Why Southern Nationalism?

Superficially, Southern Nationalism is an odd choice for me.  I was born in the North.  My mother is Irish born.  My father’s mother derives from the South, but I had very little interaction with her.  His father was of Austrian and Virginia Irish and Scots-Irish background, but I never knew my paternal great-grandmother, either.  As a child, I was raised by my maternal Irish grandmother in a very rural section of North Central Florida.  Although raised around Southern children, my grandmother imparted upon me a distinctly Irish cultural outlook and linguistic vernacular.  It is what she knew.  In fact, whereas I used Southern terminology as a boy, garbage was “rubbish,” the trunk of a car was a “boot,” and I pronounced the letter “H” in a distinctly Irish “Hay-ch” well into my teens.  Still, similarities between the Irish and the South still existed in the 1980s. 

We ate dinner at midday and supper at night.  To this day, I have no Southern accent or any accent at all.  I use Southern terminology, but most folks assume I am from somewhere in the heart of the Mid-Atlantic.  I can more easily slip into a variety of Irish brogues than a Southern accent, from the sing songy Cork accent to that of the distinct “Wesht,” (generally for a laugh at the expense of my Irish cousins).  I do a better Northern Irish accent than Brad Pitt in The Devil’s Own (not hard to beat).  Eventually, I was brought out of horse country and swamps to a New York City apartment across the street from the projects to finish high school before heading to the Marines at seventeen – and back to the South. 

So, why Southern Nationalism?  After all, Southern Nationalism is predicated on a foundational belief in the uniqueness of the Southern people as a distinct ethnicity, grounded in genetically ingrained Anglo-Celtic cultural traits and Christian values.  Whereas I share those genetic traits and Christian values, I was neither born in the South nor raised for the entirety of my formative years in the South.  This piece explains why I have chosen not only to embrace Southern Nationalism, but have been willing to fight on the streets of Charlottesville and Tallahassee for this cause… dedicated the better part of the last decade advocating for the South… invested every dime I have earned into building an enduring infrastructure for Southern patriots seeking gainful employment… been imprisoned for my unwavering support for the South. 

I am an accidental Southern Nationalist, but I am a diehard one.

As someone who was once more Libertarian-right leaning, I took a great deal of pride in being an American Civic Nationalist well into 2014.  I was always against Federal overreach.  I have always been opposed on philosophical grounds to gun control.  My belief in the First Amendment’s rights of freedoms of speech, religion, and general assembly were absolute.  Most important to me, at the time, was that I was not a “racist.” I was raised to believe the American Constitution was a sacred document that transcended race and religion.  At the insistence of my first-generation Irish mother, I was imbued with a strong desire to learn history.  My stepfather surrounded me with books.  Himself a multigenerational Yankee, but with roots in Jamestown, he took a fair approach toward the Confederacy.  His first love was Napoleon.  His second love was Nathan Bedford Forrest.  He could best be described as a Heinlein Conservative. 

I noticed a trend in the media regarding narratives set around race as early as 2008 during the Obama campaign which became the initial string that would unravel the blanket of Constitutionally inspired blindness within which I was shrouded.  Anyone who opposed candidate Barack Obama was deemed a racist.  Way back then, it did not matter that I had only voted for one Democrat in my entire life and naively believed that the Republican Party adhered to my Constitutional conservative values.  I was opposed to nearly every single policy position espoused by that candidate.  I also knew, having at that point traveled to more than fifty of the world’s deadliest cities and countries on behalf of the American Empire, that the world was (and still is) a dangerous place.  I felt – in 2008 – an experienced Commander-in-Chief like John McCain, while not perfect, was certainly preferable to a political neophyte with no practical experience. 

Yet, I was charged with being a racist because I did not support Obama.  In the morning hours of October 2008, someone spray painted my car in an apartment building in Virginia Beach with the word “Fashist” (misspelling their own) and a backwards swastika on the hood of my car, likely because I had a “Nobama” sticker.  They hit a couple of other cars in the same parking lot.  As someone who valued political freedom at that time, the attack was a moral outrage.  But what I was not yet equipped to realize was that this was the beginning of a bigger trend in anti-White and anti-Conservative violence that would manifest itself in 2015 and beyond. 

Fast forward, and the Obama years proved to be the unmitigated disaster I knew they would be.  Wars for no discernable benefit raged globally.  Functional systems were torn apart.  Young men had their lives ruined in university kangaroo courts thanks to disastrous Title IX reforms that denied them any of the basic protections of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments.  Religious liberty was under assault, as groups like the Little Sisters of the Poor were dragged into federal courts for not supporting abortion.  Christian bakers had their lives destroyed, despite the First Amendment.  Raids were conducted on law abiding gun owners for the crime of having “too many” guns.  The Second Amendment meant nothing.  When Arizona chose to enforce immigration laws, the Obama Administration pushed aside the Tenth Amendment and went after that state.  Transgenderism suddenly skyrocketed out of nowhere, as confused boys raced to chemically castrate themselves with the assistance of the Obama Department of Justice.  Basic accommodations, like using neutral bathrooms, were denied Virginia public schools – such reasonable measures were called, “Transphobic.”  Islamic radicals seemed to shoot and kill Americans at will, almost monthly.  It was as if, overnight, Obama had turned the United States into a third world shithole with nicer roads (for now). 

The Obama economy was also in shambles.  Americans continued to watch their jobs shuttled off to Communist China and Mexico, while their earnings dropped.  Wall Street did very well, thanks to multiple rounds of cheap money (Quantitative Easing).  Illegal immigration exploded in the U.S.  Overnight, family medical deductions jumped from about $1,000 a year to $10,000 and more – killing middle-class families with bad health care plans.  Corporations, meanwhile, once thought to be the bulwark against socialist malfeasance embraced the Far Left agenda of the Obama Administration.  Anyone who got in the Obama Administration’s way was rooted out and destroyed with Soviet efficiency.

But the most galling facet of the Obama Administration was its open war on heterosexual Christian White men.  The term “White privilege” emerged in the American lexicon, supported by the openly race baiting Obama, himself.  Suddenly, an entire race of people was deemed to be evil, and the concept of our perceived privilege was peddled from Attorney General Eric Holder (himself a flagrant anti-White racist) to White members of Obama’s Administration.  The idea that a White kid from an impoverished Tennessee background who served in an illegitimate war in Iraq enjoyed some kind of racially endorsed benefit over the daughter of a black doctor in Hollywood was an outrageous betrayal of the very meritocratic society which I believed the United States to be at that time.  Suddenly, over a few short years, Obama made White men the enemy of everyone else and his political party raced toward that mantle. 

I did not want to be an adversary of blacks, browns, Asians, homosexuals, etc.  Like most White men, I wanted to be left alone to work hard and enjoy the fruits of my labor and personal conscience.  I did not choose to be their enemy.  They chose to be my enemy – with open encouragement by the Obama White House. 

Then came Michael Brown.

The narrative surrounding the Trayvon Martin incident in 2012 was bad enough.  The evidence was withheld from the public regarding the self defense of George Zimmerman.  So called conservative commentators raced to convict the shooter, George Zimmerman, without looking at a shred of evidence.  What began as a story about a wanna-be White cop killing an unarmed, happy-go-lucky black teenager in a hoodie, unraveled quickly under the scrutiny of internet sleuths.  Incapable of hiding the truth from the masses in the disaggregated social media environment, the truth about Trayvon Martin was eventually revealed and Zimmerman – a man who is himself a person of color (Mestizo) – was acquitted.  Any person that values fairness in a Constitutional society would naturally look at the facts and apply that standard to the outcome of the case.  But, in the increasingly anti-White United States, blacks and the media saw the facts as inconvenient and “racist.”  The cracks in my anti-racist armor were beginning to form.

When Michael Brown was killed, I instinctively knew the official “hands up, don’t shoot” narrative was a lie.  Brown was a physical behemoth who had strong arm robbed a Southwest Asian store clerk before assaulting a police officer over a routine request (do not walk in the middle of the street).  His crack addicted, criminal buddy, Dorian Johnson, perpetuated a lie that was contradicted by black witnesses.  Still, black so-called civil rights leaders pounced on the lie and used it as a pretext to not only destroy a Midwest town, but to call for policing reforms that made no sense.  If I were shot by a police officer as a three-hundred-pound, six-foot-three-inch White male and a former active-duty Marine, after assaulting a police officer, no one would call for destroying a town in my honor. 

The Michael Brown riots were clearly not about racial justice.  It was all about racial vengeance.  There seemed to be a genetic inability of blacks to recognize the consequences of illegal and/or stupid actions – from Trayvon Martin to Tamir Rice to Michael Brown.  There was also something else going on that I was not yet ready to see. 

In 2014, I would have described myself as a Civic Nationalist who was not racist, but I was witnessing an increasing assault on White society and I was growing increasingly aware of its consequences.  As I stated previously, the Obama Administration was ramping up its anti-White rhetoric.  It was also not uncommon to find demeaning anti-White tests on platforms like Facebook asking the respondent as to “how white they might be.”  Anti-White racism was pervasive and sometimes not very subtle.  When the Marxist Black Lives Matter movement emerged, I immediately knew that it was not about racial injustice, but subverting the anti-Marxist, libertine society within which the United States had been built for the preceding two plus centuries.  I was still a believer that race should not be the basis of Nationalism, but I was also seeing that race was being weaponized. 

Enter Dylann Roof.

For years, I was aware that the South had been the most committed firewall of conservative values in the United States.  By conservative, I mean actually “conserving” traditional norms.  Sometimes, I did not agree with the general Southern perspective on things like LGBT marriage (a position with which I now agree).  To me, in 2015 for instance, gay marriage was not a moral issue, per se.  My religious freedoms side wanted the preservation of churches to decide for themselves as to how to address gay marriage.  However, I did not think that marriage in any form was a function of government – period.  Thus, without an explicit Constitutional mandate to regulate marriage, government had no right to intervene in the decisions of two consenting adults.  This was the 2015 Constitutional conservative myopia from which I suffered at the time.

Still, in every other way, I agreed with the general political posture of the “deep red” South.  I have lived far longer in the South than at any time in the North.  I was educated in elite universities both in the South and the North.  My formative years were Southern, but as described, they were from an Irish perspective.  Thus, cultural similarities existed, but they were not exact.  When getting my Masters in a school outside of Boston, I defended Southern culture and traditions from Yankees who sought more aggressive measures to compel the South to conform – way back in the mid-2000s and by establishment Republican types, no less. 

The South, as I saw it throughout my life and well into 2015, was an area that simply wanted to be left alone.  Southerners simply do not like the federal government – beyond the Department of Defense (now known as a misplaced loyalty).  Guns are not seen as simply enshrined by the Constitution to hunt deer or defend oneself from criminal crackheads, but as an equalizer against government overreach – something with which the South had keenly felt in 1861.  The personalized relationship with God and Jesus Christ was one of the reasons that the fiercely individualistic Scots-Irish of the South rapidly embraced Evangelicalism.  I knew my history and Southern culture well enough to know that the history of the South did not begin with Lincoln’s invasion.  It was a cultural construct of factors from the British colonies, namely Northern Ireland and the “Second Sons” of British aristocracy (Cavaliers) which blended to form a distinct ethnic paradigm. Anything, therefore, that smelled of an invasion by the federal government was one in which the South would naturally push back.  This is especially true of the Deep South, Appalachia, and the Gulf State swamps. 

Thus, when Dylann Roof murdered a bunch of black church folks in 2015, I knew things would get bad for the South, but how bad was not yet known.  The Marxist black empowerment movement had a year to hone its skills.  It also had a powerful ally in the White House – openly anti-White Marxist, Barack Hussein Obama.  They had been waiting for this opportunity to destroy the South and almost on cue, they pounced.  Finally, and perhaps worse, was that the South had a number of political actors out of the Republican Party eyeing a federal election in the following year to replace Obama.  Consequently, Republicans like Nikki Haley tripped over themselves to betray Southerners and Southern culture, hoping to seem like heroes to soccer moms who were horrified by the actions of a lone wolf maniac with a bad bowl cut.

Knowing my history and my love for the South, I immediately set about defending the South and the Confederacy as a whole on social media.  I was still naively using Rainbow Confederate talking points.  I might as well have been yelling at a wall.  None of the war against the South was ever about historical accuracy or even the Confederacy, for that matter. 

A race to remove Southern heritage became a cause in itself.  Regardless of declared affiliation, self-serving political actors targeted the South for complete annihilation.  Most galling were the Republicans – supposedly conservative – who helped lead the charge behind Governor Halley in the destruction of Southern heritage.   Whereas the post-Dixiecrat Democrats had always relied on black voters and, therefore, expressed an open disdain for the Confederacy, the Republicans were supposedly champions of the South.  They were not.  It was all talk. 

Suddenly, and without warning, formerly genteel debate regarding the motivations for secession ended immediately after the Dylann Roof shooting.  Informed discussions regarding the Tariff of Abominations or the constitutionality of secession ended on June 17th, 2015.  Secession was now a matter of slavery and racism – full stop.  Any discourse that deviated from that position made someone an instant bigot and conversation was shut down. 

Proud Southerners throughout the ideological spectrum were angered, confused, sad, or a mixture of all three.  Raised to venerate their forefathers, suddenly proud Southerners were the bad guys in their own homelands.  As schools were renamed, monuments were destroyed, and cemeteries were desecrated, Southerners struggled with a response.

The South was getting kicked and no one was kicking back.  To me, my Irish indignation shot up.  I knew the real reason that the South was being attacked.  It had nothing to do with the Confederacy, per se.  Rather, the obstinate South had acted as a firewall against federal overreach and Marxism for generations.  The only way to break that firewall was to break the South’s cultural uniqueness.  In other words, the South was a de facto ethnic minority within the United States and because of that distinction, Marxists around the United States needed to break her, not unlike the way the previous Soviet Russians viewed Christian Ukrainians… or Cromwellian British assaulted the Jacobite Irish. 

The removal of icons to Southern heroes had nothing to do with racial equality; the removal of icons to Southern heroes had everything to do with dismantling a memory of cultural resistance that faced overwhelming odds and nearly won.  Southern pride was viewed upon by the Obama Administration and the political Left as the glue that held the anti-Marxist Southern political posture in place.  Remove the glue and the anti-Marxist firewall will be dismantled.    

My daughters are born in the South.  My wife is Southern.  I have ancestral roots in the South.  Standing by and watching the South get attacked was not an option for me.  I am a man who has never backed away from a fight!

Enter the League of the South.

Ironically, I found out about the League of the South while reviewing a Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) “hate map” that listed an organization related to my Norfolk area Catholic church (back when I was a practicing Catholic) as a “hate group.”  It was late 2015 and a lot had occurred when I found out about the League of the South.  At that time, the League of the South had an antiquated website that seemed like a hodge podge of pretty standard Libertarian themes. 

The League stood against increased federal encroachment, the Federal Reserve, and needless wars in the Middle East that got young Southern boys killed.  The only cure for this federal overreach were free and independent states.  Dixie secession was the League’s solution to an overzealous federal entity.

None of that which was on the website seemed particularly “hateful.”  The SPLC, at that time, listed the League of the South as a hate group because of Dr. Michael Hill’s declared statement that he hoped to have a Free South founded upon “Anglo-Celtic” and “Christian” principles.  As a student of history, none of that was necessarily shocking.  Hill, the League’s founder and President, was merely stating an obvious fact: The South is a region comprised primarily of ethnically Anglo-Saxon and Scots-Irish (Celtic).  Former Senator of Virginia, James Webb, wrote a popular book entitled Born Fighting, regarding this very subject.  The South is also overwhelmingly Christian.  After all, the South is called the Bible Belt for a reason.

Upon exploring the reasons for listing my former Catholic church as associated with a hate group, I found that the SPLC had done so because it was considered a proponent of “Radical Traditional Catholicism.”  What was this radical Catholicism?  The church to which I occasionally attended believed: gay marriage is wrong; traditional marriage is right; men and women have different family roles; transgenderism is ungodly; the Catholic faith was the only true faith.  In other words, churches and publications were listed as “hate groups” by the SPLC because they maintained positions that were held by the majority of Catholics – and the Catholic Church – for generations.  It was at that moment, as I went down the list of groups listed by the SPLC as “hate groups” that I realized the list was purely defamatory.  It is a political weapon, nothing more. 

As someone who was more Libertarian-right leaning in 2015, I took a great deal of pride as being an American Civil Nationalist.  I was against Federal overreach.  I have always been opposed on philosophical grounds to gun control.  My belief in the first amendment rights of freedoms of speech, religion, and general assembly were absolute.  Most important to me, at the time, was that I was not a “racist.”  When I joined the League of the South it was to support a group that showed grit in the overwhelming assault on Southern Identity – which I knew to be the bedrock of American Constitutional values.

Fast forward to the 2016 election.

Despite nightly news coverage attempting to depict Donald Trump as Adolph Hitler, the reality of imagery was very different.  Pictures and videos circulated around the internet showing White Trump attendees assaulted by violent radical Marxists and brown skinned hordes.  Old White ladies, young White men, and even families were beaten bloody by Mexicans waving Mexican flags and blacks with baseball bats and hammers.  This was being openly endorsed by primarily Jewish media personalities.  My truck was targeted in 2016, when my tailgate was bashed in.  My wife’s car was keyed on both sides.  All of this made us MORE committed to Donald Trump, despite his later failures to defend his own constituents.  It also made me more awake to the totality of the South’s concurrent struggles in the face of Marxist inspired colored peoples and their Jewish leaders. 

By 2017, after the contentious Trump election, it was very clear that the United States was a deeply broken country.  “American First” political positions held by traditional labor Democrats were now “bigoted.”  Traditional conservative values were under full assault on steroids.  The Department of Justice was obviously weaponized by far-left activists from within the U.S. Government – from James Comey to James Mattis.  So-called conservative pundits and political actors proved they were merely controlled opposition, working on behalf of either their Communist Chinese masters (e.g., Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Jeff Flake, Joe Scarborough), globalist Wall Street sharks, and elite Jewish media personalities – often two in the same.

Sports had become a laughingstock.  Anti-American and more importantly, anti-White rhetoric filled the air waves.  Black players were taking a knee, not to protest against racial injustice, but to change a system within which they made millions of dollars from White fathers who wore black player names emblazoned on their backs.  These White fathers, meanwhile, were shirking their head of household duties to attend church, which led to the feminization and degeneracy of Christian churches.  Suddenly, Christian churches embraced heretical views that openly supported sin.  The entirety of society was flipped upside down and yet, the South continued to be the focus of assaults by elite society throughout the United States because her people stubbornly resisted. 

By the time I marched at Charlottesville, I looked around and saw the racial enemies for who they were.  Those leading the attacks on the South were not just black activists, but violent Judeo-Bolsheviks and transgender demons.  I went to Charlottesville to protest the removal of a statute to a Southern icon, Robert E. Lee, in the center of a city that was once home to the crown jewel of Libertarianism and the Southern intelligentsia, the University of Virginia.  The communists came with the full backing of the U.S. and Virginia Governments to destroy us.  They succeeded to some extent that day, but over time, I see Charlottesville as the Left’s greatest strategic mistake.  The events of January 6^th and the federal overreaction to a bunch of CivNat protesters emphasized to many who demonized us in August 2017, that the real issue is the United States Government itself, and the Jewish media apparatchiks.    

It was now very clear.  Cultural war was declared against the South by the entirety of the Marxist system, and I was given a choice:  sit back and just allow a proud people to be eradicated on their soil – a people with whom I share a genetic and cultural bond – or push back.  I chose to take action.

Since that time, my Southern Nationalist positions have matured.  I no longer belong to the League of the South.  I agree with its positions and believe Dr. Michael Hill to be a good man (among many other good men in that organization).  I simply disagree with the strategy to achieve the same objectives. 

I still feel the indignation I felt in 2015 and 2017, but more intensely.  I was doxed, lost my job, my professional networks, and much more.  I was arrested, imprisoned, and yet, never betrayed my comrades or my cause.  In prison, I spoke with other Southerners about the importance of White tribalism through the Southern lens.  I wrote copious amounts of notes and devised a strategy.  I studied revolutionary movements more astutely in prison and used the elite educations gifted to me by the U.S. Government for whom I once worked to build a parallel economic system and create a new secession mindset. 

This crusade is worth it because I am a true believer that the Southerner – the White Christian man and woman who derives from a unique ethnic background – has every right to keep the structural integrity of his beloved Southern homeland.

Today, I contribute frequently to Identity Dixie, because I seek to expand the Overton Window, from one in which the Southerner feels compelled to defend the Confederacy through “Heritage not Hate” talking points to one in which the Southerner can proudly defend secession on the evidence of a collapsed American Empire we now witness.  I want Southerners to feel pride of their Southern ways. I want the Southerner to know that media merchants from Nashville and Hollywood do not have a right to define them.  I want Southerners to see themselves as victims of the second great assault on White ethnic identity in the 21^st Century (the first being White South Afrikaners) by Judeo-Bolshevik elites and Southerners have an obligation to start defending their heritage and culture.  It is now us against them – a fight not of our own making, but a fight we now inherit. 

The South is being attacked because it is a stronghold of White resistance in a White world suddenly under assault from Antrim to Amsterdam, London to Lisbon, and Memphis to Munich.  It is under assault because it is Christian, and our enemies are not Christian – they are at war with Christ. The South is under assault because she is beautiful – spiritually, culturally, and historically – and they, our enemies, hate beautiful things that they cannot create. 

Like my avatar, I may not have been born in the South, but I will die for the South and the genetic legacy of my Southern children.  I will not back down.  I will not surrender.  I am a Southern Nationalist.

Deo Vindice!