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Ok, well let's just take a look at the undefeated Uno Reverso.
If I said: "The key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the Jewish race" do you think Ignatiev would regard that as anti-semitism? Obviously he would. So you just switch "White" from "Jew" in his own rhetoric and it goes from "moral good" to "crime against humanity."
This is funny Hoffmeister. Firstly, I never accused Ignatiev of hypocrisy, he's a Jew who is hostile to White Identity. That's not hypocritical. Ben Shapiro is not hypocritical for strongly opposing White Identitarianism while strongly supporting Jewish identitarianism. He's not being a hypocrite, he's being a Jew who is strongly motivated by his religion and ethnic identity.
But secondly, you were the one who said "In that sense, it is also true that he wants to 'abolish the black race'" without providing a shred of evidence.
In fact, the situation is worse. You, Hoffmeister, accuse me of being an equal-offender racist- racist against everyone, while I accuse you of being even worse- only racist against blacks. It's telling then that you are defensive of Ignatiev who defends Black Identity on the basis that it musters resistance to White Identity. So his real position is the precise opposite of what you imagine. He supports using Black Identity as a tool to undermine White Identity, which is why his ideas found such prominent reception during the BLM Great Awakening. In this way, his position is basically equivalent to the anti-semitic conception of the conniving Jew who wants to manipulate Blacks to get back at whitey. This is literally Ignatiev, but you remain totally blind to this pattern of behavior and the writ-large alliance between Jewish intellectuals, Blacks, and the Civil Rights movement.
He hates White Identity, he wants to destroy it- and there's no evidence for hatred of Black or Jewish identity, in fact precisely the opposite. That is my characterization of his beliefs.
Indeed. Suppose Ignatiev were to reply to your comment (and general worldview) with:
Would you accept his offer?
Because that is the difference between Ignatiev’s position and those of the dissident rightists who borrow his words in this case. He (like all communists) allowed for conversion; even the last emperor of china was converted, after all. You do not.
I'm not sure even sure if that's miles away from Ignatiev's actual position, if you strip away Protestant Christianity or going to Israel and th elike. I was prompted by this whole discussion to go search for his actual comments on the issue and found easily a series of blog texts called "Memoir of an ex-Jew", where he suggests that one of the big problems with Zionism is precisely that it prevented Jewish assimilation:
...
The entire series is likewise an extended attack on Jewish identitarianism in multiple forms.
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He would simply point out that there is no example in history, with the exception of the few brief periods in which Israel has existed as an insular sovereign political entity, in which Jewish people have had the power to openly privilege themselves as a dominant racial group at the expense of other groups. Whereas there was a period of several centuries wherein white people — conscious of their whiteness and the way it made them different/better than other people — had both the means and the willpower to travel around the world establishing states in which they were made the supreme/privileged race and others were treated as less-than as a result. And, Ignatiev would argue, this power differential favoring white people has continued to the present day. He would argue that Jewish people simply lack the concentrated power and the racial solidarity to place themselves in a position of supremacy over white people even if they wanted to.
Therefore, there is a context around the claim that “Jewishness must be abolished” — namely, that such a project has been actively attempted multiple times within fairly recent history and had demonstrably catastrophic results for Jewish individuals — that simply doesn’t exist (at this time) around the superficially-similar claim that “whiteness must be abolished.” Even if there were some not-insignificant number of powerful people working together to abolish whiteness, the methods they would realistically have at their disposal would not look anything like large-scale pogroms or the Holocaust or whatnot. White people do in fact still have the lion’s share of the money, the power, the resources, the access to nice things and prestigious employment, etc. Their enemies are forced to resort to more long-term abstract tactics such as tipping demographics through facilitation of mass immigration — something which affects countries on a long time scale, but doesn’t actually produce significantly negative impacts on the quality-of-life of individual white people in the present.
Now, of course, this is where you and I both disagree strongly with Ignatiev, given that we recognize that some ethnic groups actually are quite bad on average and have the ability to introduce a lot of pretty substantial negative externalities in a pretty short period of time when given any power/leeway. That being said, I would hope you can acknowledge that none of those externalities, as of yet, have risen to anywhere near a level of badness comparable to racial chattel slavery, industrial-scale pogroms, apartheid, etc. (You may believe that things could get that bad for a significant number of white people within our lifetimes. I think the probability of this is low but that it’s worth taking at least some basic measures to guard against. Ignatiev believes such an outcome is totally implausible, and that none of his political allies would ever dream of doing something like this even if they could.)
And again, as far as I call tell Ignatiev does believe that he personally benefits from a system of white supremacy. Unlike you, he doesn’t appear to just see himself as “white-passing, but exempt from all the really bad criticisms of white people because he’s Jewish.” He, like most people who are honest about it, recognizes that he’s white in every way that counts, and that this has benefited him tangibly. (Police officers are less likely to apply a heightened scrutiny to him upon clocking him visually. Service staff are more likely to treat him deferentially rather than warily. And so on and so forth.)
Most people, whose “Jewdars” are quite weak, would probably have no idea Ignatiev is Jewish unless they asked him, or unless they happened to have a reason to look up his early life on Wikipedia. Therefore, if Ignatiev does genuinely believe that a visibly white/European phenotype confers material advantages in this country, then he is advocating stripping himself of those advantages. I don’t think he sees “abolishing whiteness” as being in his cynical self-interest, in the way that Ben Shapiro sees pro-Jewishness as in his self-interest. Again, Ignatiev does not seem to have any affinity with the Jewish community, does not seem to wish to avail himself of protection within it while whiteness is being abolished, and opposes the continued existence of an Israeli state where Jews could escape to if they fall afoul of “anti-white” activity.
I have never called you a “racist”, and I don’t ever unironically use that word. What I do believe is that your identity commitments are too parochial. That you’re thinking too small by focusing on the centrality and purity of European-derived people only. That you’re unnecessarily excluding millions, potentially billions, of valuable contributors to the human race, because you’re too micro-focused on reifying whiteness.
Does he? Genuinely, are there specific passages of his writing in which he does so? I’m not aware of any, although I’m far from a connoisseur of his work. If you have evidence of this it would likely change my assessment of him considerably.
And even people who weren't white nationalists could look at that and say "motte and bailey".
He can claim that abolishing whiteness is a technical term that doesn't imply any racial hostility. But saying "I don't really mean X" when there are plenty of people in your coalition who do mean X is indistinguishable from giving them cover and encouraging them even if you pinky swear that that isn't really what you mean.
Right, so, I acknowledge that this is by far the largest problem with Ignatiev’s beliefs. Again, I don’t think people should agree with him, I comprehensively reject his political project, and I want him to fail miserably and to die knowing that his entire life’s work was a pointless, cancerous failure.
There is a way for naïve white progressives — even ones who are as clearly maladjusted and full of spite as Noel Ignatiev — to be reintegrated back into a politically healthy discussion, but only once they have persuasively demonstrated that they understand the extent to which they’ve directly empowered the most worthless, destructive, spiteful, irredeemable elements of our society. Since that’s not happening any time soon, we can keep trying to crush the Ignatievs of the world. I just think we can do so without calling them liars and hypocrites.
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Well, besides right now, anyway. And some would argue a few other times within living memory. Right now, after all, Jews wield a disproportionate amount of influence at the expense of western white (and the various non-whites stuck here with us) civilization. Almost all the metrics people use to point out white institutional dominance point an even longer finger at the Jews.
This privilege manifests in many forms, one of which is you can say "abolish the white race by any means necessary" and have an entire elite institution launder this attitude into mainstream acceptability, whereas if you want to say the same about Jews you have to rant on niche internet forums.
Jews do not have anywhere near the level of explicit racial solidarity that whites had in, say, apartheid South Africa, or the Antebellum American South. Whatever covert influence some powerful Jews have to influence things in their favor at the expense of others, surely you can acknowledge that their actions (outside of, arguably, Israel) are of a qualitatively different form than, say, passing laws explicitly forbidding non-Jews from owning property, voting, patronizing the same businesses as Jews, etc. The worst thing a powerful Jew can do to white people in 21st-century America is write a mean book about us, produce a TV series where we’re the bad guys, and attempt (with intermittent success) to legislatively block border enforcement. Contrast that with the worst era of White Supremacy, in which a white person could own a black person as property. The two situations are not comparable.
This doesn’t mean I don’t think discriminating against white people is bad! It shouldn’t happen, it shouldn’t be tolerated, and it certainly shouldn’t be celebrated on grounds of retributive justice, balancing the cosmic scales, etc. I’m white, I’m planning to continue to be white, and I will do what I can to resist efforts to dispossess me or to dissolve cultural norms which are good for me and mine. But I don’t believe that Noel Ignatiev has the power to make me a second-class citizen, or that there’s any realistic American future in which white people are explicitly and systemically oppressed based on group identity. Whereas there are plenty of countries where it’s at least realistic to believe that Jews could suffer that fate again, as they have in the past. (This doesn’t give anyone, Jew or gentile, a blank check to tear my culture to shreds in order to obviate the hypothetical possibility of future pogroms, to the extent that any of them are doing so.)
No, they don't. But whites don't have anywhere near the racial solidarity of the Antebellum South or Apartheid South Africa, either, and Jews are significantly more in solidarity -- openly -- than Whites have been at any time in the modern era.
Of course, they take a different form. They don't need to ban you from public spaces, just advocate for those spaces to be ruined so that you self-select away from them.
No, the worst thing a powerful Jew can do is help irreparably break society and culture through the importing of foreigners. That, plus make life domestically suck.
No, today is not like slavery. But it's also not like slavery for anyone. Slavery's no longer a relevant period of concern that should determine how we respond to prejudice and bias. It is a dead era.
We're already systematically and explicitly oppressed based on group identity! That it's not naked slavery doesn't matter one lick.
This is the crux of our disagreement. I just think it’s manifestly untrue that white people are “systemically and explicitly oppressed” in any country on earth. There are at least some number of people who want us to be — I’ve even met a couple of them — but those people have vanishingly little power at this moment. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t point them out and oppose them. It just means that you seem like a catastrophizing propagandist when you claim that those people are already actively oppressing white people right now, in America.
I don’t believe that having one’s culture disrupted/dismantled is oppression. I want very badly for many cultures in the world to be dissolved, including some within the United States. I don’t think it’d be oppressive at all for a government to do so. Mainstream early-20th-century white culture was one of the better and more functional cultures on earth. I want to preserve many of the remaining remnants of it; however even if we wanted to bring it back, it has been irreparably disrupted by technological advancements and the globalization of the world economy. That’s not inherently a bad thing.
What’s specifically bad is that, in the case of the United States, it has been partially usurped by a vulgar, consciously-hateful, anti-human gutter culture. Jews are by no means the primary creators of this culture, although many individual Jews have been influential in promulgating it. (Just as many Jews were influential in promulgating important parts of the previous American cultural era, the one you like; look up how many of the compositions in the “Great American Songbook” were written by Jews.)
I’m more-or-less fine with governments using heavy-handed tactics, including targeted population replacement, to change aspects of the culture(s) over which they have control. I just also want them to do so in favor of changes that are better for humanity, rather than worse. Smashing ghetto black culture should be a priority for future U.S. policymakers; they’ve already (probably not intentionally) partially achieved this in some major cities by facilitating mass Mexican immigration to those cities; the Mexicans have displaced blacks, taking over their neighborhoods and replacing their culture with a new one. There are plenty of things about Mexican culture I find grating, but it’s pretty much a wholesale improvement over ghetto blacks. This is one way in which population/cultural replacement can be a good thing.
Obviously this doesn’t mean that all mass immigration is good, or that every culture on earth should be smashed, or that every immigrant group will similarly be an improvement on what was there before it arrived. It’s pretty obvious that Sweden was better before a bunch of Somalis and Syrians showed up. (It remains unclear whether the counterfactual world in which Sweden did not embrace mass immigration, but also its fertility rates continued to plummet unabated, would be sustainable as a long-term project.) However, if, say, the Swedish government had invited in a bunch of Japanese immigrants, I think Sweden would have benefited quite a bit from that in the long run. Some cultural/population displacements are an improvement, some are a lateral move, and some are a downgrade. Smashing Appalachian hillbilly culture would also be a salutary goal of a future American regime, and that would potentially involve replacing white hillbillies with some non-white ethnicity. Depending on which ethnicity, that could be a strict improvement!
Our perspectives have such a vast gulf between them that I don't think there's any point in conversing on the topic, then. You think it manifestly untrue, I think it manifestly true -- I don't even know how to get across the countless ways whites are systemically pushed down if you don't see them all around. College admissions? Hiring discrimination? Grooming gangs? Massive, lopsided tax disparities, whites having their wealth stolen to fund largesse for groups hostile to them? Suppressed birth rates, combined with the deliberate importing of the third world?
Whites are at war. I don't like how SS talks, but he's not wrong there. And he's not wrong that a disproportionate amount of Jews are contributing to it.
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