For the last few years, whenever someone says “it’s not who we are” it means the conversation has veered into the heretical or that some line of argument is viewed as a challenge to official orthodoxy. Amusingly, the people most prone to blurt this out are so-called conservatives. It is how they police the boundary to their right. The funny thing though, is no one ever tries to define “who we are” in concrete terms. Instead, we get a long list of things, ruled outside the set of things that constitute “who we are.”

This is something that becomes clear in the debate about David Reich’s book, Who We Are and How We Got Here. As John Derbyshire noted in his review of the book, Reich is reporting real facts about who we are as humans, but he puts almost as much effort into re-asserting all the cliches about who we are not, even when those cliches contradict his own research. Everyone gets how this works and why he felt the need to do it. To the people in charge, defining the “not who we are” stuff is who they are as morality police.

As is often the case, that constant push by our masters to enforce their moral framework tends to turn us into thoughtless reactionaries. The Bush years were a great example of this phenomenon. If the Left had remained silent on Bush, he would have been a one term President and few people would have supported the Iraq war. Instead, crazy liberals turned all of us into warmongers, simply in reaction to the unhinged opposition to the Bush administration. The opposite of what the Left says is not necessarily the truth.

As a result, the temptation on our side is to focus exclusively on what the revolution in the human sciences is telling us about ourselves, particularly those bits that confirm what we have always believed about the human animal. It may be just as useful to look at what science says about who we are not. After all, the people in charge are acting on those assumptions about who we are, namely the blank slate. Many on the right are also operating from a set of assumptions about who we are as a species.

The first thing that bears scrutiny is the demolition of the post-Boasian conventional wisdom. As Peter Frost explained years ago, Boas may have started out trying to strike a balance between nurture and nature, but his followers went on a berserk rampage against the nature side of the balance. This really cannot be underestimated. The last half century, being a smart person meant a war against observable reality, under the color of science. Now, no smart person can deny the supremacy of nature over nurture.

That is an easy one. Another thing that bears scrutiny is the collapse of the pots not people narrative to explain the archaeological record. It has been extremely important for the people in charge that we believe the natural state of man is cooperative. The assumption being that people naturally wish to get along with one another, despite the trivial physical differences. An essential part of the prevailing orthodoxy, from the Right and the Left, is that all human beings seek order so they can go about making and trading stuff.

The data is now confirming that this is not reality. Humans have been raiding and sacking one another since the dawn of man. More important, humans with a genetic edge, some small advantage, like lactose tolerance, were able to conquer the people around them and that meant killing the men and raping the women. They did not just take over an area and incorporate the people within it. The story of man is the replacement of one people by a better people, better because they had some edge rooted in their DNA.

There is another side to this. The demolition of “pots not people” as the official narrative means the demolition of homo economicus too. Humans are much more complex than the libertarians and so-called conservatives would have us believe. It means defining man as “a creature who seeks the greatest amount of wealth, with the least amount of effort” was only, at best, a superficial observation in the moment. Man is motivated by much deeper forces within his nature. One is his biological desire to conquer those not like him.

Another one of those forces is a desire to understand his place in the universe. It is increasingly clear that belief, which often manifests as religion, is one of the earliest traits of modern humans. The research at Gobekli Tepe reveals that this complex set of structure pre-dates agriculture. In fact, the archaeological record shows that settlement was the result of a long evolutionary process, driven by shared interest and communal identity, not rational self-interest. Selfish transactionalism is not who we are.

The fact is who we are is who we believe we are. We define ourselves within the bounds of biological reality. Much of what we have believed about ourselves over the last century is turning out to be at odds with that reality. Modern science may not be telling us who we are, but it is surely telling us who we are not. We are not amorphous blobs that can be shaped into anything, regardless of race. We are not transactional economic units that exist merely to buy more stuff. We are not that. We are not what modernity has said we are.

We are something else.

Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of left-wing protests. The first I recall was on the Mall in Washington in the 80’s. I no longer recall what they were protesting, but I recall a stubby old women with a bullhorn hanging off her hip. She was screaming something rhythmic, but the audio was unintelligible. The whole scene was just a freak show for no other purpose than for the freaks to be seen. Tourists took pictures and everyone else just ignored it. It was just a part of the rich pageantry of American democracy.

With some exceptions, that’s the model for all lefty protests. At American Renaissance last year, Antifa and a local women’s group put on an all day freak show for the conference attendees. Some were there to “protests the Nazis”, but most were there for reasons that ran from the obscure to the mysterious. Some appeared to be having some sort of hallucinatory break with reality, rhythmically screaming and twirling around or just making crazy faces at people. Again, the point was to put on a show for onlookers.

This year, the authorities penned them up so passersby could not see them. The only way to get a clean look at the protesters was from the top floor of the conference center and you needed binoculars. I counted maybe 40 people in the protest pen at the peak and at least ten were “media.”  The rules against masks and weapons scared off many of the Antifa, but the rest stayed away knowing they would not be able to put on a show. If a protests happens in the woods and no one sees it, did it really happen?

The general consensus on these groups is that outside of the ones financed by Soros and the Democrats, they are just fringe loonies looking for a reason to protest. The guy with the boot on his head shows up at all sorts of events. There’s an enormously obese black guy, who gets wheeled into protests around the country. He usually just sits in a beach chair so people can take pics of him. Then there are the anarchist that just want to smash things and rumble in the streets. Again, it is just a performance that means nothing.

For the last month or so I have been monitoring a bunch of social media accounts of prominent protesters. Mostly it was in preparation for AmRen, but when you scan a lot of them you can’t help but notice the patterns. These people define themselves within their movement by their association with specific events. There’s no normal human back and forth, just trading links and pics from the events they attended. The other type of post is sympathy for some fringe action, as if they get credit by proxy, for the action.

An example of what I mean is this HuffPo piece. Christopher Mathias is actually just an Antifa member they pay to submit field reports for them. Like everyone in these protest movements, he struggles with his sanity. His “report” is actually just a testament to the fact he was there. The protest was a flop as hardly anyone showed up and they were sequestered in a holding pen away from everyone. That left little social credit to be gained from the action, other than tweets and selfies from those who bothered to attend.

I recently had some interaction with a local group affiliated with Antifa, at least that’s what they said. They may have been boasting, but they were definitely into the protest life. That was the thing. All they talked about was where they had been and the “actions” they had done. It was what got me thinking about these protest groups functioning like a cult, where the events are social credits within the subculture. If all you talk about and all you focus on in your life is the events you attended, the attendance has a lot of value to you.

What it brought to mind is people who get into narrow hobbies like model trains or some sort of collecting. They get together not to trade information about their hobby, but to display what they have or what they know. Their events are peacocking festivals so they can display their social capital. Oddly, prisons work on a similar dynamic. Prison ink is about advertising your history in the system and your violence capital. That suggests the protest culture is entirely inward looking and not really about getting our attention.

This would explain why they have started to fight with one another. The alt-right has retreated from the real world and has stopped fighting with Antifa on-line. The affiliated actors like TWP have evaporated. If your thing is to protest other fringe groups and those fringe groups have left the field, you end up protesting yourself. Or in the case of some, like Lacy MacAuley, they start jump from one momentary issue to the next. It’s the old gag. Question: What are you rebelling against? Answer: What have you got?

None of this may seem all that interesting, but it raises questions about modernity. This phenomenon did not exist in the 19th century or the 15th century. These subcultures rooted in vague and shifting causes did not exist in our grandparents age. A major reason is the splintering of society on the rocks of diversity. There’s also the collapse of mainstream Christianity and the related collapse of traditional social arrangements. These sorts of subcultures were denied oxygen in a thriving and dominant mainstream culture.

A regular topic of debate on the Dissident Right is whether or not conservatives know they are just props for the Left. Some argue that they know and have always known, but they like the lifestyle that comes with it. There’s no getting around the fact that guys like Jonah Goldberg live fabulous lives while being nothing more than stooges. The sheer volume of losing by gentry conservatives should be enough to wake up even the dumbest and most naïve.

Others are more generous, arguing that conservatives are simply naïve or mistaken about the nature of the Left. They come out of orderly upper middle-class suburbs where the rules makes sense and everyone abides by those rules as a matter of courtesy. That makes gentry conservatism and Reason magazine libertarianism attractive to them. After all, their Progressive friends are great people, the best people, so they can surely be persuaded. It just takes the right argument.

Reading Kevin Williamson’s latest retelling of his firing from the Atlantic, those arguing in favor of gross stupidity get a boost. At the start of his piece, he claims to have predicted what would happen to him if he took the Atlantic job.

In early March, I met up with Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of the Atlantic, at an event sponsored by the magazine at the South by Southwest conference in Austin. He had just hired me away from National Review, the venerable conservative magazine where I’d been a writer and editor for 10 years.

“You know, the campaign to have me fired will begin 11 seconds after you announce that you’ve hired me,” I told him. He scoffed. “It won’t be that bad,” he said. “The Atlantic isn’t the New York Times. It isn’t high church for liberals.”

My first piece appeared in the Atlantic on April 2. I was fired on April 5.

Assuming this is true, he took the job knowing it would result in a mob of angry liberals calling for his death. His decision to go through with it could be seen as just part of the Progressive passion play, with Williamson gladly playing his part. The trouble is he rather clearly thought the very liberal Jeffrey Goldberg was some sort of honorable guy, rather than a typical fanatic. More important, he thought Goldberg would stand up to his coreligionists when they came to haul away the heretic. That’s remarkably stupid.

Of course, for gentry conservatives, being remarkably stupid about the nature of motivations of the Left has been a badge of honor for as long as anyone reading this has been alive. The hallmark of gentry conservatism for generations has been the insistence on playing by a set of rules the other side refuses to respect, a set of rules that guarantees failure by the so-called Right. Even the allegedly hard-boiled realists of Buckley Conservatism, like Williamson, can’t seem to grasp this obvious bit of reality.

Then there is this tidbit later in the column. Williamson writes “If you want to know who actually has the power in our society and who is actually marginalized, ask which ideas get you sponsorships from Google and Pepsi and which get you fired.”  No doubt he was thinking of the internet meme, probably thinking the quote is from Voltaire. The line is actually from an old white nationalist named Kevin Alfred Strom. Dumb people tend to believe what they see on the internet, without making sure of the source and accuracy.

At the end of his column, Williamson writes this.

Where my writing appears is not a very important or interesting question. What matters more is the issue of how the rage-fueled tribalism of social media, especially Twitter, has infected the op-ed pages and, to some extent, the rest of journalism. Twitter is about offering markers of affiliation or markers of disaffiliation. The Left shouts RACIST!, and the Right shouts FAKE NEWS! There isn’t much that can be done about this other than treating social media with the low regard it deserves.

But when it comes to what appears in our newspapers and magazines, some of the old rules should still apply. By all means, let’s have advocacy journalism, but let’s make sure about the journalism part of it: Do the work, ask the questions, give readers a reason to assume that what’s published adheres to some basic standards of intellectual honesty. To do otherwise is to empower those who dismiss the media as a tangle of hopeless partisan opportunism.

Without credible journalism, all we have is the Twitter mob, which is a jealous god. Jealous and kind of stupid.

Conservatism, at its root, is the acceptance of reality. The man of the Right accepts the world as it is and acts accordingly. Williamson looks out at a world overrun by Progressive mobs, egged on by our Progressive rulers, and concludes that the only proper response is to pretend it is otherwise. He’s nobly walking in front of the speeding train, because trains should not speed. That’s not principled conservatism. That’s suicidal stupidity. Williamson is the example for the side arguing that these guys are morons.

In the end, it probably matters little if gentry conservatism is dying from subversion or stupidity, other than as a cautionary tale. The lesson that Williamson is unable to learn is not lost on the others hoping to get on the big Progressive stage. They will be sure to scrub their time lines and avoid saying or writing anything that could offend their Progressive paymasters. The golden rule is immutable. The man with the gold makes the rules, which is why the Dissident Right needs to build its own institutions.