Blood and Politics, published this May, is a history of “White nationalist” political activity between 1974 and 2004 by Leonard Zeskind, an anti-racist writer and activist who has monitored White political groups since the 1970s.  The book consists of a chronologically ordered series of chapters on phenomena including Willis Carto‘s Liberty Lobby, William Pierce‘s National Alliance, David Duke‘s campaigns, Klan groups, Holocaust deniers, survivalists, Christian Identity adherents, Aryan Nations, White separatist compounds, bank robberies and murders by White criminal conspiracies, the Populist Party,skinheads, Pat Buchanan‘s campaigns, Ruby Ridge, Waco, White power music, militias, common law courts, American Renaissance, The Bell Curve, the Oklahoma City bombing trials, the Council of Conservative Citizens, Sam Francis, and 9/11.

While it may be unfair of Zeskind to lump these diverse phenomena into a unitary “White nationalist movement,” one can avoid quibbling about terminology by simply assuming, as I will in this review, that by “white nationalist” Zeskind means a White who identifies in a positive manner as White, or any Jewish or White proponent of the reality and importance of IQ .

Zeskind places White nationalists along a spectrum between “mainstreamers” and “vanguardists.”  Mainstreamers, exemplified by Willis Carto and his Liberty Lobby, believe that a majority of Whites can be convinced to support their cause. They participate in the political process and try to develop messages that resonate with a wide audience.  Vanguardists, exemplified by William Pierce and his National Alliance, seek “a few good men,” a small “vanguard” of energetic revolutionaries who do not care if the public hates them.

Zeskind’s account makes clear that not all White nationalists are of one mind. Some are atheists, while others are Christian Identity adherents; some question the Holocaust, while others do not; some detest Neo-Nazis, while others idolize Hitler; some favor criminality and revolutionary violence, while others advocate political solutions.

Despite these differences, Zeskind shows, there is also a great deal of ideological overlap among the segments of the movement.  White nationalists who are otherwise political opponents will agree that Jews have disproportionate control over the media, or that David Duke’s political campaigns were a positive development.

Zeskind also shows that individuals in one segment of the movement often have connections to individuals in other segments of the movement.  For example, he points out that Jared Taylor, whose American Renaissance conferences welcome Jews, is a close friend of Mark Weber, who runs the Institute for Historical Review, a Holocaust revisionist organization.  Zeskind also describes how Willis Carto (a mainstreamer), William Pierce (a vanguardist), and Tom Metzger (a Klan leader) all tried to develop connections to the White power music scene, despite having little in common with the fans of the music. Within the network of connections among individuals in the White nationalist movement Zeskind describes, Willis Carto and William Pierce were major hubs, while other individuals, such as Sam Dickson, Bo Gritz, and Louis Beam, appeared as recurring characters in a variety of significant events.

Not surprisingly, Zeskind’s point of view is firmly grounded in the conventional wisdom of the political left.  His commentary reveals that he considers the following propositions to be firmly established:

1) The idea that the Jews “control the media” is plain nonsense.

2) The media is more than willing to give White nationalists a voice. Therefore, it is not the media that marginalizes White nationalists; rather, White nationalists marginalize themselves by saying crazy things.

3) The history of the United States is a story of progress from slavery to Jim Crow to the civil rights movement to an ideal realization of the principle that all people are created equal.

4) The civil rights movement was a product of the genius of Black people. (Zeskind knows this from first-hand experience; though he is Jewish, he has been a “life time member of the NAACP”.)

5) The relative material and occupational advantages enjoyed by White people are a product of historical inertia and the “prerogatives of white skin.”

6) Minorities who organize along racial lines are merely seeking equal rights, while Whites who organize as Whites see politics as a “zero sum game” in which minority progress toward equal rights harms Whites.

Nevertheless, Zeskind’s book is interesting because it departs from the conventional wisdom in a number of ways.  When he began writing the book in the 1990s, the working title was “Hate Mongers,” but around 1996, Zeskind says, he “abandoned the usual discourse with which this topic is discussed.  The so-called paranoid style, scapegoating and other such ideas simply did not fit the facts as they presented themselves.”

For instance, Zeskind provides abundant evidence that White nationalist activity is not the result of stupidity.  He is clearly impressed by the intelligence of individuals like William Pierce, who was a physics professor before he was a vanguardist.  He notes that Sam Francis, who was formerly a Washington Timescolumnist, “demonstrated a keen grasp” of Antonio Gramsci‘s idea of “ideological hegemony.”

Moreover, Zeskind does not beat up on White nationalists for lacking credentials.  He explains that Jared Taylor, founder of American Renaissance, was raised in Japan and graduated from Yale.  Zeskind tells the story of Eveyln Rich, a woman who wrote her PhD dissertation on the Klan while supplying information about Klan activities to anti-racist watchdog organizations.  Though she “grasped the subject of her inquiry like few others” and was later active in opposing David Duke, “[a]t some point Evelyn Rich must have dropped any scholarly distance she had from white nationalists” because she married Jared Taylor.

In contrast to liberals who assume that occasional acts of violence are the only threat posed by White nationalists, Zeskind argues that White nationalism is a serious threat because the mainstreaming wing of the movement, led by politicians, lawyers and PhDs, is capable of having an effect on mainstream politics.

For example, he argues that David Duke’s political campaigns, while unsuccessful, awakened a constituency concerned with White dispossession and thereby “opened the door” for Patrick Buchanan, a relatively mainstream figure, to bring Duke’s political issues into the Republican party.  Zeskind quotes Buchanan:

The way to do battle with David Duke is not to go ballistic because Duke, as a teenager, paraded around in a Nazi costume to protest William Kunstler during Vietnam, or to shout to the heavens that Duke had the same phone number last year as the Ku Klux Klan.  Everybody in Metairie [Duke’s district] knew that.  The way to deal with Mr. Duke is the way the GOP dealt with the more formidable challenge of George Wallace.  Take a hard look at Duke’s portfolio of winning issues; and expropriate those not in conflict with GOP principles.

Buchanan went on to win the New Hampshire primary in 1996 and to take over Ross Perot‘s Reform Party in 2000.

Zeskind also departs from conventional wisdom in explaining White voter behavior.  He rejects the idea that White voters voted for Proposition 187, an anti-immigrant ballot initiative in California, because they were opposed to illegal as opposed to legal immigration, or because they used immigrants as a scapegoat for the bad economy.  He explains that statistical analysis of the polling data showed only a slight correlation between voting for Proposition 187 and income level, education level, or financial worries.  There was a strong correlation, however, between a person’s likelihood of voting for Proposition 187 and the percentage of immigrants in the person’s neighborhood.  The distinction between legal and illegal immigrants did not matter to White voters.  What did matter was race and culture.

The David Duke campaigns demonstrated the same phenomenon.  The polling data showed that White voters were likely to vote against David Duke if the percentage of Black people in the neighborhood was small, but as the percentage of Black residents increased, the likelihood of voting for David Duke increased.  After carefully analyzing why Duke received the support he did, Zeskind quotes with approval a study that concluded, “Supporters in part saw Duke as a voice for whites, in the same sense that minorities have spokespersons.”  (Incidentally, that is exactly what David Duke says.)

Zeskind concludes that White nationalism is on the rise.  He argues that the end of the Cold War created a vacuum in American identity that many White people filled with an ethnic identity.  White nationalists, he says, are “committed to overturning American society rather than seeking to return it to some previous era.”  By possessing “significant resources” and giving voice and coherence to “grievances real and imagined,” White nationalists over the past three decades have succeeded in creating an “opposition to the status quo that will not go away in the near future,” Zeskind concludes.

Zeskind has condensed into narrative form a great deal of information about different White nationalist political phenomena, the overlaps among the segments, and the social connections among the individuals involved.  Reading Zeskind’s history, it was hard for me to keep straight in my head all of the meetings that took place in back woods compounds and hotel conference rooms, the large cast of recurring characters, the spiteful intra- and inter-organizational disputes, and other details that Zeskind recounts in 542 pages and supports with 77 pages of endnotes.

I created the figure below to represent visually the complexity of what Blood and Politics describes.  The overlapping colored circles constitute a Venn diagramof the White nationalist ideologies that Zeskind describes.  The dots represent individuals who hold particular combinations of views, and the lines represent social connections among the individuals.  The dots and lines in my figure are random, and the collection of ideologies is not complete, but the messy network conveys a schematic image of the world Zeskind describes: a complicated social network of individuals who inhabit different points in ideological space — what one reviewer on the dust-jacket called “a sprawling and shadowy world of racist leaders and their communities.”

Many of Zeskind’s readers will think this type of evidence proves that mainstreamers are just as dangerous as vanguardists.  But does it really show anything?  So what if every individual in the Venn circle of White nationalism, including Bell Curve author Richard Herrnstein, is connected to Timothy McVeigh by only a few degrees of separation?  So what if every White nationalist ideology, even one as tame as Pat Buchanan’s paleoconservatism, is connected by a series of overlapping ideologies to “RAHOWA” (Racial Holy War)?

Whenever there is some overlap between two ideologies, adherents of each are likely to develop a connection (one-way or two-way) on the basis of common understandings.  For example, Vanguard News Network, a web site that opposes Jews, immigration, and miscegenation (among many other things), currently has a link to a blog post by Bradley Smith, whose modus operandi is publishing advertisements in college newspapers asking for proof of Auschwitz gas chambers.  Given that Smith, a White man from Los Angeles, is married to a Mexican woman and lives south of the border, Vanguard News Network probably considers him a “race traitor,” but it promotes his work anyway.  Connections exist everywhere, but their significance is limited.

If I investigated, a la Zeskind, the social networks and political phenomena of the political left, perhaps my findings could be reduced to a diagram like the following:

Maybe George Soros plays the role of Willis Carto for the left.  Perhaps everyone on the left is only one or two degrees of separation away from such undesirables as 9/11 conspiracy theorists, who like to attend ACLU events, or leftist bomb-planters like Bill Ayers, who glom on to Barack Obama.  Liberals would think this kind of political connection-mapping is unimportant to understanding the left as a political movement.  So why does Zeskind want the left to understand White nationalists in this manner?

Zeskind actually does not want his readers to understand White nationalism; he wants his readers to defeat White nationalists politically.  For that reason, he provides details about the sneaky ways Willis Carto structured his non-profit corporations, but rarely allows his subjects to speak a complete thought. Readers are left with the impression that White nationalist ideas are mere instrumentalities of a political movement motivated by “prerational thoughts and feelings.”  Thus, the weapons to use against the White nationalists must be political, not intellectual.

Collecting seemingly trivial details about the social networks of White nationalists is necessary for building up ammunition for an important political weapon: guilt by association.  If an up-and-coming politician makes the mistake of attending a dinner where one of the speakers suggests that Jews control the media, his or her attendance will be duly noted in the anti-racist watchdogs’ databases.  Then, some time in the future, the politician will be accused of anti-Semitism, he will deny it, and the watchdogs will produce the factoid as rebuttal evidence.

Such ‘gotcha moments’ might not win political battles, but the aggregate effect of the politics of guilt by association is to quarantine White nationalist ideas. Respectable conservative politicians develop a fear of contracting a permanent case of political cooties by coming within earshot of anyone who talks about Jews having too much power or Blacks committing too many crimes.  As a result, White nationalist political organizations fail to attract the cultural indicia of legitimacy, and the media treats them as illegitimate.

Zeskind is concerned that White nationalist ideas will gain legitimacy by piggybacking on the goodwill of legitimate political institutions.  This can happen when legitimate institutions co-opt White nationalist political issues, as the Republican Party did by letting Pat Buchanan deliver his “Culture War” speechat the 1992 convention.  This can also happen when White nationalists infiltrate a legitimate institution, as when Pat Buchanan took over the Reform Party in 2000, or, as Zeskind warned recently, when Stormfront members decide to leaflet at libertarian Tea Parties.  By ringing alarm bells about the political activities of the mainstreaming end of the White nationalist spectrum, Zeskind helps to ensure that the boundary of the quarantine is drawn wide: not just around attention-getters like Kluxers and Neo-Nazis, not just around Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, but around Pat Buchanan and Ezola Foster (and maybe even the Tea Parties).

There are risks to Zeskind’s approach.  By honestly admitting that the rhetoric of White nationalists as “haters” and “extremists” does not fit the facts, Zeskind undermines the popular stereotype, inculcated as early as elementary school, that Whites who organize as Whites are psychopaths seething with “hate.” Zeskind does not need this silly stereotype in order to believe that White nationalists are wrong; he is immune to their ideas because he has an unshakeable faith in egalitarianism and the falsity of all forms of “anti-Semitism.” But when ordinary, well-meaning White people realize the “hater” stereotype is a sham and that mainstreaming White nationalists are people just like themselves, will they stop and listen?  If they do, Zeskind can only hope that their faith is as strong as his.  In the course of trying to warn people not to underestimate the White nationalist threat, Zeskind might be helping to destroy a useful stereotype that, perhaps more than anything else, prevents ordinary White people from becoming apostates like Evelyn Rich.

Do I recommend this book?  Yes.  It is long but highly readable.  It is full of facts and stories, with a minimum of commentary; only rarely does Zeskind depart from a dispassionate perspective.  The book can be read in the intended fashion as a history of White nationalist political phenomena, but it can also be read as an account of experiments in creating a self-sustaining White culture in the midst of a hostile majority culture.  Occidental Observer readers may find it interesting to think about which strategies worked, which failed, and why.

Some of these experiments relate to Kevin MacDonald’s question, “Can the Jewish Model Help the West Survive?”  The Christian Identity religion, for example, considers Whites to be the real chosen people.  Some groups have promoted a White Zionism of sorts, arguing for the creation of a White homeland in the northwest United States.

Many of the experiments will seem strange, but it is important to remember that designing a successful political message is entirely different from constructing a logical intellectual argument.  Consider, for example, what constitutes a successful political message for the left: the 2008 “Yes We Can” Barack Obama promotional video, which featured a multicultural cast of celebrities incanting selected phrases of an otherwise uninspiring Obama campaign speech, punctuated by “Yes we can” in English, Spanish, Hebrew, and American Sign Language.  In just three weeks, this dumb yet very poignant video was downloaded 26 million times.  Thus, if many of the unsuccessful political stunts attempted by White nationalists in the past do not seem to make sense, consider that they might not have made sense even if they were successful.

There is no way to be certain about what kinds of White cultural experiments will succeed in outcompeting the culture of Western suicide.  What is more certain, however, is that one or more of them will succeed — or at least that is the impression I have after reading Blood and Politics.  Zeskind argues:

[W]hite nationalists consistently misunderstand the larger world around them.  A significant number of White people remain determined to live and live happily in a multiracial, multicultural United States.  And they do not regard themselves as “race traitors.”

Fair enough.  But as Zeskind shows with his analysis of David Duke and Proposition 187 voting patterns, these White people who are happy with “a multiracial, multicultural United States” tend to live in relatively homogeneous White communities.  As Zeskind further shows, as the percentage of non-Whites in the community increases, White people become less happy with the “multiracial, multicultural” community closing in around them, and start to vote for their race and culture.  What has happened to some neighborhoods in past decades is happening to the entire United States this century.  Thus, while the term “race traitor” might never enter their vocabulary, Whites in the future are likely find meaning in a culture and politics of Western survival, especially if the mainstream media follows Zeskind in admitting that the vocabulary of “haters” and “extremists” does not describe the reality of White nationalism.

Jonathan Pyle (email him) is a lawyer in Philadelphia.

The suicide of the West is far more than a figure of speech. All Western societies — and only Western societies — are voluntarily allowing mass immigration of peoples who are not ethnically connected to historical Europe. Not only are they allowing massive non-White immigration, it is being promoted as fulfilling the lofty ethical goal of increasing ethnic diversity rather than any practical goal such as the needs of the labor force.  What this means in the long run is that Europe will cease to be Europe, not only culturally, but also genetically.

There are several ways that one might think about this phenomenon, but certainly a compelling one is to think in terms of Frank Salter’s concept of ethnic genetic interests. EGI is of fundamental importance for ethnic and racial nationalism, and for the preservation of European-derived peoples because it provides a powerful intellectual  counterargument to those on the left who deny the reality of race.

In this article I first summarize the basic idea of EGI (see also here) and then review a Mankind Quarterly article by Dr. Salter which implies that the reasons that EGI was not discovered sooner were mainly obfuscation by the political left.

Salter’s argument is that all people have reproductive interests — ethnic genetic interests — in the continuity of their ethny or race. Human groups have genetic differences because they were isolated from each other for thousands of years. The result is that we share many more genes with people in our ethnic group than people from different ethnic groups.

For example, a grandfather has about 12.5% more genetic overlap with his grandchild than with a person taken at random from his ethnic group; similarly, I have about 12.5% more genetic overlap with a person taken at random from within my ethnic group compared to a randomly chosen person from outside my ethnic group. And of course there is a gradient of genetic similarity among ethnic groups: Swedes are more closely related to Poles than they are to sub-Saharan Africans

The result is that humans have an enormous genetic interest in their ethnic groups. Just as with genealogical kinship where people with larger families have a higher inclusive fitness, this genetic interest becomes enormous because it is tied to the actual number of ethnic group members which, in the modern world, can total in the millions, or, I suppose billions, in the case of the Chinese.

This is an explosive argument because it implies that ethnic competition is rational in a Darwinian sense. That is, it is rational for an ethnic group to retain control over a territory because allowing people from other ethnic groups to immigrate constitutes a genetic loss to those who were already there.

But of course, this is exactly what the cultural left does not want to hear. Mass immigration into Western societies has been a project of the cultural left for many decades now, culminating in the United States in the watershed immigration law of 1965. Other Western societies went in a similar direction around the same time.

Salter’s argument is basic Darwinism quantified. Since the mathematics of natural selection have been well understood at least since the late 1970s, one would think that evolutionists would accept the rationality of ethnic competition. We can imagine Harvard professors testifying before Congress intoning that immigration is a genetic disaster for receiving countries and that allowing mass immigration would be the height of folly. Allowing mass immigration would be entirely analogous to a situation in nature where a population of a territorial species ceased defending its space against invaders. Zoologists would scratch their heads and wonder what caused such pathological behavior — behavior that is akin to suicide or self-mutilation.

Instead, we have Harvard professors like Richard Lewontin and Steven Pinker continuing to question even the biological reality of family ties, much less racial ties.

Yet, until formally stated by Dr. Salter, the fact is that there had been no discussion of EGI in the scientific literature. And even today, there are some who would deny the importance of, or even the existence of (!), EGI.  Dr. Salter’s Mankind Quarterly article is an attempt to dissect the reasons for the long and continuing obstruction of the EGI concept.

Salter attempts to answer that “why?” The history of all modern thinking in this area begins withWilliam D. Hamilton, the brilliant population geneticist, and his theory of kin selection. In his 1964 papers Hamilton thought of kin as having genes that were “identical by descent.” For example, you and your brother share about half your genes because you received them directly from your mother and father — that is, the genes you have descended from the same mother and father, so they are identical by descent.  

Hamilton’s idea was that because you shared genes identical by descent you would be more likely to help your brother. Famously, from the standpoint of the genes, it really didn’t matter if you had a child or helped your brother have two additional children. It was all the same genetically. Because your brother on average shares half your genes, there would be the same number of genes “identical by descent” in the next generation whether you fathered one child or let your brother do the heavy lifting of fathering two.

Hamilton’s next big breakthrough was when he realized that it didn’t really matter if the genes came from the same parents and were therefore identical by descent. All that mattered was that the genes were identical — period. Instead of identical by descent, it was enough that they were “identical by state” — that they were in fact the same genes.  This implies that ethnic groups really are like extended families. Why? Because if the gene sequences are exactly the same, it really doesn’t matter how the identity was established.

Thus, “identity by state” means that the gene sequences are the same — the “state” of the sequences is the same — even though there is no direct and recent genealogical relationship between the individuals in question.  Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones are unrelated, yet they share the same exact gene sequence. Perhaps they share the same gene sequence because they belong to the same ethnic group. Other ethnic groups are much less likely to have the gene sequences that Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones have.

To summarize: Shared genes are shared genes and it does not really matter how and why the genes are shared.  And this in turn implies that people have an interest in preserving their entire ethnic group, not just their family, as the original version of kin selection implied.

This evolutionary logic implies that people should not limit themselves to struggling to better themselves within the group (family or ethnic group) but also work to defend the group as a whole in its competition with other groups. In 1979 Henry Harpending made the final step by quantifying how helping your own ethnic group could be adaptive because it would improve the fortunes of the entire group in competition with other groups.

The moral is that it would make biological sense for a person with no biological relatives to devote himself to the good of this ethnic group. In fact, armed with that logic, a White person who sacrificed his life to prevent the 1965 immigration law from being enacted would have behaved in a very biologically adaptive manner. He would have increased his biological fitness dramatically more by helping his race accomplish an immigration cutoff than by having children of his own.

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So why didn’t this evolutionary logic take hold among academics and in the popular media? The first “problem” Salter identifies is “disciplinary boundaries,” in which academics are narrowly focused in their one field and they do not look beyond that more broadly. Salter criticizes Cavalli-Sforza:

The question remains as to why Cavalli did not explore the theoretical potential of inclusive fitness theory applied to whole populations after the 1970s. … Based on his best known publications, one would never guess that parents had a genetic interest in their children, let alone in their ethnies. The majority of Cavalli’s research dealt with matters not impinging on altruism, such as the history of human migration. Yet he also discussed social issues, including those contingent on ethnicity and race, from Darwinian perspective…. He denied the genetic reality of these categories, and did not discuss the possible adaptiveness of ethnocentrism.

Salter is being a bit too charitable I think in postulating “disciplinary boundaries” as an explanation here. Isn’t it possible that these scientists did not explore, or recognize, the reality and importance of ethnic kinship simply because the implications of this work were politically unacceptable? After all, it certainly does not fit with the leftist zeitgeist to conclude that ethnic genetic differences are real and these differences make ethnic conflict entirely rational from a Darwinian point of view.

Then there is the issue, popularized by Richard Lewontin, that “there is more variation within groups than between groups; therefore, race does not exist.”  More than any other argument, this one by Lewontin had a huge influence. One could almost guarantee that everyone down to the lowliest graduate student would be able to recite it pretty much verbatim.

This argument has been refuted in a number of places, most notably by Dr. A.W.F. Edwards. In addition, Salter shows that within-family genetic variation is roughly three times that of between-family variation; thus, if we were to follow Lewontin’s racial analogy, we would have to conclude that is there no such thing as family!

Given Lewontin’s long association with the political left, it would seem that perhaps politics is more important at this point than “disciplinary boundaries,” and one can consider the ethnic interests of certain scientists as well. Indeed, Lewontin is one of the cast of scoundrels in Chapter 2 of Kevin MacDonald’s The Culture of Critique which discusses the role of Jewish Marxist intellectuals in vitiating biological views in the social sciences. As E. O. Wilson wrote of him, “By adopting a narrow criterion of publishable research, Lewontin freed himself to pursue a political agenda unencumbered by science.”

Salter spends much time deconstructing the ideas of Richard Dawkins — the darling of the media when it comes to presenting evolutionary biology to the public. Salter’s piece-by-piece demolition of Dawkins (whose website is labeled “a clear-thinking oasis”[!]) is too comprehensive to be covered in detail here. Salter recounts Dawkins flip-flopping on the question of “identical by descent/identical by state” as well as his confusion over the work of Hamilton and his resistance to Hamilton’s 1971 and 1975 reformulations. Salter reminds us of a typical Dawkins quote in which Dawkins states — against all reason — that kin selection applies only to “immediate close family” and not to those who “happen to be the same color as you” — as if all the genetic differences between ethnies conflate to the single trait of skin color, and as if the differences between family and ethny are somehow mystically essential, and not one merely of degree.

Salter also shows how, despite Dawkins’ obsession in pointing out others’ “misunderstandings of kin selection,” Dawkins himself makes the basic error of confusing helping one’s own ethnic group (which makes excellent sense) with universal altruism (which makes no sense at all). Universal altruism is of course the creed of racial liberals. The reality is that we live in a remarkably diverse human world of competing ethnies, in which gradients of distinctive genetic information do indeed constitute important interests at the group level.  This fact cannot be responsibly evaded.

Salter points out that given Dawkins’ high reputation and easy access to the media, his lack of interest in ethnic kinship and his muddled analysis of ethnic genetic interests and group kinship competition have contributed to holding back this field of study.

Salter finishes by discussing what I believe the main factor in the resistance of academia to honest analysis of ethnic kinship: leftist political preferences. Salter recounts the politicization of biology and sociobiology and the harsh criticism directed toward realistic scholars in these fields. He also notes that the concept of ethnic genetic interests does not fit well with the ideas of academic elites in the West: Since the 1960s the left has been ascendant in expressing its values in academic discourse, including mainstream journals.

Ignoring or underplaying ethnic kinship accorded with the political orientation of the Anglo-American academic elite, which led and still leads discourse in evolutionary biology … Highly individualist thinkers as well as those with a universalist vision of society tend to overlook the reality of solidary groups of various kinds, or treat them as inconvenient or irksome obstacles to the ideal society.

And of course, this filtered down to the popular media to become a pillar of the anti-White intellectual left.

I think that Salter could have expanded this section into the preceding parts of his essay, since one can strongly suspect that the alleged “disciplinary boundaries” and “confusions and misinterpretations of Dawkins” possibly have a political basis.  Is it merely a coincidence that all of these scholars who, according to Salter, have contributed to holding back the advance of biopolitical analysis, are individuals who, in whatever public comments they’ve made on the subject, fall, generally speaking, into the group of “racial liberals?” These people believe that “race has no real biological validity” and that any expression of White racial consciousness constitutes racism.

Obviously, these are exactly the people who would strongly disagree with the Salter’s EGI thesis and its many implications. It seems quite reasonable then to suppose that the obstruction of EGI has always been primarily motivated by political considerations.

Ted Sallis (email him) writes on scientific issues.