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In this episode, we talk about white nationalism.
Participants: Yassine, Walt Bismarck, TracingWoodgrains.
Links:
Why I'm no longer a White Nationalist (The Walt Right)
The Virulently Unapologetic Racism of "Anti-Racism" (Yassine Meskhout)
Hajnal Line (Wikipedia)
Fall In Line Parody Song (Walt Bismarck)
Richard Spencer's post-Charlottesville tirade (Twitter)
The Metapolitics of Black-White Conflict (The Walt Right)
America Has Black Nationalism, Not Balkanization (Richard Hanania)
Recorded 2024-04-13 | Uploaded 2024-04-14
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Notes -
I'll comment on just one specific point that Walt/Yassine make vis-a-vis Black crime.
Yassine asks - what reason is there (other than just simian hatred of the racial outgroup) to advocate for White interests specifically? As he correctly points out - the end state that Walt wants (a race-blind justice system) doesn't obviously require any appeal to White identity.
He's not quite right - as Walt points out, you can't just do race-blindness without addressing the inevitable racial disparity.
But this still doesn't get us to White Identarianism - the (truthful) explanation for Black crime is simply HBD: Black people commit more crimes because of their genetics.
Walt claims that telling the truth would be politically infeasible. This isn't crazy - there's a reason why HBD isn't discussed in the mainstream (and why it's now called "HBD" instead of a more descriptive term like "racialism")
But to be blunt, Walt's proposal of reparations with strings attatched sounds even more insane and unlikely to work. He understands this won't actually make Blacks happy (very soon all the disparities will re-emerge), but he hopes this will catalyse some kind of spiritual awakening amongst Whites, as now instead of abstract differentials in crime rates, the harm caused by Blacks would be concretely manifested as the yearly "Reparation Tax". Aside from the fact that Affirmative Action basically does this already (and hasn't helped reduce tensions), this just sounds too complex to work (There's a lot of moving parts, and each step of reasoning is only sort-of plausible)
So do we conclude Whites should logically just be "race-realist but not racist"? The problem is that even if we could magically snap our fingers to get to Walt's end-goal - this would still be anti-White.
They both talk about being "harsh on crime" as though this just means we turn up a dial that puts more criminals (a disproportionate amount of whom are Black) into prison. But in practice, enacting any such policy basically has to make general society a lower trust (i.e. worse) place to live in. For some specific examples:
The fact that "inner city" schools have to include this ugly protection with their vending machines
In France, FGM has become a problem To quote the article:
In other words, by simply having Africans exist in France (and adopting an anti-racist ideology), the native French population must now have their young daughters undergo an uncomfortable, embarassing check-up for FGM, despite the fact that this literally never happens for them (I know this is a non-US context, but I think it illustrates the general point quite well)
Now you could reasonably point out that every example I gave is pretty trivial - I mean it's not that hard to lock your bicycle, I doubt the FGM-check is invasive, and a slightly uglified vending machine still produces the same snacks. But all of these little things add up, to make the environment around you feel generally crappy and prison-like, and maybe more importantly, to make you feel worse about yourself (the vending machine protector, the FGM check-up, the bike lock - they're all there because a generic person, like you, cannot be trusted not to do a smash-and-grab, mutilate your daughter, or steal a bike)
To be clear - everything I said only proves that even race-blind policies (as opposed to segregation, a different justice system for different races, ethnic cleansing, etc) would be anti-White. I haven't said anything on what would be moral (even if you're a White Identarian, the interests of Whites wouldn't be the only thing you judge morality on)
Following your argument about Blacks being more likely to be criminals, I think you misspelled Anti-Non-Black, as these policies would affect Asians, Hispanics and Native Americans just as much.
I think you can, and in fact the US criminal justice system mostly does, I would argue. There is no affirmative action in prison, where we sentence the odd Asian criminal to terms ten times longer than e.g. a Black criminal so that the incarceration rates of different races match the population rates. Race-blindness is very different from equality of outcomes. This could be due to HBD, or economics (I am sure poor Whites commit more crimes (in prison-years) than rich Whites), or more exposure to lead during childhood or whatever. While left-wing people might argue that some of the disparate incarceration rates are due to selective enforcement of laws based on skin color, I think that this is not the case for more serious crimes like murder. There might be the odd case of a corrupt police department deciding to frame the odd Black gang member for a murder to increase their clearance rates, but the median murderer you find in prison is there because they did indeed commit a murder.
Another aspect which Walt did not mention is if the HBD crime hypothesis is true, then the biggest victim in all of it is the Black community, because the lion's share of crime is intraracial. I am a utilitarian. I do not particularly care for the race of a rape or murder victim. Most Blacks are not criminals, and they do not deserve to be raped or murdered any more than a white person. Hell, not even criminals do deserve to be raped or murdered.
Take trigger-happy police shooting unarmed Black men. Utilitarianism to the rescue again. What we want to minimize is the number of innocent fatalities from both cops and innocent civilians. So we want to adjust police trigger-happiness to the point where the first derivative of the total death with respect to the trigger-happiness is zero.
Let us assume a two person interaction. A cop stops a car with a civilian. He has a certain level of suspicion that the person in the car might shoot him based on heuristics such as race, type of car, neighborhood etc. If he shoots and is wrong, one innocent (the civilian) dies. If he does not shoot and the civilan shoots him, he dies with some probability q because he is wearing a bullet-proof vest. If p is the Bayesian probability that the civilian will try to shoot him, and f(p) is the probability that he shoots first given that evidence, the total amount of innocent lives lost in the interaction is:
T(f, p) = f(p)(1-p)+q(1-f(p))*p
Then the first derivative is dT/df = (1-p)+q*p
If we set this to zero we get the point p=p0 where we are indifferent between the cop shooting and not shooting. (1-p0)+q*p0 = 0 p0=1/(1+q)
The optimal f(p) would thus be a step function which is zero for pp0.
Crucially, p=p0 is the point where a cop is just as likely to die from not shooting first as shooting an innocent civilian. Most innocents die at this point, the case where p is almost zero (a cop stopping a woman who is shopping with some small kids) or almost one (cops stopping the getaway vehicle of a bank robber) are unlikely to result in the deaths of innocents because a cop made the wrong call with regard to shooting.
I also think it is fair to ask that cops should act in a way which protects their lives not more or less than the lives of innocent civilians. (If you don't want to put your life on the line for civilian lives, get job at Walmart.)
Let us stretch our assumptions a bit and assume that p is roughly constant in frequency in that region of death near p0. (This is kind of a big assumption. It may very well turn out that most cops getting killed in traffic stops are getting killed in events where there is no warning sign and p is one in a thousand, far below p0 which is at least 0.5.)
In that world, a well-calibrated police force would carry as many cops shot by Black men as innocent Black men shot by cops to the morgue from traffic stops. It also provides an excellent incentive structure. If you shoot an innocent, the price is not that that you lose your job or spark race riots or anything, but that your police force will be made to behave less trigger-happy to the point where that will kill one of your fellow cops, maintaining the balance.
Under these circumstances, and with the relevant statistics provided by the police department, I as a proud grey tribe utilitarian would be totally fine with innocents of one race or gender getting more frequently shot than a different race or gender, just as I accept the fact that I am more likely to get shot by a cop when I get stopped at 2am in a run-down car in a bad neighborhood than I am if I get stopped at noon in a upper-middle-class car in a rich neighborhood.
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It's odd that they go round and round on how white identity would sell an anti-crime agenda. It might not on a government level, but there are ways it could work on an individual.
Walt could be clear that being in a subculture where the details and demographics of crime are discussed makes people want to stay in low-crime neighborhoods and be pretty good at predicting which neighborhoods are low-crime. Whether you live in an implicitly white suburb (quite common) or an explicitly white country (the supposed goal of WN), this may be an expression of tribal identity that makes you safer.
There's an issue with white flight, in that it concentrates crime and makes white people feel less responsible for the costs of governing areas they don't want to live in, which includes policing. Leaving the ghetto and then running it as a police state would be an example of the unpleasantness you describe. Imprisoning more people and for longer sentences is certainly the way to get the antisocial fraction out of the way of everyone else.
The cyclical pattern of crime and enforcement has existed about as long as anti-racist narratives have been dominant. We can count the 2010s trough in crime rates as a sort of completing of the cycle, with recent years repeating the mistakes of the 1960s. (Walt mentions in the podcast that it goes back earlier, so likely a reference to Reconstruction and the subsequent "nadir of American race relations.")
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Advocating for race-conscious policies so that racial groups with lower crime rates don't need to deal with the consequences of living in a high-crime environment seems like an extremely narrowly scoped argument. Should men between the ages of 15 and 25 be excluded from low-crime neighborhoods too?
Focusing on race, rather than gender, income, age, or (heck), criminality seems rather odd -- where's the post advocating for banning all felons from your city?
Well, just to take this point by point:
Age segregation occurs in senior communities. These are certainly safe from young people but impose on their residents a requirement not to house kids or younger adults for extended stays. A larger attempt to segregate people away from young men would probably require society to figure out what it intends those young men to do, especially the affluent ones if it is affluent neighborhoods that would shut their doors to that group.
Gender-based segregation is even more difficult due to most family units being composed of people of both genders and various ages. It goes in the niche ideological space of lesbian separatism if practiced consistently, but girls' schools, convents, and other explicitly or de facto female institutions can exist.
Income segregation is real in that zoning can exclude cheap housing while the well-off bid up the prices in exclusive areas. This is the most effective method middle-class people have to avoid crime, but it comes at literal and figurative prices.
Yes, actually, restricting residence in an area by rap sheet would be popular and maximally functional with a minimal impact on everyone who doesn't have a felony on their record.
Racial segregation has precedent (used to be legal) and occurs in part voluntarily due to different lifestyle preferences.
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Very much agree.
One thing that is not talked about, in the context of high black crime. Is how much higher it actually is than the official statistics indicate. Even before BLM and Floyd made policing minor crime in black areas taboos, it already was not emphasized. Black neighborhoods regularly deteriorated into street parties of teens burning garbage and openly drinking and using drugs. Rapes were and are common, and never reported, in these fiery, but mostly peaceful (unironic use of the phrase), street gatherings. The only thing that gets the cops to intervene is a gunshot, where unless they catch a body, the perp is rarely caught.
Now, try to imagine a scene like that happening in a white neighborhood. You can't. 5 cop cars descend on a house in the burbs because its 10 PM and the music is a little loud.
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