Counter-Currents
1,980 words
I’m one of those lonely people who red-pilled himself. It happened twice: Once in my early twenties and once in my early forties. And since a commenter on my previous article “The Tipping Point” asked for me to explain how that happened, I thought I’d share.
I became aware of the critical nature of race — vis-à-vis blacks and whites — in my early twenties after a few years of living on my own post-college. I can trace it back to the day I started paying my own taxes. As a good, non-materialistic leftist, I made so little money back then, yet I had to pay what was, to me, a significant sum: something like $800. I didn’t have $800; in fact, I probably owed in college loans more than thirty times what I had in my checking account at the time. And, of course, I didn’t have any savings. So the very idea that I owed Uncle Sam that kind of scratch after barely cobbling together around $12,000 in a year was. . . insulting. I’m not against taxation per se, of course, but I knew something was fundamentally wrong with this. This event was the first in my life that made me question the major decisions I had made thus far.
You can buy Spencer Quinn’s novel White Like You here
Back then, I was working in close quarters alongside people beyond the university milieu — black people, mostly. These were tedious, low-paying jobs. During college and shortly after, I, like any good liberal, had been immune to all arguments and evidence pointing to racial differences. I had heard the race-realist arguments before, especially from older family members, but felt they were mean and cynical. I had always been clever enough to refute them. (If you’re clever enough, you can “refute” almost anything.) Yet I noted how difficult it was to do this, especially against family members who did not share my university education. Despite my efforts, their arguments always seemed to hang together pretty well.
That always worried me.
After college, I began to study race from an egalitarian standpoint, wanting to understand why the races had markedly different outcomes in life. I was concerned mostly with black-white differences, but all races mattered to me. For some reason, I had always found this topic interesting. Despite vigorous research, I could only find one plausible explanation. It was presented in a little book called Chains and Images of Psychological Slavery by someone named Na’im Akbar. According to this Akbar, generations of physical slavery shackles the mind with a slave mentality, causing the descendants of slaves to inherit these shackles even if these descendants themselves are free. And with a shackled mind more often than not comes a life of crime, poverty, and low achievement.
This seemed to make sense. It certainly explained everything quite neatly. But its Lamarckian nature nagged at me. What exactly was the mechanism which caused black children to inherit psychological defects that their ancestors acquired during their lifetimes? I knew enough about basic genetics to know that that wasn’t how inheritance worked. Did black parents somehow train their children to fail? Did they inculcate these psychological chains into them? I found that highly unlikely.
Then, one day, I watched carefully as a black custodian at my place of work was telling some of us a story. The man was good-natured and quite animated, but not terribly bright or educated. His English, as is typical with most poorly-educated blacks, was atrocious. It was as if his mind could not parse the complexities of the language rapidly enough to express himself properly in real time. So, in order to prevent his mind from having to operate more quickly than it was accustomed to, he pidginized the language to make it easier to pronounce. Entertaining as his story was, listening to him was a particularly ugly experience.
And then it hit me. He is not this way due to his environment or due to what happened to his ancestors in the past. These external factors could not possibly have impacted his language parsing abilities. “White people simply do not have that much power,” I remember thinking. The reason must be purely biological. This must be the phenotypic expression of the genes that this man was allotted at conception. He is who he is, and there is no one to blame for it. All at once, the race-realist arguments of my family members flooded back into my mind. I realized that they had been right all along — and that I had wasted years of my intellectual development pursuing an egalitarian ideology that was patently false.
It was at that moment I became a conservative. And from there, there were few barriers between me and the Right.
My second act of red-pilling came as a result of reading Kevin MacDonald’s The Culture of Critique. I started the book prepared to be highly critical of it since, at the time, I was quite favorably disposed towards Jews. I had Jewish friends; I was aware of Jewish high-IQ and accomplishment; I had read Paul Johnson’s The History of the Jews; I was in solid agreement with Jewish writers such as Daniel Pipes and David Horowitz. Most importantly, perhaps, I was still nursing a grudge over 9/11 (and I still do, by the way). Conservative, nationalistic Jews and I shared an enemy — and this made me a committed ally.
After Mitt Romney lost in 2012, something inside of me died. Even though I knew he wasn’t as conservative as I was, I genuinely liked Romney back then and thought he would win. Sure, I was a race-realist, but I still believed somewhat in the melting-pot, proposition-nation notion behind a racially diverse America. When Romney lost, and lost badly, I took my first painful steps towards red-pilling myself about Jews — and this came, perhaps inevitably, as a result of my burgeoning white identity.
After the defeat in 2012, I learned first off that liberals do not care about the economy or making America strong. Despite having atrocious records on both accounts, Barack Obama was buoyed back into power by millions who loved him intensely. But why did they love him so? If it wasn’t for any objective reason, then it had to be for a subjective reason. Of course, I know now what the subjective reason is: Barack Obama wasn’t white. That’s why they loved him. The fact that he was good looking and could speak well was merely icing on the cake.
In November 2012, I realized that non-whites would gladly sacrifice America’s greatness and prosperity if it meant keeping one of their own in power. Once this idea crystalized, I understood the greater struggle in which America was currently engaging: whites versus non-whites. The very idea that these two groups could actually cooperate to pursue common goals suddenly became ridiculous to me. There could never be common goals in a racially-diverse America. Non-whites as a group were not my countrymen — they were my demographic enemies. They were waiting for their chance to take over once they have the numbers to do so. Knowing this made me cleave towards my own kind and my own racial identity. How could it not? It’s the natural thing to do when feeling threatened. Furthermore, I knew about the greatness of America’s past and doubted that it was unconnected to its legacy white identity.
Having established this red-pilled dichotomy, I began to take a closer look behind the curtain which was obscuring the true mechanisms of power in my country. I finally caught a glimpse at the tiny group of highly-influential people who were doing the most to support non-whites and to demoralize white people like myself. I began to do Wikipedia searches on them, and learned that there were more of them in positions of power than I had realized. Could these people really be my friends and allies like I once thought they could? Where’s the love I’d been showing them all these years, and why isn’t it being requited?
The human mind is a sluggish thing. Mental habits can become ruts, and sometimes it’s hard to see out of them. As I was researching Dissident Right ideas for my novel White Like You several years back, the pressure began to mount for me to break out of the rut I had been in. But I held out. I resisted. I didn’t want to admit I had been wrong. I didn’t want to turn on the Jews. But, eventually, I did. I had no choice. With enough study, one realizes that the dissidents had been the ones possessing most of the Truth all along.
As I stated recently in my essay “Rediscovering a Song”:
. . . as I was poking around the edges of the dextrosphere for information and anecdotes to put in the mouth of my antagonist, I began to realize something: the arguments from these bad-thinkers seemed to hold together pretty well. Unexpectedly well. Sure, there were some unstable and paranoid individuals out there. But for the ones that weren’t—for the ones who were merely angry or resentful yet still clear-headed—I had nothing. This made sense since they had done their homework on Jews, while I hadn’t even known that any homework had been assigned. People kept mentioning philosophers I had never heard of and historical events I never knew happened. I had never heard of the Holodomor. I hadn’t known about 200 Years Together or For My Legionaries. People kept referring to The Occidental Observer as well as Counter-Currents where I found Greg Johnson’s dissertations on Jewish power quite jarring and hard to refute. I couldn’t believe I was actually taking this stuff seriously. To put it all to bed once and for all, I decided to read Kevin MacDonald’s The Culture of Critique since everyone was talking about it. To say I went in a critic and came out a convert might be overstating it a bit. But as I was reading it, I could feel my philo-Semitic angels dying one by one. I imagined I could hear them scream.
I believe that much of the Dissident Right is about this rightward shift from race-realism to race identity to understanding the Jews. We start with biological truth, move to political truths, and then finally to forbidden truths. It’s not about hate or revenge, of course. It’s about identity. People must have identity of some sort — a way to differentiate themselves from others — or else they face swift extinction. Perhaps this is why ancient tribes living only miles apart from each other insisted on having their own gods; they needed that link to the future and the past, their alpha and omega, to tell them that they’re special, to give them a reason to keep fighting to survive. Whether against the elements, animals, Man, didn’t matter. The fight for survival is the only fight, and nothing equips us better for victory than a strong identity.
I believe white people are losing this identity — this strong racial identity. They have been on top for so long, they have forgotten what it is like to suffer at the hands of others or to live in a culture not informed by the political ideals derived and perfected by whites. To them, everyone is potentially white. Either that or they are secretly afraid of non-whites or feel so guilty about the past that they seek to deny their racial identity in order to appease them.
This kind of thinking is pathological. It is dishonest, solipsistic in the extreme, and suicidal in practice. It is this sort of thing I would like to see reversed while we still have time to reverse it.
I have shared with you how I became red-pilled, but the issue of time is why I stay red-pilled — because we are swiftly running out of it.
Spencer J. Quinn is a frequent contributor to Counter-Currents and the author of the novel White Like You.
24 comments
Brilliant
What a brave and honest essay. I must look up his books, never heard of him before.
However, this is the answer to your Lamarckian doubts: Besides our genetic code of the letters A, T, C and G we may acquire in our lifetime and pass on to our offspring the so called methylation patterns. Whenever there is a C followed by a G in our genetic code, this ‘dinucleotide’ may acquire (or lose) an extra molecule, a methyl group. This CAN be inherited as a pattern, on top of the genetic code, despite being acquired during the lifetime of an individual.
As a Southron/Dixian, it’s amusing to me, that Whites, which lack proximity/experience with/around blacks, then at some point experience intimate proximity with them, invariably develop racially realistic ‘postjudice’ observations/attitudes as to cultural proclivities prone to their greater mass, the ‘Cosby Show/Dr. Huxtable) fallacy evaporates quite quickly. proximity exposes reality. it works like a charm.
the same logic can be applied to matters ‘tribal’… to quote Bro. Dave Gardner (God rest his Dixian soul), “It’s all in how ya look at it, and study it.”
“But its Lamarckian nature nagged at me. What exactly was the mechanism which caused black children to inherit psychological defects that their ancestors acquired during their lifetimes? “
Well perhaps it’s Darwinian. Smart or plucky blacks were systematically removed from the gene pool to create a subservient slave population. Decapitation, as used on the Slavs by the communists.
The “Orcish” reply, suggesting that the better quality slaves were removed, thereby dumbing down the gene pool is, I guess, referring to blacks already at their destination because slaves from Africa were bought from Arab and black slave dealers who in turn bought from local tribes. No doubt physical characteristics were desired for labor (are we talking eugenics, here?) but I would imagine blacks in antebellum or post bellum US for that matter are much the same as blacks in Africa. Studies even suggest a slightly higher IQ for US blacks which may be due to white admixture or white education. It is said Nigerians from Africa are smarter than US blacks, but there would be a much bigger pool to choose from and aggressive selection from NGOs to provide scholarships and overseas study. Once again -eugenics?
Yeah, I was challenging someone to shoot me down. Blacks communities everywhere in the world show a similar behavioral and economic profiles, and blacks in the US are the wealthiest anywhere. So clearly biological traits are at play. And certain Nigerian groups, such as the Igbo, actually outperform whites—an exception that proves the rule, because if whites were somehow holding blacks down via direct or structural racism, why doesn’t it seem to work on these Nigerians? Similar but more crucial argument to Asian success. Igbos are some of the darkest and most African appearing blacks. Actually many American blacks are descended from Igbo.
The Igbos outperform the whites?
OK – in what?
Given what the whites have achieved, whatever the Igbos have created better be outstanding.
No broad (ie, non-selected) black ethnic group “outperforms” whites, unless we’re discussing something non-cognitive. I’d like to see real data for your assertion. If American blacks are smarter than Africans (and they are) it is due to massive amounts of past (and, alas, present) white admixture. From Frederick Douglass to Barack Obama, how many of the most successful blacks (note: usually, however, “successful” in something superficial, like political agitation, jourmalism, or perhaps organizing a record label, rarely if ever in engineering or math or even the more IQ-intensive areas of the humanities, like philosophy, theology, jurisprudence, or history of ideas) have been substantially white (half in the aformentioned cases)?
Of course, white cognitive superiority is a purely biological development. I do not accept Christian identitarian-ish views that somehow whites (or anyone else!) are “God’s Chosen People”. I recall thinking, during a viewing of the spectacularly overrated and incredibly disappointing (even aside from the black nationalist subtext) Black Panther (I had thought it would be better due to its cool trailer), that it would have been interesting if the creators had imagined Wakanda as a wholly this-world, secular phenomenon. Perhaps the ancient Wakandans somehow could have stumbled upon the principles of eugenics/breeding simply via observation (eg, smart parents having smart children) and then designed their society to be a eugenicist state, administering primitive IQ/cognitive tests to the children, and then segregating out and pairing off the best performers and encouraging and financially supporting their maximum fertility. If a society did this for 50 or 100 generations they, black or anything else, would now be highly intelligent, and likely similarly technologically advanced.
Thus it is not impossible that the Igbo could be smarter than whites had they for some reason developed a society which, intentionally or functionally, featured eugenic breeding patterns. But I have never heard this, nor seen any evidence to that effect, so I’m sceptical.
Great essay. The success of Trump is, to a great extent, the result of implicit White solidarity. There’s a funny video by one Alex Jone’s female reporters where she’s doing the compare/contrast between a Trump rally and a Resistance protest to that rally. She manages to convince this older black fellow (50-ish) to walk with her over to the Trump rally. He kept stopping people — at the journalists urging — to ask them if he would be safe inside and it was sad to see the fawning way these nice White people filing into the Trump rally treated him. The black guy never did go in, and I think it was because he was genuinely terrified of a bunch of White people being all in the same place at the same time. So, he went back among the crazies at the Resistance protest. At some point, you just realize that non-Whites have gotten more than they deserve from Whites and that they owe us not the other way around.
White Nationalists and Black Nationalists can have a conversation (probably ought to) because we both agree that we shouldn’t be mixin’.
Here here!
“White Nationalists and Black Nationalists can have a conversation (probably ought to) because we both agree that we shouldn’t be mixin’.”
Yes, that will the topic of an upcoming essay. Thanks.
One of the few Black YouTubers I’ve heard talk about ‘a meeting of racial nationalist minds’ is Hotep Jesus. I saw a short video where he discusses the topic. You may already be familiar with his views, but if not, I thought I would mention it.
@ Spencer Quinn
Yes, that will the topic of an upcoming essay.
Excellent. I googled the word ‘ethno-state’ some time ago and found that – aside from references to Israel – the vast majority of results were specific to a white ethno-state. I guess most African and Asian countries are effectively ethno-states already. But part of our task, I think, is to promote the concept of Greg’s ethnic ‘divorce’ among non-white nationalists in our communities.
For those who have no other homeland, for example AmerIndians and Australian aborigines, this will necessarily mean either carving out a seperate piece of geography in our current homelands or finding some way to accommodate two or more nations within the one state / – while respecting the autonomy and separate identity of each.
A challenging topic. I look forward to your thoughts.
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This one should be chiselled on the Moon!
Love it.
Now let’s live it!
RUJV,
Thanks for saying that. And live it, we must!
“If you’re clever enough, you can “refute” almost anything.” Ha! True that.
An intelligent person can be convincing with whatever tripe thing. Christopher Hitchens comes to mind!
Only a good few months later did I come across his (much more intelligent and based) younger brother.
Mr Quinn, I think you’re my favourite writer on this site. Thank you for your writings.
My redpilling was due to searching YouTube for motivational videos to lose weight. I almost got divorced and was also looking for the male perspective on relationships. So i came across MGTOW and MRA… Somehow paleo/keto dieting got juxtaposed against fat acceptance and sjws..
And that led me to watching Milo Yiannopolis and other alt-light figureheads back in 2016… Made so much sense. Was a big fan of Ben Shapiro and Bill Whittle and others from that conservo-sphere..
The JQ opened up to me when an Evalion video “How to identify a Jew” popped up. Having watched her other videos, i was sickened (haha) at how anti-Semitic she sounded. (All the other videos made perfect sense). And then I came across Red Ice and their Jew playlist with EMJ, Kevin McDonald and Andew Joyce = epiphany time… Evalion didn’t seem so hateful anymore…
It’s so funny to reminisce about my great awakening. Btw I did go paleo and lost weight, had a baby and then about to have another one.
Thank you, YouTube!
It’s a beautiful thing, no?! Congratulations to you and your husband on your your 2 children and burgeoning family!!
Thank you!
SRM, So you got red-pilled entirely online. Interesting. Let’s hope that happens for many others as well.
Congratulations on your two babies, and thank you for the kind words!
Me = starstruck! Thanks for noticing my humble comment, Spencer.
I guess I’ve lived in a bubble all my life. I’ve travelled a lot but luckily never had a very bad experience with diversity. Had a few so-so experiences that never made me wanna make friends with blacks or Asians… I guess I was racist all along trying to fight these instincts. Same goes for homosexuals. Something about them was just off to me and though there were quite a few at my university and around me and it’s cool to have a gay friend, isn’t it, I never seemed to click with them.
Looking forward to your next article. Keep up the great work!
PS about to have my 3rd baby. Can’t wait 🙂
I have been redpilled mimimum ten years, thanks to these pages, and eg. The Occidental Observer. Local pages at home country nowadays available too.
You write great articles. Very good.
But you forget and deny (almost like controlled opposition) brave people fighting not only behind their computer, but in the occupied streets of our occupied countries. You should talk to these brave people, embrace them, praise them. Show that you are also brave!
I got red pilled in my teens while serving in the Army in the early to mid 1980s. I met negroes from every corner and most walks of life. I grew up around only a small group of them and only saw and interacted with those while at the public school. By the end of high school I knew, subconsciously if not consciously, that many are such that a White should be extremely careful around. Especially a group of them.
In the Army most of the negroes were certified screw ups. In one way or another, to one degree or another. Many making the same mistakes again and again. Even the negroes of NCO rank that were touted by the (largely) White officers, due to the prevalent political correctness under full sway, were screw ups; it was just not publicized or talked about. One had to be present to see a screw up and then and only then find out through whispered talk that this was a recurring thing.
Additionally, many were born thieves. A White learned to not be a roommate, barracks room mate, with even just one of them, not even one of the “good ones”. Yes, that negro might be close to White behavior himself. But his soul brothers, who will visit and hang out with him in your barracks room would rob you blind. Many negroes, even good ones, would act as if they thought nothing or much at all at the trouble making of the majority of negroes.
Many were rather grubby and shabby in their hygiene both personal and living space.
As usual, many would fly off the handle, although not as much as in the civilian world. Many a time, two or more would be standing around, on duty or off didn’t matter, and would be their usual loud, garrulous selves, having loud ostentatious conversations. Within a second, two or more of them would start getting physical over something another would have said, or how they said it. And they shake their heads wondering why so many of them have criminal/incarceration records. Very little impulse control.
The truth is that the US military shouldered aside Whites who could do the military duty and wanted a military career, to make room for negroes who had to have entrance requirements/standards, training curriculum and promotion standards lowered to accommodate them. Giving lie to the claim their skin color was held against them.
I was red pilled about jews (never knew any up close and personal, and was a big die hard supporter of Israel) by reading Stephen Green’s two books Taking Sides and Living by the Sword, When Victims Rule by Anonymous and MacDonald’s Culture of Critique. For several years I’ve read all I could find on jews, past and present. Plus, I’ve made it a task to read everything written and still extant on history and use of money as well as on how propaganda is used on the mass of a people. These are two areas that my reading has identified as the well springs of jewish power over host populations. Or, at least White nations. These two need to be understood thoroughly by a White. It’s not enough to know that jews are our enemy and our worst enemy. Without those two jews would have little to no affect on Whites.
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