This is part of our continuing series of accounts by readers of how they shed the illusions of liberalism and became race realists. First published in 2015 on Counter-Currents, this essay is the introduction to Gregory Hood’s book, Waking Up From the American Dream.

Tony: The morning of the day I got sick, I been thinking. It’s good to be in something from the ground floor. I came in too late for that, I know. But lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.

Dr. Melfi: Many Americans, I think, feel that way.

Tony: I think about my father. He never reached the heights like me. But in a lotta ways he had it better. He had his people. They had their standards. They had pride. Today, whadda we got?

—The Sopranos, Episode 1, “Pilot”

I always felt cheated.

It wasn’t because I lacked for anything. I had an idyllic childhood. My childhood was so normal that in the new America, I’m a freak. Two parents (of differing sexes, a necessary clarification these days), a nice house in the suburbs, a stay-at-home mom, a hard-working father with a stable, nonpolitical job. A yard, a friendly dog, home-cooked meals, and a kitchen always bursting with food. A family that would get me through anything — if there were anything to get through.

There’s no trauma in my past. No abuse. No bullying at school. No diseases. No racial slurs around the dinner table. No terrible secrets or horrible injuries to overcome. Sensible center-left political views. No guns. No violence. Up until the time I stepped into a boxing ring well into adulthood, I had never been in a real fight in my life. After all, what was there to fight about?

Church on Sundays in the denomination of that relaxed American Christianity that holds everyone — Jew or Gentile — is going to heaven, except serial killers or Nazis. And while it was a majority white neighborhood, it was hardly segregated. Everyone hung out with everyone else. Why wouldn’t you?

Yet despite this background, I knew something was deeply wrong with the world I lived in. I eventually found my way into the most hated, marginalized, and repressed social movement in the world. I joined the ranks of a group of people who are universally portrayed by the media as violent, extreme, and crazy. And despite a lifetime of internalizing a certain narrative about history, morality, and politics preached from every organ of culture in the West, I now define myself by its exact opposite.

I am a White Nationalist. I’m writing this to convince you that you should be a White Nationalist — if you aren’t already. And more than that, I’m writing to tell you that there is almost nothing of this country that can be saved — or should be.

The great imperative of our time is for the white European population within the United States to secure its existence by creating a homeland independent of the present American system. All other platforms, programs, and issues are distractions or deceptions. All other political movements, creeds, and beliefs matter only insofar as they lead people towards or away our position.

I know this to be the truth. I know this mission to be the purpose of my time upon this Earth. I know no cause is more important.

And yet I can’t help but wonder: how the hell did I end up here?

What is My Country?

I’ve always loved my country—or at least the idea of it. But the United States of America isn’t mine anymore—and if you’re white, no matter how much you love it, work for it, or even bleed for it, it’s not yours either. And it’s not because of Barack Obama, or Bill Clinton, or even the so called Civil Rights Movement. It hasn’t been ours for a long, long time. Maybe it never really was.

Of course, there are plenty of Born on the Fourth of July-style coming of age stories where the protagonist rejects his patriotic upbringing to lose himself in a new identity built on “social justice” or faux cultural rebellion. This is hardly that. I reject nothing about the way I was raised — a stable family, a reliable income, and loving parents should be the norm. Nor do I react with some kind of exaggerated disgust towards the Philistine “’Merica” that is so easy to criticize. “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” and America is no different.

I could say that I’m simply defending the communities like those I came from — and the right of whites to live in them. I could say that — but it isn’t really true. The 1950s idealized by the stereotypical American conservative are gone — and they weren’t that great to begin with.

Another critic might say that I’m just one of those born revolutionaries who would dissent against any order at all. Today, the entire national and international power structure, political system, and moral code is built around suppressing white identity and European Identitarian politics. So I simply picked the most contrarian thing you could be — the equivalent of a Russian deciding in 1890 that he is a Communist. But that’s not it either.

I was never drawn to revolution. My politics don’t derive from suburban ennui. I was dragged to this position, and I fought it kicking and screaming every step of the way. When all is said and done, I want to win so I don’t have to do this anymore. I want a normal job and a normal life in a homeland for my people that won’t need professional revolutionaries, dissident writers, or the loathsome profession of “activism.”

The truth is something deeper, something that was always there, from the earliest point I can remember. American life can still be prosperous, orderly, and enjoyable, but there’s something deeply wrong and sick beneath the surface. It’s like a horror movie where the protagonist walks through an idyllic town. Everything seems perfect, but there’s something ominous you can’t put your finger on. There’s a nameless terror behind every smile or friendly wave. And as the film rolls on, it gets harder and harder to pretend it’s not there.

There is something deeply wrong with this country. It’s easy — even clichéd — to point to the symptoms. The skyrocketing rates of prescription drugs people take just to get through the day, the stabbings and shootings at elementary schools, the collapsing families, the barely veiled hostility between parents and children, the way Americans utterly drop out of their own lives, disappearing into a fantasy world of video games, entertainment, or celebrity junk culture. Despite a surface level of material prosperity undreamed of by most of human history, most Americans seem to be driven by a despairing, raging hysteria. They are at war with themselves and with everyone around them.

Just think for a moment how odd it is that we expect children to turn against their families when they become adults. That women idolize careerist celebrities with no clear accomplishments—but don’t want children. That men pursue perpetual adolescence. That our media celebrates people who can’t decide what sex — or even species — they are. That the smartest people in our society frantically promote an ideology that dredges up the worst within us — weakness, decadence, and an ironic condescension at past accomplishments.

That our entire society seems to be built upon deliberately destroying everything we inherited — and that the loudest voices telling us to pursue equality mysteriously accrue vast personal wealth from these efforts.

Was it always like this? Were people always so petty and weak? Were men always judged not by what they did, but whether they were “racist”?

What most people praised as the ideal, I found pathetic. And so I felt cheated. I felt something deeply important had been stolen from me — and I didn’t have the knowledge to say what it was.

I wasn’t a Radical Traditionalist when I was young. I didn’t know about the “Kali Yuga” or some grand theory of decline. I wasn’t into occult philosophy or alternative history — I was into baseball. I was just a normal American kid that felt like the great battles and heroes were all in the past — and somehow all that was left was this small world, of small people.

It started like this, a vague wonder if this was all there is. When on a field trip or a vacation I always felt an odd resentment for the people who climbed on statues or smiled for pictures in front of a memorial. The cold statues seemed more alive than the people. The tourists seemed an insult to a better past filled with better men.

The Bible speaks of a time when the angels of God mixed with the women of Earth, and “there were giants in the earth in those days . . . mighty men which were of old, men of renown.” Where were they now? The heroes of the past seemed as foreign as the giants of myth. Far better to disappear into fantasy, leading empires on computer games or reading books about ancient heroes who did something more than complain about racism. Looking around at the white males who disappear into a world of fantasy every chance they get, I knew I wasn’t alone.

Even in school, I had the impression that the End of History had arrived, even if I didn’t know enough then to call it that. At a certain point, the story of America — and the story of humanity — stopped being about the warriors, the pioneers, and the creators. Instead, it became a story about the victims, the people who built nothing but now had a right to the things other people had made. Our morality demanded it. The nation and the world we lived in had been created, and now all that was left was to point out inequalities and distribute resources accordingly.

And so we were told the great hero wasn’t a warrior or a scholar — but a social justice activist. It wasn’t the creator or the conqueror — but the weakling who has special rights precisely because of his inferiority.

Nietzsche writes of the Last Man, the man who has discovered happiness, “and blinks.” The democratic age ends with “men without chests,” leading small lives pursuing petty pleasures, looking down upon the ideas of greatness, struggle, and accomplishment. But this isn’t what we have. There are many full of passionate intensity and willingness to sacrifice. But the ideal they sacrifice for is the destruction of ideals, the promotion of “equality,” the abolition of “racism” or “hierarchy.”

And I found it pathetic.

Like so many others, my awakening to what was at stake came during college. Needless to say, the classes were a joke, and the degree was largely a waste. It was an ideological training camp, albeit one experienced through the haze of all but continuous alcohol and drug intake. Like many liberal arts majors, I found class an afterthought — and even at a supposedly difficult college, it was a simple matter to fit in straight As in between bouts of degeneracy.

But academics wasn’t the point. That became clear from the moment I set foot on campus. There was nothing, literally nothing, which could not be deconstructed. Toilets were gender exclusive and therefore evil. Statues on campus had to be torn down or buildings renamed. During class, I saw one black student burst into a sudden fury because someone casually mentioned the cafeteria was serving “brownies.”

But I was stuck there. And so I let the school do its work. I opened everything to question. I saw the structural realities of power underneath every dialogue, every class, every student organization. I saw how the personal is political.

But more than that, I saw that they had it precisely backwards. They were the system. They were the structural inequality. Using what they taught me, I deconstructed the deconstructionists. I saw what a fighting politics could be: Left-wing techniques and social analysis mobilized to Right-wing ends. When a tenured professor whose only credential seems to be her gender or skin color is shrieking at you about “privilege,” it becomes abundantly clear that American higher education is just a very expensive exercise in ideological misdirection.

But why I identified with the Right was something deeper, something primal. I had no reactionary illusions about what my country was — Lies My Teacher Told Me or A People’s History of the United States were textbooks, part of the System’s curriculum. I didn’t come from a Right-wing background. But there was something sickening, something that would physically nauseate me, in the way that the campus Left deliberately promoted ugliness, spat upon everything the country had accomplished, and rejoiced at the destruction of the historic American nation.

The turning point came with one of those racially charged campus controversies that dominate American universities. Older Americans nostalgically donating to their alma maters don’t really seem to understand just how bad it has gotten. In this particular case, some campus conservatives had fallen afoul of the black students at the school, and seemingly the entire black population of the school came to confront them. After all, they had nothing else to do.

I had no involvement in the activism or the response. I was not politically active during college. I simply sat in the back and listened, unnoticed. The black students alternately raged and cried, threatened violence or lapsed into maudlin self-pity. The handful of white students instantly turned on each other, apologizing and changing their positions. They were terrified—and they were right to be, as they were confronted by a numerically superior and racially motivated mob that had the explicit backing of the school administration.

I walked home from that incident changed. The blunt expression of racial solidarity had shocked me to my core. I began to understand that not everyone is just a white person, some of them with deeper tans. They really aren’t like us — and absent a white majority, the cultural norms and institutions Americans take for granted simply will not exist.

The American Right has always had at its fringe those who connected the dots between the United States and the European-American population that ultimately created and sustains it. Ultimately, as a defensive measure, I awakened to my racial identity. I understood that everything I valued—and everything worth preserving in a declining world — was ultimately dependent on European-American population.

Conservatives like James Burnham long ago defined the slow retreat of Western Civilization, as do mainstream figures like Pat Buchanan and Mark Steyn. I immersed myself in the “counter-jihad” movement. I studied the Minutemen and the responses to mass illegal immigration in the American Southwest. And I placed my faith in the American conservative movement and the traditional tripartite platform of limited government, traditional values, and a strong national defense.

Unfortunately, it didn’t take long to see that American conservatism didn’t really do much on the issues that matter. On illegal immigration, many Republicans and conservative leaders seemed to actually favor the invasion. A so-called strong national defense was more interested in defending the borders of countries in the Middle East than defending our own.

But more than that — I had a slowly dawning awareness that conservatives, at a deep level, did not want to win. They did not want to engage on the issues that mattered. Indeed, they even lacked a real definition of victory. The conservative movement was, as Joe Sobran said, “a game, a way of making a living.”

Millions of American conservatives have come to this realization and organized to defend conservatism from itself in the form of various Patriot groups or the Tea Party movement. But I started to come to a different conclusion. I slowly began to understand that conservatism — and America — could not be saved from itself.

Even more than that, I began to appreciate, if only distantly, the contempt artists and intellectuals have for what is called bourgeois civilization. I think your average white American, just like your average American conservative, has decent values. But every instinct they have is defensive and conflict averse. They will sacrifice anything and surrender everything in order to have another moment of peace. They will march voluntarily into the camps — indeed, they seem indifferent that what was once their country has become an especially large combination of a gulag and an insane asylum.

Julius Evola wrote in Men Among the Ruins:

We must concede that, per se, an anti-bourgeois stance has a reason for existence. I do not mean bourgeois so much in the sense of an economic class, but rather its counterpart: there is an intellectual world, an art, custom, and general view of life that, having been shaped in the last century parallel to the revolution of the Third Estate, appear as empty, decadent, and corrupt. A resolute overcoming of all this is one of the conditions required to solve the present crisis of our civilization.

An American qua American is incapable of this. Even though the mass immigration and outsourcing has ensured that the American middle class is in desperate retreat, Americans still define themselves as a middle class country. More importantly, the American Right explicitly defines its purpose as the defense of bourgeois classical liberalism — the defense of “life, liberty, and property,” to use George Mason’s phrase. Even as the substance and population of the country changes, we continue to cling to abstractions like “the Constitution.”

What I was confronting was the problem of every modern conservative: how do you save institutions that are already corrupted? And eventually, I came to understand the truth: you don’t.

Why I Gave Up on the American State — & Rediscovered My People

It’s no small thing to give up on your country. It is part of you, as much a part of you as your hometown or the faith of your youth. But people move away from those things too.

I never lost faith in what this country accomplished. It is easy on the European New Right to sneer at America — the land that progressed straight to decadence, without an interval of civilization. But the fact remains that this country — and no other — landed on the moon. We conquered an entire continent through war and struggle, perhaps the greatest military achievement of the entire millennium. We built the industries that created the modern world — and continue to create the technology that will be used in the world to come. America is the greatest military power in the world, the greatest economic power in the world, and the greatest cultural influence in the world. And, most important of all, until very recently, Americans defined themselves as whites and their country as a white nation.

And there are elements of that historic American nation that will always resonate with European Americans. The conquest of the West. The last stand at the Alamo. The Marines storming Iwo Jima. Bunker Hill, Pickett’s Charge, the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the building of the Transcontinental Railroad — who dares say that America lacks the legends, history, and heroes of Europe? This land of ours was sanctified with the blood of European warriors since the coming of the Pilgrim Fathers.

Yet America’s fall was inevitable. If the past century has taught us anything, it is that ideas are eventually taken to their logical conclusion. And whatever the triumphs the European people have achieved on this continent, they were ultimately in the service of a Founding Creed boiled down to “All men are created equal.”

It doesn’t matter that Thomas Jefferson didn’t mean this in the literal sense. Nor is it a contradiction that America, for most of its history, has thought of herself as a white nation. America at its core can only be defined as one of two ways — as an extension of Europe on the continent of North America, or as a deliberate separation from the Old World. And while there is much to admire in the American Revolution and in the great achievements of the United States, at its core the American ideal is that “we have it in our power to begin the world anew.” And so we did — and destroyed ourselves.

“America” did not accomplish anything. Whites did. European Americans did. “American” accomplishments overwhelmingly belong to them — and them alone. But the white historic American nation and “America” are two different things. The latter is an ideological construct at its core, defined by natural rights, universal egalitarianism, and material aspirations.

Looking around the contemporary United States, who can doubt that America is evolving into simply the logical conclusion of its founding ideals? Like the Comedian in Watchmen, who is asked “What happened to the American Dream?,” we have to answer, “It came true. You’re looking at it.”

To be a European American with a future means to confront the lie that is the American ideal. All men are not created equal. Rights are a product of power, not the gift of a Deist “God” whose will is reinterpreted every other week. The upward development of the race is the purpose of the state, not accumulating money by systematically degrading it. And we have more in common with our racial kinsmen in England, Germany, the Netherlands, and the other nations of the Occident than we do our nonwhite “fellow Americans.” Our Republic is no longer a melting pot, but a trash can. America today is simply enforced mediocrity.

Another world is possible — but there is something standing in the way. That something is America. Her existence drafts the past accomplishments of European Americans in service of policies and powers that are destroying them. The “mystic chords of memory,” as Lincoln called them, are less the source of solidarity and sacrifice than a tool of emotional blackmail on whites who know that something is deeply wrong but are afraid to break with a sanctified past.

Waking up from the American Dream means recognizing that American ideals have been tried, tested, and found wanting. They have led us to a country where all that is best is systematically sacrificed in the service of what is worst. Americans sense it, but resist what is to be done. To continue to believe in the Dream is to remain in a troubled sleep.

But we are awake. We are not “Americans,” for how can one be a citizen of an abstraction? We are Europeans, whites who have conquered the North American wilderness and are prepared to claim our birthright of a nation where we are free to be ourselves. We know that this farce you call a country is a nightmare that just rolls on and on, and we want no part of it.

We are not willing to die to make the world safe for garbage food, garbage culture, and garbage people, but we are willing to work and if need be fight for organic society worthy of service and sacrifice. We want to offer what is best in the service of something even greater. We want a homeland — and we mean to have it.

That which was best about America is still ours. But we don’t need this failed experiment anymore. We can be something better. But that can’t happen if we just go back to sleep and pretend that when we wake up in the morning, everything will be ok.

It gives me no joy to write this. It will be difficult, and in the short term, it’s always easier to remain asleep. But as I look back over my own life’s journey, I realize that politics and history are not so much about society, but about ourselves. What kind of people are we?

Patrick Henry once asked, “Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?” Are we willing to accept the living degradation that American life has become? And if we are, what does that say about us?

I’ve heard authors and politicians define the core of America as “optimism.” But as Spengler said, “Optimism is cowardice.” We need the courage to break with pleasant illusions. Our nation is of blood, not of paper. We need to wake up to our own dispossession, and the forces that made it possible. And we need to create a homeland in order to take back our own souls from a culture that has become a poison. To do less is to betray that which is best within us, we who created and can surpass that beautiful lie we called the United States of America.