Tag: race relations

Guest Contributor – GlennW – 28OCT2023 – Reaction to Chucking Pebbles

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Hi photog,

I’ve been watching the comments to your post to see if a discussion breaks out. Well, maybe I should be the first one to jump in and see what happens.

As you may remember, I read and listened to ZMan religiously until the kerfuffle with Michael Anton. After giving it some thought I decided that Anton was a lot more right than the ZMan and I just lost interest. I’m sure ZMan would brand me as a “civ-nat” but I just can’t care anymore. As I get older I find one dimensional labels, including “civ-nat”, worse than useless and try to avoid them when possible.

There are several ideas I would like to throw out there and see what your readers think. It seems to me that the white collar and entrepreneurial community always knew the blue collar folks were getting the shaft. For the most part they thought they were on the “right side” of history so they were safe. Now they are starting to realize they are just the next ones to be eaten by the crocodile. The next couple of years should be interesting.

You are correct that ZMan doesn’t think the races can live together under one set of laws fairly enforced. A big problem for the Dissident Right is they can’t really provide a definition of “race.” White, black, and brown aren’t races. I have heard ZMan say on several occasions that the original colonies should have grouped together into five different countries, instead of one, due to differences in the English immigrants. For anyone whose interested I believe he got that idea from the book Albion’s Seed.

If that’s true, and you multiply that across all European immigration to the U.S., there are literally hundreds of white groups (really clans) in North America. Add to that all the other immigration that’s happened over the years and I am a bit perplexed as to how the Dissident Right would implement a government. ZMan never provides a sketch of what this reconstituted government would look like and I suspect that’s on purpose.

Also, per their theory, I should prefer to live next to other white people (yes, I’m white) over anyone else. I happen to be Christian and find that I have more affinity for other Christians than a generic white person. I would, in no uncertain terms, rather live next to a black family from my church than Richard Dawkins. I don’t think I’m the only one that feels that way and would fight any attempt to cram some form of involuntary segregation down my throat.

In the end I don’t think the Dissident Right will be a majority on the “right”. If they hope to accomplish anything they will have to learn to work with the civ-nats who they love to hate. Maybe ZMan is coming around to that view? I guess we’ll see in time.

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?

 

A Black American Speaks the Hard Truth to His Race

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Glenn C. Loury is a professor of economics at Brown University and writes for the City Journal.  He’s also black.

Here’s the last paragraph of his honest essay.

“I take no pleasure in doing so but feel obliged to report this reality: equality of dignity, equality of standing, of honor, of security in one’s position within society, an equal ability to command the respect of others—such things cannot simply be handed over. Nor will they be the fruit of insurrection, violent uprising, or rebellion. Equality of this sort is something we must wrest with our bare hands from a cruel and indifferent world by means of our own effort, inspired by the example of our enslaved and newly freed ancestors. We must make ourselves equal. No one can do that for us. My fear is that, until we recognize and accept this unlovely but inexorable fact about the human condition—until we disdain the rhetoric and embrace the realities about race in our country—the disparities that have so troubled our politics and so threatened our domestic tranquility will continue to persist.”

I think if you read his post you’ll be hard pressed to disagree with any of it.  Unfortunately the Left is invested in denying this reality and feed the false narrative of “white supremacists” around every corner.

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.

The Chauvin Trial – Some Thoughts

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Many years ago, I served on a jury for the trial of a man who was accused by his ex-wife of threatening to kill her.  Now this is a serious felony that can land you in prison for a number of years.  The prosecution produced the wife and she testified that after her two-year-old daughter returned from her weekly stay with her father the daughter told her that her ex-husband told the daughter that he was going to kill the ex-wife.  She claimed that the daughter drew her finger across her neck to indicate that he planned to kill her.  The only other witness was the two-year-old daughter.  The tiny child was placed on the witness stand and as soon as the prosecutor approached the stand the child burst out crying hysterically.  After a while, the jury was taken out of the courtroom to a conference room down the hall and waited.  After about a half hour we returned to the jury box and the little girl was brought back to the witness stand and as soon as the prosecutor neared the stand, the little girl once again burst out crying.  The whole process was repeated again and with the same result.  After a third attempt the little girl was excused and was taken from the courtroom.  While all of this was going on I watched the child’s parents.  Her mother was cajoling her from the seat in the front where she was sitting to stop crying and talk to the prosecutor.  Her father, the defendant, looked visibly shaken by the spectacle and during the third attempt there were tears in his eyes.  The defendant was Hispanic and the ex-wife was a blonde who might have been Irish-American.

When we were brought back into the courtroom after the third failure the two lawyers made their closing remarks.  We were given three different charges of lessening severity that the defendant could be charged with.  The defense counsel stressed that the wife’s statement had not been corroborated by any other evidence and that a reasonable doubt was all that was needed to conclude that not guilty was the correct verdict.

The jury was made up of eight women and four men.  We ranged in age from our thirties to forties.  About half were dressed in business attire and the others more casually.  One of the women was made foreman and we had some discussions.  The woman given the lead thought that since we didn’t have much evidence, we should just assign a guilty verdict to the charge that was intermediate in severity and call it a day.  And much to my surprise every other person in that room but myself agreed.  They were perfectly willing to give the defendant a guilty verdict on a crime that could give him five years in prison.  For a minute I was shocked.  When it was my turn to talk, I said, “That’s crazy.  If you have any reasonable doubt of his guilt you are compelled to vote not guilty.”  The answer the foreman gave me was, “Well, he’s probably guilty of something so we won’t be far off with the five-year charge.”  I wanted to say some pretty horrible things to her but instead I just said, “If that was you in there would you want us to just give you five years in prison just in case you were guilty?”  She just grimaced at me and said we should write out our votes.

The first vote was eleven to one.  We called for the court officer and told him the vote.  He said we would have to spend a couple of more hours and try to reach a decision.  We talked some more but no one changed his vote.  We had three more vote and they were all exactly the same.

After two hours the judge came into the jury room and told us he wasn’t surprised that we couldn’t come up with a verdict.  He said it was very unusual to try to get a witness that young into court.  Also, he let us know, now that the trial was finished by a hung jury, that there was a custody battle going on for the child and it was not unusual for spurious complaints to be filed against an ex-spouse to strengthen a custody case.

The point I am making here is that it isn’t likely that most of the jurors will follow the correct procedure for determining guilt.  What Derek Chauvin is down to hoping is that at least one honest man is on that jury.  And I don’t think his chances are very good.  Minnesota is much like New England and most of the inhabitants are very strong adherents of the civic religion that is known as social justice.  They will think it is their duty to heal the racial divide by punishing the scape-goat and that is what Derek Chauvin has been designated.

My guess is they will select the middle severity charge and declare him guilty.  So that is the current state of race relations and justice in the Blue States.  If Chauvin is found guilty of murder I would expect a huge exodus from the police departments across all of the blue states and the blue cities in the red states.  After all, is a dangerous civil service job that pays pretty well worth the chance of spending twenty years in prison?  I’d say no.  Good luck Derek Chauvin, you’ll need it.

The Singapore Model (or Lee Kuan Yew for Dictator for Life!)

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If we’re really this multi-ethnic post-white country then I propose off-shoring our government to Singapore.  Lee Kuan Yew makes Joe Biden look like the road-kill that he is by comparison.  This guy knows how to keep the peace between ethnicities that don’t like each other and he sure as hell would cut out the deadwood in the Deep State.  Of course we’d have to get rid of freedom of the press but would you really miss it at this point?