The Barnes Review was represented at the meeting of the Traditionalist Workers Party in Philadelphia, PA on April 30 2016. Matthew Raphael Johnson, TBR’s Senior Researcher in Russian and European History was the featured speaker again, following several other talented party activists, including Matthew Heimbach himself. He had also been the featured speaker at the party’s Harrisburg meeting several months ago.
The theme of the meeting was that the “extreme” options in politics are now perfectly normal and appealing to the American mainstream. There was a time where “extreme” was seen as a threat, now it is seen as absolutely necessary. Donald Trump was, needless to say, the main focal point of this. Watching illegal immigrants attack native-born Americans and police who dare to question their mass invasion of America is too much even for middle class Americans.
Unstoppable economic decline and the total bottoming out of public morality have finally shown the mainstream to be a fraud. Moving “to the center” in politics used to be a way to get elected. Now, its a way to irrelevance. TBR is at the intellectual forefront of this movement and has been for decades.
Dr. Johnson’s remarks were off the cuff, though he prepared a normal academic paper. “I saw that the focus was on day to day policymaking and building” he said afterwards. “Speaking like an academic was not the best way to go, so I threw out the script and spoke from experience. These guys are solid idealists, but they want to get into the nuts and bolts of changing what’s left of America.”
His speech was interrupted by several rounds of applause. The loudest was for this statement: “Paul Angel, Chris Petherick and myself are now in the process of reorganizing the intellectual infrastructure created by Willis Carto. We’ve known each other for a long time and trust one another. We’ve worked fpor Willis Carto for many years but also know what needs to be done to bring this into the future. We will maintain the legacy of Willis and Michael Collins Piper no matter what. Cooperating with such groups as the TWP and Keystone United is just one part of this.”
The focus of Johnson’s presentation was on connecting the immense popularity of Vladimir Putin in Russia, that of Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus and the newly formed states in Eastern Ukraine, that Johnson called “national socialist” with the rise of Trump and nationalist politics in America. “Its all one idea: that of nationalism and unity as absolutely necessary for any civic engagement at all.” Near the end of his talk he said,
“To be relevant, nationalism must be global. It is inherently so – imperialism seeks to reduce nations to a single standard. Nationalism is its opposite. It is not relativism, but it remains at the forefront of anti-imperialist thought. International nationalism not only makes sense, but is inherent to the idea of the nation in the first place.”