Something thats always irked me about the history of Anglo Canadians, particularly in their ethnocultural homeland of Ontario and the Maritimes, is this tendency to reduce themselves to an appendage of somebody else’s empire. It goes without saying that Canada is, was, an Old World nation planted in the New World, a living bridge between two continents. Our British-derived and imperial character has been with us from the beginning. It motivated our separation from the Americans and remained fundamental to our development even as a distinct Anglo Canadian ethnogenesis unfolded, with successive waves of Irish, Scottish, and English settlers being assimilated into the foundations laid by the Loyalists. But this investment in the imperial identity also obscured a nation that emerged beneath it, exacerbating the malaise that allowed the internationalist liberal regime to take root. What so many people forget is that the Loyalists were already meaningfully distinct from both the British and the Americans during the Revolutionary War, in their outlook, social ideals, and the foundations of what would eventually become a separate ethnicity. They are unique in the Anglosphere for having cultivated a counterrevolutionary political tradition, reactionary, paternalistic, and traditionalist in its opposition to the Enlightenment liberalism of the American Revolution and its British Whig equivalents. This is obvious in the views of John Strachan, John Beverley Robinson, John Graves Simcoe, and Frederick Haldimand. Consider the aristocratic ambitions of the early colonial establishment, the desire to fill Ontario with a landed nobility, to reward distinguished military officers and soldiers with great houses, to cultivate a hereditary political order with its own House of Lords. This vision continued in Sir John A.’s vision of a unitary state, a separate kingdom within the empire, a monarch of its own drawn from a cadet branch of the royal house living on Canadian soil. It is this political foundation, combined with the ethnogenesis of the Anglo Canadian people, that makes Anglo Canada so distinct. This is why I have devoted so much of my content and whatever influence I possess to cultivating a national consciousness rooted in that inheritance. Without it Anglo Canadians are condemned to drift into one of two equally miserable delusions. 1. The downward spiral into the postwar liberal republican gravity well of the United States, whose immense cultural influence dissolves whatever remains of an independent Anglo Canadian identity. This is where you get the historically illiterate, rootless slopulists who think they’re nationalists while embracing the American political and cultural assumptions that’ll eventually extinguish their own people as a demographic and historical entity. The second is the tendency to indulge in romantic nostalgia of being the sword of an empire that no longer exists, as though Anglo Canadians were just a colonial garrison awaiting orders from London. An empire that had long since abandoned most of the paternalistic, conservative Tory inheritance of order, corporatism, communitarianism, and nobless oblige that led to its greatness. We should honour our imperial origins, celebrate our ancestors’ service to the Empire, and defend the traditional institutions we inherited from it, but we must do so as a people with our own history, character, and destiny, rather than as some amorphous Anglo diaspora, interchangeable with Americans, Britons, Australians, and New Zealanders just because we share a language and common ancestry. Those of you who have read David Mills and Robert Passfield will understand what I mean when I say that beneath all the bullshit of the last century, the ancient stone foundations of Anglo Canada endure. The Anglo Canadian race persists, like a knight of Arthurian legend sleeping beneath an ancient mountain, awaiting the hour when his people remember his name and summon him once more.