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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
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Notes -
I used to argue with white nationalists a lot many years ago on /r/anarcho_capitalism and what I found very frustrating is they refused to properly defend their point of view, particularly on the point of who counted as white. The rare time they would say, it was usually strictly people born on the European continent, so Turks in East Thrace were white but not Turks on the other side of the Bosporus strait were not, I guess. Attempts to pin them down on definitions like this were taken as bad faith tricks to undermine their cause and there was not a lot of interest in having real intellectual discussion about the merits of white nationalism. I found I could get them to explain why they thought whites were superior to non-whites, but I could not get anywhere discussing the practicalities of how a white ethno-state would work.
I completely agree that it makes more sense to select immigrants by the traits that whites are claimed to possess. Selecting them based on race is extremely crude.
Walt seemed like he was participating in good faith, but I found he rambled on a lot and would have preferred to have him pinned down more on some of these issues. I think he reinforced my impression of the alt-right, which is not that they were a bunch of super intellectual misfits but that they actually had terrible epistemic habits and were white nationalists more for the vibes as the kids say rather than its intellectual merits. I've read some of Richard Spencer's stuff and seen interviews with him. He's not that smart. I haven't been impressed by anything from the alt-right as far as intellectual arguments go.
I think that's separate from believing in human biodiversity. It's the leap from human biodiversity to white nationalism that I have never found convincing. I think there is a parallel here with communists, who are extremely difficult to convince to enter into a serious debate. Attempts to debate communists are shot down as risking undermining class solidarity. Similarly, attempts to debate white nationalists are shot down (though not nearly as quickly and definitively) as risking undermining white racial solidarity.
Another parallel is how communists put a huge amount of effort into debating theory (though not at addressing the best counter-arguments to that theory as they mostly only debate other communists) and almost none in how a communist society would actually work.
This quote came to mind when you asked what is white Nationalism.
A lady asked Dr. Franklin Well Doctor what have we got a republic or a monarchy – A republic replied the Doctor if you can keep it.”
White People - are those who can keep it. Propagate self-governance. Live as free people in a functional complex society
Non-white - are the people who can not self-govern or contribute to its existence.
In the American context which uses an expanding term of whiteness it’s basically anyone who can replicate and reproduce the ideals expressed in the founding of the nation.
That is still really vague. I am talking about people who want to restrict immigration based on race. What would that actually mean? Once they can answer that, we can talk about whether that actually makes sense, whether it could work, how it would be done, and whether there are better ways of achieving those goals. White nationalists don't seem to want to do any of those things. But they are decisions they would eventually have to make.
It's not that "How would you decide who is white" would never need to be settled, but it's often used as a gotcha in the exact same way as when trans advocates try to nail their opponents down to a precise fully biological definition of gender and then make a big deal of it when they struggle to handle all the edge cases with a single definition.
The specific way they "make a big deal of it" is to act as if these terminological questions need to be dealt with at the outset, otherwise all subsequent discussion must necessarily be confused. But they fail to consider why their opponents might see their own priorities differently. White identitarianism has gained traction online because of the way whites have been treated. Despite anti-whites probably being more likely than most to deny that there could be any definition of the white race, they certainly see no problem with talking about white people as a monolith.
This where the bad faith accusations are coming from. When a group of people is being attacked, most would agree it's in their interest to organize to defend themselves. Explicit anti-whites can be forgiven for trying to shut this down by muddying the waters on whiteness; why wouldn't they want an enemy that they can organize against but that is epistemically incapable of organizing against them?
More annoying are the centrists who do the same thing: "How can you expect people to give a sympathetic hearing to white nationalism if you can't even define one of the two words in that moniker?" The answer is that it's a peripheral question that need only be answered once white nationalism is closer to the levers of power. It's very easy to classify most Americans or Europeans as white or non-white; that's enough for now. There are factions that might prefer to include, e.g., Armenians, and there are other factions that might prefer to exclude them, and so on for other populations of coarser or finer granularity. White nationalists are aware that nature only provides us with racial clusters connected by gradients, not sharp, one-dimensional boundaries. It's simply unreasonable to demand that a single definition spontaneously coalesce from out of their reasonable diversity of internet opinions. Not to mention that any one definition would look silly and arbitrary to outsiders for the same reasons that white nationalists themselves can't agree on a definition.
That will change if and when one of the factions gains the political edge over the others. Even the hardest of the hard right generally fall in line behind Trump, whatever their personal disagreements with him, because he is doing the most (so they believe) to advance their causes. Imagine how ecstatic they would be if a US president deported all recently arrived, unmarried, non-white immigrants, severely clamped down on immigration, reasserted the accomplishments of white people in the teaching of American history, curtailed the anti-white animus in media and academia, etc. Contrary to the "But what even is white?" people's demands, they wouldn't really care whether some Istanbul satellite made the cut. It's an edge case, it belongs on the edge.
Once WNs have a power gradient to follow, then will be the time to start hardening feelings into policies, a process that will be constrained by whatever alliances and compromises make sense to those people, in those positions, with those connections, at that time. It's understandable that internet randos who know the impotence and arbitrariness of their own opinions are not willing to make themselves the spokespeople of the entire movement.
Counterpoint: I'm acquainted with some far-right folks (though I'm sure Hlynka would have disagreed with that classification) who have been consistently Trump-skeptical-to-Trump-hostile since 2016, though not in the "never-Trumper Republican" way. Some even argue that his victory in 2016 was a product of foreign election-tampering and he was a puppet taking orders from overseas; the whole "Russian collusion" narrative… except for the difference of it not being Moscow pulling his strings, but Jerusalem. That the election this November is "just a show," and there's no meaningful difference between Trump and Biden because they're both "ZOG puppets." (And that elections will remain meaningless until we have a party and a candidate who understands that the only question that matters is "the JQ" and says so.)
Then there was also one guy who argues that all secular governments are servants of Satan (citing Matthew 4:8-9), and that we need a totalizing Christian theocracy; which, in the "correct" understanding of Matthew 22:21 — that only he holds, and everyone else gets wrong — is what Jesus actually called for.
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Yes, I understand that they have reasons for not wanting to give a definition, but that still makes it very frustrating for an open-minded person who wants to hear their ideas explained and defended.
It's also quite annoying when a group keeps saying "we're being mistreated so it's only natural we organize and defend white rights and by the way we want a white ethnostate and no we won't say what that means". I have no interest in supporting a movement that refuses to say what they're actually going to do once they have more influence. If you want more influence from me, you need to explain what it is you are trying to accomplish.
And it's not that I have high expectations for being convinced, but I will certainly be open-minded and give it a fair hearing.
I totally disagree with that because the merits of your movement entirely depend on how you define it. If your argument is that whites have certain inherent traits upon which society depends, you do actually need to say who those white people are. I don't see how people can be expected to agree on those traits if you can't agree on who you're talking about.
That position makes sense if you're already convinced that having a white ethno-state is the right thing to do and that you will personally benefit from it regardless of precisely how the white race is defined, but for most people that isn't the case. They're either belong to one of these groups (e.g. Jews) whose place is insecure or they're white people who don't know exactly what you're proposing and therefore cannot assess whether it makes any sense.
For example, I personally think Jews are a clear net positive contribution to society, while many white nationalists are virulent anti-semites. Whether you include Jews is not an "edge case". It's a pretty important detail that determines how much the sense the movement actually makes. Or what about Iranians? The ones I've met have all been great. It matters to me whether they're included.
Now, to be fair, I don't see myself as likely to be convinced in any case, but I still think it matters whether a white ethno-state means including some of the ethnicities that seem like clear net contributors and more questionable ones that maybe have certain social problems like high crime rates or substance abuse issues. At the minimum, we should be able to agree that that is a very different argument. And you should recognize that the vast majority of the white people are in the same boat. If you want to have any hope of advancing your argument, you do need to work out some of these details. Some other extremists, like anarcho-capitalists for example, I find to be actually quite good at working out these details.
EDIT: Why is this getting downvoted so much?
Here's the situation. You're making demands without being in a position to demand anything. They don't care about your influence, and you aren't really offering it.
You're just standing there and screaming that you will define the null hypothesis and they are obligated to debate you according to your rules.
Have a look at this article, and notice the bit on "floating signifiers" https://status451.com/2017/07/11/radical-book-club-the-decentralized-left/
AnCaps aren't anyone's example of a successful movement.
I'm not saying they're obligated to do anything. I am saying that in conversations with white nationalists where they're trying to convince me of white nationalism, they have rarely made any effort to define white people and I find that frustrating.
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Well, you could take this arbitrarily far. We can agree that it would be unreasonable for you to demand the extension of the word in the form of a complete list of names. On the other extreme, you could simply rely on common sense. I suppose the only reason that anybody can be won over to the far right is that they find the everyday use of the word "white" good enough for government work (or rather, good enough for anything but that). As I pointed out in my previous comment, they have that in common with leftist race agitators. For some reason, people rarely feel the need to own the leftists by trying to stump them with "define white" (or "define black" for that matter) or pretend that their ideas can't be seriously engaged with until those minutiae have been tied up in a bow.
(If I had to guess why, I'd say that, besides the left having succeeded in keeping the Overton window decidedly left of center so that centrists are less willing to give right-wing radicals as much leeway on anything, the left usually doesn't openly call for things that sound like anywhere near as significant a departure from the status quo as a "white ethnostate". The exception that proves the rule is reparations, whose critics are often keen to know whether white people who do not descend from slaveowners will be on the hook. Then again, as far as I know the answer is "yes", so they're still left with the problem of having to provide an objective definition of "white".)
The resemblance between left and right extends to their ambivalence towards the Jews. As a non-leftist, my response to their ambivalence is not to buttonhole some leftist on social media, ask him what the left's real final solution to the Jewish problem is, and walk away in a huff when he doesn't give me a straight answer. Instead it's to recognize that there is indeed a natural tension, observe how various types of leftist are dealing with it, and draw my own conclusions about how the left's relationship with Jews is likely to evolve over time (not that Jews are a monolith either).
In the interest of letting you have one concrete WN point of view, I'll give you mine without any obfuscation or proselytizing. Let's define "white" and "ethnostate", starting with white. I am of NW European extraction and feel the most kinship with that group of people. But there are no prospects in uniting behind that identity while strictly excluding other white people. White ethnic particularism in the US is on the wane, white people are too mixed both individually and collectively, and I would be proud to belong to any civilization that could be considered the heir of European Christendom (emphasis on European). In practical terms, that means basically anyone who has roots in the European continent is in. Bosnians are in, ethnic Russians are in, southern Italians are in. North Africans are out. Caucasians, not sure (who cares). Turks and others whose national identities don't align well with race might have recourse to being judged on their appearance and/or genetics. Or, what would probably be safer even though it would unfortunately come with false negatives, they could be excluded en masse. It's not an important question to me, so my attitude is wait and see.
The Jewish question is more important but more nuanced. In my opinion, they are a net negative in spite of their scientific accomplishments. (To digress slightly, other than the more frequently encountered arguments about their harmfulness in the cultural sphere, a) their scientific advantage is gradually petering out, and b) people often forget to factor in the opportunity costs of fraudulent scientific paradigms that set progress back for as long as decades, and that probably only succeeded because of persuasive but intellectually dishonest Jews like Chomsky, Marx, Freud, (Joseph) Greenberg, Yudkowsky, Levi-Strauss, Mead, Gould, Lewontin, Witten, etc. My pet theory is that white scientists are more inclined towards exploring large amounts of data and noticing patterns, whereas Jews are more liable to have their "one big idea" that they will then defend to the death -- which generally serves them well in rigorous disciplines where raw cognitive horsepower is the limiting factor and their imaginations are less free to run wild. More succinctly, breadth vs. depth. Of course, their higher g probably makes them better at both approaches on average, and I concede that science is probably ahead of where it would have been now if Jews had never existed.) There are enough who are strong allies to Western civilization to give me pause, but it's hard to imagine them ever not being a huge collective nuisance. Ideally, the Jewish identity would be expunged. Failing that, they would be treated the same as other non-whites, but monitored extra closely.
Now, "ethnostate". For me, it's not just a question of demographic composition (although it goes without saying that both legal and illegal immigration must be reduced to a tiny fraction of their current levels), but how the nation sees itself. Ideally, only white people should be considered Americans in the fullest sense, the same way that being raised in Korea and fluent in Korean don't suffice to make an Englishman Korean. This was, in fact, how most non-white immigrants and their children were informally viewed in the US until very recently. The problem with that arrangement wasn't that it was synchronically bad, but that it was unsustainable. The temptation for foreigners to stab their hosts in the back -- to gain power by shameless guilt-tripping out of one side of the mouth and mockery out of the other, a tactic that could only work on the people that least deserved it -- proved to be too strong, and will only grow stronger the longer we allow it to continue.
Purely demographic diversity is not necessarily unworkable, but it can only work if there is one ethnic group that is universally agreed to be the backbone of the nation. In the same way that a white man who moves to China and gets a job there tacitly understands that he is meant to be working for the benefit of Chinese people, minorities who reside in a white ethnostate must know they are there for the benefit of white people. As of now, they can't be trusted to fulfill that expectation. So at the very least, they can't vote. They can't run for office or make political donations. They can't become lawyers or judges. They can't move money out of the country as flexibly as they can now. Their participation in professions such as journalism is capped at a low percentage. Their participation in more valuable professions where their strengths complement those of white people, i.e. certain areas of STEM, is capped at a somewhat higher percentage. (Not to dismiss the untapped white talent in this area, whose chances to develop their skills are artificially hamstrung by making worse students than researchers/practitioners.) All the preceding restrictions are introduced slowly. They are ineligible for pronatalist incentives (mainly targeted at UMC white people). White people are not paid more for doing the same work. There are restrictions on freedom of expression that are onerous by today's standards, but more transparently enforced.
History lessons that involve clashes between white and non-white people are taught predominantly from the white perspective. The contributions of minorities past and present are given due recognition (i.e. some, but without the distortions endemic to most textbooks today); they are to be neither celebrated nor demonized (with the exception of blacks, see below). The classics are resurrected but their stewardship no longer falls to academics.
Interracial relationships will ideally not have to be outright banned, as even now, miscegenation is not a serious threat to the existence of the white race, and will presumably fade away on its own. The children of whites and other light-skinned races are perhaps given some leniency in deciding who they identify with; children that are 3/4 white, 1/4 East Asian are white; half-black and half-brown children are black and brown. The thing we call "black culture" is eradicated. Blacks are expected to keep their heads down and work, or leave. They are made to understand that they will achieve less and have less as their natural condition. Capital punishment makes a big comeback and is extended to underage black teens in accordance with their more rapid maturation. Illegal immigrants at the Mexican border are shot on sight. Illegal immigrants already residing in the country are given notice to leave, after which rewards will be posted for reporting them to the authorities (who will deport them at their own expense, or kill them if they lack the wherewithal). (This could be relaxed depending on the state of the economy at the time, I'm well aware that what I'm proposing would already be crippling in the short term.) Formerly outspoken white race traitors are closely monitored and/or subjected to regular public humiliations. Formerly outspoken non-white enemies are deported if possible, otherwise killed.
Full steam ahead on AI and robotics research, in part to weaken the case for imported labor. The social sciences are purged. I have other ideas in this area that are less within the purview of white nationalism but are intended to reinvigorate the natural sciences.
Honor culture is reinstated among white men. Greater men are expected to show noblesse oblige, lesser white men are encouraged to be humble. The signature aesthetics of our culture are derived from those of the (new) elite, not from mass entertainment, which may still exist but is widely understood not to mix well with status. (Entertainment is purged of Jewish influence, which is not just pernicious but straight-up inferior -- music and storytelling are not among their many gifts.) If there is still a democracy, incompetents are unable to vote, but the state has a duty to treat them with dignity and love. The culture will be conformist at first, but only out of necessity because we presently lack the cultural depth to do anything worthwhile with independence. The ideal to be aimed for in the long term is something like the Renaissance, where the cultural backdrop provided men and women with no little inspiration to pursue independence in ways that, though often evil, added something back to the cultural ferment better than the tawdry nihilism that has infected 99.99% of the world's cultural output (superficial variations in emotional valence aside) in the last 50 years.
Goes without saying that a violent revolution is the most likely path to this highly unlikely scenario.
This is just my personal vision of a white ethnostate. Others are likelier to support blanket deportations, which might have better prospects for the long term. That would be my preference too, but I think it'll take some time before we are ready to stand on our own. I also acknowledge that a lot depends on the pace of AI development.
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