Matt Parrott Interviews Greg Johnson

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The following text is the transcript by V. S. of Matt Parrott’s Radio Free Indiana interview with Greg Johnson about his book Confessions of a Reluctant Hater ^[2]. This interview first published at the Voice of Reason network on June 3, 2011 but is no longer online there.

Matt Parrott: Welcome to Radio Free Indiana! I’m Matt Parrott. Today we’re going to have Dr. Greg Johnson, author of Confessions of a Reluctant Hater, on the line. Greg, welcome to the show. 

Greg Johnson: Thanks, Matt, for having me on.

MP: Greg Johnson, PhD, is the editor of Counter-Currents Publishing and the journal of the North American New Right. He’s a first-rate academic philosopher and writer. His www.counter-currents.com ^[3] website translates the best ideas from Europe’s thriving New Right movement and features articles from writers here in America who are part of his emergent North American New Right.

Greg Johnson recently took a break from translating, editing, and publishing other people’s works to publish a work of his own: Confessions of a Reluctant Hater. It’s a collection of some of the best articles he has written over the years aggregated from several websites and written under several pen names.

Greg, could you give us a brief sketch of Confessions of a Reluctant Hater and why you wrote it?

GJ: Confessions of a Reluctant Hater is a collection of 28 essays that I wrote beginning in 2001 going up to the end of 2010, and they represent a lot of different stages along the way in my intellectual development in my attempt to find a White voice. I don’t pretend that they are all consistent with one another, but the goal of the book was basically this: I had a suggestion from one of the readers of Counter-Currents that I put together a collection of works that are sort of introductory works, that are not deep-end philosophical analyses of New Right thinkers and their predecessors but rather they are pieces that appeal to any intelligent layman who is puzzled about politics.

So, I have a section on finding a White voice. It deals with things like the question of race hate, immigration, books like Christian Landers’ sequel to Stuff that White People Like, a documentary about the Tea Party, Craig Bodeker’s A Conversation About Race, and so forth.

MP: Now, I have been reading through here and I’m working on a review that should be posted here pretty soon probably at theoccidentalobservor.net. One of the articles I really liked, one of my favorites is “A Nation of Immigrants? ^[4]” that really dissects the notion that America is a nation of immigrants and explores that notion and explores what it means in context for an ordinary White American in the 21st century.

GJ: Yeah, I hate the cliché that we’re a nation of immigrants, therefore, we should welcome every other would be immigrant to our shores. I think that’s a very, very bad argument. It doesn’t follow.

What I basically do is explore the topic of immigration, and I end up by raising the question, “Should we have any immigration at all?” I think we should treat that as a legitimate question. America was founded by colonists. There were Dutch and some Germans and some Swedes, but it was primarily people from the British Isles who came here, and when the thirteen colonies became independent they were overwhelmingly Protestant and Anglo-Saxon and almost entirely Northern European, because the Swedes and the Dutch were from Northern Europe as well.  The society, if it was smart, should have tried to do everything possible to preserve that homogeneity. Why? Because diversity of any kind is a weakness. Religious diversity, racial diversity, sub-racial, national, linguistic diversity . . . All forms of diversity like that are bad. Unfortunately, the United States didn’t do that, and we started importing other groups, other national groups, other religious groups, and so forth, until we’ve got the sort of European tapestry of America where we’ve got Poles and Russians and Germans and Romanians and people from all over Europe now living in the United States.

That’s all well and good, and I love a lot of those people who came in later. They are friends and so forth, and I think it’s crazy to be moaning about the Irish in these contexts, for instance. But at the same time I just want to establish the principle that homogeneity is a strength and diversity is a bad thing and any policy of immigration should try to up the homogeneity of the society and resist diversifying it.

I also just raise the question “should we have any immigration at all, whether it’s the best people or the worst people of other countries?” We want to rob other countries of their best minds. And, of course, it’s clear that we shouldn’t want to import the worst people, the “wretched refuse” of other countries. That doesn’t make America a better place.

MP: You raise an excellent point there about how the integration of all these parts of Europe, of all these other people from around Europe who weren’t from the British Isles caused a lot of conflict too. And I speak as what you might call a “Euromutt” myself, but we did have the White immigrant gangs. White immigrant gangs were a major problem throughout a lot of the 19th and 20th century, and there was a lot of pain from that. There was a lot of economic pain where large corporations would use these immigrants to lower the wages for existing Americans, and for a lot of that time we were a frontier nation, and so there was an added value in filling our country up with people and so forth, but that’s not really the current context, and we have integrated every nationality from Europe. It wasn’t pain-free. It was difficult, like you said. Any introduction of differences like that results in conflict, but we worked it out and this notion that after having managed after several decades to get through that to just beset ourselves with a new problem, a far more severe problem, a really intractable problem of trying to integrate these completely alien people is just boggling.

GJ: Well, yes, I agree with that. I am the last person to go on today in this context trying to pick the old wounds of, say, 19th-century conflict between English-descended people and Irish immigrants in the United States. I love the Irish. I love the Italians. I like all the European stocks that are here. I have friends who come from all of those groups, and the last thing I am thinking of is that we should send them all back or some stupid ass thing like that. It’s completely foreign to my outlook.

My tendency is to be a self-hating WASP. I look upon my ancestors who are all, as far as I know, from the British Isles — so, I’m pretty much a pure Anglo-Saxon, if that means anything — and I’m not terribly proud of that because I look at my WASP relatives, and they’re the people who gave the country away. They’re the people who gave the country away to Jews. They’re the people who imported coolie labor from China. They’re the people who imported Blacks from Africa. They’re the people who really made a mess of things. I am far more sympathetic on a personal level and I have a lot more fun with people like Italian-Americans who don’t have any of that White guilt that WASPs carry around, and they take their own side in ethnic conflicts. They’re not hamstrung in the ways that WASPs are. So, if anything, I’m a self-hating WASP.

But the point is that throughout the history of America every introduction of a new group has been not in the interests of the people who are already there. It’s not in their economic interests to have to compete with a new influx of laborers who lower wages, who disrupt their communities, and so forth. The argument I make is that even with the frontier, America could have shut off immigration as soon as the ink was dry on the Constitution. We could have shut it off, and what would have happened is this: the necessity of the system’s expansion would have created incentives for the stock that was already there to reproduce.

So, for instance, if the big factory and mill owners and mine owners couldn’t import cheap labor from Europe they would have had to looked at the people who were there and thought, “Well, we have to invest in these people and increase their population so that we’ll have more workers.” Labor would have been scarce, and so it would have been expensive, so laborers could have afforded to have large families that way, and so the sheer necessity of the system’s survival would have created incentives that would have filled up the country anyway.

Francis Parker Yockey in Imperium talks about this. He was the person that put me on to this idea. His view is that every immigrant who was brought into the United States basically suppressed the incentive for the native population to produce a new individual. I don’t know if you can really turn that into a hard mathematical law, but I do think that there is a pattern there, and that’s reasonable. So, immigration might have been completely unnecessary to populate America, and if we’d never done it we would have a very homogeneous society.

We didn’t do that. We imported a lot of people from Europe. Fine. European peoples are basically the same. We have much more in common genetically and culturally and historically than what differentiates us. A lot of these national differences are fairly recent and superficial anyway. If we go back far enough in our history, we all thought of ourselves as Europeans. When Charles Martel fought the Moors at the Battle of Tours the chroniclers described him as the leader of the Europeans. There was a homogeneous, Latin-speaking, Catholic European Christian society at that time in the Middle Ages, and that slowly differentiated itself over time into the modern nation-states that we have.  So, in a way, one positive thing that you can look at in the American colonial experience and also the colonial experience of countries like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, which were similar, is that these are places that the original unity of the European people is being reconstituted after being divided up and pitted against one another for all these centuries. So, in a way, that can be looked at as a good thing.

But the fact that we’ve been able to assimilate other European stocks does not mean that we can assimilate Blacks or Asians or Papuans or Pygmies or radically different people, and it’s madness to try to do that. So, the idea that because all of our ancestors stepped off boats at one time in history that we have to welcome everybody that stepped off a boat today is just sheer madness.

MP: Right. I couldn’t agree more. The current economic and social situation in America today, especially with how low our own birth rate is, any immigration is a threat to the survival of our people.

GJ: I agree, and I think that one of the things that causes the suppression of our birth rates is immigration, and it suppresses it in two ways. One is a very obvious financial thing. Mexicans are coming here and having four kids, and every one of these kids is born in an emergency room, and the bill is paid for by working and middle class Whites who are responsible and civic-minded and pay their bills and they sit down and balance their books and think, “We can’t afford to have a second child.” They can’t afford to have a second child because they are subsidizing a Mexican baby boom. That’s a very simple way.

There’s another more subtle psychological thing that’s going on here. Whites are kind of a nervous, finicky race. I remember when I was in grade school, for whatever reason in my class, I think I was a 4th grader, there was a cage with some white mice in it. I don’t know why they were in there. Some kind of biology lesson. I remember that the mother mouse had some babies, and the teacher said, “Stay away from the cage. Don’t look in the cage. Don’t do anything, because when the mother mouse has babies and you’re around the cage it will cause her to eat the babies.” I thought that was a bizarre notion, but apparently there are certain animals that are really, really finicky, and if they feel like their nest is being encroached upon they will basically kill their own children or not have them. I think Whites are that kind of finicky, weird creature, and when we feel like our living spaces are in some way not safe, whether they’re crime zones or whether we just don’t feel quite at home in them. I think that suppresses fertility, which is why one of the major factors that causes Whites who live in diverse areas to move to homogeneous areas is when they start having kids. Suddenly they look around, and they don’t feel safe having their nest in a diverse area, and so they move to a suburb.

So, I think any kind of diversity in a very obvious way or in very subtle ways is one of the ways that causes our finicky Whites to stop having kids.

MP: Hopefully, we won’t eat our own babies.

GJ: Well, we abort our own children all the time. And then people say, “Why not use the stem cells for research?” I mean, we eat our own children in more subtle ways than just carving them up, but we do consume our children in this society, and we’re a very sick people, I must say.

MP: I guess you do have a point there.

Now, Greg, in another article, “The Persecution of American Renaissance ^[5],” you explain your perspective on the challenges that Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance organization has recently had. This article was written before the more recent debacle. In America, things have reached the point where we are truly losing the freedom of speech and constitutional rights and all those WASPy things we sort of just took for granted like air. There’s one section here I’d like to quote from you real quick.

Within the White Nationalist community, American Renaissance stands for gentlemanly debate and strict legality. The underlying assumption of this approach is that White Nationalists can work within the American system. America was a de facto White Nationalist society. America became a multicultural society within the system and America can be reborn as an explicitly White Nationalist society within the system as well. The American system is not so broken that it cannot be fixed.

Now, that’s quoting you, but you were paraphrasing what you essentially believe is the approach and attitude of American Renaissance, correct?

GJ: That’s correct.

MP: Do you think in light of this more recent episode that that assumption has been further undermined, that we can get out of this through working within the system?

GJ: I don’t think that we can fix this system, and I didn’t believe it at the time that I wrote that. I was basically stating what I think is the American Renaissance position and the assumption, but at the time I was writing that I did not believe that we could work within the system to fix it and I believe it even less today. I think that this system is rigged, and it is very brittle. I don’t think it is going to allow any fundamental change, and why should it? No sane society has a suicide clause built into it. The only people who believe in something like that are White people, high-minded White people who think that following their ideas off a cliff is the ultimate proof of their high-mindedness and their idealism. So, White societies can commit suicide out of high-mindedness, but we aren’t a White society anymore.

The people who rule us are not Whites. What is it? Well, it’s a coalition primarily led by Jews. They’re the ones who give all the direction. The coalition also includes a lot of deracinated, plutocratic White people; WASPS like my kin and others. And there’s this large group of minorities and disgruntled alienated groups that are held together in this coalition. But the real people who run it are Jews. They’re not like us. They’re not going to cede power like WASPs ceded power.  They’re not going to commit suicide on principle. They’re just not going to do that.

My feeling is that America has been hijacked, and the people who are running it are not concerned with the long-term viability of the system. I had this epiphany one time when I was an undergraduate. I went to the local library, and I saw this shiny new CD on the shelf, and I checked it out, took it home thinking, “Oh boy, I’m going to be able to hear this without having to buy it, and I’ll decide whether I want to buy it.” I opened the case and this apparently brand new CD was all scratched up an unplayable. I was horrified by that, but the reason why these sort of things happen with library books and library CDs is that it wasn’t the property of the person that checked it out, and so they treated it badly. Well, the people who run America today are basically just borrowing the country or, to use something from Alex Linder, basically they’ve stolen America and they’re joy-riding in America. America’s like a stolen car, and they’re taking it for a joy-ride, and when the thing crashes into a ditch they’re just going to be pumping on the gas and spinning the wheels and cursing at the car for failing them. Then they’ll get out, and they’ll go somewhere else and hijack somebody else’s car.

So, the people who are running this society are running it into the ground because ultimately it’s not their society. They’re acting like it. The idea that these people are going to maintain freedom of speech and not shred the Constitution and not destroy the system is ludicrous. It’s not their system. They’re not concerned with its long-term viability. So, I really don’t think it’s going to be possible for us to restore a sane racial hierarchy in this society within the system that we have today.

Fortunately, to extend the joy-riding metaphor, the people who are running the society are running it without brakes, and it will crash. When it crashes, then I think that we can do something about this situation. I think that a lot of the people who are running things into the ground will decamp for safer climes once things crash. I think that what might happen if the federal government defaults, I think that a lot of functions will revert back to the state level. and if we have fifty state governments running things rather than one federal government that gives our enemies a lot less leverage. I think that in 42 out of the 50 states we might be able to actually get things going in the right direction.

So, my feeling is that (a) we cannot reform the system and (b) we don’t need to reform the system because the system is going to self-destruct. My only fear is that it’s going to self-destruct too soon, and sane White people are not going to have the infrastructure, the movement, the media that we need in order to get our message out and become the people who have a voice in setting things right once things crack up. My fear is that what will happen in America is very much like what happened in the former Soviet bloc countries where after the Communists were thrown out, who ends up running things? Well, rebranded Communists in a lot of cases, because they’re the people who had the organization, the money, the networks, the access. So, they just rebranded themselves and got back into positions of power.

I think it’s very important four our movement today to do everything we can to get our acts together and get prepared so that if suddenly events break our way — and they can break our way very suddenly and unexpectedly (nobody expected that Communism would fall apart in Eastern Europe) . . .

MP: Especially those right in the middle of it.

GJ: Yes, exactly. If you polled all the experts at the beginning of 1989 and asked them, “Will Communism be around in 10 years?” every one of them would have probably said, “Oh yes, of course.” And if you said it’s going to be gone in less than a year all over Eastern Europe, they would have thought you were a crank and a kook. It was a very brittle system running on lies, founded on lies, and kept in place by intimidation and conformism.

Our system is just as brittle, it’s based on the same lies. A different version of the same lie: the lie of human equality. And it is just as brittle.

Let me back up and say this: what Communism did to destroy itself is that it was a school for cynicism. It made people cynical. What the whole diversity system is doing in the United States is similar. It’s making people cynical. I really do think that pushing diversity all the time, pushing integration, pushing Affirmative Action, all these fictional Black computer geniuses and all these dumb blondes in the movies, all that kind of stuff is making our case for us. The people I know who are the most Jew-wise and race-wise are people who live in New York City. Why? Because they have been exposed to those sorts of issues; it’s been rubbed in their face all their lives, and they’re finally getting the message. So, integration and diversity are making our arguments for us, and that’s one of the things I argue for in the title essay, Confessions of a Reluctant Hater.

What I say there is the main cause of racial hatred is having to compete with other racial groups in the same living space, and the more that people of different races are thrown together, the more they learn that there are differences and differences matter and the more they come to wish that they didn’t have to deal with this. So, I think our system is creating the conditions of its own collapse just like Communism did. As more and more people become cynical about this, eventually there will come a point when the system’s ability to enforce conformity out of fear will waver just for a moment. There will be a glitch in the Matrix or whatever. There will be a person who comes out and speaks his mind and doesn’t then retreat and apologize. Imagine if just one politician stood up and said, “It’s all bullshit!” and they don’t back down. Or one movie director or one prominent businessman or ten prominent philosophy or political science professors or whatever. If they just stood up and said, “It’s bullshit!” and stood their ground. (You can hear my academic bias, my egghead bias.) Or better yet, what if Rush Limbaugh called bullshit to his tens of millions of listeners and didn’t back down. I think the system could start falling apart very, very fast if something like that happened.

So, again, my great fear is that it will collapse, and we won’t be in a position to really put things back together in a sane way. It would probably still be better, but it won’t be ideal.

MP: Right. When they have ears to hear, we won’t be there with the message.

GJ: Exactly.

MP: That’s my own fear, too. I know a lot of people have this idea that voting isn’t going to accomplish the job, therefore I have to hide in my basement with my guns and dehydrated food. I don’t think you have to go to that extreme that because the system is integrally against you . . . Like I like to say, the system’s not broken. It’s working fine. It’s just not working for you. We have to be refining our message and practicing the art of leadership if we expect to lead if and when that time comes to be able to lead.

GJ: Yes, I agree with that, and this is where I do believe that it is important for those of us who are so inclined and talented for actual political activity, we need to get involved in politics. Now, I do not believe that we are going to vote our way out of this situation. I do not believe that there is a politician on a white horse who is going to get elected into office and change the system. I don’t think that’s going to happen. I don’t think there’s a single politician in the mainstream who believes in what we believe. I do not believe in libertarianism. I do not think that Ron Paul is on our side. He is a libertarian ideologue who, basically, would be quite happy if in 100 years the brown people who inherit America have a sound functioning economy. And I just think that’s craziness.

MP: Gold standard currency.

GJ: Yeah, they’ll have sound money for the brown people. That’s what he stands for, and I think that’s madness. It irritates me to no end, and I’ll say it right now. I’m going to write something about this someday, but I’ll just get it out there on the air now. I am going to socially shun any White Nationalist I know from now on if I find out he donates another dime to Ron Paul.

MP: So, are you telling me right here on the air to tear off my Ron Paul bumper sticker from my car?

GJ: Well, if I catch you paying $1,500 to sit down to a dinner with Ron Paul I promise you I will shun you. I will not invite you to any of my glittering dinner parties or anything like that. I’m going to socially shun you, and I think that we should all have that attitude, because there’s just something crazy about White Nationalists getting so excited about this guy who doesn’t share our philosophy but is happy to take our money, because that’s his philosophy. It’s money. It spends all the same. He doesn’t care if it comes from dirty racists. But he’s not going to listen to us, he’s not going to respect us, and just because he pisses off some of the right people doesn’t mean that he’s our friend.

MP: Recently, on the immigration issue he’s really come out ideologically. That was one of the things I really did like about Ron Paul was that he was for a relatively strict immigration policy, and he’s recently flip-flopped on that to a more libertarian ideologically consistent “borders interfere with optimal trade” perspective. When an ideologue has an ideology it’s just a matter of time before you, as a people, are betrayed by the abstractions he’s a slave to.

GJ: Yeah. The market is a global thing. If you worship the market, you are committed to globalism, and that means that you are committed to the breakdown of all national borders and all national identities, and it’s just a matter of time before people follow that logic out. It was just a tactical, temporary compromise that Ron Paul had to have any kind of sensible immigration views at all probably based on his assessment of what he needed in order to keep getting reelected in Texas. Now that he has his eyes on the national stage he’s realizing that a more consistently libertarian position — which happens to be the same position as the liberals and the mainstream Republicans, namely break down the borders and let them all in — he thinks that is a politically expedient thing to do, and so expediency and principle are beautifully aligned now for Ron Paul and so, of course, he’s for open borders.

I remember one time years ago, a libertarian said, “having borders is just another form of racism.” Yep. OK. You’re right about that. Exactly, it’s just like racism. Why? Because you have a preference for your own over aliens, and that’s what racism is.

But anyway, back to political engagement. I do think that people who have the talent for getting involved in politics and the interest in that who are our people should get involved in it to that extent. Why? Because it’s a really good school.

MP: It’s practice.

GJ: Yeah, it’s practice. They learn a lot about how the system works and how to communicate with people, and all those skills will become necessary. We want to have people who know how to do political campaigning and fundraising and all these sorts of things when suddenly people have ears to hear and we want to get our message out. That is very important experience, and if people temperamentally inclined to do that and if they’ve got the talent, I say more power to them.

Personally, it’s not for me. It’s not my temperament, it’s not my talent. But I’m a pluralist about these things. I want to get as many people involved in White Nationalism as possible with as many different talents and interests and we need to find a place for them all. We need to encourage people with all these different talents and interests to work for the cause in the way that feels best for them, that’s most authentic for them, that is most harmonious with who they are and what makes them tick. But it’s not for me, personally.

I’m not one of these guys who thinks that everybody’s got to be publishing little essays on Nietzsche and Spengler and that’s the only way we’re going to get things down. Little essays on Nietzsche and Spengler are what float my boat. I absolutely, totally understand that that is not the only thing that we need, and we’re not going to win if we’re the best Nietzsche scholars in the world. We’re going to win if we have the ability to beat our enemies in the field of political struggle.

MP: Guided by the lodestar of solid philosophy.

GJ: Yeah, we need to have the right orientation. We need to have the right foundations in place, but ultimately we’re not going to win by who has the best Nietzsche scholars, but by how many divisions we can mobilize. That, I think, is an important thing, and I definitely get that, so I don’t want to be misrepresented as somebody who thinks that by some strange occult power ideas alone are going to change things.

But ideas ultimately are the things that shape how people fight, what they fight for, how far they’re going to go and things like that. So, I think that metapolitics, which is what Counter-Currents is about, is an important thing, but it’s not the only thing.

The essays in this book, Confessions of a Reluctant Hater, are more political essays than metapolitical essays. They are engaged with political issues and cultural issues. I have a section in here on finding a White voice, which is where I try to learn how to speak as a White person and take my own side as a White person in all these issues. Then there’s a section called Polarizing Moments which are just commentaries on political events that I think will be very exciting because they are signs of racial polarization and racial awakening. Then I have a section on White lifestyle politics which deals with a lot of things. It deals with miscegenation, lawyers, sex crimes, drug legalization, Jim Goad, Christmas shopping and, one of my favorite writers, Alan Watts. It’s kind of all over the place.

I just want to stress that although I am all about metapolitics this book is more about politics and culture than the sort of higher order ivory tower things that I am going to be talking about in later books.

MP: Well, I would consider it a good gateway, a good primer for somebody who’s interested in Counter-Currents and thinking about these things on the next level.

But we are completely out of time. What I can guarantee to you, I’ve thought about it, I am going to take the Ron Paul bumper sticker off my car tomorrow morning. I don’t know why it’s still there. I do want to thank you for visiting the show. There are several things I’m thinking of here that I want to ask you about, but we’re out of time. Hopefully, you’ll come back and we can discuss West Coast White Nationalism. If you could come back soon that would be great.

GJ: I’d love to. “West Coast White Nationalism ^[6]” is one of the essays in that third section on lifestyle politics. So, yeah, I’d love to come back, and I’m glad to hear that you’re going to get rid of the Ron Paul bumper sticker. I have a sticker that says “Spengler was right,” and since I don’t have a car, I could pop that in the mail to you, if you’d like, and you could put that one its place.