Instauration: 
Profound Insights for Troubled Times, Part I

January 1976 cover of Instauration.

5,002 words

Instauration was a race realist newsletter published monthly from 1975 to 2000. I subscribed for the last two years and fondly remember receiving the publication in the mail. Edited by Wilmot Robertson, the author of The Dispossessed Majority, Instauration was a compendium of racial news, happenings, data, history, philosophy, analysis, and more.

Instauration means “the restoration after decay, lapse, or dilapidation.” It was an apt, if unwieldy, title for the newsletter which not only documented the decline and dispossession of whites worldwide but looked for ways to restore our people and our civilization for future generations.

I recently spent the last few weeks looking through back issues, which can be viewed here. For some reason, this listing does not include the issues for 1995, 1996, and most of 1997. Perhaps a Counter-Currents reader has these issues and can offer to add them to the list? 

Several thoughts occurred to me as I read through the back issues.

First, today’s race realist and Dissident Right community owes a debt of gratitude to Wilmot Robertson. Almost all the issues talked about today such as demographics, black on white crime, anti-white portrayals in movies and on television, corrupt media, the harmful effects of feminism, lack of political representation, etc., were discussed in the pages of Instauration. The pre-Internet days were something of a dark age for race realism as dissident outlets were so difficult to find. I should know as my own journey began in the early 1990s. I sensed — in fact, I knew — something was wrong, yet could find no answers in school, the media, politics, bookstores, or conservative magazines. I eventually found my way (see here and here) but would have profited greatly from reading Instauration as a young man.

Today’s dissidents can connect online and on social media (when we are not being censored or banned). But before Twitter, it was hard to find others who thought the same way. Instauration was a genuine community as can be read from the articles and correspondence from readers. “The Safety Valve” was the letters section of the publication and often comprised 4-5 pages of reader comments. I found some of the best content here.

On a personal level, I was in first grade when the first issue came out. Though my mind was on sports, cartoons, and playing with friends at that time, I can still dimly remember some of the names and events discussed in the earliest issues. These memories get less dim as the magazine headed into the early 1980s and then into my high school years and beyond. Some of the targets of Instauration in its earliest days — such as Jimmy Carter and Henry Kissinger — are still with us. 

The following is just a small sampling of the profound insights that Instauration provided. I list the issue date, page and section title for each piece below in case readers would like to get more context for each entry.

Instauration realized early on that whites were being replaced and drew parallels to past civilizations.

For some 600 years — beginning about A.D. 300 — the Maya of the Yucatan Peninsula built great cities and ceremonial centers, developed a complex written language and excelled in astronomy, mathematics and time-keeping. Somewhere between A.D. 1000 and 1250, according to most estimates, the Mayan city states “mysteriously” collapsed — after being conquered by the Toltecs from central Mexico. 

By the time the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the sixteenth century, the civilization of the Maya was little more than an impressive pile of ruins. Someday historians will wonder about the disappearance of the people who built and maintained the great cities of North America. To us there isn’t anything mysterious about “white flight.” And there probably wasn’t anything mysterious about “Mayan flight” to the Mayans. Overwhelmed by alien hordes, the Maya may have simply cut and run, leaving their great cities in the hands of barbarians who were no more capable of maintaining them than they were of building them.

(“Predestined Tijuanization,” March 1979, p. 18)

Jussie Smollett incidents with black divas have a long pedigree in the US. So does fake news from the biased media.

It is now taken as a gold-plated, historic truth that Marian Anderson, the colored diva, was barred by the DAR from singing in Washington’s Constitution Hall in 1939 solely on racial grounds. The Comtesse de Morelos disagrees and quotes from a letter written by Mrs. Erwin Seimes, president general of the National Society of Daughters of the American Revolution: 

]The Marian Anderson incident started over the insistence by her agent for a particular date (April 9, 1939). The fact that Constitution Hall was already engaged was blithely ignored. Shortly, with no request yet in writing to the DAR for this specific date (April 9), letters critical of the DAR began to appear in the press. Comment and adverse criticism gathered like a snowball. Conjecture and untruths were published. The question was raised as to whether the Hall was really engaged. The fact that the DAR magazine had published the previous October (1938), the date April 9, 1939 as booked by the National Symphony, was disregarded. The liberal press always takes license with the truth, under the guise of a free press.[/ind]

(“Stirrings,” March 1979, p. 27)

Instauration covered many cases of black on white crimes, including the grisly details and lack of outrage that greeted each incident. Sadly, this is a trend that has only intensified in the 40 years since the following was written:

Each month, Instauration tries to devote some space to crime in order to jog our readers’ minds about the unsleeping racial confrontation. This time when looking over the clippings sent in from subscribers around the country, we found the same old story — fast-food employees held up, robbed and murdered; women in their seventies and eighties robbed and raped; the bodies of murdered and molested females discovered in shallow roadside graves. It’s true there were a few new twists. One old man was knocked off his bicycle and killed because a young primate thought he was humming too loudly. A blonde concert violinist disappeared during an intermission at the Metropolitan Opera House and her nude body was later found at the bottom of a 70-foot elevator shaft. A housewife was kidnapped in Birmingham, Alabama, in broad daylight and locked in a house of ill repute for three days before she managed to escape by jumping out of a second story window. It goes on month after month after month. As ever, in almost every case, the victim is white and the criminal is a colored Unassimilable. 

(“Creeping Genocide,” October 1980, p. 22)

As I write this in January 2021, many on the Dissident Right are still shell-shocked at the results of November’s presidential election. Perhaps President Trump and his advisors should have been reading the back issues of Instauration instead of pandering to blacks for a percentage or two more of the non-white vote. Then, as now, elections are not decided by fiscal policy.

The Reagan landslide showed politicians that the minority vote is not all that crucial, that more and more Americans are learning not to be conned by the media, that inflation is a more important issue than welfare. It should have taught politicians the greatest lesson of all — that the Reagan victory depended in large part on something never discussed over the air or in print — namely that Reagan was perceived to be less pro-minority than Carter. In other words, the blacks, Hispanics and Unassimilable Minorities may indeed have swung the election, but in a totally unexpected way. The more antiblack and anti-Hispanic a presidential candidate was thought to be, the more votes he garnered. This may be by far the most important message of the 1980 campaign.

The fate of the American Majority will not be decided by a return to fiscal conservatism and the free market. Its fate will depend on a nationwide revival of white race consciousness. In this respect the Reagan victory may actually be a defeat for the Majority because it will delay the hour of confrontation, which alone will force us to get off our knees and fight for our survival. 

(“‘Twas a Famous Victory, But . . .” December 1980, p. 6)

The Dissident Right is correct to complain about doxings, which result in lost jobs and employment opportunities. But the government used to be much more involved in infiltrating and destroying any groups that advocated for whites. All dissident publications and groups should realize that the incoming Biden-Harris administration is certainly not above entrapping pro-white activists and destroying their lives.

The public is learning faster than slow thinking Majority activists that whenever the latter are arrested for conspiracy, it is not cherchez la femme, but cherchez the informer. The Klansmen and Nazis who killed those five would-be Klan killers in North Carolina had an informer from the Treasury Department in their midst who had been urging them on for months. Viola Liuzzo, the civil rights Joan of Arc from Detroit, was gunned down in Mississippi way back in 1965 by a passing car in which Gary Rowe, an FBI informer, was riding with his Klan pigeons. There is such a strong possibility Rowe himself fired the fatal shot that the children of Mrs. Liuzzo (one of them a jailbird and a drugbird) are suing the government for $2 million. The Gerhardt brothers of Indiana are now serving a jail sentence for a conspiracy that was suggested to them by a fed from one of those Cointel groups. Just recently six more ‘Nazis’ were arrested in North Carolina for conspiracy to blow up a large petroleum facility, a shopping mall and a large part of downtown Greensboro. Here again the egger-on was an agent of that good ole entrapping Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

(“Cointel Marches On,” June 1981, p. 15)

You can buy Greg Johnson’s White Identity Politics here.

The readers of Instauration no doubt loved the nation their ancestors had created. But even 40 years ago, they realized they no longer had a country of their own. The events of 2020 have yet again shown that it was a publication ahead of its time.

Nationalism. It’s all very well to accent nationalism in a homogeneous society because then nationalism is based on race. But nationalism in a multiracial society is based on geography, history, language, assorted institutions, everything but race. Today, since we are an oppressed people in a country no longer ours, it makes no sense at all for Majority members to be nationalistic. We would simply be supporting a nation that, as far as our interests are concerned, has become a foreign nation. The American nationalist of today is by a perverse twist of history either a knowing or an unknowing internationalist. 

Patriotism. A patriot is someone who loves his own country, not someone else’s. Since Majority members no longer have a country, how can they be patriots? They will, of course, be asked to be patriots because their patriotism can be used to help prop up a nation which now belongs lock, stock and barrel to the liberal-minority coalition. If they fall for this line, they will not be patriots but patsies. There was a time in America when patriotism was not the last refuge of a scoundrel, but a fundamental requisite of good citizenship. Today, patriotism is the last refuge of those Majority members stupid enough or corrupt enough to play the enemy’s game. 

(“A Majority Lexicon,” January 1982,  p. 13)

The readers of Instauration didn’t just complain about anti-white movies, they pointed out — often in a funny way — the hypocrisies of those black and brown saints we are now required to worship.

The reactions to the showing of the antiwhite Gandhi film in South Africa have been varied, but it is strange that no one seems to have questioned why it is being shown here at all. Would the Indian government permit the showing of South African films in India? One also wonders why the Indians couldn’t produce the film themselves, and instead had to call upon the nasty British Imperialists to produce it for them. There is the terrible incident when the gentle saint himself was ejected from the white compartment of a train by a brutish Afrikaner (who would more probably have been an English-speaking South African). But why was he in that compartment? Why, indeed, was he on the train at all? In India he urged his fellow countrymen not to travel on the magnificent railway system (since rundown) the British exploiters had provided for them. His reason for this was characteristically “Eastern” and would have earned any Western political leader an indefinite stay in a lunatic asylum. It was that good travels slowly and evil travels fast, and because the white man’s trains were fast, they were by definition evil! Nevertheless, he never hesitated to travel by train himself. He similarly urged Indians not to attend British hospitals in India, which he quite charmingly described as brothels and the white nurses as prostitutes, though he quickly (not slowly) made his way to the nearest of them when he was stricken by appendicitis. (The British surgeon operated only after Gandhi had signed a statement absolving him from any possible consequences.) At the bottom of it all there lies the brown man’s envy of the white man and his marvels. Members of the brown race could no more invent and build the white man’s railway engines, motor cars and aeroplanes than they could travel to the moon and back. They therefore have the need to conceal their sense of squirming inferiority under a cloak of saintliness and moral superiority.

(“The Safety Valve,” December 1983, p. 3)

In 2019, every one of the five major beauty pageant winners was a black woman. This affirmative action started in the early 1980s and was noticed by Instauration readers immediately.

Ever since Paris found the golden apple inscribed “to the fairest,” and the goddesses lined up to compete, we have had beauty contests in one form or another. Blacks or black-white hybrids amounted to 8% of the contestants and 20% of the finalists in the recent Miss America Pageant, although they are only 12% of the population. Mathematically, the odds are pretty steep against that 8% winning the top two positions, yet that is what happened. It should be obvious to everyone that the outcome was determined by politics, not aesthetics. Even before the media event began, ‘speculation’ had been strong that this would be the year of the black. Apparently, the judges cast just about all their votes for the two black finalists to make sure one of them would come out on top. That the other one came in second exposed this strategy.

(“The Safety Valve,” December 1983, p. 4)[/ind]

While there was always no shortage of bad news to report, Instauration made sure to highlight white men who risked their lives to help other white people avoid being victimized by black mobs.

Instaurationists have complained to the editor that the magazine should replace its annual feature, “Majority Renegade of the Year,” with a “Majority Hero of the Year.” This is a difficult assignment because the former outnumber the latter 1,000 to 1. Nevertheless, after much searching, we have come up with a Majority Hero for 1983. He is John Ayers, 34, a Florida repairman. Early one September evening Angela Vivier, a clerk at a Miami shopping center, decided to take a shortcut on her way home from work. As she drove down a dark stretch of road through a black neighborhood, a car suddenly pulled out in front of her. After the crash, Angela was unable to start her car. Slowly the animals gathered. One of them reached inside and tore a bracelet off Angela’s wrist. Another grabbed her purse. A third started to climb in through the window that Angela had rolled down in her vain request for help and could not roll back up. The scene was all set for the increasingly common American ritual known as the black-on-white gang rape when John Ayers drove by in his van. He fought his way through the mob, forced open Angela’s damaged door and half-dragged, half-escorted her back to his van. It cost him several front teeth, a fractured jaw, and severe cuts and gashes on various parts of his body. But they made it back to his van and drove off. “I didn’t do much,” explained Ayers from his hospital bed. “I just stopped and drove her away. I fall pretty far short of a hero.” What else can we call a 5’5, 160-lb. white guy who rescues a white gal from the clutches of a howling mob of 50 to 100 anthropoids? 

(“Majority Hero of the Year,” December 1983, p. 18)

Many worry that Daniel Craig will be the last white James Bond. Several rumors have a black — even a black woman — being cast as the next Bond. If so, that will be the end of yet another great institution created by and for white people. 

As Eldridge Cleaver grumpily pointed out in that mandatory college freshman textbook, Soul on Ice, James Bond is indeed a symbol of Scottish/Anglo-Saxon/Nordic/white (choose one) supremacy. It’s quite possible that the ongoing popularity of the Bond film series (now 21 years old) is a sub-rosa reflection of the Majority’s need for morale boosters in these darkening times. Bond subtly reminds us that courage and cunning, when finally unleashed, can get us out of some pretty desperate situations. As we’re presently in the midst of the most desperate situation we have ever collectively faced, going to a Bond movie becomes something of an act of faith, affirmation and optimism. 

(“The Safety Valve,” April 1984, p. 2)

One of the typical excuses for black dysfunction used by journalists, academics, politicians, and black race activists is that whites were or still are violent too. The “wild west” is often trotted out as an example of violent whites. Like most of what we hear from the media about race, this is false as well. Instauration is always a good source for setting the record straight:

A misleading and exculpatory trick of mediacrats when writing about the contemporary crime plague is to drag out the old cliche, “violence is as American as apple pie” — as if raping and murdering an 83-year-old widow in a New York apartment is on the same moral level as a gunfight between two outlaws in Dodge City. A history professor, Roger McGrath, has looked into the myth of a congenitally violent America and come up with some answers that should give pause, a long pause, to the apple pie crowd. Examining the crime records of two California mining towns — Aurora and Bodie during their boom days, Professor McGrath concluded in his new book, Violence on the Frontier (University of California Press, $16.95): 

The violence and lawlessness that visited the trans-Sierra frontier . . . took special forms: warfare between Indians and whites, stagecoach robbery, vigilantism, and gunfights. These activities bear little or no relation to the violence and lawlessness that pervade American society today. Serious juvenile offenses, crimes against the elderly and weak, rape, robbery, burglary and theft were either nonexistent or of little significance. . . . There seems to be little justification for blaming contemporary American violence on violence and lawlessness in our frontier heritage. [/ind]

The gunfights, McGrath found, were over matters of honor, generally provoked by insults or challenges to machismo –­ about the same causes responsible for knightly jousting in Medieval times and duels thereafter. Much of the violence was limited to consenting adults, and there was no exaggerated sympathy for the few real criminals and no exaggerated use of due process to short-circuit justice. If innocent men were killed and the lawyers got the killers off on a technicality, leading citizens would get together and hang the murderers on the nearest tree. Men who used foul language in front of women might end up in jail. No minority members were attacked or bothered, although there were plenty of Chinese and Mexicans. In the five years of the Bodie boom, not one crime was committed by a youth. In comparison, youth gangs in 1980 committed 351 murders in Los Angeles. Half of the robberies in Bodie were stagecoach holdups and the annual robbery rate was 84 per 100,000 population, compared to the 1980 rate in New York of 1,140. Bodie’s burglary rate was 128; 1980 New York’s 2,661. To sum it up, America was a rather nonviolent country even in its supposedly most violent areas and supposedly most violent times. 

(“Cultural Catacombs,” December 1984, p. 20)

Just like today, being a race realist in the 1980s meant keeping certain views hidden from friends and co-workers. Pointing out the emperor has no clothes still has grave consequences for your social and professional life.

What’s the worst thing about being an Instaurationist? The knowledge that most of your friends consider you odd for expressing thoughts that, in the wrong hands, could hurt you. These friends don’t understand that a body that doesn’t react is a corpse. 

(“The Safety Valve,” November 1985, p. 2)

Instauration was an underground newsletter but did get some media notice when conservative writer Joe Sobran mentioned the publication in his newspaper column. Below, a reader responds to criticisms of race realism from conservatives who flinch from the reality of race.

Joseph Sobran, a nationally syndicated columnist, has recently written an article which is something of a breakthrough. After pointing out that all the big cities of America are a whole lot more dangerous than those of Europe -­- Gaddafi or no Gaddafi — and mentioning that whites in America particularly have to fear the minorities, he goes on to say, “though the liberal bromide tells us that prejudice is the product of ignorance, the truth is that racial antagonism usually comes from personal experience.” However, he feels that Instauration “seems to rule out the most normal thing in intergroup relations, mixed feelings,” the point being that reasonable people all recognize good qualities in some members of other groups. He also feels we should be able to “touch the very conscience of those who are being criticized.” It is true that most of us remember a cheerful old black servant, an amusing Indian we did business with, or a cultured Japanese. But exceptions confirm rules; they do not invalidate them. Different ethnic groups can only live together with any degree of harmony on the basis of hierarchy and division of labor — and even then, miscegenation will eventually undermine the work of civilization (see Elmer Pendell, Why Civilizations Self-Destruct). The alternative is separate development for human groups on the basis of eugenics, together with a class system based on instinctive preference. Apartheid in South Africa is a prime target because, despite its faults, it offers an alternative to the creation of a miscegenated, manipulated biomass. 

(“The Safety Valve,” September 1986, p. 2)

In that same issue, Wilmot Robertson further addressed those columnists taking aim at Instauration (and at Sobran for daring to mention the newsletter somewhat respectfully) with some very blunt talk about the reality of race and the failure of multiracialism:

We end with a question for the Cohens, Cockburns, Chapmans and Alters: What, gentlemen, do you think a civilization is — a tabula rasa, a blank blackboard on which to write slanders, a social order whose only function is to let minorities worm their way into power over majorities? Civilizations and cultures are healthy only as long as they have a monoracial core. When the core disintegrates, when other races move in to get a piece of the action, the center, as Yeats so neatly put it, no longer holds. Multiracialism is a mirage. It can live quite sumptuously off the capital accumulated over centuries of monoracial creativity. But only for a short time. The maggots are soon proliferating as fast as the ‘deals’ that push a totally undeserving few into the wildest heights of unearned wealth and unmerited power. The play goes on and the production becomes ever more lavish, and the termites underneath the stage become busier and busier. Today those of us whose ears are sharp enough to hear the termites at work and who try to warn our people of what is happening are branded hate-mongers and criminals. Tomorrow, if there is a tomorrow, we will be called prophets. 

(“Talking Back,” September 1986, p. 9)

Instauration was well established when the first salvos of the war between neoconservatives and paleoconservatives were launched in the mid-1980s. The outlet was more sympathetic to the paleos, but correctly noted that they would fail unless they confronted the reality of race:

Neither [Norman] Podhoretz nor [University of Michigan history professor Steven J.] Tonsor will ever admit that there is only one kind of conservatism fit for Americans and that is a racial conservatism based on the interests and unique capabilities of Americans of Northern European descent. At present this kind of conservatism has been consigned to the underground of America, where it burrows around like a mole. Until it develops eyes again and reemerges into the light, American conservatism will remain what liberals, neo-cons and Reaganites define it to be, which is the same as saying Dr. Tonsor’s brand of conservatism, no matter how sweet, how tolerant, how fair and how Christian, will continue to retreat and its ranks continue to thin until there is no one left to hold up its banner except Tonsor himself — and Russell Kirk. 

(“Kosher Conservatives Are Counterattacked — But Weakly,” September 1986, p. 17)

Television and Hollywood have long been anti-white. The following needs no deep commentary or analysis:

Yesterday I saw the movie, Split, on TV. James Whitmore was begging a black lady, who rented one of his apartments, to have sex with him. Though he had a machine gun pointed at her, she refused. So he killed her. The murder was presented as a white-on-black racist crime.

The two-hour debut of L.A. Law had a rich white kid joining a couple of poor white kids in a gang rape of guess who — a middle-aged black woman dying of cancer! Life, some wiseacre once said, imitates art. Today, if that same person had a TV set, he would have to say that art, or what passes for art, turns life upside down.

(“Satcom Mike Dishes It Out,” January 1987, p. 25)

I have noticed that there are usually more blacks on stage than in the audience during a country music concert. Once again, Instauration was way ahead of its time in noticing a disturbing trend as can be evidenced by a gay black rapper, Lil Nas X, having a hit country song, “Old Town Road,” in 2019. 

Well, country music fans, our next to-last refuge from the blacks has entered the final stage of “integration.” I say “next-to-last” because we still have bluegrass music, unless that’s a little too “down-home” for y’all. At the Country Music Awards show, viewers were treated to no less than three performances featuring blacks. Alabama whites must have been truly flattered when the group which bears that state’s name teamed up with a black Alabamian, Lionel Ritchie, to sing current country hit, “Deep River Woman.” Next came a duet with Earl Thomas Conley and Anita Pointer of the black Pointer Sisters. It was a relief to note that the salt-and-pepper duo refrained from hugging and kissing while acknowledging the audience’s applause. Finally, there was a gospel number by two whites (I don’t recall their names) backed up by black gospel singers. The gospel combination could perhaps be defended as having some cultural authenticity, given the origins of this genre. The other black performances, however, fly in the face of country music tradition and would seem to indicate that what we, out of habit, call country music has reached a point where it is less and less distinguishable from any other form of American popular music. 

(“Satcom Mike Dishes It Out,” March 1987, p. 25)

In the pages of Instauration — and perhaps nowhere else in those days — readers were free to express their true feelings about America’s racial realities. No doubt this writer expresses views held by many whites forced into close contact with blacks:

I live in a suburb of San Diego, 25 freeway minutes from the city center. Huge supermarkets are open until midnight. You can find anything anytime. I love it . . . and perhaps the single thing I love the most about it and I’m not at all ashamed to proclaim from whatever rooftop may be at hand is the fact that there is not a black person living within probably five miles of where I live, maybe ten miles. After being forced to live with them in prison and for nine months in their neighborhoods out here, I can easily say that it is because of their absence that the stores stay open late and are not battened down with bars, that the laundromats are clean and the machines not rifled, that the public phones all work and the walls of buildings are not smeared with their offal, that police are practically never seen, that neighborhoods are quiet, civilized places where people do not live in fear of theft or assault either upon their persons or their senses, all of which contributes to a general feeling of friendliness and trust which, of course, is the exact opposite of what I’ve experienced within “their” environs. The reasons for this contrast, whatever they may be, are completely irrelevant to me. I am simply so glad to never see them or be subjected to their “culture” that I could, and occasionally do, shout with joy. It is as if a tremendous weight has been lifted from my consciousness . . . as if extra energy has been given me simply through not having to put up with them or deal with them in any way.

(“Life Without Blacks,” September 1987, p. 15.)

Part two of this article will focus on the last decade of Instauration.

Peter Bradley writes from northern Virginia.

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