Interviewing Craig Nelsen

As published at Unz Review and LewRockwell, 11/8/19:

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.





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