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In this decade, America’s most effective conservative activist has likely been Chris Rufo, who in 2020 came up with a winning euphemism for all the racist antiwhite hate suffusing our schools, streets, and screens during the racial reckoning: “Critical Race Theory,” Rufo called it.

Personally, I just refer to racist antiwhite hate as “racist antiwhite hate.” But my term is far too self-explanatory to ever catch on. In the 21st century, Americans prefer opaque neologisms like “jump the shark” or “motte and bailey,” which require lectures on Happy Days trivia or feudal fortifications to understand.

“Critical Race Theory” has the advantage of being incomprehensible to those who haven’t been briefed.

Moreover, conservative whites remain extremely reluctant to notice how much of the animus directed at whites these days is driven by simple lowbrow hate and greed.

Instead, conservatives tend to assume that their opposition must have a highly intellectual ideological backstory, ideally involving something that Adorno said to Gramsci and Marcuse in the New School for Social Research cafeteria in 1946. After all, if not for the Cultural Marxism of the Frankfurt School in the 1940s, it would never have dawned on the black people on various reparations commissions in the 2020s to demand seven figures be deposited in their personal bank accounts. It could only be Marxism that makes African Americans want whites’ money.

What else could it be?

Rufo has now written an essay for City Journal entitled “No to the Politics of ‘Whiteness’: The case against right-wing racialism.” He has a demonstrated track record of political acuity, so it’s worth listening to his opinion:

As a practical matter, too, the politics of colorblind equality is vastly superior to the politics of “white identity.” Whatever one’s judgment on mass immigration, America is now a mixed, multiracial republic, and any successful political movement will need to build a coalition beyond any single racial group. The good news for conservatives—and a point against arguments for demographic determination—is that many racial minorities, most notably Latinos and Asians, oppose critical race theory-style discrimination, support the principle of colorblind equality, and have begun to shift politically to the right. By contrast, the advocates of “white racial consciousness” have a track record with the opposite results: from the late author Sam Francis to the website VDARE, such efforts have failed to garner an audience, much less a political coalition, beyond the fringes. Such a politics is perceived, rightly, as victim-oriented and antithetical to deeply held American principles.

Rufo’s take is similar to mine in 2005 in VDARE in a debate with Jared Taylor in which I argued in favor of what I call “citizenism” (the commonsense notion that America’s policies should be biased in favor of the well-being of our fellow citizens over those of the 7.7 billion noncitizens):

As Talleyrand might have said, “White Nationalism is worse than a crime, it’s a mistake.”… Any political philosophy aimed at whites today has to be phrased in high-minded terms because mud-wrestling with Al Sharpton over the racial spoils system simply strikes many whites as too demeaning to bother with…. White Americans don’t want to act like the rest of the world, as the white nationalists advise them to, they want to act like white Americans. They don’t want to submit their individual freedom to their extended families, they want to marry whom they want to marry and then focus on their nuclear families. They want the law to treat them not as members of a clan but as individual and equal citizens under the law.

On the other hand, it’s now 2023, eighteen years later, and my ideology of citizenism has not exactly swept the country, no matter how sensible people find it on the vanishingly rare occasions when it’s explained to them. Moreover, I’m constantly denounced as a white nationalist or a white supremacist, no matter what I’ve said in the past. And the gentlemanly Jared Taylor, even as we are approaching one year into Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter or X or whatever it’s called now, is still banned.

Meanwhile, racist antiwhite hate has become mainstream media fodder. Anybody who tries to defend whites from the ethnic slurs of Ibram X. Kendi and the like is denounced as racist. Granted, there’s at present a vague impression that it’s not in Joe Biden’s reelection interest to bring up Black Lives Matters at the moment, but the fact that black deaths by homicide went up 44 percent and black deaths by motor vehicle accident rose 39 percent from 2019 to 2021 is silenced as inconvenient.

But as of January 21, 2025, will the Mostly Peaceful Protestors be unleashed once again, as in Obama’s second term?

Nobody knows.

My best guess is that the octogenarian Joe Biden would prefer not to have his second term discombobulated by urban disorder, much as the octogenarian general Paul von Hindenburg assumed that his second term as president of the Weimar Republic would be made more convenient by briefly appointing the bumptious corporal Adolf Hitler as chancellor.

Similarly, the notion that there is anything admirable about white people is verboten in the press. For example, young whites died much more in combat in the service of their country in Iraq and Afghanistan than did young people of other races, perhaps 75 to 100 percent more for the relevant age ranges. Every few years, glancing about for something to write, I’d look up the fatal casualty numbers in the Pentagon’s reports and write this up, admitting that, yes, young whites do appear on average to be more patriotic and self-sacrificing than the more fashionable races.

During these forever wars, the mainstream media didn’t utterly ignore this fact: As far as I can tell from Google, in 2005, both The Baltimore Sun and the Los Angeles Times wrote a single article each about it. Still, that’s not a lot of coverage of an important life-or-death pattern that went on for a decade or more.

But try to imagine this from a war reporter’s point of view: You’ve noticed from being embedded in combat units and from official documents that whites are disproportionately dying in the country’s two major wars. You consider pitching a story about this fact.

Your editor is going to ask you:

But what’s your bottom line? That whites are more heroic than other races? Really? Can’t you figure out some other way to angle this, such as that blacks are being discriminated against in being awarded Purple Heart medals? Or that whites are glory-hogging all the good jobs at the pointy end of the spear while blacks are forced, forced into safe supply jobs. Now, that’s a story! You might win a Pulitzer for that, but you definitely aren’t winning a Pulitzer for saying that whites are more admirable than nonwhites.

In contrast, your editor concludes,

Your pitch sums up to being that white youths are volunteering to serve their country in combat in inordinate numbers and thus dying at the same ratio. And that is not a story we want to publish. Sure, it’s true, but just because it’s true doesn’t mean it’s not racist to notice that it’s true. It’s the 21st century, dude! You can’t go around just telling the truth. You’ve got to spin it. C’mon, help me out here, nobody cares about dead white guys. If you insist on telling the truth, you’ll wind up untouchable in this business.

In the news media business, it’s essential to have phone numbers who will return reporters’ calls no matter how ridiculous the question they ask.

For example, I bet you can call Jonathan Greenblatt, age 52, of the Anti-Defamation League at any hour of the day or night and he will give you an antiwhite gentile quote. The man is a dynamo!

Al Sharpton, age 68, might not get back to you as fast, but he’s a funny guy when he does respond.

Granted, there aren’t many Asian or Hispanic superstar race agitators, but there are countless numbers of them who’d like to be, and one or more will immediately respond with an antiwhite quote you can use even if it’s not as amusing.

You ask, can you call Jared Taylor for a response defending the white race from these antiwhite racist hate slurs?

No, of course not. Are you crazy? He’s an Untouchable. He’s…pro-white.

To these newspapers’ subscribers, white people are the bad guys. Do you want people to cancel their subscriptions just because you noticed some unpopular truth?