When Trump became the Republican nominee, I talked about how he and Bernie Sanders were the only two mainstream politicians who were realistically addressing the economic situation facing working-class Americans, and that if I was a working-class American, I could easily see myself voting for Trump over Clinton.
When Trump became president, I was horrified by how determined the left-wing media were to ignore this reality, and instead became fixated on calling everyone who didn't vote for Hillary a racist, sexist, anti-gay, Islamophobe. Mercifully, they did eventually let this go, and instead became swept up in an unsubstantiated fantasy about a grand Russian conspiracy. Mercifully, this too, seems to have almost perished.
After the election, I pointed out that the Trump problem wasn't the sort of thing that could be solved through sanctimonious finger-wagging, and that if lefties couldn't bring themselves to listen to the legitimate grievances coming from Trump's voter-base, it was in fact, a problem that was only going to get worse.
For a while now, I've been a strong believer in the notion of trying to see the world through the eyes of people you disagree with. I think it might have started in 2001, when I couldn't bring myself to blindly swallow the prevailing narrative that "Muslims attack us because they resent our freedom". Oh, and if you're keen on bullshit narratives, you might be interested to know that the role of investment-banks and ratings-agencies has almost been entirely erased from the collapse of the Greek economy. Listen to any financial expert now, and the story you'll get is basically "Greece went tits-up because Wogs are lazy and don't pay tax".
Anyway, after Christchurch, I decided I was going to have a serious look into white-identitarianism. So I did. This is what I've found so far.
According to demographic projections, whites are transitioning from being an ethic majority to an ethnic minority in most parts of the world—including a number of European countries. Some of those whites are looking at what's going on in South Africa and concluding that this is not going to be a good thing for them. They may have a point.
"Critical Race Theory" is an academic field that apparently came out of America in the '80s, and is basically an intellectual attempt at explaining why the existence of white people makes the world worse for everybody else. The general idea is that whites have constructed the modern world in a way that benefits themselves at the expense of others. So, even if overt racism were to be completely eliminated, inherent racism is so thoroughly baked into the fabric of society that non-whites will always be perpetually disadvantaged.
It's a theory which can be used to explain any statistical measure where whites do better than non-whites, including academic performance, wealth distribution, and incarceration rates. And yes, in case you're wondering, this is where the notion of white-privilege comes from.
More radical advocates of CRT argue that the mere existence of white people in a society creates an oppressive force. Some hold the position that the only way to overcome this is through racial segregation; others insist that society itself needs to be torn down and rebuilt, free from structural racism. I've heard people go so far as to say that things as basic as the scientific method have to be thrown out and replaced with something less intrinsically white. If you poke around the internet long enough, you can even find people on the furthest extremes, talking about how whiteness is so toxic, and so infects anything it touches, that non-whites will never be free from oppression so long as whites exist anywhere on the planet.
All this probably wouldn't be such a big deal if it was totally fringe stuff that nobody cared about, but CRT seems to have become incredibly popular amongst young people on the far left. The old Marxist outlook, whereby the majority of the world's ills are caused by the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few—has been replaced with the idea that there is a deeper issue, whereby society is structured in such a way that money naturally flows towards "whiteness", which is in fact the true root of all evil.
And if you're thinking that a lot of this stuff sounds suspiciously like anti-Jewish propaganda from the 1930s, I probably wouldn't have much of a beef with that assessment. I guess the biggest difference is that—for the time being—whites are still a majority in most Western countries, and still occupy a majority of the positions of power.
And this, I think, is what has allowed the less radical side of CRT to seep into the mainstream. We're now at a point where the majority of people will more-or-less shrug off any disparaging remarks directed towards whites, while the mere utterance of the word "nigger", even when talking about the use of the word "nigger", is seen as utterly scandalous (hence this "N-word" bullshit). One of these things is viewed as an oppressive force punching down on a victim class, whereas the other is seen as a rebellious underdog punching up towards an intrinsic position of power and authority.
Probably the best example that I've talked about on the blog, was when Google published their last "Inclusivity Report". It showed that, amongst their US employees, there was a massive MASSIVE over-representation of Asians, and an under-representation of every other race (including whites), and that over time, there had been a trend towards even more Asians, and even fewer of every other race (including whites); and yet if you looked at the media, all you could find was article after article talking about how Google should "fix" its diversity problem by employing fewer whites and more black and brown people. Here is the Noel Plum video that I linked to at the time, if you want to get into the details of that one. While Noel isn't a white-identitarian, he's not fucking blind either.
So you've got a growing number of white people who are noticing this weird asymmetrical bigotry that's crept into the culture, and they're looking at what's going on in South Africa, and then they're looking at the demographic trajectory of their own countries—and somewhat understandably—they're starting to feel like their backs are up against the wall, and the future might not be looking all that bright for their children.
For their part, a lot of white-identitarians have adopted a counter-theory to CRT, known as "Race Realism". Proponents of RR argue that human beings are instinctively tribal animals and that race is one of the factors that we instinctively form those tribal allegiances around; so, most of them would concede that there is some degree of latent racism inherent within society. However, they also believe that for the past sixty years, whites have struggled to overcome their innate biases, and have built the most egalitarian and meritocratic societies ever to have existed … and here's where things get interesting …
These meritocratic societies are competitive by nature, with the biggest advantages going towards people with the highest levels of intelligence. Advocates of RR claim that while there is massive overlap between the intelligence levels of the races, there is also a measurable difference between the averages. This results in a natural distribution where Asians and ethnic Jews have become dramatically over-represented in the top echelons of society, while black and brown people are still dramatically over-represented at the bottom (with white people sitting somewhere in the middle). What I find interesting about RR is that it explains why some ethic minorities have succeeded spectacularly while others have not; a point that I have never seen CRT address satisfactorily.
Hard-line proponents of RR will then go on to argue that because race is something that people naturally form tribal bonds around, this stratified society inevitably becomes a breeding ground for tension. Racial groups will naturally envy those that dominate a higher strata and show contempt towards those of a lower strata. And because nobody wants to admit that they're tribe is intellectually inferior to another, the existence of the strata themselves gets blamed on prejudice, nepotism, injustice, and all manner of other things. So, just like the really hard-line CRT acolytes, radical proponents of RR also advocate for racial segregation, preferably with each race having their own separate country. This is why you will sometimes hear the term "ethno-nationalist" used interchangeably with "white-identitarian".
Or, at least, that's the case with white-identitarians in the former British colonies (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, US). The white-identity movement in Europe is a slightly different, and in my opinion, a far more interesting kettle of fish. I was going to cover it in this post, but I've already gone on for quite a while, and I'm already more than a day late in posting (this was meant to go up Wednesday). … So, to be continued, I suppose …
