Re-Examining White Nationalism

Finding serious, competent institutions among American dissidents has historically been a difficult task. The term “dissident right” itself brings to mind the image of a myriad of smaller organizations and personalities, highly decentralized and all competing to host “the conference”, or be “the group”. Some of the older organizations have gone defunct. Others never really took off. Over the past few decades, however, a few groups have stood the test of time and have become staples within the sphere. 

VDare, run by Mr. Peter Brimelow, is one such organization. Founded in 1999, VDare has been a mainstay in the fight to reduce non-White immigration into the United States, and has published many high-profile authors and activists, including Jared Taylor, John Derbyshire, and Sam Francis. Its credibility as a dissident right institution was bolstered with VDare’s purchase of the Samuel Taylor Cottage in West Virginia, where it now hosts private conferences. 

The VDare 2024 Spring Conference has just been announced, along with its speaker lineup. The group will convene for a three day event starting April 26th; attendees will listen to speeches from longtime VDare activists such as Peter Brimelow and John Derbyshire, race-IQ academic Steve Sailer, InfoWars associate Dan Lyman, Irish Nationalist and rising star Keith Woods, and former Trump admin employee Amanda Milius, with more to be announced in the following weeks. To those who have been in leagues with the dissident right for some time, this lineup sounds like a run-of-the-mill conference. There are others on the fringes who seem to think something else is at play.

You may have raised your eyebrow when you read the final name in the announced speaker list. Amanda Milius – the daughter of famous movie director John Milius. For those unfamiliar, John Milius directed Red Dawn (1984), an 80’s classic which tells the story of a Soviet invasion of the United States. Amanda, as previously stated, worked in the Trump Whitehouse as well as in the State Department, and produced the 2020 documentary “The Plot Against the President”, examining the Russia-gate controversy.

Milius’ accomplishments, previously held high-profile jobs, and her family ties to Hollywood make her an interesting figure to speak at what is generally understood to be a White nationalist conference. VDare is well outside the mainstream of political discussion, especially the conservative factions of the MAGA movement. Another curveball is that Milius is Jewish, and a hawkish Zionist to boot. For many in this dissident sphere, the idea that Jews hold disproportionate influence in American government and society is an accepted truth, one which is recognized as the primary cause of America’s decline as well as the chief obstacle in any effort to make America a sovereign nation once more. Why, then, is Amanda Milius speaking at this conference, and what must this say about VDare and the White nationalist scene more broadly?

Jewish White Nationalist Intellectuals

This phenomenon is not without its historical precedent. American Renaissance, another White nationalist political organization, has also had a complicated relationship with Jews and Judaism throughout its three decades of existence. Nathan Cofnas, a Jewish academic whose research focuses on race and genetics, has taken to Twitter over the years to say as much. Cofnas has been engaged for the better part of a decade in an academic duel with Professor Kevin MacDonald on the subject of Jews and MacDonald’s idea of a “Jewish Evolutionary Strategy”, with Cofnas defending the idea that Jews can and will identify as White and engage with White nationalism if they weren’t chased off by antisemites within the group.

After all, Cofnas points to the early days of American Renaissance, the first conference of which featured four Jewish speakers out of the ten total.

Cofnas previously had stated that much of the high-profile literature from the American Renaissance crowd was the product of Jewish scholarship, such as Michael Levin, as well as explaining that Jews have had a presence in the related Paleoconservative movement. 

In the case of American Renaissance, the two camps, those being White nationalists who were concerned with Jewish influence and Jews who saw themselves as part of the White nationalist movement, came to a head in the early 2000’s. David Duke and Don Black, two men whose focus was primarily on Jewish power, attended the 2006 American Renaissance conference and asked provocative questions on the subject. These inquiries roused the ire of Jewish researcher and longtime American Renaissance associate Michael Hart, who confronted Duke and subsequently left the conference. Whilst Jared Taylor has long sought the support of Jewish intellectuals and academics sympathetic to his cause, following 2006 and the Duke incident, Jews have been more hesitant to speak or attend events hosted by American Renaissance. This is despite Taylor’s condemnation of Duke’s actions and antisemitic opinions being voiced at his conference. 

Mr. Taylor Walks The Tightrope

Mr. Taylor himself has been caught in the crossfire of these two camps throughout many of the past decades. He has walked a narrow tightrope between the two, seeking the intellectual backing of Jewish academics concerned with race, as well as the energetic activism of those concerned with Jewish power, with either side accusing him of being too close to the other. What is interesting about Taylor, however, are the connections found in his personal life. His wife, Evelyn Rich, wrote her PhD dissertation on the Ku Klux Klan, attempting to study their ideology and how the group operated in the modern day. Of course, David Duke, being perhaps the highest profile Klansmen at the time, was an early person of interest. Rich interviewed Duke several times, and he invited her to a conference held by the Institute for Historical Review, a group dedicated to the cause of historical revisionism, with a heavy emphasis on the Holocaust and Second World War. Rich secretly taped Duke on more than one occasion, as well as other high-profile attendees of the conference, and sent her tapes to the Anti-Defamation League, as well as the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism. Rich actually met Jared Taylor at the following year’s IHR conference, but not before meeting Mark Weber, a man who some hold responsible for the decline of the Institute as a credible and influential organization for revisionists and those interested in Jewish power. 

Weber and Taylor met in Ghana in 1970, whilst Weber was working there on behalf of the US government as an English teacher. It is generally unknown as to whether Weber and Taylor maintained a regular correspondence following this initial meeting, but it is known that Weber had other connections to men working for the US government and potentially Israeli intelligence. One such man is Andrew Allen, a San Francisco-area lawyer. Allen was the president of a foundation which sought to provide resources for the targets of the 1962 Tatmadaw Coup, in which the Burmese military ousted a government which had enjoyed close relations with Israel and the United States. Allen also stated in a deposition that his most proud work was running guns to the Mujahideen during the Soviet-Afghan War, a job which, whilst funded by the United States, was undertaken on the ground largely by Israeli intelligence assets. 

Returning to the subject of Evelyn Rich, it was revealed that Rich corresponded over the phone with Irwin Suall, the chief fact-finder of the Anti-Defamation League for three decades. The event was publicized by members of the IHR who were suspicious of Rich, however Weber and those associated with him declared that it was an insignificant event, and that it had no bearing on the beliefs or operations of Jared Taylor. 

Brimelows’ Connections

On the subject of VDare, Peter Brimelow has always maintained some connection to the mainstream body of politics, of which he originated from. Brimelow worked at Forbes and National Review during the 80’s and 90’s, and maintains a relationship with media giant Rupert Murdoch. Brimelow is also well acquainted with Stephen Miller, the renowned immigration hawk in the Trump administration, who invited him to speak at Duke University in 2007. It was revealed in the Katie McHugh email leaks of 2019 that Brimelow, Miller, and White House employee Julia Hahn were connected and corresponded. 

One may know that Stephen Miller is Jewish, as is Julia Hahn. Following the attacks on October 7th, Hahn took to writing in Tablet Magazine about the absurd position liberal Jews in the United States take regarding immigration, specifically Islamic immigration, and urged her co-ethnics to rethink their potentially suicidal stance on the issue. Islamic immigration has been a theme in the writings and works of both Stephen Miller and Julia Hahn, and whilst salient in some sense to the White nationalist cause, has far more in common with Israel’s struggle against Palestine and wider Muslim neighbors. 

These historical examples all illustrate that there has always been an effort to subvert the White nationalist movement in the United States by moving its discussions about power, and the Jewish dimension to it, towards discussions of racial differences and concerns about Islam and Islamic immigration. The figures at the top of such organizations are mixed up with odd personal connections which set off more than a few alarm bells in the mind of a dissident. 

The VDare-Israeli Right Alliance?

Some of the articles and literature found on VDare following the October 7th attacks reflects a desire to win Jews over to the White nationalist cause. Multiple pieces have since been published by “The Hebrew Conservative” detailing the shift in Israeli society and the struggle of the Netanyahu administration to transform the Israeli state from its labor-oriented foundation to one that is chauvinistic and expansionist. 

Ann Coulter has gotten in on the trend, attacking Palestinian demonstrators for their jealousy of Israel transforming Palestine into a first rate nation, as well as attacking Black Lives Matter for its response to 10/7 and urging liberal Jews to join with immigration hawks against the third world. 

An old piece written by Susan Green about her journey to Nietzscheanism, as well as her coming to understand the immigration issue, rails against those who believe in a Jewish conspiracy and urges rightists to understand that Jews are no monolith, and that Jews can be fellow immigration restrictionists. In the wake of October 7th, it has since been updated and republished.

Steve Sailer has amplified the belief that Jews are White whether they like it or not, and that both Whites and Jews are hurt by Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies and therefore should ally against their mutual enemies. 

Ideas Over Identity

To answer the initial question, “How does Amanda Milius find herself speaking at the VDare conference”, one part of the answer is ironically that White nationalism is a malleable idea, not an identity. Who is White? Do Jews count as White? To some, the answer is yes. Is White civilization held to a specific faith, or must it be secular? What encapsulates White civilization? Is Israel a part of it? To some, especially following the attacks of October 7th and the shared hatred of Israel and Europe by much of the third world, the answer is yes. If Israel is part of our shared civilization, it then follows that Judeo-Christianity is an accurate descriptor, and that religious disputes have no place in such a movement. By opening themselves to include like-minded Jews in their struggle against immigration and non-White replacement, White nationalists and their organizations are a prime target for Jews who feel similarly about their current predicament in Israel and elsewhere.

The second part to this answer, of course, is that Israel and specifically the Likud party has a vested interest in subverting the American hard-right to serve their interests and collect intelligence on dissidents. This is done through personal relationships and espionage. High-brow conferences – like VDare – are a perfect target for intelligence assets to learn more about dissident networks and find influential assets within them to flip. Someone deemed susceptible to such advances may pick up a personal handler by making connections at such an event, and through a steady stream of messaging and perceived friendship, can be turned into a traitor to their nation and their own interests. This, alongside a continued effort to downplay the Jewish role in the decline of the United States, are the driving forces behind Israeli and domestic Jewish interaction with White nationalism and its associated organizations. 

American Nationalism Is The Answer

If White nationalism is too nebulous, and if its weak boundaries leave its supporters unguarded from foreign influence, then American nationalism must be the answer. American nationalism is an exclusive phenomena built around American identity, which is White, Christian and the particular experiences and developments in the cultural identity of the American people. By prioritizing identity over ideas, there are fewer vectors of influence for foreign operatives to turn men against their own nation. An American nationalist would not invite a malicious actor to speak at his conference out of perceived “White unity”. Because to him, his own nation and people are the only ones with which he feels any unity at all.