Yiannopoulos vs. Fuentes

4,787 words

Milo Yiannopoulos recently interviewed Nick Fuentes because of his movement’s demolition of Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA. Milo told Fuentes that “the purpose of this interview is to let you speak in your own words about what you in fact do believe,” but Milo must have spoken for at least five minutes to every 30 seconds Fuentes was allotted – the comment section strongly echoes this. There are more than 153 thousand views as of December 18, 2019, a large positive for Fuentes and the true conservative, nationalist movement. This interview is one of many first steps into the mainstream discourse and it will only get better for him should he stay ideologically strong, which he will. Milo probably gave Fuentes half of his audience with this video. One commenter said, “I think Nick represents Milo’s audience better than Milo does.”

This article will be using Fuentes as the ideological battering ram to show the lack of philosophical seriousness of any conservative to his Left, that Israel owes the US at least $228 billion, race is as real as gravity, and Milo is merely a provocative version of Rob Smith from TPUSA. If people care about truth, this article should give Fuentes the other half of Milo’s viewership.

The Jewish Question

The first question could be about only one thing: The Holocaust. Specifically, the Cookie Question. But this makes sense since Jews think “remembering the Holocaust” is the most essential part of being Jewish. Milo says he doesn’t want to throw sticks and stones for a joke, but he still had to bring it up. Did he? When asked, Fuentes said the Holocaust happened, and then Milo asked how many Jews died. Fuentes tiredly gave the only response he could, “exactly 6 million.” Milo acted amusedly appalled, but what did he expect? If Fuentes said at least 6 million, he’d be charged with making light of the worst tragedy in history. If Fuentes said “possibly 5,999,999” he’d be labeled a Holocaust denier. As Hugo Adrian suggested, the Jewish historian Raul Hilberg should be called the same for his writing of the first comprehensive historical study of the Holocaust. It’s the three-volume, 1,388-page tome called The Destruction of the European Jews and it estimates between 4.9 and 5.4 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Anyway, the tragedy ended more than 50 years before Fuentes was born. How much energy is he expected to spend on this event? Fuentes will be berated about the Cookie Question while he is circling the drain at 86 years old; he will never be allowed to forget it.

Milo drops the Cookie Question to discuss Fuentes’s lack of promiscuity, his refusal to hit the bottle, likens this to Evangelicalism, and then says it’s not very Catholic of him because Christianity is about joy. What? Nearly every criticism of Catholicism is about authoritarianism, guilt-mongering, etc. Whether these are accurate is irrelevant to the fact that nobody criticizes Catholics for being too joyous. However, Milo admits to playing the devil’s advocate – one usually argues a coherent position when playing this role – in this exchange since he apparently wrote a book about the need for more discipline in our culture. This makes one wonder why Milo is telling Fuentes that basic asceticism is not a Catholic ideal. This bizarre prompt for Fuentes to discuss his “puritanical version of Christianity” leaves one wondering whether Milo believes what comes out of his own mouth.

A Catholic, as Milo describes himself, meeting a successful, young man should perhaps highlight his asceticism and ask a meaningful question of why he’s chosen to forego such temptations, or not touch on the subject at all, letting his morality speak for itself. What Milo does is somewhere in the middle, insulting Fuentes and exposing Milo’s abnormal view of Catholicism, one which appears to see asceticism as an ideal toward which one should not strive.

Fuentes responds well to Milo’s objections, discussing Fulton Sheen and correctly bringing up just how far our culture has taken the idea of joy, or perhaps the subjective feeling of happiness, “transgenderism, drag queen story hour. To me, what’s missing from this picture is not joyousness or permissiveness, it’s like you said, discipline, order, perhaps a little bit of coldness or tough love is in order.”

Milo adds that Fuentes and his movement embody the words of Edmund Burke, who believed liberty can only arise from order, and these young men also personify G. K. Chesterton’s ideal of a glad and angry faith. Milo admits to identifying with these European ideals, but does he? Just a moment ago he said the well-ordered life of Fuentes is puritanical. Perhaps gay men aren’t the paragon of discipline and order. Indeed, one study found the average number of sexual partners for gay men in Madison, WI for the month of February 1983 – after hearing about the AIDS scare – was 3.2 and almost 20 percent of the respondents reported five or more partners. One of the respondents from 1982 reported that he had 30 partners. This man takes the six degrees of separation to a whole other level.

The writer does not wish to speak for either of these men, but he knows for a fact that Milo is gay and Fuentes has read Julius Evola, who said of asceticism in The Doctrine of Awakening:

The original meaning of the term “ascesis”—from [some Greek letters] to train–was simply “training” and, in a Roman sense, discipline. The corresponding Indo-Aryan term is tapas (tapa or tapo in Pali) and it has a like significance; except that, from the root tap, which means to be hot or to glow, it also contains the idea of an intensive concentration, or glowing, almost of fire.

It would be surprising if this is not what Fuentes and his movement see in asceticism. So, what is the point of Milo challenging Fuentes on basic Catholic ideals? Is it really as simple as Milo enjoying the sound of his own voice? One wonders whether Milo has read any of the books he’s carefully placed on his set, especially the E. Michael Jones tour de force entitled Libido Dominandi, or if he’s even read its subtitle, Sexual Liberation and Political Control. Fifteen minutes into the interview and we’ve heard Fuentes say almost nothing, but Milo has exposed some intriguing beliefs.

Unsurprisingly, the interview must return to the topic of Israel. Milo says, “I agree with you that aid to Israel is probably a bad idea, it’s bad for us and it’s bad for Israel.” Done! Got it, time to move on to a topic worth discussing. Indeed, this is the true point on Israel of the America First movement. Hang up the gloves. But Milo could not stop there, he added, “but, it’s a tiny amount of money. It’s a rounding error in the federal budget.”

Many poor thinkers compare apples to oranges without knowing it, but Milo manages to compare apples to all other fruits without triggering any alarm bells in his bleached noggin. Fuentes does not have time to thoroughly rebut Milo, but he acknowledges what he should: aid and fealty to Israel are the most to any country by far.

Fuentes drops the $38 billion nugget, which is the amount Obama pledged to Israel in military funding for the next decade, but there’s this report from the US Agency for International Development. It contains all economic and military aid sent and received from 1946 to 2017. It appears that starting in 1951 – a mere three years after Israel declared independence – the US had dumped a net of $228 billion in aid to Israel (constant 2017 dollars). This means the US has sent a single country so much aid that it totals one percent of the current national debt. For comparison, the aid surplus to Israel is greater than for all countries in Central Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, and even sub-Saharan Africa. Is the Waze app really worth $228 billion?

Perhaps Milo can forgive nationalists for no longer wanting a relationship with its greatest ally. We did not choose the Israel question, it chose us. Even our supposed America First President talks about Israel incessantly, wants to target campus anti-Semitism even more, and we’ve spent $6 trillion in the Middle East since 9/11. Milo admits that Israel can afford to be independent now. One would think military protection – even though they don’t need it – and a quarter of a trillion dollars from America would be an adequate nest egg for a country of only 9 million people.

The Race Question

Some 22 minutes in, Milo says it seems that since he, Gavin McInnes, Alex Jones, etc. have been scrubbed from the Internet, young people are taking the easy route: race. Milo says this without acknowledging that the entire political apparatus, social networks (the public fora), corporations, colleges, and churches are constantly bending over backward for non-whites and purging themselves of any white people who even think about speaking up on their own behalf. The easy route, he says.

Going further, Milo argues that religion is more important than race. He believes he’s arguing against Fuentes, but he’s not. This is a debate Milo is having with himself because Fuentes simply acknowledges that race tells us a lot about the predicted behavior of a group. There is no value judgment or ranking ascribed to the race question; it is what it is. For an individual, religion and race likely say little about one’s behavior. But, for a large group of people, race says much about behavior. Fuentes notices patterns from the last couple of centuries and states “the existence of religion does not negate the existence of race.”

Milo does not explicitly deny that race exists, to his credit, but when he expounds upon his ideas, we say that he believes race to be irrelevant. Milo/Shapiro/Kirk/PragerU: If race matters, religion does not. If religion matters, race does not. Capitalism saves, Socialism kills. Conservatives are smart, Liberals are dumb. This dichotomous thinking is for the feeble-minded. It crushes serious discussion of the real issues plaguing Europe and North America. It is a childish view of the world that must be rooted out and destroyed.

Milo says Nicholas Wade, author of A Troublesome Inheritance, admits that race “exists in a statistical sense.” Trying to interpret the meaning of this caveat, it seems that Milo is saying Wade believes humans can be categorized into populations that we may call races if we have a large sample size. This is true, but there exists much deeper evidence. This article is not the place for a thorough examination, but a quick example would do some justice.

Imagine that a group of 1,000 students is collected for a study, all of whom are asked to self-identify their race, and they split up into white, black, Hispanic, and Asian identities. After this, a saliva sample is taken to extract DNA from the subjects, and the researchers tell a computer to pick 50 pieces of DNA from specific gene locations for each person. However, the computer is not informed about how the students identified themselves. The researchers then tell the computer to categorize the 1,000 students into four groups based on DNA similarity. With 50 pieces of DNA, the computer will likely place about 90 percent of the whites in a tight-knit group, with some stragglers between the computer’s white classification and another group. In other words, one who identifies as white may have some Native American genetics and might be placed somewhere between the Hispanic and white groups, although they won’t be named such by the computer. The same will go for blacks, Hispanics, and Asians.

When studies similar to this are done, we find that the computer’s classification corresponds to the colloquial understanding of race about 80-90 percent of the time with small samples (only 20 DNA pieces), climbing closer to 100 percent as the samples are enlarged, i.e. the computer is more accurate when it gets a bigger sample of DNA to categorize. So, if one takes a group of 1,000 people and tests at least 100 pieces of their DNA, a computer that does not know how they identify will place these people into groups that correspond about 99 percent with our daily understanding of race. This is race existing in a genetic sense, not merely a statistical one. If the reader wants a thorough examination of the science on this topic, begin here.[1]

There are endocrinological, musculoskeletal, and neuromuscular differences amongst the races, so populations do not adapt to their surroundings by skin and hair only.[1] As one would expect, psychometric intelligence, known as the Intelligence Quotient (IQ), shows just this, but with an intriguing wrinkle: East Asians and Ashkenazi Jews have the highest population scores.

Fuentes says the average West-African IQ is 65. This is not quite accurate, but it’s unfortunately close (73). He asks Milo, “what are you going to do with that?” This is the exact question everyone familiar with the data asks. The work of Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen on IQ across the world has been compiled and the validity of IQ can be understood here, but suffice it to say that IQ is the best predictor of long-term success that currently exists in science and has been for a century.[2] The following chart contains the mean IQ by region, the 97.7^th percentile (two standard deviations above the mean), the 99.9^th percentile (3 SDs), and the percentage of each region above an IQ of 110.

One can see that approximately 37 and 21 percent of the East Asian and white populations, respectively, have IQs above 110, which seems to be the average IQ in major professions. On the other hand, less than four percent of the populations in the Middle East and Oceania (without Australia) have an IQ above 110, and less than one percent of those in Central America, Mexico, the Caribbean, and the continent of Africa meet the same criterion.

To Milo’s credit, he does not shy away from these TrueFacts™ and even adds a jab about the IQ of Ilhan Omar – Lynn and Vanhanen give a mean of 68 for Somalia. Poor Minnesota. However, he adds that “the IQ thing persists across, you know, controlling for all of these variables. I think that what sometimes these analyses lack proper apprehension of is that there are of course black people who are smarter than 97, 98, 99.9 percent of whites.”

Firstly, it conveys a bit of ignorance about the nature of science that Milo says the IQ differential persists when we control for other variables because this goes without saying. That is, quite literally, the only way scientists are allowed to make conclusions about what their studies reveal. Without controlling for other variables, one cannot conclude anything of value, so this is built into the foundation of science.

Secondly, Milo either believes that the scientists, many of whom have doctorates in hard sciences and have spent decades researching a single question within a small branch of one field of science, have not realized that some blacks are smarter than most whites, or that they do not state this fact explicitly anywhere in the literature. Either way, this is a remarkably arrogant statement about the field of intelligence testing and the psychometricians responsible for its insights. It assumes that they don’t understand normal distributions, which one learns in an introductory statistics course.

Thirdly, the point is not that smart blacks don’t exist, it’s that they are far rarer than smart whites or East Asians. That there are blacks smarter than 99.9 percent of whites is irrelevant because, for every black man with an IQ of 130 – which is considered gifted, only two to four percent of the white population meets this criterion – there are hundreds or thousands of whites/East Asians with the same. By definition, there are about 69 million people with an IQ of at least 130 in China alone – one-fifth of the US population. Forget the average IQ for each race or the regions noted above.

A normal distribution predicts that approximately 82 percent of East Asians have an IQ between 75, which is exceedingly dull, and 120, which is quite intelligent.[4] For whites, it’s basically the same, 82 percent between 70 and 115. For African-Americans and Middle Easterners, 82 percent lie between 98, which is normal in Europe and America, and 59, which is what the DSM-IV calls Mild Mental Retardation.[3] For sub-Saharan Africa, 82 percent fall between 47, which the DSM-IV calls Moderate Retardation, and 86, which is barely surpassing the admittance cutoff in the Armed Forces.[2] One can see now that Milo’s comments about the existence of blacks smarter than 99.9 percent of whites are utterly irrelevant. One can also hear the Kermit-esque echoes of Jordan Peterson handwaving this away with “there’s more variation within than between.” Both Milo and JBP talk about The Bell Curve by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein but notice the difference in the area under the curve at 120+ IQ from their book.

Discussing this usually leaves a pit in the stomach of the writer and one can see why. Fuentes’s question must be repeated, “what are you going to do with that?” The simple answer should be “nothing” because throwing money at the problem won’t help and shipping them into a high-IQ economy is like putting a 12-year-old basketball player in the starting lineup of the Los Angeles Lakers.

Fuentes and the true Right-wing of Europe and North America simply recognize that this explains much of economic trends across the world. Milo says later in the interview that race was created by the Jews, and the Chapo Trap House communists of the world say race is a construct all the same and explain away differences in behavior/performance with ethereal notions of systemic oppression. However, these insipid critiques of race cannot address any of the previous paragraphs. One wonders whether Milo thinks Koreans would be unable to notice a difference between themselves and Ethiopians if it weren’t for those pesky Jews.

The Diversity Question

The paramount implication of the race question is additive suffering. Whether one is a Finnish ecologist living off the land or a coomer crammed into the middle of New York City, suffering is ubiquitous. The case of true Right-wingers is that forcing disparate peoples from across the globe — who’ve lived independent of one another for thousands of years — into close proximity with each other is adding undue suffering on all involved, except the elites who made it happen. Moreover, this suffering is 100 percent preventable and the victims did not want it in the first place.

Milo says “America is a creation of black and white.” In a way, this is accurate. Africans were brought over to the Caribbean as early as 1500 AD and the early 1600s for Mainland North America, so strife between whites and blacks is inherent to America and the islands to her south. However, the men responsible for designing and creating these United States of America stated explicitly that this is a nation built by and for whites, and that blacks would never be able to be properly assimilated as Americans because of our history. Moreover, blacks were considered aliens until the late 1800s, after Abraham Lincoln went from supporting the repatriation of Africans and expatriation of African-Americans to Liberia to emancipating four million slaves and laying the groundwork for the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, giving them citizenship.[5]

One can see with a cursory examination of the founders’ intent that America, while it has not existed without black v. white conflict, was not intended to be home to anyone other than Europeans. Let it be stated clearly: every person who believes blacks and other non-whites should be citizens is standing in direct opposition to the founders of this country. Fuentes answers the ethnostate question by saying it’s impractical at this point in our demography, but the writer believes it’s worth noting the intention of the founders.

In reality, America is a country of whites suffering the consequences of capitalists using non-whites as cheap labor for the last few hundred years, and the whites who are capable live outside the borders of blacks. Stating that America is a creation of black and white implies that blacks, at some point, became Americans. Have Detroit, St. Louis, or Baltimore seen the floods of black immigration in the mid-twentieth century assimilate to any American ideals? Or do they instead have the highest murder rates in the country and resemble the slums of Haiti?

At one point in the interview, Fuentes asks Milo if he doesn’t see resentment in the black population, implying that we are doomed to unceasing conflict. Milo believes it is warranted because “Democrats have been malevolent and Republicans have been ignorant.” Sweeping platitudes aside, one would expect that Milo would make the slavery case over Democrat v. Republican, but he is incapable of stepping outside of dichotomous thinking.

The Democrat v. Republican issue is irrelevant to the black question. Democratic rule is not why Detroit, Baltimore, St. Louis, and New Orleans are terrible places. Minneapolis and St. Paul, Portland, Madison, Pittsburgh, et al. have been run entirely by Democrats for nearly a century. Cities become irredeemable only when they near a black majority. Furthermore, far more social democracies in Scandinavia and recovering, exceedingly poor countries in Eastern Europe are utopian in comparison with any of these black cities. Milo says scores of books have been written about why minorities don’t vote in their interest, but this assumes the Republican party could actually do anything to help blacks.

In a rare moment of the interview, Fuentes gets a chance to press Milo by asking when diversity is ever good after Milo says “there’s no intrinsic benefit to diversity for its own sake.” Milo responds, “mixing cultures, deriving from different religions doesn’t work. I don’t think I would say mixing races doesn’t work. I think if people are Christian, they pretty much get along.” Following in the previous paragraph’s vein, Hungary – 99 percent Hungarian — has a median income of $12,445, but their murder rate is 2.5 per 100,000 people and they have universal healthcare. St. Louis – 48 percent black – has a median income of $38,664 with the highest murder rate in the country, 60.9 per 100,000 people. This is 23.4 times the murder rate of Hungary. Before Milo gets sneaky, Hungary is 54.2 percent Christian and St. Louis is 51.6 percent Christian, both made up of more Catholics than Protestants. Would Milo make the case that the difference in murder rate stems from the three percent differential in Christianity?

For the multi-racial Christian utopia argument to hold water, Milo would have to give a single example of when this has been true. Milo, make the case that everyone in South Africa gets along since it’s 80 percent Christian. Make the case that Norwegians don’t get along because only 3 percent are practicing Christians. Fuentes is far more coherent on this issue, “countries have survived Leftism, they have survived communism, like Poland, like Hungary. Countries do not survive the kind of demographic displacement that we’re seeing.” Cohesive, homogenous societies get along and heterogeneous societies constantly quarrel regardless of Christianity.

The Conclusion Question

Will this article ever end? There are many more problems with Milo’s thinking that should be addressed, but the above is damning enough. Somebody needed to put Milo out to pasture. He and his Alt-lite ilk are merely liberals who partially accept some points the true Right-wing takes for granted. To summarize the Yiannopoulos v. Fuentes divide.

1. Milo: Israel is a rounding error, forget about it. Fuentes: no, I want muh $6 gorillion back.
2. Milo: religion is more important than race, so race is irrelevant. Fuentes: Check out this list of the most murderous countries in the world, each of the top 10 is almost 100 percent Christian.
3. Milo: multi-racialism can work if we’re Christian. Fuentes: give literally one example.

Milo ends the interview by placing himself between TPUSA and Fuentes, which might be the only time he doesn’t think in twos. In a practical sense, how would Milo’s ideas differ from TPUSA? He is for multi-racial societies, he is absolutely incensed when Fuentes says interracial marriage is unnatural, he can’t answer the Black Question, he wants us to forget about America’s fealty to a foreign country, etc. Milo is the edgy conservative who dares to say Islam and feminism are bad. Wow, is nothing sacred? What will these faux-conservatives do to address the fact that whites are committing suicide at an ever-increasing rate, continue to parade black unemployment with Trump?

These buffoons see themselves as the bulwark of truth, yet operate within the same framework as the people they pretend to oppose. It will not save them during the browning of America. True traditionalism and nationalism are so far outside of the mainstream that a gay, Catholic Jew married to a black man stands as a gatekeeper for entrance into broader Right-wing audiences. Fuentes and his movement hear America’s death rattle and are trying desperately to place her on life support. Milo wants her to have more non-white Christians as her nurses and doctors. Either way, America is in rapid decline and if we do not stop the hemorrhaging soon, she will bleed out.

Notes

1. Acknowledging such isn’t necessarily a death sentence in public discourse. One touches the third rail when they begin discussing racial differences in behavior that stem from genetic origins, not merely environmental. A bit further, all biological organisms are genes expressing themselves in an environment. No individual’s behavior is explained partially by environment and partially by genetics. All there is at the individual level is the expression of genes. When comparing two large populations of many individuals, we can see variation between the average behaviors or abilities of the groups. Using statistical analyses, we can isolate certain factors and discover that environmental differences between the groups explain x percentage of the variation and genetic differences explain y percentage of the variation. This is called heritability. More practically, there is clearly a genetic explanation for Kenyans, specifically the Kalenjin, dominating every marathon – 40 percent of all top honors in long distances have gone to Kalenjin since 1980. There is a genetic explanation for 74 percent of NBA players and 70 percent of NFL players being African-American. There is a genetic explanation for why sprinting is dominated by descendants of West-Africans – good luck finding a white man on that list. There is a genetic explanation for blonde/light-brown/red hair and height in northern climates and the lack of these traits around the equator.
2. The various IQ tests are not terribly important at the individual level unless one scores exceedingly low. For example, the Armed Forces Qualification Test corresponds closely to IQ, and they exclude everyone who scores below 81 and limit the percent of new admissions who score between 93 (31st percentile) and 81 (10th percentile) at 20 percent. This is because it’s remarkably difficult for the Armed Forces to find things for these people to do, even today when the Armed Forces is predominately a jobs bank. On the whole, psychometric intelligence is greatly useful when comparing large samples.
3. While a normal distribution in IQ is defined as a mean of 100 with a standard deviation of 15, it’s common for the African-American distribution to have a standard deviation of only 13. This makes sense because the mean is an entire standard deviation below the white average. An analogy would be height. Supposedly, the tallest average height for males in the world is the Dinaric Alps at 185.6 cm (6’1”). Let’s assume a standard deviation of 7 cm (2.8 in). The shortest average height is Indonesia at 158 cm (5’2”). If we assumed a standard deviation of 7 cm with Indonesia, that would be 17 percent more than the Dinaric Alps as a percentage of the mean height. To equate the distributions based on the Dinaric Alps, Indonesian males would have a standard deviation of 6 cm. For simplicity, I left the African IQ standard deviation at 13, but it might be as low as 10-12. I’m not willing to look through Lynn’s book to find out.
4. The 82 percent is calculated by taking the percentage of scores that will be two standard deviations below the mean plus the scores that are one standard deviation above the mean. One SD above the mean was chosen because we don’t really have to worry about the people who are on the right side of the curve and IQ distributions tend to be skewed right a bit, so there are often more people who are highly intelligent than a normal distribution predicts.
5. The 14th Amendment gave former slaves citizenship and was spuriously used in Brown v. Board of Education to desegregate schools, Roe v. Wade to allow women the right to abortion, and even Bush v. Gore in the 2000 presidential election. America’s immigration reflected the founders’ intent until the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, which removed all racial restrictions. However, this act kept the National Origins Formula intact, which said if 25 percent of the country were English by ancestry then 25 percent of incoming immigrants must be English. What a novel concept. The 1965 Hart-Celler Act removed the National Origins Formula and essentially negated all previous immigration law.