Category Archives: Race

Class War As Race War

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There is an interesting post up this week over at the American Renaissance¹ website, that I have been puzzling over a bit. What struck me initially about it is the opening line, “Why we must unite across class lines.” That’s not a phrase you hear much these days from politicians, activists or certainly polemicists. In fact, class does not get much of a discussion at all in polite circles. The closest we get to a class debate is snide remarks from cosmopolitans about the people shopping at Walmart.

On the Right, discussion of class has long been forbidden. This was mostly due to the fact that conventional conservatism in America is really just right-wing Progressivism. The official Right and Left agree on the big philosophical items. Their quarrels are mostly about tactics and rhetoric. In the latter, the so-called Right carried the day, so discussion of social class is mostly forbidden. We are an egalitarian society where your status is determined by how well you serve the state.

The author of the AmRen piece then goes on to explore the gap between official rhetoric on racial diversity and objective reality. Our ruling elites systematically arrange their lives so they have the least amount of diversity as possible. Whole sections of cities have been ethnically cleansed so young white hipsters can have cool places to live. Meanwhile, urban blacks, with the miracle of Section 8, are dumped into lower class white suburbs, where they set about recreating their normal chaos in otherwise stable white areas.

This compulsory diversity is not just destroying the white working class, it is hollowing out the white middle-class. Urban female hipsters are free to sing the glories of miscegenation, while they send their super white kids to the private day school, and socialize with people who look like them, think like them and live like them. As we hate-thinkers would put it, we are seeing the systematic Brazil-ification of America, where the white urban elite is turning Middle-American is to caramel colored favelas.

This is familiar ground to readers here, but it is the proposed solution that does not get much attention.

So does our hope lie with the proles? The big difference between Orwell’s 1984 and 2018 is that Orwell’s elites did not bother to indoctrinate the masses, on the ground that the proles’ fidelity to Big Brother was considered irrelevant. By contrast, in our diversity dystopia the masses are at the core of the Left’s indoctrination project. Our “proles” are the ones forced to suffer a bad education in integrated schools. They are the ones subjected to violence, harassment, and intimidation. And they are the ones told, again and again, that any resistance to this makes them betrayers of who we are as Americans, deplorable traitors in need of ever-more reformation.

Leadership may not come from the proles, but good sense and votes will. Those who bear the burdens of diversity see its damage most clearly. It is no accident that Donald Trump swept the white working-class vote.

Whatever our own particular economic station, we all have a role to play in restoring working- and middle-class white America. We should be hiring our own people, tutoring our own people, supporting scholarships for our own people, and doing our best to build schools and cultural institutions that can be healthy environments for our own people.

Growing up in the underclass, my exposure to bourgeois sensibilities about class came mostly through the movies. Movies and TV shows featuring the white working class as protagonists, only did so as a canvas onto which the writers could paint pictures of the multicultural paradise. White union men learned they had to accept blacks into the union in order to succeed. Archie Bunker had to see George Jefferson as just a dark skinned version of himself, in order to rise above the limitations of his class.

The Left’s class warfare was always a hoax played on the white working and middle classes. The offer was better economic conditions, as long as blacks were allowed to have some too. It was always a bait and switch. Whites got high divorce rates, their daughters dating black guys, rocket high inequality and the looming threat of minority status. By any measure, the Left’s agenda for the white working classes has been a disaster. It’s why the great white die off is the shadow hanging over all of us.

We are  seeing a replay of this now with immigration. “Fellow white people! You’re gonna get lots of cool restaurants and cultural diversity, and a police state, well mostly a police state. Open Borders!” All the promises of open borders and globalism are a deliberate lie, using appeals to morality to overcome practical objections and economic arguments to overcome cultural objections. Just as accepting racial integration in exchange for economic prosperity was a disaster for whites, open borders will be too. That’s the goal.

Our side embracing the rhetoric of 1960’s Progressive class warfare seems a bit strange, but it is one entry point for introducing racial consciousness to the discussion. Every time someone sees a politician address the concerns of the white working class, the audience hears it is OK to be white. Whenever white people, even hipster college professors living in urban oases, engage in talk about the white working class or the white opioid epidemic, being white gets re-legitimized and re-normalized in the greater culture.

The second line of that AmRen post is a line from Orwell, “If there is hope,” wrote Winston, “it lies in the proles.” Orwell wrote in a time when it was assumed that Africa was for Africans, Asia for Asians and the West was for white people. The olden thymes were an argument between whites about how whites would deal with one another. Our age will be an argument between whites about how we defend ourselves, our lands and our posterity from the rest of the world. That starts with defending the white working class.

¹I will be attending the American Renaissance conference this spring. if you are interested in attending, sign up is here.

An Immoderate Age

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Last week, this ridiculous article in the New York Times generated some attention on alt-right social media, mostly because it allowed for some petty bickering. Anytime the media does a story on alt-right people, the guys not mentioned take the opportunity to say bad things about the guys that were mentioned in the story. John Derbyshire said everything that needed to be said about the Times piece in this post at VDare. In it, he referenced his old column on the topic and the corresponding version from Jared Taylor.

Taken together, it is good example of how the hive mind is unable to address reality on its own terms. Mx. Audrea Lim, of the New York Times piece, cannot consider the possibility that there could be more than two opinions on a subject. For her and the others in the Progressive hive, there are good people, the people inside the walls, and bad people, those outside the walls. The good people hold the correct opinions, while the bad people have other opinions, which are all bad. That is as much of the world she needs to know.

As you see with Derb and Taylor, there is a wide range of opinion on the Dissident Right about subjects like race, identity, immigration, race-mixing and diversity. Even the alt-right has a diversity of opinion on these subjects. Calling any of these people “white supremacists” is about the dumbest thing possible, but it is just one of the many scare phrases Lefty has for those outside the walls. Not only are there few, if any, white supremacists on the Dissident Right, there are more than a few non-whites.

The fact is, the Dissident Right, in all its permutations, exists because our Progressive overlords lack the capacity to understand nuance. Take miscegenation, for example. It is a fact of life that some small number of females, of any race, will have a mating preference for males outside their race. Males are far less choosy, as their biology favors the shotgun approach to reproduction, while the female favors the rifle approach. This reality is just salt in the stew of life and if left alone nothing anyone need worry over.

For people in the hive, this is an impossibility. You either completely and totally embrace something, or you completely and entirely reject it. It is why they squeal about homophobia if you are not enthusiastic about the latest perversions. The Progressive mind cannot accept the possibility of being indifferent to something. It is why our television shows and movies are now packed to the gills with race mixing. Even though our rulers live like Klan members, there is no limit to the amount of race mixing they will pack into the culture.

The hive minded also struggle with abstract reasoning. Richard Spencer likes using the concept of an ethnostate to explain his opinions on race and identity. It is a useful way of getting people to break free from the concrete world of the here and now to imagine an alternative ordering. Spencer is not advocating for a new country to be carved out of Canada as a new white homeland. It is a mental model meant to illustrate certain points about race and identity. The hive minded, however, assume he wants a honky homeland.

Diversity is the salt in the stew. Some races like more than others, but no people wish to be overrun by people not like them. The Chinese have always been careful to limit the number of non-Chinese into their lands and limit where they can go in China. Africans tend to murder anyone not in their tribe. Europeans, in contrast, are fine with cosmopolitan cities, where you see lots of diversity, as long as the home team remains in charge and atop the social structure. Like seasoning, diversity works in moderation.

That is the core problem in the modern age. Our rulers lack anything resembling moderation. If a little immigration is good, then they want unlimited immigration. If a few temporary guest workers are good, they want the entire white workforce replaced by helot labor from over the horizon. The vulgarity of having Americans train their foreign replacements at places like Disney is driven by a near total lack of moderation. If one Hindu is good, a whole building full of them will be heaven on earth!

We live in an immoderate age. We saw that in the past election and we are seeing it now in the efforts to craft immigration reform legislation. No one would oppose a small, limited amnesty for some illegal invaders, who have been here for a long time. As long as it comes with tough measures to limit further invasions and protections against future backsliding on the issue. Trump’s wall creates a permanent lobby in Washington in favor of border protection. Programs like e-Verify alter the hiring culture to prevent labor abuse.

The package of proposals from the White House is reasonable and sensible. It is a practical response to a public policy problem. If the compromise includes legalizing a few hundred thousand invaders, a civilized people can accept it. But the people in charge are incapable of moderation, which is why they blew up the talks and are demanding a blanket amnesty with no conditions. Again, the hive minded can only understand the world in binary terms. It is those inside the walls versus those outside the walls.

There is no reasoning with fanatics. As much as many on our side want to believe that practical issues are what is behind the multicultural madness, the fact is the people pushing it are not reasonable people. They are all or nothing people. That is why this cannot end well. The people in charge either succeed in pulling the roof down on the rest of us, or the rest of us are forced to do what is necessary to dislodge the lunatics that have seized the high ground of the culture. Moderation is not the answer to fanaticism.

This will not end well.

Thinking Backward

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One of the hardest things to do when thinking about a subject is to start without a desired outcome. Most people start with the end in mind and work backwards, finding supporting evidence or constructing their argument. There is noting wrong with it, just as long as you are willing to change your mind when you stumble upon contradictory data or an alternative argument. That is hard, though, so most people do not do it. Ideologues stubbornly cling to their ideology, because it is easier than confronting their beliefs.

The funny thing is most people do not realize they are thinking backward. Even with the popularization of the term priors by economists, few people bother to examine or even consider that they are working within a moral framework. In fact, most people do not even consider the possibility of there being a moral framework. In America, at least, people who engage in publicize discourse at any level are almost always operating from the assumption they are freely exploring the full range of possible outputs and inputs.

The truth is, Progressives have imposed a moral framework on American public debate and most of their efforts are aimed at maintaining it. The four mortal sins of the modern age are antisemitism, racism, sexism and homophobia. There is nothing rational about these sins. In fact, these crimes have little support in Western history. All of them were cooked up in the 1960’s as the New Left seized control of public institutions. A quick look at Google N-Gram for their frequency in print makes this point quite clearly.

If you could go back in time and retrieve some of the most Progressive thinkers from a century ago, and bring them into the present, they would be baffled by the limitations on modern debate. Teddy Roosevelt would be baffled as to why Jews, blacks and women were even allowed to participate in public debate. The point here is that the moral framework in which we operate as modern Americans is entirely contrived and entirely new. It is as if we have been colonized by a minority cult imposing their alien religion.

Few think much about this as most of us have been born into it, but the way to understand the current troubles and the Dissident Right is to understand this point. Our public debates in the West are not about finding the right trade-offs to arrive at a sensible set of public polices. It is about public piety and defending the dominant moral framework. For example, when a guy like Sargon of Akkad decides to form a new cult based on Civic Nationalism, it is important to focus on what goes unsaid, rather than what he says.

Now, I have covered the limitations of Carl Benjamin in the past, but it is still useful to look through his new cult’s founding principles. What is missing from his laundry list of items, obviously plucked from libertarian forums, is freedom of association. The reason for that omission, and I doubt he thought much about it, is that freedom of association means the freedom to privately discriminate. If you are free to associate with whomever you like, you are free to disassociate with whomever you like, for any reason you like.

For guys like Benjamin and his followers, they have been marinated their whole lives in the morality of the Left. They just assume that private discrimination is immoral and always has been immoral. They assume it to be true in the same way people accept gravity. Even when they think about it, they quickly realize this road leads to heresy, so they change the subject. In the case of Benjamin, he is publicly in favor of laws against private discrimination. He thinks the Christian baker should be compelled to bake the cake.

The amusing thing with libertarians, but also the incoherent liberals like Benjamin, is that they will fly into a rage if you suggest ending abortion or oppose drug legalization. They demand the citizen’s absolute right of dominion over their body. There is one exception. A person is free to fill their body with drugs or hire someone to rip out their unborn child, but they have no right to position their body next to someone else without first getting permission from the state. The irrationality of that position never occurs to them.

The fact is though, individual liberty starts with freedom of association. No one has a right to be around you, which is the fundamental argument underlying the four mortal sins of Progressivism. Blacks have a right to associate with whites. Women have a right to work in your business or join your club. Jews have a right to join your golf club. Homosexuals have a right to be around your kids. Restore freedom of association and all of those conjured rights become irrational and unenforceable. Modern liberalism collapses.

That sort of forward thinking is strictly prohibited, so everyone is forced to think backward, starting with the “Four Isms” and then creating a moral philosophy within those limits. It is not hard to imagine Benjamin sweating over his manifesto, with the image in his mind of a purple faced racist standing in the doorway to block blacks, Jews, gays and women from entering his business. Liberals and libertarians are forced to defend liberty within the increasingly constrained space permitted within the moral framework of Progressivism.

That is the fundamental reason the Dissident Right exists. It is a rejection of that moral framework. The alt-right kids talk about being red-pilled, but what they really mean is they asked themselves something like “why do blacks have a right to be near me?” No one was able to provide an answer, other than “shut up!” What we are seeing is smart young white guys figuring out that the starting point of any sane society must be freedom of association. No one has the right to be around you or have easy access to your culture.

Group identity is the natural outgrowth of personal liberty. If you are free to be around whomever you choose, the group has the same right. If a bunch of libertarians wish to setup a town on libertarian principles and make adherence to those principles a condition of membership, they have the right. If on the other hand, everyone must seek permission to association with others, then there can be no individual liberty of any kind. Places where people must get permission to speak and move are called prisons.

The Mighty Whitey

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This post was making the rounds on social media over the holidays. What caught my attention was a comment someone made along the lines of “Stowe is the quintessential New England town.” I think the person meant it looks like what people think of when they think of New England towns. It is a picturesque little town and it is a wonderful place to live, not just for the architecture. The von Trapp family thought so, which is why they settled there.

Lifestyle sites love putting together lists like this. Cooking sites will have an annual “50 Best Restaurants” or “10 Best Overlooked Dining Towns.” I have an old copy of a cycling mag that lists the best rides in each state. I keep it in case I find myself in an unfamiliar state with some time for a ride. In the olden thymes, magazines would do special issues on America’s best towns. These sorts of articles are popular, because they mostly flatter the sensibilities of middle-class white people.

Looking at the list from Architectural Digest, I recognized many of the towns, but others were new to me. I have been to about half of them. Reading over the list, the thing that struck me as that all of them are very white. The first one on the list, Traverse City, Michigan, is 94.4% white. Blacks are outnumbered by Native Americans. Doing a little math, there are roughly 100 blacks in this town. This town probably has more left-handed lesbians than black guys.

Jacksonville Oregon is the next town on the list and it has more people describing themselves as “other” than calling themselves black. Here is a pic of the local high school basketball team. They do not win many games. It is not a town full of middle-aged divorced woman. The census says that the median age in the city is 54.9 years, with 65% of the population over 45. It seems that Jacksonville is a quaint little town for retired white people and some of their less ambitious kids.

Oregon is a state roughly as white as New England, so I looked at the next town on the list, Dahlonega Georgia. The Peach State is the fourth blackest state in the nation, with a black population of 40% and a sizable Hispanic population. The most charming small town in the state is 5% black. It is 90% white with a respectable number of Hispanics, but they are most likely laborers and service workers, as Dahlonega is now “the heart of the North Georgia Wine Country.”

Figuring that the good whites at Architectural Digest would be painfully aware of their whiteness, I took a look at the towns on the list in heavily Hispanic areas. One of the tricks Progressives use to get around their aversion to black people is they point to the Hispanics or Asians in their towns and claim the maximum diversity points. I have an acquaintance who swears he moved to Arlington Mass for the diversity. This is a town that is 2% black, but there are plenty of Asian professors and Hispanic maids.

Taos New Mexico is one of those towns that Boomer women like visiting, because they have warehouses full of turquoise dangle earrings and dream catchers. The last census says it is 61% white, but only 40% non-Hispanic white. Taos is less than one-percent black, which means there are 30 black people in the whole town. The high school basketball team is probably not particularly good. This is a funny town though, as it is more of a resort town that serves wealthy whites.

That is the common theme with all of the towns on the list with relatively low white populations. Marfa Texas has become a funky little arts town that is mostly Hispanic but has a small white population to run the tourism business. Bisbee Arizona became a hippie attraction and is now fully gentrified. You can be sure the readers of Architectural Digest are not taking trips to see the run down neighborhoods where the mostly Hispanic servant class lives. Still, the trend continues.

The blackest town on the list, interestingly enough, is Berlin Maryland. It is 68.8% white and 23.3% black. The town started out as a trading post for the Burley Plantation in the 18th century. This was tobacco plantations until the Civil War. The interesting thing about the black population, though, is it is declining quickly. In the 80’s the black population was close to 50%. By the 2000 census it was down to 30%. Gentrification follows the same pattern, even in small towns.

All of this is interesting for race realists, but it does speak to the great divide in the American culture. The sort of people reading Architectural Digest are the sort of people who enjoy lecturing the rest of us about race. These are the people telling us that diversity is our strength, but when it comes to where they live and where they visit, diversity is the last thing they want to see. Baltimore has some spectacular Federal architecture, but it is no one’s visit list.

The challenge before us in the Dissident Right is not to shake our fists at the gross hypocrisy of the good whites. That has been done to death by Steve Sailer. The good whites simply do not care. My acquaintance in Arlington Mass will forever hate me for pointing out to him that his town is as white as Reykjavik. The challenge is to convince the good whites that the rest of us want the same things they want. We want our towns to have the same complexion as their towns,

That would be mighty white of them.

The Tribe To Emulate

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The Asians are often called the “model minority” in America. This is based on the fact that they have low crime, low welfare dependency, low social dysfunction and high academic achievement. Some mentally unstable Asian females have tried to rail against this as racist, but Asians make terrible social justice warriors. That and only a lunatic could construe what is an obvious compliment as racism. The thing is though, they are not the model minority. The most successful minority is the Jews.

If you are in an African tribe and your people are thinking about moving to the West, the group you would want to emulate are the Jews. They have figured out how to wildly succeed in all sorts of places, always as a tiny minority. This is in despite of some serious efforts by majority populations to keep the Jews from succeeding. Then there was the bit of trouble in the middle of the last century. Asians cannot hold a candle to the Jews in this area. In the US, Jews have become the ruling class.

Steve Sailer has noticed something that has been an internet meme for some time and that is “Jewish privilege.” This used to be a gag in response to the cries of “white privilege” by Progressive lunatics, but it is slowly becoming a legitimate topic for public discussion. Whether or not you buy into the whole “privilege” argument, the point is Jews have been wildly successful in America. The question that should follow is why? What group qualities have worked for Jews that are unique to Jews in America?

Now, this is usually where people will starting mentioning Kevin McDonald and The Culture of Critique. The more empirically minded will bring up the landmark study of Ashkenazi intelligence, by Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, Henry Harpending from a dozen years ago. Neither of those are going to help your African tribe make it work in the West. That’s like the Koreans reading the Talmud looking for the secret of Jewish success. A better approach might be identifying a few qualities and copying them.

One is something Steve Sailer noticed during the short-lived Larry David flap. It used to be that Jews were obsessively self-aware. Thaddeus Russell touches on this in his book, Renegade History of America. Jews used to obsess over the quirks and flaws of their people, and tirelessly harangue the tribe about the flaws. Shame is taboo these days, oddly enough. but it makes for an excellent self-policing mechanism. In fact, it used to be the default way in which the American ruling class policed itself.

Related to the self-policing instinct is clannishness. A lot of alt-right people criticize Jews for being clannish. They call it nepotism, but they really mean clannish. There is no doubt that Jews throughout the diaspora have always worried about what is good for the Jews, so much so it is a cliche. The thing is though, unlike, say, Arabs, Jewish clannishness defends the tribe against all threats, external and internal. Arabs will protect complete idiots, who cause the tribe trouble. Jews do not do that with their members.

This is something that all identity politics should adopt. Going back to the African tribe at the beginning, if they have a member, who brings shame on the group or simply cannot pull his weight, the best course is to cut him lose. If you have talent and you are Jewish, the tribe is an enormous asset. if you are a mediocrity or a loser, being Jewish is not going to benefit you in the least. Clannishness as a reward encourages loyalty, but it also boils off the losers who drag down the group. Along with shame, it makes for a better tribe.

Another quirk of the Tribe that could help any tribe is the unwillingness of Jews to self-marginalize in society. The Ultra-Orthodox do this, but they are the exception. Generally, Jews engage with the society in which they reside and are willing to engage at the highest levels. Gypsies in Europe, in contrast, live on the fringes. Asians in America tend to gravitate to a little Hanoi or a Chinatown. Jews do not do that and when forced into a ghetto, and we have the word ghetto thanks to the Tribe, Jews resist it and try to engage.

This is not just something Jews have done in America. Italians and Irish are notable examples of groups that would not stay in the ghetto. Unlike Europe, America has never had a lot of rules about this stuff. We did not inherent Europe’s class structure. Still, the winning hand everywhere is to not settle for a quiet little corner of society. The winning formula is to embrace the greater culture and carve out a place in the center of it. The trouble last century in Germany not withstanding, it has worked very well for Jews.

Going back to the shame issue, there is a Jewish quirk that is a huge advantage and that is a form of shamelessness. That is, Jews are never ashamed of their efforts. You see this with the neocons. Guys like Bill Kristol have no problem walking around in public, despite the things he has done to the country. Anthony Weiner was out and about, even after he was caught in the “bing-bing-bing.” It is not always an asset but having the conscience of a burglar makes it easier to overcome failure and keep plugging.

The genesis of this post is a conversation I had with a Zimbabwean. We fell into conversation about his country and one of the things he said was that his people are the Jews of Africa . He thinks his people should come to America and follow the same path as the Ashkenazi. I did not think to ask if he was Lemba, but that’s my hunch. His general point was that inculcating certain group habits that have worked for other groups, is a good way forward for tribes, be they in identity politics on the African bush.

 

Peaceful Separation

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There are four ways to peacefully govern a multi-racial or multi-ethnic society. There is the hard separation that existed in the North before the Civil Rights Movement. The South had a soft segregation. The old way of stating the difference was that whites in the North were willing to treat blacks as equals as long as they did not have to live near them. In the South, whites were willing to live near blacks, as long as they did not have to treat them as equals. Both are now forbidden to mention in public now.

America has settled on Proportionalism for the last half century, as a way to navigate through the impossible task of keeping the peace between blacks and whites. Now that tens of millions of foreigners have been added to the mix, what was a fairly good situation in the 1980’s has become increasingly untenable. Thirty years ago, most people, black or white, were optimistic about race relations. That is clearly not the case today and people are starting to wonder if it is even possible to make it work.

That is what makes this New York Times op-ed so interesting. The conventional way to read it is as more of the same blame and shame the Left has done for decades. The writer is supposed to be the sympathetic character and the whites are the bad guys in the never ending drama. The writer spends a lot of time listing the sins of white people and how that makes him feel. The thing is though, the way it is written leaves the impression that race relations are hopeless.

For African-Americans, race has become a proxy not just for politics but also for decency. White faces are swept together, ominous anxiety behind every chance encounter at the airport or smiling white cashier. If they are not clearly allies, they will seem unsafe to me.

Barack Obama’s farewell address encouraged us to reach across partisan lines. But there is a difference between disagreeing over taxes and negotiating one’s place in America, the bodies of your children, your humanity. Our racial wound has undone love and families, and ignoring the depths of the gash will not cause it to heal.

We can still all pretend we are friends. If meaningful civic friendship is impossible, we can make do with mere civility — sharing drinks and watching the game. Indeed, even in Donald Trump’s America, I have not given up on being friends with all white people. My bi-ethnic wife, my most trusted friend, understands she is seen as a white woman, even though her brother and father are not. Among my dearest friends, the wedding party and children’s godparents variety, many are white. But these are the friends who have marched in protest, rushed to airports to protest the president’s travel ban, people who have shared the risks required by strength and decency.

What has become common, when blacks are trotted out by Progressive to lecture us about race, is that they make the case that they will never be satisfied with the efforts of whites. A close reading of this essay reveals that the writer is happy with the social structures of race. He does not like white people. There is no way he can be happy in America, living among whites, as long as whites continue to act white. This is the state of things. Blacks can never be happy and whites can do anything to change that fact.

That is not a problem that can be resolved to anyone’s satisfaction. When America was 80% white, it worked OK for Progressives, as it let them guilt the rest of the country into going along with the liberal agenda. As America approaches majority-minority status, this is entirely untenable. Ekow N. Yankah, the writer of that piece, is living the dream. He has an elite position in an elite profession. He gets treated like royalty and lives an upper class lifestyle. He is also an African immigrant. If he cannot be happy, no one can.

The thing is the people commissioning these sorts of pieces have to see the implications of what elite blacks are saying. American has done everything humanly possible to make it work for blacks in America. They have to see that white America is completely out of patience with this stuff. If you are a plumber worried that you could be replaced by an indentured servant from over the horizon or you are an office worker worried about the robots, Ekow N. Yankah’s complaints just sound like ungratefulness.

The inevitable end game with race relations as America careens into majority-minority status is separation. The question is what kind of separation and whether or not it will be peaceful. Ekow N. Yankah is an accomplished guy with loads of talent. Africa could use a man like him. Maybe the people in charge are pushing these sorts of essays, because they know what is coming. It helps prepare the ground for the inevitable. Or maybe they locked in the past, and they just do not see what is coming down the tracks

Let us hope it is the former.

A Foundation of Nonsense

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Math and science are built upon axioms. Very simply, an axiom is something that is always true by its nature. An example is the reflexive property in algebra. A number is always equal to itself. Axioms are the building blocks, from which new truths are discovered. A proof is an inferential argument for a mathematical statement, using other previously established statements. That means a proof can be traced back to those axioms that are the foundation of mathematics.

This is how we accumulate knowledge about the physical world. The proofs based on those building blocks are incorporated into new building blocks. The theorems and proofs multiply, slowly building up the stock of things we know to be true. Calculus was built upon algebra and physics was built upon calculus and so on. It why a student can quickly go from zero to trying to discover new truths about the world. They inherit a supply of things assumed to be true.

This accretive process of increasing our stock of knowledge is not limited to math and science. It is the way human societies evolve over time. We start with basic truths about the human condition and the realities we face as a society. Over time we acquire new knowledge, by building on what we know or that which we think we know. For example, libertarians rely on the concept of homo economicus. This asserts that humans are consistently rational and self-interested agents pursuing their ends optimally.

In theory, at least, this is the basis of democracy. One side builds a set of policies and proposals, allegedly based on the assumed truths. The other side does the same thing arriving at different policies. After a vigorous examination of the competing claims, a consensus is formed around one solution. If it works out, then that becomes part of society’s truths, from which new problems will be addressed in the future. That is not really how it works, but people believe it. It is axiomatic that democracy works this way.

What we know to be Western liberal democracy, assumes certain things about humanity to be true all the time. The blank slate is the most obvious example. Everything about our politics and culture assumes that humans are infinitely malleable. From school policy to prison reform, public policy assumes that people can be whatever they choose, because they have free will and a blank slate that can be erased and re-illustrated at any point in their life. You are what you make of yourself.

It is how our rulers arrived at the idea of open borders. Those foreigners can be re-purposed into tax paying Westerners, through education and enculturation, to pay the pensions of the native stock. Those Somali goatherds can be plopped down into Minnesota and over time, develop all of the habits of the average Minnesotan, just by emulation and proximity. Race laws are all based on the assumption that you can train people to stop noticing racial difference and therefore, end racism.

Of course, science is putting the lie to the blank slate. Genetics is filling out the truth of the human condition, which is that we are the result of our coding. We are the product of thousand of mating decisions made before us. Everything from our height to our sense of humor is baked into our genetic coding. Our health outcomes and our life outcomes are the results of that coding. Not surprisingly, the closer our coding is to others, the greater the similarities.

While no one is prepared to say free will is a lie, at least not publicly, no serious person accepts that we are infinitely malleable. The argument that you can change your personality is as nutty as saying you can make yourself taller or younger. This reality used to be a building block of Western thought but was “discredited” by the blank slate theorists, but it is now being reestablished by genetics. In other words, one of the main building blocks of modern social democracy is about to crumble.

That is a big one, but it is not the only one. Both Freudian and Jungian psychology still cast a long shadow over Western culture. Freud is no longer taken seriously, outside of his historical importance. The idea that your emotional state is the product of childhood sexual trauma is a click less realistic than phrenology. Jungian psychotherapy is also being overrun by neuroscience. Few people still think they can be talked out of their madness anymore. Instead, pharmaceuticals are used to treat diseases of the brain.

It is not just the quackery. The moral philosophy that underlies our political philosophy is similarly built on a foundation of nonsense. The Enlightenment thinkers all started by considering man’s natural state. It was either a harmonious communal existence or a brutal war like existence. From both starting points, they worked forward to build a model how man went from the state of nature to what was then civilization. The resulting moral philosophy is the basis of our political and legal philosophy today.

Property rights, the rule of law, the relationship of man and state, these are all based on those assumptions about man’s natural state. Libertarians and so-called Conservatives take the Lockean position that society is built upon the social contract. Those on the Left assume Hobbes was right and order must be imposed on society. Marxists further accept the materialist claims about the nature of man. All of the iterations and flavors of political ideology are rooted in one of those two broad assumptions about humanity.

Those assumptions are all wrong. We know that much now. Better archaeology and anthropology are helping illuminate the pre-history mankind. Evolutionary biology is also helping explain the fossil and archaeological record. Genetics, of course, are re-writing the map of mankind, explaining how we spread across the globe. What we are finding out is that man, in his “natural state” was not what Hobbes imagined nor what Locke imagined. Man’s “natural” state is much more complicated and much more local.

The implication should be obvious. As the underlying assumptions give way to new knowledge, the conclusions built on those assumptions must give way. If tomorrow we learn that two plus two is not always four, everything we know about the world stops making sense. If everything we thought we knew about man and civilization turns out to be wrong, we suddenly do not know a whole lot about how we should organize ourselves, other than the old rules are probably not going to work.

It seems today that Western societies are painfully re-learning things that were common knowledge a few generations ago. The old axiom, fences make good neighbors, was replaced with “diversity is our strength.” Every time a swarthy fellow blows up in the public square, we inch a bit closer to the realization that diversity is a nightmare. That is the part we see. The part we do not see, at least not yet is the crumbling of the foundation of the modern West.

The Future of White Nationalism

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At American Renaissance, I was introduced to an old guy from VDare, who seemed to experience the world strictly through the search functions of his phone. Someone told him about my site and the first thing he did was search for the site name and “white nationalism” to see if I had opinions on the subject. His first hit was a post where I called white nationalism the dumbest thing going. He tried giving me the business about it and I gave it right back to him. I will forever be off the VDare Solstice card list as a result.

In fairness to him, he was a good sport about it. In fairness to me, my criticism of white nationalism is mostly about aesthetics. That means it comes with baggage and that baggage is not easily overcome. When most Americans hear “white nationalism” they think of shitless rustics complaining about the coloreds. Getting modern whites to overcome the cult of anti-racism is hard under ideal conditions. Having Cletus as your sales rep makes it impossible.

That’s something the white identity people need to accept. For generations, Progressives have tightly associated racism with the South. The good white/bad white thing that John Derbyshire discusses is based entirely on this image. Bad whites shop at Walmart, like domestic beer and hate black people. Despite the fact that blacks have been moving back to the Old Confederacy for decades, black culture holds that the South is still aggressively racist.

Even if you can somehow get past the image problem, white nationalism is not some new concept developed by the alt-right. It has a history and it has a lot of veterans of its prior iterations. Those people are still kicking around. The web site Storm Front, in addition to being an FBI honey trap, is the home of the old White Nationalist guys, who used to follow guys like David Duke. If you borrow the language and symbols of these guys, you are inviting them and their ideas into your thing.

There are two problems with this. One is many of these guys were not the best people or the most stable people. Stepping way outside the moral framework is never easy, but it is a lot easier if you’re crazy. It’s also easier if you have nutty ideas that no one takes too seriously. Even the most generous evaluation of White Nationalism 1.0 says it was mostly a reaction to the cultural revolution of the 1960’s. It never came up with a plausible way forward politically or culturally.

Again, even if you manage to rehabilitate the language and symbols, you cannot get past the fact that prior efforts were a failure. A pretty good rule of life is that failure is assured if you follow in the footsteps of previous failures. It’s why adopting Nazi symbols is stupid.  Associating your thing with failure is just bad marketing. It also tends to attract people who find some sort of satisfaction in losing. New movements need need language and new symbols.

Putting all of that aside, prior iterations of white nationalism always suffered from the fact they were reactionary. At their very best, they could only offer a critique of the prevailing order. They had nothing to offer as an alternative, beyond demands to wind back the clock. Reactionary movements always fail in the long run for the simple reason that yesterday can never follow tomorrow. Even if everyone agrees the current arrangements are not working, what comes next is never the past.

There’s something else that prior white nationalists movements never got right. They assumed that a majority white nation was a given. If they could just get a majority of whites on their side, they would win the political battles over race. America is 70% white at the last census and will be majority-minority in a few decades. The issue today is not about keeping America white. That horse has left the barn. The question before us today is how whites will survive as a minority population.

That means the math is not about 50% plus one. Whatever comes to define white identity in the age of identity politics will have to appeal to and serve the interests of the vast majority of whites. That can’t just be a visceral hatred of nonwhites. Whites in America are low in clannishness. Old fashioned tribal signaling against the next tribe is not going to work. What comes next has to be an ideology that promotes a positive identity offering a promising future.

That’s probably the most encouraging thing to come out of the Charlottesville protest over the summer. The people involved began to appreciate the need to build new symbols and use new language. Even guys like Andrew Anglin are pushing his people to drop the Hitler images, beyond obviously satirical stuff. Mockery of taboos and irreverence for social norms has a place, but it can’t be the focus of a political movement, if it is going to draw in the skeptical.

The irony here is the New Left went through a similar problem. Before they were able to start the cultural revolution, they existed as an ad hoc counter-culture. The old commies from the CP-USA days tried to glom onto it, but the new radicals correctly saw that as a bad idea. They eventually purged their ranks of the old guys and their old ideas. Now, the cultural movement that seeks to destroy the New Left and the Baby Boomer culture is going through a similar process as it organizes itself.

Crime City

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Recently I was searching around for publicly available police data and found that a surprising amount of data is available to the public. Often it is very portable, letting the curious download raw data from government systems. Many cities have built out API’s so you can get live feeds from their systems. I found a treasure trove of raw arrest data from the City of Baltimore. Like a lot of cities, they have exposed their database of arrests to the public. The data only goes back to the beginning of 2013, but that’s a lot.

Since the first of day of 2013, Baltimore City police have made 152,103 arrests as of September 30th, 2017. That works out to an average of 87 arrests per day. That does not sound like a big number, but according to studies, the average time awaiting trial is close to 40 days. The number of people being held in the city awaiting trial is about 8,000, on average. Put another way, about 1.3% of the city’s population is held at any one time, awaiting their turn in the criminal justice system. That does not included convicts.

Just in case you are thinking about being arrested in Baltimore, here’s the daily breakout.

Of course, the break down by race is what you would expect in Baltimore.

Interestingly, there were only 1428 arrests for murder and attempted murder. They don’t code the crimes in an easily understood way. I simply searched for all arrests containing the word murder, which included attempted murder. Netting out the lesser charge and the total is just 252 arrests for the crime of murder. In the same period, 1382 homicides were committed in the city.  It appears arrests for attempted murder is where they start with murder cases. That or the murder total would be much higher if the locals had better aim.

Here’s the racial break down of murder related arrests.

The black share of arrests for murder related offenses should be viewed in addition to two other statistics. Baltimore is 63% black according to the last census and 29% white. This means that blacks are over represented in the arrest data for murder related crime. Whites are under represented. It should be noted that Hispanics are counted as white, but the city has a small Hispanic population. Even so, whites are significantly under represented. This is a pattern that turns up in all homicide studies, even in majority black cities.

The other factor is the victimization data. Murder is almost always a personal crime so the murderer usually knows the victim or they live in the same area. Even in a city like Baltimore, where one block can seem like a different country from the next block, most violent crime is personal. That means most times, the murderer is of the same race as the murdered. Looking at the victimization data, the number of black murder victims over the same period tracks the arrest pattern, as far as the racial breakdown.

Here is the racial break down of the murder victims.

The victim numbers let us net out the Hispanics from the white total, but Baltimore does not have a big Latino population, so the numbers don’t change much. Given the white flight to the suburbs, the city’s white population is probably closer to 25% in this time period, but the white crime share is around 5%. On the other hand, Blacks are 65% of the city’s population and 90% of homicide related crime and over 80% of all arrests. Put another way, if you removed the black population, Baltimore would resemble Salt Lake City.

Finally, here are the arrests by age.

Here’s the arrests by interesting cohort.

The Fear Of Disbelief

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I was looking for something I remembered Sailer posting about and I stumbled upon this post from Tyler Cowen. The post is from eight years ago and it is something I found interesting. I did some searching around in his blog to see if he had bothered to revisit the issue and the search came up dry. Cowen, who is one of those guys who likes pitching himself as a step outside the crowd, has avoided the topic for close to a decade, suggesting it was around this point when the subject was declared heretical.

Another thing I found interesting, amusing actually, was that Cowen succumbed to the claim that there is greater genetic diversity within racial groups than between them. While it is true that there is greater variation between individuals, than between groups of individuals, it does not invalidate classifying individuals into different racial groups. Traits common to one group, even in great variety, may not exist in another. Cowen was falling for what is informally known as Lewontin’s Fallacy.

Of course, what screams from the post is the hysteria induced in people like Cowen, when they are sheered between observable fact and prevailing dogma. On the one hand, their brains force them to look at reality. On the other hand, their fear of the morality police makes them want to shriek in terror. Cowen is a gold plated phony, but he is not a dunce. Even back in 2009, the evidence was clear. There are bone-deep differences between the races that go beyond physiognomy. It is right there in the mountain of IQ data.

People can be forgiven for not going against their betters. Even spergs like Cowen want to believe in the prevailing orthodoxy. You see that in the end where he writes “racism itself is far, far more harmful, whether in the course of previous history or still today.” That is the sort of thing a true believer writes, when he is thinking of maybe writing something heretical, but then grows frightened of where it could lead. That whole last paragraph is so carefully worded, it reads like it was written by a committee.

It is not just the smart guys who are tormented by this stuff. Most normal whites get weepy when they see a guy like Sheriff Clark or Allen West say the sorts of things honkies say in private. It is confirmation. When you see a gazillion re-tweets of something a conservative black posted, it is not hard to imagine the relief normies felt when they saw it and the joy with which they passed it along. A couple of generations of whites have been raised up to think of blacks as mystical moral arbiters. Black approval is the highest honor.

There is also the old noblesse oblige hook. Smart people like to think of themselves as having a duty to guide the less smart toward the correct opinions. A guy like Cowen is not wealthy and he is largely dependent on the state for his livelihood, like most libertarians. Nevertheless, he imagines himself as a member of an intellectual elite, charged with training the next generation and providing intellectual guidance to the ruling class. Promoting the blank slate silliness about the evils of racism feels like his moral duty.

On this point, there is a strange phenomenon that I have witnessed. It is not a lot different than what happens in a church when a long standing member quits because they no longer believe in God. There are members who will try to talk the guy out of it, telling him that they too have lost their faith, but they continue attending services to maintain the tradition or support those who to continue to believe. I have never seen this work. Every person who has quit their church did so in their mind long before they left the pew.

I suspect something similar goes on with our betters. They know that even entertaining heretic thoughts can be trouble. They have seen enough old white guys throw in the towel, like James Watson or John Derbyshire. They know that once that seed of doubt gets lodged in the head, it grows into a mighty oak of doubt. Then comes struggle, apostasy and finally banishment from the community of good thinkers. It is better for strangers to think you are a moron than to have your friends and colleagues say you are immoral.

Most people reading this probably belonged to the universal church of biological denialism at some point in their life. It has been dogma for a long time. Probably every white person has felt the warm glow of seeing blacks succeed at white things or showing their appreciation with public acts of patriotism. The opening ceremonies have become American’s favorite part of the Olympics, because it is where they see well behaved non-whites wearing the stars and stripes and looking proud to be Americans.

Race denialism, as John Derbyshire calls it, has been part of the official canon for generations now. Biological denialism has been official dogma for as long as I have been alive. Belief is easy when everyone else believes the same thing. Disbelief, however, is inevitable when belief is at odds with reality. When no matter how hard you try to make the belief real, it is thwarted by reality, doubt is the only option. That is where most whites are now. The question is, what will they believe in next?