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Niccolo Soldo's avatar

Thanks for this. Rufo's campaign in Florida brought him out of quasi-recluse state.

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Marshall Burnham's avatar

Black ethnonarcissism is a gift that keeps giving.

While at this point I find your ‘Remain Blacks’ series to be the Canonical authorship on Black ‘Intellectuals’, I still find myself taken aback by the mental jiujitsu we can see from otherwise intriguing characters.

As is the way with many Black creative types, that Coates passage was indeed an impressive set of rhetorical flourishes, but the minute you peek under the hood, it’s nothing but mental yoga bending.

I would be curious if you’d ever expand your spellbinding work to include other ‘future’ My Group Is Special movements, such as the growing Asian-American identity (although they’re much less self-involved at a group level, in fact they intermarry and champion whites with no issue) and of course Muslims In Europe, who use the exact same playbook as Blacks in America to utilize Western Altruism to gain ethnonarcissistic power.

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Second City Bureaucrat's avatar

I think what's interesting is that, as with religion, when you take a detached look at any group self-definition, you run into these kinds of distorted reasoning patterns.

Asian is a meaningless census category that will not accommodate a meaningful group identity. It may even be less meaningful than Hispanic, which exists mostly as an electoral construct. We've already seen attempts to separate off East Asians with cultural efforts like Crazy Rich Asians, but I'm not sure Koreans or Japanese, ruthlessly exclusionary and supremacist as they are, will allow themselves to be lumped in with each other, the Chinese, Southeast Asians, or Northern and Central-Eurasian Asians, not to speak of peoples from Oceania.

The issue of religion is another obstacle. America decided that the non-rational and empirically unverifiable propositions of religion, as well as the uncivil norms you find in religions, should be pushed into the private sphere, with only abstract and ecumenical references to God and inoffensive rituals remaining public. Presumably this will have to be modified if non-Abrahamic Asian religions reach a critical influential mass here.

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Marshall Burnham's avatar

Spot on that at a group level, these distorted reasoning patterns occur, even amongst whites (even a cursory glance at the belief patterns of Serbian 'specialness' shows this, lest we forget WW1 was started by a Serbian nationalist of sorts).

Regarding Asians and Muslims, I should clarify my personal 'prior': asymmetrical ethnonarcissism will continue in the US as more groups / new groups attain more power and notoriety. In the case of America, in the 2020s-2030s, I expect three new major groups to exemplify this: Han Chinese, Indian Brahmin, First-Gen Muslims

For the Asian example, agreed Japanese are more exclusionary and won't have a critical mass enough in the US to move culture, however Koreans have major cultural hubs in cities like Los Angeles and Philadelphia, and the actual country of SK is highly Americanized in its modern values for obvious historical reasons. Lest we forget that the biggest 'band' in the world is an 'Americanized' South Korean band (BTS) and SK is responsible for the most viral TV show arguably since Game of Thrones ('Squid Game') as well as the first foreign Oscar Best Picture ('Parasite').

This doesn't speak to your average Korean on the ground in the US but it does speak to the increasing global Korean-American cultural bonding, and with that comes (in a generation or two) new notoriety for the groups' desires.

But the broader point is around East Asians in general, specifically Han Chinese. Han Chinese are by far the most 'successful' Asian group in the world, essentially being the 'whites' of Southeast East Asia, and they are the most likely subgroup to lead a cultural push for Asian influence in the US. Check out the work of Amy Chua for more on all of that if you haven't already.

From a statistical level, we have seen in the last 10-15 years a waning of Jewish critical masses in education and science in tandem with the massive increase in East Asian placement. East Asian educational attainment is such a growing cultural phenomenon that they have been the main 'de jure' reason that Affirmative Action is under a microscope (Harvard, etc.) and East Asian success is one of the main reasons DEI is removing major advanced testing (SAT, etc.). And none of this is simply because Asians are succeeding, it's addtionally because they're actively campaigning to get this all noticed.

Lastly, the most viral video on "race" on YouTube in 2023 was done by an Asian law student complaining about Black-On-Asian (and/White) violence across the board, with 3 million views, and there is a cottage Twitter industry just covering Blacks Attacking Asians. Thus, I see in the future: Asian influence in education, racial tensions, cultural impact, etc. If one were to ask "who are the new Jews?" it's hard not to say either East Asians or...

Brahmin Indians. I don't want this message to be a full article, but I'm sure you see on Twitter all of the time the coverage on just how many Brahmin Indians are the top CEOs and tastemakers in tech. Looking globally, I mean literally the Prime Minister of the UK is a Brahmin Indian and there is a current GOP candidate who is Brahmin Indian, as well as the new CEO of YouTube (replacing a Jewish woman). And Brahmin Indians are much more clannish than East Asians, so they will start to wield considerable influence in the future.

Lastly, Muslims. Putting aside the veracity of religion, the truth is modern Islam has a much more cohesive set of doctrines and 'requirements' of loyalty to the faith than any modern form of Christianity. Thus, in the West, Muslims operate ideologically much more like 'an ethnic group' in their political machinations and express more solidarity with each other as they group in numbers (like Blacks in the US). The most obvious example is Ilhan Omar out of Minnesota (who is easily elected because she works in a district full of Muslim immigrants... in Minnesota) and Maine the first Muslim mayor was elected in a 90% white town because there are a bunch of Somali refugees there who voted as a bloc.

Thus, I think we should be looking at these three groups as the 'new' Jews / Blacks for further study. Doesn't mean they will "go full Ta-Nahisi" with their ideas, but as you said many of these groups will indeed start to use similar reasoning (at a group level) to 'get what they want'. Just my thoughts.

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the long warred's avatar

Sorry too busy filling out my reparations claim form at the British consulate to finish, I'm a 7th generation Irish Famine survivor. Since I know that the Irish are SCC's fav race of all time, especially on a Monday after Saint Patrick's Day previous Friday I'm sure SCC appreciates this deeply.

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Always Adblock's avatar

"I learned it from watching you!"

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SamizBOT's avatar

This critique of Coates is like using an ICBM to attack an anthill. I think I understand his appeal now that you posted that excerpt: he writes in a pleasing and almost hypnotic cadence. It's hard to keep track of what he's saying because his writing lulls you into a barely conscious state. And that's why AO Scott said his writing is more essential than air or water (lol). It's not that there's anything to his thought other than standard fare black grievance and black supremacism, it's just that it's nice to read in the same way people used to enjoy poetry.

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Second City Bureaucrat's avatar

Coates writes right up to the brink of the plane of communication that speaks to huge swaths of America's deracinated and mostly areligious (mostly white) middle and working classes, countenancing the emptiness and hypocrisy of Black identity and its cynical liberation politics, but ultimately turns his back on it, opting to return to the womb of group narcissism.

It's possible this was a business decision to protect himself from the kind of Black patrician censure to which independent blacks like Chapelle are subjected. Black group narcissism is also enormously lucrative because it panders to the delusions of America's progressive elite, which spends billions to enable group narcissism in non-white-gentile groups.

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Niccolo Soldo's avatar

pls note: I have added your Substack to the top of my blogroll, pushing Angela Nagle into second place, Scroll down to the right to see - https://niccolo.substack.com/

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Second City Bureaucrat's avatar

Thank you. Tough scene for Nagle.

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florida state of mind's avatar

It's about suppressing and controlling white people's natural sense of "us", so non-white groups can gain access to white resources which whites historically restricted to their own group.

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Second City Bureaucrat's avatar

There is in some instances a punitive impulse behind the CRT elimination of "white" but often I think it's just part of the reasoning patterns inherent to believing in an omnipotent group self-image, which require the devaluation of other groups and identities and the elevation of one's own, even when the believer doesn't harbor any personal outgroup animosity.

I'm personally dubious about a natural sense of "us" simply because it's too vague and there's too much diversity among whites. Additionally, a large population of whites -- northern europeans -- are deeply hostile to the concept of group affinity in general, hence the individualism that emerged in northern europe prior to Christianity, and then came to define protestantism. With that being said, there may be instinctual preferences for people who look and behave similar to oneself and one's family.

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the long warred's avatar

The others are driving the train on this, and had someone mentioned unifying Germany in 1800 they would have been laughed out the door. It may not have even occurred to Bismarck until 1848 events put him in motion.

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the long warred's avatar

Jim Snow has more resources and was easier to exploit and abuse than Jim Crow.

We Wipipo stopped restricting any resources in the 1960s after a century of relaxing restrictions admittedly in fits and starts. Since then we’ve been throwing them at other groups including the Blacks, with the unfortunate results of an entire industry and sector of Coates.

sacred cows that spoil the milk.

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the long warred's avatar

Then one day for no reason at all, people elected ______ .

And then it was quiet in a short enough while, and much more peaceful and productive.

The problem with victimhood as profession is it comes true , it has too, we humans attack weakness to eliminate it as a species. Has to be that way. The victims drag us all down.

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the long warred's avatar

Brah ... 😂 I can’t finish sorry its not you its him

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