Who runs this house? We run this house. The National Policy Institute’s conference this past week was a celebration of the alt-Right’s triumphs, and the Leftist reaction to it shows that they know their time is running out.

There’s really no other way to say it: half of America (and the West) is having a collective nervous breakdown. The 48 percent of Americans who believed in safe spaces, microaggressions and a Hillary Clinton landslide were handed the rudest of awakenings two weeks ago, when racist sexist homophobe Donald Trump ascended to the White House on the backs of the people who actually keep the country running. Their response has been to cry, whine and take to the streets in impotent displays of defiance, oblivious to how their antics are turning more and more Americans against them.

Case in point: “Become Who We Are / 2016,” the National Policy Institute’s conference in Washington, D.C. this past weekend. All day Saturday, several hundred young goys in tailored suits and sharp haircuts converged on the Ronald Reagan building to drink cocktails, watch speeches and bask in the glory of electoral triumph. Outside the walls, antifas and hippies banged their drums in anger that the planned genocide of Whites has been postponed, if not averted entirely.

While I’m hardly a long-time attendee of identitarian conferences, I’ve watched a pronounced shift in their tenor and attendance over the past two years. Last year’s American Renaissance conference, the first one I ever went to, had the feel of a family reunion, while NPI’s two previous conferences, in October 2015 and March of this year, featured increasingly younger and hipper attendees. The last AmRen in May had more in common with a college party than the stereotype of a White identity conference.

However, with increasing political influence comes Leftist pushback. NPI’s Friday night gala, cutely titled “IRL” and featuring none other than ex-reality TV star and Juggalo junk magnet Tila Tequila as a guest of honor, almost didn’t happen. Last Wednesday, when Richard Spencer emailed us the bar where the gala would take place—the Hamilton, no relation to the anti-White hipster musical of the same name—Leftists successfully threatened the venue into shutting NPI down. Spencer’s attempt to move the meetup to the nearby Trump International Hotel was also scuttled after antifas threatened to swarm it.

We ended up assembling in Chevy Chase outside a Metro station, an inadvertent nod to the failures of globalism: on the way to NPI’s last conference, a friend and I had gotten stuck on the Metro for twenty minutes while workers cleared a dead body out of the tracks. One of Spencer’s security guys led us to a nearby Italian restaurant, where he’d reserved an upstairs room under the name “Griffin Family Reunion.” Unfortunately, the antifas somehow found us.

About an hour into the dinner, a horde of Leftists burst into the restaurant and stormed towards our room, screaming “NO K.K.K., NO FASCIST U.S.A.!” and physically attacking waitstaff, while onlookers and their children stared in horror. NPI’s security held the attackers at bay until the police physically removed them from the building, though they managed to spray something foul-smelling on Spencer before they were kicked out. Unwilling to disperse them from the neighborhood, the police let the antifas camp outside to do little gay dances and whine about a bunch of “Nazis” eating steak, forcing the waitstaff to lock the doors of the restaurant to keep them out. When we were done, we had to depart through the back door, scrambling for the Metro and our cars.

Friday night turned out to be the antifas’ high water mark. While the conference proper drew a protest crowd of several hundred people, the Reagan building’s federal security kept them far away from where we were meeting. Aside from Emily Youcis and her cameraman getting roughhoused by antifas and a couple of them walking by the conference hall to heckle us, little happened. It was a marked contrast from NPI’s last autumn conference, where masked antifas actively camped outside the National Press Club at night to stalk and beat any attendee who left the building. Then again, considering that gale-force winds and sheets of rain swept through D.C. during the protests, Kek was clearly smiling on the alt-Right.

The actual event was spectacular. I had the opportunity to meet Arktos Editor-in-Chief Jason Reza Jorjani and Scottish alt-Right YouTuber Millennial Woes, both of whom delivered speeches. They appeared alongside NPI and AmRen stalwarts such as Jared Taylor, Peter Brimelow, Sam Dickson, F. Roger Devlin, Kevin MacDonald, and Spencer himself, whose speech ended the conference and fired up the crowd. Prominent non-speakers in attendance included Pax Dickinson, Chuck Johnson, Emily Youcis, and Red Ice hosts Henrik Palmgren, Lana Lokteff and Reinhard Wolff, while The Right Stuff’s Michael Enoch made a surprise appearance during dinner.

Also making an appearance in force was the mainstream media, with dozens of reporters around and a press conference midway through. I personally ended up talking to CNN, The Atlantic, The New York Times and NPR, lending my massive popularity to give these failing institutions a boost. While Pax and others questioned the wisdom of having MSM reporters inside—particularly after a Vice reporter was kicked out for surreptitiously taking photos of attendees in an attempt to dox them—their presence at least provided an entertaining press conference, with attendees heckling and booing the gallery every time they asked a dumb question.

While Mike Cernovich recently accused Spencer and NPI of being controlled opposition due to several of the attendees jokingly making Roman salutes at the end of the conference, I have to pour cold water on this notion. The alt-Right is increasingly driven by young men who enjoy trolling for trolling’s sake and getting a rise out of the normies. Hell, our nametags even had pictures of Pepe the Frog on them. While I can see why Cernovich might think the stunt was dumb, it wasn’t motivated by anything other than a desire to offend the MSM’s sensibilities. There are certainly feds who have infiltrated the alt-Right—he’s right to warn us on that front—but Spencer and NPI aren’t among them.

“Become Who We Are / 2016” was by far the best conference put on by NPI to date. Richard Spencer deserves credit for assembling a great lineup of speakers and keeping the show going despite the Left’s attempts to shut him down. The increasing confidence of and interest in the alt-Right—and the continuing meltdown of the Left—shows that nationalism is here to stay, in America and the rest of the West.