“The West is doomed!” “France is finished!” “Britain is over!” I’ve never understood expressions of despair and defeat like those. They’re obviously self-indulgent and harmful things to say, so how could people with any common sense and self-control utter them? Unless those people aren’t what they pretend to be, of course. No genuine friend of the West should announce that “The West is doomed!” Or announce the same of any part of the West, whether they happen to live there or not. But it’s exactly what enemies of the West will like to say, while pretending to be friends.
Fortuna favors the brave
Defeatism has been a capital offence in times of war with very good reason. Saying what your enemy wants you to say is very obviously stupid and self-defeating. I have never felt despair about the future of the West myself, but I would never have expressed such despair even if I’d felt it. Feelings are not infallible guides to the future. But expressing one’s feelings to others can certainly alter their behavior, whether for the better or the worse. What one says or does now alters the future. And so a subjective feeling of despair can lead to the objective reality of defeat. But if negativity can breed defeat, then positivity can breed victory. As Vox Day says: “[R]elentless positivity of mind, the determined avoidance of negativity, and the refusal to live in fear are vital for the Christian. … Remember, the ancients’ idea that Fortuna personally favored some individuals and disfavored others wasn’t an invention ex nihilo, it was an observation.”
The Gates of Dawn (1900), Herbert James Draper
Genetics must play some role in the positivity of individuals like Vox Day, but genetics is not destiny. Whatever our genes predispose us to be, they don’t dictate our thoughts or control our choices. We can choose to be more positive and we can choose not to surrender to despair. And we can certainly choose not to express our subjective feelings of despair to others. But positivity is helped by good news. And I think that there is more and more good news offering hope to true friends of the West. I didn’t expect to see some of it expressed by the professional curmudgeon and pessimist John Derbyshire, so this section of his “April Diary” at VDare was a pleasant surprise:
Chatting the other day with Jared Taylor, [I found that] he reinforced an impression I’ve been getting — a happy impression.
Thirty years ago, said Jared, when he had started up American Renaissance and invited people to come together to discuss race realism and white advocacy, the people who’d responded to his call were mostly an older crowd, with a good mix of pop-eyed weirdos and cranks. His followers nowadays, he said, were much younger and more normal.
Just so. I see the same thing. Last month, March, I was invited to attend a gathering in New York City to hear Chris Rufo talk about his recent book. The gathering was of a regular dissident-right club that I’d never been aware of.
It was a big crowd; friendly, cheerful, lively, smart, and… young. Sitting there among the happy noise in the socializing period before Rufo spoke, I tried to estimate the median age of attendees. If it was over thirty, it wasn’t by much.
P.J. O’Rourke’s Babe Rule came to mind, too. P.J. wrote in regard to a demonstration against homelessness he’d attended that no social or political movement in the U.S.A. is going anywhere much unless it has a good component of attractive young women, which the homelessness demo didn’t [Among The Compassion Fascists, by P.J. O’Rourke, American Spectator, December 1989].
If P.J. got that right, my hosts there on the Lower East Side in March definitely have a bright future.
I hear similar things from like-thinking friends all over. There’s a new, fresh, normie National Conservatism coming up — even, I have it on good authority, among card-carrying Young Republicans! All strength to them; and a belated thanks to my March hosts at the Rufo event. (“DERB’S APRIL DIARY: [11 ITEMS!] Eclipse In Cleveland, Eclipse On Mars?; Middle East Disavowal; VDARE Conference; The Young Ones; ETC!!!!,” VDare, 1st April 2024)
Like a flourishing rose-bush on top of a trash-heap, positivity from John Derbyshire has a special power. He isn’t an optimistic or positive person, so I’m very glad to see him succumbing to the bright side. I’m also very glad to see the truth about race relations beginning to dawn in the mainstream right. This is from American Renaissance and F. Roger Devlin’s excellent review of Jeremy Carl’s The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism is Tearing America Apart (2024):
Jeremy Carl is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, served as deputy assistant secretary of the interior under President Trump, and has been associated with the Hoover Institution. His other books have dealt with energy policy. In a chapter on religion, he describes himself as “an actively engaged Christian of Jewish descent.” That a writer with solid connections to “respectable conservatism” is publishing a book with “anti-white racism” in the subtitle is a sign of changing times. Moreover, the author does not try to tell us that the problem with hostility towards whites is merely “divisive” or supposedly incompatible with Martin Luther King’s “dream.” He states forthrightly that it leads to injustices against whites, and that whites must fight back.
As Mr. Carl writes, white Americans today “suffer from downward economic mobility, declining fertility, rising drug addiction and depression, and narrowing opportunities, all piled onto a false presumption of privilege.” Any vestigial advantages they may still derive from belonging to America’s historical majority are “informal and evanescent cultural legacies,” whereas “the discrimination they experience is . . . increasingly legal and formal.” […]
The endgame of the current system is “the expropriation of land, property, and other wealth from whites” and the institution of “a permanent regime of anti-white employment and legal discrimination.” As of now, he writes, “appeals to expropriation are usually indirect,” but over time they “will become more direct and in need of less justification as the political power of white Americans continues to decline.”
It is whites’ failure to organize in defense of our own interests that had made the anti-white regime possible. As Mr. Carl writes, “non-whites have organized and made powerful demands, while whites have focused on broad, gauzy appeals to . . . universal rights” that have proven “almost completely ineffective.” It is time for us to make strong demands.
As noted, we have looked here at only a few of the twelve realms of anti-white discrimination Mr. Carl discusses. The reader should get the book itself for the full story. I am unaware of any mainstream book on race published since American Renaissance was founded 34 years ago that pulls so few punches. (“The Respectable Right Discovers Anti-White Hostility,” F. Roger Devlin, American Renaissance, 10th May, 2024)
The publication of The Unprotected Class is a very positive sign. As Jeremy Clark himself says: “The environment is vastly freer than it was just a few years ago. To speak of anti-white racism is no longer universally taboo.” The left have been waging war on Whites and Western civilization for decades, but the “respectable right,” as Devlin calls them, have refused to even recognize the war, let alone take up arms to fight back. Now the respectable right are recognizing the war and the fight-back has started. As I described in “High Hope and Damnable Despair,” there are never any good reasons to despair. But there are always good reasons to feel hope. John Derbyshire and F. Roger Devlin have just supplied more of them.
