Tag: Race Realism

Am. Greatness Publishes Rambling Ravings of Some Crackpot Named photog

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So after Michael Anton wrote his final defense of natural rights in which he very interestingly quoted one of my posts, I found a number of reactions in the comments section thought provoking.  Mostly they were apologies for the Z-Man based on the premise (which is one of the underpinnings of the Dissident Right) that a multiracial society is doomed to failure because of the biological differences between people.

I thought that was worth discussing further and so I wrote my article and I was happy to find that American Greatness was willing to feature it on their worthy site.  So here is the link and I hope everyone goes over and reads it and leaves all kinds of interesting and highly complimentary comments that proclaim my groundbreaking insights and the general brilliance of Orion’s Cold Fire as both a font of political wisdom and also a source of entertaining cultural content.

Does Inequality Make America Impossible?

 

Race Realism Means Finding a Way for the Races to Talk Honestly

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I was reading the Z Man’s Monday morning posts and it was about how conservatism went wrong.  And as usual it was very informative and thought provoking.  One of the points had to do with Harry Jaffa and that ended up with a discussion of Jaffa’s current descendants at the Claremont Institute.  Z Man pointed to two posts on Claremont’s American Mind website (1, 2).

In the first post called “No New Normal” Z Man is satisfied with the argument until it involves race.

“Here is a post on the same site as the Gottfried post, in which the editors reject the new normal of American politics. Everything is good until this. “In reality, race is not the ultimate fact of human identity or the central problem of American life. Different ethnic populations have different general tendencies, but not different natural rights. Everyone is capable of learning to live well in this country, but only if we confidently endorse both our geographical and cultural boundaries.””

 

Z Man continues on about the second post, “Demographics are Not Destiny”

“The linked post in that quote is worth reading, as it rips the mask from the “new conservatism” and exposes it as the old conservatism. The great fork in the road, the shadow that hangs over human history, is biology. The story of man is not one tale with many chapters, but many stories of many people, all of whom have their own unique understanding of themselves and how they should live. The genuine man of the Right understands this and accepts it. Equality, in short, is inhuman.”

These thoughts encapsulate the difference between the Dissident Right and the Civic Nationalists.  The dissidents dogmatically stress that the differences between people, make living together under the American Constitution impossible.  This seems to me to be a horribly pessimistic assertion.  And since the Z Man states often that he doesn’t believe that there will be any partition of the United States along racial lines this pessimism about the various human races and ethnicities living together seems like a hopeless situation for his side.

By the way I am aware of why it would seem that race relations in the United States are so abysmal.  The Democrats have spent the last sixty years, more or less, weaponizing the African American population as a club to defeat their political opponents and almost as much time doing the same thing with Hispanics and Asians.  It really is no wonder that all of American society seems poised to melt down into a cauldron of race hatred at any time.

But I think there is a path out of this rat trap.  The Democrats were never satisfied with dividing the country into white and non-white.  They exploited male versus female antagonism and then they really went crazy with all of the various sexual deviancy populations.  The LGBT thing was their greatest extravaganza.

But all of this follow-on intersectional advocacy doesn’t sit very well with the people that they think they’ve captured during their race dividing stage.  Most Hispanics don’t want to be called Latinx.  And most of them don’t much want their kids groomed for inclusion in the trans-gender club at school.  Likewise, Asian parents don’t want their kids denied academic advancement because they don’t rank high enough in the intersectional bingo game.

And these ethnic groups are starting to realize that giving their votes to the Democrats doesn’t create a better country for their kids to live in.  Recent polls show that this is already happening.  Less than 30% of Hispanics think Biden is doing a good job.  That is lower than his number among white voters.  So, it shows that forming a coalition on the Right with non-white Americans is possible.  What seems to be the stumbling block to accomplishing this is the abysmal ineptitude of the Republican Party.

Think about it.  Donald Trump was branded as a racist in 2016 when he was running for president on the platform of building a wall on the Mexican border.  And yet he had a higher percentage of Hispanic voters in 2020.  That seems to tell me that it’s more the messenger than the message.  Trump spoke crudely but honestly about what he believed and people respected him for it.  All of this leads me to believe that leaders who aren’t afraid to speak to people of different races and who can convince them that their lives would be better under “equality” rather than under “equity” could forge a coalition based on mutual benefit.

Someone like Ron DeSantis is doing that in Florida which has a huge Hispanic population.  Trump could do it again if he can just get an unrigged election in 2024.  So, I throw my hat in with the civic nationalists.  But I think the dissidents should be willing to talk with us.  They have lots of important insights into the failures that the Republicans have been guilty of over the years.  They could point out the mistakes we must not make again.  And they represent a sizable chunk of the population.  They need to be part of the dialog.

As I’ve said before, the Right needs to expand the conversation.  When the neocons were the gate keepers, they got to dictate what was the window of acceptable opinion and that got us to the point where objecting to illegal immigration was an unacceptable position.  It’s important that a robust debate goes on and some of the people on the outskirts of the party are right about things that the establishment has been dead wrong about.  The people on the fringes aren’t right about everything but a dialog with them would be good for both sides.

UPDATE 24MAY2022

A commenter named Tucker had this to say:

“I would strongly recommend that the author of this article visit this link and absorb the rock solid analysis that “Civic Nationalism” is a gigantic fraud.

https://www.eurocanadians.ca/2020/08/civic-nationalism-is-fraud.html

I also encourage any readers of this author’s article to read the analysis cited above.”

So I went to the link and read the 5,500 word post that listed five reasons why civic nationalism is a fraud:

I. This brings us to the first and most obvious fraud of civic nationalism. Being that, by its very definition, civic nationalism isn’t even nationalism.

II. The second fraud of civic nationalism is that it’s just globalism by another name.

III. The third fraud of civic nationalism is that it’s extremely vague and practically impossible to enforce.

IV. The fourth fraud of civic nationalism is that it’s born from cowardice and cannot save whites from replacement and extinction.

V. The final fraud of civic nationalism is that it’s never worked and it never will work.

Looking through these various charges of fraud I see a list of the grievances of white citizens of the Anglosphere against their governments for allowing large scale immigration from the third world.  And I am fully sympathetic with these issues.  I am also aware of the reverse discrimination that these governments have been guilty of over the last decades in a wrong headed attempt to undermine the dominant culture in these places.  But in my mind none of those problems are tied to civic nationalism.  They are tied to some sort of white guilt that the elite class feels.  Donald Trump had no problem pointing to illegal immigration as a danger to our country.  And he was clear that reverse discrimination was going on in our government.  It seems to me that what is needed to eliminate these problems are leaders who are not ashamed of the history of the people who built the country.

As far as the demographic situation, stopping uncontrolled immigration will lessen the impact of demographic change but even if every “illegal immigrant” was sent home the non-white component of the population would still be a very significant part of the United States.  But I am more interested in making sure that the country maintains the culture that made America a special place.

The European heritage that the English and the other European settlers brought has a distinctive style.  It fostered thrift, hard work and family life.  That is what needs to be maintained.  Celebrating Thanksgiving, Christmas and the Fourth of July are an important part of the civic life of our country.  The Christian heritage is an important part.  These things have resonance with many of the immigrants who came here in the last fifty years.  Latin Americans are Catholics.  They enjoy Christmas the same as Europeans.  Many of the Asians who live here are Christians too.  Certainly there are differences in these peoples’ lives but they can be good Americans.

I think the more important problem is finding leaders who aren’t afraid to call out anti-white discrimination.  We need politicians and judges who will strike down things like affirmative action and restore our rights to freedom of free association.  The endless attempts to enforce equality of outcome in the face of the reality of human differences must end.  Seeing racism in every disparate outcome is nonsense.  Some people are smarter.  Some people are harder working.  Punishing those people to make less intelligent or lazier people feel good is unjust.  What must be maintained is equality under the law.  Equal opportunity is sufficient to allow just outcomes.

And private association also needs to be unrestrained by government oversight.  People need free association to flourish culturally.  Men’s clubs have the right to exist.  So do ethnic societies.  So do people who like baseball.  You wouldn’t force a baseball club to give equal time to a member who wanted the yearly outing to be basketball game.  If the Daughters of the American Revolution are forced to accept members from Papua-New Guinea because otherwise feeling might be hurt that negates the very meaning of the organization.

I don’t see a civic nationalist point of view preventing anyone from eliminating a lot of the problems that have made life in the United States unfair to white people.  What it takes is being unafraid to call out unconstitutional laws and also putting a brake on immigration to prevent destroying the original culture and way of life.

Race and the Right

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I often read articles by people who describe themselves as the Dissident Right.  What these groups line up around is the idea that the experiment of the United States of America as a multi-ethnic state has been a failure.  The corollary is that the reason for the failure is because the egalitarianism enshrined in the Declaration of Independence with the words, “All men are created equal,” is untrue and therefore a stumbling block to making a society made up of diverse groups workable.  They point out the absurdities and obvious discrimination inherent in the affirmative action laws that interfere in the selection of students and employees in colleges and corporations across America and the harm these practices do both psychologically and practically to all involved.  And they say this problem is unavoidable because of actual differences among different races and groups with respect to intelligence and temperament.  They will point to scientifically produced studies to prove these differences exist and point to the last fifty years of civil rights legislation to prove that nothing will ever alter the government’s approach to race relations.  In other words, the government will always consider differences in achievement and social outcome between the races as proof that racial discrimination is being committed.

I believe that some of what they say is probably true.  There are differences between people.  And intelligence is an inherited characteristic in the same way that all our other physical characteristics are inherited from our parents.  And some groups probably are better at various things depending on how their ancestors spent their time.  Farmers, hunters, merchants, sailors, soldiers, priests, and craftsman are successful for different skill sets and physical characteristics.  If a civilization has a very long history, running into millennia of a profession that specializes in doing astronomical calculations such as the Chinese or the Babylonians it might not be surprising to find their descendants have been selected for brains that are adept at mathematical calculation.  Or if your people have been traders for thousands of years such as many in the middle east it might not be surprising to find that they have skills that make them comfortable working in finance and commerce.  Let’s grant all these things.  But let’s also remember that every group is itself a normal distribution for any of these traits.  There is always a bell curve with the majority of individuals somewhere in the middle of the curve but with some individuals higher and lower than the middle.  So even within any group that is found to excel at some characteristic like IQ, that group will have some more intelligent individuals and some less.  And no one seems to be upset that there are more and less successful individuals within an ethnic or racial group that is not believed to be victims of discrimination.  If all the white Anglo-Saxon descendants in Massachusetts were catalogued, we would find some that were incredibly wealthy and then we would find some that are abysmally poor.  Why do we not assume that discrimination is at work?  The obvious reason is that there is no racial motive at work.  So, this would lead us to the conclusion that differences in the talents and characteristics of people lead to differences in their level of success.  We do not have to suspect that systemic discrimination is the cause.

Bringing this back to the egalitarian statement, “All men are created equal,” it seems evident to me that the Founding Fathers didn’t mean that people were identical in their capabilities but instead that all men were equal under the law.  There were no nobles who had priority over the rights of the commoners.  There was one law for all.  But I can’t see how that should be interpreted as meaning that everyone is forced to have exactly the same house, car, family size and television set.  Now granted the government seems to be saying that if there are disparities between the prosperity of different ethnic and racial groups then the only explanation is racism.  But I see changing the government’s minds and policies as the primary object of the Right-Wing project.

But let me play devil’s advocate.  My neighbors in the Dissident Right would say that the gap for some groups is so large that they could not integrate into the society that contains many higher functioning individuals because their skills would not be adequate.  I do not think that is true.  There are jobs in a country like ours that accommodate all levels of skill and experience.  That is proved by the never-ending influx of unskilled illegal immigrants who find occupation by the millions.

No, I think the real problem is we have to force the government to acknowledge that we’re not harming the people they claim we are.  In fact, we have to force the government to admit that welfare and affirmative action are the problems.  That and the phony claims by the Left that blacks are being systematically oppressed.  These lies have poisoned race relations in America for more than a generation past when any actual discrimination existed.

As far as the problems with police, that is a reflection of the lawlessness that reigns in these neighborhoods.  Pretending that it is the police that are the problem is a ridiculous lie.  Police hyperactivity occurs whenever criminality is rampant.  This same situation occurred in the European ghettos of the early twentieth century in all the big cities.  Irish, Italian and even Jewish gangs were constantly battling the police and the kids in the neighborhood would be recruited by the gangs and would then be fair game for the police.

Of course, at the present time, this situation has festered to the point that millions live in poverty, crime and perpetual unemployment.  To break out of this crisis the government should focus its efforts on incentivizing industries that can utilize low skill employees to set up shop in these devastated areas and shift as many of these people from welfare to work as quickly as possible.

So that in a nutshell is how I see the racial problem in the United States.  I differ from the Dissident Right in that I don’t think the problem is unsolvable.  The problem is to end the failed practice of blaming white people for disparities in racial prosperity and instead concentrate on stimulating job creation for low skill employees to break the cycle of perpetual unemployment and dysfunction.

But one thing that should be said in defense of the Dissident Right.  They were first to recognize that the Left’s use of identity politics rendered the Establishment Right perpetually on the defensive and hopelessly incapable of defeating the never-ending series of progressive demands.  And their recommendation that white Americans begin demanding their rights is absolutely correct.  In a world of identity politics, the only way to avoid abuse is to claim your own identity and stand up for your rights.

Identity Politics and Civic Nationalism – Part 2

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Identity Politics and Civic Nationalism – Part 1

At the end of the first part of this post I said I’d look a little more closely at the specifics of the Dissident Right’s logic and compare it to my own way of looking at where we are.

First off let’s acknowledge something that we cannot afford to forget.  The Dissident Right (or Alt-Right if you prefer) was the only group who both knew what was going wrong in this country and weren’t afraid to say it out loud.  They recognized that the Left was in control of all the levers of power and the Establishment Republicans had no intention of changing the results of the Left’s program.

The Dissident Right explained exactly how the schools and colleges proselytized the children and how the Media, the Democrats, Big Business and the Courts twisted every part of society until nothing remains of the normal world of just a few years ago.  And as proven, the Establishment Republicans use the anger this generates to get themselves re-elected.  But once in office they can be depended on to never actually reverse any of this destruction and instead just talk about how dead set they are against whatever the next outrage is.  And when that outrage becomes law they just move along to the next.

And the Dissident Right identified the fact that both Parties and Big Business were determined to use immigration, both legal and illegal, as a means to swamp out the votes of the citizens of the United States as a way to eliminate all resistance to their agenda.  It was plain during the 2016 election that none of the Republicans, no matter how “conservative” he was, would say a word against illegal immigration for fear of being called a racist.

And the Dissident Right was the only group that supported Trump.  Everyone else either said he was a joke or abhorred him for being a vulgarian.

So, as I said above, ignoring the Dissident Right means ignoring the only group that knew how we were losing the Country to the Left and how we could stop them from doing it.  Clearly what they say has to be carefully considered.

But you might say, why not just jump on their band wagon?  For me, that is a disturbing choice.  The Dissident Right is comprised of people who believe that differences in race and even ethnicity prevent a heterogeneous state like the present United States from living in harmony.  They believe that the future will be a fractious hodge-podge of identity groups that, led by the trouble-makers on the Left, will spend all their time pursuing imaginary grievances against the European Americans that they’ve been told are holding them back from being happy.

The Dissident Right points to affirmative action discrimination and the destruction of the family and the LGBTQ lawfare warriors and de-platforming of people on the right and say we are already there and that once we are a majority-minority-nation, things will only get much worse.

Accepting this hypothesis as true is not something I would do unless forced by irrefutable evidence.  But having it espoused by people who have been right about things that the majority were wrong about means I have to find reasonable arguments for why the Dissident Right is mistaken in their conclusions.

Instead of going through a bunch of cases and subsets of categories I’ll sum up the problem we’re experiencing by saying that in the 1960s when the economy was very strong the leaders of the Democrat party saw that they no longer had an unbeatable coalition of disaffected voters like they had in the 1930s and 1940s.  They decided to follow the Marxist playbook and weaken their enemies by sowing as much division as they could.  They espoused abortion as a way to destroy the family and they sponsored all the grievance movements to further fracture the country.  They infested the schools and steadily eroded intellectual life until even the sciences were politicized and distracted from their primary functions.  And they enshrined massive immigration both legal and illegal.

But even when all this was going on it was still possible for a conservative leader like Ronald Reagan to rally the Right.  And when that happened, the country was able to see itself as one people.  It was only when we were led by people who believed in the propaganda of the Left that everything has fallen completely apart.  Basically, since 1988 (thirty years) we have been living under the rule of the Left and their Globalist Echoes on the Fake Right.  Bush Senior, Clinton, Bush Junior and Obama allowed every outrage of the Left to happen to us with either enthusiasm or feigned reluctance.

This track record is why I think that the Dissident Right may be mistaken in the irreversibility of the changes we are experiencing.  In just two years President Trump has installed a whole generation of federal judges who will begin the process of reversing the damage done by the rogue judiciary.  Without Justice Kennedy it’s possible that the SCOTUS will reverse the decisions that found a constitutional mandate for abortion and gay marriage and affirmative action.  Those types of actions would change the world we live in.  Once those injustices are addressed people would see the world much differently.

The final thing that I need to address is the Race Realism that the Dissident Right says will prevent the United States from existing in harmony.  They claim that both differences in behavior and feelings of separateness will forever keep different races and ethnicities from living peacefully together.  My experience with diversity is a product of growing up and living in New York City in the 1960s, 70s and 80s.  Believe me when I tell you that things were very far from harmonious in the “glorious mosaic” that existed in that era.  There was a separate neighborhood every ten to fifteen blocks and mostly the ethnic and racial groups didn’t happily mingle or even interact.  There were riots and even several large areas of the city burned down.  Crime was rampant and the subways were very dangerous as were the parks and other empty areas.  Of course, the Democrats were always stoking the unrest with grievance propaganda.  But then I remember what happened when the city finally had had enough and elected a law and order Republican, Rudy Giuliani.  It got better!  And indeed, the people of all races and ethnicities felt more united and less angry when a sensible government started enforcing the law and holding everyone accountable.

I won’t claim that there aren’t differences between people.  In fact, I’ll go one step further and says we’re all different from each other.  Every family has a smarter kid and a tougher kid and a kid who doesn’t follow the rules.  But if one kid does better in school you can’t hold him back to make the less smart kid feel better about himself.  And as every parent knows, the best way to keep the peace in a family is to come up with reasonable rules and make sure that everyone follows them.  It’s only when you see someone else getting away with something, you’re not allowed to that trouble begins.

So, this is getting overly long.  My way of thinking about this is that if we can elect non-leftists who want to restore normalcy to the country, we can do it.  Maybe it won’t happen.  But just saying it’s impossible doesn’t appeal to me, at least not yet.  President Trump has given me hope that it can be done.  Let’s see if he can do it before we throw in the towel.

Identity Politics and Civic Nationalism – Part 1

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One of the most troubling aspects of the America we now live in is the racial animosity exhibited almost universally across the whole spectrum of political ideologies.  Of course, the Marxists and their descendants, the Progressives, have perfected it into a weapon that they use to inflame hatred against Americans of European Descent or as we used to call them Americans.  But the fallout of this multi-generational strategy is that their opponents, especially on the very farthest edges of the Right Wing are learning to use this same tactic in reverse.  A whole generation of Alt-Right and Dissident Right ideologues are focusing on racial identity politics and the tactics of racial polarization to the exclusion of almost anything else.  In fact, this idea that racial identity will trump all other ways of uniting and dividing people has actually made headway among formerly “color-blind” conservatives.  My read on this is that rather than any effective proselytizing by the Dissident Right, the real catalyst for this transformation was the racial animus and partisanship demonstrated by the Obama Administration during the Black Lives Matter and other teachable moments that our “Dear Leader” talked down to us about.

In that sense I somewhat understand the depth of the hatred that has developed along the racial divide.  The behavior by the Justice Department in fueling these fake police incidents was outrageous and did enormous harm by throwing fuel on the already hot flashpoints that exist in the crime ridden ghettos where the police are just about all that stands between poor people and the law of the jungle.

But what it has turned into on the Dissident Right is a conviction that civic life and law and order cannot transcend differences between people of different races and ethnicities.  The more thoughtful voices in that community do not contend that we are headed for some kind of civil war or balkanization of the United States.  They talk more about individual states ignoring laws that they do not agree with and going their own way on these things.  In fact, this is not that different from what California and some other places have already done on immigration law with their so-called sanctuary cities.

What this all amounts to is the Dissident Right declaring that the Progressives have outmaneuvered the Right by increasing legal and illegal immigration to the point that they will have a permanent dominance over electoral power and will use it to create a permanent grievance machine to disenfranchise Americans of European Descent by punitive means such as affirmative action and other discriminatory policies.

Are they right?

I prefer to think that they’re not.  My read on this is that the situation has been exacerbated by Republican “leaders” who actually seem to buy into the fairness of minority identity politics out of some kind of ancestral guilt or because they see electoral advantage in joining the progressives.  The proof of this can be seen in the success of a civic nationalist like Trump who isn’t guilted into kowtowing to illegal immigration out of fear of being called a racist.  Once you disarm the Progressives of that weapon you find out that the majority of Americans, even in Blue States, want immigration laws to be obeyed.

I contend if the Right forcefully advocates for full enforcement of immigration laws and the elimination of reverse discrimination policies by the government and other entities, it will go a long way toward lowering tensions between the various groups living in the United States and will allow people to start thinking of each other as neighbors and not potential enemies.

Am I right?  I can’t claim I’m sure.  I think the next few years will be indicative of whether the Dissident Right is correct or whether there’s still time to fix the mess we’re in.  And believe me, I don’t minimize how bad things have become.  On the worst days, I shake my head and look at maps to see where I can move to that will allow me to stave off the worst of it for a little longer.

In the second part of this I’ll look a little more closely at the specifics of the Dissident Right’s logic and compare it to my own way of looking at where we are.

Identity Politics and Civic Nationalism – Part 2

06MAY2018 – OCF Update

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This week I’ll finish up reading Larry Correia’s “Monster Hunter Seige” and post a review.  The hard cover version came out back in July but I buy the paperback for convenience and that version just got issued.  The site has been a little slow because I’m putting together a sort of “best of” post on my southwest landscape trip for a link that Captain Capitalism is providing me and it’s a time-consuming endeavor.  It’s like eleven hundred files and I’m still learning how to use Capture One.  So bear with me.  That post should be pretty interesting for the photo enthusiasts.  As I mentioned earlier I’ll get those rental lenses on Friday the 11th and that will spawn some interesting posts on the viability of using Sigma lenses with Canon mount on the Sony A7 cameras.  That may be interesting to Canon shooters with Sigma glass who have been interested in switching to Sony and anyone who is still constrained by Sony’s telephoto and macro lens choices.

The other thing I am interested in writing about is the direction of right wing movement.  I am trying to formulate my own particular spin on what makes sense going forward.  There is a lot of confusion and undirected anger that doesn’t seem to be producing much in the way of results.  And there seems to be a certain amount of opportunism and charlatanism that makes it difficult to know what is solid and worthwhile.  Sometimes it seems that several people have each latched onto a different piece of the puzzle needed to reform the current situation but like the blind men and the elephant they only “see” a small part of the reality and are missing the big picture.  And because of that, they diagnose that small part of the problem and their solution doesn’t address the broader situation.  And some of the “wise men” are too extreme.  They would throw out the baby with the bath water.  The more I think about solutions for the social disintegration the more I think that restoring the common-sense institutions we used to have is the solution.  Stopping unlimited immigration is neither impossible nor radical.  Restoring respect for the traditions and institutions of our forefathers is important and relatively straight forward.  And replacing social justice and reverse discrimination with actual justice is so rational that it shouldn’t even require explanation.  I think some of the emphasis on race reality is a response to the absurdity that occurs when racial and sexual protectionism and intersectionality tactics are used to attack the American white middle and working classes.  If you eliminate these irritants then the rules of American society should be competent to allow different types of people to function relatively harmoniously.  Anyway, that is what I’m starting to think.  I’m definitely interested in other opinions.  And I read around to hear what other people are coming up with.  For instance I’m going to read Gregory Cochran’s “The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution” and David Reich’s “Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past” to see if there’s anything in biology that rules out my optimism for a functional multi-ethnic America.

And finally, I’d love to get more feedback from the readers.  Even if it’s negative.  It’s useful to know what you like and what you don’t.  Or even to just say hi.  It’s definitely appreciated and part of why I made this site.  I am interested in hearing other points of view.  And if you find something interesting on-line pass along the link.