[A transcript of Matt Forney's speech at the recent Identitarian Ideas IX conference]
I don’t think I need to remind anyone that the election of President Donald Trump was a turning point in American and European history. For our entire lives, our overlords in the government and media have told us that we were on the losing side of history. That we were destined to fail. That the future of our civilization was rainbows, unicorns and chocolate chip cookies, fruits Frenching their boyfriends in front of empty churches, neon-lit mosques eclipsing the cities our forefathers labored to build, and finally, being finessed out of our neighborhoods by swarthy foreigners who stare at our sisters, wives and girlfriends the way lions stare at gazelles.
But for now, the arc of the moral universe has been redirected.
The arc of the political universe has also been redirected. One of the most important achievements of the past two years has been the total destruction of the mainstream American right-wing. My friend Edwin Oslan calls them “Conservatism, Inc.,” the alt-right calls them “cuckservatives,” but regardless of how we abuse them, they were the primary impediment to real, nationalist change in the West. It is they, not the left, who are the biggest losers in the age of Trump. Right now, the left is so excited about the prospect of “resisting” the President that they almost seem sexually aroused by it. It’s your National Reviews, your Weekly Standards, your Rick Wilsons and Rich Lowrys and rich finks in general who have lost everything in the God-Emperor’s ascent.
I’m not just talking about the neocons, the loudest, yappiest poodles echoing in the cuckservative kennel. There’s a whole world of inanity beyond the armchair quarterbacking of soft, pudgy Manhattan intellectuals renaming French fries to “freedom fries” or calling on poor men’s sons to fight their wars for them. Mr. Trump has helped sledgehammer the foundations of American cuckservatism, and we are now dancing among the ruins.
A common refrain during the election was that Donald Trump was not a “true” conservative. The myth of the post-National Review right-wing in America is that the United States was intended to be a different society than the nations of Europe, one bound not by blood and soil but by the liberties granted by the Constitution: the proposition nation. In the minds of the geldings who believe this myth, such as, for example, the guy at CPAC who denounced us as “left-wing fascists” a couple of days ago, Trump and the alternative right are a rejection of these core American values, a return to the bad old days of European nationalism, endless war and diminutive Austrian men with funny mustaches.
The problem with myths is that they have a bad habit of being false. The proposition nation so beloved of William F. Buckley and Norman Podhoretz is nothing but Saran wrap stretched over the casserole of white America. While it’s true that the Constitution represented a break from the European tradition of monarchy, the ideals that fueled the American Revolution were derived from Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke and implemented by Americans of European descent. Without Europe’s peoples or its philosophies, there is no Constitution, there is no right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and there is no United States of America.
The “golden age” of immigration to Ellis Island, so beloved of cucks and leftists and a fundamental underpinning of the proposition nation myth, is itself a crock of garbage. As Jim Goad detailed in his book The Redneck Manifesto, during the 19th century, corporations lobbied the U.S. government to bring in Italians, Chinese and other foreigners to break the backs of labor unions and lower wages for the average worker. The lie that immigrants do the jobs that Americans don’t want to do has a far longer history than you think.
But myths cannot take root unless they contain some truth. You may not believe that Jesus Christ died for your sins, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the Romans didn’t nail him to the cross. Similarly, while the U.S. is hardly a proposition nation, bound together only by the Bill of Rights, its history as a colonial state has kept white Americans from forming a cohesive, rooted culture.
Rare are the Americans who are so attached to their hometowns that they don’t want to leave them. Packing your bags and moving to another state, even if it’s on the other side of the country, is as American a tradition as sportsball and diabetes. From the settlement of Jamestown and the landing at Plymouth Rock to the Louisiana Purchase to the California gold rush to the rise of the Sun Belt in the 1950’s and sixties, if white Americans didn’t like where they were, they went somewhere else. I know that when I was a kid, I dreamt of nothing more than getting out of my hometown of Syracuse, New York, that decaying Rust Belt ghetto midway between New York City and Toronto.
People who are constantly moving from point A to point B cannot put down roots and develop a sense of self. In fact, recent scientific research has shown that the brains of those who live in the same place their entire life develop far differently than those who migrate to new locales. White Americans never developed a unified sense of who they are because they’ve never stayed in one place long enough for the question to come up. And that’s before we get into mass immigration, media propaganda and the other myriad ways that cultural Marxists have tried to destroy the spirits of white Americans.
Now, we do have strong regional identities: as explained in the book Albion’s Seed, the United States was settled by four distinct groups from the British Isles, and our politics and culture is in many ways a continuation of the struggle between the Cavaliers and the Roundheads during the English Civil War. But no singular white consciousness has ever existed in the U.S. Ask a Swede, a Pole, or a Hungarian who he is and what his nation means to him, and you’ll get concrete answers rooted in cultural memory going back centuries. Ask the same question of an American and you’ll quickly find out that there’s no “there” there. At the moment, mindless consumerism is the only duct tape holding the U.S. together.
So, yes, the cucks have—had—a glimmer of a point: as a settler state of European mutts, the U.S. was not merely an extension of its fatherland. But that has come to an end, not because of Donald Trump or the alt-right, but ultimately because of the left themselves.
Years ago, when I was skeptical of white advocates and tribalism, I wrote on my old blog In Mala Fide that a political movement like the alt-right would never work because whites in the U.S. don’t define themselves by their whiteness, unlike blacks. A reader of mine interjected by saying that whites have already been defined as white, in the negative, by the left. And he was right.
To be white is to be the world’s whipping boy. It means being blamed for everything from poverty in Africa to environmental degradation to women not having enough space to sit down on the subway. It means being told to shut up and sit down, that your opinion is worthless because of your “privilege,” and that the eventual disappearance of your people and culture is a sign of progress.
To be white, straight and a man is even worse, because you’re told that your natural masculine instincts, your natural desires to bed and wed women make you an oppressive misogynist. In 21st Century Parody World, six-year olds are allowed to take dangerous hormones so they can become a funhouse mirror version of the opposite sex, but not asking your wife for permission before you kiss her can land you in prison for rape. And if you’re not happy with this arrangement, you’re expected to sate yourself with degenerate Japanese cartoons and pornography, the bread and circuses of the globalist empire. That’s how mad the Marxists are: they don’t merely want to destroy our culture and identity; they want to destroy the very things that make us human.
Sun Tzu stated that when you have surrounded your enemy, you must give him a way to escape, or else he will fight you to the death, having nothing to lose. The left never learned that lesson, because they’ve pursued whites—white men—everywhere they’ve gone, leaving them no quarter and no place to call their own. Even video games, long the province of virginal nerds, were not safe, which is what sparked the GamerGate movement three years ago, the first successful backlash against cultural Marxism in most of our lifetimes. The white men of gaming saw leftists trying to subvert their favorite hobby, one they retreated to after society rejected them, and said no more. Enough. This line you shall not cross.
It was this spark that ignited the pile of TNT that was the Trump campaign and the alternative right. The average Trump voter isn’t explicitly aware of all the issues that we are versed in. They don’t know everything that we know. But they know, deep down, that something is wrong. They know that fifty years of mass non-white immigration and globalist free trade have ruined them financially and placed their lives and that of their children in peril. And they see, day in and day out, the chattering classes tell them that they are the problem. They see liberal arts dilettantes in Brooklyn brownstones, rent paid courtesy of Daddy’s credit line, banging out “thinkpieces” every day claiming that all the world’s ills are thanks to those stupid white rednecks in Kentucky, Michigan or Pennsylvania, and as soon as they kick the bucket and give way to all these newcomers from Mexico, we’ll be all better off.
White Americans saw this repulsive display and they said no more. Enough. This line you shall not cross. And they turned out to support a champion who would fight for them. Donald Trump is the first politician in years who treats white Americans as a group with interests of their own, interests that are worth defending. While he is far from the alt-right ideologically, Trump’s nationalist presidency is aiding the maturation of white America from an empty, consumerist frontier into a people with an identity of their own, one that runs deeper than pop culture effluvia and waxing autistic about “muh Constitution.”
I’ll end with an interesting anecdote.
Over the past few years, I’ve noticed an increasing number of houses in upstate New York flying Confederate flags. Seems absurd on the face of it. Why are white New Yorkers adorning their homes with the flag flown by the Southern rebels that their ancestors fought in the Civil War? After all, you don’t see many Poles flying the Hammer and Sickle, or many Koreans paying obeisance to the emperor of Japan. Then it hit me: the U.S. has become so deracinated and so debauched that rural Northern whites are reaching for any emblem of culture that they can get their hands on, anything that they can call theirs.
To the cultural Marxists, the Confederate flag represents white America, the white America they seek to destroy and replace with foreigners, a symbol that drives them insane with hatred. To rural whites across the U.S., lambasted as the embodiment of everything wrong with the world, the Confederate flag is a gesture of defiance to those who would see them dead and buried. A symbol of implicit white identity, transcending the petty regional differences between North and South, united against the forces of globalism, multiculturalism, and degeneracy.
None of us can say for certain whether this a struggle our people will win. But I can say this: we will not lie down and die either. Regardless of how the next eight years play out, the dragon of white identity has been roused from his slumber, and he’s not going back to bed anytime soon.
As my friend the Bechtloff says, I’ve made my peace with God. Let’s dance.
Thank you.
