Listen on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Podcast Addict, and RSS.
In this episode, we talk about white nationalism.
Participants: Yassine, Walt Bismarck, TracingWoodgrains.
Links:
Why I'm no longer a White Nationalist (The Walt Right)
The Virulently Unapologetic Racism of "Anti-Racism" (Yassine Meskhout)
Hajnal Line (Wikipedia)
Fall In Line Parody Song (Walt Bismarck)
Richard Spencer's post-Charlottesville tirade (Twitter)
The Metapolitics of Black-White Conflict (The Walt Right)
America Has Black Nationalism, Not Balkanization (Richard Hanania)
Recorded 2024-04-13 | Uploaded 2024-04-14
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
As a third culture kid, a recurring thought that keeps coming back to me when I read themotte, is how rare it is for bias to be acknowledged in earnest. I don't know if it's a genuine blindness, an unconscious aversion because the ramifications would be too frightening, or end-of-history-esque arrogance.
In the middle of discussion, people will insert something akin to americanisms, carry on without justifying it, and their opponents will handshake it by pushing back on everything except those assumptions. I don't want to piss off too many, so I'll add that I saw this in sneerclub too. They were guilty of the same as they cast rocks against, only their baseline/anchor point was more mainstream.
Professionally and academically, whites are fairly self conscious about being WEIRD and proactive about acknowledging their own biases, binary thinking, and so on, so it's bizarre to me that rationalists would be reluctant to engage at length about their elevated weirdness.
In this podcast, weirdness in white people does get acknowledged, but it's framed as the reason white people are/were great. This goes unchallenged, so subsequently, a lot of claims are slipped into the omnibus, and the discussion spirals into a case of Woozle effect. Sure, some white quirks enabled western hegemony, but which ones, and why does Walt get to decide?
At 21 minutes, a claim is made that you want people who have ideas at 2am after partying and hooking up with a random girl. At 26 minutes, white fratbro-ism is made out to be an integral part of white exceptionalism. If they say fuck you***, you should say fuck them. At 63min, constant fighting is the secret ingredient. And at multiple points, saying terrible things in the heat of the moment or just to be edgy should be acceptable if not celebrated.
Why is this subset of white norms allowed to represent the essence of white excellence? How do you know this isn't survivor bias and those traits wouldn't be denounced as degenerate behavior by white elites of yesteryear? Or more directly, does Walt, despite his scots-irish background, get to appropriate and define the white label simply because Tracingwoodgrain identifies cares more about his mormon community? It's likely in 50 years some retconned hispanic american will wax on about his latin temperament and machismo as what made whites great. After all, the jesuits and conquistadors certainly pulled their own weight.
***As an aside, why did no one challenge this part? The "fuck white people" articles wasn't the start of history. Up-front pro-white interests had been the norm for centuries. It's odd to frame the soft WN stance as reactive to being mocked by non-whites starting in 2014. You'd never guess this is the culture that can't stop writing Create Your Own Villain stories, and so easily understood "OJ was payback for Rodney King." And also, I really want to point out that these fucked up racial dynamics are unique even among white multiracial societies. Americans have perfected racial mobilization and being maximally edgy, so if that's what Walt sees as desirable in the new republican party, then the 'fuck white people' backlash should be seen as an expected development to the game. Personally I think American salesmanship is incompatible with running a pragmatic racial realpolitik society like Singapore. It would require too much of an identity shift, so even if they pulled it off, would you really call it a win for whites?
There was only so much time and it was already extremely difficult to stick to one point at a time, it's always a judgment call about which issue to latch onto. I admit that "Everyday Feminism article headlines radicalized me" as an explanation caught me off-guard in the moment.
Fwiw, leftism has made me more race and gender conscious albeit in a way leftists don’t like.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link