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ymeskhout  7mo ago (text post)   4716 thread views

The Bailey Podcast E036: White Right

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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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Walt has a lot of patience with Tracing.

Tracing chill the fuck out dude

Just an example; “you’re like a communist who still praises Mao”. Walt doesn’t praise Hitler, does he? Nobody expects soft democratic socialists to feel shame about their prior opinions about the bourgeoisie.

Why would I? That tension between his present and his past, and my conflicted thoughts about it, is core to the reason we thought it would be interesting to do a podcast in the first place. We chatted in advance as well and covered some of the same ground; he came in fully aware that it could get combative and was not just amenable to that approach but actively interested in it. Masking my own sentiment towards the alt-right would be a disservice both to him and to listeners. When we moved past that part, I went back to engaging in a milder, more deliberate way, but both have their place.

Walt doesn't praise Hitler, but analogies are just that: analogies. I absolutely would push soft democratic socialists who had histories full of guillotine memes and so forth on those topics in very much the same tone I was pushing Walt. In his own writing, he makes the explicit comparison between himself and liberals who had communist phases, so it's worth exploring that comparison on its own terms.

FWIW, I thought it was fine. Your point was lucid, I appreciated you pushing Walt on the matter, and while you did sound a bit charged, it didn't come off as pointless belligerence to me.

There's a transcript on the Substack page:

And I understand that now you are trying to build a healthier culture, but I think, just like I would say to someone who was a communist back in the day and then softened towards liberalism but still loved their communist phase and still talked about how proud they were about cheering on Mao Zedong and so forth, I would say, no, screw that. Mao Zedong was evil. If you want to join a different side, you have to join a different side.

Analogies are not meant to perfectly map, and Hitler never came up in the discussion.

He took a lot of liberty with that here. He’s also being very emotional while saying this.

And yeah, maybe if Hitler did come up the Mao analogy would have been better.

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