Against Hope:
On Adam Carolla & the Jock Right

1,676 words

After hearing a recent rant by Adam Carolla – the one about how Los Angeles is turning into Mexico – I feel the need to address what I call the “Jock Right.” As we all know, people tend to cluster into ideological niches, and the Right is no different than any other collective body that shares broad goals. There’s the Alt Lite, the Gun Right, Men Going Their Own Way, the manosphere, white advocates, whatever Jack Donovan is up to these days, and, of course, White Nationalism, aka the “Alt” Right.

I believe that if we were to force all of these groups to choose between Right and Left, they would all choose Right, despite how much they argue with each other on less fundamental issues.

With the Jock Right, we have men, mostly, who in a sense view life as an athletic event for which we all must constantly prepare. Famous middleweight champion Rocky Graziano once described boxing by saying, “The fight for survival is the fight.” When describing his recent brutal knockout of Daniel Cormier, former UFC champion Jon Jones noted, “There is no mercy in combat.”

Life is competition, you see. There can only be one winner. Sport is proxy for life and war. Better to lose honorably like men than to show up unprepared like children. Anyone who has followed the life and career of wrestling great Dan Gable will know that constant preparation is one of his mantras. After reading Steven Pressfield’s magnificent novel Gates of Fire, I get the feeling the Spartans had the same attitude when they were piercing Persian bodies with their spears on the beach at Thermopylae.

Discipline, essentially, is good for you. It’s what makes you win. Without it, you lose. When Adam Carolla complains about LA turning into Mexico, that’s essentially what his thesis boils down to. He starts off with clear, unvarnished logic, typical of the Right these days when discussing the clash of cultures. Only, as a proponent of the Jock Right, Carolla is a bit more combative than usual. And a bit more profane.

No one wants to talk about this but Mexico is shitty place to live . . . The deal is that we can absorb as a society X amount of folks from Mexico a year before we turn into Mexico. If we turn into Mexico, then we’re a shit joint, too. It’s easy math. Mexico is . . . shitty . . . there’s a bunch of corruption, bunch of drug lords, bunch of everything . . . We cannot get above a certain level and we are exceeding that level.

Very little to argue with here. I believe that Carolla is groping towards what’s known as the “Smart Fraction Theory,” which posits that a civilized society can only sustain itself as civilized if a certain proportion of its population has an IQ over 108. Once that minimum is no longer met, the society will become less and less civilized. Carolla sees this happening in Los Angeles and wants to sound off about it.

Carolla, however, addresses the problem with what I call “jock logic.” His complaint is not so much that Mexicans are ruining Los Angeles but that by lacking the discipline to assimilate, they are ruining themselves. And Carolla, like an authoritative high school coach, admonishes them for it:

 [I]t’s unfair to them! Because the deal is that they need to come here not for a slice of what they had, but for a slice of what we’re offering. And what we’re offering is education and we’re offering ability to move forward . . . When the populace grows too large where you can speak your own language. You don’t have to learn this language, you can work within your community . . . I would say the same thing for German or Polish or Chinese or anything. Once it hits a critical mass, when you get to the point where you don’t have to learn the language . . . then you’ve essentially just recreated what you’ve left, and what you’ve left was fucked up. Now, what you’ve created here is going to be fucked up, too.

More Carolla:

I am not talking about it as a white guy who sits on the mountain. I’m talking about it as a guy who cares about the Latin people that are in this community. It’s your school systems that are getting fucked up. Our kids are going to fucking private schools. They’re not going to those shitty LA unified schools . . . You are fucking it up for yourselves. There was a time when people came to this country, and no matter what boat your great-grandparents got off of, they had to fucking assimilate because if they didn’t assimilate, they didn’t work. Well, now asking someone to assimilate is racist . . . We are doing these people a horrible disservice by saying you don’t have to assimilate.

Inherent in Carolla’s approach, I think, is a misplaced sense of hope. His hope, of course, is that a little tough love can help turn Mexican-Americans into white Americans. It reminds me of a high school football coach I once knew who, during a halftime after his team had taken a dreadful beating, grabbed an underperforming player by the facemask and threw him into the weeds. He was hoping that by insulting the boy’s pride, he could inspire him to try harder. It worked, although the team still lost.

Remember the movie Miracle? “Win, lose, or tie, you are going to play like champions!” This is what US Olympic hockey coach Herb Brooks told his players while he was torturing them with drills after a mediocre performance. It’s not so much about winning; it’s about being a champion on the inside. By not assimilating, and by having too many children, Carolla makes the case that Mexican-Americans are not acting like champions, inside or out. They are not making the most out of America.

He’s right, of course. But he’s wrong for believing that a broad swath of the Mexican populace, as a sizeable minority in the US, contains enough individuals who are capable of behaving like champions to begin with. If they did, they would have demonstrated that ability in Mexico, no? After all, they’ve been there for centuries. It’s not like they haven’t had enough time. By Carolla’s own admission, Mexico is a “piece of shit.” Why, then, would he think that stomping on Mexican pride in a profanity-filled rant is going to change anything?

Because of hope. For all its tough, elemental talk, this is how the Jock Right differs from many other Rightist niches. They see humanity as one big team, and one should always stand by one’s teammates. You can take your IQ gaps and your race-realism and your ethno-whatevers. What really matters is heart. If you have heart, we will always have a third-string cornerback position for you, baby. You make us stronger just by being here.

Unfortunately, Adam Carolla doesn’t realize how high the stakes are. If I am wrong, and Carolla’s sense of hope is based in reality, then where is that reality? Go back to the time of the Aztecs and show me any point in history at which Mexico, when not run by whites of Spanish or French descent, was a great place. You need to find this reality before having hope, not after.

But if I am indeed right, and Carolla’s sense of hope is misplaced, then what are we doing to our country? Why are we even talking about assimilation? Is the Mexification of once-great cities like Los Angeles going to be permanent, just like the Mexification of Mexico was permanent? What then? More cuss words from Adam Carolla? Or should we just cede all of the Southwest to Mexico and be done with it?

It’s lose-lose for the Jock Right here. Either they waste their energies hunting for realities that don’t exist, or they admit defeat. Adam Carolla says, “Now, somebody has to stand up and start talking about this.” Well, yes, but I think we need to talk about the flaws in the thinking of the Jock Right before we talk about the flaws of the Mexicans. In the former case, the flaws are fixable. I believe that with enough reason, evidence, and time, the Adam Carollas of the world can be led to the two perfectly logical conclusions which currently inform the Hard Right:

1. most non-whites (Hispanics, blacks, and Arabs in particular) are simply incapable of rising to the higher white standards of civilization;
2. with enough non-whites living in a traditionally white society, they will ultimately become the enemy of whites.

Despite all this criticism, I still like the Jock Right, and I like Adam Carolla. I find him honest and funny (his podcasts are great, but I especially love his work on The Man Show). He’s also brave and thoroughly pugnacious (years ago, he was a boxing instructor). If all white men had his nerve, we would be in much better shape than we are today. He’s not afraid to dismiss political correctness and trample on taboos in order to solve a dreadful problem. Just the fact that he sees the Mexification of Los Angeles as a crisis makes him aces in my book, even if he doesn’t fully understand its nature.

The point is this: I’m the Grand Wizard from the Klan because I’m pointing something out that I’m seeing happening. And I’m seeing it as a guy who’s lived here my whole fucking life. And I’m willing to talk about it. And no one else seems to be willing to talk about it. And the deal is this: we either focus on it, treat it like the problem that it’s becoming, and start seeing what we can do about it, or we’ll just turn a fucking blind eye to it . . . And it can just keep getting worse. That’s the reality.

I agree. But given the faulty logic of the Jock Right, the solution is not to swear at Mexicans until they improve their game. The solution is to cut them from the team. The stakes are too high to do otherwise.