An Ode to the Unhyphenated American (Part 2)
A breakdown of Stephen Wolfe's speech at the New Christendom Press Conference
Part one of this series is here:
The video of Stephen Wolfe’s full remarks is here:
In a word, you cannot have a people like everyone else and why is that? Because through them, you could lay claim to this country. Indeed, the whole point of the “nation of immigrants” trope is to render Old Stock American—the Old Stock American claim—irrelevant and anti-American and even to elevate the hyphenated over the unhyphenated as more American.
The term “a nation of immigrants” was coined by then Senator John F. Kennedy, in his 1958 book of the same name. A few years later, our nation elected its first President of Irish Catholic descent, much to the ire of the conservative evangelical establishment. The Southern Baptist Convention took an official stance against the election of Catholics to public office at that year’s national convention. The Reverend W.O. Vaught Jr., then Vice President of the SBC, who would become the future pastor of Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, gave a sermon declaring Catholicism and communism to be the two most deadly threats to freedom in the world.1
When Kennedy took office he commissioned a reexamination of the American immigration system, as it had existed since the eugenics inspired Immigration Act of 1924. The report, completed after Kennedy’s assassination, served as the basis for the Immigration Act of 1965, which removed the racial quota system passed four decades earlier. Thus, we can see, with his ire for the notion of a “nation of immigrants” and his previous statement that he’s speaking to Americans “whose roots extend beyond the Immigration Act of 1965,” Wolfe takes specific issue with our nation not continuing its racial quota system for immigration. This system was not the norm of “Old Stock America,” but one based on early-20th-century notions of racial superiority, and that only existed from 1924 to 1965. Wolfe is attempting to launder quite modern notions of Anglo-Saxonism through the American mythos.
However, multiculturalism as Paul Gottfried defines it, is when the state glorifies differences from the way of life associated with the once-majority population. It hands out rewards to those who personify the desired differences while taking away cultural recognition and even political rights from those who do not.
The average listener will likely gloss over the reference to far-right commentator Paul Gottfried, a regular contributor to the anti-immigration and white nationalist website VDARE and former associate of Charlottesville Unite the Right rally organizer Richard Spencer. Largely credited with coining the term “alt-right” and regularly accused of promoting fascist ideology and ideologues, he is editor-in-chief of Chronicles magazine, where the Antelope Hill book selling C.Jay Engel serves as their podcast host. Gottfried is slated to appear at a controversial event in Texas this month,2 alongside Wolfe, Engel and Andrew Isker (co-author of a book on Christian Nationalism with the notoriously antisemitic Andrew Torba), where topics will include “the War on White America.” Much like Wolfe did when he opened the first chapter of his book with a quote from a VDARE article by the late anti-race-mixing advocate Sam Francis,3 he is giving a signal to people in the know while assuming the reference will go over the head of the average listener.
Everyone but white people can self-consciously and publicly have a bounded people and place whom they openly act for their good. Now, white people in the Western world—and this is crucial—are their own in-group’s out-group. I'll say it again—white people in the Western world are their own in-group’s out-group… Our in-group is not white or Anglo Saxon; it extends to all.
Note the addition of “bounded” to “people [blood] and place [soil],” meaning that Wolfe is no longer talking about retaining culture, but building explicitly white nations. In his book, The Case for Christian Nationalism, Wolfe centered the call-to-action of a chapter around the title of a well-known white nationalist book, William Gayley Simpson’s Which Way Western Man?4 In this chapter, where “Western Man” is the protagonist, Wolfe wrote, “Most left-wing social movements exploit Western universality and Western guilt, leveraging the bizarre tendency of Western man to out-group himself.”5 Wolfe’s New Christendom speech is the second time that he has used this line of out-grouping oneself in an explicitly white context—the first being in his 2022 review of Jake Meador’s book, What are Christians For?, for Michael O’Fallon’s Sovereign Nations. With this, he confirms that his “Western Man” in the book is a stand-in for “white man.” Wolfe has denied previous knowledge of Simpson’s book, but the core idea he promulgates in the above excerpt, and this section on out-grouping as a whole, in which “we ourselves are the obstacle to our in-group’s flourishing,” is inline with Which Way Western Man’s conclusion that “a disintegration of the White man’s own inner being” has left Western, white societies “racked with dissension and shaken with some hidden feebleness that has left them unable to take themselves in hand.”6
Jeremy Carl, the author of the book The Unprotected Class, which I highly recommend you all buy—The Unprotected Class, [Carl] writes this—that “Asian-American students would be seen as a more appealing client to a Supreme Court with no Asian-American, but stocked with a majority of white conservatives is a very revealing window into our racial politics today.”
Jeremy Carl is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, whose associates, as of late, have been at the center of much controversy regarding authoritarian ideology and white identity politics. In The Unprotected Class, Carl takes his own shot at the term “nation of immigrants,” calling it “a fascinating piece of propaganda that originates in 1950s ethnic group pressure,”7 possibly referring to the Anti-Defamation League’s involvement in Kennedy’s book. Writing of the phrase in the context of the Immigration Act of 1924 (also known as the Johnson-Reed Act), he wrongly claims that, when Kennedy introduced it, “it had only been true for maybe forty or so of the previous 350 years,” and that “it was particularly untrue in 1958 when he argued it.”8 This omits the historical reality that our nation also saw mass immigration during the first half of the 19th-century, powering the First Industrial Revolution, and that most of the two centuries before marked the Colonial Era. Most conspicuously, Carl makes his own racial-quota-esque argument in a page where he notes the rise of Asian residents since 1960, something that makes sense when Asian immigration was outright banned in 1924. He makes particular note that, “… the number of immigrants from Europe and Canada has declined by almost 25 percent… almost all the rest come from areas where immigration had previously been minimal or nonexistent.” Carl then goes on to state that “The Great Replacement isn’t a conspiracy theory.”9
Wolfe is arguing that white Americans should be able to have their own “bounded,” ethnically distinct community (the Germans had a word for that), alluding to a racial-quota-based immigration policy that only existed for forty years in the 20th-century, and that was heavily motivated by the pseudoscience of eugenics. Like the turn-of-the-century nativists who preceded him, he falsely claims that it was the traditional stance of the United States to preserve its Anglo-Saxon ethnic heritage through restrictive immigration policy, though this has been untrue for the majority of our nation’s existence. He believes that multiculturalism is turning white America into an underclass that out-groups itself. To make this case he uses the dubious example of Asian Americans being the subject of the college admissions Supreme Court case, when they were likely chosen because they were living proof that affirmative action does not universally protect minority ethnic groups, and can actually discriminate against them.
Next Wolfe will attempt to make the case that a mainline conservative view of ethnicity isn’t right-wing enough.
To be continued…
Kenneth C. Barnes, Anti-Catholicism in Arkansas: How Politicians, the Press, the Klan, and Religious Leaders Imagined an Enemy, 1910-1960 (Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 2016), 181–82.
By Robert Downen and Juan Salinas II, “‘War on White America’: Influential Texas Group Hosting pro-Christian Nationalism Conference,” The Texas Tribune, June 12, 2024, https://www.texastribune.org/2024/06/12/true-texas-project-conference-christian-nationalism/.
Paul Matzko, “A (White) Wolfe in Sheep’s Clothing,” Substack newsletter, Matzko Minute (blog), May 16, 2023, https://matzko.substack.com/p/a-white-wolfe-insheeps-clothing.
Stephen Wolfe, The Case for Christian Nationalism (Moscow, Idaho: Canon Press, 2022), 118-119.
Wolfe, 170.
William Gayley Simpson, Which Way Western Man? (1976), sec. 19.1. Present Plight of the White Race.
Jeremy Carl, The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Destroying America (Washington: Regnery, 2024), 118.
Carl, 121.
Carl, 130-131.