Dear Gavin,
Thanks for the nudge. We apparently got distracted from our task. Your letter reminded me that we still have a considerable amount of ground to get to.
So we already covered how it is okay to be white. Radical, I know. People who are white should be grateful to God for it, but not proud, and people who are black should be grateful for that . . . and also not proud. Thanksgiving and conceitedness are two very different things. But someone is going to object and say that in a Eurocentric culture, such as ours has been for some centuries now, the white guy has a lot more to be grateful for than does the black guy. He has all that “white privilege.” But this objection is only an objection if egalitarianism is true, which it isn’t. Another name for privileges is blessings, and those who have had more blessings should be all the more grateful—that, and they should be generous and eager to share (1 Tim. 6: 17-19).
But this need to be grateful for your whiteness does create a dilemma. Let us say that you come to this settled conviction in your soul. It is okay to be white. You breathe deeply and are satisfied. But if any of the progressives of your acquaintance get wind of this new demeanor of yours, you will almost certainly find yourself assailed and upbraided as a racist pig. In fact, you can also be assailed on those same charges simply for being white. And if you compound your guilt by refusing to acknowledge any guilt, the accusations will automatically ramp up to the next level. You are compounding the sin by refusing to acknowledge any sin in it whatever.
But if we have done our work thoroughly here, that won’t bother you at all. Every Christian should be comfortable in their own skin, regardless of what color it is. Individual behaviors can change. And under the influence of the gospel, cultures can mature and grow over time—as Paul exhorted Titus regarding the Cretans (Tit. 1:12-13). But the blueprints of your DNA—blue eyes, XY, white skin, and blonde hair—are both a gift and an assignment from God. Obey your chromosomes. Actually, thank God for your chromosomes, and then obey them. Embrace them. Walk with them. They are to be your lifetime friends.
However, this will create a new challenge for you, and that is our topic for this go-around. You will at some point find yourself in company with other white people who are also being harangued as racist pigs, but their attitudes, demeanor, and arguments seem to be strikingly different from yours. The left lumps you all together, and a number of these people would lump themselves together with you as well. They want solidarity on the basis of color alone, regardless of what faith or worldview undergirds the understanding of that color.
You are grateful to God for your heritage because it is the one that God gave to you. When someone gives you a birthday present, you say thank you, and you say thank you for the gift that you were actually given. You are grateful for it. But suppose you are watching someone else receive a birthday present, but instead of saying thank you, he went and said something like, “This vindicates my claim to be the heir of the throne of Mundanar, and suzerain of all the waterways to the West! I am of the true seed royal, and I will receive your embassies and tributes now.” You were both given something, but you think you got a neck tie, for which you are grateful. He also got a neck tie, but he has discerned in it in the blue and yellow stripes of an ancient heraldry that he just made up, and so starts making his grandiose claims. In short, you are dealing with a weirdo.
But wait. Let us compound the problem. Suppose the world is being run by a different brand of weirdo, the leftist weirdos, the makers and manufacturers of clown world. These are the weirdos in charge. These are the people who say that anybody who owns a neck tie must think they are better than everybody else. They have spent the last half century attacking all wearers of neck ties as colonizers, misogynists, racists, white supremacists, miscreants, and so on. Now this other fellow with the neck tie has apparently decided that if they are going to hang you for a thief you might as well steal something, and so he is doing his level best to fulfill all the caricatures that they have been throwing about so recklessly. Instead of rejecting the slander and caricature, he embraces it.
The question this creates for you has to do with how close you should stand to that guy. You are being accused of being the same thing, but from all appearances the charges are slander in your case and look to be fairly accurate in his. Now what?
You will be attacked regardless—for do you not own a neck tie?—but the accusations are false. Do you have any responsibility to try to help out the delusional guy? Or to stand by him? Even if you don’t share in his confusion at all, the mere fact that you feel sorry for him, perhaps understanding how he got there, is another strike against you. And sometimes the association is inescapable—he turns out to be your younger brother, for example.
But enough with the neck tie metaphor. You don’t want these things to get away from you. A real resistance to the hegemonic secular project has been starting to form. That resistance is still inchoate, but it is real. There are some genuine encouraging signs. People are starting to wake up to woke, and it is truly heartening to see. But remember, in the meantime, over the last half century, what has the playbook of the Left been? Anybody to the right of Mitt Romney or John McCain has been called a Nazi racist, fascist pig, and a misogynistic cave dweller. And even those two room-temperature tapioca RINOs, as soon as they got the Republican nomination, became a Hitlerian threat to the left.
Now at just the moment when the absurdity of all this slander had gotten to peak levels, and all the normies were scratching their heads and asking, “Is it really racist to mow your lawn?” we discover that Old Slewfoot—let us call him—had arranged for a bunch of people on the right to pop up and start saying a bunch of genuinely rancid and malevolent things—about Jews, about blacks, about women, and we are all summoned to listen to these tirades, for are these not the sayings of the king of Mundanar? And his “frens?”
So at just the point when the asininity was going to be exposed to all, some low rent intellectuals popped up in order to try to demonstrate to the world that the slander was not slander at all. Now these people are either malicious or mid-wits or both—or they are FBI-bots. Just within the last year, various Hitler-as-Christian-prince memes have started to circulate widely. I even saw a video that wanted to lionize the 1936 Berlin games as a cheeky exercise of white boys having their summer fun. And you may have seen the online ruckus that happened after I said that the maker of that video was presumably a Fed.
Some folks admonished me for slandering the poor fellow like that, but it was a joke, not a slander. But even as a joke, it had a sharp edge. If that guy actually were a Fed, he wouldn’t be doing anything differently at all. He wouldn’t be behaving any differently. And he would also be due a raise and a promotion, for he is doing a fine job. His assignment would have been to make all activists on the right look like they were either morons or malevolent, and to make any responsible conservative leaders look like they were willing to harbor morons or the malevolent.
Let us take a lesson from the Ray Epps episode.
The guy in the video here who started shouting Fed! Fed! Fed! at Epps was not slandering him. Moreover, he was not slandering him even if it turned out that Epps was just an idiot, and not a Fed at all. If you don’t want to be called a Fed, then don’t act like a Fed.
So the only reason you should be willing to be close to any of these guys would be for the sake of fighting with them. “Dead flies putrefy the perfumer’s ointment, and cause it to give off a foul odor; So does a little folly to one respected for wisdom and honor” (Eccl. 10:1, NKJV). Their folly has the capacity to be far more destructive in your life than any judicious cautions from you have power to influence them for good.
At this point, someone is going to ask you about NETTR, the “no enemies to the right” doctrine. Isn’t there some wisdom in that? Yes, there is, but always be cautious. First, if God has enemies on the right, and He most certainly does, then I should also. There are God-haters over here with us, and that bile and hatred will come out at some point. You don’t want to standing next to it when it happens.
So then what is the element of truth in NETTR? You must not have any enemies to the right simply because the left demands that you denounce somebody who said or did “racist x, sexist y, and problematic z.” Lies are the stock in trade of the left, and they have successfully gotten many conservatives to flinch instinctively, and to “countersignal” and “punch right” simply on their say-so. But their say-so is notoriously unreliable. Don’t ever obey them. So I didn’t attack that video because the Left wanted me to. I attacked it because Christ wanted me to. And that was because it was either made by an oaf, an orc, or an operative.
It is also worth mentioning that I don’t accept the common metric that locates Nazis on the “right.” They were nationalistic socialists who were teamed up with Stalin for the first part of the war. We should want nothing whatever to do with them, meaning that I am not trying to break up a coalition here. I want to deny them entrance into the coalition.
One last thing. The most charitable evaluation from the options I listed above would be “oaf.” But let’s make it even more charitable still. Remember that we live in oafish times, and that a lot of the alt-right has been shaped by the world of gaming, Instagram, Twitter, memes, and cosplaying. A lot of these guys could be brought to their senses in a healthy community, where people are living actual lives out in the real world. There they would be able to learn that there is far more to masculinity than picking a Crusader with laser eyes for an avatar. And remember this digital world does have one ameliorating quality. They are not actually hating real Jews. Their enmity is reserved for the jew-game-pieces in their Dungeons and Dragons set up.
Cordially in Christ,
Douglas Wilson