What Unites The Alt Right Is Resistance To Lies

John Derbyshire writes:

Three weeks ago, I floated the word “Clintocalypse” to describe how the end of the world as we know it would follow a victory for Mrs. Clinton. Other opinionators were having the same thought.

The one who’s been getting most coverage—no, I don’t begrudge it, honestly [sound of weeping]—is the pseudonymous writer Decius and his The Flight 93 election. But another I particularly liked was NeverTrumps and the End of America as We Know It, by Jared Peterson at American Thinker:

The election of Hillary Clinton would mean final defeat for American conservativism—for at least a generation and almost certainly for much longer than that.

Peterson names names in the NeverTrump camp: George Will, William Kristol and Jonah Goldberg. These folk will do fine in the Clintocalypse, he says. They will serve as court jesters to the triumphant Cultural Marxist ruling power, chattering away impotently and raising an occasional laugh while the transformation of our republic into a northern hemisphere Brazil proceeds unhindered.

Still, neither commentator ventures very far into the speculative badlands we explore on the Alt Right: questions about why different ancestral populations display such different outcomes when considered in quantity, as communities or nations.

If, following a Clintocalypse, the machinery of state falls entirely into the hands of Cultural Marxist apparatchiks, one thing we may expect is more of a clampdown on dissent. Some suggestive recent developments:

  • The National Press Club

OK, it’s a private organization headquartered in Washington, DC for the promotion of journalism. It advertises itself as “the world’s leading professional organization for journalists.” It’s venerable, founded 1908; the same year, if I am not mistaken, as saw the establishment of America’s—in fact I think the worlds—first School of Journalism.

(Of course I scoff and sneer at this elevation of journalism into a credentialed profession like dentistry or civil engineering).

But the National Press Club puts on speaker events and debates on topics of public interest, especially when those topics cause a stir in the world of journalism. It was therefore entirely natural that they would agree to host a session on the Alt Right.

Thanks to Mrs. Clinton’s August 24th speech, the expression “Alt Right” is recognized today by several thousand times more Americans than were aware of it on August 23rd. So this was an excellent topic for airing—just the kind of thing the National Press Club exists for. Right?

This event was the brainchild of Richard Spencer, whose National Policy Institute[NPI] is a major pillar of the Alt Right edifice. Spencer is in fact sometimes described as the leader of the Alt Right, although not many acknowledge that the Alt Right needs a leader.

Scheduled speakers were Richard himself of course, Jared Taylor of American Renaissance, and our own Dear Leader here at VDARE.com , Peter Brimelow.

Suddenly, on Wednesday evening, just a few hours after the event had been announced, the National Press Club reneged on their contract and cancelled the event.

The Club cited “security concerns.” That is somewhat less than persuasive. For one thing, Richard Spencer had told them that should any extra security be required, his outfit, the NPI, would pay for it.

For another thing, the National Press Club has hosted several of NPI’s events before, going back at least five years. Last October they actually hosted NPI’s annual conference. More evidence of the intensifying clampdown on dissent.

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For yet another thing, the Club has hosted events that raised far more security concerns than NPI. Nine years ago for example they hosted Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Li’l Squinty himself, outspoken Jew-hater and Holocaust-Denier.

The cancellation came accompanied by what sounded to me very like the squeaking of weasels. the Director of the National Press Club, Bill McCarren, [Email him] ,has over the past few weeks The First Amendment Lounge, and is a space dedicated to freedom of the press. [Laughter.]

I suppose we can take some slight comfort in the fact that Weasel McCarren is, at least, still enough of a human being to be embarrassed.

The event took place anyway, at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue—a mere stone’s throw, if you’ll pardon the expression, from the White House. The precise venue was the Peacock Room.

That prompts me to the following suggestion to Bill McCarren of the National Press Club. Perhaps, after a hundred-and-odd years, you might consider renaming some of your rooms to better reflect the journalistic milieu of the early 21st century. Follow the Willard’s example: the First Amendment Lounge could become the Weasel Room.

Another Clintocalypse clampdown victim:

  • James Watson, the world’s greatest living geneticist: Watson was co-discoverer of DNA, for which he shared the Nobel Prize.

Professor Watson is a race realist. Nine years ago he was in the news for publicly saying that sub-Saharan Africans have a low average intelligence. He had previously said out loud that Ashkenazi Jews have a high average intelligence.

Both things are a matter of common observation. Both things are supported by decades of evidence. Both things are, however, not to be spoken aloud in polite company. Watson lost his position as head of Cold Spring Harbor lab for what he said about blacks, and endured many indignities at the hands of CultMarx enforcers.

Watson was invited to speak at New York University’s Langone Medical Center, September 12th. But when the invitation was posted, activists at the NYU Student Council and something called the Student Diversity Initiative sent a honking letter to the organizers of the lecture. NYU thereupon went into full PC cringe mode and cancelled the invitation.

I read about this on a website written by University of Chicago biology Professor Jerry Coyne. Professor Coyne objects to the cancellation of Watson’s lecture, but in the most mincing, mealy-mouthed way possible, I suppose to safeguard his own social standing.

He calls Watson’s mild race realistic remarks “provocative, hurtful, and unevidenced,” end quote.

Provocative of what? Of disagreement? That’s the very stuff of academic debate. It should be provoked in a university.

Actually Coyne’s second adjective tells us what’s being provoked: hurt feelings.

Fiddlesticks to hurt feelings. The world, said Wittgenstein, is everything that is the case. Note he did not say, “everything that does not hurt your feelings.”

As for Coyne’s last adjective, “unevidenced,” it is a lie. There is a vast mass of evidence for race differences in intelligence. Such differences are also what you would expect a priori, as normal features of variation within species.

It’s true we don’t yet know the full genetic architecture of race differences in intelligence. As human-science blogger JayMan says, though: You don’t need to know the name and job title of every worker in the factory to know the factory produces widgets.

Conclusion:

Since the Alt Right came to widespread attention last month, the question has been in the air: What unites us? What do we have in common?

We’ve even been asking it among ourselves. What is it that makes a person think: “Yeah, I belong to this Alt-Right they’re talking about. Or at any rate, their way of seeing the world looks a lot like mine”?

Well, I’ve been hanging out with Alt-Right types for a while. I’ve known Jared Taylor for twenty years; Peter Brimelow for sixteen; Richard Spencer I think for eight or ten. All have been guests at my house, I am proud to say.

I’ve been to conferences, mingled with supporters, spoken myself. I know this territory really well. So what, in my opinion, makes the Alt-Right a distinct thing—not by any means a party, a faction, or a movement, but a collection of souls with something in common?

Here’s my answer:

We don’t like flagrant nonsense in the discussion of human affairs. We don’t like being lied to. We especially don’t like being lied to by credentialed academics like Jerry Coyne.

The lies are so flagrant, so outrageously obvious, you’d have to laugh at them—if not for the fact that laughing at them is close to being a criminal offense. Read on.

COMMENTS:

* Is Unz.com censored by facebook?

I tried to post this Derbyshire column on facebook by using the share button(on this page), but I got this warning:

“This message contains content that has been blocked by our security systems. If you think you’re seeing this by mistake, please let us know.”

* On the other hand, [James] Woolsey isn’t Jewish, so there’s a reasonable chance he could change his mind. That is, he’s not wedded to neocon views the way Jewish neocons are. That’s a very important distinction. That’s why Cheney and Rumsfeld are supporting Trump. The mightn’t completely agree with him, but they realize he’s far better for the country than the alternative. That’s something Jewish panic merchants have an impossibly difficult time doing.

* In defense of Prof. Coyne, he has been a consistent defender of freedom of speech. Given where he started, he’s come a long way. You might say he was a “68er” in the Vietnam War days. He was a student of Richard Lewontin, one of the high priests of the Blank Slate. He now supports evolutionary psychology, and admires Steven Pinker, who attacked the Blank Slate in a book of that name. He is, however, an atheist (like me), and his readers are mainly leftists. All authors like to have readers. One can forgive Coyne for his “mealy-mouthed, mincing” defense of freedom of speech, given that it amounted to so much virtue signaling to his audience. For all that, Coyne isn’t a man whose mind is completely closed. Telling him that he can only be saved if he gives all that he owns to the poor and follows the Derb is a bit much.

* In an MA Applied Linguistics program at a well-regarded British university, I tried to base a thesis proposal on an analysis of how language is used to promote the elite’s narrative on race/HBD at the expense of scholars like Watson, and also to the detriment of democratic citizenries’ generally by denying them access to information they need to make informed decisions. This approach to linguistic analysis is called critical discourse analysis (CDA). It’s similar to what Sailer has been doing with lefty news articles over the past 20 years. My proposal was flatly rejected without my being given a chance to answer any questions first. I was told in no uncertain terms that 1) CDA could only be used from a leftwing perspective; 2) Watson was ignorant because blacks would score just as high on IQ tests as whites if they had invented them; and 3) that there is no such thing as race to begin with.

I’ve since been looking for a peer-reviewed paper “proving” the existence of race and have yet to find one. This is a bigger stumbling block to studying race than I think most Alt-Right types realise. You cannot do any race-realism social science that is based on the concept of race without a peer-reviewed paper that explicitly hypothesises and then proves its hypothesis that race exists. Once we have that research paper, there’s a lot we can start to do. For now, we have to dredge through schlock social science research that is based on and cites research “proving” that race does not exist and then skips merrily down the yellow brick road to our destruction.

About Luke Ford

I've written five books (see Amazon.com). My work has been covered in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and on 60 Minutes. I teach Alexander Technique in Beverly Hills (Alexander90210.com).
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