Interview with Ryan Faulk

3,940 words

It was about a year ago this time that legendary-for-all-the-wrong-reasons Skeptic Youtuber Kraut and Tea decided to take up the sword in a mad quest to slay the White Nationalist hydra that was menacing the internet and, more importantly, frequently making him look dumb. His weapon of choice in the matter was a series of embarrassingly and easily debunked race denial videos. One the people doing the debunking of those videos was Ryan Faulk of the YouTube channel The Alternative Hypothesis. 

While the infamous Kraut Saga may have been many people’s introduction Faulk’s work, he has in fact been in the pro-white game longer than almost anyone this side of VDare. He has been blogging about race realism since the George W. Bush administration and was making pro-white content on YouTube since the early days of the platform.

The Alternative Hypothesis is also the name of Faulk’s blog that he ran with frequent collaborator Sean Last. Together their articles on race realism, crime, and the financial costs of immigrants and minorities, are valuable resources for pro-whites needing hard data to back up our narrative.

BlackAcidLizard has been following Ryan Faulk since his beginnings. I asked him how he would sum up Ryan Faulk’s contributions to The Cause:

Ryan Faulk has spent more than a decade interrogating controversial questions of vital importance and educating any and all who are willing to learn the truth of those subjects. Those who desire truth are well served by reading his work, and those who desire a future where whites flourish may well be served by his dedication to taking social consensus out of the hands of those who lie about biology, statistics, and science itself.

Seeing that in recent months, YouTube has become the hot new thing in the Dissident Right, I thought I would check in with the elder stateman of pro-white YouTube to get his thoughts on the current state of white nationalism on YouTube.

Mr. Faulk is a man who marches to the beat of his own drum (he doesn’t even like Hitler ironically), doesn’t take any guff, doesn’t sugarcoat anything, and calls ‘em like he sees ‘em. While he’s unlikely to be on the cover of Diplomacy Monthly anytime soon, he knows a thing or two about making effective pro-white propaganda and navigating the strange land that is YouTube.

This is my interview with the redpillingest man on YouTube, Ryan Faulk of The Alternative Hypothesis.

You and J. F. Gariépy are the two biggest names in race realism. However, he is credentialed scientist and you the autodidactic prodigy. You’re like Rocky Balboa and Ivan Drago. While he was being trained by humorless communists in their state-of-the-art facilities, you were off in your log cabin doing all the same exercises without anyone’s help. What do you think are the advantages of being an autodidact over the guy with a fancypants degree? 

Biggest names on YouTube. Obviously Charles Murray, whether he likes it or not, is probably the biggest name in broader society. And I’m not a prodigy; in fact I’m not even the most knowledgeable on these things within this region of the internet itself. People like Emil Kirkegaard and Sean Last know many more racial hate facts than me. I think I’m the best presenter of such facts though, although maybe J. F. is.

The main advantage of the autodidact is that I can make mistakes without it being as damning. A biologist PhD who makes a significant mistake in his field calls into question that man’s general knowledge, because biology is “his thing,” and he botched it. Whereas if you don’t have a thing, you can make mistakes, and people will still listen to you.

And a problem is that the viewers aren’t necessarily aware of how specialized an academic is. They hear “biologist” and assume he must know about the heritability of IQ in humans for example — when he may have no formal training on it at all and be just as much an autodidact on the subject as me!

Being seen as infallible on a given topic is a very dangerous position to be in. Better to have a much more realistic perception so that the fall isn’t so hard. And I’ve seen people with PhDs in biology or cultural anthropology come onto YouTube, and while they’re generally smart and can fake being knowledgeable about a tangential field for a while, they eventually get lit up on something (because a cultural anthropologist isn’t actually an expert of the question of “biological races in humans”), and the fall is particularly hard for them because they were supposed to be the expert.

Basically, if you’re put on a pedestal, and you lose, that’s far worse than never having been put on a pedestal in the first place. Having a PhD and being what the audience thinks is a “real expert” has a huge initial advantage, but it shatters with the first loss.

So trying to parlay your PhD in one area into being a public expert in a semi-related area is actually a very high-risk strategy, and I’ve only seen it fail except for JF.

When did you first discover race realism, and what were you before a White Nationalist?

First, the term “White Nationalist” doesn’t just mean white nations anymore. It means Nazis. I’m not a White Nationalist because I’m not a Nazi. I used white nationalist in the past, because I thought it just meant “trying to make a country like Hungary or Poland, or just a white area within a country.” I was wrong. It means Nazi.

I know Greg disagrees and wants to either rehabilitate the terms or constantly clarify what he means by “white nationalism.” He will not succeed, and the sooner he comes to grips with the fact that phrases are defined through use and not the component words/phonemes, and ditches “white nationalism,” the better off he’ll be.

He thinks it’s too late; it’s not. He can have a post clarifying the mistake of using “White Nationalism” in the past and going forward not use that term. People who stumble upon the old content may ask about the use of “White Nationalism,” which they would be pointed to the old post talking about the mistake. It may even be beneficial as it would humanize Greg as being just a guy who makes mistakes.

He’s about to do some things that will make it too late to do this. He’s about to close that door. It will be a terrible mistake and will make it much harder to work with him in the future, as well as nerfing any potential success he could have. I suggest he re-read his own article on the Kursk strategy.

If he thinks he’s too bound to “White Nationalism” — what, is his plan to not double in popularity? Because if Greg is, say, only 1/4 the size he plans on becoming, then there’s no reason to be so committed to anything from the first 1/4 except to the extent that he actually believes it and it advances those beliefs.

Imagine if I remained committed to anarchism because that’s so much of what I was in 2010. It’s probably a fallacy of some sort. The truth is, Greg will lose nothing by ditching White Nationalism, and he will gain so much going forward — and it’s the truth with reference to what “White Nationalism” actually means in colloquial use.

Greg Johnson, by titling his upcoming work The White Nationalist Manifesto, is actually using the term “White Nationalist” incorrectly. Greg, and I presume you as well, are, like I was in the past, using “White Nationalist” incorrectly to refer to having white nations of some sort — when it really means nazikuklux and Matt Heimbach.

Greg is about to make a very terrible mistake and greatly limit his options going forward by sticking to his incorrect use of “White Nationalist.” It’s a similar strategic blunder to naming your show “The Daily Holocaust.”

To your question:

In 2006 I was a true-believer, ideological neocon. I believed in the glorious mission of the United States military spreading our way of life to the rest of the world, spreading democracy and individual rights and a better life for the whole world through bullets and bombs.

I went online and listened to a talk by Francis Fukuyama at the American Enterprise Institute. There were other speakers at the event and a little link to Charles Murray’s talk about the $10,000 dollar plan. I found it fascinating, learned Charles Murray wrote The Bell Curve, and bought the book from a local bookstore that day. After reading Murray, I then found online copies of The G Factor by Jensen, Race, Evolution and Behavior by Rushton, and a bunch of other little things online, then I made the first “Race and IQ” video on YouTube in September 2007, and the rest is history.

Your video “A Celebration of the Jewish People” came as a surprise to some because not long ago you released a paper called “Re-examining the JQ” which triggered a lot of sperging and led to accusations of philosemitism. But “A Celebration of the Jewish People” came out guns blazing and more or less “named the Jew” (as the kids say). What could have caused such a sudden change? Have you had an epiphany? Or are your thought more nuanced than that?

Sean Last did all of the research on that, and even made a video presentation that was far more detailed. My video was just meant to be fun for the viewer to watch and follow along; it wasn’t as thorough as Sean’s actual article the video was based on. Basically Sean Last did a deep dive for about 2 weeks, presented some stuff to me, and convinced me. So talk to Sean about that, that’s kinda “his video.”

Your YouTube channel has more than quadrupled in size in the last year. Would it be accurate to say that Kraut and Tea was the greatest thing to ever happened to you?

The best thing that ever happened on YouTube was a guy who wishes to remain anonymous showing me the basics of using Adobe Premiere. That began the upward shift starting in July 2017, about a month and a half before Kraut’s first video to me. The metrics were going up before Kraut, and then Kraut happened and they went asymptotic for a while.

But the metrics have kept going up since then, the videos haven’t dropped off in views from that point as often happens to someone in the center of a drama. In fact my biggest view videos have all been after the Kraut stuff. My videos shitting on Sargon and Jordan Peterson got more eyeballs.

For a while, “the Alt Right” (or whatever it’s called this week) seemed to remain a relatively minor phenomenon on YouTube while being a major phenomenon on almost everywhere else on the internet. Until recently, YouTube remained an Alt Lite stronghold. Why do you think it took ethnonationalism so long to really break through on YouTube? Why did it take Kraut and Tea having 6-month meltdown to make it happen?

YouTube is still an alt-lite stronghold. But as for why the “alt right” didn’t take off earlier I think is down to 3 things:

1. A bias toward long-form content.

This bias is both on the consumer and producer side. The consumers like to listen to things rather comprehensively fleshed out; if they just wanted the feel-good talking points they wouldn’t be “alt-right.” The producers of content have a bias toward it because they like things fleshed-out, and also the way the producers came to be.

Because Fash the Nation and The Daily Holocaust show started off as larks, guys getting together and having fun. Then they got popular.

It’s not that there’s no content like this on YouTube, but prepared presentations, as a rule, dominate YouTube, and the livestreams are kind of a backwater. The kind of content that most of the “Alt Right does” I put on a secondary, throw-away channel called Alt Hype Streams.

Making solid YouTube videos (for me at least) takes anywhere from 6 to 20 hours depending on how long and how intensively edited the video is. First you have to write the script, then record it, then edit the audio. For a 20-minute video that’s 3 hours, easy. Then you have to make whatever charts, imagery, and animation frames you want to do.

And then you have to place everything on the timeline and slice it up just right, all the transition points have to be clean or else it looks like shit, all the blur-fades have to be done . . . It gets up to 8 hours very fast. For Mike Enoch, 20 minutes of content takes 20 minutes. Of course he has to do prep, and that adds a little bit, but so do I! I don’t even count that.

And if you already have a sizable audience from people who like long-form content, what’s the point of busting your balls to do prepared presentations (and which you’d have to learn how to do) for the rather dubious prospect of a YouTube audience?

Now obviously I have a bias toward comprehensiveism, and it’s very hard to just say “Ryan, you’re done, stop,” so I am not doing YouTube optimally. I’m making too-long videos because I just have to cross the i’s and dot the t’s.

2. The guys (Mike, Greg, Anglin, Spencer) just didn’t do YouTube.

Spencer, Vox, and Greg have YouTube channels, but Greg is just posting stuff from Counter-Currents to YouTube, which is not going to get much audience. Spencer is just kinda shit. Anglin would be banned, and Mike is oversubscribed with all the talk shows he’s on, and he does YouTube without having a channel; he just bounces around livestreams.

American Renaissance has done YouTube well though, but they took a long time to hop on, and I think that’s just because Jared’s a bit of a fuddy-duddy. But he’s certainly figured it out once he hopped on.

3. YouTube isn’t a traditional social network.

Something on The Right Stuff can be shared on twitter or Facebook or imageboard et cetera. How do you share something from TRS on YouTube?

You have to make a video. But let’s say it’s just a funny picture, how do you share that on YouTube? Do you make a 2 second video with just that meme as a still image? How does “counter-signal memes for fashy goys” succeed on YouTube? It doesn’t. And people aren’t looking for funny images on YouTube.

And one aspect of the “alt-right” is shock-memes, which don’t translate to YouTube. So an entire pillar of the “Alt Right’s” media repertoire is removed immediately. And all the talk shows that organically emerged, when placed on YouTube, just look like a long video.

The Daily Shoah, on The Right Stuff, is highly contextualized. It’s the show “we all” go to listen to. TDS is on, Mike’s saying the thing. On YouTube the whole backstory is ripped out, and it’s just one video with 20 others in the recommended bar.

I know there aren’t physical locations on the internet, but it’s analogous to having a native festival up in the Andes around all the Inca people, versus having a “cultural diversity fair” where those dancers do their little dance on a stage and up next are the Japanese flutists or whatever. To use one of Mike’s favorite terms, the whole “cultural experience” of this thing that is for now called “the Alt Right” is denuded of its authenticity, its greater context, when its placed onto YouTube.

Just as the Andean dance is more meaningful when it’s physically in the Andes, that’s all it is, and there’s a bunch of people who celebrate afterwards, even though it’s technically the same dance as what was at the “cultural fair.” YouTube’s like a cultural fair.

I remember this phenomenon when SomethingAwful started up a YouTube channel and started posting The Flash Tub videos, or when Homestarrunner made a YouTube channel. It just seems off. I’m not saying it was a bad idea, it’s just that you’re taking out the meat of something and presenting it denuded from the community and historical context in which it was created.

That said, I think you place too much weight on the Kraut affair. My (and J. F.’s) channel was growing steadily before that thank you very much.

What do you make of the rise and inglorious fall of Internet Bloodsports? What went wrong? What did we gain? How many people do you think they red-pilled?

IBS was a dumb meme that J. F. and Warski rode to make a bunch of cash. We gained very little from it. I suspect any red-pilling that happened was a kind of shallow, social-influence level of conformity that will be undone as soon as the social circumstances of whoever was “red-pilled” by IBS changes.

Why are YouTubers so degenerate? You know what I mean.

It’s a selection process. They’re people who either don’t have jobs, don’t need jobs, they’re by definition abnormal because they’re doing something so abnormal. So they’re already genetically predisposed to being weird (as a population). And this includes me, though I’m probably less degenerate than the average “internet person.”

Media has a bias toward novelty, but if you spend as much time on the internet as in real life, you end up exposed to novelty as much as you are exposed to normalcy (because the internet is media is novelty), and so weird beliefs, weird fetishes, et cetera become just as real as normalcy.

Is it my imagination of has censorship on YouTube died down a bit lately? How much do you worry about getting shoahed?

Censorship on YouTube has never been as bad as on other sites for a whole host of reasons. One is that to become a big YouTuber, you have to have a certain level of competence in knowing how to make good videos and making the right kinds of videos that get views, and having the discipline to do it.

So you get self-motivated freaks. And these people know how to play the green regarding what can and cannot be said and have the self-control to not go too far out of bounds.

And nobody cares about comments. You can actually flag comments and get people banned for posting mean comments, but nobody cares about comments, and a YouTube account that doesn’t have videos is worthless so nothing is gained by taking a video-less and subscriber-less YT account down.

So even if commenters were being taken down, it’s so easy to just make a new account. Which is why I think nobody bothers flagging comments.

Another reason censorship isn’t as bad on YouTube: it’s video. On Facebook they can just search text for bad words and ban you. For video that is much harder and requires actual humans to watch videos.

So 3 reasons YouTube is far less censorious than the rest of the net: nobody cares about comments so those don’t get censored, good video-makers tend to be smart enough to not violate TOS, and the medium makes it so you can’t automate the search for bad-thought.

YouTube actually used to be far more censorious than it is now because the flagging system used to just be based on a ratio of flags to the video metrics (views, stars, comments).

At least this is what we inferred back then since we were able to take down totally anodyne videos by just mass-flagging.

Today, what I think YouTube does is that if a video passes a ratio of flags to metrics, it gets limited stated. That means no public video metrics and video can’t be searched for. Interestingly you can still display a limited stated video on your channel.

But there’s no account strike. Your account isn’t put in danger for a limited stated video. However, if the video is actually reviewed by a real person, and they take the video down, your account gets a strike.

I know people were thinking the end is near with the limited state thing started, but I think it’s really good news. And from YouTube’s point of view, it makes perfect sense: they don’t have the manpower to review every video, so they limited state videos. The video isn’t taken down completely, and the person’s whole account isn’t jeopardized by some mass-flagging campaign.

So this policy of limited-stating videos has probably done much to prevent censorship by limiting the impact of mass-flagging campaigns to the specific videos they hit. Also some advice for anyone who gets a limited stated video: don’t appeal. If you appeal, then a human will watch your video, and that human might be diverse, or female, and will be the kind of person who wants to work for google, and they can strike it, which not only gives a strike to your channel and 2 more means you’re done — but now your channel is on the hot seat and is going to be observed more closely going forward.

What do you think will be the fate of the Liberalist movement? Will Sargon take them prime time or will he leave them behind once he gets a taste of that sweet, sweet Jew money?

I think it’s already played out. It’s philosophically vapid — nobody who actually knows about classical liberal philosophy will take it seriously, and so it will be endlessly attacked by those people as being sippy-cup libertarianism.

And as for the conservative whites, they already have a place among the Tories. And none of the latent “racist” whites are going to give a shit about it. So I think we are already looking at what liberalistism was, is, and will be. Sargon’s little pet philosophy that’ll have maybe 100,000 adherents.

Do you think Liberalists secretly know that they are wrong about race or are they really that dumb?

With Sargon it’s several things. He’s in the UK, and he makes a lot of money off this. His safety and his income are dependent upon being a respectable conservative. So even if he did secretly agree with everything Greg or I said, it wouldn’t matter. He has too much to lose.

But just because of how human psychology works, this logistical bind will translate into a rationalization. He will rationalize his beliefs that he has to hold as being true.

On top of that, Sargon’s a classical liberal type, I think genetically — if he were from the US he’d be a LOLbert. But since he’s in the UK that genotype manifests with much more limited pseudo-libertarian thoughts.

I’m not saying that’s bad — we know where going full LOLbert takes you. Sargon as a result is kind of like a conservative with some LOLbert tendencies that get smothered by common sense; Sargon isn’t for open borders, for example, even though I think he wants to.

Obviously Sargon is Liberalistism, and when talking about Liberalistism you’re talking about the personal psychology of Sargon, because that’s what it is. It’s not some long historical school of thought which just over time has ironed out hundreds of issues that have cropped up; like a tree root system that managed its way through the rocks and soil over hundreds of years in a meticulously finely-tuned way.

It’s really just this guy, who was one of the early anti-SJWs and got big for that, but then managed to maintain that splash by making high-quality videos, and thus had an audience. Carl then got it in his head to lead his own movement. That’s literally all this is. There’s more intrigue in foibles of Chris-Chan than in Sargon’s “Liberalist” misadventure.