This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Going off of memory here, but I think as a simple baseline White Women have the highest levels of endogamy compared to other races. It is not a dead-end to provide social or ideological signals to retain, promote, or strengthen that behavior. Judaism does this, although exogamy among Jews is and basically always has been one of their chief concerns, event their current level of endogamy given their small population pool relative to the population is proof of very strong social pressure for endogamy.
It certainly isn't a dead end- anywhere in the world. There needs to be a subtle or esoteric celebration of or pressure for endogamy.
The subtle and esoteric approach is better not only because it's more effective because it does incorporate more people into the fold.
Let's suppose that Trumpism is succeeded by "Vanceism" and there are going to be some major radical reforms to the Right Wing movement. I don't think Vance would oppose elements of a new Right Wing culture that esoterically promote White endogamy just because he married an Indian, in the same way I bet Jews who marry non-Jews are still more sympathetic to the Jewish effort for promoting endogamy. Does anybody think Jared Kushner is opposed to Jewish endogamy just because he married outside? Of course not.
The title "White Advocacy Is for All of Us" is an interesting one, but an Inclusive White Nationalist movement is not as contradictory as it sounds. Think of how strong the support of non-Jews is for Jewish nationalism- Zionism is for Everyone. The cultural and political levers that have accomplished that feat are available to White people as well if they learn how to use them.
Edit:
I always find this question to be pretty dishonest because it's never invoked for the advocacy of any other ethnic group. It's only when somebody talks about White Advocacy that everyone pretends they don't know what White is.
Just like "who is Black" or "who is Jewish" would be complicated if you drilled down to the nitty-gritty and tried to provide a comprehensive racial categorization, you just need to look at a PCA plot of human genes to quite clearly see where a "white person" belongs. White Nationalists will even crassly tap the PCA plots when others try to invoke ambiguity over who the Aryans were for example. Even the Nazis had a fairly comprehensive definition of "Aryan" that included all of the identified "six races of Europe" Nordic, Falish, Western, East-Baltic, Eastern, Dinaric as Aryan, and their own map of Europe is remarkably consistent with modern genetic clustering within Europe.
It's simply not a huge obstacle to White Advocacy, you can put the borderline cases in either category, just like the NAACP isn't crippled by being able to unambiguously identify the classification of every single person as black or not black. It's not some intractable problem.
Many White Nationalists do acknowledge racial differentiation within White people, so did the Nazis to various extents. The most common strain is Nordicism, which was held by some Nazi theorists but rejected by Hitler because he wanted to avoided causing racial conflict within Germans who are stratified among different European races. Point being, even Hitler understood "German" as a mixed-race concept, which many people don't know- although all the constituent races were considered Aryan.
OK, I don't know what "white" is for this purpose. Is a half-Asian kid white or not? As near as I can tell, they'll get to face the academic discrimination of any other Asian kid if they happen to have inherited Chang as a last name or the same discrimination that a white kid would if they're named Stevens. Culturally, they'll be treated as whitish. This isn't some weird, borderline case that requires adjudication via genetic clustering maps, it's just a common product of the many Asian-white couplings in the United States. That white nationalists would feel the need to dig into the PCA plots to answer the question rather than just saying that they're white enough or that they're actually Asian highlights a reason this project is just not very appealing.
How are you not even responding to the point I am making you have directly quoted? You can say you don't know what a Black is for the purpose of advocacy, or an Asian is, or what a Jew is. But literally nobody asks that in the face of somebody advocating for those groups. Racial identity is ultimately a political tool, and as such it is functional even with a relatively small portion of ambiguous cases. The ambiguous cases do not stop the ethnic advocacy of any other group of people.
Half-Asians feeling alienated is not a good reason for not having White Advocacy.
Yeah, there's a sort of isolated demand for rigor when it comes to defining "white" in online discussions about hypothetical white advocacy, or just advocacy for less anti-white rhetoric and policies.
In contrast, in real world or hypothetical discourse about giving more racial preferences to blacks and latinos, there's substantially more of a "I know it when I see it" and "let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good" vibe (to the extent such considerations come up at all), an all-gas-no-brakes attitude as to not slow things down by getting bogged down by corner cases and implementation details.
Some of it may be due to constituency, that the type of people willing to discuss—much less advocate for—the interests of white people are cognitively different on average than those who advocate for the interests of blacks and latinos, at least descriptively in the current cultural milieu.
The entire idea of White Advocacy doesn't sit well with people because of the propaganda they've been exposed to their entire lives. So the smarter among them try to dress up that feeling with arguments deconstructing what it means to be White. So they believe their opposition to White Advocacy lies in ambiguity of the concept or rational argument, rather than acknowledging it actually is something they were taught to believe their entire lives- that advocating for White people is a moral wrong and advocating for Jews and non-White people is a moral good.
It doesn't sit well with people not because of "the propaganda" but because identity politics of all stripes is deeply unpopular outside the professional managerial class and (in the US at least) remains closely associated with Marxism and Europe. Two things that are also less than popular.
Identity politics in the popular zietgiest is seen as an ideology for losers who wouldn't make the cut in a honest meritocracy, hence the popular epithet of "Didn't Earn It" applied to all DEI hires.
The way the identitarian right presents itself does them no favors either. What incentive would a sincere American white supremacist straight out of the movies have to associate with low testosterone edgelords chanting "your body my choice" and non-binary cat-girls from Ontario writing Hitler apologia. How does aligning with such losers and degenerates do more to secure a future for his children than aligning with MAGA?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link