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June 30, 2021 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
01:06:24
Paved With Good Intentions: A Story of Race Relations in America
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Paged with Good Intentions.
It's the title of a book now almost 30 years old about race in America.
The book has been updated since its initial release, and its author, Jared Taylor, is a fellow of whom you might have heard before.
He joins us on this episode of Cotto Gottfried to discuss his work and other things.
I'm your co-host Joseph Boricato and
co-host is Paul Gottfried.
Jared, when your book came out in 1992, Paved with Good Intentions, it was well-received, one could say, by the mainstream press.
But as time went on, I think it's best to say that it became too politically incorrect for most major publishers to go along with.
I mean, there's so much to address in your book.
So I guess the first thing would be, how would you describe the evolution of how it was perceived by the mainstream publishing houses?
That's quite an interesting question.
As you say, it came out in 1992.
That was a time at which mainstream publishers were rather more brave than they are now.
The Bell Curve came out in 1994.
Right about that time, Richard Lynn was publishing in mainstream publishers.
So was Philippe Rushton.
That was about the time when Peter Brimelow's book, Alien Nation, was published.
Then there was a gradual, but I think very, very persistent fallback in the bravery on the mainstream publishers.
And even in 1992, when Pay With Good Intelligence came out, the mainstream press The Wall Street Journal wrote a kind of confused review of it, but then Peter Brimelow wrote a very good review of it, National Review, back at the time when he could write for National Review,
and National Review wrote sensible things about controversial subjects.
Now, I must add also, this is a bit of a surprise to most people, and this is little known outside a small circle, but the Conservative Book Club made it its main selection.
But it also called it the most outspoken book the club has ever published and the most painful.
So there was a great deal of debate within the conservative book called itself before it decided to publish it.
Paul, anything to add before we move on?
Yeah, I think anyone who goes back and reads Pave With Good Intentions is struck by the moderate tone.
I think at the time I commented on this to Jared that I was surprised to see him defending the early civil rights movement.
And he was simply taking what later became a kind of neoconservative tag that somehow the movement had become derailed later on.
I know this was a kind of protective coloration that Jared was assuming, or so he told me, but you have to concede that it is more mainstream than other things you've written since.
Well, that's correct.
That was my last gasp of respectability.
In fact, our mutual friend, Sam Francis, at the time, he wrote a favorable review of the book himself for obscure publications.
But he said, now, you know, Jared, what you've written here is a neocon book.
And I must concede that it was.
But I debated with my editor.
His name was Kent Carroll.
Carroll and Graff was a publisher.
It's a small publisher that's since been bought out by Avalon.
But I told him there are certain logical fallacies in this book.
But in order to correct these fallacies, I would have to go into such things as racial differences in IQ and even talk about the possible...
But he said, no, no, no, no, don't do that.
And we never came to a knockdown drag out.
I decided to withdraw my insistence that I cover that.
And I think he would not have published the book had I insisted on doing so.
But in retrospect, I think he made the right decision.
You know, poor Kent Carroll was disinvited from all kinds of publishers' meetings simply because he had published this book.
And when my agent approached him with a successor book that I wrote in 2011, he said, look, I made a lot of money on your book, but it cost me so much professionally that I don't ever want to touch you again.
It's really a sad commentary on what you point out is really a neocon and very moderate book.
Yeah. Maybe I should describe a little bit of what the thrust of the book was.
As you can tell from the title, Paved with Good Intentions, it does accord good intentions to people who may or may not have had good intentions.
I tend to be a bit of a Pollyanna about these things, and I try to look on the bright side.
But basically what the book did was say that this contemporary...
Excuse-making for blacks, namely that every one of their failures is due to white wickedness past and present, just doesn't hold up.
And when you compare equivalent groups of blacks and whites, that is to say, muggers with three prior convictions, does the criminal justice system treat them differently?
No, it does not.
Or if you take blacks and whites with degrees in physics from first-rate universities, is the system prejudicial against blacks?
No, it is not.
When you take really comparable groups, you find that the differences in achievement are vanishingly small, and if anything, they go in the direction of advantaging blacks because of affirmative action.
But in 1992, when I wrote this book, Carolyn Graff did a very good job of getting me on radio interviews.
I must have done three or four a day all during the summer of 1993 after the book had been out for a while.
And it was an exhausting thing because at that time, radio audiences, and most of these were call-in programs and talk show hosts would have their own commentary as well.
Practically no one in America was prepared to hear, look, it's not the fault of white people.
I never got into the whole question of racial differences in IQ or maybe differences in testosterone level or ability to defer gratification.
I never talked about that at all.
But at that time, very few people would stomach the idea that it was really the fault of blacks to pull up their socks.
And I was constantly accused of blaming the victim.
Now, I think if I were to make those arguments today, I would get a much better reception from half the country and then a much more embittered and hostile reception from the other.
Right. I think you're right.
If you notice, the arguments you make in that book have been recycled by Heather McDonald, who works for the very neoconservative Manhattan Institute and is invited repeatedly onto Fox,
Yes. Yes.
So you're still allowed within the conservative movement to say that blacks have to get a handle on their own society and the fathers have to stay with the mother and this sort of stuff.
So that, you know, it's really bad cultural conditions which the welfare state has brought about or encouraged.
This is still, I think, a permissible position, which is the one that you take and pave with good intention.
A permissible position in the conservative establishment.
You're absolutely right about that.
And within conservatives, among conservatives, that is the kind of discourse that's acceptable.
However, among the most ferocious egalitarians, among all the people running for the Democratic presidential nomination, for example, I think they would probably flare up in righteous indignation even more than was the case back when I wrote the book.
In fact, I will give you a very interesting anecdote about that book's reception.
It was in 1995 that I was invited to speak at Hillsdale College.
It was a conversation, it was a lecture series having to do with race in America.
And I was asked to speak about race and welfare.
And Charles Murray was one of the speakers.
There were several others.
And this was after The Bell Curve had come out, of course.
And the evening before, I was to give my talk.
Charles Murray had spoken that day, and there was a kind of an informal conversation, kind of what we used to call a bull session, about the whole question of race and IQ and racial differences and the legitimacy of testing, IQ testing, SAT testing, etc.,
attended by Lisa Roach.
Now, some of your viewers may know who Lisa Roach was.
Yes. She came to a very unfortunate end that we need to get into here.
But she took a very active role and participated very eagerly in this conversation about racial differences.
Well, as part of my talk the very next day, I got up and said that, well, given the differences between the races, it is entirely understandable that there would be differences in welfare usage.
Well, and I got into some detail about the evidence for racial differences.
Well, to my astonishment, She hopped up in the Q&A, and she denounced me for even talking about these disreputable things.
I was flabbergasted, and I was too much of a gentleman to say, well, wait a minute, Ms. Roach.
Just last night, you were talking with great enthusiasm, eagerness, and curiosity about this very question.
How can you be such a miserable hypocrite?
Which is exactly what she was.
But I wasn't about to expose her in that manner.
And I simply said, well, you know, if you close your mind to possibilities, then we can never conduct a legitimate search for the truth.
But that was a part of my dying gasp of one of my last shreds of respectability was ultimately blown by having given that talk at Hillsdale.
I think that's very interesting.
Did you want to ask a question, Joseph?
Yes, there's a little footnote to that.
Every one of the speakers, all of our talks were transcribed and put into a book, a volume, the title of which was Champions of Freedom.
But my talk, mine alone, somehow ended up on the cutting room floor.
I was not a champion of freedom.
No. Ironies.
Ironies. You never know when they're going to pop up.
Some of them are predictable.
Yeah. Anyhow, people call you Jared before I'm still getting used to the formality.
Mr. Taylor, talking about, I guess, what inspired you to write the book.
What was that?
Was it something that went on in the 1980s?
Or was it something you'd had in mind before that?
Or was it maybe something that went on in the early 1990s?
Because as the book came out in 92, I imagine that whatever inspired it had to have been there before the 90s began.
What was the genesis paved with good intentions?
Well, it does have a bit of a turn and twist in how I came to write that book.
My initial plan was to write a book on the larger question of individual responsibility.
In American society as a whole, I had gotten just sick of the constant excuse-making that people are indulging themselves in.
And the whole question of racial excuse-making was going to be just one chapter in this book.
And yet, when I started writing the book, I realized that what I had in mind was just going to be absolutely enormous and unwieldy.
And I decided to concentrate on the whole question of race.
Now, I had a terrible time getting this book published.
My agent, Theron Rains, who was very, very diligent in trying to get a publisher for me, he spent two years trying to track down a publisher.
I would have given up.
In fact, I said, you know, I don't mind if you give up on this because you're making no money, I'm making no money, we're making no progress.
But he persevered and he got this small publisher who ended up doing it.
But no, as I say, it was part of an initial project to write in larger terms about what I see as a kind of...
Just a gradual, across-the-board unwillingness of people to not only take responsibility for themselves, but to say to others, look, it is your fault.
It is your responsibility.
You do have agency in the decisions that you make, but it ended up being narrowed down to that, and all the other subjects that I had considered, I never really wrote about those in the same way, and I suppose you could say I got sidetracked by a race in a more permanent way.
Paul? I raised this question that has intrigued me for about 50 years now.
As you know, I was expelled by ISI and had some articles sent back to me which had nothing to do with race questions.
It had to do with political ideologies in 19th century Europe.
I was associated with the view that ethnic groups or people with restricted gene pools will very often show different levels of cognitive ability or there's a hierarchy of cognitive abilities.
The very fact that I thought there was any value in an IQ test indicated that I was a hopeless racist.
I was not particularly surprised.
That a conservative organization would throw me out because I don't consider them conservative.
I consider them to be leftist groups by some other name at this point in time.
But I'm not quite sure why we are not allowed to talk about group differences in IQ.
To me, this does not reduce anybody's humanity because he or she scores lower on an IQ test.
It does have some, I would guess, some instructive or predictive value, right?
I mean, you know, if I were to discover that somebody has a predisposition for disease or something like that and warn that person, or if somebody had some kind of disability that prevented them from doing well, I mean, you should be wanting to know about this.
Why would it be wrong to say that...
Asians on average have higher IQs than Caucasians, who on average have higher IQs than Blacks.
Why is this a forbidden position to take?
I'm not quite sure of the reason.
I'm not being coy.
I genuinely can't understand the absolute indignation that even the question now seems to evoke.
I have had an extended conversation.
I had dinner once with a professional anti-racist whose name I will not mention, but whose name I would recognize if I were to mention.
And the view expressed there was that, and I believe this is sincere.
The idea was that whether or not it is even true that there are differences between the races, once you start drawing distinctions of this kind, then inevitably it leads to Auschwitz and extermination and slavery and all kinds of horrible things.
I believe this person was sincere in believing that.
But I think that's certainly part of it.
Now, I've found that white people are far more willing to accept the idea that East Asians are probably smarter than they are than they are to entertain the idea that they may be smarter than blacks.
There is almost a kind of a libido for wishing to feel inferior or wishing to feel racist or wishing to feel the oppressor rather than simply examining the facts on the ground.
Now, I agree.
That it is an unpleasant subject.
It's very unpleasant to say to a group, well, you know, on average, I mean, we're going to treat you as individuals, but on average, you're simply not going to advance as far as the Asians are for reasons over which you have we and you and no one else has any control.
But it's essential because any failure for blacks and Hispanics in particular to achieve at the same level of whites is laid at our feet.
And so we have to, almost by self-defense, defend ourselves against these perpetual charges of racism.
The other reason why it's important is that, as you know, there is a kind of academic obsession with narrowing the gaps.
We have to raise the scores of blacks and Hispanics up to the level of whites.
We never worry about trying to raise the scores of whites up to the level of Asians, by the way.
That seems to be completely out of the conversation.
But this, to me, is a complete...
It's a futile undertaking and it wastes resources, as I'm sure you and the viewers of this program know, when people get individually tailored instruction.
Everyone's performance goes up.
But the gap between the highest achievers and the lower achievers actually widens.
Because those who are the smartest, those are the smartest.
You really give them gifted instruction of the most intensive kind, they will shoot up.
And those who are not so bright, if you give them instruction tailored to their abilities, they will do much better than if they are just given kind of a general curriculum in which they're falling constantly behind.
But the gaps will widen.
And as I point out, there is a huge gap in the scores if you take them within a single racial group.
There are whites who vastly outperform certain other whites.
We are not, we have no interest in narrowing that gap.
That gap, we understand, it's a natural occurrence.
And imagine all the effort that we would go into taking all of the Hispanics and saying, okay, we want every Hispanic to get the same score.
It would be absurd.
But the effort that goes into narrowing the gaps between the races is equally absurd.
There are gaps.
Let's live with them.
But let's take whatever measures are required.
To improve everyone's score as much as possible.
So that's another reason why we really do have to talk about these things honestly.
Otherwise, nothing makes sense.
We're living in a completely deluded world when it comes to racial differences in achievement.
Of course, there's a power factor that also has to be taken into account.
There's a power factor and a material interest.
You have a vast bureaucracy that has been created to narrow the gap between races.
To address the problem of prejudice, which is the cause.
So there is a vast vested interest here and in every Western so-called democracy in, in fact, expanding activities and agencies that exist for the purpose of addressing prejudice or discrimination,
which is seen as the cause for these cognitive differences that we've been discussing.
Yes, that's certainly correct.
And at the same time, I think for those who are the alleged victims of white supremacy and white oppression, they too have a vested interest in maintaining this victim status because it's a way of keeping white people and white society in general constantly on the hop.
In fact, recently I've actually heard A number of black commentators establishing the inevitable syllogism that you would come up with because they would say, we know that all the races are equally capable,
equally intelligent, equally hardworking, equally able to defer gratification, yet they do not achieve at the same level.
There can be only one explanation, and that is the wickedness of you people.
Therefore, you owe us.
I mean, and if you deny any kind of group differences, then what other explanation are you left with and what other remedies are possible?
And it puts all white people in the dock.
We are collectively responsible.
And, of course, at the same time, we all enjoy this unearned white privilege and the idea somehow that we are so much better off because there are non-whites living in the country.
And, you know, I like to ask these white privileged people, well, gosh, does that mean we'd be just much better off if it was an all-white society, if you imported 50,000 Somalis and brought them into Iceland?
And people don't have white privilege.
It's all white.
Would they suddenly be better off with 50,000 Somalis living there because suddenly they get white privilege?
This whole white privilege stuff is just such a crock of spectacular nonsense.
But we are left with all of these cockamamie theories because of this deliberate blindness to the evidence of our senses, namely that not all groups are identical.
Why do whites believe this stuff?
This, to me, is the biggest question of all, that if we're not for whites, none of these things are a problem.
Obviously, whites like to believe that they victimize other people.
Those who accept guilt feel virtuous when they do so.
And as a matter of fact, whites incite blacks against other whites.
And what looks to me like a civil war among white people.
One of my differences, I think, with some of the people who call themselves race realists or white nationalists, you see the problem as being basically caused by whites who are in power and who at the same time are using blacks and other people simply as pawns in a power game.
What the end is for these whites who support blacks and appeal to their sense of victory, that I'm not quite sure, but beyond power.
Obviously, they are also destroying Western civilization in the process, but the question is, why do whites support these efforts to degrade their own race?
That, to me, is the great question of our time.
I have cuddled my brains about this, and I don't have an adequate answer.
There's some flippant answers.
A friend of mine, whose name I should probably not pronounce because our friendship would be detrimental to him, sometimes he likes to say, white people love to feel good about themselves by feeling bad about being white.
That white people have this unique desire to be somehow the victims of the plot.
I'm sorry, the villains in the plot.
Other people see it as a kind of occult white supremacy in the sense that It gives whites enormous power to think of themselves as capable of holding down an entire race or two,
even through unconscious racism.
The idea that unconscious or almost undetectable racism is still so powerful that blacks commit murder at seven or eight times the white rate, etc., legitimacy rates of 80%.
It's all our fault, even though we're not deliberately doing this.
I think it would take a sick mentality even for liberals to congratulate themselves on the immense power that they wield over these marionettes who are, at the same time, their pets.
But to me, this really is the great question of our age.
I used to get along pretty well with a fellow.
He's dead now.
He was a black separatist by the name of John Brock.
And he liked me and I liked him.
He generally didn't like white people, but he liked my honesty about race.
I liked his honesty about race.
And we would have these long conversations on the telephone.
And I remember him asking me, he says, I'm all for it, of course, but tell me, why are white people committing suicide?
He could see it, and he thought it was great.
But he wanted an explanation from me for what was utterly mysterious to him.
I said, you know, I don't have a good answer to that question.
I just can't tell you.
And the fact is, if you see these racial questions, as I do, and as I'm sure many of your viewers do, You will often find, now perhaps I know about this because I have experience with this matter, you will find that black people or Asians,
or I have had fewer conversations with Hispanics, but certainly blacks and Asians, after a moment's reflection, they will understand exactly what I'm saying.
Because they have a sense of race, they have a sense of their destiny as a people, and they're not at all surprised, or they're a little surprised to find a white person with that same sense of solidarity and destiny, but they don't find it in conversation.
Whereas it's white people for whom it's just incomprehensibility to the tenth power for us to think in terms of preserving a people and a culture and a destiny and that kind of thing to the point where, as you know,
if you put up a little sign on a campus that says it's okay to be white, then, my gosh, you're a hate monger.
Yeah. Of course, in Germany, you had a driver.
I'm a German driver.
This person was fired from his job in Dresden, and he's now being prosecuted for hate crime.
Asians do that all the time.
Muslims do that.
Nobody cares.
I think the Germans represent a special case of self-hatred.
Which has never been seen before in the history of the human race.
So we Americans are still well behind these Teutonic psychopaths.
Well, it seems to me, as I mentioned earlier in the program, if you take Whites as a group.
You have this delusional, almost psychotically anti-racist group of whites who are becoming crazier and crazier, more and more vindictive, more hateful, frankly.
And at the same time, you have a different group of whites who are becoming more and more sane, more and more immune.
To all the propaganda we're being fed on this, and I see it's almost tectonic plates shifting in dangerously different directions.
And I can see this stuff shaking out in a very seismic and potentially unpleasant way.
For the next question, your book...
Obviously, it's been re-released since its first edition in 1992, but now it's from an independent publishing house.
How did you go about re-releasing your book?
Why did you decide to re-release it?
And did you attempt at some point, Mr. Taylor, to get it into another mainstream house?
That's, again, an interesting question.
The book was re-released due to...
The efforts of a number of faithful readers, I had nothing to do with it at all.
It was a fellow whose name I should probably not mention also.
He worked very hard behind the scenes, getting it reset, correcting typographical errors, and he put out an actual print edition, and he also made a Kindle edition.
Now, the Kindle edition, as well as...
Secondhand copies of earlier editions are still for sale on Amazon.
All of my subsequent books have been banned by Amazon because I'm a wicked man, as everyone who works at Amazon must know.
Interestingly enough, though, in the preface to this Kindle edition...
And then to an afterword that I wrote later, I go into all the reasons why I describe the logical fallacy that I just described to you.
The fact that here I'm talking about how racism is not an adequate explanation for differences in achievement.
Well, in the book...
I didn't ever say, what is the explanation?
And that is obviously a yawning, yawning logical gap in this book that I'm trying to put together.
But I went ahead and I wrote about that with utter candor.
But I guess...
When it comes to the Amazon censors, the fact that it was published originally by Carolyn Graff and not by my own nameplate, which is New Century Foundation, they have given it a pass.
I suppose their censorship was not so fine-tuned that they actually read the preface and the afterword that would probably shift it into the unacceptable hate category.
Paul? No, I'm finding this extremely interesting.
I think the degrees of censorship seem to go up with every passing year.
I mean, the things that you were allowed to say five years ago, you're not allowed to say anymore.
It seems to be an almost irreversible process The controls by those elites that are in charge of us are able to inflict their views on the general public and there's no possibility that the other views or that contrary views or opposing views can be heard.
Certainly not to the same extent as the official state views or the official views of elites.
One of the things that I don't understand is why the conservative movement does absolutely nothing to deal with any kind of serious social issues.
For instance, those involving free speech on campuses, the suppression of dissent, Even something like Encounter Books basically publishes things that are toothless.
Like, why is this author who's a Zionist, why is he not allowed to speak on a campus or something equally ridiculous?
It seems that the opposition to what we've been discussing has become increasingly toothless.
You know, as those who are in positions of power impose greater and greater control on the rest of us, would you like to express any ideas or any opinions as to why the opposition has become weaker and weaker,
certainly since 1992?
By the way, another book that we might have mentioned is Why Race Matters by Michael Levin.
Yes, yes, absolutely.
I should have mentioned that.
A really, really first-rate book.
Who published it?
I'm trying to remember because I did review it somewhere.
It was originally published by Prager.
Prager was a very brave publishing house, but Prager, they printed, I think, no more than 800 copies.
Here's this magisterial work by a philosopher who is bending his first-rate mind to a very contemporary and important question, and they printed 800 or I think it was 600-something, not even a thousand hardback books.
And then that was the end of the print run, and they never reprinted it.
By the time we got the rights, New Century Foundation reprinted as a paperback.
But at that time, there were copies of the old hardback going for $600 on the Internet because it was such a good book, and there simply were no copies of it.
I felt rather bad about undercutting these lucky speculators who had managed to lay in.
I guess they're the...
The literary equivalent of scalpers.
But no, that was an absolutely first-rate book.
And that too is a book that, interestingly enough, Amazon permits us to continue to sell.
I suppose, again, the fact that it was Carolyn Graff that originally published Paved with Good Intentions, and it was Prager that published Why Race Matters.
But I cannot recommend that book more highly.
It was written in the 1990s during this, as I say, during this kind of, well, what Peter Brimler calls the intergalactic period.
There was this freeze, and then a thaw, and then the freeze returns.
But definitely an absolute first rate book.
And we continue to sell a large number of that.
We have a Kindle and a print edition of that, that Amazon and its wisdom and its bliss permits us to continue to sell.
There's also a pattern, I think, if you take a look.
First, you weren't allowed to discuss IQ questions.
By now, the conservative movement doesn't allow you to discuss gay marriage or even defend traditional marriage, except insofar as...
Evangelicals are being denied religious rights somewhere.
It seems to be a pattern that starts with race issues, then continues with traditional social morality, in which the conservatives take more and more off the table.
These are things we're not allowed to discuss.
We can only discuss permanent values, which themselves become utterly denuded of any meaning by now.
It's just sort of a vague term to show we have the right feelings.
But I think the decision to remove any discussion of IQ, of race, whatever, was only the beginning, one might say, of what has become a kind of accelerating process by which certain topics are forbidden because they're offensive to the left.
I entirely agree.
It seems to me that it is an egalitarian juggernaut that began with race, but now it's not only the races that are all equivalent and interchangeable, but the sexes are basically interchangeable, all religions are equally true,
all cultures are equally beautiful, and every sexual orientation is equally healthy and equally satisfying.
All of these distinctions that people have for millennia that have really shaped our understanding of the world and in some respects given meaning to our lives, all of these are being crushed.
But the first one to go was race.
And you can go back to what was that?
The UNESCO Declaration of Ehrenberg.
What name did he end up going by?
Oh, Ashley Montague was behind this.
The UNESCO Statement on Rights.
Right, Ashley Montague.
Yes, that was in the 1950s, for heaven's sake.
It really goes back a long way, but that, I believe, is where it started.
And once that domino fell, then...
The conservatives, so-called, were unable to defend any succeeding domino.
So that the point now that Twitter is banning feminists.
There's one, Megan Murphy, by the way, who's actually suing Twitter about this.
She was banned because she refuses to use the masculine pronoun for a woman who has converted, presumably, into a man.
And that's enough for Twitter to ban her.
And you talked about censorship.
It seems to me that one of the great misfortunes we have is that our censorship is not imposed by the government.
When you've got the commissars with the stars on their hats telling us, no, don't you dare publish that, everyone is a skeptic.
Everyone knows who the enemy is.
But in a society like ours, every man his own commissar and all of these private companies who have complete freedom to tell the truth or to allow the rest of us to tell the truth if they wish, they are the ones who are censoring us.
So, on the one hand, we live in this idyllic First Amendment regime in which the government cannot...
I think the government still can't lift a finger against us, but it doesn't have to.
All of these private companies are doing their dirty work for them.
And I'm appalled that the only exceptions are these little minuscule outfits like Gab, for example, or the equivalent, which could be the equivalent of Twitter, or BitChute, which could be the equivalent of YouTube.
They're just minor little echo chambers.
All of the dissonance end up there.
But the real, hugely dominant forces, every one of them, is in the pocket of the egalitarians.
You may underestimate the role of the state in all of this, because through the Civil Rights Commission, the Department of Education, other government agencies, they really are able to control opposition.
In the name of fighting prejudice, investigating people, the IRS can do so.
So the government is involved in censorship, and it probably could censor or come out against these Twitter and some of these others that are engaging in censorship but chooses not to.
I think there's a great deal of compatibility between, let's say, government social policies and what these private censors are doing.
I agree.
They do seem to be reading.
They're just singing from the same sheet of music, without a doubt.
On the other hand, Twitter used to call itself the free speech wing of the free speech movement.
And if they had simply stuck to their guns, when I first had a Twitter account, before mine was blasted into oblivion, they listed the grounds for which they could ban your account.
And they were all...
Illegalities. If you were selling illegal drugs, if you were taking private information and broadcasting it all around the internet, if you were in copyright violation, they had a specific and limited list.
They say,"You can do anything else, anything else, but you do these four or five things and we'll ban you." That didn't last.
Well, I mean, they then sort of chipped away, and they chipped away, and they chipped away.
And now, just like YouTube, they say, we have absolutely no obligation to host your material if we don't like it.
And that's the long and the short.
And I believe that if Twitter had maintained that genuine admiration for freedom, I don't...
I don't think the government could have forced them to do otherwise.
Now, there's no question that Democrats would have shrieked and howled and told them that they were fostering Nazis and doing all these terrible things.
But if they had taken a principal position, the government could not have said,"We're going to step in and do your job for them." I just don't think that would have happened.
Even with Sonia Sotomayor on the Supreme Court and Lenny Kagan and all the rest of them, I just don't think that would have happened.
Paul, anything for the next question?
Yes, sir.
No, I'm going to let you speak, since I've been asking too many questions until now.
All right.
Looking at where the...
I guess, yeah, this builds to something that's already been discussed.
Looking at where the right is now, there's no question that it is more interested, one might say, in blood and soil than it was even 10 years ago.
But then there is this sort of dissident wing among many young...
Very young.
Younger than me.
They're Generation Z types who interact mainly online.
And they are really like a sort of traditionalist, revanchist.
It's principally Roman Catholicism, but I think there's also a minor Orthodox Christian contingency here.
And that's what they want the basis of their political activism to be.
Essentially, they take their cues from E. Michael Jones, although some also are very much influenced by Paul, which is totally odd.
It's hard to find two people on the right more opposed to each other than Jones and Paul Godfrey, but there you are.
And they, at the same time, want to have traditionalism, but they believe that their extreme fanatical, I'll even say it, religious beliefs will somehow be able to paper over ancestral differences among them, and they think somehow...
This will be what brings the right into the future, even as the country grows more secular.
As was mentioned before, more people on the right are now interested in blood and soil.
Do you have any views on this unique situation?
Yes, yes I do.
I think it's very much a mistake to assume that we all have to become Christians again in order to establish some sort of unity.
After all, when the United States in 1864-65, people were probably equally Christian north and south, but that did not keep the country from breaking up.
Both sides in the First World War, for example, were probably equally fervently Christian.
That didn't stop them from slaughtering each other by the million.
The idea of Christianity, or any religion really, being the unifying factor that can hold all sorts of disparate groups together.
I believe it didn't work when the United States was overwhelmingly white and Christianity is not going to be the glue that holds together an increasingly Afro-Hispanic, Asiatic, Caribbean, multi-culti America.
It's just not going to work.
I understand that people who have a fervent belief in the power of faith, I understand that they would make those arguments, but then there are also Christians, and Professor Gottfried and I know some of them, who have a more nuanced understanding of the other things that are needed to hold Western civilization together.
I understand that view, but I don't think that it's any more successful than ultimately Islam is, for example.
People in Islam claim that the Ummah, the unity of the Islamic people, this is all that's needed to hold us together.
But, well, gosh, the United Arab Republic, Egypt would go into these mergers with Syria and its surrounding countries, and it would all fall apart.
And then we had the caliphate to the Islamic State.
There were all kinds of internecine wars among Muslims.
I don't think religion alone...
I mean, if one religion can do it, I suppose it's one that insists on conversion or beheading.
Maybe they've got some sort of advance, some sort of leg up in the game.
But religion alone is not going to do it.
And again, I understand the power of faith and I understand the convictions of people who have a deep, deep...
Just a visceral and a numinous understanding of the role of God in their lives and the lives of a country, but that's just not enough.
I think there's a difference, though, between saying it is not enough and that it can be a valuable foundation for building a cohesive society.
And I would argue that Christianity is the religion of us.
It is integral to what Western civilization has been for several thousand years.
And once you remove it from the mix, keeping society together is going to be much more problematic.
I also see a struggle going on on the right between, let's say, people who are concerned about race issues and those who insist on moral unity.
For instance, if someone were to ask me,"With whom would you rather be allied, a homosexual or a black?" My answer is a black.
I consider the social moral difference between myself and a person who's quietly gay.
I couldn't care.
Someone like Pete Buttigieg.
It's far more offensive to me than Al Sharpton, if I have to make that choice.
My goodness, that's strong talk, Professor.
Yes, but Buttigieg is a particularly disgusting gay because he brings with him almost a kind of puritanical righteousness, if you notice.
Gay marriage is more Christian than Donald Trump's heterosexual marriage and that kind of stuff.
But I think the moral unity, the moral religious unity is helpful in building a civilization and restoring a civilization.
Although I would agree with you that Christianity by itself is not going to hold anything together very long.
No, and today, after all, there are...
Expanding reaches of Christianity that are African and Asian and Latin American.
Inevitably, we will get a non-white pope.
I would say that if we are trying to hold Western civilization together...
I would place my bet on a group of Europeans, and that group could include Christians, it could include atheists, it could include Odinists, but those with a genuine commitment to Western civilization,
they would have a much better chance than if you did the sorting strictly on the basis of Christianity.
What would their civilization consist of, the Odinists, the Christians, and the atheists?
And the gays and the heterosexuals, what would they agree on as Western civilization?
I think that even those who were out and out atheists or Odinists, if they could not see the value of paradise lost, then they are not real defenders of the West.
If they did not have some kind of emotional feeling when they saw Notre Dame burning, Then they're not part of Western civilization.
They're not true Europeans.
I don't think one has to be a believing Christian in order to recognize that Europe is the faith and the faith is Europe.
All of this is so deeply part of our heritage that we would be cutting off our own limbs, arms, and legs if we severed ourselves from Christianity.
And I know people who are Odinists, or at least claim to be, who I think would agree with me 100% that our literature, you can't read Anthony Trollope, you can't read Thomas Hardy.
None of this makes sense without an understanding of Christianity.
So I certainly agree with you that Christianity, we are seeped and marinated in Christianity.
And whether we believe or not, it is so much part of us that to repudiate Christianity is a kind of cultural suicide.
I would argue that the West is more Christian than Christianity per se.
Which means that it's more the culture of its native pagan traditions and the Christianity, which was synthesized with them, than it is, you know, the New Testament.
I don't really know that one can make the argument that Western culture is built on the New Testament specifically rather than, you know, what was there before that and other things as well.
Looking, though, at, I guess, this young, getting back on track, this young right-wing E, which is, say, an online group of people, A lot of them, I think, do play up this, you know, you must believe as we do or else nonsense.
Because a lot of them are not...
I'm trying to figure out how to say this politely.
They would be considered diverse by traditional American standards.
I think that's a nice way of saying this.
And so they talk about traditionalism.
They talk about having America go back to, say, the pre-60s social revolution.
But many of these people are members of groups which are not, you know...
Which have not played a large role on the traditional American scene.
And that's not to judge these groups.
It's just saying that this is the history of the country.
And so they use religion, like I said before, as a means of papering over this chasm and other chasms as well.
And I just don't see it working.
I think this whole thing is a house of cards built on a foundation of sand on a windy day at the beach.
It's just not going to work.
Do you have any thoughts on that?
I agree with you.
And ultimately, I suppose I'm showing just, well, perhaps you might describe this as a limitation in my thinking, but I think of it as a kind of inclusiveness in my thinking.
And that is, so long as you are a self-conscious European and consider yourself the biological heir, To this great tradition that goes all the way back to the Greeks, then that is what matters.
So long as you see yourself as a self-conscious white person, a European, then that can be the basis of a nation.
And in a nation, you will have right, you will have left, you will have believers, you will have non-believers.
But so long as they're committed to that nation, and after all, look at...
Oh, nations that still exist as genuine nations.
Japan, or if we take, in European case, Hungary, or the Czechs.
There are all kinds of differences.
There are religious people, irreligious people.
Of course, in the case of Eastern Europe, I find myself making Professor Gottfried's argument that really he is still, perhaps, in a place like Poland.
Christianity is very much part of the social glue.
I think that is great, and I think it's wonderful to have that.
But I don't believe it's necessary.
And certainly, if we're going to save any bits of the wreckage of Western civilization on this continent, I don't think it makes sense to be drawing lines and saying, well, you have to be a Christian.
In fact, I hate to shock Professor Gottfried, but they're going to be homosexuals.
Who are going to be on our side.
Believe it or not, American Renaissance just got its first piece of fan mail from someone who calls him or herself or it a trans girl.
And I don't know quite which pronoun to use, but this person says, don't believe that we're all egalitarian, anti-racist.
Some of us are proud Europeans.
Well, okay.
I guess I have to cast my net even wider.
But to me, as I say, this is really the essential thing.
Do we consider ourselves men and women of the West?
And that, to me, is the real touchstone.
And once we have established that, then we can sort out whatever differences we may have among ourselves.
I find you're a much more liberal person.
Go ahead.
I am.
You're more liberal than I am.
And I'm definitely less on the social conservative side myself, but that's old news to anyone who watches the show.
What I will say is this.
When you're in an area...
That has a good degree of social harmony where there's a high amount of community trust.
You know that area without anybody having to tell you that we have these wonderful attributes.
And areas that I love spending time in here in Florida, all of them, now that I think about it, have a disproportionately high gay population, yet they all vote Republican.
And they are places that you can walk around without wondering whether or not someone is going to shoot you for your wallet or something like that.
Whether or not there's a gay pride flag there, I could care less.
I mean, it makes no difference at all.
But if I'm in an area where I'm an outlier and somebody is going to persecute me because of that, that matters.
Even if the people there were claiming to be religious or socially conservative values, whatever, I'm not so much interested in philosophy as I'm interested in end results.
And no end result matters more than you being able to go about your day safely, reasonably, and in a generally civilized way.
I think a lot of these folks just don't have a very good understanding of how society works beyond politics.
This is really more sociology.
A lot of them actually do reject the differences that are...
I've historically been between ethnic and racial groups, and they think that this one religion thing is going to be somehow what not only saves them as a movement or a splinter of a movement, but America itself.
And then a lot of them also claim to be America first, but they are very much opposed to the sort of, you know, individualized Anglo-Protestant cultural Christendom that was prevalent here up until the 60s.
And even after that, in certain places, you know, they want this either, you know, Roman Catholic or Orthodox thing, which really, you know, I mean, if you're a devout Catholic, you're not putting America first.
It's the Vatican first by the nature of your religion's doctrine.
And the Orthodox Christians tend to be very ethnocentric for whatever Eastern European tribe they come from.
So, you know, I look at all these young, you know, e-rightists, and what do you think that they call themselves conservatives?
And I just don't see something that's philosophically cohesive.
I don't see something coming from them that's practical.
And I really think that it's just a waste of everyone's time.
It's really more like young folks doing a live-action role play.
They're certainly not going to save the West.
I'll just leave it at that.
You touched on a lot of things.
I would comment on two of them.
One is, I do tend towards the Gottfried camp in terms of my revulsion at a celebration of homosexuality, for example.
I prefer, when I walk by a nice-looking church, I prefer not to see that rainbow flag.
I don't have anything against...
People in their own particular practices, but to somehow celebrate this particular erotic orientation is almost superior, or we're looking forward to the first openly homosexual Supreme Court judge or president or whatever it is, to somehow celebrate this.
We have these gay pride days, and the more or less normal people at the head of the line who are holding the banners, they're always very nervous about who's bringing up the rear, the ones in the dog costume.
There is a very, very disturbing contingent out there, which I think, I mean, if they have to have it, they should not by any means be celebrating it and suggesting that this is a good thing.
A transvestite book readings for heaven's sake.
This is just nuts.
It's like I know that there are deaf people who think that being deaf is superior and they celebrate deafness.
You know, I don't condemn them for deafness, but the idea somehow that we are all defective and that they've got it right.
That's just not right.
And I don't think it would be, to me, gay pride parades are about as meaningful or make as much sense as deaf pride parades.
But anyway.
I have to say that Jared speaks like a true Southern Presbyterian, which is his background.
Someone who represents the Anglo-Protestant culture of the United States, which I celebrate, which I think is essential to American identity.
Even if we have people who are not Anglo-Protestants, it's very important to assimilate them to an ethical way of life that is Anglo-Protestant.
Jared or Mr. Taylor's distaste for these people flying the rainbow flag and celebrating bizarre sexual orientations.
What was your second point?
The second point was one that you raised.
This individualism that seems to characterize the West, that can just go too far.
On the one hand...
We do have this admiration of the rugged individualist, the pioneer, the explorer, all these people who don't give a damn what anybody thinks.
But at the same time, there has to be some kind of social cohesion.
And if we do not have social cohesion...
Then we can be manipulated and taken advantage of by people who are much more oriented towards kinship groups or towards tribalism.
We seem to have many Achilles heels, more than a human being should have.
But this is certainly one of them, this almost fierce individualism that characterizes us.
So I think that's an important thing to bring up.
And I don't know how these young traditionalist Christians reconcile this.
I suppose they want to think that we will all submerge our individualism in a common faith.
But this is something about the West that I think made us dynamic, made us Faustian, made us invent things, discover things, go on all sorts of fantastic voyages.
But it is very much a weakness now that we're in competition with other groups that are much, much more cohesive.
Paul, anything before the last question?
No, since I agree with Jared's statement about the hyper-individualism, but I'm not sure that the individualism that today is celebrated has anything to do with this Spenglerian-Faustian impulse or whatever,
which is peculiar to the West and explains all of our achievements as Westerners.
I think there's a kind of cult of the individual, which is based on individual gratification more than anything else, rather than individual sense of challenge.
And that, I think, makes the individualism doubly dangerous.
And not only because it destroys any sense of social cohesion, but it is based on an ethic of gratification.
I think that's a very acute and wise observation.
Yes, it's a kind of a self-indulgence that masquerades as something heroic.
I think you're absolutely right about that.
And now for the final question.
Why should people buy your book?
Why is it worthy of not only their time, but their money?
How will it benefit their lives in one way or another?
Well, that is a particularly acute question, given that it first came out in 1992, when, as I say, this group of people got together and more or less forced my hand to republish it.
I was extremely flattered after I sort of skimmed through the book again, and then I did find that the arguments that I'm making in it are certainly valid.
And given both the fairly extensive preface and afterwards that I added to it, I think I gave it a kind of...
Intellectual mooring, an anchorage that makes it fit in with my deeper understanding of race relations to the United States.
One reason to read it, now this would be probably not perhaps the most important, but that it is a kind of an example of what could be said at a certain time in American history for those of us who are interested in that.
That would be a minor example, but perhaps I flatter myself, but I...
I think the arguments are still valid, and in fact, many of the personalities that show up in the book, the people such as Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, Bill Clinton, these are people who are still very much alive, and all of the controversies that are actual today that are all in the news.
We're already there in the early 1990s.
So on the one hand, I think arguments are still good.
The facts could be needed a little brushing up.
But I suppose I would not be sufficiently self-promoting were I not to point out that in 2011, I brought out something of a successor to the book that goes even further into forbidden territory.
It's called...
It's called, gosh, I walk in the title of my own book.
It's called White Identity.
And it is a much more explicitly dissident book.
White Identity is one that I think that readers would like.
But I can turn the question on its head and ask you, Mr. Gotti, why was it that you yourself, for the purposes of this broadcast, took an interest in a book that's now, what, almost 30 years old?
Well,
Are you asking me?
Well, I read the book.
I have not seen the new edition, but I read it when it came out, and I was very, very impressed by the scholarship, and even more by the lucid prose in which the arguments were presented.
I should say, when I first looked at it, I was surprised that it did not come out with some I recommend the book to anyone.
I don't think the arguments sound very different from the ones that are now being presented by Heather MacDonald and not Tucker Carlson so much, but Heather MacDonald on Fox News.
But the book is still worth reading, and I would like to get the new edition, which I will proceed to do once this program is over.
I'll be happy to send it to you.
Well, thank you.
I would be glad to answer my share of the question.
Yes. Okay.
Because it's so difficult to discuss much of anything to do with race relations today, and because if you look at, I guess, the history of race relations in the U.S. and the history of various racial groups in the U.S., you know, it's so easy for somebody to come out and say, you know, you're this, you're that,
all the endless lists of isms.
To look at something that came out 30 years ago, almost, and has since been updated, it's sort of like a time capsule updated for the present day, if that makes any sense at all.
Something like that, I think, is very interesting to go over in a forum such as this because it obviously allows for good discussion, but it also gives both insight on how we got here and perhaps it'll tell us something about where these subjects are likely to go in the future.
Well, gosh, thank you very much.
I couldn't have said it better myself.
Thanks for tuning in, everyone.
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