AmRen 2016: The Wind is in Our Sails

The 14th American Renaissance conference took place in a mood of high excitement and energy. As Jared Taylor noted in his welcoming remarks, “never have I been so optimistic; never have I felt such a strong wind in our sails.” Attendance at the conference — nearly 300 — was a record, even above the levels reached before anti-racist activists intimidated hotels and forced the cancellation of meetings in 2010 and 2011.

There is no doubt that Donald Trump’s candidacy has given our movement a boost, but the continuing slide towards chaos — riots in Ferguson and Baltimore; the immigration invasion of Europe — are rousing unprecedented numbers of whites from complacency. The conference also attracted a high level of media attention, with representatives from the Wall Street Journal, Dagens Nyheter of Sweden, Voice of America, BuzzFeed, Talking Points Memo, Red Ice, Vice, and an independent movie producer called Story House. Red Ice and the Political Cesspool added to the excitement by broadcasting live from the conference.

After the traditional cocktail reception on Friday evening, conferees were entertained by a new music video that satirist Uncuck the Right created just for the conference. Jared Taylor’s cameo appearance on vocals and saxophone has already spawned its own humorous tribute: Anglo-Saxin’. Veterans of the movement are marveling at the creativity of a new generation of activists.

This year’s conference saw a continuation of a perfect straight-line trend. As our numbers grow, the number of demonstrators dwindles. The park police asked conference attendees to stay away from demonstrators, but their sad contingent was surrounded and outnumbered by the press. One journalist reported back that the demonstrators were “a very confused bunch.”

Serious talks began on Saturday morning with James Edwards, host of the radio program “The Political Cesspool.” In a speech entitled “The Best Decision I Ever Made,” he spoke about his life as a racial advocate. He began by recalling what he called the best “privilege” a person of any race can have: to be born into a loving family. At age 18, he said, he felt the call of his Confederate ancestors telling him, “It’s your time” to take up arms. After several years of conventional political activism, he first went on the air as a pro-white radio host in 2004. “Since then,” he said, “a day has never passed without my working for the cause. No vacation days, no sick days. That’s what it takes to make an impact.”

Mr. Edwards said that when he first started talking about race in a polite, reasonable way, he thought he could start a reasonable discussion, but was shocked to be met with furious denunciations. “Calling for a white birthrate above replacement level is enough to get you called a ‘white supremacist,’ ” he said, but now his motto is, “If you’re not catching flack, you’re not over the target.”

In his encounters with press, Mr. Edwards has found that the media are so biased that he now refuses to be interviewed for anything but a live, uncut broadcast. Anything he leaves in the hands of an editor, he said, comes out as an unrecognizable smear.

His latest tangles with the media came after Donald Trump, Jr. gave him an interview. The press scoured the Political Cesspool website and found a quote from an African author who wrote that slavery had gotten blacks out of Africa and introduced them to Western Civilization. Mr. Edwards had added a note saying that he agreed. This, of course, led to the headline, “Donald Trump Interviewed by Pro-slavery Radio Host.”

Mr. Edwards talked about a Swedish reality-TV program that invited him to represent the traditional Southern point of view. After eight hours of filming, the program gave him exactly 36 seconds of air time.

Mr. Edwards explained that the risks of activism are far less than many imagine. “I have never lost a friend,” he said. “It has enlarged my circle of friends. I would go to war for them and they would go to war for me.” His advice? “Get involved in any way you can. Be part of the struggle.”

Peter Brimelow, editor of VDARE.com, is one of the rare outsiders who predicted that Donald Trump would run for the presidency. “I had posted, saying he would run,” he said, “though I didn’t really believe it.” In like manner, at the 2015 American Renaissance conference, he talked about how a single speech can set the tone for an era. Examples would be Joseph McCarthy’s 1950 speech on Communists in the State Department and Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968. Mr. Trump’s June 16 announcement of his candidacy has likewise upended the political establishment. “One spark can start the conflagration,” he said. “It can be one spark or one politician.”

As someone who has long promoted patriotic immigration reform — “the other kind is just another word for amnesty” — Mr. Brimelow echoed Ann Coulter’s opinion of Mr. Trump’s official position on immigration: “The greatest political document since the Magna Carta.” His policies respond to a deep yearning; at Trump rallies, audiences spontaneously start chanting “Build the wall, build the wall.”

Mr. Brimelow raised three questions about a Trump candidacy. First, can he win? Mr. Trump has been catching up with Mrs. Clinton in the polls, and he seems to be doing better than Mitt Romney with non-whites. Mr. Brimelow predicted that “if he can mobilize whites in a nation-wide ‘Southern strategy’ he could win by a landslide.”

Second, can he be trusted if he wins? “Absolutely not,” said Mr. Brimelow. “No politician can be trusted.” The important difference is that we know exactly what the other candidates would do, whereas there is at least some uncertainty with Trump. “He doesn’t seem drawn to the quiet life,” said Mr. Brimelow, “and facing down the beltway establishment is a sure-fire way to avoid the quiet life.”

Mr. Brimelow noted that the presidency is actually a much weaker office than that of the British prime minister, for example. President Trump could be like King Kong in the movie, tied down with hundreds of ropes and roaring. Still, much could be accomplished by thumping the bully pulpit and through “strategic deportations:” Whenever illegals “come out of the shadows” and demonstrate brazenly, the government could “round ’em up and ship ’em out.”

Third, what happens if Mr. Trump loses? “Hillary has made it very clear that anyone who gets in can stay,” said Mr. Brimelow, and “she could unleash an Angela-Merkel style tidal wave of immigrants, because she wants to deliver the death blow in the struggle for the future of America.”

“Last year,” said Mr. Brimelow, “I said it would take one speech. Now, I say it will take one election to make Mount America blow.”

Dan Roodt, the Afrikaner author and activist, described his people as the canaries in the coal mine. They are whites who have given up power to a non-white majority, and their fate signals what is in store if other white groups lose majority status. Dr. Roodt warned that one of the consequences of marginalizing whites is a bad economy. The sharp fall in the value of the rand since black rule began shows what happens when whites are no longer in charge.

Dr. Roodt pointed out that white-run South Africa was part of the Western world. It fought on the allied side in both world wars, and in 1942, Premier Jan Smuts was applauded uproariously when he addressed both houses of the British parliament. Just a few years later, South Africa was an international pariah. Now, with black rule and increasing Chinese and Pakistani influence, the nation is drifting into an anti-Western posture.

At the same time, South Africa “is becoming a kind of anti-racist Soviet Union, where speaking honestly is unspeakable.” Race is, of course, the great taboo, but the many laws against “hate” are enforced only against whites.

Racial preferences are now so widespread that whites have little hope of government or corporate jobs. The only real exceptions are the self-employed professions, and jobs that require technical skills few blacks have. Dr. Roodt noted that many racially conscious whites have asked him why he stays in a country where he may have no future. He replies that emigration could be jumping from the frying pan into the fire. Angela Merkel is betraying her people just as F.W. de Klerk betrayed the South Africans, and even “conservatives,” such as Nicolas Sarkozy of France say they look forward to a future of miscegenation. Just as the dominoes fell in southern Africa — the Portuguese colonies, then Zimbabwe, then South Africa — the dominoes could fall in Europe. France under Islamic rule could be the base from which to conquer the continent.

If anything, explained Dr. Roodt, Afrikaners might have a better future in South Africa. They are reviving their distinctive culture and crowds spontaneously break into the old, apartheid national anthem, “Die Stem.” “There could be a crisis,” he said, “and we could take back the parts of the country that matter and once again fly our old orange, white and blue flag.” “The canary in the mine is not dead,” he said. “He is working,” chipping away at the rock face.

Fernando Cortés, a long-time Mexican nationalist and identitarian, offered his perspective on immigration to the United States. He argued that the Mexican regime could be accused of almost intentional mismanagement of the economy so as to keep Mexicans poor and provide cheap labor for Americans. “The system wants Mexicans to migrate to the United States,” he said. “It’s not Mexicans, who would rather stay home.” But a minimum wage of $4.00 a day, coupled with a corrupt regime, forces them north as fodder for globalists. “NAFTA was a death blow for Mexican farming,” he said, “since without protection from imports, Mexico cannot even grow its own corn and beans.” The government trumpets the arrival of every new transnational assembly plant but is silent about miserable wages and working conditions.

Mr. Cortés freely acknowledged the damage that massive Mexican immigration does to American identity. “Mexico has never received immigrants,” he said, and “Mexicans would not tolerate even a tenth of the flow that has gone north.” He observed that “white people are remarkably generous and tolerant” in the face of dispossession. At the same time, the present system is bad for Mexico, which loses important workers, even as corruption and civil decay creep north.

Mr. Cortés argues that the honest Left, to the extent that it really cares about people, is the best source of recruitment for identitarians. “When white altruists understand that they are hurting rather than helping, our numbers will increase,” but he suggested that some on the Left may prefer that the Third World remain poor: “If Mexico were financially healthy, liberals and open-borders advocates wouldn’t have a purpose.”

Mr. Cortés decried the harsh restrictions on free speech on both sides of the border, noting that people who have been trained to be easily offended are easily manipulated. He spoke of his happiness in finding identitarians in America because, “for me, the US is Mordor — the only place where the ring can be destroyed.” With identitarians in both the North and South “we have them surrounded.”

We will always be neighbors, he said, and “two nations can live side by side with true, separate identities.” However, this can be successful only when “each nation has its own folk, territory, and independence.”

Jared Taylor of American Renaissance spoke about the lies that whites tell themselves about race. He said he began thinking about this after the police in Cologne, Germany, covered up the New Year’s Eve attacks by Middle-Easterners on German women for fear that they would reflect badly on Angela Merkel’s policy of welcoming illegal immigrants.

When the truth came out, Germans posted angry comments about Arabs on the Internet. The German interior minister then said that the comments were “at least as awful” as the attacks themselves. “I cannot imagine a non-white person saying anything so degenerate,” said Mr. Taylor, who likened the cover-ups to the unwillingness of the British police to prosecute Pakistani men who groom young white girls for sex. Police were afraid of accusations of “racism” when the predators all turned out to be immigrants, and did not want to reveal crimes that would encourage “racists” to oppose non-white immigration. Other European officials have done the same thing, thus turning their backs on thousands of victims.

In the United States, scientists openly express their desire to suppress the truth about race differences in intelligence. Mr. Taylor reported that Howard Gardner, who promoted the theory of “multiple intelligences,” says he opposes research on race because the findings would be “incendiary.” It is better to remain ignorant.

“The whole Black Lives Matter movement is a pack of lies,” Mr. Taylor said. “Lies about Trayvon Martin, lies about Michael Brown, and lies about the police.” This does not stop white academics from writing about how police “hunt down and target blacks” as part of a “race war.”

“In a multi-racial country,” said Mr. Taylor, “if you can’t tell the truth about race you can’t tell the truth about anything, but that orthodoxy is dying.” Like every dying orthodoxy it will lash out in desperation, and he predicted ever-greater hysteria, hatred, and even violence towards racial dissidents.

Mr. Taylor reminded the audience of great battles their ancestors fought for their survival: Marathon, Poitiers, Vienna, the siege of Malta, Blood River. “You have the blood of heroes in your veins,” he said. “You know your duty. And I know you will do it.”

Filip Dewinter is a member of the European Parliament for the Vlaams Belang and the most high-profile leader of the fight for Flanders to pursue an independent destiny. His speech was a stirring call for the defense of Europe. He warned that “uncontrolled immigration” — and there is no other kind — is “replacing indigenous populations,” and that inaction will lead to “a tsunami of pauperized Third-World immigrants” pushing their way into Europe. He called immigration a threat to all Western countries, adding, “I know that the United States faces a similar immigration-invasion.”

Mr. Dewinter used colorful slides to show the rising tide: Brussels is 70 percent immigrant, and in his hometown of Antwerp, 52 percent of the school children are Muslim. There are now 25 to 50 times as many Muslims in Europe as there were in the 1960s.

“Islam,” said Mr. Dewinter, “is the ancient hereditary enemy of Europe,” quoting many Muslim leaders who call openly for turning Europe into a Muslim continent. He called the current invasion nothing more than a continuation of Moorish invasions that were turned back at tremendous cost at Poitiers and Vienna.

“Islam is a like a predator,” said Mr. Dewinter. “It attacks only the weak.” And because Europeans have been weakened and denatured by multi-culti foolishness, “Europe is on the verge of extinction.” All European countries, including the United States, Russia, and Eastern Europe must unite in the struggle to preserve Western Civilization. The only solution, said Mr. Dewinter, is for “the West to regain its fighting spirit, to start a civilizational moral offensive, based on the foundations of our greatness.”

Ruuben Kaalep, at age 22 the youngest speaker ever to address an AmRen conference, is the founder and leader of the youth wing of the Conservative Peoples Party of Estonia. Although the party was established only 2012, it is already the sixth most powerful group in the legislature, and is dedicated to the preservation and survival of the Estonian people. “We are the generation dreaming of an ethnostate,” he said. “Perhaps some of us will be there when we have won our struggle and have established white European ethnostates all across the Western world.”

Mr. Kaalep spoke of the 12,000-year history of the Estonian people, and explained that they have survived “because we fought invaders one after another until none is left.” Survival is not a matter of luck, he said, but of struggle. “You must be willing to put yourself at risk,” he said, “but not for abstract principles. Your sacrifice must be for your people.”

Mr. Kaalep spoke to Americans: “For Europe you should care most of all, for that small continent is still where your roots lie. That is the place to which you are connected through your ancestors.” It is wrong, he said, to hope for redemption by going back to better times. Would it be enough to return to the time before the First World War? Or before the French Revolution? Or all the way back to the age of the Vikings? “We cannot escape our fate by winding back our clock,” he said. Even if our civilization must suffer a catastrophe, “we will plant our roots in the ruins, and we will then sprout wings and soar far higher than ever before.”

Mr. Kaalep spoke of his work organizing torch-light rallies to commemorate Estonian independence. The number of participants has grown from 200 to 1,000 to 2,000, as more and more Estonians come out to express their love for their country. Europeans, he concluded, must bury their old rivalries and defend their continent together. The flames of their torches are the hope of Europe, a Europe of homelands, in which the roots of each people will sink deep and nourish rich and everlasting identities.

Anke Van dermeersch, former Miss Belgium and member of the Belgian Senate, began by pointing out that the Western world faces a fundamental racial and civilizational conflict. We are reliving the great battles of our ancestors: Greece against Troy, Rome against Carthage, Christendom against Islam. Today, Europe is hobbled in its fight for survival because “it is taboo to confirm your European, Western or white identity.” In many countries it is even a crime.

Senator Van dermeersch pointed out that massive Third-World immigration has brought to Europe the same problems it brought to America: cultural conflict, lies about assimilation, and race riots. It has also brought open disdain for Europe. “Following the recent Paris and Brussels attacks,” said Miss Van dermeersch, “shouts of joy sounded in the Muslim ghettos of European cities.”

Europe also suffers from self-inflicted wounds. Senator Van dermeersch explained that “individualism, materialism and self-indulgence are the biggest enemies of family values and therefore also of demographics.” She denounced the UN’s suggestion that millions of African immigrants should be invited into Europe to make up for sub-replacement fertility, calling it “a creeping, ongoing genocide of Europeans.”

Senator Van dermeersch used slides to describe the work of her organization, Women Against Islamization. Some of the group’s work has revolved around provocative posters that highlight Muslim hatred of the female body. As a legislator, Senator Van dermeersch wrote and introduced the first law to ban the burqa, a law that became the model for every similar ban in Europe.

Senator Van dermeersch said that what the Arabs call Taharrush — gangs of men surrounding and assaulting women — is more correctly considered “sex jihad.” “Allah,” she added “does not like women.” She concluded with a call for “a strong, self-confident, identitarian Europe.” “It is the crusade of our times,” she said, “this fight for a future for Europe and for our children.”

The after-dinner speaker was video blogger RamZPaul, in his fourth straight AmRen appearance. His subject was the Alt Right, which he distinguished from the Neocons, the Christian right, and the libertarian right. He also gave a respectful nod to the Paleocons, who fought a lonely and losing battle in the 1980s and 1990s against the Neocons. He traced the first coinage of the name, Alternative Right, to an address that Professor Paul Gottfried of ­­­­­Elizabethtown College delivered to the H. L. Mencken Club in 2008. He then showed a slide of “Google Trends” results, noting that it has only been since mid-2015 that the term has shot into public consciousness, in association with the work of Richard Spencer, Colin Liddell, and Andy Nowicki.

RamZPaul described the activists of the Alt Right as young, brash, offensive, and effective, in their attacks on what they call the “cuckservative” Right. They are united in their frank acceptance of race as the basis for any healthy nation or civilization, but they also recognize sex differences, are skeptical of democracy, suspicious of “free trade,” and contemptuous of the idea of “nation building” overseas. He concluded with one of the iconic videos of the Alt Right, “This is Dildoween,” by Uncuck the Right. His talk was delivered in his trademark style of satirical humor that often had the audience roaring with laughter.

Sam Dickson, who closed his 14th American Renaissance conference, noted as did so many others, the unprecedented ferment in our movement. “Like Moses,” he said, “I may not make it to the promised land, but some of you in this room could be the pioneers of the ethnostate.” He also asked for generosity when that day comes, and that even those who may have opposed us be welcomed: “We should never give up on our racial comrades.” Other speakers had harsh words to say about the press but, again, Mr. Dickson counseled patience and generosity: “We should have an open hand and an open heart for them; they are still our people.”

Mr. Dickson spoke about how the system treats dissidents. First it gives us the silent treatment. This worked before the internet, but now the truth is too easy to discover. The next stage — the one we are in now — is persecution, attack, and smear. He said that the third stage, which could come sooner than we think, is co-optation. “There will be ‘acceptable’ version of AmRen and VDARE, whose representatives will be welcome on the major networks,” he warned. He said that these are likely to be neutered versions of white advocacy: “Beware of anyone who comes out of nowhere, foisted on us by the system. We need to be led by ourselves.”

He also warned young people of the dangers of running unnecessary risks. Your first goal, he said, is to establish financial security. No college student or junior employee has a duty to reveal his true opinions in a hostile environment. He also chided those who see the Trump campaign as the last chance for whites. “Trump is not our last hope,” he said. “Our struggle could go on for centuries.” Finally, he reminded the audience that, together with our European cousins “we are like the Panhellenic League or the concept of Christendom: we are many but we are one. We are neither of the Right nor of the Left: We are racial nationalists.”

The entire weekend was one of intense fellowship, of new friendships made and old ones renewed. Many participants said they felt a renewed commitment to the cause, and headed towards their homes with a strong sense of zeal and dedication. As he brought the conference to a close, Mr. Taylor offered a sort of benediction: “May the spirit of our people be with you. And you will know your brothers and sisters by the brightness of their eyes.”