Matt Parrott’s Hoosier Nation

1,787 words

[1]In the last few months, I have been working in earnest preparing to write The White Nationalist Manifesto. (Don’t expect it too soon, though. It is a project I have been thinking about and writing notes for since June of 2009.) Recently, I have been reading other manifestos and manifesto-like works: The Communist Manifesto, the Futurist manifestos, Francis Parkey Yockey’s The Proclamation of London, George Lincoln Rockwell’s White Power, and the like. None of them, however, struck me as ideal models. Then Matt Parrot’s Hoosier Nation showed up in the Counter-Currents mailbox, and I found my best model yet.

Matt Parrott is a 27 year old IT analyst who lives near Indianapolis. He is the founder of Hoosier Nation [2], a political activist group for which Hoosier Nation is a guidebook and manifesto. He is also a prolific writer [3] and the host of Radio Free Indiana [4] on the Voice of Reason Broadcast Network [5].

Hoosier Nation is a short book (88 pages), so it can easily be read in one sitting. It is well-written and witty, divided into short chapters that are often not much longer than a good opinion piece. Parrott’s ideas are quite radical, but his presentation is genial not strident, authoritative not apologetic, which is pretty much the ideal tone.

The goal of Hoosier Nation is to shape the ethnic consciousness of Indiana and the Midwest’s “Hoosiers” into a genuine national consciousness–a regional variant of European racial consciousness. Parrott believes that the United States is the primary threat to the racial and cultural survival of the American people(s)–the different European groups that settled this continent. Fortunately, the United States is also unsustainable and headed for an economic and political crackup. Parrott’s hope is that when that crackup comes, different states and regional identities will assert themselves. He is talking about the idea of a Hoosier nation today in the hope that it might become a reality tomorrow.

Who are the Hoosiers? As Parrott explains, Hoosiers are primarily Scots-Irish “hillbillies.” “Hoosier” derives from the Old English “hoo” for hill or highland, so it literally means hillbilly or highlander. The Scots-Irish are the restless, clannish, and fierce frontiersmen who were the shock troops of the conquest of this continent. Among Parrott’s Hoosier heroes are Johnny Appleseed, Daniel Boone, and Davy Crockett.

In today’s America, Hoosiers are disdained as rednecks and trailer trash and lumped with Nazis and Muslims because all three groups are uniquely resistant to the Judeo-liberal plutocracy that rules America. Hoosiers are a subset of the people disdained by Barack Obama for clinging to religion and guns. They are among the people discussed by Jim Goad in his hilarious and profound The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks, and White Trash Became America’s Scapegoats [6] and by Jim Webb in his Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America [7]. (I hereby invite Matt to review both of these titles for Counter-Currents/North American New Right).

Matt Parrott is a genuine trailer-park bred and public school educated Hoosier. And a damn smart one, who could easily have turned his back on his heritage to better fit in with “the system.” But he didn’t. Instead, he has done justice to both the roots that particularize him and the intellect that opens him to the universal. He has turned that intellect back toward understanding and preserving his heritage from the corruptions and assaults of modernity. He is an example of how elitism and populism can be reconciled within an organic, folkish notion of society. The following passage gives a good sense of the tone and quality of his writing:

While the Hoosier may be less well-mannered than the Southern gentleman, he’s also less restrained by protocol and less tolerant of taking orders. While the Hoosier may be less patient with abstract theories and ideals than the Yankee, he’s also less vulnerable to being brainwashed. The English and Germanic Americans may have been the primary drivers of American economic and cultural achievement, but they wouldn’t have had a continent upon which to settle were it not for our heroic and uncompromising conquest of the frontier.

This is not to say that we Hoosiers don’t have culture, it’s just more primal in nature. While the civilized citizens of the coasts and cities conducted masterful symphonies, our forefathers crafted crude dulcimers and banjos from the wilderness around them and created powerful folk music. While the citizens perused their classics, our ancestors studied our bibles. While the citizens held elaborate and fanciful banquets, our ancestors got together on random occasions to party, play their backwoods instruments, sing their backwoods songs, and drink their backwoods moonshine.

The conditions we live in would be unacceptable to your typical New Yorker, our table manners would frighten your typical Georgian, and our parties wouldn’t be tolerated in Western saloons. But for all of its faults, our heritage may be unique in America because it’s the least vulnerable to the challenges we face. Unlike Southerners, we won’t follow our leaders to oblivion out of deference to class and protocol. Unlike Yankees, we can’t be duped by ideologues with their byzantine logic games into handing over the country our ancestors fought to win. It’s very possible that we, and we alone, hold the power to rescue the American nation from the brink of destruction.

But to accomplish this, we have to lead the way, setting an example for other Americans to emulate in embracing their own heritage. We have to stop and reflect on our Hoosier identities, celebrating what we retain of our heritage and reviving what we’ve lost. If you pronounce “wash” as “worsh,” continue to do so. Embrace your Hoosier twang and resist the popular culture which equates our accent with inferiority. If you live in a mobile home and drive an old truck, save that money you were going to spend to buy “respectable” things and start respecting yourself for a change.

When Matt talks, you can still hear that Hoosier twang, even when he is quoting Spengler at you.

The goal of Hoosier Nation is less to show the way to Hoosier independence than to work up the will. That said, the book contains some useful advice for would-be political activists. Parrott rejects facile dichotomies between “vanguardism” and populism. His inspirations and aspirations are populist, but he recognizes that peoples do not lead themselves; they are led by minorities: either by alien minorities that exploit them or by native minorities that protect them and that ideally are as organically connected with the masses as brains are to hands and feet.

White Nationalism is a folkish or populist world-view in that the common good is the supreme law. Yet we are elitists insofar as we recognize that the common man left to his own devices seldom arrives at the common good. Therefore, the great political problem is how to insure that the elites that inevitably rule, do so in the interests of the whole rather than in their own partial interests.

Matt’s conclusion is worth quoting for the beautiful way he fuses vanguardism and populism:

To be the vanguards of [the] revolution, we must do more than merely awaken, we must prepare. We must awaken others. We must offer a clear path back to safe harbor. But we must also be discrete, shrewd, and patient in our work until the time is ripe. We will need to be like Johnny Appleseed, humble and persistent as we plant the seeds of Hoosier sovereignty.  We will need to be like Daniel Boone, prepared to survive in the wilderness. We will need to be like Davy Crockett, prepared to fight to the death for our liberty and our heritage.

We will need to become true Hoosiers again.

I recommend Hoosier Nation because it is an excellent piece of political prose, and because it contains many valuable lessons that can be applied by political activists of all persuasions in all locations.

But Hoosier nationalism is not for everyone. Of course not, or it would be a universal ideology rather than an expression of a particular people! Genuine nationalism presupposes pluralism. Different strokes for different folks.

Hoosier nationalism is, for instance, pretty different from West Coast White Nationalism [8]. For one thing, Hoosier Nation was written when Matt Parrott’s local Hoosier Nation group was affiliated with the Council of Conservative Citizens. They have since gone off on their own, but I imagine they still subscribe to the CofCC principles stated in the Conclusion. The first of these principles is “We believe the United States is a Christian country.” That comes before the principle, “We believe the United States is a European country and that Americans are part of the European people.”

Giving the preservation of Christianity priority over, or even parity with, fighting for white racial survival is a deal-breaker for me. There is nothing essentially white about Christianity; it is a universalistic creed; indeed the majority of Christians today are non-white.

Christianity is probably just a phase our race is going through, like geocentrism or Mithraism or wearing powdered wigs. There was a time when white people were not Christians, and there will probably come a day when Christianity is as dead as Mithraism.

I am happy to work with Christians who sincerely want to preserve our race, but I will rebuff any attempt to sneak in the idea that we are fighting for Christendom, which is a very different thing. (See my “The Christian Question in White Nationalism [9]” and William Pierce’s “On Christianity [10].”)

In the end, however, perhaps Parrott’s pluralism shows us the way. There is not “one true way [11]” of fighting for our cause. United, we can’t stand each other. But we are all about pluralism anyway, so whenever we disagree, we need to divide our camp. Let’s have Christian White Nationalism, pagan White Nationalism, and secular White Nationalism.

In the end, that is the path to real hegemony. Jews rule us because they divided their camp and colonized the whole political spectrum. When all candidates are Zionists, it does not matter which one we choose.

The path to power does not begin with White Nationalists squabbling among ourselves on the internet until we are all on the same page. Do we then plan to squabble with 200 million more whites to somehow get them on the same page too?

We will win when there is a version of White Nationalism for every religion, region, subculture, and shade on the political spectrum–when White Nationalism has colonized every “discursive space”–when white racial consciousness becomes the new common sense–so that no matter what options people choose, our race can never lose.

You can buy Hoosier Nation, or just read it online, here [12]. I have also reprinted the chapter on “Hoosier Sovereignty [13]” below.