[Wagner plays]

Proud sons of the north... my training is complete.

So you may remember, in my video about alpha males, I responded to a guy called The Golden One. 

[Clip: surprise flex]

I'm ready to begin the training master.

[Clip: The Jewish question]

you're a goddamn fascist!

In that video I said that I wasn't going to argue against White Nationalism. I just assumed that it was wrong. And of course that was pretty irritating to White Nationalists, who want to bait me into arguing with them.

[reading alt right comments]

So in this video I want to go through the exercise of explaining exactly what's wrong with White Nationalism, both to clear myself of the accusation of relying only on "insults" and to maybe persuade people who may sympathize with white nationalist views.

Now, the conventional liberal wisdom is that you shouldn't argue with white nationalists because it grants them a kind of legitimacy when you give them a seat at the discussion table. But at this point I think a lot of people privately or publicly hold white nationalist views already, and the public may never hear strong arguments against them. Also, speaking as a mentally ill, alcoholic transvestite with less than a third the YouTube subscribers of the second largest channel about the lives of ants, I think the danger of my being the one to catapult white nationalism into mainstream acceptability is pretty remote.

So, in this video I'm not going to use the words "racist" and "Nazi" (even though they're completely fair and accurate descriptions). I don't need to resort to insulting these fascist fucks because I believe that reason will prevail, and so, in this video I'm going to remain at all times calm, rational, relaxing, soothing.

[ASMR whispering] I want you to lie back and relax while I crinkle this page I tore out of Mein Kampf, and we can just have a nice, soothing conversation about the wave of right-wing extremism sweeping across Europe. Sk sk sk sk sk.

Part 1: White Nationalism with a Friendly Face

The Golden One’s recent videos are all about how to be a good representative for the nationalist cause, that is, how to tone down the, uh—I said I wasn’t gonna say Nazi—the monstrous, lunatic aspects of the program. And apparently that means wearing a suit, not jacking off, and, protecting the racial purity of Skyrim. [clip: Skyhaven temple]

It also means trying to distance the movement from the idea that it’s based on racial hate, something White Nationalists have been doing for a long time. Here’s the website of a group called the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which seems to have been designed around the same time as the promotional website for the 1996 movie Space Jam.

The website promises to “dispel some of the lies told about us by the liberal news media. Let me start by addressing the repeated falsehood that we are a ‘HATE GROUP’. Let me assure you that nothing could be further from the truth. We do not hate any group of people! We hate drugs, homosexuality, abortion and race-mixing, because these things go against God’s law and they are destroying all white nations.”

So this sounds pretty similar to the The Golden One’s bizarre cocktail of not drinking, not coming, not having sex with brown people, and generally shunning everything worth doing. Minus the Christianity, plus a little light High Fantasy Odinism.

Stormfront admin Jack Boot (who’s definitely not a Nazi) posts a White Nationalism FAQ from the 90s where it’s explained that “The desire of White Nationalists to form their own nation has nothing to do with superiority or inferiority…. In fact, the formation of a White nation removes any possibility of White dominance of other races, as well as the plausibility of the accusation that Whites wish to dominate others.”

So this is the standard White Nationalist PR move. You say: well, we’re not a hate group, no, not us, that’s not what we’re about, we’re just good God-loving folks who take pride in our own people, and what’s the harm in that?

Part 2: What’s the Harm in That

So we’ve got the KKK pretending to stand up for diversity, Stormfront users with Nazi—I mean, uh, traditional right-wing extremist?—symbology claiming not to be white supremacists, and the Golden One saying that poor maligned Hitler didn’t actually hate the Jews. 

[Clip: Golden One on the JQ]

I hope none of you are buying any of this. Still, I think maybe the Golden One raises an important point. Namely, is the main problem with Hitler really that he hated the Jews? I mean, I think just about everyone harbors some kind of racial animosity. In my case I happen to hate the Belgians. 

Fuck this waffle.

But the point is not what your private emotions are so much as what you do with them. So it’s not hate per se that’s the problem, so much as the politics it produces. It’s what Hitler did and said that distinguishes him. And what he did is kill all the European Jews. And why’d he do that? Well, in the name of purging Europe of all non-Aryan peoples, which is precisely the goal of White Nationalism. 

Now I know people are going to say, see, you’re just resorting to talking about Nazis and the holocaust! Argumentum ad Hitlerum! To which I respond that when the subject at had is ethnic cleansing inspired by anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, Nazis and the Holocaust are pretty goddamn relevant, wouldn’t you say?

And of course I realize that isn’t going to be very convincing to White Nationalists, since most of these fuckin’ people are holocaust deniers, and if the overwhelming evidence described by pretty much every academic historian who looks at the issue isn’t enough to convince them that it happened, I doubt that anything I can say will be. When you’re so deep in a conspiracy theory that all opposing evidence is immediately dismissed as some kind of Jewish hoax, well, there’s not much arguing with you.

Though I have to wonder why people whose explicit goal is the ethnic cleansing of so-called white nations find it so impossible to believe that other people with that exact same goal actually took a swing at it.

Now, White Nationalists will tell you that ethnic cleansing can actually be non-violent. After all, couldn’t non-whites simply be peacefully banished from so-called white nations? 

Well, probably not. There are around 39 million African Americans and 57 million Hispanic people in the United States alone. Where are they going to go? What will the people in the new places think about welcoming around a hundred million refugees? 

How’s this going to work guys?

I mean, even Nazi—uh I mean, Alt-Right Germany?—began with non-violent methods of coercing Jewish emigration. It was only later that it escalated to attacks on their property, ghettoization, mass incarceration, and finally extermination.

So excuse me for not feeling very reassured.

That Stormfront FAQ proposes that white Americans could simply cede lost territory and move to uninhabited lands. 

And you know guys, I think that’s a great idea. Why don’t you all move to your little colony in Wyoming, and leave everyone else alone. Don’t take your computers with you, and delete your social media accounts. Because that is a Jewish invention.

Part 3: Whiteness

Traditionally, Nationalism is a political ideology that places the communal identification with a nation or people at the center of politics. National identity usually involves a shared language, history and geographical locus. So, while, say, German nationalism or Japanese nationalism are both terrible political philosophies, they at least kind of make sense, insofar as there’s sort of such a thing as the German people or the Japanese people.

White Nationalism on the other hand, is way less coherent, because Whiteness is an amorphous and fairly recent social construct. At the time of the Roman Empire, different ethnic groups living in Europe would never have recognized themselves as belonging to the same race. To Ancient Romans, Gauls, Saxons and Celts, the idea that all Europeans belong to one people would have been about as palatable then as the idea that Africans and Europeans belong to the same race is to contemporary, uh, meme-based alternative ethno-centrists?

But the Golden One mixes Nordic, Celtic and Greco-Roman imagery together as if all historical European ethnicities are interchangeable. But this is a fictional unification that only makes sense under the relatively modern concept of “whiteness.”

And if you unweave that fictional unity, it becomes pretty hard to take seriously the utopian vision of a unified white nation. As recently as the 20th century, Irish people were treated as a kind of racial underclass in England and the US. And Nazi race theory divided the European race into at least five sub-races, of which only the Nordic were considered the master race.

So what makes White Nationalists think that these kinds of race conflicts won’t reemerge in a new White Ethno-state obsessed with racial purity?

And all this is to say nothing of the fact that having even the purest European ancestry is still not enough to guarantee your membership in the category of whiteness. If you’re Jewish, you’re out. If you’re a race traitor, you’re out. If you’re a degenerate beta-leftist pleb-tier subhuman dog, you’re out. Because being a good white person also apparently involves doing deadlifts and not taking drugs or masturbating, which is all part of what the Golden One calls Race of Spirit.

This is all so convoluted and abstract. It seems like what White Nationalists really care about is the idea of whiteness, not actual white people, most of whom they seem not to regard very highly.

[Golden One clip]

And this brings us nicely to our next topic.

Part 4: White Genocide

Sigh, so the central of idea of modern White Nationalist theory is that white people need their own ethno-states in order to prevent something called White Genocide. So what the fuck is white genocide?

Well, genocide is usually defined as the attempt to exterminate an entire ethnic or religious group. But White Nationalists use the term to refer to the immigration of non-white people to majority white countries. So that’s not really genocide, because genocide means killing off a group of people, not just adding more of a different kind of… man this idea is so stupid I don’t even know how to begin arguing with it.

Well look, one way we could think of this is in terms of historical genocides that began with new migrants. So for instance the Europeans who settled North America took over native land, they killed and enslaved native populations, they forcibly imposed their own government and religion. That’s at least in the neighborhood of a genocide.

So the question to ask is, are Muslim or Hispanic immigrants killing and enslaving millions of whites, are they forcing whites to convert to their religions and speak their language at gunpoint? No. They’re not. Basically the fear of white genocide is the unfounded fear that non-white people are going to treat whites as badly as they’ve historically treated others. 

Now I want to reiterate that it seems like what White Nationalists are really worried about defending isn’t actual white people, but the idea of whiteness. And things like race-mixing threaten that idea. Miscegenation doesn’t muddy anyone’s blood; that’s just not an actual thing. What it muddies is the already pretty sketchy concept of whiteness. 

And I should say that if I really thought that American or Swedish culture was dying out, I actually would be kind of sad about it. If the English language, for instance, was in decline, I’d say, yeah, we should do something to save it. But what’s happening is exactly the opposite. I mean, European, and especially Anglophone culture is the most dominant in the entire world. English is spoken all over India and Africa, it’s taught in Chinese schools, it’s the lingua franca of the Internet. 

So this whole thing is preposterous. You’re taking the most dominant, the most imperialistic culture in the world, and you’re saying this is the one we really need to be worried about. And that’s… goddamn. I have a master’s degree in philosophy. Why am I still arguing on the Internet with this golden man?

Part 5: Concluding Remarks

White Nationalism is an affront to everything good about western civilization. Ideas like individual freedom and religious tolerance are the best products of European political thought. Though white supremacists in practice, the founders of the United States designed a society capable of tolerating a diversity of thought, speech, and custom, and a franchise that includes people of different origins and religions. WN wants to tear it all down for the sake of some communitarian ethno-state in which skin color is citizenship and dissent is treason.

White Nationalism is therefore incompatible with the values of liberal democracy, to an extent perhaps only rivalled by Political Islam. At least in theory. In practice, White Nationalist ideas are much more dangerous to liberal values in Western countries, since they have way more influence here over governments and institutions than Islamism does.

So I don’t care whether you wear a suit, or insist you don’t hate other races, or veil your ideas in irony and memes. White Nationalism is wrong, nonsensical and immoral, and it has no place in liberal societies except in the way that Islamism does: as a kind of fringe test of the limits of toleration.

And, The Golden One, if you’re watching this, we can’t really be friends as long as you're like this. And I don’t expect you ever to change your mind, but I want to say that if you ever do, well, I’ll be waiting for you, in some faraway  tavern of degeneracy with a horn of mead.

Patron Thea Raintree asks: I've dated a fair amount of white men that refuse to date white women. Something about this feels wrong, but I can't put my finger on exactly what.

Well, let’s see. First I’ll say that lots of people have racial dating preferences, and sometimes they’re just that: preferences. But there are a couple ways this can go wrong. If a guy has a full-on fetish for, say, black women or Asian women, that could lead him to treat them as particular instances of a fetishized stereotype, rather than as individual people, and that’s obviously not great for the people he’s dating. The other way I can see this going wrong is if the guy’s preference is the product of some kind of general hostility toward white women. So if he’s like fuck white women, I’m done with them that’s probably a sign he’s got some issues to work out. But the frustrating thing about this is you really just have to judge it on a case by case basis. 

In any case, congratulations on annoying White Nationalists by dating outside your race.