The Case for Christian Nationalism
The Case for Christian Nationalism
3. Loving Your Nation | VI. Conclusion
Previously:
Much can be said about the first paragraphs of Wolfe’s conclusion on what constitutes nation, but one quote stands head and shoulders above the rest:
The object of [Western man’s] regard is the non-Westerner at the Westerner’s expense - a bizarre self-denigration rooted in guilt and malaise. Loss and humiliation is the point, however. It is euphoric to him; his own degradation is thrilling. This is his psycho-sexual etnho-masochism, the most pernicious illness of the Western mind. (emphasis mine)1
There can be legitimate discussion about some of what he is first presenting here; there is definitely an aspect of “self-denigration” in the leftist American worldview, such as presented in books like Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility. But Wolfe takes this complaint to another level when he describes it as “psycho-sexual ethno-masochism”. Stripped of its academic-linguistic obfuscation, what he is claiming is that Westerners gain a perverse, sexual gratification playing the cuckold to foreigners.2 That he would make such a statement in his book and then attempt to later claim, on Twitter, that his views on ethnicity discussed in the current chapter are “following a much older nationalist tradition”, and are not synonymous with contemporary connotations of “race”, is patently ridiculous.3
I challenge the reader to take this section, as a whole, replace “Western man” with “White man”, and see if there is any ideological difference between what Wolfe promotes and the ideas that one would expect to hear in a speech from a local Exalted Cyclops at an average Klan meeting. They certainly do not correlate if you change “Western” to “Black” or “Latino”. Wolfe has even admitted, in now deleted posts on Twitter, that Black Westerners do not fall under this rubric.4
Thus, Western (White) man, whose birthrates have plummeted, creates well-ordered spaces and civil institutions not for himself and his natural progeny but for his replacements.5
Repeatedly, in the face of ethnic identity politics, we see Western (White) man retreating to this universality - to the universal values of the Declaration of Independence, for example - not realizing that those values come from the collective experience of a cluster of European nations.6
Most left-wing social movements exploit Western universality and Western (White) guilt, leveraging the bizarre tendency of Western (White) man to out-group himself.7
You would think that Western (White) man would come to his senses. But universality is so ingrained in him and is so strongly enforced that he psychologically cannot reject it, even in the face of its absurdity.8
Western (White) man blames himself; he reaffirms the promise; he offers restitution or reparation at his own expense; he receives more immigration;9
The Western (White) mind needs to be critiqued in order to free it from exploitation and self-disparagement… Indeed, you must critique and deliberately decline to act on certain mental habits designed to extinguish this discomfort, such as accusations… like “racist” or “fascist” or “xenophobe”;10
That is, we tend to impute Western (White) altruism to all people, concluding that their first love is humanity, not their ethnicity.11
Again, would it make sense to say that “left-wing social movements” exploit Western Latino guilt? Would it make sense to say that a Western Asian man blames himself for not perpetually affirming ethnic universality, resulting in him offering “reparation at his own expense”? Does a Western Black man have to free his mind from accusations like “racist” or “fascist”, because he critiques appeals to ethnic universality, such as the Declaration of Independence? These statements only make sense from a perspective of antagonistic White ethnocentrism. Further evidence is that, in a review of Jake Meador’s book, What are Christians For?, he discussed one of these bullet points in an explicitly White context, writing, “Meador - a white male - can ‘prove’ his assertions only by out-grouping himself and by speaking ill of his civilization,” and, “The only way for white people to contribute to Protestant ‘social doctrine’ is by out-grouping themselves in order to offer credible assertions.”12
On November 27, 2022, Alastair Roberts (whom Wolfe mentions earlier in this chapter13), a teaching fellow at the conservative Christian, Davenant Institute, published an exposé on Wolfe’s podcast co-host, Thomas Achord.14 In the article, published several days after he made a public accusation, Roberts conclusively proved that Achord had long kept anonymous “alt” accounts on both Twitter and Facebook, where he regularly expressed explicitly white nationalist sentiment, including:
Calling Congresswoman Cori Bush the female derivative of the n-word.15
Claiming that all Antifa are Jews.16
Promoting “a robust race realist white nationalism” as a counter to wokeism.17
Writing that the takeaway from the same type of “Anarcho-Tyranny” that Wolfe discussed in his article for IM—1776 was, “Don’t rise up, white man. Keep your head down. That’s the message.”18
Though Achord initially denied that the account was his, he later admitted to being the account holder in a since deleted blog post, where he said he had “trouble recollecting tweets (and the entire account)” and that it was the product of a “period of [his] life [that] was a spiritually dark time marked by pessimism and anger and strained relationships.”19 One wonders how someone has “trouble recollecting” regularly posting racist tweets on an anonymous account only a year prior. Before Roberts posted his evidence and Achord made his admission, Wolfe claimed in a lengthy Twitter thread that Roberts, out of his “obsession with [him]”, and “with total disregard for anyone but his tribe”, “unleashed the twitter animals on [his friend] right before Thanksgiving.”20
Roberts’s investigation revealed that the anonymous, “Tulius Aadland”, accounts, on both Twitter and Facebook, had roughly thirty followers each, mostly people whom Achord was personally acquainted with - all but two of the Facebook account’s twenty-seven followers were in Achord’s friend list. The small list of followers of the accounts, on both Twitter and Facebook, included Wolfe. The most reasonable conclusion to draw from this is that Achord told his personal acquaintances to follow these anonymous accounts, likely with the expressed intent to post things he wouldn’t say on his public account, and Wolfe did so.
Wolfe engaged with the Aadland accounts at least once, liking a tweet that read, “I’m back on this account just to meme.”21 A meme posted on the account just a day later (and two years before Wolfe's book was published) is a picture of an attractive, White woman in a sun dress, holding a baby, with a caption nearly identical to the question Wolfe asked in the beginning of this chapter, “Which way, Western Woman?”22 The book, Which Way Western Man?, was written by a white nationalist author, William Gayley Simpson, in 1978. Its last official printing was in 2003 by National Vanguard Books, the publishing arm of the white supremacist organization, National Alliance. The phrase has become moderately popular in right-wing memes, used in a similar, dichotomous vein to the far more common Reject Modernity, Embrace Tradition, a consistent, though unwritten, theme of the Tulius Aadland Twitter account, which often shared images highlighting traditional aesthetics. Perhaps this history of the phrase explains why Wolfe went out of his way, in a footnote to that question, to contend that his was “not a ‘white nationalist’ argument”, before continuing to use Western Man as this chapter’s protagonist.23 It beggars belief, when a Google search shows the clear origin of the phrase (as does the knowyourmeme page24), that he benignly chose it as the call-to-action for his chapter on the nation’s “ethno-genesis”, and as an expression of a central theme of his theory.
Despite the evidence, and after Achord admitted to being the account holder, Wolfe claimed that he did not remember seeing these posts, that he did not know it was Achord’s account, nor did Achord ever confirm to him that it was his.25 The day after Roberts published his evidence, Douglas Wilson, the pastor behind Canon Press, who published The Case for Christian Nationalism, ran cover for Wolfe in a blog post, sardonically titled, My Part in a Delightful Little Proxy Row, where he chose to focus on Roberts’s probable motive to impugn Wolfe, whose book had just been published, more than Achord.26 To my knowledge, he has yet to address any of the actual evidence that Wolfe likely knew the account was his co-host’s. On March 1, 2023, Wolfe announced on Twitter that their podcast, Ars Politica, would be returning.27 Listings for the podcast show only Wolfe as a host.
I see no core ideological disagreements between what Wolfe promotes, in his book, on social media, and through his articles, and the thoughts presented by his podcast co-host on his anonymous Twitter and Facebook accounts. Wolfe publicly disavowed Achord’s racism after he admitted to it, but the philosophy of nation presented in his book would in no way be disagreed with or considered too light-handed in the worldview of “Tulius Aadland”. Wolfe is far more reserved and coded in his language, but so was Thomas Achord in his public discourse. Two steps forward into a “community of blood” and one step back towards “culture” still ultimately leads you to the ethno-state.
Next:
Stephen Wolfe, The Case for Christian Nationalism (Moscow, Idaho: Canon Press, 2022), 169.
Wolfe has accused Joel Berry, a writer for the Babylon Bee, of harboring this sentiment, because he pointed out that Western Civilization began in the Mediterranean and not Northern Europe.
Stephen Wolfe, 169.
Ibid., 169.
Ibid., 170.
Ibid., 170.
Ibid., 170.
Ibid., 170.
Ibid., 171.
Stephen Wolfe and 2022, “An Unhelpful Review of ‘What Are Christians For?’ By Jake Meador,” Sovereign Nations (blog), March 2, 2022, https://sovereignnations.com/2022/03/02/unhelpful-review-what-are-christians-for/.
Ibid., 166.
Alastair Roberts, “On Thomas Achord,” Alastair’s Adversaria (blog), November 27, 2022, https://alastairadversaria.com/2022/11/27/the-case-against-thomas-achord/.
Thomas Achord, “Thomas Achord Admits to Being Tulius Aadland in a since Deleted Medium Post,” Medium (blog), November 28, 2022, https://web.archive.org/web/20221128221320/https://medium.com/@thomasachord/from-the-start-of-this-controversy-i-have-tried-to-find-the-truth-of-the-matter-and-i-have-an-e18b7e6f560e.
Stephen Wolfe, 119.
“Which Way, Western Man?,” Know Your Meme, August 13, 2021, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/which-way-western-man.
From the website: “Which Way, Western Man?, also misquoted Which Way, White Man?, is a catchphrase originating from the name of a 1978 book by white nationalist author William Gayley Simpson.”
Douglas Wilson, “My Part in a Delightful Little Proxy Row,” Blog & Mablog (blog), November 28, 2022, https://dougwils.com/books-and-culture/s7-engaging-the-culture/my-part-in-a-delightful-little-proxy-war.html.
