An Ode to the Unhyphenated American (Part 4)
A breakdown of Stephen Wolfe's speech at the New Christendom Press Conference
Part one of this series is here:
The video of Stephen Wolfe’s full remarks is here:
Economists from Brown University—their names are David Weil and Lewis Putterman—and really a path-breaking study in social science and political science. Or, I guess they're economists. If the only thing you knew about each nation on the planet was the fraction of that nation with ancestors of European descent, you would be able to predict two-thirds of all global income differences as summarized by Garrett Jones. So a growing body of research indicates that the people matter more than the place.
What are we to do with such information? It’s a useless data point without context, and there are endless theories as to why Europeans were the people to conquer and colonize much of the rest of the world, in the modern era. One could reference Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, which aims to disprove racially-based theories,1 as much as Wolfe used the first half of his speech to persistently allude to movements that upheld them.
The most common mark of a dishonest academic is that he ignores evidence that contradicts his thesis. As a 2012 article in the Harvard Business Review noted, when researchers in 1996 pulled 250 recently issued patents and examined them, they discovered that nineteen percent of them had immigrant inventors, and that those patents generated 1600 jobs. A 2011 study discovered that three-quarters of all patents issued to the top ten patent producing Universities had at least one immigrant inventor. Another study found that forty percent of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children, and that they had $4.2 trillion in combined revenue.2 We are not only a nation of immigrants, but highly productive ones.
We can conclude, therefore—if we rely on reason and not on emotion—that reducing the European composition of any country, unless replaced by Chinese, will harm the well-being of that country and certainly undermine the Western character of their institutions.
Beyond the clear eugenic undercurrent of this statement, note the lack of any nuance whatsoever. Would admitting a few thousand people from a non-Western nation into ours of over 300 million “undermine the Western character” of our institutions? Would admitting a million even do that? Wolfe continues to give up his ultimate game, that he wants white people to be given exclusionary room to live.
But at the same time, we have this Western—what I call, what other people have called—Western ethno-masochism which I'll define as the perverse thrill in experiencing cultural suicide—the perverse thrill in experiencing cultural suicide. This is radically new and is exclusive to our time. It would be utterly incommunicable to our forefathers—the degree that we do this. And guilt, it seems to me, that guilt is the crucial factor in our weirdness.
In his book, Wolfe called it “psycho-sexual ethno-masochism” and said that it’s “the most pernicious illness of the Western mind.”3 He accused Babylon Bee writer Joel Berry of the condition, for noting—in response to those who take conspicuous issue with the term Judaeo-Christian—the historical fact that the seed of Western Civilization (and Christendom) was planted in the Mediterranean and not Northern Europe. In reality, what Wolfe displays is a point of projection. He derives an unwarranted pride in a European ancestry that he has no direct cultural connection to, and therefore strangely accuses anyone who will not join him in this folly of gaining a perverse, sexual gratification from their disagreement. It would be laughable if he wasn’t so serious about it.
In response, we don't wake from our ideological slumber. We don't realize that the conditions for flourishing are not universal but under-girded by a particular way of life, of a particular people. No, we blame ourselves for not establishing the universal, for not yet rooting out the implicit biases and our implicit supremacy in the system. So, we utilize guilt to cope with the failure of our ideology to successfully universalize outcomes. Again, we are our own in-group’s out-group.
The theme of white Americans awaking from their ideological slumber is the language of propaganda, and is meant to elicit an emotional response from the audience. There is room to criticize those who would seek to immediately universalize outcomes, but to claim that outcomes in America haven’t historically universalized over time, and that current efforts will fail, is ridiculous. Wolfe’s entire argument is hinged upon a call for white Americans to gain an ahistorical collective consciousness, because our outcomes have become so universalized over the last two centuries of mass immigration, from nearly every European nation, that he can do nothing but appeal to the founding of the United States as some sort of abstract Anglo-Saxonism. He is appealing to universalism to attack universalism.
And instead of rejecting this ideology or recognizing that our way of life is what under-girds our system—that is, instead of affirming our in-group—our true in-group—our guilt causes us to reaffirm the universalist and radically egalitarian ideology. To double down. In psychological terms, guilt suppresses the cognitive dissonance between our ideology and our experience.
Though the term has become extremely overused, in a reductionist way, by those who don’t put Christian Nationalism in its proper historical context, this statement by Wolfe fully qualifies as “Woke Right.” Here he is referring to what Karl Marx’s ideological partner, Friedrich Engels, termed “false consciousness,” and what the early-20th century Italian communist Antonio Gramsci called “hegemonic narratives.” Wolfe is claiming that a systemically oppressive myth has been foisted on the minds of white Americans and causes them to work against their collective class interests. Continuing to properly highlight this tendency among Christian Nationalists and the Dissident Right, in general, is an effective means to inform the general public of the brokenness of their ideology.
All of this comes after the infamous Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal in which Pakistanis in England from the 1980s to 2013 assaulted thousands of teenage white British girls. The local authorities knew about it for decades, stretching back to the 80s, and they did almost nothing—fearing charges of racism… Now has the UK learned its lesson? Around 83,000 Pakistanis immigrated legally to the UK in 2023.
Wolfe believes that the official response of the United Kingdom to a child exploitation ring localized to one city, that was run by several dozen people of Pakistani descent and has a total of 420 suspects, should be to ban immigration from Pakistan. Take a second to ingest that, because it is the very definition of racism, to ascribe characteristics to an entire ethnicity based on the actions of a minority. Stephen Wolfe is objectively racist.
To be continued…
Jared M. Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, First Edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999).
Glenn Llopis, “Adopt an Immigrant Mindset to Advance Your Career,” Harvard Business Review, August 24, 2012, https://hbr.org/2012/08/adopt-an-immigrantmindset-to.
Stephen Wolfe, The Case for Christian Nationalism (Moscow, Idaho: Canon Press, 2022), 169.