[Note: the story below is fiction.]
“Hey,” asked my friend Jake Denker, “would you like to go to the Robinson Crusoe Society meeting this Thursday?”
“The white nationalist meeting?” I asked skeptically.
Jake, who was not a white nationalist but had been one in the past, rolled his eyes. “Only 30% of the members are white nationalists.”
“Pretty sure if 30% of something is made up of open white nationalists, that means it is white nationalist. That’s how it works in our Brown Scare America. There’s a one-drop rule.”
“Well, whatever,” Jake said. “You wanna come or not?”
“Why do you want me to come?”
“We’ve been losing people lately.”
“Fewer people attending white nationalist meetings isn’t necessarily a bad thing.”
“I’m not saying to embrace the ideology. Just come and see.”
I hesitated for a minute. Politics had gotten less interesting in the year since LLMs took off. AGI will be here in a short time, and they will inherit the Earth. Even if they’re completely friendly and only here to ‘advise’ us, those politicians who follow their advice will out-compete those who don’t. But perhaps there’s a sense in which the developments in LLMs should make me more interested in politics. These are the last ten years in which politics is still a human-only affair. Shouldn’t I experience it to the fullest while it’s here? I’ve been to LessWrong meetings, YIMBY meetings, and even found myself in a DSA meeting after I got really drunk. “Alright,” I said. “I’ll go.”
The meeting was held in a meetinghouse in a large suburban condo complex. There were about thirty attendees. Most, Jake had said, were programmers, and many had that programmer look: casual clothing, no facial hair, glasses, cheap shoes, headphones around the heck and a bottle of Diet Coke in the hand. I, a programmer myself, wondered why they were so common in libertarianism, rationalism, and white nationalism. I toyed with the idea that it resulted from the economics of computer programming. Someone with a million-dollar idea could make millions without first securing millions in capital. If one had a million-dollar idea in chemical engineering, auto manufacturing, or medicine, he first had to convince someone with millions in capital to help implement the idea, and the capitalist would naturally derive much of the profit. To the programmer, the world seems more fair, and so they are drawn to ideologies that make an unapologetic defense of hierarchy. Ultimately, though, I thought it was more likely that deeper psychological factors were the answer.
Six of the attendees were noticeably non-white. Ten years ago, it was considered notable when there was a /pol/ meetup and two Asian kids showed up. Now, nobody would bat an eye. More were distant from the Aryan ideal in a more covert way; maybe they were half-Jewish or had an Asian girlfriend.
I walked toward Jake, who was talking with a small group. They were discussing the outing of Richard Hanania when I came up and introduced myself. “Hi,” I said. “Jake invited me here to this ‘white nationalist meeting,’” I said half-jokingly.
Jake smiled. “Why don’t we go and tell my friend who we are, and whether we are white nationalists?”
The men in the group looked comfortable; there was no sense of paranoia about me as an “outsider.”
“Joel Smith,” said one young white man, “computer programmer and white nationalist.” He reached out and shook my hand.
“Steve Martin,” said another man, who looked to be in his thirties. “Not a white nationalist, but a normie conservative, or the closest thing to it here. During the day, I work as a conservative opinion journalist. Ten years ago, I would have had to conceal my attendance at events like this. Today, nobody cares.”
“Peter Grehan, eighteen years old, CS major, white nationalist.”
“Ishwar Bharadwaj, computer programmer, Bengali, not a white nationalist.”
“Daniel Barnard,” said a man who looked to be the oldest in the room. “I’m an Afrikaner, born in Johannesburg in 1971, the only one here to be a white nationalist family in a country whose raison d’etre was white nationalism. I came here in ‘95 and was part of the movement for many years, but no longer.”
“Blake Johnston, 31 years old, not a white nationalist.”
I introduced myself, being careful not to include too many identifying details, and encouraged the group to resume their conversation.
“So,” said Ishwar, “I’ve been thinking about what the Richard Hanania story tells us about immigrant assimilation. White nationalists often identify Israel as a model for the kind of state they want, and it’s not hard to see why. If you only looked at the Levant, one would conclude that white nationalists are right about almost everything. Think about Jewish immigration to Palestine from 1918 to 1948. The Zionist Jews were the ultimate unassimilable minority, a culturally separatist immigrant threat. They didn’t show “dual loyalty.” They showed almost no loyalty to the British Empire which invited them to immigrate. They assimilated to virtually none of the native Palestinian culture. Their national anthem was the Hatikva; their loyalty was to their racial religion. And the Palestinians suffered a catastrophe. Hasbaraists like to tell us the Arabs are better off in Israel than any other non-petrostate Arab country, but that leaves out the fact that 80% of Arabs in 1948 Israel were simply booted out, with absolutely no compensation for lost property. Lest you think I’m being too partial to the Palestinians, I’ll tell you that they behaved in much the same way. When they were welcomed into Lebanon, they responded by rebelling against the Lebanese government, taking over much of the country, and provoking a civil war. Looking only at the Levantine region, one must conclude that immigration is bad; cultural homogeneity is the only way a stable country can operate, and assimilation is impossible. Promoting the mixing of cultures through intermarriage will not work, for people do very little of it in Israel/Palestine. You’d have to force it on them via bayonet.”
“And yet,” Ishwar continued, “when you look outside the region, you find that most of the world looks nothing like Israel/Palestine. Look at Brazil or Mexico. There are some conflicts with unassimilated Amerindian tribes. But the city-dweller who speaks Spanish or Portuguese in Mexico City or Sao Paulo does not see himself as part of some racial tribe. He is simply Brazilian or Mexican. Multiculturalism, or rather multiracialism, works.”
“Not true,” said Joel. “In Sao Paulo, the whites live in gated communities while the blacks live in favelas. Race is real. You can’t imagine it away, though the Brazilians sure have tried.”
“I’ll grant you,” Ishwar said, “that if you say that multiculturalism cannot succeed so long as there are differences in average income between races, then multiculturalism in Brazil is a failure. But why would we do that? Are we wokist homosexuals, getting our panties in a bunch about ‘disparities?’ Go to Wikipedia and look up bios of Mexican Presidents, Vice Presidents, Supreme Court Justices, and the like. With a few exceptions, you will find people who would not look out of place in Barcelona or Madrid. The Mestizo masses mostly don’t care. American college professors named Goldblatt have to come down from Los Angeles and tell them they should be outraged. Now, why is it so hard to believe that when Mestizos come to America and learn to speak English, they will behave with the same docility toward the North European, English-speaking ruling class? Is there something special about Spaniards?”
“I will perhaps grant you that multiculturalism ‘works’ in such a sense in Mexico,” Joel said. “But does Mexico ‘work?’ I mean, if the places you cite as the success of multiculturalism are Mexico and Brazil, well, those are poor, violent, messed up places. I don’t think that’s gonna be very persuasive.”
“That is very true,” said Daniel, looking at Joel. “I remember arguing with liberal opponents of apartheid in the early 1990s,” he said. “They would list all the bad things we had done to the blacks and I would sit politely and listen, then simply ask, ‘is it not true that the blacks here are better off than in any other African country?’ And you saw this look in their eyes as they realized their simplified model of the world had a giant hole in it. I see much the same with white nationalists. I ask them, why is it the case that everybody is moving to Texas? Texas is already forty percent white, forty percent Latin, and twenty percent Asian or black. It’s what the country will be in forty years, what white nationalists keep warning us against. And yet whites throughout America, from Ohio and West Virginia to California and New York, are flooding in.”
Steve attempted to rebut this point. “First of all,” he said, “I see the correlation as being backward. People aren’t moving to Texas because it’s diverse. It’s that Texas is prosperous and this leads it to be a magnet for all migrants, whether white or non-white. And look at certain metrics, test scores, violent crime, and the like, and Texas doesn’t seem to be doing so well. And if you look at the fiscal effect of low-skilled immigration on our government, it’s clearly negative.”
“That’s true,” Ishwar said. “By Moynihan’s law of the Canadian border, Texas is not doing so well. Their test scores are low, largely due to their large black and Hispanic population. But why should I get my panties in a tizzy because some black kid can’t break 1000 on the SAT? Am I a wokist? If people find an area to be a desirable place to live, that seems to be a much better measure of whether a place is successful than fourth-grade test scores. Moynihan’s law would predict that everybody would be moving to Minnesota and New York, when in fact everybody is moving to Texas and Florida. As to the fiscal impact, it does seem negative, but hardly enough to matter. The taxpayers of Texas have to pay for public schooling for all those illegals. Did this force the government to increase taxes so high that the white middle class was driven out of the state? No.”
“Well said,” said Barnard. “It’s a common observation among white nationalists that all those white liberals say they love diversity, but, when it comes to where they choose to live, where they choose to send their kid to school, the calculus is very different. I have observed that it’s only half-right. Clearly, they don’t want Johnny to go to a black school. The pattern for Hispanics is much less clear, and for Asians, it’s pretty clear they can indeed ‘celebrate diversity.’”
“I disagree strongly,” said Peter. “Where I went to school, the Mexicans hated white people. I was often insulted and called a ‘school shooter.’”
“I would bet you a dollar that school was located in a blue state,” said Ishwar.
Peter looked surprised. “Yes,” he said. “I was in Colorado.”
“Not at all surprising,” Ishwar said. “Think about those Mexican kids, those ‘wetbacks.’ In Mexico, they were entirely unfazed by living in a country run by whites. Then they came over. Where do you think they got this idea that white kids are ‘school shooters?’ Did they bring it over from Mexico? Or did they get it from the Jewish-controlled media and the woke, Democrat-run school system?”
“What difference does it make?” Peter asked. “Even if the latter, you can’t just imagine it away.”
“The question is, can they be assimilated? Can they be converted to another way of seeing things? Consider Texas. In 2020, Trump got 41% of the Hispanic vote. Were these 41% possessing of anti-white animus? Sometimes white nationalists say that whites vote on the basis of ideology, while non-whites vote as a block, and whites need to start voting racially or else their interests will be harmed. In Texas, 66% of whites voted for Trump, whereas only 58% of Hispanics voted for Biden. Whites were the ‘tribal’ voters and Hispanics the ‘ideological’ voters. The question is, how do we win them over? Do we do it through white nationalism, by describing them as unassimilable due to their very DNA?”
Peter had little to say to this.
“Wait?” I asked. “What’s this all got to do with Richard Hanania?”
“Hanania is a Palestinian Christian,” Ishwar said. “Palestinian Christians tend to support the secular side of Palestinian nationalism. The no-assimilation thesis would predict he’d be an enthusiast for the PFLP. Instead, he became a white nationalist and, more recently, a libertarian. Or take myself. My parents are devout Muslims. Well, they weren’t devout enough to stay in Bangladesh. They knew that moving to America would risk me and my brother becoming apostates and were not terribly surprised when we did. The other day, I was talking to my brother, who thinks I’m insane for showing my face here. I said, ‘you heard about the latest drama in the movement?’ We both knew ‘the movement’ meant white nationalism. Unlike Hanania, we’ve never described ourselves as white nationalists, but we certainly have more interest and affinity for that movement than for our own native religion. Islam sucks. Tells us we can’t have bacon, have to fast during Ramadan, etc. A whole bunch of pointless, stupid rules that people only follow if they’re forced to. And I don’t think I’m the exception here, for most young American-born Muslims, Islam is only treated with lip service, and they marry women named Gomez or Smith.”
“Maybe Hanania was a deep-cover Palestinian agent, joining the white nationalist movement to rally whites against Jewry,” I suggested mischievously.
“Yes, you can always contort the facts to fit a worldview,” Ishwar said. “But a plain reading of the facts is that he was a white nationalist because he was a white nationalist.”
“Something similar happened with the Jews,” Joel said. “Once emancipated, free from the tyranny of the Jewish religious establishment, they mostly abandoned the religious laws. But they didn’t cease to identify as Jews. By assimilating partially, they became only that much more destructive a force to the white race.”
“Give it time,” Ishwar said. “Today, the majority of secular Jews marry non-Jews. This is another of those pesky facts that comes like a cargo truck through one’s worldview. If secular Jews are so anti-white, why are they marrying whites? Within a hundred years, Jewry will be made up of poor guys in black hats and ¼ Jews at events like this.”
“So,” Joel said. “What is the solution you propose? What is the ideology you want us to adopt to replace the white nationalism you want us to give up?”
“A few years ago, I read the book Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition by Kevin MacDonald. He pointed to a long tradition of individualism in the Western world, where people are judged by merit rather than lineage. He contrasted individualist European societies to the collectivist societies of the Levant, and he was mostly approving of Western individualism. But he wanted to make an exception for people who were very far away from Europeans racially. Have an individualist, merit-based society that is overwhelmingly, if not purely white. There is a different book he could have written, one in which the individualist ethos of the West is taken to its logical conclusion. You may say that migration from a collectivist society to an individualistic society will just turn the latter into the former, but that does not seem to be happening.”
“Are we supposed to ignore these fractious identity groups that keep arising in this supposedly successful multiracial society?” asked Peter.
“Not ignore them,” Ishwar said. “But we should ask where they come from. I read AmRen every day. Usually, there are about ten news stories. Most of them can be sorted into two baskets: bad behavior from underclass blacks and ideological insanity from affluent white liberals. You don’t see stories about poor Asians flash-robbing liquor stores. Every once in a while, there will be an article about a young Asian woman who rails against white privilege and white stereotyping and how white men are “fetishizing” her. In the comments section, people will say, ‘see, this is why a multicultural society will always fail; ‘they’ are ganging up on us.’ But I say, ‘do they talk like that when they’re fresh off the boat?’ Or are they just mindlessly repeating the mantras of their white college professors?”
“Your ideas bear a certain resemblance to those of Blake here,” said Peter.
The group turned to Blake Johnston, who had looked rather bored throughout the conversation.
“What was it you said? ‘I can’t be a white nationalist because I believe in the superiority of the white race?’”
“Something like that,” Blake said.
“Explain,” I asked skeptically.
“Well,” Blake said. “In the Turner Diaries, everybody gangs up on whites. Latinos ally with blacks against us. But why should that happen? Why would they look at blacks, look at whites, and say, ‘the former, that’s who we want to share power with?’ No. Whites are the superior race. Whites have higher IQs, and nearly all scientific advances from 1500 to 2000 were produced by whites or Jews. The same is true for political ideas, and that continues to this day. Think about novel political and philosophical ideas. Think about LessWrong style rationality, transhumanism, evolutionary psychology, effective altruism, and neo-eugenics. All these ideas are the product of white people and Jews. East Asians have higher IQs; that’s a fact. But they don’t seem to be innovating any novel ideas. China took the Western idea of communism and managed to make it even more idiotic than it was in the Soviet Union. Then, it took the rantings of idiotic college professors about ‘overpopulation’ and used them to shoot themselves in the foot demographically. Recently, they went hard-core with COVID lockdowns. They didn’t do vaccine challenge trials. They’re not doing eugenics, despite what some may hope. Japan gave us anime. Hikikomori had some influence on American incel culture, that’s about it. Many white nationalists would agree with what I just said. But then they say we will be a hated minority, where I say their theory predicts we will dominate.”
“Your theory would predict whites would run South Africa,” Peter said.
“America will never be South Africa,” Ishwar said. “You cannot take a primitive boat across the Atlantic. And if we did have open borders, the flood of Africans would come along with a flood of Indians, Chinese, and Latin Americans.”
“So what’s the idea?” Peter asked. “Whites will be on top, so it’s good to be on top?”
“That’s basically it,” Blake said.
“Italians in Brazil are ‘on the top’ relative to blacks, but I bet most would rather be merely average in Italy.”
“True,” Blake said. “But as Ishwar pointed out, the immigrants are not and will never be mostly black. I have an Asian wife, and I’m rather glad the 1965 Immigration Act allowed her to come here.”
Several people cringed at the mention of the Asian Wife Question. Blake seemed to notice.
“Yes,” he said, “let’s have this conversation. It’s not just white nationalists but the broader far-right in general. I have a friend I’ll call Bill. He’s very red tribe, more so than anyone here, probably. He’s got his red hat, pickup truck, loves Trump, and is very not racist. But he is openly xenophobic. He’ll say, ‘America is the greatest country in the world.’ I’m thinking, if that’s true, why’d you marry a first-generation Chinese immigrant? Many white nationalists will be the first to start railing against wokeness, against transgender crap and feminism. Well, Asia and Latin America have millions of women who do not believe in any of that and want to immigrate to the United States. They would make better wives to white men than the fat, entitled, tattooed, feminist white woman.”
“I feel like a lot of this is, to use academic terminology, ‘performative radicalism,’” said Peter. “Blake here is using ‘offensive,’ far-right language to defend an essentially liberal position. If pressed, he can always turn around and tell his liberal friends, “hey, I’m only using this language to try to convince right-wingers to support immigration. If you’re smart, you’ll thank me.” It’s the same with these people who advocate for abortion for eugenic reasons.
“So, what, do we have to go full boomer Newsmax guy?” Joel asked.
“No,” Peter said. “But do it too often and it looks suspicious.”
“Well, transgenderism is a mental illness and George Floyd was a menace to society,” Blake said. “There, I’ve done it. I won’t be invited to liberal cocktail parties. Look what happened to Hanania. When the Chaimstream media tried to cancel him, none of them said anything about his opposition to Trump. They didn’t give him ‘credit’ for it. So when people on the right or the far-right tell you the liberals are right about some and such issue, you ought to listen to them. They probably believe what they’re saying.”
“Wait a minute,” Peter said. “You say the white race is superior, the only one capable of creating original ideas. And yet you’re participating in obliterating it through miscegenation?”
“Yes. And I don’t see a contradiction there. In America today, most people claim they don’t care if the white race continues to exist as a biological entity. They don’t care if their grandkids aren’t white. Maybe some do care, deep down. Others are willing to say, actually, I care. And they show up to places like this and are told that that should be the only thing that should matter, that they should structure their whole political ideology around achieving it. I do not accept this. I’d like for my children to be white, but it’s not my only concern. Much more important that they grow up in an intact family.”
“Because the beauty of the white Aryan woman must not perish from the Earth,” Peter said. He regained some confidence he seemed to have lost in the previous debate.
“It won’t perish from the Earth, or if it does, it will quickly return. Think about Brazil. If you looked at its models, you’d think the population was positively Teutonic. Or look at Bar Refaeli. The average Israeli doesn’t look like that. Ancient Greek goddesses were commonly blond. Greeks themselves rarely are. In the slave markets of Constantinople, Russian women were the most costly, followed by Middle Easterners, with Ethiopians and Sudanese on the bottom. It is reasonable to assume that this same beauty standard will remain as the races merge. And then, when we get CRISPR to work, we’ll be able to choose the genetics of our children, make them pretty, and this will mean making them white. Maybe it will take a few generations. The dark-skinned Latin will have light-skinned but dark-haired children and blond grandchildren. The beauty of the white Aryan woman will return, and she’ll be much smarter, much nicer, much more creative than she ever was before.”
“Will we get CRISPR to work?” Peter asked.
“Yes. Or rather, they will make it work. They being the AIs. White nationalists commonly see the arc of history as being made up of distinct races or nations competing. But it is really all leading up to GPT12. That is the story of humanity. We replaced our muscles with much stronger machines, and we will replace our minds with much better computers. Anything evolution did, intelligent design will do better. We will have it in ten, twenty years, that looks very likely.”
“But those beauties will not be Aryan!” Peter said.
“In a sense, that is correct. Their junk DNA will show them as mongrels. One could theoretically ‘correct’ it, but I don’t see why they would. But should that really matter? How many of you have donated sperm or even bothered to look into the process? If passing down your junk DNA was what mattered, there’s nothing better to do than that. The obsession with junk DNA is rather autismal. It may be what nature ‘wants,’ but it’s not what humans want unless you talk them into it.”
“Perhaps this is the final stage of radicalization?” I say. “The media warns that it starts with normie conservative or libertarian politics. It escalates to ‘edgy’ ‘ironic’ racism and jokes about how women can’t do math. Then, it becomes white nationalism and antifeminism. And then, at the final stage, you realize that miscegenation is actually good, and we need more immigration to own the feminazis. I must say I’m glad Jake here talked me into attending this. I could NEVER have thought of these ideas myself.”
“Well, then,” Peter said. “You’ll love Daniel’s idea here that white nationalism is a form of political correctness.”
“It’s Ron Unz’s idea, but I certainly believe it. Take Orania, South Africa. Now, I like Orania. I even sent a bit of money to one of their charities. But I heard an interview with a woman in the community, who justified the town’s whites-only status by saying, ‘we’re an Afrikaner cultural community.’ And I thought, what nonsense. They moved there to escape the bad behavior of the blacks, but they can’t say that, because those are negative, ‘hate’ emotions. They need to pretend it’s motivated by a positive love of Afrikaans poetry or something.”
“Well, what’s it matter if they aren’t 100% honest about their motivations?” Peter asked. “Intellectuals obsess too much over honestly. A nice white country. I want that, and if it means mouthing a bunch of feel-good platitudes, well, that’s a price I’m willing to pay. Look around here. You don’t see many women. We need arguments that appeal to them, and if feel-good, not-entirely-true platitudes are what it takes, then let’s do that.”
“The harm is not just from the untruth. It leads to strategic blunders,” Daniel said. “It leads Orania to exclude English-speaking whites who could contribute to its growth. It leads American white nationalists to oppose the immigration of intelligent, well-behaved Asian immigrants. Or take Ukraine. When Russia invaded, six million Ukrainians hit the road. How many American white nationalists were saying, ‘let’s bring them here to strengthen our numbers?’ Almost none, because they had spent so much time saying immigration equals bad and we don’t want people who don’t share our ‘culture.’”
Later that night, after several more mind-blown ideas, Jake and I walked through the parking lot back to our cars. I had never asked Jake why he ceased to be a white nationalist, as it had never before been a subject that interested me. Now I wanted to know.
“Well,” he said. “As you know, I was raised Mormon. I probably ceased to believe in the religion at around age fourteen, but I still believed in belief. And then I was thinking about going on a mission, and I was told that only in the third world were we making any converts. I just thought, if a doctrine only appeals to those born into it and third-world peasants, well, there’s something wrong with that doctrine. Perhaps that missionary zeal was transferred into the movement. What pushed me out was the white nationalist reaction to the COVID vaccine. I realized that if we cured cancer tomorrow, half of all white nationalists would soon convince themselves that the cancer cure was a plot by Bill Gates to destroy the Aryan race. While David French, cuckold though he is, would reach the correct conclusion about it. When an ideology attracts so many pathologically paranoid people, you’ve got to ask yourself if there’s a problem deep within it.”
Ishwar says that America will never be South Africa, but there is nothing really stopping that from happening. All that's necessary is for current population trends of low or negative growth outside sub-Saharan Africa and strong growth in SSA to continue, and for the authorities to decide that high levels of immigration are desirable or even just acceptable. Then, a South Africa-like situation could develop.