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Notes -
Richard Hanania interviewed Jared Taylor.
Jared Taylor, founder of white nationalist publication American Renaissance, was recently reinstated on Twitter/X after a years-long (and, under the Elon Musk “free speech” era, increasingly controversial) ban. Many have hoped that, as Dissident Right and race realist ideas are beginning to break into semi-mainstream online discourse, some of the old-guard figures like Taylor may enjoy a long-overdue rehabilitation in the public eye. (Something like this has recently taken place for Steve Sailer, who, after decades of being the commentator whom all the serious thinkers read but never publicly acknowledged, recently undertook a lucrative book tour and has finally been published by several mainstream conservative publications.) While Taylor was once a semi-regular fixture on serious news programs, and his speeches at American Renaissance conference were even occasionally broadcast on C-SPAN, his banishment over the past decade has been comprehensive; if he is, at this late stage of his life, able to make some money and get his name out there, it would be a well-deserved culmination of an honorable life. Taylor’s work has been formative in my intellectual development, and I consider him a formidable thinker as well as a true gentleman.
That being said, I think his conversation with Hanania (who promoted the interview as a debate) unfortunately revealed how the world has, in some sense, passed Taylor by. Part of this is simply that he is old and has lost a step cognitively. In his prime, back when he was often asked to appear on mainstream news segments, Taylor was known as a sharp, charismatic, and erudite debater; at his advanced age, he can now be outmaneuvered by more agile thinkers — and, whatever you think about Richard Hanania (who, in his now-disavowed younger days as a white identitarian commentator, wrote several pieces for American Renaissance), he clearly has a keen mind. More importantly, though, Taylor’s model of the world does not appear to have adequately adapted to observed reality.
One of the central pillars of Taylor’s racial worldview is that human beings naturally seek to cluster among others to whom they are similar. For Taylor, the “white flight” of the 1960’s and 70’s, in which white families fled urban areas for the growing suburbs in response to the growing presence of blacks, is an archetypal example of humans naturally and subconsciously coordinating to segregate themselves into racial affinity groups. Writing and speaking in the 1990s and 2000s, when Mexican immigration to the U.S. (both legal and illegal) was at a tidal surge, Taylor predicted that this would set off a fresh white flight, in which white Americans would flee states with growing Hispanic populations. The looming confrontation between whites and Latinos, in which whites would be forced to put up a mighty fight to prevent themselves from being replaced and politically outvoted by drunken and crime-prone illegals clamoring for Latin American socialism, was a central theme of white nationalist discussion at this time. “Demographics are Destiny!”
However, as Hanania deftly points out, the intervening years have been… less than kind to these predictions. Though left-wing agitation by a certain section of the Latino population did have some impact on politics in the early part of this century — I distinctly remember a segment of the Mexican and Mexican-American segment of the student body at my high school staging a full-fledged walk-out in 2006 in protest of the failed “Sensenbrenner Bill” (H.R. 4437) which would have curtailed illegal immigration — the long-term political realignment among Latinos in this country has been a surprise to both political parties. Famously, Trump’s 2024 campaign achieved considerable success among Hispanic men.
Additionally, while white identitarians were correct to predict an exodus of conservative whites from racially-diverse liberal states, they probably did not anticipate that such whites would flee not to Whitopias such as Idaho and Montana, but rather to racially-diverse conservative states. The racial demographics of Florida and Texas are hardly more favorable to racially-conscious whites than California’s or New York’s! As Hanania points out, it seems like the revealed preference of many white Americans is to move to places with plenty of Hispanics (and a decent number of blacks, provided they’re well-policed) as long as the economic prospects and the political environment seem headed in a positive direction. White Americans seem to have no problem whatsoever living alongside Asian immigrants, who generally make excellent neighbors, friends, and classmates.
(Taylor’s stance on race relations between whites and Asians has never been coherent, which is particularly surprising since he was famously born and raised in Japan as the child of two American missionaries. He acknowledges the many great things about Asian culture and the various metric on which Asians are on par with, or even superior to, whites, yet when asked why it would be a bad thing for whites and Asians to intermarry and their countries become more integrated, he retreats to some wishy-washy petty nationalist “Well, I just think white people should stay white and Asians should stay Asian because I believe in real diversity.” This has never been persuasive, and Hanania rightly skewers him for it.) Ultimately, Taylor’s predictions of mass racial strife and whites fleeing to the hinterlands to form whites-only communities just have not panned out. As Hanania says: There are plenty of extremely white places in America, and almost nobody is moving to any of them.
This particular section of the interview (beginning around the 55-minute mark) has also produced controversy among Taylor’s ostensible allies. Hanania brings up West Virginia and asks why, if living among other whites is the highest instinctive concern for most white people, why are so few people moving there? And, furthermore, what sort of white person would want to move there, knowing how poor and dysfunctional the local whites are? Who would prefer living among fentanyl-addicted hillbilly whites rather than living among educated and productive Asians and Hispanics? Taylor expresses agreement with Hanania, and indulges in some accurate criticism of the white people he witnessed while visiting the capital city of West Virginia.
This has caused many on the online right to turn on Taylor, as discussed by Scott Greer. (Many of the responses to Greer’s tweet perfectly encapsulate the phenomenon pointed to in his article.) The criticism of Taylor’s remarks strikes me as identical to a phenomenon many have observed in black culture. When blacks congregate among themselves in places like churches, a frequent topic of discussions and sermons is frank self-criticism of the failings of the black community. “Black men, we need to do better! Work harder, be better fathers! There’s too many young black men out there acting a fool, killing each other over nothing, leaving our communities shattered.” All true, all healthy, all necessary, and maybe at some point the introspection will lead to material changes. However, when blacks (or, at least, black activists and “community leaders”) are talking to white people, suddenly they’re a united front: “All our problems are your fault.” Any criticism of even the worst aspects of underclass black culture is suddenly forbidden, as it might give succor to the enemies of black political advocacy. Black commentators who break this taboo (Glenn Loury, Thomas Sowell, etc.) are savaged as traitors and dancing monkeys by the very same blacks who, among their own, will acknowledge the truth behind that very same criticism.
Apparently we now have a vocal contingent of aspiring “white community leaders” who similarly cannot brook any public criticism of the worst elements of white trash culture, lest it empower “the enemies of our people.” This is pathetic, insecure, dishonest behavior. Whatever one might say about Jared Taylor, he has never been afraid to publicly air out the neuroses and failings of his own people; his brand of upstanding, intellectually honest discourse appears fundamentally unsuited for an increasingly propagandistic “siege mentality” discourse on the modern racially-aware right.
I have many problems with Richard Hanania, but seeing the army of pro-Taylor trolls spamming the comments section of the debate with petty insults about his appearance rather than even attempting to engage with the substance of his arguments, I have to concede that the new contours of the debate have squeezed out principled but overly-old-fashioned men like Jared Taylor, and will require the torch to be passed to high-character individuals who can thread the needle between the increasingly low-brow Chud Populism of right-wing Twitter, and the respectable but vacuous thought leaders of the dying Boomer right.
Assuming that Blacks are inferior to whites and whites are equal to Asiatics, still doesn't get you to supporting infinite Asiatic migration to white countries and infinite white immigration to Asiatic ones. When the next war errupts with an Asiatic country, the coethnics of that Asiatic country US will again face brutal persecution, which would be lacking if they were white.
And because Asiatics are perceived to be intellectual equals to whites, their future persecution is all the more likely: if Japanese-Americans were as smart as mere rats, like Americans depicted them as, they wouldn't credibly be considered a threat. But because the enemy is both weak and strong and Americans in their heart of hearts knew Japanese Americans were at least their intectual equal, Americans knew they posed a threat, if they weren't loyal.
Likewise supporting infinite white immigration into Asiatic countries makes you no better than open border types who consider all socities with functioning credit cards to be equal: immigration even of equal quality populations breeds distrust and disrupts the assabiyah. The few white Americans in Japan, despite your claims that their IQ is equal to that of natives, act in the same manner as immigrants to white countries do: refuse to learn the language, write smear pieces alleging persecution or spread deceits inteding to besmirch the reputation of the host country. See Debito Arudou, Jake Adelestein, David Atkinson, neither showing the amount of respect to the country which opened its doors to them, I assume you would demand from immigrants show to the US.
If white nationalists want to be seen as something to conservationists, who can care about pandas without hating snub nosed monkeys, they should refrain from promoting dissolution of non-white peoples. Admixing South Koreans to some subgroups of US whites could increase their average IQ, but it would decrease diversity, and a principled white nationalist who cares about diversity would oppose it, just as he would oppose any attempt to destroy as a nation any ethnicity, no matter how low its average IQ.
Afford Asiatic peoples the same rights you, Hoffmeister25, have in the past said Black people also deserve: the right to their own states and with their own immigration policies.
I see no reason to believe that this is true. (And, to be clear, the supposed “brutal persecution” of Japanese-Americans during World War 2 was actually nothing of the sort.)
I made it explicit in my post that I do not support “infinite immigration” of anyone to anywhere. Immigration numbers should be controlled and manageable, to limit cultural disruption and strains on education, the job market, and public accommodations.
I don’t care about diversity in that sense. I want the world to become more interconnected and culturally-homogenous over time; I just want the culture the world converges on to be advanced, Eurasian in character rather than some oppositional Third World miasma, and to value the things I value. I’d be perfectly happy if in 300 years nobody speaks Korean any longer, as long as that means that people with Korean ancestry have been successfully amalgamated into a thriving, technologically-advanced, proud world culture. This will mean a flattening and merging of white cultures as well; I don’t care if anyone is still speaking Dutch in 300 years either. This process of cultural blending between the peoples of Eurasia and the Americas needs to take place gradually and not by force or coercion, but I do believe it will take place.
At the risk of drawing booing, hissing and throwing of rocks I will confess that I'm super woke in this regard, and actually do care about diversity. Humanity transformed into stirred gruel of averaged out geno, pheno and culture types sounds very unappealing to my sensibilities, even if despite the numerical supermajority of Indians and Africans they somehow fail to dominate this gestalt.
Let the hundred flowers bloom, I say. The only realistic obstacle to what modern left winger would perceive as consummate planetary diversity is ironically the rejection of diversity on the local scale through self segregation and political borders - unfashionable as it is today. Interesting how through seemingly subtle tweaking of what diversity means we can arrive at dramatically different policies.
I'm aware that, to an extent, homogenization is natural in a world made smaller through technological means. With any luck, space colonization will prove a lasting obstacle to this.
Idle curiosity: how many languages do you speak fluently?
Just English. I used to be conversational in Spanish, albeit at nowhere near a high enough level to discourse intellectually in it; my Spanish has atrophied significantly from disuse, though.
I do expect that English will probably be the global lingua franca if the homogenization I’m expecting becomes a reality; while I love the English language very much (duh, I speak it, it feels like home to me, of course I think it’s the best) I also welcome language reforms (especially spelling reforms) in order to make it a truly suitable global (and later interstellar) human language.
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