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The basic idea is that black players that had not taken the Wonderlic when joining the league had their post-career Wonderlic score compared to a lower default/baseline than white players that had not taken the Wonderlic prior to joining the league. The reason for this being that the median black Wonderlic score is lower than the median white Wonderlic score. There was no manipulation/lowering of actual test scores based on race, it was applying a baseline for players that hadn't taken the test before.
Hlynka's characterization of the incident is... uncharitable to say the least.
That's where you are wrong. A major part of the scandal was that it was revealed in discovery that the NFL had attempted to use the lower "race-normalized" scores to justify reduced payouts even in cases where the initial score for an individual player were available. Only problem being they got caught by a player who'd saved a copy of their initial scores and subsequently challenged the ruling.
If you ask me "We didn't actually get away with it, so you can't blame us for trying" isn't much of defense.
Edited to be less antagonistic.
The NFL is not meaningfully "we" and I don't understand why you insist that it is. You have this habit of assuming people who violently disagree with each other are on the same time and then arguing against the people we disagree with instead of us. It's like you making a some point about culture and then I spend reams of text explaining how young earth creationists are wrong and thus your real motivations are some version of backwards theocracy.
Violent disagreement does not preclude fundamental commonality. Gambino soldiers and Luciano soldiers kill each other, and yet are both members of a single well-defined set. Stalin murdered Trotsky, yet I do not think any fundamental ideological difference existed between the two.
The proper way to draw ideological borders is a non-trivial question.
While this is true their borders don't seem to reflect reality at all. The dominant strain on the left is absolutely not HBD believers who oppose a color blind meritocracy on the grounds of believing in HBD.
The dominant strain of the left and the white-identity right believe fervently in the inescapable importance of racial identity, in the same way that Gambino and Luciano soldiers believe in "their thing", and Stalin and Trotsky believed in revolutionary socialism. That their understanding of the realities of racial identity and what it means are opposed doesn't make any more difference than it does with the mafioso or the revolutionary communists.
Stalin and Trotsky doubtless had many finely crafted ideological differences, but their ideology was largely bullshit, and none of those differences actually cashed out into differences in action: both men believed that they were the champions of an unstoppable progressive force that justified a practically-unlimited amount of murder and destruction in pursuit of "the greater good". As it happens, one beat the other in the power struggle, and the loser got exiled and then killed. The fine ideological distinctions appear to me to be meaningless trivia, because they never cashed out in actual differences in action. I am not persuaded that the details of Trotskyism as an ideology actually explain why he lost, or indicate that he would have been any better if he had won.
how do the differences between the progressive left and the white-identity right actually cash out in action and policy? The progressive left demands discrimination against whites and Asians as racial groups, the white-identity right demands discrimination against blacks and hispanics as racial groups. How is this not Gambino and Luciano, Stalin and Trotsky?
I do not believe that racial identity is necessarily important or inescapable. I believe that it is at least possible in principle for people of different races to live together in peace without either top-down race-based tyranny or bottom-up racial predation. This is a distinct difference between my ideology and that of both the progressive and white-identity types.
If you think white identitarians and progressives are distinct, what differences in policy, action or outcome do you see as relevant? Is it something beyond which specific racial groupings should be favored and which oppressed?
Broadly speaking, they differ in their policy positions on and attitudes towards:
Abortion
Gun ownership
Social status of women in general (white identity right would prefer to see them railroaded much more strongly into traditional homemaker roles)
Homosexuality
Pornography and all other types of social "degeneracy"
Transsexuality and access to trans medical care
Even their views on race are not simple mirror images of each other - progressives believe in the possibility of a multiracial society and consequently support much higher rates of immigration, white identity right believes in monoethnic enclaves with restricted immigration.
White identitarians are, on average, extremely socially conservative, and they consequently take socially conservative views on these issues.
Economically it's a mixed bag, certainly you have some self-styled "national socialists" on the far right who support expansive government intervention in the free market and a strong social safety net, but you also see plenty of free market libertarianism, of the variety that no progressive would support.
It's harder to try and think of things that the two camps actually agree on.
You might say that all the non-racial issues don't actually matter, and that the two groups are actually defined by their views on race so that's the only thing we should be looking at, but that just reduces your claim to a tautology. Obviously if you consider X-believers and not-X-believers in the abstract and refuse to entertain any other property, then the only thing we'll be able to say about them is that one believes in X and one believes in not-X. So in order for the claim to have substance we have to look at progressivism and white identitarianism as concrete social phenomena, along with all their attendant "contingent" properties.
It is routine for me to see HBD proponents decry the reversal of Roe v Wade explicitly on the grounds that black women will no longer be aborting their babies at their previous disproportionately-high rates. Has your experience been different?
Plausible, but I'd appreciate some examples. I do not see any HBD supporters or white-identitarians in leading the charge in the gun culture, and given how many of them vote Democrat and have all their lives, I'm skeptical they're staunch 2A advocates. Do you have specific people in mind here?
Again, do you have specific examples here? Is Jared Taylor outspoken on womens' role being in the home? For that matter, I'm curious how you understand Red Tribe's attitude toward social status of women, given that committed Christians holding conservative views such issues are disproportionately female. Like, there are a lot of women in my Church, and I'm pretty sure most of them wouldn't agree with your framing. Certainly my wife would not, or her sister, or her mother, or my mother or sister.
Did we ever figure out whether BAP was actually gay or not?
BAP again, and in general this is not the vibe I get from my interactions and observations. God Shaped Hole would be the strongest support for this argument that I'm aware of. I didn't finish the piece, but while it struck me as porn-critical, its objection seemed much more political and centered on porn-as-it-currently-functions, not porn-in-general. Perhaps I'm wrong, or you have other examples in mind?
I expect the people most concerned with Trans issues to be the sincerely religious, and those most concerned with white identitarianism to be atheist and to view Trans issues as a distraction from what really matters, which is race. Certainly that's the pattern I believe I've observed here. I'm open to being corrected, though.
I don't think either one has much chance of securing the future they purport to desire, so I'm not sure why this should be more relevant than the similarities in the ways they engage with race here and now.
Trans issues are important to many on the social right - religious or not, white identitarian or not.
There's concern for the healthy people who are performing irreversible unnecessary medical procedures on their bodies due to what is essentially a social contagion, many of whom are impressionable young teens, and there's also the natural bristling at the Orwellian "you must say that this man is actually a woman and let him participate in women's sports" dictates. Neither of these justifications are religious in nature.
From the National Justice Party platform statement (the NJP is a recently-defunct white identitarian party spearheaded by Mike Enoch of therightstuff.biz. Although the party recently disbanded due to internal conflicts, their website nationaljusticeparty.com is still available on the wayback machine):
From Patriotic Alternative (largest active white identitarian party in the UK):
From Counter Currents:
It's primarily a general attitude that I've picked up on from comments sections and podcasts. I don't have a ton of specific examples offhand to link to. But we do have:
From Patriotic Alternative:
From the NJP platform statement:
Surely these statements would set off alarm bells for progressives.
Your original post was about the "progressive left" and the "white-identity right", so those are the groups I'm comparing.
It's important that we not conflate "white-identity right", "HBD supporters", and "red tribe". These are all separate things, even though there is overlap.
If your wife, sister, and mother are not white identitarians, then I don't think their views are relevant for this comparison.
Is BAP actually a white identitarian? As in does he advocate for a race-based criteria for citizenship and immigration? I'm not familiar with his work.
Regardless, see the NJP platform statement above about banning homosexual propaganda.
From Counter Currents:
Girls on Film: The Predominance of Pornography. The money quote is right at the end: "Readers of this website are aware that there is more to our ideas than just biological “whiteness,” and porn is an excellent example of this."
Why Porn Makes You Pathetic
From The Occidental Observer:
Legalized Pornography and Demographic Genocide - "I think the implications of these findings to White Advocates should be loud and clear: The use of pornography by Whites should be fought tooth and nail, and the banning of pornography in White majority countries and states should be set as a central long-term goal."
Research on Pornography and the Sexualization of Culture
There's a pretty wide variety of perspectives on abortion within white identitarianism, but in general most people will be opposed to white women aborting healthy white babies, which is already a marked difference from the standard progressive platform of (relatively) unrestricted access to abortion for all women.
Greg Johnson's take.
It's not a flagship issue for white identitarians but see here.
You asked how the progressive left and the white-identity right are different. I pointed out a policy question that they differ on. How is that not relevant?
The progressive left hates white identitarians, deeply, and has done a lot of concrete harm to individual white identitarians by doxing and canceling people. We can explain this hatred by pointing to the numerous deeply-held ideological differences between them. And yet somehow, despite all that, both groups are still really the same because... the white-identity right isn't powerful enough to actually implement the policies they want? That's bordering on a non-sequitur.
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