April 16, 2017 - Radio Free Nortwest - H.A. Covington
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Greetings from Seattle.
Andy Donner here to talk about theorycraft.
Harold has spoken at length about the issue of Dutch uncles before, and one might say that theorycraft is the art of the Dutch uncle, and it's the underlying reason the party detests Dutch unklings so much.
If you've been sent this audio in response to something you've said, there's a reason for it.
Don't just take it personally or think we're writing off what you have to say.
Do give a listen first.
Odds are, we've heard it already, or thought of it first, and we decided against it for some reason.
Do take this in stride and try to understand why we might send you the MP3 equivalent of a form letter.
This is going to be my one and only address on this subject specifically because I'm genuinely tired of dealing with this so very much, and afterward, I'm going to be done answering it.
This is going to be a meteor talk, and in the past, I've been criticized for being unclear.
While that's sometimes been the case due to having to be circumspect with certain subjects, I'm going to be pretty straight up today, and in an effort to maximize understanding, I'm going to give a brief outline of this shortcast.
I'm going to start by defining theorycraft and explaining why it's bad.
I'll then give a few examples, some of which you'll be familiar with and some of which you won't, so that I'm not just talking abstracts at you.
Then, I need to talk about why the Northwest Front does what it does in spite of Johnny-come-lately pseudo-nationalist disagreeing with us.
I'll spend a bit of time talking about a thing I call negative theorycraft, and then I'll close with what you all need to do instead of theorycraft so that there's a useful takeaway.
As I just said, I want to spend a moment or two defining the term theorycraft, so my meaning later in this shortcast is clear.
I was first introduced to the word itself a number of years ago.
For those of you unfamiliar with it, many video games allow the player to customize their experience as they progress.
In most of these cases, the actual gameplay takes place based on mathematical calculations related to a number of things which could be tweaked by these player customizations.
It's also very common for there to be many types of activity available in these games which require very different customizations of the same character in order to participate effectively.
These customizations are frequently complicated, and their workings become opaque as they interact.
As such, people spend huge amounts of time not really playing their games, but instead working on all sorts of intricate analytical efforts to determine the optimal specialization for their gameplay in given situations.
Initially, this relied on a certain amount of what is called theorycraft, because one would have to make a guess about what direction to work in, and then see if their idea panned out.
Okay, so there's the definition.
Now here's why this is a problem in the white nationalist movement.
I recall one such community of gamers from my gaming days.
Their message board had very specific rules which were enforced mercilessly, and quite a few people were booted off permanently shortly after signing up because they thought they were somehow above the need to familiarize themselves with the community and its guidelines before shooting their mouths off, which is a lesson many white nationalists could stand to internalize in their own activities.
Optimal customizations were specced out along with the mathematical presentation of why they were the best according to the current game rules.
But more importantly than the theoretic justification for one of these assertions was the actual proof of in-game performance offered along with the theorycraft.
This proof was critically important because the community was results-oriented.
If they were doing something wrong or subpar, they were going to stop it once they knew better.
They actually played their game, so the effects of their theorycraft mattered more than the theorycraft itself.
I say all this to point out the polar opposite where quite a few people didn't bother to play the game at all because they were so busy doing nothing, but arguing over which strategies were superior to others without ever putting any of it into practice.
You can probably see why I'm on this subject, so I'll get right to it.
The Northwest Front was never interested in hearing theorycraft from anyone, and we never will be.
And this wouldn't be such a big deal, but it happens pretty frequently, and most of you don't even know you're doing it, which means there's no way for you to self-correct because you don't even know the correction is required.
Here come the examples.
Fair warning now, folks.
This is going to go on for a bit, so feel free to pause and fetch yourselves a beverage.
I'll say it again.
Don't take any of this personally.
The reason I'm putting this together is that most people don't understand the difference between theorycraft and implementation due to that white character thing.
And even if someone does, they're not used to substantial criticism because, at this point in time, lots of us didn't have father figures to bounce ideas off of when we were children.
Now, it's not our fault, but it has to be dealt with regardless.
I'm not knocking any of you, and I hope that's understood, because this father figure issue is going to play a larger role in handling this subject.
And leading into these examples, I need to make something very clear about my methods, since they've come under criticism for some time.
This criticism came to a head a few years back and has more or less stayed there ever since, when someone told me they were sick of listening to my snarky yapping.
Their words.
This was after an interesting exchange regarding public demonstrations, at a time when such silliness was being pushed heavily in the movement to prep for a specific event.
I was able to effectively undermine the theorycrafting behind these sorts of things, and that resulted in the snarky yapping remark.
But there was no snark involved there, or in anything I've submitted to RFN.
In the interest of not being deliberately rude to the person who made these remarks, I will point out he's a very sincere white nationalist, and is aggressive in his sincerity.
That said, he left the distinct impression that he believed me to have employed some subtle trickery, or perhaps an oratory technique, to make a deceptive case.
Nothing could be further from the truth, and I've never once employed a rhetorical twist to deceive someone like that.
I'm sure most of you remember the comic strip Charlie Brown, drawn by Charles Schultz, and more specifically, that the titular character played on various sports teams.
After a particularly bad baseball game in one comic, Charlie Brown was drawn asking how his team could lose when they were all so sincere.
Many of you are likely to confront that sort of predicament if you're being sent this talk.
Recall those video game theory crafters I mentioned moments ago.
I'm sure quite a few of them were initially shocked that they were wrong because they viewed themselves as so incredibly brilliant at their craft.
And honestly, they may have been.
Being outright genius doesn't prevent someone's guesses and projections from being useless, especially in the face of proof.
I'll talk more about this later, but I do need to make it clear up front that being the smartest person in your environment doesn't mean your theorycraft is anything other than theorycraft, even if you've never been wrong in your life.
Many people these days have never had the experience of failing to meet a standard, and having to change themselves, in order to fix that, and this is the underlying cause of the theorycraft epidemic in white nationalism.
Many of the examples I'm going to use are theories that are blatantly wrong or anti-strategic, as well as theories that have been tried but don't pan out.
A good starting place would be the take over a town or county theory.
This suggestion doesn't even pan out in the realm of theory for a number of reasons.
The name of the theory suggests well enough what it is, and we've been over the whole Beaver Cleaverville diversion enough on Radio Free Northwest that I don't need to spell it out.
Anyway, the beaver-cleaver diversion doesn't go anywhere near addressing our strategic needs, but this isn't the right time to explain why yet again.
And my second example of the worst sorts of theorycraft the party deals with is that of the streetwalk.
This is another one of those things that we've been all over on RFN for years now, so I won't do more than hit the high points and move on.
Basically, there's this idea out there that says white nationalists absolutely need to put on some demonstrations and protests for, well, whatever's popular at the time.
These demonstrations almost always come off as pathetic and weak for a litany of reasons I don't have time for right now.
I'd rather focus on why this particular diversion is especially troublesome in light of the theorycraft problem.
This sort of activity is always lauded as doing something, even though this something doesn't have any tangible connection to stopping white genocide.
Even if I were to grant that white nationalist demonstrations constitute any variety of worthwhile action, which I most certainly do not, there's no actual value in any of it.
The party is frequently reprimanded and told that others will see how brave the demonstrators are and be moved to join our cause, or some such baloney.
In reality, this never happens.
Ever.
And yes, I do know that for a fact.
It's hard for a younger or newer white nationalist to grasp this, but American white nationalism has been around for quite some time, and the street walk has been around for just as long.
In the beginning, it served a certain purpose, but that just doesn't pertain anymore.
And no, it's never ever caused a burst of interest in white nationalism.
None.
The people telling us this aren't just guessing.
They're actually flat-out wrong and out of alignment with reality.
Before I leave the issue of street walking, I ought to bring up some feedback the party got last time there was an outbreak of streetwalking fever.
Someone ended up flipping out on the party, and absolutely insisted a particular set of protests quote-unquote worked, and we all needed to quote-deal with it, unquote.
But worked how?
And to what end?
Was white genocide suddenly averted?
Something else?
Name it, please.
But here's the thing.
If you can't measure it or demonstrate it, then it didn't happen and you're just theorycrafting.
I hope the first of my points is starting to sink in since I need to go other places today.
Another of the really irritating theorycrafts we deal with on a regular basis is that it's got to get bad for white people before they'll change.
Just about everyone who has come home had it decent enough where they were, so that's not true.
And even if it were, it's been said for so many years that it has no meaning left because things are significantly worse with no change in behavior to match.
My least favorite theorycraft is that the Butler plan can be ignored because someone else is going to come up with something more convenient.
This one is nothing but a character failure, because we all know that's not actually going to happen, yet all but a handful refuse to take appropriate action based on their knowledge.
Having brought up some examples of failed theories, I ought to let that specific topic lie and move on to issues of theory versus reality.
In theory, practice agrees with theory, but in practice, it doesn't.
Most of the people who try to sling theory at us are actually very intelligent and are frequently put off by our lack of interest in their ideas, which is part of the reason I've asked you all to put your egos on the back burner long enough to consider this presentation.
As I've said, odds are you're a smart cookie, and because of that you're very likely to be able to solve problems you understand without having to test your solutions before using them in the real world.
And yes, you deserve a healthy amount of appreciation where it's due.
But hear this.
It's not due here.
Not from us.
Especially not on the subjects we address.
And before you get upset with me, bear in mind that I do know very well how this sounds.
Your best bet is to take a page out of the Big Lebowski's book and repeat to yourself, you're not wrong, Donner.
You're just an asshole.
I've spoken at length on RFN about the reality that facts don't matter, as well as the implications of this truth, and we're running right smack dab into the middle of that very same concept here.
In addition to the couple of diversions I started this talk with, there are all sorts of other arguments I'm going to address after I make the core of my point.
As has been pointed out, practice only agrees with theory in theory.
Despite the blatantly high level of intelligence displayed in many criticisms of the Northwest Front and our activity, these criticisms are simply not valid due to their entirely theoretical nature.
Since I've gone here, I'll have to stay here long enough to address the most obvious criticism.
Is it, or is it not, the case that one of you Auslanders might have something to say that we couldn't possibly encounter or figure out on our own, that you must absolutely communicate to us?
Well, not unless you're an expert in whatever subject you want to address.
Further, we actively seek out experts and their material when we need it.
To prove the point, I'll tell a short story about a time Comrade Don Welke and I needed to meet at my place to discuss a party item or two.
He walked into my living room, and we sat down to deal with whatever business was on our docket that day.
He noticed and commented on a medium-sized set of books on one of my bookshelves, got up, examined them, and said, You're reading interesting books.
I didn't think much of it at the time, but having reflected for almost a year on theorycraft and how to deal with it...
I realize the stack of books he noticed were the books I was reading on how to instigate changes in yourself and other people, as well as how to actively make important concepts stick, instead of just letting them die off, as is so common in groups and organizations.
I'm not going to go into what I learned, which was a ton, by the way, because it's not really a whole lot we don't already do.
By pure accident, the party was doing just about everything recommended by experts on various subjects.
Sure, there are a few things we've tweaked since then, and I'll talk about those shortly.
What I need you all to glean from this specifically is that we're not opposed to doing things differently, and we do actively police ourselves for whether or not we're doing the right thing on a regular basis.
It's just that if we're doing the things we need to do according to experts and we're not getting the right result, it sure doesn't seem like we're the ones at fault.
Take the hint, please.
And as for those changes, the two examples I want to use are things you've actually heard about on RFN in the past, so they're safe to talk about.
For starters, the party as a whole has never favored anything resembling a membership organization.
True, we're still not that, but the whole NPA thing, whereby people were asked to formally pledge support, was something we avoided for a long time for reasons Harold has addressed at length.
The other item is what Harold has called the edifice complex among white nationalists.
We've addressed our unwillingness to give in to the typical American political expectation, but we've been forced to admit that's just not going to cut it.
A herald periodically mentions the need for some sort of building to give us an air of legitimacy among Americans.
So, if the party knows certain things have to change, whether or not we collectively want them to, and we actively seek out the ways in which we need to change, why don't we listen to more people?
Well, it's because they're not experts or experienced in the things they have to say, so they're merely theorycrafting.
Now look, I'm not saying this to be mean or beat you up, but it is what it is.
Here's the Cliff Notes version.
A new white nationalist has, to a certain extent, figured out how the world works.
But with this new knowledge, they should see if they're in line with reality before they start coaching others.
That's what those of us associated with the Northwest Front did, anyway.
Our Dutch uncles and sundry other theorycrafters are doing things in the exact opposite order, and that's why we're not concerned with their opinions.
I've had this presentation in the works for well over six months now, but this next bit has been reworked quite a few times since I could never get it to a point where I was happy with it.
I've tried several different ways of handling this material, and I've decided I need to get on with it rather than worry about absolute perfection this time around.
There's been an awful lot of chatter about millennials and their ilk in the last couple of years and about a year ago.
During one of RFN's call-in shows, a female comrade made the observation that the vast majority of what she saw in the alt-right was fatherless young men.
She was very, very right about that, and the effects of this are worth considering.
In general, women are good at raising well-behaved preteens.
Men, on the other hand, are good at raising well-adjusted adults, particularly...
Well-adjusted young men.
It's not hard to find out about the awful effects of being raised by a single mother.
Just hop on any political YouTube channel that leans right of center and you'll have more material on the subject than you could possibly consume in a lifetime.
It's critically important for children to have adult male relatives around when they're children.
Doubly so for boys, because a boy's normal psychological development requires a man around to bounce ideas off of.
The essential part of this experience comes about when the man has to correct something the boy said or did.
We've all seen the various meltdowns social justice warriors have when they encounter either some level of disagreement or especially some objective proof that they're really just a bunch of maladjusted juveniles and probably always will be.
That's the result of never having had the experience of being wrong, which, I repeat, is probably one of the most important things that can happen to a boy while becoming a man.
Granted, this also applies to girls in certain respects.
That said, recall nearly every one of my 2016 RFN submissions was aimed at dealing with latent cultural Marxist tendencies that pop up in New White Nationalists, and you'll see why I'm so bothered by all of the theorycraft out there.
I could keep going on and on and on with several different examples, but I've already passed a shocking amount of time, and I really do need to move on to the thrust of my point about what we need to do with theorycraft.
And that is to...
Wait for it.
Stop.
Just stop it.
Many of you will recall I've been promising this presentation for several months now.
It's been in the works for even longer because I saw this problem starting to really present itself.
We hit peak theorycraft around August and September last year when the party was being confronted with a number of purely theoretical arguments involving our lack of progress and how we ought to conduct ourselves here in the proposed homeland.
When I started talking today, I promised to get to a point where I would discuss in detail why the party doesn't really care about the disagreement we get from other white nationalists, and this is it.
The exchange of theorycraft regarding what the party was and wasn't doing wrong occurred over the party's message board around the specified time period.
I would have dealt with this all then, but I experienced the perfect storm of party activity, career requirements, and multiple important family events which left me no time whatsoever.
Then the whole Trump thing came to pass, and I've had to sit back and take note of the fallout thereof, since it's going to flavor quite a bit of my commentary for some time.
But here I am now to actually wrap this issue up.
As stated, this issue came to a head towards the end of last summer, when someone tried to present the party with an actual logical argument as to what we were doing wrong and what we needed to do differently.
To his credit, this is actually the first time since I've been involved that someone has actually attempted to do such a thing, no matter how poor it was.
That said, he was just as wrong as every other Dutch uncle the party has dealt with in the past, and I'm going to tell you why by way of the job I had prior to coming home to the Pacific Northwest.
Without getting into uninteresting details, the job I had when I found the Northwest Front had me on a large team of people working on large projects which spanned many months at a time.
These projects would eventually come due and need to be delivered.
Every time this happened, the managers would set up a monitoring station which tracked the theory versus reality of the delivery.
It didn't matter how experience the team got or how carefully we planned because theory only agrees with reality.
In theory, reality always has other plans.
Even as well as everyone on the team got along and as hard as we all worked, we just knew what was going to happen every time we finished a project.
A lot of our planning would be outright invalid and useless.
Sure, we would learn from these incidents and get better every time, but then we would only run into new and different obstacles.
So all of our theorycraft was going to go right out the window, and this was always a given.
It didn't matter how much we thought we dealt with previous failures, or how careful we were in planning.
And it was like this through the whole industry, too.
Having told the story, here's the real deal with theorycraft.
Just like those video game junkies.
Political and white nationalist theory crafters just can't accept evidence of being wrong, even though they have nothing material to fall back on.
This guy I mentioned, who so desperately wanted us to engage his arguments, could not accept proof that his premises were absolutely wrong.
His faulty assumptions were that no one would ever actually come home like we ask you all to do, and that even if they could, the party was incapable of getting them to do so.
And just so we're clear, I wasn't able to respond to him in the way he wanted when this was all going down because I was busy with all sorts of things.
One of them was real-world party activity.
Specifically, we had people in Seattle on their scouting trips.
And this wasn't just a meet-and-greet either.
They were here because they were seriously lining up work in support of their own homecoming.
As the party has maintained on RFN, people do come home all the time, but they almost never care for it to be announced.
I know from my own experience that people will come home, and the party is capable of convincing them to do so because it is true in my case and the cases of all those I've met since.
That by itself eliminates any theorycraft to the contrary, but as I covered in my Real Politics Talks from 2014, facts don't matter, especially to most white nationalists.
We've actually had a few very vocal Dutch uncles over the years that have all made the same sort of claims.
They'll all admit that the Northwest Imperative is the right thing for everyone to do, and in a few cases, they'll even offer to perform various services.
One of these sorts made short videos for us several years back.
He was quite plain that he himself would never come home, even though he produced online propaganda telling other people to do so.
Some online hangabouts told me they thought his material was powerful, even though I didn't.
In truth, it couldn't be very good, because he himself didn't want to follow the advice in his videos, and the people who liked them so much never came home themselves, either.
And that's the same with this guy, who considered himself a supreme logician such that he was so offended I wouldn't engage his argument.
I've said this before, and I'll say it again.
If your own advice isn't interesting enough that it causes you to come home and help the party implement it, it certainly won't interest us, and that's your fault, not ours.
That aside, I really can't emphasize enough that I couldn't deal with this person's theorycraft when it was going on because I was off involved in activities he said never happened and that he demanded I admit never happened.
To put it bluntly, I just couldn't be bothered because his ideas were completely divorced from reality, even though he couldn't admit that.
That is the reason the party just doesn't care about what our Dutch uncles have to say.
Not only are they wrong, they're so far off base in their thinking that they won't even consider Northwest migration.
The party doesn't just emphasize migration because we need you here, though we do.
We talk about it because of the perspective change it brings about in those who undertake it.
The criticisms we get are almost always from the perspective of someone who either refuses to migrate or imagines it to be impossible.
Everyone involved with the Northwest Front just knows better.
We don't think differently, we know better, because we've done it before you were even aware we were here.
That's the difference between theorycraft and actual white nationalism.
While all this was happening, I personally was accused of mistaking online message board activity for real-world activism.
Bear in mind the person making these accusations couldn't be bothered to come home themselves and were trying to convince me of this while I was actually out in the real world meeting people doing what they said never ever happens.
I mentioned earlier the issue of a lack of experience adjusting to father figures, and this is the core issue facing white people today.
When you're wrong, you're wrong.
You don't get to decide whether or not you're wrong, and you don't get to decide what the consequences of being wrong are.
At some point, you have to be told things that may disagree with your own personal theorycraft, no matter how smart or right you think yourself.
It's time we all got better at being told things.
And having made the totality of my point, I'm going to wrap up by discussing something I call negative theorycraft.
Periodically, we hear from someone who genuinely has a migration block in their lives.
And I deliberately say periodically rather than frequently.
In actuality, based on what I've seen in my time with the party, this is almost never truly the case.
There are situations, however, where some difficulty actually exists outside someone's imagination that, in reality, keeps them where they are.
I can usually tell when this is the case since the person in question chooses to give the party money and encourages others to do so.
For those of you in such a situation, however rare it is...
I understand you can't come home, and I genuinely appreciate your willingness to support the party with something other than words.
Very few people do that to begin with, and I do take notice of you.
That said, we have a problem on our hands in that far too many people are all too quick to give us reasons they can't come home in a reasonable timeframe or even at all, and I've grown quite tired of it.
I've spoken about this in the past, but the short version is that almost none of these multi-year migrations actually happen.
And obviously, the outright refusals are what they are, despite how well they're meant.
And despite all the good intentions.
In all but the rare cases where there's a genuine reason migration cannot happen, just like all the other guesswork involved in normal theorycraft, the reasons are almost always very bad guesses.
People move all the time for all sorts of reasons that aren't even all that personally beneficial.
Coming up with imaginary reasons that you can't do something is what I've termed negative theorycraft, and it's just as harmful as regular theorycraft because it prevents taking proper action.
I'm going to do my best to keep it off party websites from here on out because, if nothing else, it will demoralize someone struggling with whether or not they will make the In fact, The issue of negative theorycraft isn't limited to migration.
I frequently bring up the issue of the Northwest Imperative online to others claiming to be white nationalists, and I've almost always met with the immediate objections of negative theorycraft relating to what we supposedly cannot do or what barriers are surely insurmountable, both before and after the creation of the NAR.
I was able to correctly deal with these objections on my own prior to coming home.
I spend an awful lot of my personal time dealing with all sorts of theorycraft, and it's about time that stopped, because it's pure waste and it actually indulges the underlying character flaws.
So, instead of theorycrafting as a non-contribution to white nationalism, actually try to put your white nationalism into practice.
I'd go into more detail, but the broad strokes have been painted to death.
The details you need to figure out are yours and yours alone.
I can suggest that you explore avenues of involving yourself in the Northwest Imperative instead of imagining reasons that you cannot participate and see where that takes you.
As always, if you have questions, please direct them to the party message board.