Antifa Calling Shots In Brussels

Two NatCon Cancellations In Four Days, With Police & Officials On Antifa's Side

Hello from Brussels, where shocking events are underway. I’m here for the National Conservatism conference. Last Friday, under pressure from Antifa and the Socialist mayor of Brussels, the Concert Noble venue cancelled its contract with NatCon.

The NatCon team scrambled and found another venue in a Brussels suburb. Then Antifa alerted the mayor of that suburb, Etterbeek, who called the police, who in turn went to the Sofitel and pressured them to cancel the event.

Can you believe that? Rather than defend the right of Europeans and their guests to meet peaceably to hear speeches from mainstream Right figures in Europe, the Belgian police took the side of Antifa.

We heard tonight that NatCon has found a third venue. Antifa put out a press release saying that if it finds out that NatCon is meeting somewhere, it will mobilize to stop it. There could be violence — and the authorities here in the capital of Europe don’t seem to care.

I am not surprised that Antifa slandered me in its press release , describing me as

an American writer who believes that the Christchurch shooter, who killed 51 people in 2019 in a mosque, had « sincere and real concerns » about « the declining population of ‘ethnic’ Europeans ».

I am more surprised that The Guardian more or less reprinted the press release uncontested:

Also on the speakers’ list are Rod Dreher, an American writer who argued that the Christchurch mosque gunman who killed 51 people in 2019 did have “legitimate, realistic concerns” about “declining numbers of ethnic Europeans”.

I cannot let this smear stand.

They’re quoting out of context two AmCon pieces I wrote about the 2019 Christchurch shooter. The first is here. Excerpts:

One of the biggest lies we hear whenever there is a mass terror attack, such as the one against New Zealand’s Muslims, is that the killing was “senseless.” It’s not without reason when ISIS does it, and it’s not without reason when people like Brenton Tarrant, the alleged NZ shooter, do it. The acts are evil, but not senseless; there is a rationale for what they do. To be clear: do NOT read me as saying Tarrant’s acts “made sense” in the general sense of the term; I’m speaking narrowly here, to mean that causation is at work. We need to know this so we can better combat things like this.

I read Tarrant’s manifesto, which is easy to find online, though I’m not going to link to it here. It’s a chilling document, for a couple of reasons. First, it’s grounded in both paranoid, racist grievance, and legitimate, realistic concerns. Second, as with ISIS videos and propaganda, the Internet distributes this stuff worldwide; we may be certain that Tarrant’s manifesto will strike many resonant chords with murder-minded fanatical racists like himself.

Though I don’t want to be part of spreading the manifesto, I do want to talk about a few parts of it, including parts you may not hear about in the media reporting. It’s important to talk about it. I will say here clearly that any reader who in any way attempts to justify this atrocity in New Zealand will NOT be posted. It was a despicable act, and if you pray, join me in praying for the souls of the murdered, and the families they left behind.

Is it clear that I have no regard at all for Tarrant? More:

Here’s the most important line in [Tarrant’s] manifesto, one that the rest of us had better have a good answer to, because this assertion, in some form, is going to be with us for the rest of our lives:

RADICALIZATION IS THE RATIONAL RESPONSE TO DEGENERATION

What is “degeneration”? According to the manifesto, it consists of:

1. The decline in native European populations, and native European stock in the US, in terms of numbers relative to non-Europeans within those societies.

2. Politics and policies within European countries (that is, countries with ethnic European majorities, including the US and Canada) that disempower native Europeans.

3. Widespread drug use.

4. The loss of worker rights and stability under the reign of globalist capitalism.

5. Environmental degradation.

6. The collapse of Christianity (which he seems to value only as a force ethnically binding Europeans)

7. Rampant hedonism

Here’s the chilling part: Everything Tarrant identifies as qualities of a disintegrating Western civilization is true. You may think that declining numbers of ethnic Europeans is a good thing, or something that has no particular moral meaning. But it really is happening. So are all the rest.

In no way do I see “radicalization,” at least not remotely in the violent terms conceived of by this mass murdering scum, as the answer to the disintegration he identifies. There is never, ever any justification for what he did. But if we are going to figure out how to stop these things, we have to take seriously the roots of it — this, in the same way we have to recognize the roots of Al-Qaeda and ISIS in specific experiences of Arab Muslims in late modernity. In fact, what Tarrant did, and what the Islamist terrorists do, intersect insofar as they are responses to the profound displacement of peoples and traditions in the modern world.

We are no doubt going to see more Tarrants emerge from the masses of angry young white men radicalized by the world they live in, and from living online. Again, the emergence of the same kind of men from the stresses of Arab Muslim society is entirely predictable.

The temptation many here will have in response to this obscene attack is to deny that it is based in any kind of reality. To do that, though, requires closing one’s eyes to actual conditions in the world. It would be like Russian aristocrats, circa 1900, telling themselves that the communist and anarchist revolutionaries committing acts of political murder have nothing to do with social, political, and economic changes roiling Europe and Russia of the era. That they are just inexplicable acts of savagery caused by the reading of revolutionary tracts.

Here’s a link to the follow-up. Excerpt:

I bring all of this up because of the controversy over the New Zealand shooting, and my mention in an earlier post that I believe the murderer was not wrong to mention demographic shifts in Europe as a sign of the decline of European culture. This is in no way to endorse Tarrant’s racist conclusions, nor certainly to endorse his violence. It’s simply to point out that it’s folly to expect people to sit back and watch their countries’ populations decline relative to that of migrants moving in, and to be sanguine about it. Even if you favor immigration, intelligent political management means that you have to take very seriously the social disruption that this kind of tectonic social change will bring.

Last year in France, I met a farmer who had been to nine funerals of neighboring farmers who had committed suicide. Nine funerals! The French government believes that these small farmers have to be allowed to die off because they are economically inefficient. Do you think this farmer I talked to, who had buried nine of his neighbors, gives a rat’s rear end about whether or not he is sufficiently diverse and committed to cosmopolitan international values to satisfy people in the salons of Paris? The only thing keeping him together, body and soul, was his profound Catholic faith.

Guess whose new novel is about people like that farmer? That’s right, Michel Houellebecq’s.

European culture is either dying, or it’s changing into something we don’t yet know. Wherever you come down on that issue, nobody can deny that the changes underway now are massive, and that they are driving European politics. (This is also true of US politics, though less so.) When people are not allowed to discuss these changes without being called racist, then the only ones you will have speaking out are actual racists. The 21st century is going to be a century of unprecedented migration around the globe, in part driven by global warming, and in part by the radical imbalance in population growth in Africa. Look:

If you are a European looking at this graph, you must be filled with a sense of foreboding. The politics of Europe for the rest of this century are going to be driven by nothing greater than migration. Has there ever been an entire civilization that has peaceably yielded to an alien civilization moving into its territory, if it had any alternative? I’m not asking to be rhetorically provocative. These questions have to be faced honestly by political leaders of all parties.

Go back to the top of this long piece, and read what Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg had to say about the white working class, and their sense of displacement. There is no way that any political leader can speak meaningfully to them if they believe that that leader sees them as losers who deserve their fate, because they’re bigots. Similarly, no political leader can speak to blacks, Hispanics, or anybody else with credibility if those populations see them as losers who deserve their fate. Our own politics in the US is going to grow increasingly nasty and divisive because our political parties have become so tribalized. Many of us are coming to believe that the Other Party sees people like us as the Enemy. I know I do. You — left or right — probably do too.

We have to find some other way. Do you think we can? I’m not hopeful, but I know that if we don’t, the alternative is a future with a lot more people in it like the New Zealand killer. They won’t all be young white males. They will come from all kinds of backgrounds, ethnic and otherwise, as people fear that they are losing something that gives them dignity, meaning, and purpose. The ruling class in this country — I’m talking about people like me: educated people with stable jobs and families, and with megaphones — had better pay attention.

Do you see where I stand on all this? My point was very clearly that the Christchurch shooter was an evil man, but his radicalism was grounded in certain realities that we dare not dismiss or ignore. Similarly, the evil that Islamist terrorists do cannot be excused, but if we want to understand where people like that come from, we have to take the conditions that form them seriously.

We have to be able to talk realistically and openly about migration and these other matters. That’s part of what it means to live in a democracy. The Left — politicians, activists, the media — are trying to shut it all down here in Brussels. It’s as if the capital of the European Union had been turned into a liberal arts college campus.

Last month here in Brussels, police arrested four would-be young jihadists and charged them with planning an attack on a cultural center. The terrorism alert in Brussels today is at Level 3 (out of 4), in part because of that. And yet, the Socialist mayor of Brussels, one of the chiefs leading the charge to kick NatCon out, expressed concern to one newspaper about “Catholic fundamentalism.” I’m not kidding!

Pay close attention to what happens here in Brussels this week, with NatCon. It’s the future that the Left will impose on all Europeans, if they can. If it is impossible to come to the capital of the European Union, and have a peaceful meeting of conservatives, including the head of government of an EU member state, a Catholic cardinal, leading British and French politicians, and intellectuals of the Right, without being silenced by government officials and police, all doing the bidding of Antifa — well, what does that tell you about the reality of democracy in Europe?