Tag Archive for: nationalism

Flawed Globalist Ideology Underlies Opposition to Trump

There is a reason that nearly every powerful special interest in the United States is doing everything in its power to defeat Donald Trump, and it has nothing to do with the media’s fraudulent portrayal of him as a racist. Nor does it have anything to do with his allegedly abrasive personality.

If the president were willing to put the United States citizens under a total lockdown, allow millions of economic refugees to swarm across the borders, ship more jobs to Asia, and then impoverish whatever was left of middle America under the pretext of fighting “climate change,” he would be cruising to reelection.

Put another way, if Trump were a globalist, instead of a nationalist, there would not be well-funded militants destroying our cities while benefiting from a news blackout. There would not be NPC drones like ABC’s David Muir spewing anti-Trump pablum night after night, and money from Big Tech and Wall Street billionaires would be pouring into his campaign, instead of supporting his opponent.

In January 2018, in a speech of striking clarity, Trump described his vision of American nationalism. Addressing the assembled heads of state and business elite at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Switzerland, Trump’s speech amounted to a declaration of war on the globalists. For example, he said:

“The United States will no longer turn a blind eye to unfair economic practices, including massive intellectual property theft, industrial subsidies, and pervasive state-led economic planning. These and other predatory behaviors are distorting the global markets and harming businesses and workers, not just in the U.S., but around the globe. Just like we expect the leaders of other countries to protect their interests, as President of the United States, I will always protect the interests of our country, our companies, and our workers.”

These words did not constitute a threat to globalist ideology because Trump’s version of nationalism is toxic, but because it exposes the globalist vision itself as flawed and dangerous. What globalists want will not deliver peace or prosperity to the world, much less America. What globalist billionaires and globalist corporations want, however, will make them wealthier and more powerful than ever.

These words constituted a threat to globalist ideology not because Trump’s version of nationalism is particularly toxic, but because he exposed the globalist vision itself as flawed and dangerous. What globalists want will not deliver peace or prosperity to the world, much less America. What globalist billionaires and globalist corporations want, however, will make them wealthier and more powerful than ever.

In 2016 the World Economic Forum released a brief video called “8 predictions for the world in 2030” which remains an accurate summary of the globalist vision for the future. Here are the key points:

1) You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy. Everything you’ll want, you’ll rent, and it will be delivered by drone.

2) The United States won’t be the world’s leading superpower. Instead, a handful of countries will dominate.

3) You won’t die waiting for an organ donor. We won’t transplant organs. We’ll print new ones instead.

4) You’ll eat much less meat. An occasional treat, not a staple. For the good of the environment and our health.

5) A billion people will be displaced by climate change. We’ll have to do a better job at welcoming and integrating refugees.

6) Polluters will have to pay to emit carbon dioxide. There will be a global price on carbon. This will help make fossil fuels history.

7) You could be preparing to go to Mars. Scientists will have worked out how to keep you healthy in space.

8) Western values will have been tested to the breaking point. Checks and balances that underpin our democracies must not be forgotten.

The essence of this list, or agenda, can be distilled into the following: Private property will be abolished, the United States will lose its sovereignty, food will be rationed, state-supported refugees will arrive by the millions and be dispersed into every American city and town, energy will be rationed, and America’s traditional values and institutions will be obliterated.

This is a deeply flawed vision of the future. It fails on every practical level, but is marketed relentlessly by all the same institutions that attack President Trump. And on the surface, it has a powerful moral appeal. Consider these lyrics from John Lennon’s globalist anthem: “Imagine there’s no countries, it isn’t hard to do, nothing to kill or die for, and no religion, too.” This sounds great, until you face the reality of other powerful nations who aren’t about to cede their sovereignty to Western corporations, or deliberately undermine their cultures or their economies.

This means that “climate refugees” will not be pouring into China, or Japan, or Russia, or any other powerful and independent nations. It means those nations will continue to consume cheap and abundant fossil fuel, allowing them to allocate a higher percentage of their GDPs to more productive investments including research, industrial development, infrastructure upgrades, and military spending.

Deliberately hobbling the American economy, unilaterally, in the name of fighting “climate change” will elevate the price of everything imaginable—energy, water, food, housing, transportation, and every product and service that requires those basics for its own production. At the same time, adding tens of millions of “climate refugees” to America’s population without any regard to whether or not they come with productive skills will place additional burdens on an already handicapped economy.

Even worse, this agenda embraces a new dominant ideology, already well established, that attacks the core values that made America great. It justifies American submission to rationing and mass immigration through the underlying claim that American imperialist capitalism is responsible both for the “climate crisis” and the economic misery in other nations. It goes on to reject the most fundamental premise of capitalism, which is individual ownership of property. “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy.”

But just as abandoning the fate of the world to rising nations such as China—an implacable police state bent on enslaving the world—is obviously flawed, abandoning capitalist values to a society where “you’ll own nothing” is also a recipe for misery. Taking away the ability for individuals to own property takes away the incentive for people to work hard and strive to improve conditions for themselves and their families. Behind the obvious historical fact that communism and socialism have never worked and have led to nothing but murderous tyranny and economic devastation in every place they have ever been tried, is one simple truth of human nature: people need to have an incentive to achieve, or they won’t bother.

Thus far, America’s influential elites, from Big Tech and Big Media to at least some significant percentage of academia and the corporate community, have been unable to embrace the alternative vision President Trump represents. This is a failure of imagination as much as evidence of corruption. Because there is an alternative future that doesn’t involve American decline.

In this alternative to the agenda of the Davos set, instead of despoiling the landscape with millions of wind turbines, we would have clean fossil fuel, hydroelectric power, and nuclear power that is deregulated and allowed to create cheap abundant energy in America and around the world. This would cause a rapid rise in the standard of living and quality of life in developing nations, which would lead to rising literacy and lower birth rates. In Africa, India, and elsewhere, economic development also fosters voluntary population migration into revitalized and inviting urban centers, taking pressure off ecosystems and wildlife.

This scenario, where sovereign nations are encouraged to develop conventional energy and make big infrastructure investments, has been completely derailed by the Western obsession with fighting climate change. The result is environmental destruction caused by burgeoning populations pouring into protected wildernesses in search of firewood and game meat. And that is a cold, devastating fact. Anthropogenic climate change as an existential threat to humanity, on the other hand, is a theory; a mighty convenient one at that.

President Trump’s policies have encouraged industrial development, especially in the United States, but also around the world. The globalists’ agenda calls for tightly controlled development, massive migration, and socialist redistribution, all under the supposedly benevolent management of multinational corporations and international banks. But even if their intentions were entirely innocent, their plans, should they ever come to fruition, would spell catastrophe.

The irony of globalist ideology is that its ostensible goal, peace and prosperity for all mankind, is better served by Trump’s version of nationalism. What Trump envisions—peaceful competition between nations, all looking out for their own national interests—offers humanity a path into the future that can be realized without trauma, especially if America remains united and prosperous, and able to exercise leadership. What globalists offer is tyranny, masquerading as enlightenment.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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The Case for a Muscular Civic Nationalism

America today faces challenges that cannot be overcome without national unity. Desperate economic hardship and existential international threats are beyond the living memory of most Americans, but they could be coming back. The Pax Americana, in effect since 1945, may be coming to an end. Since the end of the Cold War in 1991 America has been a hyperpower, dominating the world economically and militarily. All of that is now in question.

Every aspect of American power is threatened. America has a new peer competitor, China, controlled by a regime determined to attain superiority over the United States in all aspects of national power: technological, economic, and military. As Chinese power grows, America’s response is increasingly inadequate. American corporations are more than just reluctant to abandon Chinese markets, some of them, such as Google, appear to be more responsive to China’s security concerns than they are to America’s.

America’s culture of tolerance of individual rights and free enterprise has morphed into a dysfunctional encouragement of anti-American dissent that reaches well beyond appropriate responses to grievances. In pursuit of worldwide profits and power, America’s corporate elites have abandoned the culture that nurtured them. In pursuit of utopian ideals, America’s colleges and universities have trained American students to despise America for its failure to be perfect. All the while, America’s politicians in both parties have pandered to America’s most vocal, embittered, and unrepresentative activist factions.

This is America as it enters the third decade of the 21st century. What ideology, what form of revitalized patriotism can heal America? What agenda will awaken a national spirit of unity sufficient to meet and navigate what may be a perilous future?

As it is, America’s corporate and political elites disparage nationalist sentiment, even conflating it as inherently racist. Is this motivated by a benign desire to hasten America’s evolution as a people? Is the genuine intention to make America a better, more open society? Is that what is behind the popular condemnation of nationalism and the endorsements of globalism, a peaceful world without borders? And if that is truly the benevolent core of this consensus, what parties to this consensus may have hidden agendas?

A discussion of this topic need not dwell on the threats confronting America today. They’re real enough. The military threat is expertly described in the 2020 book The Kill Chain, a visceral recitation of China’s rise and America’s negligence. The economic threats are equally obvious; for global economic analyses we’ll never see on ABC Nightly “News,” the forbidden fruit of Zero Hedge, or the suppressed musings of Felix Rex are as good as any.

Perhaps the most palatable reason America’s corporate and political elites have decided to cater to violent mobs, and America’s cultural elite have tried to transmute all of it into some new version of radical chic, is because there isn’t a more attractive alternative. What unyielding and persuasive ideological counterpoint exists in America that feels safe enough for the establishment to embrace? In the discussion to follow, the thesis to be explored is how civic nationalism can be defined in a manner that goes well beyond its current, barely intellectualized, tepid iteration, bereft of passion, uncertain of purpose, and devoid of popular support.

The case must be made that civic nationalism, colorblind but uncompromising in its adherence to traditional American values, is the only hope to unify Americans, which in turn is the only way a revitalized American civilization can hope to counter the rise of China.

To use an allegory from the 1930s, civic nationalism offers an American unity that could galvanize this nation with fireside chats instead of Nuremberg rallies. It is an inclusive version of American patriotism that rallies all Americans to meet the challenges of the future with pride and unity. It may very well be America’s only hope.

Absent civic nationalism, America’s ruling class is adrift. The wealthiest look east and see even more wealth to be had, rationalizing their anti-American greed with heaping helpings of outdated free-trade liberalism. American politicians look to the Left and see righteous passion, while on the Right there is only defensive mutters or divisive bellicosity. The smartest among America’s ruling class see racial tension and have no answer but to let it fester and grow. Perhaps their thinking goes something like this: We’ll sell America to China, and when the masses realize what’s happened, they’ll blame each other instead of us.

How else to explain what’s happening, as mass unrest continues across America? Paul Joseph Watson, one of those inconvenient YouTubers who is not quite impolitic enough to get banned, but provocative enough to deliver insights (along with insults) you may not find elsewhere, featured this quote from an unidentified guest in one of his recent videos:

People who support Black Lives Matter, people who support the Left; a lot of them think they are in possession of radical political opinions. But how radical is your opinion when the cops and the national guard are kneeling and doing the Macarena, dancing with protesters, and every major corporation has put out a message and donated money to this cause? To the people who are spray painting and burning cop cars and smashing windows, how radical are your opinions, really, when these actions are allowed to take place? Because this is a tactical decision. It’s not like the cops and the national guard couldn’t crack down on this if they wanted to. It’s that it’s being allowed to happen, and if you think otherwise you’re a fool.

This sums it up quite well. The mayhem erupting across the nation since George Floyd’s death on May 25 has been allowed to happen. It is orchestrated by well-funded organizations that are collecting millions from mega-donors and mega-corporations, and egged on by months if not years of propaganda. The unrelenting havoc in the wake of George Floyd’s death is not a precipitous spasm of unrest that will eventually pass. It is a deliberate escalation of an ongoing insurrection.

The primary goals of this insurrection supposedly are to protect black lives and to oppose fascism, with a strong LGBTQ contingent also represented. The ongoing rampage has impacted almost every large American city. Despite dozens of deaths, thousands of injuries, and probably billions in property damage, compounded by the COVID shutdown, this insurrection has plenty of support. Blithely ignoring the destruction, the “peaceful protesters” have received sympathetic treatment from Democrats, and their slogans have been turned into marketing campaigns by major corporations. The media’s coverage of the insurrection has been predictable.

“America is irredeemably racist” is the message spread, with rare exceptions, by every establishment media property, online and offline. So desperate is the media to stoke this message that when a young man who probably just had a few too many drinks uttered a few anti-Asian slurs at a family in a California restaurant—no context was ever provided, despite it being very unlikely that “people being Asian” was the only thing that made this man angry—it was a top story on every major television network in the country. Similarly, when a young woman and her dog felt threatened by a black birdwatcher in New York City’s Central Park, her alleged overreaction was national news.

These are unpleasant events. They are examples of bad judgment, a failure to communicate, a loss of civility. They are not national news. The very idea is ridiculous. But on and on and on this story goes, desperate for fodder. America is a horrible nation, filled with horrible white racists.

Why? Who benefits by making white people out to be so rotten? Who benefits by convincing nonwhites, especially blacks, that whatever challenges they face as individuals and as a community are solely the fault of white people?

The “racist” stigma has been deployed by politicians and activists to manipulate American public policy for decades, because regardless of justification, it worked. But the perception that America is rotten to the core, comprehensively and indelibly defined as racist, used to be a notion largely restricted to academia. No more. Now it’s everywhere. ABC’s David Muir, with his carefully fabricated gravitas, intones yet another variation on the theme literally every newscast, often several times per newscast. The rest of the gang follow suit, from CNN’s Don Lemon to NPR’s Judy Woodruff.

But America is not an irredeemably racist nation. America in the 21st century is the least racist nation on earth. And yet this destructive lie is the currency of Democrats, the obsession of the media, and the marketing message of global corporations. The duration and weight of this lie, its steady growth despite a steadily vanishing basis for it, go well beyond its obvious goal of convincing Americans to vote President Trump out of office. What else is going on?

Finding a Scapegoat for Present and Future Problems

Behind the mere momentum and opportunism propelling the false and divisive narrative of endemic white racism, there is a formidable alignment of special interests. Foreign adversaries, China and Russia in particular, want the United States weakened by violent internal conflict, and fomenting racial polarization furthers that objective. Multinational corporations benefit by convincing Americans that fighting racism is a national imperative, because it makes it easier for them to stigmatize and silence as a racist anyone who objects to them exporting jobs and importing cheap labor.

Also propelling and profiting from the “America is racist” narrative, of course, are socialists, who have realized that as long as any group disparity exists between whites and blacks, they can argue that racism is the cause, and redistribution of wealth is the cure. But there is an even more insidious motive perpetuating the lie of endemic white racism—the need for a scapegoat.

Anybody familiar with the momentum of history must wonder how long the United States Treasury can continue to electronically materialize trillions of dollars to finance federal spending deficits. They must wonder how long American society can continue to function with every small business in the nation destroyed by the shutdown. They look with fear upon the millions of American youth who are disenfranchised by globalization robbing them of the ability to make a decent living, and environmentalism run amok robbing them of the ability to afford a home.

If the last few months have demonstrated nothing else, it is that anything can happen. Who would have thought one year ago that a global pandemic would strip away our constitutional rights as if they never existed? Who would have thought six months ago that our nation would be convulsed with violent riots, and major cities would become virtually ungovernable? And the other shoe has yet to drop. America’s economy remains precariously intact. There are (at least) no new foreign wars. Statues have toppled, select urban streets are still on fire, but widespread, horrific chaos is not yet here. Will it come, and if so, when? It could happen fast.

This is the scenario that confronts America’s billionaires and the political and corporate strategists who serve them. What happens when Americans aren’t just upset and financially squeezed, but desperately hungry and financially broken? What happens when small business owners and their workers aren’t just on a pandemic hiatus, but permanently ruined with no hope? What happens when the only businesses left standing are multinational corporate franchises? What happens when the inner cities are unlivable, the suburbs are besieged, and supply chains for essential products are broken? What happens when the Chinese cold war goes ice cold, and Americans quit their addiction to China’s exports cold turkey?

When people’s lives and livelihoods are destroyed en masse, they look for someone or something to blame. That’s human nature. And perhaps unwittingly, perhaps as a precaution, but regardless of intention or conscious planning, America’s corporate and political elite are preparing the target and hedging their bets, with the full complicity of the establishment media. It goes like this, “when the shit hits the fan, and all hope is lost, don’t blame the people who got rich selling America to China, blame white people. It’s their fault.”

By doing this, not only will the fury of a disenfranchised citizenry be turned upon itself in a fratricide that will be horrific to its participants but relatively harmless to the elites, the ideology of the socialists will be co-opted and used by corporate and political elites to further centralize their power. This is already happening, in slow motion. And the more crises that hit America, the more the narrative will intensify. Whites are the problem. Whites are to blame.

Understanding the True Political Conflicts in America

Stoking racial hatred is a dangerous game. Encouraging identity politics is only a winning strategy if the identities being nurtured or disparaged continue to be the chosen targets. But it doesn’t take an expert in political jujitsu to redirect all this poisonous swill. Most Americans have already realized that both of the mainstream political establishments do not represent them. A majority of Americans already understand they cannot trust the establishment media. Only two more axioms have to be broken to change the game: First, that this is not a battle between capitalists and communists, it’s a battle between nationalists and globalists, and second, that in this battle, whites and blacks are not enemies, but allies.

The elites are making race and racial oppression the central topic in American politics, and for good reason. Because if you take race out of the equation, there is very little of substance separating the grassroots on the Left from the grassroots on the Right. Why? Because communists and corporations in 21st-century America are working together to advance big government globalism; they both support an authoritarian, collectivist, micromanaged society.

On most of the big issues of our time, including the rejection of traditional moral values, the centrality of “climate change” as a transformative economic and political agenda, and the need for affirmative action, racial redress, and open borders, they share a surprisingly congruent agenda. Only on the issue of private property do they diverge, and even that may be illusory when considering the realistic prospect of publicly held corporations with activist directorates owning virtually the entire economy.

So where are the actual divergences in American politics, if not the distinctions between Left and Right, Conservative and Liberal? The following chart attempts to depict the more relevant political dynamics in America today. The vertical axis represents the split between supporters of nationalism vs supporters of globalism, and the horizontal axis represents the split between supporters of ethnically homogeneous societies and supporters of multiethnic societies.

On the above chart, for ease of explanation, the quadrants are numbered. In quadrant No. 4, which represents the multiethnic globalists, you find everyone supposedly at odds with each other in conventional political paradigms. The establishment Democrats and establishment GOP (indistinguishable from “Conservatism, Inc.”) are joined by America’s Social Democrats, along with multinational corporations and corporate media, academia, and foundations and think tanks on the “Left” and the “Right.” All of them envision a multiethnic, globalist future.

Diagonally opposite and diametrically opposed to the multiethnic globalists are the ethnic nationalists (quadrant No. 1). As in any of these quadrants, there exists a continuum of passion, from the most hardcore extremists to merely insouciant rebels and provocateurs. But at whatever level of extremism, here is where you find white nationalists, black nationalists, Chicano nationalists, and various other smaller cadres of ethnic nationalists.

Why Civic Nationalism Offers a New American Consensus

Civic nationalists, occupying quadrant No. 2, are beleaguered, inadequately defended or explained, and under attack from all sides. The ethnic nationalists consider civic nationalists to be naïve, incapable of recognizing that cultures are inextricably connected to race, or that some cultures are incompatible. They believe that multi-ethnic national solidarity – as expressed in civic nationalism – is impossible. Virtually all ethnic nationalists consider themselves to be oppressed, which tinges their animosity towards their counterparts among the civic nationalists with the additional insult of betrayal.

Multiethnic globalists, for their part, also view civic nationalists as naïve, but for the opposite reason. They consider civic nationalists merely by virtue of their nationalism to be pairing up with “white nationalists,” possibly unaware of their complicity, or possibly even deliberately camouflaging their own racist tribalism. After all, how can it even be possible to be a nationalist if you aren’t a racist?

But the whole point of civic nationalism is to reject racism while embracing patriotism. It expresses the quintessentially American ideal of the melting pot. It expresses—not nearly forcefully enough—America’s history of assimilating immigrants into the mainstream culture. Our tradition of assimilation offends ethnic nationalists, who are skeptical that it can still work, but it has also become problematic for multiethnic globalists who typically must defer to identity politics.

The exploration of what it means to be multiethnic but monocultural is one of the prevailing challenges for civic nationalists, and to-date they are not up to the task. They are so busy defending charges of secretly harboring feelings of ethnic nationalism that they don’t have time to distinguish themselves from the multiethnic globalists. But these are fatal distractions to civic nationalists, if it means the bigger questions aren’t answered.

What is American culture? What defines the American civilization, and how can it be defended? What is America’s tradition of assimilation, if not the preservation of a unique core culture that nonetheless constantly evolves and incorporates dazzling new ideas from around the world, while retaining the foundational values of individual freedom, free enterprise, and European Christian heritage?

It is a tragedy that America’s civic nationalists are a barely recognized and often stigmatized movement. For one thing, once you escape the corridors of the chattering classes or the cadres of extremists, small in number but vocal and politically connected, you find that civic nationalists describe the majority of Americans. To the extent their exposure to unrelenting globalist, anti-nationalist, anti-American, anti-white bombast coming from academia, media, entertainment and politicians hasn’t corrupted their hearts, most Americans love America. They love it just the way it is, imperfect but always evolving and improving, offering opportunities to everyone willing to work hard, a big, sprawling nation with all kinds of different people who are united by the American dream.

That dream—individual freedom and economic prosperity—is threatened as never before, but instead of speaking up louder than ever, civic nationalists are hunkering down. Many of them are afraid to defend their biggest champion, President Trump, who epitomizes the American dream and would be far more popular if he weren’t demonized by the establishment at every turn. To be fair, Donald Trump is often his own worst enemy. But Donald Trump personifies the nightmare of the globalists—an American president who embraces civic nationalism.

Now more than ever, civic nationalism is a movement that must find new adherents and persuasive advocates across American society because, in troubled times, it is America’s only hope for unity.

The Toxic Realignment That Must Not Happen

Where will Americans turn, if the social contract is broken by economic devastation, or an even more serious pandemic, or any other sort of seismic hiccough that inaugurates not weeks or months, but years of turmoil and suffering? What happens if America descends into a new depression, requiring a decade or more of mass hardship that dwarfs anything in living memory?

Here is where the riots and the racism narrative become even more useful to globalists. Here is why the BLM and Antifa militants, with their passionate denunciations of racist America, are being allowed to carry on. Here is why a full-spectrum campaign is being waged to push whites into either paroxysms of self-hatred and guilt, or reactionary anger, and here is why, at the same time, nonwhites are being pushed into blaming whites for literally anything in their lives that isn’t right. Just before the deluge, get them busy fighting each other.

What better way to prevent a populist rebellion against globalism, or, in a related and even more sinister twist, a realignment that embraces conspiracy theories? Referring to the previously discussed chart of political alignments in America, what constitutes ethnic globalists (quadrant 3 on the chart)? Is there such a thing? Perhaps not yet, but If history is any guide, the phenomena of “one tribe takes over the world” is the rule, not the exception. Across the millennia of recorded history, the story of humanity is one of empires, almost invariably dominated by a single tribe, rising and falling in their attempts to dominate the world.

Civic nationalism recognizes the potential for today’s version of imperial competition, the so-called clash of civilizations, to unify people in America. No longer scapegoating each other for the challenges they face as individuals and groups, they are unified as Americans facing international challenges. And within a domestic culture of lowered tensions, Americans might respond more judiciously to foreign adversaries and reject jingoism. But there is another, darker outcome.

By continually stoking the fires of racial resentment, it is possible that in a severe economic downturn, America’s warring tribes might redirect their aggression away from each other and towards the globalists themselves. After all, if a people have been conditioned for a generation to find a scapegoat for whatever miseries they’ve faced, they will probably find the narrative of predatory globalist bankers at least as compelling as blaming straight white guys who live in the same modest apartments and condos as they do, and whose material comforts have been equally compromised by bad times.

History provides a hideous and fairly recent example of how a powerful nation with a sophisticated populace nonetheless were seduced by a demagogue into falsely attributing their failures to a small group of people. The evil perpetrated by the German Nazis against the Jews of Europe is a horrific example of a reactionary paroxysm that could not have occurred if it hadn’t been stoked by decades of preparatory hatred.

What if the ethnic nationalists of the United States, created as much by the incessant establishment drumbeat of victim and oppressor as by their own antagonistic pathologies, stop fighting each other, because they found a common foe?

The conventional establishment analysis of anti-Semitism in America focuses almost exclusively on its embrace by white nationalists, and the response has been to expose and deplatform any online content that includes criticism of the Israeli lobby in the United States, or assertions that Jewish individuals own a disproportionate share of America’s media, entertainment, and financial sectors.

The problem with this focus on possible anti-Semitism on the part of white nationalists is that it ignores  far more pervasive anti-Semitism coming from so-called social justice warriors and Democratic Socialists. And that omission, that selective focus, exposes a deeper problem: In the radicalizing environment of a social and economic collapse, the American corporate establishment may not effectively counter an anti-Semitic narrative from spreading, because in their attempt to co-opt America’s Left, they fed an anti-Semitic beast that got too big to control. They are funding Social Democrats who, in their obsessive hatred for “Zionism,” are a heartbeat away from publicly hating the disproportionate influence of Jews in American media, politics, and finance. Many of them already do.

Some of the Left’s highest-profile leaders, certainly including members of the “Squad” in the U.S. Congress, have openly spouted anti-Semitic rhetoric. Some members of the BLM movement and its sympathizers also have been openly anti-Semitic, and every time one of their voices is canceled, they become more susceptible to conspiracy theories. If America’s economic and political stability continues to deteriorate, the schizophrenic strategy of the corporate establishment—embracing anti-Semitic Leftist groups at the same time as they crush any expressions of anti-Semitism—will fall apart.

The nightmare scenario that the multi-ethnic globalists are flirting with is a toxic realignment in which American nationalism captures a majority no longer divided by race, because they are instead unified by hatred of global elites. In the worst case, the perception could spread that the crash was planned in advance, and that a specific tribe of individuals is to blame. If that happens, the populist momentum that will fuel it will come from Leftists. It will come from the same people who in the spring and summer of 2020 occupied a section of downtown Seattle, fought pitched battles with police for months on end in Portland, and spread violence and vandalism from coast to coast.

The conspiracy theories that give rise to toxic mobs don’t have to be anti-Semitic. That’s just one possibility that history has taught is impossible to ignore. But a populist rebellion against globalists can apocalyptically target any group perceived as exploiting the people or lying to them. Global elites. Bankers. Television news anchors. Tech Barons. Stock traders. Anyone living in a gated community. Race or creed may have nothing to do with it. It may simply be the upper class, the one percent. That’s still a tribe. It still becomes us vs them. Where were you, when the dam finally broke? If you were a propertied landowner, living on high ground, perhaps you were in on it. And if so, now you deserve to lose everything. Such is the reasoning of a disenfranchised mob.

Only Civic Nationalists Can Counter Conspiracy Theorists

To understand the potential of civic nationalism to peacefully unify Americans even in the face of great economic and geopolitical challenges, one must return to the shared agenda of Social Democrats and corporate globalists. The rejection of the traditional nuclear family, the climate change agenda, the rejection of a meritocracy in favor of race and gender quotas, enforced equality instead of equality of opportunity, and mass immigration.

The common thread in all of these policies is that they will harm middle- and low-income Americans, regardless of race. Children need a father and a mother. Climate change policies that enrich corporations and empower leftist bureaucrats will impoverish everyone not wealthy enough to be indifferent to the crushing cost. Abandoning meritocracy in favor of quotas will destroy America’s ability to compete and innovate at the same time as it will breed cynicism and alienation. Mass immigration drives down wages and bankrupts social services.

Civic nationalists are the only ones who can explain that of course Democrats, establishment Republicans, and corporate globalists want to distract us by turning us all into racists and anti-racists who consume one another in endless conflict. Without this massive distraction, how would globalists get away with destroying America’s standard of living while enriching themselves? While we are kneeling before BLM activists, the globalists are taking away our freedom. While pregnant women form a skirmish line to protect Antifa militants, the globalists are taking away our prosperity. It’s a good scam. Define everyone as either a victim or an oppressor. Get everybody fighting. This devious, epic, diabolical fraud and hidden agenda must be exposed at every opportunity. But there is also a positive message, promoting hopeful solutions, that is desperately necessary in order to avoid radicalization.

A muscular civic nationalism incorporates opposing alternatives to every one of these pillars of corporate globalism and promotes them without apology and without reservation. The traditional family is the backbone of society. Fossil fuel, hydroelectric power, and nuclear energy are absolutely necessary to grow a healthy and prosperous economy, not only in America but even more so in the aspiring nations of the developing world. Immutable colorblind standards are the only fair and legitimate way to allocate opportunities in all aspects of society. Immigration must be strictly regulated to protect the interests of American citizens, not global corporations.

With these principles forming an uncompromising foundation, civic nationalists have the credibility to reject racism and anti-Semitism. They have an appealing, prosperity-oriented narrative that will attract wavering adherents of ethnic nationalism as well as reluctant globalists. They offer common sense and hope. They offer calm unity. They can reject extremism of all types, whether it’s classic racism or teaching transgender ideology to prepubescent students in the public schools. And they love America.

Emphasizing these policies—pro-family, pro-conventional energy, and pro-meritocracy—have not been the common currency of civic nationalists. Instead, with good reason, they’ve been stereotyped as waffling on immigration, lukewarm on climate realism, AWOL on expressing the problems with race and gender quotas, and, if anything, antagonistic to pro-family sentiments. No wonder they are barely relevant. And no wonder Trump’s enemies get away with accusing him of catering to ethnic-nationalists and conspiracy theorists. They claim nobody else is out there, and in one important respect, they’re right. The civic nationalist movement, despite its potential to become the center of gravity in American politics, lacks a critical mass of leaders with the voice and visibility to give it an undeniable presence.

America’s Civic Nationalism and Foreign Affairs

An important criticism of nationalism of any kind in America is that it allegedly ignores the interconnected community of nations and steers America towards isolationism. A related criticism is that America cannot abandon the multilateral agreements and security guarantees that have guaranteed relative stability in the world for the last 70 years. Underlying these criticisms is an argument in favor of globalism, something with too much legitimacy to be merely dismissed. But a distinction must be made between globalization and globalism. Globalization is a phenomenon. Globalism is an ideology. Even more to the point, globalism can be understood in various ways, including ways that embrace nationalism.

The phenomenon of globalization is unrelenting, fueled by trade, migration, capital flows, technological innovations, revolutions in transportation and communications. It can’t be stopped, but it can be managed. American nationalists are correct to point out that for Americans, in recent decades, the benefits of globalization have been largely illusory if not negative. While free movement of capital and people has made multinational corporations more profitable, it has hollowed out American industry and depressed American wages.

At the same time, the American consumer has paid far more  than his foreign counterparts for drugs and medical treatments, effectively subsidizing the development of these cutting edge therapies in order for American manufacturers to sell them at competitive prices in the rest of the world. The American taxpayer has paid for a military establishment that guarantees open sea lanes and global security. The American worker has paid the price for job creation and economic growth overseas. The American household is overwhelmed with debt, borrowing against the bubble value of their home in order to pay for overpriced tuition and imports from foreign manufacturers. The American economy has been turned into a gigantic, overleveraged mass of collateral for foreign debt.

For the rest of the world, there’s been upside to all of this. And for dispassionate economists, if the overall economic growth of the world exceeds the negative impact all of this has on American economic growth and median household income, that’s a worthwhile exchange. But it’s also short-sighted. Liberal free trade policies work until they don’t. How does it benefit global stability when the economy of the United States implodes after decades of unsustainable, debt-fueled growth, leaving nothing but a hollowed out nation, riven by social conflict?

Navigating this rebalancing, where the United States continues to provide global leadership in a community of nations, but no longer sells its national assets to fuel half-trillion-dollar annual trade deficits, is something that globalists have to come to terms with because it is inevitable, and nationalists have to come to terms with because complete isolation is impossible.

A Civic Nationalist Approach to Globalism 

To manage globalization, what sort of globalist ideology to reject or embrace is a choice. The conventional globalist ideology is that borders should be erased, and that people and capital should move freely. In this manner, according to this version of globalist ideology, all people on earth, overall, will be better off. An alternative version of globalism is that a community of sovereign nations is the only fair and realistic way to manage globalization. It holds that unrestricted movement of people and capital destabilizes nations, punishing the cultures that historically have been successful.

A civic nationalist doesn’t have to be an isolationist. Civic nationalism can promote the vision of a community of nations, competing and cooperating, with each managing globalization on its own terms. For Americans, civic nationalism can recognize that American leadership in the world remains essential not only to promote Western ideas of individual freedom and free enterprise but also as a purely pragmatic matter. When America is socially unified and economically and militarily strong, it deters war, sets an example for emerging nations, and generates the wealth necessary to invest in the developing world.

Much of what passes for foreign aid in the developing world is wasted. Without wholesale changes in priorities, calls to end foreign aid and foreign investment are justified. But here is where the primary foundations of civic nationalism in America can also find expression in foreign aid and foreign investment. If America needs upgraded infrastructure and more cheap, reliable, conventional energy, imagine how much greater the need in African nations. And yet today the preponderance of foreign aid and foreign investment go to expensive and ineffective solar energy projects and other “sustainability” initiatives that arguably do more harm than good, while, in a gross and hypocritical inversion of logic, untapped hydropower and conventional power grids are not considered “sustainable” options.

Much of today’s globalist approach to foreign development has not only been fundamentally misanthropic, but misguided. Investment in developing nations that emphasize cost-effective conventional infrastructure and power generation will yield profitable returns, reducing if not eliminating the need for government involvement.

This, too, is an alternative view of globalism that America’s civic nationalists should embrace without reservation. It would pay financial dividends to American investors, manufacturers, and civil engineering firms, and it would offer developing nations a viable way out of poverty. It would even spare these nations further environmental degradation, as population growth eases through prosperity, and these economies move from burning wood, eating endangered game, and practicing inefficient subsistence agriculture to, for example, developing nuclear power and adopting modern agricultural techniques.

By exposing these misanthropic experiments in foreign aid and foreign investment and abandoning them in favor of initiatives that will deliver rapid and genuine prosperity, civic nationalists can present new ways to manage globalization that entice developing nations. As it is, the practical effects of globalist policies in the developing world are exploitative. Like their domestic equivalents, their only benefit is to subsidized investors, misguided (or wholly corrupt) nonprofits, and state bureaucrats. Civic nationalists can break this cycle, and offer a hopeful vision to aspiring communities at home and around the world.

The Constituency of Civic Nationalists

On the surface, the coalition that constitutes multiethnic globalists in America presents seemingly insurmountable power. After all, they have the corporations, the entire establishment uniparty, the colleges and universities, the public schools, the media and entertainment complex, and most of the billionaires. But this coalition is not invulnerable, for reasons that have already been explained in part. As noted, the blatant anti-Semitism of the American Left threatens to short-circuit their marriage of convenience with the corporations and billionaires that currently indulge them with money and supportive marketing campaigns.

There is another constituency that currently enjoys a marriage of convenience with America’s corporations and billionaires, and that is the labor movement. Despite their reliance on rhetoric that attacks corporations and billionaires, for the most part, America’s union leadership shares the same agenda as their supposed adversaries. Immigration is the prime example. To counter the systemic racism that defines white America, to partially redress the colonial theft of North America by whites, and to partially atone for supposedly causing catastrophic climate change which disproportionately harms people in the “global south,” America’s leftist dominated unions clamor for mass immigration. But how is this in the interest of the American worker?

There’s a reason President Trump has enjoyed support from millions of union workers across America. This is another example of support that invalidates conventional political antagonisms. Trump is supposedly “right-wing” and labor unions are supposedly organized to fight exploitation by right-wing interests. But none of that is applicable. Trump is American, and is promoting America First policies that benefit the American worker. Trump is a nationalist, and nationalist policies resonate with workers, and ought to resonate with any union that cares about Americans.

The labor movement in America is destined to split. Those unions that truly support the American worker will embrace the foundational economic premises of civic nationalism—specifically, development of conventional energy, expansion of practical infrastructure, strictly regulated immigration, and America First trade policies. Those unions that cling to the corporate globalist narrative will become nakedly internationalist and anti-American and anti-white, and they will continue to pretend that economically unsustainable “renewable” energy and open borders will further the interests of the planet and humanity. Labor unions, if they are true to the interests of the American worker, can play a critical role in the ascendance of civic nationalism.

Another constituency of the civic nationalists is every parent in America. It is hard to imagine any special interest more deserving of indictment than the teachers’ union. If you want to know what animates the thousands of rioters and their millions of sympathizers, look no further than the twelve years of anti-American, anti-white, anti-capitalist indoctrination they got in America’s public schools, thanks to the teachers’ unions. Along with what passes for a college education these days in America, the publicly funded, unionized education establishment from kindergarten through high school has brainwashed a generation.

Any parent or community leader who recognizes that children and young people need to acquire basic skills and a work ethic, and that those priorities have been abandoned thanks to the influence of teachers’ unions, is ready to embrace civic nationalism. Any parent who recognizes that race-baiting and identity politics are dead-end curricula, offering nothing but excuses for failure and rationalizations for government handouts, is ready to embrace civic nationalism. Breaking the ideological monopoly that America’s teachers’ unions have on its public schools is a goal that millions of Americans will share, and should be a top priority of civic nationalists.

Civic nationalism appeals to additional powerful constituencies. Corporations that still aspire to serve Americans first but have been marginalized by the Left are plentiful if you know where to look. The nuclear power industry is a prime example, ready to help expose the lies that have stopped its progress in America for decades. The American oil and gas industry is another one. It is one election away from being systematically shut down, with catastrophic consequences to the economy and national security. Civil engineering firms that want to rebuild America are ready to embrace civic nationalism.

The list of potential advocates of civic nationalism is bigger      than people imagine.  EcoModernists  who recognize the environmental benefits that will result from investment in conventional infrastructure in America as well as in developing nations. Members of law enforcement who have had it with, for example, “catch-and-release” laws in progressive, criminal-friendly cities. Members of the military who realize that if more naval officers had been assigned to fire safety, and fewer officers had been preparing PowerPoint presentations on transgender sensitivity training, the ”Bonhomme Richard” might be ready for redeployment instead of an incinerated hulk.

A Common Fate, a Common Vision

The appeal of nationalism ought to be obvious. It is natural to yearn to be part of something bigger than oneself. This is why racial division is the most potent weapon that globalists have to divide Americans. Why should a black American revere the history of America, if the emphasis that is continuously thrust at him is the legacy of slavery? Why should a Chicano accept the sovereignty of America over Aztlan, if all he’s taught is how the land was stolen from Mexico? Why should Native Americans accept the white majority, if the entire North American continent was stolen from them? Why, indeed, should Asians move to America and assimilate, if assimilation has become a dirty word, whereas their cultures of origin remain proud and confident?

This is where a muscular civic nationalism offers the only viable hope to unify America’s ethnicities into a coherent national culture. It’s a cliche, but nonetheless true that America’s white majority historically has been slow to accept immigrants who were different. But to America’s exceptional credit, assimilation eventually happened, every time. Today there are ethnic groups that at one time were not assimilated that now are considered to be part of America’s white ethnic group: Eastern Europeans, Southern Europeans, Irish. Moreover, millions of Americans are considered “white Hispanics,” and additional millions of Asians have blended into the American mainstream. The secret you’ll never hear from race-baiting propagandists like ABC’s David Muir is the fact that 17 percent of American marriages are now between couples of “mixed race.” America’s ability to assimilate is ongoing, despite all attempts to divide us.

This all begs the question: What is “white?” Is it skin color, or cultural affinity? A civic nationalist has to confront this question squarely. Americans don’t have to be white. But they do have to be  American. This means adopting America’s values and traditions, and feeling part of an American culture that has its roots in white European civilization. That’s just historical fact. Racists, whether they are those white nationalists who fit the overhyped stereotype, or the suddenly fashionable black nationalists, or the racially obsessed mainstream American globalist establishment, care very much about skin color. Civic nationalists do  not  care about skin color. They care about preserving American culture, and welcome anyone who shares that goal.

So why shouldn’t black Americans embrace civic nationalism? Because it would mean they are selling out and becoming “white?” This is a stigma that school-aged studious blacks are apparently tagged with. This element of some inner-city cultures holds that to carry your books home to study after school is to become “white,” and is somehow a betrayal of black identity. This is an absurd and destructive notion that should be opposed by any black person serious about the success of their community.

Equally important, for a white person to kneel to BLM activists is not only an act of cowardice and ignorance, but it reinforces two lies. First, it is a lie that white people have no right to suggest anything to black people. This is a ridiculous lie, because blacks are the swing vote that will decide the fate and future of the nation. Second, the chief obstacle to black achievement is not racism. Rather, the primary barrier to black achievement in America is a thug culture that undermines if not terrorizes black communities, expressed in broken homes, substance abuse, gang violence, contempt for education, and rejection of law enforcement.

If white people truly care about black people, they will challenge these lies. And if they do, they will have plenty of help from black conservatives, who unfortunately are ignored by the establishment media, but whose messages are bubbling up through the internet and in churches and education reform organizations and elsewhere.

The notion of shared fate can be colorblind, and a civic nationalist has to emphasize this while at the same time not succumbing to the premises and the language of the Left. For example, “colorblind,” “assimilation,” and “meritocracy” are not code words for racism. They are noble concepts to live by, they are the inclusive premises of American civilization and America’s vitality, and they must be defended at all costs.

Americans can unify as a single, colorblind culture. There is no reason why any American citizen, of any color, cannot read the founding documents of America and be inspired by them. There is no reason why any American, regardless of his ethnic background, cannot appreciate America’s unique commitment to individual rights and free enterprise and private property, and understand its transcendental value. There is no reason why Americans of all races cannot view America’s history not as “deeply flawed,” but instead as an illustrious story of evolution from an inspiring beginning to what it is today, through perpetual refinement—a nation of unparalleled opportunities for everyone willing to work hard.

America’s destiny, according to civic nationalists, can be to remain a leader and an example to the world, while caring for its own citizens in a way that doesn’t alienate the world, but inspires other nations to do the same. America’s destiny can be to invest in practical, prosperity-oriented projects at home and abroad, to maintain technological and military preeminence, and to blaze a trail into the solar system. This is a vision that civic nationalists need to let every American know they can share.

What Does the Future Hold?

The multiethnic globalists are on a path that leads, ultimately, to the destruction of America as a sovereign nation.

There is no guarantee they will succeed, or if they do, that it will be a smooth transition. The conflagration they’re inviting by fomenting racial conflict, especially in the event of economic collapse, may not be kind to the corporations, the billionaires, the bankers, or anyone else perceived as party to the chaos, including Malthusian environmentalists who oppose everything that might create sustainable prosperity.

But then again, they might win.

Examples of nations where the elites successfully consolidated their power have taken many forms throughout history: Centuries ago, feudalism united the elites atop the peasantry. In the 20th century, with stupefying brutality, we saw Spanish and Italian Fascism, German Nazism, Soviet Communism, Japanese Militarism, Chinese Maoism. Today there are plentiful examples, including President Xi’s fascist, racist, expansionist Chinese empire, or Maduro’s pathetic, brutal regime in Venezuela.

Here in America, perhaps the best vision of where we’re ultimately headed if the globalists get their way is a society that lies somewhere on a spectrum between Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Whatever national identity Americans once knew will no longer exist. We will become undifferentiated human matter, as much a commodity as the products we consume, Pavlovian in our political rectitude, under a watchful corporate Panopticon.

Americans have been betrayed by their elites. The globalist agenda of open borders, unfettered movement of capital, the rejection of traditional values, the rejection of meritocracy, the deliberate overreaction to “climate change,” and the heedless accumulation of debt to fund the development of foreign economies—including the Chinese military—has been accepted and promoted by virtually every major institution in America: unions, corporations, academia, K-12 public education, the media and entertainment business, the Democrats, and most of the Republicans. They lied about all of this, and in so doing elevated the cost-of-living at the same time as they deprived Americans of good jobs.

There is an irony, here, because for multiethnic globalism to succeed in the long run, America’s elites needed to treat American citizens better in the short run. They have not. Now they are hiding behind racial tension, stoking it, funding it, allowing it to happen, evidently hoping to suppress the truth of their betrayal, hoping to deny us consciousness of our potential for colorblind national unity.

Absent the achievement of national unity through a civic nationalist political realignment, Americans face ongoing and worsening civil strife and economic decline. Civic nationalism is the only alternative to this bleak future for Americans. It can offer compassion, inclusion, optimism, an agenda of hope, and economic revival.

The choice is ours to make.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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When is Extremism Justified?

It was him they’d come for, not only Jabez Stone. He read it in the glitter of their eyes and in the way the stranger hid his mouth with one hand. And if he fought them with their own weapons, he’d fall into their power; he knew that, thought he couldn’t have told you how. It was his own anger and horror that burned in their eyes; and he’d have to wipe that out or the case was lost.”
The Devil and Daniel Webster, by Stephen Vincent Benet

This excerpt from Stephen Vincent Benet’s masterpiece offers a critical perspective on the nature of extremism. It is altogether justifiable to have an extreme reaction to an extreme problem, but if one descends to the same level of hatred and evil that inspires their oppressors, their fight loses its virtue. But can fate be reasonably expected to deliver a positive outcome merely because the good guys were more eloquent? Daniel Webster knew he could not overcome hatred with hatred, but his ability to persuade a jury of the damned to spare a man’s soul, while a powerful moral fable, is nonetheless fiction.

In the year when The Devil and Daniel Webster was written, 1937, ideological hatred was exploding into violence and war across the world. But unlike in Germany, where an entire population succumbed to the exhortations of a fascist demagogue, in America, the growing extremist militancy was attenuated by the calm leadership of FDR. The point here isn’t to defend FDR’s solutions nor to condemn them. Rather it is noteworthy that while worker grievances were addressed through what many still consider to have been a dangerous drift towards socialism, these policies were enacted in America without demagoguery, scapegoating or an epidemic of murderous violence. In Germany, the Nazis were also attentive to worker grievances. But their solutions came at horrific cost. Roosevelt, unlike Hitler, projected a kind persona. Instead of inflaming a nation, he healed it.

In our time there has been a relentless campaign by opponents of president Trump to paint him as another Hitler. Obviously Trump has done his part to feed this assault, since he’s all too willing to openly mock his detractors and rivals. Shifty Schiff, Nervous Nancy, Sleepy Joe, Crazy Bernie, Pocahontas, Mini-Mike, Cryin’ Chuck, Low-IQ Maxine, Crooked Hillary, Lyin’ Ted, Little Marco, Low Energy Bush, Leakin’ James, and so on. But the media, along with everyone else horrified by the Trump presidency, go way too far.

While President Trump isn’t afraid to utter divisive, politically incorrect statements, those represent only a small fraction of what he has to say. Some of his tweets are inflammatory. These tweets, along with out of context low-lights from spontaneous moments at his rallies, are replayed endlessly by the anti-Trump media. Never shown, unless you make the effort, are the rest of his tweets, the rest of his speeches, and the rest of his proclamations, which invariably are positive, uplifting, optimistic, and even – gasp – inclusive.

Trump’s recent state-of-the-union address gave Americans a glimpse of that side of him which the media never shows. But it’s Trump’s policies that ought to provide additional evidence that far from being the reincarnation of Hitler, he is a moderate centrist, violating as many libertarian pieties as leftist ones. Examples of this are plentiful. Investing in the inner cities, pushing for paid parental leave, passing “right-to-try” legislation, and championing infrastructure projects are all taken straight out of the Democrat’s playbook. Other policies advanced by Trump, such as common sense roll backs of environmental regulations and encouraging conventional energy development, are only controversial because the “consensus” pushed by the liberal elite had itself become extreme. In other areas, such as deescalating tensions with Russia and North Korea, and avoiding war with Iran, Trump’s actions are condemned as appeasement. Whatever they are, he’s no second coming of the Fuhrer.

But no matter what Trump does, the America Left condemns him as an authoritarian, a wannabe dictator. Their hatred of Trump, however, is what should be of concern. If Hillary Clinton had been elected, it would have meant an acceleration of every leftist project that had already acquired dangerous momentum during eight years of Obama’s presidency. With Trump, the Left encountered the first substantial resistance to their agenda in over a generation, and this is what guides their fury.

They’d better watch out. Trump is a pussycat compared to what comes next if the leftist agenda in America isn’t stopped in its tracks.

Americans of all stripes – let’s forego the obligatory itemization of identities and just go with “stripes” – are deciding they don’t want to live in a nation where foreigners outnumber natives in most cities and several states, and enable Democratic socialists to acquire a permanent electoral majority. They’re also tired of watching their jobs get exported at the same time as millions of welfare migrants get imported.

Americans of all stripes don’t want their children groomed in the public schools to consider sex to be a subjective individual choice, and they want to decide for themselves how to discuss sexuality with their young children.

Normal hard working Americans, whoever they are, don’t want – in the name of “inclusive zoning” – to have homeless people, including drug addicts, alcoholics, criminals, perverts and the insane corralled into backyard “mini-homes,” or into apartment buildings dropped randomly into neighborhoods of single family homes. They especially don’t want this to happen when their taxes will help pay for the construction and help pay the rents.

Common sense Americans don’t want to spend $6.00 per gallon for gasoline, or $1.0 million for a home on a lot so small you can’t fit a swing set in the back yard. They don’t want to have to take buses and “light rail” every time they need to go grocery shopping or drop their child off at soccer practice. They don’t want to spend their lives living paycheck to paycheck based on the preposterous theory that if they do these things, somehow the “climate” will no longer deliver cataclysmic storms, fires, and floods.

Fair minded Americans don’t want to have opportunities denied to themselves or their children because of the color of their skin. They don’t want to be pushed to the end of the line simply because they happen to be white or Asian, and get told this is necessary because of their privilege, or their “proximity” to privilege. No fair minded American, “privileged” or not, wants to get a job merely because of the color of their skin, or because of their “gender identity.”

Patriotic Americans don’t want to have to submit to “common sense” gun control legislation that solves nothing, but jeopardizes their ability to defend their homes and their freedom. God fearing Americans – and, presumably, atheists with even a bit of humanity – abhor late-term on-demand abortion. Watch a high resolution ultra-sound video of a 20 week old fetus trying unsuccessfully to dodge the abortionists blade. You’ll never be the same.

All of these policies, pushed relentlessly by the American Left, are offensive to the vast majority of Americans. The only reason the outrage isn’t universal is because the mainstream media lies about the extent of these problems and completely ignores the causes. Similarly, the online media monopolies censor – or “throttle down” – content that exposes the leftist agenda.

Donald Trump may not be another FDR, but if he got fair treatment from the media, his popularity would be rising even faster than it already is. Because he has brought the leftist agenda out of the shadows and into a public conversation.

Donald Trump is also no Daniel Webster. But if you watch his speeches and press conferences, you can see that he is almost always thoroughly enjoying himself. The fact that he has not succumbed to the hatred that consumes his critics is a big part of the reason they hate him more than ever.

America is very lucky that Donald Trump, a moderate centrist with common sense and a sense of humor came onto the scene when he did. Because the American people are not going to let their nation and their culture be destroyed. Absent Trump, or at the least, absent some progress stopping the leftist agenda, Americans will eventually fight the Left “with their own weapons.” Fighting extremism with extremism is a last resort, but “when in the course of human events” all else fails, virtue is put aside, and it becomes the tragic final option.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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The Undifferentiated Human Matter of Replacism

Just over a year ago, an English translation was published of the 2012 book You Will Not Replace Us. Written by Renaud Camus, a French author and political thinker, it was intended as a condensed summary of lengthier volumes he’d already published on the subject of culture and demographics.

The phrase “you will not replace us” gained notoriety in August 2017 when it was chanted by an assortment of right-wing protesters who had shown up in Charlottesville, Virginia, to protest the planned removal of Confederate monuments in that town.

There is no excusing the violent extremists who were among those present in Charlottesville, much less the unforgettable and tragic outcome. And it is unlikely that many of the protesters in Charlottesville had any idea that a relatively obscure French writer had coined the phrase they were shouting as they marched across the University of Virginia campus.

But Renaud Camus, whose literary career began in the 1980s as a “pioneering gay writer,” in more recent years has become, as described in The Nation, “the ideologue of white supremacy.” In March 2019, The Washington Post referenced Camus’ book as the inspiration behind the mass murder of Islamic worshipers that had just happened in Christchurch, New Zealand. In September 2019, the New York Times described Camus as “the man behind a toxic slogan promoting white supremacy.”

It’s always problematic to discuss anything questioning the demographic transformations sweeping the West. It’s easy and politically acceptable to celebrate diversity, and even gleefully to anticipate the permanent political ascendancy of the global Left in Western democracies, as the demographic character of the electorate inevitably shifts as a result of mass immigration. But to ask whether or not this shift is desirable invites accusations of racism, xenophobia, and white nationalism. It even invites accusations that to open this discussion is to encourage extremist violence.

Given these stigmatizing constraints, the only reason to bother exploring the potential downside of “diversity” is that behind the term “diversity” is possibly the most unexamined, voluntary, abrupt and profound transformation of a civilization in the history of humanity. And what if suppressing this discussion, pretending nothing of consequence is happening, and censoring voices of caution is actually what encourages extremism and violence?

In a New Yorker article written about Camus in 2017 by Thomas Chatterton Williams, entitled “The French Origins of ‘You Will Not Replace Us,’” the Frenchman is described as “a kind of connective tissue between the far right and the respectable right,” who can “play the role of respectable reactionary because his opposition to multicultural globalism is plausibly high-minded, principally aesthetic, even well-mannered.”

That description offers a broader perspective on Camus than one of someone merely motivated by xenophobia or racism. Camus is reacting against globalism as an economic nationalist and as a cultural preservationist. He claims that what he calls a “Davos-cracy” has deemed cultures secondary to having a critical mass of consumers, and that it considers all humans interchangeable. The phrase he’s selected to drive his point home, and repeated throughout his book, is “Undifferentiated Human Matter,” or UHM.

Replacers, Replacists, Replacees, Replacism, Anti-Replacism

Camus begins his book by declaring “replacing is the central gesture of contemporary societies.” But he isn’t just talking about people, he’s talking about everything. Claiming “the world itself is fast becoming just another amusement park,” he describes the process of replacism in all encompassing terms. In an extended explanatory passage, he writes:

“Faux, simili, imitation, ersatz, simulacrum, copies, counterfeiting, fakes, forgeries, lures, mimics, are the key words of modern human experience. Stone masonry is being replaced by ferroconcrete, concrete by plaster, marble by chip aggregate, timber by PVC, town and countryside by the universal suburb, earth by cement and tar….literature by journalism, journalism by information, news by fake news, truth by fallacy, last name by first name, last name and first name by pseudonyms….history by ideology, the destiny of nations by plain politics, politics by economics, economics by finance, the experience of looking and living by sociology, sorrow by statistics, residents by tourists, natives by non-natives, Europeans by Africans….peoples by other peoples and communities, humanity by post-humanity, humanism by transhumanism, man by Undifferentiated Human Matter.”

What Camus is defending is more than preserving an indigenous ethnic majority in his country. He is defending, as he puts it, “an order, a prosperity, a sense of generosity in terms of social benefits and safety nets, the sound functioning of institutions which have been achieved through centuries of nurturing efforts, trials and tribulations, cultural transmission, inheritance, sacrifices and revolutions. What makes countries, continents, cultures and civilizations what they are, what we admire or regret, are the people and the elites who have fashioned them….man is not, or not quite yet, some undifferentiated matter that one can spread indiscriminately, like peanut butter or Nutella, anywhere on the surface of the Earth.”

Rejecting most conventional terms, Camus has built his own nomenclature around what he believes are fundamental mega-trends that are not adequately described with existing vocabulary or commonly understood polarities: liberalism vs conservatism, globalism vs nationalism, capitalism vs socialism. Instead, he has come up with the ideology of “replacism,” with three protagonists, “the replacists, who want to change the people and civilization, which they call multiculturalism, the replacers, mostly from Africa and very often Muslims, and the replacees, the indigenous population, whose existence is frequently denied.” He then divides the “replacees” into two groups, the consenting replacees, and the unwilling replacees.

Is France Actually Destined to Replace its Population?

The concept of demographic replacement brings with it an assortment of tough questions, largely ignored, dismissed, or even censored by the establishment media and mainstream politicians. In France, the government collects no census or other data on the race or ethnicity of its citizens, which means any tracking of alleged “replacement” of the native population has to rely on estimates. Estimates, however, reveal dramatic shifts in just the past two decades.

An article published by the Brookings Institution in 2001 estimated that five percent of the French population was non-European and non-white. From what information can be found since then, that percentage has changed at a blistering pace. According to World Population Review, “when statistics were released in 2008, it was reported that 11.8 million foreign-born immigrants and their immediate descendants were residents in the country; a figure which accounted for around 19% of the total population of the time.”

While a rise from 5 percent to nearly 20 percent in less than a decade is a stunning statistic, it may actually understate the magnitude of the so-called replacement, because it doesn’t take into account birthrates. For example, a chart on the Wikipedia page “Demographics of France,” quoting data available (in French) from the “Institut national de la statistique,” reports that in 2014, an estimated 29 percent of all births in France were to parents where at least one was foreign-born. Moreover, of the 71 percent of births in that year to parents who both were born in France, it is probable that a significant portion of those were to second- or third-generation immigrants of non-European origin.

A 2017 article appearing in the Washington Times, referencing a study published (in French) by the “Institute des Libertes,” offers projections based on known population demographics and birthrates in France. The study predicts that within 40 years, or barely after mid-century, the white population in France will become a minority. This forecast extrapolates from a white birthrate in France of 1.4 children per woman, compared to a Muslim birthrate of 3.4 per woman. If these birthrate disparities persist, France is destined to become a Muslim majority nation within just a few decades, even if immigration were stopped entirely. Among the younger generations of French, that threshold will be reached much sooner.

Is Integration Possible in France and How is Mass Immigration Justified?

According to Camus, several false narratives are being spread in France by the “replacists” to dismiss the significance of the current migration by saying it is nothing new. Camus argues that it is preposterous to say that “France has always been a country of immigration,” because “for about fifteen centuries the French population has been remarkably stable, at least in its ethnic composition.” To the extent there was immigration, it was always thousands of people, of European stock and Christian faith, compared to millions today who “have almost all been African and more often than not Muslim.”

Whether or not Camus is a white supremacist is debatable, but his skepticism towards the possibility of integration is unambiguous. He writes “Their African culture and Mahometanism make it a much stronger challenge for them to become integrated into French culture and civilization, all the more so because most of them show no desire whatsoever to achieve any such integration, whether as individuals or communities.” Sadly, without honest, balanced, and well-publicized research into this very question, it is impossible to dispute this assertion.

Other popular narratives, according to Camus, also designed to justify mass immigration, include the claim that France was liberated from the Germans in 1944 by Northern and Central Africans recruited by the Free French. Anyone familiar with the battles of World War II would dispute this based on the fact that the main invasion was at Normandy by American and British forces. While units of the Free French army did land along with other Allied forces in Southern France two months after D-Day, this later invasion was launched after the Germans had begun to withdraw their forces to fight in the north, and in any case, only about one-third of the Free French troops were of African origin.

Another popular myth that Camus claims is promoted by France’s multiculturalists, or replacists, is that North African workers reconstructed France after World War II. This is clearly inaccurate since France’s post-war reconstruction was completed well before the 1970s, which is when mass migrations began from Africa into France.

Possibly what might be considered by replacists to be the most compelling argument in favor of mass migration is that it serves as recompense for the depredations of the French as colonial occupiers. But if the colonial era were so horrible, Camus asks, why is it that millions of Africans “appear to nurture no plan more clearly and cherish no higher ambition than to come to France and live with the French?”

Camus makes an important distinction between European colonialism and mass migration into Europe from Africa, one that calls into question both mainstream claims—that integration is possible, or that mass migration is justified. As he puts it, “France and Europe are much more colonized by Africa, these days, than they ever colonized it themselves.” His point is that the Europeans imposed a military, administrative and economic occupation on its overseas territories, but “this type of colonialism, developed in a political framework, is much easier to end—all that is required is for the conqueror’s army to withdraw.” What is happening in France today is what Camus refers to as “settler colonialism,” which is far more difficult to undo, if not impossible.

If the immigrant vs native French interactions Camus writes about are typical—“making life impossible or an unbearable ordeal to the indigenous people….through aggressive gazes, overbearing posturing to force passers-by down from the sidewalk….the creation in the citizenry of a general feeling of fear, insecurity, dispossession and estrangement….unprecedented forms of hyper-violence up to full-blown terrorist acts and massacres….which in the process secure under their rule additional chunks of territory for themselves”—then eventual integration may be very unlikely, and his characterization of mass migration as a foreign occupation may be more descriptive.

The Case for “Undifferentiated Human Matter”

To criticize the double standard applied by most online and offline media on topics relating to race has been dismissed as “whataboutism,” as if double standards don’t matter, as if differing sets of moral criteria should apply depending on what group or worldview is being examined. This double standard is in effect throughout the West, enforced in matters ranging all the way from online censorship to offline criminality. Camus notes countless Christian church desecrations in France, rarely prosecuted, and compares those to the heavy sentences levied onto protesters who unfolded a banner on the roof of the “Great Mosque” of Poitiers during its construction.

In France, Camus writes, “non-European youngsters by the thousands can post horrible and very disturbing messages on Twitter or Facebook about European or White people in general without the slightest threat to have their social network accounts suspended or be interrogated by the police; while opponents to mass migration are the permanent target of the most finicky censorship.”

Camus marvels at the fact that contemporary Western Civilization is the first in history to be lenient “towards those who want its eradication while it relentlessly persecutes those who would put up efforts to defend it and work for its salvation.” But what is Western Civilization? Is it bound up with ethnicity, or is it something more intangible yet more profound?

In France, the very notion of “race” has been deleted from Basic Law texts. The conventional explanation for this transformation, implemented in the 1970s, was that it reflected the revulsion the French people felt towards Nazism and their horrific experience under German occupation when Jews were being deported to German death camps. Undoubtedly, this is true, but Camus focuses on how the termination of the concept of race fulfills the goals of the replacists.

Mocking the mainstream scientific dogma that proclaims races do not exist, Camus takes the position that “race” embraces “social, literary, or poetic, or taxonomic creations of such considerable impact that proclaiming they do not exist is tantamount to seriously testing the meaning of the verb to exist.” He uses “race” interchangeably with “a people” and argues that conflating biology with culture is to suggest that Europe does not exist, that European civilization did not exist; no such thing as French culture; no such thing as French people—that there are only people with a French passport.

“In industrial and post-industrial societies, especially those where the main industry is the industry of Undifferentiated Human Matter, where man is the producer, product and consumer at once, there is no such thing as a genuine product.”

The “Anti-Racist” Paradox: The True Agenda of the Anti-Racists

If everyone is undifferentiated human matter, and races—biological or cultural—do not exist, how can racism exist? And if races do not exist, why must anti-racists so aggressively enforce a drive to achieve perfect equality among races; why must they insist that all races are equal?

This logical flaw is inexplicable, according to Camus, until you consider how the meaning of anti-racism has changed. Anti-racism no longer means a stance against racism as it is historically understood, it now denotes a stance against the existence of races and a willingness to have them disappear. Camus considers this evolution of the term anti-racism, impelled by the paradoxical concept that races both do not exist and are all equal, was a critical enabling condition for the Great Replacement.

As he puts it, “Paradoxically, without the non-existence of races, the change of race would not be possible . . . since there are no races, there can be no substitution of races . . . change was obvious, and rather unpleasant, but it was not taking place. How could it occur, since it was scientifically impossible?” But why? Who benefits?

It is here that Camus’ opening remarks, “replacing is the central gesture of modern societies,” comes back into play, addressing a phenomenon of which mass migration is only a part, albeit a very, very big part. If the native French are being replaced by settler colonials, then who is orchestrating this, and why? Camus claims “what we are dealing with here is a delegated form of colonization, a colonization by proxy, and that the forces that want it, and who organize it, are not the forces who actually accomplish it.”

This two-fold colonization, orchestrated by the very rich and implemented by the very poor, is part of the destruction of culture that began before the mass migrations. As he writes, “no people that knows its own classics would accept numbly and without balking to be thrown into the dustbins of history . . . this numbness had to be created.” Here and elsewhere, Camus is not talking about a conspiracy, but rather “powerful mechanisms” created by the combination of ideals and interests. The main ideal; equality. The main interests: “normalization, standardization, similarity, sameness.”

What Camus calls a “powerful mechanism” can indeed explain the rise of globalism without resorting to conspiracy theories. For global investors and multinational corporations to achieve maximum growth and profit, the prerequisites are standardization, free trade, open movement of people and capital, and a growing mass of consumers in every economic zone—dependent, destitute, it doesn’t matter. But to justify this, to make it a virtue, even a populist cause, the ideology of equality and anti-racism are in-turn prerequisites.

This erasure of high culture, this popular contempt for a cultivated class that might perpetuate reverence for traditions and greatness, this devolution, suits the ideology of the anti-racists. But it is useful as well to global commercial and financial interests. In an irony of history, Lenin’s useful idiots, the leftist movements in Western nations, are now serving not the international communists, but global capital.

It isn’t just France, of course, where traditional culture and proud national histories are being deconstructed and disparaged by the Left. In the name of anti-racism, the history of Western Civilization is now being taught in America, increasingly, from elementary school through graduate school, as an unending saga of oppression and exploitation. In the name of equality, SAT scores, and even grades, are being dispensed with in schools and universities, double standards are established based on racial quotas in academia and business, because race does not exist, yet all races are equal. All this paves the way for an erasure of peoples, the replacement of culture and identity with undifferentiated human matter.

The Genealogy of Replacism

On page 138 of the English edition of You Will Not Replace Us, Camus offers a family tree of sorts that pulls together the historical events and ideological evolution which led France, and by extension the West, to its present state. It not only attempts to illustrate the origins of replacism, but also the cultural devolution that he believes made replacism possible. Shown below is a graphic representation of what Camus describes in painstaking detail. Here is the “marital status” of replacism. “Son of Anti-Racism and High Finance (themselves, respectively son of Egalitarianism and Anti-Fascism, and daughter of Taylorization and Ultra-Liberalism, granddaughter of Industrial Revolution and Capitalism), marries Petite-Bourgeoisie, daughter of Democratization and Welfare State, grand-daughter of French Revolution and Proletariat.”

The logic of this genealogy makes a lot of sense. Replacism is ideologically justified by anti-racism at the same time as it serves the interests of High Finance. “Taylorism,” loosely synonymous with “Fordism,” is the system of factory management that evolved in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to break production into standardized repetitive tasks, greatly improving both the efficiency of manufacturing as well as making it possible to hire far less-skilled workers for less money, and making them easily interchangeable. Ultra-liberalism is Liberal ideology as originally conceived, devoted to the virtues of free trade and free movement of capital.

By marrying replacism to petite bourgeoisie, Camus is showing the synergy between a loss of higher culture and the replacist agenda. By depriving Western Civilization of its “cultivated class which is indispensable to culture in the old sense of the word,” by allowing respect for Western Civilization to slowly disappear, indeed by demonizing all vestiges of privilege, and by glorifying the most popular, largest common denominators of human experience, by democratizing education to the point where everyone and nobody is educated anymore, by mass-producing simulacrums of culture designed to appeal to the most universal and primal ambitions, there is no longer a people, there is no longer a unique culture, there is no longer history, tradition, pride, identity, the nation becomes an economic unit and nothing more.

Another fascinating aspect of the genealogy that Camus has described is that it is not just logical, but perhaps some of what he is describing is also inevitable. In hindsight, where would the human path have deviated from these outcomes? Is it much of a stretch to say the industrial revolution was inevitable, or the innovation of mass production and standardization? Is it unreasonable to suggest the rise of workers and unions to the abuses that characterized the first hundred years of industrialization may  have been inevitable? Is all that Camus really has to say mere sentimentality, mere nostalgia, is this just a primal scream of a book and the movement it represents merely the last mad roar of a primitive nationalism whose time has come and gone?

Nostalgia and sentimentality may well inform the millions who merely wish that things could go back to the way they were, but for Camus, at least, stronger emotions and reason inform his motivation. First of all, he would probably deride it as thoughtless and typical for his critics to think that objecting to the destruction of Western Civilization, in all of its traditions and values, is mere reactionary nostalgia and sentimental longing for the past. But he also would remind us of the threat we face, not only at the hand of the replacists, but when the replacers eventually confront the replacists.

Replacism, for all its deplorable sameness, for all its drive to conquer and merge all cultures in the name of anti-racism and in the interests of high-finance, at least has a new world to offer. It may be grotesque and shallow, hedonistic and common, replete with addictive gadgets that pass for fulfillment and while away lifetimes, but there is profit, there is order, bread, circuses. There is still civilization, after all, cheapened, flattened, filled with undifferentiated human matter. But what if the replacers have a different agenda entirely?

Camus believes the combination of leftist morals and traditional right-wing business interests gives a unique power to replacism. He writes, “as if the ruthless power in the upper district of Metropolis, had, to top it all and make it worse, the capacity to project to the world the gentle image of the soft social order found in the Alpine pastures of The Sound of Music. He describes replacism as a totalitarian ideology devoted to promoting the replaceability of everything, man included. But he also claims that the only totalitarian ideology in the world capable of rivaling replacism in the world today is radical Islam. What a choice.

Neither Conspiracies Nor Scapegoats Account for Replacism

The phrase “conspiracy theorist” or “conspiracy theory” recently has been weaponized by globalists throughout the West. Wielded along with the more established word weapons, “racist” and “denier,” “conspiracy theorist” is now used as a verbal bludgeon to silence anyone who questions globalization or replacism.

Camus has much to say on this and the related topic of scapegoating. He writes, “The theory of conspiracy theory is one of the most effective, catchy and brilliant inventions of the ideological power and its executive clique, the media, to discourage any reflection on its own workings, on the nature of its power and on the crimes it might have committed. The theory amalgamates all conspiracy theories into one, whose model are the most eccentric views about the attacks of September eleventh against the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. But just as being paranoid does not mean you have no enemy, accusing everyone whose views differ from yours of being an adept of some conspiracy theory does not mean there is no plot and no conspiracy.”

Having made that assertion, Camus backs away from alleging there is a conspiracy. Dismissing attempts by others to blame replacism on the European Union, Wall Street, the International Monetary Fund, or Jews, he suggests, in fact, it is “some enormous, bizarre and complex process, so intricate that no one can understand perfectly how they work and why, and no one can master and stop them once they are started.”

This makes more sense than it may initially seem. It returns to the idea of a logical and almost inevitable flow of history. Only at pivotal historical moments can that flow be willfully directed through the exertions of a united people, because so much of its momentum is mechanical. And clearly that is what Camus is calling for, when he writes “it is for us to break the machines which churn out men like others churn out cookies, or Nutella, or surimi.”

Camus explicitly challenges the theory, not his, but prevalent among some right-wing factions, that Jews are providing the money and brains behind replacism. He correctly notes that in Europe they are the first victims of the Great Replacement. He discusses at length how “the change in the population of Europe has made daily life very difficult, if not impossible, for a number of Jews who are almost permanently exposed to very strong Muslim aggressiveness, modern anti-Zionism flourishing both as a form of exasperation and as an excuse, a more decent cover, for very classical Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism.”

While identifying Muslim immigrants as the source of revived anti-Semitism in Europe, Camus dismisses the role of “classical occidental European anti-Semitism,” referring to it metaphorically as “a derelict shop in the dilapidated historical downtown, now entirely driven out of business, and fashion, by the enormous shopping malls in the banlieues.” He notes that many Jewish communities in Europe that survived the Holocaust are not going to survive the Great Replacement, with thousands of Jews now being driven out of France every year.

The experience of European Jews today in the face of mass immigration of Muslims has led Camus to conclude that while there are some prominent Jews involved in promoting the Great Replacement, such as George Soros and others less known, he believes that in recent years the proportion of replacist Jews and anti-replacist Jews is now almost reversed, with anti-replacists predominating. And he makes a claim, similar to sentiments observed by Churchill a century earlier, that “Jews are very much divided on that issue [replacism], which makes them no different than any other community.” It may be fair to say that Camus sees the Jewish community, certainly in Europe, as a microcosm, split on the polarizing issues of our time in a way reasonably proportional to the rest of the Western elites.

And perhaps in this we will come a recognition that Zionism is only one form of nationalism, and Jews and Gentiles alike throughout the West will begin to coalesce in support of preserving the peoples and cultures of all Western nations. Camus writes “Israel belonging to the Jewish People, with Jerusalem as its capital, is the model and the essential reference, at least in Western culture and civilization, to all sense of belonging. If those three did not belong to each other, it would be the end of all belonging. If Jerusalem were not Jewish there would be no reason for Paris or Saint-Denis to be forever French, for London or Winchester to be English, or indeed for Washington or Concord to be American.”

The Flight 93 Civilization

If you believe even half of what Camus has to say, Western Civilization is all but doomed. It is to be replaced either by a generic replacist world consisting of undifferentiated human matter, or an Islamic world, which would take shape in the aftermath of a cataclysmic conflict in which the replacers overthrew the no longer useful replacists. What can be done?

Towards the end of his book, Camus calls for “remigration” of immigrants out of France and back to their nations of origin. To accomplish this, he views the European Union, currently controlled by replacist interests, as something that could potentially be taken over by anti-replacists. As he puts it, “The continent is being invaded, the nations which are part of it should stick together and resist, not try and find salvation one by one, in dispersion and isolation.” But he reemphasizes how what threatens European civilization is bigger even than colonization, writing “when we Europeans started to be subjected to another, more brutal and direct colonization, we were submitted to an Islamisation of our Americanization.”

American cultural power, such as it is according to Camus, populist, egalitarian, flattened, Petite bourgeoise, is almost—stress, almost—a proxy for globalism sweeping away the unique cultures and peoples of the world. Camus might say that America, when it comes to replacism, is as much a culprit as a victim.

Which brings us to America, where, just as in Europe, resurgent nationalism—unwilling replacees—contends with a daunting coalition of replacists, replacers, and willing replacees. The eventual outcome hangs by a thread, and no matter what the outcome, so much can go wrong.

In 2016, an influential essay entitled “The Flight 93 Election” compared the presidential contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump with the choice passengers faced on the doomed Flight 93 on September 11, 2001. As he put it, “2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees. Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain.”

Written by Hillsdale College research fellow Michael Anton, who went on to serve for a time as a senior adviser in the Trump White House, this essay addresses all of the same issues of replacism, in the broadest context of the term. The dispossession of the American people, culturally, economically, and eventually, through actual physical replacement. Anton manages to make his points without inviting quite the opprobrium that Camus has attracted, but his words—a breath of fresh air to many but an unforgivable transgression to others—were so frank and so incendiary that he initially wrote under the pseudonym “Publius Decius Mus.”

What Camus has dubbed the Davos-cracy, Anton called the “Davoisie,” as he implicates America’s conservatives as “sophists who rationalize open borders, lower wages, outsourcing, de-industrialization, trade giveaways, and endless, pointless, winless wars.” Anton went on to reserve an entire section of his essay for the “other” issue, writing that “The sacredness of mass immigration is the mystic chord that unites America’s ruling and intellectual classes.”

Anton’s description of America under a Clinton administration is almost synonymous with how Camus describes France under Macron, differing only in the particulars. “A Hillary presidency will be pedal-to-the-metal on the entire progressive-left agenda, plus items few of us have yet imagined in our darkest moments. Nor is even that the worst. It will be coupled with a level of vindictive persecution against resistance and dissent… We see this already in the censorship practiced by the Davoisie’s social media enablers; in the shameless propaganda tidal wave of the mainstream media; and in the personal destruction campaigns—operated through the former and aided by the latter—of the Social Justice Warriors. We see it in Obama’s flagrant use of the IRS to torment political opponents, the gaslighting denial by the media, and the collective shrug by everyone else.”

Three years after Trump’s stunning upset victory, the power of the Left in America remains pervasive and growing. Under the twin ideological poles of anti-racism and climate action—which is a proxy for economic replacism—they have more or less consolidated their hold on academia, and continue to expand their influence in government at all levels along with most major corporations. Imagine if Trump had lost.

Characterizing the U.S. election of 2016 as a last chance to have a chance, a last chance to avoid certain death, was accurate. Now the battle is joined but the odds remain stacked against the anti-replacists. The Davoisie in all its power is doing everything it can quiet the passengers and regain full control in the cockpit. The Flight 93 Civilization remains fitfully airborne, but for how long?

The Inchoate Rebellion Against the Ruling Class

Across the United States and Europe, a rebellion is brewing that lacks coherence or unity. Indeed many of the rebellious groups are battling each other at the same time as they share a rage against the Davos-cracy. In France, the Yellow Vest Movement which has gripped that nation for over a year has attracted far-left and far-right demonstrators.

While the Yellow Vest Movement in France was sparked by rising fuel taxes, the duration and intensity of the protests bespeak years of frustration. What unifies the participants is the punitive cost-of-living in France, but there is no apparent agreement on the cause. To speculate as to the cause, for the Right, immigration is the primary factor; for the Left, global capitalism is the main reason. In fact, they’re both correct.

The unemployment rate among immigrants in France in 2018 was 15.3 percent, nearly twice that of non-immigrants at 8.3 percent. This ratio is virtually unchanged for over a decade. While it is now almost impossible to find reports connecting the Yellow Vest protests to anger over immigration—which means nothing—even President Macron has agreed to new, tougher immigration enforcement. In November 2019 the New York Times quoted Macron as saying “The bourgeois live in areas with few immigrants and do not encounter immigration in their daily lives. It is France’s working classes that live with the difficulties of immigration, and have thus migrated to the far right.”

On the other hand, huge sectors of the French economy have been devastated since the introduction of the Euro in 1999, and this consequence of globalization would have happened with or without immigration. Two searing, pessimistic visions of where this is leading are found in books by the bestselling French author Michel Houellebecq. His 2015 book, Submission, describes a bloodless transition in France from a secular republic into an Islamic theocracy. His 2019 book, Serotonin, includes chapters describing how France’s agriculture industry, which for centuries was a vital, productive, diverse ecosystem comprising hundreds of thousands of independent farmers, was within just a few years nearly wiped out by foreign imports and corporate takeovers.

It would be simplistic and inaccurate to characterize the Yellow Vest Movement as either Right or Left, just as it would not be accurate to describe Marine Le Pen’s National Rally political party as right-wing. The Yellow Vest Movement is a populist reaction to replacism, for mostly economic reasons. The National Rally candidates are a nationalist reaction to economic and cultural replacism.

This illustrates how Camus has invented a term, replacism, that not only transcends conventional definitions, but creates space for new combinations of political ideologies to form. Why should the anti-replacists be capitalists instead of socialists? Capitalism has been the justification to impoverish the middle class and fill the nation with foreigners. Globalist (or international) capitalism has been rejected by all within the otherwise inchoate Yellow Vest Movement. Is there such a thing as nationalist capitalism? And if not, is the battle taking shape one between national socialists and international socialists? That would make sense.

The Rising of the Bronze Age Mindset

If Renaud Camus now plays the role of “respectable reactionary,” a book that has quietly sold its way into influence and infamy is Bronze Age Mindset, self-published in 2018, written by a pseudonymous author “Bronze Age Pervert,” which he typically shortens to “BAP.” Bronze Age Mindset is a book that disrespects pretty much everything about modern life. Instead, the author exhorts readers to aspire to become the piratical, fearless figures of Bronze Age antiquity. Talk about reactionary!

The author, who in his book periodically dispenses with grammar, recently surfaced to publish a response to a review of Bronze Age Mindset written by Michael Anton. Both the review and the response are valuable reading for anyone trying to understand the evolving mindset of the anti-replacists. Because closely linked to the reactionary resistance to both cultural and economic annihilation is, obviously, a rejection of the so-called ruling class. This sentiment, and little else, unites the Yellow Vest Movement in France. A feeling of being betrayed by the ruling class also informs movements in the United States that are otherwise bitterly opposed to one another. BAP writes:

“What you are witnessing is the unraveling of the postwar American regime—or what is mendaciously called by its toadies the ‘liberal world order’—in a way that is far more thorough than the disturbances of the 1960s, and with consequences that will be far more dire. The ‘altright’ doesn’t exist and has nothing to do with the media representations of it as a form of ‘white nationalism,’ or even—and here is what is crucial to understand—just ‘white males’ or just the ‘right wing.’ The same phenomenon is taking place on the left, and there is much more crossover than older people realize: there is much more involvement also by nonwhite youth and particularly by Latino, Asian, and multiracial youth in this phenomenon than people want to admit.”

In BAP’s essay, entitled “America’s Delusional Elite is Done,” he accuses the conservative intellectual establishment of failing to oppose “the violent racial hatred and other forms of unprecedented insanity coming from the new left,” including “the destruction of the family, and the new push to groom children on behalf of transsexualism and other supposed sexual identities.” He points out that “this one crucial matter extends the appeal of the ‘frog people’ far beyond that of any one racial or ethnic group.”

So where Camus saw cultural deconstruction as a prerequisite to ethnic replacement, to be resisted, BAP sees resistance to cultural deconstruction as something that is unifying various ethnicities. Economic globalism and cultural deconstruction may have left France open to ethnic replacement and ethnic conflict, but in the United States, these same two mega-trends could form a reactionary and multiethnic solidarity. The difference is that the Yellow Vest Movement unifies a diverse assortment of factions based, so it appears, purely on economic grievances. In the United States by contrast, among the still gestating Bronze Age resistance, the economic factors are present but equally unifying are the cultural grievances.

In the long run, France and the United States face very different challenges with respect to mass immigration. Compared to America, France is a nation poorly equipped culturally to absorb and assimilate millions of immigrants, and—can we say this?—the immigrants entering France are not easily assimilated, insofar as they are mostly African and mostly Muslim. Moreover, France’s mostly secular native population will not find much common ground with the social conservatism practiced by Muslims, whereas a far higher percentage of white Americans are Christian, practicing variants of Christianity that overlap almost completely with those of immigrants to the United States from Latin America.

Until very recently, America’s dominant culture emphasized the importance of assimilation, and even in its atrophied, discredited current state, America’s ability to assimilate its immigrants remains robust. Asian immigrants entering the United States typically come from successful, developed nations, bringing a strong ethic for higher education and entrepreneurship. America’s Muslim immigrants constitute a far smaller fraction of America’s immigrant population, and on average they have more education and skills than the waves of Muslim immigrants entering France. For these reasons, America is far more likely than France to eventually absorb its immigrants while leaving its culture relatively intact.

But BAP isn’t done. Perhaps he offers further encouraging words to those conservative nationalists whose demographic awareness has made them give up when he writes the following: “Conservatives pretend to be able to recruit Latinos to their cause with the degraded ideology of Jack Kemp but Latinos see David French call forced ‘drag queen’ visits for schoolchildren ‘part of free life,’ and want nothing to do with it. We are far better at recruiting Latinos, and as the example of Bolsonaro among many others shows, this new, energetic and popular form of the right is a Latino movement, and it is the future.”

And where is the Davos-cracy in all of this leftist debauchery and conservative cowardice? BAP is one with Camus in implicating the “large monopolies that promote mass immigration, mass surveillance, and the most bizarre type of speech restrictions, not only on its own employees, but now on American society at large.” In America, the NeverTrumpers and Libertarians, and all of what Michael Anton may have been the first to refer to as “Conservatism Inc.,” have been worse than useless, they have been puppets of the Davoisie.

Finally, BAP’s observations are in accord with Camus on how the meaning of “equality” has been entirely perverted by the replacists. BAP writes:

“It is indeed possible to oppose this vicious and exterminationist hatred on purely liberal and racially egalitarian grounds. But this didn’t happen, which puts the lie to the claims that traditional conservatives care about equality under the law or about any of the ideals they claim to espouse. We are now faced with a left that has embraced a dialectic of racial and class destruction in a context where belief in absolute human equality is professed at the same time that no one believes in it anymore.”

In the 21st Century, the United States and Europe, France in particular, faces increasingly radicalized, politically disenfranchised, economically abandoned, embittered masses. What mindset they adopt, what alliances they form, may be the surprise of the century.

The Solution to Replacism—A Community of Nations

Camus considers an “orderly and peaceful” remigration of millions of French immigrants back to their nations of origin to be the only way to preserve French culture. It is hard to imagine how this could ever happen. But it is probably true that either assimilation or remigration will be necessary in France in order to avoid either civil war or submission to Islam. Houellebecq’s book of that name is not in the least far fetched, although if it were to happen it prefigures a larger eventual clash, since an Islamicized West would still have to deal with China and other Asian nations that remain committed to preserving their own cultures.

Which begs the question: What does it take for a nation to be willing to fight to again assimilate its immigrants? In France, the economic challenges caused by globalization have already sparked the Yellow Vest Movement, which led to dramatic recent shifts on immigration policy by Macron. But can France, and the other Europeans, recover a sufficient belief in their own history and traditions and identity to demand others assimilate to their ways, instead of the other way around?

In his 2017 book, The Strange Death of Europe, British conservative author and journalist Douglas Murray suggests that those forces still extant in Western societies that resist the leftist derangements of our time—the secular and the religious—put aside their differences and unite to save their civilization. That’s an interesting idea not only because it might enable a critical mass of resistance to arise, but because it represents a new synthesis of Western culture that might help defuse the mutual resentment of Right and Left. They’d better get busy.

Nothing BAP discusses, either in his book or in his essay addressing Michael Anton’s review, offers a solution. BAP describes his work as that of a Samizdat, those Eastern Bloc dissidents who reproduced and distributed censored and underground publications critical of the regime. Anton, for his part, adheres to the ideals of the American Founding Fathers. To which BAP responds, “he [Anton] should admit that this form of government would today be called white supremacism or white nationalism, as would Lincoln’s later revision of it, as would indeed the America of FDR and Truman, not to speak of Theodore Roosevelt.”

Indeed it is. By the Left.

So where does Camus cross the line? How is Camus the “ideologue of white supremacy?” Why did Michael Anton have to use the pseudonym “Publius Decius Mus” when writing candidly about the Davoisie’s embrace of mass immigration into the United States? Why is Bronze Age Mindset written by “Bronze Age Pervert,” instead of whoever lives behind that name?

Camus answers this repeatedly in his book. Anti-racism has come to mean anti-white. Examining the phenomenon uncovers endless examples and makes a strong case for the truth of this statement. Neo-commissars variously described as Chief Equity Officers now infest public and private bureaucracies in departments of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.” They manage aggressive staffs, expensive and empowered, micromanaging everything from micro-aggressions to the precise ethnic proportions represented in the personnel headcounts of every institution in America. This is authoritarian, totalitarian fascism, bureaucratized and masquerading as anti-fascism. It is explicitly racist, yet it markets itself as anti-racist. That is already a reality in much of America, and it’s spreading fast.

In Europe in general, and France in particular, the same applies. If you question the future of your nation, based on utterly indisputable facts—consistent and immutable voting patterns by ethnicity, leading societal indicators by ethnicity, demographic reality—you are branded a “white supremacist” and the consequences are swift. In ascending order: Unwelcome in polite society. Banned or suppressed online. Fired from your job. Denied various public and private services. Prosecuted and fined. Imprisoned.

And yet the movement of anti-replacists isn’t necessarily “white,” at all. The Yellow Vest Movement isn’t white, and it is ideologically heterogeneous. The rising Bronze Age reactionaries in the United States aren’t ethnically pure, and their ideology remains very much in flux. For these reasons, practical nationalism—centrist but honest, faithful to culture and tradition, having expectations of immigrants instead of the other way around, willing to protect national industries in defiance of the libertarian Davos-cracy, able to put the national interest first—still could have a future in the West. And it may have nothing to do with “whiteness” at all.

The alternative, prosecuted by the Left and condoned by a cowardly Right establishment, is Balkanization based on race and gender, even though race and gender “are a social construct.” It is enforced equality according to race and gender, even though all races and cultures are already equal, and in any case, “race and gender are social constructs.”

The alternative, prosecuted by the Davos-cracy, is to flatten the world, erase borders in the interests of commerce, and reduce humanity to undifferentiated human matter. How does this square with the “celebration of diversity” that informs every coopted institution of the Davos-cracy, from mainstream media to monopolistic multinationals? It doesn’t until you return to one of the first points Camus makes, where he emphasizes that replacism isn’t merely to turn humanity into undifferentiated human matter, but to create simulacrums of culture replacing genuine culture. The iconic buildings and monuments and historic plazas of Paris or London will be faint and boring ruins compared to the neon recreations of those same places around the planet, in cities turned into theme parks. The commodification of high culture is the essence of replacism.

Understanding this fact, that replacism is a wholistic repatterning of all national cultures and a wholesale erasure of national economies, is crucial to refuting the claim that to be anti-replacist is to be a white supremacist. The journey into the future, with technology and globalization whipping forward faster than anyone can fully track or comprehend, changing everything in decades, then changing everything yet again, and again, will not be weathered without the strength of national cultures that embrace and cherish and share a common faith, tradition, values, patriotism, being part of something.

Absent intact and confident national Western cultures who know where they came from and who they are, the immigrant waves that retain the most confidence in their collective identity will overwhelm those cultures that do not. And that may not end well for anyone or anything, including the Davos-cracy, including modernity itself.

To the extent Renaud Camus fights a lonely battle, with the smug opinion-makers of the world stigmatizing him and everyone like him as a “white supremacist,” chances are France will become a nation of undifferentiated human matter, or an Islamic state, or some hybrid of the two. But France will no longer be France.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Realignment and Race in the Anglosphere

Two national elections, one decisive and the other a cliffhanger, have shaken the politics of the West to its core. In the United Kingdom, just last month, Conservative candidate Boris Johnson won a decisive victory for himself and his party. In the United States, barely three years ago, Republican candidate Donald Trump won the presidential election in a stunning upset where he narrowly lost the popular vote but logged a decisive victory in the electoral college.

The voters that supported these candidates represent a movement that has been building for several years but was not expected to result in a political realignment so disruptive and polarizing. Both candidates prevailed in the face of almost universal condemnation from the establishment media, the entertainment glitterati, most major political donors, and even members of their own party.

The reasons for their success are no secret, the only surprise was the level of support they were able to attract. To repeat what everyone acknowledges – whether or not they agree or disagree – Boris Johnson and Donald Trump owe their political success to a populist reassertion of national sovereignty. They represent renegotiating bad trade deals, reconsidering mass immigration, restructuring tax laws to discourage exporting jobs, repealing crippling regulations, and rethinking foreign policy to replace nation building with principled realism.

There’s much more to this picture, however, something harder to recognize, obscured by Johnson’s bombast and Trump’s bellicosity. While both of these politicians are channeling resurgent nationalism, they are also common sense centrists. While common sense and centrism isn’t how the typical critic of these men would characterize them, their lives and their policies provide ample evidence. Both of them have changed their party loyalties. Both of them are unwilling to engage in draconian budget cutting. Trump increased funding to the Veterans Administration. Johnson plans to invest more in the National Health Service. Both of them champion massive infrastructure investments. Both of them are pragmatists.

The politicians who oppose Trump and Johnson, on the other hand, are confirmed globalists. Their agenda prioritize values antithetical to nationalism. They tout the virtues of free trade, as if it’s a revelation that wool is cheaper in Scotland and wine is cheaper in France, and use it as the theoretical bludgeon to justify exporting millions of jobs to overseas sweatshops. They tout the virtues of integration and multiculturalism, but use it to treat their own people and their own culture as interchangeable with any other. They claim there is an urgent need to discontinue use of fossil fuel, nuclear energy, and even hydroelectric power, but collect obscene profits as the attendant regulations create barriers that only the biggest multinationals can navigate.

The rhetorical weapons of globalist politicians do not withstand close examination, but they don’t have to. It is enough to declare anyone who wants to stop exporting jobs and importing welfare recipients as an economic ignoramus and a racist. It is enough to declare anyone who wants to deregulate in order to restore affordability to homes and utility bills as a climate holocaust denier.

In all of this, there is only one question that matters: Can a nationalist centrist realignment hold? And in answer to that question, there is only one variable that matters: Will nonwhites start voting for authentic nationalist centrist candidates, or will they continue to be voting fodder for the globalists?

Shown below are four maps that graphically illustrate the current voting trends by race in the United States and the United Kingdom. The first one shows the United States distribution of votes by county in the 2016 presidential election, with the blue representing those counties that supported Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, and the red representing those counties that supported Donald Trump. The second one shows these same counties according to their concentrations of nonwhite residents.

As can be seen on this second map, below, the concentrations of nonwhites in the United States are depicted by a spectrum from very light green, which are counties that are 90 percent white, to deep purple, which are counties where over 50 percent of the residents are nonwhite. The correlation between these two maps is striking. On both maps there is a crescent running through the South from Northern Louisiana down through Alabama and Georgia and up into the Carolinas, where blacks voted overwhelmingly for Clinton. Similarly, on both maps there are concentrations of Hispanic voters supporting Clinton in a line starting on the Northern California coast and running south and east along the border all the way through to Gulf of Mexico. Washington DC, which is 90 percent black, and Miami Florida, which is majority Hispanic, went for Clinton, as did most urban centers where there are significant nonwhite populations.

The most recent data on voting patterns by ethnicity in the United States verify what is evident from these maps. According to Pew Research, in 2018 U.S. congressional races, 69 percent of Hispanics voted for Democratic candidates, as did 77 percent of Asians, and 90 percent of blacks. Only 44 percent of whites voted Democrat.

Before speculating on what this all means, it is instructive to view similar maps for the recent parliamentary elections in the United Kingdom, because the trend of nonwhite support for the globalist agenda is equally evident in that country. The visual evidence, in fact, is uncanny, despite needing to take into account several political parties instead of just two. As the map showing the distribution of votes by party, setting aside the regional parties in Scotland and Northern Ireland, there were three major parties vying for seats in Parliament. Two of them represented globalist interests; depicted in red, the Labour Party, and in orange, the Liberal Party. The sea of blue, on the other hand, depicts the seats won by Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party.

As can be seen on the next map, below, apart from significant swatches of Scotland, which voted Liberal because they want to keep the flow of North Sea Oil royalties unimpeded by any potential Brexit related obstacles, the globalist vote is concentrated in precisely the same places where nonwhites are concentrated. The areas where the Labour Party won include the metropolitan areas of Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, and Sheffield in the English Midlands. Moving south, Labour was victorious in Birmingham, Nottingham and Leicester, along with, of course, nearly all of the area in and around London, where the population of the capital city is now over 50 percent nonwhite.

Data already compiled by the British Parliament confirms what these maps suggest. In the 2019 realignment, with four major parties to choose from (and parties other than these four garnered five percent of the overall vote), white voters preferred the Conservative Party over the Labour Party by a margin of 45 percent to 38 percent. Nonwhites, on the other hand, supported the Labour Party by an overwhelming 73 percent, with only 19 percent supporting the Conservatives.

What Does This All Mean?

The significance of this is already clear to anyone paying attention. In the United States as well as in the United Kingdom, there is a consensus among nonwhites in favor of loose immigration policies, generous welfare and entitlement programs, along with support for favored elements of the liberal agenda such as strict gun control legislation, and laws restricting free speech if it is deemed hateful or offensive. All of these political preferences, to the extent they have become policy, are threats to national sovereignty.

A partial solution for those concerned about retaining national sovereignty would be to restrict immigration. In America, President Trump has worked hard to reduce illegal immigration and he has called for merit based legal immigration which at least would reduce the percentage of immigrants dependent on taxpayers. But birthrate statistics by ethnicity indicate that the percentage of nonwhites in the United States (and the United Kingdom) will continue to increase even if immigration were stopped entirely.

With American realignment in favor of nationalism hanging by a thread, it isn’t enough to stop immigration, even if that were possible. It is also not likely, and probably not desirable, to succeed in polarizing the vote completely according to race, where, for example, 90 percent of whites supported a nationalist agenda, and 90 percent of nonwhites supported a globalist agenda. Such a campaign would inevitably drift further and further towards extremism.

The solution, if there is one, for nationalist centrists is to emphasize the centrism equally with the nationalism. This worked in the United Kingdom, where Boris Johnson was able to convince wary Labour Party voters that he not only did not intend to dismantle the National Health Service, he intended to invest in it. It will be interesting to see how he does that, because centrist solutions to America’s healthcare challenges do not involve a national health service. On the other hand, however, in February 2016, it was Trump, and only Trump among the other 16 libertarian beholden GOP candidates, who said in response to a question about alternatives to Obamacare, “I am not going to let people who need healthcare die on the streets.” Trump is a centrist.

Defining National Centrism

Centrism in 21st century America doesn’t have to rely on historical precedents. It can be defined in terms that many on the far left would consider to be far right, because what used to be moderate, mainstream political sentiments are now tainted by the Left as far right. For example, a politician might consider themselves to be a centrist even if they are in favor of gun rights, merit based immigration, free speech even when it is offensive or hateful, and endorse tariffs if that’s what it takes to enforce fair trade agreements.

Why shouldn’t endorsing development of fossil fuel and nuclear power as part of an “all of the above” energy policy be considered centrist? Why shouldn’t a centrist be willing to encourage publicly funded new roads and freeways so new suburbs can be built, leading to affordable home prices in precisely the same way as back in the 1950s and 1960s? Why wouldn’t a centrist be in favor of slowing down a bit, and not spreading panic over “climate change,” when, despite media hysteria to the contrary, the science does not suggest any sort of looming catastrophe?

And why, for that matter, should it not be centrist to support not a wealth tax, or a return to confiscatory tax rates, but at least closing the carried interest loophole that allows money managers to treat their commissions as capital gains? Who cares? Find one super wealthy political donor in America who is willing to put hundreds of millions into backing nationalist political candidates. Find one super wealthy political donor in America who puts any political agenda in front of their support for lower tax rates for the highest tax brackets, “free” trade, and open borders? Any?

Can National Centrism Attract Nonwhites?

It isn’t clear that a centrist agenda will attract nonwhites in the same proportions that it attracts white voters, but there is no alternative but to try. An encouraging fact is it will not take a seismic shift in nonwhite voting patterns to deliver elections to nationalist candidates in the future. If 20 percent of blacks vote for Trump in 2020, instead of the 10 percent who voted for him in 2016, he will be elected in a landslide. Similarly, if Trump attracts a third of Hispanic voters, instead of around the roughly 20 percent who supported him in 2016 (the percentages are disputed), he will be elected in a landslide.

Ultimately, nationalists who are concerned about changing demographics have to ask themselves tough questions. Do you believe that a community of sovereign nations is a better international model for the 21st century than the globalist vision, where corporations and supranational institutions run the world? Do you believe that the Western values of individualism, property rights and free speech are values that should appeal to everyone regardless of ethnicity? Do you think the emerging citizens of the world will eventually embrace a set of values that is very close to those pioneered by Western nations?

Nationalism, tempered by centrism, offers a political pathway towards a multi-ethnic future that should not be written off as an impossible sell until the sales pitch has been made.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Political Realignment is Coming to America

Just over three years ago, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, speaking at a fundraiser in New York City, characterized half of Donald Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables.” And for over three years, Trump, along with everyone who supports him, has been subjected to passionate hatred from nearly everyone who would rather have seen Clinton elected.

It’s therefore tempting to return the favor, and hate back, but that would not only be a tactical mistake – since you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar – but also inaccurate. There are a surprising number of liberals, progressives, and even socialists, who are not only anti-Clinton, but are begrudgingly, and increasingly, capable of seeing positive sides of the Trump presidency.

A very early indication of this was in back in October 2016, when John Pilger published in the London Progressive Journal an influential article entitled “Why Hillary Clinton Is More Dangerous Than Donald Trump.” Pilger, notwithstanding his socialist leanings, is a world renowned journalist and filmmaker of undeniable courage and integrity.

In an eloquent tirade notable for its many, many examples of how Hillary Clinton is a murderous establishment puppet, this observation by Pilger summed it up, “She is no maverick. She embodies the resilience and violence of a system whose vaunted ‘exceptionalism’ is totalitarian with an occasional liberal face.”

Sound familiar? And wow, how that system has tried, and continues to try to take down Trump. Pilger saw this coming. About Trump, he wrote, “In the circus known as the American presidential campaign, Donald Trump is being presented as a lunatic, a fascist. He is certainly odious; but he is also a media hate figure. That alone should arouse our scepticism.”

A “media hate figure.” Ain’t that the truth. And liberals eat it up. And along with Trump, they hate us. Or do they? John Pilger isn’t alone. There are millions of liberals, progressives, Democrats, and even socialists who have seen through the establishment’s programmatic hatred, despite (or perhaps because of) it coming from every quarter – entertainment, academia, corporations, politicians, and all mainstream media, online and offline.

Their skepticism is indeed aroused, and not just over Trump.

Loving the Bull

Many Trump supporters cheered his election not because of his pugnacity (about time), or his policies (also about time), but because when you hate the China Shop, you love the Bull.

Trump has exposed the Democrat vs Republican, right vs left, liberal vs conservative paradigms as, if not obsolete shams, at the least, models that have lost most of their dialectic vitality. They remain real and represent important differences, but they are overshadowed by a new political polarity, worthy of urgent and vigorous dialectic, globalism vs nationalism.

Until Trump came along, the globalist agenda crept relentlessly forward under the radar. Issues that can now be explicitly framed as globalist vs nationalist – immigration, trade, foreign policy, even climate change – found deceptive expression when shoehorned into the obsolete paradigms.

It suited the uniparty establishment to engage in phony, ostensibly partisan bickering to keep up appearances. It suited them to pretend that immigration and “free” trade bestowed unambiguous global economic benefits, while claiming that to oppose it was economically ignorant and “racist.” It was convenient to pretend ceaseless foreign interventions were based on moral imperatives, while silencing the opposition as “isolationists.” It was easy to get away with promoting climate change policies based on supposedly indisputable scientific evidence, while stigmatizing opponents as “deniers.”

Suddenly all of that is revealed as almost Ptolemaic in its contrived complexity. Here is Trump’s Copernican breakthrough: if you want open borders, absolutely free movement of capital and jobs, and an aggressive international “climate agenda” enforced by the American military, you are a globalist. If you do not, you are a nationalist.

The impact of the globalist agenda have been acutely felt in America already, but the pain is spreading and intensifying. Unskilled immigrants are taking jobs away from the most vulnerable Americans, and every year, they continue to arrive by the millions. Manufacturing jobs which are vital to America’s economic vitality are being exported to any nation with cheaper labor, costing Americans still more jobs. Policies that are supposedly designed to save the planet have made it virtually impossible to cost-effectively build anything – houses, roads, reservoirs, power plants. In states where the globalist agenda is well advanced, the gap between rich and poor is at record levels, and the cost-of-living is prohibitive.

The rest of the world faces the same onslaught from globalists. With rare exceptions, such as the administrative clerisy and the minute fraction of economic refugees for whom the rudest of welfare benefits in developed nations far exceeds their lot in their nations of origin, the only beneficiaries are the investor class and multinational corporations. Economic development, utterly dependent on cheap fossil fuel, is denied because fossil fuel is denied. African cities that might become inviting metropolises fueled by natural gas and nuclear power are instead hellholes of misery, as a burgeoning population forages into wilderness areas for food and fuel, stripping it of life.

The problem with the globalist vision isn’t just that it denies people their cultural identity as it MacDonaldizes the world. The problem is that it’s not working economically or environmentally. It is an epic disaster, unfolding in slow motion. If globalism isn’t stopped, it will engulf the world in war and misery.

And guess what? There are liberals, progressives, and socialists, who get it. The see how their lives are being destroyed. They see through the platitudes, they see the hypocrisy. They can tell that globalism is not working. They’re looking for new ideas.

Modern American Nationalism Transcends President Trump

Donald Trump may have accelerated nationalist movements around the world, but how they find expression in the decades to come depends on how they are shaped by his followers, including belated, reluctant followers, including many who had been his critics. For many years, there are a lot of smart Democrats who have been rejecting the tactics of globalists, even if they have not been critical of globalism itself.

In California, a crucible of American culture, two respected Democrats offer examples of brave commentary that constitutes rank heresy to establishment globalists. In Berkeley, of all places, Michael Shellenberger, a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment” and co-writer of the EcoModernist Manifesto, has worked through his organization Environmental Progress to tirelessly campaign for reviving nuclear power in America. Shellenberger in recent years has turned his attention as well to California’s homeless crisis, calling for emergency measures that cut through a web of stultifying, counterproductive laws that have prevented effective solutions.

Another Californian, quite possibly the most intelligent Democrat who’s ever lived, is Joel Kotkin, a fellow in urban studies at Chapman University, described by the New York Times as “America’s uber-geographer.” For over a decade, Kotkin has patiently explained how urban containment (because suburban sprawl supposedly causes excessive “greenhouse gas” emissions”) is strangling our cities and preventing equitable economic growth. Backing up everything he writes with data, Kotkin has exposed the hidden agenda behind extreme environmentalism, and how it benefits a coalition of special interests – investors, tech billionaires, the professional consultant class, and public sector unions – but condemns everyone else to a feudal existence.

Nationalism Can Be a Model for World Peace and Prosperity

What is nationalism? Why does that word have to connote something extreme? Why can’t it simply acknowledge the practical reality of borders, language, culture and history, and the ongoing right of citizens to determine their own destiny and compete in the world?

Why is it that to the establishment in America and throughout the western democracies, “globalism” is still held up as an ideal, and the inevitable destiny of humanity? Why can’t that inevitability be restricted to the technical facts of globalization – communications, transportation, trade, finance – without also requiring a surrender of national sovereignty? Why can’t nationalism be compassionate, benevolent, economically enlightened, and inclusive?

Nationalism can be all those good things. It can be a model for world peace and prosperity.

As for “climate change” mitigation, why are rational criticisms such as those produced by the luminous Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg castigated as denying reality? Shall the reasoned skeptics of the world be swept away by an orchestrated crusade fronted by children? Shall the 16 year old schoolgirl Greta Thunberg’s vapid denunciations of world leaders actually be taken more seriously than Bjorn Lomborg’s impeccable cost/benefit analyses?

Although mass movements of people proceed more slowly, a philosophical realignment is arguably already upon us. In terms of applied political theory, the prevailing opposition today is nationalism vs globalism. Like all polarities, these labels are fraught with ambiguities and contradictions. For that reason, there are virtues to some aspects of globalism just as surely as there is a dark side to nationalism. Moreover, the 20th century polarities of Left vs Right and liberal vs conservative are still potent. But to have a meaningful political discussion today, those 20th century labels are subsumed within the new model.

To be a left wing socialist liberal, most of the time, is to be a globalist. But not always. Not any more. Remember this, the next time hatred comes your way. Realignment is coming.

Don’t recriminate. Recruit.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Defining American Nationalism

The Make America Great movement confronts hostility from nearly every establishment sector in American life; legacy media, social media, academia, entertainment, big corporations, big labor, big government, all Democrats, and a sizable percentage of the Republican elites.

Decrying the movement as “nationalism,” the establishment offers endless cautionary comparisons to nationalistic movements in history, condemning nationalism as tribal, racist, reactionary, hateful. The response to this relentless condemnation is an understandable belligerence, manifested all the way from Presidential tweets to Tea Party Facebook pages.

Belligerence is a justifiable reaction. The establishment has imposed a double standard that should infuriate any member of MAGA. Imagine if black-clad flash mobs of “nationalists” took over the streets of Portland, while police did nothing? Substitute hundreds of Antifa thugs and their sympathizers for nationalists, and that’s life in Portland today. Why isn’t that, and topics like that, the top story on ABC nightly “news,” night after night, forever?

The reason may be as simple as this: The Left invariably speaks with moral authority, whether they deserve it or not. The Left has managed to rhetorically out punch the MAGA movement because they’ve been able to associate MAGA with hate. In response, MAGA complains bitterly, instead of focusing on the optimistic, positive, inclusive, practical, solutions-oriented, wondrous hopeful future it imagines for America and the world. Until that alternative is presented, relentlessly, with enthusiasm and attention to detail, the establishment will continue to condone if not actively support the American Left. They will do this despite the contradictions inherent in the agenda of the Left that will destroy America as we know it.

Fundamental Contradictions in the Agenda of America’s Left

  • Mass immigration of unskilled people cannot be reconciled with socialism, because the ability of government to provide welfare and other entitlements to its citizens requires the percentage of productive taxpaying citizens to remain sizable enough to fund those benefits.
  • Mass immigration of unskilled people cannot be reconciled with ethnic quotas in all hiring, promotions, and academic admissions without undermining, perhaps fatally, the ability of corporations to operate competitively and universities to produce a critical mass of employable graduates.
  • Achieving 100 percent “renewable” energy cannot be reconciled with prosperity, or even with environmental protection. Renewable energy requires expensive backup power, and its environmental “footprint” is orders of magnitude greater than conventional or nuclear energy.
  • Mitigating “climate change,” even if you believe that anthropogenic, catastrophic climate change is imminent, cannot be reconciled with survival of human civilization, which cannot possibly wean itself of fossil fuel in the time span supposedly remaining.

These contradictions are beyond serious debate, yet serious people on the Left ignore them. Because these leaders on the Left are too intelligent to miss the huge contradictions in their logic, as noted, their goal can’t possibly be to help Americans, or even recent immigrants to America. The only logical conclusion must be they want to destroy, or perhaps just “fundamentally transform” America.

American Nationalism is not Belligerent

The biggest mistake the MAGA movement can make is to fight hatred with hatred. In between the emotion-driven irrationality of the many passionate foot soldiers of the Left, and the cold calculations of the nihilists at the top, are millions of people with common sense. If you can separate these people even for a moment from the propaganda of the panopticon, they will see the contradictions that discredit Leftism. They will walk away.

The greatest fear of the Left is that the MAGA movement will begin to attract everyone, regardless of their individual “identity.” This process has already begun. A telling example is to be found in California, where the Republican party recently held its state convention. Despite the MAGA grassroots members narrowly losing their battle for control of the party to establishment consultants and their uniparty donors, the energy was all with the MAGA contingent.

The most noteworthy, and very encouraging sign at California’s state GOP convention was how diverse the attendees have become. These were confident, self-sufficient individuals, who value the opportunity to compete and succeed on their own merits. There were hundreds of them; Latinos, Sikhs, Hindus, African Americans, Asians. More of them than ever, they came to Sacramento to be among fellow Republicans. Nearly all of them were enthusiastic Trump supporters.

If you had attended California’s recent state GOP convention, you could have talked to a Latino whose cousin has a ranch in the Rio Grande Valley. He would have told you why we need border security. You also could have talked to an African American grandmother who has watched hope return to members of her extended family, because they have good jobs in the Trump economy. These people are proud Americans. They don’t want to be patronized or appeased, and more and more, they’re seeing right through the Leftist con. They want the tough truth. Because honest hard work, reckoned by immutable and evenly applied standards, is the only true pathway to achievement.

It is vitally important for MAGA supporters to understand the significance of this trend. Some of Trump’s most enthusiastic fans are not angry old white men, but people of color with most of their lives in front of them. They are the vanguard of a new America that believes in the values of the old America. These are the allies that will help define American nationalism as embracing the English language, and the universal truths embodied in the values of the European enlightenment.

Maybe this is hard to fathom until you meet someone born in Bangalore, who is talking with irrepressible, well informed passion about the Federalist Papers, personally identifying with the founders of America, and making America’s founding ideals part of their own moral and intellectual identity. These people are out there. Their numbers are growing. They are going to save help our nation. Welcome them.

Making American Nationalism Benevolent

Just as there are contradictions in Leftist thought that render it a futile, nihilistic dead end, there are immutable facts that may inform American nationalist thought that make it a necessary and desirable path for Americans. Here are a few of them:

  • Globalization is inevitable, but no country is better able to manage that process than America. No other nation has America’s demonstrated commitment to individual rights, nor such an illustrious history of systematically eliminating racism and sexism.
  • The character of nationalism in many nations today is reminiscent of those forms of nationalism that darkened the early 20th century. China, in particular, is an ethnocentric, expansionist superpower that can only be contained by a strong America.
  • For America to remain powerful it must recognize that immigration henceforth has to be merit based. Similarly, for America’s institutions to stay competitive, they must become totally colorblind and gender-blind.
  • Merit based immigration of skilled professionals will enhance America’s workforce and its technological leadership. Restricting immigration of unskilled people will improve the job opportunities for lower income Americans already living here, and reduce demands on America’s welfare system.
  • Fossil fuel and nuclear power are necessary not only for America’s economic health, but for the economic health of every nation. Precipitously curtailing use of fossil fuel will cause more harm than good both to human societies and the environment.
  • The best way to help destitute would-be migrants is to assist the nations where they live to achieve stability. It is far more cost effective to use the money that might have paid for domestic resettlement for a few to instead invest in opportunities overseas for the many. For every million that come to the U.S., tens of millions are left behind.

The resentment MAGA supporters feel towards the Left is justified. The Left has the establishment on their side, and it’s not fair. But examining the ultimate source of this resentment reveals an encouraging truth: Where the Left is pessimistic about the future, MAGA is optimistic. As the Left predicts the end of the world, MAGA believes in progress and prosperity. When the Left finds overwhelming faults and failures in American society and American history, MAGA sees the inspiring, absolutely authentic upside. If the Left demands “diversity” which in practice results in new forms of segregation, MAGA supporters come in all colors and are unified as proud Americans.

This hopeful and positive form of American nationalism will not only attract American voters, no matter what their background, it will also attract corporate support. America’s multinational corporations condone the agenda of the Left, even co-opting much of it, because that’s what corporations do. They are politically neutral. In order to operate, they accommodate the dominant ideology, the dominant culture, and the dominant political power.

This explains why corporations indulge Leftist sentiments even while knowing that if those sentiments were ever taken to their logical extreme, their directors would be replaced by a politburo. America’s corporations need to be offered a coherent, benevolent vision of American nationalism. The rapidity with which corporations might then discover their enthusiasm for an inclusive, welcoming MAGA vision may surprise a lot of people.

Seizing the high ground of optimism, believing in a bright future, not only will win over many establishment and corporate elites, it will transform America’s political landscape. America today seethes as a purple battleground. Republicans and Democrats are evenly matched. Who knows how 2020 will turn out. But the moral worth of Democratic policies is shallow. In the name of earth justice and social justice, they are going to make life in America even harder for low and middle income residents. The Democrats are incapable of compromising on their rhetoric or their policies. They are locked into the ideological straight-jackets of climate change hysteria and identity politics.

Republicans must demonstrate their ability to find the balance that Democrats are incapable of finding.  There is a moral value to instilling pride by abandoning race and gender preferences. There is a moral value to embracing policies of abundance – by turning the private sector loose to increase the supply of housing, energy, water, et. al. – rather than creating politically contrived artificial scarcity. There is a moral value to being hopeful.

This optimism in the MAGA movement is what should be heralded at every opportunity. We are Americans. We can do anything. We will continue to set an example to the nations of the world and everywhere, people will continue to emerge, by the billions, out of poverty and oppression. We will continue to be practical stewards of the environment. We will develop radical new energy technologies – satellite solar power systems, fusion power. We will cure cancer and slow the aging process. We will colonize the solar system. We Americans will remain the strongest power on earth, fighting when we have to, and we will lead the way to a peaceful global civilization.

That is the nationalism that defines the MAGA movement, and demands expression.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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