“It Will Only Take One Election”—The Trump Tsunami vs. Clinton’s Coming Merkel-Style Immigration Surge
[Adapted from VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow’s address to the American Renaissance Conference, May 21, 2016]
American Renaissance Editor Jared Taylor:
Our next speaker is a naturalized U.S. citizen, and therefore, unfortunately, ineligible to run for the presidency. He is, however, one of the very rare recent citizens that fits the original 1790 criteria for naturalization: namely, a free, white person of good character. I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt about character. [Laughter],
Of course, I am speaking of Peter Brimelow, the presiding genius of VDARE.com. Before he started VDARE.com, Peter Brimelow had a brilliant career as a financial journalist, but brilliance will not save you if you start speaking the truth. Of course, National Review’s loss has been very much our gain because Mr. Brimelow has built his site up into an indispensable voice of sanity.
An indispensable voice of sanity that, of course, the Southern Poverty Law Center calls a “hate group.” Well, the $PLC is wrong. And I can prove it.
The Brimelow family was at home and a country music song came on over the radio. One of their little girls [Karia, right] piped up and said: “What’s this song about, Momma?” And Momma explained that the singer was sad because she loves a man who doesn’t love her.
Well then, the little girl said, “Daddy will love her. Daddy loves everyone!” [Laughter]
“Hate group” indeed!
Well, today, Mr. Brimelow will speak to us about “The Trump Tsunami And The Future Of The Historic American Nation.” Please welcome Peter Brimelow.
VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow:
Thank you, Jared, and congratulations on this triumph here.
As Jared said, I have children more or less the same age as [Political Cesspool’s] James Edwards, 5, 3, and 1. And I worry what’s going to happen to them after I’m gone.
When I spoke here last year, I made a bold and radical assertion that nobody believed and it turned out to be…wrong.
I predicted that Jared Taylor would run for Congress in his home 10th District of Virginia against the useless Rubio-endorsing RINO, Barbara Comstock.
Do you realize, Jared, that she returned Trump’s $3,000 campaign contribution as late as March? [Rep. Barbara Comstock Gives Away Trump Donations, NBC Washington, March 30, 2016]
You could tell that the Evil Party was scared. The spy that the SPLC had here—and whoever it is may be sitting next to you, ladies and gentlemen— had various nasty things to say about my talk. But the spy was afraid to mention the impending threat of a Taylor tsunami.
Well, Jared didn’t run. One of his reasons was legitimate—sort of. Getting on the ballot in Virginia turns out to be a real bureaucratic hassle. It is a case study of how the managerial state represses dissent (and he actually owes me an article on that, I’ll be waiting for it to come through as soon as he’s gotten through with this conference).
But the main reason was that Jared was entirely focused on getting out this year’s edition of The Color of Crime. I assume The Color of Crime is available somewhere in the back? It’s a great work on who actually commits crime in America and it’s well worth buying [Also available as free PDF download].
So you can see the urgency. I mean, the color of crime might change! And all this work would be wasted!
Now, it really infuriates me when people don’t do what I say. And as revenge on Jared, I am going to reveal one of his most shameful family secrets. As you know, he is very proud of his Confederate ancestors. Well, I have to tell you that on his mother’s side, he is directly descended from General George B. McClellan. [Laughter].
That’s an “in” joke for those of you who haven’t been bitten by the Civil War bug. (By the way, James [Edwards], as you know [Confederate General] Patrick Cleburne [whom Edwards had just quoted] was a British immigrant! He’d served in the British Army. [Laughter]).
Well, I did make another assertion that turned out a bit better.
To put this in context, the AmRen conference was in mid-April of last year, 2015. It wasn’t completely clear that the Congressional Republicans were going to cave in on their campaign promise to reverse Obama’s Executive Amnesty—but it was fairly clear.
And that was very bad, because it meant that there would be no longer any conceivable chance of stopping the Left’s drive to Elect A New People. Somewhere in the decade after 2040, federal immigration policy will reduce American whites (that is to say, the people before the 1965 Immigration Act who were known as “Americans”) into a minority. And America won’t survive without them. Which is why I am worried about the future of my children.
My talk last year was called “Immigration: Is This The Breaking Point?” And most of it was devoted to what I called “Plan B”—what the Historic American Nation, that is, the American nation as it had evolved by 1965, should do if the breaking point broke the wrong way—if they find that they have lost control of their polity, their nation-state. And there a lot of things, such as subdividing the existing states to reflect actual ethnic realities, that I think will have to be done eventually.
And I was speaking, obviously, before Donald Trump announced his run for President—on June 16, 2015—incredibly, still not a year ago!
At VDARE.com, we had just posted an article by one of our writers, Matthew Richer, predicting that Trump would run and that he would run on the immigration issue. I edited this article, we posted it…but I can’t say that I really believed it. I’ve been writing about immigration for nearly a quarter of a century (my cover story on immigration in National Review, which eventually grew into my immigration book Alien Nation, came out in 1992). We’ve seen a lot of false dawns.
So I’m going to take the liberty of reading out what I said last April to give you the argument that laid behind my assertion.
To quote me:
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 in 1997. 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.
Does anyone remember Jeb Bush? [Laughter]. He was the inevitable nominee this time last year.
I went on:
In that case, the sense that this is the “breaking point” on immigration could be optimistic. I don’t want to rule this out.
Well, this is why I’m rich and famous! [Laughter].
In fact, it didn’t even take a speech. It just took a soundbite, a few sentences in Trump’s declaration announcement.
Is anyone here from Washington State? [Yes]. Right, well, you know that the reports right now that there are so-called earthquake swarms gathering around Mount St. Helens in Washington State and that another eruption may be imminent. That gets everybody’s attention because of the huge mess that the 1980 eruption caused.
Well, there have been “earthquake swarms” around the immigration issue in the U.S. dating back more than 20 years. Jared and I and others have been saying for more than 20 years that the American political order is built on an increasingly stressed seismic fault. The political elite, Left and Right, just went on building. Now they have Trump. They deserve him.
(The moral of this story, by the way, is: Listen to the Alt Right! Or the Dissident Right as John Derbyshire calls it).
Trump didn’t say much in that soundbite. He hasn’t said that much, actually, about immigration at all. He doesn’t have to.
He often fails to bring the issue up in speeches and debates. In Wisconsin, for example, Senator Ted Cruz, who really came a long way on this issue during the campaign, actually gave better technical answers on immigration than Trump in the debate. He talked about the labor market impact of immigration and he talked about the possible substitution of mechanization for cheap labor.
But we can’t judge Trump like a normal politician. (I guess that’s obvious!)
How many of you have been to a Trump rally?
I’d say at least a quarter of the audience.
Well, as you know, it’s a phenomenon. He doesn’t give written speeches. He just gets up and talks, extemporizes. Sometimes, he forgets his lines. Sometimes he gets excited, the crowd gets excited, and he decides that he’s gone far enough and he stops, gets on his plane, and goes home. [Laughter].
Sometimes he just gets flat-out bored—for example, when he is asked for the 35th time how he feels about David Duke. (They have to ask him about his feelings because no one has ever proved a connection between him and David Duke).
And above all he simply will not prepare for debates. Specifically, from VDARE.com’s point of view, that means that he often fails to point out the immigration dimension of the various questions he’s asked about—such as the minimum wage. (The answer: tighten up the labor market with an immigration moratorium).
I do think that this lack of preparation could be a problem for him in the general election.
But what do I know? What does anyone know about the Trump phenomenon?
What Trump does do in compensation, though, is that he will periodically put down a hard formal marker on issues he really wants to claim. So on August 15 of last year, he issued a policy statement on immigration, prepared with Senator Jeff Sessions that was simply stunning. I have been in this business for 25 years and I was amazed.
He wants to end birthright citizenship. He wants to pause legal immigration. He wants to tighten the labor markets. He wants to have E-Verify, the whole thing. Jared and I actually did a podcast about it. [Jared Taylor And Peter Brimelow: Let’s Put A Cherry On Top Of The Trump Immigration Plan!, August 17, 2015]
Here’s what Ann Coulter—and I have enormous respect for Ann, don’t be deceived by her bimbo stereotyping—said about Trump’s immigration statement: “It’s the greatest political document since the Magna Carta.” [Laughter] “and I don’t care if Donald Trump wants to perform abortions in the White House after his policy paper.” [Laughter]
I would say that that was qualified support from Ann! She is pro-life, of course.
For reasons that bear analysis, you still don’t often see the immigration issue mentioned in Main Stream Media analysis of Trump’s triumph. The blogger Mickey Kaus, who is a very fine fellow, has even started what he calls the Omerta Olympics, listing the MSM thumbsuckers that don’t mention immigration.
But Trump knows that immigration is an issue, and that it’s an issue that is working for him, because he hears his crowds spontaneously chanting, “Build The Wall!” It’s a regular feature at Trump rallies.
Recently, I’ve seen the role of the immigration issue resurfacing even in the MSM. For example, this week in Vanity Fair the writer T.A. Frank, published an article which I recommend to you headlined The One Issue that Could Destroy Hillary Clinton. [May 17, 2016]
He used FiveThirtyEight’s interactive Swing-o-Matic feature, which allows you to make various assumptions about electorate, and he concluded:
small percentage of white votersoutweigh a large percentage of Hispanic voters
(Emphasis added). That’s because in spite of all the hype, there are many more white a.k.a. American voters—about 6 or 7 times more—then there are Hispanic voters.
Of course, we like this article particularly because at VDARE.com we did essentially the same calculations, using the same feature, back in December.
People should listen to the Alt Right.
So what now? I’m going to ask four questions.
Firstly, can Trump win?
Secondly, can he be trusted if he wins?
Thirdly, if he can be trusted, can he actually do anything?
And, fourthly, what happens if he loses?
First: can Trump win?
Well, as I said when I appeared on James Edwards’ Political Cesspool back in September: in this crazy system, of course Trump can win! [September 25, 2015]
The big GOP problem—and I mean here not the party of Paul Ryan, but what we at VDARE.com sometimes call the GAP, the Generic American Party, the default mode political expression of white Americans, of the historic American nation—is 1) low white share and 2) low white turnout.
It’s not absence of minority outreach.
White turnout actually fell in the last two presidential elections. It fell! Overall, the GOP generally get somewhere between 50 and 60 percent of the white vote. In 2010 and 2014 Congressional elections, it got about 60 percent.
But there are enormous sectional variations. For example, Mitt Romney actually lost the white vote in Iowa. He lost the white vote in Iowa—extraordinary.
So what the GOP basically needs to do is to Southernize the white vote. It needs to have everyone in the country voting like Southern whites vote.
For example, as you all know, there are a lot of lamentations about how California is unwinnable for the GOP right now. Well, the demographics of California are really no different than the demographics in Texas. It’s just that in Texas, the whites vote almost 70 percent for the GOP. They vote together. And that’s not high by Southern standards.
The GOP (or the GAP) needs the white vote to tip like residential neighborhoods—once the minorities reach a certain point, whites leave.
And that’s actually happening at the state and local level. The GOP is very strong on the state and local level. It controls a historically high share of state governments. Not that it’s done anything to deserve it, it’s just happening spontaneously.
Now the Democrats can rile up their base very easily by screaming about white racism. And that’s what all these MSM campaigns about Black Lives Matter and Ferguson and Trayvon Martin [and Roots] are about—riling up the minority base.
But the GOP has not been able to figure out a way to rile up its base really since 1988, since George Bush won against Dukakis, when it used the Pledge of Allegiance issue, Willie Horton, and so on.
However, I think that this year that Hillary is going to solve the GOP/GAP’s problem—because, quite unnoticed by the MSM which doesn’t report this sort of thing, she’s moved very far to the Left on immigration. I’ll come back to this.
Now, of course, the big news last week is that the gap between Trump and Clinton has been closing very dramatically. Rasmussen and Fox are actually showing him ahead. But these polls, interestingly enough, show that he is still is not in the historically high range of the white share. He actually seems to be doing better than Romney did among minorities—which is a reason why some people don’t believe the poll.
What this says to me is that if Trump does start to move the white vote into these historic high levels, even 60 percent or so, we’re looking at a landslide.
But anyway, for the Republican Party, as Mrs. Thatcher used to say, “There Is No Alternative.” GOP/ GAP can never out-pander the Democrats and go after the minority vote. So they have no alternative.
Also, I think it’s important to note that, even if Trump loses, he’s already shown that immigration and the whole concept of “America First” works electorally.
There are some elections where losing candidates blaze trails for the future. The obvious examples: Goldwater in ’64; McGovern in ‘72. They transformed their parties, and showed their parties new ways to move forward.
Generally speaking, with campaign consultants, you can talk to them all you want and you can show them all sorts of numbers, but you can’t get through to them until they actually see an election that’s worked. And Trump of course, in these primaries, has shown that the immigration issue does work.
Well, the second question: can he be trusted if he wins?
And the answer is: absolutely not! You can’t trust any of these characters.
It’s entirely possible that he could be another Schwarzenegger, that he could be content to reign rather than to rule. We don’t really know what he’s going to do when he gets into the White House.
But we did know what Jeb Bush was going to do. And