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You are being intentionally obtuse. You are obviously intelligent enough to parse Ignatiev’s actual beliefs, yet you intentionally flatten their nuance whenever they appear to deviate from your simplistic framing.
Let’s assume for a moment that Ignatiev is forthrightly representing his own beliefs. He wishes to abolish the cultural belief that appearance and ancestry should confer any prestige or preferential treatment upon any individual. He, like any committed critical theorist, believes that an inherent quality of “whiteness” — not simply a broadly European phenotype, but the cluster of meaning and historical importance retroactively applied to people with that phenotype — is a belief in a hierarchy in which white people are in some sense more important, more valuable, etc., than non-white people are.
In that sense, it is also true that he wants to “abolish the black race”; not to abolish the African phenotype, but to abolish the idea that anyone should care what ancestral group an individual appears to descend from. However, it means something different to lead with a call to abolish a powerful, hegemonically-empowered group than it does to lead with a call to abolish a more vulnerable, historically-persecuted group. When it comes to Jews, it makes sense for Ignatiev to say that Jewish people have just as much a right to their own private religious beliefs as anybody else, but that these religious beliefs should not be made into a template for policymaking, nor should Jews be treated as any more special than anyone else. (As they are in Israel, which is why Ignatiev has repeatedly expressed opposition to the existence of Israel.)
In this framing, anti-Semitism is bad specifically because it is one example of a larger category of beliefs: namely, that an individual’s ancestry or inherited religious beliefs should have any bearing on one’s treatment of, or expectations about, that individual. It happened that the context of the conversation Ignatiev was having centered around a Jewish-specific issue. (And one on which, as @Stefferi pointed out, Ignatiev came down on the side that did not advantage Jews rather than the one that did.) Had that conversation been about a black-centric issue, he would have said that anti-blackness is a crime against humanity.
Now, if all of these beliefs are his actual beliefs, there is no hypocrisy there at all. He is a standard-issue hardcore blank statist secular progressive who wants to abolish nations, dissolve unchosen bonds between individuals in order to liberate them to pursue a life of pure self-discovery and voluntary commitments. There’s no secret undercurrent of wanting to see Jewish people secretly privileging themselves while dissolving other macro-scale unchosen identities.
And of course you can say he’s lying, and that in fact his commitment to blank-slate liberated individualism does actually have a secret exception clause for Jews. (This appears to be your claim.) But then, if you’ve opened the door to accusing him of cynically lying, why are you certain that he’s honest about wanting to abolish whiteness, but also certain that he’s lying about not thinking anti-Semitism is any worse (or any better) than any other form of bigotry? Why couldn’t he be making a bombastic call to “abolish whiteness” because it’s catchy, provocative, and likely to get him a lot of attention, interview requests, and speaking engagements? Why is it that you believe Jews are liars, except when they say negative thing about white people?
Like, Ignatiev’s contention is that there is a society-wide belief that phenotypically-European people are more special than other races, and that’s it’s somehow important to keep them pure and make sure they continue to hold all the important positions of power in as many advanced first-world countries as possible, both because they’re entitled to those countries (“we built them”) and because they’re more qualified to competently run them, whereas other races would fuck it up. That’s what he means when he talks about “whiteness” and what he has explicitly argued for abolishing.
And this appears to be a pretty accurate descriptor of your beliefs! You do think those things about white people! When I’ve expressed enthusiasm about miscegenation between white people and East Asians, you’ve reacted with shock and horror, because you take it for granted that preserving the genetic purity of the white race is of considerable importance. When others have argued in favor of skilled non-white immigration into white countries, you’ve expressed fervent opposition because you don’t think non-whites would be responsible, capable, conscientious wielders of power within white countries. Basically you want non-white people to stay in the parts of the world that currently have all the non-white people, because you want them to stay separate from white people. You’ve made this explicit! The caricature of “whiteness” which Ignatiev attacks — one which, in truth, vanishingly few white people in the 21st century believe in — is the reality of your belief system.
If you want to claim that Ignatiev is making sone larger, more genocidal claim about wanting to directly harm all people of fair skin, or all people of European descent — and also that he wishes to exempt himself from this by retreating into a defensive and subversive Jewish identity — then you have to actually contend with the substance of his stated arguments.
SS says a lot of pretty nakedly racist things, but man, a screed defending a literal call to abolish the White race that ends in claiming the desire to protect one's culture and homeland from foreign replacement is some vile thing -- as if literally every people don't want to do that, as if it wouldn't be considered mad, bigoted offense to promote this same replacement for minority groups -- is quite possibly the only situation where Secure sounds more sympathetic than the person he's arguing with.
Again, I’m not saying that Ignatiev’s beliefs are good — I oppose pretty much every aspect of his worldview — but simply that they are sincere and internally consistent. They’re not hypocritical. He doesn’t appear to want any special carve-out for Jewish people, nor does he seem to have any special affinity for Jewishness on account of his own personal ancestral background.
Like, yes, many Jews, Ignatiev himself, are hardcore believers in deracinated progressive abolishment of blood ties. So are many non-Jews! If you want to oppose their beliefs — and I do! — it is a useless distraction to try and smoke them out as secret Zionist special-pleading hypocrites. We can just oppose their actual stated beliefs, which are bad enough, instead of grasping at straws to call them liars.
Oh, yes, assuredly. Ignatiev's creed is abominable, but so long as he also supports the dissolution of Israel and Black identity or whatever, he's evil for non-hypocrisy reasons. That's a thing SS is good at: finding a lot of evil Jews. The problem is they're mostly evil Jews, whereas he thinks they're evil Jews.
It's rough! Ignatiev's beliefs are awful. But not Jewishly awful. Still, SS is more sympathetic than Ignatiev.
Well, the problem is for SS, all Jews (modulo some tiny fringe who agree with him that yes indeed, we Jews are awful!) are evil.
Eh. They both basically want to eliminate their outgroup. I suspect Ignatiev's agenda is probably not literally exterminationist, so fwiw I find him more sympathetic, but that's like choosing which woman on The View is more intelligent.
Do you think Ignatiev's ideology is that "all white people are awful?" I don't think that's his ideology. I think he's hostile to White Identity.
It's so telling that you are so charitable to Ignatiev when I have never spoken rhetoric nearly as inflammatory as Ignatiev in his statements on the White race. But you still interpret his philosophy openly calling for the end of the white race with so much more charity than my cultural criticism of Jewish behavior in American society.
When it comes to Jews, it's not possible to simply oppose them politically and culturally. You have to be an exterminationist if you oppose Jews politically. You can't just oppose their influence in culture and academia and foreign policy, if you criticize them it means you want them all killed. Only for Jews though. This is the hysterical bullshit standard you enforce in every single reply to me Amadan, but don't at all apply to a Jew who openly calls for ending the white race by any means necessary.
Yes, that is exactly what I said.
I think Ignatiev distinguishes between white identity and the white race. Whether you or I find that distinction meaningful is irrelevant to understanding what his meaning is. Lots of non-Jewish white people in the woke movement say exactly the same thing. I have, in fact, heard some white people unironically say the white race should be allowed to go extinct (and a few loons even suggesting more direct and immediate measures), but they are pretty far out on the fringes and not what most of these people mean.
I'm "charitable" in the sense we are supposed to be charitable to views we disagree with here on the Motte, which means not straw manning, eliding context, or characterizing someone as saying something they didn't say. I don't think Ignatiev is calling for the end of the white race, in the sense that white people will no longer exist. And I think you know this and you are being dishonest in claiming you believe that's what he's saying.
If all you said was "Jews have disproportionate power in politics," I wouldn't disagree with you factually, though I'd still want to know what specific remedies you advocate and why you think it is specifically a problem. But come now, SS, you tactically hide your power level but your agenda is not merely JAQing about why so many Jews.
If you are constantly talking about how one particular ethnic group is a threat, how their values are hostile to ours, and how almost every member of that group is driven to behave in a certain fashion, yes, it leads me to strongly suspect that your actual agenda is exterminationist, because if you really believe all the things you say about Jews, it would be irrational not to be.
If you want us to believe that Jews are parasites undermining our civilization and we cannot peacefully coexist with them, but you don't want them dead, you just want to... you know, raise awareness, well, you're either treating your audience like chumps or you're unwilling to follow your own logic to its logical conclusion, and I don't believe for a second it's the latter.
The notion I hide my power level is absurd. I'm very open that I view the dynamic between Jews and White Gentiles to be a very profound, long-standing cultural and political conflict that is even deeply rooted in the Jewish religion itself. Ignatiev is just a figment of that conflict. But what gets annoying is that you won't allow me to simply recognize a political or cultural adversary as such. I have to be an exterminationist hiding my power level. Yes, they are a threat obviously. But acknowledging and engaging a threat is not the same thing as being an exterminationist. I don't think the USG wants to kill all the Iranians even though the USG considers them to be a threat.
I wouldn't even say about Jewish identity what Ignatiev says about White identity. I don't call for the end of Jewish identity but the renaissance of European identity, and that's not simply because I'm hiding my power level. I do accept the reality that Jewish influence in politics and culture is a huge counterforce to any political or cultural effort to achieve that, with Ignatiev only being one of many examples of Jewish academics pathologizing White racial identity while declaring strong opposition to anti-Semitism. But on the other end of the political spectrum you have Ben Shapiro who is also opposed to White identity.
What are we to make of the fact that two figures so politically divergent as Ignatiev and Shapiro still oppose White identity and strongly support Jewish identity?
You don't hide that. You hide your final solution. You talk and talk about how "Jews are a threat." Okay, what should we do about this threat? (SS posts more random stuff about how some Jew did something, see how threatening they are, and look! Israel!) How do you want to acknowledge and engage this threat?
Gentiles are not at war with Jews. Neither are a nation. If by analogy you think we should be bombing the Jews' infrastructure to deprive them of offensive capabilities, so to speak, how would you propose to do that?
Cool, I am a white person with Russian, German Jewish, Irish, Scottish, English, and Norwegian ancestry and (according to DNA testing, much to my surprise) about 20% random North African, Southwest Asian, and Turkish admixture. How should I identify? Am I Jew because of my Jew blood, even though my entire family is physically and culturally WASP? Do I get to count as white? Which side should I take in the wars to come?
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