It’s Time to Wage “War” on Protein Wisdom

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Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom hates identity politics. He would like to wage war against it; stamp it out, as it were. The problem, however, is that the weapons he would like to use in this war only point in one direction: against whites. He pretends otherwise, but he’s easy enough to see through.

Three years ago, he wrote a piece for The Federalist called “The Alt-Right is the Mirror Image of the New Left ^[2].” In it, he promotes his conservative credentials and professes to share some of the concerns of the then-burgeoning “Alt Right.” He tells us:

I’ve openly criticized the breakdown of our immigration system and the risible claims that importing low-skilled labor into a country where leftists control entitlement programs – largely because establishment Republicans are content not to act, or will act on behalf of those who most benefit from cheap labor – would be anything other than a vote-buying scheme.

This, of course, is a nice, non-racial way of putting things – Trumpian, even – and there is some truth in it. The Left is indeed election tampering when it imports as many non-whites as possible, knowing they will vote their way when guided. So far, so good.

But Goldstein mischaracterizes America, either insidiously or out of sheer ignorance, and this mischaracterization forms the fundament of his useless and self-destructive support for what’s come to be known as the “proposition nation”:

American exceptionalism, which neither Barack Obama nor Donald Trump understand or can articulate, was born of our founding. This exceptionalism is found not in its genetic makeup (after all, we fought other white Europeans for our independence) but in a collage of Enlightenment ideas our Founders pulled together to create what became our national portrait.

Goldstein, quite frankly, gives us the opposite of the truth. American exceptionalism was indeed founded on genetics – white genetics, that is. The 1790 Naturalization Act ^[3] limited immigration to “free whites of good character.” Furthermore, as we all know, the Founding Fathers – whom Goldstein loves to lionize – deliberately excluded blacks and American Indians from citizenship. How could he claim that the Founding Fathers renounced all forms of tribalism when they took such overt tribalist measures to protect their young nation?

Goldstein’s claim that whites fighting against whites during the Revolution proves that the Founding Fathers did not care about race is similarly ridiculous. How does a war between white people trying to preserve an empire against white people trying to form a republic somehow lead to the renunciation of white identity politics? How does that even follow? In Britain, the Irish were not and could never be English despite living alongside the English for millennia – hence English (and Irish) tribalism. On the other hand, both the Irish and the English could move to North America and become indistinguishable from each other as Americans – hence white tribalism.

Sneaky little syllogisms like this from Goldstein make me suspect that he’s not an innocent rube but that he knows exactly what he’s doing. He wishes to suppress the white tribalist character of the Founding Fathers because such tribalism negatively impacts his tribe – that is, the Jews. Christian, gun-toting, traditionalist, patriotic, blood-and-soil-type whites have always been the least receptive to outsiders, and this makes perennial outsiders like the diaspora Jews a bit nervous.

Instead of admitting this and accepting the validity of white tribalism (as some of our leaders would require us to do ^[4] for Jewish tribalism ^[5] in Israel), Goldstein prefers to lie about the basic character of America. From this, he promotes his colorblind, civic nationalist, proposition nation idea of America, which, as he tells us, was “designed for assimilation and naturalization.” In such a system, no one should be identitarian. To be fair to Goldstein, he implicates the Left quite well in this:

We need to re-embrace American exceptionalism and reject the kind of toxic identitarianism the Left uses to divide us, manage us, and place us into needy voter blocs they then collect to win elections, and through which an institutionalized progressive cancer spreads to eat away its bones.

Much of what Goldstein brings to the table is fairly boilerplate “reclaim the Constitution” stuff. However, he applies a clever twist by equating the New Left with the “Alt Right,” as indicated in his article’s title. Since both support the “cancer” of identitarianism, reject the supremacy of individualism, and promote a form of collectivism, they must be one and the same!

Identity politics necessarily brackets and minimizes individualism. As with much the Left does, it remains policed by a kind of mob shaming and an enforced intellectual correctness that is linguistically incoherent.

Unfortunately, this same set of core beliefs is now ascendant on a vocal part of the self-described “Right.”

Goldstein frets that “the Alt Right” is no better than “the Left” because it consists mostly of self-identifying whites who recognize that their group interests are being threatened by the anti-white Left. He then tries to pick apart Vox Day’s “16 Points of the Nationalist Right ^[6]” (then called the Alt Right) to prove how similar both ends of this spectrum are. For Goldstein, “the Right” is “conservatism or classical liberalism . . . which incorporates federalism, republicanism, legal equity, and a separation of powers.” And anything that isn’t this should count as the Left. So, because both Vox Day and most of the Left oppose free trade, they amount to the same thing.

This is silly. Although Vox does a good job of defending himself ^[7], he is not the end-all of Dissident Right economics. There is an entire range of opinion on the topic with people retaining their preferences for everything from socialism to libertarianism. The common denominator here is the recognition of the existential demographic threat now staring down the white race in the West. Whites are slowly losing control of their homelands to hostile invaders, they are not reproducing at replacement levels, and they are subject to a host of cultural elements which are obviously dysgenic. This “Alt Right” Goldstein speaks of wishes to fix these more urgent problems before tackling less pressing issues such as free trade, taxation, inflation, and unemployment. It’s called prioritizing. Just because someone prioritizes demographic health over free trade doesn’t make him a Communist.

The truth is that Goldstein, like many conservatives, gets bogged down in economics and fails to realize that, in an increasingly multiracial West, economics is becoming less and less important. As I pointed out last year, Democrats certainly don’t care about the economy ^[8]. If they did, Barack Obama would have been a one-term president after reaching a nearly ten percent unemployment rate ^[9] in 2010 and overseeing four negative GDP rates ^[10] (one as low as minus eight percent!), and three rates that were less than one percent. If they did, the healthy Trump economy would have allowed the Republicans to sail through the 2018 elections. But it didn’t.

So if the enemies of whites – who say the most horrible things ^[11] about us, advocate violence ^[12] against us, glorify our murder ^[13], claim they wish to replace us ^[14], and pay no political price ^[15] for it – don’t care about the economy, why should white people care about the economy? A strong economy only allows our enemies to raise more money to use against us.

Of course, Goldstein wraps his argument in the cloak of universalism in order to give it respectability. He is against all racial, sexual, and religious identitarianism, you see. If everyone just acted like tabula rasa individuals and eschewed these nettlesome group entanglements, then the American Dream would be that much sweeter for everyone:

It [the “Alt Right”] is an identity movement on par with Black Lives Matter, La Raza, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and other tribal products of the kernel assumptions that inform cultural Marxism. That it pretends to throw off some of those trappings – it enforces an anti-PC ethos in a way that creates yet another tenor of the same PC, this time attached to white nationalism instead of multiculturalism – is but camouflage.

The obvious problem here – and one that Jeff Goldstein dishonestly doesn’t mention – is that blacks, Hispanics, and Muslims do not read Jeff Goldstein. And if they did, his calls for colorblindness would have no impact on them. (How’s that working out so far, Jeff? Has Jorge Ramos or Stacey Abrams called you back to thank you for lending them your copy of Free to Choose?) No, Goldstein’s main goal is to prevent white people from adopting white identity politics – which is, as I have argued before, the only thing that can save them from the Left ^[16].

This is what Goldstein cares about the most: that whites, as members of the species Homo oeconomicus, act purely as individuals so that they, as a group, become completely defenseless against the rising tide of color coming from the Left. This will eventually devour them ^[17] if something is not done soon. He seems to think that non-whites can simply change their natures and embrace grand concepts such as federalism and republicanism if they could only read enough Jeff Goldstein articles. He seems to think that biology and genetics play no part in the creation of cultures and nations, and blames the “Alt Right” for relying on “the legitimate science of population genetics to draw pseudo-scientific racialist conclusions that glut the burgeoning field of white nationalist sociology.”

This is absurd. It is not pseudo-scientific to infer, based on all available data, that some races are inherently smarter and better behaved than others. We don’t yet have a comprehensive understanding of the human genome, so how would such a conclusion be pseudo-scientific? It’s also not tribalist to see that the intent of non-whites is to take over the West through demographic change, enforced cultural Marxism, and Islamic totalitarianism.

Things will get violent and ugly as a result; perhaps too violent and ugly for Goldstein’s taste. At which point, he’ll likely be grateful to have a race-realist ^[18], tribalistic ^[19] Israel to flee to where he can write screeds blaming the fall of the West on – you guessed it – anti-Semitism. I wonder if he’ll have the honesty to admit that he helped fan the flames of this conflagration himself when he equated the good guys with the bad guys, all in the name of a proposition which was never proposed to begin with.

I bring up this three year-old article because, in the wake of the recent El Paso shooting, Goldstein has doubled down on his antipathy towards whites and the Dissident Right. In a recent Protein Wisdom post entitled “It’s Time to Declare War on Identity Politics ^[20],” he seems to have warmed to Donald Trump, but expresses the desire now to “kill white supremacy.” Of course, it’s beyond sloppy and irresponsible to lump all Dissident Right thought into one crude and inaccurately-named category. But, to his credit, Goldstein does call for the marginalization of “identity and grievance politics” on the Left as a means to this end. As in the previous article, he spends much time condemning the Left for its racism, for its “totalitarian political impulse,” and for the way he believes its identity politics dehumanizes and delegitimizes the individual.

But it seems that the real problem here is not so much the excesses of the Left but the inevitable (and, he admits, understandable) blowback from the Right. While he wants to marginalize Left-wing identity politics, he wants to “kill” Right-wing identity politics. His choice of language is telling (emphasis mine):

It follows that stamping out white supremacy must happen either by force, or by thoroughly and completely rejecting the identity politics and intersectionality the left has mapped over the country and its discourse. We are a country of individuals. We need to act like it.

“By force?” This is nothing less than a call for violence against the Dissident Right and anyone who identifies as white. This is unadulterated anti-white racism. The “war” mentioned in the title of this piece is purely figurative, but in the title of Goldstein’s piece, I’m not so sure it is. Goldstein is not honest enough to differentiate between psychos who are putatively Right-wing, like the El Paso shooter, and responsible and consistent thinkers like Greg Johnson, Kevin MacDonald, and Jared Taylor, who oppose violence and advocate for white people in different ways. We all look alike to him, apparently – and yet he’s the one who claims he opposes racism.

Jeff Goldstein and writers like him have given us years of conservative punditry with nothing to show for it. As Vox Day correctly points out, conservatives couldn’t even conserve the ladies’ room. The only thing conservatives like Goldstein have accomplished in all this time is convincing white people not to use the most powerful tools at their disposal to prevent their civilization from being dragged off into the abyss.

Perhaps that was their goal all along – in which case, well done, boys. Well done.

Spencer J. Quinn is a frequent contributor to Counter-Currents and the author of the novel White Like You ^[21].