The Authoritarian Plot at the National Conservatism Conference

The fourth National Conservatism Conference began on a triumphant note. “Welcome to — ready or not — the mainstream,” announced Chris DeMuth of the Heritage Foundation during an opening plenary. {snip}

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An unapologetic obsession with race and fertility marked all three days of the conference and sets natcons somewhat apart from a mainstream they despise. On the second day of the conference, I attended a panel on “Surviving Late Liberalism,” which promised a presentation from former Trump official Jeremy Carl. In 2020, HuffPost reported that Carl, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, had called the Black Lives Matter movement “racist.” Media Matters found that in 2015, he favorably cited Jared Taylor of the white-nationalist organization American Renaissance. {snip}

At NatCon, Carl spent much of his time promoting his new book, The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart, and he decried an “anti-white regime” that “manifests in dozens of areas.” Diversity, he said, “is almost inevitably a synonym for less white,” and though adding whites would often make a system more diverse, “nobody’s interested in doing that because really all they’re interested in is having less white people involved.” {snip}

He later speculated that a “post-white America” would denigrate “much of the cultural, political, and social legacy that built the country” and spoke of a need to “reform” civil-rights laws. {snip}

A day later, Hillsdale College professor David Azerrad warned that liberal “idols” are “centered on the aggrieved groups who have the greatest of all contemporary privileges, the privilege of having their purported oppression be recognized by the state. Black people, first and foremost, followed closely by women, especially if they’re childless, followed closely by members of the so-called LGBTQ community with Hispanics, Muslims,” and “Native Americans” as people with disabilities “trail far behind.” Azerrad later described the white-nationalist website VDARE as being merely “anti-immigrant” and portrayed it as a victim of political persecution at the hands of New York attorney general Letitia James. “At its core, the regime today is anti-white, anti-male and anti-Christian,” he added, before repeating familiar — and false — great replacement theories. He complained of an “intentional demographic transformation of America into a majority minority country through large-scale immigration,” and said, “What diversity ultimately really means is fewer whites. In the end, it may well mean no whites. Whites are bad, non-whites are good.”

Azerrad and Carl are extremists and proud of it. There’s no way to shame them. Carl said that in his book, he talks “about something perhaps more extreme, American whites being victims of a cultural genocide,” adding, “I’m suggesting this partially again to troll any leftist media who might be in the room.” But the line between a troll and a true believer can be thin, if it exists at all. He was received well by the crowd and spoke to a packed breakout room, telling us that his book had provoked great interest on Capitol Hill. “Just yesterday, I was asked by a number of senior Hill staffers to come give a presentation on the book,” he claimed, and said that a staffer who worked for a “very, very mainstream member” had invited him to speak with the boss. {snip}

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The natcon future looks a lot like J.D. Vance, who appeared at a VIP dinner a few hours after Azerrad’s speech. Vance first spoke at NatCon before he was a senator, and he was comfortable here, talking to friends. At the dinner, he shied away from sweeping pronouncements — conscious, perhaps, of outshining his potential boss. But he knew the crowd well and spoke of a country invaded by immigrants, controlled by elites who were crushing the American Dream. “Look, the thing on immigration that no one can avoid is that it has made our societies poor, less safe, less prosperous, and less advanced,” he said. The city of Springfield, Ohio, had been inundated with Haitian immigrants, he complained, before saying that America is not an idea but “a nation.” He will be buried in his family’s ancestral plot in eastern Kentucky, he said, and he hoped his children would follow him. “That is a homeland,” he declared.

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