Mike Solana

We have gotten very good at scaring anyone right of a Berkeley gender studies scholar away from discussing their views by invoking the word "Nazi," and we have gotten very, very bad at debating literal Nazis.

I've been watching the proliferation of white identity with increasing horror. First, Richard Spencer debating skeptics and libertarians on YouTube (half a million views), and now Arthur Jones, running for Congress.

In each debate, the white nationalist is disturbing, but the ineffectual liberal counterpoints are chilling. "You sound like a white nationalist" is met with "well yeah." END OF DEBATE. Culturally, intellectually, we have no antibodies to this stuff.

To stop white nationalism, we're going to have to grapple with white nationalist ideas and build compelling counterarguments. In order to do this, we'll have to target the root idea, not the concept of "white identity" but the collectivist concept of group identity itself.

We cannot argue against something like "cultural appropriation," for example, without implicitly endorsing the notion certain races own certain ideas, arts, technologies, tragedies, an idea which extends naturally, necessarily, to concepts of superiority and inferiority.