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By David Futrelle
Alt-Right Nazis love calling conservative pundit David French a “cuck.” In part, that’s because alt-rightists love calling everyone they hate a cuck, and French — a never-Trumper who’s openly criticized the alt-right — is the sort of “cuckservative” that alt-rightists especially love to hate.
But a large part of the reason they so relish attaching this particular epithet to French– which they’ve been doing for years now — is that he and his wife have an adopted daughter from Ethiopia, making his family an multiracial one. In alt-right eyes, this makes French a “race cuck.”
James Poulos — executive editor of The American Mind, a publication of the right-wing Claremont Institute — evidently also likes to call David French a “cuck.” But apparently he felt that the case for French’s alleged cuckoldry lacked a certain intellectual rigor. And so he recently devoted 1600 words in The American Mind to a rambling, quasi-Nietzschean essay on French’s supposed “cuckery” and, more broadly, on the alleged changes in society that allegedly make this insult so allegedly resonant. The “geneology of cuckery,” he calls it.
The essay is, to put it plainly, a huge mess; Poulos buries whatever points he’s trying to make beneath a virtual avalanche of vague buzzwords. I’ve read the piece through three times now and only barely understand what he’s trying, and mostly failing, to say. Here’s a rather typical passage:
But the charge of cuckery, leveled against Christians like French, has to do with the perceived untenableness today of staking out a middle position between the Benedict Option of evacuating from fronts collapsing in the culture war and the yet-to-be-named option of reasserting powerful constitutional authority for localities to resist and reject colonization by the revolutionary vanguard of institutionalized wokeness.
That’s all one sentence, by the way. The whole piece is like this. Here’s Poulos trying to argue that there are deep cultural changes underlying the sudden popularity of the “cuck” insult:
The Nordlingerians do not grasp that the rise of the cuck charge is the product of changes in our social and psychological environment that supervene upon, and are independent of, ideological phenomena.
In case you’re wondering what, specifically, these “changes in our social and psychological environment” are, he mentions two: ubiquitous porn and, er, invisible robots.
This alien invasion of invisible robots our technologists have touched off makes us feel as if our own creation has betrayed us, because the order of machine memory obsolesces the whole social structure of imagineering that first twinkled into being during the Enlightenment and really took off with the advent of electricity.
I think he’s still mad because Google once apparently tagged an anti-multicultural polemic from The American Thinker as racist.
Speaking of racism: Poulos manages to avoid mentioning the outright racism behind most alt-right attacks on French, and he himself says nothing about French’s adopted daughter. But racist worries about supposed “white genocide” seem to underlie many of the arguments that Poulos shows sympathy for in his piece.
The metaphor of cuckoldry is selected to the exclusion of all others because nothing else quite as effectively sharpens the charge that your obsession with the details of honor and principle has in fact become fatally abstract: you are being kicked out of your own house by a rival power actively working to take away everything that is yours, your children included. You are becoming the end of your line, forever, in every respect. Yet you won’t even evacuate from your breached defenses before it’s too late. Only the heights of spiritual snobbery can explain such a choice.
So, don’t adopt children of another race, I guess? If that is indeed the implicit message (or one of the implicit messages) of this passage, it means that Poulos has managed to stretch out the “race cuck” epithet from two to 1600 words.
This whole weird episode suggests to me that the walls between those like Poulos who warn against the alleged dangers of “multiculutralism” and those who shout about “white genocide” are indeed thin — and porous.
H/T — Thanks to Twitter’s @ClenchedFisk, whose tweet on the subject led me to this essay.
Well, they’re, you know, invisible.
But there’s one in every corner.
They’re the ones who keep moving your keys and glasses and stuff….
@Gaebolga:
Are you sure that’s not the ugliness men?
@BTD
I was wondering that. Can’t these trolls even keep their messaging straight? Or is “The Benedict Option” like the hipster/religious term for “Going Galt.”
And if the “untenableness” is only “perceived” that means it’s feelings instead of FACTS and LOGIC, doesn’t it? (Also, the right word is untenability, just to make this pompous arse look even sillier.)
Actually, that the alt-right came up with “cuck” (from “cuckolded”, of course) as an insult is very, very psychologically revealing. More than they know, or wanted to be.
They couldn’t have hown more plainly how they unconsciously see themselves. And, that’s why so much violent behavior to get themselves out of their perceived cuckoldry.
@Gaebolga
Now I’m just annoyed with the invisible robots. Maybe this guy’s right that the robots are ruining civilization. /s
@Garnetstar
The whole Men’s Rights/alt-right reactionary movement has very clear sexual insecurities. I don’t really find “cuck” to be a strong insult. If someone calls me a cuck, it’s not going to affect me. Of course, the alt-right is more likely to call me a k**e, and that is actually an insult.
My favorite alt-right insult is “SJW” because it’s the ultimate self-own. If you are admitting that social justice is your enemy, you’ve basically admitted you’re the bad guy. Also, I find it odd that they think I should be insulted to be called a social justice warrior. I take it as a compliment.
As that creepy American Mind article shows, the alt-right hate for David French stems from this debate he recently had with Sohrab Ahmari at Catholic University. Ahmari, a recent convert to Catholicism, basically wants to go full theocracy whereas French is like “whoa, you’re gonna scare the straights talking like that,” hence the references to Dreher’s “Benedict Option” which is running away and hiding from broader societal change in some kind of cloistered enclave as the Benedictines do.
I gotta marvel at this, though:
That’s an amazing bit of appropriating the language of oppression, as if they’re indigenous peoples subjected to residential schools or forced relocation. No, they’re just finding it difficult to adapt to a pluralistic hypercapitalist society. Marx himself said capitalism destroys traditions, and that includes Catholicism. But I’m willing to bet dollars to donuts that the issues this Poulos guy has is with the pluralism rather than the capitalism.
@Naglfar
Sexual insecurity is definitely the biggest chunk of what fuels Nazis and analogues, but it is all tied to identity, their own expectations and their perceived roles in society.
The entire identity of the western man was conceived on to the notion that White women are their property, that POC are subhuman, intellectually and morally inferior, that they alone are self-sufficient and independent, and that they were appointed by god to rule the world.
Yet these past few decades seem to have thrown a wrench into that narrative, as the fight for equality has chipped into the institutions that maintained that social “order” bit by bit. And they fought each of these changes step by step.
But I suppose the whole notion of women’s liberation was especially jarring for them, because it is their last “stronghold” and the one and only place were they can maintain the narrative of being “self-sufficient”.
Now, not only are they failing to put food on the table, thereby damaging their perceived role of “bread-winners”, but women are turning away from their toxic personalities. And that last one is probably particularly vexing for them. Not only because they are losing their last “ally” in White supremacy, but because they always operated under the false belief that all the evil and wrong they could have ever committed was for a noble purpose: protecting White women. They played the role tragic hero that sacrifices himself for his family. Misunderstood martyrs in their own little play.
Without that last justification, their actions just turn into evil without a purpose, and that is not an idea they are willing to contend with. So they have to pin the blame on everybody else for failing to fulfill their own roles, which in turn makes the performance of theirs impossible to hold up.
Without someone to play the villain, you can’t exactly perform your role as the tragic hero. And without someone willing to play your inferior, you can’t play the superior.
@ Katamount:
I believe the TERFs have recently begun doing that as well, accusing trans women of “colonizing femininity.” All part of the “Reverse Victim and Oppressor” tactic I guess.
Also, obsolesce is not a valid verb form of the word obsolete.
I thought Poulos was a garden-variety Glibertarian, but he seems to have gone full alt-right (with a not so small a dose of cocaine or speed, IMO).
Good for him, I guess? I can’t imagine the “serious” conservatives at Claremont want their place to basically become Breitbart or The Federalist, but alas.
@moon custafer
They did. They may claim that they don’t but no one hates gender non conformity like terfs. From my experience they also really hate when people (especially cis women) like sexual activities they don’t like. Almost all of the “feminist” that like to give me shit online for liking bdsm are also terfs. They really hate if you want to live your life in ways they don’t approve of.
…which is pretty much why they sound like garden variety fundies trying to dress up their prejudices with more respectable language (in this case, the language of feminism).
Some people seem to have a really hard time grasping that feminism is about expanding social options for everybody.
…although in fairness, I suppose a number of conservatives actually do understand that, they just don’t think it’s a good thing….
@Lainy
Of course they hate nonconformity. It subverts the patriarchy, which TERFs pretend to oppose but actually reinforce. ContraPoints (yes I know she’s involved in a scandal, I am not agreeing with what she said otherwise) shared this a while ago about her experiences with TERFs and nonconformity.
@Gaebolga
They don’t want people to have choices and freedom. They know that LGBTQ rights doesn’t mean less rights for cishet people. They know feminism doesn’t mean less rights for men. They just hate anything that breaks their system and goes outside their accepted norms.
Though I do know that a lot of conservatives also oppose feminism because they want to be able to assault and harass women and not face repercussions.
Soooo many Glibertarians threw away all their pretense at egalitarianism the instant there was a big enough goose stepping mob to join. In their hearts, they just know they’re all ubermenshen.
O/T, but Zoë Quinn’s Twitter is back up with a bit more to say about the whole thing. Anita’s Twitter is still up but she hasn’t tweeted since August 31. They survived this wave of harassment, which looks to be dying down, but it never really ends and it’s just a matter of time before more internet misogynists find a new pretense under which to attack.
I find it a little bit interesting that one of the hashtags started against Zoë, #ZoeyQuinnBodyCount, spells their name wrong. Not sure if this is deliberate (why?) or accidental, but it just looks like egg on the GamerGaters’ shirts.
You write this kind of crapola when you want to convince people of something that would be self-evidently stupid if you wrote it in clear simple language. The point is to intimidate people with big words and convoluted sentence structure into fearing that they will be revealed as imbeciles if they dare to disagree with such obviously profound “thinking.” The Right in the US (and many other places) depends on the idea that being melanin-deficient is an exceedingly precious condition which places one at an evolutionary pinnacle but also subjects one to grave danger, requiring desperate self-defense by all means fair or foul. In other words, that White People are the True Victims of Racism and in Horrible Danger of Genocide and must Fight for Their Very Survival. But when you put it that way, it’s pretty self-evidently stupid, and the idea that a white couple are endangering the white race (“race cucks”) for adopting a black child is absurd beyond words.
I regard the whole concept of race as absurd on its face, but put that aside for a moment. Every higher plant or animal relies on sexual reproduction, and the reason for that is that it facilitates genetic diversity, which makes a species more adaptable and more able to survive changes in the environment. The idea that “racial purity” is desirable — that one should only procreate with genetically similiar people — is in clear and obvious opposition to this principle. I recall reading one of WHTM’s Finnish commenters saying that, because of the isolation of certain areas of Finland for a number of centuries, there are several genetic disorders that are seen only in the descendants of those people. So white racism can actually cause the genetic degradation of white people. Ironic, isn’t it? I wonder if our friend Poulos has an answer to that — in plain language.
@GOSJM
Yup. One of the biggest scientific arguments against eugenics/racial separation is that in biology, genetic diversity is viewed as good and is needed for continued survival. Species with low diversity due to the founder effect or bottleneck effect tend to face problems and go extinct. Hopefully white supremacists go extinct as well.
Well. That’s certainly a lot of verbiage for Poulos to say absolutely nothing. Reminds me of a gem I heard Hannity utter on my MIL’s telly once: At the end of the day, it is what it is. Two cliches fused together to fill dead air. Wonderful.
@Katamount (secondarily @moregeekthan, because you also commented on the subject)
Aha! So that’s why it’s called the Benedict Option. Now to do some quick googling about Benedictine monks …
…
… this sounds kinda almost socialist except with a designated absolute leader, why do conservatives want this? Maybe they all plan to be sarabaites or gyrovagues? “Chapter 57 enjoins humility on the craftsmen of the monastery, and if their work is for sale, it shall be rather below than above the current trade price”– but muh Invisible Hand!!! What what what!
I guess this definitely isn’t like “going Galt” at all, that’s for sure. Dang.
@Naglfar
I also googled this scandal, because I was not familiar with it, and the second result for “ContraPoints scandal” is from the National Review which I discarded as likely to be biased (it says she is creepy and weird in the opening paragraph, so… I think I’m not wrong). Is the first result a good summary of the facts of the scandal, minus the opinion commentary around it?
@Big Titty Demon
The thing you linked is a pretty good overview of what happened. The National Review is super anti-LGBT so I’m sure their take is mired in transmisogyny and probably misrepresents the events.
TL;DR for anyone who doesn’t feel like reading it, basically what happened is Natalie tweeted something complaining about how she hates having to say her pronouns when around cis people, and a lot of people (me included) read that as putting her own convenience above the needs of non-binary and otherwise nonconforming people. As a result, there was a large Twitter backlash and she deleted her account, only for it to reappear a few days later (after that article) with a note saying that someone else would be managing it now. Interestingly, another account @realNatalieWynn has appeared, which the original account says is fake.
Edit: I read the NR article mentioned. It is shit.
She doesn’t “hate saying her pronouns,” she experiences gender dysphoria when cis people performatively make her say her pronouns when they damn well know them.
It’s hardly a comment worth the harassment and death threats she got as a result.
Rod Dreher does an entire book based on his own lack of knowledge of the fall of the Western Roman Empire, like the fact that it was already Christian, as were the Germanic tribes invading.
Even if his premise is accepted, you have an older culture (Graeco-Roman paganism) being replaced by a newer (Christianity), and some adherents of the new order move out and set up their own institutions. Nowadays we have a old order (Christianity) being replaced by a newer (secularism). This is Rod’s whole theme; taken at its word it does bot cast his fellow adherents as brave truth-facing pioneers, but puts them in the role of bitter old pagans complaining about those crude churches replacing all the old temples.
The Guardian had an article last Friday on pronouns which went into the Natalie Wynn controversy.
Grumpy wrote:
It wasn’t me but, yes, this is a thing that’s occasionally mentioned in Finnish pop science journalism. Honestly, I think this kind of mild inbreeding has been historically standard in remote rural communities everywhere, but it’s only been thoroughly studied in a few areas, such as Finland and Iceland (in part thanks to meticulous marriage records going back centuries).
With our modern high mobility and population density, I don’t think it matters for genetic diversity if people only marry similar looking people. OTOH I don’t think there’s any particular value in separation of “races” either.