Complete Text! IMMIGRATION: IS THIS THE BREAKING POINT? [1] "It Would Only Take One Speech" [2] Plan B (Jared Taylor For Congress!)
Previously, we had embedded a video of the conference speech, but since this speech was delivered, both VDARE.com and American Renaissance have been banned from YouTube—because of our success, really. Watch the speech on Bitchute Video here.
UPDATE: Video is back!
Peter Brimelow writes: This is an adaptation, and a translation into American, of the talk ("Immigration: Is This The Breaking Point?") I gave to the American Renaissance conference on April 17-19 2015. Many thanks to Jared Taylor and all involved.
Thank you Jared. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Jared has been kind enough to invite me to speak at American Renaissance conferences before, but I’ve always wimped out. And I am here now because, well…John F. Kennedy said he became a war hero because “It was involuntary, they sank my boat.” That is basically what happened to me!
Of course, after Alien Nation, my 1995 book on immigration, the die was really cast. I was with Forbes Magazine at the time. Alien Nation caused a huge stink, it was denounced, reviewed twice by the New York Times and all that kind of thing; and it upset the Forbes family terribly. So it was never mentioned in Forbes Magazine—a ludicrous situation: one of the most prominent writers at Forbes, but his book is not mentioned in his own magazine.
That was kind of a bad sign! And things have continued downhill since then. For the last decade or so, I was a columnist for Dow Jones MarketWatch, writing about very arcane financial issues, never about politics. But more recently it became increasingly clear that I was being offered a choice between Mainstream Media and VDARE.com. This was irritating because, as Jared says, at my advanced age I have a young family to feed.
But at the age of 67, you get to the point where you say to yourself: if not now, when? When am I going to be actually allowed to write about the things I want to write about?
So I’ve not exactly come out of the closet, I’ve gone into the closet! Or at least the dungeon, like Jared, and Richard Spencer, and other people here.
I think this is important to note, because one of my general themes is that doom is not inevitable, despite the title of John Derbyshire's book (We are Doomed). (By the way, John has copies of his second anthology published by VDARE.com, which has finally managed to crawl through the publishing process, and he'll be happy to sign them for you). This phenomenon of repression is not completely new in the Main Stream Media.
When I began in the MSM over 40 years ago, it was a very Bad Thing to be anti-Communist. Recently, I’ve discovered that no one under the age of 40 has any idea what the Cold War was like (although they do know about the Holocaust, oddly enough). But there really were communist cells in major papers that worked to repress non-communists and to promote their line. There's a wonderful novel about this, by the way, by Irwin Shaw, called the Troubled Air, which I really recommend to you. Similarly, there's a fine biography of Ralph Ingersoll (Ingersoll by Roy Hoopes), who eventually became a capitalist and founded a whole chain of newspapers, but who was at least a sympathizer with the Communist cells within Time Inc. and the newspaper PM. They were there, and they were working hard.
So I survived in the MSM by going into financial journalism, a repellant and boring subject interesting only to those interested in it. But they leave you alone there. It’s like Bre’r Rabbit and the Tar Baby story—he persuaded Bre’r Fox to throw him into the briar patch because he could survive there. I survived in the briar patch of financial journalism.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a sort of interglacial, a brief period when Jared’s book Paved With Good Intentions was published, and my Alien Nation was published, and The Bell Curve was published, and so on. Then, quite suddenly, this new Red Terror came surging back, orders of magnitude worse than McCarthyism (which was justified anyway), and run by the same people, the same sorts of people, who ran the Communist cells.
When I was younger, I used to believe elaborate socio-psychological theories of how this happened—Joe Sobran, who I’m sure many of you remember, used to have this concept of the “Hive,” that all liberals do the same thing at the same time because they have this collective mindset. But now I think it’s all a damn conspiracy.
And I think that the discovery of that JournoList listserv group, where MSM Leftists were actually conspiring during Obama’s 2008 election campaign, to beat up on conservatives and accuse them of racism, proves it.
As Jared will tell you, it’s gotten much harder to get on talk radio than it used to be. VDARE.com no longer announces in advance when our writers are going to be on radio or TV, because we’ve learned that Cultural Marxist enforcers like Media Matters or the Southern Poverty Law Center call the radio station and tell them they’re going to have a neo-Nazi on and the radio station will back down. These kids who do the booking for these shows don’t know anything. They are too frightened to take the risk.
The reason for this intensified Red Terror, I think is demographic. The Left knows that the U.S. is very close to a tipping point—very close to getting a non-White majority in the US. Already, the majority of children in the US are non-White.
(When the Census Bureau announced that news, by the way, the Editor of MarketWatch told me he had fifteen of my colleagues come into his office or email him to tell him not to let me write about it. Not that I’d ever written about political issues for MarketWatch, but they knew about me from the attacks by the Southern Poverty Law Center. And their reaction was they wanted to endorse those attacks. They absolutely, positively wanted to see suppression of alternative points of view. This is the atmosphere in the MSM today).
The Left knows they are very close to victory—but also they know they could be easily stopped—the demographic shift could be reversed, it could be finessed in various ways, Americans could wake up as to what’s going on. So it’s essential to the Left to keep White consciousness suppressed and to keep Americans in general divided.
It’s no longer a conspiracy, it is an outright lynch mob. And they actually came all the way down into this obscure financial rathole that I was working in.
Now, frankly, this is a very bad lookout for younger people. Jared and I and John Derbyshire are too old to care. But I don’t know how you would operate now in the Main Stream Media as a younger person. You would have to be completely underground. I think that this is actually what’s happening, by the way, with the younger generation of Conservatism Inc. writers—some are actually very sympathetic, but they never say so in public. They tell me “I read VDARE, but I can’t admit it!” They are very sensibly underground.
The Breaking Point? Which Way?
We chose this title, “Immigration: The Breaking Point” because Jared likes to get things prepared very far in advance. (You’ve got your speech written out already, haven’t you, Jared?) [Answer: yes]. It’s ambiguous, because it wasn’t clear what was going to happen to Obama’s unilateral Executive Amnesty. Of course, I believed it was going to be overthrown because the Republican leadership told me so, and they wouldn’t lie about a thing like that, would they?
It is important to realize what a tremendous unsung achievement it has been, over the past 14 years, to stop Amnesty and the illogically-associated, but nevertheless always concomitant, Immigration Surge. Three times this thing has come up in the shape of legislation. And three times it has been stopped by just absolutely massive inchoate resistance from the American grassroots.
And that’s why Obama ultimately had to go for Executive Amnesty. He didn’t want to do it, he was very nervous about it, there were lots of indications of that. You can see he was nervous by the way it was designed. It's only for three years. It doesn't cover H-1b—they originally wanted to bring many more guest workers by executive action, but they didn't do it because they decided to keep the legal focus as narrow as possible. As even Speaker Boehner pointed out, Obama had repeatedly explained to his more rabid supporters why Executive Amnesty was illegal and he couldn’t do it.
But then he had to do it anyway—because he couldn’t get Amnesty through Congress.
So the GOP had three options. The most obvious—VDARE.com was saying this back in the summer of last year: they should have moved to impeach Obama. That's the appropriate Constitutional answer. And it was the appropriate answer last summer when the southern border collapsed and a great wave of so-called refugee kids came in from Central America. It was quite clear that the Administration had no intention of stopping them, that he wasn’t enforcing the law he swore to uphold. So he should have been impeached.
The GOP leadership put impeachment off, because they said they had the power of the purse and they were going to stop Executive Amnesty that way. And Congress does indeed have the power of the purse and it has indeed repeatedly stopped things that it hasn't wanted by cutting off funding. Including the Vietnam War—that's how the Democrats finally finished the South Vietnamese off.
So the GOP Leadership could have stopped Obama either by a wholesale shutdown of the government or at least shutting down the Department of Homeland Security.
And, third, they could—and Ted Cruz, to his credit, pointed this out—simply refuse to confirm nominations. Above all, the nomination of the new attorney general, Loretta Lynch. They’ve got the votes to do that, they could do it easily. [They didn’t]. That was one obvious way of stopping Executive Amnesty.
But in fact, the GOP Leadership has done absolutely nothing. They’ve achieved nothing.
The only thing that has been achieved: a very brave federal judge in Texas has put a hold on this Executive Amnesty.
But who knows how long that’s going to last? I was talking to a conservative lawyer I really respect last night, and he quipped that the rule of thumb now with litigation is that what the Red states want is unconstitutional and what the Blue states want is constitutional. So he has no hope that this judicial decision will ultimately hold, as it is appealed up the system.
James Kirkpatrick wrote a piece for VDARE.com in January saying this Congress was the “Hour Of Decision” for the Republican Leadership. Other people said it was the Moment of Truth. It has turned out to be an hour of capitulation—and a moment of lies.
Well, why have the Republican Establishment done this? The obvious explanation: they are in the pockets of the donors. That is particularly true of the Republican campaign consultants. Those of you who don’t remember the Cold War won’t remember a time when we didn’t think about campaign consultants They’re a relatively new form of infection that has gotten into the body politic really only in the last 20-25 years. Their intention is to raise as much money as possible and spend it on themselves. They’re much less interested in winning elections.
But I don’t think that is a complete explanation. Look at the situation with the Iran treaty in Congress right now. The donors may not want patriotic immigration reform, but they do want war in Iraq. VDARE.com doesn’t get involved in foreign policy, although I personally can’t see the point of this war in terms of America’s national interest. But it used to be you needed to have two-thirds vote to confirm a treaty. Now it appears you need a two-thirds vote to reject it. The Republican leaders have been totally outmaneuvered.
I think the problem may just be that the GOP leaders are just really stupid. They just can’t think their way through things at all.
This is a particularly telling moment for me— this breaking point. It’s almost 20 years to the day since Alien Nation was published. It’s been almost 23 years almost to the month since I published the National Review cover story that ultimately grew into Alien Nation. (You will have noticed the celebrations.)
In 2012, the 20th anniversary of the cover story, I had Ed Rubenstein do a calculation. He found that, if the U.S. had imposed an immigration moratorium within a year of the cover story, there would now be 26 million fewer people living in the US. And the date at which whites (which of course means Americans—because in 1965 whites were what we meant when we said “Americans”) would go into a minority would have been pushed back from 2032 or so to something like 2077—for practical purposes, forever.
The Immigration Act of 1965 and the collapse of enforcement against illegal immigration certainly had done enormous demographic damage by 1992. And that damage would have continued to metastasize, as the immigrants had American-born children.
But the assumptions involved in a population projection extending out to 2077 are heroic. All kinds of things could happen—above all, falls in fertility rates. Most people don’t realize, for example, that black fertility rates in the U.S. have fallen below replacement level. It is just not the case that fertility rates remain high forever. And that could equally happen with Hispanics. We may never get to a white minority.
Furthermore, the electorate is going to remain majority American even longer, because you have to be over 18 to vote, and you have to be legal to vote….in most cases!
So an immigration moratorium in 1992 would have a great deal of good.
Now, I didn’t expect the politicians to do what I told them to do immediately. But I did expect that the immigration issue would be on the move by the end of the decade, by 2010. I said this in a VDARE.com article in 2001.
The reason for this is that it generally takes about 30 years for big new issues to work their way through the political system. Thus the Immigration Restriction League was founded in 1894, and the final cutoff was in 1924. In the current case, FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, the first and best-funded patriotic immigration reform organization, was founded in 1979. So I thought it would be reasonable that the cutoff would at least be debated by 2010.
And the amazing thing is that it was being debated by 2010! VDARE.com published some excellent articles on this by William L. Houston (if he’s here, I wish he would identify himself, I’ve never actually met him!) In 2010, literally dozens of states were passing legislation modeled on Arizona’s SB 1070 and immigration was an issue in all kinds of local elections…and elected all kinds of Republican legislators.
But what happened was, after 2010, when Boehner became Speaker of the House, he didn’t bring up any of these issues. It’s like chess—he should have bought the issues up and forced the Democratic-controlled Senate to block them and gotten the issues into public debate, they’re all intensely popular. People do want immigration reform, Official English, an end to Birthright Citizenship and so on. But he didn’t do anything like that.
At the state level, the Chamber of Congress went into action and unwound essentially all of the local initiatives that had happened.
At this point, William Houston gave up writing on electoral politics and stomped off in disgust, and I can’t get him to write for us anymore.
So the immigration issue was emerging—it’s just been aborted, in a very unusual and questionable way.
All It Would Take Is ONE SPEECH
Now I want to say, to emphasize here, that I haven’t given up on the idea of Patriotic Immigration Reform happening—of immigration being cut off. All it would take to get this issue into politics is one speech.
In Britain—the British people in the audience will testify to this—the impact of Enoch Powell’s 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech was absolutely enormous. And it did stave off mass immigration for a generation. He was denounced, of course, but at the same time the politicians were too frightened to increase immigration—until Tony Blair was elected. That’s when the floodgates were really opened in Britain.
Similarly in the U.S., the issue of Communist subversion—which was a genuine problem, even if no-one under 30 has heard of it—really exploded after Joseph McCarthy’s speech in 1950 in Wheeling, West Virginia.
Note that, in in both cases, in Powell’s case and McCarthy’s case, the preconditions were already forming. Quite a number of people had been talking about immigration in Britain for a long time before Powell, they just weren’t as prominent. In McCarthy’s case, people forget that Alger Hiss was already in jail, for perjury related to his testimony about his activities as a Soviet agent, before McCarthy spoke.
It’s just that suddenly one spark starts the conflagration. And that could still happen in the U.S. All it needs is a spark—and all it needs is one ambitious politician.
For example, I was very impressed by the fact that Scott Walker has said he’s changed his mind on Amnesty and that he’s also now critical of legal immigration. It’s not clear how far he’s changed his mind, or if he’s changed it back, but he did say it. It’s at least the homage that vice pays to virtue He can see that this is a good issue to get around Jeb Bush with.
So I still think it’s possible that, in this Presidential election cycle, someone (Walker? Rick Santorum?) will decide to drop the bomb on the immigration issue. In that case, the sense that this is the “breaking point” on immigration could be optimistic. I don’t want to rule this out. But I also think that we may have to face the fact that it may be a Breaking Point in a negative sense.
In other words, immigration may not get into politics in time for the historic American nation to retain control of the country it created.
We may have to move to “Plan B”.
I have to say I anticipated this in Alien Nation. I had a passage in which I said that if immigration is not cut off, then
Deep into the twenty-first century, throughout the lifetime of my little son…
(Alexander had just been born. He had blue eyes and blond hair. There’s just one (1) reference to his blue eyes and blond hair in the book, in the absolutely unimpeachable context of the absurdity of immigrants getting Affirmative Action preferences at the expense of the native-born, but this is what Alien Nation is most famous for, for reasons I’ll leave you to contemplate)
…i.e. the year in which when Immigration Act opened the floodgates. That was the point where America could have become Switzerland. It was 90% white. But in fact, it opted, or at any rate it was compelled, to