Counter-Currents
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About a year and a half ago, an associate professor at a European university reached out to me over Facebook. He politely invited me to an interview. This is what he wrote (links added):
I am working on an academic project about novels, novellas and short stories published by Counter-Currents Publishing and Arktos Media. The project’s working title is ‘Imagining Alternative Worlds’. I am interested in topics raised in these works, the authors’ creative processes and motivations, as well as their views on the function of their writing more generally.
I have read your ‘White Like You’, and I would be extremely grateful if you could agree to be interviewed online (30-60 minutes, audio-only if you prefer). I have also read ‘Charity’s Blade’ and ‘My Mirror Tells a Story’, but while the interview might touch on these two too, it would focus on ‘White Like You’.
I was, of course, flattered to be considered important enough to be the subject of an interview. That hasn’t happened terribly often in my career as a dissident scribbler, and never before by a total stranger in the mainstream. I quickly considered the upside. Such exposure could help spread our ideas and win converts, to say nothing of raising my own profile. My interlocutor promised not to include any quote from me without my permission and seemed perfectly reasonable. Maybe this was a big opportunity? I was certainly excited, but at the same time wary. I didn’t like the fact that many of his publications included the term “far Right” in both text and title. That rang alarm bells for me.
You can buy Spencer Quinn’s novel White Like You here.
Far Right. Is that what I am?
I’m on the Right, certainly. If anything, the term “Right” more or less asserts a person’s adherence to the truth behind tradition, nationalism, race- and sex-realism — the Old Gods, basically. It also serves to distinguish oneself from one’s opposite, the Left, which promotes everything that is opposed to all of the above. Lies, essentially. Jim Goad and I have gone back and forth on how to describe this thing of ours. It seems that he believes that the Right-Left distinction is less meaningful than its underlying racial components: either you’re pro-white or you’re anti-white. Pick one. He’s not wrong; it is possible for one to be Right-wing and anti-white. Jews who push for racial integration in America while promoting segregation of non-Jews in Israel are a prime example. It’s also possible, at least historically, for one to be Left-wing and pro-white, such as the socialist author Jack London.
Still, however, I prefer to keep with the terms Right and Left. They link us to the past, when political divisions were more about class than race and sex, as they are now. You can draw a straight line from thinkers such as Carl Schmitt, Julius Evola, and Francis Parker Yockey to the issues we face today. The same with Karl Marx, Franz Boas, and Max Horkheimer — one of the originators of critical theory, which has taken over much of our educational system in the past few decades. Abandoning Left and Right takes us away from that. Yes, their definitions evolve over time. But in the field of politics, what doesn’t?
Also, what I consider to be the Left-Right distinction encapsulates more than just race. For example, a global warming activist blocking traffic or a drag queen reading stories to children could be perfectly agnostic about race, and yet must still belong to the Left, according to my definition of the term.
But “far Right?” I’m not comfortable with that because it implies ideas which are violent, unhealthy, and otherwise extreme. What mainstream academia calls “far Right,” I call normal. Where Candace Owens says she is on “team God,” I feel like I am on team normal. A century ago, when living conditions were much harsher than they are today and all people had to constantly fight and scrape for their very survival, whites could less afford fanciful notions about egalitarianism, progressivism, and political correctness. They understood the truth behind race, gender, and ethnicity. They understood the importance of tradition and tribalism. This was all part of mainstream discourse, and whites typically could not give a hang if outgroup members felt otherwise. If anything, many non-whites were on the Right as well back then — in order to remain on whites’ good side. Not a bad position to be in in 1920.
You can buy Spencer J. Quinn’s novel Charity’s Blade here.
Being on the Right today means that one holds to the past and believes that, thanks to the influence of the Left, Western culture has become corrupted, both morally and spiritually, and has lost its way as a result. This doesn’t mean that Right-wingers today wish to return to slavery or the divine right of kings. There is some progress the vast majority of us do not want to reverse. The great republican experiment, which more or less started in 1789, has tempered the Right somewhat — and not entirely for the bad. Human rights should be respected. Democracy in limited forms should be encouraged. Freedom of speech, religion, the press, and to bear arms are all good things.
I think the term “far Right” is simply a smear to describe one who is uncompromising in the face of lies and degeneracy, and who is willing to resist the unscrupulous power-mongers who promote such things. This is the real Right in my opinion, and without it, Western civilization would perish in a great, bloody cataclysm as Russia did in 1917.
This is how I responded to our academic friend:
I will agree to grant you an interview in print (not vox or video) if you will first return the favor by allowing me to interview you (in print) for Counter-Currents. After reading your essays, I will send you a list of several questions. Thanks.
He refused, naturally, and that was the end of our conversation. Typically, people on the Left do not like to have the tables turned on them. I think that whenever Leftists interview someone on the Right, much of their motivation is to make their readers gawk at how old-fashioned and reactionary some people can still be in this day and age. I have no idea if this individual in particular had such a scheme in mind. Maybe not. But it seems that most ideologues on the Left these days believe that Right-wing ideas refute themselves. All they have to do is give some lost soul on the Right a platform, and he’ll embarrass himself by running his mouth.
The assumption here is that Left is normal and Right is not. This is false. Agreeing to be interviewed by a Leftist on his own (Leftist) terms in a way accepts this falseness as true — as if liars would ever engage a truth-teller in good faith. When interacting with the Right in any form, Leftist goals are always to enforce Leftist perspectives and discredit Rightist ones — despite any claims of impartiality. People on the Right should never let that happen. If anything, we should be interviewing them. After all, we’re the ones who are normal.
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29 comments
Well done, sir, including this nice article that you got out of it. A victory all around!
Oh, I think you should have done the interview. Any exposure is good. Many times when mainstream figures draw attention to the far right, it’s out of secret sympathy.
Right and left are highly contextual. Diaspora Jews as you mention, support racial integration in European countries, but racial exclusivity in Israel. While they fall on the left of the spectrum within the United States, in reality, from the point of reference of Judaism, they are right wing. They are supporting their group’s evolutionary interest. It is to their interest for their diaspora societies, where they are usually small minorities, to be open and permissive, making no racial or religious distinctions, or even weakening the majority. In Israel, where they can rule by numbers, they are in favor of majoritarian supremacy. So Jewish leftism is really a form of far rightism, when viewed from their own point of reference, and makes perfect sense. The true Jewish leftists are people like Norman Finkelstein, etc., who actually criticize Jewish group behaviors. Something along those lines, I notice in the media, is that non-whites of every stripe have to be cast in shows about European history, even in the middle ages, or whatever. However, on a series, like shogun, set in the far east, no one feels like you need to have black and Caucasian samurai. This tendency of historical replacement, or however it’s termed, is very specific to white societies.
Also, I think the dissident right are the true leftists in the contemporary paradigm. The Democratic left, you know, tells minorities lies about group ability and the sources of their social problems in order to get votes. Demagoguery. This will never really do a solution. This is like telling a cancer patient that they’re fine. Wrong diagnosis, wrong treatment. However, we, or at least the HBDer set, express to people what is really the issue, group differences in ability, and gives some prayer of meaningful improvement or at least reconciliation. Similar with sex changes and all. We’re the ones to tell people it’s a terrible idea to cut off a piece of your body. While this may be momentarily unpleasant to someone who wants to believe unrealities about the world, ultimately our advice leads to a better outcome. I use “left” here in the sense of progressive or meliorative.
I disagree. I think Mr. Quinn outmaneuvered the Professor quite nicely. Agreeing to an interview for CC would have shown this person’s genuine interest and his impartiality. In this case, as in many others, their motive is simply to score political points and to smear the Right by presenting the cause and its champions as extremists, hence labeling us as “far right”.
I have a question: do people not like this comment because you guys find it antisemitic and are offended? I am sorry; I did not intend it that way, only that when people act in their evolutionary interest, that is right wing.
I was not offended at all. You make some interesting points about the left-right divide, evolutionary behavior, and HBD. I’m just not convinced that any of that supports your contention that I should have done that interview. Maybe you’re correct and that the person has a secret sympathy for us. But I did read one his papers and it did not seem that way.
Basically, if one is deft enough in media he can control the narrative any way he wants, even to the point of making lies seem like truth and vice versa. Unless he was going to allow himself to be publicly interviewed first in an authentic right wing setting like CC where he puts all his cards on the table, I wasn’t going to trust him not to spin things against me (and us).
Oh you probly know better than me. I’m virtually always wrong on political matters. That was just an aside.
I was going to write a longer article defining right wing as the evolutionary tendency to appropriate the free energy of the environment for oneself and genetic group and the left as the tendency to subvert evolutionary tendencies for “moral” reasons, but that sometimes moral can be utilitarian.
[This was supposed to be a reply to DarkPlato, above.]
Somebody once said ‘Everybody is a nationalist when it comes to their own people – the groups they feel affinity with’ and that the ‘anti-nationalist, universalist’ left is no exception. I’m not sure if it’s really true of everybody, but I think there’s something to it. It’s just that the left in the West doesn’t feel affinity with their own race and nation, but instead blacks, browns, the “indigenous”, Palestinians, sexual deviants, and so on… a kind of telescopic altruism, or telescopic nationalism…
“A liberal is a man who won’t take his own side in a fight.” Robert Frost
I use that deeply true quote (which of course you have literally, but not substantively, altered) all the time, but suitably further emended:
“A liberal is a man who won’t take his own people’s side in a fight.”
Liberals are very pushy on behalf of themselves and their personal interests, as well as their pet causes and peoples, which, however, never includes their own people. Indeed, they see virtue precisely in betraying groups to which they are affiliated by blood or history, but not personal consent. This is a degenerate offshoot of the larger suite of evolutionary traits which together account for the white race’s higher morality relative to other races.
Excellent point.
You handled that masterfully. That must have provided considerable satisfaction.
Yes, anyone who refers to us as far right is not a friend, especially someone in academia
Good observation. A fellow nationalist, or even just ally, would use a term like “authentic Right” or “serious Right”. “Far Right” is almost always a signifier of a leftist, and a dishonest one at that.
Well, I consider myself to be Far Right and proud of it, but I agree that the Professor was undoubtedly disingenuous about being interested in you or your ideas, and I strongly agree that you handled the situation masterfully.
🙂
I’m on “team normal,” too, SJQ.
I think you made the right call on this one. But I wish this academic had agreed to be interviewed by you. That would have been something.
Good for you Spencer in rejecting that interview. We need to learn from the mistakes of the past. All publicity is not good publicity. It was brilliant to counter his offer by requesting he first allow you to interview him. His reaction shows his bad faith intentions.
The person in question would never have “stooped” (in his mind) to being interviewed by one of us. This would have created a paradigm where he must tacitly acknowledge some level of moral equality or an “even playing field”. That our differences of opinion are justifiable, rational, and borne from equally honest, sincere, and defensible intentions.
No, such a balance can never be. We are icky dirt people who must be tricked and hoodwinked, marginalized and spat upon.
A society is sick if it calls its normal people “extremists”.
I had a conversation once in which a woman called me extreme. I responded by saying that our elites openly support transexual boys playing sports against girls. And I am the extreme one? That point seemed to sink in with her.
This week I have been watching a pretty good documentary series on Netflix called “Captive”. It is a limited series which narrates a variety of high profile hostage taking/kidnapping/ransoming incidents over the last 50 years or so (in recent enough memory to have living survivors).
How this relates to the topic: The one I watched most recently narrates the story of 4 Christian peacekeeping volunteers who were kidnapped and held hostage in Fallujah by insurgents a year or so after the fall of Baghdad during the second Gulf War.
This story, and the behaviors and thought patterns of the western governments, peacekeeping organizations, rescuers, and surviving hostages, really caused me to examine my beliefs, and how they fit into the typical left/right paradigm. (Which also tends to be a proxy for the good vs evil paradigm, but the side of which depends on your own perspective)
So these hostages were captured by Iraqi insurgents who affiliated with Islamist Nationalists of various stripes. They Islamists used jihadist tactics, and their perspective was “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”, in seeing the western militaries destroy villages and kill innocent civilians. Despite the volunteers being Christian peacekeepers who sympathized with the Iraqis, the insurgents used them as a bartering chip to release Iraqis held captive.
So all kinds of contradictions jumped out at me. One, I normally sympathize with western Christians, but these idiots were such do-gooder naive fools that I felt a sense of disgust by their absolute passivity. They didn’t want to be rescued by the western military because they didn’t want violence perpetrated on their captors. You can’t make this stuff up.
Yet, with that said, I admired their consistency. I admired their ability to dissociate their own biases and at once both objectively and subjectively see the moral ambiguity in war, to understand that innocent Iraqi civilians were being slaughtered by western governments, even if a rationale for retaliation by western governments for various terrorist activities was arguable. It is a unique ability that white people alone are almost burdened with to be able to empathize with people who would otherwise hate you.
Usually Christianity is associated with the “right”, and is seen by many leftists as a form of fascism. Yet, many on “this side of the divide” think of these same types of Christians as the worst of the worst antiwhite, white guilt spreading leftists.
I myself am antiwar, but I can’t abide by people behaving so sheepishly, even if they disagree with the actions being taken by their own countrymen. I can’t respect someone who would jump in front of their rescuer to defend their captor. Despite their absolute consistency, I think they were child-minded morons. Even if I disagree with the tactics of western special forces, I know their courage to go in and rescue hostages is infinitely more admirable than the passivism of the hostages.
I know that the second Gulf War was wrong. I know that Iraq deserves to be left alone. I know that if western governments stop perpetuating the Zionistic policies that cause the conflict, there would be a greater peace. I am myself a passivist up to a point. But I’m not going to allow myself to be used as a pawn by people who hate me.
‘War’ – kinetic warfare – is organized mass murder that has never benefited the ordinary person (especially the ordinary soldier) in the West. Being ‘anti-war’ is the same as being ‘anti-naive’.
Without ‘war’, Whites would still be the dominant sub-species of human in Europe and the White Diaspora.
I’m not a pacifist because I think violence is always necessary when fundamental issues are stake, such as whether Whites will have political orders that favor White survival and advancement or not.
As a White Nationalist, my core vision is Whites caring about Whites because they are White and for no other reason. As a consequence, I think Whites need a religion that encourages them to nurture one another. A religion that encourages you to ‘nurture everyone’ is, ultimately, anti-White because most of the world is not White.
A far-right person is someone normal who can articulate coherent political opinions. Most people lack intellectual clarity and coherence. They do not think too much about politics, and they are ignorant of the JQ. You could classify them as left, right, or center, but they don’t have real political opinions. They have other interests in their lives. Their flawed, nebulous opinions are heavily influenced by the media.
In order to develop real opinions, they would have to be able to listen to the pro-White point of view in the mainstream media. They would have to hear both sides of the debate, participate in it without fear of intimidation, and come to their own conclusions. As long as they don’t have any real opinions, they remain innocent in the eyes of the media. But they become suspicious as soon as they take an interest in politics and start expressing themselves convincingly.
Sir, I think you missed the opportunity to pull an American History X on him and his audience.
I’ve gradually come to accept that ‘the Right’ has one and only one intellectual component: The prioritizing of Nature over Nurture. If you reject ‘nurture’ in any form, you’re ‘far-right’. If you accept that ‘nurture’ has some limited ability to compensate for ‘nature’ then you’re ‘moderate-right’.
Everything else that is said about ‘the Right’ is largely a matter of historical (or geographic) accident.
Everything else ‘the Right’ says about itself is basically self-comforting and ego-stroking.
I don’t think people on our side should ever interact with ‘the media’. They’re the enemy. Starve them of grist for their mill.
That’s pretty much the conclusion of my next contribution here, which should appear soon if it passes muster. Don’t feed the bears!
If you haven’t already done so, I encourage you reading In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities by Jean Baudrillard. Of the many brilliant things Baudrillard discusses in this book, the idea of ‘opacity’ as disabling the liberal ‘panopticon’ by frustrating the hierarchical need for ‘information’ about ‘the masses’. Also Ivan Illich has an essay somewhere in which talks about about a ‘silent protest without demands’ as a way to frustrate the expectations and tactics of liberalism.
I can give it a whirl, but it might be a while. I always thought Baudrillard was boring academic lefty literature, but it might have some gems.
Baudrillard is French, which means he does not feel obligated to make his arguments or describe his modeling in the Anglo-American philosophical tradition. He’s rather more playful. That can easily be confused with ‘leftishness’ but it’s not. Baudrillard was an actual sociologist who genuinely tried to understand the ‘human condition’ for ‘social persons’ in the post WWII era of ubiquitous ‘advertising’ (propaganda). He denied being a ‘post-modern’. He was his own man.
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