…Hillsdale College professor David Azerrad warned that liberal “idols” are “centered on the aggrieved groups who have the greatest of all contemporary privileges, the privilege of having their purported oppression be recognized by the state. Black people, first and foremost, followed closely by women, especially if they’re childless, followed closely by members of the so-called LGBTQ community with Hispanics, Muslims,” and “Native Americans” as people with disabilities “trail far behind.” Azerrad later described the white-nationalist website VDARE as being merely “anti-immigrant” and portrayed it as a victim of political persecution at the hands of New York attorney general Letitia James. “At its core, the regime today is anti-white, anti-male and anti-Christian,” he added, before repeating familiar — and false — great replacement theories. He complained of an “intentional demographic transformation of America into a majority minority country through large-scale immigration,” and said, “What diversity ultimately really means is fewer whites. In the end, it may well mean no whites. Whites are bad, non-whites are good.”

…

Vance first spoke at NatCon before he was a senator, and he was comfortable here, talking to friends. At the dinner, he shied away from sweeping pronouncements — conscious, perhaps, of outshining his potential boss. But he knew the crowd well and spoke of a country invaded by immigrants, controlled by elites who were crushing the American Dream. “Look, the thing on immigration that no one can avoid is that it has made our societies poor, less safe, less prosperous, and less advanced,” he said. The city of Springfield, Ohio, had been inundated with Haitian immigrants, he complained, before saying that America is not an idea but “a nation.” He will be buried in his family’s ancestral plot in eastern Kentucky, he said, and he hoped his children would follow him. “That is a homeland,” he declared.

Whose homeland will it be? Vance seems to think it belongs to him, or to his wife’s immigrant family, who did not “abuse” asylum laws as he claims Springfield’s new residents have done. His future is bleak; his America is paltry. An alternative is necessary, but as NatCon drew to a close, liberalism seemed more shambolic than ever. NatCon speakers relished President Biden’s apparent decline and saw an opportunity to press the attack. They thought little of Vice-President Kamala Harris, whom Vance sarcastically called “the prize at the end of the rainbow.” The prospect of a Black and South Asian woman at the top of her ticket forces NatCon’s racism into sharper focus — and illustrates the stakes.

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