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The Alternative South
by Hunter Wallace
http://www.occidentaldissent.com/201...rnative-south/
http://www.counter-currents.com/2017...rnative-south/
http://christian-identity.net/forum/...5929#post15929
http://whitenationalist.org/forum/sh...5929#post15929
.
Editor’s Note: This is the full text of my address to the 2017 Atlanta Forum.
.
Southern Nationalism is facing a crisis.
The crisis began around late 2014 when a year and a half of public rallies by the League of the South had begun to take its toll. We had spent the previous two years building up an amazing real world network of activists across the South. There was nothing else like it on the American Far Right. We were holding monthly rallies, annual national conferences, state conferences, private events, etc.
Believe me, it was FUN taking it into the real world after spending a decade or more camped out in the anonymity of cyberspace. We learned that our enemies in Dixie were not as organized as we had imagined them to be. We learned that doxxing is not as problematic here as it is elsewhere. We learned that various issues like opposition to immigration and refugee resettlement were broadly popular in our region. In hindsight, I think you could say that we saw the Trump movement coming.
Somewhere along the way, we began attracting women to our movement. It is striking how most of us are married and have young children now. We can’t do the public activism like we used to anymore because our responsibilities have multiplied. If you look at the Far Right as a whole, it is not a problem we should complain about. Whereas White Nationalists have argued about the lack of women in the movement, our wives spend enormous amounts of time talking and networking on Facebook. Women seem to really enjoy the social aspect of our movement that you can’t get by interacting exclusively with anonymous people online. We don’t go to immigration rallies now so much as weddings and baby showers.
Anyway, I look back fondly on 2013 and 2014. I got married, had a son and met lots of great people who share my views all across the South. That was FUN. That was VALUABLE. That was a GOOD INVESTMENT. We needed an institution that would enable us to propagate our views, coordinate our energies, build real world networks, challenge the status quo in public space and overcome the well known weaknesses (i.e., the autism and extremism) of a purely online movement.
At the same time, we eventually came to see the limitations of this approach. It was easy for the opposition to violate our civil rights and knock down billboards which were very expensive to put up. It was impossible to keep up the pace of the rallies – too expensive, too much traveling, we hit a ceiling, etc. More than anything else though, the constant bickering on Facebook over small points of disagreement and the willingness of some to tread into violent territory which made others uncomfortable began to fracture the movement. What’s the point of spending so much time recruiting ordinary people at public rallies only to squander it by alienating them with extremism on social media?
During the first half of 2015, the pace of our public rallies began to slow down. Several leaders including Michael Cushman dropped out of the League of the South. That was the case until the Dylann Roof mass shooting in Charleston ignited a campaign of cultural genocide across the South. We lost the Confederate Battle Flag at the South Carolina Statehouse. The Southern Heritage movement and the League were briefly reenergized. We held more rallies than ever before, but eventually the news cycle rolled on, the enemy was repulsed, enthusiasm faded and burn out returned as a major problem.
In the midst of the reaction to Charleston, Donald Trump announced he was running for president on June 16, 2015. Everything was about to change. The inconceivable started to happen.
Donald Trump Changes America
Southern Nationalists weren’t prepared for Donald Trump.
We are so accustomed to thinking regionally, but the anger and alienation that we saw at our protests in the South was national in scope. It was even global. No one was even trying to summon all that anger and alienation and channel it against the liberal establishment.
How should we feel about this? We have been too narrowly focused on the Confederacy. We never entertained the possibility of a successful nationalist and populist revolt in our lifetimes, another Andrew Jackson, put into the White House by a MARS coalition led by the South. The Populists had mounted a fierce challenge in the 1890s and even briefly captured the Democratic Party, but they were beaten back. We have just witnessed the most improbable election since Jackson’s victory in 1828.
In light of our own history, we shouldn’t be surprised. It actually makes sense. Radical Reconstruction changed the nature of our people. Previously, the South had been much less coherent, which was one the major reasons we lost the War Between the States, but living under the boot of radicalism changed America. The differences between the lowland and upland South faded into the Solid South of the Jim Crow era. White Northerners lost interest in pushing Radical Reconstruction. The Yankee mind of the late 19th and early 20th centuries turned instead to imperialism and commercial progress.
As hard as it is to believe, eight years of living under President Barack Hussein Obama may have had a similar effect. The experiment seems to have cooled the enthusiasm of non-Southerners for ‘social justice’. Maybe it was all the Black Lives Matter rioting in the streets? Whatever the cause, a critical mass of White Northerners in rural areas started voting a lot more like rural White Southerners and changed the world. The racial and cultural gap between coastal urbanites and interior ruralites has widened to such a degree that it has become the primary polarity of American politics.
I’ve occasionally written about this over the years. We have seen Upper South states like Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky and West Virginia become much more Republican. The same process has now moved across the Mason-Dixon line and into the Rust Belt and Midwest. The Left has demonized and written off the White working class. President Donald Trump is the result.
by Hunter Wallace
http://www.occidentaldissent.com/201...rnative-south/
http://www.counter-currents.com/2017...rnative-south/
http://christian-identity.net/forum/...5929#post15929
http://whitenationalist.org/forum/sh...5929#post15929
.
Editor’s Note: This is the full text of my address to the 2017 Atlanta Forum.
.
Southern Nationalism is facing a crisis.
The crisis began around late 2014 when a year and a half of public rallies by the League of the South had begun to take its toll. We had spent the previous two years building up an amazing real world network of activists across the South. There was nothing else like it on the American Far Right. We were holding monthly rallies, annual national conferences, state conferences, private events, etc.
Believe me, it was FUN taking it into the real world after spending a decade or more camped out in the anonymity of cyberspace. We learned that our enemies in Dixie were not as organized as we had imagined them to be. We learned that doxxing is not as problematic here as it is elsewhere. We learned that various issues like opposition to immigration and refugee resettlement were broadly popular in our region. In hindsight, I think you could say that we saw the Trump movement coming.
Somewhere along the way, we began attracting women to our movement. It is striking how most of us are married and have young children now. We can’t do the public activism like we used to anymore because our responsibilities have multiplied. If you look at the Far Right as a whole, it is not a problem we should complain about. Whereas White Nationalists have argued about the lack of women in the movement, our wives spend enormous amounts of time talking and networking on Facebook. Women seem to really enjoy the social aspect of our movement that you can’t get by interacting exclusively with anonymous people online. We don’t go to immigration rallies now so much as weddings and baby showers.
Anyway, I look back fondly on 2013 and 2014. I got married, had a son and met lots of great people who share my views all across the South. That was FUN. That was VALUABLE. That was a GOOD INVESTMENT. We needed an institution that would enable us to propagate our views, coordinate our energies, build real world networks, challenge the status quo in public space and overcome the well known weaknesses (i.e., the autism and extremism) of a purely online movement.
At the same time, we eventually came to see the limitations of this approach. It was easy for the opposition to violate our civil rights and knock down billboards which were very expensive to put up. It was impossible to keep up the pace of the rallies – too expensive, too much traveling, we hit a ceiling, etc. More than anything else though, the constant bickering on Facebook over small points of disagreement and the willingness of some to tread into violent territory which made others uncomfortable began to fracture the movement. What’s the point of spending so much time recruiting ordinary people at public rallies only to squander it by alienating them with extremism on social media?
During the first half of 2015, the pace of our public rallies began to slow down. Several leaders including Michael Cushman dropped out of the League of the South. That was the case until the Dylann Roof mass shooting in Charleston ignited a campaign of cultural genocide across the South. We lost the Confederate Battle Flag at the South Carolina Statehouse. The Southern Heritage movement and the League were briefly reenergized. We held more rallies than ever before, but eventually the news cycle rolled on, the enemy was repulsed, enthusiasm faded and burn out returned as a major problem.
In the midst of the reaction to Charleston, Donald Trump announced he was running for president on June 16, 2015. Everything was about to change. The inconceivable started to happen.
Donald Trump Changes America
Southern Nationalists weren’t prepared for Donald Trump.
We are so accustomed to thinking regionally, but the anger and alienation that we saw at our protests in the South was national in scope. It was even global. No one was even trying to summon all that anger and alienation and channel it against the liberal establishment.
How should we feel about this? We have been too narrowly focused on the Confederacy. We never entertained the possibility of a successful nationalist and populist revolt in our lifetimes, another Andrew Jackson, put into the White House by a MARS coalition led by the South. The Populists had mounted a fierce challenge in the 1890s and even briefly captured the Democratic Party, but they were beaten back. We have just witnessed the most improbable election since Jackson’s victory in 1828.
In light of our own history, we shouldn’t be surprised. It actually makes sense. Radical Reconstruction changed the nature of our people. Previously, the South had been much less coherent, which was one the major reasons we lost the War Between the States, but living under the boot of radicalism changed America. The differences between the lowland and upland South faded into the Solid South of the Jim Crow era. White Northerners lost interest in pushing Radical Reconstruction. The Yankee mind of the late 19th and early 20th centuries turned instead to imperialism and commercial progress.
As hard as it is to believe, eight years of living under President Barack Hussein Obama may have had a similar effect. The experiment seems to have cooled the enthusiasm of non-Southerners for ‘social justice’. Maybe it was all the Black Lives Matter rioting in the streets? Whatever the cause, a critical mass of White Northerners in rural areas started voting a lot more like rural White Southerners and changed the world. The racial and cultural gap between coastal urbanites and interior ruralites has widened to such a degree that it has become the primary polarity of American politics.
I’ve occasionally written about this over the years. We have seen Upper South states like Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky and West Virginia become much more Republican. The same process has now moved across the Mason-Dixon line and into the Rust Belt and Midwest. The Left has demonized and written off the White working class. President Donald Trump is the result.
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