As I have said repeatedly, the main reason people go to these conferences is for the networking, camaraderie, friendships, and behind the scenes action. I’m told some attendees have found mates there. The real conference takes place in the casual conversation that goes on in the breaks between speakers, at lunch, at the bar, at dinner, and after hours in the hotel rooms. The scheduled lineup of speakers is really just an excuse for geographically dispersed racialists to gather in a central location. It is a shame that Amren only puts on this show every two years.

We all know by now that public conferences have serious drawbacks. They attract anti-fascist scum who poison the environment and pressure hotels to cancel our reservations. Anyone can attend a public conference. This includes people who many of us would prefer to exclude. Antifa spies can attend, snap damaging photos, and use ritual shaming and guilt by association to damage the careers of high profile attendees. Lots of people don’t attend the public conferences for this reason. All of these factors combine to depress turnout.

A private conference has none of these disadvantages. The private model also retains the advantages that make a conference worth the expense of attending. If I were organizing a national conference, I wouldn’t even consider the public model. I would only invite people I know and trust and “known entities” who comrades can vouch for. The 2010 Amren conference was forced to adopt this model at the last minute. It is a superior model anyway, and I hope future conferences will be organized along these lines. Next time around this should be done well in advance.

The catch of the private model is getting new people involved in Amren and the broader White Advocacy movement. Lots of good people show up at the biannual public conferences who don’t have a record of previous involvement in the pro-White scene. They don’t know anyone. Quite often their racial views are still evolving. I have two friends who attended previous Amren conferences at this stage of their development. We need a new mechanism for getting newbies to the national conference while filtering out potential spies and saboteurs.

Local clubs are the solution to this problem. Ideally, we could create Amren clubs in every state of the union and the major metropolitan areas. These private clubs could host monthly events at local restaurants, state parks, or historical sites. There is an endless number of potential meeting places for this type of social networking. It is my understanding that the Chicago group has been doing this for years. New recruits could meet established racialists in their local area. These established racialists could then decide whether to recommend inviting them to the private national conference.

The networking, camaraderie, friendships, and behind the scenes action that go on at the biannual conference, which only lasts a few days a year, could potentially go on around the clock all year long. The only thing better than the biannual gathering is having racialist friends in your local area, on your college campus, or within driving distance. OD is taking its first steps in this direction with the Virginia Network. We already have a few local people who are interested in organizing a regional book club and touring the local historical sites. In particular, I can’t wait to get the time to hike the Blue Ridge Mountains and go kayaking in the spring.

I’m learning how to do online social networking with Pip Pockets. We’re gradually learning the basics of Twitter, Facebook, Digg, and YouTube. We plan to fully exploit all of these mediums to amplify our message and increase the size of the OD audience. We’re also going to take a hard look at podcasts. I’ve joked around several times now about adding a “Radio Free Virginia” section to OD after the site redesign. Jim Giles is correct when he says that radio and video are more powerful than the written word. Most Americans don’t have the patience to read more than a few lines of text. This limitation alone severely restricts the size of our potential audience.

Amren could profit by moving in this direction as well. They should have a daily updated WordPress blog and Facebook page. Twitter is still a mystery to me, but Stuff Black People Don’t Like is building a huge following there. I’m told that every journalist in America is on Twitter now. Young people love YouTube. There are all sorts of missed opportunities to exploit with video. All of these social networking mediums could be exploited to organize racialists into a web of real world state and regional groups. Personal interaction in the real world will drain a lot of the poisonous acrimony, conspiracy mongering, character assassination, fantasism, and backbiting that prevails in racialist circles on the internet.

Just some food for thought. If Jared Taylor plays his cards right, I think Amren could emerge from all this stronger and more influential than ever before.

Occidental Dissent, February 28, 2010

On the blogs and email lists I see essentially three strategies:

(a) Do not change, keep trying to hold the event in private facilities. Problem is, the current system is rigged against us. We are sitting ducks for these thugs.

(b) Buy up land somewhere and hold an event on private land. Fine for small invitation-only gatherings, but for events larger than a dozen it strikes me as pure fantasy. Even if it could be arranged, it sounds creepy and isolated. When people go to conferences they want to be close to restaurants and other amenities.

(c) Hold the event in a public venue. This is the best of the three, because it puts government into the picture as a mediator. However, it does not address how to deal with terrorism from groups like the One People’s Project. It is also vulnerable to government hostility towards the organizers.

I would like to offer another scenario. Before describing it I need to define the various components of an academic conference.

Speakers: Good speakers motivate people to pay a registration fee and travel.

Lecture facilities: Conferences provide a place for those attending to gather in one place and listen and ask questions in real time.

Comfortable lodging: People attending like to stay in an attractive, comfortable location, close to the lectures.

Face to face networking: It is often said that the real activity at conferences is between sessions. Conferences give people who share a profession, academic discipline, or interest an opportunity to meet and talk in person.

The standard approach to organizing a conference within our community is for one person or organization to reserve space for attendees to gather and listen to speakers in real-time (components 1 and 2), and also “book” a block of rooms (components 3 and 4 above) in the same hotel for attendees, perhaps at some discounted room rate. The terrorism (yes, terrorism) against the organizers of the 2010 AmRen Conference in D.C and the 2008 EURO Conference in Memphis demonstrate how pro-White events can be disrupted and even canceled through intimidation and threats of violence towards the management of the hosting facility. We can expect that the American Third Position will encounter the exact same problem when they try to stage a conference.

A New Model is Needed

A modernization of our approach to staging a conference through thoughtful application of commodity technology can preserve the essential nature of the conference experience yet make it impenetrable to the kind of tired, predictable harassment we have come to expect. The vulnerable point in the current model is booking the lecture venue. This is where our enemies attack. Our enemies focus on smearing the reputation of the person or people organizing the event, then forcing the hotel management into a “are you with or against the White Supremacists?” decision. Hotel management caves in to the pressure every time.

The way to make that vulnerability disappear completely is to remove the hotel management from the equation. Migrate the lecture component to commodity collaboration technology called a “Webinar” (or “webcast”). The model that I am proposing is actually a hybrid: traditional conference hotel gathering (face-to-face networking must be preserved), with an embedded Webinar. If we eliminate the need for a physical lecture space we can decentralize room reservations, too. In fact, in the model I propose, the conference organizers have no contact at all with the hotel management. The hotel management does not even know that a conference is taking place within its walls.

Webinars work as follows. Attendees register for the event. In exchange for registering they are sent a URL (and optionally a unique code) that they paste into their Web browser at a designated time of the event. A webinar presenter can broadcast to dozens all the way up to thousands depending on the software used (see note below on service options). Browser-based Webinars are now common in business as an alternative to travel.

Hypothetical Example

I will now illustrate through a hypothetical example how this could work. Let’s call this hybrid conference, EURO 2010.

David Duke announces that on Saturday, September 4 (Labor Day weekend), EURO 2010 will take place in Memphis. Speakers will include Duke; James Edwards of The Political Cesspool radio program; Greg Johnson, editor of The Occidental Quarterly; Bill Johnson, Chairman of the American Third Position; and others. The conference program starts at 9:00 am and ends at 5:00 pm. Registration is only $50 because the costs and risk of organizing an event have been radically lowered. Registrants receive a short list of Memphis area hotels, all clustered within a short distance of each other, where they are encouraged to stay during the conference. Why more than one hotel? It’s optional. More than one hotel makes it even harder to pinpoint an attack on us. Furthermore, if one hotel has no vacancies, it directs attendees to reserve a room at one of the other options. The total size of the conference is self-scaling. Registrants also receive a lapel pin that has printed on it a distinctive but non-controversial symbol.

Actually, the conference begins on September 3, at a local attraction. It could be Graceland. It could be someplace close to the hotels. EURO 2010 organizers choose a mid-morning walking tour of downtown Memphis, starting at Confederate Park. No event permit is necessary from the city because the quiet gathering is informal, just a starting place. (Alternatively, a formal permit could be requested if the organizers and attendees want to stage a public media event.)

There are several benefits to the gathering. The walking tour gives attendees an opportunity to meet up with old friends and perhaps make arrangements to watch tomorrow’s conference events in small groups. A nice secondary outcome of the gathering is to give people an opportunity to be out in the fresh air with like-minded folks, in a public place that has historical significance. If the location itself holds special meaning to European Americans, as Confederate Park in Memphis does for some of us, then the event itself adds to the lore of the place. (For a growing list of other places special to European Americans, review the entries on my blog, ourgazetteer.org.)

At 9:00 am Saturday morning attendees turn on their laptop computers and log into the conference Webinar. Folks without laptops join with others who do have a computer — sharing resources encourages collaboration and friendship building. Duke starts the conference off with a talk on the First Amendment. In addition to audio, Duke makes use of the Webinar application’s ability to broadcast a video feed from his computer’s built-in webcam. To facilitate two-way interaction, the Webinar software allows participants to send in questions via a chat window. Q&A is also possible via telephone. A moderator helps Duke to sort through the questions. It should be emphasized that Duke could be anywhere giving his talk. He could be in one of the three conference hotels or he could be across town at a friend’s house.

As it turns out, Duke and all but one of the speakers is broadcasting from the same hotel suite. Some people registered for the conference are not even in Memphis: Moscow, London, Los Angeles — all around the world. Attendees outside of Memphis miss out on the full experience, although this problem could offset that by getting together with friends and watching in a small regional group. During his talk, Duke suggests that conference attendees log into Twitter in a separate computer window or on their cell phones and use the hash tag #EURO2010 to post comments and links. This twitter feed serves as a public conference side channel. Notice the general shift towards decentralization. At the end of the talk Duke mentions that he will be eating lunch at the BBQ restaurant across the street if anybody wants to join him.

Following two more speakers, the conference pauses for a lunch break. A generous two hours offers attendees plenty of opportunity to talk over their meals. An incident breaks out at the BBQ restaurant. Jeffry Imm appears with a couple of cronies as Duke is about to walk inside. Imm starts to verbally assault Duke, but something interesting happens. Two large groups of conference attendees arrive and immediately stand between Imm and Duke. They repeatedly pepper Imm with insults: “loser,” “get a job,” “idiot” while inching him towards the curb until Imm backs down and slithers off humiliated. And every bit of it is recorded on video by a half dozen different people — attendees are strongly encouraged to carry some kind of video recording device. Within an hour the video is uploaded to YouTube, the link is posted to the conference Twitter feed and several blogs. Imm swallowed Duke’s bait, and the hook.

In the afternoon session, one speaker chooses to reduce the size of his video feed in order to make more room for a slide show that accompanies his talk, to emphasize and illustrate the talking points he is trying to convey. The other speakers stick to the talking head style, including Nick Griffin, who logs in from London. After the last speaker of the day, attendees disburse into the lobbies of the hotels and make arrangements to meet over dinner and drinks.

The continuum from implicit to explicit whiteness is represented in the hotel lobby. Some participants wear their conference lapel pins; others do not provide a single clue that they are registered for the conference. Texting between cell phones is used by many to facilitate real-time communication. Of course there are spies in attendance, but it hardly matters. They have no easy target to attack. What the spies see around them in the lobby are hotel guests. Conference attendees are energized by the cloak and dagger mischief.

Experiment

Keep our enemies off balance. I can envision variations of the Webinar model; for example, a Webinar could be used as a backup plan, in the event that a traditional lecture venue contract is cancelled. Or the morning session could be conducted through the Webinar, and right before lunch the location of a large afternoon meeting room is revealed.

I recommend running two or more half-day, invitation-only events. These experiments will help organizers work through the details of operating the Webinar software, try out Twitter, carefully consider how much information to release and when, etc. Through practice and attention, better microphones, cameras, and lights can be integrated to lend a more professional appearance to the Webinars.

With creativity and commodity technology it is impossible to stop a pro-White conference.

Webinar Options

DimDim (http://www.dimdim.com/): $79/month for meetings with up to 1000 attendees.

GoToWebinar (http://www.gotomeeting.com/fec/webinar/gotowebinar_pricing): $499/month.

WebEx (http://WebEx.com): call for price.

Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro (http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobatconnectpro/): call for price.

The Occidental Observer, February 26, 2010

Sheldon’s strategy of using Webinar technology would probably work — provide the benefits of a pro-White conference without drawing the attention of their Leftist opponents. It is an excellent prescription for a group that must remain underground in order not to expose its members to the usual costs of being associated with White advocacy (job loss, etc.).

The downside is that pro-White advocates would be implicitly accepting their status as an underground movement. Such meetings could essentially go on forever without effecting real change in the direction we all want.

It seems to me that we have to get above-ground visibility. We have to make noise and have a public presence if we are going to make real progress. We have to get in people’s faces and have the courage of our convictions. Hence perhaps Nick Griffin’s “frequently voiced despair over U.S. politics, given its lack of white nationalist parties” (in the WSJ article).

This is one thing that attracted me to American Third Position. The young men who are the backbone of the party go out onto the streets with signs and pamphlets advocating deporting illegals and other issues related to pro-White advocacy. They are not afraid of people spewing in-your-face hostility at them. (Guess what? You may be called a “racist” or a “Nazi.”) They do not hide away in secret conferences or restrict themsleves to discussing issues among themselves on private email lists.

Quite clearly, the left is well aware that public visibility would be the beginning of the end for their dominance of public discourse. That’s why the mainstream media has given almost no coverage to the cancellations of AmRen or Nick Griffin — the only exception I have come across is a brief mention in the Wall Street Journal. The article is noteworthy for not mentioning anything about the obvious implications for public discourse in America. The tone of the article is that some meetings of far right crazies got shut down — expressed in the same manner as a story on the cancellation of a meeting of the local school board because of a snow storm. Imagine the outrage if meetings of La Raza or the NAACP were shut down with similar tactics.

Meetings at privately owned facilities are problematic because businesses are likely to cave under the pressure of the left and I suppose that is their right as property owners.  Some people have suggested using government-owned facilities because denial by such a facility would raise First Amendment issues. I think this is a good idea. And we should be ready with attorneys willing to argue on our side if there are attempts at disruptions or if the government attempts to cancel the event for reasons like “public safety.” And we need security forces; and ways to identify the people who are doing the disrupting.

And it should all be out in the open.

The Occidental Observer Blog, February 26, 2010

Jared Taylor

“2010 AR Conference Held Against All Odds”
Jared Taylor
American Renaissance, February 22, 2010

Despite unprecedented threats and intimidation, the 2010 American Renaissance conference took place in the Northern Virginia as originally planned. Four hotels successively broke their contracts to hold the event—the last one just two days before the conference was to begin—so we sent out notices to registrants telling them there was to be no conference.

However, our supporters refused to let us cancel! So many people told us they were coming anyway that we put together what turned out to be a very successful program. Now we are getting complaints from people who say they would have flown across the country if only they had known! There is a tremendous appetite for our people to meet, and hear straight talk about the crises our nation faces, and we were immensely heartened by the spirit of solidarity and commitment that galvanized this conference.

Three of the originally-scheduled speakers were on hand: Sam Dickson, Louis March, and I. The others had changed their plans, but we had first-rate stand-ins: Attorney Joe Sibley, Canadian activist Paul Fromm, and BNP candidate for Parliament Matthew Tait.

I opened the conference with an account of the unprecedented lengths “anti-racists” went to shut down our meeting. A partial account is available here, but this does not include the pressure put on the Capitol Skyline hotel, the fourth and last hotel to cancel. We had heard that the Capitol Skyline stands firm in the face of people who try to push them around, and we explained in every detail the bullying and the death threats that had led the other hotels to cancel. They said they were happy to get the business. We drew up a contact on Tuesday, February 16—just three days before the conference was to begin—and put out the word that the conference was back on.

Our opponents, mobilized after the pressure they had put on other hotels, struck quickly. They flooded the Capitol Skyline with hostile calls. Someone came onto the property and shoved lurid pamphlets under guest-room doors. A hotel official told us people were pressuring their suppliers to say they would take away their business if the hotel offered us a forum. He added that he had heard that a high-school class was going to come out to protest and leaflet the hotel. Zealots harassed the hotel’s owners, and threatened to march on the hotel during the conference. We have heard that there were death threats.

The Capitol Skyline held out for about 24 hours before it capitulated. It was 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday the 17th, and we again had no venue for a conference that was 47 hours away. So much for freedom of speech and assembly in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. Our supporters refused to stay home despite our cancellation notice, so here we were despite it all.

I then went on to speak on my original conference subject, “What Is at Stake for Our People.” I recalled Sam Francis’s words from the first AR conference in 1994 that got him fired from the Washington Times: “The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people. . . .” I also recalled that I had said the same thing more prosaically: “We have the right to be us, and only we can be us.”

I noted that every one of us in that room had a deep love for that great flowing river which is the genetic and cultural heritage of Europe, and that we all believed that river should and would flow on forever. I pointed out that my generation, which grew up in the 1950s, had inherited a good country but that just in my lifetime, we had put in motion forces that are destroying it. I said that perhaps never in human history had a single generation done so much damage to a country that had not even suffered occupation by invaders or natural disasters such as famine or pestilence. Indeed, my generation has presided over the dismantling of a once-great country in a time of great scientific and economic advance.

I concluded, however, that our movement has made much progress in the 20 years I have been publishing American Renaissance. I spoke of my admiration for the large number of people who now openly support a thoughtful form of racial consciousness, and expressed my faith in the young men and women who will take up the struggle when my generation—the one with so much to answer for—has been put out to pasture.

The next speaker was former Army Ranger priand Harvard Law School graduate, Joe Sibley. He spoke of how he came to understand the racial forces at work in our country, and of the commitment he feels to our people and culture. He outlined provocative strategies for advancing our cause and spreading the message to yet more potential supporters.

The final speaker of the morning was Matthew Tait, who is a parliamentary candidate for the British National Party, running for the Windsor seat. He spoke of the recent very encouraging electoral successes of the party: Richard Barnbrook’s seat on the London Assembly and party leader Nick Griffin’s and Andrew Brons’s great victories in the election for the Euro-parliament.

Mr. Tait discussed in some detail the legal harassment the party has faced over its constitution, which has until now limited membership to “indigenous Caucasians.” There are many organizations in Britain exclusively for blacks or Asians, but whites are not allowed to associate only with themselves. The constitution has now been amended, but it is not yet certain whether the new language will withstand court scrutiny.

Mr. Tait also described the prospects and challenges that face the unprecedentedly large slate of BNP candidates—no fewer than 98—running for Parliament. Chairman Nick Griffin, who is campaigning in the promising constituency of Barking, has the best chances, but it will be an uphill battle. In any case, the elections will be another first-rate opportunity to tell more patriotic Britons that there is a party that still speaks for them.

After a delicious buffet lunch, the conference resumed with a talk by business consultant and former Capitol Hill aide, Louis March. He recounted the great accomplishments of our people and emphasized the tragedy that will befall us if we do not work to save our heritage. He decried the heedless liberalism that is reducing whites to a minority, and issued a resounding call for continued commitment and action.

Long-term Canadian activist Paul Fromm then spoke about the challenges to free speech in his country. He recounted the absurd legalisms used to persecute a host of dissidents, some of whom have been thrown in prison for expressing their views. Mr. Fromm described the astonishing travails and humiliations of several entirely ordinary Canadians who were caught up in legal processes that seem deliberately unfair. He painted a picture of a system of kangaroo commissions that would be unthinkable in the United States. He noted that some of the most egregious laws have been overturned—even if on very narrow grounds—but that obstacles to free speech remain formidable.

As he always does, Sam Dickson, the Atlanta lawyer, closed the conference. His theme this year was “knowing who you are.” He described the ludicrous, spiteful image our opponents have of us and laughed at their alleged ability to read our minds. People at the Southern Poverty Law Center, for example, claim to know that we are “haters” and to understand our motives better than we do ourselves. He gave one hilarious example after another of the “links” by which our presumed wickednesses are proven. He affirmed the nobility and goodness of our cause, and urged us to love the comrades with whom we march in this great struggle.

Mr. Dickson also elaborated a theory of how schizophrenia on race contributes to the rise of white sociopaths to elite positions. He argued that unlike non-whites, who need not strike foolish poses about race—who are free to make healthy demands in the names of their people—prominent whites are so accustomed to lying about the most basic aspects of society that only the most practiced liars ever rise to positions of power. Mr. Dickson’s invariable combination of wit and inspiration was a fitting end to an embattled conference.

Something that the events surrounding this weekend have made clear is that our media elites are utterly untroubled when racial dissidents face the extraordinary levels of harassment that caused so many cancellations. On February 15, we issued a press release [see below] outlining the outrageous behavior of our opponents, and urged several hundred radio talk show hosts to invite me on their programs to discuss what our experience says about the rights to free speech an assembly. We were met with almost total silence. This may change, but for now we have uncovered a total lack of principle. Editors and reporters who would have shrieked with outrage had a liberal or non-white group been treated as we were treated, have shown their true colors: They believe in freedom of speech only for those with whom they agree.

This experience has left us with twice the resolve we had before, and AR will study its options for future conferences. Conferences are central to the mission of American Renaissance, and we will hold them against all odds. The 2010 conference has also brought home to us the passionate commitment of our supporters, who refused to let us cancel this conference and who insisted that we host them for a wonderful weekend of honesty, inspiration, and camaraderie. We look forward to seeing you all next time.

I don’t personally know all the details, and this was actually the first of about four or five conferences in a row that I would have missed (financial reasons, in part). So I’m casting about in the dark here, but here is what I would like to see.

1. A thorough investigation by federal law enforcement. Whether the FBI, the civil rights division at the Department of Justice (criminal or civil sections) or Homeland Security, this entire episode screams out for agents to look into what happened. Imagine if the NAACP had to cancel a conference because of similar threats. What would law enforcement’s reaction be? Swift, fierce and overwhelming. Law enforcement should set up a sting. It would be so easy — and bound to catch someone, as the anti-whites are increasingly convinced they’re untouchable. Yes, most white advocates laugh at the notion that the federal government would ever investigate crimes against us — but don’t be too sure. Not everyone in federal law enforcement is sitting around itching for the death of the white race, believe me.

2. Consideration by American Renaissance organizers of civil legal options. A lawsuit against the hotels, against Fairfax County or D.C. government, against law enforcement, against One People’s Project — whoever else could be named. Breach of contract, outrageous conduct, prima facie tort, tortious interference, interference with First Amendment rights of assembly and speech, interference with civil rights, emotional distress… you name it, there’s a cause of action, if not a hundred. Who is this Daryle Jenkins? Or Jeffrey Imm? What do these men know about what happened? Did they encourage illegal activity? Or civilly tortious activity? Who are their financial backers, and could those sources be reached? This option may go nowhere, but it’s worth thinking about. As a civil defense attorney, I saw the absolute fire-bombing a plaintiff’s attorney could accomplish with nothing but a well-pleaded complaint and discovery. If you can lay waste to a company because one employee claims sexual harassment — bringing the CEO on down to the cleaning lady in for day-long depositions — imagine what else you could do.

3. Coverage by the press. The press hates white advocacy, but they love a juicy story. “White supremacist conference cancelled” is a juicy story, and there are plenty of people to talk to and comment. A good reporter should do some digging around. He (or she) might come up with gold. If not the NYT, how about the Village Voice? If there’s no legal recourse here, this must at least be known to the general public, who can usually be expected to say “I don’t agree with those guys, but they should have the right to speak.” We as white advocates cannot let this incident go undocumented and forgotten, like a modern-day Katyn. Are you listening out there, journalists? Jared Taylor will speak to the press, and Lord knows the SPLC will, too. It’s all packaged up and ready to go… unless, of course, you actually have zero sympathy for white advocates being prevented from meeting, and actively seek to suppress that story because it would present them in too sympathetic a light. I will be watching, I can assure you. And I know damn well some of you know about this incident.

4. Strategizing by white advocates about how to stop this in the future. This has already been going on, and lots of good ideas have come out, like more-public (i.e., government-run) or private venues.

What’s so depressing about this episode is that it can’t really be called a “wake-up call” for white advocates. We already know exactly how marginalized we are. We know exactly what the stiff consequences are for standing up publicly on these issues. We’ve seen violence against our people. We’ve seen our people fired from their jobs. We can’t get paid ads run in publications. We know CPAC wouldn’t allow us a table. So, this really is a hard blow.

Could the speakers have their comments recorded and uploaded to the AmRen site for youtube-style viewing?

The Occidental Observer Blog, February 21, 2010

Dear AR conference registrant,

We regret to inform you that at 6:30 pm today, February 17, the Capitol Skyline hotel, which had promised to withstand any pressure, canceled the conference.

We informed the hotel of all circumstances surround the previous cancellations, including death threats, and the hotel still agreed to hold the conference. We had every reason to believe it would hold firm. We feel just as betrayed as you do.

We will be in touch later to discuss how to handle refunds of conference registrations and other matters.

Best regards,
Jared Taylor

Greg Johnson’s “The Persecution of American Renaissance“

Breaking news: At the last minute, the American Renaissance 2010 conference has found its fourth location—this time far from the Dulles Airport exurbs: the Skyline Hotel in diverse Southwest DC. [You can still register here]

Before I get to my analysis, first let me give a Readers’ Digest version of the facts.  Jared Taylor and his race realist American Renaissance have held eight biannual conferences since 1994, the last six taking place in the Dulles Corridor exurbs in Northern Virginia.  There has not been a single incident of any violence by the attendees at the conference. I don’t believe there’s even been a hotel staff worker claiming they were called by a bad name.

But the event regularly attracts several to a couple dozen loony left wing protestors who will hold signs like “Nazis [VDARE.COM deleted expletive] off and Die” and will make complaints to the hotels hosting the conference.

Slightly more sophisticated opponents manage to sneak into the conference and try to harm those who attend.  The most famous example: at the first AR conference, neoconservative Dinesh D’Souza’s smear got speaker Sam Francis fired from his job at the Washington Times.

In 2006, a prosecutor from Buffalo, NY was fired after he told a reporter covering the conference “You can see European Christian Americans are an endangered species” [Promoting 'Preservation' Of Whites in Suit and Tie, By Michael Laris, Washington Post, February 26, 2006]  and the Anti-Defamation League complained to his employer.

That year, protestors also began targeting the Dulles Hyatt, which had held the conference since 2000, harassing patrons who were not even attending the conference and stuffing leaflets under the guest room doors.

Because of this harassment, the Hyatt declined to lend its facilities to American Renaissance any more. So the 2008 conference was held at the Dulles Crowne Plaza.  Protestors took it up a notch, going as far as threatening the lives of the family of the General Manager of the hotel.  Additionally, one left-wing site copied the names and hometowns off the name tags of the attendees in an obvious attempt to cause professional harm and/or vandalism and physical attacks to the attendees.

As a result, the Crowne Plaza declined to host American Renaissance for this year, 2010. The conference was accordingly booked at the Dulles Marriot. This was made public.  Marriot dropped the conference, telling Taylor that no one had called them, but they had become aware of all the trouble that occurred at Crowne Plaza, and did not want to repeat it.

American Renaissance relocated to the Dulles Westin.  It assembled an impressive lineup ranging from Member of European Parliament Nick Griffin to American Indian conservative David Yeagley.

The Dulles Westin was fully aware of the controversial nature of American Renaissance and said it had no problem, even calling the American Renaissance website “scientific” (which is actually true).  As a precaution, American Renaissance did not report on the location on its website

But the Left began calling up all the hotels in the Dulles Corridor, asking them if the New Century Foundation had booked a conference, and eventually found out.  The Westin claimed it was getting 50-60 nasty phone calls a day and, in light of the experience at the Crowne Plaza, feared for the safety of its employees.  (Note that it was not concerned about violence by American Renaissance attendees—but by the protestors.)

Next, American Renaissance booked the conference into the Manassas Four Points Sheraton. Neither American Renaissance nor the Sheraton told anyone that the conference would take place there. American Renaissance told its registrants that they would be informed of the location a few days before the conference.

Leftists contacted the Manassas Four Points Sheraton—along with every single hotel anywhere close to Dulles—and asked if the New Century Foundation had booked the event. The Sheraton said no.  However, someone also contacted the national booking organization for every major hotel chain including Sheraton, and found out that way.

The Manassas Sheraton got death threats, including one stating “If you hold this conference I will go in there and shoot you”. It capitulated and cancelled on Monday, February 15, just four days before the conference was scheduled to begin.

American Renaissance initially announced that its conference would have to be cancelled. But it ended up giving it one more shot, and managed to book the Skyline Hotel in Southwest DC.

Who is behind these attacks on free speech?  They are mostly a rag-tag group of self-described radical “anti-fa” activists who organize on e-mail lists and websites like The One Peoples Project, Info-Shop, and Anti Racist Action.  They have Orwellian mottos like “Intolerance of Intolerance is the Only Intolerance Tolerated” . . . . Read the whole article here.

For Immediate Release:
February 15, 2010
Jordan Zammit
President and Founder,
MSU Sons of Liberty
MSUSonsOfLiberty@gmail.com

The newly-formed registered student organization at Michigan State University, the Sons of Liberty, canceled its first public event. Nick Griffin, a democratically-elected member of the European Parliament and chairman of the British National Party, was scheduled to speak at MSU on February 18 regarding the fraud of man-made global warming. The event was canceled because left-wing agitators caused other organizations to cancel their own events that featured Griffin, and it could not be justified for Griffin to fly to the U.S. to only speak at MSU and at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C.

After a synopsis of Griffin’s schedule was released to the media, left-wing agitators relentlessly threatened with violence and death the organizers of the events. This caused Taylor Somers, the leader of Kenyon College’s conservative Robert A. Taft Society, to cancel his club’s event out of concern for safety of his fellow students. It was confirmed that Griffin would not come to the U.S. after leftists successfully caused three hotels to rescind their offers to allow the biyearly American Renaissance conference from being hosted at their properties.

Griffin could not afford to spend time in the U.S. to only speak at MSU and at CPAC when he could otherwise spend his time campaigning for a seat in the U.K. Parliament. The Sons of Liberty does not fault him for canceling his trip to the U.S., and the student organization looks forward to hosting him—hopefully as M.P. Nick Griffin—when he next crosses the pond.

Jordan Zammit, the founder and president of the Sons of Liberty, said, “The Left does a very good job of advocating free speech for themselves while denying it to others. I am very proud to say that the Sons of Liberty, in its inaugural run, did what it was meant to do and that is ensure that all points of view are presented and that the first amendment is upheld for ALL people to the fullest. If the other speaking venues would not have canceled and his speaking tour called off, I can assure you Mr. Griffin would have been here Thursday afternoon as scheduled, intimidation or not.”

The BNP-U.S. liaison is planning to file a complaint with the United States Department of Justice because elements of the Left conspired to deprive American citizens of their First Amendment right to peacefully assemble and participate in political discourse, which is in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 241. That federal law states that “If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State . . . in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having exercised the same; they shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.”

Zammit also said, “Although Griffin was targeted in Sweden with assassination by leftists when they tried to bomb the train he was riding on in 2006, members of the Sons of Liberty were not—and are not—afraid of the red menace. My organization is made up of common sense young men and women, both considerably liberal and conservative, of numerous races and creeds, whom all believe that the rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution are something sacred, and that no matter who is speaking, he or she has every right to, and whether you agree with them or not, it can never hurt to listen.”

What does this say about Jeffrey Imm? Several things: he is a busybody who sticks his nose in the business of others, he hates the spirit of freedom, he wants to take away your constitutional rights, he is un-American, he is a fanatic who denies the humanity of people he disagrees with, and he is a self anointed commissar who wants to impose a political orthodoxy on freethinking Americans. Such an individual won’t stop with racialists. This can be established in a quick glance at his website. Red Jeffrey poses a threat to the free speech and freedom of association of the broader American Right.

Look at it this way: if the Constitutional Convention of 1787 could reassemble in Washington, DC, Jeffrey Imm would try to shut them down too. Every delegate to the Constitutional Convention was a White male with politically incorrect, racially insensitive views. Thomas Jefferson spent his entire life advocating the deportation of blacks to Africa. James Madison actually served as the President of the American Colonization Society. The freedom of White men to assemble and petition their government, which thousands fought and died for in the American Revolution, has never been challenged in the United States . . . until now.

Jeffrey Imm and his associates aren’t content to replace free speech with political orthodoxy. Although Imm denounces violence, the hotel that was hosting the AR Conference received violent threats, probably from the usual anarchist nutjobs. R.E.A.L. claims to stand for a free society, but there are people who share their political views who are willing to use force, communist ritual shaming, and old fashioned lynch mobs to attack and cower their opponents. I believe it was Huey Long who famously said that when fascism comes to America, it will come in the guise of anti-fascism.

Jeffrey Imm and his Gestapo must be stopped. We can contribute to that project by raising our voices even louder here. We need more media. If any of you have something to say about Jeffrey Imm and his thought police, write an article for OD and send it to me at prozium1984@gmail.com.

Occidental Dissent, February 16, 2010

There are several conclusions we can draw from all this. One is the transformation of so called anti-fascists into de facto arms of officialdom. Far from being anarchists or even leftists, we see the spectacle of anarchists championing a government report that calls the mild-mannered Jared Taylor a terrorist and warning us that if we associate with him it will be difficult to get a security clearance. While I suppose we should thank our anti-system radical friends for looking out for our reputation with the Department of Homeland Security, it certainly shows the real nature of power in this society. College kids dressing up to play “antifa” risk nothing, and know it. Nor have they had any success in their self professed goals of socialism or economic justice, if they even really believe it. While they can certainly get in our way, their existence does not disturb the sleep of the political elites and financial barons they claim to oppose. In fact, they serve as an indispensable support. As One People’s Project recently featured Goldman Sachs frontman Barack Obama on their homepage, they to some extent know this.

All of those in our movement, who engage in any level, are taking tremendous risks. The strategy of anti-fascists is to increase the costs of involvement to the point that people fear not just to take action but to even think forbidden thoughts or associate with those who do. More importantly, as we saw with the attack on James O’Keefe, the target is not the person themselves but the political networks, institutions, and professional colleagues that provide activists with support. The objective was not to makes James O’Keefe stop doing what he’s doing but to make sure “respectable” conservatives run screaming from anything he touches. The actual facts of the allegation do not matter, but leftists simply throw enough mud and hope that it sticks. This is straight out of Rules for Radicals (p. 144 in fact). The point is that a person’s friends and colleagues will not want to be associated with him simply because of the trouble it brings, regardless of the truth or falsity of the assertions. As a result, the left can coolly disable and dismantle the right’s most effective activists, with hapless conservatives falling all over each other in their willingness to surrender, as long as they are left alone.

This kind of repression is also escalating at an official level, with the laughable inclusion of Jared Taylor as a terrorist by the state of Virginia and reports by the Department of Homeland Security warning of a dire threat by right wing extremists. For the first time, there is a real danger that British style police repression could be used against racial realists.

This occurs even as “implicit” white movements such as the Tea Parties are growing in strength and number, to the outrage and concern of the liberal establishment. Ignoring the actual content of the protests (mostly harmless fluff about fiscal conservatism), the leftist counterattack consists — predictably — of charges of racism, based on the grounds that the tea parties are made up overwhelmingly of white people. These days, that is sufficient grounds for suspicion. It can also be suspected that the Tea Partiers and conservatives will respond by allowing far left groups and antifa to set the terms of the debate for them. Certainly, there will be tremendous pressure from libertarians and others to keep the immigration issue out of any Tea Party rhetoric. This will allow the Left to keep white advocates isolated from their constituency and keeping the emerging populist movement toothless and wedded to a Republican Party establishment that will use their votes and discard them. As always, the Left understands the Right better than the Right understands itself.

White advocates are not just opponents of the system — we are the only opponents of the system. The real question is how we operate in such a challenging environment without falling into the dead ends of the past. The good news is that our objectives are actually quite clear. We must engage with the emerging opposition to the current political and financial order and resist any attempts to force us back into the familiar WN ghetto. We must build institutions that can engage all along the political spectrum and train our activists in effective political technology rather than in engaging in the amateurish efforts of the past. Every one of our activists must be doing something productive. Finally, we must support those institutions that already exist. I will return to this question of what is to be done in the days to come. For now, I stand with American Renaissance and will pledge what I can. I encourage you all to do the same.

Occidental Dissent, February 16, 2010

Taylor Somers

Left-wing terrorists win another round.

The following statement from Taylor Somers of Kenyon College appears on the One People’s Project website:

We have been in communication with Campus Safety, and we have come to a consensus regarding the upcoming Griffin event. While we had wanted to shake things up, the reaction against the event has been compelling. The possibility of violence, or at least unintentional injury, to Kenyon students at such an event outweighs, we feel, any contribution that could be gained from having Griffin speak. Never have we intended to incite violence or to otherwise provide an atmosphere in which it becomes at all likely. With Campus Safety’s advice in mind, and as members of the Kenyon community, we must take it upon ourselves to do the right thing and ensure no one is injured. It isn’t worth the possibility of violence or the further pain that will almost certainly be caused, so with those concerns in mind we have cancelled.

The hurt that this controversy has already caused is palpable. There is a rift, an upset in the Kenyon community, and I will accept personal responsibility for that as I think a sense of honor compels me. It was never my intention to cause such a hurt, and so I think the only decent option is to minimize it at this point. It saddens me that many of those with whom I’ve been on friendly terms are now at odds with me. I would like to apologize to those offended or who feel or felt threatened by the immanent presence of Nick Griffin, who I have never claimed did not say many things that were wrong in the past and present. Your passioned appeals, along with the concerns for the safety and integrity of this school and those who attend it, have persuaded me that we were on the wrong course. I am attempting to right that course now.

As for my own views which were dragged into all of this, I intend to embark on a path of radical self-examination. Those who know me personally will recognize I’m not a bigot, fascist, or totalitarian, but rather, perhaps, more of a contrarian (yet one who believes in a free society, even though we may find difficulty agreeing on what that is). Some of that which I have written over the past day and night could be described as knee-jerk reaction to being attacked personally, and I can recognize failures in my own judgment due to that fact. I think I have been beholden to a more abstract and theoretical point of view than is merited by real life, as has been made clear over the course of this trouble. I only ask that it not be assumed I am insincere in this appeal. I am being sincere, and I humbly submit my apologies to those of you voicing your legitimate concerns who I have attacked for recognizing my failures in judgment before I saw them myself.

I realize this has been difficult, and has created a rift. I’m willing to try to correct that, to learn a lesson, and go on with life, if you’re all willing to go on with life as well. I’ll not go out in search of controversy or extreme methods to incite discussion, however curious I may be. The Taft Society will exercise better and more sensitive judgment with regard to who we bring to campus. I should really thank you all for persuading us toward the right course of action, and indeed I do thank you for that.

With Best Wishes,
Taylor Somers
Robert A. Taft Society

This should come as no surprise from a college kid narcissistic enough to pen this pretentious interview.

Is a revolutionary’s work ever done? Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn can rest easy: theirs is.

The aspiring black politician they hosted at their Hyde Park home, Barack Obama, is now the president of the United States. The anti-white invective that animated their terrorist acts in the 1960s is now the stuff of staid school board pronouncements, ad campaigns of Fortune 500 companies, and the musings of a Republican candidate for president. Their locked-in-the-tissues conviction that the very existence of white people is the primary explanation for human suffering is widely accepted.

Today, the wily Ayers and his wife sit pretty atop American society: he, a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago whose traveling lectures find him hailed in the press as an “anti-war activist” rather than a terrorist, and who enjoys the fawning attention of the New York Times Magazine’s Deborah Solomon; she, an adjunct professor at Northwestern, one of the most prestigious law schools in the nation, and a former employee of white-shoe law firm Sidley Austin — despite apparently having never been admitted to the bar. (A hiring partner was friends with Bill Ayers’ father, Thomas Ayers, once a CEO of Commonwealth Edison in Chicago. Sidley Austin also employed Michelle Obama as an associate and Barack Obama as a summer associate.)

Bill Ayers, in fact, has been lavished with praise by none other than the Southern Poverty Law Center. In a 1998 edition of its magazine, Teaching Tolerance, he is described as a “civil rights organizer, radical anti-Vietnam War activist, teacher and author.” Ayers, the SPLC tells us, “has developed a rich vision of teaching that interweaves passion, responsibility and self-reflection.”

Talk about white privilege. Ayers and Dohrn — themselves white — committed a slew of criminal acts on the way to persuading most of America that whites are something worse than the devil, but escaped unharmed. Only the occasional pesky journalist from Fox News bothers them now, with Ayers responding by threatening to call the police (apparently the racist pigs are sometimes useful).

In their co-written memoir-cum-screed, Race Course: Against White Supremacy, they take a deep bow for their accomplishments, and lay out for all to see just how shallow a revolution can be.

Publisher “Haki R. Madhubuti” of the Third World Press (born Don Lee) tells readers in an introductory note that the book’s release was delayed until after the presidential election for strategic reasons. Would it have mattered? Obama fielded a question or two about Ayers, but as VDare.com’s Steve Sailer observes, the press astoundingly never bothered to read Obama’s own autobiography, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. There’s no reason to think the publication of this book would have invited much scrutiny from a press corps determined to see him elected.

In any event, the book reveals nothing scandalous by today’s standards. It’s peppered with aggressive quotes from Malcolm X (“. . . the white man. He’s an enemy to all of us. I know some of you think that some of them aren’t enemies. Time will tell.”) but describes the bombings of the Weather Underground as more of creative writing exercise for gifted suburban students than violent terrorism (“We fought back, we dreamed out loud.”) Should we laugh or cry?

They have a plan

Anyone hoping for some juicy details about a young Bill Ayers sweating out a bus ride through Chicago with a bomb under his jacket will be disappointed (Ayers wrote a previous book called Fugitive Days about his time on the run from the law, which was described by Slate writer Timothy Noah as “self-indulgent and morally clueless . . . Ayers periodically expresses mild regret for his crimes, in tones reminiscent of a middle-aged insurance executive who wishes he hadn’t gotten drunk quite so often at his college fraternity.”)

Ayers and Dohrn announce in the introduction to Race Course that their project is part memoir, part defense of their actions, and partly “to inflame the debate about white power and privilege . . . and to participate in a flash course about some of the ways in which every one of our current crises feeds on and intersects with racism.”

On this last front, they do not perform particularly well. They never go beyond the standard approach of declaring “white racism” responsible for America’s, and the world’s, ills, coupled with the usual statistics. One of the advantages of being the victor in a culture war is that you need not debate too vigorously. They’re compelled at one point to include a denial of race as biological reality: “The ‘science of race’ is by now a thoroughly discredited myth,” they say, and quote one Robert Pollack (described as a dissenting colleague of the “racist” James Watson) as saying that “the genes that regulate the amount of melanin beneath the skin are simply not expressed in the brain. . . . The social responses to race are real, race is not. . . . Race is a choice.” (Should someone have told Frank Ricci?)

Brian V. McDonnell, killed by the Weather Underground in 1970

How the anti-white left juxtaposes “race does not exist” with a belief that “racism” is the central explanation for human suffering has always puzzled me, though obviously, anti-whitism at its core isn’t conflicted on this point at all: there’s clearly a bad race, whites, and they must be eliminated. But presented with the exhilarating prospect of a burning a city to the ground, bombing the Pentagon or clandestine meetings with the Black Panthers, most would-be radical whites of the 1960s probably didn’t bother thinking that one all the way through. They just knew mommy and daddy would sure be shocked.

It’s interesting to consider where Ayers and Dohrn fall on this spectrum of awareness and sincerity (Dohrn, apparently, has a Jewish father and white gentile mother, and her birth name was “Ohrnstein.”) Ayers, meanwhile, tells readers that early on, as a “community organizer” in Cleveland, “whites didn’t feel in any way like ‘my own people.’” But not too interesting. Ayers and Dohrn basically come off as pot-addled airheads, leaning heavily on abstract cries of “freedom” and “liberation” and “justice” without much compelling narrative about life experiences that transformed their thinking or why they connived violence.

Ayers writes that after a short stint in jail for disrupting the draft board in Ann Arbor, he went to work for a school that “stood against racism and segregation, authoritarianism and cynicism, violence and war, irrelevance and fatalism and violence.” No word on whether any of the school’s children knew what “fatalism” was, or whether any of its graduates have managed to stamp out “irrelevance.”

Ayers and Dohrn are world-class name-droppers, sounding at times as if they’re trying to get the heads of a black congregation bobbing in approval of their radical white selves. But we never hear of their own interactions with these figures. As a memoir, they offer us only newsreel-style descriptions of Jesse Jackson speeches, riots, the Attica prison violence, and long lists of organization names like “The People’s Center for Renewal” or “Resistance in Action.” The scenes pass by, but Ayers and Dohrn aren’t in them. In a chapter titled “Born Into War,” for instance, they tell us that “We were both born into war, launched into life under the leaden shadow of Pearl Harbor, the Holocaust, Dresden, Stalingrad, the Blitz, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” Really? More than anyone else who happened to be living on the planet at the time?

Ayers celebrates himself throughout the book, but rarely details concrete accomplishments that would have advanced a left-wing agenda. What might be his manipulation skills in person come through in his writing: he sidesteps where he was likely influential (the violence) and centers himself when he was likely a mere an observer (dissolving white resistance). In the grand scheme of white dispossession, Ayers and Dohrn might well be near-irrelevant little brats who amused themselves with explosives while more serious anti-white figures did the actual heavy lifting. Those memoirs, if ever written honestly, might be more helpful to us.

Edward O'Grady, killed by the Weather Underground in 1981

Ayers alternates chapters (with near-parody titles like “Freedom Now!,” “Awake!,” and, no joke, “Emancipate Yourselves From Mental Slavery”) with wife Dohrn, which in turn alternate with unsigned chapters where the voice is apparently a “we.” The result is disjointed and confusing. Given the bland tone of the book overall, though, it probably doesn’t make much difference whether it’s Ayers, Dohrn, or a mystical brain-meld of the two talking. At times, Ayers and Dohrn are simply too absurd to read without laughing out loud – how they decided to name their children, for instance.

But there are flashes of sincerity. The chapter on John Brown, the violent abolitionist, stood out as one in which Ayers and Dohrn come closest to justifying violence in the name of a cause. “We were fixed by John Browns’ revolutionary blood feud with slavery,” they write. “Self-defense was one thing, but carrying the war to the oppressor and those who sided with them (pro-slavers are fair game) seemed both unthinkable and inevitable. Brown refused to permit the physical risks of resistance, the suffering and dying, to rest solely on the Black community. We aspired to be like him.”

In a famous letter to the New York Times, coincidentally run on September 11, 2001, Ayers wrote “I don’t regret setting bombs. . . . I feel we didn’t do enough. . .”  What else did he hope to accomplish? FBI informant Larry Grathwohl described Ayers and Dohrn as the true decision-makers of the Weather Underground. In a 1982 documentary titled No Place to Hide, he described one conversation in which Ayers contemplated the killing of 25 million “diehard capitalists” in a Communist takeover of the United States.

This, apparently, is how the adjective “unrepentant” came to be attached to Ayers’ name. I suppose any radical can appreciate the willingness to actually do physical acts to further a cause (if not the acts or the cause themselves), so Ayers and Dohrn deserve some credit for steering hard away from apologies.

But what comes around goes around, as they say. Perhaps without realizing it, Ayers and Dohrn played a part in creating an American society where whites are coming to feel equal and opposite revolutionary longings.