national leader.
Well, on the other hand, Richard, what he did in Wisconsin, winning three elections there and defeating a recall and so on, and taking on the teachers' union, that takes a certain amount of guts.
So I wouldn't completely...
I mean, there are lots of Republicans in blue states who would simply have gone along with the teachers' union.
What he did was extraordinary.
Sure, yeah.
I mean, he was, you know, fighting other white people and taking away their pensions.
And it was a kind of, I don't know, I don't want to focus too much on him.
I mean, I'll grant you that it takes a certain amount of guts.
But nevertheless, you just have to go by your eye test.
I mean, he's just shockingly boring.
My own interest in life is immigration.
As you know, I wrote a whole book about the economics of education, the teaching union.
And he's done essentially what I said ought to be done in that book.
You know, the union has to be broken for all kinds of economic reasons to do with the way in which society works and to do with the way the economics of education work.
He's done it, so you have to give him credit for that.
I mean, the Bushes didn't do it.
I will give him credit.
But let's go back to something you mentioned actually just before I turn on the recorder, and that is that you actually read the transcript of the debate.
And you said that Walker seemed to be indicating that he wanted to reduce legal immigration, but that he never articulated it clearly.
So I'm very curious about that.
So what did you pick up?
He said it's in code.
Interesting.
that but so it puts up he said that he wanted to a design a immigration policy which put American workers first Bernie Sanders has done the same thing.
There is a late market impact of immigration, and Walker's aware of it.
By the way, he did say on Hannity, apparently, after the debate, he expanded on that and explained he wants to reduce legal immigration, which is what he said before.
Interesting.
What do you think the prospects of something like that happening?
Let's say a Republican wins in 2016, which is certainly possible, despite all of the demographic changes which you have...
But that is possible.
Let's say that I'm wrong and that Scott Walker is his boringness, or maybe it's actually his boringness is his greatest strength, and he becomes president.
What do you think the possibilities of actually reducing legal immigration for the first time since...
When was the last time we seriously reduced immigration?
Was it 1924?
Right.
But, you know, at least turning around this kind of, you know, ever-increasing immigration sense, the 65 Act.
So what do you think the possibility of that is?
Well, I think it would be a miracle, but on the other hand, miracles happen quite often in politics.
I mean, you're too young to remember this, but nobody expects the Soviet Union to collapse.
Oh, yeah, I know.
Nobody expected Ronald Reagan to win the presidency as early as January, well into 1979, well into early 1980.
The conventional wisdom was it couldn't possibly run.
So my answer is it could be done.
And what will happen, of course, and the reason why the no-goodniks are so hysterical about it is that once one step is taken, it will become obvious that other steps can be taken.
Partly because it will assemble a constituency.
I mean, the problem that the Republicans have is they're not winning the white working class vote above all in the northern tier of states.
You know, greater New England from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon.
And this would do it for them.
And once they realize that, and they'll have to see it.
You can't explain it to them.
We've been trying to explain it to them for 20 years.
But once they see it, I think they will start to take additional steps.
And that's why any discussion of immigration reduction at all is met with such hysteria.
What should we talk about here, Peter?
I do want to talk about the 20th anniversary of alienation, but I feel like we've only kind of touched on some of the more timely things.
Let's talk more about Trump.
Go for it.
I, for example, I know you're not interested in this issue, but at the time of Mike Pence's capitulation on the religious freedom issue in Indiana, I wrote a piece in which he said that these Republicans had the faintest idea of how plioculture works.
all and all you have to do among other things to say the certain keywords which meant to be political discourse even though the left doesn't like political correctness and he should have said he was opposed to political correctness.
That's exactly what Trump did say when he was charged on this stupid war on women point.
He said he didn't have time for political correctness, and it was greeted with applause.
And similarly, he said, what else did he say?
He didn't have time for something else.
He didn't have time for tone.
He was being attacked about tone.
These are all things that conventional professional politicians would have fled from.
Yeah, but don't you think the Republicans have always kind of engaged in some kind of race baiting and pushing people's buttons while never actually doing something?
I mean, Republicans, I just think that focus on crime, Fox News, which of course isn't obviously the Republican Party, but they're attached at the hip.
They kind of reinforce one another.
I'm not sure which leads the other, but they love to talk about the knockout game, sweeping the country.
I guess what I'm getting at is that...
I think what in a way makes the right even more infuriating than the picture you're painting of it as feminine weaklings who aren't afraid to get tough is that they're actually master manipulators who kind of like to touch on these things without ever doing something.
So like Ben Carson denounced political correctness.
They're not master manipulators.
If they were master manipulators, Obama would never become president.
They do pretty good for the demographic hand that's been dealt them.
I mean, they keep white people voting for them.
Well, as you know, Richard, first of all, the white turnout in the last two presidential elections has fallen.
And secondly, the Republicans simply do not get that good a share of it.
I mean, Nixon and Reagan both got well into the high 60s of the white vote, and the Republicans have come nothing, were not within 10 points of that for many years.
So no, I don't think they're that good at it.
But they do occasionally do it, and certainly Bush wanted it when he ran against the caucus.
He was just lucky, I saw.
He had somebody who was prepared to take these issues up.
Right.
I think there's also an issue of what Kevin MacDonald calls implicit community, you know.
I mean, the Republicans are an implicit white community.
Without doing anything at all about it, they just are.
And similarly, the Republicans, you know, in the South have succeeded in getting very high shares of the white vote, as high as nearly 90% in Mississippi, without doing anything to deserve it at all.
In fact, the first possible opportunity, they'd piss all over their white base with this backing off down the Confederate flag question.
Right.
So I guess this is kind of what I'm saying.
I mean, it's...
Well, I mean, if they were...
They're trapping white people.
If they were really trying to mobilize the white vote, they would have said, look, the Confederate flag is the flag of the white South.
Get lost.
But they didn't do that.
I actually don't think they really understand why they win elections half the time, you know.
They genuinely do think people are voting for capital gains cards.
Tax cards.
Right.
No, I agree.
I think we both agree, actually.
I think we just have kind of different emphases.
But Governor Perry has recently, twice, been asked about legal immigration.
Governor Perry of Texas.
And on both occasions, he was completely unpaired to answer the question.
He simply rambled off to discussing illegal immigration.
Now what this means is, I think Perry is a fool.
Oh yeah, he's an obvious idiot.
I mean, just listen to him.
I also think that...
You know, he has people around him because they go batten on to him, these various campaign consultants, whose job it is to prepare him for debates.
And it's obvious that they hadn't thought about this question of legal immigration either.
They just hadn't given him any answer at all.
He didn't have a good answer, a bad answer.
He just had no answer.
He just didn't know what to say about it.
So I really do think that there's a staggering amount of ignorance in the political class.
They generally do believe what they read in the New York Times, in the Republican political class, I should say.
They generally do believe in what they read in the New York Times.
And they have no ideas beyond what.
I think also there's a kind of...
And I don't want to seem ageist or something, but there's a kind of generational factor to it all.
And I can definitely see in someone like Kasich or someone who's, who's this almost kind of, uh, good old boy, uh, backroom dealer, local politician writ large, you know, in his mentality and I read somewhere that he actually used the word, there are a lot of ethnics here.
It's people who come from a very different background.
They have a different vision of what we're going through.
And their vision is that America is 90% white and there's a kind of minority community of blacks.
We have these illegals that are a big problem.
And that made sense in 1960.
But it's just, you know, I think for someone of my generation, I mean, I'm 37. I'm not exactly young.
Someone, you know, younger than...
That's pretty young, Richard.
Okay, well, I'll hang around you more.
Right.
They just don't get it.
They don't understand the world we live in, and they don't see it.
And they think only in terms of patronizing white people who can bring in the minorities, the ethnics, through conservative values.
They don't get the world we're going to live in, and they probably will never get it because it's very difficult for people to really change a paradigm at the age of 60 I mean, again, I don't want to sound...
This might sound terrible, but we're just going to have to let the Mike Huckabees and John Kasichs and all these idiots die because they're never going to get it.
And we just need to make sure that the coming generation gets it.
And I think they will inherently get it.
It's in their face every day.
They've been to universities.
They've lived through it.
They've been to a big city.
So it really is a kind of generational paradigm that just has to change.
Well, you know, I said in Alien Nation that people generally don't change their minds about anything after the age of 21. And it's true, actually, not just in macro-political questions, but it's true, you know, as you know, in academic life, you get theories become dominant in all kinds of abstruse topics, all kinds of academic specialties.
In general speaking, it's not that a new theory triumphs by debate, it's just that the older people die off.
Yeah, well, Thomas Kuhn had a very, it's a very famous book about paradigm shifts, and he questioned that notion of whether there's this, you know, linear ascent of knowledge.
No.
There's basically these paradigms where you'll have groups that are hegemonic and they will either kind of become bankrupt or they'll just simply die and then a kind of new way of seeing the world comes into place.
And I think that's going to happen.
I said specifically in Alien Nation that this was the reason why the immigration debate hadn't really gelled in 1995, because the thing on the act...
And the subsequent illegal immigration influx only began in the late 60s.
So most of the people who were then around in 1990 had basically grown up at a point where it simply wasn't an issue.
Now, I have to say, though, that we've gotten absolutely nowhere in 20 years.
And there is another fact to work here, which is the increasing intensity of political correctness.
And as you know, John Derbyshire, who, like me, is a fellow geezer, is extremely depressed about the younger generation because he thinks they really are brainwashed.
Now, of course, he's looking at the National Review, the people who knew in the National Review.
But he really thinks they are brainwashed, and that they do.
I don't think they are brainwashed.
I actually have a lot of hope for millennials because they're experiencing it firsthand.
But what I would say, they're not going to become conservatives.
I think the whole conservative paradigm is just totally over.
It is utterly bankrupt.
Most pressingly due to George W. Bush and his years.
But it just doesn't have any resonance anymore.
I think for younger people, the idea of hyper-patriotism and hyper-religiosity and all this kind of stuff just strikes them as a joke.
I don't think there's any future to conservatism.
However, is there a future to identitarianism or just simply a kind of...
I think it's happening.
It's going to happen.
And in a way, conservatism has to die so that something more vital will rise in its place.
I mean, it's just, I know that's the kind of way I see it, but I have a lot of hope for millennia.
I don't think they buy into the illusions of their parents and grandparents about, you know, the American dream and we can just, you know, say these magic words like the Constitution and democracy and it's all going to be okay.
I don't think they believe in any of that hokum.
And so I actually have a lot of faith in them.
I think they're going to...
I'm married to millennials, so I'm inclined to do it.
Yeah, I'm going to keep my daughter away from you, Peter.
Anyway, yeah, well, let's talk a little bit about alienation, because I can actually remember purchasing a used copy of your book in a book.
In a used bookstore in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2001 or 2002.
I can't remember.
It's been a while ago.
It's actually the 20th anniversary of Alienation.
Let's talk about a couple of issues.
I'll just set them out and then I'll let you go.
First off, what was it like getting that book published 20 years ago in 1995?
What has been the trajectory of the immigration reform movement?
Because you've kind of given a hint of that, of we've accomplished nothing.
But what was it like in the 80s and 90s?
And then, you know, what do you see?
Which direction do you see the arrow pointing, so on and so forth?
And then maybe we can talk a little bit about the future of immigration reform and going beyond immigration and all that kind of stuff.
But let's start with that first one.
What was it like getting that book published in 1995?
Well, you know, Richard, Derbyshire and I have this concept of an interglacial.
If you look at the way in which the mainstream publishing business operated, there was a moment and a window, really, in the 1990s when it was possible to get all kinds of books published, notably the bell curve and so on.
It was something to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
It did really disorient the left a great deal.
For a brief while, you were able to get this stuff published.
I wrote this big cover story in National Review in '92, and a famous agent called Andrew Wiley contacted me and urged me to do this book about it, and he was able to get mainstream publishers interested.
Now, I have to say that when I tried to revise Alien Nation ten years later or do a later version, his response was to sever our professional relationship.
The blowback from Publishing Alienation was so fierce that he obviously didn't want to represent anymore.
He was animal.
He had no political interest.
He just thought it would catch a certain mood and he could sell a lot of books.
It did.
I noticed when I first saw it, or maybe when I looked at it a little bit later, that David Frum blurbed it.
And, you know, I probably saw that at a time when I hated, you know, David Frum was a speechwriter for George W. Bush, and I probably, you know, hated him more than any other intellectual.
You had the paperback on the back.
We were quoting the first review.
Oh, you were quoting a review.
Well, he gave it a favorable review.
It was interesting.
Even the neocons, you could say people like you and I are very far away from ideologically, but even they were picking up on these things.
Actually, a lot of neocons have been fairly good on this question.
There really was a moment of that mid-late 90s when...
When there was a chance of this becoming a major, you know, intellectual movement.
You know, there is, this is famous about people who have mortal illnesses.
They go through several different phases.
Denial, anger, bargaining, denial and acceptance.
That was true for the immigration issue.
I mean, the first response is denial that anything was happening.
And then there was anger, and we got a lot of anger.
But we did get breakthrough as far as the bargaining stage.
And you would say, people would say things like, everybody knows there's something wrong with the immigration system.
And, of course, we should be reoriented towards skills and all this stuff.
But obviously, it's gone too far.
And if you look at the early reviews, that was quite a common reaction.
But what happened after that was a ferocious count.
It was partly because there was legislation actually in Congress at that time, which was the Smith-Simpson bill, which would have reduced legal immigration.
And, of course, Proposition 187 passed in California in 1994.
And it really looked like there was going to be a serious reduction in legal immigration at that point.
It's hard to believe now, but it was commonly thought to be an inevitable thing.
And it took a great deal of lying and lobbying on the part of the left and the business lobbies and the nail conservatives.
Do you think there's a connection between what we could call social mood and immigration?
You know, the early 90s, that was a kind of different time.
The stock market had gone through a major downturn.
I can remember back then, and I was a young guy, but there was just a lot of talk of too much debt, of national decline, and so on and so forth.
It was kind of ironic because that was coupled with the, we just won the Cold War and it's the end of history kind of stuff.
There was always a lot of, you know, Japan is going to kill us.
We're declining as a nation, so on and so forth.
There was a lot of pessimism.
And maybe that almost...
Do you think that goes alongside a kind of a sense of we shouldn't be a universal nation.
We should be this American nation.
And that sometimes America can flip over to this euphoric, grandiose social mood of, say, the late'90s when you had the tech bubble and at other points, even the 2000s, where we're going to change the world.
No, actually, Rich.
I think the cost of the immigration debate in the U.S. is absolutely abnormal.
I think if it had cleared like an all political issue, there would have been a resolution.
Some form of Smith-Simpson would have been passed and it would have gotten under control.
I mean, it's extraordinary.
You look at Ann Coulter's book now, you know, Actors America, which is a very fine book, by the way.
I think very highly of it.
What she's advocating is exactly what I advocated in the nation 20 years before.
Moratorium and reorientation towards skills.
And a recognition that the U.S. is an organic nation, that it does have an Anglo Corps, and it won't survive without it.
It took a great deal of intense pressure to drive those arguments out of politics.
As you know, one part of that was we lost control of the National Review in '97.
And I really do think that that was a serious development, because if National Review had been around, had been in the right hands, I think it would have made quite a big difference to the Republican Party.
So, I mean, it's an extraordinary thing to see a party in the GOP committing suicide here, because the cost of it is suicidal.
And that takes some explaining.
And I put it down to, I mean, I think the role of the now cons, you know, has really got to be examined closely.
I mean, these are people I knew very well.
It was very close to personally and professionally in the '80s.
It was a shock to me to find out how hostile so many of them were on this question, and unreasoning.
So there's something really odd going on there.
Why do you think that is?
Just to face the point, you know, Derbyshire and I had this concept of an interglacial, but now there's a new ice age.
I mean, I think the intensity of political correctness It's far in excess of...
It's abnormal.
I mean, it's tempting to call it a new McCarthyism.
You know, people being forced out of work because they hit the...
Brendan Eich because he gave money to, you know, the wrong cause and all this kind of thing.
But McCarthyism, first of all, McCarthy was right.
The work can be surrounded.
And secondly, you know, it didn't last anything.
It lasted how many years?
He was censored when?
In '56 or '57?
No, so it didn't even last 10 years.
But this has gone on for 20 or 30 years now, and it's getting worse and worse.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, so you have to look.
It's not just a passing fad.
I mean, it's some deeper issue, and a kind of moral issue, I think.
And I've got this concept that I occasionally write about on Vida.com of American anti-America.
And I say there's really two nations here warring in the bosom of one state.
And there's one nation which is fundamentally white and essentially a white nation.
And it's what we call a historic American nation, which has been evolving here since before the revolution.
And then there's another American nation, which consists basically of minorities of various types.
And I call it anti-America.
And they're struggling for the control of the polity.
And that's, you know, they know, the Democrats know, that it will be very easy for the...
American Party to cut off immigration.
It could reverse immigration.
It could throw all these illegals out, if it felt like it.
It could strip them of citizenship, the ones who've erroneously got citizenship because they were born here.
They know all that, and that's why they're so desperate to keep this issue out, out of politics.
That explains, I think, the history about Trump, who in himself is not a particularly conservative figure.
It's not like Reagan or something where he actually does have a long list of conservative beliefs on various things.
Trump is obviously a fairly moderate Republican, apart from his mention of this immigration issue and apart, of course, as you said, from his personality.
Anyway, the point is they've got to stop this from coming into politics.
I guess I just see it very differently.
I think it's a little bit optimistic to call this the true America is against this.
I think you have to look at something deep.
In the ideological core of America, and in a way, in the kind of moral core of Americans, that they can't think of themselves as a people, that they must think of themselves in terms of values or ideology, and that that's what they resonate to.
And that this is kind of the direction the country has been going actually for a long time.
And in a way, the exception are people who go against it.
And the people who go against it have often been anti-American.
At least they were very skeptical of its founding ideology.
It doesn't matter what they formally say.
If you look at the opinion polls, you'll find that white America and everybody else diverge fundamentally and systematically on a whole range of issues.
They really have very little in common.
I mean, the Washington Post on guard did an opinion, Paul, the other day about how many people would actually deport all the illegals in the country.
And of course, the answer is very high, but it's overwhelmingly high among whites.
Whites respond to these issues systematically differently from my knowledge.
I think there are more important things than issues, is kind of what I'm saying.
Issues are like epiphenomenon, but you have to get at something much deeper.
I mean, you have to answer, like, why is America like this?
And it's just a deeper question than political tactics.
It isn't clear to me, America, if you were to look at the white, the white component alone, it's not clear to me it is like this.
I think the way they respond to issues is so different from the way everybody else responds to issues, and for that matter, the way they put the very elite response to issues, that you can see there is some type of identity there, which is, you know, that's the point, of course, that you made earlier.
I mean, whether or not it expresses itself in traditional American patriotism, there is clearly a group that has an identity here, which it is in court, it is conscious of.
Yeah, no, I agree with that.
We just have kind of a...
We just diverge on some kind of ideological questions.
But I agree with a lot of the fundamental things you're saying.
But, yeah, so let's talk a little bit about that.
Let's talk more about the movement aspect of immigration reform.
Because I believe your talk at American Renaissance, I think you said something like when they founded FAIR, the Federation...
Of American immigration reform that you expected that it would take 20 years for there to be actual immigration reform.
And that's what happened in the first quarter of the 20th century.
If I'm misrepresenting what you said, please correct me.
But you basically saw this as this is where it begins.
We're going to become conscious of this issue and then there'll be a political effect later.
But that actually hasn't happened.
So maybe talk about a little bit of that, the trajectory of the immigration movement.
Well, you know, last time there was a serious immigration problem like the current one, what is sometimes called the first great wave of immigration from 1880 to 1920.
Somewhere around about 1890, the major immigration reform group, which we call the Immigration Restriction League, was founded, and it prevailed after about 25 years.
And that comports what we said earlier.
It takes a long time for people to get new ideas through their head.
So I just, in the early days of Vidare.com, which was in the early 1990s, I guess.
Early 2000s.
2000, yeah.
You were on the internet in 1990.
This will happen to you too, Richard.
This will happen to you too.
Anyway, I just did a calculation as to what we could expect the issue to actually surface in politics.
The answer was about 2010.
And as I said in Tennessee for American Renaissance, it actually did surface.
If you look at the 2010 election, all across the country, there are all kinds of local initiatives against immigration that are going on there.
And what happened was they elected all kinds of people locally, and then they were systematically betrayed by the Republican Party, by the Republican people they elected.
All of these local issues were undermined, and, of course, none of them were taken up at the congressional level.
I mean, at that point, after 2010, the Republicans had control of the House.
They could have started to pass legislation and force the Democrats to vote against it and force the president to veto it and this kind of thing.
But they didn't.
They did absolutely nothing on immigration throughout that Congress, with the result, of course, that they lost the general election in 2012.
Now, again, in 2014, I think you could argue that immigration was clearly an issue, and it was working at an inchoate grassroots level.
And the Republicans did seize control of immigration.
Do you think the Senate has done any of these issues?
I don't see that the Republican Party can survive, frankly.
It really is a house divided.
Let me put this out there, because this might actually, in a way, marry our two views.
And that is, I totally agree that immigration is the gorilla in the room.
It's this implicit thing that really riles people up, and they sense it in their bones.
But they're not always able to articulate it in the best fashion.
And it affects elections even when you wouldn't see that by looking at specific issues.
It is an identity.
It's an implicit identity issue that informs the elections even when you think this election is actually about religious freedom or abortion or something.
It's in a way about implicit identity.
And so I totally agree with you there.
But maybe the reason why fair and the immigration movement failed is because it in a way wasn't like the early 20th century immigration reform.
Because that really was a heady, idealistic movement.
And yes, you can't...
Create a political movement based around professors or something.
Of course I agree with you.
But you need to be able to articulate something.
You need to have those power of those big ideas that attract all levels of society and that kind of trickle down to people who aren't intellectuals and who are blue-collar, normal people.
And that is when a movement can succeed.
I mean, that's how the left works.
The, you know, the left isn't ultimately born out of, you know, labor unions.
The left is born from intellectuals, and it kind of trickles down to them, and it kind of integrates them, and so on and so forth, but it also kind of captures people's imagination, and in the first quarter of the 20th century, you know, natural conservation was a movement that attracted some of the best people.
Racialism and And I feel like the contemporary immigration reform movement It doesn't do that because it's all kind of like quantitative.
The names of the organizations are like numbers or carrying capacity.
It's this kind of wonky, which is not an intellectual thing, wonky stuff.
It makes real intellectuals run.
It's not what they're into.
It's a kind of wonky movement that isn't idealistic and therefore kind of doesn't reach either intellectuals or the people.
A real white identity movement that is not supremacist and that is not racist, as that word is usually used in the sense of hating people or so on and so forth.
It's a real idealistic movement that that could attract Heady intellectual people, and it could actually resonate with blue-collar people.
But when you're just talking about numbers and statistics and new policies and blah, blah, blah, you're not going to attract either of those.
So actually, the answer to building an immigration reform movement is for us not to act, but to think.
To come up with bold...
Idealistic dreams that capture the imagination, that light a fire in someone's mind.
Because I'm just speaking for myself, numbers and fair, I don't read anything they produce.
I have no connection.
I don't need to hear what they say, because I get it, it's obvious.
But I am interested in things that are exciting and dangerous, and that's how the left has always operated.
And the right is always pragmatic.
And pragmatism is ultimately a failing strategy.
You have to be idealistic and a bit crazy to accomplish things.
Well, I think that...
You're talking about the inside of the Beltway movement.
There's no doubt that's completely crippled by political correctness.
And their own boringness.
I mean, let's be honest.
Well, they're forced to be boring because they can't say anything interesting.
Yeah, but they won't say anything interesting anyway.
They're inherently boring.
It's about stats and numbers.
You know, movements should be about feelings.
That's all they're allowed to talk about and retain their access to the mainstream media.
When I started VDare.com, and for that matter in Alien Nation, I deliberately went beyond what the bounds of...
I pushed the envelope.
I start to talk about race and stuff like that, and culture and so on, in ways which they would never talk about racial balance and so on.
And the result of that is that the Southern Party Law Center denounced we were a hate group, and all of our bookings from the mainstream media prominently dried up.
That was the end of our relationship with the mainstream media.
And that's been very, very damaging to us.
Although, of course, thanks for the internet, we can find our own audience.
But there's a real price to making that step, and there's people inside the bell where people are acutely aware that it's too dangerous for them to take, they think.
And that's why they're crippled, and that's why they're impotent.
So my position is basically to go back to the hills and start trying to mobilize people to the grassroots level by discussing these things.
I mean, I think it's true for political discourse generally.
I mean, I think the concept of coxervatism, although it's vulgar and everything, is profound.
I mean, there are a lot of conservatives who will not address these issues and consequently are bound not to reproduce themselves.
Oh yeah, I love coxervative.
Yeah, it's great.
It's the power of naming.
Rumpelstiltskin knew the power of names.
Exactly.
I mean, it's a very important concept, actually.
And it is true that the establishment right is not willing to fight on this.
This kind of circles back to what I was talking about before.
The people with whom coxervative, the meme, is popular are millennials or younger people on Twitter.
They're people who aren't connected, certainly aren't connected with Beltway politics.
They're people who are liberating themselves from them.
It's kind of like an abused wife.
Decides to just leave.
That's almost what I feel it's like.
It's just like, I'm done with this.
I'm gone.
And I think that is what this conservative meme...
That's why it's powerful.
And that's why we have to keep it away from silly conservatives who want to turn it into a euphemism for liberal or something.
We need to keep it as ours.
Because it's a way of saying, you're done.
We're done with you.
You're not going to reproduce yourself.
You're committing suicide.
Your whole...
Being is towards the destruction of your people and civilization.
So fuck you.
I mean, that's what it's about.
And I think it's great.
I think it really is a sign that younger people are kind of getting it and that we're going to have a new kind of politics emerge.
Well, you're right, Richard.
I'm not changing course.
What do you mean?
I wait for it with great interest.
Okay.
What do you mean, changing course?
I mean, obviously, I can't go back.
I mean, that's one of the problems that Alien Nation was decisive for me professionally because you can't really unsay things like that.
I hadn't, you know, and it's been extremely damaging.
I mean, you know, it's been extremely damaging to be professional.
On the other hand, you know, I'm called up here and I mean, she's again, as I do, pushing the envelope.
I just don't know if she can survive.
That is an interesting question.
Because Anne, again, no offense meant by this, but Anne is much more popular than you were.
I mean, again, in the sense that she has a following.
There's a lot of young people.
When she goes to CPAC, it's like a rock star or like a comedian event.
She tells all these jokes and people love it.
So she is...
For better or for worse.
To be honest, during the whole Bush years and the Iraq War, I hated Ann Coulter, to be honest.
She was just the expression of this mindless warmongering.
Anyway, I won't go into that.
But yeah, she has a huge following and she's definitely going out there.
The fact that she really did...
She actually denies the existence of race.
She denies Darwinian evolution.
She denies all this kind of stuff.
But the fact that she says, A, this is going to destroy the country, and whether it's illegal immigration or legal immigration, it doesn't matter.
It's ultimately the same thing.
It's just whether you filled out the paperwork correctly.
And I think that is very powerful.
I agree.
I think we should watch this because it's going to be interesting whether she can survive this or whether this is maybe her last book.
I don't know.
Maybe that's not too pessimistic.
We have this concept of Vidalia.com, you know, what we call the curse of Stein.
And that's because Dan Stein, who was the head of, when I first started writing about this issue, actually, quite surprisingly, said to me, why are you interested in this?
Everybody who gets interested in this issue, it destroys their careers.
Kind of an odd thing to say if you had a fair, but I appreciate the spirit in which you said it.
And you know what?
He's right.
I mean, look at what happened to Luke Dobbs.
I mean, there's maybe 20 people who have been involved in this issue.
Always nasty things happen to them.
Anne is really taking a really serious risk here.
And I think, you know, it's greatly to a credit.
Yeah.
I think it's about Anne, Richard, is that...
Although you're right that she doesn't directly address the subject of race, she does directly address the subject of ethnicity.
And she says that, you know, and the other side know this and complain about it.
She says that America was fundamentally a wasp country.
And it can't be extended beyond a certain point ethnically.
You know, and what's happening here is that through the Immigration Act of '65, basically the government is dissolving the people and electing a new one.
And that's a very disturbing point to the left, because they are very, very concerned that Americans not think of themselves as an ethnicity.
They're very concerned that they think of themselves as an idea.
Some of the reviews, they really...
Not that she's got that many views, by the way.
Again, this is a book that's been possible because of the internet.
She's almost been completely shut out of the establishment media, the establishment press and so on.
But still, the reviews that you see, you can see that the idea that she's mentioned, the sort of northern European nature of the historic American nation, is very, very disturbing to the side.
I totally agree.
Well, Peter, let's put a bookmark in this conversation.
Thanks for being on.
I really appreciate it.
And I guess, you know, thank you for what you've done over the past three years.
You've strapped on the suicide vest of immigration reform.
Or what I failed to do, I'm afraid.
But we keep plugging away.
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