Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
No bio...
User ID: 732
It may, in fact, be true that we are in a temporary lull as it pertains to concrete and public exercises of woke power. However, I think the great lesson of post-2014 wokeness is that its most enduring victories - the ones that create lasting changes to the legal and cultural infrastructure - are achieved directly after, or in the months following, specific events which get maximally weaponized into a coordinated outrage machine.
Before Michael Brown, the “cops are killing innocent black men for no reason” narrative was just not on the radar of most people; afterward, suddenly this narrative was everywhere, and activists were working every day to locate examples to turn viral, in order to maximize the salience of the narrative and to solidify as many concrete gains - and put as much money into the pockets of activists - as possible. Thousands of new jobs and tentacles of the NGO-industrial complex were generated in that roughly two-year-period - even while support for BLM began steadily declining among white Americans not too long after the initial 2014 spike.
Then, just as that level of support had finally dropped below a certain threshold, and most people had stopped thinking or caring about that narrative, George Floyd happened, and suddenly the outrage machine went right back into full gear and ratcheted everything one step further. The activist class had spent the intervening years quietly laying the scaffolding behind the scenes, waiting for the right viral event to light the fuse that would allow them to spring into coordinated action. Even as most Americans now start to lose interest in the narrative and things start to get pared back slightly from the new 2020 peak, the overall baseline level of power accrued to the activist class still vastly exceeds the old pre-2020 baseline, which was itself vastly larger than the previous pre-2014 baseline.
So, my question to the public who are belatedly starting to rethink things and to push back on the extremes which they themselves were willing to tolerate in the immediate aftermath of that viral event is as follows: Will you have the moral courage and willpower and hard-heartedness the next time a George Floyd level event happens, to say, “I don’t give a fuck”? When the news shows you some incident with horrible optics and constructs an expansive and emotionally-manipulative narrative around it, will you stand firm and reject fundamental elements of that narrative? Will you say, “it’s completely fine that this happened, and we should change nothing about our society to prevent it from happening again”? Or, like the previous times, will you say, “I understand why you’re angry and I agree things need to change, but do you have to be quite so extreme about your response?” If all you can muster is the latter, then you’re allowing another ratchet of the dial one more step to the left and they’re going to claim as much more power as they can before you start to lose interest again.
There is talk on the Dissident Right - I was actually exposed to it initially by James Lindsay, who is himself only a lukewarm member of the DR - that the activist class is quietly laying the groundwork for a “Drag Floyd” or “Trans Floyd”; in other words, the increasingly aggressive pushing of things like Drag Queen Story Hour into as many Red enclaves as possible is a tactic designed to eventually provoke one or more violent responses which can be virally weaponized. Eventually somebody will get radicalized enough to take violent action against one of these drag queens, or one of these doctors who performs sex changes on minors, and that will be just what the outrage machine needed to light the spark. Will the parts of the public who matter be able to hold firm and say, “Well yeah, what did you think was going to happen? Sorry, we’re not interested in another ratchet”? I predict that they will not. That would require much more conviction and unity/clarity of purpose than the Anglosphere public is willing and able to muster. No, we’ll get another massive coordinated action, another permanent power grab, and it’ll take a few years for people to start forgetting about that narrative, during which a new baseline will have been established, from which we will never retreat.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
In the last Culture War Thread, in a very interesting exchange about why white people in America (and the so-called West more broadly) tolerate being constantly denigrated from every corner of the intellectual elite, the always-insightful @FiveHourMarathon had an interesting comment that resonated with me. He finds the grievance-oriented, victim-mindset side of the white identitarian sphere viscerally off-putting and pathetic. Why, he asks, should I be proud to be white, if in fact being white means being weak and crying out for forbearance and mercy from the ascendant coalition of white-hating POCs whose power and vengeful intent increases daily? Why would one choose to identify as a powerless victim, and what appeal would that self-identification have for those well-adjusted, successful, thriving individuals whose allegiance the white race ought to covet most assiduously, especially if it is indeed true that whites’ prospects are at a historic low point? While the downvote totals indicate that his perspective was poorly-received by many of our pro-white posters (for understandable reasons upon which I will touch shortly), I found his comments extremely instructive and worth reflecting on - a splash of bracingly cold water which ought to invigorate those on my side who wake up every day and wonder how white people let ourselves get to this point.
The conversation dovetailed wonderfully with Jared Taylor’s excellent essay, adapted from a speech he gave at a recent American Renaissance conference, in which he delves deep into the historical antecedents of white people’s current malaise. In this essay, Taylor points out that the ethno-masochism which pervades Western elite consciousness is consistent with a more general philosophical framework that has characterized the European psyche for centuries. He illustrates that the individuals who drove many of the most influential social/political reform movements of the last 300 years - from the Jacobins and the abolitionists to the temperance movement - have all demonstrated a fairly consistent psychological phenotype: a sort of Protagonist Syndrome, obsessed with virtue (and particularly with displaying that virtue to other white people) and with uplifting the underdog, and driven by an atavistic hatred of fellow white people who don’t share that same temperament.
In a sense, the leftist psyche - and, as a former committed leftie, I think I understand this temperament pretty well, and am still an example of it in many ways - is an extension of the “Faustian spirit” that many right-wingers love to attribute to European Man. In this telling of history, the most important defining characteristic of the European soul is its driving need to conquer, to transform, to bend nature to one’s own ends. This boundless desire for conquest drove the great achievements of Western man - from conquering the globe, to unlocking the secrets of wielding nature’s forces to our own benefit, to curing disease, to landing on the moon - but I think it also drives the leftist desire to transform humanity itself. To improve humanity from its basic, crude, unworked Hobbesian “state of nature” and to unlock its true potential. Hermetic alchemy applied to the human spirit - never accepting limits, never taking “that’s just the way things are” as an answer, always believing that we can keep pushing the limits of what is possible. Combine this with an almost pathological altruism, the anguish one feels when contemplating the plight of the downtrodden, and it’s very easy to see why Faustian man is so driven to “correct” the obviously-unjust vicissitudes of random chance that have produced the current distribution of human fortunes.
I know that I personally still feel deeply this instinctive sympathy for the underdog. It’s so ingrained in our national psyche that it’s incredibly difficult to overcome it. It has characterized my experience as a sports fan, and it was a major formative element of my self-conception as a college progressive. Wresting myself out of that mental framework as I’ve drifted rightward has been, and in some ways still continues to be, a psychologically disorienting experience. On the one hand, the recognition that unequal distribution of talent and fortune is an unalterable fact of reality, baked into the human spirit, is a bedrock element of the right-wing worldview. Hierarchy is right and proper, and the strong and capable shall always prosper while the weak and mediocre will always vainly envy them. On the other hand, this offends Faustian man’s innate sense of limitless ability to transform the world. Much as Europeans looked at grim realities such as the ubiquity of deadly disease, or man’s inability to traverse the skies, and said, “I have the power to change that,” we have the unshakeable sense that the injustice of fate which has rendered some less fortunate than others is yet another so-called reality just waiting for us to apply our ingenuity and boundless power to correct. A mere engineering problem which our best minds are rapidly working to solve. And hey, if I’m the process of fixing this problem we also gain the opportunity to ostentatiously display our own virtue and gain relative status accordingly, all the better!
This instinctive desire to uplift the underdog is, ironically, only rational if one believes that one’s own interests are not threatened by that underdog’s success. If I can help the underdog get his piece of the pie while my piece stays the same size, that means that in reality I must have been stronger than both the underdog and the supposed overdog against whom he was striving - I was so far above the conflict that I could observe it as a spectator. The underdog becomes, then, a sort of prop or vessel through which I can achieve emotional satiation of my altruistic instinct, at little to no cost to myself.
Where, then, does this leave racially-conscious whites, who assess the state of the world around us and see genuinely foreboding trends which appear to pose a serious threat to our people? Who observe the rising chorus of hatred and envy echoing from the halls of power, who dismay at the ever-worsening fertility differentials, and who see our own elected representatives seem to revel in our decline? What is the optimal rhetorical strategy to appeal to successful white individuals in order to get them to see the disturbing portents and to realize that things are not looking good for us? That this isn’t, in fact, an idle game, but in fact deadly serious? Well, one very appealing strategy is to appeal to that characteristically-European sympathy for the underdog. It’s to say, “Look, guys, we are the weak and vulnerable party in need of special concern and uplift! I know that you’ve been trained by the media to view white people as the permanent bully in need of humbling and people of color as the noble and scrappy up-and-comer just looking for a fair shot - and yeah, at certain points in history that was even true! - but at this point in time the tables truly have turned. We lay ourselves at the mercy of the victors, and ask only for their mercy and indulgence. Quit picking on us!”
This is also, I think, the motivation behind much of the “JQ” discourse on the right; Jews can be portrayed as an all-powerful enemy, against which we defenseless whites are fighting an impossible uphill battle which we can only win through a herculean effort. “Feel bad for us! We, too, know what it is like to suffer systemic discrimination against our rapacious racial overlords! It’s not faaiiiiir!” However, for a lot of white people, feeling like a victim just doesn’t come naturally to them at all. They look at the history of European man and think, “You know, seems like we’re pretty fucking awesome. Whatever minor setbacks we’re suffering right now, it seems like we’ll get through it just fine. I like our chances.” And, historically speaking, that is a pretty damn astute assessment! The all-time scoreboard sure seems to back that up. There haven’t been a whole lot of limits or setbacks that we’ve faced in the past that we haven’t been able to overcome with some ingenuity and some elbow grease; why should something like collapsing fertility rates be any different? The only way we lose is if we beat ourselves, and we can choose to start winning again at any time once we put our mind to it.
This is, I think, a far healthier mindset than the doom-and-gloom, woe-is-me, why-won’t-the-Jews-stop-picking-on-me mindset that so alienates @FiveHourMarathon. Our problems are real, but they’re ones that we ourselves created, and they’re ones that we ourselves -and only ourselves - can fix. We haven’t even begun to conquer the stars yet - how are we going to let ourselves get bogged down by such comparatively quotidian setbacks? We only lose if we keep tying both hands behind our backs - all we have to do is untie them!
I don’t know, I’ve been sick with the flu all week and I might just be deliriously rambling. I’ve been ingesting a lot of blackpills as of late, so this line of thinking is a useful whitepill to counteract their toxic effects.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
What a monumentally cynical take by you. First off, do you have any solid evidence of the specific motives of the shooter? Please recall the coverage of the Pulse nightclub shooting, which received massive and nonstop worldwide news coverage as the sine qua nom of anti-gay hate crimes. Well, it turns out that, as @Iconochasm notes below, the Pulse shooting had absolutely nothing to do with gay people, and the shooter literally picked it at random after he arrived at his planned target, the Disney entertainment complex in Orlando, realized that the security was too strong and that he stood no chance, and then searched “Orlando night clubs” in Google Maps and went to the closest one. We know this for a fact because it all came out in the trial of his widow. Still, to this day, Pulse is such a load-bearing part of the narrative that LGBT+ advocates continue to wield it totemically, either genuinely unaware of the truth or calculating in their dishonesty.
So, I think I’ll wait to render any judgment of the shooting (other than, of course, to unequivocally condemn it and its perpetrator) and hold off on assigning any blame to anybody.
That’s not even touching the obvious double standard which countless other commenters are noting, wherein catastrophizing about the perpetual threat posed by the very public existence of right-wing speech - let alone right-wing policies or actions - is routine, constant, and amplified daily and hourly by the most powerful people in the world. I don’t need or expect you to apologize for any of that - you have, as far as I’m aware, no power nor any significant public platform beyond this forum - but I find it profoundly cringeworthy that you would stoop to something like this.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
This post reads like a right-winger’s uncharitable parody of a rich liberal Jewish douchebag. You spent more money than my entire paycheck on pointless degeneracy, then on a random whim you bought some bum candy - not something useful that might get him through any extended period of time, but a bit of pointless temporary hedonism - sort of like your trip to the strip club, but in miniature - and now you’re congratulating yourself like you’re some kind of saint.
I’m perfectly happy to embrace being your enemy. As far as I’m concerned, what we as a society do with Smokey and Sean and Matt us that we take them far away, to some ranch estate owned by the government, and then they never come back. As for what happens at that estate, I’m not picky. Maybe it’s like an asylum, maybe it’s a labor camp, maybe they just put them to sleep. That’s pretty much where I’m at with it. I don’t need to suffer every day so that you can keep Smokey and Matt around as props to flatter your own undeserved sense of moral superiority or rub them in our faces.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
But a lot of similarly brainless beat-em-up action movies have been released with women leads over the years, often with better objective craft and quality overall, and male audiences have generally rejected all of them.
The very obvious explanation is that neither men nor most women actually enjoy watching a woman act like a man. An action movie featuring a thin woman punching, shooting, or otherwise overpowering men is not only wildly unrealistic, but also just aesthetically revolting on a primal level. Women are not actually strong, hypercompetent, ruthless badasses. The number of women who have ever lived who could truthfully be described in this way could probably all fit inside an average-sized parking lot. The number of women who have been successful police detectives is probably a bit larger - maybe it’d take two parking lots to fit all of them - but the fact remains that this is also a heavily male profession, generally utilizing classically masculine virtues.
Now, it’s unclear if you’re identifying this phenomenon as “explicit misogyny”. The director could be fully correct that audiences reacted poorly to this show on account of its female leads, but also totally wrong that this is “sexist” or “misogynistic”. Men and women are different. The overwhelming majority of both men and women are aware of this. They strongly prefer media which accurately depicts men as men and women as women, and in which men and women embody the virtues typical of their respective sexes. I wouldn’t want to watch a film about a male nurse or caregiver; the only three films I can think of off the top of my head which feature males employed in those professions are Meet The Parents (including its sequels), Mr. Mom, and The Pacifier - all of which are comedies which treat this situation as inherently and hilarious incongruous and weird.
Whether we’re talking about action movies or romcoms - the two most broadly popular film genres of our age - the overwhelming default is men acting like men and women acting like women. To the extent that True Detective challenges this dynamic by treating two women as hypercompetent, dogged, logically-minded badasses, it’s doomed to fail. I haven’t seen any episodes of any season of the show, so I can’t comment on whether or not that’s the case, but if it is then perhaps instead of blaming misogyny the director and the writers should blame themselves for making media that people didn’t ask for and didn’t want to watch.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8mo ago
Some thoughts on the conversation this post has generated this far:
Much of people’s moral reasoning about this dilemma centers on the question How much agency does each participant have in his or her choice? It’s very interesting that @Meriadoc intuited immediately that there will inevitably and undeniably be some non-zero number of people who pick blue. That proposition probably wouldn’t have occurred to many of the more right-leaning users here - it probably wouldn’t have occurred to me - but in hindsight it is somewhat obviously true. So then we get into the question of why those people picked blue: Was it by accident? On purpose? Were they tricked? Did they do so in a moment of aberrant psychosis or a self-destructive impulse, which is not representative of their normal behavior? Or is their choice symptomatic of a larger pattern of behavior/shortcoming, such that given the choice to redo the selection several times, they’d still pick blue every time?
Recognizing that this poll isn’t merely a frivolous internet meme, but rather a chance to publicly hash out and enforce local political/philosophical default norms, we can extrapolate this to thinking about the types of real-world societal dilemmas the poll is supposed to invoke, and we can recognize that progressives believe that there are people who are born having already picked blue. Racial minorities, gays, trans people, the disabled, etc. They were never actually given the opportunity to pick red. By the simple fact of one or more of their identities being inherently blue, they will on some level always be reliant on the communitarian protective instincts of the larger society. Taking it as a given that such people exist, and that they will never have the option to “switch pills”, blue becomes a far more compelling moral option even for those of us who personally gain nothing by picking blue.
Someone who refuses to decouple the poll from its larger political implications will also intuit that even though the poll specifically fails to enumerate any actual benefits from selecting blue - it’s merely a choice to avoid bad outcomes, and offers no positive-sum outcome over and above that - in the real world the communitarian option actually does offer very clear benefits to everyone involved, including the selfish fucks who picked red. Subsistence farmers may not be reliant on the kindness of strangers, but they’ll also never successfully launch a rocket to the moon, nor cure cancer, nor build Notre Dame Cathedral. Thus, a poll that sought to more accurately model real life would have to include a clause that “if 50% or more people choose blue, all participants are given $5000, and anyone who chose blue gets an additional $5000.”
Also in real life, many people do have the ability to “switch pills” at any time, based on an observation of the choices made by those around them. People who made terrible choices early in life can choose to make better choices in the future. Drug addicts can get clean, people can go to trade school or get a second degree to improve their economic prospects, etc.
So then we have to actually parse out which people are genuinely stuck with blue no matter what, versus how many people were just demoralized and psyopped into picking blue, because they thought they could never hope to hack it on their own without society propping them up, whereas they were in truth fully capable of thriving independently if just given more effective coping strategies. Psychopaths, schizophrenics, and people with profound mental disabilities will never be able to Git Gud, but people with minor depression and transitory suicidal ideation mostly can just choose to snap out of it at any time if nudged in the right direction.
But then what do we do with the people who actually are stuck with blue? The people who will definitely die, or at least have very bad life outcomes, unless we all dedicate some not-insignificant level of effort and resources, and incur some level of personal risk, in order to provide a safety net for them?
One way to think about it is to deny that they are stuck with blue; to harangue them into making a better choice, to deny that they are innately blue, to blame their “culture” and to tell them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Maybe every time they pick blue, we insult them and tell them to pick again, until they pick red. (Except of course, as we established, you could do this a thousand times and they’re still gonna pick blue.) By convincing yourself that they had agency the whole time, you not only absolve yourself of feeling any responsibility for the consequence of their decision, you also maintain the certainty that your own choice was 100% the result of agency, and therefore you morally flatter yourself.
The other way to think about it is: Yes, they’re stuck with blue, I could never have saved them, and it’s actually a good thing that they’re gonna die. Leaving aside the question of whether or not you could have saved them - in the poll, it was possible, but in real life? I’m not so sure - we do have to actually grapple with the question of whether or not the vast majority of us are better off without the people who were stuck with blue. The profoundly mentally/physically disabled, those who are born with the psychological equivalent of glass bones and paper skin, etc. Those who are essentially utility monsters - burdens with no hope of creating a positive-sum contribution, into whom we must continually sink our own resources to keep them from destroying themselves.
Several users brought up children; the thing with children, though, is that the vast majority of them will eventually grow up into people with agency. Any sacrifices we make for them now are actually an investment, made with the assumption that it will produce a positive future outcome. This is fundamentally different from the sort of sacrifices we make for adults with Down Syndrome, who will still have Down Syndrome at every point in their life, and will never “get better” and never repay the investment. How many times do I need to pick blue, putting myself at significant risk, in order to stave off the inevitable for these people? Because that’s the other thing about picking blue: you don’t actually get to just pick it once and then everything works out for everyone. You’re actually going to be given the same choice over and over throughout your life, and so will your children and their children and so on into perpetuity. But perhaps if enough of us pick red enough times to cull the people who keep forcing us to make these choices, we can buy ourselves some length of time wherein we can just thrive for a while as productive, normal people, until enough people who are blue-by-default start to accumulate again and we’re once again forced into unpleasant choices.
Last week, right-wing gadfly David Cole wrote a banger exploring the parallels between the childhood transgender craze and the “childhood sexual abuse”/“ritual satanic abuse” panics of the 1970s and 80s. Cole points out the irony of the “say groomer” obsession on the right, and the larger moral panic in right-wing spaces about how the “trans kids” phenomenon is primarily about “sexualizing children”, given that the first wave of moral panic about the molestation of children was driven primarily by leftist women, which is the same demographic now primarily driving the movement that is in turn being accused of molesting children. I think Cole makes a very convincing case that the “groomer” thing is a red herring, a distraction which has blown up into a full-blown purity-spiraling moral panic in the hothouse ecosystem of the Extremely Online right. If you think that the people teaching kids that they’re trans are primarily doing so because they’re interested in molesting kids, why are they so overwhelmingly women?
His observations ring true for me; from the constant sharing of the Auron MacIntyre sign-tapping meme and the Sam Hyde quote, to Pizzagate and the obsession with Epstein, the right wing is proving that it’s every bit as susceptible to purity spirals and moral panics as the left wing. And as Cole points out, it’s especially odd because the “groomer” panic on the right is itself a response to the “trans kids will all kill themselves unless we affirm them” panic on the left. The “groomer” panic also features the same obnoxious and cancerous motte-and-bailey strategic-equivocation tactics that rat-adjacent rightists despise so much when it’s used against them; figures like James Lindsay, Rod Dreher, and even Marjorie Taylor Greene, are all involved in a linguistic shell game, wherein they use a word which they know for a fact is supposed to refer to grooming children for direct sexual abuse, and when pressed they retreat into “well, they’re saying that children have a sexual identity, which is kind of like sexualizing them, which is the same thing that child molesters do.”
There are certain topics that I won’t publicly touch even in a space like this; I’ve thought about one day trying my hand at starting a Substack and joining the right-wing online commentary/content-creation ecosystem, and there are certain subjects where I fear that if I deviate too much from the party line, I will be cast out into the outer depths before I even begin. The whole issue of child sexuality, how it relates to teen sexuality, whether or not queer theorists want to rape kids, etc., seems like the most high-voltage of any of those third rails. Being seen as an apologist for child molestation is a hell of an accusation to face, no matter how specious and lacking in credibility, and it’s nice to see a writer with some level of clout in right-wing commentary stick his neck out there and identify this moral panic for what it is.
I’m even hesitant to offer too much more of my own larger commentary on the issue, but I wanted to put this piece out there for commentary, particularly for those who do take the “groomer” thing more seriously than I do.
Reinhart is starting from the moral proposition that we ought to weight the lives and happiness of the criminal underclass and the pathologically uncivilized the same way that we weight the lives and happiness of the (much more numerous) productive and pro-social members of society. In this telling, if there is a policy approach which would massively decrease the quality of life of the criminal class - i.e. mass incarceration, three-strikes laws, public execution, forcible institutionalization of chronic hard-drug abusers, etc. - we ought to look very negatively at that approach, even if its effects would substantially and demonstrably improve the quality of life of the vast majority of non-criminal citizens, since the drop in utility among the targeted class proportionally outweighs the gain in utility among the beneficiary class. The easy way to route completely around Reinhart’s utility calculus is simply to say, “I assign close to zero value to the lives and interests of the criminal element, and their loss is pretty directly my gain. The amount of decrease in their utility which I would happily sacrifice to even marginally increase my own utility is nearly-infinite.”
Comparing murder to air pollution is an embarrassingly obvious red herring; air pollution is a distributed phenomenon, culpability for which is incredibly difficult to attribute to clearly-identifiable actors, and is a byproduct of economic processes which are on the whole beneficial to society. Nobody is polluting the air because they just want to kill birds and make people sick. Violent crime, on the other hand, is a purely negative phenomenon, not resulting from any process that’s otherwise positive, and its perpetrators are, generally, almost cartoonishly easy to identify and apprehend if the state is given the proper resources and has the will to utilize those resources effectively.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Since Sam Brinton is (or, until recently, was in any case) a powerful and privileged individual with important decisionmaking power over the lives of the little people, isn’t mockery in itself a valuable tool of legitimate journalism?
I second @Nantafiria in admonishing you to take this question to a forum which is not so unanimously “anti-woke” as this one; it’s not that you’re not going to get any insightful answers at all here, but rather that you’re not going to get any insight into what wokeness feels like from the inside, which seems to be what you’re asking for.
That being said, I’m going to give you my best attempt to describe what an actual “woke” (fair warning, I’m going to continue to put this word in scare quotes, because I believe that it’s intentionally under-defined and contains several motte-and-bailey imprecisions which are designed to be exploited) person thinks about when pondering the kinds of issues you’re asking about. Depending on which definition of “woke” you have in mind, I would have qualified as “woke” when I was in college a decade ago. I was exposed to many of these ideas several years before they exploded onto the mainstream, so I feel like I was exposed to a purer version of them, less adulterated and packaged for consumption by the general public than the strains of “wokeness” we see now.
The most important through-line connecting the various strains of “wokeness” is a belief in the centrality of power relations to every aspect of human life and society in a post-agricultural world. In the Marxist-Hegelian telling, the primordial state of humanity - what we would call the hunter-gatherer model of society - was profoundly egalitarian and non-hierarchical; every person was expected to contribute to the collective good in an amount commensurate with his or her ability to do so, and everyone understood the importance of providing for those members of society who could not “pull their own weight” - children, the elderly, the infirm/disabled, etc.
It wasn’t until the advent of agriculture that human societies began to be plagued by the twin evils of surplus and centralized political institutions, which produced a class of rent-seeking parasitic elites who could hoard surplus resources for themselves. This class had to overcome the perception of their own illegitimacy which would have been viscerally felt by all of the vast majority of people who were not members of that class; in order to defuse and redirect that resentment, that class of rent-seekers must have been incredibly adept at narrative-weaving - in creating powerful narratives which legitimated their privileged position. Priest-craft was certainly integral to that narrative-weaving, as was a sophisticated network of power-brokerage in which the privileged class could utilize leverage and patronage to play various factions of society against each other.
Why else would the mass of society, dispossessed by these rent-seekers, and having a vague pre-conscious ancestral memory of the idyllic egalitarian before-times, not simply rise up against these pathetic elites and reclaim their birthright? The fact that they didn’t is a powerful testament to the centrality and potency of narrative - specifically, elite-crafted narratives which legitimate hierarchy, inequality, and state power - in human society.
Hegel even talks explicitly in strangely religious, post-Christian terms about this. He references the metaphor of the Garden of Eden and the Fall, and he subverts this metaphor by saying that there is no literal god or Eden, but that this allegory actually represents the way that humanity was robbed of its idyllic anarcho-primitivist birthright by the advent of inegalitarian states. For Hegel, and subsequently for Marx in an attenuated and less explicitly religious sense, the teleological goal of humanity is to reclaim that birthright: to rebuild Eden, to dismantle the unjust structures who took it from us against our will by weaving webs of lies and cynical narratives.
So, you have an ideology to which the following axioms are central: 1. Hierarchical and unequal power relations are a (contingent) fact of human society; 2. The inherent injustice of those power relations is masked by self-serving narratives created and propagated by the class of individuals who benefit from those unequal power relations; 3. Some of those individuals may be intentionally creating and manipulating those narratives, but the majority of the individuals in the privileged class simply imbibe and repeat those narratives without investigating the truth value of those narratives, since to do so would be to risk delegitimizing the structures that allow their lifestyle to persist; 4. The only way to dismantle these unjust structural power relations - short of mass revolutionary violence, anyway - is to rhetorically deconstruct, attack, dismantle, and replace the legitimating narratives. You must first identify what those narratives are, which means you must constantly be vigilant against them. This vigilance sometimes requires a great deal of sophistication, because the narratives themselves are so sophisticated and are protected by a network of legitimating institutions which grant the narratives the armor of their support.
So, let’s look at discussions about race through that lens. First off, we have a clear example of a form of social capital which some people have and others don’t; those who have it enjoy a position of rent-seeking privilege, while those who don’t are barred from the privileged class and suffer accordingly. The social currency in question is whiteness. (Or, if you want to get even more sophisticated and up-to-date, you might even say “not-blackness”, as many black post-Marxists - see Charles Blow’s recent op-ed about the Nury Martinez debacle in Los Angeles for an example - predict the rise of a form of “lite supremacy” in which the racially privileged caste will continue to expand to encompass Asians, Latinos without significant African ancestry, and any other group that isn’t Black.)
Now that you’ve identified the vector along which this particular dynamic of unequal hierarchy is constructed, you then have to ferret out the narrative that people have internalized in order to legitimate that narrative. Remember: the default primordial state of humanity is egalitarian and does not recognize hierarchical distinctions between individuals, so any time you identify a hierarchy, there must, by definition, be a narrative preventing people from seeing it and instinctively revolting against it. So, what’s the narrative legitimating racial inequality? And, more importantly, what are the institutions that are propping that narrative up by granting it the imprimatur of their support?
The narrative, of course, is that this inequality is inevitable due to some inherent difference between classes of people, and any attempts to rectify this inequality will fail because it’s built-in. Big surprise there - this is the exact same form that every other hierarchy-legitimating narrative takes. The convenience of this narrative for the class of people benefiting from it is manifestly obvious and impossible to miss. How wonderful for you, the possessor of the social capital whiteness, that you just happen to be in the “biologically superior” caste, and there’s nothing we can ever do to change that, because the subaltern caste is just inherently worse than you. Nothing more to see here, folks, now get back to toiling and suffering while whitey hoards the fruit of your misery.
What’s the legitimating institution that protects this narrative? Well, it used to be the church. Their narrative was something like “God cursed Noah’s son Ham for looking upon his father’s nakedness, and now the descendants of Ham carry that ancestral curse which has made them natural slaves to the descendants of Japheth and Shem. It is God’s will, nothing we can do about it.” Or, at other times, instead of the descendants of Ham, blacks were said to bear the Mark of Cain, but the effect was the same. Well, we eventually deconstructed and delegitimated that particular narrative, and the institution which legitimated it now bears only a fraction of the power it once held; very few people uncritically internalize narratives propagated by churches anymore, at least not ones that contradict egalitarianism. So, the privileged caste needed to find a replacement institution to pass the narrative baton to, and they needed to do it in a hurry. Well, conveniently, the institution of Science™️ was there to step into the breach.
Science™️ is a very slick and effective power-legitimating institution, partly because it superficially seems to act in opposition to the old, defeated institutions such as the Church, and partially because it is so good at presenting itself as Objective and Narrative-Free. Once the proto-Marxists (the Enlightenment thinkers) showed up and dealt a knock-out blow to the Church, they had to then be co-opted by a narrative that allowed them to enter the privileged caste! Good lord, power-legitimating narratives are memetically powerful and infinitely-malleable, which is why we have to work so damn hard to relentlessly sniff them out. Now, the practitioners of Science™️ had obtained a form of social capital called Knowledge, and this allowed them to speak authoritatively and to, once again, intimidate the disempowered masses into submission. Do what you’re told, plebs, the Knowers have decreed that inequality is inevitable because some people are naturally worse than others. Conveniently, we the Knowers look and sound very similar to the guys who previously told you that their privilege is natural. Hell, in many cases they’re literally the same guys! But, nothing we can do about it. God - er, sorry, Science - made it this way. Get back to work!
Even if some of what the scientists are saying has some factual basis, that doesn’t excuse the fact that they are helping to once again lend legitimacy to the eternal narrative that powerful privileged people deserve their power. Our most important goal is to defeat that narrative. Everything else is secondary.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
Immigrants in the US tend to assimilate extremely well and usually do better than the native population in various statistics.
They do better than blacks. Crime statistics for Latinos in this country are significantly worse than whites on every metric; the fact that they do better than native blacks is a sign of just how low blacks set the bar, rather than any sort of salutary reflection on Latinos.
There is some evidence that legal immigrants - people who went through the whole process of obtaining citizenship, rather than people who came here illegally and were then retroactively made into citizens - commit crimes at reasonably low rates; however, their children generally regress to the rate of criminality one would expect based on their racial background.
This was also true of Irish and Italian immigrants for many decades - their rates of criminality were considerably worse than native Anglo whites - and they really only began to assimilate to Anglo norms after the 1924 Immigration Act cut off the supply of further immigrants from their home countries. At some point I’m going to do a big effort post about how the fact that the Irish and the Italians eventually became more like Anglos, only after many decades of not doing that, and after massively contributing to the shocking levels of corruption and inter-ethnic violence which blighted American cities during the Gilded Age - is not in fact the sunny and optimistic pro-immigration story that 21st-century immigration advocates think it is.
Furthermore, if you want to come and see non-assimilated multigenerational immigrant communities in America, come to my home city of San Diego and spend some time around the East African neighborhoods; you’ll see loads of women in hijabs and men in traditional dress, and I went to public school with these people’s kids and saw how different they were from the “assimilated” groups. They are not a useful data point in favor of your thesis.
So, this used to be my favorite movie for years. I think I imprinted strongly on it because I saw it for the first time at age 8 and it was probably one of the first movies - along with Jurassic Park, which also had a profound effect on me at the time - I saw with actual dramatic stakes and spectacular visuals. (It’s also the first nude scene I saw in a movie, which probably contributed to my very positive first impression of it.) I also acknowledge that I was (and still am) a pretty low-T guy, and that my tastes and proclivities largely tended toward the feminine during my formative years.
Other commenters’ cynical and acidic takes on the film’s central romance are basically completely accurate; if you’re a man who is neither as virile and charming as prime DiCaprio, nor as rich and ambitious as Cal, the entire Rose plot is pretty blackpilling. It sucks to know that probably the best that most guys could ever hope to be is the nameless schmuck who later picked up those guys’ sloppy thirds, never being featured onscreen or even apparently occupying much of a place in Rose’s emotional landscape at all, despite being the father of her children. Far more realistic is being one of the innumerable guys who died horribly in frozen water, or just ended it all quickly by leaping off the deck. Me personally, I’d probably end up like poor First Officer Murdoch, gunning a man down in a panic and then offing myself.
The film really is a testament to the awesome power of artifice, spectacle, and aesthetics. On some level, nearly every modern person who appreciates Titanic does so because the world it depicts - no matter how much the nihilistic Hollywood shitlib James Cameron tries to paint it as stuffy and doomed - is glamorous, confident, impeccably classy, and features exclusively high-quality white people. Even the poorest people on the ship are charming European immigrants, with no signs of criminality or dysfunction, dancing a sprightly Irish jig. The music is lush and gorgeous, the effects are stunning, the sets and costumes are incredible. The emotional/ideological soul of the film is utterly poisonous and it doesn’t even matter, because the experience is so beautiful and tragic. (See also: Harry Potter)
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
I largely agree, although I still think there’s some value in holding these people to the same standards that they hold their counterparts in Bad Countries like Russia and Iran to. If you were to make this argument as a defense of Russia Today, saying, “The fact that they’re funded by the Russian government is irrelevant; the viewpoint advocated by RT is due to the kinds of people who work for RT, and the people who listen to it,” there is no chance in hell that the NPR audience would consider that defense remotely credible.
So, if they want to believe that “state-affiliated media” is a valid and useful category, then pointing out the obvious parallels is a useful way to humiliate and undermine them. I’m not necessarily saying this is the best approach - I think that maintaining intellectual coherence and actually having good arguments is probably more important than “owning the libs”, although my confidence in that view is fraying - but I do think it’s probably the best thing that Elon Musk can do, because these people are actively trying to destroy him, leveraging every bit of sophistry and media manipulation that they can muster; for that reason, Musk’s only relevant goal right now is to humiliate them, rob them of their power to control the narrative, and demoralize their audience in any way possible.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
We don't have many vegans, anti-car people, or socialists here at The Motte - but that's not because their arguments are invalid, it's because the people attracted to those ideologies don't fit well with our particular discursive style.
We’ve had a number of pro-car vs. anti-car arguments here on the Motte, in which both sides have made well-argued and not at all annoying arguments. I’m on the anti-car side in the sense that I personally hate driving and would strongly prefer to live in a place where owning and operating a motor vehicle is not only unnecessary but actually discouraged. Many others here are similarly disposed toward urbanism and against cars, and are far more adept at making practical/technical arguments in favor of that position than I am. The main topics of discussion in such arguments always seem to circle back to 1. Is it feasible/desirable to convert cities built for cars into cities built for walking/transit, and 2. Is a car-free lifestyle feasible for people who have multiple children. People on both sides muster the best arguments at their disposal, and few of the participants resort to cheap emotional argumentation or goalpost-shifting.
I think that perhaps you just personally find one side of that argument annoying for idiosyncratic reasons, and have convinced yourself that it’s impossible for people who disagree with you on the issue to do so for non-annoying reasons. I won’t gainsay any personal experiences you’ve had when discussing the issue in other spaces, but I can assure you that here at the Motte we are in fact perfectly capable of conducting ourselves in a dignified and intellectually-honest matter as it regards cars, and have demonstrated this capability multiple times since I’ve been here.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
7mo ago
This seems excessive. I agree that the post could use more original analysis than she offered, but this is a breaking-news sort of situation that could have important implications, and I think it’s reasonable to want to spark a quick discussion of the major questions sparked by this development.
A brief epilogue to my previous post about the cabal of Former Theatre Kids who appear to be running every significant Western government and international organization:
On Thursday, the official NATO Twitter account posted a thread in support of the Ukrainians which included this jaw-dropping statement:
Ukraine is hosting one of the great epics of this century
We are Harry Potter and William Wallace, the Na’vi and Han Solo. We’re escaping from Shawshank and blowing up the Death Star. We are fighting with the Harkonnens and challenging Thanos.
The official honest-to-God NATO account posted that. Not some third-rate dingbat functionary, like the execrable Karen Decker who posted about how Afghanistan needs more “black girl magic”. No, this is the public-facing voice of a war machine that controls hundreds of billions of dollars, and it decided that the best way to make its case to skeptical world was to spam references to media primarily targeted toward middle-schoolers.
Besides being yet another Theatre Kid shande far di goyim (Rod Dreher had us dead to rights with that line) in an era that has been full of them, I think this is a data point in favor of a pet theory I’ve had about progressives/post-Marxist culturists/“the woke” for a while.
When I see some fat black woman or horse-faced lesbian activist rail against how society “reifies hegemonic standards of beauty and body shape which disparately marginalize the bodies of subaltern identities” or whatever, I cannot escape the impression that these people - mostly women, but not entirely - just never really recovered from the petty traumas of middle school. The jocky white boys were all attracted to the slim white girls with the straight hair, and not to the chubby girls, especially the black ones. And I’m not just taking potshots at my outgroup here; I’m guilty as hell of this in my own life as well. (“We must reimagine masculinity to de-center violence and the domination of others,” says the noodle-armed kid with low testosterone, certain that in the Glorious Future, women will prefer guys like him.)
If we’re getting deep into psychoanalysis, it seems at least plausible that for a certain personality type - highly neurotic (and thus liable to experience negative emotions acutely, leading to traumatic imprinting on experiences that non-neurotic people are likely to move on from with no issues), extremely creative and imaginative, great at constructing arguments and manipulating symbols - combined with some social/physical handicap which places them at the bottom of a local social/sexual status hierarchy, you get a perfect storm that leads to becoming trapped in a sort of arrested development - results in a failure to mature emotionally past that formative period, and a predisposition to escapism translating into political utopianism.
Now, presumably this is where someone like @FCfromSSC would jump in and dismiss my attempt to draw a clean through-line between psychology and ideology. Agency is key, and equipped with the right religious and cultural guidance, anyone with these baseline psychological traits and formative experiences can transcend them, becoming a normal and functioning member of society with a healthy worldview. In this telling, in pre-Enlightenment societies, either 1. this personality type basically didn’t exist at all, or 2. those civilizations were far more adept at social engineering, such that they could far more successfully integrate people like this into their social fabric and find roles for them which utilized their strengths and defanged their more dangerous and subversive tendencies.
I am genuinely unsure whether or not I accept this telling! To hear psychology researcher Ed Dutton tell it, these “proto-woke” people or “spiteful mutants” were precisely the type of people primarily targeted by medieval witch hunts. I tend to intuitively favor the explanation that these people have always been a sliver of humanity; maybe that’s because it gives me psychological comfort to imagine that even in pre-literate warrior nomad societies, there were scrawny little guys like me, preoccupied all day long with stories of the gods and ancestral heroes while they were supposed to be sharpening their spears and hauling bags of cured meats. If it is true that the Enlightenment unleashed the full latent power of this sliver of the population, propelling us first to great heights but then succumbing to the poison pill at the heart of the project, then perhaps this offers a roadmap to reintegrating the “spiteful mutants” back into the fabric of healthy society by showing them both the benefits of giving them a day and the grave dangers of letting them monopolize power. Certainly at the very least they shouldn’t be running NATO’s Twitter account.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
So, what does this mean for pre-Christian societies? It wasn’t Christians who built the Parthenon or all of those gorgeous Greco-Roman statues. You draw a distinction between “post-Christian” and “post-pagan” societies, but, at least in the entirety of Europe, Christian societies are all post-pagan societies. Pagan Europeans made beautiful representational art many centuries before they were converted to Christianity.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Dissident-right-adjacent writer David Cole (a Jewish filmmaker who got his start as a Holocaust revisionist, put that life behind him after being threatened by the ADL and the now-defunct JDL, became a respected Hollywood insider under a new name, then had his past exposed and suffered an early and very intense version of “cancellation”) recently pointed out that many of the high-profile dustups between black entertainers and Jews are a direct result of business disputes. Black athletes and entertainers (and, of course, many white ones as well) become wealthy despite having no financial literacy or business acumen, and they are extremely vulnerable to the predations of shockingly unscrupulous agents and lawyers - a great many of whom are Jewish. Examples such as Jerry Heller, Lou Pearlman, and Allen Klein come immediately to mind. Many athletes and entertainers feel that they are being exploited and victimized by Jews because they are, in fact, being exploited and victimized by Jews. (Of course, there are millions of Jews who are not involved with exploitative business practices in the entertainment and sports industries, but I can forgive individuals who have had millions of dollars stolen from them for focusing on what’s emotionally salient to them.)
So, yes, there certainly is a contingent of anti-Jewish sentiment in segments of the black community such as the Nation of Islam, the Black Hebrew Israelites, Hotep culture more generally, etc., but I think it’s useful and important to draw a distinction between those strains of thought and the type of Jew hatred you see among rich blacks, which is based on direct first-hand experience with the profoundly ugly underside of these industries. The average Hotep may not have ever even really interacted with Jews, so their antipathy is somewhat abstract and second-hand, whereas if you’re Kylie Irving or Kanye West (or Dave Chappelle) your interactions with Jews are constant and vitally important to nearly every aspect of your professional life.
Now, again, this is not true only of black entertainers. White entertainers and athletes are also, presumably intimately involved with Jewish lawyers, agents, executives, etc. However, most modern whites lack anything more than a rudimentary racial consciousness, and are especially uncomfortable with noticing anything about Jews, so it probably does not occur to a lot of these whites to even reflect on the Jewishness of those industries.
Most blacks, though, are primed for racial/identitarian thinking by their upbringing and cultural milieu, so they’re far more likely to Notice things like that. Black public figures have also come to enjoy a level of public immunity from mainstream criticism that white public figures don’t enjoy. The “shut up and dribble” mentality that used to be commonplace in audiences’ relationship to athletes has become extremely taboo and has been replaced by a fawning and indulgent tolerance of all manner of divisive public statements by black figures.
Frankly, I think that dissident rightists are really taking their eye off the ball by taking the side of insanely spoiled black multimillionaires who have accrued obscene amounts of money for things like throwing a ball into a net. Personally, if Kyrie’s cancellation is a price to pay for getting anti-white and anti-police activism back out of sports and music, it’s a price I’m more than happy to pay. Jews are absolutely correct to rain condemnation on the appropriation and theft of their history by black revisionists; now we just need whites more generally to begin reacting just as strongly to the theft of our own culture by Hoteps who would have us believe that blacks were the real first inhabitants of Britain, that blacks invented every major technology and that whites stole the credit, that blacks were Viking chieftains and Roman emperors, etc. Criticizing the Jewish scumbag agents who siphon off large portions of their earnings is understandable, but for me personally I feel no need to take the side of people who shouldn’t have anywhere remotely near that much money to begin with.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1mo ago
One thing people haven’t brought up is the fact that the modern internet allows nude scenes to be stripped from their original context, slowed/brightened/zoomed-in, and widely distributed/collected for easy access.
In the 70s and 80s, a respectable actress could do an artistically-justified nude scene for some artsy, small-distribution film, and if people wanted to see that scene they would have to find a way to view or purchase that movie, and at least watch the whole movie up to that point. Now, if I want to see that scene, all I have to do is wait for some guy to get his hands on a digital copy, then post the scene to Reddit or to any of dozens of other places. A ten-second scene can be shared everywhere, with AI-upscaling and the ability to pause and rewind to make sure I see every detail as many times as I want to see it.
And that means also that that actress’ friends, family members, dentist, accountant, second-grade teachers, and everyone else can see it. And jerk off to it.
All while not only the actress makes no money whatsoever off of it, but the studio who’s paying her also makes nothing off of it either. There’s no upside anymore for anyone involved, unless the actress in question is just an exhibitionist and likes getting naked where people can see it. Certainly this does describe certain people who get into showbiz! However, most of the women with that personality type, combined with the kind of good looks required to make a living off of it, are probably better off just leaning into OnlyFans or a career as an influencer or something like that, since movie studios are no longer willing to pay them big bucks to get naked.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
@DradisPing brought up the founding of Liberia, but in fact that was only one of several large-scale but ultimately abortive attempts to achieve what was called, at the time, “colonization” of freed blacks. Liberia was a project primarily of the American Colonization Society, an organization about which I’ve spoken in this forum numerous times, and which included as its members and supporters an absolute all-star cast of American Founding Fathers and political heavyweights. Unfortunately, the ACS could not achieve the level of funding and logistics necessary to undertake the process on anywhere near the scale they had hoped for. They were not the only ones attempting to make it happen, though.
Abe Lincoln, a supporter of the ACS and of “colonization” since early in his political career, invited a delegation of black political/religious leaders to the White House in 1862 to try and convince them to support the mass deportation of blacks - this time, to a proposed Central American colony which he wanted to name Linconia. The black leaders were opposed, though, as were the various Central American nations who felt threatened and/or had their own territorial designs on the region. After Lincoln’s death, his particular proposal was never pursued by any of his successors.
However, in 1869 Ulysses S. Grant attempted to initiate the annexation of what is now the Dominican Republic (called “Santo Domingo” at the time) for similar purposes. Grant was actually able to secure a treaty proposal with the Dominican president; Grant also sent a committee, which included Frederick Douglass, to investigate the country and the feasibility of annexation. Sadly, this treaty was defeated in Congress.
There was also a private initiative in 1862 by Floridian entrepreneur and plantation owner Bernard Kock to purchase the Haitian island of Île-à-Vache and to invite blacks to come work there, offering Haitian citizenship (and revocation of American citizenship) to any takers. This initiative also failed after the financiers reneged on their promised investment.
Ultimately, the staggering costs and logistical realities of mass deportation of blacks were simply insurmountable at the time, to say nothing of the political difficulties and opposition from various important political constituencies.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
What even is this comment? The vast majority of the things we discuss in this forum have no objective answer. That’s what makes them interesting, and why they are able to sustain extensive conversation. If there was an objective way to look at things, you could just look it up and there wouldn’t be much to discuss. It seems like your comment is a fully-general argument against most of what this community is all about.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1mo ago
At the time he posted this comment, there had been no other posts in this thread, despite it having been up for several hours. I believe the joke is that the mods’ idea of “perfect moderation” is “no posts allowed at all.”
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1mo ago
Either you yourself are Travis LeBlanc, or you have simply lifted substantial portions of this essay without crediting the author.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9mo ago
Of course the problem with Europe from the point of view of an American White Nationalist is that Europe is full of Europeans.
This bears no resemblance to Hood’s argument. Both he and his interlocutor are celebrating the fact that Europe is full of Europeans, and their disagreement is regarding the degree of international cooperation and unity of identity/purpose that should prevail among those Europeans.
The alternative of course is to move to a state like Iowa or Vermont which is >90% white but living in one of those States doesn't confer the status or "validation" that guys like Hood so desperately crave. A white guy wearing a nice button-up in Iowa is just another white-guy. It doesn't convey the separateness from the laboring class that it might in a far more stratified place like Coastal California.
He is from New Jersey, but lives in rural West Virginia. He literally made the exact choice you’re criticizing him for not making.
I don't know much about Hood's background, or whether he would consider himself a "Berkely Marxist", but in any case his writing strikes me as representative of that genere
Hood - real name Kevin DeAnna - worked in the mainstream conservative movement for over a decade, working for conservative think-tanks in DC. That’s the milieu he came up in, and what he is now reacting against because he has seen it firsthand from the inside.
Any story of World War II and the societies that waged it that doesn't at least acknowledge the aftermath of World War I is going to end up an as incoherent mess. It would be like starting the story of the Illiad with Hector already dead. Similarly, you can't meaningfully discuss the story of the US as a nation, without acknowledging its founding conditions as a frontier colony. Or the bloody crucible of the American Civil War from which so much of our industrial might and martial ambitions arose. Of course, Hood is not interested in meaningful discussion.
Hood writes extensively about Rome, and about early American history. Just because you have no familiarity with his work doesn’t mean you get to accuse him of not knowing about or talking about these things. He does not mean that World War II is the important starting point of Western civilization; he means that it is the founding myth for the current narrative being pushed by academia and the media-political complex. The Boomer Truth Regime.
"The 14 words" get bandied about a lot in these discussions but I find it telling that those who go on about them the most often seem the least inclined to actually build or secure anything resembling that future. It begs the question "Who's Children?"
Greg Hood has, I believe, four children at last count. So, presumably those ones.
You have reduced this man to a straw-man archetype to rail against, but all of your fulminating is completely useless because it doesn’t address any of the basic facts about his actual life or work. It just makes you look ignorant and ineffectual.
You wrote an entire post about how he’s a hypocrite for not living the lifestyle you think he should be living, despite the fact that he does live that lifestyle. You accused him of being a Marxist who doesn’t care about pre-WWII history, when actually he’s a Rome obsessive, a monarchist, and a devotee of Ebola’s esoteric spiritualist tradition.
Just for once admit that you spoke overconfidently about something without doing any research at all to determine if your assumptions were correct. Can you do that? Even just this once? You made multiple easily-disprovable claims about this guy, and those claims are central to your argument.
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