The Greatest Time to Be Alive

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Adapted from remarks given at the 20th American Renaissance conference, August 12, 2023.

Good evening, everyone. Thank you for having me.

I’d like to begin by expressing my gratitude to those who made this conference possible. The accomplishments of Jared Taylor, in collaboration with many of you, hold significant importance, as they pave the way for a lasting impact, even after our generations have passed the fire to the next.

For the free publicity that they provide for my speech here today, I’d also like to thank the journalists who have written slanderous articles about my presence here and will continue to do so in the coming weeks.

Indeed, I’m not just addressing the fine people here in this conference today. Thanks to the historical time in which we live — during which we can make use of the internet and social media — my words today will resonate with thousands, possibly even millions of young Europeans all over the world.

This unparalleled window of opportunity, made possible by swift technological advancements, caught the establishment off guard. The liberty to access information and communicate with millions in an almost unfettered way, such as we have experienced in the past 15 years, has been an historic anomaly. It has afforded an opportunity that many activists like myself have grasped with both hands and an opportunity I will gladly make use of today.

Yet, regrettably, my friends, the powers that be are now catching up, and this window of opportunity will soon close, so we better make good use of it now that we still can.

Thus, I’d like to direct this speech to the many young European nationalists who will see it or read the text.

Today I’d like to share with you why I, as a young European nationalist, firmly believe this is the greatest time to be alive. Many of you will not agree, at first, because it may increasingly feel like we’re living in hell, in some kind of clown world. And I get why people feel that way.

• Every cornerstone of a healthy society is being deconstructed. Men are no longer men, women are no longer women, and all the mental illnesses in between are applauded
• Our environment is being polluted on a massive scale
• Celebrities, politicians, and bankers who go to a private island to molest children are given free rein while nationalist activists are getting locked up without a trial for going to a protest
• Our people are being poisoned with processed foods, pornography, drugs, and Hollywood wokeness
• Our cities, once the center of civilization, are now multicultural hellholes

Given these realities, one might argue that this is anything but a great time to be alive. Yet the circumstances present us with what we as Europeans need — an enormous challenge. They give us purpose, and that is why this is the greatest time to be alive.

We men of the West were not made just to sit back and “enjoy life.” We weren’t made to chase happiness. Those who chase happiness will end up unhappy. Instant gratification makes you depressed.

Those who chase meaning and purpose instead of happiness, on the other hand, will live fulfilling and meaningful lives and end up being the happy ones.

It’s because we Europeans weren’t made to live an easy life. We are the outcome of hardship and adversity. It’s our nature to fight, to struggle, to suffer, to honor our ancestors, and to achieve great and glorious things.

And I’ve got good news for everyone today, because there’s never been a better time to achieve those things than now. I’ll give you a few examples.

When I saw how weak our youth have become, how they get beat up at school by non-whites, and how they’re being dominated even in places where they’re not yet a minority, I didn’t start whining. I didn’t start dreaming of the better days when our youth were strong enough to get on a ship and conquer the world or when our youth were brave enough to jump out of the trenches and face certain death out of love for their fatherland.

No, I didn’t do that. I didn’t whine or complain. I took action. I established boxing clubs, where our youth can take free boxing classes and work out, and I make sure that the many elders — some call them boomers — who complain about the weakness of our youth are donating so that we can keep providing those free classes.

When I saw how the mainstream media, Hollywood, and even the educational system indoctrinate our youth on a daily basis, I didn’t complain about how they’re too powerful and too big. I took action, and I launched my own media channel, because I know that in this period of time even a small media channel can win when it has the truth on its side.

When I saw how our youth have no purpose in life and how they’re being brainwashed into individualism and nihilism, I didn’t start complaining about their passiveness and apathy. I took action and created Schild & Vrienden, which is now Belgium’s most influential political youth movement and the Belgian establishment’s worst nightmare. We organize activities and campaigns that reach millions, we help our fellow Flemish people who are less fortunate, and two weeks from now we’ll have our yearly summer university where we train the leading activists of tomorrow.

When I saw how our party and political system and our parliament were being corrupted by power and were completely neglecting the will of our people, I didn’t evade my responsibility by becoming a defeatist or an escapist. No, I took part in the elections and became the youngest member of the Belgian parliament.

My speaking the truth and my nationalistic idealism, which made me immune to the corrupting effects of the political system, made the establishment and the media so scared that they were screaming as if my arrival in parliament were the end of the world.

By giving you these examples of what I achieved at my young age by taking action instead of complaining, I don’t mean to brag. What I want to do is precisely the opposite of bragging. I want to show you how much can be done if we put our minds to it. What I did isn’t rocket science. If I can do it, so can you.

We all have different talents, of course, but I don’t possess some unique talent that nobody else has. I don’t have access to means that other people don’t. I don’t have rich parents; I wasn’t born into a politically connected family.

I’m telling you this because a lot of people are making excuses for their cowardice and passiveness by telling themselves that they don’t have what it takes. They’re lying to themselves that it’s other people who have to do the dirty work — people who possess something they don’t, or people who don’t have the so-called “responsibilities” that they have. But that is a lie.

What it takes to be a successful activist for our people isn’t the highest IQ, the best oratory capabilities, a lot of money, or being in a position that you have nothing to lose. What it takes is a choice. Not everyone has the same talents or the same means, but we all have a choice.

Every day we are faced with many choices. You can choose to act out of laziness and cowardice, or you can choose to act in the interest of your people. You can choose to donate your money to the international financial elite, to Blackrock and Vanguard, by consuming all day, or you can choose to donate some money to nationalist activists so they can do what must be done.

You can choose to watch porn and become a filthy degenerate, or you can choose to find a suitable wife and become a family man, to become a literal, physical part of our future.

You can choose to waste your sexual energy on daily masturbation and on meaningless dating app sex, or you can use that energy to fuel your daily striving toward greatness.

You can choose to be weak and pathetic, or you can start working out and become the best version of yourself. Mens sana in corpore sano —a healthy mind in a healthy body: the Greeks knew it, the Romans knew it, but we seem to have forgotten.

That is nowhere as clear as in America, where the physical degeneration has gone hand in hand with moral and mental degeneration. But you can choose to stop that, today!

Choose to be an example in your community. Choose to make a difference, however small or big it may be.

You can choose to support mega-factories owned by nameless and rootless international capital, or you can choose to support local, regenerative farmers so they can provide for their families.

You can choose to numb your mind with videogames and television, or you can broaden it by going out into nature and collecting life experiences.

You can choose to keep your head low and never speak up because you’re afraid to lose some friends, or you can start to speak up and thereby gain the confidence and persuasiveness that are needed to become a leader.

You can choose easy, socially acceptable lies, or you can speak the hard truth and thereby take the first step toward positive change.

You can choose instant gratification and end up as a hollow depressed shell, or you can devote your life to the struggle for our people and become the hero your ancestors want you to be.

You have a choice.

Work out. Pay cash. Start a family. Get into nature. Join a nationalist movement. Stop watching porn. Start speaking up. Start speaking the truth.

You have a choice.

You don’t have to be the one leading the resistance on the barricades to be a good activist for your people. You don’t have to devote your whole life to it — as Jared Taylor, Martin Sellner, Nicholas Fuentes, and I have — to make a difference. If you make the right choices, you will make a difference.

We need all sorts of people with all kinds of talents and means for our struggle to be successful. A few summers ago, I had a good conversation with Viktor Orbán, whom I regard as an example of a good and successful nationalist, and he gave me some great advice. He said, “Dries, the first step towards making a change is believing that this change is possible. And the most important thing to achieve that change in politics is that you need to have a good squad, you need to have a good team. A group of people that you can trust.”

Prime Minister Orbán is right, of course. Things will change for the better, and we will bring about that change with your help. Every European man and woman listening to or reading this speech can and must join their local squad — their local team of nationalists — and offer whatever talents or means they have to make a change.

If you make those necessary choices, you will become what our enemies fear: strong, uncontrollable, and loyal. If you make the right choices, you will do what they don’t expect.

Our enemies thought that if they burdened us with a new original sin, with the anti-white lies that our European identity is made up of slavery, colonialism, and the Holocaust, that we would bow our heads and abandon our pride in our identity and heritage.

They thought that if they numbed our spirits with pornography, sports, drugs, and other addictive methods of instant gratification, we would forever abandon our Faustian urge to explore, to overcome, and to risk our lives in ventures that can bring us no material benefit.

They thought that if they censored and punished anyone who speaks out, we would stop asking questions.

But they were wrong. Something happened they didn’t expect.

It wasn’t the degeneracy of the West; they expected that. They expected our youth to become weak, fat, and depressed. They expected the family unit to be replaced by the state. They expected the immense surge in antidepressants and suicides. They expected our women to be raped en masse in Europe. They expected over a hundred thousand to die of overdoses in America each year. They expected the slow decline and eventual death of our people.

But they didn’t expect that we would resist. They didn’t expect that we would not go gently into that good night. They didn’t expect that deep inside our European hearts, below all that 21st- century cowardice, a tiny, yet inextinguishable flame still burned — a flame that we are now nurturing until the bonfires of resistance light the whole Western world!

That resistance is against a great evil. Don’t be fooled by the postmodern lie that all is relative and that there is no such thing as good and evil. There is evil in this world. The battle in which we find ourselves today, the struggle for survival of our people, is not just some kind of disagreement. It is not a mere difference of opinion. Nor is it not a different view of how to build society. No, our adversaries don’t want to build anything — let alone Western civilization. They want to destroy.

That’s why it is so easy for our enemies to get along with each other. That’s why they’re not constantly disavowing one another or distancing themselves from so-called “radical elements.”

Imagine Western civilization as a house. When you want to destroy a house, it’s easy to cooperate. Someone using a small hammer has the same goal as someone using a bulldozer. They want to destroy, and whatever or whoever helps destroying the house is welcomed.

Liberals, Marxists, globalists, bankers, egalitarians, universalists, Islamists, envious immigrants, Antifa, pedophiles, and degenerates — they all get along really well because they all have the same goal: destroying the European people and all that we stand for.

This isn’t some secret conspiracy. They admit it themselves: they want — and I am citing quotes — to “eradicate whiteness,” and they even claim that “world peace can only be reached if there are no more majority-white countries left.” The same media that claim “racism is in the DNA of white people” are calling for the “eradication of racism.” You don’t even have to read between the lines to see the calls for genocide in that. Just weeks ago, a call to kill all the whites in South Africa was met with a deafening silence by the so-called “international community” and with an endorsement by the mainstream media who claim to be defenders of their fairytale human rights.

Our enemies are spewing constant genocidal rhetoric, but the right wing — those who call themselves conservative but conserve nothing — are refusing to work together with the nationalists and the radical Right.

Building a civilization — imagine it again as a house — is far more difficult than destroying it. One man building a staircase in marble will be stopped by someone else wanting a wooden one, and during their everlasting discussions, the house will fall into disarray and be destroyed. In that same way, our civilization is falling into disarray and is being destroyed while people on the Right are discussing whether certain forms of activism, certain topics of discussion, or certain words are politically correct enough to be used in the defense of our people and civilization. We must stop this madness at once.

Stop being divided over small differences. Don’t fall into the trap of a never-ending dissociation with others because they’ve been called extremists by the press.

Don’t let them place doubt inside of you. Don’t allow yourselves to fight over petty differences between nationalist movements. We must not be divided over what separates us as different nationalists; we must unite against the great evil that lies before us. And a great evil it is.

I’ve told you before and I will tell you again. What we are facing is not some kind of disagreement between progressives and conservatives. It’s not a difference of opinions between the so-called Left and Right. This is a battle between good and evil.

It’s a battle between those who want to build and those who want to destroy.

We want to protect the innocence of children. They want to protect child abusers and indoctrinate our children with gender ideology and filth.

We cherish the warmth and beauty of femininity. They want to rip a woman away from her children and turn her into a cog in their capitalist machine instead of a loving mother.

We recognize masculinity as the powerful complementary force that takes the risks to build and protect our civilization. They slander masculinity as toxic and want weak men who aren’t able to stand up for themselves, let alone protect their families.

We venerate beauty. They venerate ugliness.

We build cities that feel like home. They build cities that feel like a dystopian hell.

We want our people to be safe. They release criminals and import even more.

We want to preserve the European peoples. They want to destroy us.

We are right. They are wrong.

We stand for the truth. They stand for lies.

This truth is the most important thing there is. It is sacred. If there is one thing we must do, it’s fight for the truth.

If we find the courage to denounce the egalitarian and universalist lies and put forward the truth that the European peoples must be preserved and deserve their own homelands, then all the rest will follow. First, we must get the truth out there, into this world of lies, and then the policies will follow. This principle, of putting the truth above all else, is of the utmost importance to preserve our people, but it is also the solution to everything else.

I’ll give you an example. The whole transgender debate can be solved if we dare speak the truth that there are only two genders and that there is no such thing as being transgender. It’s a mental illness. A woman is an adult female that has female reproductive organs.

In this room it seems silly to even say that, but there are many, many so-called conservatives who will go along with the transgender madness and call transvestites women just because they think the principle of “live and let live” is more important than the truth. It is not. Nothing is more important than the truth.

The same “conservatives” will complain about perverts entering a girls’ locker room and drag queens reading to little children, but they don’t realize that it’s their own fault because they were too cowardly to speak the truth when it mattered and hid behind their intellectually dishonest and lazy “live and let live” statements.

These cowards disgust me more than those on the Left ever will.

Those same people claim they want to Make America Great Again, but when you ask them “what made America great in the first place?” they shrink back in fear and deflect the question by babbling some nonsense about economic opportunity or the Constitution.

No. Christianity, nationalism, and most crucially of all, Europeans made America great. Europeans tamed this great continent and built this great nation. The less Christian, the less nationalistic, and the less European America becomes, the less great it will be. If we want to solve the crisis in this country, we must get that truth out there. Once we achieve that, all the rest will follow.

It is that simple. We must get the truth out there. If we do that, we win. If we don’t, out of cowardice, then everything we hold dear will be lost.

If we let our enemies have it their way, and if we outsource our political struggle to the so-called conservatives who do nothing but barely slow the decline, then very soon there will be nothing left to conserve. There will be no more traditional families, no more classical architecture, and no more privacy or freedom.

There will not be one school left that hasn’t been diversified to the point that it produces only stupidity instead of excellence.

All the great institutions will crumble under the destruction of diversity.

Planes will be falling out of the skies. Electricity will go out. There will not be one statue or monument left standing.

Our democracy will turn into a competition of ethnic voting blocks.

Terrorism, shootings, and riots will become everyday occurrences all over the West. There will be no more great art, no more truth, and no more beauty.

Everything will be lost, so much so that eventually there won’t even be any more historians in the West to write about our demise and ruination.

I can hear you saying, “But Dries, what you’re describing is already here.” And you’d be right to say so, to some extent. But that too is a reason why this is the greatest time to be alive, because we are now almost in a deep enough crisis for our people to be receptive to the uncomfortable truths that are necessary to start a renaissance, but we are not so deep into the crisis that there is no possibility of recovery. People are starting to realize that there is no other option than to fight back and that every form of escapism is temporary and futile.

We needed this crisis as a wake-up call:

• Just like the Sumerians needed life-threatening drought to build the first cities
• Just like the Europeans needed the constant threat of an unforgiving winter to evolve and prepare, to always think ahead
• Just like the Spanish needed to have almost every corner of the Iberian peninsula conquered by Muslim invaders for them finally to set aside petty differences and unite as a Christian European people for the reconquista
• Just like we, in the Europe and America of the 21st century, needed this crisis of mass migration and degeneracy to realize how crucial our identity as Europeans is.

We needed to be hit by Mexican gangs on our own streets, we needed to be dragged to foreign wars by Zionist warmongers, we needed to be forced out of our own cities by Africans, and we needed to see what weakness does to our people.

We needed all that to realize that we have to become stronger than ever.

We needed this decline to be able to ascend to greater heights than ever before.

We needed to be depressed, defamed, slandered, and blackpilled to realize that this is the greatest time to be alive.

Never have our decisions mattered more. Never has the courage of a generation had the potential to save our people and culture from such peril, from such an existential threat.

Never have fearless young leaders had such a potential to light the fire of an entire generation. Never have our sacrifices been more needed to save our people from the great evil that looms before us.

I don’t want to hear anyone complain about the sacrifices that have to be made. My activism has demanded many sacrifices. I got kicked out of university. I got kicked out of my bank. I got kicked out of every payment processor. Regime police raided my house two times, taking everything from me. I’m being prosecuted on more counts than Jeffrey Epstein ever was, and I have never done anything even illegal, let alone morally wrong.

In a desperate attempt by the Belgian regime to prevent my getting juridic protection as a member of parliament, I was yanked out of my bed by regime police and thrown into jail days before I was to pledge my parliamentary oath. Luckily, I got out in time thanks to my good lawyers, but they work for me only because I made the sacrifice of paying more than 142,000 euros in legal fees to defend myself against a barrage of false lawsuits and prosecutions by the regime in recent years.

Don’t let this scare any of you. I know it sounds as if my life has been hell since I became the number one political dissident in my country. In some moments, it has surely felt like hell. But when people ask me whether I feel sorry for the choices I have made in life, there is not the smallest doubt in my mind that I made the right decision in devoting my life to our people’s struggle.

I will say even more. The people standing on the sidelines shouldn’t feel sorry for me. I feel sorry for them. Their lives are hollow, empty, and meaningless. They serve a system that hates them. They live for nothing but the false promise that material wealth will one day bring them happiness and fulfilment, which it never will.

I go to bed every night with the biggest smile on my face. I have worries, of course, just like all of you, but every night when I lay in my bed, I ask myself whether I have done everything in my capacity that day to further the cause of our people’s survival. I sleep well because the answer is a strong and confident yes.

The regime has used all their powers against me, but they have only further ignited the flame burning inside of me. I don’t want flattery by the mainstream press. I don’t want material wealth. I don’t want to sit on the benches of parliament for 40 years and get a ribbon for my service to the regime.

No, all I want is to be able to tell my children and grandchildren that I did everything I could to make sure that there is a future for them and for our people in our homelands, that the lands of our ancestors remain the lands of our descendants.

A smooth sea never made a good sailor, and I can tell you I’ve become quite the sailor in recent years. But I’m glad that I took to the turbulent seas, that I decided to beat the waves, because it has been the most liberating experience in my life.

I often talk to businessmen and service clubs, to wealthy and powerful people, and I have found that many of them live a lie. They have all the money in the world, but they dare not speak the truth. They often don’t even dare to make a donation. They will never be able to look their children in the eye and say they did what had to be done. I can. And I wish for you all to be able to do the same.

I have told you a part of my story as a testament to prove that I know what happens when you threaten the liberal, anti-white regime, but my personal sacrifices are still nothing compared to the sacrifices made by our ancestors.

Our ancestors hunted mammoths in the freezing cold to be able to feed their offspring. They went through hunger, suffering, and danger to be able to forge, with each generation, the European people.

Our ancestors beat back the Mongol hordes and defeated the Muslim invaders to save Christian Europe. Our ancestors showed what bravery means when they defended the Alamo and when they beat the odds again and again in Rhodesia.

Our ancestors sacrificed their last food and even their own flesh in Ukraine while Stalin starved them, just so their children would survive the famine instead of them and so that the chain of generations could continue.

Our ancestors built cathedrals so big and beautiful they knew it would take multiple generations and they would never see them finished.

So don’t come and complain that you don’t have the time for some activism. Our ancestors sacrificed everything and endured unimaginable hardships to discover new lands and new seafaring routes. A few hundred brave conquistadores sailed to what is now Latin America and burned their ships on the shores of the Aztec empire so they had no way of retreating. They then went on to conquer it all.

American settlers fought violent tribes and tamed a whole continent to build the most powerful nation the earth has ever seen.

These men and women are watching you when you complain about not wanting to make any sacrifices.

Our ancestors fought for months at Stalingrad without a chance of survival, with the cold literally freezing off their toes and with hunger chewing away at their empty stomachs. They fought on in the ruined buildings and even in the sewers, because they knew what Bolshevism would mean for their descendants.

Our ancestors kept on building our great cities while the Black Death gruesomely wiped out half of their population. They rebuilt our cities after they were bombed to ruins in two world wars. They are watching you when you lie to yourself that it’s too difficult to make a difference.

They spilled blood, sweat, and tears for you to be able to inherit the flame of European civilization.

Are you going to make them proud by doing your part in saving their heritage and by saving our people? Or are you going to make your ancestors watch as you end their bloodline and shrink back in cowardice. They are watching you masturbate to two people on a computer screen instead of starting a family and continuing the chain of generations.

Are you going to disappoint them by not even intervening when you see a fellow European being harassed or attacked?

Are you going to let other people claim the soil in which our ancestors were buried?

I promise you that I won’t, and I want you to make that promise with me. I want to make my ancestors proud. I want to continue their legacy.

Just as they were, I am prepared to give my life for our people and our future. Nihilists and individualists who have nothing to live for will laugh at us; they will claim it’s absurd to be willing to give your life for something greater than yourself. But we know that if you don’t have anything you’re willing to die for, you don’t have anything to live for. Once you accept that there are things that are more important than yourself, that there is a cause that’s worth fighting for, every little aspect of life becomes much more fulfilling and meaningful.

That is, my brothers and sisters, why this is the greatest time to be alive. Because never have our choices been of such importance for our people. Never in history was our willpower more needed than today.

Our struggle as nationalists is so important that the personal hardships we must endure will never outweigh the feeling of fulfilment we achieve through sacrifice for our people. Even though we will have to endure many more hardships before they will make a difference, let alone be recognized, we must endure them nevertheless.

It is our duty to all those who have gone before us, to the many generations that have shed blood, sweat, and tears for us to be able to continue this chain of generations. It is our duty to make sure that this chain becomes stronger than ever before. It is our duty to make sure that the lands of our ancestors remain the lands of our descendants.

Never despair. All the great powers are against us. I am aware of that. I have been caught in the eye of Mordor more than once. But do not despair, because we are not the last men standing; we are the first. We are not the last line of defense; we are the first to attack.

We must become the greatest generation of Europeans to have ever lived, or we will be the last generation. I choose greatness, and I will devote my life to it. I hope you will all make the same choice with me.