American journey

Monday – the trek begins

After a busy day in the office, broken briefly to cut some wood so Jackie and the girls can light the Rayburn each evening to keep the autumn chill off, Jackie drives me to meet security at our usual RV. Martin has been held up by a two hour traffic jam caused by a serious accident – and by the fact that the country is desperately overcrowded. Bad as things are now, just imagine them with another ten or twenty million people, as several leading demographers forecast today will result in due course on present trends. Unbearable!

Then it’s down to the second half of a well attended and determined Black Country meeting. South Birmingham organiser Mike Bell is just finishing a short speech when we arrive, and local organiser Ken Griffiths introduces me almost straight away.

I keep my speech pretty short, explaining how all the public apathy, “I’m alright Jack” consumerism, and “I’ve voted Labour all my life” moronicism of recent decades is going to be swept away by the harsh winds of economic pain. Distressed home-owners (or rather, people who didn’t realise that the banks owned their homes) in parts of the USA are now being offered just 50 per cent of their nominal value of a few months ago by venture capitalist sharks drawn by the blood spilt by those already crushed by the credit crunch.

There are plenty more set to join them, including on this side of the water. We’re in the earliest stages of perhaps the biggest forced (by economic circumstances, of course, the robber barons of today don’t ‘do’ swords or bayonets, though in not so many years time they may well use paramilitary police in a new form of feudalism) transfer of wealth from the actual and aspiring middle and taxpaying working classes, into the hands of the super rich since the theft of the English commons and the Lowland and Highland Clearances.

This new wealth grab will of course be cloaked in socialist legitimacy by tossing a few threadbare rags and stale crusts to the spongers – homegrown and imported – whose votes may allow their system to maintain a fictional democratic legitimacy)

The comfortable times are gone; the only question yet to be answered is whether the damage done to our society and the nations of the West under cover of “you’ve never had it so good” hedonism has already gone so far as to be irreparable? That liberalism and the multi-cult are finished is beyond any doubt, but the moment is yet to come that will decide if they are replaced by national rebirth or by lawless feudalism that merges into an Islamic Dark Age.

Leave the meeting dead on half-past ten and head for a hotel near Heathrow. One of the side effects of the Bush/Blair/bin Laden Clash of Civilisations is that the old “get there forty minutes” before your flight routine has now been replaced by a three hour wait. Hence a mid-morning flight from Heathrow really can’t be caught with an early morning start from home.

Breath of fresh air on the radio

Typing up this section of the blog on the M40, Radio Two has a slot with Kate Rusby – she claims to be getting on a bit now, but truthfully she’s still very young for such a big folk-singing talent. As usual, her set mixes her own material with traditional songs delivered in her unmistakable southern Yorkshire accent. It’s a welcome contrast to the multi-cult junk played incessantly on Radio One – not so much entertainment as an instrument of torture.

If any readers are involved in any of the pub Christmas concerts she says that the area is noted for then let me know and I’ll try and get to one. Years ago in Suffolk we used to sing sometimes in the back room of the Laxfield Low House (a pub with no bar, which is much better than it sounds, go and find out for yourself) and in the now gentrified Scole Inn near Diss – one of the great character pubs of England until bought up by a hotel chain and ‘renovated’ to the point of soullessness. If you ever went there when it had tile floors and smelt of wood smoke, real ale and good cheer, keep those memories and never go back to see how they’ve murdered the place.

Best of all back then (circa 1978) was carol evening in the Butley Oyster, complete with Mummers Play and pints of Old mulled with a poker straight from the fire. I hope it’s still like that and not a yuppie bar with carpets and over-priced South African wine.

Tuesday - Eight hours on the plane

After four hours sleep in a motel near Heathrow, the flight to Chicago takes eight hours. The clear skies on take-off last for the whole time we’re over England. With a window seat I spot various landmarks in central and then North London, then we cross the M25 and after that it’s a bit of a guessing game. A motor racing track below our starboard wing must be Silverstone. Over the north Midlands we pass a fair size place with a big sports stadium just south of a river. Nottingham? I’m not sure we’d be that far east. The layout of Derby I scarcely know at all, but I guess it could be, because not long after that we fly first over some fairly wild hill country and then pass Manchester to head out to sea over Morecombe Bay.

It’s cloudy as we pass Belfast and then there’s nothing to see anyway. Until, that is, we cross the southern tip of Greenland. I’ve been re-reading Bruce Bawer’s book While Europe Slept, which deals in a slightly PC way with the threat of Islamicist aggression. But now I stop for a while. Fortunately the sky is clear again and there’s a stunning view from 38,000 feet of the enormous ice sheet to the north, and several glaciers snaking down valleys to the sea. One in particular is ‘calving’ icebergs, dozens of bright white specks which must be huge down there.

Another hour and we’re over Canada and the clouds are back until we cross the Great Lakes and then Michigan. It is impossible to fly over North America when the sky is clear without being stunned by the sheer size and space of the place, and by the achievements of the mainly English, Scots and Scots-Irish who first pioneered it (though of course the French played a major role in Canada).

Coming down to land in at Chicago’s massive O’Hare Airport the city suburbs stretch as far as the eye can see out of both port and starboard windows. It’s a giant example of how our civilisation revolves around the internal combustion engine and the fuel that powers it.

There’s no doubt that late industrial capitalism has been unbelievably ‘efficient’, and the last couple of generations of Westerners have been extraordinarily fortunate, at least in material terms. But when ultra efficiency spills over into the hyper-consumption of finite fossil fuels, there must inevitably come a time when those unfortunate enough to be in the chair at the time get to pick up the mother of all bills. It’s been one hell of a party, and it’s going to be one hell of a hangover.

They don’t know what’s about to hit them

The business pages of the Daily Mail I pick up on leaving the plane include a brief reference to the German Energy Watch Group report that the Guardian covered the other day. It is described as ‘startling’, which shows just how out of touch with the real fundamentals of the world economy supposedly well-informed journalists can be. Frankly, it’s terrifying.

Especially this bit: “EWG sees world production slumping from 81 million a day to 39m by 2030. It does not predict prices, but if it is right they could double.” Where do they get this rubbish? The 1973 oil shock was caused by a gap between global supply and demand of les than 5%, and that led to prices quadrupling almost overnight. America’s so far minor steps towards serious bio-fuel production have led to a doubling in the price of grain and animal feeds as food production is cut in order to produce alternative transport energy. A 50% drop in global oil output, combined with the growth in demand from China and India, wouldn’t lead to a simple doubling of prices.

We’re not talking about you not being able to afford long drives to the seaside quite so often – this is about the likely collapse of the modern world, mass starvation among the world’s poor, and a contest between the decentralising effects of technological simplification and the crudely centralising efforts of scavenger capitalist police states. Unless, of course, someone comes up with a solution so effective and so cheap that we can collectively afford the astronomical cost of writing off the infrastructure of the Oil Age. Don’t hold your breath!

About the only consolation is that, after a period of even greater wealth and power when the Muslim OPEC states literally have us over a barrel as scarcity sends oil prices trough the roof, there will come a time when inexorably declining oil output sends Saudi Arabia in particular into a tailspin of social unrest. And once the Mad Mullahs take over they’ll turn the place into an economic and social basket case – which would severely curtail both the prestige and the world-changing clout of Salafist/Wahhabi Islam.

From Chicago we take a connecting flight to Charlotte, in the old Confederate state of South Carolina. Our host and the organiser of the whole tour, Preston Wigington, is there to pick us up for the two hour drive to Clemson, which is the first university at which I’m speaking.

We arrive in the late evening their time, which means that by the time we’ve finally had something to east other than in-flight pap, our British-set bodyclocks are convinced that it’s actually time to get up. Not a great night’s sleep.

Wednesday (I think!)

At least Wednesday is a fairly light day. I do three radio interviews over the phone, write my lecture, deal with a few calls from the UK and meet with members of the conservative student group that invited me to their campus.

One of the interviews is with a big Southern radio talkshow host – a way OTT near-caricature of his type, loud, self-opinionated and extremely politically incorrect and proud of it. The others, one of them a big Christian station, are much more restrained, but still very friendly. All are shocked when I tell them that one of the reasons I’m speaking at American universities is that I’m banned from doing so at British ones. The fact that the four 7/7 London bombers had between them collected more than half a million dollars in welfare benefits courtesy of the British taxpayer also caused a fair bit of justifiable incredulity.

An old friend and a first

The university buildings are an architectural cut above the cultural-Marxist boxes that disgrace many modern British university campuses. We pass a magnificent multiple fountain to enter the six storey library and the auditorium where I’m to give my first ever lecture in a university (on account of the ‘No Platform’ policy imposed by the Marxist cranks and bigots who still manage to deny British students the right to listen and make up their own minds on certain taboo subjects).

Among those students and guests already waiting are Bob Whittaker, an old friend from previous visits and late-night Bourbon sessions, and author of, among other things, the brilliant critique of the liberal indoctrination system ‘Why Johnny Can’t Think’. The opposition is represented by little group of leftists and Afro-Americans on one side of the room, and a bearded Muslim of clearly North African origin on the other.

To be honest, I really don’t feel like speaking and answering questions for well over an hour as scheduled – my body is now convinced that it’s two or three in the morning and that I’m part way through some experiment in sleep deprivation. Still, the anticipation of some barracking or awkward questions from the leftists produces a little shot of adrenaline and I get to work.

In the event, they all listen attentively and politely for a while. About halfway through my forty five minute main talk, the group of blacks and white feminist types get up and leave quietly. My guess is that they’ve come expecting to hear rabid hardcore racism and anti-Semitism, and are somewhat confused by a message that includes the threat posed by radical Islam to some of the causes dearest to their own hearts.

See the video on Google here.

At the end of the event we find that they’ve left a message on one of the question cards that were left on the seats: “This is bullshit. Hope you enjoyed tonight. Your reception at Michigan will be rather different.” They’ve also drawn a Peace sign, which is a little odd given that the Reds up at Michigan have already vowed to stop the lecture there by force.

When I finish – with a warning that, with 100,000 ‘legal’ Muslim immigrants a year, the USA is merely not a far down the road to Islamisation as Europe – the Muslim does not applaud. Strange really, because I don’t think I’ve said anything to belittle or insult his Faith but have simply pointed out its incompatibility with Western values, the rapid rate at which it is advancing in Europe, and the role of our own liberal ‘elites’ in the process.

The questions are wide ranging, from sympathetic and politically astute gifts to polite but hostile ones which are supposed to be awkward. At the end of the event we say our goodbyes and are escorted by a very round and jovial policeman to a police car waiting to drive us back to our car on the other side of the campus.

It’s now eleven in the evening local time, 4 or 5 a.m. Griffin body time. And we’ve got to get up at just gone four local time in order to drive back to the airport and our flight to Houston, Texas.

Thursday

By the time we get to Houston the grey skies have cleared. Below us as we come into land are the meanders and textbook oxbow lakes (the remains of ancient loops in the river which have been cut off by its change of course) of a river on its way to the Gulf of Mexico. The huge refineries and chemical plants down near the sea are visible in the distance.

Houston Airport is magnificent – one of the most strikingly designed but still practical modern building complexes I’ve ever visited. We pick up our luggage within minutes (so far, on this visit, we’ve been spared the mayhem created last time I visited the USA for a conference in Louisiana, when our bags all ended up thousands of miles away somewhere on the West Coast) and pass gleaming stainless steel, plate glass and plain rendered pillars to board an ultra modern monorail to the car park where Preston left his vehicle a couple of days earlier.

The whole place is very nearly futuristic and truly impressive. Will the huge revamp at Heathrow produce something to match it? Knowing the chronic botching, skimping and addiction to Bauhaus-influenced concrete that afflicts so many major building projects in Britain, the more likely answer is ‘no’. There again, we might get something as dramatic and eye-pleasing as the magnificent (though nearly bankrupt) Millennium Theatre in Cardiff – now there’s a building!

A fine studio in a fine cause

First stop is the HQ and studio of one of the most influential and respected Christian TV companies in the USA – indeed, worldwide – DayStar TV. We step into an ornately decorated foyer and are warmly welcomed by both the receptionist and an enthusiastic young producer. I’m actually due live on air in twelve minutes, which presents a potential problem as I’m wearing a travel-creased T-shirt and haven’t yet shaved this morning.

The moment I explain the problem I’m whisked upstairs and through another ornate-to-the-point-of excessive Italianate sitting room to a washroom. Once shaved and changed, it’s off to see a make-up artist in a room of a way higher standard than any I’ve seen in a mainstream British TV studio – this really is a big operation.

It’s nearly half past eleven and we’ve had nothing to eat all morning. I emerge to find that Martin and Preston have been shown the snacks we’d been told would be available on our arrival. Martin’s face is a study of misery as he picks at a small plate of raw celery, carrot and broccoli! Personally any earlier hunger has now been replaced by slight butterflies in the stomach. I’ve been interviewed on US Christian radio shows a fair few times before, but this is a full half-hour live TV slot to an enormous audience on the same lines.

The studio itself again outdoes anything I’ve seen outside of the main London news studios of the BBC and ITN. I’m the guest on a comfy sofa with the husband and wife presenter team. We chat briefly and into the opening credits to give them a better idea of what I can bring to their huge audience this morning, and he checks our web and PO Box addresses as these will be read out and flashed up on screen.

Fortuitously, he’s got the splendidly Christian sounding Waltham Cross address, but as he’s asked if he’s got it right I point out that his ‘Hertz’ pronunciation of the ‘Herts’ abbreviation of Hertfordshire should in fact be ‘Harts’. He tries it out and instantly reminds me of Trevor McDonald. Preston later tells me that the couple are absolutely typical of the best of the old fashioned but still very common Southern black Baptists, as sincere, genuine and generous of spirit as their white neighbours.

I tell him he’s got it so perfect he actually sounds English, but he laughs and says that he’ll stick to the pronunciation that his viewers would expect. This one’s a good example of how in many cases modern American actually preserves long-gone snippets of the English of Shakespeare’s time. The ‘e’ in words like Hertfordshire and Derby only mutated into an ‘a’ sound in late Georgian and Victorian times as the result of an upper class affectation – people trying to sound posh.

I gather that the actual programme – or at least clips from it – will be on You Tube soon, if not already, so won’t go through what was said here. Suffice it to say that we agree on all points, from the dangers posed by radical Islam through to the fact that mass immigration is a threat to the existence of the separate nations that all pre-liberalisation Christians knew were ordained as such by God.

Many black Americans are particularly concerned about Mexican and other Third World immigration on working class jobs and on social cohesion. Add in the natural worries that true Christians have about the seemingly relentless spread of the Arabic moon cult, our common belief in the importance of traditional values – including the ‘minor’ ones like good manners and human respect that comes naturally rather than being extracted by intimidation - and our getting along is really not the surprise the clips will be to left-liberals who simply haven’t got the faintest idea what makes people like me tick.

We finish the programme and chat for a few more minutes. The efficiency and thoughtfulness of the whole operation is epitomised by the fact that we’re handed two DVD copies of the live broadcast as we walk out of the studio. Then it’s back to the car park in the bright sunlight, and the two hour drive to College Station, home of the next University on the list.

Deep in the heart of Texas

The scenery out of Houston isn’t worthy of the name. Flat sprawling suburbia
gives way to miles of shopping malls, giant used car lots and a vast array of places where already fat Americans can eat their way to full-blown medically registered obesity and thus welfare handouts. The waffle shops are particularly good examples:

A waffle is really only a pancake – I know, because I made one from a pre-mixed cupful for yesterday as our hotel had only self-service continental breakfast available. But while a French crepe or an English pancake could well have maple syrup poured on it, there is a strict limit to how much liquid obesity one can get to stay on a flat circle of cooked flour, egg and milk. So the Americans hit on the idea of turning it into a three dimensional set of open top boxes – each one of which can then hold a sickening quantity of syrup, a miniature reservoir of calories.

It’s more than an hour’s drive before we start to see woods rather than featureless scrub and billboards, then gently rolling hills and some lakes. It’s much greener than I expected, apparently the Texas that springs to our mind is much further west in a state which would comfortably swallow England twice.

Texas A&M, like Clemson, is renowned for its faculties of agriculture and engineering, and is also well known as a generally conservative university. Not so many decades ago their strict honour code even extended to ensuring that students kept their rooms ultra clean and tidy. Any student who dared to let the side down was liable to be beaten up and thrown out of the university! Standards have slipped since then, but the place still looks spick and span.

We meet up with the ‘Aggie Independents’, an organisation of free-thinking students who believe that people should be able to hear all points of view and then make up their own minds. We’re in a big coffee and pastries shop with settees and armchairs as well as tables and a bar. Some students are using it to study, others to sit and chat. It’s got a great atmosphere and we sit and talk about all sorts of current affairs and historical issues for a couple of hours.

A&M is a major army officer training corps university and several of the lads will be off to Iraq or Afghanistan or even – they suspect – Iran. They are all agreed that they’d gladly go off to fight and, if necessary, die, in a war in which genuine American interests were at stake. But they know that this current wave of foreign adventures don’t fit that bill. Oil, the big corporations, the Israeli lobby, the Sunni Saudi fear of Shia military superiority, and the vanity of individual politicians – all these factors come into play, and I’m impressed by their grasp of the real picture. The ignorant ‘gung-ho’ image often shown on our TV is way off beam.

The lecture this evening is in a normal classroom. It’s packed with more than a hundred people despite the fact that some leftist clown had earlier put a ‘Cancelled’ sign on the door. The crowd ranges from committed nationalists through to conservative and Christian sympathisers, through genuinely liberal free-thinkers to libertarians, and thence on to Mexican and black racists and to a couple of Muslims and a handful of Marxist cranks. Plus a few dark horses that emerge during question time.

This is an intelligent and adult audience. Even the oppo are influenced by the Aggie and Southern tradition of good manners; they listen intently, laugh at my jokes and recommendation not to trust any politician, present company included, and applaud when my hour-long talk ends

Then we have an hour plus of Q&As and debate. The Muslim in traditional garb tries to convince people I’ve taken things out of context, several of the leftists try to sidetrack the debate down the Holocaust road although that does at least allow me to set the record straight and deal with the combination of Wikipedia lies and out-of-context propaganda and to put on record the fact that – while I used to be very angry at (and rude about) the way the left-liberals use the Holocaust as a moral club to silence debate on the key issues of our time – I have never denied the fact that the Nazis murdered huge numbers of Jews in one of the great crimes of a century of terrible inhumanity.

One asks me how my demonisation of Muslims differs from Hitler’s demonisation of the Jews? The answer is simple: The Nazi critique was largely based on a hoax – The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. It was this work of fiction, combined with the fact that the Bolsheviks carrying out mass murder on an unprecedented scale all over Eastern Europe included a disproportionate number of radicalised secular Jews (itself a reaction to Czarist anti-Semitism), that set the scene for the tragedy of European Jewry.

The Koran and Hadith, on the other hand, and their inspiration for hatred, violence and oppression of Unbelievers, are not forgeries. The threat to our civilisation is not a myth but a clear and present danger.

A middle aged Mexican is the darkest of the horses. Far from being a La Raza type, he is a passionate opponent of mass Mexican immigration. He fought in Vietnam, and his dad served in World War Two. His son introduces himself too, an intense, wiry young man with flashing dark eyes and a huge knowledge of European history and philosophy, and a fierce attachment to our culture and freedom. Apparently a number of freedom-loving Mexicans fought with the Texans against Santa Anna’s corruption and tyranny back in Alamo days. You learn something new every day.

One of the non-student guests is a British expat who has driven five hours to meet me. He’s a great character, formerly from Stoke (and still missing the oatcakes). We find several ways in which he can help advance the Cause in Britain and I think he heads off for home happy that his long journey was worthwhile.

Friday – strange things on a plane

For us, there’s just a few hours clock-watching sleep before having to get up at four in order to drive back to Houston for a three hour early morning flight north to Chicago, a wait in O’Hare airport (during which time I do yet another radio interview over the mobile) and then a shorter connecting flight on to Detroit. Every time, thanks to Richard Reid, we all have to take our shoes off as we go through the security check.

In the pocket on the back of the seat in front of me is a Sky Mall magazine, 280 pages of mail order advertising for a huge array of obscure gadgets, must-haves, things you wouldn’t give house-room and the plain eccentric. There is, for example, a snow flurry generating snowman (works in cold or hot weather, snowflakes evaporate without residue); a mobile alarm clock that rolls away and hides so that you have to get up to turn it off; a laser-guided pool cue ($79); the fish finder watch sonar sensor (detects fish in a 75’ radius and to a depth of 120’).

This could be used to find your two foot long remote controlled robotic shark if it goes beyond the 40’ radius at which its submersible remote can control it. Or you could leave the water behind and relax in your total body massage lounger (total 800 square inches of massage area) while listening to your life-sized Elvis Animatronic Robot bust (real leather jacket, curling lip, sings eight songs including Heartbreak Hotel and relates key moments from his life. $299).

You can get a vendor-style hot dog cart or a machine and the mixes to make a gallon of margaritas; a remote-controlled mouse for your cat ($25); a solar-powered talking Bible (English or Spanish), or a personalized branding iron for your barbeque steaks ($90). Only in America!

We’re already being promised a lively reception much later today at Michigan State University in East Lansing. Various far-left and ‘minority’ racist groups have announced their plan to bus people in from all over this vast northern state and to close down the lecture by force.

At Detroit’s rather down-at-heel airport we pick up a rental jeep and head north west for about 120 miles. At a retail park halfway I take a look around a big electronic store and buy the camcorder that is the key to the further improvement of Simon Darby’s multi-media blog and our Internet rapid response capability. The saving over buying at home is massive, and as they’re all imported from Japan anyway, there’s no moral dilemma over not buying British.

Young Americans for Freedom

In East Lansing we meet another group of very well informed patriotic students. They’ve formed an organisation called Young Americans for Freedom and, in addition to having YAF button badges (routine stuff), have developed a habit of suing the university over its occasional failures to uphold their civil rights to meeting halls and security (unusually advanced).

Here too we talk about various subjects including, again, the woeful failure of Americans to develop even the embryo of an effective political response to the multi-cult, anti-human, globalising treason of their liberal capitalist elite. Yet again, however, I get the feeling that this need not be the case for much longer. This group too have realised that the neo-Nazi crankery and ‘This World is Ours’ racial supremacy nonsense have got to be faced down and driven into gutter of defeat a negativity where they belong.

Since the days of Ancient Rome it has been a good and proper policy to say nothing of the dead unless good, but in the interests of future generations of our kind it is essential that genuine nationalists throughout the English-speaking world understand that – well-intentioned and honourable though they my have been as individual men – the Leese/Rockwell/Tyndall/Jordan/Pierce strain that polluted our Cause for half a century was a political, strategic, tactical, moral and practical disaster.

Still, those pernicious influences are wearing off rapidly throughout the English speaking world. These youngsters are not alone.

We head for the auditorium we’re using tonight and, on the way, pass the antis ‘marching’ in the same direction. They assemble in front of the main entrance, but as we’re already inside and the police ensure that other people can get in, their promised blockade comes to naught.

By the time they come to the large, sloping lecture theatre, our team have already moved out of the lecture theatre every chair or bin capable of being thrown if things turn as ugly as they might. We end up with about thirty supporters and a few neutrals, and some seventy chanting, F***-banner-waving leftists and minorities.

Kyle from YAF explains that this is a free speech issue, asks that everyone displays good manners, then calls on the audience to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance to the Stars & Stripes behind us. Thirty rise and recite; seventy sit and hurl abuse at the land whose bounty has made them the most spoilt and pampered brats in history.

I begin my speech to howls of protest and a barrage of hostile questions every couple of sentences. The mob is the all-too-familiar mixture of truly hideous lesbians, semi-dwarves of indeterminate sex, full-sized freaks, chip-on-shoulder anti-white racist minorities, angry Muslims, a half-handy looking lad who acts really hard and a couple of strikingly attractive blondes – typical of the people descended from the Swedish farmers who did so much to settle this part of the USA.

There are just two police officers in the hall, but Martin and Preston (a tough, lean winner of strongman competitions) take a seat on either flank. Fortunately too I have a clip on microphone linked to a good PA system. I begin with quotes from historian Niall Ferguson and Muammar Gaddafi, in order to show that both the British Establishment and key figures in the Muslim world agree that the looming future of Europe is to fall to Islam. The mob howl their approval.

I’m determined to get through the first section of my speech, which lays out just what Islamisation would mean for several of the groups and concepts which the far-left claim to hold so dear. Widespread female genital mutilation, universal chattel status for women, the religiously determined apartheid of the dhimmi system, and the spread of the crude racist contempt and exploitation displayed in Saudi Arabia against ‘lesser breeds’ such as converts, Pakistani and black labourers, and Filipina sex slaves.

There’s a continual barrage of awkward questions (like their British counter-parts, this crowd of oddballs and ultra-conformists seem unaware that the real art of devastating heckling is to pick up on things your opponent says and shoot them down with ridicule and quick-fire put-downs. Simply trying to shout down a confident speaker who has the advantage of a powerful PA system leads those who attempt it first looking like bigoted loudmouths and then losing their voices).

This in fact happens very quickly to the most striking of the blondes, who by now is going horse (some of the others already look like horses). I offer her a drink of water, which is actually a bit risky because if she takes me up on my considerate gesture she could throw it at me. But, as I expected, she’s too angry to think straight.

Still, by now it’s clear that there is no chance of my being able to talk to this audience about the scale of immigration into Europe, nor any point trying to do so; the moment I get off subjects on which I can actually play on their concerns to make them think a bit (wimmin’s and gay rights, and animal welfare, for example), the oppo will go berserk.

So I decide instead to sucker them into a rolling debate by answering their questions. When they try to derail me by asking more while I’m answering the current one, I am able very often to appeal to their inverted racism by pointing out that the minority member who asked the question is surely entitled to an answer? A modicum of quiet descends each time.

When I tell them that I’m going to explain why I’m a racist pig, and go on to relate the facts of the current, capitalist globalism-fueled extinction of the vast majority of the 5,000 unique cultural and ethnic groups that make up the truly wonderful tapestry of human diversity, their confusion actually shows in some of their faces. They even agree that European cultures and identities are also worth preserving. The would-be hardnut ruefully admits to supporting Celtic.

Naturally, the spell doesn’t last long, and the long battle of voiceboxes and wits continues. Since one of our supporters videoed it, you can take a look for yourself here and also here. Anyone who doesn’t quite understand why we have a security team who can look a little ‘heavy’ for polite society may get a glimpse of reality here. Our opponents are not polite and if it hadn’t been for the deterrent value of Martin on one side and Preston on the other the footage would inevitably have included unedifying shots of me and our young student hosts rolling around on the floor with the rest of the audience.

As it is, the mob leaves after about an hour when they realise they’re not going to break me, and then set off the fire alarm. We ignore it and after a while the black janitor turns it off, leaving us to finish off with a more sensible discussion among the supporters and true liberals who remain.

When we finally decide to call it a day, we head off to a bar/restaurant to celebrate a job well done (bear in mind that the antis had pledged to stop the event going ahead at all). The others eat, but by now I’m bouncing off the walls with adrenaline and I can’t stomach anything. A few bottles of Sam Adams (one of the few reliably drinkable beers in a continent dominated by tasteless iced lager) are a different matter.

Saturday – and a trip in a time machine

We would have been heading home today but a Saturday flight would have cost our host an extra $700 so we’re going to kill a day doing not a lot. Just as well as what isn’t far off sleep deprivation has caught up and I don’t even wake up until well gone ten.

Even now there are several more press interviews to do, and I spend more time typing up this now huge blog entry (I had intended to send it in sections, but the pen drive I use to transfer the files refuses to work).

Later we meet some of our local hosts and take a look around their huge university campus; a mixture of Victorian philanthropist grandeur and modern giantism. Then we pile into the biggest, toughest jeep available and head in the late afternoon to Detroit – once one of the great industrial cities of the world.

On the freeway into the centre we see block after block of late 1960s project housing lying burnt out and derelict, then pass older factories and modern high-rise flats which are also boarded up at ground level and a mass of broken windows higher up.

This continues until the very centre of the city, where there is an abrupt change to the magnificent gleaming steel and glass General Motors tower and its surrounding ultra-modern complex. It has to be said that this is impressive – or at least it would be if one didn’t know that GM shares are now officially rated as Junk Bonds. The survival of one of the last century’s truly great industrial companies is no in serious doubt.

Driving on just a couple of blocks, we are suddenly thrown from the peak of modern urban civilisation into what could easily be a movie set for a film about life ten years after a nuclear war or the return of the Black Death. As I describe the scene to Simon Darby for his audio blog file the next day, the sight beggars belief. Whole factories lie derelict. Block after block of once smart suburban homes lie shattered; perhaps eight out of ten houses have simply gone in some parts, leaving one derelict and boarded up or burnt out, and another still lived in but with steel cages on doors or squalor outside.

In the gaps where whole streets of houses have virtually disappeared, sapling trees and scrub are springing up as Detroit begins to return to the forest that once covered the east and centre of this continent. We don’t see any of the deer that apparently now roam where, during the 1950s, the young families of well-paid, proud skilled workers and foremen lived out the post-war American Dream.

And it goes on, and on, and on; miles of dereliction, collapse, despair and spaced out drug addicts shambling aimlessly along. What happened? First Afro-American migration from the Deep South broke up the Anglo/Irish/Polish communities which built the place. Then the race riots of 1968. Then decades of more immigration and white flight from schools and neighbourhoods that just weren’t safe any more.

Then the US political and corporate elite decided that there were bigger profits to be made shipping jobs and plant to the Far East than could be earned by reinvesting in home industries and skills. Then the outnumbered middle class blacks fled too, and the decent, God-fearing, hard working ones, who got out any way they could (most have moved back down South).

Finally, even the lively young criminals seem to have gone, for we drive around for at least an hour (our hosts on tenterhooks) without the slightest sign of aggression or even recognition that we are very definitely in the wrong place. There is none of the “what you looking at” aggression that you would get in the backstreets of vast ‘ethnic’ areas of most big British cities. The few people left here seem to be past that; past anything except their drugs and their despair.

It’s more like something from the later chapters of Ayn Rand’s brilliant (though ideologically and realistically deeply flawed) novel ‘Atlas Shrugged’ than anything I have ever seen (though parts of Hartlepool, Sunderland and Liverpool I’ve been taken to aren’t exactly candidates for Britain in Bloom). Every bastard politician who’s ever waxed lyrical about the wonders of multi-culturalism and globalism should be brought here, and dumped in the middle of the future their policies are creating in other cities, on both sides of the Atlantic.

Apparently it gets worse each Halloween, known in places like this as Devil Night, as those youths who remain make a special point of burning down a few more of the empty houses. I don’t know if they stone the firemen if they turn up to dowse the flames, as is the custom in many enriched British cities. Perhaps here no-one even bothers.

We go off to a different Halloween – a party at a country town bar owned by the sister of one of our guides. The contrast is amazing. Instantly we’re back in our time, with our people, where the worst behaviour involves having drunk one or two beers too many, and the phenomenal friendliness of the real Americans is still on show.

Sunday – and homeward bound

Next day I have a couple of hours writing on the laptop on various things as well as bringing this blog up to date (difficult with such a packed schedule and the tendency of the battery to die). Then we’re picked up and head for Flint airport, from which we’re to fly to Chicago and thence Heathrow overnight.

We’re talking politics and so our driver misses the turn on the freeway, so what started as a leisurely drive ends up a mad rush. Which means that we don’t have time to stop to buy an extra bag for various items obtained in the last few days. Which in turn means that I have to cadge a couple of clear plastic bags from the check-in staff and put the bits and pieces in there.

As the extra baggage disappears along the conveyor belt, I can’t help wondering if it wouldn’t perhaps be better if the rather unorthodox package doesn’t make it to Heathrow anyway. How, after all, would I explain to Customs what I’m planning to do with: A hobby-horse style reindeer complete with about 28” of red velvet handle and bells on his antlers, which waggles its nose and sings ‘Jingle Bell Rock’ (he’s going clubbing with various daughters just before Christmas – honest); a telescopic camcorder stand; two collapsible umbrellas (in fact ideal for fending off eggs and bags of unspeakableness if thrown by Red mobs), and a bottle of highly spoken-of sensual massage oil (unopened til I get home, which is all I have to say on the subject)?

On the plane, I get to watch ‘Blue Blood’, a brilliant if limited interest British film about the Oxford squad training for the 2005 Varsity Boxing match against Cambridge. It’s highly accurate and, to someone who went through it all several decades ago strangely moving. I’d write more about it but simply don’t have time to do it justice right now, so I’ll probably return to that subject later. For now, all I can say is, if you enjoy boxing, or want an insight into what it takes to get a sporting ‘Blue’, and what it means to those of us who’ve been lucky enough to do it, watch ‘Blue Blood’. It’s so good I could even forgive the heroes of it for having gone to the Wrong Place!