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Aug. 9, 2020 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
41:53
Richard Spencer: "Why Do They Hate Us?" (2015)
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Our next speaker has a BA from the University of Virginia and an MA from the University of Chicago.
He was in the PhD program at Duke, but he dropped out in order to do battle with the prevailing insanity.
And I'm sure you'll also join me in congratulating Richard Spencer on becoming a father for the first time this year.
Thank you.
Mr. Spencer is known to all of you as the director of the National Policy Institute and Washington Summit Press.
He's also the founder and editor of Radix Journal, and he is a popular and prolific podcaster on everything from movies and television to history and philosophy.
And in all these capacities, he's performed great works for our people.
And, of course, if you start speaking out in the name of white people, you are liable to stir up opposition.
And the extent of that opposition is often a measure of your effectiveness.
Well, it's in the business of stirring up opposition that Mr. Spencer has acquired some experiences that have helped fill out today's subject, which is why they hate us.
Please welcome Richard Spencer.
Why do they hate us?
That's a question that was famously asked by journalists and presidents and average Joes in the aftermath of the September 11th terror bombings.
Judging by the last 14 years of disastrous wars, sending grandma through pat-down lines and x-ray machines and freedom fries, I think it's safe to say that we Never really answered that question with a great deal of honesty and self-awareness.
Hopefully we can do a little bit better here today.
Well, first let's break this question down.
When I say us, I recognize that there are many different people in this room with varying perspectives, hopes, and dreams.
So I'll define us simply.
We think race is biologically real and that it has tremendous social, cultural, and historical consequences.
More important, we have a passionate attachment to our extended family and the cultures and civilization that it birthed.
Now, when I say hate, I'm not
to a passing emotion or a maniacal contempt or loathing or resentment to some particular individual.
I'm referring to something much bigger.
To the total delegitimization of the white man.
And to what is often called white guilt.
This feeling that is so pervasive that the white race and white racism These ideas could best be summed up by Susan Sontag's facile remark that the white race is
the cancer of human history.
Sontag, of course, was a literary poser.
But the sentiment behind her words is very much a part of the imagination of millions of people and has become a kind of implicit slogan of the unified left.
Yesterday, a friend sent me a photographic essay from the hugely popular website BuzzFeed.
A journalist...
Isaac Fitzgerald met with attendees at the annual Association of Writers and Writing Programs, which sounds like a dorky conservative gathering, to say the least.
Fitzgerald asked them to send a message to the white straight male publishing establishment, and apparently white straight males in general.
And so here are the results.
Read less straight white men.
That's actually the most benign one.
We owe you nothing.
Sit down and let us abolish you.
And she looks so sweet.
We are not tokens.
You have not doomed us.
You've doomed yourselves.
Agreed. We don't need you.
No comment.
Take a vacation.
A long one.
It's pretty sinister.
Don't assume that you are at the center.
That's actually good advice.
In thinking about the they, and why do they hate us, it's tempting to focus on the kinds of people in these images.
Or the kinds of people who have often protested just outside our conference.
You know the type.
A particularly furry and foul-smelling species.
Even the male varieties.
But I have sometimes wondered if we just totally misunderstand these people.
And when they protest, they're actually groupies and rabid superfans who have traveled across the country to come up, hold up a sign, and scream our name, and maybe get an autograph.
We just haven't given them a chance.
In other words, it's tempting to focus our inquiry on leftists.
Social justice warriors and granola communists.
Because they personify in our minds what white guilt is and means.
We don't quite understand what motivates them.
But whatever it is, it certainly can't be reduced to money or career advancement.
They are true believers, which you could say makes them interesting.
But in focusing solely on this low-hanging fruit, we miss the big picture.
We radically underestimate just how widespread and seemingly normal white guilt really is.
We overlook the banality of evil.
Those little things that go on every day, which millions take for granted or don't even think about at all.
And which are slowly eating away at our future.
For when I say"they" in"Why do they hate us?" I'm actually referring to everyone.
To the vast majority of the population of the industrialized world.
They hate us.
And we know it.
It's why even the brave ones among us are afraid to show their faces.
White guilt is indeed so pervasive that it's difficult to pinpoint or say where it ends and where it begins.
For millions who don't want to think about white guilt, white guilt is thinking for them.
So what do I mean by all this?
As likely everyone here remembers, last August, a major story emerged from Rotherham.
In South Yorkshire, England.
A report revealed that between 1997 and 2013, some 1,400 children in the town, and likely many more, experienced the worst kinds of sadistic rape, beatings,
and torture.
In the words of the BBC, gang rape had become a usual part of growing up in Rotherham.
This otherwise quaint town with Roman ruins and a Gothic cathedral.
Looking into the matter further, we discovered that the vast majority, if not all, of the alleged rapist and child abusers were Asian, which in British parlance means Arab, Semitic, and mostly Muslim.
Furthermore, the reason...
This grotesque situation was allowed to persist for so long was that the accusations, stories, and rumors that the authorities were hearing always involved Asian men as the perpetrators.
The town council thus constantly avoided the issue, like someone trying to forget a bad memory because they feared being called racist.
In a way, the Rotherham case would be much more reassuring if it had been revealed that the town council were secret Maoist revolutionaries, Muslim power activists, or just Satan worshippers or perverts.
That is, if they were part of some dark conspiracy to destroy the white race.
What makes Rotherham truly horrifying is that they weren't.
The authorities in the town were, to all accounts, respectable white people who took their positions and social responsibilities seriously.
The story offers us a glimpse of just how powerful white guilt can be.
In our society, being labeled a racist is arguably more damaging than being convicted for murder.
For even murderers get second chances.
But I never imagined that white people might actually prefer that their children be raped and demeaned than they have the scarlet R penned on their chest.
So what does this mean for us?
We who are taking part in this conference.
On matters that most white people would equate with unspeakable crimes.
Among other things, this means that we occupy a very strange position in modern society.
As the writer Gregory Hood remarked, we racists, as our enemies call us, are utterly powerless.
And yet, we've got all the power.
We are what huge foundations, even sovereign governments, have dedicated billions to combat, unsuccessfully.
We are what rival politicians accuse each other of being.
We are able, somehow, to sow hatred in the world, which would otherwise enjoy a multiracial embrace.
We might very well feel Powerless.
Not to mention impoverished and other things.
But that is not how we are viewed.
Our situation reminds me of an old joke.
One that involves ethnic humor, but which is actually beloved by anti-racist and leftist.
There are two Jews sitting on a park bench one Sunday.
One discovers that the other isn't reading the New York Times or whatever as usual.
But instead is reading, of all things, a neo-Nazi pamphlet.
When asked how he could read such trash, the Jew remarks that he loves this magazine.
It says here that the Holocaust never happened and that you and me control the world.
Well, such a joke is, of course, misleading with regard to the status of Jews in modern America and the power of some Jewish organizations.
But is this joke not perfectly suited to us?
Perhaps we should spend more therapeutic Sundays reading critical race theory.
We'll learn just how powerful we really are.
Are our institutions underfunded?
Have some of us lost our jobs or become estranged from our wives for our views?
Never fear.
For apparently we have hegemony over the known world.
What this situation tells us is that however futile our efforts might feel, and they feel futile sometimes, when we do what we do, we're doing something powerful,
something dangerous.
We're dynamite.
And because of that, we make the modern world hysteric.
In case you think I'm exaggerating, I would direct your attention to the recent travails of little old me.
To sum things up, in the fall and winter of last year, I was dragged out of a bar in Budapest by the police.
Thrown into jail for three days, then shipped out of the country in cuffs.
When I arrived back home, a social movement had formed dedicated to making Richard Spencer illegal.
In phrasing things this way, I'm exaggerating only slightly.
The story, if you haven't heard it, goes like this.
My organization, the National Policy Institute, It was to host an event quite similar to this one, an English-language conference in the beautiful imperial city of Budapest.
Jared Taylor was to be a featured speaker, as were other Americans, a Croatian, a noted Russian philosopher, and a French activist, among others.
The Budapest event was to be something rare.
It was a genuine attempt by all involved To be good Europeans.
To think as Europeans.
And to try to overcome the ethnic conflicts and hatreds that have informed European history to this very day to our great detriment.
But from one perspective, our gathering could easily be thought of as entirely harmless.
The event was just talk.
It would have been attended by journalists, bohemians, and other dreamers.
But we struck a nerve.
We became dangerous.
As I was increasingly aware, our conference was making headlines.
And it was becoming a political football, and even launched a sort of constitutional crisis over free speech in Hungary.
The event happened to be scheduled just before a parliamentary election, and suddenly politicians were forced to weigh in on the hate that was just about to descend on them from abroad.
Then strange things started to happen.
First of all, all of our venues canceled.
Next, and through our colleagues, we had made contact with a man named Marton Gianjosi and the ethno-nationalist party, Yabek.
Contacts were claiming that they had no idea who we were.
They were apparently suffering from a kind of political amnesia.
I hope they recovered.
Things started to get crazy when we were denounced by the Minister of the Interior, and then by no less than the Prime Minister himself, Victor Orban, who claimed that he would use"all legal means" at his disposal to stop us.
I was taken aback by all this, and I certainly thought that maybe I should just cancel everything.
But there was something about doing that that didn't feel right.
First off, there were some 150 people coming to Budapest from around the world.
Conferences are really about meeting people and making friends, not speeches.
So why shouldn't we all come together in a private venue?
On another level, I felt that our movement needed to stand its ground.
And we needed to force our enemies to play by their own rules and follow through with their threats.
If Victor Urban was determined to act like a liberal caricature of a fascist and demonstrate our movement's resolve all at the same time, then why should I stop him?
The rest is, as they say, a blur.
The government sent a detail of a couple dozen police officers, some undercover, to track us down at a local bar.
I was arrested around midnight, and the next 15 hours were comprised of bright lights, hard benches, and being shuttled between various bureaucracies.
I was forced to sign my name to documents printed at Magyar, which is understandable we were in Hungary, but they gave the proceedings a...
Kafkaesque quality.
I was then informed that I had been declared a national security threat, which made everything even Kafkaesker.
Jail is the experience of having everything on your person, up to the lint in your pockets, inspected and cataloged, and then being under constant surveillance by guards, literally even while you sleep.
It's also the experience of being served some substance that appears to be a mix between sawdust and cat food.
I don't say any of this to evoke pity.
In a way, I'm deeply grateful for what happened, as funny as that might sound.
A little bit of prison goes a long way.
It focuses the mind.
It allowed me to better understand myself and learn just how far I was willing to go.
And crises reveal character.
In other words, you get to know who your friends really are and aren't.
When I arrived back in Whitefish, Montana, where I live for half of the year, I spent the next few months fighting a local battle I previously didn't think was even possible.
I had been under this impression that Montana was immune to leftists, that all those people had moved to Oregon or something.
But lo and behold, after the town paper reported on my Hungarian adventure, a local rabbi and his band of the self-righteous came out of the woodwork.
The group called themselves Love Lives Here.
And much like the SPLC, their lives are based on hating hate.
Thank you.
Furry, foul-smelling creatures, even the male varieties.
In October, more than 100 people mobbed the city council meeting, telling various tales of patriarchal and racist oppression, and demanding that the local government ban me.
These efforts, as you might imagine, didn't go anywhere.
America is still a free country, or sort of.
At least we can say that you aren't allowed to pass laws against people you don't like.
My enemies then decided to pass a much weaker resolution, one that simply declared the goodness of diversity.
And in a chess move that still brings a smile to my face, I publicly endorsed their call for greater inclusiveness.
Writing for the local paper and even standing before them in the city council.
I'm able to chuckle at this episode now, But the fact is, living through it became very painful.
Being the subject of a witch hunt means alienation.
It means not being home in your home.
It means this surreal feeling of knowing you're on everyone else's mind.
The suspicious glances and stares.
The polite request that I had not returned to their shop anymore.
And the knowledge that nothing will ever be the same.
But enough about me.
The real question is how do we make sense of all these threads?
In the case of Whitefish, we see something all too familiar.
And almost entirely all white community reacts pathologically.
To any movement for white consciousness and survival, or even to any individual who appears to be racially aware.
For me, this kind of antipathy and hatred towards us should never be understood as just some misunderstanding.
They don't know what we really stand for, or we haven't yet given them our best argument or our best data set.
To the contrary, Their hatred points us to the nature of guilt, the nature of morality, the foundation of religion, and the things that make us social animals.
These are uncomfortable topics for modern people, who like to believe that they're all past all that, that they're post-moral, post-guilt, post-shame.
For them, religion is just another lifestyle choice.
Like yoga or the paleo diet, something one could try out or not.
They close their eyes to the reality that morality, guilt, and shame are much more than personal.
They are a force of social bonding and social hierarchy.
Sam Francis was deftly perceptive when he observed that Modern people have not really dispensed with morality and religiosity like they think they have.
They've just rearranged it and swapped out the parts while maintaining the same intensity.
Sam noted that for the Victorians, the great taboo was sex.
And they were, from the perspective of the 21st century, profoundly repressed.
Sexual acts and identities that are now commonplace on television were criminalized by the men of the 19th century, or seen as signs of insanity were denied altogether.
On the other hand, the Victorians would speak about the biological reality of race, not to mention eugenics and breeding, in frank...
Carefree terms that would utterly horrify the enlightened minds of today.
Seen in this light, modern people have become Victorians about race.
They've become Puritans about race.
Race has become the very center of their moral universe in the most unhealthy fashion.
So much so that the Rotherham Town Council was unable to protect children.
Lest they violate that unspeakable great taboo.
And we must recognize that this morality of white guilt would not be nearly as powerful and successful as it is if whites didn't, at some level, really believe in it.
Put another way, white guilt could not have triumphed over whites.
If whites lacked that special capacity of becoming their own worst enemy.
This is the manner in which white guilt functions as guilt, that is, as a personal moral experience.
Any animal can feel shame.
My dog feels shame.
Whenever I'm capable of actually...
Whenever I'm capable of actually disciplining that lovable creature.
Caught in the act, he will assume the prone and penitent posture of a devout monk.
Shame is based on fear.
Guilt, on the other hand, is shame when one is alone.
Guilt is shame without fear of a master or tribal elder.
Guilt is disembodied shame, internalized shame.
Guilt is our ability to punish ourselves.
And this psychic violence we are able to inflict is what we call our conscience.
In a notable book, Paul Godfrey had understood modern white guilt as a kind of skewed form of Protestantism, with slavery or the Holocaust replacing original sin.
But the white man's ability to inflict guilt on himself goes back much further, well before Protestantism, to the dawn of Christianity in Europe, and it actually points to something eternal in ourselves.
In Beowulf, the first great piece of old English culture from 950 A.D., the narrator relates, that was sorrow to the good man's soul.
Greatest of griefs to the heart.
The wise man thought that, breaking established law, he had bitterly angered God, the Lord everlasting.
His breast was troubled from within by dark thoughts, as was not his want.
In this scene, Beowulf is alone, and yet he is troubled by these internal dark thoughts about his honor.
What kind of dark thoughts haunt us?
We might be able to glimpse, off in the distance, another version of ourselves with another morality, one that is utterly immune to white guilt, in fact, to guilt in general.
There was a time in our history when we practiced what Nietzsche called master morality.
A morality that is self-contained in a way that only an aristocratic morality can be.
We are we.
We are strong.
We rule.
We are good.
They are other.
They are weak.
They are bad.
The greatest revolution And morality occurred when these basic, natural, unthinking assumptions were brought into question.
When we began doubting ourselves and giving legitimacy and honor to the other.
Some of us might long for a return to that old master morality.
Perhaps today in the form of an unthinking, affirmative nationalism.
But I doubt anything like that is possible or desirable.
And we shouldn't underestimate how our conscience, our self-questioning, self-doubting, self-loathing mechanism has made us deep and made us interesting.
And we shouldn't underestimate the degree to which we will need our conscience in the future to confront the great challenges of this new century.
Which are not the sexual hot buttons of contemporary conservatism, but the question of how we can become guardians of the natural world and the creatures that live in it and restrict our unrelenting economic and industrial will to power.
But we shouldn't forget that the Jews and early Christians who, at the dawn of this new age, said that the meek shall inherit the earth That the first shall be last, and that there is righteous and the most pitiable.
That they were waging war against their masters, their other embodied by Rome, and making them doubt themselves.
In turn, we shouldn't forget that there is a fundamental asymmetry to the white guilt phenomenon.
There is a difference between being sick with guilt, being decadent, as so many millions of white people are, and on the other hand, promoting white guilt as a means of making your enemy sick and decadent.
Why do they hate us?
The fact is, our enemies are giddy imagining a world without us.
As do so many whites embrace their own oblivion.
White guilt is the foundational morality of this global transformation we are now experiencing.
What could be called the great erasure.
It is a transformation of a world created and once dominated by Europeans.
Into a world with many European shapes and forms.
Democracy, feminism, free love, and the iPhone.
But a world without Europeans in it.
In other words, sit down and let us abolish you.
Opposing this coming world and offering alternatives to it is the mission of our movement.
In order to achieve this, in order to fight, we must learn to rise and greet the dawn with a clear conscience.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
Yes, Matt?
The title of your talk being, Why Do They Hate Us?
In regards to the people who clearly do hate us, to what degree do you feel that they can best be approached with love?
Jared Taylor told us last year at the end of his talk about how it can be very, very disarming to assume in your opponents that they may be trying to do...
What they think is best.
To assume positive intent and to kind of approach it, not from a negative point of view where you reject it or you mock them, but to try and sort of say, okay, let's deal with that.
Try to be reconciliatory.
Not because for any reason we think that they do have positive intent or that they are going to not hate us anymore, but from the point of view of the opinions of people who are perhaps undecided.
And the majority of people at large in a way by which we can show them our generosity of spirit, if you like, and they can see that we are not the things that our enemies portray us to be.
Again, as I stated, I really don't believe that if we're just simply nicer, they're going to like us.
I don't think this is just some misunderstanding.
That being said, I mean, I love getting into dialectical confrontations with people who disagree with me.
I mean, that's fine, but I think there's a great limit of thinking that simple generosity and niceness is going to really get us anywhere.
I think it's more important that we learn to fight.
Richard, I'd just like to say, First of all, I'm one of your fans, as you know, and I want to congratulate you on the marvelous attitude that you have shown in following up on the hardship that you experienced over in Eastern Europe.
And I actually believe you when you say that you're grateful for that experience.
I don't think that was said for effect.
I think that it was said in absolute sincerity, and I believe that it's true.
In fact, I envy you that.
I wish that I had been with you.
Well, almost.
We could have shared cat food together in a Hungarian prison.
But I just have one comment, an observation that may have escaped some of the others here in just how unique you are.
Well, I can't say that.
You're either unique or you're not.
My English teacher would get on me.
There are no degrees of uniqueness.
Anyway, how unusual you are here.
It is true.
Is it not, Richard, that you are the only ex-con in attendance here?
Well, that might not be true.
Thank you.
Richard, I had a question.
You're talking about the other and how basically we are the other.
And that every system, ideology, civilization needs an other and that this is what our civilization is based on not being.
These are the outsiders.
We're better than these people.
So I was questioned that since civilizations need that and we are contemporary liberalism's other, moving to go further, how do we have an other?
Is that possible since that would be hatred and bigotry?
To revive, what would be the other, or is that necessary or not?
Well, I'll answer this really briefly.
One of the themes of my talk is that we are our own worst enemy and that whites have this special capacity to become our own worst enemy.
We don't have anyone to fight against.
We wage war against ourselves.
So I think that is the state we're in.
It might sound like I'm almost contradicting myself, but I think we need to approach, in a way, other races and other cultures with a kind of generosity and a respect for their otherness.
I think it is, you know, I don't agree with Susan Sontag, but there is without question a certain kind of idea I think we need to have really a new ethic where we have deep respect for African Americans.
We have deep respect for the Chinese and their civilization.
That we look at them as other and we can approach them honestly and respectfully.
And I think in some ways that is something new.
Thank you.
Richard, you are not a white man who suffers from lack of self-esteem, so I hesitate to bolster your sense of self-worth.
Your little ears were tingled with delight last night as people were talking about you and congratulating you on going to jail.
I think it was a great thing for you.
We need people who are willing to go to jail, and I just wanted to congratulate you on that, that you have...
Establish credentials that others of us don't have in that regard.
And to sort of answer Matt Tate, I have various techniques that I use to approach white liberals.
And one of them is to take something that they believe in and put it in a way that they can't quite handle it.
And this goes back to what I was saying about your going to jail.
In the courthouse filing a case a few weeks ago, and it took a long time.
We dealt with very discourteous clerks, and this county is 60% white.
There wasn't a single white person working in the courthouse.
There was a young lawyer who was very impatiently waiting there, and so I pointed this out to him, and he became very frightened and sort of looked down at the ground.
And I carried it further, and I said, you know...
Black people would never put up with this.
They have more integrity than we do.
What are we white guys ever going to do to grow the balls of Rosa Parks?
And this creates confusion for liberals.
I congratulate you on having the balls of Rosa Parks and going to jail.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I agree just real quick.
I agree sometimes taking things out of context and turning them around I think is an interesting technique to create a little cognitive dissonance.
Richard, I would like to take a moment and give you an answer to your beginning question.
Why do they hate us?
It goes back to Aesop and his proverb,"The hungry wolf will always..." Have a grudge against the fattened sheep.
I don't disagree.
Hi. I appreciated your talk very much, but I might have misunderstood one point that you made.
It seemed that you suggested that white guilt has its roots in Judaism and Christianity, and I could be wrong.
You were saying that.
But anyway, it seems to me that Christian civilization was very self-confident and accomplished very much for centuries, for instance, in the Middle Ages.
And looking at history, it suggests that this white guilt came in much later, in the late 19th, early 20th century.
And I just wondered what you thought about that.
I'll try to answer this quite briefly.
Our capacity to become our own worst enemy, I don't blame Judaism and Christianity on that.
I think that goes much deeper.
That might be some internal aspect of ours, that we're able to disembody shame.
Eat it and keep it inside ourselves or something like that.
I do think that the modern white guilt phenomenon is a post-Christian phenomenon.
I don't doubt that there were tremendous glories of Christian civilization.
And as I said, I think in a way this revolution of morality made us interesting.
It made us deeper.
But I also would certainly not deny that the left and the white guilt phenomenon is a post-Christian phenomenon.
And that doesn't mean it's a Christian phenomenon.
It's a post-Christian phenomenon.
I don't think we can really ever get away from that, even if that's going to make us uncomfortable.
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