This is part of our continuing series of accounts by readers of how they shed the illusions of liberalism and became race realists.

In 2015, when Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign, I was still a neoconservative who didn’t think much about race. I was attending a public high school in Texas with no racial majority, but everyone seemed to get along. My main passion was acting, and I was your typical “theater kid.” The leading man in almost every school production was a sensitive and soft-spoken black — and one of my best friends. Because of this, I placed very little importance on race.

Initially, I found Mr. Trump’s grandiose idea about building a wall on the border off putting, but he grew on me over time. I thought Hillary Clinton was so corrupt that any alternative was preferable. In 2016, I started paying attention to politics for the first time. I quickly found out my friends did not share my opinions. While we debated many political topics, race never really came up — until I had the bright idea to recite a pro-white poem at my school’s poetry slam, with the goal of soothing racial tension in America by saying that all races (including whites) had a right to be proud of themselves.

While it didn’t win any awards, the judges gave me positive feedback, and no one actively disliked it. At least, not to my face. Later on, during a political argument with one of my friends, he accused me of reciting a “white supremacy” poem, which infuriated me because he clearly hadn’t read it — it specifically denounced white supremacy, and talked about black and Asian heroes too. But even this didn’t shake my opinion that race didn’t matter, culturally or biologically. If it did, why was Candace Owens on our side? Why did I get along so well with my non-white classmates?

One day, I came to school carrying a sign that read, “It’s okay to be white,” and a whole crowd of blacks just stood around asking me questions about it! The only people who had a problem with it were other whites, and the school administrators. This reaffirmed my belief that white liberals were the problem.

Then my dad turned me on to Vox Day. I read his article, “16 Points of the Alt-Right” and was shocked by how tame it was. Until then, I’d been completely convinced that the Alt-Right was made up of Nazis who had nothing to do with Trumpism, and were opposed to real conservatism. But Vox Day was very clear in stating that, “The Alt-Right does not believe in the general supremacy of any race, nation, people, or subspecies. Every race, nation, people, and human sub-species has its own unique strengths and weaknesses, and possesses the sovereign right to dwell unmolested in the native culture it prefers.” For the first time, I could see that these people only wanted to live in peace and harmony, through race nationalism. No matter how much I disagreed with them about race, I couldn’t call them Nazis in good conscience. I soon became an avid follower of Vox Day. Thanks to him, I started to call myself a nationalist, but only of the civic type.

By the end of high school, I became more and more disillusioned with the state of politics. My hatred of the Democrat Party was growing, but I just couldn’t see how race factored into it. I called my brand of nationalism “cultural nationalism” as a coping method, trying to straddle the line between race realism and conservatism. I had the idea of introducing a testing system at our southern border that would rigorously determine whether a given immigrant would be compatible with American culture.

Maybe, I thought, that would prove racial nationalists wrong, and America would see waves of patriotic non-white immigrants come in with passing scores. But late at night, when I was actually honest with myself, I knew that such a system would reduce immigration to a tiny trickle, and would definitely disproportionately favor whites. I was still stuck in the mindset of “trying not to be too racist,” by favoring policies that benefited whites without being explicit about what I was doing.

In 2019, the “Groyper Wars” made a big impression on me. This was when followers of Nick Fuentes (and his show America First) started flooding Turning Point USA events to ask tough questions about immigration, race, and conservatism. I was greatly impressed that there were still young conservatives fighting the good fight — and trying to hold Conservatism, Inc. accountable. I started watching America First religiously.

Mr. Fuentes broke down the barriers in my mind that told me discrimination of any kind was wrong. When I saw the racial statistics of the 2016 election, I knew we had to halt all immigration. Different races do have different cultures, as well as many immutable differences. A thousand little bits of cognitive dissonance and revealing conversations I had had in the last five years were suddenly all making sense. The Western Culture I so desperately wanted to protect could be more accurately described as white culture. And only whites can defend and maintain it.

Postscript:

To bring others into the fold of pro-white politics, you must be an opportunist. You must look for people who are disillusioned with politics and confused by the demands of anti-white provocateurs. Once people start questioning why they should be ashamed of their racial heritage, it’s quite simple to refer them to AmRen, Vox Day, or any number of pro-white activists. This will only become easier and easier in the coming days.

If you have a story about how you became racially aware, we’d like to hear it. If it is well written and compelling, we will publish it. Use a pen name, stay under 1,200 words, and send it to us here.