Washington

I just got finished listening to the latest podcast of Radio Free Northwest. As I suspected, Harold Covington, a writer of fantasy fiction, had a few words to say about this website, none of which were positive.

I suggest we play a game.

– First, take a deep breath.

– Second, hold your breath like you are underwater.

– Third, count how many seconds you can hold your breath before you exhale.

I can hold my breath for at least 35 seconds.

Now let’s imagine every second you can hold your breath represents a person. By my count, that is at least 30 more people (counting sockpuppets) than there are in the Northwest Front and 35 more than there are who are seriously willing to engage in an IRA-style terrorist campaign to create a Northwest Republic.

According to Gallup, 25 percent of the residents of Washington self identify as “liberals.” There are 6,664,195 people in Washington state. That means Harold Covington has around 1,666,048 “liberal” neighbors.

Can you hold your breath for 19 hrs and 25 minutes?

If every White Nationalist in America (including every sympathizer who reads these websites including antis and monitors) moved to Washington state tomorrow, they would still be dwarfed by the sheer number of liberals on the ground there.

If they followed HAC’s advice, the liberal, moderate, and conservative majority would unanimously react to vanguardist terrorism in the same way that Americans reacted to the Oklahoma City bombing. Local law enforcement alone would be sufficient to squelch any rebellion. Not to mention the FBI and ATF which have snuffed out any number of such groups over the past thirty years.

Mainstreamers vs. Vanguardists

I’ve repeatedly compared “vanguardism” to fool’s gold. It is a rhetorical position that sounds tough and uncompromising. It is a siren song that at first sounds promising. This type of radical posturing is attractive to highly alienated people, but all bullshit aside, it ultimately amounts to nothing more than escapism.

There is nothing of substance to vanguardism. There isn’t a Northwest Front. There is only Harold Covington (see photo above) living in a fantasy world. There is just one alienated fantasist sitting behind his computer, someone who has no real influence in his own community, browbeating other alienated fantasists to move to the Northwest and join his cult to keep him company.

If I were to move to Washington state, I would find myself hanging out with Harold Covington when I got there, thousands of miles away from home and without a job. Instead of being alienated and irrelevant in Alabama, I would be alienated, irrelevant, broke, and homesick in the Pacific Northwest.

The most damning criticism of Harold Covington is that he doesn’t believe his own bullshit. For all his talk of military bravado, Covington himself can’t even find a single unhinged psychopath to take on the local post office. His own followers won’t move to the Pacific Northwest because even they understand at some level that Covington is nuts.

The Pacific Northwest and Vanguardists

Vanguardists have been active in the Pacific Northwest since the 1970s. From the 1970s until 2001, Aryan Nations was based out of Idaho. The phrase “hiding out in a bunker in Idaho” has become a derisive phrase in the movement for that reason.

When Richard Butler died in 2001, Aryan Nations had a worldwide following of around 200 people. The SPLC bankrupted the group with a wrongful death lawsuit. Their property was seized and awarded to the plaintiffs. It was later turned into “a peace park.”

Aryan Nations failed to make any inroads into the surrounding communities. The group has since splintered and relocated to Ohio and Pennsylvania. If Richard Butler and the Aryan Nations couldn’t spark a Northwest Migration, what makes Harold Covington think he would be any more successful?

All of vanguardism is based on the same errors: unrealistic escapist fantasies, a fundamental unwillingness to adapt their rhetoric to the experience of their audience, a radical sense of alienation from White America, wild millenarian expectations of an apocalyptic collapse, a tendency to withdraw from society, a tendency to express that alienation by erecting unnecessary barriers to understanding, an unwillingness to start where people are today, and radical impulse to burn bridges and push people away.

It really doesn’t matter where the vanguardists go: Arizona, Washington, or West Virginia. The effective result is always the same. Stewing in their alienation, they fail to make any progress in establishing a political base in their communities. With nothing else to do, they log on to the internet to vent their frustrations and share their alienation and misery with others.

“The Northwest Homeland” is an abstract republic. It is an imaginary community that is pitched to intellectuals and vanguardists on the basis of their alienation, fantasies, idealism, and abstract reason. For all his prodding to “come home,” Harold Covington must know that he can never compete with someone’s real home.

There is a scene in Gods and Generals that captures the attitude of many White Southerners to a Northwest Migration.

In 1861, Simon Cameron (President Lincoln’s Secretary of War) offered Robert E. Lee full command of the Union Army. It was a major promotion. Lee was then a Colonel. He could have fought on the winning side of the War Between the States. In some alternate histories, Lee might have succeeded Lincoln as President like General Grant, whose war glory propelled him into the White House.

Robert E. Lee preferred to lose rather than accept a promotion and turn his back on his native state.

Admittedly, this is an extreme example. The vast majority of White Southerners have nothing like Lee’s sense of honor and duty. At the same time, they are highly adverse to uprooting themselves (from their friends, families, kinship networks, culture, communities, native climate) and travelling thousands of miles across America to settle in a strange place where they don’t know anyone and probably can’t find a job.

A good example of this is the response of Southerners to devastating hurricanes. It doesn’t matter how many times hurricanes like Ike, Ivan and Katrina strike the communities along the Gulf Coast. It doesn’t matter to the natives who know that the prevailing weather of the region means they are likely to get hit again.

The people who live there rebuild Galveston, Bay St. Louis, and Panama City. They won’t even contemplate moving to Wyoming or Idaho because they want to live in Mississippi and Florida.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 unleashed an epidemic of negro pathologies in the Deep South. The people who live in Alabama responded by adapting to the hated law, not by fleeing to other parts of the country.

The moral of the story: a fantasy world can never compete with a real community.

There has to be some compelling reason and practical benefit to the settler to abandon everything he knows. In the 1840s, the discovery of gold in California sparked a migration. The Mormons traveled to Utah to save their souls. The pioneers went West for freedom and cheap land.

No one is going to move to the Northwest for Harold Covington will have someone to talk to.

The Pacific Northwest and Mainstreamers

In his latest episode of Radio Free Northwest, Harold Covington accused me of “running down the Northwest.” In reality, I have only criticized Covington and his implausible vanguardist scheme, which will only have the effect of making life even more uncomfortable for White Nationalists already living in the region.

There are many valid reasons for White Zionists to move to the Pacific Northwest. I have spent hours analyzing Wyoming and Idaho. Eventually, I plan to take a hard look at Washington, Oregon, Montana, and the Dakotas. I will complete my analysis with a regional summary.

Harold’s real gripe isn’t that I am “running down the Northwest.” It is that I have written positive reviews of the wrong Northwestern states. Namely, those where Harold Covington doesn’t live, which are excluded from his fantasy world.

White Zionists settling in Idaho and Wyoming could have a far bigger impact than they could in Washington or Oregon. Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota are smaller states than Idaho. Their impact would be even larger there.

There is nothing stopping White Zionists from taking over existing communities in the Interior West and creating communities where anti-White taboos are unenforceable. If they moved to Wyoming or Montana, they could demonstrate the potential of the White Zionist model. That would attract more recruits and the publicity necessary to fuel and sustain a real Northwest migration.

In his podcast, Harold Covington denounced the Ron Paul campaign. Ron Paul’s presidential campaign laid the foundation (through institutions like Young Americans for Liberty and Campaign for Liberty) for Rand Paul’s successful bid to become U.S. Senator from Kentucky.

Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota are smaller than Oregon and Washington. Instead of 4 Senators, they send 10 to Washington. Wyoming has 2 Senators in spite of being 1/9th the size of Kentucky.

If the libertarians can succeed in Kentucky, the home of millions of “Red State Fascists,” why can’t White Nationalists succeed in Wyoming?

This migration plan is perfectly legal. It is not based on a wild fantasist scheme of a successful vanguardist insurrection. The vast majority of White Zionists are just looking for a place to settle down and live a White life.

The Nagging Little Voice

The “nagging little voice” says:

If I moved to Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, or the Dakotas, I could live a fairly decent life, pay less in taxes, own more property, and my kids would have Nordic classmates. I might find myself an attractive, conservative Nordic woman to marry and live with on my ranch or in my cabin in the woods. There would be no Jews or blacks to put up with.

I would be safe. I might have some actual political representation. If more people moved here, seeing how good we have it, we might even be able to live openly as White Nationalists.

Alternatively, I could move to Washington and join the Northwest Front, which would consist of me hanging out with Harold Covington and a few other alienated vanguardists all day. After getting a job, I would be constantly prodded to support “the movement,” which must have some financial base of support.

Any association with Covington might actually prevent me from acquiring employment. In the event I did move there and built up a nest egg, it could be wrecked at any moment by an unhinged fantasist going on a counterproductive shooting spree.

Maybe I ought to just move to the Pacific Northwest and enjoy living a quiet life there. If I want to hear what Harold Covington has to say, I could always listen to his podcast. That way I could enjoy all the benefits of the Pacific Northwest without the liability of having any dangerous affiliations.