Welcome back to Mytheos Science Theater 3000! The last time we saw our dashing bourgeois hero, he was wooing the charming, if imaginary, young lass “Sylvia”, who learns languages in two weeks, but is a bit of a brainwashed Nazi. Bummer! Will he get the girl? Can he finally deliver on his promise to make an intellectual argument for Donald Trump’s white nationalist support? Can I maintain a few shreds of precious sanity all the way to the end of this masterpiece? Can you? Let’s see what happens!

I. The Art of Seduction

Over the coming weeks, I continued to send out feelers and message and speak with her online,

Well that sounds stalker-y, for a guy who was only in it out of “morbid intellectual curiosity”.

keeping my ethnic heritage a secret at first so I could probe her ideology without sending up alarm bells. After a while, she got used to me,

She…got used to you? Most people don’t describe a relationship in terms reserved for bringing a new puppy home, but what do I know.

and we bonded over our mutual love of H.P. Lovecraft and dark internet humor.

Dark internet humor? Why, whatever could that be? <makes note>

As a result, she began to open up about her more risqué beliefs.

Dude. Risque is a word you use to describe getting weird in a Macy’s dressing room or dressing up like the cowboy and Indian from the Village People. Being a Nazi isn’t risque. Being a Nazi is something you can describe in the same breath as communism in regards to history’s most repellent and wantonly lethal ideologies.

So, this time with more gentle prodding, I started to make her doubt what she’d been taught.

Of course, at some point I had to reveal that I am a Jew.

Wait, what? How…wha.. you just skipped into the next paragraph? Don’t you think explaining the deprogramming of a Nazi is a vitally important part of this story? How did you make her doubt this? Through gentle prodding? Is there a reason you can’t list even the most basic rationale as an example? This is a fascinating omission. And why did you have to “of course” reveal you’re Jewish? Why is this written as if the reader should just know?

Needless to say, this shocked her, not least of all because apparently her people

“Her people”? Present tense? <makes note>

train their children to recognize Jewish heritage in someone’s features, yet I had registered as pure Aryan.

Aryan. An utterly fictional and invented “race”, yet here you are using it in a context one normally sees used to describe rare elements. No quotations, no qualifiers, just a casual aside that naturally the reader understands what pure Aryan means, doesn’t everyone speak this way? It’s interesting how comfortably you adopt language and terminology.

The realization that “they can look like us,” to use her words, set off something of a minor existential crisis for her, but I’m pleased to report

“I’m Hurricane Schwartz, coming to you live from the Channel 10 WeatherCenter — I’m pleased to report only a 10% chance of showers, highs in the mid-50’s, and overnight, minor existential crisis due to light Nazi deprogramming.”

that she got over it, and that my ethnic revelation actually made her open up more to me rather than less.

<bow chicka wow wow>

II. Romeo, Juliet, and the World’s Not Fair

When Two Worlds Collide

That’s because what shocked her even more than my Jewishness was that I’d known she was a white nationalist and still willingly engaged with her like a human being and an equal.

Sure, if online stalking, dark internet humor, and HP Lovecraft meet the criteria of engaging like a human being.

From someone who belonged to a group that she’d assumed held nothing but contempt and malice for people like her, this was the last thing she expected. The feeling was mutual on my end.

Truly, the love story of our time.

After that revelation, gently poking holes in her worldview was out of the question, as I’d just metaphorically sent a cannonball straight through its foundation.

Did you play some Dave Matthews Band in the background when you were firing that cannon?

What happened instead was that, with the scales lifted from both our eyes about the other’s decency and humanity, we started dissecting the other’s culture as it actually existed rather than how we’d been taught to believe it did.

“I learned white nationalists are mostly bad — but they’ve got some pretty good points!”

To make a very long story short, she came away understanding that my people weren’t intentionally hurting her people, and I came away with an appreciation for how much, and how unfairly, her people really were hurting.

“They’re just misunderstood!”

I say “unfairly” for multiple reasons: firstly, because people as brilliant as Sylvia is do not deserve to be written off as incurable white trash.

Well, Sylvia doesn’t really exist, so technically, I can’t write her off. I’m happy to write off real white nationalists as incurable white trash, though. A movement containing a goodly hunk of people who will gradually get around to “kill off the Jews” is not one of those “need to understand it before you judge it” type ideologies.

Giving everybody the opportunity to succeed means everybody, even people who were raised in ways we find troubling.

You seem to suggest here there’s some law or state mechanism at work suppressing white nationalists, and that they’re being denied some foothold into decent society by a government apparatus. This is in no way the case. White nationalism is held in society’s eyes to be a repugnant view because it is a repugnant view. White nationalists are free to hold and express these views, because it’s America, and the choice to hold and express those views are a God-given right. What you have no God-given right to is understanding, compassion, empathy, platforms, respect, or audiences.

Stop demanding these as if you’re entitled. Stop decrying “shame culture” when you engage in behavior that rightfully earns you shame.

White nationalists’ insistence that we hear and honor their views is no less perverse than the insistence of the transgender activists demanding access to locker room showers with young children. They’re not special snowflakes. They’re warped individuals with inferiority complexes and malicious intent towards others they deem to be inferior specimens.

Certain ideologies aren’t content to be left alone. Certain ideologies demand action be taken on their behalf that directly harms or eradicates altogether the liberties of other members of society. The Constitution protects the speech behind the ideologies, but what actually protects society from the ideology gaining traction is an unwritten agreement to collectively scorn and shun these individuals because the ideology is morally wrong. Society performs a vital function which supports the Constitution in its role of prohibiting the very speech-suppressing laws and state actions you insinuate are holding people back from success.

In short, you’re not happy your views aren’t mainstream, and you‘re lashing out at society for oppressing them. As a card-carrying member of society, I feel we’ve done a pretty solid job of keeping the lid firmly tamped down on your repulsive movement, and I extend you the finger.

III. Snowflakes

One doesn’t have to be willing to offer blanket pardons to the Aryan Brotherhood to see that someone who was merely raised with bad ideas is not necessarily a lost cause, no matter how repellent those ideas are.

Exactly how repellent do you find those bad ideas? And exactly what are those bad ideas? You still haven’t told us.

In fact, lifting people like Sylvia out of circumstances where they think white nationalism is the only solution seems like Americanism at its finest, not a betrayal of the idea.

White nationalists as victims. This is an incredibly progressive slip-up; an argument for the much-lampooned compassionate conservatism, but vis-a-vis white nationalism.

The other reason I say the pain experienced by Sylvia’s community is unfair

“Unfair”. Who else do we know who’s spent the past decade decrying the unfairness of a community’s plight?

is because when you strip away the swastikas, imitation Hugo Boss uniforms, and Klan hoods,

Sounds pretty specific, for a guy who couldn’t tell us any details whatsoever about white nationalists up until this very sentence. Sounds like you’ve seen a few things firsthand?

there are things that even rabid, clannish white nationalist society does better than our own.

Goosestepping? Okay, I’ll give you goosestepping.

Ironically, given their loathing of other cultures, the biggest one is bilingual education.

As we’ll see in a moment, ironic is an understatement.

One of the odder things I learned was that Sylvia and every other child in her community had to learn to speak German and English

Because of course it’s German. You were expecting Mandarin?

and achieved total fluency in both by their teens.

As opposed to Sylvia, who, remember, learned it in two weeks.

I’m from California, and our own education system wishes it were that good.

Whoa, a bit hasty to knock the California education system, aren’t we? It says on your LinkedIn page that you speak another language, so you learned it somehow. Ironically enough, it’s German.

We don’t have to excuse, or even tolerate, the massive amounts of bad behavior such people engage in to learn from the few decent things they do.

Or you could just learn decent things from decent people as a surprisingly effective shortcut around that “massive amounts of bad behavior” obstacle. By the way, what are those bad behaviors? You still haven’t mentioned any.

After all, just because Mussolini made the trains run on time doesn’t mean punctuality in public transit is itself bad, no matter how hard the DC Metro system pretends.

This is, again, supposed to be an intellectual argument. “Say what you will about Josef Stalin, but he never beat his wife.”

Ultimately, the biggest reason the pain that drove Sylvia’s family and so many like them into the arms of white nationalism is unfair is a pain that I, as a Jew, can empathize with.

The Holocaust?

After all, once many Jews turned to communism as a way of trying to get political rights they didn’t think they could get any other way, and as a way of lashing out at a society that unfairly disdained them and their culture.

<mind reels so dizzily I fail altogether to type an actual rebuttal>

Even though this ideological shift made many people hate Jews more, at least the communists were trying to do something.

Am I…am I reading a literal “at least they were trying” defense of communism, in an intellectual argument in defense of Donald Trump, in defense of his allure to white nationalists? That…that can’t be right.

<slaps side of computer monitor a few times>

<same sentence is still on screen>

No, that’s right.

Only that kind of desperation can make a radical ideology like white nationalism attractive.

The intolerant othering of white nationalists actually creates white nationalists. It’s not them. It’s society.

I’d be impressed with the sheer audacity of this argument if it wasn’t inadvertently plagiarized from the pages of Salon. You just made, word for word, the same exact argument progressives have been using in defense of radical Islam for well over a decade.

IV. Did I Say That Out Loud?

Nationalism Is Backlash to Hatred of Western Culture

This brings me to the first and, arguably, the most important lesson that Sylvia taught me about what drives people into the arms of white nationalism: that urge comes not from economic dispossession, nor spiritual dispossession, but cultural dispossession.

Should I just do a find & replace for “white nationalism” to “radical Islam” to prove my point?

No, I don’t mean the sort of “where has my country gone” ignorance that I and my fellow coastal cosmopolitans like to mock over cocktails.

Oh, right, you’re bourgeois, I forgot for a few minutes there.

I mean the sorts of people who are attracted to white nationalism are people whose own communities have been hollowed out by economic and cultural forces beyond their control, and who are now adrift in a society they perceive to be universally hostile to their heritage for no good reason.

Are you describing the inner cities again? Because actually I think you might be onto something here and this ideology you’re describing may in fact hold some real appeal for the impoverished and largely black communities— <checks white nationalist handbook> — ah. I see. Apparently “not being black” is a big prerequisite of enlisting in “white nationalism”.

It suddenly occurs to me that a joint venture between BLM and Stormfront could actually be highly successful, if you guys could work out a way around the melanin problem.

That heritage, as white nationalists in America see it, is the heritage of Western civilization. If you wonder what that means (which is reasonable), let me spell it out: It means historically Western European cultural norms.

Fascinating. “Western European” cultural norms, not the America-inclusive “Western” norms.

Specifically, norms like respect for agents of the law,

I notice you specified “agents of the law”, not “the law”, which reveals a certain affinity for a militant police-style state.

aspirational pride in work, willingness to accept the consequences of one’s actions,

I thought we were blaming “being left behind” and “being misunderstood & victimized by society” for our actions.

disdain for laziness and welfarism, and reproductive responsibility (i.e., not having children you can’t afford to keep).

Let’s take a list at that list of characteristics in its entirety. You’ve accidentally just described <pulls name out of “modern nations” hat> Japan. Is Japan in Western Europe? Is that what you meant to do? Are you just describing stuff you think is desirable in a society at this point? Or is this a sloppily camouflaged facsimile of someone else’s list?

They respect these norms not merely because these are what their own communities follow, but also because they think these norms make constitutional government, liberty, and classical republicanism possible.

I am 100% convinced at this late point that you have not the slightest idea what any of those terms truly mean, but better pepper them in somewhere because remember, we’re making an intellectual argument here.

If you have to pick between the two, defend the norms every day, since temporary cessations of liberty will naturally recover if they’re still in place,

This is such a bizarre idea that I’m actually quite certain it’s not your own, but borrowed from some unstated ideology (I have a pretty good guess which one at this point) that’s trickled into yours. I believe you truly don’t understand what you’ve just said, but it sounds neat and you’re taking it for granted that the logic behind it must be self-evident. It’s not self-evident. It’s an idea that could not possibly be more incorrect if you set out to make it so.

whereas the institutions without the norms will become meaningless: the Constitution will become a pointless scrap of paper to which people pay only lip service, and constitutional government will become bureaucracy hiding behind the fig leaf of a separation of powers.

It’s as if you reversed the arrows in the flow chart explaining that government institutions derive power from the Constitution, which derives power from the consent of the governed.

Where this otherwise perfectly respectable, conservative pride in Western culture atrophies into white nationalism when the person holding it comes to believe that respect for liberal Western civilization is inextricably tied to one’s race.

By writing “otherwise perfectly respectable”, you imply there is a glaring flaw in the system, and this glaring flaw is where the toilet fungus of white nationalism organically blooms.

One particularly irreverent white nationalist YouTube songster

Hold on.

sums this attitude up in a video mocking libertarians: “It’s not that freedom is bad/But only whites think it’s rad.”

No hold on. Hold on. Wait. Let’s go back. I want to go back to something.

What are you doing on white nationalist YouTube?

Moreover, and this cannot be stated enough: these people genuinely believe that to be proud of the history of Western European accomplishment, and one’s own descent from the people responsible, is taboo in modern America.

You didn’t answer my question. What are you doing on white nationalist YouTube? Did you just…stumble into it one day? You said “one particularly irreverent songster”. This implies you’ve viewed enough of these songsters to have standards of comparison for reverence. How much of this garbage have you consumed?

If you look at what cultural studies departments, much of modern media, left-wing college students, and the crazy wing of the Democratic Party says, this is probably at least partially accurate. Unfortunately, however, it’s not just leftists who are responsible for the rise of white nationalism in communities like Sylvia’s.

Sylvia doesn’t exist and anyway, YouTube. So you stumble onto white nationalist YouTube and figure “Hey what the hell, as long as I’m here let’s see what these guys are all about?” How does this work? I’d really like to know how you know so much about this ideology of which you can only seem to reveal tiny sanitized bits and pieces. Is this the “dark internet humor” you alluded to before?

We conservatives bear some blame too, though in this case, largely because of misunderstandings of how our own behavior is perceived.

“We conservatives” haven’t spent five seconds on white nationalist YouTube, let alone long enough to check out music videos, dig the tunes, listen to the lyrics, bookmark the link for future use, recall the lyrics apply to a white nationalist article we’re writing, embed the link, and argue in favor of the lyrics.

Do you realize how bizarre this is? Do you understand that people who are not themselves, knowingly or unknowingly, white nationalists, do not hang out in the white nationalist sewers of the internet? People who are not interested in this stuff are not willingly navigating to this stuff, hoping to find a nugget of wisdom here or there, buried in the photos of gassed Jews and balloon-lipped cartoons of the Negro Menace. But yet, here you are, casually linking to it as if its an entirely normal phenomenon.

You just accidentally exposed your browser history to the entire world… in an intellectual argument.