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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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Greg Johnson is the most respectful white nationalist on the internet.

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.

or working-class white women that they can’t be with dark-and-handsome mestizo guys

This is extremely common among the working class, usually phrased as 'you know they're all alcoholics who'll beat and cheat on you'.