Here are some excerpts from this new book:
* Yet eugenics is practiced every single day all over the world. It is practiced in its horrific sense, as with selective-gender abortion and the killing of female infants in societies that view male children as more desirable. But it’s also practiced in populations with low genetic diversity (this is not a slur or a euphemism), such as Hasidic Jews. The Hasidic Jewish community, due to inbreeding, has a higher than average rate of genetic diseases such as Tay-Sachs. Yet there’s a workaround. As Tablet magazine reports, “After conducting genetic screening, [an organization called] Dor Yeshorim assigns identification numbers that correspond to its clients’ genetic data. Before or soon after meeting, potential partners exchange ID numbers and dial an automated hotline to check genetic compatibility—a phone call that almost always determines if a relationship will move forward or end.”
As of 2012 approximately 67 percent of infants with Down syndrome have been aborted. Does that mean that inside the breast of every expectant mother beats the heart of a Nazi eugenicist? This subject has become so riddled with taboo and outrage that it has led to some truly odd outcomes. In 2014 Fredrick Brennan authored an opinion piece titled “Why I Support Eugenics.” Brennan was the founder of the message board 8chan (“Twice as good as 4chan!”), and suffers from Osteogenesis imperfecta. As a result of this genetic disease, he has severely stunted growth and is confined to a wheelchair—hence his handle of “Hotwheels.” The common name for Brennan’s condition is “brittle bone disease.”
It is heartbreaking to read his contention that Osteogenesis imperfecta “is one of the most painful conditions in the world” knowing that he’s speaking from firsthand experience. Many know the extreme pain of breaking a bone once or twice in one’s life. Few have to endure that pain over and over, or the stress of living in constant fear about when it will happen again. Brennan suggests offering carriers of extreme genetic diseases like his a cash sum in order to undergo sterilization, arguing that this would save millions in future medical costs alone. Such genetic testing is easily done, and in his view this would be a very humane way to make sure no child has to live a life where they will never know the fun of running around outside due to Osteogenesis imperfecta. “Eugenics is a humanitarian idea,” he concludes, “not a national socialist one.”
So where did Brennan run this piece? A page as far from removed from humanitarianism as possible: the neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer. “I could find no other publication which would publish this article,” Brennan reveals, “and I am far from a neo-Nazi.” For the evangelical left, those who suffer largely exist as mechanisms for others’ salvation, but not as beings with consciences of their own—or more precisely, they are allowed to have their own conscience if and only if it fits into their salvation model. Else, they can be considered as corrupted.
* One of the first “out” gay people, Quentin Crisp (1908–99), agreed. As recounted in The Independent, “In 1997, he told The Times that he would advise parents to abort a foetus if it could be shown to be genetically predetermined to be gay: ‘If it (homosexuality) can be avoided, I think it should be.’” And while there are many parents who genuinely don’t care if their child is gay or straight, there are plenty who, if given the chance in private, would opt for the same preference as O’Donnell or Crisp.
* Gavin was of the impression that Jews invented political correctness. Yet I pointed out that every culture has heresy and taboo. Jesus died for being politically incorrect, for example. Eugene V. Debs was jailed by President Woodrow Wilson for opposing World War I. The writer Paul Graham tackled this issue in an extremely insightful 2004 cultural essay titled “What You Can’t Say.” “In every period,” Graham wrote, “people believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you would have gotten in terrible trouble for saying otherwise.”5 “Every culture is a culture of fear,” I insisted. “When wasn’t it a culture of fear, in your mind? In the ’50s? In the ’60s? In the ’70s?” “2000–2005 was the least—” “Wait!” I interrupted. “After 9/11 it was not a culture of fear? You’re literally saying this?” “Yup.” At a certain point you realize there is no speaking further to the person. That is when I said to Gavin, “OK.”
* The New Right goal is for the public to view the corporate press in the exact same way as they view Chesterfields: as self-serving merchants of death who have their own agenda that is often malignant but never healthy. Given how often the press loves to beat the drums of war, this is not hyperbole.
The destruction of the press means unmasking their claim to be objective agents of truth. It is to expose them and humiliate them, individually and collectively.
* In 2012, presidential debate moderator Candy Crowley declared that she would interject herself into the debate should she see fit—and she did in fact, forcing the hapless Mitt Romney to fend off both President Obama and the woman who had been selected for a role meant to be impartial. By the 2016 Republican primary debates, the audience was cheering when Ted Cruz berated the moderators over their questions, something which would have seemed insane not too many years prior. Not long after that, nominee Trump pointed directly to the press pool and openly mused about killing them to the crowd’s great applause.
* We all tend to need a boogeyman to point to, a villain who embodies our opponents in one person. This is one of the greatest strengths of the New Right: Yes, there are many prominent personalities within the movement. But all of them are, by and large, expendable to varying degrees. Trump is the consequence, not the goal, and most certainly not the head (pun intended) in any sense.
* A key tactic used by the New Right is forcing the enemy to make difficult choices. Are they going to be held to the principles they espouse, or are they going to be loyal to their own people? When they are in complete control, they can get away with doing both. But if there’s pressure, then they will have to choose. In such a case, some will choose the former while others will choose the latter—and both sides will be upset with the other for making the “wrong” choice. In fact, that is exactly what happened. Some defended Griffin on free-speech grounds. Others felt the need to distance themselves and throw her under the bus. But they did have to choose one or the other. They couldn’t play coy, make a mumbling note of disapproval, and then continue on as if nothing had happened.
* The controversy over transgenderism, bathrooms, and pronoun usage was predicted by Steve Sailer in TakiMag in 2013, over a year before the article that got Gavin fired from Thought Catalog. For Sailer, “the structure of the dominant contemporary mindset means that with the triumph of gay marriage, a need will be felt for a new front in the elite culture war on average people, with ‘transgenderism’ (a catch-all phrase for a variety of complaints) the most likely salient.”
Sailer’s approach here is common to him and emblematic of New Right analysis. Similarly, he has put forth “Sailer’s Law of Female Journalism,” which holds that “[t]h most heartfelt articles by female journalists tend to be demands that social values be overturned in order that, Come the Revolution, the journalist herself will be considered hotter-looking.” Instead of focusing on what a given article says—or in this case a given class of articles—the salient question for Sailer is: What caused this article to be written in the first place? What purpose does it serve? In a New Right context, where objective journalism is either impossible or extremely rare, the tendency is to focus on the writer or publication’s given agenda. There is an idea among moderates of both sides of the aisle that we should focus on ideas and assume that fair-acting people can independently come to different conclusions. While this may hold true in interpersonal relationships, the idea that this holds true when it comes to members of the press is rejected in toto.
* As Milo put it in that same podcast, “In the gay world, some of the most important enriching, and incredibly life-affirming, important, shaping relationships are between younger boys and older men. They can be hugely positive experiences very often for those young boys.” For decades it was not uncommon for older gay men to initiate younger ones into the lifestyle. In fact it was to be expected; a closeted and confused young gay man would need someone to guide him and let him know that he’s not as alone in his proclivities as he might feel. As a consequence, historically, there was a huge cultural perception that homosexuality and pedophilia were virtually identical. When Milo spoke of being taken advantage of as a young man by an older one and enjoying it, he was either (a) the victim of statutory rape and trying to deal with that in his own way or (b) telling the truth and pointing out that male/male standards shouldn’t be expected to be the same as male/female ones. What people heard was: pedophilia is OK.
* Andrew Breitbart saw this analysis as essential, writing, “The left does not win its battles in debate. It doesn’t have to. In the twenty-first century, media is everything. The left wins because it controls the narrative. The narrative is controlled by the media. The left is the media. Narrative is everything.”
* The universities’ explicit goal is to train the next generation’s elites. No one disputes this, though some prefer to use platitudes like “training the leaders of tomorrow.” This is a banal way of obscuring an important point: Are the leaders being trained to be leaders? Or are they being trained to be evangelists? The answer is both, and for the New Right it is the second group that is the enemy.
To call something a conspiracy theory—even an actual conspiracy—is akin to calling it “racist.” It’s a mechanism to dismiss a subject or speaker without having to engage with their ideas. Technically speaking, the Constitutional Convention—a small elite who swore their discussions to secrecy—was a conspiracy.
Malice’s book is OK. He has a decent understanding of The New/Dissident/Alt – Right, and so far has given their views an infinitely more charitable representation than you’d find from any mainstream rag or journalist, but I’m 10 Chapters in and things are starting to fall apart.
His recounting of and subsequent 1 line rebuttals to the main arguments in Buchanan’s “Death of the West”, are paper thin and often non sequiturs; pointing to wrong predictions … but were wrong in so far as they underestimated how bad things would get.
Malice at one point even uses IRAQ as an example (one Buchanan to my knowledge never does) of a Nation that could be said to have “died” recently and says “well it didn’t die for any of the reasons Buchanan is predicting the West will “die” so these are bad predictions!” It’s like one patient dies of a heart condition so you tell another who has cancer he’ll be fine.
At one point he responds to Buchanan’s lamentation of Japanese abysmal birthrates and the degradation of their traditional culture yielding to westernization post WW2 by saying “well they have tentacle porn so they’re still unique in some meaningful way!!”
He basically (so far) hand-waves away the central postulate that “demographics are destiny” and doesn’t even anticipate the 1 hope the dissident right has in the short term; that the coalition of white liberals, jews and various POCs is fragile to the point of breaking before establishing political hegemony.
Grazz comments:
I am honestly quite thankful to see Luke’s responses to Michael’s various commentaries. During the Jared Taylor part of the book he put forth all these post interview rebuttals that I felt were utterly idiotic to the point I was actually getting angry reading them.
This book is trash, the interviews are good but literally all the insights and commentary are pure trash. Combine that with various quotes and what not it felt like he was just trying to extend the length of the book without actually adding any content but where he could actually add content he simply chose not to. He was on the ground for the charlottesville insanity but his commentary on what it was actually like amounts to saying his friend got his hat knocked off…. Dude the police drove a group 1/10th its size into an angry mob and no comments on rooftop snipers, no commentary on how the media was trying to imply a police helicopter crash was a result of the the demonstration, no commentary on how the counter protesters were there illegally. This book is just massively disappointing. Take for example the segment on Jim Goad, he spends pages explaining who he is and his back story but his actual conversation with him amounts to a page worth of dialogue…. What???? It’s like this for everyone. A discussion with jared taylor could be an entire book but Jared’s actual words only make up a page or 2…..
This book isn’t even good for a normie’s guide. It’s also not good for someone in opposition to the right as its not detailed enough. This is just a bad book.
Paul Graham wrote in January of 2004:
Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and been embarrassed at the way you looked? Did we actually dress like that? We did. And we had no idea how silly we looked. It’s the nature of fashion to be invisible, in the same way the movement of the earth is invisible to all of us riding on it.
What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They’re just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they’re much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed.
If you could travel back in a time machine, one thing would be true no matter where you went: you’d have to watch what you said. Opinions we consider harmless could have gotten you in big trouble. I’ve already said at least one thing that would have gotten me in big trouble in most of Europe in the seventeenth century, and did get Galileo in big trouble when he said it—that the earth moves. [1]
It seems to be a constant throughout history: In every period, people believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you would have gotten in terrible trouble for saying otherwise.
Is our time any different? To anyone who has read any amount of history, the answer is almost certainly no. It would be a remarkable coincidence if ours were the first era to get everything just right.
It’s tantalizing to think we believe things that people in the future will find ridiculous. What would someone coming back to visit us in a time machine have to be careful not to say? That’s what I want to study here. But I want to do more than just shock everyone with the heresy du jour. I want to find general recipes for discovering what you can’t say, in any era.
The Conformist Test
Let’s start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?
If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you’re supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn’t. Odds are you just think what you’re told.
The other alternative would be that you independently considered every question and came up with the exact same answers that are now considered acceptable. That seems unlikely, because you’d also have to make the same mistakes. Mapmakers deliberately put slight mistakes in their maps so they can tell when someone copies them. If another map has the same mistake, that’s very convincing evidence.
Like every other era in history, our moral map almost certainly contains a few mistakes. And anyone who makes the same mistakes probably didn’t do it by accident. It would be like someone claiming they had independently decided in 1972 that bell-bottom jeans were a good idea.
If you believe everything you’re supposed to now, how can you be sure you wouldn’t also have believed everything you were supposed to if you had grown up among the plantation owners of the pre-Civil War South, or in Germany in the 1930s—or among the Mongols in 1200, for that matter? Odds are you would have.
Back in the era of terms like “well-adjusted,” the idea seemed to be that there was something wrong with you if you thought things you didn’t dare say out loud. This seems backward. Almost certainly, there is something wrong with you if you don’t think things you don’t dare say out loud…
I suspect the biggest source of moral taboos will turn out to be power struggles in which one side only barely has the upper hand. That’s where you’ll find a group powerful enough to enforce taboos, but weak enough to need them…
Although moral fashions tend to arise from different sources than fashions in clothing, the mechanism of their adoption seems much the same. The early adopters will be driven by ambition: self-consciously cool people who want to distinguish themselves from the common herd. As the fashion becomes established they’ll be joined by a second, much larger group, driven by fear. [9] This second group adopt the fashion not because they want to stand out but because they are afraid of standing out.
