Counter-Currents
Janice Drew, Vandalized Plymouth Rock
1,310 words
The Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Rock 400 years ago. Sadly for the occasion, unknown vandals defaced the actual Plymouth rock and other monuments dedicated to the Pilgrims’ arrival.
It’s unclear who’s responsible for this week’s vandalism, but the act itself symbolizes the growing contempt for the settlers. The Pilgrims and other European colonists are no longer heroes — they’re genocidal invaders. They’re not the original Americans — the Indians are. They didn’t found the country — black slaves did.
Some right-wingers may welcome the defenestration of the Pilgrims and Puritans. According to them, everything bad in America originates from these ultra-Calvinists. America’s greed, its opposition to high culture, its “Judeo-Masonic” spirit, and its messianic mission to turn the whole world into a shopping mall all apparently originate with the Puritan founders. The New England settlers earn the dubious distinction of being hated by nearly everyone. Liberals hate the Puritans for their sexual repression and overbearing morality; Leftists hate them for their theft of Indian land. On the Right, Neoreactionaries hate them as the builders of the “Cathedral,” neo-Confederates hate them as perfidious Yankees, Catholic traditionalists hate them as heretics, and the European New Right hates them as the ur-Americans.
You would almost expect Mencius Moldbug to congratulate the Plymouth Rock vandals.
Whatever their faults, the Puritans are unfairly demonized as the culprits of American corruption. Other factors are far more responsible for the poz. The fact that many Puritan critics are Ellis Islanders — whether Jewish or white ethnic — should always be remembered. This criticism is often made to obscure the real sources of corruption and satiate old ethnic resentments. The Puritans weren’t that bad, and many of their descendants were quite based. This is a misguided prejudice the Right needs to retire.
One of the most prominent sources for the Right’s anti-Puritan sentiment is the aforementioned Mencius Moldbug. Moldbug, the pseudonym of Curtis Yarvin, is a popular neoreactionary blogger and tech entrepreneur who receives surprisingly fair coverage from the media. His influence has also spread to mainstream conservatives and libertarians. Moldbug, who is Jewish, offers the Puritans as the archetypal social justice warriors. Whenever you read a commentator complaining about the Left as the New Puritans, there’s a good chance this take is derived from Moldbug.
“We don’t just live in something vaguely like a Puritan theocracy. We live in an actual, genuine, functioning if hardly healthy, 21st-century Puritan theocracy,” he argued in his massive ebook, A Gentle Introduction To Unqualified Reservations.
This theocracy roots out wrongthink and forces the citizenry to follow its religious dogmas. He sees the malignancy of Harvard and other esteemed institutions as the fault of Puritans, not the current occupiers of these institutions. “The political program and perspective that we think of as progressive is, or is at least descended from, the program of a religious sect. Unsurprisingly, this sect, best known as ecumenical mainline Protestantism, is historically the most powerful form of American Christianity,” he writes. In the same work, he approvingly quotes a source claiming that “the Puritan divines were the precursors of the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks.”
He doesn’t argue that modern progressives are actually ultra-Calvinists — just the natural descendants of Calvinists. Many of Moldbug’s writings are concerned with pointing out the WASP figures and institutions that carried this disease to its modern form. Less attention is paid to how these figures and institutions are no longer WASPs. Moldbug, in spite of his value, is prone to advocate for goofy theories. The Puritan thesis may be the silliest.
Of course, he’s not the first to make similar claims. The European New Right shares this contempt for the Puritans. Alain de Benoist said in a Telos interview:
“I detest this puritan heritage [of America], which forbids the normal expression of feelings, turns everything into a “problem” (“What’s your problem?”), reduces daily life to using set formulas for solving these problems (how-to books, programs, etc.) and seems to forbid normal relations between the sexes. Frankly, there is something hysterical in the Prohibition of yesteryear and in today’s campaigns against smoking, sexual harassment, sexual abuses, etc.,”
Benoist believes this puritan heritage makes Americans hate Europe.
Francis Parker Yockey also despised the “money-based Puritan culture of WASP America.” Oswald Spengler, his primary influence, saw the Puritan as the descendant of the Viking, a pirate who lacked the honor and dignity of the Prussian knight. He only seeks money.
This Puritan hatred often descends into outright anti-Americanism. It’s not a mystery why. If these were the people who founded America, then the whole country must be diseased.
The real-life Puritans and their descendants rarely satisfy the imaginations of their critics. The old settlers braved an ocean journey to found a new land. The Puritans were more “utopian” and egalitarian than the Cavalier settlers of the Southern colonies. They were also more devoted to spreading the gospel to the Indians and including them in their communities. But their communities were not Judeo-Masonic communes. They created high-trust communities that distinguished sharply between members and non-members. Their democratic structures resembled the tribal ways of the ancient Germans, and the Puritans certainly weren’t liberals. Their efforts to assimilate the Indians failed, leading to King Philip’s War. After the war, the New Englanders saw their communities as limited to their racial kin, not their brothers in Christ.
Their descendants are not bad as their critics make them out to be. Radical abolitionism and feminism originated with dissidents in their communities, not the WASP mainstream. A Boston mob nearly killed the famed abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison in 1835. Many Puritan descendants championed race realism and immigration restrictions in the early 20th century. Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant were both of Puritan stock. Stoddard was even a unitarian, the boogeyman faith to Moldbug. The foremost advocate for immigration restriction in the early 20th century was Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, the very embodiment of WASPdom. Charles Francis Adams Jr., the great-grandson of John Adams and grandson of John Quincy Adams, opposed imperialism on the grounds it would expose America’s racial core to foreign dilution.
There is little in common between these Anglo-Protestants and the modern progressives they supposedly birthed. Why do neoreactionaries see Garrison the archetypal Puritan and not Lodge?
Puritans are not as inspiring or as romantic as the Cavaliers, but the society they built did not create clown world. The reasons for blaming the Puritans for our present mess are numerous.
Many white ethnics still harbor resentment over alleged WASP oppression and can’t get over that America demanded their ancestors speak English. The Puritan thesis satisfies these silly ethnic grudges. Right-wing Jews, such as Moldbug and Paul Gottfried, possibly like the theory because it diverts attention away from Jewish influence to those nefarious Protestants. “Puritan” is an epithet in our society; the flat top-hatted ones are loved by few. They’re an easy scapegoat and far less controversial to blame than Jewish power or non-white immigration. The Puritan thesis makes us blame white Protestants instead of alien forces.
America may not have had the perfect neoreactionary founding, but it is still our country. It’s more valuable to reclaim our history and remember the greatness of our forerunners than to denigrate them. Anti-Puritanism often leads to animosity for the entire Anglo founding stock. Frankly, that’s cringe and a sign of immigrant cope. America wasn’t wrong from the moment the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Rock. It went wrong when a new elite who trace their descent to Ellis Island — not Plymouth Rock or Jamestown — took power.
P.S. For readers who would like to see the Puritan theory debunked, I highly recommend reading through the archives of the “racehist” blog. WASP America has never had a more dedicated defender than this anonymous blog author. This blog is sadly no longer updated, but it remains a valuable source for the Dissident Right.
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32 comments
Frankly, I think this debate ended decades ago. You’re right about the Puritans, which is why I do empathize with those that support them. But this whole WASP vs Ethnic debate was marked obsolete decades ago. Most of Americans are Euromutts anyway. And while your reaction towards the defamation of the settlers is more than understandable, I think you’re misplacing your anger on the so called “Ethnics” unfairly. Don’t forget that Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci (behold America) and the entire Golden Circle were also ethnic in that regard. There’s nothing effective about dividing OURSELVES for such matters. As a writer here said in his article “America is home to Whites of all flavors” and John C Calhoun called this the Government of the “Free White Race” and I think that as long as we have a core culture and language based off on that of the founding we can preserve our unity. There’s no other way.
No intention of saying white ethnics are not welcome. They just need to get over the old grudges and see the settlers as their own forefathers. No one denies the contribution of Med explorers or the good things white ethnics have contributed
I totally agree and you couldn’t phrase it any better. One people, one nation. Thanks for replying and Good luck!
And lest we forget that nearly every single one of the Founding Fathers had Rome as their first and foremost model. Just look at their reading lists! Virgil, Cicero, Plato, you name it. Thomas Jefferson referred to Palladio’s Four Books on Architecture as his BIBLE. New England and Washington DC are disproportionately Classicist in their architectural style. As much as I enjoy reading and dwelling into the Poetic Eddas, I still have to admit that there’s no such thing as Viking “High Culture” or architecture for that matter (although their descendants formed a large portion of the settlers of America). I guess what I’m trying to say is that our heritage is simply EUROPEAN, not WASP nor ethnic. And ethnics that REFUSE to assimilate and keep bashing America and their WASP brothers NEED TO BE REMOVED FROM U.S SOIL.
I’d like to give the defacers of the Plymouth Rock a wood shampoo.
Calvin Coolidge, who had a very good grasp of reality, also had deep roots in New England. Here’s an interesting discussion of Coolidge at The Occidental Observer…
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2019/03/30/where-is-calvin-coolidge-when-we-need-him/
Thank you for this article. Many historians, including prominent ones such as Samuel Eliot Morison and David Hackett Fischer, showed that the Pilgrim Separatists and Puritans were quite complex and admirable. Anyone would do well to follow the examples of the Pilgrim Edward Winslow and Puritan John Winthrop in various ways.
Thank you for writing this; it needed to be said.
For a white American to hate the Puritan Settlers is the height of Wignattery.
Doesn’t Moldbug acknowledge Carlyle as his main intellectual influence? How can someone cite Calvinism as the source of all evil and then base their ideology on Thomas Carlyle?
Jews have a higher-than-average rate of schizophrenia.
The Puritans were a remarkable people with a legacy that nobody wants to claim, not in America or in England.
In my country, Puritans gave us Paradise Lost and Pilgrim’s Progress. If America couldn’t create a high culture, you can’t blame anything inherent in Puritanism.
I recall reading something to the effect that England sent the Puritans overseas specifically to get rid of them.
The Puritans only founded America inasmuch as their anti-tradition, post-Christian descendants won the War Between the States.
Are you sure about that? Trust me, I’ve been there too! But at the end of the day rich Southerners, despite their bright culture and achievements, were the ones who imported slaves into America for cheap labor. Are they any different than our masters today? (probably, but not in that regard). Their expansion into the western states could have had disastrous demographic effects for the whole region. That’s why many abolitionists supported the Back-To-Africa movement. Heck I’ve even heard some “Anti-Racist” Confederates supporting their positions by claiming that Lincoln was the “true racist”. In the end these Puritans-New Englanders-Yankees were the ones that saved America from becoming demographically like Brazil and instead transformed this nation into an industrialized superpower with unparalleled technological achievement. What we need is a Yankee-style, centralized, and industrialized Hamiltonian government, not some backwards “limited government” agrarian society.
Ok Yankee. Go try to rehab proto-Marxist Lincoln elsewhere. That dog won’t hunt with me.
I kid, I kid. But seriously, if you’re gonna have slaves, getting blacks to pick the cotton was better than making Germans and Irish chop sugar cane (those slaves were treated worse and had shorter life expectancies than Africans too). That said, I agree with the Tyrant Lincoln about repatriating Africans after the war…and we all saw how that big plan worked out with his successors.
The beauty of a confederation is that the constiuent states can each have their own systems of government, so if you want your Yankee Reich then have at it.
Yankee Reich, huh? Doesn’t sound bad at all. If by Yankeeism you mean Industrialization, a National Bank, and an elite of well-qualified enlightened absolutists guiding the masses to the right direction, then hell yeah Im in. How would we even compete with the Chinese with a decentralized, agrarian, classical liberal system of government. Even Hunter, the editor of Occidental Dissent, has argued that the very reason that the CSA failed during the Civil War was that it was a decentralized mess of different states quarreling with each other. Yankees on the other hand had a common front and an industrialized economy that places them ahead of the CSA. Besides the US wouldn’t be the same without the U, right? Overall, I think that what we need is a synthesis of Yankee high culture and law, with Southern customs and other virtues.
And don’t forget: E Pluribus Unum (Out of many, One)
I agree with you, sir, and on every point. I am only playing the role assigned to me for laughs at this point. On an entirely serious note, the time for squabbling over the Civil War is over, and nationalist southerners and Southern Nationalists ought to count their blessings that going forward we can and should look forward to an alliance with all like-minded white people everywhere, including Yankeedom. All we ask is that, if the future ethnostate is a genuinely more perfect union (The Holy Yankee Reich?) and not a reborn CSA (the Third Confederacy?) that we be treated as equals and not as stupid yokels and white trash forever as under the current, post-CivWar regime. Our history is just as American and worthy of being lauded as yours. Basically we just want a polite and sincere apology and a handshake extended in friendship. I suspect that’s how the Irish and Welsh and Scottish and Boers feel toward the English.
Great article, Mr. Hampton!
I remembering getting into the anti-Purtian mindset after reading about it from Hunter Wallace, who is a Southern Nationalist, and Kevin MacDonald, who is an Irish Catholic. Those two have an outsized influence in the Pro-White Movement, especially Dr. MacDonald.
What slowly but surely changed my mind was learning that the Pilgrims were basically at the front lines of the Race War against the Indians. The track record of Pilgrims and their descendants on White Racial Identity is superior to that of the Cavaliers in the South, who, although they produced great thinkers like Alexander Hamilton Stephens, also promoted a Paternalist/Elitist/Planter Class mentality that I find insufferable and unworthy of an advanced race such as ours.
On that note, I’d like to share a comment I found in a Youtube video, a 13 minute diatribe called “Chapo Trap House – Cheesecake Factory and Shitty White Suburban Culture.” I did a lot of research on Chapo Trap House after Travis LaBlanc mentioned them in his latest series of articles on the Bernie Sanders phenomenon. Suffice to say, the following comment is a perfect response to anyone in the Dissident Right who hates White Anglo culture, including Puritan culture:
“The funny thing is, you claim that white anglo american people don’t produce any culture yet every other culture wants to run from their homeland and live with them and be in their space! Why do people with rich cultures always looking to move to white anglo people space where there is poor culture. Can white anglo people not have their poor culture space to breathe without other cultures wanting to enrich them all the time?
So what if white anglo people culture is just Corporatism, capitalism and shitty cheesecake factory white suburbia? It is their poor culture and they like it! I see no issue with this. Why always this desire to constantly enrich white anglo people culture as if it is the duty of all mankind?
Their capitalism, corporatism or whatever, built them the largest economy present. Got them the largest military power ever assembled and the most widely spoken international language! If they want to preserve this poor culture then let them have it in peace.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuMJSf1-4dg&t=621s
I highly recommend listening to that video, as the rhetoric spewed from the 6:00-11:00 mark is identical to what was preached back in 2013 and 2014 by Hunter Wallace and Richard Spencer, among other leaders. I thought that comment was an excellent takedown of the cultural imperialist mindset fomented by the Dirtbag Left and the Ex-Leftists/Populists in the Dissident Right, an attitude which says, “You’re culture sucks and deserves to be replaced!” You know what? How about allowing Whites to choose which subculture they want to belong to and respecting each other’s differences? How about – gasp – learning to leave other Whites alone?
DP84 You write
“Kevin MacDonaald, who is an Irish Catholic…”
Are you sure about this? Is he still a believing, attending Mass every Sunday Catholic? I never met the man but I would bet he isn’t. Although, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if he were raised in a Catholic family.
I think I heard KMac say he is from a Scottish protestant background.
He has said that he grew up going to a super-religious Catholic school and that he is an atheist now.
“Their capitalism, corporatism or whatever, built them the largest economy present. Got them the largest military power ever assembled and the most widely spoken international language! If they want to preserve this poor culture then let them have it in peace.”
Since I got red pilled into WN I have periodically wondered how much “White” is a synonym for Anglo. Planning on bringing back up your “capitalism, corporatism or whatever”
after we WHITE ethnics help you get rid of the darks and the Jews? There goes national socialism huh? Back to good old Anglo limited government, markets blah, blah blah?
That comment I quoted from Youtube wasn’t about the “White Anglo vs. White Ethnic” dichotomy. It was about the rhetorical abuse heaped on the culture created by Middle Class, suburban White Americans. The same verbal abuse heaped on suburban White Americans by the Dirtbag Left and the Dissident Right is also heaped on the Purtians, and thus, I thought that comment could also stand in as a defense of Puritan culture, not just White suburban culture, especially since Capitalism is the underlying economic system of both cultures.
That said, I would like to reply to this comment:
I can pretty much guarantee you that in a future White Ethnostate on the North American continent, the economic system would more closely resemble National Capitalism than National Socialism. The culture in America is simply different here than it is in Germany. I’m not saying its better or worse, I’m saying that White Americans are simply more individualist in their orientation, whereas Germans and all the other ethnic groups of Europe are more collectivist. That’s been the case since the founding of America, as acknowledged by elites on both sides of the Atlantic.
More to the point though, the fundamental argument made by the likes of Richard Spencer, Hunter Wallace, Erik Striker, and their ideological cousins on the Dirtbag Left is that White Suburban culture is grotesquely inferior and therefore should not even be defended. They feel the exact same way about the Pilgrims and their culture. Sam Dickson, a speaker at Amren and NPI conferences, once gave a speech at the October 2013 NPI conference in which he basically said he was ashamed of being descended from British settlers because they are “too individualistic.” That’s the kind of crap that major thinkers in the White Nationalist Movement were putting out before Chapo Trap House echoed their rhetoric, and in the same breadth, they fancy themselves defenders of the White Race.
One of the most powerful talking points we have in our arsenal is this: Whites have the right to walk into 7 Eleven, or Cheesecake Factory, or McDonalds, or Disney World, without having to fear for their own safety. We have the right to eat where we want, shop where we want, and travel where we want, without worrying about getting robbed or murdered.
I am not enamored of Puritanism. Making all allowances for varieties of Puritanism it is pretty clear that the roots of Puritanism are in a kind of backsliding into Judaism. Sombart has shown this and so has E Michael Jones. It is this Puritan – Jewish affinity that makes “vulture capitalism” so likely in the anglo sphere. What I want is perhaps better called productivism = private property, profit making but a Henry Ford like valuation of labor and social welfare as opposed to just making money for money which prereformation was called usury – a great sin – until Jewry’s values later triumphed. I don’t know what National Capitalism is in your mind but I think objective capitalisms will always lead to denationalism if given its head. Denationalization is where the money is and capitalists value money, not labor, not society
Now when I say I want National Socialism I am using the term generically. Maybe I should say I want American Fascism. I certainly don’t advocate emulating the 30’s Germans because I am too individualistic for that . However I am also in the camp with
Spencer and Dickson etc. Anglo individualism is anti social as I see it. But I am completely in sync with your opinion of how whites and particularly guys are being treated There is no dividing line there. But if National Capitalism and white nationaism is just another try at libertarian economic individualism, or limitied government. count me out
Look, I am full blood Irish but know way more about the American Revolution than the irish one. As a little kid I played at being one of Washington’s soldiers and my first wife was WASP. I am not phobic about Anglo’s and I know Anglo’s like Greg Johnson and Spencer see economics more or less my way. But I am often left wondering how representative my national socialism or whatever I ought to call it is among the White Nationalists and how traditionalist Anglo WN’S are I will give up WN and go for Bernie style socialism before I go back to Capitalism. I think Capitalism – which is in my mind a synonym for Jewish like Usury – is why we are where we are right now.
Oh yeah, I’m a long time ex Catholic so I don’t mean Usury in a strictly theological sense.
Peace be with you. HOPEFULLY, We whites could all grind out some compromises if we work at it. I think Dickson stresses that If you’re white, come on in. Not Jewish though. Ron Unz types excepted of course
As a .75 ethnic White — is Irish blood an ethnic component? — with only fractional ancestry dating back to colonial times, and even this to Quakers, I applaud this article. Well said, Mr Hampton!
This was an excellent article and one that must be read. What happened to Plymouth Rock should serve as a stark reminder of how badly they hate us and as a warning of how much worse it will get unless we turn the tide of color in this country ASAP. Just look at how far the West has fallen, as indicated by the recently applied legislation in the UK that will deny “non-critical” patients treatment if they’re deemed to be racist or homophobic. This is why government run healthcare can become a death sentence to many, and in the case of a Sanders presidency, it would be those who are members of the Dissident Right.
UK Hospitals To Deny Care To “Racist” Or “Homophobic” Patients
“Patients deemed to be “racist” or “homophobic” will be denied care in NHS Trust hospitals under new rules set to take effect in April.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/uk-hospitals-deny-care-racist-or-homophobic-patients
Ahem. “Possibly”? That is the understatement of the century. That is entirely why they favor it — and, in (((Moldberg)))’s case, why he fabricated the theory in the first place!
His entire verbose oeuvre — all of it, every last word — has only ever had one, single, overarching purpose: to exculpate his own tribe from the blame that they deserve, as the true originators and maintainers of the hegemony of Cultural Marxism. Hence (((Moldberg)))’s notorious “Cathedral” misdirect — his slander on one of the greatest White cultural achievements, by maliciously associating it with the very Leftist hive establishment that his own kin created! (Which, by anyone with a sound understanding of the matter would instead rightly be dubbed a “Synagogue” instead.)
Here is a question that occurs to my white ethnic mind: if Anglo Saxon culture is so cool, why did Anglo’s give up America to the Jews?
They didn’t. The Catholics teamed up with the Jews to bring down the wasp. Look at New England today. It’s not a
A democrat party stronghold because of wasps, it’s a stronghold because of the Irish and the Italian and the Jewish vote. These groups teamed up, sometimes with blacks too, at least on the Jewish case.
Who admitted the Ashkenazi Jews – the world’s premier parasites and 85% of our Jewish population – to the United States beginning in the 1880’s? The Catholics? The Italians? What ethnic elite joined the Jews in taking down National Socialism and fascism? The Catholics? The Italians?
I can tell you who was against letting them in and who lobbied for immigration restriction: wasps.
The fact of the matter is our laws were not equipped to deal with Jews, many of whom are technically white- thus, laws were required to restrict them. Many Jew’s were here from the beginning of America as well, so there is that complication.
The fact also remains that Catholics in the northern cities teamed up with Jews against the wasp elite. The Kennedy family is representative of that. The most conservative areas of America, and the most religious are protestant and British/Germanic (the south, midwest, Appalachia). However, it pleases me to say that non-wasps are coming/ have come to their senses and have assimilated.
There’s a hot take.
Oh, so it was the Catholics who got the Askanzi pit bull into the goyums’ kennel in 1880.? I never kniew we Catholics had that much power Well perhaps we did but I want to see a study of that immigration issue and period. Meanwhile
it pleases me to say that non-wasps are coming/ have come to their senses and have assimilated.
That is not so simple. the non anglo had values which we could use in some proportion today – neighborhood, community, tradition. leisure time, labor theory of value vs capital theory of value. OK we non Anglos were coming from places where we could not survive – especially the irish = to a country that opened its doors so it does seem reasonable that we adopt Anglo individualism despite its drawbacks. The difficulty is the Jews did not assimilate. They went right on being usurious, collaborative jews absent the yamakas By 1999 you could look at a cover of Time Magazine and see the faces of 3 Guys = Greenspan, Summers and Rubin = who looked like an outtake from an an old antisemetic pamphlet= and be told that these 3 “gentlemen” were going to “save the world”. Salvation came in 2008. For me the semophilia embraced by Anglo elites who made that photograph – not to mention world war 2 and Iraq = possible has sundered the assimilation contract. White ethnics no longer OWE white Angloes anything.
Let’s throw the Jews out, get together and make a Nation state for WHITE people
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