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Aug. 16, 2017 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
27:51
Weimar America
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There's recently been a great media furor over Donald Trump's response to the Charlottesville violence, where the alt-right and antifar and various other leftist groups had violent physical conflict and someone ended up getting killed in a car ramming.
This was Donald Trump's initial response.
We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides.
On many sides.
Donald Trump was absolutely correct to say that this violence was being done on many sides, because it is.
However, the media seems to have been afflicted by a temporary lapse in memory.
So I'm going to remind them very briefly now exactly what he's talking about.
This is Antifa, and Antifa can broadly be termed communists.
The left-wing journalists, who invariably identify as a form of socialist, are naturally remarkably sympathetic to communists.
And so they have pounced on Donald Trump, not because he has condemned, rightly so, both groups of racialized collectivists, but because he failed to denounce in strident and explicit terms the particular group that these racial collectivists hate, their antithesis, their enemy.
So Donald Trump, and rightly so, doubled down on what he had originally said.
When you say the alt-right, define alt-right to me.
You define it.
Go ahead.
So define it for me.
Come on.
Let's go.
Senator McCain defined them as the same group.
Excuse me.
What about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the alt-right?
Do they have any semblance of guilt?
This is for everybody.
Let me ask you this.
What about the fact they came charging, that they came charging with clubs in their hand, swinging clubs?
Do they have any problem?
I think they do.
So, you know, as far as I'm concerned, that was a horrible, horrible day.
Wait a minute.
I'm not finished.
I'm not finished, fake news.
That was a horrible day.
I will tell you something.
I watched those very closely, much more closely than you people watched it.
And you had a group on one side that was bad, and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent.
And nobody wants to say that, but I'll say it right now.
You had a group, you had a group on the other side that came charging in without a permit, and they were very, very violent.
If I didn't know that there were so many left-wing journalists with socialist sympathies, it would be baffling to me why Donald Trump would be forced to single out either one of these groups.
But I do.
But anyway, let's have a look at the footage that they are referring to, and Donald Trump is referring to there.
I guess it's kind of hard to tell, but I think it's indicative that Antifa had placed themselves directly in the path of the permitted march that would possibly sway my opinion as to who is in the right and who is in the wrong here.
But ultimately, both of these groups came for a fight, and that's because Antifar have shown themselves to be instigators constantly every time before this one.
I mean, do you not remember the fact that the left went on an absolute and completely unethical tirade after an Antifar member decided to punch Richard Spencer?
It's uh, Pepe has become kind of a symbol.
And now the left is unironically still grappling with the moral conundrum of do you punch someone just because they think differently to you.
And the overwhelming consensus from the socialist left appears to be of course you do, because that person must be a Nazi.
At least in the case of Richard Spencer, you are closer than most.
But most anti-far violence is not done to Nazis.
It is done to people who have no particular interest in politics, or at least are not out demonstrating at the time.
But none of this matters to the left-wing media, who aren't broadly sympathetic to Antifar, and have been pressuring Donald Trump non-stop since his statement on Charlottesville to outright condemn the neo-Nazis.
And so he did.
Racism is evil.
And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.
My problem with this is that it implies there is not a moral equivalence between Nazis and communists.
And there is.
They are both collectivist groups who demonize an out-group.
In the case of the neo-Nazis, it's people who are not members of the white race.
In the case of communists, it is people who are not members of the proletariat.
There is a reason that German collectivists end up forming death squads, and that's because the utopia is always just one murder away.
I mean, let's compare their actions, shall we?
Let's have a look at the things that both of these groups do and see if we can't identify any commonalities.
So some neo-Nazi has been arrested for smashing the glass of the Holocaust Memorial in Boston.
And like I showed in the Antifar footage earlier, this is leftists pulling down a Confederate statue in Durham.
Neither of these groups are particularly concerned with property rights, but that's not a big surprise given that both the Nazis and communists are what you could term as some variant of socialist, which is incidentally directly opposed to the English liberalism of the Enlightenment that was the direct inspiration for the Founding Fathers.
Here is one group of racial collectivists chanting, Black Lives Matter!
And here is another group of racial collectivists chanting white lives matter.
The only difference produced by this cacophony of racialized collectivism is the side that they're advocating for.
Philosophically, these people are separated by a hair's breadth.
The only difference between them is which side of the conversation they fall on.
But they are both very pleased to be having the conversation about race.
And they are both as violent as each other.
The only problem that the left seems to have is that they are not as competent as the right when it comes to actually committing violence and killing people.
I'm going to take a bit of time to explain in their own words what the alt-right is.
Because it is a white identitarian movement that could just be summarized as the white person's version of Black Lives Matter, which is why they were chanting White Lives Matter.
Richard Spencer, the man being unjustly punched earlier in this video, is the person who coined the term alt-right.
This is him explaining what he thinks the alt-right is.
Go so far into nihilism, go so far into the destruction of meaning and identity, that we have to pull ourselves out of it by the scruff of our own collar, that we have to demand meaning, we have to demand identity, that we have to become something that we aren't, that we have to become something greater than ourselves, that we have to become part of a family, part of a story.
And that's what the alt-right is.
That's what the alt-right is.
Alt-right is about identity.
In some ways, the powers that be like identity.
They like it when it has no teeth.
They like it when identity is just this kind of elective that we choose.
Oh, this is who I am.
These are my hobbies.
This is what I like to buy.
I like to dress up as this superhero when I attend this freakish nerd festival.
I'm going to create a new gender, a fourth or fifth one.
Stop.
I apologize for insulting cosplay, sir.
But all of those identities are ultimately toothless.
They're ultimately meaningless.
They're ultimately easily integrated into the global capitalist consumerist system.
That identities that matter are not the identity of, oh, oh, I like this film or that film.
This is what my music choices are.
I really like to consume on this breaking shampoo on Amazon.com.
No, that has no meaning.
That is not at all a challenge to the system.
Being a tranny or a transgender, that is absolutely not a challenge to corporate America whatsoever.
Indeed, they will embrace that and integrate that into their human resources system.
The great challenge to the system is when you say, I am German, I am English, I am white.
That is what they do not want to hear.
That is the true challenge.
As you can see, in no uncertain terms, the alt-right are not pro-capitalist.
They are not pro-individualism.
They are pro-racial collectivism built on a white identity.
If someone is not a white identitarian, then they are not alt-right.
Let us be clear about this.
While Richard Spencer might be the most prominent member of the alt-right, he is not the only member of the alt-right that has his own following.
Another person is Jared Taylor, who almost seems to be a parody of what a white supremacist is.
But he is, of course, considered to be a thought leader in these communities.
This is his opinion on what the alt-right wants.
I think what the people in this room care about is whatever policies Donald Trump carries out that reduce the rate at which whites are being reduced to a minority.
Anything that slows that process, we welcome.
And obviously, one of the important things that is reducing us to a minority is immigration, whether it's legal immigration, illegal immigration, preventing illegals from coming in, sending illegals here back to where they are.
All of this, all of these policies, for whatever reason inaugurated, and I don't think Donald Trump thinks in racial terms, all of those policies will slow our dispossession.
And that is what is vital to us.
Naturally, the alt-right have to be victims because all identity politics is the politics of victimhood.
And yes, they believe that there is a white genocide going on.
And this is one of the many reasons that they are against immigration.
And I wouldn't bother calling them racist if I were you.
They fully understand that they are racists, and they accept it.
So how do you handle it when people call you racist?
I tell them, say something original, for heaven's sake.
And for me, when people say you are a racist, it's just a form of name-calling.
They don't even know themselves what they mean precisely by this expression.
It is simply a means to say, you are a moral inferior, and therefore I don't have to listen to you.
And when you're reduced to name-calling, that's the most graceless way of admitting you've lost the argument.
Well, I think we should say that no, we're the real racists.
Because we have to be honest about this.
Everyone else is.
I mean, it's very simple.
I think it's time.
I think it's time for honesty.
The alt-right is overwhelmingly a young movement, with many of its converts being young white men and women who are identitarian in the same mold as social justice warriors.
Jared Taylor and Richard Spencer are basically the alt-right version of Anita Sarkesian and Belle Hooks.
Belle Hooks was for the longest time an intersectional racial feminist who found herself on the margins of feminism.
But given the rise of intersectionality, Belle Hooks has found herself with a new lease of life, doing many, many conferences and being treated like a feminist icon.
Much in the same way that Jared Taylor is being treated with the alt-right.
I'd like to think that there will still be a role for dinosaurs like myself who make sober, careful arguments, but I must say, I am tremendously impressed by the creativity of these young people.
They're doing extraordinary things.
These burgeoning videos, sarcastic memes, new websites showing up all the time.
To me, this reflects not only the creativity of young people, but also the incredible energy that is behind our ideas, an energy that will only grow and manifest itself in ever more varieties of different ways that will appeal to different people, but to end at the same result, namely a nation for us.
And they both want the same thing.
Racial hegemony.
Many of the young people joining the alt-right have been primed to think in racial terms and have decided that they have chosen the side of white people.
It's easy to talk about the alt-right in terms of some colorful movement from the past.
The fact is, the alt-right is really coming from 2016.
The alt-right is an overwhelmingly young movement.
And the alt-right is coming from an experience of young people entering minority status, a young white person, someone who could have been once a fish in water, who wouldn't have had to think about things like race and identity, someone who is now experiencing multiculturalism, and thus his consciousness of who he is is increasing.
I think this general trajectory is the historical foundation of the alt-right.
It's important to remember that the alt-right are for identity politics.
In fact, they consider themselves to be the natural conclusion of the introduction of racialized identity politics.
This is absolutely logical.
Any psychology would see this, that you're going to have all these people having identity politics and you see all the hostility of the left on campus, the BLM and everything else.
The obvious conclusion is white people are going to have identity politics.
It's inevitable.
And I think they see that as a horrifying prospect, but I think they're understanding they got to tone down their own thing to do that.
But I don't know that it's possible at this point.
I don't think it's possible.
And I do think we're headed for some very serious social conflict times.
I do think that some kind of civil war is possible.
You see what they're going on in campus.
These people on the left feel no compunctions about violence.
And if Trump does something like really starts deporting illegals, you can just imagine what's going to go on in these cities.
There are going to be insurrections.
And they're going to have to put them down.
And it's going to be social chaos.
It's going to be a very interesting thing.
It's often said that the individualist liberals who are more than happy to engage with the ideas and arguments of both the regressive left and the alt-right are somehow stoking the fires and converting people from one group to another.
I don't believe that's correct and neither do the alt-right.
In fact, here's Jared Taylor's opinion on the subject.
I was wondering if I could have some comments on the riots and how you think that will be affecting just the politics in general.
The riots.
Yes, as I have been explaining as patiently as possible, the fact that 50, 60 years after this so-called glorious achievement of the civil rights movement, we still have race riots.
What does this tell us about this attempt to build a society in which race can be made not to matter?
To me, it is the Black Lives Matter movement.
It is Trayvon Martin.
It is Michael Brown.
It is the riots in Ferguson and Philadelphia.
These have woken up otherwise more or less satisfied white people far more than Donald Trump ever did.
To what extent this awakening has led to his victory, I cannot say.
But these are the events that are driving people into the alt-right into a kind of sustained racial dissidence that can never be papered over again.
Now, how Donald Trump himself is going to handle this kind of thing, I think there again, depending on how he reacts to any future riot that might occur when some other black person is shot by a white policeman, or these days could be shot by a black policeman.
They'll still riot.
How he reacts in some way to that could also precipitate a kind of racial grinding of the gears that could, again, throw into relief just how difficult, just how futile this objective we have set for ourselves of making a society in which race just glimmers away.
I want to be really, really clear about this.
It is the opinion of the neo-Nazis that the left-wing racial identitarians are creating more Nazis.
What do you think about the present political situation in the United States from the point of view of our race?
I find it very encouraging.
I think it's really breaking down along racial lines.
As to the situation in general beyond politics and megapolitics, our enemies are doing everything that I would have them do.
The one person who is not, the only one group that is not failing us is our enemies.
They are pushing this race thing.
They will not let it die.
They will not leave it alone.
They keep worrying it.
It isn't working for them.
And so their reaction is always to press down on the accelerator.
If it's not working, we need to send more non-whites to Sweden.
We need to have broader busing.
We need to have more of a so-called conversation about race, which whites will be told how rotten and awful they are.
This has created a lot of opportunities for us.
And whites now in South Dakota are no longer isolated in an immunity bubble from experience the realities of these things.
I was very intrigued in the Democratic primary.
This is something very few of our people have noticed or talked about.
But the Democratic Party itself split almost exactly on racial and ethnic grounds, with the Jews, the Hispanics and blacks voting for Hillary, and the white Democrats voting, white Christian Democrats voting for Berry Sanders.
Now, superficially, that would seem to be a very odd thing because the whites were voting for the one that was actually more dedicated to being adversarial to us than even Hillary.
But it shows that race is the ultimate reality.
They're breaking it down on racial lines.
And I think we'll probably visit this later in the interview, but it's very important for us to get shed of old ideas and old limitations about being part, ideas of being part of a conservative movement.
We're not part of a conservative move.
Of course, when it came to the general election, what was it?
45% of whites did nevertheless vote for Hillary Clinton.
They did join forces behind this candidate who did pander to non-whites in what were often the most shameful ways.
This remains to me something of a mystery, just why so many whites can line up and salute to a candidate who is clearly oriented towards non-whites.
And it seems to me, I agree with you, by the way, that the Democrats, the lefties, the black bloc, all of these people are behaving exactly as we would wish in ways that will just drive people into our arms.
But this new head of the Democratic Party, Perez, he's a Hispanic.
His deputy is Keith Ellison, a Muslim black.
Those people could not have been chosen better to send a message to the Democrats.
We are not your party if you are white.
I agree.
This is a wonderful, a wonderful development.
Is there a single person left who thinks it is not the regressive identitarian left that is creating the Nazis?
These groups, both of them, are fundamentally diametrically opposed to Enlightenment values.
They think they are a bad thing.
They think individualism is a bad thing.
They think that the principles upon which the United States was founded are a bad thing.
Jordan Jordani, Jason Jordani, excuse me, who's the editor of Arctos Publishing, which has done tremendous things in terms of translating European philosophy and bringing it to the Anglo-American audience.
So yeah, those are what we're interested in.
I have a very strong interest in German idealism and Friedrich Nietzsche, but we all have our interest.
I think it's clear to say we're coming from somewhere different than the conservatives who kind of have a little paint-by-numbers ideology of ma constitution, macapitalism, and mobaman ma-Muslims.
And finally, they too understand the damage that the regressive left-wing media has done in actually trying to describe, identify, and address the alt-right.
They know the media has helped them.
When you have Mexican Americans who are citizens, or you have Muslim Americans who are citizens, saying that they go to bed terrified that they may be dragged out of their beds and carted off to rail cars, this is a reaction to a Frankenstein monster Trump that you people created.
They are not.
They are not.
They are not reacting to anything Donald Trump ever said.
Not once did anyone as any part of his campaign talk about any kind of measure against Hispanic citizens, against Muslim American citizens that would give them the slightest reason to think this.
It is you who called him a fascist, a threat to democracy.
It is you who said that if he is elected, the American experiment could fail.
It is this fantastic, hysterical view of Donald Trump that has caused this utterly unnecessary, cruel fear in the people that you claim to support and protect.
As it stands now, the alt-right is still a relatively small movement, but it will continue to grow as long as people like this are given a platform to spew racialized nonsense.
I went into the night like everybody else expecting for Hillary Clinton to win.
So when she didn't, and we spent so much time talking about the numbers and the maps and the region and the class and everything but race, I thought it was important to address the elephant in the room.
This was a whitelash.
This was a white lash against a changing country.
It was a white lash against a black president in part.
And that's the part where the pain comes.
I don't think that a lot of Trump voters who are happy right now understand the way that some of those throwaway lines about Muslims and Mexicans have landed like a bomb in some of our communities.
Van Jones is having precisely the same conversation that Anit Sarkesian, Bell Hooks, Jared Taylor, and Richard Spencer wants to be having.
But they have each declared each other to be their mortal enemies.
And they are.
They always will, in every time, in every place, be the mortal enemies of any liberal individualist anywhere, as well as each other.
Which is why liberals get the bullet too.
As Hayek observed in The Road to Serfdom, and as we have seen in the conversion of YouTubers and activists from being social justice warriors to alt-rights, these people have a very similar frame of mind.
They think in racially collectivist terms.
They will forever be the enemy of the individualist who does not, and who is not interested in judging people on the grounds of their race.
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