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Notes -
Greg Johnson is the most respectful white nationalist on the internet. Even more than his boss, Jared Taylor, who has a habit of deploying an annoying little giggle and sardonic attitude in many of his interviews. I discovered Greg Johnson through this website and have been reading him on and off.
He has recently written an article entitled "White Advocacy Is for All of Us". I'm not sure I'm smart enough to articulately respond in essay form, but I do want to give my immediate thoughts to some of the points he raises to spur discussion. I apologize this is not more high effort.
As a preface, like others here, I've been immersed in online reactionary politics for years but have not, like our ideological progenitor Scott Alexander, become a reactionary. More on that later.
Excerpts from the article and my thoughts:
We're off to a definitional start, but I'd like to see Johnson define "white" in the American context. For example, does he include mixed-race people? Arab Americans? Are Polish Americans as white as those with German ancestry from North Dakota? Is there an argument to be made that certain non-white Americans are more "white" than certain groups of white Americans?
I'm not sure progressives think much about patriotism in non-white countries, and I don't think many of them admire Israeli patriotism.
A person with citizenship in seven countries is far more secure than an average citizen in a first or second world country because the latter could be completely fucked over by a recession.
I'm sure that a lot more can be said here, but two reasons I think class is often more salient than race are (1) middle class and affluent whites (and blacks) often choose to live around others from the same social class rather even if it means living in a more racially diverse area, and (2) the high rate of intermarriage (look up Indian American women) of non-whites.
"We" is doing a lot of work here. By now, most white Americans are descendants of people who did not found the country, to say nothing of the fact that many non-white people help to sustain it currently.
Complaints about "race mixing" are a dead end for the white nationalist movement, but I guess that goes with the territory. You can't be a white advocate and also be ok with marrying Indians, but they're not going to convince anyone than JD + Usha is anything other than a lovely couple. This is just one of those things that people have moved on from.
Maybe? At least, it's not obvious that affirmative action is more likely to adversely affect a white applicant in 2025 than 2010.
The impetus for this was, among others, this tweet from Chris Rufo: "This is basically “full employment.” The Panda Express near my house is offering $70k/yr plus benefits for the assistant manager. You can make $100k/yr working at Chipotle for a few years and working up to store manager." This...seems reasonable to me? Why is working as a manager and potentially making a very respectable salary of 100k/year a bad idea? The alternative, if one can go to a decent school and is otherwise capable, is working in a traditional white collar profession - accounting, wall street, medicine, law - which I imagine many white men are still doing. And why woouldn't this message from conservatives be equally applicable to blacks and Hispanics? I don't think Rufo is speaking to just white men here.
I don't get the first sentence. Does he mean working a grifter podcaster or something? That's not a viable career path for most. As for the second sentence, making a 100k/year in a managerial position that Johnson believes is low status - supplemented by some income from your spouse - does allow one to marry and buy a house.
I laughed here at the "married to an Asian". It seemed to come from nowhere. But ok, if they shouldn't get jobs at companies that hate them, where should white men work? Is the suggestion to build their own businesses?
I thought this was very interesting and I hadn't seen this is any of the post-election coverage.
An interesting paragraph, but I'm not sure what he's getting at. If the situation really is as dire as he says - rampant anti-white racism, demographic replacement, no jobs for whites - then the Republicans don't even need to campaign for white votes: the overwhelming majority will just vote for them. But given that that isn't happening (Trump lost non-evangelical white working-class voters by eight points!), perhaps it's more complicated and perhaps a lot of whites don't see their problems through the prism of race.
All this begs the question: what exactly does Johnson propose should be done, and why do those things require white identity politics?
Oh, it's you again. Damn cold, makes it harder to focus or I'd have spotted you before you got out of the queue.
I really don't understand the mindset of you and your ilk, though my best guess is that you feel like you have to "win," you absolutely cannot admit you've been made, and so you have to keep coming back again and again because surely this time we won't see through your clever disguise.
The thing serial alts don't understand is that most of them are just... honestly quite terrible at concealing themselves. Their writing style, their obsessions, the way they appear and engage.... they'll try to "disguise" themselves and think they're not giving themselves away, but the thing is, it has almost nothing to do with how smart you are. One guy I knew, on a long-ago forum no one remembers, was probably one of the smartest people I've ever known, but he was also absolutely batshit crazy, got himself banned constantly for being hyper-aggro and possessing zero self control, and he was obsessed with proving he was smarter than the people who kept banning him. He'd sneak back in, over and over and over again, each time as obvious as, well, one who farts in a room, loudly and pungently, and each time he was enraged that he'd get made and banned again.
Uh, what was my point? Sorry, rambling. Like I said, I have a cold.
So anyway, banned. Buh-bye.
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Like the last amren article I read, its the woke right cobbling together a smattering of aborted syllogisms, half-truths, and outright falsities to advance even more identity politics. Its not completely devoid of truth and, especially towards the end, political insight. But on balance it comes off as whining. Whites are, in fact, increasing their real wages. Middle earning whites are dwindling, but only because they're becoming the upper earning whites. I have about as much sympathy for them as I do for laggard blacks: the government should probably help, but get your shit together.
My most pressing current thought is this guy needs to read more history. About 400 years ago, when the requisite technology was fresh, Dutch Jews whose ancestors had recently fled Portugal moved to proto-Brazil, then Surinam, then NYC, chasing state alliances and riches. Most people don't give two fucks about race, even if they think HBD is true.
Massive claim, and almost certainly a waste of thought.
Perhaps, but they are also wasting their time and thoughts. The smart ones overcome this concern and do well on average.
While its true that Progressive definitely scorn it in (jingoistic coded) whites, even reddit regularly vocalizes the inherent racism of modern Japan, let alone Israel.
Such a pessimistic an narrow view of what is possible. However, I think convincing readers that this is true is the point of this rhetoric.
Hysterical whining.
Pure bullshit.
I think this is the nexus of confusion. The author seems to have no idea how prescient, capacious, and wise the founders vision for a future America was, especially for the time.
This is the most deformed aborted fetuses of a syllogism. For one, I blame American Indians for their own regressive attitudes. Yeah, they're a conquered people. So am I, if we push the clock back far enough. Open a casino already. Second, Germany roared back to success post WWII. Its 1% of world population, yet one of the best places to be born. Wow. Such consequences.
I think it depends on the type of identity awareness. There’s definitely a time to be an individual and a time to circle the wagons. The individual can do great things, certainly. But when you’re in electoral politics, ten individuals lose to a group of five if the five acts as a bloc. This is exactly the issue. Whites have been taught that they are evil if they form a voting bloc over their race and racial interests. Other minorities are allowed to do so. And thus when things like DEI are decided, blacks, Hispanics, women and others are there demanding to be included in the program. Whites aren’t there and thus cannot push back even though the entire process is based on removing whites from coveted positions in the workplace and schools to give them to others. Is that working? Are the political needs of whites being considered in these programs?
But if you entertain one groups racial grievances you have to entertain all groups racial grievances. That door gets shoved wide open. Yes, in more recent times some whites have been vilified and discriminated against in some awful cases. Welcome to the club. Now lets slam that door in Ibram Kendis face, dismantle such programs (as Trump recent initiated), and move towards a legally colorblind, merit based society. Organizing around race mistakes the map for the territory in most cases. The political needs of whites aren't inherent to them being white. Not all whites are equally susceptible to opioid addiction or welfare dependency. Whiteness certainly doesn't explain who those people are. And whoever they are, they have agency and thus responsibility. Government help is not out of the question, but skin color is a bad heuristic. And keep in mind that all this grievance is in the face of increasingly median prosperity, while bring the most decisive voting block, over-represented in positions of power.
Because we aren’t there and are rapidly running in the opposite direction. In 1990 we could have more or less said something like that without a problem. But as it sits today, the racial, sexual, and gender groups are much larger and stronger with more group cohesion than ever before. To ignore this simply means choosing not to have your political interests matter. Nobody cared about the problems of poor whites until said poor whites began to organize themselves into the alt-right movement and other similar groups. Nobody cared what white men wanted until they began to see themselves as a group that has needs and has every right to get those needs met. Nobody worried about what Christians wanted until they started uniting around the ideas of Christian nationalism.
Once it became clear that whites were going to demand that DEI stop, sure people started paying attention to it. Before that point, it was taken as a given that since blacks were watching and voted as a group, that it was politically wise to make sure to not anger the Black vote because they vote as a block.
Unilateral disarmament is quite simply deciding to lose on principle.
And what you are saying is that we should run faster?
That instead of pushing back against the identitarian left we should instead embrace thier values as our own?
Sounds to me like it's you who is pushing for "unilateral disarmament", not @justmotteingaround.
I disagree simply because we are and have been running in the direction of more identity politics rather than less. Trump might well represent a step away from that, but for how long? If we start back up again, will not being at the table be good? When blacks are allowed to get boosts from the government as minority owned businesses, in a downturn, why does it make sense that white owned businesses can’t say anything about the government choosing those businesses when everyone needs work?
And you believe that this is a good thing?
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And I oppose continued running in that opposite direction. In the data, the groups are getting smaller in absolute terms, although they may be forming larger and more robust coalitions (around identity characteristics, which I obviously oppose). That trump made historic gains with minorities shows that its not an insuperable boundary. Urban/rural, BA/no-degree, costal/center, religious, and economic categories usually show a wider disparity than almost all identity labels. This is the norm for all of US history. North/south, and urban/rural divides go back to de Tocqueville, and arguably back 14th century Irish cracker culture, which would appear in the American south. Over the past few decades blacks have probably lost more than they've gained from in-group and party loyalties. I don't wish that on anyone. But having been governed under wildly disparate laws for centuries, this at least made sense. And even then only for a handful of decades.
People of every political persuasion have long cared about poor whites by dint of caring about poor people generally. Both black and white poors have often been derided in the culture, but those hurt feelings don't beggar a policy response. As far back as 1900 there were assistance programs for poor, disproportionally white Southerners which they often pridefully rejected (talking about hookworm eradication here). Blacks were often squeezed out of such assistance (their current welfare dependency notwithstanding). More recently, technology led to globalization, which hurt specific, largely white, regions. Industrial and trade policy should care just as much about the blacks in Detroit as the whites in Appalachia. Both got screwed. Otherwise you necessarily invite useless arguments over relative privation, apparently extending all the way to 1619. Its lunacy.
My advice to black America has long been "Yeah, you got historically screwed. But rest assured, help is very much not on its way. Therefore, just copy Asians where possible." Its no different for whites. There was a brief window where idpol achieved something useful. Trump rescinding Johnsons EO is good precisely because the policy has been bassackwards for decades. The territory is that certain people need specific policy to serve their interests. This is normal. But race is a bad map.
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Binding dictionary definitions are pointless here. Normal human beings can make a judgement with human wisdom on whether someone is white. You can look at their physiognomy (African Albinos aren't really what we mean by white), their skin colour, their diction, dress, language, bearing... You can distinguish ultra-white 'I love Trollope novels' Jared Taylor from the kind of youth seen here: https://x.com/MythoYookay/status/1882007121266717151
You can judge a continuum of whiteness between the Swiss watchmaker types to the Tibetan tribesmen or Amazonian indigenous tribes. People might disagree on the ranking and the metric but there will still be a spectrum. And because language can't handle continuous spectrums very well, we use words like red, green, yellow and white not as rigid formal tools but to gesture at a cluster of properties.
No they are not pointless, and any one who sincerely desires a system of "white advocacy" is going to have to grapple with that fact for all the reasons @Hoffmeister25 lays out below.
We live in a world where nobody outside of academia and weird autists pays any attention to physiognomy. When people like Taylor Lorenz, Nancy Pelosi, or Karen from the Atlantic talk about dismantling white privilege they aren't talking about dismantling thier own privilege, they're talking about dismantling the privilege of a certain sort. The sort who isn't with the program, the sort who likes sports and country music more than he should, the sort who will put cheese and steak sauce on everything but wont put his pronouns in his email. It turns out that the catagory of "white" includes a lot of blacks which is how a this man ended up as "the face of white supremacy" on the West coast despite being darker than most of the youths in your picture.
Nancy Pelosi is white and finds political advantage in being against white privilege. Joe Biden for instance used to say 'we already have a nigger mayor, we don't need any more nigger bigshots' and 'I don't want my kids to grow up in a racial jungle'. He now talks about how it's great that the US is going to be minority white, how 'it's the source of our strength'... These people sway with the wind. Their words don't necessarily have any sincerity behind them. They say what they think will help them (or what they are given to say).
The existence of defectors doesn't disprove the existence of groups.
Anyway, HR doesn't need to come up with a foolproof definition of white or Asian or diversity if they want more diversity. They just do it. In Australia there are statutory declarations of aboriginality that people need to get affirmative action jobs. But no such thing is strictly necessary. There is no definition of 'culturally and linguistically diverse people', the unwieldy phrase positively defies definition. Yet it works. And so does white, for the very same reason.
You're missing my point. Race in the US is not a physical phenomenon it is a cultural one. We all recognize this on some level which is how people like Pelosi are able to talk about "whites" without including themselves or refer to Kenti-Jackson as the first "black" supreme court justice without a hint of irony. Its the background assumption behind Biden's bit about how you aren't really black if you vote rebublican. We know that when people talk about "black" they aren't talking about people of sub-Saharan ancestry, they're talking a bout a specific sort. Do you follow?
Black is both physical-genetic AND cultural but the genetic level is most important.
You can be ethnically white and act in the most black ways, that makes you less white than you would otherwise be in a holistic sense. But even so, you wouldn't become black. Elizabeth Warren isn't Native American even if she does a few rituals, whereas an actual genetically native american who acts like Elizabeth Warren could still be native american. People might say 'she's not acting like a native american' because she has all this money and poise and prestige and a certain kind of status.
The specific 'sort' you're talking about are MORE black than other blacks but other blacks are still black. Joe Biden is talking about precisely this, he means 'you're not acting black as you should be' if you vote Republican. But voting Republican doesn't automatically make you white, they still get classified as black Republican voters.
Likewise certain east-asians (Koreans and Japanese) are more white than others, so they don't get as much affirmative action and people call them model minorities. But they're not fully white, just more white.
Not to the vast majority of Americans it is not. That is my point.
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I have literally never heard anybody do this, because no matter what anyone thinks of Clarence Thomas, Thurgood Marshall preceded him on the Court by more than twenty years.
Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, and multiple mainstream news outlets have all referred to her as such at one time or another. Most recently NBC and the Huffington Post when reporting on the big necklace she wore to the Inauguration. Im still not clear on why exactly the necklace was newsworthy but there you go.
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IIRC, several journalists have made this error. Example
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I would suggest to the white nationalists that, within their own framework, right now is precisely the correct time for white nationalists to quietly disappear.
Look, I am not going to pretend to be on the same team as the white nationalists. I do think that it's pretty bad that white people were and are being discriminated against for being white (let's set aside the rabbit hole of how far freedom of association should go for a minute). And inasmuch as that was bad, even if I am skeptical of racial identity politics, I can at least understand the desire to form an ethnic coalition, to pursue a sort of perceived counterweight to other ethnic groups. Defection, game theory, and all that. But with the Latest Developments it seems likely that discrimination against white people may be on the wane. Inasmuch as whites as a group have any interest, if you think that whites perform adequately in a meritocracy, (which I think most white nationalists think – and of course I think there are other reasons to favor meritocracy) then the interest of "white people" seems to be to make sure that meritocracy sticks as the law of the land. As such, supporting the new meritocratic norms that the new administration is trying to push is probably more likely to be effective and good for whites than agitating for white nationalism. And since white supremacy was what originally gave cover for discrimination against white people to begin with, I would think it is tactically advantageous for white nationalists to be particularly unthreatening so as to not give ammunition to team anti-meritocracy (that is, assuming the goal of white nationalists is "stuff that is good for white people" writ large.)
And a cynic might be inclined to believe that this is precisely why they won't.
The sudden signal-boosting of voices claiming that "in order to defeat wokism we must embrace wokism" in the wake of Trump's win reeks of left-wing entryism/controled opposition.
I don't follow the white nationalist types very closely but uh didn't some of them also endorse Biden? Which doesn't exactly beat the controlled opposition allegations – in fact it's so cute that it kinda makes me less likely to think it's (literally) controlled opposition because it's so on the nose.
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If someone suggests that their opponent do, for their own good, something which straightforwardly harms them, it's probably concern trolling or motivated reasoning.
This might not be good for white nationalists (although I suspect in many cases it actually would be) but if the white nationalists are willing to put what's good for white nationalists ahead of what's good for white people then what is the good of white nationalists?
Of course you could argue that this is a principal/agent problem that exists in all political parties and...yes! And political parties (should) get punished by their constituents when they ignore their constituents' interests. To the extent that "white people" are the constituents of "white nationalists" (which in reality is very much not the case) then my argument is that they are arguably staring down the barrel of a principal/agent problem, inasmuch as (waiving objections for the sake of argument, here) to whatever extent that what identity politics ("white nationalism") was an asset for the constituents under an identity-politics regime, it has now become an increased liability under a more meritocratic regime.
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I suppose that begs the question, do you sincerely believe in the superiority of the white man or do you not?
Because if you do, a truly colorblind meritocracy will get you 90% of what you say you want for free, as the cream naturally rises to the top. Sure the occasional woman or Negro may rise to power on thier own merits but that is hardly a insoluble problem, and arguably not really a problem at all.
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So people who want one thing (promote white interests, whatever the details), and after years and decades of being pushed back and marginalized, should stop pursuing their goal the moment they make the slightest gains in order to promote a completely different goal (promote meritocracy) that might align with their goal? Because the procedural outcomes might favor them...assuming that nobody ever screws with the procedures again, as has been done for last half-century, and is still being done, and has only begun to be rolled back in any way at all practically yesterday? Where we still don't know whether even those minute rollbacks will stick?
I'm glad you said
because otherwise it'd smell of bad faith. This way it's just...enlightened self-interest? You just want the white nationalists to quit, period, and any argument can be a soldier. It's fine, mind you. It's fine.
These gains were made, at least overtly, by the color-blind crowd like Elon and Rufo. Which – if the argument is "well this happened because the gigachad white nationalists are good at pushing for white interests but it had to be cloaked in the guise of meritocracy so it doesn't spook normies" again I would just suggest that white nationalists just convert into being color-blind meritocrats, since clearly that's actually politically possible to make inroads that way and apparently also in white interests and it's unclear what added value white nationalism brings to the table.
Now – maybe it would be bad for white nationalists to lie about their views (even if you think their views are bad, maybe it does damage to the soul to lie) but it probably doesn't do any damage to the soul to not make big splashy protests or give juicy quotes to journalists and the like. And (this is probably what I should have led with, in the other post) if one was pushed towards white nationalism as a reaction to some very bad strains of anti-white sentiment, now is exactly the time to rethink that and get behind a framework that is more meritocratic and more color-blind.
Now – definitely true that any argument can be a soldier. But am I wrong that color-blind meritocracy is the winning issue here, not white nationalism? And am I wrong that actual white nationalism is politically impossible in the United States of America (100% seriously, I think white nationalists would be engaged in a vastly less quixotic quest if they started preparing now to found a whites-only space colony in an O'Neill cylinder).
My concern here is two-fold: I don't want people to think "oh look white nationalism is ascendent" because color-blind meritocracy is ascendent and then explode all the good potential that color-blind meritocracy could unlock. And I think that people who are tempted by identity politics can aim higher.
Fair.
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That assumes the purpose of white nationalism is to fight anti-white discrimination rather than what their name actually says: establishing a white ethnonation. That's a terrible pipe dream of pipe dreams, but "we're just here to fight against discrimination against our in-group" is the motte, not the bailey, and it's not truly the central goal they want to accomplish. If you take their actual goals seriously, then now is actually the time to become louder: the broader political coalition they like is gaining power and implementing goals they approve of, so they have momentum.
Yes, I think you're right about this (and I'm a bit stupid for not taking the name more seriously). But on the other hand, if my argument about what is good for white people in the United States is correct, it's helpful to clarify that what white nationalists want might diverge from what is good for white people.
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Right, you’re just posting random far right blogs… as an opponent…
You think it's that guy again?
No, it’s dozens of feeble-minded liberals trawling far right websites to post the worst rebuttals in the world on new accounts one after the other. Of course it’s him.
I mean, what if...?
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It’s obviously that guy and I still don’t understand the motivation. Why doesn’t he just explain?
I guess I'll reply here rather than to OP.
No, not "that guy", but if you tell me who that guy is I can maybe provide a more substantive rebuttal.
Explain my post? Sure - I'm interested in dissident politics, despite myself not aligning with the alt-right. I like The Motte because quite a few people have this same proclivity and so I can give my thoughts on these things and get feedback on whether I'm thinking through things correctly.
This particular topic - white nationalism - interests me because I try to understand why there are white people (some who are demonstrably less "white" than me) who feel a natural solidarity with other white Americans to the extent that they, in the words of Gregory Hood, see them as their "family". I can understand Polish solidarity and German solidarity and Irish solidarity in the American context, but not white solidarity.
Come on, are we really supposed to believe that every new account with only a few past comments that makes a post about some dissident right current thing, from the perspective of a liberal, who definitely disagrees with the thing he's posting, and that always writes with the same tone, are all unrelated? This doesn't happen for any other topic.
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I’m not sure how “race realist” or even “Christian realist” I am. I will say that both groups desperately need an equal seat at the table. This is just simply survival. If the privileges and benefits of civilization are being handed out and you aren’t there, you don’t get any. And being in the majority doesn’t make up for not being at the table. And whites and Christians up until very recently were the ones who told themselves and others in their camps that even thinking about trying to get a seat at the table was horrifically bigoted. This lead to the current open season n both.
You can say the most horrible slanders against whites— they’re monsters, the6 hate everyone who isn’t white, their white cops can’t wait to gun down black people. Likewise, you can say all kinds of terrible things about Christians. They’re backward, stupid, violent, hateful, stubborn. Trying saying anything like that about Islam or Judaism. Try telling people that a religion that forces kids to stay inside a burning school because they don’t have a hijab on is backward, and people will rush to the defense of Islam. Tell them that a religion that won’t allow phones capable of going to certain websites and they’ll defend Orthodox Judaism. Let them hear that Christians don’t want their kids taught trans and queer studies in elementary schools, and it’s all terrible bigotry. Neither group had a seat at the table. And it’s pretty much open season.
Last I checked, progressives were pretty upset about the mutaween and didn't like hasidic judaism when they bothered to think about it.
Look, I think these religions are evil, if not quite as evil as progressivism. I laughed my ass off at the mohammedans who got shot at the mohammed drawing competition and complain at the subsidies for orthodox judaism in a way I don't at the carve outs for the amish. But the idea that progressives are pro-these things as opposed to afraid of criticizing them, and inaccurately believing that Christianity is the same thing for not wanting to bake gay wedding cakes and all that, seems pretty far out.
Progressives are explicitly pro-Islam. They just redefine Islam to be ONLY GOOD THINGS and blame the bad bits of Islam,. Pakistanis systemically raping white children under the encouragement of Imams urging womb jihad, ISIS committing barbarities against other muslims, rmass public sexual assault in Cologne and Tahir square against women (insert endless examples); all of these things are Bad Western Values that innocent muslims absorbed due to the trauma of colonialism and the crusades.
The easy way to see this is observe the media commentary following muslim terrorist attacks in the 2010zs. The Guardian, Slate, Salon, NYT... they all had think pieces about how ISIS was not true Islam, that true Islam was peaceful and should be supported, that all these terrible things were due to the trauma of colonialism. There were even puff pieces about how the Pulse nightclub shooting was not done out of the shooters own declared islamist motives but instead due to his internalized homophobia, and after the manchester bombings there were endless articles about how muslim cab drivers rallied to give free rides to the hospitals for victims, which is particularly funny since it was sikh cabbies who did that.
Contrast that with anything involving a white mass shooter, where active efforts are made to highlight the christian or white character of the shooter, which is normally easy since the Christchurch shooter and Brevik all published their manifestos. Yet Christians have sufficient agency to act on their own declared words, but muslims who kill the kuffR after stating which passages in the quran they are following are simply misled by the depth of their trauma.
Progressives are explicitly pro-Islam, and make every effort possible to whitewash the efforts of muslims themselves to get their intentions publicised. To an extent I will grant that progressives are pro-Islam only out of reflexive opposition to Whites and Christians, but even that was starting to fade as a justicication in the late 2010s, with progressives being pro-Islam without even mentioning Christianity as an opposing point.
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The article you’ve linked is by Gregory Hood — real name Kevin DiAnna, also known as James Kirkpatrick on Twitter — not by Greg Johnson. Greg Johnson is the founder of Counter-Currents, a different white nationalist website. Hood is certainly not anywhere near as respectable or genteel as Taylor; his speeches and podcast appearances are bombastic and full of vitriol and sarcasm. His affect — fashy haircut, explicit pagan beliefs, pugnacious New Jersey street-brawler physiognomy — certainly triggers people’s Neo-Nazi alarms in a way that Jared Taylor never has. It’s odd to present him as the new face of “respectable” white nationalism; Taylor is clearly grooming Hood as his successor as head of American Renaissance, and I expect the tone of its website and conferences to evolve in a direction more suited for the extremely-online Right of the 21st century.
As for the essay itself, I agree with you that it represents an ideological dead end. Blanket opposition to race-mixing is an archaic position which is profoundly unappealing to the vast majority of Americans, white or otherwise. (Wariness about black-white pairings is still a fairly common, if unspoken and subconscious, position, but it cannot be spoken about explicitly at this time.) Telling brainy white guys that they can’t be with cute Asian girls, or working-class white women that they can’t be with dark-and-handsome mestizo guys, is the easiest way to repel them from your movement.
As with much of Hood’s work, it is explicitly designed as a piece of propaganda; it exaggerates and simplifies very complex phenomena in order to craft a narrative convenient for his policy goals. He developed a knack for this style while working in mainstream conservative media. I don’t think he’s a grifter — he has always struck me as sincerely committed, and obviously being the second banana at a deplatformed white nationalist website is nobody’s idea of a lucrative sinecure — but he knows how to selectively massage issues in a way that’s favorable to his preferred message.
As for the nuances you bring up about who counts as white, Hood has hinted many times that he has a sort of esoteric spiritual approach to racial identity. He seems to believe in a sort of collective, vaguely supernatural model of race. The sort of materialist PCA-chart-informed scientistic view of race advocated by @SecureSignals below would be seen as useful by Hood only insofar as it can be used to launder his more esoteric beliefs into a legible and exportable framework. He cares about his volk, and he has explicitly advocated a worldwide cross-national white imperium. (In this, he differs from the man for whom you mistook him, Greg Johnson, who advocates a more decentralized small-nation model.) He doesn’t actually believe that white nationalism is “for everyone”, because he’s genuinely not concerned about the welfare of non-whites except in the most trivial and perfunctory way.
This is extremely common among the working class, usually phrased as 'you know they're all alcoholics who'll beat and cheat on you'.
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Sorry, yes, Greg Johnson is the other guy. Counter-Currents and Johnson are far more incendiary, so it's a bad mistake to make.
Looking at the speech you linked, I agree that as a public figure, Hood is more off-putting as the face of the white nationalist movement than Taylor, but I maintain that Taylor is not nearly as respectable as his fans like to think he is. In the interviews I've seen, he's often annoyingly sardonic, peddles in racial stereotypes that would alienate most people, and prone to snickering as a way to communicate that he is clearly right and his opponents are clearly wrong.
This is an aside, but I've always wondered how these guys make enough money to support themselves and a family.
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For what it's worth I always found him and others to be more like opportunists who capitalized on a movement for personal gain/branding. Anti-DEI does not mean pro-white. I guess better to learn this later than never.
looking to politicians or gurus is the problem. Better to focus on building personal wealth, starting families, and so on. No one ifs gonna throw you a lifeline . As far as the GOP is concerned, losing some White evangelicals is a worthwhile tradeoff if it means getting more votes elsewhere.
Rufo seems like a very capable operator. I think it's a mistake to write him off as a grifter, even if you don't like him.
Being a capable operator doesn't exlude someone from the category of "grifter" the most successful grifters often are quite capable.
It seems to me a grifter is someone who is pretending to be effective to get money – they might be effective at getting money, but what makes them a grifter is that they over-promise and under-deliver. I am not a Rufo Expert, but from what I've seen, Rufo actually delivers.
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Minor nitpick, but
AFAICT progressives oppose Israeli patriotism precisely because they think of Israel as a white (hence settler-colonialist, oppressor) country.
I don't think progressives are particularly favourable towards patriotism in non-white countries either. The whole "indigenous people" thang is about encouraging members of certain special ethnic groups to see themselves as loyal to their ethnic group, not the non-white-ruled sovereign state they live in. On the rare occasions when Western progressives stop to think about Japanese patriotism, they get the garlic and holy water out and start worrying about whether Japanese patriots are sufficiently apologetic for raping Chinese women in WW2. On the one occasion I have seen a Western progressive notice that Thai patriotism was a thing, they rejected it as atavistic and oppressive.
Although I think the best example of progs rejecting 3rd-world patriotism is Marvel's Black Panther. T'Challa's job is to convince the Wakandans to reject Wakandan patriotism and adopt a pan-Africanist mindset, with a particular focus on the "Africans" who the rest of the world sees as Black Americans.
In general, the point is that wokestupid thinks that non-whites are supposed to be loyal to ethnic groups, not countries, which isn't what patriotism means.
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Yeah, this and the Usha portion of things highlights that while he may be unfailingly polite, I simply have no interest in allying with guys like Johnson. I can somewhat understand their angle when we're thinking about long-term ethnostates or some hypothetical land, but that's not where I live and it's not a way I would want to live. For Johnson, this does seem to mark them as traitors of some sort, but this just not how anyone I know lives or thinks about the world around them. Rufo, Vance, Zuckerberg... take your pick, these guys all seem to have pleasant families that should be considered the conservative ideal. Ultimately, most white people just don't share the sort of crass racism that's bubbling just under the surface of Johnson's niceties and when he shows it hand, it alienates them.
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Going off of memory here, but I think as a simple baseline White Women have the highest levels of endogamy compared to other races. It is not a dead-end to provide social or ideological signals to retain, promote, or strengthen that behavior. Judaism does this, although exogamy among Jews is and basically always has been one of their chief concerns, event their current level of endogamy given their small population pool relative to the population is proof of very strong social pressure for endogamy.
It certainly isn't a dead end- anywhere in the world. There needs to be a subtle or esoteric celebration of or pressure for endogamy.
The subtle and esoteric approach is better not only because it's more effective because it does incorporate more people into the fold.
Let's suppose that Trumpism is succeeded by "Vanceism" and there are going to be some major radical reforms to the Right Wing movement. I don't think Vance would oppose elements of a new Right Wing culture that esoterically promote White endogamy just because he married an Indian, in the same way I bet Jews who marry non-Jews are still more sympathetic to the Jewish effort for promoting endogamy. Does anybody think Jared Kushner is opposed to Jewish endogamy just because he married outside? Of course not.
The title "White Advocacy Is for All of Us" is an interesting one, but an Inclusive White Nationalist movement is not as contradictory as it sounds. Think of how strong the support of non-Jews is for Jewish nationalism- Zionism is for Everyone. The cultural and political levers that have accomplished that feat are available to White people as well if they learn how to use them.
Edit:
I always find this question to be pretty dishonest because it's never invoked for the advocacy of any other ethnic group. It's only when somebody talks about White Advocacy that everyone pretends they don't know what White is.
Just like "who is Black" or "who is Jewish" would be complicated if you drilled down to the nitty-gritty and tried to provide a comprehensive racial categorization, you just need to look at a PCA plot of human genes to quite clearly see where a "white person" belongs. White Nationalists will even crassly tap the PCA plots when others try to invoke ambiguity over who the Aryans were for example. Even the Nazis had a fairly comprehensive definition of "Aryan" that included all of the identified "six races of Europe" Nordic, Falish, Western, East-Baltic, Eastern, Dinaric as Aryan, and their own map of Europe is remarkably consistent with modern genetic clustering within Europe.
It's simply not a huge obstacle to White Advocacy, you can put the borderline cases in either category, just like the NAACP isn't crippled by being able to unambiguously identify the classification of every single person as black or not black. It's not some intractable problem.
Many White Nationalists do acknowledge racial differentiation within White people, so did the Nazis to various extents. The most common strain is Nordicism, which was held by some Nazi theorists but rejected by Hitler because he wanted to avoided causing racial conflict within Germans who are stratified among different European races. Point being, even Hitler understood "German" as a mixed-race concept, which many people don't know- although all the constituent races were considered Aryan.
The intermarriage rate among secular Jews in the US, which now approaches 70%, exceeds that of other small religious/ethnic population groups, like the Mormons. Yes, their smaller population explains some of the intermarriage, but it doesn't explain why it's so high.
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Jews are 2.4% of the American population, 58% endogamy among American Jews is proof of an enormous social pressure for endogamy among Jews.
It’s 72 percent in recent years for exogamy among the non orthodox so that social pressure is rapidly waning. at that rate in two generations they no longer effectively exist, they’re essentially white like any other group at least genetically. You’ll only have Orthodox Jews left to hate on at that point.
Only 9 percent of American Jews are orthodox although with their birth rate it will expand very rapidly
Jews who identify less as Jews are less likely to be endogamous. This just illustrates how idealistic things like "identity" actually do influence the breeding behavior of people, and why promotion of identity among White people is not a dead-end to promoting endogamy among White people.
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Not necessarily, because very few American Jews live somewhere they’re 2.4% of the population.
Jews choosing to live among other Jews would be an endogenous factor, sure. But it's a factor that is itself explained by the phenomenon of Group Identity and ideology directing breeding behavior. And even if you adjusted that for certain communities the level of endogamy among Jews is impossible to explain by chance. I know you bemoan it is even as low as it is (!), but it's certainly not a dead-end issue.
It’s quite high in a general sense and has risen rapidly. In addition I don’t think you can discount that it’s likely gentile white subgroups still marry endogamously at much higher than random rates, for religious and/or regional and local demographic reasons. Irish and Italian in-marriage was still quite high until the latter third of the 20th century, particularly in urban areas on the East Coast.
If you take a modal PMC white (well, you know what I mean) Jewish person in their late 20s trying to find a spouse in Manhattan, for example, it’s likely that even someone with no serious ethnic or religious preference would find a substantial proportion of their dating pool was Jewish or half-Jewish at this point. Most American Jews are substantially more likely to intermarry than Muslim, black, Mormon and many other American tribes. To me, this doesn’t reflect a very strong ethnic presence; British Pakistanis manage to have 95%+ endogamy despite making up only a few percent of the population, so it’s not as if it’s actually hard for truly ethnocentric groups to restrict out-marriage. High rates of Jewish intermarriage therefore likely reflect a degree of actual rejection of hardline ethnic chauvinism among a substantial proportion of the American Jewish population, since a substantial proportion of those unions will result in children who aren’t Jewish according to Halacha and will have little Jewish identity.
I think you misunderstood my point, I do think that gentile white subgroups are naturally endogamous and that was my point. It's not a "dead-end" when it's something they seem inclined to do anyway, even with the apparatus of propaganda being optimized to try to discredit the natural tendencies that are associated with the pattern of behavior.
My point was that I don't think promoting endogamy among white people is at all a dead end; even after decades of promoting exogamy White Women still prefer White Men. It's certainly not a dead end.
The disparity between "secular" and Orthodox Jews only illustrates the importance of ideology and identity to tuning the level of endogamy. How is it a dead end when the experience of Jews shows how important identity is to the practice?
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This simply isn’t true. For example, during the discussions about reparations which have taken place at both the state and federal levels in the U.S. over the last few years, a major undercurrent is the desire to avoid having to face the inevitable controversy over who counts as “black” for the purposes of reparations. Are they only for descendants of American slaves? Could they be offered to descendants of slaves from, say, Caribbean countries? (Even though those slaves were never the property of Americans, but rather other colonial powers?) What about African immigrants, or the descendants of African immigrants who were never enslaved? (Could some wealthy second-generation Igbo-American get the same reparations check as a sixth-generation ADOS person?) And then how mixed-race could somebody be — How diluted can their black ancestry be? How white-passing? — before they no longer make the cut for the reparations check?
These are going to be very live and very sensitive issues if reparations ever become a serious policy proposal at the national level. It’ll become very clear how non-unified people of African ancestry in America are, once it’s no longer politically expedient to present a veneer of solidarity.
Reparations as a policy fails on so many fronts it's useless to point to as an example of political advocacy being made impossible or impractical by ambiguous cases of group identity. As you noted, the controversy isn't even who is "black" it is who is owed reparations and who is not. All of those groups are considered black for the purposes of political advocacy, but when assessing damages to some perceived harm that is a different entirely question. It's also just not a popular policy, a lot of Americans do not like handouts. Also, if we made an attempt to objectively settle the financial costs of harms caused by social relations between blacks and whites, then certainly the reparations would be owed to White people and not the other way around.
I don’t think you addressed the core of my point. I’m saying that the extent to which a given racial group has common interests worth coordinating around is extremely context-dependent. White advocacy potentially makes sense in a context in which white people are being systematically acted against, regardless of a given white person’s other characteristics.
To some extent, this is true of the current American political context. It does not appear to be remotely applicable to Europe. Hood wants Europeans to coalesce around a shared supranational White identity, but the current political and racial conditions in Europe simply do not seem conducive to this. Whites are not under attack as whites in Europe. There is nothing like the DEI edifice, the mass affirmative action disfavoring whites, etc. If current demographic trends persist in Europe, that could certainly change, but as of right now there is no strong external pressure compelling Europeans to defensively adopt a shared white identity.
The comparison to reparations is instructive, I think, because it reveals the cracks in the “black” racial coalition. When blacks feel collectively besieged, as though their collective destiny hinges on remaining in solidarity, then “blackness” is a meaningful identity to them. This has certainly been the case throughout the entire history of the black American experience. When things like affirmative action were introduced, it introduced another vector incentivizing blacks to stick together and to adopt a “big tent” understanding of blackness. However, reparations introduce a countervailing incentive: the reparations money is a finite resource, and the more people qualify for it and split the pie, the less each individual black person has to gain. Suddenly solidarity is the wrong approach. Suddenly the question of whether someone like Kamala Harris is black becomes very relevant. The question of whether Obama was black was at one point a live-wire question; once he became elevated as a figure around which blacks could politically coordinate in order to secure power and resources, it ceased being a question. But if he’d been trying to claim a limited resource to which another more “authentically black” person could have credibly laid claim, it would have stayed a potentially divisive issue.
Many whites in America understandably feel that way about the issue of who counts as white. Different camps of whites recognize political sovereignty as a limited resource which cannot be shared between groups of whites with radically different political and cultural sensibilities. There isn’t enough political and economic power to go around, such that every subset of white people gets an acceptably large share. That’s a recipe for division among whites, not solidarity, and people like Hood need to present a compelling case why white people should sacrifice their more local interests in order to secure resources for other whites whom they don’t even like.
Historically, the superordinate European identity wasn't whiteness, it was Christendom. Arguably it still is* - even though few culturally Christian Europeans actually believe in Christ. The near outgroup has historically included Jews, but is mostly physiologically-white Muslims (Albanians, Turks, North African Arabs), and increasingly extends to Muslims in general now that non-white Muslims are here in sufficient numbers. Christian Africa is fargroup, as is anywhere with a non-Abrahamic religion.
Also, critically, the superordinate identity is weak. The people who don't like non-white immigrants mostly don't like Polish immigrants either. If you really want to see British Brexit-supporting xenophobes get their hate on, the preferred target is still Ze Jermans.
* Things get complicated with the FSU and Yugoslavia.
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Obviously it's aspirational. You have the EU- so you already have an ever-growing political and financial integration of European countries, including movement across borders. You have NATO so you have a level of military integration, including major recent developments like Germany remilitarizing and France advocating for closer military ties among European countries.
We are already quite close to Pan-Aryan Imperium simply with the current powers of EU, NATO and growing political and financial integration of Europe. And then you have demographic change which is spurring populist movements in Europe and a racial consciousness. The conditions are absolutely conducive for the fostering of a pan-European racial consciousness or a European unification. But a "White racial consciousness" would be required for European Unification. Unifying Europe is a glorious aspiration, and it's not as impossible as you think.
German Unification seemed impossible for thousands of years, until it happened. American unification was a pie-in-the-sky idea, until it wasn't.
I also reject your notion that whites are not under attack, the demographic changes themselves are ipso facto an attack on White people, and they are increasingly perceiving them as such in Europe. Are White people able to stop or reverse demographic change without racial consciousness? It seems to be required.
An aspirational White identity already exists in the US, so the idea that European people can't just federally integrate into a single country, and then very shortly identify as White is disproven by history. The concept is extremely relevant to Europe.
And yet... there's still a Congressional Black Caucus. And the NAACP. And many, many, many other organizations dedicated to black advocacy. All of these arguments also apply to Jews who often disagree among themselves vehemently.... And yet....
You are just inventing these roadblocks for why White people can't advocate for themselves that do not exist. None of the reasons you are giving for why White people can't organize are unique to the challenges faced by White identity, they apply to all other identities exactly the same and yet those other identities succeed in organizing to project political power, even if it fails in certain silly cases like reparations.
I’m not trying to “invent” reasons why global white racial consciousness can’t become a reality. I’m simply observing that up to this point, it has not happened, and I’m trying to identify the reasons why. I also want a global imperium of sorts, although my vision of it is not limited only to people of European descent. I want to be clear-eyed about what the obstacles to that are.
You are correct to note that European identities are far less insular than they were a few centuries ago, let alone a thousand years. Nearly nobody cares about being a Burgundian, or a Moravian, or a Cornishman; those identities have been subsumed into larger and more inclusive identities. That process could certainly continue to erode petty-nationalist concerns. (Or it could see reversals — see the reawakening of Welsh language and consciousness, or the growing Catalan separatist movement.)
However, there are still very significant and (on a human-historical scale) very fresh wounds of enmity preventing integration of certain white countries into a larger pan-European project. (Russia most obviously, but also in the Balkans.) When I hear a Swede take potshots at a Norwegian, or a Fleming express enmity toward a Walloon, I find it as exasperating and cringeworthy as you do. It’s a bit harder for me to dismiss out of hand a Pole’s or Finn’s suspicions and hypervigilance about Russians. There are still very serious geopolitical tensions and conflicts of interests which seem to present a considerable impediment to full “pan-Aryan imperium”.
Those are two groups of people with a very specific history of persecution and conflict with larger and more powerful ethnic groups, though. Their ethnogenesis was forged in defensive struggle. Whatever you and I think about how much difficulty whites have suffered as a result of the black presence in this country, it’s simply not comparable in any way to racial chattel enslavement. Whites in Europe, even during the headiest days of the Saracen and Mongol invasions, have not suffered collective persecution on the level of the anti-Jewish pogroms. Whites have not had any good reason to assume a collective defensive identity, defined to exclude another more numerous group. Whites were too busy making war on each other.
I’m a big fan of an “aspirational white identity” (although my conception of “whiteness” is considerably broader than yours), and since we’re responding to OP’s post about Gregory Hood, I’ll bring up that Hood has made the point that “America was the original European Union.” In America, people of European descent had at least two distinct outgroups — blacks and Amerindians — against which to contrast themselves. It’s easier to recognize one’s similarities to other whites when they’re thrown into such stark contrast by the existence of a very different Other.
I am desperately hoping that whites, Asians, and other advanced peoples are able to develop a collective consciousness, without needing to first go through our own crucible of collective persecution by a dominant collective enemy. We need to be looking toward the future and projecting out threats which are, at this early stage, mere potentialities, and to start thinking collectively before they become stark realities.
To be clear, this has already happened in the United States, and for the vast majority of the history of the United States until very, very recently. That unification was inspired by the project of empire-building itself, not being victims in some "pogrom", no good civilization was born over identifying as Eternal Victims, and likewise Jewish identification and ethnocentrism was a cause for such progroms as much as the pogroms inspired ethnocentrism.
Collective identity is based on myth and propaganda, as it was in the United States, Rome, the British Empire, Greece, any great civilization, and certainly how it is for the Jews as well. No great civilization was ever built by a race of whiney victim-mongers.
It's another of many liberal precepts you still low-key hold, that in order to form a collective identity you must be a victim to be inspired to act that way. You don't need to be a victim, although I agree you need pressures to motivate the change. The pressures are already here. War with Russia, which has directly motivated greater European military buildup and integration. You have demographic change which is evoking racial backlash all over Europe as well as Canada and the United States. You have the threat of China, the African population bomb, you have Indian migration which judging by the Canadian subreddit has turned the average Canadian into an actual Nazi.
There are plenty of pressures, the project of European integration into a white identity has already happened in the US, and it wasn't based on identifying as some whiney eternal victim, or long-over struggle against the Indians. It's only modern-day liberalism that grants value for identification based on being a victim.
The pressures faced by Europe today are far, far greater than they were during the integration of European immigrants into the United States "white identity". At the turn of the century the country was 85%+ White, with the 15% blacks concentrated in the south and largely segregated. At the turn of the century New York city was 93% White. It's just not true that European integration on the American continent was motivated by blacks or Indians as a common enemy.
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I think that the average white French person - and certainly white Parisian - feels a closer affinity to a second or third generation black French person than they do white Americans. This is more likely to be the true if we're talking about a particularly idiosyncratic American culture, like the deep south, which most Europeans are confused by. And of course, white and black Americans have more in common with each other than they do with their racial counterparts in Europe.
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OK, I don't know what "white" is for this purpose. Is a half-Asian kid white or not? As near as I can tell, they'll get to face the academic discrimination of any other Asian kid if they happen to have inherited Chang as a last name or the same discrimination that a white kid would if they're named Stevens. Culturally, they'll be treated as whitish. This isn't some weird, borderline case that requires adjudication via genetic clustering maps, it's just a common product of the many Asian-white couplings in the United States. That white nationalists would feel the need to dig into the PCA plots to answer the question rather than just saying that they're white enough or that they're actually Asian highlights a reason this project is just not very appealing.
The existence of edge cases doesn't immediately invalidate the usefulness of having separate categories, otherwise we would throw our hands in the air whenever we had to define languages (is this rural Galician dialect Spanish or Portuguese?), colors (where is the boundary between blue and green?), or sections of the electromagnetic spectrum (is this extreme UV or weak X-rays?). If there are ever enough half-Asians to matter, we will get our own box on the census the same way Hispanics do. Either way there are still tens of millions of unambiguously White Americans, and that is who the category is for.
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Since we're in white-nationalist-hypothetical-fantasy-land, why not PCA plots using already existing public genomic data by population? Wouldn't need any digging beyond DNA-testing potential entrants into United Whites of America (UWA), as it sounds like by the hypothetical this white nation would be carved out of the United States.
Nowadays, commercial DNA tests are cheap and contain way more than the precision needed to ascertain someone's white admixture. I doubt US white nationalists would make a hardline about excluding US South and East Asian Americans since there's large compass unity in treating US Asians as white-adjacent, and Asians are only 7% of the US population. Having a country to one-selves that excludes blacks, who are disproportionately net-tax consumers and perpetrators of violent crime (DESPITE... being 12% of the population, 56% and all) and furthermore, latinos (although less damaging on a per capita basis), would be a blessing for white and Asian Americans.
It's mainly West Asians in Europe, the "Pajeet Problem" in Canada, and some generalized Yellow Scare fear, that give white nationalists pause (and persons across the US political aisle pause, for South and East Asians are Acceptable Ethnic Targets [the TvTrope page for which has since been turned to just "Acceptable Targets”]), especially with the 3 billion plus South Asian and East Asian populations at a global scale.
Even a simple two part triangle test could take care of this. First, a triangle test for Central Europeans (CEU), West African (YRI), and Amerindian (AMR) DNA. If you're within, say, 40% of the European node (i.e., 60% white admixture), as defined by a radius or baseball field ranging from the CEU-YRI and the CEU-AMR edge, you're in. This would basically include all US South Asians, but likely leave a lot of US East Asians hanging, as global scale PCAs sometimes have East Asians and Amerindians lumped together. The second triangle test would be between Chinese from Beijing (CHB), YRI, and AMB. If you're within the 40% of the radius of the CHB node, you're in.
So it’d be a matter of political will, not genetics. Most Argentine Americans would make the cut, some Puerto Rican and Colombian Americans would, most Mexican and Central American-descendant would not. East Asian Americans and White-East Asian Hapas would make it in. Such an outcome could be called something like a 60% agreement (damn, I swore I had something for this).
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How are you not even responding to the point I am making you have directly quoted? You can say you don't know what a Black is for the purpose of advocacy, or an Asian is, or what a Jew is. But literally nobody asks that in the face of somebody advocating for those groups. Racial identity is ultimately a political tool, and as such it is functional even with a relatively small portion of ambiguous cases. The ambiguous cases do not stop the ethnic advocacy of any other group of people.
Half-Asians feeling alienated is not a good reason for not having White Advocacy.
Yeah, there's a sort of isolated demand for rigor when it comes to defining "white" in online discussions about hypothetical white advocacy, or just advocacy for less anti-white rhetoric and policies.
In contrast, in real world or hypothetical discourse about giving more racial preferences to blacks and latinos, there's substantially more of a "I know it when I see it" and "let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good" vibe (to the extent such considerations come up at all), an all-gas-no-brakes attitude as to not slow things down by getting bogged down by corner cases and implementation details.
Some of it may be due to constituency, that the type of people willing to discuss—much less advocate for—the interests of white people are cognitively different on average than those who advocate for the interests of blacks and latinos, at least descriptively in the current cultural milieu.
The entire idea of White Advocacy doesn't sit well with people because of the propaganda they've been exposed to their entire lives. So the smarter among them try to dress up that feeling with arguments deconstructing what it means to be White. So they believe their opposition to White Advocacy lies in ambiguity of the concept or rational argument, rather than acknowledging it actually is something they were taught to believe their entire lives- that advocating for White people is a moral wrong and advocating for Jews and non-White people is a moral good.
It doesn't sit well with people not because of "the propaganda" but because identity politics of all stripes is deeply unpopular outside the professional managerial class and (in the US at least) remains closely associated with Marxism and Europe. Two things that are also less than popular.
Identity politics in the popular zietgiest is seen as an ideology for losers who wouldn't make the cut in a honest meritocracy, hence the popular epithet of "Didn't Earn It" applied to all DEI hires.
The way the identitarian right presents itself does them no favors either. What incentive would a sincere American white supremacist straight out of the movies have to associate with low testosterone edgelords chanting "your body my choice" and non-binary cat-girls from Ontario writing Hitler apologia. How does aligning with such losers and degenerates do more to secure a future for his children than aligning with MAGA?
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The example I provided addresses at least part of it directly - I don't know what an Asian is for the purpose of advocacy and I think this has been an obstacle for Asian-Americans that would prefer less discrimination against them.
And yet we have a Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus. And a Congressional Black Caucus. And a Congressional Hispanic Caucus. And a Congressional Native American Caucus. And of course innumerable Jewish advocacy groups. And while all of those are expressions of racial identity formulating political power, you stand on the sidelines pretending to not know what an Asian is. That's your right, but you are wrong to imply that these challenges to are unique to White identity.
And if you admit they are not unique to it, then you've failed to demonstrate why it's politically not possible if it's so politically effective in these other cases.
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How about Ukraine?
Israel is a bad example but I do think the phenomenon is real. There is a weird respect for the nationalism of the other. This is how the Canadian MPs ended up praising an ex-SS.
Progressives pretty strongly commit to not noticing the ideology of the defenders of Ukraine…
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