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Bad Apples

On March 12, 2016, Black Lives Matter protesters blocked traffic at a Trump rally in Chicago, including an ambulance, which led to the death of a 4-year-old girl’s father. Not the best PR for the Left.

2,842 words / 17:26

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There are plenty of us on the Alt Right who are truly not motivated by anything that an ordinary person would think of as “racism.” Of course, the Left will classify all of us as “racists” whether we think of ourselves as such or not, simply because of what we believe: that differences in behavior are often influenced more by genes than by environment, and that there are therefore differences between groups that can’t be eliminated by introducing changes to the environment.

All of us genuinely believe that these things are true. And we believe that these things are true because there is compelling evidence to warrant these conclusions – not because we’re looking for excuses to hate people, but because there actually are really good reasons to think these things are true. Many of us even find that our first instinct is to experience curiosity and interest when we come across something foreign, unusual, or weird.

What, then, are we to make of the actual “racists” in our midst? By using that term, I mean to refer to the ones who are actually motivated by distaste, or even hatred, of other people.

The core belief that defines us all is that packing more diversity into a single region is simply not a source of strength. Even if we do believe that diversity has some unique benefits, we believe that those benefits are vastly overwhelmed by the associated costs.

The more diverse society becomes, the less easily people can model and predict the behavior of the community around them, as it is increasingly composed of varieties of people who are unlike them. The less people can model and predict the behavior of people around them, the less people trust each other. And the less people trust each other, the more society as a whole falls apart: there is less donation to charity, less support for welfare policies, less voting, less participation in local community events, less trust for the media . . . and so on down the list it goes.

Copious amounts of research, stretching across vast expanses of time and space, have now confirmed that these are the certain consequences of increases in ethnic diversity, all over the world. Sincere political discussions devolve into the free-for-all of identity politics, and each group bends the truth to suit its own niche interests. If truth and sincerity were fields of grass, diversity would introduce competing farmers there to graze, creating a classical “tragedy of the commons” within the very root of political discourse itself.

And most of us have in fact arrived at the views we hold today because we really do care about things like truth and sincerity. So what should those of us who are here because of sincerely-held convictions and commitment to principles, who desire the best possible outcomes for all, do when actual “racists” appear among us? What should we say or do when the media zooms in on them with laser-like focus, and clicks them with the dropper tool from Microsoft Paint in order to aim the resulting paint bucket at our entire movement?

Believe it or not, many of us – perhaps even most! – were raised in households where speaking “the ‘N’ word” would have gotten us beaten silly, whether because our parents were sincerely offended or simply because they had the good sense to train us not to transgress against such a powerful social norm for no good reason. Whether it was The Cosby Show, or The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, or cartoons like Static Shock or Keenan & Kel, we were raised on a diet of media that often had us identify with non-white protagonists – and we never thought twice. We never lost our girlfriend to a black football player, or fell victim to a black-on-white crime, or had any other comparable formative event define our views, besides our very commitment to truth and justice.

But the fact is, you won’t hear the “non-racists” among us disavow the “racists” very often.

That goes for myself, and this very article as well: while I have used the word “racist,” and the term usually has inherently moralistic connotations, I am merely using it to describe a distinction between myself and others, and I haven’t gone out of my way to give it any elaborate condemnation.

Why?

Here is the core of the issue.

The Left’s bad apples create trouble for the central hypothesis of the Left. Now, the Left doesn’t just preach that tolerating our differences with each other is better than being intolerant. It doesn’t just ask us to be nice and polite to each other. Someone who said, “Look, I know all this diversity is a strain and a source of conflict and tension, but you still ought to try to make the best of it” would not be a Leftist, although they might be some kind of conservative.

No, the central hypothesis of the Left is that the more differences there are between us, the better. To the Leftist, it isn’t just that diversity should be tolerated, and it isn’t just that people should be nice to each other – it’s that we should strive to make sure that the people in a given society are as different from each other as we can possibly make them, because the more differences there are in society to force people to be tolerant of, the stronger society becomes.

When white Leftist parents of mixed-race children find that they can’t fully recognize their children as their own, or preach the virtues of tolerance and diversity while finding that they prefer to live in the whitest parts of the United States (like Austin, Texas, or Seattle, Washington), these people aren’t just doing bad things. No; they’re providing a serious logical strike against the very core of their own doctrine. If even the very liberals who preach the most about tolerance and diversity find out that they really prefer living among whites, or can’t fully relate to children whose skin color isn’t their own, then this only shows the falsity of the doctrine that diversity is somehow an unequivocal good yet more clearly: even the very people who want to love diversity the most still end up falling prey to its many inevitable downsides.

Okay – so what about our bad apples?

While the “bad apples” on the Left coherently work to support our point for us and undermine its central thesis, guess what? The “bad apples” on our side do so as well. Those liberals who find out they can’t fully connect to their mixed-race children are proving that there are real human costs to diversity. The liberals who preach about how others should live in mixed-race communities while discovering that they really don’t want to do so themselves are proving that there are real human costs to diversity.

But there’s more to it. When someone like Dylann Roof shoots up a church, people like him are also proving that there are real human costs to diversity. Suppose I thought that every single person who showed up to march in Charlottesville was some kind of mouth-breathing, neo-Nazi thug. How would I, as someone who agrees with at least the underlying principles of the Alt Right, feel?

Actually, even under that forced assumption, I’d feel exactly the same way about Charlottesville as I do about Black Lives Matter marches where protesters block ambulances, risking the lives of sick children and violently attack white co-marchers with hammers. I’d recognize that both of these kinds of events are an unfortunate byproduct of diversity.

Going back to the equation outlined above and repeating it more succinctly, more diversity means people are less able to model and predict the behavior of the people around them. Less ability to model and predict behavior means less trust. And less trust means society decays from the inside out: less voting, less donation to charity, less civic participation, less faith in all forms of media, and so on.

As this process of decay takes place, everyone is going to feel it.

Black Lives Matter is wrong – dead wrong – about the pet issues they stake their movement on. Most striking of all of these falsities to me is the discovery that in any given interaction with police, a given white person is actually more likely to be shot than a given black person.

But ultimately, they’re out there because they’re experiencing a general sense of mistrust. They’re looking for narratives to explain why they feel it, and those narratives are highly flawed, but that doesn’t change the fact that that mistrust is real. The mistrust itself isn’t something that would just go away because someone refuted their narratives. Indeed, there may even be too little trust for it to be possible for anyone to refute the narratives. When I collect data to show that the crime rate is higher in black communities, BLM advocates I’ve spoken to almost unanimously turn around to argue we can’t know this because it’s racist cops who are determining how many people go to jail for their crimes.

I always point out that we actually have data from victims and witnesses in the National Crime Victimization Survey which shows that when a person calls in a crime naming a white perpetrator, cops are more likely to pursue them than they are when a person calls in a crime naming a black perpetrator. This directly refutes the charge that racist cops are illegitimately singling out blacks, and it proves that the black:white skew of violent crime is even higher than the arrest rate shows.

But at this point, they usually end up endorsing some kind of grand conspiracy theory wherein the government, police, and people who call in to report crimes across all of society are coordinating to make all forms of data on race in crime misleading absolutely everywhere they appear.

Similarly, we know that today, the war on drugs is seen as having originated as a racist conspiracy to use drugs as a pretext to jail more black people. Yet, during the drug epidemics of the ‘60s and onwards, black society blamed whites and viewed them as racist because they weren’t sending cops in to handle the problem. No matter whether white society addressed drugs with policy or ignored it, the problem, according to black society, was whatever white society was doing, even when it was doing the opposite of what was alleged to be racist behavior in other contexts.

This is nonsense – but again, it stems from a basic sense of mistrust that didn’t come out of nowhere, and doesn’t just pop up for no reason. It’s a consequence of diversity. These kinds of conspiracy theories don’t arise when a black cop arrests a violent black perpetrator in an all-black region of Africa. The fact is, when a white cop shoots a black perpetrator, no matter what the facts are, there is a basic sense of mistrust among blacks, because blacks simply don’t expect a white cop to feel as much affinity for blacks in general as a black cop would. And when a black cop shoots a black perpetrator, there is still a basic sense of trust among blacks that a black cop would feel that affinity, and so probably wasn’t acting out of line. White citizens generally feel that same, basic sense of trust when a white cop shoots a white perpetrator. And if black cops were frequently shooting white perpetrators – even if the white crime rate justified it – the fact is, white people would be getting more nervous about it.

So what can you do with this? Well, you can either accept that this is what human nature has been demonstrated to be and work with it, or you can fight it – tirelessly. Forever. You won’t “win” that fight, unless you consider condemning yourself to a world where you have to constantly fight these trends in human nature for as long as you live lest they resurface again to be “winning.” But those are the choices.

And the same thing that goes for Black Lives Matter protests goes for Charlottesville. Just like having blacks riot in the streets even when white cops legitimately defend themselves when actual criminals threaten their lives is part and parcel of diversity, so is having whites marching around yelling about Jews and creating costly clean-ups for local government.

Want to put an end to any of those things? You’re going to have to put an end to diversity. The other choice is to live trying to push the beach ball of tension under the ocean of public consciousness permanently, knowing that it’s going to shoot straight back up the moment you let your focus or energy drift. That’s it. Those are the only choices you have.

I can see the objection now: “Accepting this argument would just be giving the racists what they want! We shouldn’t respond to evil emotions like hatred by giving in to their demands!”

“Diversity” comes from the Latin root word divertere, which means “to turn away.” This root word also gave us the English word “divorce,” a term which refers to a person “turning away” from their spouse. Incidentally, it also gives us the words “perverted” and “vertigo.”

Suppose you saw two people in a failing relationship. The woman vengefully cheats on her husband at every opportunity she gets, and the man comes home violently drunk on a regular basis and smashes furniture. Suppose they really are at a point in their relationship where they are consumed by hatred for each other, and their actions are routinely motivated by this emotion. Would anyone oppose the sentiment that divorce is for the best, because that would be letting the two spouses’ hatred for each other “win the day”? Of course not. And that’s exactly why Greg Johnson frames ethnonationalism as a call for “no-fault racial divorce.” When it comes to individuals, we retain a certain kind of common sense that we lose the moment we begin talking about groups. Almost no one would ever preach to us about how the two people in this toxic relationship should be forced to stay together, or trained to act as if they like each other. Almost everyone would recognize right away that this is an absurd recipe for disaster. Keeping them together would be building their worlds “on hate.”

To sum things up, it’s as if our political conflict is between the friends of the possessive husband, who all want to force the couple to stay together despite their irreconcilable differences, pinch their noses, and try to get along – and the friends of the cheating wife who feels nothing towards her husband but spite, advocating for the obvious solution of divorce. The wrongs done by the wife don’t count against her friends’ position the way that the wrongs done by the husband do count against his friends. When he comes home raging drunk, her friends can say, “Look, you really think these two are going to sort this out, much less like each other at the end of it?” But his friends can’t say any comparable such thing against them. Because when the wife commits some egregious wrong, it may make them look bad for being friends with her, but it still supports their bottom-line conclusion either way.

Even more to the point, however, is this: one would not even have to be friends with the woman, or view her infidelitous actions with the slightest degree of sympathy, in order to see that this is still the truth. And in a real-life version of this situation, you wouldn’t hear much condemnation of the woman on the part of the advocates of divorce. Why? Because they view the situation realistically. They know that the marriage has no hope of being saved in the first place, and that separation holds the only hope for change. They don’t view her actions as being responsible for ruining her marriage so much as they view them as a consequence of its already being broken. And they aren’t trying to reform the woman in order to force her into the relationship so much as they are waiting on the advocates of forcing this relationship to continue to finally get the hint! Their dominant experience upon seeing the woman do shitty things would not be outrage driven by the belief that if she could just shape up, everything would be fine, but rather fatigue, because they know how obvious the only solution is.

And it’s for exactly that same reason that even the “non-racists” among us won’t be heard spending excessive amounts of energy denouncing the “racists” who join our movement. It’s not because we secretly sympathize with the idea of going out and shooting people ourselves. It’s not even necessarily because we view cultures that are different from our own with contempt. It’s not because we are motivated by hatred or any of the other undesirable qualities that may motivate them. No, we’re motivated by the pursuit of Truth. Quite simply, it’s because we’re realists.