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Anyone remember that whole "HBD" thing? You don't hear much about it anymore. It makes sense. The new narrative on the Online Right is that there's a huge mass of white men without jobs who have no choice but to inject fentanyl because of "the border" and free trade sending the factories to China. The unemployment rate is only low because these people are so dispirited that they've given up looking for work. We need to drastically remake our economy to help these unfortunates, who are incapable of helping themselves. This worldview would seem to conflict with HBD theories. Indeed, one would have to conclude that whites are an inferior race. Guatemalans in their "third-world s***hole" don't just sit around despairing, they cross multiple borders and look for work in a country where they can't even speak the language, while white men who got laid off in their rust-belt factory towns twiddle their thumbs and inject fentanyl, unable to compete with said Guatemalans. They see whites like people have long seen the American Indians, a "noble" race who ought to "own" the country but who are ill-equipped to deal with the evils of modernity that more advanced peoples have introduced like liquor or fentanyl.[1] But where this worldview makes some sense in the case of the Indians, it is utterly nonsensical to apply it to whites, who all the statistics show have higher incomes, higher IQs, higher educational attainment, and lower unemployment. Even opioid overdose deaths, initially a "white" issue, are now highest for blacks and American Indians, as with most social problems. (Whites do die at higher rates than Hispanics or Asians.) Labor force participation rates have indeed declined, mostly because there are more students and retirees. 89.2% of men aged 25-54 are in the labor force, a figure that is likely higher for whites, and the 11% who aren't include students, prisoners, stay-at-home dads, and those who can't work because of legit disabilities.
The Online Right has often been compared to the woke left. The woke black looks at his race, disproportionately poor, uneducated, and working low-skill jobs, and demands affirmative action so that more blacks can work in medicine, law, business, and politics. The "Woke Rightist" looks at his race, sees a mostly imaginary mass of helpless unemployed drug addicts and demands tariffs so that they can rise to the lofty heights of sewing bras, picking fruit, hauling equipment, and digging ditches in the rain. Is that really what you want your political ideology to be?
Now, you may be asking, "what about the real unemployed drug addicts?" For one, this is a disproportionately non-white group. One study found that blacks are 3.5 times more likely to ever be homeless in their lifetimes than whites, while Hispanics are 1.7 times more likely. Still, while not as common as some of you think, they do exist. Tariffs aren't going to help them. Law enforcement, drug treatment, mental health care, and legalizing SROs might, though the real issue is that these people need to help themselves. If I believed, as many of you profess to, that my race was at risk of going extinct, I wouldn't be centering my politics around helping the least capable members of said race who refuse to help themselves. Don't you have bigger problems? It's not like you should feel any "political" loyalty to them, Trump's working-class base work, homeless people rarely vote.
This whole post relies upon an extremely facile (and uncharitable) conception of HBD. I find myself entirely uninterested in the points being made here.
"White people" is a bad category when discussing HBD. I'm not sure if it's quite as bad as 'Hispanic' but it's gotta be close. Skin color matters much less than ancestry even if they usually correlate. Consider Obama, or almost any other high-achieving 'black person' who happens to be heavily or even mostly Hajnali genetically.
I expect non-Hajnali 'whites' to basically end up as an underclass, so it is what it is I guess.
The solution here is more and better HBD, not less.
Lots of the underclass whites he refers to would have had ancestors within the Hajnal line.
Albion’s Seed is instructive here. Lots of Borderers are likely over represented
And most descendents of Borderers have intermarried with descendents of non-Borderers. You simply can't trace most white Americans' ancestry in a clean unbroken line back to specific founding-era groups without lots of intermarriage and interconnection. This is why I find the discussion in some groups about "founding stock" to be inane, I have a large cluster of ancestors who were apparently here before portions of the 13 colonies were even ruled by Britain, and another large cluster of ancestors who came in the 1800s and early 1900s. Most whites are the same.
I fully understand the diversity of my ancestors, and I think picking just one of those and saying "this is me" is very silly. I treasure their stories and what they contribute to my heritage; I have a copy of the original Lutheran hymnal in German that my great-great grandmother owned. But I speak American English, watch American movies, am concerned about American politics and eat American cuisine, I celebrate the Fourth of July and when I stand, I lean. I'm an American, of European descent. Anything more specific is irrelevant.
Do you have evidence for this claim, or is it just a vague assumption? Class assortment is pretty strong in marriage and reproduction, and few move in to the rural areas where the borderers live
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There’s also big differences outside of the Hajnal line in Europe itself. Slovenia is a prosperous country with well functioning infrastructure on track to surpass the UK in terms of GDP per capita while Serbia is a poor corrupt autocracy, even if both were part of Yugoslavia and are ethnically south Slavs.
I don’t know any circumstances where HBD is a better explanation than culture and history.
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