Vanguard (18) Alien Nation, Redux (Transcription)

Back in 2013, Peter Brimelow of VDare.com was the guest on the Vanguard Podcast. Here is a transcription of that conversation, with a a few gaps as Brimelow has a rather impenetrable accent due not only to his Northern English origins, but also his rather slurred manner of speaking. The audio of this can be heard here. 

Intro man: Welcome to Vanguard a radical podcast on culture society and politics. Here are your hosts: Colin Liddell, Andy Nowicki, and Richard Spencer.

Spencer: Hello everyone and welcome back to Vanguard. This is Richard Spencer and this program is being recorded on Saturday, February 2nd 2013, and it will be netcast to the World on the following Sunday. Well, joining me as usual, are my friends and co-hosts Andy Nowicki and Colin Liddell. Colin, you first, how is life over in Japan?

Liddell: Very bright and sunny here. Yesterday I went down to Yokohama to check out the Robert Capa exhibition.

Spencer: Oh fascinating! Were you writing that up?

Liddell: Yeah I'm going to be writing about it somewhere, and, yeah... So it's like time traveling back to the 1930s and 40s.

Spencer: That is interesting. Andy, how are things over in Georgia?

Nowicki: Things are clear and cold here in Georgia. It's nice weather, it's to my taste.

Spencer: That's nice. Well, we've actually had some warm weather out here in the wilderness where I live, although things are now very cold and windy, so I'm sitting here enjoying a nice bourbon on a Saturday night, talking to you folks. But anyway today we have a very special guest, and that is our friend Peter Brimelow. Peter is of course the editor and founder of Vdare.com, and he's really, actually had a fascinating career in journalism that's taken him through financial journalism and the Conservative movement in the United States and immigration activism. So, Peter, thanks for being back on the show.

Brimelow: Thanks for having me, Richard.

Spencer: Well, we... As I mentioned, we're recording this on February 2nd, 2013, and, for better and for worse - mostly for worse, I guess - the immigration/ amnesty debate has reared its head once again. I used to think the last time it was taken seriously was in 2007, and there was a very strong grassroots effort to kill it - I guess - really in infancy, but, you know, it is back, and I think it might be stronger than it was a couple years ago, so that's the main reason why we have Peter on the show. Peter, let me ask the first question, and that is: What has happened to Talk Radio and a lot of the Populist Right? Because, if you remember back in 2007, you had a lot of the Republican higher-ups on board with the McCain Amnesty, but it was really these, the radio, the talk radio guys, who were very populist about it, they had all these people calling into their congressmen, and they supposedly melted the circuit board or something like that, and there are all these stories of this really "hot rage" against immigration, but what I what I've seen now is almost a concerted effort to subvert all these talk radio hosts, and so you have Rush Limbaugh fawning over Marco Rubio and all that kind of stuff, so what's happened to the populist right, and could it maybe have a a comeback, as it were?

Brimelow: Richard you know I'm really an internet person and, I think that uh one of the things that we've seen in talk radio over the last 20 years or 15 years is that it's become increasingly centralized and corporatized and the minds are getting increasing control over the hosts, and one of the big... I mean look what happened to Lou Dobbs, you know, I mean you're not allowed to have any kind of a deviant point of view in the mainstream media, and they've systematically taken out a lot of the leaders of the opposition on talk radio and on television, I mean, Pat Buchanan being another example. On the other hand, it's awfully early in the cycle, you know. We on VDare.com we monitor what Rush Limbaugh says with great interest, not because we have a lot of respect for him as a political thinker, but because, I think, he says as much as he... He is is a balancing act between his audience on the one hand and his sponsors on the other, and, yeah, he obviously feels, and more so than most of Conservativism Inc., that the audience doesn't like it. You know the famous story about market research is looking at dog food he came back and told the [????] the dogs don't like it that's why he won't sell. Well the problem about the entire political establishment has is that the dogs don't like amnesty, and Rush has gone back and to on this. I mean, on the one hand, you're right, talk radio is quiet as it is now I think partly because it was so stunned by the disastrous defeat of the Romney campaign, but on the other hand we see you see people like Charles Krauthammer and so on, somewhat quickly, tacking back tacking back in response to popular discontent. Krauthammer is now saying we have to have a fence and all that kind of thing. I mean it's a complete stupid and symbolic point of course, but he obviously is feeling heat, and the last few days Limbaugh has been throwing a lot of petrol on the issue, so you know we still have some hope for him.

Spencer: But isn't isn't border security in itself a bit of a distraction, you know, in the sense that the real problem is massive legal immigration and the potential of amnestying in all of these illegal immigrants. But, in a way, you know, from our perspective, illegal immigration, which is the thing that everyone's always talking about -- oh we all agree that we need to stop that. Well, I mean, illegal immigrants very often go back home. I mean that's been documented, and they'll cross the border the other way, and so, in a way, that's not the real problem, but Andy...

Nowicki: And, yeah, and more of them I've heard that in the in the last two or three years, there's actually more of them going back because of the stagnant economy in the U.S.

Brimelow: Well, illegal immigration does fluctuate but [???] because the economy's relatively low, but it'll just start up again when and if the economy picks up. I agree of course that that legal immigration is the more serious problem in the long run, and I also think that border security is only a small part of the problem of illegal immigration, and the major issue with illegal immigration is interior enforcement. You know, they ought to be able to stop people from hiring illegals, and the second issue is birth-right citizenship. You've got to stop this population naturalizing all the time, which is what it would otherwise do. And neither of these issues have been raised at all in the current proposals. I mean especially what the political establishment has done here is simply repeat the Bush Amnesty proposals. There's no difference at all between what Bush proposes, Obama proposes, and what Rubio proposes. They're just saying the same thing. It's the famous definition of insanity - you keep on doing the same thing expecting a different result.

Spencer: Yeah, go ahead Andy.

Nowicki: I was just thinking, you know, when Bush was was trying to push through the amnesty plan in 2007 and there was this fierce resistance to it. Of course, you know, the ones behind it, the main ones behind it, the main ones pushing it were Republicans and the GOP was in charge pretty much at that time. Is there anything to... And now, of course, it's the Democrats and Obama... Is there anything... Is it easier for the the Grassroots types to get fired up  against you know a member of their own party than it is for them to get fired up against the opposing party? I mean that seems counterintuitive in some ways but I wonder...

Brimelow: Actually I think... One of the things about this amnesty drive, which has obviously been planned long in advance is... It would have happened under Romney. Romney made it very clear he was going to go for amnesty. He said that's in the [???] debate, and he's always saying he's in favour of massively increasing skilled legal immigration, despite the [???] so we would have seen exactly the same drive for amnesty if Romney had been elected, and we would have been worse off, of course, because there are Republicans who would go with the president, and that was the big problem under Bush, you know it was very hard to get a lot of loyalist Republicans angry with their own president, and, in fact, in the areas of spending and so on, and of course the disastrous foreign policy of Bush, you know, Republicans didn't kick. They only started to kick once Obama was in, but on illegal immigration and legal immigration they did kick, and, you know, both in 06 and 07. [In] 06 Bush [and] the Republicans controlled everything -- the Congress and  the White House, In 07 they didn't control the Congress, you know, and that... They've had it both ways and, you know, we stopped it both times, and, you know, the people inside the Beltway who I respect, believe it could be stopped again, but it's going to be a huge shock for the political class who've absolutely convinced himself they can get it through this time. 

Spencer: Do you think even the grassroots are more demoralized than they were, in the sense that this whole meme that... You know, in a weird way, the meme is 'Demography is Destiny' and so the idea is we... you know, the GOP needs to reach out to Hispanics or it's doomed and it's just going to be 2012 over and over again, and...

Brimelow: You know, Richard, as you know, we consistently run on VDare.com every day coverage of what the polls said that the Republican share of the white vote was, and the poll was terrible. I mean Romney never did well with the white vote. In the end he got about 57%. That's just not enough. In 2010 they got 60%. They need to build on that, they need to get up to the levels you seen in Georgia and the Mississippi and so on, significantly higher than that. As you know, the demographics of Texas are as bad as California, but the Republicans carry Texas because they have a substantial, much stronger white vote. [???] the Republicans again failed to carry the white vote in California. According to Reuters/IPSOS they got 49%. So, you know, the issue is not that the demographics caused by immigration. The Republicans' problem is that they do not turn out the White base, and one of the reasons they don't do that is that they won't run on these national [???] issues like immigration. I think that Conservatism Inc. and a lot of Republicans in the field are very demoralized, and the reason they're demoralized is not because they lost bad - they didn't lose that badly - but because the themes they've been running on for the last 30 years, which are basically just going over... running the 1980 elections over and over again, simply don't work anymore. You know, they're just not having the resonance that they used to have, and that means they've got to come up with new ideas, and, of course, that's very difficult thing to do.

Spencer: Absolutely. Colin, do you want to chime in?

Liddell: Just curious about the percentage figures. Peter, you're talking about the percentage of the white vote. Does that include all the people who absent themselves from the political process, because I guess when you say 50% of the white vote that means 43% for the Democrats 57% for the Republicans and then there's also a large number of white voters that are just not bothering to vote as well.

Brimelow: But there are two issues with the White vote. The first is how many turn out and the second is what share the Republicans get. Now, as it turns out, the White turnout was down in this election, and it was down in the previous general election. McCain didn't turn out the White votes either. So this is the second time Whites simply hasn't turned out very substantially, and the reason for that of course is that they're just thoroughly demoralized. But the other aspect is that even the ones that did turn out, didn't go so sufficiently for Republicans, so Republicans are losing both on the share and on the turnout. But it's obviously, when you look at the crew that they've got there, why people don't bother to vote for them, but they don't realize that. But they just, I guess, that's something that they can't allow themselves to think.

Liddell: This sort of represents the greatest disenfranchisement of the White vote since the period of Reconstruction I'd say.

Brimelow: That's a [good] way to look at it. Yeh, except in this case it's a self-disenfranchisement.

Liddell: In a way, they don't really have a choice, because they're just been given these these two false choices, so... I mean, they don't actually have the option to vote for what they would prefer to vote for.

Brimelow: No, I'm sorry, I mean the great target of opportunity in American politics is the white working class, particularly in the Northern states - the great tier of states,  Greater New England, from Portland Maine to Portland Oregon. You know, Republicans did terribly in all of these areas, and they're not heavily minority States. They're white States. But the big problem is the [???] pollsters are just not getting the working class vote, and of course it's not surprising. What do they do to appeal to them? [???] You have very wealthy country club campaigns who have nothing in common with these people. Make that clear.

Spencer: Oh, I think it was interesting... Actually you ran a very good report on this recent National Review Institute conference, that was written by James Kirkpatrick, and again, I mean this goes back to what you're talking about of these Conservative Inc. just regurgitating all these just totally stale ideas. It's all about "the fight against Socialism" or something like that, and I think one of the things that struck me is just particularly delusional amongst them, is that they... A big applause line was that they should have had a Ryan-Romney ticket, that... They didn't have that, you know, the little Ayn Randian kind of objectivist nerd, you know, he wasn't front and centre enough, and then, you know, the country club Wall Streeter should have been number two or something. And, you know, what you were saying, you know, there was all of these White people who are potential GOP voters in the Rust Belt kind of places, that, I'm sure, just looked at the, you know, the objectivist nerd and the Wall Street Country Club person, they're just like, "These people don't represent me in the slightest, I think, you know, the Liberals represent me. They at least say they do."

Brimelow: Absolutely, I mean Ryan of course is a Kempite, he's a follower of Jack Kemp, and he's utterly hopeless on immigration. You know, he's a wonk, he's interested in highly technical issues, none of which are popular with the Republican base. It was a very bad choice. But, you see, as you know, I mean the point of the Romney campaign is, we think, and it's actually true about this row about [???], we think we're looking for a plural contest, where ideas and candidates and so on, are competing with each other. Well, that's not actually true. The Romney campaign was simply a feeding frenzy by campaign consultants, who wished to raise as much money as possible and spend it on themselves, and to do that, they avoided running on issues which were popular and for issues which they could raise money on, and they could raise money with Ryan who's very popular with the hedge fund people, and suddenly I think with this amnesty row at the moment, it's probably not going to go through if you actually look at the numbers and so on, and if you believe the people I respect - the immigration patriots in Washington - it's still very tough to get this thing through, particularly in the relatively short period of time that they have. But, the [???] class doesn't really care because what it wants to do is to raise as much money as possible from Bill Gates, and have a huge row and campaign, and spend the greatest money on lobbying and so on. And whether it wins or whether it doesn't win that's not really important. It's just it's just [???] by the political class against the business class. The business class is essentially helpless in this market. It's fools.

Spencer: Let me ask you, Peter, going forward, what are some of the key, let's say, new vocabulary that a lot of the grassroots need to start learning? Because, you know, one thing that we've talked about together off air is this problem, when you have something like the Tea Party, it was really an implicitly white community, and that was clear, and I think all the Liberals are criticized it as such we're quite perceptive, but, at the same time, all they talked about was all this kind of nonsense from the Buckleyites in the 1950s, so, you know, it was like, "Oh, it's taxes and we need to fight Socialism" or, you know, something like this, and so what you found is that they didn't really know how to speak. They didn't know how to speak for themselves, and so, if you think about going forward, what are some of the key maybe like policy ideas on the one hand but also just kind of language that people should learn how to speak that could replace all this curdled milk that's given us by the Conservative Inc. morons?

Brimelow: In the end, Richard, of course Americans - and by that I mean White Americans because they are Americans because that's what America is - they've got to start defining their own interests. We've got to explicitly say how does this benefit or disadvantage Whites. Now, we're some distance from that, but it can be gotten up as a national issue, you know, I mean you can say... For example, one of the things Republicans should be running on is language legislation. They should take a leap out to the book of the Quebec nationalists and pass laws which prohibit employers from demanding people to be, demanding that employees be bilingual, except in very exceptional circumstances. I get email all the time from people, you know, in the... it's Eastern Washington State and places like that, who say that their kids can't get jobs in hotels or as working fast food operations, because they don't speak Spanish. Well, of course, it's not that there's that many people speaking Spanish. It's just that if you, you know, in a situation like that, employers are inclined to [???] in favor of the minority language community, because they're the only ones who are actually bilingual as a fact of the matter. What the Quebecers did was they simply made that illegal. You can't require, most Quebec employers cannot require employees to speak English, because two-thirds of all Quebecers don't speak English. They're monoglot francophone. That's the kind of thing you have to [???].

Spencer: And also I like the idea of removing birth-right citizenship. I mean that was... That kind of was an issue a couple of years ago, and I think that's an important thing to get across, just so you don't have all these people just being born in the country. Also wasn't it...

Brimelow: One of the interesting things about this debate however, I'd say that they've learned nothing and forgotten nothing, proposed exactly the same thing. If they had come up with a proposal while saying. "Well, look, we will amnesty all these people in, but they will never be citizens, and we will never allow birth-right citizenship," so we will have what is essentially a class of helots in the country who have don't have full political rights, which is what the Swiss have. The Swiss have a very substantial population of Swiss-born people who are never going to be Swiss because the Swiss don't want to have a [???] community. Now, of course, this is just appalling from the point of view of democratic theory, and it's a disaster for American working class. But who cares about them? It's very clear that the ruling class didn't care about them. What it would have done, is it would have gotten the business community out of the debate. Because they don't care about people having political rights. They just want to have cheap labour. I still think that might be a fallback position which we might see emerge. I'm also very intrigued by Rand Paul. I can't make up my mind...

Nowicki: That's what I was about to ask...

Brimelow: I can't decide whether he doesn't know what he's talking about, or he has [an] extremely clever idea. He said... Well, what he said is "We've got to evolve on amnesty," that is basically we've got to amnesty these people in with border security, but, at the same time, he's also... he has said that he'll simply stop legal integration, he'll stop all integration after amnestying these people in. Now that's a very interesting deal. He said just a couple of days ago... We had a blog up on VDare.com with... He told a local talk show host that... He actually quoted this line from Milton Friedman: "You can't have open immigration and the welfare statem" [???] normally get Libertarians to think about

Spencer: Well, yeah, but I'm afraid what he means is that he wants open immigration and no welfare state.

Brimelow: That's not what he's saying. He has actually said he'd like to see no further immigration until everybody assimilates, and he's not proposed, as far as I'm aware, to abolish the welfare state. 

Spencer: Well, we don't want them to assimilate. I mean I don't know I don't know... I don't... Well, in the sense, if they assimilate, it's always to what? I mean it's just we would have some weird Hispanic, you know, country that they assimilate to I mean it's not... Anyway, I don't want to argue with... Rand Paul's not here and obviously we're on the same page, Peter, so... But anyway...

Brimelow: The thing is to trade, to have no legal or illegal immigration going forward, well that would be a great prize to stabilize the democratic situation in the country. That would be really something remarkable to achieve, and if you also, to do things on the language front and so on, a lot of these Hispanics would probably leave, so I mean that's a really interesting idea that Paul's proposing. I'm just not sure he knows what he said. I mean, you know, it's such a radical idea and it's got no pickup on it that I wonder if he realized what he said - if he isn't just sparking off a few libertarian platitudes.

Spencer: I don't trust Rand Paul. I see him as a real, just a kind of opportunist type person, and he's also someone who seems much, much more than his father to kind of want to play footsie with Conservatives and be a kind of a part of the movement. His father took on big enemies. Whatever you want to think about him, he took on the military-industrial complex and the establishment, he took on the Federal Reserve Bank. I mean these are huge... You know, you're taking on Goliath, to say the least...

Nowicki: And did pretty well, didn't he? I mean...

Spencer: Yeah I mean, he did, he started a movement among young people. I mean you could you should give credit where credit's due. I think Rand, he just does all this nonsense, like, you know... The stuff he does was like, "We should stop foreign aid to some country because they like didn't tell us something about a Bin Laden," or it was just something where he was always making it 'Work with Conservative In.' He just strikes me as just not at all trustworthy. He's just a kind of opportunist guy who wants to be part of 'the Movement.' But maybe I'm being too harsh.

Brimelow: I think one thing about Paul, you know, Ron Paul was in politics for a long time and he was out of politics for quite a long time you know after he ran for president, so now, what you and I are used to, Richard, the late Paul, he had a... He accumulated a long record [???] the Capitol [???]. I don't know about Rand Paul, which is what... I think it'll be a long time before they'll be able to judge him.

Spencer: Okay, sure, well anyway, Colin, do you want to add any last questions, and we'll let Peter go back to his late night editing routine, which is how he operates?

Liddell: Well just curious how Japan is viewed over in America because obviously they have a completely different approach to the whole question of immigration.

Nowicki: Very restrictionist.

Brimelow: We've run a number of [pieces] on VDare.com on Japan by Jared Taylor, discussing the fact that they moved to mechanization rather than  importing lots of Filipinos. Now I have to say that this has had absolutely no effect on public debate, and the general consensus here is that the Japanese are going to have to cave in and have lots of Africans come to, you know, run their industries for them because they're getting old. I should ask you, Colin, you know, I mean there's a great scare at the moment of the [???] about American fertility rate. But I must say it's always occurred to me that, you know, fertility rate... You know, there's nothing wrong with the decline in population if you can manage it. I mean, the population's spiked dramatically in the 19th and 20th century. I don't see any reason why it couldn't come down quite reasonably. The question is how skilled the population is. Are the Japanese panicking about this?

Liddell: I wouldn't say panicking. I mean, I think it's more of a problem in some of the rural areas because in Japan all the young people tend to gravitate towards these cities, and when you go to some of these rural areas, most of the people do seem to be a bit elderly, and so some of those areas are trying very hard to encourage young people to stay there, and this has resulted in various kinds of tax breaks and incentives, so that might be worth keeping an eye on - what do these, you know, rural Japanese communities do to maintain their demographic profile.

Spencer: You know one thing. Peter. I think unfortunately with the Japanese, I mean, I think people like us look at Japan, and Switzerland also, as deeply sensible people, but, you know, I think particularly Conservatives, this American exceptionalism meme is just very strong in their brains, and I think they really think of America as a different kind of society. It's not like a normal country.

Nowicki: It's the greatest country in the world.

Spencer: Well, yeah, they think that, but it's the greatest ever... We're the richest country in the world, even though we're clearly not, but they think of it in terms of "We are a global society, we're the hope to all mankind," and I think in some ways a lot of the...

Nowicki: Proposition nation.

Spencer: Proposition nation, yeah, there are a lot of different varieties of this, and I think in some ways some of these real sensible... "Sensible nationalism" maybe I'll call it, because it's not anything scary or strange, just sensible rational nationalism, it runs up against all this American exceptionalist bullshit that Conservatives seem to believe in.

Liddell: Well, the culture, the culture of the country really dictates its destiny I guess in many ways, and in Japan, one of the one of the things about Japanese culture is there's a lot of emphasis on non-confrontation, and this permeate, you know, almost every area. They try to avoid direct confrontation in all sorts of situations, culturally and socially, and just having a rapidly increasing immigrant population would completely mess that up, so it just cuts across the grain of Japanese culture to start importing lots of different culturally distinct populations.

Brimelow:  I mean Taylor, Jared Taylor said of course that he really think[s]... And, of course, you know, he spent his childhood in Japan, so he really thinks that if the Japanese ever confronted with a group making passionately rational arguments in favour of immigration, opening their borders. they would have fallen too. They just... They were lucky that they didn't have a kind of a group operating in their culture.

Liddell: Yeah, I think the pressure point for increasing immigration in Japan, I think you you referred to earlier, Peter, is the nurses, the Filipino nurses. That's because one of the other key points about Japanese Society is that it's a rapidly aging society, so there's a big concern about having enough, you know, nurses to look after all these old people. So, you sometimes hear about efforts to increase the number of nurses coming into the country, but the Japanese unions actually work against that because they maintain very high standards. So, for Filipino nurses to actually qualify to operate in Japan, they have to pass quite rigorous tests that the Japanese nurses have to pass, so there's no kind of affirmative action and allowing people in by lowering standards.

Brimelow: Well, good for them.

Spencer: Well, Peter, let's put a bookmark in the conversation and we['d] certainly love to bring it up again with you at a future date, but anyway we'll certainly be watching this immigration amnesty battle as it unfolds. So, you're predicting that amnesty will fail?

Brimelow: Richard, of course I don't know. All I can tell you is that the people I respect inside the Beltway believe that it will fail. Of course that's very much a minority opinion now. In fact, it's almost an unheard-of opinion in the mainstream media. One of the things that strikes about this last attack is how extraordinarily controlled the mainstream media narrative is. There's just simply no dissent anywhere. We started to run a series on VDare.com, where we find some [???] dissent and we report it. There's a Liberal columnist in Rhode Island from [???] that's just written something asking what about the, you know, White working class. So it's reported, but they're few and far between. The consensus in the media is overwhelming in favour of this thing going through. And the Republicans finally having to pay attention to this.

Spencer: Oh yeah, well I think McCain was on NPR and he said that he could get 88 Senators to support it. He seemed pretty confident.

Brimelow: All I can say is we've been here before. I mean, you know, things were very, very bad in 2006 and 2007, and the other thing is, Richard, even if this does go through, it's not going to make the problem go away. It'll make the problem get worse. You know, the problems of displacement and social disruption and so on, will get worse, to say nothing, of course, of the destruction of the Republican party. I think one thing I do notice that's different to the commentary, but does seem to be somewhat more awareness that the Republicans are committing suicide with this. Even Rich Lowry has been writing columns saying that there's actually no evidence that the amnesty's going to help Republicans with the Hispanic vote. He's not taking the additional [???] point that the Hispanic vote is extremely small anyway and dwarfed by the white working class vote. He's not getting into that, but he is saying that, no, the Hispanics vote for... because of economic reasons and that they're in favour of redistribution, they're basically in favour of looting the White Americans and trying to get money for themselves, and that's not going to stop with amnesty. I think I do see more awareness of that argument.

Spencer: Yeah, well, I mean, I guess it's in some ways bad that they're aware. I mean, maybe the GOP and people like Rich Lowry and all these horrible Conservative Inc. people deserve to be totally displaced and, you know, thrown into the dustbin. They've been so awful for the country.

Brimelow: Well I think that... I mean it's obvious to everybody, I think, that the Republican party is totally corrupt, and, you know, it'll have to be replaced, and immigration's the issue which might very well just break it and displace it. That's you know what [???] predicted, you know, one of Reagan's tools, towards the end of his life, he wrote an article on his own blog, saying that he'd come to conclusion that immigration couldn't be contained in the party system. We'll see a new deal,  we'll see a fourth party system arise, a new party will come along.

Spencer: Well that gives us some hope. So why don't we end on that optimistic note? Thank you Peter, we really appreciate it.