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April 25, 2021 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
44:55
St. George Floyd, The Redeemer

Ed and Richard discuss the guilty verdict in the trial of Derek Chauvin, discuss the religion surrounding George Floyd, and how this faith servers to justify the American system. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe

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As I see it, it's a grotesque miscarriage of justice.
But I wouldn't expect there to be a great deal of justice in a period of mob rule.
Feelings don't care about your facts.
And religion, God knows, doesn't care about facts.
and he arose to a kind of religious significance that will overwhelm any form of doubt.
So, And so I'm not particularly surprised by it.
I mean, it seems to be quite obvious that first of all, second degree murder is he intentionally and with malice aforethought, but not in a premeditated or planned way, killed the person.
So this implies that he didn't go out with the intention of killing George Floyd, but once he was on top of him, he thought, yeah, I'm going to kill him.
Right.
There's no evidence.
That can be brought forth for that, other than that it is true that he was saying, I can't breathe, man, I can't breathe, but that is exactly the kind of thing that you would say if you were trying to escape apprehension in order to cause the person to loosen their grip so that you could try to escape.
So that's not really an argument.
And the people witnessed George Floyd saying these kinds of things, but again, that's not really an argument.
Secondly, voluntary manslaughter.
My understanding is that American law on murder, or at least the law of this particular state, seems to be more complicated than English law.
You have all these different degrees of manslaughter and degrees of murder.
Voluntary manslaughter, as I understand it, is things like a crime of passion.
So you don't have a prior intention to kill, but you go in in such circumstances where you just lose it.
Any reasonable person would become mentally disturbed.
and on the spur of the moment, they would kill because of that.
Is there any evidence that he is guilty of voluntary manslaughter, that he completely lost his temper with this person and decided to kill him?
As far as I can see, he was completely calm and he was doing his job and he was engaging in an apprehension hold, which they are taught to do.
Yes, in Minnesota they are.
In other states they have actually decades ago moved away from a kind of neck or lower back hold, but that was actually part of...
So he's following policing procedures.
That's good.
So we can't possibly say he's guilty of voluntary manslaughter.
So that's out.
Then we have involuntary manslaughter.
That is a killing that stems from a lack of intention to cause death, but involves a negligent act.
Right.
If he has been taught that that is how you should apprehend somebody, that is how you should keep hold of a criminal, then that is not a negligent act.
If that person is saying, I can't breathe, I can't breathe, it is quite reasonable in the circumstances for him to say, well, look, that's just an attempt to escape, you know, whatever.
So that cannot be understood to be a negligent act either.
So he hasn't engaged in a negligent act, and the person has nevertheless died.
So he's also not guilty.
...of involuntary manslaughter based on the definition that you have under American law, or under the law of that particular state.
As I understand it under English law, he may well be guilty of manslaughter, but then, on the other hand, he is acting, he has not put himself in that situation, and that makes a fundamental difference.
On behalf of the government, as an enforcer of the law, he has not put himself in that situation.
He has been put in that situation.
And in that situation, it is understood that he has to follow the instructions and if things go wrong, and the training.
And if he follows the instructions and follows the training, then he should not be guilty of a crime.
The best that could be said is that he is guilty of incompetence.
In his office, he should have somehow intuited that this person was losing consciousness or whatever, and he should have released.
If you bring in a rule where they're not just guilty of incompetence, and they can be sacked for that, understandably, but they're guilty of a crime, then you bring in a situation where no reasonable person would want to become a police officer.
Because if you become a police officer, then you will put yourself in those kinds, or indeed a member of the army, you will put yourself in those kinds of dangerous situations where you have to make split-second decisions that are life and death or can result in serious violence if it goes wrong, and sometimes they go tits up.
And that's what happened in that case.
And so that's why, in general, in America, you don't have that system, which we do have in England, by the way, where you can sue police officers in civil court.
Now, it's the worst of both worlds in America if they bring that in, because at the moment in America, police officers are paid badly.
But they have certain, compared to Britain, they're paid very badly.
Well, that might be true.
I mean, look, I don't buy this right-wing thing that no white person will become a police officer ever again.
Oh, no, no, absolutely.
I mean, they have benefits.
Most of them are not in this situation.
I absolutely do think white people will become police officers, and that's the problem.
So I think that this is a matter of total injustice, and we shouldn't be surprised.
Firstly, the judge...
Should have sequestered the jury for the entire time, so they couldn't have been aware of any of the coverage of this trial, let alone of this insane congresswoman basically calling for violence.
Second, the jury would have been, even if he hadn't done that, would have been so intensely aware of this and would have been so intensely aware of the potential consequences of delivering the wrong verdict and would have been so sort of indoctrinated potentially that I don't see how this could be anything other than...
How it could be possible to get a fair trial.
And the guy's attorney raised that issue.
and weirdly the judge said that this might be a matter for you to appeal on that it's a mistrial but i'm going to rule it out here which is most peculiar because if it's a matter on which he can appeal then it's a matter that's a fundamental problem with the trial which should which should come before him uh there and then so really you've got almost sort of jury nobbling sort of Right.
Right.
There's also, at the very least, a reasonable doubt on the cause of death.
There was actually a man who was...
Quite authoritative, maybe even charismatic, who was discussing the cause of death as effectively strangulation, lack of oxygen to the brain.
The fact is, there really are very serious issues about what happened in the sense that George Floyd had, I believe, twice the amount of...
Fentanyl and his bloodstream that could cause death by itself.
There's also an issue of his drug dealer refused to testify.
He pleaded the Fifth Amendment, which is your ability not to incriminate yourself effectively.
He did not do that because he was basically providing drugs for George Floyd.
Could easily have killed him.
And these drugs were found in his car.
There were a mixture of meth and fentanyl.
So, I mean, God knows what that will cause someone to be like.
The video itself showed someone who was just clearly, of George Floyd, the body cam video, of just someone who was clearly out of his mind.
So, I don't know what to say.
I don't...
There is much more than reasonable doubt that Derek Chauvin killed him by effectively suffocating him with his knee on his neck.
So is the law in America, then, that it's not good enough?
Because you could argue that there's no way he would have died.
Yes, he's on drugs, but it was that that pushed him over the edge.
Right.
The whole.
So is the law in America, the assumption is that the person who dies, you have the right to assume that they're just a normal average individual and they're not on drugs?
I don't know the answer to that.
I mean, obviously, you can't take these things so far, you know, in the sense of...
If there's a 90-year-old man in a swimming pool and you start dunking him underwater like you would a teenager and he dies and you say, well, I was just having fun.
I didn't intend to kill him.
Obviously, that is going to be some level of manslaughter or murder, too, or something.
Even if you're aware that someone's on drugs, that obviously doesn't give him a death sentence.
you have to reasonably, um, affect your actions to accommodate that.
I don't have a direct answer.
I'm not a legal expert.
But I just think there are so many reasons to believe that Chauvin's direct action did not cause anything.
And he actually did things like he and his team called an ambulance and so on for him that it's just, it cast much more than reasonable doubt.
But I would say that in this kind of thing, the facts don't matter.
And I don't believe that...
I think that this case now spells the fact that all cases across the country are going to be mob justice, and that if you're white, you're guilty, and if you're black, you're innocent.
I don't think that is going to at all be the case.
I do think that that kind of mob justice has an effect in these particular instances when a case rises from just another You wrote an excellent piece on the BLM protest that followed immediately after George Floyd,
and its relation to the coronavirus pandemic, the fact that people were cooped up, that they had anxiety due to...
This worldwide pandemic and death and so on.
It also is related to a replacement religion in the sense that these times of stress, anxiety, and insurgency will bring about a greater deal of religiousness.
And what we have to understand about George Floyd is, again, feelings don't care about your facts.
And the religion...
God knows doesn't care about facts.
And he arose to a kind of religious significance that will overwhelm any form of doubt.
On the news, they were asking this woman who used to be his girlfriend or something, you know, what would this white woman, what would George Floyd want?
Oh, George Floyd would want peace and justice and all this.
No, George Floyd held a gun to a pregnant woman's stomach demanding money for drugs.
That's the kind of person George Floyd is.
George Floyd's a horrible, nasty person, a criminal, a violent criminal.
And so the idea that with some people you can try and make them into a saint, perhaps, but it's rather more difficult with someone like George Floyd.
Incorrect, Ed.
They have already done it.
I mean, I don't know what to say.
People have said that about MLK.
MLK, he screwed around with too many women, and he had some funding issues, so he can't be a hero for Americans.
Incorrect.
Feelings do not care about your facts.
Oh, no one said that!
Someone on the news said that.
Someone said that he was a martyr.
He was a martyr.
That to me implies that he voluntarily gave up his own life for a religious cause and therefore surely Chauvin is not guilty because he voluntarily died.
Again, that's like being autistic.
If he was a martyr, it's like a religious significance.
He died for the good of race relations in America.
That's the way that people will understand it.
Yeah.
Here's Nancy Pelosi.
Thank you, George Floyd, for sacrificing your life for justice, for being there to call out to your mom.
How heartbreaking was that?
Call out for your mom.
I can't breathe.
But because of you and because of thousands, millions of people around the world who came out for justice, your name will always be synonymous.
Yeah.
That's where we are.
It is simply Christianity with a new person there.
I mean, George Floyd is kind of the son of man.
The fact that he's flawed, I don't think will actually be...
And he is obviously flawed.
You and I are flawed.
This guy is flawed off the charts.
But it's just irrelevant.
And they're going to forget about this stuff.
We are living in a time of just total decadence in which people, everyone's depressed, they want my drugs and my Netflix and my alcohol and the fact that he's a drug user and in fact that he's a hard drug user and that those might have...
It just doesn't matter because people will kind of imagine their version of drug use as what he was up to.
It's like, oh yeah, I smoke pot every week.
Whatever, man.
It's cool.
It's not to be taken literally.
Right, and they're going to forget about the really bad stuff.
I have heard that pointing a gun at a predicate woman.
I mean, that seems...
You can't come back from that one, but he will.
And this is at least my kind of cynical view of it, is that it was a religious thing.
It was probably impossible for the jury not to have gone this way, particularly given the circumstances of not being sequestered and so on.
We now have this myth, but the myth can kind of support the system itself.
So Nancy Pelosi can say, like, the son of man, George Floyd, sacrificed himself for our sins, and now we are closer to justice.
None of them want to say this is actual justice.
This is accountability.
We're approaching that big platonic good up in the sky called justice.
But by turning him into a religion, it kind of helps support the status quo in this way.
Joe Biden disbanded some committee on defunding or radically changing the police.
The idea that the police are going to be defunded in major cities.
Strikes me as totally ridiculous.
It's just simply not happening.
I think it will change.
There's probably more social work involved.
But these right-wingers who think that, like, whites are going to quit en masse, they're going to defund the police, and we're going to have just endless chaos in American cities.
That is not going to happen.
That's reactionary nonsense.
Not yet.
I think you're right.
The defunding the police, as I argued at the time, or implied at the time in my article for Radix, that was the popular reformation.
That was emotion getting too far.
We need to think about a time of radical change, a time of breakdown, and when you have breakdown, you have all kinds of chaos that happens, and then it's reined in into a new dispensation.
Think of it in terms of Thomas Kuhn and scientific theories.
You have the scientific theory falling apart, you have all kinds of scientific theories being suggested, you have the new scientific theory taking power, and then that's it.
That's the new power in the land.
And there's a period of chaos in between where all kinds of ideas are out there and where all kinds of things can be questioned.
And then you have a new orthodoxy and that's the orthodoxy.
And that's what happened.
So this is now the new orthodoxy.
George Floyd, as you say, is the son of man.
There is a degree.
And it's fascinating that people in power who are invested financially and socially in this system are trying to suggest that there's some sort of substitutional atonement in the death of George Floyd.
As you say, we are closer to the platonic ideal of racial justice, which we worship, and of equality, and therefore it doesn't matter that Nancy Pelosi is a hereditary politician rolling in money.
That doesn't do it.
We can look over that because her lack of equality, her greed, and the fact that she manifests everything that is unfair about the racial system in America, if you want, a very, very rich white woman of unbelievable privilege, an aristocrat, that she's atoned for now.
Her sins are atoned for by her mask wearing, obviously, but also by the sacrifice that George Floyd gallantly made, laying down his life.
So the upper middle class virtue signaling white people could feel better about themselves.
Exactly.
In other words, the strong will use the weak, or let's say, the strong will use a religion of the weak to their own benefit and to maintain the status quo.
Indeed.
And I think that's in some ways where we are now with the whole Biden administration, in which he...
In a grandfatherly way, we'll kind of talk the talk of racial justice, but he won't do it in a kind of edgy, hard way, like we need to tear down the white family or something.
He'll do it in a kind of grandfatherly way of, you know, we need to get better as an American, and this is unfair, and blah, blah, blah.
But they, again, have their cake and eat it too.
They ultimately worship this religion, but they're ultimately going to maintain the status quo.
And this religion is a kind of functional ideology for the current order.
And it works for them.
Well, it does.
The religion can only be understood as a genetic battle between two types of white people.
Between individualistic type white people.
Not just two, but two individualistic-type white people and group-oriented-type white people, between rich white people and poor white people.
And the religion assists the individualistic-type white people who make a coalition with the non-whites to abstain and attain power, and it helps the white people that are already basically wealthy and rich to maintain power because they're intelligent enough to realise the brilliance of this system.
And they realized it very early on that in the wake of World War II, racism, that's the thing we can use.
That's the guilt thing.
Christianity is falling apart.
We need to hold people together.
We need to hold...
I need to continue to feel superior and radiate my superiority over everybody else to stay in power.
I can do it with this racism thing.
And other people are too stupid to understand that.
So they'll hold on to the thing that I was indoctrinated with when I was a child, with nationalism or whatever.
No, this is the new thing.
And so it's like this American Civil War, in a sense, not to be hyperbolic, but I think you've got two casts of whites.
That are battling it out.
The thing is, it's the castes of whites that don't hold on to this that are the ones that are breeding, and that's going to have consequences eventually.
But at the moment, it's a wonderful, wonderful religion.
It has everything.
It doesn't have God.
It even has forgiveness, because you were saying a few months ago, the problem is it's like Christianity, but there isn't the forgiveness.
There is forgiveness now.
They've come up, they've realized that problem.
They realized the problem of the no-forgiveness and the nihilism.
You can be forgiven through the sacrifice of George Floyd.
Maybe we needed Floyd, ultimately.
Because MLK, when I was a lot younger, was a much bigger figure.
I hear a lot less about MLK now, interestingly.
And they kind of needed someone else.
They needed a new sacrifice.
Because, again, sacrifice is what lets you live.
I mean, you're giving this over so that you can live.
And we needed something, and George Floyd has filled that need.
But that's the problem.
MLK advocated unhelpful things like meritocracy, and that was what everybody accepted.
And so you need to move beyond that to a new way of virtue signaling, which is equality.
So we need a new person for that, and that is St. George.
I mean, I can only assume that the sort of reified equality god sent George to be in that place on that day and, you know, Golgotha.
They shouldn't call it George Floyd's word.
They call it Golgotha.
And make the noble sacrifice which he did.
I mean, it's...
It's brilliant.
They're such clever people.
That's the thing.
To go back real quick, I think you're referencing Jonathan Haidt or Haidt, however you pronounce his name.
Individualism and binding values.
The way I look at it is that we have these, every few months, some kind of event like this that might very well You know, otherwise be a kind of quotidian event that no one talks about or cares about.
I mean, the fact is, there are police shootings and killings every day.
But this one really struck a chord.
It struck a chord because of the video.
Mainly just the image.
It struck a chord because it came at a very particular time right at the pandemic.
I mean, everything kind of, the world kind of conspired to make this into a religious event and not just a quotidian or pedestrian terrestrial event.
But so, and I think we kind of can understand polarization.
When we see people, it's like this becomes a left-right issue and it becomes a red-blue issue in the United States.
And just because the United States is so big and media apparatus is so huge, this becomes a left-right issue across the world.
I mean, one of the most remarkable things, there were BLM rallies in Finland after the death of George Floyd.
Poland in Berlin.
I don't, maybe Russia, I don't know.
And I don't know how far afield it went, but definitely in the Western world, people just freaked out about this and they thought that they had something at stake in Black Lives Matter, which is this just kind of stupid American thing.
Like, why are you even talking about this?
But it really impacted them because it impacted them on a religious level.
But what I guess what I was saying is that, you know, with conservatives, You see a lot of rationality and kind of deconstructing of this event, where you can find some good content from conservatives where they're talking about, oh, well, how exactly did he die?
Who was this drug dealer?
Blah, blah, blah.
But I kind of agree with the left criticism in the sense that all of those things...
Might very well be true.
But at the end of the day, it's that you support the police.
Because, you know, whatever kind of individualism you have, and I think there's actually a lot of individualism and harm avoidance among conservatives, this freak out of her mask being an example of that.
But you ultimately want order, and you ultimately support the police, and you ultimately identify with the state.
And conservatives can't They're having a harder and harder time identifying with, say, the bureaucracy, that's now the deep state, or their local newspaper, oh no, liberal media, or even certainly the president, you know, oh, crazy, the radical left, blah, blah, blah.
But they do identify with certain things.
They still identify with the military.
They can still identify with the police.
They basically still identify with the badass, violent wing of the state, the police and the military.
Maybe a few other things in there.
This is the background of this left-right divide is identifying yourself with order, culture, and the state.
And then on the left-hand side, this kind of insane obsession with harm avoidance where Even this just kind of thuggish, generally awful person,
George Floyd, the fact that he might have been abused in some way by the police, it just expresses this sin, this almost endless sin that goes back to slavery and Jim Crow, and it's still infecting all institutions.
You know, still attacking blacks using this residual history.
And this is the divide of polarization.
These two things.
Yes, that they find this...
Well, it...
I suppose the thing that I see as the underlying mechanism is basically neuroticism and mental instability.
So if you have low self-esteem, then you identify with those that are outcasts and you feel a strong sense of guilt and negativity and you feel unhappy with life and you feel everything's unfair and all this.
So it's those kinds of people, what William James called the religion of the sick soul.
Those are now very much the people on the left, and there's many, many studies that I have found on this, whereas those on the right have high self-esteem and are content and are happy and are mentally stable.
And it is having those individualistic values, that is being harm avoidance and equality, those are associated with being neurotic, because being neurotic is this adaptation to this unstable world where you've just got to survive.
So it's all about you and your ability to survive.
You're like, and we are like this, you're like an animal in an overcrowded cage.
All order in a pack animal in an overcrowded cage goes away and they just start killing each other.
They're complete individualists and that's what we're dealing with here.
So I think I would see that as the divide.
I would see it to a certain extent as the divide between the mentally ill and the less mentally ill.
And that very strongly crosses over with what Jonathan Haidt suggests.
I think that's certainly one level of it.
I can remember Michelle Obama.
I think it was a 60 Minutes interview where she was talking about Barack Obama and she was like, as a black man, he can just get killed for walking around.
And it was just so...
You know, again, that was kind of an earlier state of this hyperpolarization, but it was definitely in effect.
And I think for most Americans, that was just so foreign.
It struck them as kind of malicious and so on.
Like, of course that's not.
What my life is like.
I don't worry about being shot as I walk to the grocery store.
And the notion that Barack Obama should worry about being shot for being a black man while walking down the street is just absurd.
But I think it does...
Well, that's true as well.
But I think it gets to...
I mean, you can...
View all of this as cynical and they're just using race, but I think you can also view it as they actually kind of feel this way.
Oh, no, I do.
I agree.
I think some of them are...
You've got the Vicar of Bray types.
Do you have that phrase in America?
No, I've never heard that.
The person that's like a willow that will just bend with the political tides in order to stay in power.
We call the Vicar of Bray.
And you'll get the Vicar of Bray types that will, like, Piers Morgan is an example of this.
Whatever is the thing where he feels that he can get a niche and be a bit edgy, and at the moment it's being anti-woke.
But if you go back to Thatcher's Ink Britain, it was being very left-wing.
Yeah, exactly.
Whatever it is, but it's a bit edgy.
It's not too edgy that he doesn't get money, but it's a bit edgy.
That's what Peter Morgan will go for.
He's an extremely cynical...
He's so brave.
He's stunning.
And so you have got people like that, and you've got to remember, well, that among these leftists, you do get people that are narcissistic and that are Machiavellian.
But on the other hand, it could be argued that being Machiavellian is an expression of being left-wing, or being neurotic, because if you feel that the world's out to get you, then you want to have power, because you want to control things.
You want to control things because everyone's out to get you.
So it could be that Machiavellianism is inherent to being an individualist and thus inherent to being left-wing at the moment or in general.
Indeed, Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, argued precisely this in his manifesto.
You brought this up a few times.
You must be reading...
Well, no, people have said to me, you should read it.
And I just thought, yeah, the schizophrenic ramblings of a madman.
No, no, no.
No, no.
Some of it was that, but most of it was a very well thought out, well argued thesis.
Yeah.
Anyway, that's why I brought it up.
It articulated for me the nature of left wingness, I think, in a way that I'd never seen as well articulated.
So that's why I brought it up.
So, yeah.
And the other thing I wanted to mention, though, when we were talking about the police and white people becoming police officers, is I do think that this won't stop them from doing so.
Because I think that we get to a point where what are the jobs you can do if you're...
About average IQ or a bit less?
Like, what can you actually do?
As everything gets outsourced, as there's no farming anymore, there's no factory work anymore, there's no internet, there's no shops anymore.
What can you actually do?
And one of the things, in a society of declining intelligence and polarisation, you're going to get more and more violence, so you're going to need more and more security guards, and you're going to need more and more policemen.
And so that's what you can do.
And so it doesn't matter.
There'll be way more people that will want to do this than there will be demand for it.
And there'll be a growing demand for it.
But then increasingly, there'll be nothing else you can do if you can't do science or whatever.
There'll be nothing else you can do as a man.
And so that's what you'll do.
And so they become like 19th century coal miners, really, where they're at the pit face of crime and they're just expendable.
Yeah.
So it doesn't matter if, well, this person is very unjust that he goes down for this crime, but so what?
Because, frankly, it's expedient that he does, and there'll be somebody else that will replace him.
It's not going to have any effect on recruitment.
It won't.
It won't.
This idea that other policemen from now on are going to say, oh, there's a six-foot black man on drugs.
I'm on my lunch break.
No, somebody will have to do it.
And so I'm afraid I'm quite cynical about that.
I don't think it's going to have any effect.
I think it'll carry on like this.
This guy is a convenient sacrifice.
From what I've heard about him, of course, they've dug up lots of things about his personal life and stuff like that.
And I guess they could do that with anybody and they could slant it so that it looks bad.
Take it from me.
We're not for someone safely like me, but perhaps to you and Derek Chauvin.
The fact that he's married to a former Miss Minnesota makes one who's also East Asian.
Makes one think he's a bit of a fast-life history strategist, if you know what I mean.
But anyway, it's unfair, because you could do that with anybody.
But they've certainly made it come across like he's callous, like he hasn't apologized.
Perhaps he should have seen fit to do that and to beg for forgiveness, and then it might have helped him.
That would have been a good strategy, yes.
Although I think they kind of needed this.
If he were let off, and again, Chauvin is not doomed at the moment.
I mean, he is in prison at the moment.
But again, the judge seemed to indicate that an appeal is at least possible.
So who knows what's going to happen?
And we'll also see what goes on with sentencing.
I do think there would have been riots.
You know, if he had been let off or maybe just kind of nicked on manslaughter.
I remember this.
When I was in Chicago about a year and a half ago, and I was...
I would work out at this gym not too far from my house.
And I went in one day, and everyone was standing around the TV as if it were 9-11 or something like that.
And I was like, you know, what's going on?
And they're like, oh, you don't know, of course.
It was this trial of a Chicago police officer.
And he, too, was found guilty of a case that was much like the Chauvin case.
It was violent and...
Extremely unfortunate, but also kind of morally and legally ambiguous.
But he was found guilty.
And it was all these white people and whitish people, maybe some Asians or an Indian or an Arab or something.
But it was not exactly upper class, but middle and upper middle class people at this gym.
And they're all sighing relief.
Like, oh, I'm glad he was convicted.
And they might say that they're glad he was convicted because he's a cop.
Murderer and so on.
But the real reason is that they can go to their favorite sushi restaurant tonight and so on.
That you kind of have to...
This religion has incentives based into it.
Like if it were just a crazy new version of Christianity where we're worshipping, you know, black...
If there are incentives to you leading your middle class suburban or urban life and it going along more smoothly because you sacrifice the occasional Derek Chauvin or you express white guilt or wash the feet of a BLM activist, etc., it's worth it.
Also, one thing we haven't looked at, which I think is germane to this, is that it's not new, this.
If you look at Romanticism and the Romantic nationalist movement, what you're worshipping is peasant culture.
It's a defanged peasant culture.
If you know anything about the actual lives of these peasants in 19th century Europe, these aren't nice people, necessarily.
Right.
High in general factor of personality, you tend to go to the top.
And if you're low in general factor of personality, you're low in intelligence, you're a peasant.
And that was the case even then.
The heritability of socioeconomic status is 0.7, and it's been 0.7 for hundreds of years, based on studies that have been done.
So these are horrible people, probably.
At least by the sounds of the time.
And, of course, those are the people that are worshipped.
And you have it, again, with the other romantic, with the Rousseau and the tribes.
Again, it's this defanged tribalism.
In reality, you're dealing with the Yanomamo, these extremely violent, aggressive, unpleasant people.
And it's just an extension of that.
This is defanged African-Americanism.
Right.
But it's interesting.
That's an interesting comparison between romantic nationalism in the 19th century of, you know, a kind of high mot, worshipping the, you know, that good peasant who's connected to the land and God and the earth and who is kind of sinless as well and guileless.
I think it's interesting that Americans...
And increasingly the Western world have picked urban African Americans for this role.
And they don't pick, say, rural white Americans in West Virginia.
They don't pick that.
That cannot be romanticized.
Well, they did do that.
They did do previously, yeah, but for the last...
I don't know.
Most of them are my adult life.
Those people are villainized.
Those people are the problem.
Those people are the ones who are either benefiting from Derek Chauvin's of the world or the ones supporting him.
Those people are villainized and they've chosen the target of their romanticization is urban African-American culture, which is quite a feat that they've accomplished this, but they apparently have.
They have.
And they did do that, but they move on.
So once everybody accepts something, you virtue signal some more.
And the other thing I'd note in a different way, and the other thing I'd note is some people have said to me, oh, romanticism, well, no, that's different.
We shouldn't compare that to Marxism or to these other multiculturalism or to these other Christian ideas because it's beneficial to the race.
But I would think about this.
Who is it that founded these things?
What was the name of the person that published Kalaballa, the Finnish?
The Finnish romantic folklore.
Was that a Finnish surname?
No.
What was the name of the person that published Kalavi Poeg, the Estonian folklore?
Was that an Estonian surname?
No.
It was a German and a Swede.
So it was people from the different ethnic group, from the upper class ethnic group, playing for status by fetishizing the poor and saying that I'm on the side of the poor.
And that's how it started.
And you get this again and again with these kinds of romantic nationalisms.
And also you have this history, don't you, in America.
Steve Saylor has written about this, the idea of the magic Negro.
So the black person is somehow freer and more genuine and has magic powers like Morgan Freeman.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, it's a little...
I think it's kind of a residue of a paternalistic aspect towards African Americans.
I mean, when I would talk to my grandparents, both of whom lived in the South, they would very often say something to the effect that Race relations were better because we would kind of take care of...
It's this paternalism, and you could say they knew their place.
Like, you had a maid in your house who actually was taken care of in many ways.
Was treated decently, no question, and lived a very good life and got some money out of it.
But she also very much knew her place and was subordinated.
And I think in some ways there was a kind of idea that they are kind of magical, that they're maybe inarticulate but wise, that they'll give you a little saying here and there.
It's a kind of Oprah god that lives in your kitchen.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It gives you little wisdom drops.
It's like My Grandpa Willie from Frasier.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
There are many versions of this.
Or your caddy on the golf course who, you know, you just lost your job.
But he says, you know, sometimes when you're lost, you shouldn't be found.
Or just some true, you know.
Exactly.
Exactly.
But you kind of need that.
I think it's...
Yeah, we've always had this.
And I think in some ways you could say that the magic Negro George Floyd is almost a kind of new version of this, a continuization, a continuation of this kind of paternalism and fetishism.
Yeah, it is.
That's what I just said.
So, yeah, I think it's a deep thing in American culture that doesn't quite work so well elsewhere, that you have the Magic Negro, and that's what he is.
He's the Magic Negro.
But he's more than magic, though, because other ones, like Morgan Freeman or Oprah or whatever, they've got, like, a bit of magic.
Whereas he's got, like, super deep...
Right.
And no other race...
Hispanics can't be magical in this way.
Asians can't be magical in this way.
Native Americans might a little bit in the sense that there's long been a kind of romanticized talk about Native American culture.
But it seems to be...
Mr. Miyagi.
Okay.
I'll grant you Mr. Miyagi, but it's a particular African thing.
And I don't...
There's probably some reasons for that, but I don't think other ethnicities can be.
Jews can be magical.
The local spells the Mogwai in Gremlins.
I think you do have a magic element.
And even Indiana Jones' voice.
Oh, short round?
Yeah.
So I think maybe there is that element with Asians to some extent, but as you said, it's more than Eclipse by Black.
Yeah, it's Eclipse by Black.
Anyway, good conversation.
We'll leave it there.
See?
So it wasn't that bad, was it?
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