A Very Successful Eleventh AmRen Conference

Despite the presence of noisy protesters–indeed, stimulated by their clowning — the 11th American Renaissance conference took place under ideal circumstances over the weekend of April 5 through 7. As we did last year, we met in beautiful Montgomery Bell State Park not far from Nashville. Some 150 people, many of them first-time conferees, enjoyed a weekend of stimulating talks, fellowship, and conviviality.

The conference began on Friday evening with a cocktail reception and welcoming remarks by conference organizer Jared Taylor. Formal talks began on Saturday morning with Roger McGrath, retired professor of history and noted television commentator, who spoke of the importance of honoring our heritage. “I was instinctively proud of our people when I was growing up in California,” he said. “The Golden State really was the Golden State. We must pass on to our descendants this pride in our people, our culture, our history.”

In a presentation lavishly illustrated with projected photographs, he then spoke of the devotion and courage of the American pilots who fought the Japanese in the Pacific. He cited many names of heroes, among them Butch O’Hare after whom the Chicago Airport is named. Early in the war, O’Hare was flying a Wildcat, a plane distinctly inferior to the Japanese Zero. He was the only pilot in the sky when nine Japanese bombers attacked the carrier Lexington. O’Hare shot down five bombers and damaged a sixth before other American planes finally arrived to protect the ship. O’Hare saved the Lexington and thousands of men single-handedly.

O’Hare was later awarded the Medal of Honor and reporters asked his wife what she thought of her hero husband. In words that captured the spirit of the times, and show how much we have changed, she replied, “I think he’s just swell.”

Professor McGrath spoke of the Doolittle Raiders, of “Pappy” Boyington, and the men who carried out the precision attack that brought down the architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. These and many others, he said, are fit heroes for our tribe, men whose bravery can be a model for our own behavior.

Next to speak was Byron Roth, professor emeritus of psychology at Dowling College. His subject was the complex tangle of misfortunes that have befallen working-class whites. He noted that before the Second World War, a man did not have to have much education to get a job that could support a family. Farm, factory, and other low-skilled work was abundant and well paid.

Prof. Roth argued that there are three reasons why things have changed dramatically. One, of course, is the influx of low-skilled immigrants who put downward pressure on wages. The second is off-shoring of jobs, which has the practical effect of making Americans compete in the labor market with people who live on twenty dollars a day. The third is the opening of markets to products from Third-World countries, which has exactly the same effect. Prof. Roth pointed out that the results of these policies — low wages and cheap foreign goods — benefit the elites but are a callous betrayal of unskilled Americans.

The Left always argues that “education” will lift the working class into the middle class, but Prof. Roth pointed out that this is a delusion. This theory fails to recognize that there are inherent differences in ability that mean certain people simply cannot benefit very much from additional education.

Forty percent of all high school students are now black or Hispanic, and many cannot absorb education past the seventh or eighth grade. Prof. Roth argued that they would be much better served by vocational training, but that would be impossible in America: classes of that kind would be largely non-white, resulting in cries of “discrimination” and “institutional racism.” In a homogeneous society, it is much easier to track students into instruction suitable to their ability.

Prof. Roth projected fascinating statistics on the screen, showing that racial differences in average IQ are an almost perfect predictor of how much people from different groups will achieve in school and in professional life. People with IQs below 80 cannot really handle a high school curriculum and people with IQs under 105 do not benefit from a four-year college. Yet, we have a tremendously powerful education lobby that persuades young people to waste years and to go deeply into debt for training that will do little practical good.

Prof. Roth noted that all societies must provide for their less able members, but that the combination of free trade, open borders, off-shoring, and the fraud of “college for all” proves that “our elites have lost any sense of noblesse oblige.”

Paul Ramsey, who goes under the Internet name of RAMZPAUL, is a YouTube blogger who pokes irreverent fun at the foolishness of our times. In a talk peppered with jokes, he spoke about how feminism and multi-racialism contribute to the decline of our country. “We are being replaced and displaced,” he said, and our country has become “a land of the racial spoils system and conflict of all kinds.”

Feminism and the sexual revolution have also brought us unprecedented problems. Now, nearly 60 percent of college students are women. Women still prefer to marry men who are better educated or at least smarter than they, but many of these women will never find a suitable mate and will never have children. At the same time, the sexual revolution now means we have people who suffer from syphilis, gonorrhea and AIDS–people Mr. Ramsey calls “incurable romantics.”

Marriage is breaking down, in part because it has become risky for men to marry. If they divorce, they lose their assets and their children. “Marriage is like poker,” he said. “You start out holding hands and end up in financial ruin.” At the same time, as smart women go into careers and become more choosy about their mates, it means that even if they do have children, they have them late in life and have only one or two. It is the dim women, who do not plan ahead, who are proliferating.

Nevertheless, Mr. Ramsey remains optimistic. At least among whites, it is conservatives who are now having more children and the worst of the self-hating liberals may go extinct: “If you hate your race and you hate your sex, why would a white woman want to have sex with you to make more hateful babies?”

Mr. Ramsey reported that more people are speaking out all the time, and that the PC folk are desperate. So many people are now “haters” and “racists” that the words hardly mean anything. As Mr. Ramsey noted, “The country is lost, but the nation is still there,” and the nation could reassert itself with surprising force and speed.

Jared Taylor spoke of how the most basic and ancient distinctions between people have been crushed by relentless egalitarianism. He said that the rot began with race, with the assumption that race was superficial and meaningless. However, since then the egalitarian juggernaut has tried to obliterate distinctions between men and women, homosexuals and heterosexuals, welfare spongers and productive tax-payers. Mr. Taylor also mentioned Marian Wright Edelman’s denunciation of the need to “distinguish between our own children and other people’s children.” Even the love parents show their children is bigotry because it is a form of discrimination. Mr. Taylor predicted that the next target could be distinctions between citizens and foreigners. After all, we are all citizens of the world, so why not let anyone run for office and vote and American elections?

Thus there are now many subjects — not just race — on which Americans may no longer dissent. Lawrence Summers was forced out of his job as president of Harvard for suggesting that the female and male minds are not identical. School teachers can be put on administrative leave for saying they think men should not marry each other.

We must recognize, said Mr. Taylor, that this is not our country and this is not our government. The federal government, which is engineering our displacement, has become the greatest enemy our people have ever faced. A government that is permitting Mexico slowly to invade and conquer the United States is, by any standard, a government of traitors.

Mr. Taylor emphasized that we, like all people, have the right to a homeland, but it is probably too late to reclaim the United States. He concluded that we must think in terms of secession and local community-building. There is no guarantee of success, he said, but we have an obligation to our ancestors and a duty to our children to fight to the last breath for the preservation of our people and civilization.

Richard Spencer, director of the National Policy Institute, spoke of the need to go beyond the question of immigration that absorbs so much nationalist effort. We have stopped amnesties in the past, but the other side always returns to the fight. And, since a white newborn is already a minority, stopping immigration would only delay our decline into minority status. In any case, not all immigration is bad. We should prepare to welcome the whites who, for example, may well be forced en mass out of southern Africa. Unlike others who talk about immigration in terms of numbers, we talk in terms of quality.

Conventional “conservative” goals are irrelevant to us. What would sound money, limited government, and a return to the Constitution mean if the country were a Third-World mishmash? These goals attract white people and give them the impression that they have a role in shaping the country, but any effort that ignores race is effort wasted. The energy and commitment of these white people must be redirected towards goals that will genuinely serve them.

“Our challenge is one of the spirit,” said Mr. Spencer. “Our task is to capture the imagination of our people or at least the best of our people and shock them out of their assumptions of what they think is possible.” Mr. Spencer noted that for many decent whites the process of letting go of the dream of America will be very painful, but we must dream of a new nation, an ethnostate for our people on this continent. He noted that although the idea may seem fanciful now, the construction of an ethnostate is a modest project compared to crazy federal goals such as narrowing the racial gaps and bringing democracy to the Middle East.

Our ethnostate will be an old-new country that nourishes our roots even as it ensures our future. Mr. Spencer concluded by quoting Theodore Herzl, the father of Zionism: “If you wish it, it is no fairy tale. If you do not wish, it is a fairy tale and will remain so.”

Jared Taylor then spoke in praise of Jean Philippe Rushton and Arthur Jensen, who both died in 2012. Both men, he said, spent their careers battling for truth in the face of insults, professional ostracism, and endless lies about what they said and wrote. Both men started out with conventional views on race and intelligence, but changed their minds in the face of the evidence. For them, what mattered most were the data, and as true scientists they followed where the data led.

With the help of other brave academics, they succeed in convincing essentially all the serious scholars in their field of the reality of IQ, the nature of intelligence, and the important genetic contributions to both individual and group differences. The mainstream media, however, ignore their findings, and public policy continues to be based on egalitarian fantasies. Mr. Taylor concluded by saying that the best way to honor the legacies of these great scientists is to disseminate as widely as possible their enormous and profound body of work.

Kyle Rogers then made a brief presentation about the Council of Conservative Citizens and Bill Johnson introduced the newly renamed American Freedom Party, which is the successor to the American Third Position.

The banquet speaker was Fabrice Robert, who is the leader of one of the most dynamic nationalist movements in Europe today, the Bloc Identitaire (Identitarian Bloc). He pointed out that traditionally French and Americans have had a prickly relationship but it is different for us: “We agree on a fundamental reality: We are Whites, with common problems. We must fight our demographic decline and our substitution in our ancestral lands by Third-World people.”

Mr. Robert said that the identitarian movement was born in 2002. It has put up candidates in local elections, but its greatest successes have been street action. The Bloc Identitaire burst into the national headlines in 2003 when it began distributing free food to Paris street people. Most are Arabs and Africans, but the bloc wanted to help needy Frenchmen. It hit upon the idea of distributing pork soup. Pork is cheap and thoroughly French — and considered unclean by Muslims. This put the authorities in such a frenzy that the police actually forbade the distribution of free food! It was “racist” food if Muslims could not eat it.

The bloc has also publicized the fact that parts of Paris and other French cities are taken over by Muslims for prayers. They illegally block traffic, lay rugs in the streets, and turn entire neighborhoods into outdoor mosques. The mainstream press refused to report this, but by filming and publicizing these activities, the bloc persuaded the authorities to stop these illegal takeovers.

The bloc’s most recent success was the occupation of the Poitiers mosque last October. Poitiers is where Charles Martel turned back the Moors in 732 at what Americans call the Battle of Tours. The bloc was outraged to learn that a huge mosque was under construction in a place sacred to the defense of the West. It sent 100 activists to occupy the construction site at 6:00 in the morning. By 9:00 a.m. French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault was already denouncing this “act of racism.” The occupation lasted six hours, raising the bloc’s profile worldwide, and inspiring thousands of new members.

Mr. Robert concluded, to a standing ovation, with these words: “We are sons of the same matrix: Europe. We are brothers of the same people, the European people. There will be no future, for us or for you, unless we stand together proud, united, and prepared to fight.”

The next morning, John Derbyshire gave a very informative talk, supplemented with arresting slides, about the first encounters between people of different races. He noted that his was the last generation of Europeans to grow up in a mono-racial country — he did not see a black person until he was in his teens.

Most of the first encounters happened before recorded history. Genetic studies now show that at one point Australian aborigines received an infusion of genetic material from Indians who had crossed the ocean. It may well be that lost Japanese fishermen could even have washed up on Australia, but we know nothing of it.

When races encountered each other in historical times, people were invariably struck by physical differences. The Chinese word for whites was “ghost” because Europeans seemed so pale. In one noted encounter, a Japanese described to Chinese the Europeans with whom he was traveling: “Physically they are close to beasts. They cannot speak or write Chinese.”

First encounters sometimes led to race war. During the 1675-1678 King Phillip’s War in Massachusetts, for example, both the English colonists and the Indians fought with the explicit goal of extermination. Mr. Derbyshire noted, however, that the really great wars that have left their marks on history have been intratribal wars: the First and Second World Wars, the American Civil War, the Chinese civil wars.

Mr. Derbyshire concluded by pointing out that we can still have first encounters. In many countries children, especially, may have never seen someone of a different race. He told of an incident in China, in which a small boy stared intently at him as they went up in an elevator. Mr. Derbyshire got out at his floor, and as the doors closed, he heard the child say — in Chinese, of course — “What a big nose.”

As he always does, Sam Dickson brought the conference to a close. He began by pointing out that when the Southern Poverty Law Center calls American Renaissance a “hate group,” it means only that AR is a group the SPLC itself hates. Far from anything resembling hatred, the desire of whites to pass their civilization down to their biological descendants is the most healthy, natural, and positive of emotions.

Mr. Dickson noted that long-term planning distinguishes successful from unsuccessful people, and argued that the purpose of a group such as ours is to plan for what happens after the inevitable collapse of the present system. The entire paradigm of American society will change, and there must be as many of us as possible in a position to help direct the construction of an ethnostate out of the wreckage.

Mr. Dickson mused on how different our country would be if we had run it for the last 10 years. We would not have squandered trillions on useless wars, nor would we have encouraged the minority-lending housing bubble that so damaged the economy. By avoiding just those two catastrophes, a sensible, racially oriented regime could have saved six trillion dollars.

Mr. Dickson pointed out that we are not fighting for ideals or abstractions. We are fighting for our people. He spoke admiringly of the French, who build monuments to soldiers who died for la patrie, the homeland, whereas we build monuments to men we claim died for “freedom” or to “make the world safe for democracy.”

Mr. Dickson also urged us to purge our vocabularies of useless words, such as “conservative” or “right-wing.” To adopt these terms consigns us to a subset of a political spectrum that is irrelevant to our struggle. “We are a race, a folk, a people,” he said, “and a folk is not to be divided into Left and Right.” We can and must unite with all white people on the central subject of race; all other differences are insignificant. A true homeland for our people must be one that cares for our entire family.

Mr. Dickson argued that the founders fumbled badly because they failed to specify who could be an American. The black dictator Dessalines was smarter than Jefferson or Madison when he specified in the Haitian constitution that no white could ever be a citizen or own property. We, too, must act on the same principles and guide ourselves strictly in accordance to what is good for our race.

Mr. Dickson’s speech ended the conference on a note of high optimism, with the overwhelming majority of attendees expressing the desire to meet again next spring.

When we convened at the conference site, we were flattered to learn that “anti-racists” had organized a simultaneous “counter-conference” about two miles away in the same state park. Their goal, as they put, was to “confront white supremacy and hate.” A spokesman explained that it was our thinking that had “led to forced sterilizations in America, White European imperialism in the 19th and 20th centuries, and ‘ethnic cleansing’ of entire groups of people in Germany, Kosovo, Palestine, Cambodia, Rwanda and across the globe.”

The counter-conference, which was billed as “queer, trans, and feminist positive,” covered topics unfamiliar to us and included sessions with titles such as “Othering,” “Transphobia is Bigotry, Too,” and “Connecting the ‘Isms:’ How Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism & Speciesism Intersect.” It was a pity we had to miss these edifying presentations.

A small contingent of fanatics came by to greet us on Friday, and a larger group arrived on Saturday just in time to provide pre-banquet entertainment. From a distance of about 40 feet, they waved signs and red flags, howled and bellowed. We looked on, drinks in hand, as they shouted for “more Dresdens” and “death to fascists.” We got a hearty laugh out of their antics, and could not think of an exercise better calculated to fortify us in our convictions.

The scruffies were superbly managed by park police who, at one point, had to order them to stop shouting obscenities. Indeed, the park police were a model of professionalism and courtesy, and their presence ensured a smooth-running and most satisfactory conference.