Over the April 17-18 weekend, the so-called scientific racists around the American Renaissance newsletter and website once again met at the Montgomery Bell State Park, less than 60 miles west of Nashville, Tennessee. They discussed whether or not the change they wanted would come from involvement in “American political system,” heard from a Latvian nationalist, British National Party cadres, and from a bevy of American white nationalist and anti-immigrant speakers. Despite a small group of anti-racists protested outside the park, from the standpoint of American Renaissance boss Jared Taylor, the event was their “best ever.”
Atlanta attorney Sam Dickson, a white nationalist who also spent time in the 1980s and 1990s promoting Holocaust denial, has been recently quite pessimistic about the future of white supremacy, and this time again gave attendees the very barest of hope in his time at the podium.
Peter Brimelow, a British immigrant who, on his VDARE website, specializes in bashing other immigrants who happen to not come from a European locale, also gave more of the same. Now he worries that the USA is becoming like Brazil and will soon break up into smaller territories. His proposal: abolish birthright citizenship, abolish the King Holiday, secede at the state and local level, and other nutworthy ideas. Brimelow once edited Forbes magazine, but not holds down a small post writing a column for Market Watch. Time is working against him, however, and he, like Dickson, will soon become part of the sordid white supremacist past.
Richard Spencer, born in 1978, is the white nationalist future. A well-educated racist, born in Boston and raised in Dallas, Spencer now lives in Whitefish, Montana. He has taken over the National Policy Institute. At this gathering he added nothing new, but simply re-walked their bitterness at other white people who have decided to join with other human beings, rather than take their white-road alone. “Whites have a special capacity to become their own worst enemy,” he said. It was a line that had spoken at American Renaissance many times before.
From the United Kingdom came Matthew Tait, a one-time British National Party (BNP) member who came to explain that party’s sharp decline in the polls. The BNP and its one-time leader were once extremely popular at American Renaissance gatherings, showing off their gains in the polls and acting a bit like an older brother to some of the pups present. Now, Griffin is out, deposed from the party because of his mishandling of funds and his mishandling of the party itself. Tait claimed the BNP’s fall in the polls was the party’s own doing, and did not give any account of the BNP’s active opposition—for which the London-based magazine Searchlight has been given much credit. Indeed, if Tait’s analysis holds in white nationalist circles, we can expect less and less in the electoral field from them.
From Latvia, came a man calling himself Konstantins Papurs to bless what he called Lativan nationalism. He described the many nationalist associations in the Baltic republic, and showed a video of one of their larger events. According to American Renaissance’s description of his talk, he gave a, “sobering reminder of the heavy sacrifices our European brothers have made for their people.”
For Jared Taylor certainly, and increasingly for others at American Renaissance, their inability to make a defined impact on American electoral politics has only increased the importance that Europe plays in their racism besotted minds.
