Kyle Rowland writes:
Greg Johnson says:
“Right wing terrorism helps the enemy and hurts our cause.”
“Harms our movement in four ways – creates public sympathy in our people for the victims of these crimes, and the victims of these crimes belong to groups that we would like to build a case for separating ourselves from them, it makes all the liberals want to cling to them even more, and dress like them, and act like them, and show solidarity with them. That’s not a good thing.
Second, it makes white advocates look bad, because our job is to convince the world that white nationalism is a solution to ethnic conflict, not a cause of ethnic conflict.
Third, it energizes the left. It gives them options for signaling and manufacturing martyrs and jinning up moral panics.
And fourth, those moral panics are used as pretexts for repressing us. Repressing our freedom of speech and repressing our right to bear arms, and those are bad things.
“I want to argue that times aren’t quite so desperate as some people think. Yes, as I argue in this book, The White Nationalist Manifesto, available in the lobby there, if long term demographic terms for white people are alarming, if we do no not halt the existing demographic trends, we will first lost control of all of our homelands and then we’re simply going to become extinct as a race. But that end-point still lies a couple centuries off. And even in parts of the white world where the majority of births are now of non-whites, and there are cities and states in the United States, and probably cities in Sweden where the majority of births are of non-whites, it’s still going to be some decades before these people have voting rights and can exercise political power.
And by the time that happens, you might find that a great deal of white people are willing to countenance limiting the franchise, or doing away with voting all together. So we are going to have some decades to get things right, 20 years, 30 years, 50 years, depending on what country we’re in. And that means we have a lot of time to prepare, a lot of time to plan, a lot of time to get it right, and if doing it right won’t save us then doing it wrong won’t save us either. So, we just have to do it right, we have to do it the right way and figure out what the right way is, and the idea that things are so dire that we have to go on shooting sprees in hopes of setting off waves of repression that will cause some upheaval in the white world – those are desperate, panicky, and I think stupid self-destructive self-defeating measures.”
“It is the case that long term demographic trends are alarming. But, there are a lot of medium-term social trends that are working in our favor, and we need to recognize that these trends give us a great deal of room for maneuvering and a basis for actually surfing our way into power someday.”
“In any fair debate, our arguments beat theirs. We have truth on our side, everything they are arguing is based upon lies and sanctimonies and coverups of the catastrophes they create.”
“The question is not whether but how long it takes for us to change public opinion sufficiently that we inaugurate a new paradigm, that we sweep away globalization and that our kind of nationalism becomes the dominant paradigm in all of our societies. It’s not if, it’s simply a matter of when, because the longer we stay in the debate, the longer our reach, the quicker it’s going to happen. We win every argument in every fair debate.”
“Terrorism increases sympathy for our enemies, decreases sympathy for us, makes us look like maniacs when we’re really the most sensible and sane people in the world. Try that on for size. The rest of the world is crazy – we’re the sane ones. And we’ve done nothing wrong, and we think nothing wrong.”
Kyle Response:
You say “we” and “us” a lot. What “we”? What “us”? Here are some opinions I have noticed in white nationalist circles.
Russians aren’t really white — Norvin
Persians are whiter than me — Richard Spencer
Jews are white enough, so long as they convert to Christianity — Brundlefly
We don’t want gay people in our movement — Pretty much every straight white nationalist I have seen give an opinion on the matter
Mixed people aren’t a big deal, we can be welcoming of mixed people — Richard Spencer
We pretty much know who is white, there’s no big problem or complication with the definition — Mike Enoch
Jews should first give me all their money and then go straight to Israel — Mike Enoch
My view on ‘what is white’ is essentially northwest europeans… a nordicist view — JF Gariepy
I have also seen favorable allusions to the one-drop rule and ‘racial purity’ made.
Basically, to tell it to you straight, white nationalists have no idea what they want. Ethnicities are genetic clusters with fuzzy boundaries. Races are clusters of ethnicities, with fuzzy boundaries. There is inherent ambiguity, and everyone with with sense knows that a purity spiral will end up alienating almost everyone. However, the most inclusive definitions also have insoluble problems. Prominently, there’s a very large group of mixed amerindian-whites called Hispanics. If your definition of white is broad and generous to mixed-race people, you end up being radically pro-immigration in the American context. But no white nationalist is.
Similarly, no white nationalist I have seen is passionate about excluding all Hispanics, even those with all or nearly all European ancestry. Some have the northwest-european centric view which would exclude spaniards from ‘core whiteness,’ but they don’t tend to get very worked up about that.
Then there are the Jews, a European ethnicity that has significantly diverged phenotypically in terms of intelligence, and which has historically been quite distinct from other European ethnicities culturally and religiously. How do you deal with them? The overwhelming answer is – kick ‘em out. But this is not justifiable philosophically without a healthy dose of purity-spiraling when defining ‘white.’ The justification can be pragmatic – but if this about pragmatism rather than an attempt to accurately define a ‘people’ the entire ‘white nationalist’ thing seems like a liability. Pragmatically speaking, why not welcome high IQ or rich members of other races, who can provide much-needed contributions to a country or a movement? Clearly if all this trouble is to be justified, we need to be coming from some principled approach!
But there’s no principled approach that unifies the disparate perspectives of ‘white nationalists.’
Therefore, I have to contend that Greg is wrong, and victory for racial nationalism across the west is far from inevitable. Racial nationalism is not a particularly coherent idea. Ethno-nationalism is coherent, but quite unworkable in the American context. It is workable in certain European contexts, and they are welcome to explore that path if they like — I do not much care what they choose to do with their own countries.
As far as the country I am focusing on – the United States of America – I see no reason to adjust my prescription. Respect the rights and freedoms of American citizens. Educate people about the findings of scientists who study human variation. Attempt to attract the richest, highest IQ people into the country, and deter the poorest, lowest IQ people. Attempt to develop and implement policies and technologies that lessen or eliminate the fertility gap between the educated and uneducated. Emphasize the suffering and danger imposed on Jews by fraudulent narratives about how racial outcome gaps develop. Explain the disastrous story that plays out again and again across the world – from Indians in Uganda, to ethnic Chinese in Malaysia, to Jews in Old Europe, to Whites in Zimbabwe, and increasingly to Western Civilization and the world, the lie is told again and again – that those who are most productive are to blame for the plight of the least productive. In fact, those who are productive uplift those around them, and the world. Point that out, and avoid the disastrous morass that ‘white nationalism’ has so far proven to be. Emphasize that a richer, safer country is good for every American citizen, and that unfortunates who through no fault of their own cannot contribute as much should be protected from being undercut again and again by low-end foreign labor.
This perspective strikes me as hard to assail. Every line of attack faces powerful rejoinders in the scientific and moral realms. In this regard it stands in stark contrast to previous platforms advanced by the dissident right.
A philosopher emails me:
Hi Luke,
In case it might be of interest to you, or anyone, I had a few comments about Kyle Rowland’s position on white nationalism.
Two quotations from Kyle:
“Pragmatically speaking, why not welcome high IQ or rich members of other races, who can provide much-needed contributions to a country or a movement?”
“Attempt to attract the richest, highest IQ people into the country, and deter the poorest, lowest IQ people.”
What seems strange to me in this proposal is that Kyle never even considers the possibility that immigrants with money and high IQs might have other traits that would be damaging to the receiving society. In fact there wealth and high IQs will probably be damaging unless they have many other specific traits, such as patriotism or loyalty or reverence for the host society. A high IQ can be used to exploit and subvert society just as much as it can be used to make valuable contributions. And there’s no reason to assume that rich high IQ Chinese people or Indians or Muslims, for example, are going to be particularly concerned with what is good for American society or the American nation. On the contrary, it seems like these kinds of people are often quite openly indifferent or even hostile to American society. Kyle claims to be concerned with empirical evidence. So should he not at least attempt to demonstrate empirically that there is high probability that such immigrants will tend to have appropriate and helpful attitudes towards American society–that, for example, they won’t view it mainly in terms of how it can be exploited for their personal benefit or the benefit of their clan or ethnicity? Maybe he has offered solid evidence for this, and I missed that.
This indicates an internal weakness in Kyle’s proposal. He goes on to say that in his preferred version of America, low IQ or less capable citizens would be “protected from being undercut by low-end foreign labor”. But, of course, those kinds of protectionist policies won’t be implemented or retained unless the wealthy high IQ people in charge of American policies care about “low-end” Americans more than they care about profits. So these two elements might well be inconsistent.
If high IQ immigrants will not tend to care too much what happens to those Americans, opening the country to those kinds of people makes it pretty unlikely that these “low-end” Americans will actually be “protected”. And it’s also likely that, in the long run, the country will be opened to poor and low IQ immigrants as well, since that will be beneficial in the short term for a class of high IQ rich people who have no particular loyalty to America or the American people in general. In fact, there would seem to be a plausible empirical argument here that this is exactly what has already happened, as a result of the fact that the wealthy high IQ elites who have shaped American life for many generations are often immigrants (or descendants of immigrants) who have no particular loyalty to the American people and no concern for the long term well being of American society. Now America is full of low IQ immigrants who are a massive drain on public infrastructure and resources, who are culturally incompatible and disloyal to America, and whose presence is a cause immense hardship for the poorest and least capable Americans. How does Kyle think they got in? Which individuals and groups were behind the changes in law and policy and morals that facilitated these changes? One plausible answer would be that high IQ immigrants, especially wealthy high IQ Eastern European Jews, were largely responsible. Hard to say how things would have turned out if these people had never been admitted. But, on the whole, their relation to American society has been very complicated and ambivalent; it would be an absurd over-simplification to say merely that these kinds of people always “uplift those around them”. Or does Kyle think there is really no evidence at all of Jews and other clannish high IQ immigrants acting in ways that harm the poor, the out-groups, the less capable?
