The Extremists We Create

How the left and right fuel each other’s radical fringes through fear, shame, and silence.

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About the Author

Julian is a columnist for Reality’s Last Stand and a member of the Braver Angels media team. He’s also the founder of Heal the West, a Substack movement dedicated to combating illiberalism via spiritual formation and rebuilding the American community.

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Recently, Christopher Rufo reported that Lockheed Martin, the nation’s largest defense contractor, engaged in illegal discrimination against white employees. In December 2022, an employee compiled a data-driven list of workers recommended for year-end bonuses. However, higher-ups took issue with the list based on its lack of ethnic diversity. They ordered the employee to remove 18 white employees from the list and replace them with 18 minorities—a decision based solely on skin color.

Stories like this fuel the rise of the Dissident Right.

How? While the Dissident Right is a loose and diverse coalition of new-right thinkers, a central thread running through many of their arguments is fear.

When I speak with people on the Dissident Right who support white identity politics or white nationalism, the most consistent explanation they offer is that they are afraid. They see companies like Lockheed Martin engaging in anti-white discrimination, and hear far-left figures like Ibram X. Kendi declaring that, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” From this, they conclude that white people are under threat—and that they must band together in self-defense.

Hunter Ash, a prominent figure in the Dissident Right, justifies his support for white identity politics this way:

My radical, far right stance on race is equal treatment. Ibram Kendi should be as socially vilified as David Duke. Probably moreso. I don’t think Duke ever claimed that black people were aliens. “Black lives matter” and “white lives matter” should be treated the same. A scholarship for only minority students should have the same legal standing as a scholarship for only white students.

The problem is that this never happens. Politics is a negotiation. You typically get outcomes about halfway between what one side wants and what the other side wants. If white people advocate for neutrality while other groups advocate for special privileges, we’ll end up with moderate special privileges for them.

No thank you. I will not tolerate the seething resentment against whites broadcast from every major institution. I will not tolerate “moderate” discrimination against my people. And it seems, both empirically and theoretically, that the only way to achieve equality is for us to actively advocate for our own group interests, such that the final negotiated outcome is something close to equality.

Figures like Ash view the overt racial discrimination practiced by elements of the far-left as a threat requiring an equal and opposite response. On a podcast, Ash told me that he supports white identity politics because he doesn’t want his white children to grow up in a country where they are discriminated against for their skin color.

Stories like the one at Lockheed—and many others like it—add rocket fuel to his message.

But it’s not just Lockheed, or even corporate anti-white policies more broadly, that contribute to the rise of the Dissident Right. And it’s not just Ibram X. Kendi fanning the flames. In a broader sense, the entire far-left inadvertently strengthens the Dissident Right—through shame.

Specifically, through instilling feelings of shame in young white men.

Many of these young men are coming of age in schools and universities where they are told that “whiteness” is the root of societal evil. Critical Race Theory teaches that white people are inherently “oppressors.” A 2022 study by the Manhattan Institute found that 35 percent of 18-to-20-year-olds had been taught in class that “in America, white people have unconscious biases that negatively affect non-white people.”

These young white men are told they must “interrogate” their own racism—and that if they don’t feel racist, this is merely evidence of how deeply their racism runs. In the paper “Learning (Not) to Know: Examining How White Ignorance Manifests and Functions in White Adolescents’ Racial Identity Narratives,” researchers asked white students a series of questions designed to expose their so-called “white ignorance”—defined as “systematic and intentional ways of (not) knowing that function to perpetuate racism.” Remarkably, the authors flagged even statements like “I don’t really care what your skin, what your race is… you’re still the same person on the inside, even if you look different on the outside” as examples of “white ignorance.”

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Watch or listen to a full breakdown of “Learning (Not) to Know: Examining How White Ignorance Manifests and Functions in White Adolescents’ Racial Identity Narratives,” by evolutionary biologist Dr. Colin Wright and journalist Brad Polumbo on the latest episode of the Citation Needed podcast.

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In another jaw-dropping study, researchers presented participants with three quotes originally spoken by Adolf Hitler about Jews—except with the word “Jews” replaced by “Whites.” Participants were then asked whether they agreed or disagreed with each statement. The statements were as follows: