Stephen Wolfe and 13/52
As mentioned in a previous post, I have begun publishing my notes on Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism on a new Substack. Having reached the part of the book where he begins to describe how a “pre-rational preference” for kith and kin forms the basis of his ideal nation, I took the opportunity to note how he has previously described people outside of his own in-group, namely how he considers Black Americans “reliable sources for criminality”. I am cross-posting it here, as I believe this examination of his online writings will be of interest to my regular subscribers as well.
I do not argue here for the sort of 19th-century nationalism that homogenized the socio-economic classes of peoples. My principal interest is a reinvigoration of a collective will that asserts and stands up for itself. Prerequisite to such a self-regard, at least today, is a conscious articulation or sense of one’s people as distinguished from others.1
Much can be said about this subsection, where the ethno-state begins to be defined, but this is probably the best place to attempt to first answer the question, How does Stephen Wolfe view his “people as distinguished from others”?
On March 1, 2023, Jason Truett Glen, a professor of ethics at Liberty University, tweeted that Wolfe’s “writings & social media posts have been clear enough on his thoughts on interracial marriage” for him to be considered an ethnocentrist.2 Wolfe responded to this tweet with:
Maybe not [sic] believe every lie told about my "writings & social media posts". From CCN pg. 139.3
A picture from The Case for Christian Nationalism, provided by Wolfe in his tweet, contained a quote from the current section on nations:
We should not, however, disregard the work of intermarriage over time in creating bonds of affection, as Aristotle argues.4
Conspicuously cropped from Wolfe’s picture of the book is the immediately preceding sentence, on the same page, which would serve to significantly undermine his claim that Glen is lying about him.
Blood relations matter for your ethnicity, because your kin have belonged to this people on this land - to this nation in this place - and so they bind you to that people and place, creating a common volksgeist.5
Also, as was earlier noted, Wolfe has publicly championed the limiting of intermarriage through social pressures. He could argue with Glen about the severity of his views on intermarriage, but he cannot argue that Glen was lying when he said Wolfe was “clear enough” on them that they can legitimately be seen as ethnocentric. Secondly, his use of intermarriage is nondescript in a practical context. For example, this section mentions that the Israelites and Moabites were blood relations, through Abraham; Wolfe also notes a lack of cultural ties to his “Italian, German, and English” ancestry, though he earlier described his ethnicity as rooted in “Western Europe”.6 Would Wolfe see an ethical or practical difference between Israelite marrying Moabite versus Israelite marrying Ethiopian, between German marrying Italian versus “Western European” American marrying African American? Though his book does not answer that question, as Glen correctly observed, his other public writings can help one make an educated guess.
The Anti-Defamation League defines 13/52 as:
The number 13 used in conjunction with either the number 52 or the number 90 is a shorthand reference to racist propaganda claims by white supremacists against African Americans to depict them as savage and criminal in nature.
In this numeric shorthand, the number 13 refers to the purported percentage of the U.S. population that is African American. The number 52 refers to the alleged percentage of all murders committed in the U.S. that are committed by African Americans. Some white supremacists use the number 50 instead of 52…
White supremacists typically employ references to 13 (by itself), 13/50, 13/52 or 13/90 in response to social media posts, and in the comments sections of news stories about crimes in which the suspected perpetrator is African American. In some instances, white supremacists use the numbers as a purported police radio code, using language like, “We have a 1390 in progress.”7
This very particular type of characterization of ethno-cultural enemies as predisposed to violent criminal behavior is nothing new in American nativism. An anonymous leaflet (likely from the Klan), disseminated during the 1928 presidential election, where the Democrats ran the Catholic Governor of New York, Al Smith, contained the following:
In 90 per cent of the cases where criminals are executed for crimes committed, the victims of the execution have a priest at their elbow to administer the last sacrament.
Over 65 per cent of the prison convicts of all grades and of all kinds of prisoners are Roman Catholics, while less than 5 per cent are graduates of our public schools.
These statements are astounding when we remember that only about 12 1/2 per cent of the entire population of the United States are Roman Catholics, while the other 87 1/2 per cent are not.8
In March of 2022, Wolfe wrote an article for IM—1776, an online and print magazine that publishes some of the more academically-minded authors within the anti-left “meme war” movement9, entitled Anarcho-Tyranny in 2022.10 Using the nationwide riots of the summer of 2020 as his example, he makes the claim that “the Regime uses disorder (anarchy) to terrorize its opponents and uses state power to protect the anarchical element and to crush any resistance to disorder (tyranny).”11
As for whom they utilize for this anarchy, he writes:
In the United States, this anarchic element is composed largely of black Americans. For complex reasons, blacks in America, considered as a group, are reliable sources for criminality, and their criminality increases when constraints diminish. Despite being around 13% of the US population, blacks have consistently committed over 50% of the homicides for decades, and it is getting worse. In 2020, according to the FBI stats, blacks committed nearly 57% of all known murders. (emphasis mine)
Later in the article, he states:
There is more to the story of black criminality, but what is important here is that black Americans, considered as a group, are more willing to conduct certain types of public disorder (violence, petty theft, vandalism, looting, rioting, etc.) when constraints are reduced. For this reason, they serve as the anarchic element of anarcho-tyranny in the United States.
One would imagine that someone who has socially acceptable reasons for claiming that Black Americans are “reliable sources for criminality” would be eager to share them, so as to dispel any notion of harboring unacceptable prejudices. Yet, at no point in the article does Wolfe attempt to explain how he came to this conclusion. When questioned about these comments on Twitter in November of 2022, he gave the following excuse across four terse tweets, posted within eight minutes of each other:
Nothing I said can be logically construed to mean that any group is inherently more violent.
The people I criticize in article [sic] are *white liberals*.
The whole point is that white liberals exploit the factually obvious problems in black communities for their own purposes.
You can find this in the work of Thomas Sowell.12
Wolfe is very likely referring to Sowell’s essay, Black Rednecks and White Liberals, where the economist claims that “ghetto” behavior in Black people is actually culturally appropriated from their former, Celtic neighbors in the American South.13 Therefore, it would seem that Wolfe believes the reason Black people are “reliable sources for criminality” is that it has been ingrained in them culturally, over multiple generations. This means that it meets his definition of being an integral part of their ethnicity.
This article is not the only place where he has expressed the principles of 13/52. As mentioned before, Wolfe tweeted the following in July of 2021:
Consider how absurd it is to elevate bl*ack men when they far exceed all non-bla*cks in just about every negative indicator, including in sex crimes. What is astonishing is that seemingly seriously people can’t recognize how ridiculous they’ve become. The fact is that if there was serious racial oppression since the civil rights era, they have handled it very poorly. This is obvious if you get past the ideology. There is nothing heroic in it, given the level of violent crime and sexual assault (of underage girls).14
On December 8, 2020, the anonymous Twitter account, Woke Preacher Clips, known mainly for highlighting the poor doctrine and political idolatry of theologically liberal pastors, shared a video of Reformed Seminary Chancellor, Ligon Duncan, saying, “It's gonna take us 100 years to overcome the trust issues...My very best black friends have trouble trusting me, for really good reasons. Because people like me have been doing awful things to them and to their families for four centuries.” Stephen Wolfe responded to Duncan’s statement with:
Just think about the principle at work & affirmed here. If one group disproportionately does awful things (say, violent crime and property crime) to another group, then the victim group has “good reasons” to distrust all members of the offending group.15
Working this sentiment of 13/52 from Wolfe into his definition of nations, it is reasonable to infer that he considers White and Black Americans to be distinct, ethnically disparate peoples. We can also reasonably infer that he would likely be indisposed to joining his family to a people whom he sees as having a higher group propensity for “violent crime and sexual assault (of underage girls)” than his own.
Michael Williams, Shadow of the Pope (New York: Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1932), 233-234.
I realize that “meme war movement” may be an insufficient description, but I believe it works better than “alt-right” or “MAGA”, which has a myriad of connotations and could calumniate some of the authors. On the other hand, the magazine’s website has several thumbnail images of Pepe frogs and a 2022 article entitled, The Power of Meme Magic.
Stephen Wolfe, “Anarcho-Tyranny in 2022,” IM—1776 (blog), March 18, 2022, https://im1776.com/2022/03/18/anarcho-tyranny.
Alastair Roberts’s investigation into Wolfe’s podcast co-host, Thomas Achord, and his anonymous Twitter and Facebook accounts revealed that they were “almost entirely followed by Achord’s close friends”, including Wolfe. On September 3, 2020, Achord tweeted, “Meanwhile the perpetrators of these crimes go undocumented, unrecognized, exonerated, justified, applauded. Anarchy for them. Tyranny for you. Don’t rise up, white man. Keep your head down. That’s the message.”
Alastair Roberts, “On Thomas Achord,” Alastair’s Adversaria (blog), November 27, 2022, https://alastairadversaria.com/2022/11/27/the-case-against-thomas-achord.
