True Loyalty Is Always Personal

Adapted from remarks given at a Counter-Currents event at CasaPound in Rome, April 11, 2026.

It is certainly a great honor to be hosted by an organization that I’ve heard so much about and admired for so long. There is a certain amount of embarrassment as a foreigner coming here and lecturing about politics like there is something those here don’t know. Of course, I am an American, and loudly asserting this is the way things are or should be is kind of what we do. I will lean into it.

My first observation of Rome may also seem imperialist. The issues here do not seem very different from those at home. I do not mean this just in the sense that as someone of European and specifically Italian descent, I can walk around this place and feel a connection to it. That may mean something to me, but should not mean anything to anyone else. It is mere sentiment.

What is more important is that many of the problems are the same. The streets of Rome may be surrounded by far more beautiful monuments but they are not terribly different from New York City, Los Angeles, or Chicago. There are the same Africans hawking junk no one asked for. There is the same graffiti, indeed more of it. There are the same leftist stickers on every light pole. I admit Rome has much nicer buildings. But there is still the same sense of occupation, decline, and ruin.

My president, Donald J. Trump, is fond of saying this is America’s Golden Age. I think few in this room would agree. I am afraid that I do agree, not because things are so great, but because things can get so much worse, and were worse not long ago when Joe Biden was president, and can get worse more quickly than anyone expects.

The point is that for all the talk of European-American cultural divides, and the very real different national interests that we all have, we are all essentially in the same situation. To use an American phrase, we are all down bad. It is not a good situation for anyone, no one is in a position to brag, and to go further, I am frankly uninterested in hearing the nuances of European or Canadian or American political divisions and cultures. Every single city looks like a cross between Mumbai and Nairobi. I promise I am not here to blackpill, quite the opposite, but I think we should be honest about the situation we are in.

First, there is a time limit to this, a point at which the demographic situation becomes, if not irreversible, very difficult. It is never irreversible, but it can be so difficult to reverse that you can only use extreme solutions, and even those will get harder the more time goes on. Second, no country is exempt from this decline. Regardless of seemingly diverse national cultures, forms of government, and political divisions and disparate interests, the same process is underway everywhere, the people ruling us basically say the same things everywhere, and the enemies in the street are basically the same everywhere.

There are many right wings, and many on the Right do not even like being called on the Right. They may claim they have an ideology that may go beyond that or borrows elements from both. Perhaps they do. However, the Left is basically the same everywhere and they never call themselves anything different. The effete technocratic sorts who run everything from the European Union to the multimillion dollar NGOs in the States are the same everywhere too. We can have an interesting discussion about the different circumstances we all face and the different interests we have. It could be fun to host esoteric debates about how different we all are. Yet at the end of the day, we are all basically governed by the same system and the same people and face the same existential danger.

What are we? I like the label “Identitarian.” If I had to call myself something, it would be that. Politics is about power, and identity is the source of power. When I was younger, I was fascinated by ideology and ideas, and I thought they were so important. One of the most well known American conservative writers, Richard Weaver, wrote a book called Ideas Have Consequences. Yet do they? Ideas are often the after-the-fact rationalizations that we use to defend our own claims on status, wealth, and power. In other words, identity comes first. Tell me who you are and I’ll tell you what you believe.

Here is the bad news. One, non-whites simply have a much stronger sense of identity. One of the largest polling companies in America, Pew, did a study a few years back that found the majority of all non-whites thought that race was important to their identity. Only five percent of whites agreed it was very important, I think 10 percent said it was somewhat important. Whites do not like being reduced to a type. Your town, your religion, your culture, and your values cannot just be reduced to skin color. Race is about more, but that is still the way many people think of it. Even people who spent their life in what some called the white nationalist movement do not like just being reduced to race. It is simplistic and insulting.

The problem is that in a democratic system, eventually quantity has a quality all its own. If you are not operating as a racial collective, in an extremely simplistic way that people do not have to think about or justify to themselves, you are just food for those who are. Simplicity is political strength. You can out deadlift everyone, you can be a great fighter, you can be monetarily successful, you can be smart or charismatic or hardworking, but if five Somalis with 80 IQ vote as a bloc, they get to tell you what to do. Your property is theirs when they choose to exercise their power via the state.

The second problem is in many ways worse. Some may disagree, but I believe the most important aspects of identity are unchosen. The great lie of liberalism is you get to invent yourself. “I need to discover myself, I need to find out who I am, and I need to express myself.” If one does not inherently know who one is, there is probably no self to express — and certainly no reason for others to pay attention to it. You are who you are inherently and there is no alternate version of you. You could say that is fatalistic or depressing. Others may call it inspiring. I find it liberating. Yet there is another aspect to this which is not. Your identity is also how power views you. Power views us as white and as “far-right” cartoon Nazis. That is it. We can bob and weave, we can offer compelling arguments about why this is wrong. It simply doesn’t matter.

I have been in this movement for a long time and I have met some remarkably smart, intelligent, dedicated, and capable people. You look at the other side and you say, “How the hell am I losing to this guy?” Times are changing, the youth are more radical, the Overton Window has shifted and more people are discussing key ideas. Yet at the end of the day, the demographic change is still taking place, even accelerating, and at some level, that will determine everything else. Media bias is less important than the demographic facts on the ground.

Are we losing because the Left’s ideas are better? Like most of you, I have gone through the great left-wing thinkers who shaped the culture of our time, men like Herbert Marcuse, John Rawls, Karl Popper, Adorno, Habermas, and others. I do not have a very high opinion of my own intelligence. Yet I find little of this impressive, let alone persuasive.

The political assertions made by the intellectuals who came to dominate American culture, and therefore world culture, are comically false and stupid. They will inevitably lead to terrible outcomes, and have every time someone has seriously tried to implement them. It is so obvious one cannot help but assume malice. Yet everyone who matters still believes in these ideas. In Europe, you are required to believe in the supposedly sacred values of tolerance and democracy, diversity and human rights. How quickly the language of bureaucrats becomes the dogma of priests if questioned!

We are not losing because our opponents’ ideas are compelling or even functional. They are an efficient tool for consolidating power. The Left operates as a predator. Our side has its problems, yet I believe our people are smarter than they are, better read than they are, and at the risk of going Tyler Durden, I trust the guys I know to explain Nietzsche and have a better understanding of it than the philosophy chairs of most colleges. This is not because I think we are so smart but because I think they really are that ignorant. Therefore, why are they winning the demographic battle?

There is a simple distinction. The Left is a patronage network. The Right is a market. The Left may be effeminate, weak, and cowardly on the surface. It is not. “Everybody owes, everybody pays,” in the words of Bill the Butcher from Gangs of New York. The NGOs that import tens of thousands of illegals into Europe, especially Italy, are the real governments in the ways that matter. Tax dollars fund them and European courts of human rights protect them. They will not fund or protect you. America’s situation is not much different, and whatever President Trump has accomplished can vanish with a new president who will go right back to funding left-wing activism with our money.

This is what democracy actually means, this government by a permanent class of journalists, NGOs, judges, and bureaucrats. The purpose of your life is to provide money to people who say they are morally better than you because they use your money to import foreigners and preside over social programs that exacerbate the problems that they are supposedly designed to combat. You don’t get a democratic veto over it. If you try to cancel one of these things, an unelected judge will tell you it is against the rules. Somehow, this is what the sovereignty of the people is actually like.

The Left is a highly efficient predator. It effectively seeks out ways of acquiring leverage over you through laws and regulations that cripple your ability to do business or protect yourself. These laws apply to you, they do not apply to your opponents. In Rome, both in the imperial era and even the papal era we see lots of monuments and buildings that glorify status, domination, and hierarchy. Now, we say things have changed. They have not. We still have rulers and ruled, but the difference is the rulers now pretend to be the victims. Some 15-year-old kid who posts memes on the internet is the evil oppressor, it is Ursula von der Leyen or whoever else that is actually the victim who needs protection. An overt tyranny under a clear sovereign is far more bearable than an unlimited government under a whole class of tyrants who deny what they are. Perhaps worst of all, unlike some of the (admittedly) tyrannical people who ruled from Rome in the past, our current leaders cannot build anything cool or beautiful.

It just goes on and on. If you are among those who think there is a limit to this process, I invite you to look at the former Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, go to South Africa, go to any once great American or European city that has been turned into a slum. Has the Left gotten stronger or weaker, have the people risen up and reacted, or moved away or even accepted or defended it? There is no bottom because there will always be those who want to be king of the ruins, and power is best exercised when it is done hypocritically and in concealment.

What is the Right? It’s a market. We sell takes. There is a set group of people that make up this market. My enemies in this market are not the leftists or the liberals or the capitalists or the cops or the communists. They are the other people in this market. It is always in my interest to tell you that no one can be trusted except me, that everyone is a shill or a slave, except me, and, most importantly, there’s nothing you can do, except keep watching. Oh, and of course, send money. It is just entertainment. It is better than watching TV because you feel like you’re fighting the power just by watching, which is very powerful in its way. Really, however, it is just escapism.

There’s also the presumption of defeat. In America, we’ve seen some truly remarkable examples of people who have actually stepped away from power because they would literally rather have a podcast or a streaming show on Rumble. It should be the other way around. Content creators should be pursuing power. On the Left, they are. However, if you can make more money and isolate yourself from the decline, why wouldn’t you do that? A lot of dissidents have made essentially the same calculation as many of the conservatives they supposedly despise. They assume it is going down. You should make what you can now flattering the rubes. After that, get out. What can you expect from a movement that tells you individual self interest is the only way to build the economy and have a legitimate moral order? Why would people not cynically pursue economic self interest?

I realize I am a part of it. I do a show called Identity Politics. However, my goal is not for it to end there. It is not simply a way to make money, because white identity politics would be a stupid way to make money. The show is not supposed to be a sitcom where in this week’s episode I give you some nonsense about what unstoppable faction is behind the conspiracy du jour or what online drama can titillate you today. The point is to actually take our countries back, demographically, and build the moral and political will to do it. If we do not, we lose the whole thing.

Media and education are just means to an end. They are not even the most important things to do, because ideological agreement is not the most important factor. I would rather have ten people who I can get to show up to something than ten people who can explain Heidegger to me but won’t go to a meeting ten minutes away.

During the English Civil War, during the Long Parliament, the Duke of Manchester was one of the parliamentarians. He was on the more “democratic” side. He supposedly said, “If we cannot gain from governing the nation, there’s really very little point to our being here at all.” That is the true spirit of democracy. Yet that is preferable and more worthy of respect than playing crabs in a bucket, pulling each other down, and competing over the scraps that are left behind once a regime controlled by our opponents takes its cut. Unfortunately, this is what the Right is doing today, especially in America.

I do not think power corrupts. The solution is always power. More than that, given that we are in Rome, we should think of the Roman form of politics, the old Roman form of politics. Politics is about patrons and clients. Given that hierarchy always exists, given that power always exists, it is actually not a bad thing that powerful people take care of the people who rely on them and receive loyalty in return. I have a simple test about when we have gotten somewhere. It is when at least one of our activists is being paid full time by the taxpayer to do activism. This is the situation the other side takes for granted.

How can we overcome this terrible trap we find ourselves in? We do have one advantage, besides the truth. The other side operates as a mechanism. We can respond with personal loyalty. Where we are today is a great example of what that looks like. Any system, no matter its extent, can be penetrated by those who have personal loyalty to each other. One defeats tyranny with loyalty, one overcomes a lack of weapons with will. Yet what does loyalty truly mean?

We often talk about loyalty to principles. This is less important to me than loyalty to people. Loyalty, to mean anything, should be to a person or a group of real people. We will always disagree over something. Yet our cause is not difficult to understand or explain, and most of the political solutions we want are obvious. What holds us back is insufficient loyalty to each other and a seeming refusal to pursue power in a serious way. It is through loyalty that we can penetrate any institution, overcome any system, and see through any trial. It is not just a loyalty built on sacrifice, but mutual gain. It is a self-interest of idealism, not cynicism.

This is what I call you all to today in this most appropriate action. In the heart of our civilization, we must look to the smallest building block as we seek to reclaim our Empire, or at least our nations. We will triumph not through grand ideological critique nor a new political theory. We triumph by showing loyalty to each other, taking care of each other, and working to build our mutual power. We triumph by building networks of patrons and clients. We triumph by appealing both to idealism and self-interest, and being less concerned with the form of power than its reality. If we alone in this room remain true to each other, that by itself is a powerful force. And even Rome began with a small group of outcasts who joined forces in defense of something far better than an idea — a simple determination that no one will violate these walls with impunity. If they come for one of us, they come for us all, and it is only together, as white advocates, as Europeans and as Americans, as men of the West, that we win.

Thank you.