American Renaissance 2025: A Call for a New Whiteness

From November 14th to 16th, about 230 stalwart white advocates gathered at Tennessee’s beautiful Montgomery Bell State Park for the 22nd annual American Renaissance conference. Last year the mood was positively giddy. After all, just days before we met, Donald Trump had won the presidential election. I wondered if this year’s mood would be equally positive, after a year of Trump flip-flops, and, especially, his recent statements in support of the H-1B visa program, which many in the MAGA movement see (correctly) as a betrayal of “America First.”

Surprisingly, the mood this year was still quite positive, and there was a general feeling that our movement had made a great deal of progress. One piece of visual evidence for this was the large number of young people in attendance. Indeed, the attendees seem to get younger every year (only part of which can be attributed to the fact that I grow older every year). To my knowledge, the youngest attendee was just seventeen. This is not counting the couple of mewling and puking (yet still adorable) infants in the room, who probably have not yet formulated conscious political views, but whose genes will guide them in the right direction.

Of course, not everyone was happy to see us. At the security checkpoint, near the entrance to the park, stood an older man who seemed to be taking pictures of everyone who arrived. We were informed that he was from one of the local TV news stations. I learned later that one of our brethren, a lawyer by persuasion, called the station and reminded them, lest they be tempted to turn those pictures over to Antifa, that that organization has recently been designated as a terrorist group.

There seem to be fewer and fewer protestors each year, and those that show up are quarantined far from the conference center. From my hotel room balcony, which afforded me a beautiful view of the lake, I heard what seemed to be one lone protestor crying out in the wilderness. “Go home!” he shouted in impotent rage. “We don’t want you here!”

After some introductory remarks by Jared Taylor, we were treated to a talk by Leonarda Jonie, a very pretty standup comic of Albanian extraction who is gaining a wide audience. Due to her frank words about race, feminism, and transgenderism, she has been cancelled from multiple venues, yet she is still managing to succeed as a comic (you can read about her upcoming gigs here). Leonarda’s talk was extremely funny, but it was also quite poignant.

She described the efforts to deplatform and to cancel her, a tale both sad and now sadly familiar. But she also discussed her own journey to the right. Unlike many of us, who were “born redpilled” (as Jared Taylor would later describe Sam Dickson), Leonarda had accepted many of the lies promulgated by our anti-white and anti-male establishment. Unlike her friends, however, she was blessed with an active mind.

In remarks that would be echoed by Greg Johnson a day later, Leonarda said that “true freedom” is the freedom to think and speak as we like, as opposed to false freedom, the “freedom of slaves” offered us by the modern world, which promises us all manner of luxuries and distractions, so long as we shut up and obey. Leonarda’s story is a truly inspiring one, and she will doubtless inspire others—amid lots of laughter.

Saturday’s events began with an opening address by our venerable host, Jared Taylor. He had titled his talk “The American Experiment,” but it turned out that this was a touch of irony on Taylor’s part. “I hate the term ‘the American Experiment,’” he said. After all, no one talks about “the Chinese Experiment.” America is a nation, a people, not an experiment. And Taylor also poured scorn on the much misunderstood and misused term “American exceptionalism,” which refers to the naïve idea that America is so special we get to be an exception to the laws of nature and of history. The notion that we can build a “multicultural society” without sacrificing our national identity is a prime example of this.

Multiculturalism has been a colossal failure, as evidenced, Taylor noted, by the fact that the politicians who advocate it all manage to shield themselves from its effects by living in gated, majority-white enclaves and sending their children to expensive private schools where they are unlikely to encounter much “diversity.” Taylor spoke positively about the policies enacted by the second Trump administration, especially its enforcement of immigration laws. Trump himself has no firm ideological core and is not a White Nationalist. Nevertheless, Taylor said, he has behaved as if he were a racially conscious president.

But how permanent are the changes brought about by Trump? Most of them were enacted by executive order, which means that a future Democrat president could simply undo all of them with the stroke of a pen. Demographically, whites continue to decline. It’s true that conservatives have made gains, and that America seems to be tired of all the “woke” nonsense. White people finally are finally “waking up,” but the obstacles we face are still enormous.

Even if, following Trump, J.D. Vance is elected to two terms, demographics will not change unless something radical happens, Taylor warned. This means that replacement will eventually make Democrats a permanent majority. How likely is Vance, with his Indian wife and half-Indian children, to take a pro-white stance against legal immigration as well as illegal? How likely is it that he will abandon the civnat ethos?

Taylor’s projections for America’s future are rather gloomy. A radical change in demographics, as well as immigration policy, seems highly unlikely. And getting white Americans to devote themselves to family and have more babies would require a huge cultural shift. We would, for example, have to return to traditional sex roles. And the priorities of typical Americans, which are almost entirely focused on self-promotion and consumerism, would have to radically change.

Taylor believes that America, as currently constituted, cannot be a home for our people. We must have a place that belongs just to us, and this cannot be the entire United States. Even if all illegals were removed from our country, we would still be left with millions upon millions of legal immigrants, who diminish the quality of our lives and have more babies than we do. The hope is that we can start making parts of the US our own. What can save us is an approach that is bottom-up, not top-down. We need a grassroots movement of whites determined to form communities for whites only.

Though Taylor’s projections for the future of a united America are gloomy, his talk was anything but. He ended his remarks by saying that he is now more optimistic than he ever has been in all his years in our movement. We must become better white men and women, he said. We must remember the words of our founders, who acted in the name of “our sacred honor.” And, with great emotion, Taylor reminded us that we have the blood of heroes in our veins. Ours is the greatest struggle any people has faced in thousands of years of human history. After all, we must persuade our people that they have a right to exist, after decades of brainwashing has convinced them that they do not. But Taylor believes we are up to the task.

With remarkable synchronicity, the next speaker’s remarks were directly relevant to Taylor’s call for us to build white communities. Eric Orwoll is a bit of a Renaissance man. He teaches online courses in philosophy and is also a musician and composer. Young Mr. Orwoll is also the President of the Return to the Land Association. Founded a couple of years ago, the aim of this organization is to build an intentional community for people of European ancestry.

Orwoll’s talk was titled “Reclaiming America One Neighborhood at a Time.” But how, one might ask, can one make a neighborhood or community in the US “whites only” without running afoul of the law? Answer: we can, if the land it sits on is owned in common by a “private membership association.” Parcels of land are allocated to each member, and the use of such land is a benefit accruing from membership in the corporate entity. This is the arrangement that has been used to form the whites only Orania community in South Africa. It enables the residents to adopt strict rules for membership, and to effectively exclude anyone they wish.

In 2023, Orwoll and his associates acquired 160 acres in Arkansas under the auspices of such a private membership association. It was extremely successful, and all available stakes were purchased before October 2024. Just this year they opened a second community nearby. And there are plans for others, in other states. Now, pessimists are likely to think this project doomed from the start: surely the System is going to go after this community and force it to open up to all the huddled masses.

Surprisingly, however, Orwoll and his associates seem to so far be getting away with it. The Attorney General of Arkansas has announced that what they are doing is perfectly legal. Nevertheless, Orwoll and company may still face challenges ahead – which will be unsurprising to anyone reading this. Part of the problem is that the law does not define what a “private membership association” is with complete clarity. This may either work for Mr. Orwoll or against him.

Orwoll ended his talk by making a simple but profound point: the purpose of white identitarianism is white community. This is the ultimate end of white advocacy, to establish white societies. To move in this direction, Orwoll noted that we will need to become more collectivistic in our thinking, more focused on the good of the whole, and less individualistic. The same cultural or moral shift Taylor spoke about would be necessary. In my own mind, I wonder if this shift is possible for us, the most individualistic people who have ever lived. Perhaps it is possible for a small number.

For many years, those in our movement have called for us to actually do something to build white spaces – something beyond holding meetings, writing books and articles, and podcasting. Eric Orwoll is doing something, and we wish him all the best, for surely he is in for a fight.

The next speaker, Mark Collett, joined us by video link from the UK. He could not attend the conference in person for he is banned from entering the US and Canada. He is also banned from the Schengen Zone for a period of fifteen years. This is pretty extreme. Even Jared Taylor was banned from Schengen for only five years. As Taylor pointed out, this must mean that Collett is three times as dangerous as him. Collett was formerly chairman of the Young BNP, the youth division of the British National Party. In 2019 he founded the nationalist organization Patriotic Alternative.

Collett’s talk was titled “The Antidote to the American Poison.” The US, he said, is the fountain of all moral degeneracy in the world today. Yikes. But Collett quickly pointed out that the degenerate America is not the original America, the Anglo-Saxon America. America is now controlled by hostile aliens who look like whites but are not. They are motivated in part by an atavistic hatred of Europeans. Collett is, of course, referring to the Jews, and I will note in passing that there was more discussion of the “JQ” at this American Renaissance conference than at any previous meeting, at least in my experience.

Collett referred to what he called the “Judeo-American State Oligarchy,” which controls media, social media, the corporate world, education, and government itself. Jewish control really went into high gear in 1945, when we were sold the lie that the US went to war against fascism in the name of liberal democracy. The US, as a result, was portrayed as a hero nation, as the champion of democracy. In essence, America underwent a second founding, a false founding.

America was reconceived as a beacon against the evils of nationalism, especially white nationalism. All dissenting voices were ruthlessly suppressed, only through far more subtle and less obvious means that were employed in the Communist countries. At least the oppression employed in the USSR was more open and honest. The truth, Collett pointed out, was that the Western liberal democracy championed by the US was just the other side of the coin to Bolshevism. The real counterbalance to Bolshevism had been defeated in the Second World War.

In the aftermath of that war, Western Europe was effectively occupied by America, or, we could say, absorbed by the Judeo-American State. Jews had been heavily overrepresented among the Bolsheviks, but “liberal democracy” was a much easier sell in the US than Communism, but had the same anti-nationalist intent. The result, for the last eighty years, has been a steady stream of cultural poison flowing from the US to Europe and, indeed, to much of the rest of the world. A poison that undermines family, masculinity, European values, and religion. Ironically, after the fall of Communism it was Eastern and Central Europe that returned to family, folk, and faith. And the US is now unquestionably the most hated country in the world.

The US and Western Europe have now thoroughly absorbed the anti-nationalist, multicultural agenda. If this is not defeated we will become a minority in our own nations. And we will be hated and blamed for all the failures of multiculturalism that will inevitably occur. Ours seems to be a nightmare future.

But there is hope, Collett stated, for America, and for the rest of the West. The Judeo-American State will be defeated, but it must be defeated from within. America – the real America – was built by Europeans for Europeans. The intention of the American founders was the antithesis of that of the Judeo-American State. “Western liberal democracy,” Collett said, “is the poison that flows from occupied America.”

And he exhorted us Americans to deny the state our support. Stop directly or indirectly supporting the system. Collett called for what he described as a “peaceful separation.” In remarks that echoed the comments of both Taylor and Orwoll, he stated that we must walk away and create our own spaces. When we do, the multicultural society will collapse all on its own, for it depends on the efforts and intelligence of white people to sustain itself. Time for Atlas to shrug (my words, not Collett’s).

Mark Collett gave us a powerful speech, delivered with passion and real intensity. It was Mosleyesque, the highest compliment I can pay him.

Next, Bradley Fischer of Patriot Front spoke to us. His was a speech pitched at a very practical level. It bore the self-explanatory title “Engaging the System Without Losing Yourself.” In other words, Fischer gave us practical advice about infiltrating the system and using it to our advantage, without becoming identified with it.

He spoke about inserting our own people into local government, government advisory boards, etc. Some of this involves standing for office, but much of it involves just showing up. Fischer also spoke about building “middle ground spaces,” such as the Young Republicans. It’s quite useful to have a group, he noted. A lot of us tend to be lone wolves, but the problem with this is that lone wolves can be taken down by a pack of coyotes. A group provides resources and manpower.

To get started, Fischer advised us to only engage with very specific goals; don’t operate with vague ideas about what you want to accomplish. We must also think in terms of identifying opportunities, which are almost never immediately obvious. In order to do this, we must be flexible and engage with existing structures. Knowing the opposition is, of course, vital. Fischer reminded us that “politics is the game of getting others to advance your own goals without necessarily advancing theirs.” (A game which, I will note, the Jews have certainly mastered.)

It was an excellent talk, filled with practical advice.

The next speaker was our own Dr. Greg Johnson, addressing an American Renaissance conference for the very first time. Greg’s talk was titled “Our Sacred Honor,” drawing on the very same line from the Declaration of Independence quoted earlier by Jared Taylor. (There was a remarkable synergy between all the talks at this year’s conference.) Greg spoke of something well known to us all: the tendency of others to warn us that we will “ruin our lives” by involving ourselves with white nationalism. And many follow this advance, staying away out of fear that life as they know it will come to an end if they are seen, for example, at an American Renaissance conference (one of my best friends stays away for precisely this reason).

Greg called upon such people to ask what “life” really consists in. When we are warned that we will “ruin our lives” what is usually meant is that we will ruin ourselves financially and be ostracized from normie society. Now, one response to this is to challenge the idea that this will be the result of involvement in our cause. While it is quite true that some have been financially ruined and, like Mark Collett, prevented from travelling, this is not true of everyone. I know many people in vulnerable positions who have been able to fly under the radar for years without being doxed. It also goes without saying that we should come to the aid of individuals who have been doxed and harmed.

Greg’s point, however, is to challenge the conception of life that some are operating with. Thinking that our lives will be ruined if we are financially disadvantaged is a fundamentally bourgeois conception of what life consists in. In opposition to this, Greg spoke of an aristocratic conception of life which places honor above material comfort and security. It was in this context that he spoke about the American founders. While the Declaration speaks of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” which seem like bourgeois values, the signers exhibited an aristocratic spirit.

The Declaration closes with these words: “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” The founders were willing to sacrifice their lives and their fortunes to the cause of independence. They were willing, in short, to “ruin their lives,” where this meant financial security. They were not willing, however, to sacrifice their honor. This they held sacred.

As Greg pointed out, none of the signers of the Declaration were titled aristocrats. Many were lawyers. Others were farmers and businessmen. They would qualify as what we now call “bourgeois,” yet they had aristocratic souls. It is such a spirit that we must cultivate in our own people, Greg argued, so that they will be willing to risk it all for our cause – so that they will value honor most of all, and look down on the man who values security above all else.

It was an excellent speech and was very well received by the audience. Greg sold a lot of books afterwards.

Our next speaker hailed from Down Under: a young Australian named Hugo Lennon who has been very active in our movement (he goes by the moniker Auspill on X) and is now an undergraduate at the University of Florida. He did not intend to get drawn into politics in the US – until Charlie Kirk visited campus one day for a TPUSA event. Lennon rose and asked him if anybody could be an American. Predictably, Kirk said yes. Lennon kept pressing him, eventually asking him if America would still be America if one day it were 90% Indian. St. Charlie said yes.

As Lennon noted, the official MAGA policy now seems to be to kick out all the Mexicans and replace them with Indians. He spoke about the White Australia policy, which was done away with after World War Two. The key difference between Australia and the US is that illegal immigration is not really a problem in Australia. It is legal immigration that the Australian right objects to. The MAGA movement needs to learn from this. Combatting illegal immigration is only half the battle. If we continue to allow legal immigration from the Third World, the country will be fundamentally transformed even if illegal immigration is reduced to zero.

Lennon warned Americans not to be lulled into a false sense of demographic security just because we are stemming the tide of illegal immigration. He spoke of the Indian BJP party, who are right wing Indian nationalists, and now openly admire Jewish strategies and the Jewish lobby in America, which they would like to emulate. This means that Indians would like to get a foothold in the United states in order to advance their own ethnic self-interest. Once again, as the right has maintained for decades, it is only white people who believe in multiculturalism. All other peoples will simply take advantage of our generosity and our tolerance in order to advance the interests of their people without regard to the good of the whole.

Lennon called for a racial awakening and a rejection of universalism. We must insist on the right to maintain our majority status and to preserve our culture. There can be no compromise with civic nationalism. And we must reject framing everything in economic terms, as conservatives tend to do. America is not an economic zone, it is a nation, it is a people. And America First means nothing if it does not mean putting Americans first, putting our people first.

Our banquet speaker was AR’s own star writer, Kevin Deanna. He cited a revealing poll conducted in Britain, about which I had not heard. The poll asked if non-white British citizens were actually British. Two thirds of white Britons said yes. But two thirds of non-white Britons said no. From this, we can draw two conclusions. First, there are a lot of naïve and obedient white people in Britain. But we knew this. Second, the majority of non-white “Brits” do not identify with Britain and its culture. They do not think of themselves as British.

So why are they there? Obviously, it’s to get whatever they can out of the suicidally “tolerant” British system. They are there to pursue their own selfish, private interests and the interests of their group. Increasingly, non-whites in the West are no longer pretending to identify with our societies but are openly admitting that their real loyalty is to their ancestral homelands, far away. Kevin declared that “everyone is a blood and soil nationalist for the people he actually likes.” All politics, he argued, is identity politics whites must face the reality of this, and fight for their own people.

Kevin always delivers a rousing speech, and he certainly did not disappoint us this year. He received a standing ovation.

I will note that earlier in the day I discovered that a few more protestors had shown up, and that I could see them from my hotel room window. Someone had brought a boombox and was playing (I kid you not) the evil-sounding “Imperial March” from The Empire Strikes Back. Apparently, the poor fools think we are evil, or in league with the Dark Side, or something. They do not realize that they represent the Empire, and that we are the plucky rebels. (This is the last Star Wars analogy you will ever read in my work.) It all came to nothing: their noise was inaudible in the main conference hall. It is such fun now to laugh at these people.

Sunday’s first speaker was F. Roger Devlin, a frequent Counter-Currents contributor, whose talk was titled “patriotism is Racism.” The title is inspired by a left-wing protester Devlin saw carrying a sign with those exact words. Devlin’s speech argued that patriotism is indeed racism, but he called upon us to embrace this because it is an eminently reasonable position. Patriotism means loyalty to one’s own tribe and was long considered a sacred obligation. Similarly, racism fundamentally means preference for one’s own tribe. Thus, we can understand the two as basically identical.

These days, our enemies have rebranded patriotism as racism as a strategy for undermining nationalism. How did this situation come about? We all know that in any society tribal interests and individual interests can come into conflict. Patriotic individuals think in terms of the good of the whole and are willing to sacrifice individual interests for the sake of the group. But not everyone thinks or behaves this way.

Invoking the work of Jonathan Haidt, Devlin distinguished between binding moral foundations and individual moral foundations. Binding moral foundations have to do with duties towards others, especially duties to the whole. Individual moral foundations are such things as the right to be left alone and the right to pursue one’s own happiness. Studies have shown that conservatives embrace all the different moral foundations Haidt discusses. Liberals, on the other hand, have almost no interest in binding foundations. They are uninterested in duties to others, even to those closest to them. Devlin quoted Edward Dutton, who holds that liberals are born traitors. And he also cited psychological studies which show a high rate of sociopathy amongst leftists.

Historically, this has not always been true of every form of leftism. The leftists who, in the past, were union organizers and fought for better working conditions were clearly motivated by a sense of duty to others. By contrast, today’s nation destroying, anti-racist left has no group loyalty. Unfortunately, many of those people are in positions of great power and influence in our society. Our tribe is being run by people indifferent to it, Devlin said, people who have replaced the virtue of loyalty with the virtue of “tolerance,” which does not call upon us to do anything for others except not make judgments about them.

Devlin cited the case of a former member of the Blair government in England who openly admitted that Blair and company allowed mass immigration in order to “rub the right’s nose in diversity.” Men like this now govern Western civilization. These are men who are preoccupied with advancing their place in the tribe but who have no regard for what is good for the tribe as a whole. These men are now allying themselves with foreigners because it suits their interest to do so.

Our final speaker of the conference, my old friend Sam Dickson, has addressed all twenty-two AR meetings (that’s twenty-two conferences over the course of 30 years: the first was in 1994). And I believe he has always been the last to speak. Sam always gets the last word. In his introduction, as I mentioned earlier, Jared Taylor described Mr. Dickson as “born redpilled.” I think this is probably true. Sam then began his remarks by praising Jared, which brought the audience to its feet in a standing ovation.

Early in his remarks, Sam made an interesting observation that had never occurred to me before. He said that white people need geographic boundaries; we need to live in our own spaces. When we live among other peoples, we tend to become assimilated. The opposite is the case with non-whites. For example, wherever Jews go they fundamentally remain Jews and never fully assimilate, thinking of their own group interests above all. The same is true of blacks, Asians, and others. It really is only white people who believe in diversity, tolerance, and the “celebration” of other cultures. Other peoples believe in themselves, and play us for suckers.

Of course, the white people gathered at Montgomery Bell are capable of seeing that, and of bemoaning the fact that whites do not have a greater sense of group identity. Sam argued that this is because the key feature of right wingers is that they see things as they are, rather than as they are told that they are. The vast majority of any group simply believe what they have been told by authority figures. Told that diversity is a strength and white racial consciousness a sin, most fall into line.

And those who rule us are happy to exploit this. Like Devlin, Sam spoke of the high rate of sociopathy amongst the political left. Indeed, Sam jokingly referred to Devlin as using “the black arts” to steal parts of his speech as he slept. The truth is simply that great minds think alike, and, as I have noted already, the speakers at this year’s conference were remarkably “in sync” with each other. Sam referred to the ethno-masochism of whites today as only partly due to conformity. Ethno-masochism is also a strategy used by left-wing sociopaths to advance their own social standing.

America shares these woes with Europe. But America suffers in particular, Sam argued, from the fact that many of those who founded the country were religious fanatics. They were willing to turn their backs on their homelands over relatively trivial theological issues. These men passed their genes along, and we see their character today in the suicidal ideology of American leftists.

With his conclusion, Sam Dickson brought the conference to an end. It was sad to part, but everyone left energized. Several attendees told me they thought it was the best AR conference in years.

As I have noted, there was an important synergy between this year’s talks. There was one issue on which every speaker seemed to agree: we cannot save ourselves purely through legislation, executive orders, and the enforcement of existing laws. In order for the white race to survive, we must change. We must put aside universalism in favor of particularism. We must reject the modern model of the individual as selfish consumer, tirelessly seeking his own personal satisfaction. Instead, we must place the good of the whole, of the group, above all else. We must value honor above comfort and security.

In short, our speakers have called for a moral revolution, one that strikes at the heart of modernity. One cannot have white nationalism in the midst of an unchanged modernity: white nationalism and anti-modernism go hand in hand.

The really tough thing here is that white folks who gave birth to modernity. We seem to have a group tendency towards universalism and individualism, as Kevin McDonald, Ricardo Duchesne, and others have argued. Thus, the white nationalist movement calls for a fundamental change in whiteness. It calls for us to reject some of the central attitudes and tendencies of the white race, tendencies that, in Duchesne’s words, are responsible for both our greatness and our ruination.

All of us felt considerable optimism at this conference. But we’ve certainly got our work cut out for us, don’t we?

https://counter-currents.com/2025/11/american-renaissance-2025-a-call-for-a-new-whiteness