An American Anthem (Identity and Renewal)

By Wayne Allensworth

It’s approaching mid-November and in the morning sky the rising sun, bright as it climbs in a China blue firmament, has moved closer to the moon, a half orb at this stage, the half facing the sun bright and clear, reflecting morning’s light. The leaves are turning finally, after a second Indian summer and then the onset of fall temperatures.

I follow a stream and arch my neck to watch the morning lights, picturing in my mind’s eye the orbit of the moon around our earth, while we orbit the lifegiving sun. The thought itself is awesome, even overwhelming. 

The leaves are glittering, like the wings of small birds flapping in a light breeze, whispering some song maybe only the birds can hear. The Great Plains stretch north of us into Canada. Near where I live, the Chisholm Trail passed by. Cattlemen drove vast herds of Longhorns to railheads in Kansas. The Comancheria stretched from Colorado to the Mexican border. In East Texas, the dense piney woods marked where the Southern landscape began. And along the Gulf Coast, the muddy Gulf waters splashed in Galveston Bay for eons. The Llano Estacado, or Staked Plains, a vast mesa some thousands of feet in elevation, extends across the Texas Panhandle and into New Mexico. The Big Bend country of desert and mountains is south of that. The Rio Grande Valley of South Texas juts farther south along the Mexican border marked by the Rio Grande.

This is my land. This is my country in the truest, most proximate sense. The land, its harshness and stark beauty, shaped my people as much as we shaped it. I’ve always known who I was and never forgot where we came from. Settlers and frontiersmen. The men leathery and laconic, or gregarious tellers of tall tales, the women as enduring as the landscape, as devoted as could be, wise, long suffering — and loving. My country, my people. 

On the night that Zohran Mamdami won the New York City election, leftist podcaster Jennifer Welch reveled in the non-whiteness of it all, surveying a vast room of decidedly not white people and telling her giggling interlocutors that if white people had been there, the event would have been boring. A deracinated, soulless pod person, Welch is a fine representative of the post-American United States, and proudly, stupidly, and ignorantly stated that Americans — meaning “Americans” the way they were thought of before the 1965 Immigration Act — have no culture. The only real culture in America is “multiculturalism.” The nonsense begins at 4:10.

Welch is as shallow, arrogant, and perverse as pod people get, as plain and androgynous as they wish all women were, and is as good an example of the seething resentment and adolescent, demonic, rebellion that drives the hard left and fuels globalism as one can find. She can’t wait to eliminate us and is living proof that the worst enemies we have are childish white leftists LARPing as Bolshevik revolutionaries and 60’s “activists,” the generation of spoiled vipers whose ultimate aim was the destruction of their own civilization. 

What she believes is nothing short of genocidal. The deracination of which she is the product was also an aim, as Leviathan flattened out regional peculiarities and undercut the roots of identity in a vast project of modernizing standardization that required deculturalization. And the product of that is a core population so shorn of roots and unsure of itself that it can’t muster the will to defend itself as itself, not as an abstraction or idea. The difference between them and the pod people is that the pod people celebrate that destruction of their identity, seizing it as an opportunity. 

The pod people love the idea of destroying real identities so they can become gods and remake humanity. They are not only post-American, but post-human in a sense, for dehumanization, shearing off real attachments and true sentiment is what makes the tabula rasa with which they imagine they will mold us into a trans-human reality. Pod people are as shallow as can be, lacking substance. It’s as if one could poke a finger right through them, apparitions that they are. 

Welch and company don’t really give a damn about the non-whites they hail as co-liberators. They are merely a collective battering ram needed to further break down resistance to displacement and disinheritance of real Americans. Pod people can use them to posture and pose as virtuous rebel-liberators from “whiteness.” “Whiteness” is a proxy for the limitations and strictures necessary for civilized life, and the God they reject. Giving away their country to aliens is a suicidal act of vengeance, as the mentality of our most dedicated foes is that of the school shooter. 

I remember. I remember a culture that was already eroding but that was far “thicker” than the pod people want us to believe. In fact, that thicker culture of regional accents, local attachments, tighter families, obligations and duties, family histories, reverence and respect, is exactly what they hate.

But I remember it. I knew my great grandparents, as well as my grandparents. And in them, I knew the old America. It was a time machine view back into the 19th century. My paternal great-grandfather was a lawman in the days when he transported prisoners to Fort Sill in a wagon. His father was a Civil War veteran who lost a limb in combat. I knew their voices and their stories — stories of Comanche raids and dug outs on the frontier. I knew their virtues, their vast capacity for endurance, and generosity. An easy fatalism. No excuses. And I knew their vices. I saw how the old women’s faces became lined by hardship yet still glowed with maternal love. I ate their food and learned the cadence of their speech. I heard their Bible stories told and re-told. I knew their music, music rooted in Appalachia and the great panoply of American folk stories and musical styles, Gospel and Blues and Bluegrass that blended into Rockabilly, Rock n’ Roll, and Country and Western and Western Swing. Fiddles and steel guitars. Beer joints and wooden churches. 

I knew who I was and where I came from.

If we are going to defeat the pod people, we must start with ourselves. You want to get mad? They want you to disappear. They even say that we — a self-aware American Remnant—don’t exist. We have no culture. We are the oppressor in their victimology universe, one that should be gone.  But be careful what you get mad about. I couldn’t give a damn about what Jimmy Kimmel or Rosie O‘Donnell think about anything. And the Joe Biden jokes are wearing thin. The Middle East? Spare me. Our war is here. The pod people mean to eliminate us. But “we” have to feel a sense of cohesion and purpose and that means identity. The very worst thing we could do is wrap ourselves in a post-War Superpower identity of space shots, aircraft carriers, T-Shirt slogans, and neocon creedalism. If we want to be a nation, it cannot be a neocon/neoliberal universal proposition state, but a real nation, an ethnicity with its own stories, history, culture, speech, and all the attributes that make a national core. America as a nation can renew herself, but not by embracing an ideological identity. We have to look back at our rooted identities as Texans, Hoosiers, Buckeyes, and Volunteers. As Sooners and Cornhuskers. Natives of the Lone Star state, the Magnolia state, and the Hawkeye state. People with a past, with their own manner of speaking. We can draw on that to bolster our spirit and resolve to build something new in the ruins.  And that means disconnecting as much as is feasible from the mass culture sewage that is drowning us.

We have to unapologetically remember who we really are before we can truly defend ourselves and resist the dismal tide of the pod people. 

Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of  The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood. For thirty-two years, he worked as an analyst and Russia area expert in the US intelligence community.

Please consider supporting American Remnant: A green “Donate Today” button has been added at the end of each article (see below) appearing on the website. If you value what AR is doing, please consider supporting the website financially. $5, $10, or any amount that you can afford. Regular donations would especially be appreciated. Thank you!