The 2025 American Renaissance Conference

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Like American politics generally, the last decade of American Renaissance conferences has been dominated by the political movement led by Donald Trump that aimed to Make America Great Again. This year, the conference was about what comes next.

Comedian Leonarda Jonie opened with an address that was both funny and thoughtful. Between jokes that had the audience roaring with laughter, she called for courage, especially among artists and creators. “The world is built on lies because the truth makes people uncomfortable.”

She described the deplatforming she has suffered as a politically incorrect comedian, even though her jokes are about what “99 percent of people have believed throughout human history.” She argued that we must have “true freedom” — the freedom to write, speak, and say what we believe, instead of the “freedom of slaves” our “sociopathic” system offers us, which is the freedom to destroy ourselves through vice.

It can be painful to break out of this system. “The truth does feel harmful when you’re living in a lie,” she said, “because the truth is trying to break that lie, and it feels like you’re being broken.” Miss Jonie described her own struggle to break out of the consequences of bad choices, and walk a different path: the pursuit of truth and moral behavior consistent with what she expects of herself as a white woman.

Jared Taylor declared the American Experiment a failure. He nonetheless praised President Trump for his race-related policies: closing the border, cutting FBI ties with ADL and SPLC, letting in white South Africans as refugees, banning DEI within the federal government. However, except for a huge new ICE budget, all the good he has done was by executive order and could be instantly reversed.

The share of the white electorate will drop from 71 percent to 69 percent from 2024 to 2028. The Democrats may well return, and fierce persecution will begin. Mr. Taylor argues that even with a political miracle — eight years of President Vance after Mr. Trump — no President can make America a home for whites again. There could be some better policies, but through differential birthrates alone, “the Great Replacement will eventually make Democrats the permanent majority.”

Mr. Taylor said that this may sound dark, but he is more optimistic than he has been in the 35 years he has been active, with more groups, influencers, supporters coming our way all the time — even a lady comedian. “When we have enough people on our side, the pieces of the puzzle will start fitting together in ways we haven’t even imagined.” He said the priority must be to build a place for whites and only whites, and he made a strong case for territorial division. A top-down division would be difficult and unlikely. Instead, whites should deliberately take over local areas where they can build power and from which they can open up new options.

Eric Orwoll of Return to the Land (RTTL) may play an important part in that effort. He described the legal structure of his racially exclusive community-building organization and its many advantages, especially that it is scalable and can stand up in court. “Private associations are allowed to discriminate on any basis,” he said. He explained that the structure of RTTL was carefully set up to meet all legal requirements and follow case law. He said we cannot mobilize tens of thousands to change the demographics of whole states — at least not yet — but starting intentional white communities is the first step. RTTL has already established its first settlement in rural Arkansas, and has plans for other states.

Some would argue that an informal organization could infiltrate a promising town or village and build a self-consciously white community, but only a formal organization can expel opponents and miscreants. He argued that community ownership of land means that no major company, such as Amazon, can move in and attract workers who would change the racial mix. Mr. Orwoll argued, therefore, that intentional, exclusive communities are the best way forward for white people who are building a future for our race and who want to rear proud white children. He won applause when he said that his organization has tripled its membership in the last few months — thanks to overwhelmingly negative media coverage. We are not rejecting liberal democracy, he said, just extending its protections to our own people.

Mark Collett spoke via video link on the “American Poison,” but took care to contrast “Anglo-Saxon America” to the “perverse and twisted version of America” that took over the Western world after the Second World War. He said that though the Soviet threat was monstrous, it was at least obvious.

The Cold War had the tragic consequence of making America and Western liberal democracy “the good guy” that was Communist tyranny’s opponent. Nationalism itself, the real opposition, was discredited, so the Cold War victory was no victory at all. “We all face a future as a minority,” he said, and not one like current racial minorities with luxuries funded by the state. Instead, he said whites will be in a “nightmare future” as a hated and despised group that all other groups will blame.

Mr. Collett argued that though the media endlessly campaigns against a “stale male” white leadership, America is not controlled by white men. He called this twisted version of the country “Judeo-America,” which offers its subjects seductive poisons cloaked as “liberation:” sexual degeneracy, crass materialism, and selfish individualism. The current state of the West — as opposed to healthier societies in Eastern Europe — shows our system was even more dangerous than Communism. He concluded that white Americans can turn their backs on a hostile regime and become the people who liberate the rest of the West.

Bradley Fischer of Patriot Front followed with a talk on the sort of political organization that can advance our goals. Much of his discussion was on working with intermediate groups, such as the Young Republicans or local political clubs and parties. The key to political action, he argued, was for our group to advance its own interests regardless of the outcome of a political contest or whether the other group gets what it wants. For example, if activists help with a campaign, they should choose one that will give them valuable knowledge and experience even if the candidate loses.

Before we decide whom to work with, we must study the local community to understand what other groups exist, their strengths, and their motivations. This takes time and money, but is essential. He noted that young activists can offer local political clubs the kind of support they will come to rely on, ultimately opening the door to leadership roles. Every group exists to serve its own interests. Remember the “Golden Rule,” he said. “Politics is the game of getting others to advance your own goals without necessarily advancing theirs.”

Dr. Greg Johnson of Counter-Currents noted that white extinction is not a natural development but the predictable consequence of deliberate political decisions that can be reversed. Clumsy moral blackmail, which holds that racial identity and nationalism are evil only for white people, is driving us to oblivion.

How can such crude tactics even work? By threatening a dissident’s economic life, which has come to be identified with life itself. The highest value for the stereotypical bourgeois — the pure Economic Man — is materialism. Libertarianism is the political expression of Economic Man, but once he realizes he must be part of a collective to force other people to leave him alone, he is no longer a libertarian.

Dr. Johnson pointed out that the American Revolution was not bourgeois. The Signers of the Declaration explicitly risked their lives and fortunes in the name of their “sacred honor.” To value honor more than material interests or even life itself is an aristocratic virtue, one Dr. Johnson told us we must adopt. We are not what liberalism says we are doomed to be: animated merely by greed and fear. “Our cause is to give white people a future,” he said, and that can only be done by putting honor above all.

Hugo Lennon, aka “Auspill” on X, began his speech by telling the story of when he pressed the late Charlie Kirk on immigration policy. Caught off guard, Kirk said that America would still be America if it was 90 percent Indian, as long as they were Christian. He later backed down from this because of its absurdity.

Citing this example, Mr. Lennon argued that any nonracial argument against mass immigration, even if rooted in civic nationalism, leads to white replacement. Australia shows that a more “conservative” policy of favoring legal and presumably skilled immigration led to a massive and growing population of non-whites. This leads to a rachet effect, because the immigrant population immediately begins lobbying for more immigration of their co-ethnics. Foreign governments, such as India, demand more immigration of their people as a condition for trade deals.

A nation is a people. If that people is replaced, it no longer matters how productive the replacements are; the nation is gone. This means that there can be no compromise with civic-nationalist conservatives. We cannot be placated. “We in Australia,” Mr. Lennon said, “ran the meritocratic, legal immigration program that many American conservatives propose.” The result was a disaster. “We must reject the comfort of the mainstream position and develop an explicit, pro-white politics,” he concluded to great applause.

Kevin DeAnna argued that a post-American white Right is developing because American identity becomes ever-more ethnic and racial. Throughout the Western world, non-whites no longer need to pretend to identify with their host societies, instead openly proclaiming loyalty to their real homelands. Mr. DeAnna then proposed seven rules for today’s politics. The first and most important is that “everyone is a blood and soil nationalist for the people he actually likes.” He argued that all politics are identity politics and urged whites to face reality, even if it is painful, because the dedication to truth is at the center of what it means to be white.

F. Roger Devlin took a left-wing protester’s sign, “Patriotism Is Racism,” as a point of departure to show that the protester may have been right, though not in the way he meant. Tribe is the common root for both patriotism and racism. Loyalty to tribe is an obvious evolutionary advantage, so it must be discredited to force people into deracinated individualism. This individualism, often with showy moral stands in favor of people far away instead of kinsmen, may be a cover for the cynical pursuit of individual self-interest. Dr. Devlin argued that many of the West’s rulers may be “born traitors,” a phenomenon that could have arisen through adverse mate selection in post-industrial Western society. The universal morality they preach becomes indifference to their own people.

The United Nations defends the principle of ethnic self-determination, but white states ban this political position for their own citizens. They flood their countries with foreigners, strengthening the bureaucracy and smothering self-governance through sheer force of numbers. Nationalists have become a “threat to democracy” simply for opposing their own replacement. Dr. Devlin argues this is profoundly unnatural and can therefore be defeated. We can remove the sociopaths from power and return to a normal moral order.

Sam Dickson gave the final address as he has for every American Renaissance conference. He argued that liberals hope for monuments erected to them by grateful minorities, but we must destroy their fantasy that non-whites will do anything but despise them. Loyalty is the supreme political virtue, and no one likes traitors, not even those who benefit from treason. A community can exist only through a sense of connectedness, identity, and loyalty. Without these, we get the materialism and general immortality we see today.

Mr. Dickson urged the audience to remember how extreme those who rule us really are. Both the leadership of the American Right and American Left are to their left of their voters. Rightists are kept out by their so-called leaders, while leftists prosper within the mainstream. The key, warned Mr. Dickson, is not to consider ourselves as on the fringe. We are the real “normies.” We are not sick or abnormal; we are the cure. “And with that, I say goodbye to you, my fellow normies,” he said, concluding the conference.

There was a scattering of protesters as there is every year, who turned in a low-energy performance. Opponents seem to have given up trying to cancel the conference. American Renaissance is now an institution at our regular location, and this stability means we can move beyond theory into practice. This year’s American Renaissance was a pragmatic gathering heavy on solutions for a movement determined to see victory within our lifetimes.