By Paul Nachman
03/03/2021
The recent, rational pushback against manufactured outrage (i.e., reflexive nattering about "racism") at Smith College — covered at VDARE.com by Steve Sailer — led Power Line blog’s Steven Hayward to post (February 24) The Worst College President In America, honoring Smith’s Kathleen McCartney. McCartney thus supplants Evergreen State College’s George Bridges, whom Hayward had dubbed The Worst College President In America back on March 11, 2018.
Bridges' well-documented fecklessness was tied in with the nationally publicized travails of biologist and evolutionary theorist Bret Weinstein at Evergreen’s campus in Olympia, Washington, covered here by [surpise!] Steve Sailer. Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying resigned their tenured professorships at Evergreen in 2017 in exchange for a $500,000 settlement from the college.
Hayward’s 2018 piece contains an embedded video wherein — about six months after the denouement — Weinstein revisited his old haunts and reflected on his experiences during Evergreen’s 2017 days-of-(blithering)-rage. Interspersed with those reflections are some scenes of the blithering, but also some stretches in which Weinstein, who calls himself a "Progressive" (he’s categorized by Ann Coulter as a "far-left liberal") says things informed by actual thinking. The part of the video that starts about 16 minutes in and lasts for about two minutes is notable:
I’m very much in favor of true, permanent equity. That is what I want. I do not believe that this movement in its current configuration is going to produce that. What it’s going to produce is a temporary reversal of fortune that is then going to come back to haunt it. I don’t want to see that happen.
I do not act in the interests of white people. My point to students for years and years and years has been you have to be careful because evolution itself has set you up to prefer people who are more closely related to you than people who are more distantly related to you. And that means we all have latent racism waiting to emerge if we do not confront ourselves. That has been my message to our students, OK?
So that message is about ending racism permanently. It’s about recognizing that your genes want something. What I say to my students is “What your genes want can not be defended. Right? It is indefensible, and, therefore, it has to be confronted.”
That is the central message of this program. It is the central message of the program I taught in fall and winter. It was my central message last year as well. This is not something new, it did not emerge in response to this movement of people of color. My point is: We are a danger to ourselves if we do not recognize where these biases come from [unintelligible] confront them.
To the extent that people fear me as trying to advance the interests of one racial group over another — or trying to protect some privilege that I know I benefitted from — that is an error. That is not what I’m doing, it’s not what I’m talking about.
Now I don’t think it would be very difficult at all, if people will learn to listen to each other, to sit down and — 15 minutes, 20 minutes, maybe an hour — get to understand where each other are coming from. We might not reach agreement about what to do, but there would not be so much misunderstanding about what it is that I’m trying to accomplish, what you folks are trying to accomplish … and I believe it would be valuable.
[Transcript by PN, with boldfacing to mark spoken emphases by Weinstein and color for things that are startling to hear from a leftist]
So a smart Progressive acknowledged that evolution-plus-genes leads to "racism"! Or, put another way, "racism" is just a pejorative for completely understandable "tribalism," the innate preference for one’s own "tribe." Yay!!!
For an amusing illustration of tribalism among non-human animals, see — hat tip to "J" — the 19-second video here:
Can’t load tweet https://x.com/AnimalsWorId/status/1366275980591915008: Sorry, that page does not exist
Those words on evolution and genes were Weinstein’s high point. The rest of that impromptu riff suggests that he remains captive to utopian ideas. Consider, as counterpoint, some actual wisdom from VDARE.com’s own Brenda Walker:
We all prefer to be around others who speak our language, share our values and understand our jokes. Human community is based upon similarities, not differences. Wouldn’t it be better to develop public policy on the basis of human nature as it really is?
[Social Engineering in Green Bay and Beyond, June 24, 2007]
And Weinstein’s faith in the utility of 'talking things out' brings to mind a passage from Jared Taylor’s classic essay on The Myth of Diversity:
In Los Angeles, relations were so bad that in 1986 a Black-Korean Alliance was formed to reduce tensions. It staggered on uselessly until late 1992, when it was dissolved in mutual recrimination and accusations. The more blacks and Koreans talked to each other the angrier they got.
Interethnic frictions are a frequent theme at American Renaissance, particularly in its series of "First-Person Accounts." The summing-up at the end of a recent piece in the series provides another counterpoint to Weinstein’s impossible dream:
From working in intelligence, I learned a lot about psychological operations and propaganda, and the people pushing multiculturalism clearly know what they’re doing. It’s a purposeful effort to weaken our culture. The only thing that gives me hope is that what they seek is entirely unnatural. Racial frustrations and unrest will continue to escalate until nature reasserts herself and we all live in homogeneous communities once again.
[The Navy Made Me Into A Race Realist, by John Mason, February 27, 2021]
Or as Jared Taylor has repeatedly put it — even more succinctly — by quoting the Roman poet Horace: “You may drive out nature with a pitchfork, but she will always return.”
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.