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Notes -
Hitler's Identity Politics, Part II
(c) Feb 19, 2025, By J. Nelson Rushton
Note:
This post is an installment of a book I am writing, under the working title They See not, which I am serializing as a series of posts on The Motte. The book is planned to be about the nature and common characteristics of populist tyrannical movements, with special focus on the woke ideology, and about how to combat such movements. The first four posts in the series were:
The current chapter is entitled Hitler's Identity Politics, Part II.
1 Introduction
The Nazi worldview, as definitively expressed in Hitler's Mein Kampf, has certain similarities with the pagan worldview, certain similarities with the Judeo-Christian worldview, and certain similarities with the woke worldview.
Like a pagan, Hitler is righteously proud of the conquests of other peoples by his people, and he credits these conquests to the greatness of his folk and their leaders. Hitler's glorification of Bismarck and the German military command in Vol 1 Ch 10 of Mein Kampf, for example, echoes the tribute to Shield Sheafson's mægen in the opening stanza of Beowulf.
However, unlike the pagans, but ironically following in the Hebrew tradition, Nazism also posits a transcendent, universal moral order. This seems an odd conjunction, and it is an odd conjunction, but the Nazi rationale is as follows: (1) the fabric of Nature has a fixed moral compass, and (2) as it happens, that compass inexorably points toward the triumph of the German Volk and Reich [people and state].
This Nazi picture of the world entails a theory of social justice rife with double-standards, and this is where it comes to resemble wokeness. In the Nazi view, those people and nations who stand in the way of German imperialism, or who make convenient targets of opportunity for German imperialism, are stripped of their would-be human rights by the Law of Nature. On the other hand, when the shoe is on the other foot and Germany is defeated (in World War I) and imposed upon (by the Versailles treaty), Hitler wails with righteous indignation that would make Ibram Kendi and Ta-Nehisi Coates look like trifling wanna-be's in the arena of victim politics.
2 The Competing Mythologies of Nazism and Judaism
This section compares the grand narrative of Mein Kampf with that of the Hebrew Bible in terms of (1) a vision of transcendent purpose, (2) their respective views of conflict and conquest, and (3) where they place credit and blame for national victories and national catastrophes. It may seem strange on its face to compare the Bible with Mein Kampf, but I believe the comparison bears discussing. Both books are manifestos of sorts, and both lay out ideas that nations have felt were worth fighting over.
My interest here is not in questions of who were the Hebrews, or who were the interwar Germans, or who was better than whom. I am less interested in comparing groups of people than in comparing ideologies -- that is, in the effect the Hebrew Bible had on the Hebrews and their cultural descendants, and the effect that Nazism had on the Germans of the Weimar Republic and their cultural descendants. Before they became Jews, the Hebrews were bronze age barbarians; before they became Nazis, the Germans were Western Christians like me. I doubt that any ideology is going to come along and make people like me act like the Hebrews in the book of Joshua; moreover, if there is an ideology that could do that, it isn't in the Bible -- because I've already bought into that one and I am still not interested in launching wars of aggression in the Holy Land or anywhere else. On the other hand, an ideology did come along and turn people like me into genocidal Nazis. So evidently these two ideologies have very different effects on their adherents.
I submit that key features of the Nazi ideology include the following:
Transcendent Purpose
The pagan worldview is one of shameless conquest of the weak by the strong. The conquest is naturally shameless because in the pagan view, Heaven, like Earth, is a theater of war between separate sovereigns. For example, the Romans presumed their gods favored them in battle (so long as the Romans had been properly pious), but they also presumed that their enemies' gods favored their own worshipers. Thus, the best the Romans could hope for from those foreign gods, as they prayed for in the evocatio, was that they would sit things out.
The Greek view was similar. Homer's Iliad depicts forces of Heaven engaged on both sides of the war:
In the Judeo-Christian view, by contrast, Heaven takes only one side. As Abraham Lincoln wrote,
While Hitler's Mein Kampf espouses an ethos of shameless conquest, Mein Kampf is decidedly not a pagan book. Ironically following in the Hebrew tradition, Mein Kampf extolls a vision of a singular, transcendent Higher Purpose. The first section of Vol I, Ch X contains Hitler's founding myth of the German Reich. In this section, Hitler mentions Nature as a singular, grand force in almost every paragraph. Moreover, Hitler casts Nature as a personified force: one which has goals, and which takes action to achieve those goals. For example, he writes,
For Hitler -- as for a Hebrew but not for a pagan -- Heaven takes one side in every conflict. In Hitler's view it is the side of the strong,
and Hitler tells us precisely who the strong happen to be:
So, the Nazi worldview holds that there is a moral compass woven into the fabric of the universe -- but instead of pointing North, it always points to Nazi.
Conflict and Conquest
The Hebrew vision, in contrast with the Nazi vision, is not one of eternal victory by the strong over the weak, nor of themselves over anyone else. It is a vision of progress toward peace. The envisioned peace is not ruled by the strongest tribe, nor by the Hebrews themselves, but ruled impartially by God:
The Biblical vision of a Messianic age of peace on earth stands in stark contrast, of course, to the Hebrews' narrative of their own national founding. When confronting their neighboring tribes, the Israelites are commanded by God, through Moses, to make them an offer they can't refuse, largely in the mold of pagans like of Pompey or Shield Sheafson:
Moreover, in case of the previous residents of the Holy Land, the Israelites are to make no offer and give no quarter, even to women and children -- more reminiscent more of Genghis Kahn, or perhaps of Hitler himself, than of Shield or Pompey:
Lo!
The Biblical stories of conquest and slaughter by the Hebrews are gruesome even for the ancient world. One key thing about them, however, is that they probably never happened. The rough consensus of secular historians is that the tales of ruthless conquest in Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Joshua are legends and fables. The fact that that is the story the Israelites chose to tell about themselves tells us something about their culture -- but exactly what it tells us is subject to debate, and that debate should be constrained, first and foremost, by the facts of history. We know a lot about what the Nazis did, and it is reasonable to look for explanations for their what they did in their founding mythos. We know a little about what the Hebrews did, and it is reasonable to look for explanations for what they did in their founding mythos. What is not reasonable -- though it seems to be fairly popular -- is to speculate about the cultural impacts of those narratives without looking primarily at what their believers have done.
Unfortunately, we don't have copious records of what the ancient Hebrews did. However, if they had been conquistadors like the Assyrians or the Persians, we would know; ergo they weren't. The Hebrews may well have tried to subjugate their neighbors and failed in the endeavor. They probably would have if they could have. Why do I believe that? Because that is what everyone would have if they could have in the bronze age. We have no reason to think the Hebrews were different in this respect, Biblical or historical. But precisely because that was typical for the age, that tells us nothing about the effects of the Bible on Hebrew culture and morals, except that it didn't miraculously turn them into pacifists overnight. Surprise! The Bible didn't even turn the Hebrews into non-pagans overnight, and the Bible itself is clear about that.
What we do have records of, and very good records, is Hebrew law. Now if God came down from Heaven and cast a spell on the Hebrews to turn them all into superhuman moral geniuses, then we should expect them to have suddenly implemented a system of laws whose wisdom and insight meets or exceeds those of the most enlightened societies of today. That didn't happen (Surprise!). But the relevant control group against which to measure the ancient Hebrews is not the Kingdom of Heaven, or even the modern West; it is their contemporary neighbors. By that standard, I submit that Hebrew law was a deeply important and substantially unique departure in the direction of modern morality. I will make that argument at length in future posts, but here I will restrict the discussion to how the Biblical view of conflict and conquest differs from the Nazi vision.
In the Nazi story, as we saw above, the Reich was born in battle. In the Hebrews' account, their nation is born when God forms a covenant with Abraham (notably in direct contrast to Hitler's disdain for origins based on mere talk).
Having been brought up in the Judeo-Christian tradition, it is easy for us to overlook something in this passage, that to the pagan mind would have been quite puzzling: what's the point of blessing the families of the Earth? except maybe with the end of a spear, a la Pompey or Shield Sheafson?
To the point, the Nazis had no interest in being a blessing to all of the families of the Earth. Hitler's long-term vision, noted above, is eternal victory of the strong (viz., the German Volk and Reich) over the weak (viz., whomever is convenient to attack and exploit). In the short run, he has his sights set on the seizure of foreign lands, through wars of aggression, for the purpose of Lebensraum ("living space") for the German people. If there are others currently in that "living space" -- such as there were in the lands of the Soviet Union which he intended to seize and occupy -- Hitler held it is only right that they be killed or displaced to make room for better people.
Note that a pagan would not need a pretext for conquest, but a Nazi -- on the view of a transcendent moral order -- does. In service of this pretext, Hitler uniquely dignifies and uniquely and humanizes the Aryan race:
By contrast, he expresses relative disdain for the Slavic people of Russia and Eastern Europe, whom he intends to attack and kill or displace. Hitler's disdain for the Slavs takes on special significance in the context of an "eternal victory of the strong over the weak", and of Hitler's imminent plans for war:
And of course Hitler spews venomous hatred toward the Jews, whom he would like to extirpate from the Earth.
I am afraid many readers will have trouble stepping outside the Judeo-Christian moral waters in which they swim, whether they profess belief in God or not. So, at the risk of being redundant, I repeat that a pagan wouldn't need a pretext for conquest or slaughter; a pagan conqueror would not need to disparage his victims, and a pagan conqueror would have no need for Hitler's view that might makes right. For a true barbarian, might makes might, might is enough, and "right" need not enter the picture.
The Hebrew Bible has many verses that give Jews special status in their own country, which celebrate their victories (real or imagined) over foreigners, and which warn against mixing in marriage with foreigners. But none of that makes it unique. What makes it unique is that it contains verses that point toward equal human rights under Natural Law, with repeated emphasis on equal rights for non-Jews. For example,
Neither pagans nor Nazis entertain this idea of equal treatment under law for mere human beings dwelling among them, even as an aspiration.
The Hebrews are commanded to conquer the Holy Land and kill its inhabitants. That is bronze age business as usual. What is not business as usual is that they are specifically commanded not to attack their other neighbors, nor to take so much as a cup of water from them without paying for it, even though they have the power to do so. For example,
Pompey would just be befuddled by this, and so would Hitler.
In summary, Mein Kampf and the Hebrew Bible are both narratives of a transcendent purpose, but the consistent purposeful vision of Mein Kampf is domination by the strong of the weak, forever, the strong being Deutschland (uber alles). The Hebrew Bible has sprinkles of jingoism and chauvinism as well, and to expect otherwise would be ridiculous; but it also contains sprinkles of other things, that are mostly if not wholly missing from the pagan worldview and the Nazi worldview: equal treatment of mere human beings under law at home, and a far future vision of peace on Earth abroad. In the sweep of history, the fact that so many people even view these as good things is relatively new in the world -- but Germany consciously relapsed from those aspirations under the Nazi rule.
Credit and Blame
When the Germans win, Hitler credits this to the greatness of the German people and their leaders:
By contrast, in the Hebrew Bible, it is not the Hebrews who are said to be mighty, but their enemies:
Whereas the Nazi narrative credits their victories to the German Volk and Reich, the Hebrew story credits the victories to God:
Lest the Hebrews dare to think they earned God's favor because they are such good people, their Bible makes it clear that they did not and are not:
So the Nazi and Jewish views of who gets credit for their national victories are quite opposite. But so are their accounts of who gets the blame for their national defeats. On those occasions where the Hebrews are defeated or oppressed, the Hebrew bible -- particularly in the books of Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah -- places the blame squarely and somberly on the Hebrews themselves. In a twisted sense, this is the one point of agreement between the two ideologies: Nazi mythology places the blame for the German national catastrophes on the Hebrews as well. I could quote Hitler ad nauseam on this, but I don't think the fact is in dispute, and I don't care to repeat Hitler's words on the subject.
Ѻ
To summarize, the Nazi ideology is distinguished by
3 Hitler and Plato
In Vol 1, Chapter 10 of Mein Kampf, Hitler describes the moral and economic decay of Germany that he believes led to its defeat in World War I. Echoing the narrative of Plato's Republic, Hitler describes a state which has regressed, in his view at least, from timarchy (military rule), to oligarchy (unrestrained greed and rule of the wealthy), to libertine, Marxist-leaning populism. The parallels between Mein Kampf and Plato's Republic Book VIII are too close to be ascribed to chance -- though Hitler doesn't mention Plato, and I do not know whether Hitler had read Plato's Republic, or whether he and Plato witnessed similar turns of events two thousand years apart, or both.
Like Plato, Hitler views the transition from timarchy to oligarchy to be driven by moral decay, and in particular by a cultural shift in what is held in esteem. He writes,
Both Plato and Hitler write that after the descent from timarchy to oligarchy, the greedy predation of the oligarchs gives birth to a class of ruined men, who then form a cohort of non-working poor. As Plato puts it,
Hitler tells a similar story of exploitation and inequality:
For Hitler as for Plato, the oligarchic state soon degenerates into one of class division, moral libertineness, anti-nationalism, anti-meritocracy, multiculturalism, and general half-heartedness in all attempts to keep order. It then further degenerates toward leftist populism of some form (communism for Hitler, and dimokratia for Plato).
There is one point, however, where Hitler and Plato part ways. For Plato it is all about values; for Hitler, it is all about race. Hitler's final assessment of the root of his country's problems is this:
On this score Hitler diverges from Plato, and more closely resembles another noted thinker of the Western canon.
4 Hitler and Ibram Kendi
A colleague of mine at a certain university (which will go unnamed) once described certain bureaucrats of that university's administration as Nazis. What he meant was that they were ruthless, tribal authoritarians -- which they were -- but something about the metaphor struck me as wrong. It took me a few seconds to put my finger on where the comparison broke down, after which I blurted out in protest, "Nazis were effective".
There are many disparaging charges that could be rightly leveled at Hitler, but pipsqueak is not among them. Ibram X. Kendi -- author of the woke manifesto How to be an Antiracist -- is, by contrast, a poster child of pipsqueak. For that reason among others, it feels strange to analogize Hitler to Kendi. Nevertheless, the calculus of ideological similarity puts these two on the same plane in several key respects.
For starters, both Hitler and Kendi hate capitalism. Hitler writes, for example,
and for Kendi:
There is some nuance to Hitler's views from the standpoint of terminology: he is both fanatically anti-capitalist and fanatically anti-Marxist. For many readers, "capitalism" and "Marxism" are ideological polar opposites, but Hitler's ideological emphasis is different from that of most readers. For him, both Marxism and capitalism are tools of an international Jewish conspiracy to exploit the Aryan people, with national socialism standing in direct opposition to both. What Marxism and capitalism have in common for Hitler, besides their association with Jewry, is their materialist, individualistic, and anti-nationalist character. In any case he uses "Jewish", "capitalist", and "Marxist" all as slurs, often together in reference to some tripartite conspiratorial hydra:
Both Hitler and Kendi identify predatory capitalist oligarchy as the immutable genetic characteristic of a certain race. Hitler of course identifies it with the Jews:
Kendi has a different race in mind:
The similarity is quite remarkable. Whites for Kendi, like Jews for Hitler, are a race of (1) genetically disposed (2) deceivers and (3) capitalist (4) exploiters. They just can't help it.
It must be pointed out that Kendi's statements here are beyond the pale even for woke pundits, and most notable SJW's would not follow as far in Hitler's ideological footsteps as Kendi does. It must also be pointed out, however, that Kendi's comments were well known for years, and he was seldom if ever denounced for them by the woke left -- so, while unusual, these statements were not particularly unwelcome. If a right winger had said any such thing, about any group of people, you can be sure that woke cancel-culture would have unearthed the offense and kicked into high gear over it.
Like Hitler, Kendi sees his people as the heirs of a glorious past with glorious leaders:
And he holds that it remained glorious until the capitalist exploiter race stepped in and ruined it all with their underhanded backstabbing:
Even Hitler doesn't blame the Jews entirely for the German defeat in WWI. He actually says the Germans brought it on themselves by.... wait for it... tolerating the Jews and their capitalist exploitation in their midst! Similarly, Kendi gives a nostra culpa [our fault] on behalf of his people, blacks. The problem with blacks, says Kendi, is that too many of them feel they are to blame, instead of whites, for their lagging outcomes:
5 Conclusion
Hitler claimed that the Jews had undermined the German war effort in World War I. In truth, there were probably a lot of people who contributed to Germany's loss in WWI and its subsequent economic collapse, and of course some of them were Jews. But in all likelihood, most of them were not Jews, and there was no massive program to exterminate those people, either as individuals or as members of any group they belonged to. On the other hand, around 30,000 Jews won medals for bravery fighting on the German side in the WWI -- and yet many of those very men, along with their families, perished in Nazi death camps under the pretext that they were somehow enemies of the Reich.
In particular, Hitler said he despised Jews because of their penchant for Marxism. It is true that Marxist leadership, in Germany and elsewhere, was populated disproportionately by Jews -- but if you want a litmus test for likely Marxists, current or former member of the Communist party is a pretty good one, and yet there was no systematic effort by the Nazis to exterminate them, of the sort that was directed against Jews (who merely might be Marxists). These obvious failures of the shoe-on-the-other-foot test, once we think to apply it, tell us that the stated reasons for the Nazi persecution of the Jews must have been quite different from the actual reasons. That is the nature of group guilt, aka social justice.
Hitler claimed that the Jews of Europe needed to be exterminated, war heroes and all, because they were a menace to his people. Alright then, Austria and Prussia had been a menace to their neighbors in Europe for hundreds of years, and their union in the German Empire was a greater menace after that. By Hitler's logic, the Allies would have been within their rights to implement a final solution to the German problem while they had Germany at their mercy following WWI. In hindsight that would have saved the allies a great deal of blood, toil, and tears. If the Treaty of Versailles were a Jewish conspiracy (as Hitler loudly charged), then Germany should have expected Old Testament justice out of the deal. But the Versailles treaty, while it caused significant hardship for the German people, was no Holocaust (not the same ballpark, not the same sport). And yet how did Hitler respond to it? Vae victis [woe to the vanquished] in the eternal triumph of the strong over the weak? No. What did we do to deserve this? Not really. He wailed that it was an unfair, unjust, absolute abomination against the Natural Order. Poor baby. That is the nature of double standards.
Group guilt and double standards: that is the nature victim identity politics.
What would you think of posting these in their own mega submission, instead of the CWR? Or separate individual submissions even.
I am not sure. The unifying theme of the posts is in the main theater of the culture war, but some of the essays don't have any visible connection to it as stand-alone posts. Any input would be welcome.
I'd personally appreciate it if you removed them from CWR one way or another (but feel free to put them elsewhere, like I said). To me, they're too long and single purpose for the amount of visibility in the CWR thread. But, you get engagement, so it's not at all obvious to me that others would agree.
As far as my imaginary vote goes, I prefer the ability to decide for myself what posts are interesting and what posts are not. Moreover, most of the utility of this place is in the discussions. I don't see the point in having to trust someone here to decide what post is likely to generate good discussion or not, when we can just wait and see.
To that extent I'd personally appreciate if you stopped asking posters to not post, and instead just clicked the - on the left.
I did not in fact ask that this poster not post. I asked their thoughts about posting outside of CWR.
This is...very much not the same as my intentionally ban-worthy douchebaggery from a bit ago.
Edit: hm, my "I'd personally appreciate" is closer to asking they not, but still better than than the consensus building antagonism I rightfully ate a ban for.
I think this is also essentially (or entirely? I don't care enough to read too much of their user history) single issue posting, which is against the rules. Iirc copy pasting in a whole substack is also frowned upon, and it's adjacent to that. So, I'll report - but I think discussing with someone about their posting is more direct and productive than just clicking report.
And, OP has -12.
I am doing exactly the same thing, minus the report. To that extent we agree.
I don't know what this means. I already see moderation here as way too user dominated. I'd prefer it if the mods weighed the quality and effort of the post put forth rather than buckling to dislikes and mass reports. Though that seems to be the opposite of what they are doing.
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While my criticism of your entire thesis from your last chapter applies to this one as well, probably even more so, one point I want to (again) make is that Slavs were considered Aryan according to Nazi racial theory and Nazi racial law.
Hitler's project was pan-Germanism, which he is delineating as exclusionary of Slavs. That does not mean Hitler did not consider Slavs to be Aryan. The Nazi hatred towards the Soviet Union was foremost driven by Communism and not any belief that Slavs are non-Aryan or sub-human.
In contrast, the Nazi racial theory on the Aryans has essentially been vindicated by recent genetic analysis showing all European cultures descend from a common Indo-European culture. They call that culture "Aryan", but all European cultures descend from it according to the theory, and that theory has been confirmed by more recent genetic and linguistic analysis.
Hitler's writing here is also cogent- rejecting the notion that "Germanization" means teaching an Arab or Chinese person the language and having him vote in a German election makes him German, which is the theory that has been forced onto Europe since the defeat of Hitler, to catastrophic consequences.
Aryan or not (and I'm skeptical of that pictographic source), Hitler considered the Russian people, aside from their aristocracy, to be congenitally inferior to Germans. Do you dispute this?
For example, in Mein Kampf he wrote,
That perspective has nothing to do with Hitler's political objectives or animosity towards the Soviet Union. Hitler acknowledged racial inequality even within the German people has well. I also think even many HBD-aware Russians would be sympathetic to the suggestion that the Russians seem to have less capacity for constructive politics... certainly the evidence is stacked against them on that question, with the eternal dysfunction of Russian politics and the bright spots being disproportionately associated with leaders of German ancestry...
Hitler's animosity towards the Soviet Union is not based on the Slavs it's based on Bolshevism. It's a dishonest reading of Mein Kampf to pretend otherwise. He could not possibly be more clear that he regarded Bolshevism as the ultimate enemy, but you somehow manage to entirely elide Hitler's self-stated reason for his animosity towards the Soviet Union in his own work, which is the traditional approach taken from the mainstream perspective. That animosity was not derived from his plausible claim that the Russians have less capacity for constructive statecraft, or some claim that the Slavs were not Aryan even though they were explicitly considered Aryan in German racial law.
It's worth pointing out that Hitler's theory he applies to the Russians here he applies to the Germans as well:
Hitler's theory on this front is also not related to his hostility towards the Soviet Union, it's Bolshevism which he makes abundantly clear.
Edit: i.e., from Mein Kampf:
But somehow, without fail, the mainstream seems to interpret Hitler's animosity towards the Soviet Union as being related to Aryan racial theory relegating Slavs as subhuman. It's an intentional lie to hide the actual reason he was hostile to Russia.
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Well, there is at least one book by the woke left denouncing those statements - "How to Be an Antiracist" by Ibram X. Kendi, where Kendi spends an entire chapter self-flagellating about these statements and his other similar youthful views and uses it as an example on how, in the course of being an antiracist, one should not be an anti-white racist, either.
Well, darn. I tried to piece the contents of that book together from snippets without reading it, because I don't want to buy it on principle and I couldn't find the full text online. Now I have to spend Saturday at the book store reading it in an easy chair.
Thanks for the info. I will make appropriate edits when I have time.
Thrift Books has preowned copies from $5.29.
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Check out a website called Anna's Archive. You have to get pretty obscure before they don't have a free full download of a book.
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There's a short summary of the book's chapter, including chapter 10 that discusses the anti-white racism part, here
I'm sometimes convinced I'm the only person to have actually read this book or DiAngelo's White Fragility. The latter is complete empty-headed twaddle mixed with obvious bait for grifting (ie. not-so-subtle promotion of DiAngelo's course on this), the former, while not high lit, is at least interesting in the sense of being built around Kendi's personal narrative and continuous course of absolving himself of his past racism/sexism/homophobia etc. through the act of confession and self-contrition.
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I read Ch 10 of How to be an Antiracist and did not find what I expected, from this post, to find there. I don't see him walk back the contents of his 2003 Famua article; he says you shouldn't hate white people for being white, but he was already expressing that position in 2003. Can you quote him on retracting and/or apologizing for the 2003 article I quoted?
He calls it a "fallacious idea" right there.
More to the point, though, it's best read within the context of the entire book which, as said, is Kendi using examples of his own life as examples of fallacious ideas in general in the process of confession and self-contrition.
Kendi clearly retracts “Europeans are simply a different breed of human,”, but this is in the context discussing the crazy idea that white people are literally aliens from another planet. In the book, he recounts his friend Clarence pushing back against that:
and then, in the next paragraph, says he was wrong to think whites are a "different breed of humans". Ok, Kendi believes white people are homo sapiens; that's a relief. The rest of the paragraph could be read as backtracking substantial parts of the 2003 article, but it doesn't do that explicitly. Maybe he retracts it more strongly somewhere else, but if this is all there is, my guess is that he doesn't really want to distance himself from it, but has realized he was talking like a Nazi and wants to manufacture plausible deniability. If I had once said what he said, and wanted to retract it, I'd be pretty clear about it. Is this quote the best there is, to your knowledge?
This really sounds like nitpicking and goalpost moving, setting up specific standards on the spot that he apparently should have passed for it to be a real retraction.
Kendi's clear message in this chapter is that his youthful views are bad and it's bad to hold views like this. He could have very well chosen not to include a chapter on the book on why anti-white racism is bad, and yet he chose to include this. Furthermore, to my knowledge, it was only after this book that people even started to pay attention to what he said in 2003, so he was almost certainly the one doing the most to even publicize the fact that he had held these views in the first place - why would you manufacture plausible deniability to something you are promoting yourself?
So, to be clear, this is the strongest retraction of the 2003 article he makes, to your knowledge?
You wrote:
My standards came from the expectations I had based your description:
Yes, especially within the context of the book, the chapter is indeed an act of self-flagellation over having held views of the described sort in his youth. I'm not sure what sort of a further retraction than what was described you're looking for here.
Imagine someone who had published an analogous article about blacks to what Kendi said about whites, that was part of a searchable public record. Now imagine they apologized by saying,
Now imagine that was their apology and they left it at that. Would that be OK with you?
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This is a somewhat one-dimensional interpretation of Ancient Judaism IMO. We have plenty of examples of Jews discriminating against groups of people seen as enemies, and excluding them much like the Nazis originally wanted to exclude Jews:
Deut 23:3: “No Ammonite or Moabite or any of their descendants may enter the assembly of the Lord, not even in the tenth generation. For they did not come to meet you with bread and water on your way when you came out of Egypt, and they hired Balaam son of Beor from Pethor in Aram Naharaim to pronounce a curse on you."
Ezra 9: “After these things had been accomplished, the leaders approached me and said, “The people of Israel, including the priests and Levites, have not kept themselves separate from the surrounding peoples whose abominations are like those of the Canaanites, Hittites, Perizzites, Jebusites, Ammonites, Moabites, Egyptians, and Amorites. Indeed, the Israelites have taken some of their daughters as wives for themselves and their sons, so that the holy seed has been mixed with the people of the land. And the leaders and officials have taken the lead in this unfaithfulness! When I heard this report, I tore my tunic and cloak, pulled out some hair from my head and beard, and sat down in horror.”
Joshua 23: “ The LORD has driven out great and powerful nations before you, and to this day no one can stand against you. One of you can put a thousand to flight, because the LORD your God fights for you, just as He promised. Therefore watch yourselves carefully, that you love the LORD your God. For if you turn away and cling to the rest of these nations that remain among you, and if you intermarry and associate with them, know for sure that the LORD your God will no longer drive out these nations before you. Instead, they will become for you a snare and a trap, a scourge in your sides and thorns in your eyes, until you perish from this good land that the LORD your God has given you.
We have examples of ethnic narcissism, similar to Nazi Germany:
We have a genocidal drive against the Amaleks, whose entire seed needs to be genocided because they attacked Israel when they were weak:
The punishment for belonging to a different religion in Ancient Israel was death, something considerably worse than camps before exportation to Madagascar:
Jews often blamed their troubles and defeats on allowing foreign people and their customs, or marrying foreigners. It’s not quite correct to say that ancient Jews did not attribute victories to themselves. The God is themselves, it is their own priestly class who sacrifices to God, it is the organization of their whole peoplehood. “Israel is rewarded for her faithfulness” is functionally identical to “we deserve this land for our righteousness”, it is just cloaked in religious language so that the priestly class and hierarchies are justified. If Ancient Israel had a group of foreigners with foreign customs living amongst them, God (by which I mean priest and prophet of the Israelite community) would command them to be slain, and probably their whole family, and all their animals as well. I suppose if they converted, they would be allowed to participate socially after the eleventh generation, depending on how a Rabbi wanted to interpret Deut 23:3. But when you read “God says these people need to be driven from the land because they are evil”, it’s a little silly to interpret this other than “the Jews believe they deserve the land for not being evil” — it is just rendered in a justifiable and humble way by the priests.
The Ancient Israelite “rendering” of their superiority is significantly better and more prosocial than Nazi Germany, and much more sophisticated. But IMO it is still identity politics. It reminds me of a Spanish Conquistador “compassionately” conquering Mexico for God, because God is their God too, and God wants them to be Christians and to be guided by God’s representative on Earth, the Spanish Crown. This is just poetic identity politics.
I edited the post, specifically the section called "Conflict and Conquests", to address this.
Basically I think you are comparing the Hebrews to perfect angels based on their mythology, whereas I am comparing them to Nazis and pagans based on their laws.
As you said,
What we disagree about is that I think that difference is exactly what is important, and that it is so large as to be rightly considered categorical, regardless of anecdotal counterexamples.
This part, however, I think is self-evidently incorrect:
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No, none of that is in line with Nazi ideology. Hitler had no plans to exterminate the French despite them being a massive thorn in Germany's side. He wanted to weaken the French state significantly such that they'd not be able to contest German dominance of Europe but the French people had a place in the New Order. And he wanted an alliance with Britain the entire time. According to Hitler, Western Europeans were basically fine, just misguided. Western Europeans/Aryans were not supposed to be going around exterminating eachother.
It was in the East where peoples were going to be compulsorily removed from their land, enslaved and treated harshly in various ways. And even there there's room for moderation. The Allies planned initially to treat the German nation harshly post-war in the Morgenthau plan but then moderated their stance in peacetime when they concluded it would be unhelpful.
The argument doesn't depend on Hitler wanting to exterminate the French. The Jews had no plans to exterminate the Germans; they were just a threat of some sort. Hitler's axiom is that threats to your national safety can be preempted by genocide. Germany was a threat of far greater magnitude to the Allies in 1919 than the Jews ever were to Germany, so by Nazi logic the allies were entitled to exterminate the Germans in 1919.
It would only be unhelpful if it didn't go far enough.
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This just isn't how Nazism works. Why didn't they exterminate the French? Because they were not in favour of 'exterminating anyone who is a potential threat to your national safety'.
You can't generalize Nazi anti-semitism out like that. Jews were considered specially, different from every other people. They didn't launch a boycott of French shops in Germany, they didn't enforce various discriminatory laws against people who married French. They didn't mark out French people in public. Jews were seen as subversive and extremely dangerous, in part due to the revolutions that Jewish communist leaders launched in 1919. The Spartacists and the Bavarian Socialist Republic for instance.
You can't understand Nazism without getting to grips with the special place that anti-semitism has in Nazi ideology. Whenever Nazis looked out at the world, they saw a global network of Jewish financiers and media working against them. Paying off Churchill's debts: Henry Strakosch. Behind Roosevelt, Harry White and Morgenthau.
I think I understand that tolerably. The question remains what is the rationale for this antisemitism? My only assumption is that it rests on the alleged threat the Jews pose to Germany. Am I missing something? If it doesn't rest on that, what does it rest on?
There's a difference between an enemy-for-the-moment who might have been and might in the future be a friend and a straight-up defectbot who is permanently hostile regardless of context.
To take the debate to safer pastures, 40K Orks are bad. They are all bad. They are genetically programmed to be bloodthirsty killers and are inherently incapable of peaceful coexistence or advanced civilisation. They are not and can never be in a moral community with humanity, will always be dangerous regardless of social context, and as such they are djur in the Ender Quartet typology, the "dire beast that comes in the night with slavering jaws" and they should be exterminated down to the last gretchin because that is the only way to end the conflict with them while preserving humanity.
I don't know all that much about Hitlerian ideology, but if he considered Jews to be in a similar category to Orks and Frenchmen to not be so, well, there you go.
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I would quibble with this. Between the Commissar Order and Barbarossa Decree, great latitude was afforded to German soldiers to kill the political elements of the Soviet state. Certainly the default approach to any captured Soviet political agent was summary execution. General guidelines for troop conduct, as well as orders circulated by corps and army commanders, all emphasized that the goal of the war was the destruction of the Soviet state and the eradication of Bolshevik influence. Furthermore, the degree to which Nazi propaganda conflated communists and Jews meant that in practice they were often viewed as one and the same and treated accordingly.
Within Germany and other occupied countries, having been a former member of the communist party was plenty enough to secure your arrest, and very frequently your execution. (Ironically, during the Great Terror, it was also very bad to be a former KDP member if you were living in the Soviet Union.)
Thanks. I changed this to:
Upwards of 20% of the KDP (communist party of Germany) in Germany were killed by the Nazis so I think this is fair to say.
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You go from
to
This sounds contradictory - were the pagans and Hebrews meant to be the other way around in the latter?
More generally, if I read this as a book, I think certain parts of it would strike me as failure to maintain the professional detachment (or maybe just copy-editing?) I expect from them: the opening of Section 2 seems to jump back and forth between something like dry passive-voice academic writing ("This section compares the grand narrative...") and overly personal ("I believe...", "people like me into genocidal Nazis"), which is jarring and gives me the impression that you are trying to write in a voice that is not yours and you are not fully comfortable with. If I evaluate it as a mottepost, it feels like a manifesto smuggled in through the "review my book chapter" backdoor: the idea that the SJW and Nazi identity politics are the same is not new, and I'd want more thoroughness (Do you expect the wokes to start opening concentration camps soon as well, or is there an important way in which they are different? Do these commonalities you identify apply to other movements in history, and how did they fare?) and less gratuitous emotional appeal and polemic ("Poor baby.") from a repeat treatment here at this point.
Yes that was a typo. Thanks for pointing it out.
I think it's funny that you expect books to have a tone of "professional detachment". Plato didn't.
Quod licet Iovi non licet bovi?
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Musk's secret? Elite human capital.
I still can't get over this picture of the Grok 3 team that built arguably the world's best AI in record time. Notice anything?
Exclusively Indian, East Asian, and White.
100% male.
Everyone, or almost everyone, under 40.
No suits.
This is what extreme meritocracy looks like in an intellectual environment. Elon's secret sauce is giving geniuses the space to do genius things with performance as the only metric.
Obviously this can't work for every company. The number of genius workaholics is too small. But Elon found a group of people who were comically undervalued by the market and let them cook.
Having read stories of how Musk treats his employees: I hope their sacrifices are worth it.
Musk has a better track record of producing results with those sacrifices than others do, after all.
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Save your pity for the grad students working 80 hours/week in a biology lab, getting paid peanuts, working on a project that has a 0.01% chance of ever mattering.
The Grok team on the other hand? These are killers, working with other killers, on some of the most interesting and impactful problems in the world. They get paid in the top couple percent of workers in the US, and top 0.1% in the world. It's not a sacrifice, it's an extreme privilege.
How much credit will they get, other than the Sense of Pride and Accomplishment? My guess is no more than 0.01% of what Musk gets, all combined.
If "killers working with other killers" were treated akin to ancient war heroes, I might reconsider my position on that.
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Most of the smartest scientific and technical minds wore suits for much longer than they have worn hoodies.
No competent LLM engineer in San Francisco is undervalued. If he poached from Meta and OpenAI he did it either by selling the rationalist types a vision of better AI safety, (which he does / did seem to care about), by exploiting his personal fan base, or by offering the mercenaries more money.
The Vesuvius scrolls kid had to go to the university of Nebraska, I'd say that counts as undervalued by the market. "the pipeline" at tech companies has been deliberately bent to exclude young men like him from getting into it at all. Just look at Google's recruiting stats in their DEI reports from 2012 to 2022
All of the FFANGS discovered that the top performers from Land Grant Flagship universities were nearly as elite as CalTech/MIT years ago. In fact, one of the draws for FAANG was that the NAME on your alma mater didn't matter as much - what counted was work product like a GitHub portfolio, or performance in some of the CS / Cyber competitions etc.
They may have discovered it, but they still focus their recruiting on particular universities (a slightly different set for each one, and some do include public universities), and getting their attention from another school is... difficult.
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Going to a state flagship even if you could technically get into a more selective private college is pretty common behavior in flyover.
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Did he have to, or did he choose to? It’s pretty common for Midwestern students to prefer to go to college somewhat close to home. A lot of us form lifelong friendships in high school, and going to college far away from home would tend to destroy those relationships.
You also save an enormous sum of money don't you?
Much easier to accumulate when you aren't spending 3 quarters of your 6-figure salary to rent a spot in a feces-ridden urban core.
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I know a few people like this. The 2 put together is scary effective in the short term.
In my experience, it doesn't last. A large portion of them burn out at they approach their 30s and turn semi-resentful. They make money, but their management/leadersip makes more. They haven't experienced much of life. Their heath takes the biggest hit as you lose your immortality in the 30s. And then ofc, The lack of bitches comes to haunt all men.
They tend to have zero human experience, so they end up in permanent "senior" IC roles, while their savvier & stupider friends are now ascending into VP-dom. It's like working in the military. It definitely shapes you in a specific way. But, it can be hard to adjust to civilian life afterwards. The classic example is HFT. Work through your 20s, retire permanently at 30. However, in HFT, you make 10s of millions instead of just a few millions like these kids are making. Not rich enough to Fat-fire.
Now, I personally love working with these people. They are machines and other than a few turbo-autists, most of them are good people.
I knew a few models in which life works out for these people.
Option 1 - Pump and dump yourself. (bail out at the right time)
Option 2 - Become a 70s dad
So yeah, couple of good options, but it is really easy to sleepwalk into your 30s with upper-middle class wealth and zero outside of it.
Exception to the exception - the best of them are monsters beyond understanding. Genuine ubermensch. Handsome, fit, smart, articulate and human calculators. Universally, they are either the most humble people I've met or sociopaths. No middle ground. They all love running marathons for some reason. In my experience, this group knows the perfect tipping point to start their VC funded startup or find a multi-million/yr VP role to camp at big-tech.
Huh, is this for the median quant? My understanding is you top out around 1-3 mil / year (at e.g Citadel or HRT), which makes “10s of millions” … tricky, especially after taxes, living in NYC, and also you have a 1-2 yr burn in period (so ~ 2 - 10 mil after a decade). Where are ppl getting these numbers??
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I've been laughing at this for the last 10 minutes. WMAF couples are by far the dominant demographic in my immediate social circle.
Is it a stereotype if it's true ?
Yeah, nothing about stereotypes say they have to be false. In fact, stereotypes exist because they are largely true. Black people really do love fried chicken, white people really do love ranch dressing and hate spices, and so on. Every group has its members to whom the stereotypes don't apply (e.g. I'm a Midwestern white guy who loves spicy food), but they still have a lot of predictive power.
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Yes, stereotype accuracy is one of the strongest and most reproducible effects in social science.
Could you please link me to some choice studies?
I remember reading a book about it a few years ago, but for the life of me, can't recall the author or title. While I can't find it, just googling yields a ton of results.
Hmm. Not that much to go on here, but thanks.
What's the kind of thing you'd like to see? Pretty sure each link will have a tone of further references.
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Where this gets even more hilarious is when a WM-WF sniffs around the WMAF couple to determine they're probably kinksters, invites them (the WMAF) to some sort of sex party - and then horribly out-freaks the WMAFs.
The two dudes have to join different run clubs. Sad.
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This teams looks diverse and inclusive to me. Hope they have enough equity in the project too.
On a more serious note - this is like rediscovering the wheel. This formula has proven track record. And I am willing to bet that they will be quite accepting of women if they manage to survive the initial hazing period.
I doubt they have much. Elon's not dumb. He's not going to want people who are primarily money motivated. And employees who have fuck-you money are lethal to a startup.
No, the employees are doing this for love. I assume they make very good but not insane money.
Yeah. This "genius move" is really pretty obvious. And yet so few are willing to do it because they don't like the optics.
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I used it for the first time today with some technical questions. For me it was very good. It's definitely much better than Claude 3.5 Sonnet which is my current daily drive. I haven't used O-1 though.
I also tried the Research feature which did a better job than Google's offering.
Grok won't be my #1 because it doesn't have API access, but my days of using ChatGPT as a secondary are likely over.
That said, I think everyone's mileage will vary on these things, and you're right not to trust benchmarks.
Edit: My mileage has varied. I asked Grok a fairly simple Regex problem and it bombed. When I used the "think" function it spun its circles for 2 minutes before coming back with some very convoluted but correct result. Claude bombed too. ChatGPT bombed as well, but fixed it on the second attempt. Once again, AI is great until you actually try to use it for anything.
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Too bad in 10 years, the corporate grind will have eaten most of those people. Two or three will make the transition to management. About the same will try to found startups of their own, maybe one ending up destroyed in a lawsuit with Musk. The rest will find the company they work for sets the minimum standard at their highest previous achievement, and added a bunch of corporate BS on top to make that harder to achieve, and will end up burning out in the bit mines.
This doesn't pattern match similar people I know.
True, they will get burned out in a few years. Then they'll walk over to Google or Microsoft into a nice cushy job. They will have a couple million in savings by then, and will look proudly on this period of their life as one of true achievement. Some of them might found companies. Some might go into [[shudder]] management.
This isn't the corporate rat race. This is more like Bletchley Park.
More likely casualties:
Dating and family
The AI they create might eat the world
AI development isn't about stopping a mortal enemy, like Bletchley Park or the Manhattan Project. It's a corporate endeavor, there to make money for the companies who make it. It IS the corporate rat race.
God forbid an employee make money for his employer in exchange for a salary.
But I don't think that's even what's going on here. Elon is not primarily motivated by money either. He wants a freedom-maximizing society that exists on multiple planets. He likely believes that woke AI is a threat to this.
And yet, unaccountably, Elon is the one who ends up with buckets of money.
I believe that Elon isn’t primarily motivated by money - he’s motivated by power, which he wants to use to achieve his goals. But money is a proxy for any goal you care to name, because it can be used to achieve any care you care to name.
Older tech guys who know their worth will sometimes do passion projects for a discount, like film stars, and good on them. But “do it for the love” is an excuse used to fool generation after generation of passionate young people out of demanding what their boss knows they’re worth.
Yeah, "this job isn't about the money, it's about passion" throws up as many red flags for me as "this job is about bringing your Whole Self to work to be part of The MegaCorpoCubeMart Family"
Scam alarm, demand twice as much money or walk if the CEO can't show his $1 executive pay package to prove he's only in it for the passion.
I feel like I've stumbled on /r/fednews. Don't like your job? Think the CEO gets paid too much? Good. Quit and find a better one. Better yet, start your own business. It's still a free country.
You've stumbled on a problem with the system (from the tech guy's point of view). The skill that matters most for making money is not technical. Being a technical guy doesn't give you the skill to start your own successful business, and if you try to partner with business people to do it, they're almost certainly going to get most of the money in the success case. They'll be the ones taking private jets and entertaining celebrities in their multiple mansions, while the middle-aged tech guys are trying to stay current enough to keep a job to pay a mortgage on one house in the Bay Area and take a vacation (flying coach) once in a while.
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My objection isn't to the employee making money. It's to the system that makes them "comically undervalued"; they are hailed as heroes now but they will continue to be comically undervalued in the future.
Fair enough.
The wages of these people is suppressed from what it should be for several reasons.
They are young
They are white/Indian/Asian
They are male
They are not posh
Companies are rarely willing to pay extreme outliers what they are truly worth. The 10x engineer only makes 20% more than the 0x engineer.
None of that is likely to change. But I don't feel bad for them. No one is forcing them to work at xAI and this is the best kind of work for a genius. Also, they still make good money.
I have a 10x coworker, and from what I know of our company's pay scale, he makes around four times what an entry-level engineer makes, and probably twice what an unremarkable mid-career engineer makes.
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Aren't they making $500k-1m/y total comp? Set for life even if they do get ground up after ten years.
Yes, they are likely making very good salaries. But the whole framing is wrong.
This is like asking how much the scientists working on the Manhattan Project got paid.
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All of them? Probably not.
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Everything I've seen is that they make about $300k TC in the Bay, which isn't the insane salary you think it is, with that cost of living.
Unlikely. When you join early a company that then becomes highly successful, the equity grant you get is going to the moon. So yeah, maybe they got offered $300k TC when they joined, but that $300k is worth much more after a year or two.
I get how vested options work, I'm in tech. xAI is private right? It could be that Elon is offering stock but we don't know that. Until they IPO their fake money is worth literally nothing. If so, then they are likely making far less than the 300k TC. I pulled the xAI from some leaked memo about the Lawsuit between xAI and OpenAI, it didn't include the equity split though (can't find it now rip).
However this says 188k - 440k, I image the 440k is for for Senior and Staff engineers, Like 2-3 on that whole team, afterall someone needs to be the junior, and SWE2/MLE2s https://cybernews.com/news/musks-x-ai-jobs-salaries-/
You clearly don't actually understand how equity works. It obviously is worth something, because investors are paying billions of dollars for it. Being public or private only has indirect effect on how much stock is worth.
Going public provides easy liquidity, which is good, especially to small stockholders, but private companies of the size we are talking about also usually provide liquidity options to stockholders. SpaceX, for example, had a tender offer a couple months ago. This event allows individual SpaceX stock holders to sell their holdings to institutional investors, in case you don't understand what that is.
To put it in more concrete terms: I'd happily go to any of these X AI employees, and buy whatever they vest in a year for $10,000. This offer establishes that their stock is worth something. (I'm not just making a point, this offer is 100% serious: if you work for X AI, feel free to DM me, I'm open to negotiations even).
These figures only include cash compensation, and they are a very reasonable range for cash part of the comp for between junior and staff levels.
There are around 40 people in the photo. I bet you that at least 10 of them are seniors or above.
Trust me I do, the real discrepancy is that we have different risk appetites. But please keep talking down to me.
I linked twitter salaries in the above thread. Everything in the Bay is talked about in the TC range because it sounds more impressive. If the post-Elon twitter salaries are any benchmark, then the 118-440k are TC as well. That means probably about 50% is in equity.
Anyone who worked for xAI would be a fool to take this offer because you are massively lowballing them. If they vest over 3 years as is typical, that 150k vested would be 50k a year. They would be a fool to sell it to you at 10k, Realistically based on how much you value it they would be better charging you 3x-5x the price since you clearly think its worth it. Would you cough up 150k-250k cash for 50k vested stock in xAI? You do after all think it is worth near half a million+, that would be quite the steal for you...
You made me go back and count, there are 26 people visible in that photo. If we assume a typical corporate structure of Junior, Engineer II, Senior, Staff. The general ratio is a mix of 1-3 Juniors/IIs per Senior, and 1-2 Seniors per Staff. I'd say there is 4-6 Seniors and 2-4 Staff Engineers.
You say:
You also say:
How can I be lowballing them when their stock is literally worthless? Can you make up your mind?
No, you quoted an article that was citing figures from job postings. Those figures are not there to sound impressive, they’re there to satisfy legal requirements California imposes on job postings.
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Twitter's not technically FAANG, but I think they need to compete with those salaries -- for which (especially in the Bay Area) $300K is nowhere near top-end.
Stock grant of that much again would also be nothing special for somebody at all in demand -- so $.5-1M TC sounds about right.
A Senior Software Engineer at Twitter makes about $335k TC. A senior puts you in probably your mid 20s to early 30s depending on how much you grind. A Senior MLE is 387k TC
Source: https://www.levels.fyi/companies/twitter/salaries/software-engineer?country=254 https://www.levels.fyi/companies/twitter/salaries/software-engineer/title/machine-learning-engineer?country=254
Levels tends to be a good source in my experience. If anything its high because people like to brag on levels. Honestly people wild overestimate tech salaries, unless you are a founder, are in at the ground floor, or have some astronomically rare skillset you get a nice 300k+ which isn't much in the Bay.
Aren’t ML / LLM engineers paid more than regular engineers coding the website or database stuff, though?
For context I'm an MLE, and while I'm not in the Bay, what I see is a 10-20% pay bump for MLEs over traditional backend SWEs. Frontend SWEs (Websites and stuff) are paid much less than backend SWEs. Database peeps can make wildly varying salaries depending on how much DevOps stuff they are doing and how critical the Database is.
MLE is generally a really nebulous job title as well, and than can really impact salaries a lot. I'm more analagous to an ML Researcher + SWE, but it can run the gamut from Data Scientist, Mathematician + SWE(I imagine this is a Quant), ML + Database/MLOps, SWE that interfaces with ML models, and most recently LLM specific Engineers (Generally called AI engineers).
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Well, Steve Bannon just threw a Roman salute at CPAC.
I know some people may have reservations in claiming that Elon didn’t mean to do what people thought he did, and many will scream until their hearts give out that he did it emphatically due to some inherent impulse to troll. Bannon doing this (a month no less) after Elon’s own stunt not only means that this was probably in response to that, but also Bannon didn’t even do the same winding motion which was the cover; no, ‘my heart goes out to you’, or, ‘I am reaching out to you’, or any superficial justification, just an unbridled arm stretched out for the purposes of salutation. Accompanying this a proclamation that Trump is a great man of history, no less, someone whose coming is augured only twice in the history of a country, with Bannon proclaiming that only Trump is worthy to be the Republican Party (and therefore President) even in 2028.
The Rubicon seemingly is continually crossed ever-so-slightly, or at least, it is being approached for the purposes of eventually making it to the other side. This comes after the news of the Napoleon quotation posted on the date of Mark Antony offering Ceasar the title of King, and the White House social comms posting Trump as King. Obviously, the former is enigmatic as a function, and the latter humorous. It’s just an interesting start to a new regime seemingly radicalized by its previously downtrodden nature; defeated, the bloodied and uncowed rejects are now reveling in their victory beyond even the limits of their persecutors’ sense of regality.
It’s funny seeing Richard Spencer being a decade early to the seeming new tradition of Trump orbiters, and only if he had bid his time he would potentially have been capable of releasing his true feelings had they not been mellowed in time. Nick Fuentes, on the other hand, is late: stating his sensing of some ulterior goal behind this style of communication being only discomforting. This is basically like the twilight zone at this point in that, although these points don’t seemingly add up to one singular great attractor at the end of whatever this Presidency even is, it’s entailing something completely different.
Ave Trump, Emperor of the Americans.
I do agree that the intention is there. Right now is not testing the water, just approaching it. It's not boiling the frog, just touching the knob. Trump and his most ardent supporters are starting to stretch the Overton window to also include "crossing the Rubicon". From an objective centrist perspective, it's all just talk. But like IGI-111 notes that "TROLLING ALONE MOVES THE WHEELS OF HISTORY", well, "trolling" is really just a different form of "talking". I am concerned, but not alarmed. Alarmed is when Congress and the Supreme Court (and the People) start keeling and rollover and really do let Trump run for a third term. Even then, I'm not sure what I can do as an aspiring immigrant. I suppose cross my fingers. Maybe now's a good time to get into religion or alcohol.
But what possibilities are they trying to approach, or to stretch the Overton window to include? Invading Canada/Mexico? Genociding the Jews? And if so, why would they try and reference Nazi imagery, which is probably the aesthetic repulsive to most people in the US? None of it makes any sense.
Is it really that repulsive? Seems like Americans find Nazi imagery repulsive but most still hold their nose about it and not saying anything. I suppose the argument here is how fast to stretch and maybe the reactionary right is stretching it too quick. It's still early days, I think the full repercussions of what's happening hasn't really engendered a backlash yet.
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Some guesses -- though mostly possible, rather than probable, ones:
It's probably not one specific factor, but rather their calculation of the sum PRO / CON difference from several such factors.
These are the only ones that seem possible IMO
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Forget reading their moldbug, some of these guys need to learn the most basic lesson from Cartman: "don't talk out loud about it until you have most of them on the trains heading to the camps"
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I see calls from the Right to sufficiently ostracize Bannon for this, and I wonder if that's the wrong tactic. Instead of defending his right to free expression (which in this context begins to sound like a defense of his ideas) or act like the sky is falling the way the left does, can't we just mock Bannon? Take the power out of it. His gesture wasn't funny or deep, he's pathetic, etc. (I'm trying to provide an example of mockery, but without breaking the rules and actually getting into it.)
The left tried the "Act like the sky is falling every time someone does something Nazi-ish" tactic for a while and that didn't help anything. I vaguely remember a time when people would just roll their eyes or add layers of sarcasm. Something like the way /r/TumblrinAction mocked otherkin. That is how seriously I take Bannon, as if he had just proclaimed he was an otherkin on stage. If he wants to stop pretending to be an otherkin and start eating at a human table any time soon, then he's welcome back on the Right. (Now to make actual Right influencers act this way.)
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TROLLING ALONE MOVES THE WHEELS OF HISTORY
You know maybe it would be a fair outcome of constantly calling everyone Nazis for years that the gesture of the French Revolutionaries becomes socially acceptable again because it's funny to own the libs.
Next stop, Charlie's mustache.
The priestly class cannot openly condemn identity politics or mass murder because to do so might reflect poorly on thier agenda and allies.
Thus they are reduced to attacking aesthetics.
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Just to nitpick: he never actually gave the Roman salute, at least not publicly. The one time he was accused of doing so, he was actually raising his glass of whiskey.
Right, what Spencer famously did after Trump’s first win was to shout “hail victory” ie the literal translation of “sieg heil”.
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We need to have a discussion some day about what was the actual bad thing about the Nazis.
Was it the Hugo boss uniforms?
The music?
The German language?
Swastikas maybe?
Is nationalism itself bad?
I’ve always understood that the bad thing the Nazis did was load 6 million people or so onto train cars and drive them to industrialized killing factories. The bad part was hunting down people they didn’t like and killing them. It was all the torture and death and so forth.
edit: guys I'm being a little hyperbolic here. Of course the atrocities of the Nazis went substantially beyond just the holocaust. I'm saying that it wasn't the uniforms, or the colors red black and white, it was the violence. When people call Elon Musk, for instance, a Nazi, it comes across as stupid.
I keep seeing people get called “Nazi” for like…waving at a crowd? Which is very clearly what Steve Bannon, an explicit Zionist, is doing here.
I’ve listened to hundreds of hours of him taking. I like Steve Bannon quite a bit. He is definitely not a “Nazi” in any meaningful way that aligns with anything the Nazis did which was historically significant. Bannon is a pro workers rights, anti big government, anti CCP, Christian Nationalist. The first speech he gave after prison was about how the justice system is racist against black people and we need to fix that. During the summer of Floyd he was taking about George Floyd as a victim of globalism, and while he obviously condemned the riots, he was sympathetic to that exact same things the rioters were upset about.
When Ukraine was invaded, he gave a long monologue about how Zelensky was being brave and defending his people, and how the US was leading him down the primrose path towards the place he is now.
He literally went to prison for his principles.
Bannon is one of the good guys. Hard to put into any of the buckets commonly talked about around here. He was definitely not giving any sort of Nazi salute here.
It is their preference for out-group-misery over in-group flourishing.
For all their faults, previous govts have never taken this much joy in hurting their outgroup. Bannon doesn't care about the flourishing of white people. He cares that America doesn't facilitate the flourishing of non-whites (non-natives?). Elon clearly cares about empowering his lackeys and winning, more than facilitating a good life for Americans at large.
I agree that Bannon isn't a Nazi. But, I have yet to hear him recommend policies that would facilitate positive change.
He can point out problems all day. No solutions. No appeal to positive change. No optimism. Just finger pointing and loud gestures.
That's Nazi mentality. Germany can't flourish until the jews are genocided. What fiscal policy will enable a pure-Aryan Germany to flourish ? Who cares. We need to get the jews out first. We'll figure out the big solutions later. Ofc, this mentality horse-shoes quite hard. Bernie, AOC, Stalin & Mao have similar traits, with different outgroups. (with varying degrees of severity)
Centrists look incompetent because nothing happens. But, gridlock can be feature too. Decision by committee means that no one group gets a raw-deal. In a functioning nation like the US (richest country), the govts job is to preserve processes, not uproot them. Drastic actions make more sense in completely broken systems like Ecuador, Argentina or places with no systems like newly independent Singapore.
Now America isn't perfect. Many of its systems are broken and deserve to be disrupted. Healthcare billing is broken. Border enforcement is broken. Accountability for military spending is missing entirely. The zoning and urban planning setups are broken. I have yet to see Elon do anything towards disrupting [1] any of these truly broken American systems. Leads to me suspect that disruptions are chosen with the goal of hurting enemies rather than fixing systems.
[1] I have heard whispers of LVT. That would be a welcome change. I have yet to see anything substantial on it. Until then, my point stands.
There is nothing clear about this, and I'm not sure what other option you have. Tariffs work to subsidize domestic industry. Tariffs allowed Japan to make cars. They work on steel, on manufactured goods, on everything.
They don't work in a month, and if your timeframe is measured in months then of course they're never going to work.
If all it took were Indians, then India would do it. They haven't, and they can't, because Indians are neither necessary nor sufficient. The same with Russians, and the same with Chinese.
That's a mild way of putting it. There were millions and millions of brown foreigners imported in the last administration for the purpose of displacing the native American population, again. It's worse now than than it was with the Italians and Irish, and those were as bad as you've ever heard. No Irish Need Apply was good, actually, and an appropriate reaction to importing foreigners to displace natives.
This is also why
in the first place. You're complaining about problems, but don't believe in the solutions, so you pretend they're not being offered.
They "work" on steel in the sense that they make American steel competitive at the cost of making stuff made out of American steel not competitive. It also happens to be the case that making stuff out of steel employs a lot more people than making steel. Solve for the equilibrium.
Every economist likes to think you can have the dirty raw material processing happening elsewhere and keep the fun, clean, super-profitable stuff for yourself. The problem as I see it is:
This is why successive countries were able to move from 'raw processing and cheap junk' to 'serious manufacturing contender' to 'holy shit, everything's made in X now'. It's also why places like the UK or the Rust Belt no longer do even advanced manufacturing for the most part.
We're outside the realm of "economists think" and in the realm of "past experience shows".
Even if true, this isn't an argument to speed up the process of eliminating manufacturing jobs by introducing steel tariffs. The American steel industry had plenty of time to stay competitive with cheaper countries and it has completely failed. Now you want to reward them so they can keep being fat and inefficient and at the same time make it so that nobody in the country can actually make competitively priced goods out of steel?
I doubt this is true in any meaningful sense, but in any case, we already have the next, more desirable steps. Why kneecap them by putting tariffs on steel?
When those countries were doing raw processing, were they as uncompetitive as American steel? Or were they cheaper than the competition and therefore entered into a virtuous cycle? Meanwhile, putting tariffs on steel in an advanced economy is ensuring that you'll produce steel but hardly anything out of it, because it's just not cost effective. This a kind of cargo cult approach - China made a bunch of steel and they were blessed with cargo. We must go back to making our own steel at any price, and we too will be blessed with cargo.
The starting points here are different. If you're starting from scratch as a developing economy, it makes sense to start with raw processing because that's the simplest thing you can get in on and it lets you build business connections, etc.
As a developed economy that already has a long tradition of manufacturing further along the value chain, it doesn't make sense to tariff steel in the hopes of reinvigorating the manufacturing that's further along the chain. You are already making the stuff that competitors wanted to make all along, just make it cheaper and better. Steel tariffs pull in the opposite direction.
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Bold of you to assume the Biden border policies had a purpose other than 'doing not Trump'.
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Quasi-Keynsian war economy with Konzern characteristics. The Nazis absolutely had plans for all sorts of things beyond just getting rid of the jews - not necessarily good plans, but they were there, largely in advance of taking power. The communist party also had lots of plans. Its quite typical of totalitarianism really. Very few political movements ever had as little plan as Trump I, which is precisely why he didnt do a whole lot. This idea that that makes it extra dangerous seems to be entirely a just so story.
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The bad thing about the Nazis was that they started WWII. Everything they did before the start of WWII was within the envelope of typical right-wing authoritarian governments. Most people would cite the Holocaust as the bad thing about the Nazis, and yeah, it was bad, but the over-emphasis of it ironically plays right into the Nazi Propaganda that WWII was a war launched against Germany for the benefit of the Jews.
"Who started WWII" is more ambiguous than that. WWII started with England and France's declaration of war on Germany. Germany had a reasonable casus belli on Poland, and England was pressuring Poland not to negotiate with Germany. Even more important are the many peace proposals Germany offered England, which entailed Germany fully pulling out of France, and Churchill not only rejected them but even hid them from the public. Ultimately Churchill and the United States would set the only war aim as Unconditional Surrender, which is what ultimately led to the mass murder and destruction.
Furthermore the tall tale of Germans tricking millions of Jews into walking into gas chambers that had been disguised as shower rooms is a fantasy meant to justify this one-sided WWII narrative. Incidentally, Grok 3 is the first LLM I've seen explicitly take the Revisionist side of a core argument regarding that narrative, even going so far as to criticize the Narrative's sole reliance on witness testimony over any other form of evidence. Also first that has accurately summarized the mainstream position on an issue, accurately summarized the Revisionist position on an issue, and explicitly concurred with the Revisionists that the "official claim is not plausible under scrutiny." The days of that narrative are numbered, and other WWII Revisionism is going to come along with the collapse of that narrative.
Germany's war on Poland provides no justification for England and France to ally with the Soviet Union in a catastrophic war aim of unconditional surrender on Germany.
On that note, normalize the Roman Salute. It's just a cool pose. It evokes emotions in people and that makes it powerful.
This is the second time you've made this comment. I know you're not a complete fucking mongoloid, but obviously you think the rest of us are. So tell me again: how did the Soviet Union end up allying with the UK? Did Germany, say, do anything to the USSR that made them break their alliance?
Less antagonism, please.
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You are pretending like their hands were tied, when they could have remained neutral or even allied with Germany against the Soviet Union. Hitler pleaded for either of those two options, offering to pull out of France for peace with Britain. But Britain wanted to restrain Germany from becoming the greatest European power, so they allied with the Soviet Union and destroyed Europe to make it happen.
And then after they destroyed Germany they were desperate to make them the front line against the Soviet Union.
So after Germany has conquered Poland, France, Denmark, Czechoslovakia, Norway, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Yugoslavia, Greece, and tried to conquer the UK, you think they should have made common cause with Hitler. I'm shocked they refused to.
The only worthy response came from Churchill:
The notion that Germany had any intention of conquering the UK is just totally ridiculous. Germany conquered France because France declared war on Germany and then Germany offered peace, pulling out of France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Norway. Of course the notion that Germany had any plan or intention whatsoever of conquering Britain is a pure, unadulterated lie, meant to manipulate people like you into accepting a certain narrative.
The British Empire was lost due to "Their finest hour!" They lost Poland too, and they destroyed Europe and killed tens of millions and gifted half of Europe to the Soviet Union. The only way the actual outcome of that war can be reconciled with the victors coming out as justified is with an enormous pile of lies.
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What are you referencing?
Don't know why johnfabian alludes to "vague offers", Hitler offered to evacuate from France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Norway in exchange for Britain's neutrality in the war against the Soviet Union. This was after Hitler conquered France and after Dunkirk, so when he was in his strongest bargaining position. Churchill rejected the offer.
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Neo-nazis frequently allude to "Hitler's peace offers"; vague claims that Hitler offered various enticements to the western allies after the fall of Poland, and later the UK after the defeat of France, to end this senseless and destructive conflict so the Aryan races could work together to defeat the communist menace.
There's a kernel of truth: Hitler wasn't particularly interested in fighting the UK, which he saw as a potential racial ally, and twice Hitler made mentions of peace offers to the Reichstag (in October 1939, and again in July 1940). There were no specifics described, nor did the western allies ever enter into peace negotiations, so any claims about specific terms (neo-nazis will claim Hitler offered to decamp from all of France, Belgium, and Luxembourg, for example) are nonsense. Nor did Germany ever seek to initiate peace talks either.
There was about a week in May-June 1940 where Lord Halifax brought up the notion of seeking a negotiated peace via mediation by Italy, but the Cabinet was decided against it. They thought that no terms Germany would offer would offer them a better situation than continuing to fight; in any case it was pointless to make agreements with Hitler because he had violated every international agreement he had ever signed.
Hey I'm only making sure I'm not missing a hidden gem of history buried by the International Jewry.
If people want to consider the July 1940 Reichstag address a peace overture -- I assume July 40 address is the source of the idea since France is a chip -- then it's an atypical one. To me it reads as another handwave that the UK wasn't a priority, the UK could (and should) accept German conquest, accept the new status quo, and bow out. It's a speech of victory, of conquest, of military and diplomatic success.
These are not the words of a statesman that wants to set aside conflict and recruit the might of the British Empire. It's assurances to Stalin that Soviets have nothing to worry about. Then more prodding Churchill to surrender.
The UK being at war with Germany was bad for Germany. Everyone knew this. Hitler knew it when he wrote Mein Kampf in the 1920's. Generals knew it was bad in 1939, they still knew it was bad after victories in 1940, and it only became worse each year the fact remained true. The haunting face of the fact drove a legendary cosmic epiphany right into Rudolf Hess's head. Seems like the time for counterfactual fantasy diplomacy would be much earlier than Summer of 1940.
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Your talking to someone literally names SS. I suspect you may not get edifying answers from him on this topic.
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Leaving aside for a second the more odious points of this comment, this is preposterous. Britain had no justification for attempting to stop Germany attempting to make itself the pre-eminent power in Europe by conquest? Almost as if it was the guiding principle of the British to prevent such a state of affairs emerging for centuries prior. This was precisely the argument Napoleon tried to give at various - Britain had no need to meddle in continental affairs rather than attending to its overseas possessions and trading activities and had ruined itself for the sake of a conflict it had no interest in. It was preposterous then and equally so in 1939. And indeed the conduct of Hitler and the and the Nazi government before and during the war proved that they could never be tolerated as a major element of the European order.
This is the Revisionist position. And no I do not think it had a justification to do so with the threat of the Soviet Union and the human and cultural cost of destroying Old Europe in a war of unconditional surrender. And ultimately Britain lost its own Empire. But yes Britain did start WWII in order to prevent Germany from becoming the pre-eminent power in Europe. That's the real reason WWII started and Britain allied with the Soviet Union to make it happen. It wasn't over Danzig, all of Poland was conquered by Britain's ally at the end of the day.
The Treaty of Versailles was an attempt to make sure Germany never become the pre-eminent power in Europe. But it was unenforceable. So they waged war ostensibly over Danzig, but then retconned it ultimately to be about the Holocaust narrative to try to post-hoc justify the war and solely blame Germany for the utter destruction and death.
Very funny that Britain makes the claim Germany wanted to "make itself the pre-eminent power in Europe by conquest" over Danzig. Germany offered to fully evacuate from Western Europe for peace and England said no.
But yes, the real reason for the war was Britain didn't want Germany to become the largest power in Europe. No that is not at all a justification for their alliance with the Soviet Union, the demand for unconditional surrender, and mass death and destruction of Europe to realize that objective. Germany is today arguably the largest power on the European Continent anyway. No it was not justified.
As @johnfabian said, you must think we're complete fucking mongoloids if you expect us to buy that.
Contemporary articles have Sir John Simon and Anthony Eden both drawing parallels to Napoleon and the 30 years war in thier opposition to appeasement, and you can find speechs from Churchill about the German/Nazi Menace going back the early 30s. There's also the 390 years of observable foriegn policy between the end of the English Civil War and the start of World War Two.
The idea that the war was justified because contemporary articles compared Hitler to Napoleon is just absurd, as absurd as all the contemporary articles you can point to which endlessly compare X with Hitler to justify some war, whether it's Ukraine (with both Zelensky and Putin invoking Hitler to justify the war effort on the other) or Iraq or Iran. Britain lost its Empire, Europe was destroyed, tens of millions dead, half of Europe gifted to the Soviet Union including Poland.... oh but contemporary articles said it had to be done because of Napoleon, right.
That wasn't the claim, the claim was that the British having a long-standing foriegn policy of countering any individual continental power that got too big was a "Revisionist position".
That it is relatively easy to find examples of the British government and it's officials citing this policy and acting upon it prior to 1939 is proof to the contrary.
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Might makes right, i dont think the historical semantics really matter. Who ever won the conflict would have gone down in history as the "justifed" one.
That's the bone of contention isn’t it?
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People don't get mad at Nazi salutes because they think the salute itself is bad. Likewise the swastika isn't arcane magic that can cause harm, and Hugo Boss is just a fashion brand. Most left wingers have few issues with the modern German state and it's language. Nobody is confused about this.
Context matters. When you're a politician (or other political public figure) giving a speech , making an unironic Nazi salute communicates a message. And that message is typically "I support the ideals of the Nazi Party".
If you don't want to send that message don't make a Nazi salute. Not even accidentally. You should know what it represents.
Essentially nobody is confused about if the Nazis are bad. I'll grant that there's arguments to made about exactly how bad they where, or how also bad the Allies were, but that doesn't change the fact that you shouldn't use Nazi symbolism if you don't want to be accused of being a Nazi.
You can't "not make a Nazi salute accidentally". First of all, by definition, an accident isn't done deliberately. Second, it's easy for a motivated leftist to find Nazi salutes everywhere; it's impossible to not do something that with the appropriate camera angle and out of context still image can be called a Nazi salute.
What I'm saying is that making a Nazi salute during a speech is a little like running a red light while driving. Sure, doing it accidentally is better than doing on purpose, but you should be more careful. One of the reasons you should avoid it as much as possible is precisely because it is easy to take out of context.
There's room to debate how annoyed we should get at people accidentally making the gesture - I feel much more strongly that deliberately making the gesture is clearly wrong, and that most people understand why.
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It’s still a map territory error, and I think that the salutes are aimed at ironically reclaiming the most common sneer aimed at every conservative leader since probably Reagan. Every last one of them, no matter what they actually did was gasp a Nazi. Both Bushes were, Romney was, Trump is. And this wasn’t based on anything they actually believed and did. It was just governing as a conservative makes you a Nazi. It’s hardly surprising that after nearly 50 years of “opposing democrats makes you a Nazi”, people do the Nazi thing ironically and say “fine, if not being a democrat makes us Nazis, we might as well throw up the salute.”
I keep going back to one question to answer the “are they actually Nazis “ question. Forget the aesthetics, forgot the words, forget the tweets, what actual policies are happening that are fascist? The best sterlman I have of them going Nazi is the mass deportations. Other than that, I can’t put anything they’re doing in that “literally Hitler* box.
It’s not surprising. We’ve been turning Nazis into cartoon villains since the 1960s. Nobody knows, outside the holocaust, anything they actually believed or did. In modern America, it’s just a sneer term meant to get people to stop supporting those+labeled with the sneer.
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The narrative in the US really focusses on that to the exclusion of everything else. I'd say the bad thing they did was to take a peaceful and democratic if troubled country, force a totalitarian (in the textbook sense of the state meddling in every aspect of life to align it to its purpose) reorganisation at breakneck speed, oppress and kill all internal opposition, promulgate an ideology that is fundamentally anti-humanist (in that it assigns most humans zero to negative value based on innate attributes), and finally start a massively destructive war of conquest and annihilation against almost all of its neighbours.
The comparison of anyone in Trump's orbit to that is of course massive, ridiculous exaggeration, but I don't think the assertion that Trump's second term has echoes of it is so far-fetched. The two main goals the administration is currently pursuing are firstly the "anti-woke" thrust, which they understand as a mandate for sweeping top-down action to purge parts of society of enemy elements that until then were more organically entrenched than directly installed from above, and secondly "America first", which surely is nothing other than a call to assign lower value to non-Americans than whatever value they are currently assigned.
From what I understand, Bannon is still bannished from the inner circles of the administration, and critical of it in a way that could be glossed as "Fifty Trumps". I think 50 Trumps, in the sense of cranking the above thrusts up fiftyfold, could in fact start looking somewhat like one Hitler.
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Don't be obtuse - unless you aren't being, in which case this betrays a spectacular lack of imagination. In the first place, outside some extremely niche corners of the internet antisemitism it still entirely unacceptable in mainstream society or left-wing politics. Even the more vociferous critics of Israel who may stray, in some people's view, into antisemitism would still openly condemn the latter (and indeed might even riposte with their own accusation that conflating Israel with Jews is antisemitic). In any case, even if one entirely discounts that there's still plenty left to find 'detestable' - what most of the comparison are gesturing towards is authoritarian government. That is, though for now institutional guardrails are up to the task of preventing such circumstances from arising, Trump wants total deference from all levels of culture and media, and thinks that liberal democracy is a scam which keeps power out of the hands of the Real People of the Nation (even if his conception is not racial in the same way), for whom he speaks and therefore any result which is not a victory for him is necessarily illegitimate.
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When has Bannon advocated for white people?
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Surely when the online left calls people Nazis they mean "white supremacist" and not "anti-Semitic" (not that the hypocrisy of the statement isn't absurd)
And of course "white supremacist" has also lost all meaning. Do you want to enforce laws? Do you want kids to learn to read? Those are literally white supremacist beliefs, according to the online left.
We don't have to care. We need to simply ignore these people and route around them.
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None of this contradicts the idea that he intentionally made a Nazi salute to draw attention to himself.
It's like saying "this person can't be a commie because their parents are rich" as they're waving a hammer and sickle flag on video.
Yes it is kindof like that. To take it further it would be a bit like saying: "you can't be a communist if you explicitly argue against communist ideology and start a podcast and spend 3+ hours per day arguing about why communist ideology is bad."
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To the people who lived through the evils of Nazism, there was no doubt that the worst thing the Nazis did was start the most destructive war in human history (and thereby lead their own country to defeat, conquest, ruin, and misery). "Aggression is the supreme international crime." That is the words of the Nuremberg prosecutors relegating the Holocaust to Hitler's second-worst crime - and this was not controversial at the time, and should not have been given the destructiveness of the rest of WW2. The only country for which a majority of the dead were Holocausted Jews was Czecholslovakia. And it isn't clear why the Holocaust doesn't itself count as an incident of the aggressive war - after all only about 200,000 Holocaust victims were from Germany.
Intelligent people who compare Putin to Hitler are doing it because he is engaged in the violent pursuit of lebensraum, not because he persecutes gypsies and homosexuals.
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This is from 1 month ago:
“Bannon calls Musk 'evil' and 'racist' as MAGA civil war boils over”
Bannon hates Musk. In a wider sense, it’s a conflict between two large groups on the ‘new right’.
A largely Christian, largely evangelical, largely middle aged, largely middle-American wing, descended from ‘classic’ Fox, Breitbart, OANN, Newsmax. Pro-Israel, pro-troops, sometimes isolationist, not-necessarily pro-NATO, shades of Buchanan at times minus the historical conspiracies, but also within the mainstream of US conservative opinion. This is where Bannon and his ‘permanent coalition’ of 60% of whites, 40% of Hispanics, 20% of blacks is. Opposed to mass immigration, but especially including H1B immigration. Especially distrustful of big tech. Want to preserve existing US demographics and may stereotype but have no overt or intellectual racial animus towards black Americans.
_
Tech right, ultra online, ambivalent toward H1Bs, pro in Elon’s case, disproportionately non-white, Silicon Valley, e/acc, government waste, very pro free speech, largely parrot’s Musk’s views but also associated closely with Thiel and some other VCs. Like /pol/ often performatively racist, especially toward black people, but actually quite diverse themselves. Blue tribe, lives in big cities, probably works in tech, DOGE staffer, likely not religious except in a possibly tradcath or orthodox aesthetic-only sense, redscarepod listener or subreddit user, new right press involvement in some cases. HBD believer, read Moldbug and Land in 2010 (if they’re older, read their views rephrased in online infographics in 2017 if they’re younger).
_
In addition to these you have combinations of more esoteric racists, third-worldists like Fuentes, extreme antisemites, ultra culture war obsessives still cataloguing video game wokery like it’s 2015, people who primarily have contempt for women and the wider Tate-sphere, zoomer Muslims who’ve adopted a hybrid of Islamist and western dissident right ideologies, Russophiles and nazbols like Hinkle, BAP’s gay bodybuilders and so on, and overt feds like Carlson, but they’re relatively less relevant to this current dispute.
'Overt fed'?
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Odd that someone in the first group would have such a hate-on for white South Africans.
Why? They're not Americans.
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Not really. They're often driven by an inferiority complex with regards to richer, more educated, more sophisticated whites, usually expressed in hostility to blue-state whites and Europeans, but easily transmissible to white South Africans, who are not part of the "heartland" ingroup. Even for the explicitly "white nationalist" among them, you only really count as white if you pretend to be religious, like NASCAR, didn't go to college, etc.
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Musk is African-American, so their hatred of him is stereotypical even ignoring the fact he's wildly successful.
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Does JD Vance occupying a liminal space between the two groups explain the lefty hate boner for him?
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If anything that looks less like a roman salute than Elon's gesture
The woke left and woke right are both desperate to make fetch happen.
despite how online I am, I somehow didn't know what "make fetch happen" means
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/make_fetch_happen
The only good thing to come out of that film.
IDK, some of those Joe Biden "get in, loser" memes were pretty funny.
Okay, there was that. But apart from some good memes, what has Mean Girls ever done for us?
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Booooo, you whore.
Go shave your back.
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Ahem.
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The get in loser were ... meme also originates with the same speaker taking the main character shopping.
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It's to Roman salute what a solar cross, a kolovrat or a meander are to a swastika. Sufficient plausible deniability, but they know you know they know why you put something with rotational symmetry and right angles on your banner.
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Let it never be said Bannon wasn't above cribbing from those he loathes, to piss off those he also loathes, to stay relevant in a media cycle.
For a guy who tries so hard to be a political kingmaker, though, he seems pretty far on the outs of the Trump Administration, despite his attempts to be let back in.
Bannon’s podcast has an incredibly powerful audience. It’s basically a political activism organizing meeting every day.
Maybe not a “king maker”, but he’s a big deal. Much more than just a talking head.
Sure. Bannon is a 'big deal.' But it's also clear he's not as big a deal as he wants to be, wishes he could be, or compares himself to.
Bannon is fundamentally trying to reverse one of his worst mistakes of his political career, which was his break with Donald Trump after being chief strategist the first time. Trump has his peculiarities, and it's not uncommon for him to welcome in former foes, but one of his apparent dividing lines is post-separation loyalty. He can respect a parting of ways, but if the person then wants to write a tell-all / slam piece, that's an act of betrayal in a way that simply parting isn't. Bannon did the slam piece tell-all, thinking Trump was done without him. Bannon went from being 'the man behind the curtain' to outside the wire, and has spent a good part of the last few years trying to get back into Trump's good graces to the position he once had.
The envy dynamic is emblematic of his recent-ish feuding with Musk. Musk has the power that Bannon wishes he was, even though has never been the sort of 'big deal' that Bannon has spent a lifetime trying to cultivate. Musk has agenda-setting power, can come in and shut down entire government agencies in weeks, and has an influence that Bannon lacked even when he was on the 'inside.' In the first major inter-right dispute of the administration, Trump pretty clearly sided with Musk over the Bannon-esque faction.
None of this means Bannon has nothing. Bannon even has power that Musk does not. Musk is very much an ideological outsider in the right circles.
But when it comes to setting government policy- and especially Trump administration policy- that's nowhere near enough. Bannon is out, when he really wants to be back in, and he's trying so hard he's being a try-hard in echoing his foil's own recent fake-scandal.
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Ugh. Nazi salute is with hand raised up front and steady. Not a sideways wave.
It has to be from the municipality of Nuziders, Austria. Otherwise it's just a sparkling Roman Salute.
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Its particularly easy to make that move if you're on an elevated platform and wave or otherwise gesture in a way that is directed at some particular person or part of the audience.
If you're waving towards someone on the same height plane as you, the arm will naturally be at a 90 degree angle so its visible to them.
If they're lower than you, then you'd be rotating the arm and palm downward towards them so, again, its more visible to the intended target. That puts you more in the "no no" range, especially if you have the arm fully extended.
All kinds of tricks to avoid it looking like a salute. Don't fully extend the arm, or use only a couple fingers (or the classic 'finger guns.' Although is that too violent?), or hell, use both arms. Most of those make you look more goofy, but that's a tradeoff. But man, isolating one gesture from a speech as evidence is not a great tactic.
And finally, if you ask me, the factor that makes the Roman Salute 'bad' is the part where you usually yell "SEIG HEIL" or "HEIL HITLER" while doing it. At least, that's the part that removes all ambiguity.
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It's actually stupid how easy it is to find inflation of savings by DOGE. You can do it yourself! This thread walks through an example showing that a claimed savings of $120M at DHS is actually $0. And I was able to find another example of this myself!
There is unfortunately not a way I can find to link directly to a row in the stupid DOGE table of savings so I have to be more rounbdabout. If you go to the main DOGE savings page here and click on the "see more" row at the end of the Contracts page you get a much longer list of contracts cancelled. Pop down to the Department of Commerce section and you'll see a few contracts for $20M to various firms with the description "BLANKET PURCHASE AGREEMENT TO CREATE HIGH-QUALITY EDUCATIONAL AGENCY VIDEO(S)". From either the screenshots or FPDS link copy the "Procurement Identifier" field. Then head over to the contract search on usaspending.gov. Scroll down to the "Award ID" filter and put in the Procurement Identifier from above. Hit "Submit" and you should see 1 result for your ID. Here is one such contract, I see three on the DOGE site.
If you look at these contracts above you can see that all three were awarded Jan 22 2024. That they all have the same potential award amount ($20M) and that no money has actually been spent (Combined Outlayed/Obligated Amounts are 0). The contracts are also still listed as "Open", meaning they have not even been cancelled! $60M dollars in purported savings at the Department of Commerce are for awards that are not actually cancelled and for which no money has been spent in the first ~year. Is it really correct to say all this money was "saved"? It took minutes to find this. Just look for any suspiciously large/round number and you're going to uncover something like this.
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Absolutely none of this is surprising to me whatsoever. In my opinion and definition, the “median voter” is split into two camps; those who voted for Harris, and those who voted for anything else/didn’t vote. Furthering my opinionated answer to your question, the former group already cares and anticipated these developments and so does the latter group, it’s just the latter group doesn’t believe it’s happening, and I don’t think they’ll believe it until a serious, serious recession hits the economy and tanks their income.
In my experience, the Trump voters believed that we were already in a recession or heading there. One happening now will just cement their belief that we were already there.
I will admit to being surprised that DOGE wasn't just shunted off to a room to spout hot air and do nothing. Government budgeting is messy and the real problems are extremely difficult to solve (bad demographics and a basically unreformable healthcare sector; we can't grow our way out of the debt when our post '08 growth has been pitiful compared to Reagan, Clinton, or even Dubya). Are social conservatives brave enough to suggest that MAID is the morally correct conclusion to Boomers and older Xers' fondness for aborting future taxpayers? I doubt it.
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I think this is how voters would take it if there is a recession (which seems at least plausible, IMO, but certainly not guaranteed). On the other hand, I've seen a lot of ink spilled about how "essential" all these roles are, and if there isn't a recession, or worse, there is a period of perceived prosperity, it'll hurt the credibility of the left's messaging with those voters going forward. I'm thinking about how many said Twitter would fall apart without half its employees, and despite a few extra "fail whale" pages it's still online, at least. Or how Reagan effectively won the standoff with the ATC strike.
I don't know if it's "the left's" messaging. I've seen plenty of folks online get fired from the National Park service, for example, which as far as I know is a fairly bi-partisan group of folks.
We're not going to agree about Twitter. Twitter was THE global platform, once such a vital and reliable source of communication health and safety departments of various countries relied on it; now the bar is set to "still online", since Musk's suspension of journalists' accounts, measures like labeling media outlets as "state-affiliated" and restricting their visibility, viral misinformation, hate speech, and antisemitism, statements without evidence such as that Community Notes "is increasingly being gamed by governments & legacy media" thus he is going to "fix" Community Notes, has completely driven out everyone but reactionary conservatives. Hardly a win in my book.
We might, actually. The doom-selling I remember that I'm calling out as inaccurate was from the technical side regarding site reliability. The cultural side, whether it can maintain relevance and cachet as X, I think you're correct still remains to be seen, and isn't trending great for them (although I think it was previously on a different course, if perhaps slower, for irrelevance by losing the political zeitgeist in the other direction).
Even the technical side isn't great. I've been locked out of my account on desktop for a while now since every time I try to log in I get into some kind of loop where it keeps asking for my login information. I never really used it much, so now I just don't use it at all. I imagine for people who are into it they've figured out all its quirks, but for a casual user like me it just isn't worth it.
That's not so uncommon on other platforms either.
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Musk's? All of those that ngs predate him.
His statement is, of course, cope, but he's the one that set up the Community Notes system to start with, I'd say he deserves credit for that.
Progressives got so used to total control of speech, that not having it will always look like "everyone but reactionary conservatives being driven out".
Can you show me evidence that previous Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal did those things? Because I can show you evidence that Musk did all of those things. And what do you mean, exactly, by "progressives got so used to total control of speech"? Who are the progressives, what are the parameters of total control, and by speech are you including verbal?
Wait, you were talking about what a given CEO did on the platform, rather than it's hat was happening under their reign? Why?
That speech that would go against their preferred narrative would be reliably removed or throttled.
What are you asking here? The ideological of what qualifies and disqualifies one as progressive?
Mostly what I stated previously - that stating an alternative viewpoint would get one reliably banned, their content taken down, and/or their reach throttled
Until Spaces, Twitter wasn't much of a verbal communications platform, so no.
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I mean yeah, this is just more of the 2020 "X claimed without evidence, where the evidence was hidden just enough to have plausible deniability and the debunkers made no attempt to ask questions."
The whole nonprofit ecosystem is a scam that needs to be shut down and rebooted with different people in charge
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I’m confused by the contradictions coming in fast from the DOGE critics. On one hand, they argue that no money is really being saved or it’s just a paltry amount. On the other hand, the cuts are severe and devestating and will send us into recession
Clearly only one can be true, but which is it? Who is being dishonest?
I don't see the contradiction. Some of the cuts (NIH indirect costs, firing thousands of employees) are real and likely to be devastating. Other cuts (a purported $8B DHS contact) are fake or wildly overstated. There is only a contradiction if one is talking about the same cut.
Even then, the same thing can be inexpensive (as government programs go) and worth keeping. Dropping such a thing wouldn't be likely to cause a recession, but barring cases where they specifically say that, there's nothing wrong with that logic.
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It's not a contradiction; there are plenty of things like this. Just last night, a friend of mine's temperature light went on. She was low on coolant. $5 worth of coolant later she was back on the road, no harm done. Had she not spent this five dollars, she could have overheated her engine, rendering a $20,000 car unrepairably useless and leaving her without transportation indefinitely. Deciding against spending the $5 would have been saving a paltry amount and risking severe and devastating consequences.
What in your opinion will have the most devastating effects on the economy (from the cuts - not other trumpian policies like tariffs/foreign policy)
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it is possible for something to be very cheap and at the same time bad to get rid of
Give an example of something like that doge cut
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These aren't contradictions to me. All things considered, DOGE is cutting peanuts from the federal budget and is unlikely to make even a small dent in the annual deficit. They big leagues don't start until they start cutting Social Security, Medicare, and the defense budget.
At the same time, these cuts may end up being fairly devastating. I don't know that they will be devastating enough to send us into a recession, but they may really gum up the works for people who truly rely on government services. The other thing is with all these cuts to the IRS, it seems likely to me that tax receipts will be much lower this year than in years past, thus contributing even more to the deficit.
That’s not what the critics are claiming though. They say we are headed towards economic catastrophe because welfare recipients may miss a cheque or two
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They're just throwing crap at the wall and hoping something sticks. For instance there was some post on dailykos proclaiming that the 150-year-olds on Social Security were there because that's how a missing birthdate was represented in COBOL -- 20 May 1875, the beginning of the international Gregorian Epoch. The article contains howlers like "Early versions [of COBOL] used the standards set in ISO 8601:2004." LOL; that 2004 is a year. That would be a very recent version of COBOL (which dates back to around 1959) indeed. The first version of ISO 8601 was from 1988, still far too new for Social Security. A little Internet research revealed that versions of COBOL which had an epoch usually used January 1, 1601. And if the epoch was a custom one, they sure would have picked something before 1875, since when Social Security was computerized, people older than that were still alive. And then data was released showing no, the records of very old living people didn't all have the same birthdate.
Did anyone change their mind? No, they just found other reasons Elon was "obviously" wrong.
Okay, but the cobol bullshit notwithstanding, there aren't any 150 year olds on SS, to say nothing of the table Elon posted claiming 1.3M of them.
That's a long and excellent post. The executive summary is...
Being marked "alive" in the data doesn't mean they're collecting benefits. It just means they have no evidence that this person is dead.
Though nowadays funeral homes outright report deaths to SSA which immediately terminates benefits.
There are separate processes to follow up on people that are long lived and collecting benefits. One kicks in at 100 and a more aggressive one at 115. There's also periodic audits that kick in if someone does things like draws benefits but hasn't used their Medicare benefits in awhile (since dead people don't go to the doctor).
There's lots of garbage data in the database due to migrations over the years and some records are unfixable due to layers of kludges, but separate systems exist to stop them from getting payments.
There have been proposals to fix all of the records but they've determined the cost outweighs the benefits, which sounds plausible for a government to say (not that I would agree).
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It has Elon’s fingerprints all over it. This is his style after all, like when he bought Twitter. Just come in like a wrecking ball, fire fast and loose, and deal with the fallout later. It’s an approach that works very successfully in business but government is a different beast so we will see how things shake out
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Did they focus on probationary employees, or employees in probationary positions? I've heard a lot of claims that there are employees who got a probationary promotion, but the probationary status of "depending on performance the promotion might become permanent or you might be returned to your old job" was just replaced by "you don't have any job now".
It's interesting to ponder the selection effects, if that's true. We'd be keeping the "so obviously capable that we can't imagine undoing their promotion" employees, but also the "so obviously incapable that we wouldn't even offer a probationary promotion" ones, while hollowing out the middle a bit.
It was their union that negotiated the contracts to set up these incentives.
If you’re looking to cut budgets and have one class of employees that will be difficult to terminate and another class that are essentially at-will, of course you will focus on the latter group.
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In the government, you are typically in a probationary status in three situations:
When you are first hired. Most agencies have a probationary period of 1 year (some are 2). The reason for this being that it's statutorily harder to fire civil servants who have tenure, so you want to make sure someone is a suitable employee before making them permanent. In theory, probationary employees can be let go at any time for substandard performance, though most agencies have rules about how much notification and opportunity to improve probies must be given. (Even more so than with private companies, the onboarding and training period is expensive so it's really not cost effective to be casually churning employees.) DOGE is discarding the "theory" and just mandating that all probationary (i.e, can be legally fired at will) employees be cut.
When you switch agencies. This is what's biting a lot of long-term government employees. You might have 15 years in civil service, but for whatever reason you switch from one agency to another. You are once again in a probationary period in your new agency. Usually this is a formality, but suddenly people who recently switched agencies are being cut just like new employees.
When you are elevated to the Senior Executive Service. This isn't a regular promotion in the GS levels; SESs are division chiefs or VP equivalents. They're senior decision makers, and again, they are put in a probationary period in their new position. Previously, a senior who failed probation for whatever reason (which is, unsurprisingly, rare) would just be returned to a GS15 position, but now DOGE is taking advantage of their "probationary" status to summarily fire them too.
I'm barely following this whole DOGE saga, but you make it sound like they're purely trying to maximize the number of people fired, with no consideration for merit or political allegiance. Is this the case?
That appears to be the case, yes. What they want to do is simply fire everyone from every agency they don't think should exist. The law doesn't actually allow them to do that, so instead they're firing all the employees they believe can be legally terminated without process.
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Sort of yes. They think with technology they can make enough efficiency gains that even if they fire the more competent people the efficiency gains will offset the productivity lost from the fired employees. So basically the thesis is we can cut government costs (eg payroll) without cutting government productivity.
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Musk has no authority except what the President gives him, and the President cannot simply say "Everything Elon Musk says is a lawful order."
The President also cannot sack federal employees with tenure like this. For probationary employees it's... debatable whether what they are doing right now will hold up in court. But the civil service reforms that ended the patronage system explicitly prohibit the executive branch from simply firing civil servants at will. Congress can withhold funding and the President can perhaps abolish certain programs, but federal agencies have to follow a prescribed RIF procedure. They can't just arbitrarily fire people without cause like this.
Elon Musk sending an email saying "If you don't reply, you're fired" is absurd to the extreme. And how will that even work? Who is going to be reading the hundreds of thousands of emails federal employees send in reply? Are they going to do this every week?
It is unworkable and makes no sense. There is no way this can withstand any legal scrutiny.
That said, it appears the administration is operating on the principle of "legal is what you can get away with." Many people here seem to like this, so I can only assume those who do are operating on the assumption that Trump and his successors will never lose power again.
We are operating under the assumption that the executive controls the executive and the idea for example that the president cannot send emails to his subordinates or fire them is absurd. Government sector unions should be per se illegal.
You may feel that the idea that the executive cannot arbitrarily fire any civil servant he wants to is absurd, but that is actually the law right now. Likewise, government sector unions are legal. Change the law if you don't like it. Schoolhouse Rock told me that's what Congress is supposed to do, but apparently we don't care about that anymore, so uncharted waters ahoy. My point was that the wheel turns.
Let’s challenge that in the courts. The executive power cannot be vested in the president if he cannot fire people who attempt to block his exercise of the executive power.
There might be statutes but that doesn’t make them law. Maybe you need a refund from schoolhouse rock
So your argument is that the Civil Service Reform Act is unconstitutional, and Trump should simply ignore it and do an Andrew Johnson? I mean, that's a coherent argument, but I'll return to my question about whether you are okay with the next (Democratic) president doing the same thing?
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It was sent out Saturday night and has a deadline on Monday night. There could be people who work Saturdays and have Mondays off who will not see it until too late.
I can get behind the idea of explaining what you do and how it serves a specific directive from Congress (everyone should be able to explain this much). I have to send my boss a similar missive every week. But the way Musk is doing this seems solely for the purpose of upsetting people without thinking it through.
Doing it for your boss who you know is one thing, the point here is that you're doing it for someone a million levels above you with no context or two-way communication whatsoever. I would find it absurd to reply at all, whether I was a high or low functioning employee, so I agree with you the manner Musk is doing this is likely intended just to annoy people.
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Of course the idea of having to explain what you did this week to your boss is not absurd. Elon Musk is not the boss of anyone in the government, though, and people who won't see the email are just the beginning of why this is a stupid idea. What about employees who are on leave? Out sick? Working jobs without email access? (Lots of government jobs involve being out in the field for extended periods.) Working on classified networks? One could charitably assume that Musk intended such obvious cases to be exceptions to the "Everyone must answer by Monday midnight" edict, but he indicated no such exceptions or even awareness that such might exist. Moreover, I can only assume he intends to use some kind of AI to process these emails since he can't possibly have enough employees in DOGE to read them. On Twitter he's shit-posting about how "All you have to do is use words that make sense about what you're doing- such a low bar!" Yeah bro, so how is your LLM going to individually judge each and every response and decide if it was adequate? If it flags it as "insufficient" does a human review it, or has he set up an automated system to send out termination letters? Which I would not put past him, and which is, also, illegal, because Musk has no legal authority to terminate civil servants.
It's so ridiculous, I am starting to wonder if he is just... unwell.
Did you catch any of the "Musk ranting at the astronauts calling out his lies"
TwitterX drama last week? How about the baby mama drama?He's got to be unwell. The best case scenario is that he's irresponsibly upped his ketamine dosage or gotten sucked into other drugs but not yet enough to suffer permanent damage, if only there's someone (his mom??) who could intervene and not be ignored. The worst case scenarios are that either his genes have betrayed him ("Quite an astute engineer, although he's gone a little crazy later in life. I don't think he has all his cookies in the jar." - Elon Musk discussing his father Errol in 2008, and hopefully not foreshadowing anything) or that politics and memes alone are able to do this much damage.
As an American and a person worried about climate change, space exploration, AI, social media, etc., I think the "Musk genes just broke him" hypothesis is the most worrying one. E.g. although I'm sure Gwynne Shotwell would handle SpaceX just fine if Musk retired tomorrow, I'm not sure what would happen if he just kept spiraling intellectually while not abdicating any control.
As a fond long-time user of The Motte, I think the "politics memes alone just broke him" hypothesis is the terrifying one, even if it might not be irrecoverable. I pride myself on being able to read at much wilder places than this, both to learn about how others think and to sift through the dross for an occasional real insight ... but do I need to retreat, soon, before just a little bit more aging renders my brain vulnerable to even mid-quality propaganda? I'd like to think I'm not one of the typical engineer-brains who thinks logically about one field but drops rationality elsewhere, but I have to admit that the most straightforward rationalist take on this topic is probably still "Politics Is The Mind-Killer", and now I'm wondering how much of that title is an exaggeration for a cute Dune reference vs a literal description of what I've been watching happen to many once-sane people.
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