Books Displayed During Banned Books Week vs. Actual Banned Books

2,329 words

The week of September 18-24 in the year 2022 is Banned Books Week in libraries across the United States. It’s something of an oxymoron, because the library will feature books that are “banned” — sort of doing the opposite of banning them by calling attention to them. A better name would be “Books Banned by Other People Week.”

A better way of celebrating Banned Books Week would be to feature books banned on Amazon, where we used to be able to browse Jared Taylor’s White Identity, Greg Johnson’s New Right versus Old Right, and Kevin MacDonald’s Culture of Critique. What these three books have in common is the notion that whites have interests as a race.

I wouldn’t recommend actually doing this to any college students because it could result in them being banned from their schools, but one funny trick a student could play is to approach a college librarian with one of these three books and ask if they can add it to the collection. (Typically, the individual to whom you speak will not be a librarian but a college student being paid to essentially sit there and do homework while interacting with people once every few minutes.) They will probably think nothing of it and take it to a middle-aged person who actually makes good money working there. If they send back word that the donation is not going to be accepted due to offensive content, you could then inquire as to whether they could therefore feature it in their display for Banned Books Week, since they have effectively banned it from the library. Capturing all of this on video would be particularly funny, but it’s a bad idea because a green-haired they/them may make a big fuss about it online or, worse yet, play a virtuous victim crybaby for school officials and implore them to do something in retaliation. The campus will then mount a massive “investigation,” presenting numerous opportunities for virtue-signalers to display their adherence to mainstream Leftist ideology. With the courts and judges so corrupt, particularly in university towns, doing something like this is a bad idea, and no one should ever do it.

Banned Books Week is a farce, but it seems to fool enough people that librarians still celebrate it. It’s part of a larger trend of what I call placatory politics. Essentially, this falls under a number of different gestures designed to placate people who have less power than the people who run the establishment, which would essentially be well-paid, mostly middle-aged people in business, finance, and the government. Placatory politics is essentially Wampum beads for those without power. For those who don’t know, the whites who colonized North America would often buy huge swaths of land from the primitive Amerindian inhabitants by giving them beads or other trinkets. Similarly, our “woke” elders prefer to give us special pronouns or designations, such as being extra anti-racist, rather than a living wage. Modern politics is the equivalent of having a foosball table in a business’ break room — despite the fact that most of its employees under 40 can’t afford to buy a house.

The way Banned Books Week relates to placatory politics is that our rulers are essentially pretending that they are going along with some kind of revolution, and even appearing to guide us in it. Since youthful revolution seems to be something that has been occurring either culturally or in terms of coups d’état for well over a century now, perhaps those with power have decided that they should go along with it, or at least give the impression of doing so.

You can buy Greg Johnson’s White Identity Politics here.

Sometimes in wondering what it’s like to be the sort of Leftist who goes along with Banned Books Week, I feel like Nagel addressing the question of what it’s like to be a bat. Maybe I’m just such a different animal that I could never know. I can only guess, but I’ll try to imagine what they think of me and of themselves.

First, they would view me as thinking too literally about things. For them, life is like a Haunted Hayride during which we pretend things are real for fun. Just as it’s fun to pretend that the paid actors who lunge at you are real monsters, it’s fun for middle-aged librarians to pretend that they’re still part of a rebellious youth culture by displaying “banned” books. The ability to play pretend with others is crucial to success in life. People must pretend that their petered-out boss is competent, that their job isn’t a “bullshit job,” and that they feel a strong sense of duty despite their actual abilities going unused or in the service of making some billionaire Jew even richer. Pretend thinking seems to benefit Machiavellian operatives more than literal thinking.

The second thing adherents of Banned Books Week would accuse me of is thinking outside the box in inappropriate ways. For them, there is a set of socially acceptable, universally inoffensive things, and then there is another set of things which aren’t so anodyne, especially for the black and brown customer-students. For them, one must color inside the lines and never question them.

The third thing they’d accuse me of is being emotionally detached. On an interpersonal level, we seldom point out our friends’ weaknesses. If anything, we seek to cover up their faults or explain them away as a product of bad luck or some such thing. Most white people — even White Nationalists — have non-white friends. It’s easy for a non-white to support his race, because non-whites collectively want to move to white nations, cities, towns, and so on despite the minute adversity they face in doing so. However, whites collectively don’t want to move to African-American ghettoes, Chinatown USA, Israel, India, etc. In fact, most whites want to avoid non-whites on a collective level, even though they’re okay with being friends with them on an interpersonal level.

When non-whites support their own ethnic interests, they’re supporting their right to intrude on white lands, but when whites support their ethnic interests, instead of doing their usual thing of fleeing to the suburbs or white cities like Billings, Montana, they’ll vote to stop non-white immigration and repatriate non-whites — or at the very least promote segregation or secession, which is almost de facto segregation. If the stronger race that creates more desirable societies supports their racial interests, it means fewer interracial friendships, but if the weaker race that creates less desirable societies does, it usually means more interracial friendships. While it still may be possible to maintain friendships with non-whites via the Internet, phone calls, or visits, it won’t be as easy to create them living in different nations or segregated communities.

While there is no doubt that proponents of stigmatizing white identity politics have a point about there being a contradiction between being friends with non-whites and holding these beliefs, it only applies to future friendships with non-whites, because existing ones can be maintained remotely or in the form of visits. A white man can leave his white country and visit a black friend in his black country, and vice versa. For all intents and purposes, they are already doing the same thing, as often a black will leave a majority black area to meet a white in a majority white area within the same nation. Despite this, though, there is an uncomfortable barrier even among such friendships, as white identity politics essentially means rejecting the conditions which brought about the friendship. Eschewing white identity politics would seem to make such friendships less strained.

The effect of non-white identity winning out is to end up with more non-whites in white countries, which is something that won’t cause trouble in the short run, but over time will transform such nations and lead to whites being absorbed into a mixed-race mass of people that will in turn be less attractive to non-white immigrants. (After all, Africans aren’t trying to get into Brazil with the same fervor they’re trying to get into the US or Europe.) The effect of white identity winning out is a more effective way for whites to formally demarcate their suburbs, states, and nations than doing it intuitively and furtively as they do now by running off to new cities and suburbs.

The immediate effect of most whites uniting in their opposition to non-white intrusion would be civil unrest among non-whites and white Leftists, but greater societal happiness in the long run, since studies show that racial diversity is not a strength. There seems to be a tradeoff in one’s ability to think in terms of collective, group-level harmony and interpersonal harmony. Whites who play the game of going along with political correctness, landing a good job due to their social connections, and then galloping off to a suburb seem to be hacking the system in the way most whites choose – namely, as Joe Sobran astutely noted, by showing that “the purpose of a college education is to give you the correct view of minorities, and the means to live as far away from them as possible.”

Most of the middle-aged librarians who set up Banned Books Week displays aren’t thinking in terms of a society at large or centuries into the future. They’re only thinking in terms of interpersonal harmony and, most importantly, their own career success. Even if they recognize the irony of displaying “banned” books, they go along with it, because they want to seem politically correct. They must think that if they can burrow their hearts and minds deeply enough into the mainstream’s multiracial ideology that perhaps they can continue their quiet life in a majority-white suburb, where they can live with their only child — who suffers from autism in part because they waited until their late 30s to have him, since that is the age by which the librarian job finally started to pay enough for them to buy a house.

It’s normal for people to believe that if they just go along with the mainstream that they’ll be okay. We live in a very technologically advanced age, so people must think things are as they should be. Historically, engaging in something a tribe considered taboo could result in a death sentence. As a result, most people instinctively prefer to walk on the straight and narrow path as the majority of people define it. Some people can afford to go along with mainstream society and be okay, but others can’t.

It seems non-whites come to America mainly to do tough jobs whites don’t want to do in the first generation so that their children can benefit from affirmative action in the second generation. They can then breeze through college curricula that have been dumbed down, partly for their sake, and nudge out white people for jobs, and hence enter the upper classes. The system would seem to need to continually harvest blue-collar workers from overseas and then later lower standards so that these workers’ kids can get through college and achieve societal equity.

This isn’t the entire picture, however, as it seems that more than second-generation non-whites are winning out in status competitions against whites. For example, let’s assume that the average IQ of a black college graduate is 100, and the average white college graduate’s IQ is 115. An extroverted white with an IQ of 115 and an introverted white having an IQ of 130 can graduate with the same degree, but because standards for entry-level jobs have been lowered to suit black graduates with IQs of 100, the necessary intelligence threshold can be lowered so much that the intellectual advantages of having an IQ of 130 vanish due to the hiring process. For his part, the extroverted personality of a white person with an IQ of 115 doesn’t help him, since non-whites can be just as extroverted; thus, in this case the standards haven’t slackened. If the white extrovert with an IQ of 115 goes along with multiracialism, he not only does well, but he gets to outcompete the IQ 130 introvert, since intellectual thresholds have been lowered in entry-level jobs to accommodate black graduates with IQs of 100. Extroverted whites who are relatively stupid therefore benefit from multiracialism, whereas introverted whites who are relatively smart suffer. Perhaps this is wishful thinking on my part, though, given that growth in artificial intelligence may soon have an unlimited capacity to compensate for growth in human incompetence.

Overall, of course, whites don’t benefit as a group in terms of being able to pass on their gene variants in the proportions their race produces them due to allowing non-whites to enter their societies, but some whites do benefit in the short run of perhaps a few generations by creating societies that suppress those whites who possess different gene variants from them. Some gene variants therefore seem to buttress the overall race, whereas others undermine it.

The odd thing is that many whites who benefit individually from multiracialism nevertheless choose other whites as partners, and may even outbreed those whites who lose out — at least insofar as successful men outbreed unsuccessful ones. Whites may be coevolving to be behaviorally closer to non-whites intellectually while evolving to not want to interbreed with them — although that’s hard to imagine, since if they become behaviorally closer to them, they’ll be more likely to interbreed with them.

The sad truth is that many students who obediently accept Banned Books Week will get nothing in return for it. Despite their starry-eyed ambitions, the more introverted ones will often end up underemployed and working at places like Starbucks, getting paid just enough to squeak by. Maybe those who hit the wall of the dislocation between education and employment will start questioning the box and begin to think outside of it.

Maybe they’ll think about things truthfully, comprehensively, and dispassionately enough to realize that we live in an Orwellian society where “banned” books are on display, while calling attention to an actual banned book will get a student banned from school — not to mention any job requiring a college degree.

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