If 2015 was the Year of the Quickening, as reported in our last annual review, then the year that has passed represented a period in which the political consensus throughout much of the Western world has been almost wholly upended. This was the Year of the Pivot, during which notions of what is possible or appropriate in the social and political sphere were challenged head-on by characters who were incessantly attacked as fools and vandals, but who enter 2017 as victors and visionaries.

This was the year when the “freedom and democracy” obsessions of Western liberal elites delivered Afro-Arabia into a quagmire of chaos and tyranny, one that would make even the most vicious of the deposed autocrats of the secular Islamic world blush with embarrassment. This was the era when the European continent was (and continues to be) inundated by a veritable deluge of alien savagery at levels not witnessed since Turkish, Arab and Tartar hordes ravished the borderlands of Christendom in centuries past. Yet this time the human flood has been aided and abetted by Europe’s indigenous cultural establishment drunk on the fatal poison of love peace and tolerance at all and any cost. Perhaps more importantly, this establishment has enjoyed the tacit approval of a sentimentalised and naïve populace deluded by the utopian illusions of progressive social reformers who hold censorial command over public discourse, thus keeping political dissent safely at bay.

But this has also been the year of significant push-back and unprecedented triumph for dissidents on the populist and intellectual right. Europe continues to suffer the negligence and recklessness of its Cultural Marxist stewards, but the countries of the Visegrad Group spent last year consolidating their position as a bastion of sanity on a continent bleeding from self inflicted wounds. Hungary remains a symbol of patriotic resistance on the Danube, and Poland’s popularly elected national Conservative government has not buckled under the pressure of constant harassment from Brussels Eurocrats and local post-communist apparatchiks. Yet if there are two major developments in the political realm that characterise the spirit of 2016, they would have to be the successful campaign of patriotic forces to stop the erosion of British sovereignty in the face of Eurocrat imperialism, and the victorious candidacy of Donald Trump for the Presidency of the United States, also in the face an imperialism of a similar sort. It should come as no surprise to readers that these two events were the focus a great deal of attention among traditionalists and reactionaries here in Australia. Both the UK and the US are part of the greater family of Anglospheric peoples across the globe and it was with great joy that we witnessed our cousins across both ponds stand in defence of their national dignity.

These conflicts were, of course, fought in a moral climate defined by those who have tirelessly laboured to undermine the traditional bulwarks of Western civilisation. What animated the past year was the public rejection of that morality, a morality that proved itself increasingly disconnected from the everyday experience of people whose interests were no longer (if ever!) served by globalist, liberal and universalist conceits. At the heart of the establishment’s failure was that those conceits were embraced as first principles of both the official left and right, across the entire mainstream political spectrum. But Trump is not a conservative, we were told by exasperated official spokesmen of the mainstream pseudo-right, desperate to comprehend why their tired clichés and stale champions no longer inspired authority; of course he isn’t, we know that, we replied, and that is exactly why he has our support!

What those who pose as our political betters do not (and show no sign of being able to) understand is that it is precisely Trump’s lack of “conservatism” that may rescue those things that soi-dissant anti-leftists profess to revere but have failed utterly in preserving over the last several decades. With our dutiful, but increasingly reluctant (and now non-existent) electoral approval, they have overseen a social and political climate dominated by the assumptions of progressive ideology, without effecting any real opposition to it, and at best offering perpetual compromise with the Enemy for the sake of “stability”. Thank heavens Trump doesn’t have the “character and tenacity” of the usual suspects! Ironically, it may be a non-conservative populist in the US, with his finger on the pulse of what our Menzies once called the “forgotten people” who may more competently achieve what these “conservatives” were evidently inept at securing themselves. They had decades, and they failed, but now they castigate those who refuse to reward failure with support at the ballot box. After the tumult of Brexit, the nomination of Donald Trump was a sign that times indeed were “a changing”, and there was certainly hope (up until then a word in the progressive political lexicon) that change (ditto) was on the horizon, much to the bitter chagrin of powers left and “right” who had a vested interest in maintaining the slow march to national oblivion.

Like hot pus from a tremendous burst zit, the hysteria gushed forth rapidly from The Club – those who built networks of superficial loyalty among a motley crew of careerists and opportunists ensconced in Washington think-tanks, within their party establishment and among favoured partisan talking heads of what still managed to pass for non-leftism in the legacy press – those for whom electoral victory has always taken precedence over prevailing in the Culture War, but were unable to even secure electoral victory against such total zeros as the 44th US President, and on two occasions – these people, who demonstrated feats of moral malleability with respect to leftist vanguard projects such as homosexual “marriage”, now became unbending fundamentalists in their “principled” opposition to a candidate who obviously had the heart of America’s historic core population, but cared little for The Club’s own isolated and self serving interests. Over night, their true colours were revealed. The “Never Trump” mob sallied forth, gladly assisted by a formerly hostile media which happily carried their message attacking the candidate who was the only viable – and after the nomination – the only opposition to Clintonite radical progressivism. The flagship magazine of conservatism – whose name needs no mention – dedicated an entire issue attacking this last stand against the personification of its putative nemesis. All this, to no avail.

The complete loss of the mainstream “conservative” establishment’s credibility rendered them morally bankrupt, and therefore largely ignored by a population they themselves ignored since at least the closing years of the Reagan administration – this was poetic justice of the sort reactionaries often dreamed of but never thought would be possible on such a scale. Their mimicking of leftist rhetoric and tactics in attacking the one man who stood against the floodgates of militant hyper-liberalism rendered this mainstream “conservative” establishment indistinguishable from its alleged foe. Thus, ultimately, what Donald Trump fought was a single opponent on multiple fronts, and his struggle mirrored similar efforts across the world where people no longer satisfied with leadership by condescending sell-outs searched desperately for someone to become their voice. Only those committed to willful blindness remain surprised today that this voice often carried the tone of anger.

Yet, pace our detractors, anger was not this reaction’s dominant spirit. But for isolated instances, this voice almost entirely derived its vitality not from “hate” but from a genuine affection, an affection for what was taken for granted or openly slandered and mocked by political and cultural elites for years before this latest “populist” rising came to the fore. The Brexit campaign, spearheaded by the charismatic and indomitable Nigel Farage, was a reassertion of national pride in the face of state sponsored identity-errosion. The incessant narrative of self-hate and xenophilia took its toll on the proud British, and fed a reaction that shocked only those who dwell in the organs of the Moldbuggian “Cathedral”, isolated as it is from the anxieties and frustrations of its most hated and feared demographic: the Indigenous European Man. Brexit presaged the victory of Trump, and just as the Status Quo Coalition constantly tried to delegitimise and derail this “outsider’s” triumph over the candidate of transnationalist and deracinated globalism, Eurocrat and progressive forces continue to filibuster Albion’s decision to part ways with the project to create a rootless European superstate founded on abstract, largely meaningless “values”.

The incessant hypocrisy became too blindingly obvious to ignore any longer, and its relentless enforcers’ near magical qualities of persuasion simply evaporated. The people were constantly warned: if they chose to depart from the endorsed linear Whig path of progress, disaster would immediately befall them and their nations. Obama warned the UK that if it left the European project, it would find itself “at the end of the queue”. That same Obama, who chided Trump to “stop whining” about allegations of vote tampering, would accuse Russia of interfering in the US Presidential elections, presumably by facilitating the release of documents via Wikileaks that somehow damaged the candidacy of the Democratic contender. Whether those documents were true, however, the commentariate (which almost universally endorsed Clinton for the presidency) has remained conspicuously silent. On Clinton’s connections with Saudi Arabia and relationships with shady characters such as Messers Epstein and Soros the media also remained relatively silent, but frequently raised “concerns” that Trump was somehow “conflicted” due to his business dealings and personal friendships abroad. His use of unpresidential language in a private conversation eleven years prior became an international news story for weeks, while Clinton’s attitude towards the plight of a certain group of rape and molestation victims was quietly ignored. He was denounced as an “isolationist”, and therefore, after some mental gymnastics, deemed “dangerous” with the launch codes; she called for open confrontation with a nuclear superpower in Syria, yet somehow declared to be the “most qualified” person for the presidency.

Such levels of nonsense and idiocy simply could not be born for long, and certainly not for over a year. The UK voted to “Leave” and the US voted for the populist outsider who demonstrated he was, at the very least, a good listener. What followed could be predicted if one takes leftist accusations as a form of collective projection – which at the end of 2016 it most certainly was. Political and racially motivated violence did eventuate in the US, but evidence of thuggery on part of White Trump supporters was invariably exposed as manufactured or part of a series of “hoax crimes”. On the other hand, videos were uploaded of Whites and Trump supporters being violently assaulted for their race and political allegiance. Rallies and protests organised under the banners of “universal love” quickly deteriorated into aggressive melees that involved the destruction of property, and of course, more assault on Whites and Trump supporters. Those who demanded that Trump declare he would respect the results if he lost now refused to accept his victory. Recounts ensued, increasing Trump’s lead in some states. Bound delegates were pressured to vote their conscience – two did on the Republican side, and five on the Democrat side. Clinton became the first presidential candidate to effectively lose the same election three times in a row.

This rebellion against the Narrative Enforcers echoed elsewhere across the globe. The new Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte reflected in rhetoric and policy a no-nonsense attitude to his country’s social decay; his rebuke to Obama’s criticisms were nearly as brutal as his plans for cleaning up his country (and welcomed locally as well as abroad among advocates of national sovereignty). Austria’s Norbert Hofer lost his country’s Presidential elections, which were plagued with irregularities and had to be re-held late in the year; unfortunately this second attempt did not obtain victory for the right but it did illustrate that Austrian society, like much of Europe, was sharply divided along clear ideological lines. 2016 was also the year when the fortunes of Marine Le Pen’s Front National began to rise dramatically as a result of continued Enrichment from aggressive Diversities in progressive, multicultural and secular France. “Italexit” followed on the heels of the British vote, highlighting that the European transnational consensus was faltering if not entirely thrown into question by larger sections of the public. 2016 was the year when the ethnic or national tribe re-entered centre stage: Russian irredentism in eastern Ukraine, Chinese nationalism in the South China sea, Scottish separatism, all these examples suggest that questions of regional, cultural and national identity will become more pronounced in coming decades as people turn away from the oneworlder utopianism of the current elites.

In all, the year that passed saw the soap bubble of post-90s liberal triumphalism finally pop. We too were no exception to these trends. While Prime Minister Turnbull managed to retain government in the last election, it was by the smallest of Parliamentary margins and forced him to deal with minor parties to secure passage of his legislative agenda. Indeed, his Senate reforms (which were intended to limit the influence of minor parties in the house of review) backfired, and ushered in a record number of representatives who did not belong to either of the two dominant party blocs. 2016 saw the continued demise of the Greens and the return of Pauline Hanson to federal politics, with her One Nation Party posed to take on the role of a “third force” on the right of the spectrum. This was the year when Immigration Minister Peter Dutton made the faux pas of admitting the obvious, namely, that we woudl not have to deal with the problem of “Australians” traveling to foreign war zones had prior government not made the error of allowing large scale Lebanese immigration into the country in the first place. 2016 saw interest in Senator Cory Bernardi’s alleged plans to break from the Liberals and form an explicitly conservative party peak: one-time conservative champion and failed Prime Minister Tony Abbott warned about the consequences of such a move. He claimed that conservative secession from the Coalition would be fatal to the prospects of the Liberal/National parties being able to win government in the future, as if voters on the right were being served by the Coalition the way it was presently constituted anyway. This was the year that the Australian push for “marriage equality” was temporarily put on hold with the failed passage of the same-sex marriage plebiscite bill, ensuring that the question of so-called “gay marriage” would undoubtedly be an electoral issue in 2019.

Lastly, but certainly not least of all, 2016 was the year that Mark Latham, former leader of the Labor Opposition, proved himself to be a more credible reactionary political commentator than Tony Abbott, when he – rightly – claimed that the “White Ribbon” campaign against domestic violence in Australia was first and foremost an ideological device used by the “feminist left” to “demonise men” and promote its political agenda. Lat year was certainly a target rich environment for those of us on the right, but examples such as these show that allies can be found in unlikely places.

For 2017, our mission is much as it was since we established our small association here in Sydney. Jonathan Bowden once said that youth would be attracted to the nouvelle droit if and when it became exciting. The cultural agitation of the loose movement known as the “AltRight” proved that this was true, and could be achieved with facility so long as there were people who no longer accepted the pieties of the left and were committed to usurp its position as the vanguard of the times. The pressure must be kept on our opponents, just as it was over the last twelve months – but in the coming year we will enjoy the additional task of building on what has already been achieved. The winds have changed, the magic of liberal thought control has vanished, and we now determine the field of battle for the future of our people. We don’t care whether our opponents are “offended”, we care about what is true. They can call us what they like; the future belongs to us.

– SydneyTrads Editors.