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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 -
The article by Hanania is genuinely infuriating because while he gets it right that a majority of African-Americans see politics through the lens of race, neither he nor the comments can seem to figure out WHY this is. Instead they just shake their heads and go “man, those Negroes, why are they so unreasonable?”
This is a genuine blind spot amongst the right IMO. Because actually understanding the historical roots of this dynamic that might lead to an actual SOLUTION, would require actually engaging charitably with (dramatic pause)
CRITICAL RACE THEORY!!!
(horror movie thunder sound cue)
Which of course, they won’t do.
Are we not missing the kind of Occam’s razor of reasons here.
Black people are more ethnocentric in their politics because under any other system they consistently come out bottom.
Lots of ethnicities have been aggrieved by discrimination and colonialism but have generally gotten on-board with a racially pluralistic form of politics because they don’t consistently come out on bottom, so the situation isn’t bad for them.
No population is ever going to just admit their worse, therefore there must be a more nefarious reason and the simple solution to that reason is for your population to govern.
This is not to say that the legacy of discrimination does not help justify that lack of trust and resulting governing reason, but it is far from the sole cause.
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Yes, I'm also considering writing a post about (the loss of) trust which imo explains large parts of our current problems. Blacks have lost trust in whites ever since the colonial era's blatant racism, and only ideologies that strongly denounce this past manage to successfully build a coalition with them. The right has lost the trust in public institutions since many of them blatantly push a left-wing agenda, sometimes even above the interests of the institutions they nominally belong to. Center-left people disgruntled with wokeness don't trust the right with power due to the moral majority & McCarthy era and more recently the rights failures to replace laws and institutions they got rid of with functional replacements.
The same is happening on the country level; Russia, after briefly moving towards the west shortly after the fall of the USSR, has lost the trust in the west due to consistent "will never happen -> has already happened, sorry" Nato-creep. China, India and many other non-western ascendent countries feel likewise betrayed by a western attitude they interpret as "we totally tolerate all cultures, except everything about them that's not about exotic food and funny clothes, or else you're a fascist and we'll punish you with sanctions".
The linked Metapolitics... post actually goes into detail about this.
I was delightfully surprised by the Walt Bismarck post. It’s a level of empathy toward blacks you don’t usually see on the “Dissident Right”
The Alt Right was always empathetic to other races, the DR is far meaner and chuddier.
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Critical race theory, as an application of Marxist theory, is essentially a product of white (and Jewish, if you want to separate that out) academics engaging in a project to rehabilitate the post-Stalinist left after the Soviet Union (and Maoist Chinese) economic project failed and orthodox Marxian economics was widely discredited.
It has nothing to do with an inward-facing attempt to understand black people, black identity or black culture. To the extremely limited extent that some black people were involved in early progenitors of what would become critical race theory (and personally I really would push back at the idea that this is what, say, Frantz Fanon is doing, but hey) it was largely about colonialism in Africa and the Caribbean rather than the unique situation that what exists in the modern US.
I don’t think black people are necessarily being ‘unreasonable’ and I think that Hanania would certainly acknowledge that a large contributing factor to the development of a separate, extremely prominent African American identitarianism is the history of slavery and segregation. But the solution doesn’t run through CRT, it revolves around whether this separatism is something the black community wants to change, and even if it is, whether it can.
Well, that’s just the issue right? Defeating black separatism would have to involve a fundamental change in the social dynamics that give rise to seperatism. Namely ghettoization and outcome gaps.
But the central premise of “HBD” is that changing that is basically impossible because we’re just worse than every other group. So I guess we’re just fucked then.
I can't tell if this is trolling or just completely lacking in any empathy and interest in giving a serious response.
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The right has an easy answer to this. The differences are entirely genetic. Low IQ, high criminality, highly prone to violence. There are no such things as “historical roots”. The problem with CRT is it then inflames racial differences and also proposes solutions that only makes things worse. For example it tries to solve genetic differences with social programs like affirmative action. Which eliminates the meritocracy but doesn’t solve the underlying differences.
Hanania also is a hardcore HBD but has stated fairly directly that you really can’t make those arguments in public. Instead he uses dog whistles now. Like arguing for the meritocracy because he views that as a winning political strategy while using his more direct logic for those positions is a failing political strategy. Arguing against affirmative action is a failure of a policy because IQ gaps can’t be fixed by going to Harvard is a losing strategy. Arguing for a meritocracy because Asians are on the wrong end of the affirmative action stick is a winning a political strategy.
Black identitarianism / nationalism isn’t a product of HBD lol, plenty of groups have a strong identity and ethnonationalism at all population performance levels.
Black Brazilians are of predominantly the same background as African Americans but have a much less pronounced ethnic identity and nationalism.
(2) isn't good evidence for (1) because Brazil Blacks are much more mixed than American, ditto Brazil Whites.
There is a substantially larger mixed population, but no whiter (in most cases) than those most African-Americans would consider unambiguously black.
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Can someone speak plainly on what I’m getting wrong?
I generally translate CRT to disparate outcomes is proof of racism and we even had a long post in Racism academically being about the same.
I have no problem with black nationalism/identitarism so long as it isn’t code for special access/anti-meritocracy/criminals don’t go to jail.
Being that he specifically cited no-solutions and quoted Hannania I feel like I correctly identified where Hannania’s position is coming from.
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Need to read this: https://newaltright.substack.com/p/the-metapolitics-of-black-white-conflict
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Cute, but it would be easier to believe that attempt at mockery isn't posturing, if everyone in the mainstream didn't flip out when alt-righters apply the exact same theory.
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This is why I support reparations: https://newaltright.substack.com/p/the-pro-white-case-for-reparations
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