Another WhyNat Meeting
Note: this is a sequel to That Time I Went to the White Nationalist Meeting...
There was, of late, a slew of articles like “why I’m no longer a white nationalist,” “my long road to Centrism,” and “why I chose to reject populism.” Usually, their authors told a personal story, here’s what happened to me to change my mind. But one could also think of these people as belated followers of the white college graduate normies who moved away from the Republican party between 2015 and 2018. In the other direction, no-college whites like Tim Pool and Joe Rogan had become more Republican. Class realignment affected the intelligentsia as the masses.
I was thinking of this as I was headed to a meeting of the Robinson Crusoe Society, home to a motley crew of white nationalists, hereditarian IQ researchers, conservative opinion journalists, and former white nationalists in the process of moving left. They were the exploded remnants of the “Alt-Right,” which pointed out that the pre-2016 corporatist and neocon-dominated GOPe was not representative of Republican voters and then said they should be replaced by a bunch of Nietzsche-appreciating secular nationalists. I suppose I am part of this group, too, continually drawn back more by a desire to have fun than anything else.
I arrived at almost the exact starting time, as I never liked the idea of being “fashionably late.” As the room filled up, we split into groups and made small talk about work, dating, and family lives. I formed a group with Steve Martin, the middle-aged conservative opinion journalist, Joel Smith, a young computer programmer and white nationalist, Blake Johnston, a thirty-one-year-old lawyer and critic of white nationalism, Peter Gehan, a college student and white nationalist, and Ishwar Bharadwaj, one of the many brown guys who hang around in far-Right spaces and stand as living proof that assimilation works. At first, we discussed random bits of news until the subject shifted to that of the election.
“Recently,” I said, “I came across a statistic that showed that the richest metropolitan areas in 1950 were places like Clevland, Ohio and Detroit, Michigan. San Fransisco was on the list, too. It is no wonder, then, that many midwesterners embraced the declinist narrative of 2016 Trumpism. But what’s Trump’s message now? It’s nostalgia for 2019.”
“It does seem to be working for him, if you look at the polls,” said Steve Martin. Steve was forty-four years old and, in some ways, acted even older, a man who dressed in business casual even as he worked from home. He was married, had two children, and called himself a Christian, though he became uneasy and defensive when I asked about his actual religious beliefs. He was thus a “square,” much more so than the younger non-conformists in the room, who dressed casually, often like overgrown teenagers. He was psychologically closer to the typical Republican voter, though I wondered if even he was growing alienated by the downscale-ification of the Republican party.
“Trump’s message is indeed resonating,” I said. “And what does that tell you about Trumpism? I remember the narrative of the 2016 election, which I believed in at the time. Trump won because of trade and immigration. Because the elites decided we were going to become a white-minority country and told the people they didn’t get an opinion about that policy. But it turned out that all that was necessary to please these people was to make Donald Trump the President.”
“‘Trump is the leader of a personality cult,’ people say. I agree, but what am I supposed to do with that information?”
“Say it,” I said. “Your articles are full of condemnation of the Left and praise for the people, white Americans, middle Americans, whatever, who are resisting it. But you rarely talk about the man at the head of that movement, the elephant in the room.”
“Suppose we declared war on Donald Trump, the way National Review did in 2016. Do you think it would make a difference? You said yourself: it’s a personality cult. His fans don’t care about the issues.”
“So the plan is just to wait for him to die, like this is some s***-hole third-world authoritarian country?”
“Yes. Again, what’s the alternative?”
“Declare war on Trump. You’re not going to win his supporters. But ordinary people matter less than smart people, and Donald Trump repels smart people.”
“A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.”
“Are they in your hand? I keep hearing about how the neocons have been defeated and destroyed. But when neocons have been driven out, it wasn’t because they were neocons. It was because they didn’t support Trump. That’s the only thing Republican primary voters care about.”
“I don’t know what happens when Trump dies. It’ll be a free-for-all. But I’ll start with many followers I wouldn’t have if I made my views plain. I was talking to someone much like you the other day. He said, ‘you can’t just ignore these anti-vaxxer kooks and hope they go away.’ I said, ‘maybe I can?’ Consider the 9/11 truth movement. In 2007, a third of Democrats thought Bush either perpetrated the attacks or knew about them in advance. Elite democrats didn’t try to ‘cancel’ them or run them out of the party. They just ignored them and they went away.”
“Really, sitting around and waiting for problems to go away, that’s your plan?”
“Yes, that’s my plan. Beware of action bias, the appeal of the fight, struggle, do something message. Sometimes, sitting around and doing nothing is the best option.”
I was taken aback and had to admit to myself he had a point. “Perhaps you are right.”
“And in many ways,” Steve continued, “2019 was a better world. Crime was lower. It was possible to have both low inflation and low interest rates.”
“Did anyone think we’d wind up nostalgic for 2019?”
“Nobody ever thinks people would be nostalgic for their own time,” Steve said. “I never thought people would be nostalgic for the 90s.”
“Are they nostalgic for the 90s?” I asked skeptically.
“Oh, sure,” Steve said. “You’d hear it if you were my age. It was a ‘simpler’ time, they like to say. Before gay and trans stuff, incels and angst about fertility, Islamic terrorism and the rise of China. The end of history. Of course, all those things flowed directly from the 90s, but we didn’t foresee them.”
“I guess it’s hard for me to imagine nostalgia for the 90s because the 90s don’t stand out. It’s encoded in my mind as the ‘normal time.’”
“Remember The Matrix? Or Office Space?” said Joel Smith.
“I don’t really remember the Matrix. Office Space, yes. But it doesn’t stand out as ‘90s.’ It’s timeless, relatable by anyone dealing with the Kafkaesque work nonsense.”
“Every generation deals with it, but how they respond is different,” replied Joel. “Consider the absence of labor unions from the movie. If the protagonist worked in a steel plant in the 1950s and his boss made him come in on Saturday, ‘form a union’ is an obvious answer. But unions had been declining, for unclear reasons, for decades. The Soviet Union was dead. The idea of seeking any collective, political solution does not occur to Our Hero or anyone else in the film.”
“Wasn’t the decline in unionization down to the decline in manufacturing?” I asked.
“Yes, but why are unions less common in the office than in manufacturing?”
“Office work is easier. There’s less of a need for unions.”
“Maybe,” replied Joel. “But it seems like people bitch and moan about their jobs just as much today.”
“I have a theory about that,” said Peter Gehan. “Unionization declined because of socialization by the school system, which took the intelligent and ambitious and inculcated them with a habit of obeying authority, a habit that is transferred from teacher to boss upon graduation. The knucklehead class clown who resisted that socialization is probably too stupid and unlikable to convince his co-workers to join a union. Note that when the protagonist does decide to rebel, he does so by following in the footsteps of the underachieving student. Coming in late, doing as little work as possible, and refusing to pay his bills. That’s the only avatar of rebellion he has available to him.”
“It’s funny,” said Steve. “There’s a pro-capitalist interpretation of Office Space. The company is run dysfunctionally, making its workers do pointless busy work. In a centrally-planned economy, it may have continued dysfunctionally forever. In a capitalist economy, it is forced to make layoffs. Workers wind up in firms that are more productive. GDP goes up. And the workers do find new jobs remarkably quickly. But nobody’s going to see it that way, just like nobody’s going to look at the traffic jam in Falling Down and think “congestion pricing can fix that!’”
Everyone nodded in agreement.
“There’s another way in which Office Space is very 1990s,” said Joel. “Our Hero is asked by his school guidance counselor, ‘what do you want to do when you grow up?’ He doesn’t have an answer, so he winds up at Initech. There was much less credentialism then. Initech is like the textile mill in a 1950s industrial town, the default place to go for those who didn’t aspire to anything better.”
“Computer programming is much higher status now,” I said.
“Yes,” said Joel. “There’s also the hypergamous relationship. Our Hero is a white-collar worker who may well have not attended college. Probably making decent money. He asks out a waitress who presumably makes much less than he does. They form a happy couple, and nobody considers it an inter-class relationship.”
“That still does happen on TV today,” I said. “Look at Leonard and Penny in The Big Bang Theory.”
“Yes, but it’s remarked on. Everyone understands that Leonard and Penny are of different classes and have dramatically different life experiences. Leonard worked hard in school and Penny did not. That’s not the case in Office Space. In fact, the world of Office Space was probably the least neurotic we’ve ever been about sex. It was after the sexual revolution. Nobody bothers themselves with traditional moral standards. Nobody cares about interracial marriage or Protestant-Catholic marriage. Nor do you see Our Hero agonizing over the possibility that the beautiful but uneducated woman might put on fifty pounds as she ages or divorce him and leave him paying alimony and child support for many years.”
“Having lived through the period, I concur,” said Steve. “The 1990s seem, in retrospect, to be a time of remarkably little social tension and neuroticism. Then you had 9/11, the religion-atheism wars, rising tension over race and immigration, and more exotic concerns like low fertility and dysgenics.”
“Yes,” said Joel. “Who would have thought that making America more diverse would lead to more social tension? Only every student of history ever.”
“Really?” said Ishwar Bharadwaj.
“Yes,” said Joel. “Everything the white nationalists of 2000 warned us about has come true today.”
“Hard disagree there,” said Ishwar. “On certain things, they were right and mainstream society was wrong. The achievement gap stubbornly refuses to close. As mass immigration has occurred, race has become a bigger deal politically. The post-racial society refused to arrive. But what about the Canadian-style bilingualism they warned us about? Instead of that, we have woke white people saying ‘Latinx.’ Why is race a bigger issue in politics today? Suppose that the 1965 Immigration Act was never passed. Desegregation busing and the resulting class-based political realignment still would have happened. The tension between white Christian America and white secular America would still exist. #MeToo, gay rights and the pronouns thing still would have happened. The ADL and $PLC would still be here. Of course, as white nationalists, I fully understand you seek to preserve the biological existence of the white race, and that would be much easier in a country that was still 90% white. But can you really maintain that it would be a homogenous and politically unified country?”
“Many of these Left-Right divisions are consequences of mass immigration. Or is it a big coincidence that these divisions arose at the exact time mass immigration was inflicted on our country? Look at Japan. It has gone through the same economic and technological changes as America. But it has nowhere near our level of Left-Right ideological tension.”
“Japan is a special case. Religion was never as strong there, so a religiously-based culture war would never have arisen. Their rates of obesity and out-of-wedlock births are very low. I remember reading that they have the same pattern of dysgenic fertility as America but are far less concerned by it. It makes sense. Being outbred by the lower classes is less of a concern if they aren’t fat and raise their children in two-parent families.”
“So, if not immigration, what is the cause of our Left-Right tensions?”
“The rise of social liberalism, the outgrowth of the sexual revolution and the so-called civil rights movement, which evolved into what we now call wokeness. Here’s a thing I find odd about our discussion of immigration. Before I came here, I mostly associated with other Left-wing people. They had no idea their brown friend spent his days reading Counter-Currents. Hell, I was so dumb I thought me and my brother were the only brown guys who did, when now I realize we’re like 10% of the moobment. Anyway, most of my friends were Left-wing. I noticed that immigration was very low on their priority list. They talked a lot about how much they hated the religious right and the pro-life movement. They talked a lot about feminism and wymen’s issues. They talked about the gays, man did they love the gays. They saw them like Levites, a natural moral aristocracy. And they talked about how much they hated racism. But the victim of racism was usually black, sometimes generically ‘non-white.’ The bracero at risk of deportation; he was pretty low on their priority list. Which is especially odd because, of all the Left’s victim groups, he really is genuinely afraid of ‘persecution’ by our government.”
“Even if social liberalism had just as many adherents among whites, it would be less of a problem without the votebank that immigrants provide,” Joel said.
“Are they a votebank? Think about the Stonetoss dox. Back when he was doxxed, a whole bunch of people started saying he’s Puerto Rican. I couldn’t find any evidence it was true, but nobody would have been terribly surprised if it were. That’s another thing our 2000 white nationalist never would have predicted. What percent of white nationalist leaders are from pre-65, goy white backgrounds, married to pre-65, goy white women? Jared Taylor is. David Duke is. But it’s striking how many others aren’t. Richard Spencer married a Russian. Richard Hoste was a Palestinian. Mike Peinovich had a half-Jewish wife. BAP is a half-Jewish Romanian immigrant. You know that clown named GypsyCrusader? He’s half Roma and half Mexican.”
“It reminds me,” said Ishwar, pulling his phone, “of an excerpt from a book: Into the Darkness, Nazi Germany Today by Lothrop Stoddard.” He looked into the screen and read aloud.
“There are one or two German ideas about race which, it seems to me, are widely misunderstood abroad. The first concerns the German attitude toward Nordic blood. Although this tall, blond strain and the qualities assumed to go with it constitute an ideal type in Nazi eyes, their scientists do not claim that Germany is today an overwhelmingly Nordic land. They admit that the present German people is a mixture of several European stocks. Their attitude is voiced by Professor Guenther when he writes: “The Nordic ideal becomes for us an ideal of unity. That which is common to all the divisions of the German people is the Nordic strain. The question is not so much whether we men now living are more or less Nordic; the question put to us is whether we have the courage to make ready for future generations a world cleansing itself racially and eugenically.”
I started laughing. “So white racial purity is an aspirational goal of a bunch of edgewhites and white guys with Asian wives?” I asked.
“Pretty much,” said Ishwar.
“What do you think of that?” I asked, turning to Joel.
“They’re fine with me. You’ve got to build the movement with the people you have.”
“That reminds me of a tweet I saw a month ago,” I said. “Mike Cernovich was warning Americans about the crime wave likely to occur because of these new illegal immigrants. Right there in his Twitter profile picture is him with his brown wife. That tweet contains the entire history of 21st-century American politics right there. White guy with a brown wife warns of imaginary crime wave from some brown group. He congratulates himself for defying woke pieties while saying nothing about the group that actually does commit a greatly disproportionate share of crime: blacks, because he doesn’t want to be called racist.”
“So what you’re saying is, xenophobia is the racism of fools?” asked Steve.
“Pretty much.”
“Why are you dismissing the probability of a crime wave?” Steve asked. “Venezuela is a very violent country. You can’t just extrapolate based on the behavior of immigrants who arrived twenty years ago.”
“Mexico is also very violent, yet Mexican illegal immigrants are not. And there’s a story here that nobody gets. The Left-winger will say, ‘illegal immigrants commit less crime than native-born Americans.’ But he doesn’t have the intelligence to realize he is contradicting his own theories. After all, if ‘poverty’ causes crime, shouldn’t illegal aliens be expected to have a high rate of crime? In an alternate universe, conservatives might use this fact to demonstrate that their narrative about crime is the correct one. If a citizen commits a crime, he gets some time. If an illegal commits a crime, he’ll do his time and will likely be deported. That’s a much harsher punishment. Yes, he can try to sneak back into the country, but it’s not that easy; if it were, there’d be far more immigration. We have here a natural experiment. But they don’t want to make that argument because they’re so dedicated to xenophobia.”
“So what are we to take from that? Yes, deportation of criminals will deter crime, and the deported criminals, if they re-offend, will not be counted in the statistics since the crimes aren’t happening here. We can’t deport U.S. citizens.”
“We could imprison them for longer. Exile them somewhere. Make land next to Pelican Bay a giant, open-air prison like the Gaza Strip. Anyone who commits a violent crime or a sufficiently serious property crime with no mitigating factors is sent there for long periods, perhaps even for life. It’s quite harsh, but not dramatically harsher than saying someone must live in Haiti for life just because they were born there.”
“Might be a good idea,” Steve said. “But it’s not politically realistic.”
“It might be politically realistic if the Right had had different goals over the past twenty years, instead of focusing on immigration and the bizarre ‘unborn child’ fetish.”
Steve shrugged. “Perhaps you’re right.”
“By the way, what’s that guy in Malaysia’s name?” Ishwar asked
“Ian Miles Cheong,” Joel said.
“Yeah, him. Another phenomenon nobody was expecting in 2020.”
“That’s not the case,” Joel said. “In the Camp of the Saints, there was an assimilated Indian character who prided himself on being more white than Indian and feared the immigration wave. White nationalists have long been aware of non-whites sympathetic to the white cause.”
“I think the situations are different,” Ishwar said. “You can understand why a black man would become an advocate for the black cause. You can understand why a white man would if he were married to a black woman, raising half-black kids in a black community. But why does a man who lives in a lily-white suburb, far away from blacks, become a black advocate? If he were a universalist humanitarian, he’d be concerned about all the kids dying of preventable diseases in the Congo. But he cares far more for the far more affluent African American population. The white nationalist used to ask these questions, and he said, well, this is an inherent feature of whites, our individualism, etc. Other groups do not behave this way. Well, Ian Miles Cheong is the color-reversed white libtard. It’s not like he’s living in America and stands to lose out from the influx of the brown hordes. He’s a Chinese living in Malaysia who became partisan for the cause of American anti-woke whites. To the extent that it’s poisoned his brain, made him embrace Russia because ‘at least they’re white.’”
“I have a simpler explanation,” said Blake Johnson. “Cheong’s a grifter.”
“Yes. And Tim Wise, parentheses be around his name, is just in the antiracism business for the money. That’s a fully general counterargument against any activist you don’t like. And, in the case of fringe groups who aren’t paid by groups like the Ford Foundation, I really doubt it. Yes, some guys make money, and it’s not usually a great deal of money. But for everyone who does there are like thirty who don’t get squat.”
“This all reminds me of a theory I’ve been toying with,” Blake said. “There are basically three groups in America: WASPs, blacks, and Jews. Everyone else is just in a transitory phase that will end in assimilation into one of those groups. Look at Ellis Island immigrants. The Catholic “white ethnics” became Reagan democrats and now are just normal Republicans. And this will happen with Hispanics, too. Southernism will consume the Tejanos, just as it consumed the originally French-speaking Catholic Cajuns. There was one group, however, who did not assimilate into WASPdom: the Jews. They did something remarkable: they assimilated rich WASPs into their way of thinking. It used to be said that the Jews were a strange group because they ‘earn like Episcapaelons and vote like Peurto Ricans.’ You don’t hear that saying anymore because it’s no longer paradoxical. Instead of assimilating into country-club rich WASPdom, they made rich WASPs more like them.”
“So,” I asked, “when 70 IQ antisemites on the internet say every single Left-winger with a German or Slavic surname is Jewish, they are right?”
“Yep,” said Blake.
“The identitarians are right that people naturally crave an identity,” Ishwar said, “but race is only one of many they can choose. Take the LGBTQ clown show. Twenty years ago, it referred to people who got off on doing perverted sexual stuff to one another. Now, huge numbers of young people are identifying without the associated same-sex sexual behavior. It has become a political identity denoting hostility to maleness and obedience to the chaimstream media.”
“Hasn’t it always been like this?” Blake said. “I had a funny experience recently. Two guys, one a Jewish-identifying mischling, the other the child of Egyptian immigrants, were arguing about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We wuz indigenous! said the Jew. No, the Palestinians are indigenous, you’re European colonialists! said the Egyptian. I interjected with an analogy. Suppose a group of white nationalists did a great big goon march and were thrown out of America. They fled to southeast Asia and married local women, raising their children to identify with whiteness. Meanwhile, in America, white race traitors continued melting down statues, spitting on their heritage, and intermarrying with non-whites, eventually identifying fully as ‘brown.’ At the end of the process, the white nationalists in Thailand are genetically 50% white, while the race traitors in the U.S. are 75%. But white identity, the American flag, the U.S. Constitution, all of it could be found only among the former group. Who has the greater claim to the heritage of white America?”
I burst out laughing. “How’d they respond?”
“They didn’t grasp that it was an allegory for the Israel-Palestine conflict. I tried to explain it but they looked very uncomfortable, so I stopped. ”
At that moment, we were interrupted by the entrance of several tall guys in black suits. Following them was the President, Joe Biden, here to court the crucial WhyNat vote. We all gathered around him.
“Thankfulness to all of you for being here,” Biden said. “We must exist – we must secure the existence of people and some children for a white future.”