From Guardian:
Jared Taylor was prominently featured in a Hillary Clinton campaign ad released ahead of her speech denouncing the “alt-right” in Reno on Thursday and “appreciates” the Democratic presidential nominee for “calling attention to the message I have for America”.
…
Asked to define what the diffuse alt-right stands for, Taylor said there were “areas of disagreement”, but that “the central element of the alt-right is the position it takes on race.”
Now here is where it gets interesting:
For Taylor, and other members of the alt-right, race is an inescapable biological fact, which has consequences. “The races are not equal and equivalent. If a nation changes demographically, its society will change,” he said.
But where does this stuff come from?
In her speech, Clinton cited the US Olympic team as an example of strength in diversity. Taylor uses it as an example of the different capacities and abilities of races. He argues that while black people are good athletes, whites and Asians have higher IQs, offering a form of the “scientific racism” that was widely discredited, and denounced by the UN after the second world war. More.
Scientific racism? Yes, but that was conventional Darwinism until World War II, and alt right appears to be a late survival.
See, for example, H. G. Wells: Popularizing Darwin, racism, and mayhem – the history you never learned in school
and
Still legal to say this about Darwinism and “scientific racism”? It’s fair to say that the reason this cannot be discussed honestly in most venues is that many progressive icons and pioneers were fuelling the scientific racism.
Oh well, some will say, everything’s changed now. Has it? What about the curious incident of Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History (2014). See: City Journal addresses the “Nicholas Wade reinvents Darwinian racism” story:
As if this isn’t enough, Wade’s penultimate chapter, “The Rise of the West,” argues that natural selection similarly helped produce European societies that were open and innovative, which enabled them to “achieve a surprising degree of dominance in many spheres.” Given the influence that multiculturalists have on today’s American campuses, it’s unlikely that Wade will be delivering any commencement address anytime soon.
Wade was way too smart for that. He retired. And in most venues, this thesis was just not discussed much, or nothing like what one would have expected of a racially charged topic.
Meanwhile, a group that sounds a great deal like the alt right, the “human biodiversity movement,” kept sending me mail for years promoting Wade’s book.
This state of affairs probably explains at least in part why most reporting on the alt right is heavy on simple denunciation (that’s expected) but vague about its origins. So it’s not very helpful.
* As David Klinghofferputs it at Evolution News & Views,
But not till reading Cathy Young’s post did I recognize that the mother lode of pseudo-conservative, pseudo-scientific racism is Richard Spencer’s AlternativeRight.com, which as she points out has been rebranded as Radix Journal, “dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of European people in the United States, and around the world.”
Here, the vein of evolutionary thinking is particularly rich. We read, “Darwinian Evolution Revolutionized the Natural Sciences. The Social Sciences Have Been Immune for Too Long.” In “What Is Identitarian Religion?,” writer “Alfred W. Clark” tells of a “long-standing ‘Trad Catholic’ I know [who] told me recently that he had left the Church. [H]is ‘conservative’ priest had become obsessed with [among other things]…denouncing evolution because it’s ‘racist’.”
– Denyse O’Leary
Follow UD News at Twitter!