Review: 2024 Southern Cultural Center National Conference

I was honored to speak at the 2024 Southern Cultural Center National Conference in Wetumpka, AL this weekend. This was their third national conference. I also attended last year’s conference as a guest. We had a blast giving Jared Taylor a civil rights tour of Historic Selma.

The conference was held in what used to be known as the League building which will no doubt be familiar to many of our readers. I have been attending conferences there for over a decade now in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018. After the Southern Cultural Center split with the League of the South, I attended and spoke at the League of the South conference in Pine Level in 2019. Then I took a break during the chaos of 2020 and the first two years of the Biden administration.

Without a doubt, I can say that I have met the finest people that I have known in the Southern Nationalist movement in this building. I started attending events here before I was married. I brought my son Jackson to his first conference this weekend as well as my eldest son who is now 10-years-old. I enjoyed recounting old stories from a decade of bygone conferences like the time we camped out on the Coosa River and went kayaking or the time that Bill Cawthon took us to see William Lowndes Yancey’s grave in Oakwood Cemetery at night in downtown Montgomery. It was interesting to have some of the best people in the pro-White movement who are old friends – James Edwards, Jared Taylor and Sam Dickson – in the same building. White identity and Southern identity come natural to everyone who spoke this weekend. There is a right way and a wrong way to try to bridge these two worlds. This is the right way.

In my speech 10 Years As An Activist, I brooded over the mistakes that I think we have made as activists. I think the issues that we spotlighted as activists like the Great Replacement, our anti-White and anti-Christian culture or the desirability of a National Divorce have gained political traction over the past decade. We are a lot less fringe than we used to be. We were a vanguard in the sense that we were willing to take the heat to say out loud things that millions of people were thinking. At the same time, I cannot shake the feeling that we have also been our own worst enemy at times and have inflicted serious damage on our cause because activists were either in too big a hurry or were caught in a spiral. In the speech, I stressed the importance of staying positive, patient and pragmatic, reducing our turnover rate and the ideal of becoming the steady activist who contributes over the course of several decades. We have far too many activists who burn bright, burn out and after a few years are never heard from again.

The Southern Cultural Center is my political sweet spot: pro-White, pro-South and pro-Christian and full of normal people who are reliable and relatable. It is possible for activists to go off in any of those three directions at the expense of the other two which are vital. There are Christian Nationalists who are pro-Israel, not pro-White. There are antiracist Rainbow Confederates who are pro-South. There are White Nationalists who bang the anti-Christian drum. In retrospect, I think the biggest mistake that we made was going too far in the “revolutionary White Nationalist” direction by getting sucked into and mixed up with the unstable Alt-Right and Neo-Nazi groups like the NSM at the expense of our Southern and Christian identity and message. I’m not saying this to criticize anyone as I drifted in that direction myself. I have learned through bitter experience that what I saw in that was like a mirage in the desert.

If I could do it all over again, I would have focused on local organizing, not on building up a social media profile or making big splashes for “journalists” at popular front rallies. The unglamorous work of holding regular private meetups, networking and lobbying state legislators would have been a far better use of our time. Half of Trump supporters and a majority in the South are sympathetic to a National Divorce. Instead of attacking and mocking those people as “rightoids” and “contards,” we should be trying to steer them toward real solutions. Currently, there is no pressure on state officials in the South to move in our direction. This is in part a reflection of how we have chosen to spend our time as activists.

I noticed at the conference that there were quite a few people there who support both Trump and secession. It was nice to put a face on the people who I see in polls. I want to work with people like this in the future. I know it seems like a hopeless contradiction to the type of ideological activists who I addressed in my speech, but this is where most of our people are at right now. MAGA is a phase. They are coming around to our positions as as activists, but at a slower place. Many of them are older and more hopeful about America. They are nostalgic for better days than most people my age and younger. Everyone who becomes a White Christian Southern Nationalist is guilty of nostalgia for a bygone era.

As I said in a recent article for the Southern Cultural Center, the survival, independence and well-being of the Southern people is the big tent. It is obvious who belongs under that tent. It includes people like James Edwards, Jared Taylor and Sam Dickson who are ethnically and culturally Southern and whose sentiments, values and loyalties are to the South and its people. There is ample room for disagreement about all sorts of things like strategy and tactics (the merits of the Anglican, Lutheran, Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian traditions), but shared blood, identity and devotion is the core.

Note: Here is the archive of The Political Cesspool broadcast at the SCC conference.