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I appreciate that you recognized the rhetorical trap; rather than disappointingly falling right into it by replying with a series of whines about how white men really are discriminated against or with weird Turner Diaries masturbatory fantasies about Black men murdering my family.
While clearly we disagree on some ideological points here, I also don't see why you feel that grievance is the only rhetorical mode for White nationalism. While grievance has been the traditional mode of nationalism since roughly when the Germans got ahold of it, grievance and narrative of oppression are not necessary components. I have a longer effortpost in my notes app about this with regards to the John Wayne movie McClintock (of all things!), but while a grievance based White Supremacy doesn't appeal to people like me an excellency based ideology of the Supreme White does have some emotional pull. An honest Kipling; John Wayne arming his own enemies so they can get a fair shake from the government. When White supremacists are people who either don't themselves seem all that proud of being white, or are people I wouldn't be proud to be white with, it's not going to appeal to me.
If victimization politics are so bad when every other group does it, let's leave it to them, n'est pas?
"If." An interesting choice of word. I have to wonder: are they so bad, or am I being told that the right thing to do is always to be the bigger man, to take the high road, and choose "cooperate" no matter what, by parties who intend to defect against me? After all, superweapons are indeed terrible things, but they are also effective ones, so unilateral disarmament often leaves one staring down the business end of "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must" eventually, even if one is confidently strong right now.
I mean, I'd really like to keep believing that victimization politics are so bad; that mutual cooperation really is an end that's still possible and still worth striving for; that the values I hold actually weren't instilled in me just to breed a mark, a chump, a sucker. But seeing them defended in ways like this risk cracking my faith.
Edit: to summarize what I would stand for: if something is bad, it's bad, and let us not excuse badness on account of its perpetrators or the act's magnitude being too weak or harmless or unimportant, primarily because that is injustice and corruption in itself, but also because this renders the appearance of weakness or harmlessness or unimportance the currency of power, which is itself corruption.
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I find people's confusion on this kind of strange. It's not a complicated phenomenon. Much like people who really care about 2A for the ward against tyranny reason still end up getting into arguments on the utilitarian grounds of whether the increased ability to defend yourself actually makes us safer than the reduced access to guns of near do wells there is actual real value in defeating your ideological opponent using their own values. If you can successfully argue that guns actually make us safer then there is no where left for the anti-gun people to retreat, it is a total victory. If you fall back to your ward against tyranny position then it's a conflict of incomparable values and they are still able to justify their policy preferences.
The value in engaging progressives on grievance is because their entire edifice crumbles to the ground if they lose on that point and conservatives sense this intuitively. If white grievance is proven then the progressives just lose, permanently and forever. You may find this step unnecessary and unsightly, I also find debates on defensive gun use very boring and unimportant, but surely you can recognize the value?
Yes, it is actually worth dismantling bad and dangerous ideas about how the world works when they are sufficiently influential.
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