RadixJournal - Richard Spencer - AOC's Curious Nationalism
Aired: 2026-02-19
Duration: 08:21


=== Many Germanies Exist (07:45) ===

[00:00:00]  There's a very big difference between whiteness and national, like your actual culture, right?
[00:00:10]  Whiteness is an imaginary thing.
[00:00:13]  Being German is real.
[00:00:14]  Being Italian is real.
[00:00:16]  You know, being English.
[00:00:18]  You're going to name any other Axis powers there, AOC?
[00:00:22]  These are rich cultural heritages that are based on values and they are so much a part of what make our cultures and our societies what they are.
[00:00:36]  Okay.
[00:00:37]  This is just very interesting.
[00:00:40]  So she said these cultures are based on values.
[00:00:43]  I mean, how do I start on this?
[00:00:46]  I think the notion of a white race is, in terms of a biological concept, is more coherent than the notion of a German.
[00:00:59]  Now, she said that whiteness is imaginary, but then being a German is real.
[00:01:05]  Okay.
[00:01:06]  Well, all of these are concepts.
[00:01:08]  So they sort of all are imaginary on some level.
[00:01:12]  They all exist in our head.
[00:01:14]  We come up with words to describe reality and reality never quite fits into those words.
[00:01:21]  It never does.
[00:01:23]  I'm certainly more than willing to say that.
[00:01:25]  What is the border of whiteness?
[00:01:26]  Well, what's the border of German-ness?
[00:01:29]  We're using a word and putting it on reality and seeing if it works.
[00:01:34]  And if it's more descriptive and predictive, then we continue to use it.
[00:01:38]  That's all it is.
[00:01:40]  But the notion of a European is more coherent than a German.
[00:01:45]  And I mean, this gets back to a lot of things that I would talk about in terms of identitarianism many years ago, where she's reifying the nation state here.
[00:01:56]  And I don't even think she, I don't think she's thought through this enough to quite know what she's doing, but she's reifying the nation state.
[00:02:04]  Now, what is Germany?
[00:02:06]  Germany became an entity many decades after the United States became an entity.
[00:02:13]  Many decades after the United States nation was defined in a way through the Naturalization Act and the notion of free white people.
[00:02:22]  If you're free, white, and of age, come on down.
[00:02:26]  You're welcome here.
[00:02:27]  Got to be a good character.
[00:02:28]  That's all we demand.
[00:02:30]  And even there, we're kind of lax.
[00:02:32]  America was sort of, it wasn't an immigration policy because it was open in so many ways, but it was a kind of definition of the nation.
[00:02:43]  Now, English has never been our official language, but it certainly has defined what it means to be an American.
[00:02:50]  And English culture does as well.
[00:02:54]  Although I think there's even, isn't there like just as many people of Germanic descent as English descent in the country?
[00:03:02]  There certainly is in many places, certainly the Midwest.
[00:03:05]  Someone said in the chat, slightly more.
[00:03:06]  Yeah.
[00:03:07]  We're a German country in a way.
[00:03:10]  There are more people who identify as German, but actually genetic testing shows that most people in America are just English.
[00:03:18]  Right.
[00:03:18]  That's a founder effect.
[00:03:21]  Yeah.
[00:03:21]  Yeah.
[00:03:22]  Because they were sort of here first.
[00:03:25]  And they, so you create a new gene pool and that the founders have a great deal of effect of what it's going to be like even hundreds of years later, maybe even a thousand years later.
[00:03:37]  But you see my point, which is that there's always going to be a fuzzy border on any concept.
[00:03:44]  There's a fuzzy border on the concept of what is a mammal.
[00:03:47]  There's always going to be a duckbill platypus.
[00:03:50]  It's this exception, but it's an exception that proves the rule.
[00:03:54]  And to get back to what I was talking about before, you know, like the nation state, there was a lot of blood and tears that went into the formation of France that went into the formation of Germany.
[00:04:09]  Germany became, in a way, Prussia-ized in order to achieve that national identity.
[00:04:17]  As late as the 1950s and 60s, this is a kind of a legend, but it gets to a point when Conrad Adenauer would take the train from the Rhineland, which is his home.
[00:04:28]  He's a, of course, German chancellor, post-war German chancellor, extremely consequential post-war German chancellor, old, generation older than Hitler.
[00:04:38]  He kind of took over after the young guys fucked everything up.
[00:04:42]  When he would take the train to Berlin, he would close his windows so he wouldn't look out onto Asia in his mind.
[00:04:53]  This horrible Prussian, Eurasian, brutal, Protestant industrial culture.
[00:05:00]  He preferred the more organic green Catholicism of the Rhineland.
[00:05:06]  Might have Konrad Adenauer had a little more in common with the French, in fact.
[00:05:13]  Isn't that Rhenish culture of Germany kind of French in so many ways and architecture and mentality and sentimentality?
[00:05:23]  You could say all of those things.
[00:05:25]  What does it mean to be Tyrolean?
[00:05:27]  There is a culture that has its own accents and dialects in many ways that stretches across Germany and Switzerland and Austria.
[00:05:37]  It's kind of Tyrolean.
[00:05:39]  It's a particular thing.
[00:05:41]  So in a way, the nation state that she is reifying, she's just taking for granted, basically, if Germany exists.
[00:05:49]  Because I don't know, she went to a beer garden or an Oktoberfest festival once or something.
[00:05:53]  It's not even German culture.
[00:05:55]  It's Bavarian culture, by the way, which is Catholic as well.
[00:05:59]  It's different than what we would associate with Germany.
[00:06:03]  But anyway, the nation state is first off created through blood and tears.
[00:06:08]  You are forcing different regions, smaller locales, regions that are, that cross over borders into one sovereign entity called Germany or France or Great Britain or Russia, etc.
[00:06:24]  So the nation state is on some level both too big and too small.
[00:06:31]  It doesn't get at bigger regional cultures.
[00:06:34]  It doesn't get at this civilizational idea that we call the West.
[00:06:39]  But it's also sort of too big in the sense that it doesn't really capture, it sometimes suffocates and squashes regional dialects and so on.
[00:06:50]  Whether you're a Yankee in Massachusetts or a Westerner who loves the rodeo or a Southerner, being an American has on some level suffocated those regional identities.
[00:07:05]  They're not, we shouldn't reify these things.
[00:07:07]  We should recognize the difference.
[00:07:10]  There are many different Germanies.
[00:07:12]  So she doesn't want to recognize whiteness because coming from her standpoint, whiteness can never be a oppressed group, a visible minority, to use a Canadian terminology, according to the Civil Rights Act.
[00:07:31]  You can't really be discriminated against if you're white.
[00:07:36]  You can't join the great gravy train of diversity and inclusion and the welfare state, et cetera, if you're white.

=== Why Being German Isn't Black and White (00:36) ===

[00:07:45]  That's what she's saying.
[00:07:46]  So that kind of thing is imaginary, but being German is real.
[00:07:53]  Because, in her mind, her mind being German means that you sit on a bench and drink vice beer and pinch a girl wearing a derndel in the ass every September.
[00:08:06]  So, anyway, I don't think she's thought through any of these things.
[00:08:10]  I think she has a very kind of like weirdly nationalistic conception of race that's just odd.