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The following is the video and transcript of F. Roger Devlin speaking during the “Battle of Ideas” panel discussion at this year’s Counter-Currents retreat. His subject is the problem of winning ordinary conservatives over to the cause of White Nationalism. The title is editorial.
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We are a small group of highly committed people with ambitious aims whose achievement will require the mobilization of great masses of our people. For this reason, the first thing to say about our battle of ideas is that it will have to be fought on more than one level. We have distinct audiences to reach. I have no doubt that there is still plenty of interesting work to be done at the highest theoretical level, but that is not our most pressing task.
To find out what is, we must ask what is preventing the great mass of white Trump voters from getting behind us — what is motivating them to go on supporting the Republican Party in preference to people who could actually get them out of the dangerous situation they are in. In part, it is a matter of sheer ignorance. Many, perhaps most, of our potential constituents have simply never heard of Counter-Currents or American Renaissance or The Occidental Observer even after all the years of work we have put in. Of course, it is hard for us to be heard above the din made by the dominant ideology, or even by its officially permitted so-called conservative opposition. But this is not the whole problem, either.
The disproportion of resources between ourselves and the other side is so great that our potential supporters are likely to hear of us at first not directly, but via our enemies’ attacks upon us. They will hear what the other side’s patented “extremism” experts say we say — long before they actually hear what we have to say.
Here’s a recent example: Andrew Torba, founder of the free-speech Twitter alternative Gab, discovered that the top two results of a Google search on his name were both an Anti-Defamation League (ADL) attack upon him. In the top spot was an ad for which the ADL had paid Google; in the second was the exact same page supposedly dished up independently by Google’s own algorithm. This is what wealthy organizations can do when they go up against a guy struggling to run a website out of his home.
First impressions are often decisive, simply because the ordinary man does not have the time or sufficient motive to check their correctness. The other side is well aware of the enormous advantage they enjoy in being able to reach most people first, and if we want to understand the real battle of ideas in which we are engaged, we had better start by taking a close look at what they get to people first with.
You Can buy F. Roger Devlin’s Sexual Utopia in Power here.
Obviously, it is not statistics showing that the races of mankind all have identical crime rates or IQ scores, after all. It’s not careful sociological studies demonstrating that Jews exercise little influence over American society. No such information exists to counter the information we are presenting. In other words, they know they cannot beat us by doing what we do better than we do it.
Instead, what they hit people with is emotional and moral manipulation, bristling with suggestive but content-free words like “hate” and “extremism” — crude stuff, but well-adapted for the modest ends in view, namely biasing the minds of ordinary but poorly-informed people with little obvious incentive to invest time and effort in inquiring farther. Clearly, no rational argument is airtight enough, and no empirical study thorough enough, to counter such strategically-placed manipulation.
Nor would it be very effective for us to do precisely what they do, such as for example by trying to argue that the other side are the real haters, even if that happens to be true. (I absolutely believe it is; there is a good deal of psychological projection involved in anti-white rhetoric.)
If we study the ordinary white Trump voter to see what is preventing him from supporting those who would actually do something for him, we find that where it is not merely a lack of information; it is likely to be a matter of moral misgivings. Pro-white organizations sound to the average white person as if they would involve unfairness to other groups, which certainly do have their own legitimate interests to defend as well.
The first thing I would point out to such a prospective supporter is that whites seem to be the only race which faces a hurdle of this kind. Other groups organize to advance their own interests without a second thought, as if it were the only natural thing to do. If you convince most non-whites that something is in their group’s interests, they are likely to support it without asking too many questions about its effects on others.
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant believed that a leading source of moral evil in the world was man’s tendency to make exceptions in his own favor. For example, the common thief is not a principled Communist opposed to all property rights. He, no less than the person he robs, wants his own property to remain secure. He merely wants to exempt himself from the general duty to respect property. The promise-breaker does not want to abolish the custom of making promises; otherwise, he could gain no advantage from the trust of others. He just wants the freedom to break his own promises.
In our own time, the Jewish academic philosopher Michael Levin, in his book Why Race Matters, has suggested that Europeans are uniquely high in a trait he calls, for the sake of brevity, Kantianism. He is referring to this conscientiousness about not making exceptions in one’s own favor. He even cites some empirical evidence to show that Europeans are the most Kantian race: more disposed this way than other peoples. And if that is true, as I suspect it is, it seems to me the likeliest explanation of why so many whites hesitate to take their own side in a dispute. All the propaganda about white advocacy being equivalent to “hate” could probably not even gain a purchase on the minds of our people if it were not for this unusual moral sensitivity.
The average white man has scruples about taking his own side in a sense very close to the technical meaning of “scruples” in Christian moral theology, namely believing something is a sin when it isn’t. He thinks expressing racial solidarity would necessarily involve an injustice toward other races when in fact it does not. We have never advocated for anything we have not been willing to grant reciprocally to others.
Once our potential supporter has overcome such scruples, it will not be hard to show him what is the likely outcome of a competition in which every group seeks its own advantage — except one, which tries to benefit everyone equally. Obviously, the universal-minded group will be taken advantage of by all the others. At that point, America’s current racial situation suddenly becomes easy to understand — and I suspect that ears will also open quickly to hear our already strong empirical arguments concerning race and the Jewish question.
* * *
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14 comments
Why aren’t more progressives racial progressives–that is, eugenicists?
Dr. Devlin is an impressive man. I enjoyed his talk and getting to meet him.
He is indeed. Any Counter Currents reader would benefit from his brilliant book “Sexual Utopia In Power.”
Thanks for the recommendation. I’ve been meaning to get it on e-book (even though I like to have hard copies), since that’s the most convenient way to keep all my stuff always on my person. I need to go ahead and make the buy.
Mr. Devlin’s book is the one from WN circles I’d most recommend to women who want to know more about how we got here, the warping of male-female polarity from normal traditions to the dementosexual grotesquerie of now, but don’t quite know where to start their search.
I just ordered it. That sounds superb.
A GREAT book loaded with common-sense observations. Buy this book; you won’t be sorry.
Just did! 🙂
Roger is strongly recommended.
James, thanks for your help at check-in and all kinds of other miscellany that weekend!
It was my pleasure, Cyan! That was a memorable weekend, well worth the trip.
Supposing John/Jane Q Normie goes to a typical Beltway Conservatism Inc group and says, “Look, I’m fed up with the anti-White indoctrination at my job and in my kids’ school. What can you do for me and my family?”
The standard Conservatism Inc response would be, “What! If your boss wants to conduct indoctrination in the workplace, that’s his business. No one owes you a living. If you do not like it, then you can quit and bear the consequences. That’s Muh Free Enterprise. Shut up and vote Republican!”
Now supposing John/Jane Q comes to the Dissident Right and asks the same question. Well, it would be be nice for the Dissident Right to respond thusly:
“Yes, we understand, you resent the workplace indoctrination. The reason for this indoctrination is the anti-White agenda. The answer to this is in White Nationalism. And here is what we can do to get you onboard with the program.”
Some examples:
Pro-White information which would counter the indoctrination in the workplace (and in the schools, the media, the public square, the etc., etc.).
Advice on how to launch lawsuits against, say, a boss who pushes workplace indoctrination.
Perhaps a job service for such workers who find themselves unemployed.
Something practical such workers could do, like sending in samples of anti-White agitprop and to which Dissident Rightists could provide responses. Or online chat groups for White workers to share experiences and activism. Or just contributing money.
The point is, for John/Jane to take their own (White) side in this struggle, their side (that is, the Dissident Right) has to take the side of the Normie family. The Normies have to know there is a larger organization out there which has their back.
Many, perhaps most, of our potential constituents have simply never heard of Counter-Currents …
A prerequisite would be a much more effective Dissident Right propaganda campaign to reach the wider White audience. This is really a separate topic, to be addressed in some other posting.
Three days ago, I wrote a comment to the Kevin MacDonald post which is directly on topic here, too:
I’ve been preaching a variation of this since the 80s. Western man is ethical man – modally more so than any other race. That is both our glory, and, perhaps, our downfall. Whites have to be persuaded to be even minimally ethnocentric, while all other peoples are naturally maximally or near-maximally ethnocentric. It is a huge evolutionary disadvantage for us – the chief reason we are ineluctably headed to extinction if we do nothing (ie, absent acts of conscious racial resistance).
Of course we have morality on our side, which is one reason I have always HATED Nazi LARPing (and other overt expressions of aggressive White Power: someday such may be needed, as they already are in our Third World-dominated prisons, but we’re not at that stage of disintegration yet nationwide, and we certainly were not even close in the 1970s-90s). Such behavior simply announces that a) white preservationists {WPs} are moral cretins, and b) for the more discerning but still mainstream conservatives, we are fundamentally unserious. For this reason I even used to sometimes cringe when I’d receive my copy of Instauration back in the 80s/90s (“Primate Watch” – really? I get it, but still …. tactically speaking …).
Because of our collective inaction over all those ‘lost’ decades since the 60s (when the race war on white America formally began), however, the moral case for white preservationism is now both more necessary, and more difficult to make. When I was fighting the immigration invasion, starting in the mid-late 1970s, and later affirmative action (and the ongoing academic/cultural de-legitimizing of white America), the prowhite case was morally unimpeachable in part because the solutions were so morally unproblematic.
From a true Christian standpoint: 1) people have a right to (heterosexually) marry – but not necessarily to anyone they wish to (eg, in this case, to people of different races); 2) nations have the right to restrict foreign entry and/or settlement based on national, environmental, economic and other preservationist criteria; 3) societies have no obligation to tolerate pathological criminal predation by minority groups, nor is racial integration or ‘diversity’ any kind of moral imperative; 4) majorities are under no obligation to foreswear teaching their own histories to their own children simply to be ‘inclusive’ towards children from cultural out-groups, let alone to discriminate against themselves to provide special privileges to less meritorious members of other groups; and finally, 5) peoples have no obligation to maximize the fecundity of alien peoples via socialist inter-group wealth transfers.
IOWs, miscegenation, affirmative action, immigration, diversification, socialism and multiculturalism can all be banned or “not-maximized” without violating any aspect of ecumenical Christian ethics. We are also under no moral edict to maintain in perpetuity Puerto Rico as a territory, or, indeed, Hawaii as a state. Ridding ourselves of both would be good for white genetic and political interests.
The moral problem we now face, however, is how WPs should act (ethically) post-invasion. Saying we could have done something to prevent the current impasse from having arisen is obviously different from saying we may do what is necessary to return to the status quo ex ante. Yes, we can still eliminate affirmative action, halt immigration, ban CRT, etc. But the invasion was. The problem we face is that we must justify taking hard, coercive measures to rearrange our circumstances so they resemble those we had pre-invasion. Developing the ethical case for doing so is an astronomically more difficult task than if we’d never allowed matters to get so far out of our control in the first place. That is, even if many whites might wish we’d never allowed our treasonous ‘leaders’ to work for half a century replacing us, much of that replacement has now occurred, and undoing it will not be remotely as unproblematic (according to standard white/Christian morality) as originally preventing it would have been. “A stitch in time saves nine …”
I think the biggest mistake for pro-White advocacy was hitching its wagon to the falling start of right-wing ideas. What the White moral compass points to is ‘fairness’ and we could use ‘fairness’ to get Whites to act in their own interests without requiring they openly embrace pro-White politics. The problem is that pro-White positions are – at least at this time – tied up with right-wing ideas that most White people want very little to do with. It’s no more difficult to make the case for ‘fairness’ today than it was 30 years ago, the only difference is that today, arguments for ‘fairness’ between the races are more likely to help Whites than non-Whites. But right-wingers are not only not interested in ‘fairness’, they openly scoff and mock the very idea of ‘fairness’. Instead of fighting the idea of ‘fairness’ White advocacy should have been emphasizing it because, in truth, Whites and non-Whites have very different ideas about what constitutes ‘fairness’ and realizing this could help racially awaken many Whites.
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