site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 16, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

10
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

What is the end goal of white nationalism?

To see our founding principles utterly discredited and destroyed so that they might be replaced with a load of post-modern psuedo-marxist intersectional nonsense.

If you want to understand "white nationalism" as it exists on twitter and various rat-adjacent spaces, you need to understand that they are motivated by the same thing the intersectional left is. Specifically, certain sense of entitlement/having been chosen coupled with belief in the ideology of victimhood that ultimately manifests as a deep and abiding resentment of what the West in general, and the Anglosphere/US in particular has historically represented. The idea that all men are created equal is simply intolerable to them because it means they have to actually work at being better if they want to be perceived as being better.

Idiots like Steve Sailor and Greg Johnson can bitch about dysgenics all they want but at the end of the day the middle-class white guy who marries a thicc Latina and pumps out a couple of kids is doing more to actually implement and embody the 14 words (not to mention build a nation) than the vast majority of so-called "white nationalists" are.

a deep and abiding resentment of what the West in general, and the Anglosphere/US in particular has historically represented.

Whatever you imagine “the West” to be, it seems to bear no resemblance to the actual historical reality, in which every important European country practiced widespread, industrialized chattel slavery, as well as explicitly racial conquest of non-white peoples. The men of the West believed for centuries that white people were naturally and manifestly supreme over lesser races, whose backward practices and pathetic excuses for culture needed to be flattened and replaced with the ways of “Christendom” - understood in explicitly racial terms at the time - as part of the destiny of Western man.

You decry “progressives”, yet you clearly believe in a very strong form of historical progress yourself. You want to pretend to cherish “the West” as a coherent and contiguous historical/cultural whole, but you clearly believe that the specific part of Western history when Enlightenment principles emerged - sweeping away bedrock principles and practices which had defined massive swathes of European and Semitic history - should be treated preferentially as a wholesale improvement and indeed irreversible replacement of what had come previously.

Aristotle certainly didn’t believe that “all men are created equal”; he wrote reams of material arguing precisely the opposite. Nor did any of the men who wrote the Old Testament, and nor did most of the men who founded the United States. If you want to believe that ideological principles which are less than 300 years old represent the only important legacy of the multiple millennia of European and Semitic thought, be my guest; it’s an entirely respectable and coherent position. But then you can’t really claim any appreciation for “the West”.

And of course all of this leaves aside the fact that you have still never once engaged with the core claim at the heart of white nationalist ideology, which is that distinct peoples - and I mean distinct in terms of language, culture, religion, heritable proclivities, shared history, or whatever other organizing principle you want to pick - function best as a homogeneous polity, free to pursue its own path and tend to its own affairs. It’s the principle that led to the formation of most of the modern states existing in the world today. Slovaks will have the best and happiest life if they can just worry about being Slovenes and taking care of the welfare of other Slovaks, while Czechs meanwhile can focus on being the best Czechs that they can be.

White nationalists simply apply the same principles to distinct racial-cultural groups within their own countries. Some white nationalists want a unified multinational, multilingual confederation of European-descended peoples; other white nationalists viciously disagree, and believe that all of the different white peoples of the world - from the Dutch to the Poles to even currently stateless ethnic groups like the Basques - should have their own distinct states. The only through-line linking these two diametrically-opposed stances is the belief that there are sufficient aggregate differences in temperament and shared history between, on the one hand, people of European descent, and on the other hand, people of non-European descent, such that the optimal model of political organization is one in which each lives apart from the other, and neither is politically responsible for the welfare of the other.

I don’t know where you see “victimhood” in any of this. If you’re talking specifically about the pathological whining about how hapless and blameless whites are being manipulated and coerced by ultra-powerful Jews into ruining their own countries and failing to maintain the former glory of their ancestral patrimony, then I agree with you that this is a flawed and pathetic attitude. This is not, however, an integral aspect of white nationalism. Many more clear-eyed and practical figures within the movement are far more focused on identifying and combating the unique shortcomings and failure modes of their own people - in the same way that any nationalist of any healthy civilization ought to do - than they are with blaming some other people for those failures.

It may surprise you to hear that I basically agree with you! I want to clarify that I myself don’t answer to the term “white nationalist”, and part of the reason is basically what you’re pointing at. If white nationalism means total opposition to all marriages between any person of European heritage and any person of non-European heritage, then I fully agree with you that such a project would be DOA in America. It would have been successful - it was successful - even a hundred years ago. But, after sixty years of mass non-European immigration, the demographic horse has already left the barn. Marriage between many white people and many non-white people is an irreversible reality in this country as of the 21st century. Marriages between whites and Hispanics are not going to stop. Marriages between whites and Asians are not going to stop. To the extent that white nationalism as a movement cannot figure out a way to work within the constraints of this reality, I agree that it will not be sustainable outside of Europeans countries that are still 80+% white.

However, you yourself have now linked multiple posts of mine which were brought to your attention by @HelmedHorror. (Thank you to him for plugging my work while I was completely occupied by my day job this week.) In those very posts, I explicate my somewhat idiosyncratic and very broad framework for what I mean when I say “white”. In those posts, and in other of mine in this forum, I’ve said that Asians are welcome within the big tent of whiteness. I also see the necessity of integrating mestizo Hispanics into this tent, which will be a complicated but not insurmountable project. Much as modern-day Europeans have genetic ancestry from three distinct populations - Western Hunter-Gatherers, Neolithic Farmers, and Proto-Indo-Europeans - I think it’s likely that the globally-dominant human population in 2,000 years will probably have some combination of European, East Asian, and probably Hispanic ancestry.

Remember that the big division that I care about is “black vs. non-black”. It really is just people with substantial sub-Saharan and Negrito (Australian/Oceanian Aboriginal) ancestry that I think the rest of the world’s populations need to remain separate from. (Arabs represent another major sticking point, and I’m still figuring out exactly what I think the optimal outcome would look like regarding that population and how/whether it could successfully integrate with other populations.) Now, certainly there are people right now with at least partial black ancestry who I could definitely imagine a successful white-centric culture managing to successfully embrace and integrate. (Is Blake Griffin “white”? Is Aaron Gordon? Is Mariah Carey? Sure! If they truly want to be!) This would require those people to relinquish any cultural/emotional/political affiliation to blackness as an identity and to marry and reproduce with people with zero black ancestry, in order to dilute the percentage of black ancestry in the future population to as small a number as possible.

Since the vast majority of blacks will not do this - and to be clear, that’s not an indictment of them, but rather a simple acknowledgment that for the vast majority of people, identity is centrally important and it is completely natural and healthy to relate to, and to value the welfare of, people who physically and ancestrally resemble you - and since only a small percentage of blacks are truly capable of integrating successfully into first-world civilization, it is going to be necessary to exclude them. Right now, in this country, people of mulatto (half-black, half-white) ancestry overwhelmingly relate more to their black ancestry and seek to be accepted by black culture. One can propose paths forward to a future in which the reverse is true, and I’m open to hearing them, but my money is on this continuing to be the case for a very, very long time.

Now, regarding AmRen’s claim that Chris Rufo’s marriage to a Thai woman makes it basically impossible to trust him as a reliable ally to this movement given current political and philosophical realities, is simply a descriptive observation, rather than the prescriptive/normative claim that you’re interpreting it to be. I think it’s a demonstrable fact that most people who are in mixed-race relationships are going to be extremely turned-off by any movement which they perceive as remotely threatening to those relationships. Whether their perceptions are accurate or not is not ultimately all that relevant. For example, a friend of mine from high school - historically a pretty conservative/libertarianish guy, skeptical of the left - was posting on Facebook a few years ago about his support for BLM, his opposition to any “racist” or “nativist” or “anti-black” political forces, etc. This guy is white, but married to a (very light-skinned, evidently of at least partial white ancestry herself) Filipina friend of ours, with whom he has two children. He told me that as a father of mixed-race children, it’s crucial for him to support pro-black causes in order to oppose “systemic racism” that threatens his family. This argument involves total non sequiturs, as far as I’m concerned; what does supporting a black communist organization that seeks to appropriate non-blacks’ resources in order to enrich blacks and prevent black criminals from being punished have to do with the safety of hapa children? But for a great many people in mixed-race relationships, they apparently currently perceive the only two choices as “white nationalism” (scary, bad, unacceptable) or “total unwavering loyalty to a coalition of non-white identity groups who oppose any attempt by whites to exert political will on their own behalf”. Cutting this Gordian knot of branding and public perception is the key struggle of white nationalist/identitarian movements, and in America at least they are fighting an uphill battle.

That’s one of the reasons why, for me, it’s so important to draw clear distinctions and explicitly communicate that we don’t have any big problem with white guys marrying Asian women, or even “thicc Latinas”. It’s not our ideal world, but the ideal world is no longer attainable given current (and seemingly irreversible) demographic trends. We need to work with what we’ve got, which is why some form of Castizo Futurism needs to be the way forward in America, while still fighting hard to preserve overwhelming white demographic dominance in any and all European countries in which that’s still even a remotely achievable possibility.

In those very posts, I explicate my somewhat idiosyncratic and very broad framework for what I mean when I say “white”.

This was a lot of words to explain that what you mean by "white" is basically "not black." This is why I find your views - articulate and verbose as they are - to be incoherent and not entirely ingenuous. You have some very personal grievances based on your, ah, "lived experiences," and basically you don't want to live around black people, but just saying it like that doesn't sound very nice even to other rightists, so you've invented this vision of "white nationalism" which includes Asians and Hispanics and Jews and basically anyone who isn't too dark and black-ish.

It's like claiming you are Christian or "Christian-adjacent" but really, you just like the vibes, so everyone should join your Christianity but believing in God is not a requirement, and all that talk about Jesus is kind of cringe, and why can't we include Jews and Zoroastrians under the Christian umbrella?

You have some very personal grievances based on your, ah, "lived experiences," and basically you don't want to live around black people, but just saying it like that doesn't sound very nice even to other rightists

Call it uh, Scott Adams-nationalism.

“Based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to White people is to get the hell away from Black people,” the 65-year-old author exclaimed. “Just get the (expletive) away. Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there’s no fixing this. This can’t be fixed.

In another comment I explain why I don’t call myself a “white nationalist”, and it’s mostly exactly what you’re pointing to. It would be disingenuous of me to present myself as a white nationalist, with all of the assumptions and associations that come with that brand, but then privately believe in some other ideology so far removed from the central example of that ideology that the two are totally incompatible.

The term I generally use when I describe my worldview is “white advocate” or “white identitarian”. My whiteness is very important to me; I’m very proud to be a direct descendant of the Anglos, and the Europeans more broadly, who built everything important about the pre-20th-century world. I oppose any efforts to marginalizes whites within the countries whites built, and in which whites are still the majority of the population. I want whiteness to be centered in those countries, and for it to be widely understood that non-white people in those countries are guests and newcomers who must tread lightly and maintain a deep respect for their host societies. And I want the small number of non-European-descended individuals invited into those countries to be integrated not only culturally, but also by blood - marrying native whites, giving their children names which are indistinguishable from those typical of the host population, and hoping their children do the same, such that European ancestry will always predominate in those societies.

In the much longer-term future, I would like to see a mixing of white and Asian peoples, creating a race with combined ancestry from both. While I do have a strong aesthetic attachment to a world in which some not-insignificant number of women look like Blake Lively and Rachel McAdams, in the idea future probably more of them will look more like Mina Kimes, and that will be just fine as well.

The lower classes in America, meanwhile, will continue to interbreed with Latinos. It doesn’t matter whether I like it or not, it’s going to continue to happen. We could build the wall tomorrow in earnest and the Latino population would still be too massive to prevent this outcome. And look, I’ve lived in Southern California my whole life; the appeal of light-skinned Latinas is absolutely not lost on me. My sister is dating a guy who’s half-white, half-Mexican. Really nice guy, we all like him a lot, etc. Based on conversations I’ve had with her, I doubt she’s ever going to have any children, which is heartbreaking to me, but if she does marry him and have kids, they’ll probably look pretty much white, maybe with darker hair than average and the ability to tan, and that won’t be the end of the world. That’s probably what a very large percentage of the American population will look like in 100 years. Again, it’s not my perfect world, but we have to work with the materials we’ve been given and use them to construct the best possible future we can under those conditions.

As for your contention that I am careful not to openly say “I just don’t want to live around blacks” so I construct a whole edifice of fake ideology to avoid looking like a jerk, I think that’s a misrepresentation. Again, my worldview is more complicated than “everyone who isn’t black can just say ‘I’m white!’ and that’s good enough for me.” It’s more complicated than that, and involves a lot of genuine work and assimilation and careful interbreeding. Some dark-skinned Amerindian-looking guy from the jungles of South America can’t just say “I’m white and my whole family who looks like me is white” and that’s the end of the story. There are criteria people need to meet in order to be white, and it’s a multigenerational process.

It’s also not fair to just say “I don’t want to live around blacks.” By and large I don’t want to live around blacks, and I’m pretty explicit about that. But I’ve also said that there are black people in my life who cause me a lot of angst about my ideological commitments, and I spend time agonizing over “well, what if we were able to make an exception for her, because she’d fit right in…” and then I’m struck by how complicated the world is and how ideology is a prison, etc., same as any intelligent and thoughtful person ought to be. My understanding of Mormonism is that they square this circle by saying “If you try really hard to be a good Mormon, you’ll be white in Heaven even if you weren’t in life.” I think that’s charming, and is a more earnest and wholesome version of the RW Twitter memes where people joke about how Clarence Thomas will be invited into Hyperborea.

If more people knew what Castizo Futurism was, I’d probably use that word to describe myself. Unfortunately, that meme has pretty much died on the right. AmRen used to run articles about it, but they abandoned the term a king time ago and I don’t see it used anywhere. Too complicated to sell to normies, maybe? Or perhaps too full of contradictions, too milquetoast, too accommodationist. I’ve thought about trying to bring it back by writing more extensively and with more carefully-considered explications of the ideology, rather than spitballing like I’ve done here. Whatever I do, it’s not going to be disingenuous, although I can’t promise it won’t be incoherent.

This is low effort and not adding much to the conversation.

Since you deleted your other comment, I'm not going to mod you for it (it was wise of you to delete it), but I am still going to tell you that we can see deleted comments, and it does inform the perception we have of how you are interacting with others.

The thing is, I was never all that “far left”. Even at the height of my “college socialist” phase, my opinions were squarely within what would in 2023 be the normie progressive Overton window. Opposing foreign wars and “imperialism”, wanting Wall Street bankers imprisoned, believing in economic redistribution and gay marriage. These were on the “far left” relative to the largely apolitical liberal-ish social scenes in which I had rolled prior to that point, but they would be bog-standard among any self-respecting PMC type today. My ideology now is massively farther outside of the Overton window than anything I believed ten years ago as a leftist.

Have you documented the cause for your swap anywhere?

The founding Fathers were white nationalists. This is nonsensical and extremely online. I hope you are trolling with this take. Segregation ended only 60 years ago.

The founding Fathers were white nationalists.

Worth noting that at least Benjamin Franklin's definition of "White" would have excluded French people, Russians, Swedes, and Bavarians -- quite different from how it would be used today.

Then they shouldn't have imported so many black people. That necessarily precludes ever having a white nation. Also some of them were race mixers and not at all meeting the purity standards of modern white nationalists.

They planned to send all the blacks back to Africa once they were no longer needed. Thomas Jefferson was very explicit about this, as I demonstrated in a reply to Hlynka above. Many of the greatest Americans, from James Madison to Andrew Jackson, and from Daniel Webster to Henry Clay, were members of an organization entirely dedicated to achieving this goal, as, again, I’ve noted in multiple comments in this thread. This effort was a dismal failure, resulting in the deportation of only a few thousand blacks to what became Liberia. So, yes, the importation of a massive population of black slaves was a disaster for this country, and the men responsible should indeed be roundly lambasted for their decision to do so. However, it’s not like it didn’t occur to the smart ones just how big a problem they had on their hands, nor the importance of dealing decisively with that problem at some point. Sadly, their descendants waited far too long and couldn’t execute the dismount.

They planned to send all the blacks back to Africa once they were no longer needed.

Most of them didn't, actually. A few did, hence the ill-fated Liberian venture, but the majority of early slave importers never had a long-term vision for what they'd do with a growing slave population, and the later ones just thought they could keep the system going forever with enough force (hence, the Confederacy).

It's true that many of the founding fathers undertook projects later in life to send Africans back to Africa. But their motives varied. Jefferson believed it was necessary for self preservation - he was terrified of slave revolts - while Madison was one of many slaveowners who came to have moral qualms later in life. I also suspect that they didn't really think their projects were likely, any more than you think your project to segregate America into Whitelandia and Blacklandia is likely. They saw the problem but short of somehow convincing almost all their fellow countrymen to undertake a radical transformation of society, it wasn't going to happen.

The founding Fathers were white nationalists.

I recognize that this is a one of the woke left's favorite talking points/rhetorical bludgeons to wield against patriotic Americans, but it simply doesn't hold up to scrutiny. The reason that nonsense like the 1619 Project has largely failed to catch on anywhere outside the wokest of woke enclaves is that the plain text of "We hold these truths as self-evident..." is right there for all to read.

Let’s look at some of the other things Thomas Jefferson wrote about race:

In his Notes on the State of Virginia:

The first difference which strikes us is that of color. Whether the black of the negro resides in the reticular membrane between the skin and scarf-skin, or in the scarf-skin itself; whether it proceeds from the color of the blood, the color of the bile, or from that of some other secretion, the difference is fixed in nature, and is as real as if its seat and cause were better known to us. And is this difference of no importance? Is it not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the two races? Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of color in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immoveable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race? Add to these, flowing hair, a more elegant symmetry of form, their own judgment in favor of the whites, declared by their preference of them, as uniformly as is the preference of the orangutan for the black women over those of his own species. The circumstance of superior beauty, is thought worthy attention in the propagation of our horses, dogs, and other domestic animals; why not in that of man? Besides those of color, figure, and hair, there are other physical distinctions proving a difference of race. They have less hair on the face and body. They secrete less by the kidneys, and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odor. This greater degree of transpiration renders them more tolerant of heat, and less so of cold, than the whites. Perhaps too a difference of structure in the pulmonary apparatus, which a late ingenious experimentalist has discovered to be the principal regulator of animal heat, may have disabled them from extricating, in the act of inspiration, so much of that fluid from the outer air, or obliged them in expiration, to part with more of it. They seem to require less sleep. A black, after hard labor through the day, will be induced by the slightest amusements to sit up till midnight, or later, though knowing he must be out with the first dawn of the morning. They are at least as brave, and more adventuresome. But this may perhaps proceed from a want of forethought, which prevents their seeing a danger till it be present. When present, they do not go through it with more coolness or steadiness than the whites. They are more ardent after their female: but love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. Their griefs are transient. Those numberless afflictions, which render it doubtful whether heaven has given life to us in mercy or in wrath, are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them. In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection. To this must be ascribed their disposition to sleep when abstracted from their diversions, and unemployed in labor. An animal whose body is at rest, and who does not reflect, must be disposed to sleep of course. Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous. It would be unfair to follow them to Africa for this investigation. We will consider them here, on the same stage with the whites, and where the facts are not apocryphal on which a judgment is to be formed. It will be right to make great allowances for the difference of condition, of education, of conversation, of the sphere in which they move. Many millions of them have been brought to, and born in America. Most of them indeed have been confined to tillage, to their own homes, and their own society: yet many have been so situated, that they might have availed themselves of the conversation of their masters; many have been brought up to the handicraft arts, and from that circumstance have always been associated with the whites. Some have been liberally educated, and all have lived in countries where the arts and sciences are cultivated to a considerable degree, and have had before their eyes samples of the best works from abroad. The Indians, with no advantages of this kind, will often carve figures on their pipes not destitute of design and merit. They will crayon out an animal, a plant, or a country, so as to prove the existence of a germ in their minds which only wants cultivation. They astonish you with strokes of the most sublime oratory; such as prove their reason and sentiment strong, their imagination glowing and elevated. But never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never see even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture. In music they are more generally gifted than the whites with accurate ears for tune and time, and they have been found capable of imagining a small catch. Whether they will be equal to the composition of a more extensive run of melody, or of complicated harmony, is yet to be proved. Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry. — Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry. Love is the peculiar oestrum of the poet. Their love is ardent, but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination…

… I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind. It is not against experience to suppose, that different species of the same genus, or varieties of the same species, may possess different qualifications. Will not a lover of natural history then, one who views the gradations in all the races of animals with the eye of philosophy, excuse an effort to keep those in the department of man as distinct as nature has formed them? This unfortunate difference of color, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people. Many of their advocates, while they wish to vindicate the liberty of human nature, are anxious also to preserve its dignity and beauty. Some of these, embarrassed by the question `What further is to be done with them?’ Join themselves in opposition with those who are actuated by sordid avarice only. Among the Romans emancipation required but one effort. The slave, when made free, might mix with, without staining the blood of his master. But with us a second is necessary, unknown to history. When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture.

It would be easy for me to dig up plenty of other quotes not only from Jefferson, but also from Madison - who, remember, was the two-time president of the American Colonization Society, an organization solely and explicitly dedicated to achieving the mass deportation of blacks back to Africa - and from Franklin, and John Dickinson, and Hamilton, and Abraham Lincoln, about their explicit denial of racial equality and about their desire for the entirety of the American continents (North and South!) to be populated exclusively by white people. In Jefferson’s case, he even specified that they should all be Anglo-Saxon.

The sad thing, though, is that you purport to be a Real American Patriot, yet you don’t seem to want to hear what the Founding Fathers said outside of the one or two documents they authored that you agree with. Because in your heart of hearts, you are a bleeding-heart liberal, and you truly believe, in full agreement with the left, that racism and white supremacy are the most evil things in history. And since you don’t want to believe that the Founders were evil, you need to believe that actually they were all anti-racists, it’s right there in the Declaration, la la la la la I can’t hear you when you quote all the other stuff they said and talk about the way they actually lived their lives.

If you were to really deal with the totality of the truth about these men, you would either have to abandon them or abandon your other beliefs. And since you can’t imagine any third position other than “the Founders were racist, and that makes them evil and this country illegitimate” and “the Founders were not racist, which is the reason this country isn’t evil or illegitimate” you’re forced to just lie and obfuscate.

But there is, in fact, a third option. “The Founders were white supremacists, and that’s totally fine, and white supremacy was a legitimate goal and it doesn’t reflect negatively on the men who founded this country, or any other colonial outpost of white/Western civilization.” It’s the position I’ve been thumping since I got here, and you keep telling me that I’m the unpatriotic anti-Western America-hater, when I’m the one here trying to rescue and rehabilitate the Founders for who they actually were and what they actually said that they wanted.

If you were to really deal with the totality of the truth about these men, you would either have to abandon them or abandon your other beliefs. And since you can’t imagine any third position other than “the Founders were racist, and that makes them evil and this country illegitimate” and “the Founders were not racist, which is the reason this country isn’t evil or illegitimate” you’re forced to just lie and obfuscate.

I couldn't agree more here. Their world view is basically if the 1619 project was DR3. The funny thing is that the 1619 project is actually a more realistic view of US history because at least they acknowledge that the US and Europeans did often treat non-whites very poorly and that those actions were every popular at the time. From the responses below, I kept asking him who the real racists were that the real Patriotic Americans were fighting against in a quest for equality in the 1960's and apparently like today it was only the Democrats and white progressives:

You ask me who were the people on the opposite side of the CRA debate, and my reply is the same people who are supporting segregation today, namely college-educated white democrats. The specific terminology they use to justify their beliefs might change, but the substance of those beliefs (racial segregation, mob justice, and various flavors of Marxist nonsense) hasn't.

I don't think there are any fundamental challenges in 'important person believes very intelligent correct thing A and very dumb incorrect thing B'? The world we live in is incredibly complicated, and in an individual's attempts to comprehend it they can simultaneously attain great insight and leadership in one area while being uninterestingly incorrect or simply insane in another area. Every person alive 1k years ago held beliefs that are (correctly) deemed patently ridiculous and immoral. And that isn't just culture-war-related beliefs. Beliefs like 'the way to treat diseases is to apply herbs that don't work and pray' or 'we should kill members of other Christian sects because they are corrupting our souls'. Plenty of beliefs both people here and normies have will be (correctly) judged in the same way in the future.

It might clash with some desire to worship the whole person of a leader, but that's more a personal tendency than it is an intractable problem.

The problem is that progressives really dislike racism and hurting, or doing things that sorta look like hurting, the downtrodden, and that 'the founders were nazis' is sort of like that, not that 'the founders or nazis' is an intractable problem for a smart liberal.

They literally restricted immigration to white people and allowed slavery. This is also there for all to read. More recently, were George Wallace and Strom Thurmond members of the woke left? Are you denying that conservative whites, especially in the South, were deeply racist until very recently? David Duke almost won in Louisiana in the 1980s!

David Duke almost won because his opponent was literally a criminal who coined the phrase "vote for the crook" which has since caught on in the francophone world.

First off you seem to be conflating immigration with naturalization/citizenship. The US didn't start restricting immigration at federal level a until 1866, prior to that our borders had basically been open with anyone who could afford the boat ride welcome to settle. What was regulated was who could vote or run for office, the requirement being that you had to own property within the states and been a resident for a minimum of 5 years. Slaves obviously weren't going to be owning property, so they were out, which is where the old "wealthy white landowner" line comes from. However, the "white" part is complicated by the fact that we also see multiple occasions in the northern colonies of free blacks successfully asserting their "white" status in court by dint of being both Christian and (in kind of an inverse of the one-drop rule) being of English/European descent.

Given that most of the immigration laws of the 19th and early 20th century were specifically targeted against "Asians and other non-Christians" I think the annoying Evangelicals have a much stronger case for arguing that the US had been founded as an explicitly Christian nation, than the woke white kids do of claiming that it was founded on white nationalism.

Coming back to the issue of slavery, reading contemporary accounts of the founding it's clear that it was a very contentious topic at the time and one who's can kept getting kicked down the road. It was so contentious in fact that one of the bloodiest wars in recorded history up to that point would be fought over it. The anti-slavery camp won that one.

As for more recent history I'm not "denying that conservative whites are racist" so much as questioning your definition of "conservative". The coalition of business-owners and conservative Christians that originally backed the civil rights act and ultimately defeated segregation was largely Republican and has remained so.

The typical woke retort is to bring up the alleged "southern strategy" but this is just another one of their talking points/bludgeons that doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Contra popular narratives about the two major parties pulling a switch-a-roo in the 60s as a result of the CRA, it's not until the mid to late nineties that the south becomes reliably republican which is kind of awkward for democratic partisans because it suggests that as the South became less racist, they also became less inclined to vote for the party of Woodrow Wilson and George Wallace.

You didn't respond to anything I asked you. This is just a rambling about things that apparently annoy you.

Were George Wallace and Strom Thurmond members of the woke left? Are you denying that conservative whites, especially in the South, were deeply racist until very recently? David Duke almost won in Louisiana in the 1980s.

Who were these people in the Jim Crow South voting for it? Did the woke left travel back in time and vote in those elections or did every Southern state except Texas in 1968 vote for Republicans or a segregationist after the CRA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_United_States_presidential_election

The coalition of business-owners and conservative Christians that originally backed the civil rights act and ultimately defeated segregation was largely Republican and has remained so

Were the people on the opposite side of this debate? The woke left? Were the woke left the ones beating black protesters here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selma_to_Montgomery_marches#%22Bloody_Sunday%22_events

You didn't respond to anything I asked you.

I did actually.

You claimed that founding fathers restricted immigration and I pointed out that this was false.

You claimed that founding fathers allowed slavery and I replied the issue was a bit more complicated than that.

You ask me who were the people on the opposite side of the CRA debate, and my reply is the same people who are supporting segregation today, namely college-educated white democrats. The specific terminology they use to justify their beliefs might change, but the substance of those beliefs (racial segregation, mob justice, and various flavors of Marxist nonsense) hasn't.

The founding fathers never intended for this country to be populated with majority non-whites. This isn't debatable.

You claimed that founding fathers allowed slavery and I replied the issue was a bit more complicated than that.

How was it more complicated? They allowed it. Everything is complicated so that is a ridiculous "argument".

You ask me who were the people on the opposite side of the CRA debate, and my reply is the same people who are supporting segregation today

Wait so the woke left and Marxists were running the Jim Crow South? You are delusional. Today I learned that George Wallace was the same as the college educated democrats today just the "terms" are different.

More comments

Were the people on the opposite side of this debate? The woke left? Were the woke left the ones beating black protesters here

You're asking if the people who wanted segregation back then are different from the same as people who want segregation now? Why would an affirmative answer be in any way surprising?

He thinks they are the same

You ask me who were the people on the opposite side of the CRA debate, and my reply is the same people who are supporting segregation today, namely college-educated white democrats. The specific terminology they use to justify their beliefs might change, but the substance of those beliefs (racial segregation, mob justice, and various flavors of Marxist nonsense) hasn't.

More comments

They are doing a giga DR3 and implying the American Right and Red Tribe were apparently never racist. I'm just trying to get them to admit that's what they are doing.

they also became less inclined to vote for the party of Woodrow Wilson and George Wallace.

I know this is kinda tangential to your point, but George Wallace found Jesus, had a change of heart on race issues, and managed to talk the NAACP into endorsing his run for Alabama governor in the 80's. Kind of a microcosm of the south's racial progress.

I knew that he had a "come to Jesus moment" later in life and had approached both John Lewis and Vivian Jones asking for forgiveness but I did not know that the NAACP had endorsed his final run for governor. TIL.

Edit: Also goes to support my repeated contention that history/reality is under no obligation to conform to expectations.

If you think they were meaningfully similar to the modern white nationalists, they were also commies and ancaps and monarchists all at the same time.

But generally if you talk to them, they do reason through things similar to the worst sorts of leftists. I generally get bored with them and start using the arguments I learned here to argue for them.

Was there a single one who thought whites and blacks could live next to each other as equals? I'm not aware of a single one. On the other hand, you had many who thought them to be naturally suited for slavery, and even if they opposed slavery, were willing to compromise on it and found having a united nation more important than outlawing race based slavery. I think it's pretty obvious they didn't care very much about the well being of blacks and found them to be inferior both biologically and spiritually.

But I agree using their political beliefs and mapping it onto today's is a pointless because they lived in a very different world. They were much closer to the Thirty Years' War than our own time. But OP seems to think that they were concerned with racial equality which is frankly absurd. They would have closer views on race to white nationalists than they would OP. But they would be very different from them as well. Nationalism in Europe was just barley getting started. It was a very long time ago.