My Egalitarian Refutation of a White Nationalist's Flat-Out Lying But Eloquent Screed
He describes real working class suffering eloquently, and then lies about its cause and how to end it.
I’m going to refute a very skillfully written white nationalist screed by a Constantin von Hoffmeister titled, “The Decline of White America” that is online here. I am doing this not because I believe any substantial number of my Substack readers agree with the racialist viewpoint of this screed, but because I would like to present to my readers the egalitarian way of refuting it, which my readers may not have heard before, and which is, I believe, the most persuasive way of winning over people who would otherwise think this screed (because it is indeed very skillfully, and in parts eloquently, written) is absolutely wonderful (and there are many such people, good and decent people too, as I have written about here.)
Additionally, it is important to win people over who would otherwise be influenced by this screed (and other screeds like it, such as one supposedly “scientific” no longer online that I refuted here) because although this screed does not explicitly advocate white supremacy (i.e., racist discrimination against, or attacks on, non-whites) the racialist framework it advances for understanding what’s happening in the United States to working class people is exactly the framework that explicitly white supremacist and racist organizations rely on to recruit members and justify actual racist violence.
So, here we go. The quoted italic text below (but not the un-italicized text) is from the screed. My approach is to identify some parts of reality that the screed cannot mention and that Hoffmeister, the author, requires his reader to be ignorant of in order for the screed to be at all persuasive.
The American lawyer and conservationist Madison Grant (1865–1937), in his book The Passing of the Great Race, provided a stark analysis of the perilous trends threatening the racial and cultural foundations of America. He emphasized that the strength of the nation was rooted in its “Nordic backbone,” the lineage and values of its original settlers.
What “racial and cultural foundations of America” rooted supposedly in it a “Nordic backbone,” Mr. Hoffmeister?
From the very beginning of the British (“Nordic backboned,” apparently) colonization of North America the actual work force, the people who actually were the “strength of the nation” who farmed the land and made the products and services in the towns and cities, were people from Africa as well as from Europe.
The “cultural foundations of America” did not exist. Instead there was a working class culture and a conflicting upper class culture. The people who shared the working class culture were people of African and European descent. This is the reality that Hoffmeister cannot mention and that he hopes his readers don’t know about.
In 1676-7 there was a rebellion of English and African descended bond laborers (indentured servants and slaves1) against the British large landowning ruling class of the Virginia Colony, known as Bacon's Rebellion. Few Americans have heard about this momentous event and how the upper class responded to. Why not? Because the ruling class in charge of our education today knows that if Americans knew about this event they would understand how racial discrimination is a weapon used by the rich against all working class people regardless of the color of their skin.
Nathaniel Bacon was a member of the Virginia Colony ruling elite who launched a rebellion for aims that did not involve liberating bonded laborers [1] from their bondage. Bacon, however, relied on bonded laborers for his armed uprising and in the course of it, in order to maintain the support of his followers, he was obliged to do the unthinkable: he "proclam'd liberty to all Servants and Negro's" [this and the following accounts are from T.W. Allen's The Invention of the White Race, volume 2, pp 213-14 (and other indicated pages for the quotations below; the book provides the primary source references)].
"The Royal Commissioners noted that "sundry servants and other persons of desperate fortunes in Virginia during the late rebellions deserted from their masters and ran into rebellion on the encouragement of liberty...It became clear, in the words of one Virginia account, 'the name of Authority had but little power to [w]ring the Sword out of these Mad fellows hands.' Authority failing, [Captain Thomas] Grantham [of the thirty gun Concord] 'resalved to acoste them with never to be performed promises" of pardon for the freemen [former indentured servants] and freedom for the bond-laborers, English and Negroes, such as had constituted the rebel army from the time of the burning of Jamestown [by the rebels]...Grantham described the historic encounter:
'I went to Colonel West's house about three miles further, which was their Cheife Garrison and Magazine; I there mett about foure hundred English and Negroes in Armes, who were much dissatisfied at the Surrender of the Point, saying I had betray'd them, and thereupon some were for shooting mee, and others were for cutting mee in peeces; I told them I would willingly surrender myselfe to them, till they were satisfied from his Majestie, and did ingage to the Negroes and Servants, that they were all pardoned and freed from their Slavery: and with faire promises and Rundletts of Brandy, I pacified them, giving them severall Noates under my hand, that what I did was by the Order of His Majestie and the Governor...Most of them I persuaded to goe to their Homes...except about Eighty Negroes and Twenty English which would not deliver Armes.'
"Grantham's testament has significance that is beyond exaggeration: in Virginia, 128 years before William Lloyd Garrison was born, laboring-class African-Americans and European-Americans fought side by side for the abolition of slavery. In so doing they provided the supreme proof that the white race [as a concept designed to achieve social control by the ruling class] did not then exist."
The solidarity between laboring-class African-Americans and European-Americans [1] fighting alongside each other against the upper class that exploited them both, demanding the abolition of bond labor, frightened the Virginia Colony ruling class extremely. It was precisely to prevent such solidarity--to destroy it!--and thereby secure their domination over all laboring people, that the ruling class did something drastic. They instituted overt racial discrimination in order to make working class people of European descent view those of African descent as less than fully human and thereby foment mistrust and resentment and even fear between the former and latter groups of working class people.
They broke with centuries of English common law to create an entirely novel system of social control based on creating something that had not previously existed--a "white race" defined as people of European descent who, no matter how poor, would, by newly enacted law, hold a higher social position than absolutely every person of African descent, no matter how wealthy. Heretofore individual people had been deprived of their liberty, as were indentured servants, and some people of African descent had been made indentured servants for life (which is one definition of slavery), but not yet had an entire race of people been dehumanized by being made thoroughly inferior under the law to people of European descent. For the British upper class, however, this was a case of desperate times requiring desperate measures.
Where O where, Mr. Hoffmeister, does this actual reality fit into your white nationalism framework with its rhetoric of a “Nordic backbone” defining the “racial and cultural foundations of America” and the “lineage and values of its original settlers”? It doesn’t fit! So you try to hide it.
Mr. Hoffmeister, you praise a Mr. Grant with these words:
In his view, the immigrant masses, although adopting surface-level aspects of American culture, failed to internalize its deeper values, thus threatening to dilute and ultimately replace the ideals installed by the nation’s Founding Fathers, whose goal was to establish a White Republic for “free White men.”
Do you have any idea how much the working class Americans came to hate the Founding Fathers when they discovered what were the actual values and aims of those men with Nordic backbones? Here’s a bit of real history that you work hard to keep secret from your readers, taken from my article “The U.S. ‘Founding Fathers’ Were Enemies of ‘We the People.’”
Shays's Rebellion
George Washington (read about his IMMENSE wealth, aside from his slaves, in footnote *; read about his slaves here) and the 'Founding Fathers' wanted to rule what became the United States instead of allowing King George III to rule it. In order to mobilize an army to fight King George's British military force and achieve "American independence" George Washington told the subsistence farmers, whom he needed to join his "Revolutionary Army," that the "War for Independence" was a war for equality and for things like "no taxation without representation" democracy. The subsistence farmers (who made up the vast majority of the population) were inspired by Washington's noble rhetoric and joined the Revolutionary Army in huge numbers.
These small farmers made a huge economic sacrifice when they joined the army because it meant not planting and harvesting the crops that they relied on to earn any money. General George Washington paid these farmer/soldiers with pieces of paper that promised that the United States government would "pay to the bearer" an indicated number of dollars, plus accrued interest, in the future when the new United States government was independent. Essentially these pieces of paper were IOUs, sometimes referred to as "securities."
After the Revolutionary War when independence had been won, the former soliders--now extremely poor and financially desperate small farmers--hoped that they would finally be paid for their "service to their country." But no! The Founding Fathers said the government had no money to pay the debt on those IOUs.
Guess what happened then? The small farmers realized that their IOUs were essentially worthless.
And guess what happened next? Rich people (many of the Founding Fathers like George Washington who was a big time slave and land owner and their upper class friends) said to the desperate farmers, "I'll buy your IOUs."
And guess how much the rich people offered to pay for those IOUs?
Practically nothing.
But "practically nothing" was more than nothing, so the desperate farmers sold their IOUs to the rich people and tried to make a life as a small farmer as best they could.
But you'll NEVER guess what happened next (if you've only been "educated" by the American ruling class's school system and mass media). What happened next is mind-boggling awful.
The rich people and their Founding Father buddies came up with a brilliant idea. (It was apparently Alexander Hamilton's idea, God bless him, although somehow the Broadway play, Hamilton, curiously neglected to include this deed among all the deeds for which it praises the man to such wonderful music!)
What was Hamilton's brilliant idea?
Like all brilliant ideas, it was simplicity itself. Here we go. Fasten your seat belt.
Have the state government of Massachusetts (at first; later they used the new national government) TAX the poor farmers to get the money to pay back the IOU debts to the "bearers" of those IOUs (who just happened, now, to be the rich buddies of the Founding Fathers.)
But wait! There's more! Have the government pay the bearers of the IOUs not only the amount of dollars specified on the IOU, but ALSO the accrued interest for the years since the end of the Revolutionary war until the present.
Guess how the poor farmers felt about this? "Furious!" would be an understatement.
In central Massachusetts the farmers refused to pay the tax, and when the Massachusetts state government tried to collect the tax, the farmers organized a military rebellion in 1786-7 against the state goverment that came very close to seizing the state's armory at Springfield and thereby overthrowing the government of the rich. This rebellion is named after one of the several leaders of it, a man named Shays: Shays's Rebellion.
The Shays's Rebellion consisted of small farmers and included the better-off small farmers in their ranks. Of note, the renowned poet, Emily Dickinson's great-grandfather was one of the leaders in the rebellion, joined by many other Dickinson family members at the time, and the Dickinson's--though only small farmers--were the leading family in Amherst, Massachusetts at the time.
While you're enjoying that Sam Adams beer you might want to pause between gulps to think about this. Sam Adams [with his Nordic backbone, no less, Mr. Hoffmeister!] called for the Shays's rebels to be hanged! Oh the Founding Fathers--gotta love em, uh?
George Washington helped mobilize a private army of rich people and mercenaries to attack the Shays's Rebellion farmers, and--due in large part to chance--it defeated the Rebellion. But history is written by the victors. The Founding Fathers and their descendants have declared that the Shays's Rebellion rebels were just a bunch of low-lifes who refused to "pay their debts." (Who says that G.W. Bush's WMD lie was the biggest lie ever told by rich Americans?)
George Washington, the "Father of our country," was the first president (after the Constitutional Convention) selected (oh come on now, hardly any poor people could vote then!) under the new Constitution. That Constitution was, to those who actually read it, obviously designed to make sure that ordinary people would never prevail against the very rich.
The Constitutional Convention consisted of men who were, and who in their correspondence admitted to being, terribly frightened by the fact that just a few months before the Convention the Shays's Rebellion damn near overthrew the rich in the state of Massachusetts, and the rebellion was sparked by a tax designed to make poor farmers suffer so that the richest Americans--like the guys at the Constitutional Convention--could get even richer. To cover up the thoroughly anti-democratic essence of the new Constitution one of the convention delegates had a great idea, "Let's give it a preamble saying, 'We the People, in order to' bla bla bla." And the rest is history.
Anybody who thinks that President Trump, with his use of federal armed thugs against BLM protesters2, is somehow acting fundamentally differently from the supposedly good George Washington is simply not informed about the historical truth. A very rich upper class has been running the United States, using whatever violence is necessary to suppress ordinary people, since the very beginning.
So please, let's not use phrases such as "Our democracy is at risk" that wrongly imply we ever had a genuine democracy, OK? We have always had a dictatorship of the rich. We need to remove the rich from power to have real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor.
The Whiskey Rebellion
After the rich Americans had their new strengthened national government and George Washington was its president, another tax--this time national--was levied against the poor farmers in states south of Massachusetts that included the Appalachian mountains. These poor farmers could only obtain money for their crops by distilling some of it into whiskey and selling the whiskey. The U.S. government, in order to pay back the interest on loans made to it by rich people, decided in its infinite wisdom (again, largely the wisdom of Mr. Alexander Hamilton) to get the money by taxing this whiskey.
This led to the Whiskey Rebellion, which forced George Washington to suppress it with another private army of rich people and mercenaries that he organized--an army of "12,950 militiamen...an army approximating in size the Continental force that followed him during the Revolution" against King George III! Washington just happened to own ten thousand acres of prime land in these western regions, in addition to the land back east where he owned slaves. But never mind--poor farmers, not the likes of George Washington, would have to pay the rich the interest on their loans to a government of, by and for the rich.
The Whiskey Rebellion broke out in 1794 in western Pennsylvania. It was a rebellion of the poorest people against a federal tax that was destroying their ability to live, a tax that aimed to further enrich the richest Americans.
"At one point 7,000 western Pennsylvanians advanced against the town of Pittsburgh, threatened its [rich] residents, feigned an attack on Fort Pitt and the federal arsenal there, banished seven members of the community, and destroyed the property of several others. Violence spread to western Maryland, where a Hagerstown crowd joined in, raised liberty poles, and began a march on the arsenal at Frederick. At about the same time, sympathetic 'friends of liberty' arose in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and back-country regions of Virginia and Kentucky. Reports reached the federal government in Philadelphia that the western country was ablaze and that rebels were negotiating with representatives of Great Britain and Spain, two of the nation's most formidable European competitors, for aid in a frontier-wide separatist movement."
In response, what did President George Washington do?
"President Washington nationalized 12,950 militiamen from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia--an army approximating in size the Continental force that followed him during the Revolution--and personally led the 'Watermelon Army' west to shatter the insurgency." [Quotations are from the book about the Whiskey Rebellion cited above.]
The Whiskey Rebellion rebels understood perfectly that the rhetoric about equality and no taxation without representation was just rhetoric, and that the new rulers of the "independent" American government did not intend to honor that rhetoric at all.
This is the real history of We the People. Read these books and you'll learn how the United States has been a dictatorship of the rich right from the beginning. When people ask, "When did we lose our democracy?," the answer is that we never really had it.
John Adams?
John Adams was on the side of the rich upper class and was an enemy of ordinary people--the have-nots. You can see that this is so by looking at these two website articles about him:
1. Regarding his opposition to Shays's Rebellion (he spelled it "Chaises") and to the Whiskey Rebellion (both of which rebellions were by the have-nots against the haves): "John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, 30 June 1813" at https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-06-02-0216 .
2. Regarding his opposition to allowing non-wealthy people to vote: "John Adams Explains Why People Without Property Should Not Be Able to Vote" at https://shec.ashp.cuny.edu/items/show/1645 .
Please, Mr. Hoffmeister, can you really keep uttering words such as your “the ideals installed by the nation’s Founding Fathers, whose goal was to establish a White Republic for ‘free White men’” with a straight face? Do you think the actual reality could ever in a million years fit in your white nationalism framework unless you deny reality?
Mr. Hoffmeister, you write,
The great warning signs are all there: porous borders, fragmented cities, and a politics of division that celebrates “diversity” (the fake kind) while dismantling unity (based on homogeneity).
You make it obvious that by “homogeneity” you mean racial homogeneity, in other words unity by being all white people exclusively. You try to make it seem as if the important thing about a person is their race, not their values and aims. But the reality contradicts your racial mode of thinking. The important thing about a person—as actual history demonstrates over and over—is whether or not they are for real equality and democracy or for having some rich and some poor with the rich dominating and oppressing the others to stay rich and powerful and privileged. And there are white people with “Nordic backbones” in BOTH categories!
Did you know, Mr. Hoffmeister, as I show in great detail in my article, “Most Southern Whites Hated the Confederacy” (which I challenge you to read) that the fact that the Confederacy was led all by white people meant diddly squat to the great majority of white Southerners living under and hating that Confederacy? Despite the fact that the Confederacy was based on slavery of blacks and on white pride rhetoric for whites, the whites still hated it and they refused to serve in the Confederate army or they deserted from it when they could and even signed up to serve in the Union army, in such large numbers that it caused the Confederacy to lose the war. How would you explain this huge historical fact to your readers? How would you force this bit of reality into your white nationalism, racialist, framework? You can’t!
But Oh, Mr. Hoffmeister, I’ve got to hand it to you for your masterful attempt to portray the very real suffering of the United States white working class as suffering unique to white members of the working class and as caused by non-white working class people.
You point your accusing finger in particular at the illegal immigrants, as if they were nasty people who come to the United States just to destroy our “racial and cultural foundations of America.” You never mention two key facts about these people, which I prove in my “Illegal Immigration to the U.S.: Myth vs. Reality.” #1) They have been forced to illegally immigrate to the United States because for decades the modern-day descendants of our Founding Fathers—the rich—have been doing things south of the border and in Haiti that were designed to make life so onerous and unsafe for poor people that they had to flee north to the United States just in order to survive. #2) These illegal immigrants want to stop the rich from forcing people to illegally immigrate to the United States more than anybody else does. Most of them have the same positive values and aims as the great majority of white working class (and non-white working class) American citizens. You should be demanding the deportation of the billionaires (as I do here), Mr. Hoffmeister, if you really gave a damn about the welfare of ordinary white people.
Yes, Mr. Hoffmeister, you do a fantastic—even eloquent!—job of identifying and describing the ways that American working class citizens are suffering. But with your skillful omissions of actual reality facts and your misleading racial rhetoric, and your claim that the way to end the suffering is for whites to make America racially homogeneous instead of joining with all races of suffering people to remove the rich from power, you are nothing but a flat out liar who is helping the rich stay in power and continue to make working class people suffer. Shame on you!
Read here how YOU can help build the egalitarian revolutionary movement to remove the rich from power.
Read here about bond labor versus slave labor at this time; the distinction had not yet become as sharp as it did later.
Note that many and probably most of the BLM protesters in the streets were themselves aware that the officials in charge of an organization named “BLM” were corrupt and said things they (the protesters) thoroughly disagreed with. The mass media used the corrupt “BLM” organization officials to try to discredit the huge number of good people who were angry at the police killings of many black people, not just George Floyd but, for example, 12 year old Tamir Rice and Eric Garner (for the crime of selling cigarettes). Yes, the self-described “leaders” of an organization they named “BLM” were corrupt, but so what? The leaders of many trade unions are corrupt, but that doesn’t mean when workers go on strike against real grievances they should be dismissed as just a bunch of corrupt people, does it? The ruling class-controlled mass media also censored the police killings of working class white people in order to make it seem that if you were white then you had no reason to oppose the police. Dr. Nayvin Gordon discusses this further here. This slanted media coverage and censoring is why so many good people knew only about the police killings of blacks but not of whites and thus organized around the slogan of “Black lives matter.” Blame the imperfect slogan on the ruling class, not the people demonstrating against police killings. Read here why there are so many police killings in the United States compared to, say, Europe.
I posted the following as a Substack message to Mr. Hoffmeister's Substack profile page:
Dear Mr. von Hoffmister, I invite to to comment on my Substack article ( at https://open.substack.com/pub/johnspritzler/p/my-egalitarian-refutation-of-a-white?r=1iggn&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
) that I wrote in response to your "The Decline of White America.” My readers and I would like very much to know what you might say.
John Spritzler
Very important. Thank you. You addressed Mr. Hoffmeister several times in the post, but i didn't quite understand if you actually sent this to him? I think it would be very important to send this to him or comment on his post with at least a link to this post, or better yet, to invite him to publicly discuss his agreement or disagreement with your response
I think it is very important to engage directly with the people who believe in and are influenced by his ideas. They are not going to see this post here, but i think they are much more likely to see it if you comment on his post (or his newer posts).