American Renaissance 2011:
A Tale of Two Conferences

300 words

^[1]The 2011 American Renaissance conference was canceled due to pressure from egalitarian love-mongers, just as the 2010 conference was canceled.

But in 2010, dozens of speakers and attendees still converged on Dulles Airport, an impromptu location for speeches was found, and there was a great deal of camaraderie and productive networking.

This past weekend, AmRen speakers and guests also went to Charlotte, but this time there was no convergence. Instead, there were two meetings with very little interaction or overlap.

The Grass-Roots Meeting

Matt Parrott of Hoosier Nation ^[2] and Radio Free Indiana ^[3] organized the American Dark Age Meetup ^[4] for die hard AmRen attendees. Matt himself will write up the story for Counter-Currents, but I can tell you that there were talks, networking, camaraderie, and some activism, namely a protest at the Sheraton that canceled AmRen’s contract. Most of the events were recorded on video, and those videos will appear good time at the Voice of Reason ^[5].

The Astroturf Meeting

If Matt Parrott set up a grass-roots meeting, I suppose Rachel Maddow would call the other meeting “astroturf,” meaning something centralized, elite-controlled, and “virtual.” Originally, the plan was that AmRen’s speakers would gather and give their talks to one another. The talks would be videoed and streamed live on the internet to people around the globe. The original plan for Matt Parrott’s group was to watch the streaming conference while enjoying the networking and camaraderie of a face-to-face meeting.

Unfortunately, the webcast did not happen. Apparently, the hotel where the guests were staying had inadequate internet connectivity. So they booked a meeting room at an adjacent hotel. But before they could begin, their reservation was mysteriously canceled. So they ended up simply videoing the speeches for release on DVD.

An account of the speeches has been posted at American Renaissance website: “A Very Successful Unsuccessful Conference ^[6].”