Counter-Currents
Derek Black, a rare example of a former White Nationalist who “unlearned” his views.
1,247 words
A common sentiment one encounters among Leftists is that their opponents have a moral obligation to “unlearn” their views (see this post). Leftists from conservative backgrounds insist that they changed their minds because they “thought for themselves,” and order all Right-wingers to do the same — or else.
The claim that they “thought for themselves” is easily disproven. Truly thinking for oneself is difficult. Shedding old beliefs in the pursuit of truth is an arduous, even painful process, like summiting a mountain. Anyone who has embarked on this path would realize that beliefs cannot simply be discarded overnight and that ordering someone to “unlearn” his views and providing no further direction is far from helpful.
In most cases, people who reject the value system instilled in them by their upbringing did not arrive at their views through reason. They were simply initiated into a peer group/subculture whose ideology they absorbed, or they consciously decided to rebel against their parents. Swapping one ideology for another via peer pressure or rebellion is relatively easy. It’s akin to memorizing a formula instead of actually deriving it oneself and understanding why it works. This explains why Leftists scoff at those who struggle to leave old beliefs behind and proclaim that “it’s not rocket science.”
If you genuinely wanted people to think for themselves, then you would not order them to arrive at a particular position. You would not shame them (“there is no excuse”) into falling in line with your ideology. You would simply urge them to question everything and come to their own conclusions
Finally, if you really cared about timeless truths, you would be indifferent to social fads and would not invoke the Current Year as an argument. Many Leftists from conservative backgrounds are upwardly-mobile strivers afflicted with status anxiety who prize their social standing over truth. This also explains their eagerness to intimidate conservatives: It is an attempt to distinguish themselves from classmates and relatives who never left their hometown. One sees similar behaviors among affluent urban white people who are anxious about retaining their status.
Leftists are resistant to the idea that they did not arrive at their views through reason because it threatens their unspoken belief that they are innately morally and intellectually superior to lesser white people. They are quite confident that they would have been the “good guys” in the Civil War-era South or National Socialist Germany, despite the fact that only a tiny fraction of people actively resisted those regimes at home. It is rather ironic because their conviction that they are somehow better is not exactly an egalitarian sentiment.
Derek Black, the son of Don Black of Stormfront, is a good example of someone whose political transformation was a product of peer influence. He was raised a White Nationalist and was active in the movement from a young age. Upon going to college, he was suddenly surrounded by Leftists. When his political activities were exposed, a Jewish friend started inviting him to Shabbat dinners and held him by the hand as he coaxed him out of White Nationalism. Black soon did a 180 and is now an anti-racist activist.
You can buy Greg Johnson’s It’s Okay to Be White here.
Unlike most Leftists, Black actually seems self-aware and credits his friends with converting him. In one TV appearance (which I cannot locate now), he mused that perhaps his parents would cease to be White Nationalists if they had different friends. Regardless of whether this is true, it reveals a lot about his own psychology.
Other “former racist” stories are similar. Jeff Schoep abandoned his worldview after befriending a nice Jewish woman and a black guy who fixed his car. I can’t think of a single case of someone who disavowed White Nationalism on intellectual grounds.
To anyone who has spent lots of time thinking about politics and philosophy and forming a worldview, cases like these are nothing short of baffling. But it is not surprising when one takes into account humans’ powerful desire for belonging, community, and social status. If all of the above are contingent upon their espousing certain views, they will unconsciously conform and brainwash themselves into adopting such views — unless they have a quasi-autistic immunity to social pressure or are naturally dominant, high-status males.
Leftists’ general assumption is that White Nationalists cannot possibly have arrived at their views through reason. They were instead infected by the “virulent” mind-virus of racism. Even if they grew up in liberal or anti-racist households, White Nationalists somehow magically absorbed the racism that supposedly pervades our culture. In reality, loners and “spergs,” who have a heightened immunity to peer pressure and are driven by a desire to know the truth, are overrepresented in the movement.
This brings me to my next point. Even loners and spergs are products of their biology and environment. I evolved beyond my conservative, religious upbringing and rejected much of it, but it influenced my political trajectory. The reason why formerly conservative Leftists strayed further from their upbringing than I and many other White Nationalists is not that they are smarter or more independently-minded, but that they were subjected to peer influences and social pressures to which we, being loners, were not. So to the accusation that I have not fully outgrown my past, I would simply reply, “Yes.” There is, after all, nothing wrong with adhering to traditional values instilled in you by your family.
Furthermore, political affiliation, like all psychological traits, is heritable. Up to 60% of variance in political ideology can be explained by genetics. Racial loyalty and ethnocentrism have a biological basis. No one can ever fully emancipate oneself from his biology.
It takes intellectual humility to acknowledge the limitations of one’s own reasoning. I am not surprised that the post linked at the beginning of this article was shared by a page entitled Science & Atheism, since atheists are not known for their humility, despite proudly referring to themselves as “skeptics.”
If the vast majority of people will never be able to independently and organically experience a radical shift in their worldviews, then telling them to do so amounts to telling them to find a new peer group. The irony, of course, is that Leftists ostracize their political opponents, preventing them from achieving this, so they end up mostly recruiting upwardly-mobile striver types who were determined to ingratiate themselves into their circles, anyway. Derek Black’s Jewish friend was shrewd enough to realize that inviting Black to his home would be more likely to effect a change in his worldview than punching him in the face, but most Leftists don’t share his approach. (Ostracizing and shaming your opponents only brings them to your side when it is paired with a more inviting approach. They must be given space to retreat.)
What do Leftists really want? They certainly do not want you to “think for yourself.” Most of them do not even necessarily want you to experience a change of heart, otherwise they would actively engage with their opponents and foster a culture of debate. Even apologizing profusely is not enough. They will never really forgive you, and apologizing actually heightens their contempt for you. One can only conclude that all they really want is to bully their opponents and remove them from public life.
Whenever mainstream Leftists style themselves as independent thinkers and urge their opponents to “think for themselves” or “read a book,” they must be mocked and exposed as the conformist bullies that they are.
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13 comments
I’m living currently in one of the most woke and vaccinated states, and let me tell you the mood is glum and downbeat. Even the most normal of people realize there is something fishy about this pandemic. Many are starting to regret putting the mysterious gene juice in their bodies. Many are starting to realize Ukraine will lose. Many are starting to realize the crime wave has just begun. Many are starting to realize sexual perversion is being taught in our schools. Many are starting to realize that (white america) exists in a hostile world, that our feckless leadership is totally inept on the global stage, and that our youth are dying from drug overdoses, from hopelessness. That is why my opinions have become hardline. These are my people, even if they are hopelessly deluded, and they are in peril and only dimly realize it.
Yes I think that as conditions for the ‘aspirational’ classes in Western nations (i.e. the tax base) deteriorate under the encroachment of third-world demographics and practices, the economic cost of not drawing a line in the sand on crime, immigration and cultural entropy will outweigh the social cost in terms of ostracism. When the numbers are right and ‘mass cancellation’ of dissidents becomes impractical, then a tipping point will occur. It is my belief that this is still some years off, and that despite the recent election result, France may be the first to fracture.
Your locals are showing a lot of awareness. Where I am, we still have some people wearing the face diapers. Even of those who aren’t, I’m not seeing any signs that they have much awareness of what really happened. They’ve moved onto the next thing.
I suppose it’s possible for someone to go from our way of thinking to the other side. I find it difficult to believe because we are all weened from birth with their garbage. It’s as we age we keep having more and more aha moments. Then you realize that everything you were ever told is a steaming crock. We all know a few nice black people. I always say to myself-they can take care of the others.
As some wise anon once said:
You can disavow everything you learned, but you’ll never forget it.
One point you didn’t make that I immediately thought was that this Derek Black fellow and other children of red-pilled dads may have been raised in a red-pilled home, but they didn’t develop those ideas for themselves, they don’t own them for themselves through trials, experience, research, and logic. They don’t share the roots of their parents who forged those views. So Mr Black will have to evolve on his own and perhaps he’ll seek truth someday, perhaps not. As you mentioned, if he is a low-T beta male or homosexual, chances are he’ll never be brave enough to actually seek truth and will prefer the comfort of conformism along with the vast majority of women and other beta males.
This is precisely how I feel about this case. From what little I know, Derek Black was basically born and raised in a cult. He rebelled against his parents beliefs and was welcomed into a system that made life easy for him. Perhaps his upbringing wasn’t the best and perhaps he equates his father’s ideas with what he’s been put through. Dissident life is hard and perhaps it just wasn’t attractive enough for him. Regardless, the ideas we hold are hard-fought and come from within. If they come from outside, and are forced on us in an unpleasant way, they are easier to ignore. Emphasis on “ignore” and not “disprove”.
Either way, there will soon come a day when it’ll be easier for a white man to be a dissident than it will be for him to persist as a second class citizen within an anti-white system.
The more cult-like and far removed from the lives of ordinary people a movement is, the more likely its members are going to perhaps move away from it, be they either born into it or recruited.
There’s a strong possibility that Derek Black had been in secret contact with the SPLC for quite some time before he had officially relinquished his hitherto held views, perhaps before he went off to college – maybe aged around 16 or 17 when the desire to do the types of ordinary things that others that age do, would be almost irresistible – meeting new people, experiencing new things, etc.
By his own admission, he realised that it would only be a matter of time before some of his fellow college students “Googled” his name to reveal that he had connections to the White separatist movement. What did he honestly expect to find at college? What sort of people? Surely he must have had SOME idea that they were not going to hold opinions that were conducive to White continuity?
Derek Black deliberately chose to go to college to not only escape the cult-like environment of the family home, but to try and expunge the ideas with which he’d been brought up. Instead he could have chosen to quietly and less dramatically move away from home; gone to trade school to learn something useful, rather than obtain some tin-pot degree from a provincial college and perhaps kept a not unsympathetic position towards his family’s political consensus without abandoning it altogether.
Leftists are higher in extroversion and neuroticism on average. Extroverted men and neurotic women have more children, but they fare worse than the average person in procreating such that parents having, instead, average levels of either trait relative to their gender go on the have the most grandchildren. Having excesses of short-lived, unstable procreative enhancing traits, Leftists represent a partial gradual die-off and to some extent are here today, gone tomorrow. The glue is laid on too thick and to anything or anyone, rather, they’ll stick. They “like” people as an extrovert would, but neurotically fear not being liked so they conform to norms enabling them to maximize the size of their potential peer group, their safety in it, and sexual partner opportunity.
We’re all somewhat extroverted or neurotic, though, and we can relate to their sentiments, but they go so far with them. The “youth,” (who are more extroverted) are easily deceived because they are quick to hope, to paraphrase Aristotle. Hope, Obama’s cliche slogan, the genome’s exhaust noise. DNA forever young, that doesn’t last.
It is evolutionary advantageous for humans to seek group acceptance. Without this genetic predisposition, human civilization would not exist. The ancient religions established order and encouraged procreation. Today’s ruling ideology in the west is anti-human. It discourages reproduction and incites chaos through criminal worship. If the majority of people truly valued truth, we would not be in this position. There are two possible paths to reestablish sanity; convert the elites who influence the masses and/or hold strong until the collapse forces people to choose truth out of necessity. It’s more important than ever to build an ideological foundation that is prepared to be the refuge when the inevitable collapse occurs. We have to think long term and realize we may not even be alive to see the fruits of our labor.
“in the Civil War-era South”
A civil war is one in which two factions are vying for control of a country. The South wasn’t trying to take over the whole country or to rule over the North; the South was fighting for its independence.
“The first act of secession dates as far back as 1789, when eleven of the States, becoming dissatisfied with the old articles of confederation made in 1778, seceded and formed a second union. When in 1861 eleven of the States again seceded and united themselves under the style of the Confederate States of North America, they exercised a right which required no justification….” (Edward A. Pollard)
The North was trying to lord it over the South. The North was fighting against self-determination and “consent of the governed” and the right of the Southern people to govern themselves.
“A leading organ of public opinion—of Northern, or New England public opinion—says: `We have the power to subjugate, or to annihilate, the South, and one or the other we are going to do.'” (the New York magazine The Old Guard, Feb. 1865)
“This malevolent and venomous spirit … pervaded … Northern society. It was not only the utterance of such mobs as, in New York city, adopted as their war-cry against the South, `kill all the inhabitants,’ it found expression in the political measures, military orders, and laws of the government; it invaded polite society, and was taught not only as an element of patriotism, but as a virtue of religion.” (Edward A. Pollard)
(archive.org/details/invaded)
“No one can ever fully emancipate oneself from his biology.”
I think this one line sums up the differences between left and right dissidents. They would call you a fool for limiting yourself to biology. You can be a prima ballerina if you so desire or black activist despite your pale skin. The same way the left gladly accepts a man coming to his own realization, usually through peer pressure once again, that he now wants men for sex, they will just as quickly vehemently condemn a man that seeks to rediscover his natural attraction to women. Even simply trying to rekindle religious beliefs after a hiatus of years would quickly be condemned by the left. It takes true confidence and competence to be able to stand up for your whiteness and it’s beauty. The peers definitely flipped the subject of the article.
Humanity consists of such “peer groups”. I have searched far and wide for a community (ironic) that would tolerate and embrace diversity of thought, the spirit of honest debate. All for naught. The vast majority of people think in pheromones, not in words. They distinguish between a familiar smell, and a foreign one. Humans indeed belong to cultures, large and small. And cultures themselves are these monstrous constructs, blind and deterministic… even though there might come a prophet like Muhammad, Lenin or Hitler with the power to change a lot.
Even in this thread, imagine responding to a commenter that Russia is in the right, but is set to lose! It’s hard psychologically. Or that vaccines are bad, whereas masks are good. Or that both Hitler and Stalin had good sides. Or how the word “Nazi” means different things to an American and to a Russian. Humans use language as a means of bonding, not as a vehicle of a search for the truth.
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