Southern Nationalism: An Interview with Padraig Martin of Identity Dixie

Tell us about Identity Dixie. How is it similar to other Southern nationalist and identitarian organizations? How is it different?

Thank you for the opportunity to answer this question. Identity Dixie (ID) is a voluntary collective of content producers, primarily — but not exclusively — writers. The purpose is to advance Southern Nationalism: the foundational belief that the people of the American South are a distinct ethnicity with their own traditions, culture, societal norms, political outlook, and even genetic construct, worthy of their own place as a Nation unto themselves. In this regard, ID carries on a tradition that predates the American Revolution and one that gained momentum and prominence during the early-to-mid-nineteenth century. We are modern Fire Eaters; the various writers who sought to inspire secession among Southerners in the nineteenth century. We seek to secede, again — this time, successfully.

As it pertains to other Southern Nationalist entities, we amplify their messaging, while remaining distinct. League of the South, for instance, seeks the same goals, but does so in a different, more direct way (such as street demonstrations). ID does not engage in street optics, and as a group we have never participated in any street rally or protest. Some individual members have, but ID has not. Other Southern Nationalists do not seek secession. They seek recognition and respect for the uniqueness of Dixie. They play an important role in the preservation of history and culture, but we simply do not believe the South will be allowed to survive as a distinct culture in a Northern-dominated federal architecture. Modern assaults on our heroes, cultural icons, and monuments are evidence of this fact, thus our desire to secede.

As it pertains to other identitarian movements, I believe that ID shares more in common with early-stage European identitarian movements that arose in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It seeks to build a zeitgeist and broad consensus within the South that the Southern people have a right to a homeland of their own making. Modern, racially exclusive identitarian movements are bound to fail because they do not take into consideration very real differences in ethnic values, outlook, and cultural narratives.

How would you fit Identity Dixie into the broader Dissident Right? Would you call it a subset of the Dissident Right, or are there aspects of your organization which might fall outside its confines?

Identity Dixie is a bit of a hybrid. As with most Dissident Right entities (distinct from the “Alt Right”), we believe National identity and tradition are critical to the preservation of a functional society. Consequently, like the broad umbrella of the Dissident Right, we largely shun modernity. We value order, recognize the importance of morality, and know that an effeminized world is falling apart at the seams. ID does not entirely fit within the definition, because it is an identitarian movement with a long history that predates the modern Dissident Right. No one would have called Jefferson Davis, Edmund Ruffin, John C. Calhoun, or George Wallace members of the “Dissident Right.” They would not likely call themselves “Southern Nationalists,” either. Rather, they would simply identify as Nationalist (if provided the definition). The moniker “Southern” would be self-explanatory to those men, i.e., distinct from the Yankee. Consequently, in many ways ID falls within the Dissident Right, while in others, our mantle of traditions long predates the current awakening we now see growing throughout the world. After all, Robert Lewis Dabney warned us of the twenty-first century in the late nineteenth century, well before the descendants of Yankee soldiers realized the South was right as it pertained to the impact of Africans upon polite society.

From your writing, you seem to believe that almost anyone can accept the salvation of Christ. Yet, your organization is limited to white men, and you say Identity Dixie “hold[s] no ill will toward broader White Nationalism.” Do you envision the independent South of the future being white first, and Christian second? The other way around? Or both equally? Will non-white Christians have a role in such a state?

Regarding the universal option of Salvation found in Jesus Christ, I can only answer for myself. I personally believe it is highly improbable that non-whites will find Christ and true Christianity. I say that based on my personal beliefs. I believe the voting patterns and behaviors of so-called non-white Christians bears this out. That stated, nothing is impossible in God, and there are likely sincere Christians found within other races.

Biblically, however, one thing remains constant throughout the longitudinal readings of the Word: Nation is a God-given construct within which God has provided distinctions that are meant to be preserved and protected, not blended into an amorphous mass. Deeply misguided Christians will point to one line within the Bible to justify the elimination of Nations — Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” Obviously, this is in reference to the universality of Salvation offered by Christ. It does not eliminate human differences. The author of that epistle, Paul, writes very clear, distinct rules and guidelines for men and women, slaves and freemen, as well as Greeks and Jews. He is not advocating a gender-fluid world order of Greco-Ashkenaz. Regarding non-Christians in a governing role in the South, that is highly unlikely. There may be one or two who “slip through the cracks,” but the South is overwhelmingly Christian.

The writers at ID may disagree on the manner in which Christianity may take root (we do not allow the method of worship to divide us), but we agree in the fundamental principle that Christ is our Salvation. As our beliefs are rooted in a Triune God, we see God-given Nationality and Christian Salvation as inseparable. God blessed Dixie with her own identity; God blessed Dixie with a pathway to eternal Salvation. The two are joined in that identity. As it pertains to whether or not an independent South would be exclusively white or white-run, the short answer is “Yes.” Southerners are very familiar with blacks. They are a very large minority bloc within each Southern state. Prior to the elimination of Jim Crow, blacks largely managed themselves within the overarching structure of a white Christian government. I suspect many would self-deport, as they did in the late nineteenth century, when federal subsidies end, and the few that remain would be rural blacks who have a history of largely staying to themselves.

Do you have any thoughts on Red State Secession, Texas Independence, Calexit, or any other secessionist movements?

As it pertains to White Nationalism, we support all white people’s right to preserve and secure their respective cultures, history, values, and genetic lineage. We root for the success of white people. We simply do not believe that generic White Nationalism works as a concept because it fails to account for genuine ethnic distinctions and motivations. That which works in North Carolina does not necessarily work in Idaho or Norway. The Carolinian likely sees things through a different lens or perspective. This is one of the reasons I think the Red State Secession movement is okay as a temporary measure, but unlikely to succeed in the long term. The South is different. Still, we support all secessionist movements — be they Texas (TEXIT), California (CALEXIT), Quebec, or even regional sub-secession movements, such as that which is being advocated in New York at present.

What exactly is the Dispensationalist South?

Finally, regarding the Dispensationalist South — it is a long vestige of Reconstruction Era propaganda that was slowly infused into Evangelical churches throughout the post-war and early twentieth century South. Dispensationalism is a Christian theological concept that relies on the notion that God’s plan is largely linear and broken into Biblical periods by which there is no need to interpret the Word. It effectively maintains that the sanctity of the Abrahamic Covenant between Israel and God is unbroken. As such, it lends itself to a great deal of manipulation by those who wish to advance the causes of Jewish people — often at the expense of Christians. The concept was derived by John Nelson Darby, an Anglo-Irish theologian, who traveled to New England and Yankee Midwestern Evangelical/Congressional churches and seminaries during the war and Reconstruction. His adherents were sent as missionaries to the South during Reconstruction, largely at the behest of men like Thaddeus Stevens, in an effort to heavily influence the modern Baptist faith. Darby’s Reconstruction acolytes in the late 1860s/early 1870s were especially aggressive in the Carolinas, Georgia, and the Deep South. Prior to their arrival, the Presbyterian and Methodists faiths had a very strong societal bond with the South.

The problem for Dispensationalist Christianity is that it serves to harm the South’s understanding of the special relationship Christians have with God Himself, as well as divorcing the South from the needs of geographic Israel (often confused with Biblical Israel). Because Dispensationalism has had such a profound impact on the South due to the strength of the Reconstruction Era and upon impacted Evangelical faiths, it takes a different communications approach to divorce ordinary Southerners from their love of the Jewish people — often to their own detriment. Personally, I take this into consideration when drafting content designed to peel them away from this deleterious and exploitative relationship.

Tell us about your trucking company and how you are employing doxed dissidents. Was that the purpose of your company from its beginning?

The only thing I can say on this matter is that our trucking company is part of a consortium of other companies that have been established within non-fragile trades. We continue to build upon those entities. A few companies were started by my wife, a couple of business partners, and me for the sake of building a company that could provide gainful employment for likeminded men in need. To protect our clients and employees, that is the most information I can share at this time, however.

Recently, I wrote an essay about Hinton Rowan Helper, who can be described as a white identitarian living among Southern identitarians during the antebellum South. This difference in outlook may have been the root of some of the disturbance he caused in the South with his work, The Impending Crisis. Do you have any opinions on Helper?

I am familiar with Hinton Helper. The problems with Helper come down to a few points. To begin, much of the South’s economic disparity by the time Helper returned to the South were born out of Northern policies related to the Panic of 1837, which displaced nearly one million Southerners and led to hundreds of thousands of dead Southerners due to deprivation and starvation. Helper’s age and status would have protected him from much of the destruction that was wrought in the South during that time, but he would have certainly been aware of this little-explored period of American history. By the time Helper returns to the South from California, it was recovering from the anti-Southern, nearly genocidal policies of the Van Buren Administration between 1837 and 1841 (much of which was felt well into the 1840s).

Second, in the aftermath of the 1837 currency crisis, Northern banks, commercial merchants, and government policies led to a shift from the South to the Midwest as the breadbasket of the United States. The South’s agricultural economy had been shattered due to a preference for greater production in newer states like Illinois and Iowa. Northern commercial interests shifted Southern agriculture from one that had been fairly diverse to one that was now almost exclusively cash-crop focused, which stripped financial means away from small farmers — especially those growing food. Interestingly, only Florida seemed to survive this shift, largely because Florida’s agricultural industry still had strong ties to Spanish Cuba (a fact that would enable Florida to prosper during the War of Northern Aggression). The fact that this was lost on Helper was astonishing, but it largely betrayed a Marxist inclination to blame Southern cultural paradigms through the economic lens of Yankee egalitarianism.

I suspect Helper, who was of German extraction and from wealthy means, likely enjoyed the company of German Marxist 48ers who settled portions of the interior American West and California. No doubt, he was impacted by their perspectives on class struggle. If he did not outright interact with John C. Fremont, a fellow abolitionist Southerner, he no doubt danced in the same social circles in California. Finally, Helper’s perspective on the Southern planter class is foreign to much of the South. It is hard for the Yankee mindset to understand the relationship between landed gentry and the common people. Social and economic stratification as a source of contention is unfamiliar to the Anglo-Celtic Southerner. Yankees view happiness and personal attainment through a material myopia. Southerners do not. When you divorce the heart and mind from the New England interpretation of “success,” one finds Helper to be a foreigner, born on native soil, who little understood the people whom he studied.

You seem to have an advanced and highly critical interest in American interactions with the Muslim world, especially in Iraq and Iran. Can you briefly describe the biggest mistakes or worst acts of aggression American forces have made in the Middle East in the past ten years? Is there any good the Americans have done in the region? What would be the ideal relationship be between any White Nationalist state and the Muslim world?

One of my two graduate degrees was obtained in Islamic Culture, with a particular emphasis on Shi’a Islam and Iran. My thesis, which was published by the US Department of Defense in both a classified and non-classified version, focused on how Iran builds Nationalist insurgencies from the ground up. I then spent nearly 20 years traveling to more than 78 countries in the employment of the US government in some capacity, helping to undermine those movements, as well as others. Over that time, I gained a combined love and hatred for the Muslim world that can best be described as an admiration and a deep respect for one’s enemy. I know that the Muslim world has no care for me or my people. At the same time, I sincerely believe we are manipulated enemies. If we left them alone, we would be left alone. Instead, the liberal West has attempted to impose upon the Muslim world foreign concepts that naturally led to a reaction.

The first truly inspiring rise against Western-defined modernity was that of Iranian Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. I consider him to be one of the greatest men of the twentieth century, and one who is rarely studied by Westerners. Unlike the mythology peddled by neoliberal Western officials, Khomeini’s revolution was not born out of revenge for the overthrow of Mohammed Mosaddegh in 1953 by the CIA. Khomeini, like the rest of the Iranian clergy, despised the socialist Mosaddegh and assisted his removal. Rather, Khomeini’s uprising was against the White Revolution of 1963. The White Revolution, promoted by the Kennedy Administration, sought to modernize Iran, turning it into a more Western-style country of degeneracy and immorality. Those trends escalated through the 1960s and ‘70s, and Khomeini was a vocal detractor of them who was ultimately exiled. He returned to Iran in 1979 to — in his own words — “punch the system in the mouth.” The fact that the Shah was a totalitarian of sorts often shrouds the reality of a rapidly disintegrating Iranian society replete with homosexuality, transgenderism, and sexual deviancy prior to the return of Khomeini. The Western Dissident Right, especially those of us who believe that both Faith and Nation are divinely intertwined, can learn a lot from Revolutionary Iran and its offshoots, such as Hezbollah and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq when it was the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. I view Iran and the Iranian people with great admiration. When I read about their struggles against Western-imposed sanctions and American aggression, I cheer and pray for their success.

As it pertains to the good of the Americans in the Middle East, there is nothing with which I can point at and say we did anything right, with the exception of Mosaddegh, who was a Communist menace. Otherwise, we have spent the entirety of the post-Second World War era getting nearly every single decision about the region wrong. In part, I believe this is due to a fundamental misunderstanding of the region that is somewhat shared with the American South. Western analysts view Islam through the militant egalitarian lens established by their Puritan forebears and which were codified at schools like Harvard. They are incapable of setting aside their biases to understand the people and their leadership. The West approaches the Middle East like evangelical secularists, attempting to convert the region into a godless morass of degeneracy and consumerism. When Middle Easterners refuse this empty religion, the West — especially the United States — gets angry. The very people making these decisions love to tell you about the beauty of the region and the simplicity of the people, based on their time as members of the Peace Corps. The finish these descriptions, however, with the word “but,” or the phrase, “if only they would change . . .” Correspondingly, the same things that make those communities beautiful — the simplicity, their value of nature, their devotion to God, their love of family and tribe — are shared by the very same people whom they deride as hillbillies and rednecks in the South.

If they are incapable of understanding a Baptist fellowship on a Sunday afternoon in Northeast Mississippi, how can these same people think they can understand an Azeri transborder tribe near the Iranian border at Agarak — let alone construct substantive policy? They cannot. Thus, their hearts are closed before they even have a chance to listen to the people whom they claim they wish to help. Americans seek to destroy the leaders and institutions that have served those same simple people for centuries — all in the name of progress.

The military tradition in the American South has always been strong. Is it still this way? Are Southern military-aged men beginning to lose faith in America and shy away from military service? If so, how do you think this will impact the US military?

I believe that the American South is genetically inclined toward a love of militancy and war. It is in their DNA. This is a direct vestige of their Anglo-Celtic origins. Young boys are raised around men who served and fought. They are inculcated with military rhetoric. The South is America’s Sparta, a subject that was my very first article for Identity Dixie. There is a reason that songs like Trace Adkins’ “Arlington,” or “American Soldier” by Toby Keith, were recorded. When Zac Brown sang “Chicken Fried,” the third verse states: “Salute the ones who died, the ones who give their lives so we don’t have to sacrifice all the things we love . . .” This is a familiar theme that can be nearly universally found at kitchen tables throughout Dixie. Thus, while black boys are listening to black rappers waxing philosophical about their hoes, dollars, and guns as obese black females twerk on the screen, Southern boys are listening to songs about men fighting and dying for a cause bigger than themselves. Thankfully, the American Empire is destroying that sense of patriotic zeal.

One of my personal missions is the elimination of Southerners from American military service. The Regime makes this easy. From its anti-white bias to its embrace of transgender freaks to its Covid vaccination requirements, it appears Southerners are less inclined to join the military than ever before. When you couple the anti-Southern hatred articulated by the current black-led US military, which includes bans on Confederate States of America Battle Flag tattoos and the renaming of bases in the South, with the cultural collapse of the United States, you get failure. Correspondingly, the US Army just reported a staggering drop in recruitment. Whereas I have no statistical evidence this is directly related to Southern disinterest, I pray it is. To put this in perspective, I have a personal story on the subject.

We tried talking one of our sons out of joining the military, but he chose to do so, anyway. I was an active-duty Marine. His grandfathers were active-duty Army (both retired as senior enlisted in the Reserves). One of his grandmothers was in the Army. One uncle was in the Army. One uncle was in the Air Force. Two great uncles were in the Navy. All of his great-grandfathers and all of his great-grandmothers had been in the Army, or had been WACs or WAVES. In fact, the only time that at least one male has not served the United States in our son’s lineage was during 1861-1865, when every male ancestor in North America served the Confederate States. At the close of his enlistment, he told us he could not wait to leave. He was in a highly valued infantry unit. Every member of his unit did not reenlist. That made me proud.

The US military will lose its next war, Praise God! The system needs a punch in the mouth. It cannot win a war with social justice warriors and homosexual drag queens led by Colonel Sha’quanda. When the senior military leadership tells more than half of the recruitment pool that they are evil because they are white and created a systemically evil system for which they must atone, why would that pool volunteer to defend such an evil system? When you tell the rest that they are good and have been oppressed by the evil system created by whites, why would that pool volunteer to defend such an evil system? Neither will, but my concern is keeping the Southern white boy home. He can do more for his people in Dixie, making babies and learning a skill, than he can for an Israeli hedge fund manager who is seeking an opportunity to exploit commodities futures by virtue of another war in the Middle East. Our boys should not be sent overseas to kill Muslims who have more in common with them culturally than they have with the Israeli or the black commander directing them to their deaths.

Last question. Since the South has such a strong literary tradition, I have to ask: Do you have a list of favorite Southern authors and books? What books on Southern culture and history would you recommend to someone who knows little about it?

That is a big question, because there is so much to the South and Southern Identity. The South is something you really need to feel, not learn, if that makes sense. From an academic perspective, a good start would be:

• The South as a Conscious Minority: 1781–1861 by Jesse T. Carpenter
• Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South by Grady McWhiney
• Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America by Jim Webb
• Albion’s Seed by David Fischer
• A Defense of Virginia by Robert L. Dabney
• I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition by Twelve Southerners
• Empire of the Owls: Reflections on the North’s War Against Southern Secession by H. V. Traywick
• Defending Dixie: Essays in Southern History and Culture by Clyde Wilson

I know it is a bit hokey and replete with Rainbow Confederate arguments, but even The South was Right! by the Kennedy Brothers is good for the sake of some basic understanding of the perspective of the era, even if there are a lot of modern interpretations of the Southern motivation to secede. Those would all be a good start.

Getting to understand the culture is a little more challenging, because there are so many state and regional distinctions. Of course, Southern Gothic, Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! There is a fantastic book on old Florida — historical fiction — entitled A Land Remembered by Patrick Smith. One of my colleagues strongly recommends Elvis Is Dead and I Don’t Feel So Good Myself by Lewis Grizzard for Southern cultural humor. But there really is no book per se that captures the South in its entirety. A really good film that speaks to Texas, for instance, is Hell or High Water. It seems that sometimes Hollywood gets it right, even when they want to get it wrong.

Finally, I recommend reading other authors at Identity Dixie, the Abbeville Institute, Shotwell Publishing, Reckonin’, and Dissident Mama, to add to a better understanding of the modern South and its concerns, history, culture, and what we deem to be her future.

Thank you for the questions and the opportunity to answer your questions regarding Identity Dixie.

-By Spencer J. Quinn and originally published at Counter-Currents