This essay is based on a speech given at NPI’s 2016 winter conference, Identity Politics; first posted at Radix.

The Donald Trump phenomenon is amazing. I’ve never seen such enthusiasm for a politician—ever. His rallies are overflowing with emotion. This scares a lot of people because it conjures up images of populism, and even fascism. There’s something about crowds of cheering White people that terrifies America’s elites, especially when the speaker is criticizing their long-standing immigration policies. We have become inured to an arrangement in which major party candidates are vetted by the media and the donor class before being put up for election. It’s a top-down system that more resembles an oligarchy than a democracy. Donald Trump has not been vetted. Trump has said some incredible things—things I never thought I would hear from a politician with a real chance to win it all: birthright citizenship, Mexican criminality, a moratorium on admitting Muslims, an immigration policy that meets the needs of Americans, to name but a few. Without Trump in the GOP field, we’d be choosing between candidates’ methods of balancing the budget. For years, the system has been stacked against our movement, to put it mildly. We have been doing our best to figure out how to get our issues before the public—issues like immigration and the demographic transformation of the United States. We ask: How could it happen? How could a political movement arise that would ignite the imaginations of White America, depose the corrupt donor class in the Republican Party and the corrupt politicians in Congress, and generate a populist uprising among those Peter Brimelow calls the “historic American nation”?

Among the forces stacked against us, most prominent have been the mainstream media, which reflect academic culture and political culture generally. The media, academia, and the bureaucracy have been engaged in a top-down revolution, in which the moral and intellectual high ground has been seized by people hostile to the traditional peoples and cultures of the West.

The top-down nature of this revolution cannot be overemphasized. There was never a demand by a majority, or even something close to a majority, from any Western country for a complete transformation, to the point that White people will soon be minorities in societies they had dominated for hundreds and, in the case of Europe, many thousands of years.

The mainstream media environment is closed off to our message that Whites have interests, just like everybody else; that identifying as a White person who wants to advance these interests is normal and natural; that race is real; that there are real racial differences in traits important for success in a modern society and that there is no magic wand to change these traits; and finally and most importantly, that immigration and multiculturalism carry huge costs in terms of social cohesion, social conflict, trust, and willingness to contribute to public goods, like healthcare, welfare, and public infrastructure.

The only type of person who could get through this elite consensus is someone who is, first of all, a celebrity, but also wealthy and willing and able to fund his own campaign—in other words, someone like Donald Trump.

Political celebrities have an enormous ability to shape public debate because the media cannot ignore them. Trump is not going to speak about racial issues in the way we would. He would be foolish to do so, and it is strategically wise for him to repudiate our support. But his statements on immigration, his violations of the pious platitudes of political correctness, his advocacy on behalf of American workers, and his condemnation of Angela Merkel’s policies and the ongoing refugee disaster in Europe have been energizing to say the least.

Trump’s courage is infectious, and he is disinhibiting people. More people are standing up to political correctness like never before, and seeing Trump as a symbol of their defiance. At Rutgers University, students chanted “Trump, Trump, Trump” repeatedly when Black activists tried to disrupt a conservative speaker.

What the establishment fears most is a highly visible, personally attractive, honest, populist candidate who cannot be shut out of the media, and who has enough money to run a viable campaign. Certainly, the Republican Party—the party dominated by the Chamber of Commerce and the Israel Lobby—richly deserves to die, unless it can appeal to the real interests of its base—middle- and working class White America.

As I mentioned, the U.S. now better resembles an oligarchy than a democracy. In fact, a recent paper by two Princeton political scientists shows that an oligarchic model fits U.S. politics better than a democratic one, as demonstrated by policy issues, where elites in business, politics, the media, and academia hold starkly different attitudes than the majority of Americans on issues like immigration. In turn, the attitudes of the Chamber of Commerce, the neocon establishment, and the Republican Jewish Coalition on immigration are not even remotely connected to the attitudes of the GOP base. According to the Pew Research Center, more than 90 percent of GOP voters oppose an increase in immigration, yet a restrictionist policy has never been supported by elites in the Republican Party. Indeed, elites favor something like Marco Rubio’s Gang of Eight bill, which would have doubled legal immigration and given amnesty to untold millions.

The anger is palpable, and the Trump candidacy is the most hopeful sign that the present oligarchy could be circumvented at the presidential level.

Neocons would much prefer Hillary to Trump. After all, she voted for the Iraq war and was instrumental in promoting the intervention into Libya. She supported sending arms to Syrian rebels and likened Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, to Hitler. She wholeheartedly backs Israel, and has her own set of rabidly pro-Israel foreign-policy advisors, including Robert Kagan, who advocates military intervention and democracy creation throughout the Middle East as a moral imperative. Clinton’s main donor is Haim Saban, a rabid Zionist who has said that his only issue is Israel and wants to “bomb the daylights” out of Iran.

Needless to say, Bill Kristol and the neocons would not lose any sleep if Hillary Clinton became president. In fact, I suspect they would prefer Hillary to any Republican candidate except Marco Rubio, who has the ideal blend of subservience to neocon foreign policy and enthusiasm for mass immigration.

On the other hand, Donald Trump opposed the Iraq war and has supported Vladimir Putin’s policy of supporting the Assad government in Syria. As is well known, Assad and Putin are very high on the neocon hate list. Trump has told the Republican Jewish Coalition that he doesn’t want their money because with their money comes control, and he has pledged to be neutral on the Israel-Palestine issue. Because of this blatant conflict with neocon thinking, Bill Kristol has been in the lead in floating third-party candidates to run against Trump should he get the GOP nomination.

Lately, Kristol and other neocons have proposed plans that would deny Trump the nomination even if he has a plurality of the delegates, knowing full well that this would give Hillary the election as millions of angry Trump voters would stay home. This would mean at least four more years of the Left in charge: Supreme Court appointments, crackdowns on politically incorrect speech, and the continued immigration of millions of future Democrats, which would make “conservatism” electorally impossible. For neocons like Kristol, the rhetoric of “principles” and “ideals” is a masquerade. Their real interest is an aggressive U.S. foreign policy serving the interests of Israel.

And for the neocons, a Trump-led GOP would be Armageddon, as their influence in the GOP would be finished. So expect a fight to the death.

But even on its own terms, it’s obvious that principles like “limited government” may fail to secure fundamental interests. The reality is that Trump voters are focusing on the big issues: immigration, first and foremost, but also trade. And Trump has, like no Republican since Pat Buchanan, criticized the policies that have devastated U.S. manufacturing and the White middle class.

It is extremely gratifying to read that evangelicals are supporting Trump, even though he does not have a history of being pro-life or opposed to gay marriage. For far too long, too many of our people have gotten sidetracked on issues that are simply not critical.

Immigration, more than any other issue, reflects fundamental interests in the ethnic composition of the United States. It is an enduring Utopian ideal that constitutional government and individual freedom can survive the importation of millions of people from radically different cultures—cultures that often possess hatred toward the peoples and cultures of the West. This has been a common defect among liberals going back to the nineteenth century—the belief that other people will become “just like us” when they come to the United States. To the contrary, concepts like liberty and representative government have very deep ethnic roots, going back thousands of years in Europe.

A great irony is that self-styled “conservatives” don’t want to even countenance the idea that importing millions of non-Whites has resulted in increasing pressures directed squarely at some of their sacred “principles,” in particular very high chronic levels of welfare use and demand for public services in some immigrant groups. In other words, non-European immigrants want “big government” and lots of free stuff, and they could not care less about “conservatism.” A recent report, summarized by F. Roger Devlin, showed that over three-fourths of Hispanic households with children used some form of welfare, whether immigrant for not. And such people will be a voting majority if things don’t change.

Another very basic principle that conservatives adhere to, and which is under threat from immigration, is freedom of speech. Multiculturalism has resulted in pressure for controls on speech and thought resulting from the need to placate aggressive minorities, who don’t take criticism kindly, no matter how factually based it might be. It is fair to say that the Left, which during the 1950s championed free speech for Communists, is quite comfortable with controls on free speech now that they are in power. This is especially the case in universities and the media, where violators of multicultural decorum are routinely harassed and fired. Intellectual rationales for curtailing First Amendment freedoms, and in particular speech critical of the multicultural ideal, are already common in liberal academic circles (see Jared Taylor’s review of Jeremy Waldron’s The Harm in Hate Speech), awaiting only one more liberal appointment to the Supreme Court. (The death of Antonin Scalia is extremely important in this regard; it is thus difficult to take seriously neocons like Bill Kristol, who prefer Hillary over Trump, when they claim that they care about much else than Israel’s national security.)

In Europe, police-state controls on thought and behavior intended to buttress the multicultural revolution, which is really an anti-White revolution, are firmly ensconced. In the UK, Germany, and elsewhere, people have been investigated and in some cases arrested for Facebook and Twitter posts simply opposing migration and the transformation of their societies. Recently Twitter set up a committee, which includes the ADL and various Social Justice Warriors, in order to better police its content. The ADL is notoriously opposed to free speech, and in general the organized Jewish community throughout the West has been a major force in placing penalties on speech related to race, ethnicity, and immigration. It is no surprise that these same groups have been hostile to Trump, especially because of his statements on Muslim immigration and refugee policy. Such organizations have been in the forefront of promoting a multicultural and non-White America, and they see Trump, correctly, as a man who brings into question the elite consensus on these issues.

It is predictable that the response to incidents such as the mass sexual assaults in Cologne would be enhanced police surveillance and the curtailment of civil liberties. We are living in societies that are not only dominated by the ideology of multiculturalism but are budding police states as well. In response, many people, especially women, will be intimidated and choose not to attend public events or public facilities like swimming pools. This is not the culture we want to live in. Principled conservatives should be horrified at this—and therefore be open to Trump’s proposals on Muslim immigration.

And it will likely be worse in the second generation. The data show that second-generation children of migrants are vastly more likely to commit crimes. By the second generation, poorer immigrant groups become susceptible to radicalization by ideologies that rationalize their low socioeconomic status and sense of alienation by making them out to be victims of White racism and privilege. These ideologies are acquired from universities, schools, the media, politicians and ethnic leaders.

In the long run, multiculturalism can’t exist without powerful social controls on speech and behavior, and conservatives need to wake up to this reality. As ethnic conflict continues to escalate throughout the West, increasingly desperate attempts will be made to prop up the ideology of multiculturalism with sophisticated theories of the psychopathology of White ethnocentrism, the ideology that any and all bad behavior or underachievement by non-Whites is caused by pervasive White racism (including the now fashionable concept of “microaggression”). There will be police state controls on non-conforming thought and behavior.

Although terrorism and the recent mass sexual assaults in Germany certainly focus the public’s attention on the costs of massive unselected immigration, the far greater problem is the loss of a traditional sense of national identity as bound up with a particular people and culture. Citizenship becomes a hollowed-out legalism—what is often termed the “proposition nation” concept of citizenship, dedicated only to abstractions like freedom, democracy and limited government, rather than the identity and interests of a particular people. The origins of the “proposition nation” concept are discussed extensively in my book The Culture of Critique. This ideology is now well established among political and intellectual elites throughout the West. A belief in America as a White, European civilization was strong in the 1920s; it was on the defensive in the 1930s; and it disappeared, more or less, completely after World War II. It was not a natural death but the result of a prolonged assault by the intellectual Left. It is now maintained, not by the free flow of ideas, but by imposing costs on dissenters, such as job loss, ostracism, and lack of access to the mainstream media.

The sad reality is that the suicide of the West has become a moral imperative in elite circles, a testimony to the enduring and unique appeal of moral principle that has been so characteristic of the West, at least since the 19th century—apparent, for example, in the anti-slavery movement, where anti-slavery activists were successful by highlighting the suffering of Africans, and in the recent outpouring of empathy in response to the photos of the migrant child washed up on the beach in Turkey.

Every war, at least since the Civil War, has been justified on moral grounds. I know of no other culture that is so susceptible to such arguments. Will Israel apologize out of guilt for what they are doing to the Palestinians? Will Muslims apologize for their expansion in Asia, North Africa, and parts of Europe? Of course not. But many Whites feel unending guilt for colonialism and the conquest of North America and other lands by their ancestors — guilt that is zealously encouraged by the media and the educational system.

Some moral crusades are justified. But in so many cases, such as the Iraq war, which was promoted by neocons and the Israel Lobby, moral sentiments are manipulated cynically by elites who pursue very real and very immoral interests. Right now, these moral sentiments and proneness to empathy are being cynically manipulated in the service of displacing White America.

The outcome of present policies is an utterly predictable decline in social cohesion, with far-ranging costs in terms of increased conflict and crime, and a lessened willingness and ability to contribute to public goods. Each of the national healthcare programs in Europe was enacted when these societies were homogeneously White and citizens had a sense of being part of a common culture reaching back far into the pre-historic past. It is well known that people in ethnically diverse societies invest less in social capital; they cooperate less; they are less prone to engage in volunteer work; and there is less trust among citizens. We should keep in mind that evolution occurred in small ethnically homogeneous groups. The hunter-gatherer mentality, which is a critical strand of European culture, evolved in small, face-to-face encounters, where trust and moral reputation were absolutely critical.

The problem is that now Europeans are being asked to participate in their own suicide in order to maintain their reputation as moral, upstanding citizens and avoid being called “racist.” So many of us shudder at the thought of being ostracized and humiliated as pariahs simply for expressing a sense of identity. This is testimony to the ability of the Left, with its power in the media and educational system, to create morally defined in-groups, which are ultimately suicidal for the peoples and culture of the West. Our task is to create a counter culture—one that is based on science and truth, to be sure, but one that is also deeply moral and emphasizes the righteousness of protecting our people and culture.

Thilo Sarrazin has already warned Germans about the deeply immoral consequences of non-European immigration in his book Germany Abolishes Itself. Sarrazin documented the slow pace of integration of Turkish immigrants into German society and economy, their disproportionate reliance on government welfare, and their higher fertility. Most importantly, given the (genetically influenced) lower IQ and academic achievement of the new immigrants compared to native Germans and other Western societies, there will be ethnic stratification in which ethnicity becomes correlated with social class—a poisonous situation, indeed. Ethnic stratification has always existed in the U.S. because of African-Americans, but immigration from Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East simply makes it worse. This results in the racialization of politics, in which people vote along racial/ethnic lines, with the migrants and their descendants much more likely to vote for the parties of the Left, with their generous welfare policies and promotion of immigration and affirmative action. And the Left, having abandoned its White working-class base, views immigration as the key to its political success.

The racialization of politics is a critical process of our time. Even a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist, who seeks to view all social phenomena in terms of the “class struggle,” could not fail to see that the political fault lines are fast becoming based on race. The vast majority of Republican votes are from Whites, and around 60–65 percent of European-descended Whites vote Republican. This is likely not a ceiling. In fact, the White Republican vote is regularly increasing by 1.5 percent in each presidential election cycle, and Trump may well attract many more Whites, especially working-class Whites, who either stayed home in 2012 or voted Democrat.

In the 2012 election, White Americans of all social classes, both sexes, and all age groups voted for Mitt Romney and his sidekick Paul Ryan, both of whom represented almost parodies of Republicans as plutocratic, Ayn Rand-reading members of the Chamber of Commerce. Even White “Millennials” (age 18–29) and the White working class, which has gotten absolutely nothing from the Republican Party, voted for Romney/Ryan. At the same time, an average of around 80 percent of non-Whites voted Democrat. It’s becoming obvious to everyone that the much-advertised era of racial harmony isn’t going to happen any time soon.

The racialization of politics reflects what I have termed implicit Whiteness. Despite the current cultural programming featuring Blacks and Whites as best friends in Bud Light commercials, White people are gradually coalescing into “implicit White communities” in multicultural America—that is, communities that reflect White identity, but which “dare not speak its name.”

Research on ethnocentrism has shown that people often have unconscious attitudes that they do not express explicitly. Unconsciously, the vast majority of Whites have the usual stereotypes about Blacks, but they would never say so explicitly, at least partly for fear of the consequences. Parents’ choice of schools and neighborhoods (their “revealed preferences”) reflect this widespread racial hypocrisy. Parents, including liberal parents, act on their implicit attitudes, and there is a profound gap between their implicit attitudes and behavior (where they show in-group racial preference) and their explicit attitudes (where they piously express the official ideology of egalitarianism).

In effect, they are creating implicit White communities. They do not explicitly state that their choice of friends, neighborhoods, and schools derives from racial preference, because that conflicts with their explicit racial attitudes and with official ideology. And when explaining why they vote Republican, they talk about “limited government,” opposition to the welfare state, and lower taxes. In turn, Republican candidates often appeal to them in exactly these terms.

The problem is, Whites often believe in their rationalizations and hold them dearly. They thus resist asserting their real, fundamental interest in preventing the demographic transformation of the United States. The beauty of Trump is that he is cutting to the core issues—issues like immigration—which are implicitly White issues and, if addressed properly, could resist or even reverse the demographic transformation (“Make America Great Again”).

White Americans are gradually coalescing into political and cultural affiliation as Whites, and this trend will continue to strengthen in the future—identities such as being a Republican, a NASCAR racing enthusiast, an evangelical Christian, a country music fan, or even a National Review-reading conservative in love with “limited government.” All of these are associated with the political Right in the United States.

But there are also implicit White communities on the Left. One such group are the affluent, well-educated Whites that Christian Lander talked about in his famous blog, Stuff White People Like. They love farmers’ markets, expensive bicycles, and driving Priuses. More disturbingly, they idolize Blacks as cultural heroes, and they vote for the likes of Bernie Sanders. They passionately believe in a future world in which everyone will be nice; they passionately believe in a United States where everyone should be welcome because, after all, people are the same everywhere. These White liberals are highly prone to racial guilt complex. Landers had a very funny blog on how they feel guilt for not recycling. “Look in their eyes. All they can see is the bottle lasting forever in a landfill, trapping small animals.”

So imagine the guilt they would feel in voting for Trump—or explicitly opposing Muslim or non-White immigration. The headline in Huffington Post after Trump won New Hampshire screamed: “New Hampshire goes racist, sexist, xenophobic”; after South Carolina, it pictured Trump giving a fascist salute. Surely none of these morally self-righteous White people could possibly vote for Donald Trump without unending guilt.

For such White people, their White identity is entirely compatible with the dispossession of Whites via immigration and multiculturalism. Many of them look forward to a non-White America, even as they continue to associate with other Whites down at the local Whole Foods or at their church supper. They are collaborating with the elites that are dispossessing White America, and they feel morally righteous in doing so—exactly as they were told in their sociology class in college and in the mainstream media every day.

Of course, the “Stuff White People Like” Democrats will rationalize their voting with morally uplifting platitudes that make them feel well-educated, intellectual superior, and in tune with the brightest minds in academia, Hollywood, and the editorial board of the New York Times. In my view this is a potentially fatal weakness of a great many European-descended people, resulting from our evolutionary history. This weakness is endlessly exploited in the media and educational system.

And of course, quite a few of these people live in predominantly White areas like New Hampshire, Iowa, or fancy suburbs of major cities. These people are relatively removed from the downsides of immigration and multiculturalism, and in the suburbs, they can hire a nanny and get their lawn mowed cheaply through Hispanic labor. It’s easy to be moral and principled when the costs aren’t yet personally apparent, and when you still feel connected to your predominantly White community. But if present trends continue, moving away and insulating yourself from diversity won’t be an option for millions of Whites. In South Carolina, Trump was strongest in counties with the highest non-White populations; this is consistent with research showing that diversity results in greater White racial consciousness, and showing that Trump is the implicitly White candidate.

Because of the deluge of non-White immigration, the Republican form of implicit White identity attracts a majority of Whites, and this majority will increase in the future. But the affluent NPR-listening Whites are still a force, and without them, the Democrats would be in serious trouble, at least until there is a non-White voting majority—a scenario that has infinite appeal to our enemies.

The Trump candidacy may or may not work out, and even if he becomes president, it would be a very tall order to put in place the fundamental changes that need to be made. However, the anger against the establishment that he is tapping into will just continue to become worse if he does not win and things keep going the way they are going. The anger will be especially strong if people have good reason to think that the presidency was stolen from Trump by devious tactics at the convention, or by some bogus third-party candidate put forward by establishment Republicans and “conservatives.” If Trump loses, we have to hope he starts a third-party movement that could destroy the GOP forever and lay the groundwork for a new kind of politics in the future. It’s only a matter of time before Whites identify and organize explicitly as Whites, just as every other group does.

For our part, we have to keep on doing what we are doing. There are many signs we are getting stronger and that our message is being heard, and it is gratifying to say the least to see so many young, smart, and educated Whites gravitating to our cause—like so many of you here this evening. We must understand that our message is based on science and the realities of human behavior—and, more important, it is morally righteous. We have every reason to look forward to the future. Indeed, we should project the image of confident, optimistic warriors—exactly the image that Donald Trump projects. We know that the transformations that are occurring are evil, and that they were engineered, not out of love for humanity, but out of a narrow self-interest of certain groups, groups that are possessed by a hatred toward the traditional peoples and cultures of the West. And we know that these transformations are supported by so many of our own people, possessed by a misguided, suicidal idealism.

These changes are well advanced, and our enemies remain wealthy, powerful, and determined. But there is a morally righteous anger in so much of White America that Trump is tapping into. Sooner or later this will have cataclysmic consequences.