08/18/2016
Episode 49 of my podcast is now posted here (with copious links) and on YouTube. My guest is Jared Taylor, editor of American Renaissance and President of the New Century Foundation, but his work hardly needs introducing here.https://soundcloud.com/user-762000146/grace-steel-ep-49
I began by asking whether he was more respectable now than in 1990 when he founded AR. Better known, he replied, but more “radioactive” than ever. There are certainly more MSM interviews and citations, but Taylor understands that he is being used a cudgel with which to beat Donald Trump and find him guilty (by association) of “white nationalism.”
Black nationalism remains as respectable as ever, as proved by Black Lives Matter, whose rise has paralleled Trump’s. Those who wish to find the truth about racial violence in America can find it in AR’s “Color of Crime,” and it is gratifying to hear from Taylor that the number of people accessing this data continues to increase. There are none so blind as those who will not see, however, and I have sworn off debating crime on “Black Twitter.” One might as well debate with communists. BLM (and its white supporters) have abjured truth, preferring instead to wield “racism” as both oath and talisman.
2016 is often compared to 1968 and with good reason. Doubtless many on the Left expect this year’s riots to result in the same response as a half-century ago: more exhortation, more programs and, above all, more money. This cannot happen because the money spent on black uplift in times past was generated by what I have dubbed the “capitalist surplus.” America was once so rich that trillions could be wasted on various fatuities without an appreciable decline in the general standard of living. As we discovered to our horror in 2008, however, the capitalist surplus has vanished and capitalism with it. Money is no longer saved and then loaned at higher interest to business. Savers are instead punished, while the government conjures up phantom money which is then “helicoptered” to the banks in the vain hope that some will trickle down to the masses.
American blacks are willing enough to concede their shortcomings but only when such conversations are believed to be entre nous. Such is the power of the in-group/out-group dynamic that the return of segregation, de facto if not de jure, is increasingly likely. Taylor and I spoke before the Milwaukee riots, but he would surely agree that when the cost of enforcing the law in the inner city is wholesale destruction, the authorities will soon enough condemn its benighted residents to their own devices.
Even if the money could be found for Great Society II, the political will to spend it is lacking, and the political capital of the inner city is not what it was. A half-century of dysgenic breeding engendered by the welfare state has lowered black American IQs to a level approaching that of Jamaica or Haiti. A 2002 study by La Griffe du Lion estimated that black IQs in the city of Baltimore have fallen to 76, while white IQs there have fallen to 86, the former black national average.
Taylor has been a tireless opponent of Decadent America, and he regards the rise of the AltRight (at least in its “Twitter trolls” manifestation) as further evidence of a decline in standards. When I argued that AltRight vulgarity had achieved more in barely more than a year than the genteel Right, he replied that he saw little evidence of any achievement. He is especially irritated by those who have adopted the Left insult “shitlord” as a badge of honor. When I confessed to have done so myself, he sighed, and it seemed I was testing his patience. When I asked whether he was much familiar with popular culture, he replied in the negative. In that case, I argued, it is of little use to condemn men for speaking in the parlance of their time.
In any event, Vox Day is surely right that dialectic is of little use when disputing with the intellectually dishonesty. Rhetoric is the proper tool here, and, as we have seen, our enemies cannot abide mockery. The success of the AltRight has been in driving them to distraction and baiting them into fury and gross foolishness.
My final question was whether Taylor knew he had become the victim of mockery himself for his habit of pronouncing “white” with an extra vocable. He explained why he does this and then demonstrated his fundamental good humour with the explanation, “If I can provide inadvertent amusement to large numbers of people, I think that’s just fine.”
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