….while white males are only 30 percent of the US
population, we are, according to the Centers for Disease Control, a
mind-blowing 70 percent of the nation’s suicides.
Please introduce yourself to the readers.
My major in college was Western philosophy and, after graduation,
at the suggestion of one of my professors, I took a position teaching English
at a university in Shanxi province, China for the opportunity to immerse myself
in a society informed by Eastern philosophy. I went for six months and stayed
for two years. I left the US a naive, we-are-the-world, no-borders idealist and
returned a hard-nosed, damn-there’s-a-lot-of-people-here,
post-immigration-epoch realist.
Back in the US, I began to look into the immigration numbers and
was alarmed by what I found. I was even more disturbed by the seeming total
lack of serious attention paid to such an important issue as immigration. I started a non-profit advocacy group
called ProjectUSA with the stated mission of dragging the immigration issue
into the center of public debate where it belonged. To that end we put up
billboards advertising, for example, Census Bureau statistics on the impact of
current immigration policy. There was a backlash, to put it mildly. Among those
attacking me was a particularly nasty outfit out of Mobile, Alabama called the
Southern Poverty Law Center.
Despite there being nothing at all racial about my work, the SPLC
called the billboards racist and linked me to “Nazi atrocities”. To the SPLC,
my call for a time-out on immigration had to be motivated by racial concerns.
That forced me to ask, if one’s views on immigration are necessarily a racial
matter, what are the SPLC’s racial reasons for supporting mass immigration? The
answer to that question opened my eyes politically.
I moved to Washington, DC, where for several years I continued my
activism from an office on Capitol Hill. But after years of fighting that
city’s own brand of corruption and deceit, made mosaics for a while, then moved
to Baltimore. In Baltimore, at a surprising number of intersections, you will
see young, able-bodied males panhandling among the cars waiting at the red
lights. And even though Baltimore is a city where white males are only twelve
percent of the population, they are almost one hundred percent of the
panhandlers. It’s a remarkable social phenomenon, really, and unlike anything I
ever saw when I was their age. Curious, I began to pull over and get out of my
car to talk to them.
The panhandlers were demoralized and mostly homeless. Some lived
in group homes. Some lived with girlfriends or relatives. But, all of them were
heroin addicts. In other words, they were all committing slow-motion suicide,
numbing the pain as they marked time—selling their degradation, while they
waited to die, to motorists stopped at the traffic lights of Baltimore. (Here’s
Josh and Dave). But their deaths don’t count as suicides, according to official
statistics-keepers, which makes the following statistic even more alarming: while white males are only 30 percent of the US population, we are,
according to the Centers for Disease Control, a mind-blowing 70 percent of the
nation’s suicides.
It became obvious to me the country was experiencing a public
health crisis, and it was getting virtually no attention. That led me to
develop the Robinson Jeffers Boxing Club, a 13-week residency program combining
healthy eating, exercise, and academic study including philosophy, literature,
math, music, history, and, to help the men conceptualize a higher life, poetry.
The core of the program was two hours of intensive boxing training every day
but Sunday to help build self-respect, confidence, and brotherhood.
While the program was to be open to men in distress of any race,
its focus was on the particular challenges unique to white males in modern
America. A friend in DC thought the program was worth a try and had an empty
8000 sq ft grocery store in Lexington, Missouri available that he was willing
to provide. So, a like-minded friend and I headed to Lexington to give it a
shot. Unfortunately, we were shot dead in the water when a vicious hit piece on
our effort was published January 24, 2018, by, once again, the Southern Poverty
Law Center. And, once again, I was linked to Nazi atrocities and readers were
left with the false belief that I and my partner, who is black, were secretly
opening a whites-only club.
In November, 2018, I filed a defamation claim against
the SPLC in the US District Court for the Western District of Missouri, Kansas
City. I am a pro se plaintiff, meaning I am acting as my own attorney, which
puts me at a huge disadvantage against all their money and the lawyers it can
buy. Nevertheless, despite that handicap, my lawsuit recently survived their
Rule 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim. I’m told that,
out of some 60 similar legal actions undertaken against the SPLC over the
years, this is the first one to clear that particular hurdle.
But now we are headed into the discovery phase, and, as I am not an attorney, I
fear some ignorant blunder will torpedo our chances to get justice. Remarkably,
even though the suit has been validated as viable by the Court, I have
contacted scores of lawyers and law firms and have been unable to find a lawyer
to take the case.
The Robinson Jeffers Boxing Club website states that it is “open
to any male for whom life has become an unbearable struggle,” but that “special
challenges faced by white males” will be addressed, since “Whites are dying of
opioid overdoses at a rate far exceeding their share of the population. At the
same time, white males commit suicide at a rate far exceeding their share of
the population. Clearly, white males are in crisis […] Just as the United Negro
College Fund pursues only the ethnic interests of African-Americans and the
Anti-defamation League pursues only the ethnic interests of Jews, the Robinson
Jeffers Boxing Club pursues only the ethnic interests of whites. Oh, wait,
that’s not true. We accept males in crisis of any race.”
I wrote that while in Lexington and at the height of the fury the
SPLC had unleashed. Can you hear a little bitterness? I don’t know whether
you’ve ever had the experience of having vicious insults like “Nazi” and
“racist” screamed at you in broad daylight by complete strangers driving past,
but it is very unsettling. The most unsettling part was probably the sheer
insanity of it all. We showed up in this small, overwhelmingly white,
Midwestern town with a new approach to a horrible problem devastating families
all around there. We wanted to help, but were, instead, attacked and driven off
by the white residents because they thought we were there to help the white
residents. It’s like that scene from Apocalypse Now where
Marlon Brando describes how all the little kids in a remote Vietnamese village
who’d received a vaccination from the American medics had their arms cut off by
their parents once the medics left. These villagers were like those villagers,
but without the excuse of remoteness.
The Southern Poverty Law Center thinks you’re not being sincere,
“Nelsen claimed the club is open to all races, but he isn’t convincing anyone.”
Its 577 word profile on you states that you were a sponsor of “racist
billboards,” and though you’re “not a neo-Nazi,” “One resident [of Lexington,
MO] compared Nelsen’s arrival in Lexington to that of neo-Nazi Craig Cobb, who
attempted to start a whites-only colony in the tiny town of Leith, North
Dakota, in 2012.” The SPLC also points out that your ProjectUSA got $10,000
from Pioneer Fund, a group that’s focused on “race betterment” and eugenics,
“the ‘science’ of breeding superior human beings that was discredited by
various Nazi atrocities.” So without being legally liable, the SPLC uses “Nazi”
three times in your portrait.
…and “anti-immigrant” five times. This is an example of their
dishonest tactics—the unsavory tactics of the propagandist, the character
assassin, the demonizer. It’s a shame so many Americans fall prey to their
gutter enterprise—their fraudulent come-on of “fighting hate”. The Bolsheviks,
too, cloaked their genocidal hatreds in a mantle of virtue and thereby gained
the support of large segments of the Russian people. But, once the Bolsheviks
took power in Russia, in 1917, it didn’t take long before the people regretted
it. Almost immediately, they unleashed the overtly dysgenic Red Terror—a crime
against humanity as depraved and shockingly brutal as anything the world has
ever seen. It says something that the SPLC, as part of their mission to “fight
hate”, will demonize an effort to help men in distress, yet remain silent on
Antifa—the one organized group out there committing actual political violence.
In the lawsuit, I argue that the whole notion of “fighting hate”
is, itself, a fraud. Hate is an emotion like any other—just a part of being
human. We can no more fight hate than we can fight digestion. Moreover, there
is no such thing as an evil emotion. Emotions themselves are only ever rational
or irrational. If I hate you because you are abusing my child, it is a rational
hate and can provide me with the determination to put a stop to the abuse. If I
hate you because you were born in Vietnam, it is irrational hate. And that’s a
good thing, because we can actually fight irrationality. Reasoned argument,
open debate, free speech, respect for the views of others, persuasion—these are
the weapons with which to fight irrationality. Demonization, deplatforming,
censorship, destroying careers and lives—these are the weapons of the “hate
fighters”.
If Pioneer Fund sends me 10 grand, I’ll take it too, and not just
because I can use that cash, but also because I don’t see the studying of
racial intelligence or eugenics as being discredited by any Nazi atrocities.
But these Nazi innuendos are merely distractions, meant to steer people away
from your central contentions, and they are: 1) unchecked immigration and
increasing diversity will not be good for the USA 2) white men are being
targeted inside their own country, so in their despair and impotence, they’re
killing themselves more than any other group.
If white men run the show, how can this possibly happen?
Clearly, white men don’t run
the show. You’ve heard the saying, attributed to Voltaire, that if you want to
know who runs the show just ask who it is you can’t criticize. In the modern
West, that’s just about everybody. We’ve reached the extreme point where the
only groups you can criticize are Christians, males, and white people. By that
reckoning, if you are a white Christian male, you belong to the least powerful
group in the country. We’re so weak, we’re not even a group, because that would
be racist.
It’s hard to come by the data, but it appears that when a people
are defeated in war, suicides go up among them—especially among young to middle
aged males. In the US, for many years, young Native American males killed
themselves at a far higher rate than anyone else, but, about ten years ago, the
suicide rate among young white males surpassed theirs.
The full impact is only now beginning to be felt, but we were
defeated on October 3, 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson traveled to New York
City to sign the Immigration and Nationality Act into law, opening the borders
to the world and inflicting on us defeat by the same method we defeated the
Sioux—sheer numbers.
Although we can’t criticize everybody but white men, not everybody
is running the show. Most of these untouchable groups are only being used to
badger white men, but who’s doing the badgering? Who’s responsible for a media
that routinely makes white people, especially rural or blue collar ones, look
like idiots? This media distortion has a worldwide reach, as you well know.
It seems, to me, clear that the source of the anti-white hatred
pouring out of the media is Jewish. The New York Times, alone,
has waged a multi-decade campaign of vilification against
“local whites.”
It is vital that Jews of good will—and there are many—put aside any
defensiveness and call out the hatred and ill will their co-ethnics are
fomenting.
But it’s not just the news media. In 2008, a friend from Venezuela
told me he didn’t think Barack Obama could be elected president because
“America is too racist”. I asked him how he could know that, given the only
part of America he had ever visited was Washington, DC. “Well, we know it from
the movies”, he said. The kids in Venezuela watching Django
Unchained and 12 Years a Slave are
imbibing a false and hateful view of America, American history, and founding
stock Americans. For the American children—especially the white
children—watching those same movies, that history is toxic.
History was, for that reason, to be a main component of the
Robinson Jeffers Boxing Club’s academic program. Take a young white man who has
never heard anything about his ancestors except that they were rapacious,
genocidal, oppressive, racist monsters—the source of everything evil—and let
him read the accounts of wholesale slaughter in Gibbon or Deuteronomy. Wow!
We’re not really that uniquely evil! Let him read the actual
letters home from soldiers on both sides in the Civil War. In fact, we’re just
humans! Let him read the actual oral histories of recently freed slaves taken
down by Northern college students just after the war ended. I might
not be the spawn of Satan after all! Gee, real history is way different than
movie history! And reading real history would benefit non-white
participants, as well.
The media narrative during the 2008 presidential race was the same
as my Venezuelan friend’s—lots of hand-wringing over “rural white racism”.
Being a rural white myself, I knew they were painting, intentionally or not, a
false picture. So, I went onto the FEC website and looked at political
donations from the ten whitest states in the country. (This was before the Iowa
caucuses, when a plurality of blacks were still polling for Hillary Clinton.)
In the ten whitest states in the country, unless there was a native son running
(McCain in Arizona, for example, or Kerry in Massachusetts), Barack Obama was
raising more money than any other candidate of either
party. But, that easily checked fact didn’t stop the slurs against
rural whites from continuing non-stop right up to election day.
There is no question that the cultural demonization of whites is
severe and worsening. That the demonization is responsible, at least in part,
for the wave of “deaths of despair” decimating white males across the country
is at least plausible, if not likely. Those deaths of despair represent an
ocean of real human suffering, families devastated, potential unrealized. You
would think any decent human being would support any effort at all to try to do
something to help. Stephen Piggott and Heidi Beirich of the SPLC linked our
effort to help these men to Nazi atrocities, for crying out loud, and had the
locals screeching “Nazi” at us on the streets of Lexington, Missouri. They
successfully shut down a program meant to help men in distress avoid suicide.
What kind of people do that?
Just now in Saigon, I saw a peculiar sign for Levi’s, with a
“white trash” woman on it. It looks like a booking photo. Just to be clear
here, I have nothing against “trash,” since nearly all my friends, of any
color, are trash, but in this ad campaign I see something rather
cynical, if not sinister. There’s a man in torn jeans, one shirt sloppily worn
over another and bad tattoo. As for the woman, she’s a half retard with bad
teeth who looks like she’s just been caught shoplifting. Her cheap chain
necklace is also worn outside her shirt. Someone is pushing white trash chic
onto the “Third World.” Someone is laughing very hard at our expense.
Well, as my gay friend Michael used to say, “Everyone looks better
under arrest”. I don’t know whether anyone is pushing white trash chic so much
as you are seeing evidence of a general global anti-aristocratic trajectory.
With greater democracy comes greater vulgarity, and that ad may be an example
of it. It just makes you and me, in our roles as kindly old scolds, all the
more needed. On the other hand, there are people out there actually pushing
democracy—well-funded people—so, you might have a point.
Well, the ad struck me because I had never seen anything like it,
but there’s a parallel with how the worst of ghetto culture is massively
marketed, so that you have kids of every color everywhere dressing, posturing
and sometimes acting like ghetto “gangstas.” Now, there are Vietnamese rappers
who strut, menace and sprinkle “motherfucker” into their belligerent lyrics.
Four years ago, I spent five months in Leipzig, Germany, and nearly all its
neighborhoods were marred by American styled graffiti that defaced stores and even historical buildings, so
that you would read, for example, “KILL COPS” or “FIGHT THE POLICE” in English. In your rural,
mostly white Missouri town, there’s also this toxic spread, I’m sure. What’s
presented as pop culture, then, is not organically grown so much as packaged
and disseminated from above in a deliberate program of degradation. They’re
trying to turn us into cartoony beasts, but you’re fighting back, but why is
your boxing club named after a rather forgotten poet? The program itself also
emphasizes poetry. I thought poetry was dead and no one was missing it, not
even poets, so what are you thinking?
I was standing above the dance floor in a Beijing disco back in
the mid-1990s watching the crowd on the packed floor below. I don’t know
whether they still do this in China, but there were armed soldiers stationed
throughout the club. The music was mostly American, and the American music was
mostly black. And it struck me that some 22-year-old black kid from the
Brooklyn projects with his music exerted more power from the other side of the
planet over the offspring of China’s ruling class than the 22-year-old Chinese
soldier standing awkwardly with his gun on the other side of the dance floor.
That’s the power of Art, and the most powerful art forms are
movies and music. They are easily accessible, global, and leveling. It takes no
effort at all to absorb a movie or a hit single. It happens without you even
trying, and it happens to everyone in the same way. But that doesn’t provide a
very nutritious worldview, however powerful it is. It’s like you grew up on
saccharine, cigarettes, frosted flakes, and processed cheese product. You are
alive and fed, but weak and unhealthy.
Poetry is deliberate. It takes work. It is more participatory. If
you say “wow” when you finish reading a poem it comes from a deeper more active
place than if you say “wow” after watching a movie. The goal of the Robinson
Jeffers Boxing Club was to help men in distress reach that deeper place. It’s
like there is a warrior down there asleep and he needs to be revived. Whether
it’s being a good father or husband, or getting and keeping a job, or standing
up to injustice, or keeping one’s word, a man needs a kind of warrior spirit.
For me, Jeffers goes in and grabs the sleeping warrior and shakes him awake.
Please give us more observations about China, and how has your
time there influenced your understanding of home. Is China or Asia better
equipped to combat this all encompassing cultural war?
That’s a great question. I sometimes feel that the defeat of the
West—that civilization that looks to Athens as its birthplace, created by
Europeans and their descendants—has been so total as to be an irreversible,
extinction-level event. At such times, I find myself wondering “and then what?”
Is the Confucian East the next to succumb, or does the Confucian East have the
tools needed to identify the threat, mobilize against it, and destroy it? That
may be the overriding question of the 21st Century.
Speaking only of China, I see strengths (e.g., ancestor worship)
and weaknesses (e.g., materialism). But I suppose it really boils down to
whether they will learn from our example. For that, they would need a clear
view of what’s happening to us here and clear views are hard to come by under
the best of circumstances. For the Chinese to get a clear view of the forces at
work in our demise would require not only that they penetrate the cultural
masking we ourselves have failed to penetrate, but do it while resisting the
human impulse to pile on. It’s a tall order, but if anyone can do it, the
Chinese can.
When I arrived in China in 1995, all the men smoked everywhere
because Mao smoked everywhere. You’d get on one of the little bus/vans to go
downtown, and every male in the van—including the driver—would have a lit
cigarette dangling from his lips. Then, one day shortly after I arrived, and
citing the burden to the health care system, the government announced a
stop-smoking directive. To my astonishment, everyone stopped smoking the next
day. At least, in public, anyway.
That kind of top-down influence mimics an aristocracy, which is a
Chinese strength if the leaders can recognize the threat early enough and while
they still have the power to command preemptive action. Perhaps a working group
of Eastern and Western pro-peace nationalists could develop a framework for
collaboration with a view toward understanding the culture wars, identifying
and assessing risks, and developing policy positions.
But what, exactly, has caused the West to collude, often
enthusiastically and aggressively, with its defeat?
Oh, boy, isn’t that the mother of all questions? There are so many
examples of the West doing exactly that, from the catastrophic and fratricidal
“world” wars to the tearing down of statues of historical figures to letting
George Soros freely roam the streets as he openly works to destroy us while
locking up the one person—Julian Assange—who had found a way to fight him.
Ultimately, I see it as a religious failing.
The SPLC is a tax-exempt non-profit whose mission statement says
they exist to teach economic principles to the underprivileged. They have a
half billion dollars in assets—half of it parked off-shore out of the reach of
US regulators and definitely out of the reach of any of the underprivileged. We
gave them that money. After the fracas in Charlottesville, for example, George
Clooney wrote a million dollar check to the SPLC to “fight hate”. Apple did the
same thing. The election of Donald Trump was a 137 million dollar cash bonanza
for the SPLC. But why? What motivates us to put hundreds of millions of dollars
of our own money in an envelope and send it off to some hucksters in
Mobile, Alabama?
It’s because we want to be thought of, by others and ourselves,
but especially others, as virtuous, and we think we are acting nobly—that we
are “fighting hate”—when we send off that check to the SPLC. There’s a reason George
Clooney announced his donation publicly and made sure there were cameras there
to record it all.
The SPLC’s grift relies on its marks buying into the notion that
racism is the greatest sin, –specifically, and exclusively, the racism of white
people. But, is racism really the greatest sin? As Steve Sailer has been pointing out for years, a
race is just a very big, very extended family. Just as my brother and I have
more ancestors in common, and more recently, than either of us has with any
other person on the planet except our sisters, any white person on the planet
and I will have more ancestors in common, more recently, than either of us has
with you.
Why does this matter? Try this thought experiment:
You come around a corner and see a man beating a woman. The woman
is crying for help. What’s your first reaction? To rush to the woman’s aid,
right?
Now you come around a corner and see two men beating two women.
They are both crying for help. One is white and one is black. What’s your first
reaction? If you are a white male, paralysis, because either choice is
“racist”.
Now you come around a corner and find two men beating two women
and one of them is your mother. What’s your first reaction? The immediate
reaction—for everybody—is to come to the aid of your mother first.
Here’s why that’s important. If you come to the aid of your mother
first, i.e., if you are a “familyist”, it doesn’t mean you are acting out of
hatred for the other woman, and it doesn’t mean you aren’t going to help her,
too, as quickly as you can. It just means your mother is closer to you; she
comes first. In fact, you would appear something of a monster if you didn’t help
your mother first. And that’s exactly where we find ourselves.
I was in a bar in China during the 1996 Olympics, and they were
showing a tennis match between a German and a Japanese. All the Chinese were
cheering for the Japanese player, so I asked them, what gives? I thought you
guys hated the Japanese. We do, they replied. But they are closer to us than
the Germans.
It is safe to say most white Westerners believe it is a sin to
affirm such closeness with another white person in the way the Chinese rooting
for the Japanese tennis player did. Indeed, to explicitly abjure that closeness
has become, for a white person, a mark of piety. That’s why you see the West
committing suicide with such enthusiasm. We’re on a mission from God!
In the end, Christianity is to blame, because it was not up to the
task of protecting us from such a pernicious, self-destructive morality.
Indeed, churches are the worst offenders, and if there is any cause for
optimism for those who might want to preserve the West, it might be that the
churches are empty. Perhaps we are getting ready to flush the system in order
to reemerge with a modernized, upgraded Christianity—a Christianity that
doesn’t see the story of Christ as a story of Abrahamic sacrifice, that is to
say, a Christianity that doesn’t posit self-abnegation as a moral good.
The prevailing ideology in most white countries is that only
whites can be guilty of racial hatred, while every non-white person must be a
victim of white racism, but there is nothing more racist than to deny someone
of moral agency. To declare that a black, brown or yellow man can’t hate or be
evil is to reduce him to an animal. It also doesn’t make sense, but common
sense is hard to come by these days.
Whites have been manipulated into mass murdering Muslims for Israel and welcoming Muslims at the same time. Teaching in Leipzig, I told my students that if they really cared about Syrians and Iraqis, they should protest their government’s participation on wars against Syria and Iraq, but most of them were unresponsive, for it was easiest to just wave that “REFUGEES WELCOME” sign.
So what can be done at this point? What do you suggest as
remedies?
I’d be interested to hear what you think we should do, since looking
on from the outside frequently gives one a clearer view of the whole.
But since you asked, I’d
say we need more diversity of media ownership—break up the Viacoms and the
Googles like we did AT&T. There should be legislation providing guys like
Gavin McInnes clear grounds on which to sue Twitter when they arbitrarily shut
down his account for political reasons. If a tax-exempt organization amasses a
half billion dollars in assets, they should be investigated and the officers
indicted. AIPAC should be forced to register as a foreign agent. We should send
a basket of fruit to Putin with a handwritten apology. We should pull out of
the UN and give our permanent seat on the security council to Germany on the
condition they lock up Chancellor Merkel in Rudolf Hess’s old cell. Julian
Assange should be freed. George Soros should be jailed. For every lovely on the
dole, mandatory birth control. We should implement policies to encourage
marriage and family formation like Israel has. We should build the wall like
Israel has. We should bring our military home and shut down the bases
world-wide. We should shut down the CIA and flush the FBI. We should take
another 40-year time-out from immigration like we did from 1925-1965. We should
purge the nation’s humanities faculties, close the Department of Education, ban
the NEA, and get the government out of the education industry subsidy business.
We should raise tariffs across the board and rip up all the free trade
agreements. Speed limits should be set to accommodate the natural speed of
traffic. Cops should not have a financial interest in making arrests—end asset
forfeiture. Lethal use of force by cops should be drastically reduced, and
attacks on cops should be more severely punished. We should end the war on
drugs. We should shut down the refugee and asylum programs completely. China
wants to lead the world? Let them welcome the wretched refuse for a couple of
decades while we inspect the paperwork of every refugee admitted in the last
twenty years for signs of fraud. If found, deport and assess whichever refugee
resettlement program was responsible triple damages. We should audit the Fed,
or flat out shut it down. We should implement policies to discourage factory
farming and ensure the animals we eat are more humanely treated. We should end
taxpayer support for Holocaust museums. We should shut down the National
Endowment for Democracy and end all government-funded political activity, here
and, especially, abroad. We should pay reparations to all the Iraqis we displaced—payable
in Iraq—then deduct the amount from the aid we send Israel. We should semi-fund
political campaigns and eliminate the ability of guys like Haim Saban, Sheldon
Adelson, and George Soros to dump 25 million dollars each on a political
campaign. We should open a full inquiry into the USS Liberty incident. We
should open a full inquiry into the Jeffery Epstein affair. We should unseal
the findings of the Warren Commission. Antifa should be declared a domestic
terrorist organization and ruthlessly suppressed, its members sent for
reeducation at a camp run by me.
Of course, none of these policy changes will be implemented
without a media campaign behind it. Therefore, the most important thing is to
break up and diversify the media. So, if we can just get the media on board
with that…
Or, Linh, maybe you could produce movies with Chinese money and
alt-right talent.
In the meantime, we should
watch less football and do what we can to soften the blows. Hiding under a rock
won’t save us.
Linh Dinh’s latest book is Postcards from the End of
America. He maintains a regularly updated photo blog.