As you and I were enjoying our Thanksgiving meals with family and friends, Dublin was on fire. An African migrant had stabbed several children near a school before being restrained, but the Irish government was more upset about anti-migrant rhetoric than the horrific attack itself. The native Irish protested, starting a riot in the streets of Dublin, burning an immigrant processing center and several police cars throughout the night.
The government doubled down, accusing the rioters of being an angry, white, far-right mob which blamed immigrants for its own problems. Irish Garda Commissioner Drew Harris called the scenes “disgraceful” and blamed the riot on a “far right ideology”.
The Irish people found an unlikely spokesman in MMA legend Conor McGregor, who denounced the government’s response on Twitter:
Innocent children ruthlessly stabbed by a mentally deranged non-national in Dublin, Ireland today. Our chief of police had this to say on the riots in the aftermath. Drew, not good enough. There is grave danger among us in Ireland that should never be here in the first place, and there has been zero action done to support the public in any way, shape or form with this frightening fact. NOT GOOD ENOUGH. Make change or make way. Ireland for the victory
God bless those attacked today, we pray
Most western nations are engaging in the wholesale replacement of their native populations through mass migration, but Ireland is a unique case. Many of the reasons given as to why Europeans and Americans must acquiesce to massive demographic displacement don’t apply to the Irish. They never engaged in widespread slavery, in fact the Irish were often enslaved themselves. They never established colonies, in fact they were colonized by the British. By all the measures that intersectional Marxists use to determine status, the Irish should be as “oppressed” as anyone. Yet their progressive leaders still drip with hatred for their own people, demanding they meekly accept replacement in their native homeland.
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar (essentially the Irish prime minister) recently said that Ireland was too white and needed to become more diverse:
Elon Musk recognized this rhetoric for what it is:
Varadkar also posted a video this week urging migrants to register to vote. It’s absolutely perverse that an Irish leader can lose the confidence of the Irish people but hope to stay in power by rallying the very foreigners he has spent his term importing. It brings to mind a satirical poem written in the wake of an East German uprising in 1953:
After the uprising of the 17th of June The Secretary of the Writers' Union Had leaflets distributed on the Stalinallee Which stated that the people Had squandered the confidence of the government And could only win it back By redoubled work. Would it not in that case Be simpler for the government To dissolve the people And elect another?
Throughout the west our governments are dissolving the people and electing another. Millions of migrants have crossed our southern border, many of which are military-aged men, not women and children fleeing disaster. Migrants continue to cross the Mediterranean Sea into Spain and Italy, moving on to wherever they can find the most generous benefits. Britain’s supposedly Conservative government has done nothing to stop mass migration across the English Channel even after it was revealed that Tony Blair’s Labour Party had deliberately increased migration to dilute the influence of the native British who opposed their socialist programs.
Many of these countries have also made it criminal to criticize this mass migration. The United Kingdom will already arrest you for mean tweets and in Ireland, Taoiseach Varadkar promised to “modernise” hate speech laws in response to the Dublin riots.
The history of Ireland is the story of a people fiercely devoted to their freedom and their heritage. The native Gaelic Irish were easy prey for the Vikings in the last few centuries of the first millennium AD until High King Brian Boru united the people and drove out the invaders at the Battle of Clontarf in 1014. King Brian was killed, but his legacy is eternal.
Ireland was oppressed by their neighbors in England numerous times throughout its history. The Anglo-Normans under Strongbow conquered Dublin and Waterford in 1170. In 1541, King Henry VIII of England proclaimed himself King of Ireland, adding the realm to his dominions.
It was around that time that English and Scottish Protestants began establishing plantations in Ulster, the northernmost province of Ireland. During his tenure as Lord Protector of England, Oliver Cromwell invaded Ireland, massacring many Irish and confiscating their lands. The losers of various conflicts in England and Scotland often found their way to Ireland, including an ancestor of mine who chose the wrong side of Monmouth’s Rebellion of 1685.
A major Irish revolt in 1798 failed and Ireland was soon brought under the auspices of the United Kingdom. The Cross of St. Patrick was added to the existing British flag, which included both the Cross of St. George and the Saltire of St. Andrew, representing England and Scotland, respectively:
The Great Famine of 1845 saw many Irish families emigrate to the United States as two million people died of starvation. Many Irish blamed British economic policies for not having enough food, and thus the cause of Irish nationalism came across the sea to America.
In 1916, with World War I raging, the Irish rebelled again. A series of bloody revolts and civil wars followed which resulted in the Irish Free State. However, the descendants of the Ulster Protestants wanted to remain tied to Great Britain, leading to a partition: Northern Ireland remained part of the United Kingdom, while the rest of the island eventually became the Republic of Ireland.
The situation remained tense, however. A minority of Irish Catholics living in Northern Ireland desired reunification of the island, while the majority Protestants attempted to maintain control. Conflict escalated through the 1960s, leading to Bloody Sunday — January 30, 1972 — when British soldiers fired at an Irish Catholic protest in Derry, killing fourteen.
Thus began a guerrilla war carried out on the streets of Northern Ireland, which included terror attacks throughout the British Isles. This conflict killed more than 3,500 people over the next three decades, only ending with the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. It’s no surprise that Irishmen took to the streets yesterday — they have not forgotten how to fight for what they believe in.
I had the privilege of visiting both Ireland and Northern Ireland in 2012. It really is a lovely country with a tremendous history. The Irish have constantly punched above their weight when it comes to creating culture, from authors such as Jonathan Swift, James Joyce, and W.B. Yeats to bands like U2 and the Cranberries.
My own ancestry is Scots-Irish. My 6th-great-grandfather left Ireland as a teenager with his aunt and uncle and helped establish villages in New Hampshire and New York. His wife’s grandfather helped defend Londonderry against King James II after his ouster in the Glorious Revolution.
The Irish people are proud of their heritage. On one of the last days of my 2012 visit I stayed up late with a hostel keeper who shared his opinions of world affairs. He hated the English, hated that Prince William wore an Irish Guards uniform for his wedding, but couldn’t bring himself to hate Queen Elizabeth. It’s tragically ironic that the Irish fought for so long against the English, to whom they are relatively near in culture, only to surrender to a globalist ideology that seeks to supplant them with cultures far more foreign.
The Irish were once one of the most fiercely Catholic people on Earth, but that religious devotion has been watered down by progressivism as well. Over the last ten years, Irish leaders have legalized abortion and gay marriage as well as importing migrants who are devoted neither to Christianity nor Irish culture. Yet perhaps they moved too fast. Yesterday’s riots showed that the Irish people are not going to be replaced without a fight. Their culture, history, and beliefs are too important to sacrifice on the altar of diversity.
Conor McGregor surely speaks for many who are fed up with the way in which the globalist agenda is erasing their nation. Those people need a leader, a voice, someone who can’t be silenced. Governments are supposed to act on behalf of their people, but today they openly hate their own people and seek to oppress them. Perhaps it will take a loud and obnoxious MMA fighter to rally the Irish people to defend their homeland once again. Auron MacIntyre put it succinctly: “He found the crown of Ireland in a gutter.”
It’s tempting to condemn yesterday’s riot while still opposing mass migration and forced diversity, but you must recognize we are well past the point of being objective. Grade school history books taught us that it was protests by Martin Luther King Jr. and other black leaders that moved Congress to pass civil rights, but that puts the cart before the horse. Protests and riots are allowed or even encouraged when they support what the ruling regime already desires — see the George Floyd riots of 2020. On the other hand, any protest, no matter how peaceful, is denounced and shut down if it opposes the regime — see January 6th. We must realize that the biggest protests are often not organic, but organized by the regime in power, a regime which today extends beyond elected lawmakers and executives and into a vast bureaucracy and a massive network of NGOs and advocacy organizations.
Many of the same figures who denounced the riot in Dublin promoted everything that was done in the name of BLM. Irish Justice Minister Helen McEntee was one of many such cases:
This is not to say that we should endorse violence, of course. Conor McGregor himself condemned attacks on law enforcement and first responders, but recognized where the impetus had come from:
I do not condone last nights riots. I do not condone any attacks on our first responders in their line of duty. I do not condone looting and the damaging of shops. Last nights scenes achieved nothing toward fixing the issues we face. I do understand frustrations however, and I do understand a move must be made to ensure the change we need is ushered in. And fast! I am in the process of arranging. Believe me I am way more tactical and I have backing. There will be change in Ireland, mark my words. The change needed. In the last month, innocent children stabbed leaving school. Ashling Murphy murdered. Two Sligo men decapitated. This is NOT Ireland’s future! If they do not act soon with their plan of action to ensure Ireland’s safety, I will.
Appeals to democracy only matter when the demos is already on the side of the regime. See how our leaders say with a straight face that the election of Donald Trump in 2016 was a threat to democracy. When I visited Ireland in 2012 the people were debating whether or not to ratify a European Union treaty which would cede even more sovereignty to Brussels and Strasbourg. No matter how many times nations voted against the treaty, their leaders continued bringing it up until they got the desired result, at which point it became set in stone.
Remember that the same thing happening in Ireland is happening here too. Lawmakers and the bureaucracy are moving our society to the left as fast as possible, normalizing things that were once well outside the pale. They’ve opened our borders to uncounted numbers of people who flood our communities and destabilize our culture. They demand we meekly accept this, on both humanitarian (they’re all poor refugees looking for a better life!) and economic (they do the jobs Americans won’t do!) bases. If we speak up, we’re labeled racist, xenophobic, white supremacist, far right.
Yet there are questions that need answered. What does it mean to be a citizen of a nation? What does it mean to be Irish? What does it mean to be American? What does it mean to be Idahoan? Do our children have the right to inherit the societies their ancestors created?
These things matter. It’s an absolutely dystopian idea that we should aspire to a global society where borders, citizenship, and culture are meaningless. Nationalism is simply the belief that people groups with a common language, heritage, history, culture, religion, and ideals should govern themselves. It’s not about supremacy, but about true cultural diversity: the Irish should be allowed to rule Ireland, the English should rule England, the Japanese should rule Japan, the Ethiopians should rule Ethiopia, and the Americans should rule America. It’s a contradiction to denounce centuries of western colonialism only to endorse the mass migration of the third world into the west.
More than fifty years ago, English statesman Enoch Powell warned that mass migration would lead to tension, strife, and violence. Quoting the Aeneid, he said:
As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood". That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect.
This speech has been taken out of context by proponents of globalism and mass migration who called it a threat against ethnic minorities, but Powell was simply arguing from history that mixing vastly different cultures never ends well. Raheem Kassam, who gave me my first real writing job in 2020, wrote a book called Enoch Was Right in which he evaluated Powell’s rhetoric in the wake of the mass migration of the 2010s, numerous terror attacks, communities which have become no-go zones for law enforcement, and of course, Brexit:
I look around the London I knew as a kid, and the Britain my parents emigrated to, which gave them the opportunities which they handed down to me in turn. That Britain is disappearing. When they came to Britain, and when Powell gave his speech, migration was in the tens of thousands. Now gross migration is about 600,000 a year into the UK. It’s extraordinary. Nothing can cope. The transport, the health service, housing, none of it. It’s all creaking and crumbling and we’re stacking on more and more debt to finance our growing, ageing population. Enoch Powell knew what was coming and I was tired of his legacy and intellect [being] maligned and marginalised by an establishment who just couldn’t afford for people to know he was right all along. God knows what happens when a majority figure it out.
We cannot let the threat of mean words deter us from standing up for the truth. Auron MacIntyre once again sums it up well:
It’s not racist to believe that culture groups should have their own countries. It’s not racist to oppose a globalist movement that sees human beings as identical cogs in a GDP machine, to be swapped out for the convenience of an unaccountable bureaucracy. It’s not racist to want to preserve the nation our forefathers established. It’s not racist to want to bequeath our society to our children.
Nationalism and federalism go hand-in-hand because they both recognize that the best government is the one closest to the people. What’s happening in Ireland, in America, and throughout the remnants of old Christendom is a removal of government to a higher place, unaccountable to and unreachable by the people. Mass migration is just one tool in this globalist endeavor, and that is why we must stand up and say enough!