The Political Cesspool: 20th Anniversary Conference

When James Edwards asked me to speak at The Political Cesspool’s 20th Anniversary Conference earlier this year, I accepted on the spot and cleared my schedule. I knew that it would be a fantastic event. I knew that the finest people that I have met in the movement would be there.

I’ve been critical of the movement on this website, but it has always been from the perspective of love and as an insider. I have been a card carrying member of the Council of Conservative Citizens and League of the South. I have been to dozens of conferences over the course of the past 15 years. I marched into Charlottesville. I’ve been around since the White Nationalism 1.0 days. I saw the rise and fall of the Alt-Right. I’m as deeply involved as ever in whatever we are calling ourselves these days. I’m so deeply involved in the movement that my sons are Gordon Baum’s grandsons. I have watched children grow up and old war horses be buried. I count the leaders of the movement as my closest associates.

The truth is that the leaders of our movement, most of them anyway, are all smart, solid, productive, interesting, wonderful people like James Edwards. It is always a pleasure to be in the same room with them. I can’t speak highly enough of the core of the movement where most people have known each other in real life for decades. You encounter so many cranks and morons online. It is the fine people who I know offline who keep my spirits up. It is essential to develop and nurture these relationships.

The Dissident Right is like the Palace of Versailles. There are so many wings of it which are adjacent to the main building. There are innumerable rooms and gardens where the various subcultures are each doing their own thing. We cross paths with each other. Sometimes we get into arguments over the various points of division. People travel from room to room. James Edwards is unifying figure who is known and liked by nearly everyone. The Political Cesspool conference is a place where White Nationalists, White advocates, Alt-Right people, unreconstructed National Socialists, paleocons, populists, Patriots, Southern nationalists, Southern heritage activists and so on can all feel at ease and have a good time.

When I walked through the door of our hotel, I felt rich, fulfilled and among friends. It was emotional. It wasn’t just the 20 year anniversary of The Political Cesspool. It felt like passing a milestone in my life as well. I have been active for roughly the same amount of time. I have spent my entire young adult life in this scene. I am entering middle age now. I have a wife and two kids. I knew I would be seeing a lot of old friends. I knew that I would be meeting people who I know from the internet, but who I haven’t had the pleasure to meet yet in real life. I knew there would be people there who were at my wedding and who are like family to me. I knew there would be other bright people there who I hadn’t met yet. I knew there would be people there who I haven’t seen in years or who I saw in the blur of Charlottesville.

The 20 year anniversary of The Political Cesspool got me thinking about our ideological journey, not just about political shifts in the culture which I could measure in numbers in my speech, but in the origins and the trials and triumphs that we have all experienced. I thought about my most memorable experiences. I thought about my regrets and mistakes which are numerous. I thought about all the things for which I was grateful. I thought about the areas in which we were successful and the challenges ahead of us. I thought about all the stories that I have a few of which I enjoyed talking about over whiskey.

The title of my speech was “Paleoconservatism: From the Margins to the Mainstream.” It was about how critiques of conservative orthodoxy from men like Pat Buchanan, Sam Francis and Peter Brimelow in the 1990s and early 2000s have resonated and seem to be gaining a larger audience on the Right. Identity issues have become more salient and now animate the Republican coalition. We live in a time when Joe Six Pack is radicalized enough to storm the Capitol, but also one in which the Republican House has held nearly thirty votes in two months on Israel and “fighting anti-Semitism” on Ivy League campuses.

Warren Balogh of Modern Politics and formerly the National Justice Party circled back to Pat Buchanan’s run on the Reform Party ticket in 2000 in which he defeated Donald Trump. Warren and James Edwards started out in politics in the Buchanan Brigades. I had no idea what Warren was going to speak about, but he also traced our cause back to those crucial years and was able to describe it in greater detail in terms of his first hand personal experience. Paleoconservatism looked finished in the early 2000s. The George W. Bush administration is where history began to bend back in our direction.

Tim Murdock of White Rabbit Radio described his experiences working with Bob Whitaker and their role in injecting the term “anti-White” into the discourse. Bob Whitaker was always trying to use new technology to impose terminology and thus ideology on spaces outside the White Nationalist echo chamber. I will never forget the interview that I did with Tim on White Rabbit Radio in January 2022 which I called “The Tipping Point.” I had spent the first year of the Biden administration tracking the mass radicalization of conservatives across multiple polls. It was clear to me that something huge was happening in the wake of Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election, but the significance of this wasn’t registering in the wider movement. Tim is one of the few activists who thinks like I do. I define success as our ideas, values, criticisms and concepts permeating the Right. Thus, I saw it as a watershed moment when the “anti-White” genie was let out of the bottle by Tucker Carlson, even if it was being used in boilerplate conservative rhetoric. Whites were given permission to think racially. We anticipated even greater triumphs in the years ahead like the mainstreaming of the Jewish Question. All of this has come to pass in less than two years.

Nick Griffin of the British National Party addressed the conference via video. He was scheduled to attend and had booked his flight and hotel room, but was denied entry into the United States. He spoke about how the political window to turn things around through democratic means had closed in Britain. Much like the Republican Party in the United States, the Tories have spent the last 25 years successfully absorbing, containing, redirecting and dissipating the energies of the Right. As in the United States, mass immigration has reached an all-time high in Britain under Conservative rule, which guarantees a majority-minority Britain by mid-century which will one day resemble Syria or Lebanon. In spite of this bitter defeat, Nick remains optimistic. He spoke at length about the collapse of the post-World War II liberal world order and how it is happening militarily in Ukraine, economically through de-dollarization, culturally through extreme polarization and morally through the end of the Holocaust card thanks to Gaza. Historically, we are at the end of an epoch which has been defined by Germany’s defeat in World War II.

Mark Weber of the Institute of Historical Review and Jared Taylor of American Renaissance were our next two speakers and both spoke about how America deserves to fall at this point. Uncle Jared told us that the America which fought the War Between the States was gone. Similarly, the nation which had reconciled and moved beyond sectionalism to become a Great Power in the 20th century was gone too. We now live in a country which prefers to demonize its founding stock and deconstruct its culture. We live in a country which renames schools and topples men like Robert E. Lee from pillars. It is not our country anymore. We occupy the same geographical space with hostile aliens including those who are related to us. It doesn’t matter who wins the next election because it is too late to “Take Back America.” Instead, we should be thinking about how to salvage a part of it through migration and secession.

Sam Dickson spoke at length about the media shapes the news cycle through selectivity and repetition to fit its preferred narrative. We have all heard the names of George Floyd, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Emmett Till and so on. No one remembers the names of White victims of even the most gruesome crimes like Daniel Williams who was recently raped to death by black inmates in an Alabama prison. I personally remembered that horrific story, which happened here near Montgomery, but not the name. It didn’t stick with me because I haven’t heard it repeated a thousand times. Lies which are repeated a hundred times like the notion that our current system is based on “white supremacy” are earnestly believed by millions of people. The American education system is also based on lies like this. We recently celebrated the 70th anniversary of the Brown decision which failed to erase academic racial gaps.

LISTEN HERE:

Hour One

Hour Two

Hour Three

We closed out the evening with a live three hour broadcast of The Political Cesspool. I was interviewed along with the other speakers and many of the attendees. Jaye Ryan was interviewed. Unfortunately, I missed Dr. Michael Hill’s speech on Sunday which closed out the conference, which was in South Carolina. I was done in by a familiar foe … exhaustion from traveling, staying up too late drinking and socializing with friends over the previous two evenings. We also brought the baby who wanted to sleep in.

Note: I would like to give a shout out to my new friends at Antelope Hill Publishing. Thanks for the coffee! Check them out!