From Gen Z Democrat to Nationalist: My Journey of Disillusionment

Director’s Note: We were genuinely touched to receive Gen Z-Gal’s story, and it reflects our own in many ways. The way she describes discovering FAIR and Samuel P. Huntington reminds me of myself ten years ago discovering Ann Coulter’s Adios America and Peter Brimelow’s Alien Nation. She articulately describes a shift in the Democrat party that left many young people in a lurch. There are so many readers out there who will also relate to her story. Welcome to White Papers!

By: Gen Z-Gal

As my headline suggests, I have been an out and proud Democrat for the majority of my 21 years. My family has never been overtly political, and we are suburban professionals from the West Coast (I am in college for my BA in Communications) who have always voted blue (as I imagine farmers in Kansas vote red out of habit). My voting habits weren’t entirely tribal.

I remain deeply concerned about climate change. I think that fundamental legal equality is the greatest pursuit of our time. I value stability (AKA the “rule of law”). And I continue to hate the idea of judging people based on things they cannot change. I used to think that I was a Democrat because of these motivations, but today I find myself in a political place I never expected to be: Nationalism.

I also feel like I am part of a mass movement of people away from the Democrats. In Wikipedia’s “List of party switchers in the United States,” I read that only 28 elected Republicans have left their party since 2020—just eight moved to the Democrats. On the flip side more than 30 elected Democrats have left their party and become Republicans since 2020 while a grand total of 51 elected Democrats have abandoned my former party since 2020.

On the flip side, I am one of the minority of college-educated White girls who voted for Donald Trump (41%). I’ve been called a traitor to Democracy by my own college educated White mother and a “pick-me” by most of my friends.

The Landscape Shifted Under My Feet

The shift—my shift—didn’t happen overnight. I remember learning how the Democrats did so much for the working families of America, were not low-key inept at economics, didn’t try to take children away from their parents, and advocated for policies that helped all citizens, regardless of their background.

The Democrats have never been perfect, but their history with transformational programs such as Social Security and Medicare used to serve as a serious foundation for me to believe that the party was still capable of seriously improving life in the US.

In recent years as I began to pay attention to the political content online I began to notice not subtle but violently significant differences in my image of the Democrats and the reality of the Democrats. The first real slap to my face had nothing to do with my daily life. I read on Instagram that the Democrats’ American Rescue Plan was going to give Black and Indigenous Farmers of Color $4 billion in debt relief.

My first thought was that this must have been to correct for some kind of over-payment to farmers of other races since the Democrats claimed they received $50 billion to offset shocks from COVID and the trade war. Imagine the dumbfounded look on my face when I found out 91% of farmers in America are White—I had always assumed farmer demographics reflected American demographics to a greater or lesser degree. It is also true that at the time I had not the faintest idea what the demographics of America looked like. I also learned that farmers have really high levels of debt and that most of them have a spouse working outside the home in order to make ends meet.

Anyway, I was left in shock. Black farmers were receiving debt relief entirely based upon the color of their skin and for no other reason. A load of boujee Democrats who have never worked on a farm a day in their life were bailing out POC farmers to the detriment of all the White ones. Before this moment, I had never once questioned the necessity of affirmative action or race being a consideration for college admissions. I supported Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the workplace or in schools. I no longer support any of these things.

The final straw was also delivered by the Democrats when Kamala Harris said that disaster relief efforts would be delivered based on fundamental racial characteristics—what she called “giving resources based on equity.” It really hits differently when you have to look into your soul and realize that you cannot think of yourself as good or kind if you support racial prioritization for disaster relief.

There were other things. I convinced myself through mental repetition and the help of Instagram that trans women were women and that the Republicans were evil for attempting to keep people from becoming their true selves. My illusions about the transgender movement went away when I learned that two-thirds of transgender inmates are in prison for sex offenses. I now view men in women’s clothes for what they are: predators, and young boys and girls pretending to be the other sex as victims of a social craze.

And Then There was Immigration

And then there was the issue of immigration. As true basic liberal in a home of other basic liberals I grew up being taught that the United States is a “nation of immigrants” which welcomes everyone. I took this to heart, and for my entire life had passionately believed that anyone could become an American. This view began to change with the illegal immigration crisis. Thanks to the help of Google’s AI, I was led to the Federation for American Immigration Reform website where I found out that the Republicans were not just crazy racists ranting about a few people coming across our border. Instead, about five million people had been allowed into the country and released without a proper background check.

This led me to reading posts about the massive number of illegal alien criminals being released into the country. These facts and the murder of Laken Riley were enough to change my view about the wisdom of being a nation of immigrants.

While I had not considered myself a Democrat for a few months by this point, it was this fact about illegal immigration that ended my era as a liberal.

Nationalism

When my liberal era ended I began to watch a lot of YouTube videos about politics and political ideology. The algorithm for YT seemed to try and push libertarian and non-woke liberal content in my direction but I didn’t find any of it intellectually satisfying. It appeared that these ideas weren’t something different but were an attempt to rearrange the left wing red flags in a more appealing pattern. I began exploring alternative political ideologies. It was my TikTok searches that eventually introduced me to nationalism. Actually the first nationalist I came across was a video edit of Ireland’s Keith Woods and from there these ideas snatched my attention.

I was definitely uncomfortable at first. When I Googled the terms or the statistics I was seeing I often got back results about “far right” or “ultranationalist” ideas and even the occasional warning about supposed white supremacy. This and some of the more intense misogyny slowed my interest in nationalism. I certainly didn’t and don’t want anyone to be mistreated for their skin color or for being gay. It makes me incredibly uncomfortable to hear the word “hate” despite the fact I would have regularly used it to describe my feelings toward Republicans just two years ago. I had not seen anything overtly hateful in the words of Keith Woods, The Lotus Eaters, or nationalist parties like AfD, yet was constantly told they were hateful.

This anxiety clung to me for months until I watched an interview with a few nationalist women one of whom mentioned Samuel P. Huntington’s book Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity and recommended that anyone listening who was unsure about nationalist politics to read this work by a Harvard professor and international relations scholar.

After reading Huntington’s book twice through, I felt much more confident that nationalism could be a positive force for change rather than a destructive force. So here I am!

From the foundation of Samuel P. Huntington’s work, I came across White Papers and other publications that did not traffic in hate or animosity, but attempted to put forward the positive vision I desire.

I still reject the idea of hating anyone for their appearance or fundamental characteristics. I still think that equality before the law is one of the most significant developments in our recent history, and I still believe that people have a great deal more in common than not. It was White Papers that convinced me that nationalist policies can consider both the dignity of individual people and the needs of the nations to exist free of destructive influences like mass immigration.

I now believe that without robust borders nations will dissolve, leaving a people homeless and without political power. I believe that seeking to deliberately demographically replace people is morally unacceptable, and I do not believe that all cultures are equal. Not everyone can be an American. And if America is to survive, the Anglo-Protestant and other European settlers who created this country have to remain the dominant group—so dominant that people of other races and ethnicities will feel they must, to quote Samuel Huntington “participate in American life, learn America’s language history, and customs, absorb America’s Anglo-Protestant culture, and identify primarily with America rather than with their country of birth.”

We are a long way from this type of integration being normal. I believe that a partial repatriation of illegal aliens, their children, people who committed fraud, and dual-citizen criminals is absolutely necessary to start rebuilding a country already fracturing along the lines predicted in Who Are We?.

Two years ago I was a Democrat filled with rage at every invented injustice against groups that I was never a part of. Today I want nothing more than to protect my country.

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