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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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White Dudes for Harris

It should be remembered that it was the Democrat party that broke the ice on invoking White Identity Politics directly to muster political support. The Republican party has only ever used proxy rhetoric like "they have to come legally" or "tough on crime", but looking at the recent Convention it's clear the Republican strategy is to go for the Big Tent rather than directly appeal to white voters. It's the Harris campaign that makes the direct appeal to white men, and you would not see an event like this hosted within the Republican party.

This is another indication that we're probably over the hill of Peak Woke that a white identity is acknowledged in a non-critical context:

“There is an epidemic amongst men in this country,” Mike Nellis, a Democratic strategist who helped organize the call, told The Hill.

“That loneliness, that anxiety, that disconnection, it gets filled by something. And what Republicans have done an incredible job of, depressingly so, is creating a permission structure that makes it very easy for white men to embrace Donald Trump, to embrace MAGA culture, to embrace this sort of devolution of our politics into something much more crass,” he continued. ...

Nellis, on the other hand, argued that Democrats have been too quick in the past to give up on constituencies that seem out of reach, like rural voters and white male voters.

“We should be fighting for every inch and damn sure know that the Republicans do that. They communicate with every constituency that they can win, lose, or draw,” Nellis said.

“If we could move even a fraction of white men and get them to a place where they feel comfortable with being a part of the multicultural movement that is the Democratic Party, as imperfect as it is a lot of days, that would change our politics dramatically and so much for the better.”

That's a huge shift in messaging from just a few years ago in the midst of the Floyd riots.

This is the WhitePeopleTwitter effect. Reddit had a popular default sub called BlackPeopleTwitter where everything was positive and pro-black. In order to be an approved poster (?) you needed to prove you were black, unless you were an attractive white woman. Sensing the possibility of a white version popping up, they preemptively made WhitePeopleTwitter and used it to de-potentiate and emasculate white identity. So BPT gives positive valence to blacks, WPT gives negative valence to whites and white identity (intermixed with some humor). I just checked WPT, and the first post is Kamala Good Trump Bad, and the second post is telling everyone to call Republicans weird (a very interesting strategy which deserves its own post, hopefully someone writes it out, but it is the perfect minimization of the entire progressive strategy for years). The third post is actually about white dudes for Harris! The fourth is GOP weird and racist, the fifth is GOP weird. On BPT, the first video is “cool black people interrupted by annoying white women! Colonizing their space”.

Social engineering slop, all of it, certainly. But it works! You want whites to have a negative response when they think about their own group; that is, if you want to subjugate and destroy them. Replace their heroes with black drug dealers who rap and demean their women. So for Kamala, it is helpful to broach the topic of white identity insofar as it is used to vote for a black-indian woman. In the same way, in the corporate world you are allowed to acknowledge you are white when you at DEI training.

There is a double edge to the nihilistic view on race that whites are allowed to have. That being as soon as someone flips the narrative on its head, you are greeted with all the same nihilistic arguments facing any other ethnic group. Best exemplified in the 90's era rhetoric of 'everyone is racist'. It deflates the whole victimary discourse and drives it towards whatever pit of nihilism awaits it. Further than that, if you set up teams, it's only a matter of time before someone starts to genuinely root for theirs, even if it's the designated bad team.

People against European-white ethnocentrism, like Jordan Peterson, saw this coming a mile away and have spoken about the dangers of invoking any sort of ethnic identity for European-whites. Instead preaching the universalist individualism stuff.

There are multiple reasons for doing this if you are against positive white identity in general. The most obvious being that if you ever lose the reigns on that particular horse you might not get it back. Even if it's all supposed to be negative, you might end up with an institutional structure where the power ladder you have to climb drives you towards ethnocentric action in favor of whites. It might seem impossible today, but give it a generation or two and you have no idea what priors the youngest generation has.

On top of that, having white people not think about themselves in collective terms is simply better. You can just tell whites to not commit to any rational group action and they wont. They will seemingly buy into any individualist ethos regardless of how obviously stupid and suicidal it is. Just wrap it up in some novelty and have it appeal to their vanity and off they go. There is no risk there. Comparatively, even with a negative identity, there is always risk that some pathological nerve gets struck one too many times which, as mentioned prior, can easily spread. I'm worthless? We are all worthless. You are worthless.