In Defense of the Groypers on Race

A Response to Kennedy Hall

In a recent article in Crisis Magazine, traditional Catholic commentator Kennedy Hall took aim at the Groypers for their views on race.

I do not identify as a Groyper. I consider myself to the right of them. I find Nick Fuentes to be painfully blue-pilled on basically everything other than race. But for the purposes of this article, I feel that I am familiar enough with and close enough to their opinions to give a defense of them. I am also of the same religious persuasion as Kennedy, being a traditional Catholic.

With that said, I will confess that I do not find Kennedy to be particularly compelling. He’s not my personal cup of tea. However, Traditional Catholicism is a vanishingly small subset of the population, so we must be content with the influencers we can find, be they effeminate webcam dads, dude bro philosophers, or squishy gender performers.

Kennedy, to his credit, is none of these. However, the essay in question seems to have been thrown together casually. It is quite disjointed. Since my essay will be a response to his, it will necessarily fall short of providing any truly comprehensive treatment of the topic of race. However, have no fear! I am currently writing another essay on that very topic, in which I will debunk the malicious attempts to baptize race communism as somehow part of the Christian canon. But until then, you must be content with this.

Let’s talk about the article.

Upon first reading, it seemed to me like another example of the all-too-common trope of a Christian conservative, so used to being on the losing side, eagerly tripping over himself to take the fashionable liberal position to launder it to a traditional-leaning audience, as soon as he can find a way to fit it within his religious parameters.

Upon a second reading though, I changed my mind. Kennedy has proved his intellectual honesty and moral courage in the past by defending the SSPX, something which will unfailingly get one written out of fashionable Catholic society. He has also taken many other unpopular positions. (Anyone who can publicly claim that dinosaurs lived in the middle ages has my complete admiration with regard to his lack of concern for human respect.) So I think it would be unfair to imagine that his position on the Groypers is motivated by fear of social disapprobation.

I think rather, that Kennedy’s criticism of Groyper race theory is a result partly of not understanding their position, and partly the consequence of some uninterrogated boomer-liberal assumptions.

Kennedy will insist he’s not a Boomer, having pointed out in the piece that he is 37. But for political purposes his chronological age is irrelevant, as the population has bifurcated into spiritual Boomers and spiritual Zoomers. Insofar as the fissure does occur along actual age lines, it seems to split about midway through the Millennial generation. The spiritual boomers accept the sacral myths of boomer-liberalism like the blank slate, egalitarianism, “meritocracy,” etc. Spiritual Zoomers reject these myths as the malicious lies that they are. Kennedy’s thought, such as it is, reveals that he falls in the spiritual Boomer category.

In a brief moment of seemingly unintentional comedic relief, Kennedy assures us that he really does understand Gen Z because, you see, he was a schoolteacher. This is really good stuff, and gave me a very hearty laugh.

With the generational topic out of the way, let’s break down his criticism of the Groypers.

A Flawed Historical Argument

Early in the article Kennedy makes the following statement:

“As far as race is concerned, the main issue with the general Groyper conversation about race is that they are often utterly wrong about how race has been understood historically. What I mean is that before Modernity, races of people were not separated by skin color but by tribe, regional differences, and so on.”

This is a bizarre red herring, since nothing in the Groyper platform makes any claims about how people saw race “historically”. The Groyper position on race is about present-day race relations and immigration policy.

Kennedy also implies the old Leftist continuum fallacy to discredit the idea of a White race. The fallacy goes: because there’s not a single, clear dividing line, there must be no real distinction between peoples. (This is also known as a Sorites fallacy for you nerds out there.) And of course, it’s not true.

More to the point, in the present conflict, we don’t have to be the ones to define it. When you are under attack, it is the attacker who defines whom he is attacking. Those attacking White people have defined them for us. This is how we know that “White” does include Slavs, and doesn’t include Jews. It may be true that in the 19th century Celtic Irishmen and Slavic Czeks may have had little to nothing in common. But in the 21st century we are both objects of the same explicit attempt to destroy “Whiteness.” I would say that’s plenty of common cause.

However, while he’s busy missing the Groypers’ point, Kennedy, by pointing out how much more narrowly segmented races were in the past, inadvertently makes the racialist case that people were more tribal in the past, not less. Which would make tribalism the more traditional position.

Of course in the past you wouldn’t talk about skin color, because you likely wouldn’t ever see someone of a different skin color in your life. Not only that, but our ancestors would have felt there were significant cultural and social differences between their community and that of the next valley over, let alone one hundreds of miles away. At no point did they believe you could throw people from different areas of the world into a “melting pot” and expect them to get along.

Kennedy then makes another unforced historical error:

“Within Groyperism, there is an acute understanding that mass immigration has led to severe societal consequences—because it has, at least in our day. However, it has not been the case historically that such immigration has produced deleterious results. If you are a North American and are proud of your history, be it Quebecois, New Englander, Hispanic, etc., then you would not have a history to be proud of if it were not for massive amounts of ancestors coming over from the Old Continent.”

This is another red herring because the question at hand is the immigration of our day, not that of the 19th century. But the historical argument is also erroneous.

The first error is that Kennedy commits the Leftist equivocation of treating colonists and settlers carving civilization out of the wilderness as the same category as contemporary third world economic migrants coming to take advantage of systems and wealth that has already been built. These two things are categorically different.

The more brazen error is that his historical claim is the exact opposite of the truth. Mass migration historically has led to massive conflict. He cites American colonization, seemingly without irony, despite the fact that it involved the ethnic cleansing, disenfranchisement and near extermination of the previous inhabitants. Whatever you think of the justification for colonization, I don’t think anyone would make the case that the Amerindians came out on the winning side of that exchange.

Even setting aside the fate of the Amerindians, it would still be a bad point. The influx of foreigners into the US in the late 19th and early 20th century had enormous disruptive effects. It caused major conflict with the host population and spawned the ethnic mafias which would plague all major American cities for a hundred years, and whose legacy still largely influences politics. Immigrants who lacked the traditional American values of localism, subsidiarity and voluntary organization which sprang from the colonial tradition, were major voting blocks for the communist-infiltrated FDR administration and its disastrous Progressive policies.

It is true that, after a long period of strife and severe immigration restriction, those White immigrants were ultimately able to assimilate because of their shared European blood and cultural assumptions. If it was that difficult for Europeans to integrate with each other, it shouldn’t be a surprising or controversial stance to take that a much larger migration, composed of peoples far more different, is likely to have disastrous consequences.

The Conflation of the Spiritual with the Material

Kennedy then moves on to deny that race and DNA have anything to do with anything:

“However, upon further consideration, the notion that the problems associated with other people groups have to do with race—DNA—is an untenable position for a Catholic. This is because genetic characteristics pertaining to skin pigmentation and other physiological traits carry no moral or spiritual weight. And the fabric of a civilization is not based on the color of skin or how people look but in how they believe, act, and so on.”

To assert that how people believe and act has nothing to do with their DNA is an incredibly asinine display of Boomerism. Even more so to assert that such a ludicrous position is somehow Catholic dogma. The idea that we are all born the same and that our behavior is a product exclusively of family upbringing, culture, religion etc., is not a Catholic teaching but is rather the Enlightenment error of the “Blank Slate.”

We know that how people act is largely affected by their DNA. This is what is meant by “I will visit the sins of the father upon their children.” (Deut. 5:9) We know from twin studies that nearly every relevant behavioral trait is highly heritable, (including the practice of religion.)

This should surprise exactly no one, given that we are literally made out of our mother and father, and they from theirs and so on. To believe that your DNA has no bearing on how you believe and act is either profoundly stupid or profoundly dishonest.

The Effect of Genetics on Political Order

We can infer from his statements here that Kennedy believes that Christianity and more specifically Catholicism is the most important factor in politics. So let’s see how that actually matches up with reality.

Aquinas tells us that a healthy polity is at peace and ordered to the common good. Crime is punished and justice rendered impartially.

But if we look at the record of countries around the world in establishing tranquility, basic property rights, and rule of law, we don’t exactly see Catholic countries coming out on top.

Latin America, heavily Catholic, has the highest murder rate of any geographic region, beating even Africa. It is overrun with organized crime, and infested with corruption. With a few notable exceptions, Latin American countries are textbook examples of disordered polities from a Scholastic Catholic viewpoint.

Compared to the Anglosphere (historically Protestant), Latin America has 3-4x the murder rate and significantly lower social trust than Anglo countries.

I wonder, would Kennedy rather raise his small children in crime-ridden Mexico or Nicaragua because of the higher Catholic population, rather than around evil White Protestants and seculars in his native Ontario? His revealed preference would indicate not.

New Orleans is heavily Catholic, with the rest being other Christian denominations, and this has not spared it from being famously violent, chaotic and corrupt.

Historically Protestant countries have on average lower murder rates and less corruption than historically Catholic ones. This is largely skewed by Latin America, but even removing them, we see a small difference in favor of the Protestant European countries. Certainly this isn’t due to the metaphysical truth of Protestantism, but to the predilections of the actual people who live in those countries. Protestant countries, being further north on average, are Whiter on average. White people have, over a period of many centuries, aggressively killed criminals, resulting in a population less genetically disposed to criminal behaviors.

Now, Kennedy, being a Trad, will likely object that those countries aren’t “really Catholic.” Every Trad (myself included) has been guilty of this delightful version of the No True Scotsman, because, as we all know, Real Catholicism ™ has never been tried. Of course, one could just as easily say that the Protestant countries aren’t “really Protestant” either. But let’s go well before Vatican II. If we look at Latin America vs the Anglosphere in the year 1900 when religious faith was still strong in Latin America, we see the same trend. Much higher homicide and corruption rates than in the Anglosphere, which was already experiencing a decline in religiosity.

My aim here is not to score points against my own team, but to point out that a simplistic view of politics where religion is the only factor is not useful because it is manifestly not true. The third world has resisted civilization, whether they converted to Christianity or not. The reasons for that, like with all complex human phenomena, are multi-causal and well beyond the scope of this essay and my expertise. The relevant factor is how particular groups of people actually behave, which is observable and measurable.

Kennedy’s assertion that one’s physical heritage has nothing to do with how they act, or even what they believe, is demonstrably false. And it is perfectly reasonable and in no way morally objectionable for the inhabitants of White countries to say that they don’t want an influx of migrants from places which lack the same cultural assumptions about violence, the rule of law and the like. In fact, it would be a massive betrayal of their own children for Western fathers to take no heed of the nature of the immigrants they allow to be brought in.

Of course, genetics is not deterministic. Individual people have free will. Their genetic predispositions incline them one way or the other, but they ultimately have to choose.

But politically, we must make prudential decisions about groups of people as a whole, taking into account the actual outcome of their free choices on net.

Even if there were no qualitative difference between White and non-White countries, the Groyper point would still stand. Because ethnonationalism is not ultimately about racial superiority but about self-determination. Are White people allowed to have their own place among their own people? Any answer other than an unqualified “yes” is genocidal.

Sanctity Vs Political Stability

Kennedy goes on to critique the Groyper concerns with race from a religious perspective:

“For a Catholic, the most important characteristic anyone can have is holiness, which is a spiritual quality and cannot be associated with DNA in any capacity.”

This is another equivocation. The political question of race is not about any race being “spiritually superior” but about how big a natural polity can be, and how closely related the people within it should be in order to have natural social cohesion.

It’s also a category error since holiness is an non-measurable individual trait, and ethnic political questions are about measurable group traits.

And again, having positive traits wouldn’t give one a right to citizenship in a particular polity. The operative question is not “are you a good person?” but “are you part of this particular people?”

He goes on to knock down another strawman:

“However, when pressed about whether or not race itself is a deciding factor in the goodness of a desired society, Groypers would have to answer in the affirmative, which is problematic.”

Kennedy speaks of “a desired society” as if it exists in the abstract. This allows him to strawman the Groyper position and equate it with White Supremacy, as if they are claiming that, in order to have a good society at all, that society must be White. Whereas, the Groyper claim is simply that each race/nation, including Whites, should have self-determination, and be able to build their societies as best they can on their own terms. Which race is better is a matter of patriotic opinion, not substantive debate.

Kennedy then makes another own goal:

“Have blacks not been in America for centuries longer than Italians, Irishmen, Germans, and so on?”

He again strawmans the Groypers, as NJF has said repeatedly that Blacks have a place in American society. But in doing so he inadvertently makes the racialist point. Black people have lived in the United States for four centuries, have converted to various forms of Christianity, including Catholicism, and their homicide rate is still an order of magnitude higher than Whites. Blacks are thirteen times more likely to kill whites than vice versa. Their resentment and anger against Whites is virulent and public. (Of course, dishonest race communists will blame this on “racism and oppression,” but the Black violent crime rate increased after the Civil Rights movement. It dropped again after the “racist” 90’s crime bill, and of course increased again since BLM.) All of this would suggest that there’s more to assimilation than being Christian and time in the country.

Kennedy then indulges in yet another strawman:

“Are Cristero martyrs, who would have been Mestizo, any less sanctified and excellent than the English Martyrs or French Martyrs, who would have been white Europeans? Are the Ugandan Martyrs qualitatively different than martyrs of other ethnic groups?”

No Groyper would claim that they are any more or less sanctified. Just that they’re not American. They sound like wonderful Ugandans, Mexicans etc. They will do wonderful things to sanctify Mexico or Uganda, respectively. We want everyone to do well. A virtuous, flourishing, law-abiding, prosperous Mexico, Uganda, Nicaragua, Somalia, would all be better for all of us. This is actually an argument for the best talent of the third world not immigrating to the West, but rather working to improve their home countries.

Kennedy concludes the article by stating that:

“There are many things that Groypers correctly recognize as evils in our modern world. But their solutions will, in the end, lead their movement in the wrong direction”

This is quite puzzling since at no point did he state or contend with any of the Groypers’ “solutions.” Since we are talking about race, the pertinent Groyper position here is that of immigration restriction and remigration, which Kennedy never actually addresses as a policy. Perhaps because to do so would further demonstrate his own fundamentally liberal viewpoints.

Erroneous Underlying Assumptions

Why does Kennedy make so many obvious errors here? One answer is that it feels like this was a low-effort article. It doesn’t seem like he put much work into understanding the position he is critiquing, or thinking through any of the issues.

But the article also reveals some very interesting assumptions.

I think the biggest underlying problem is that, in the wake of the destruction of natural society, many have come to believe that religion and the supernatural can simply replace the natural. Many Christians, Catholics included, seem to believe that Christianity on its own is all that is needed for a coherent society. This has led many to try to make the case that the Church is also an anti-racist multi-cultural coalition which demands we accept anyone and everyone into our community so long as they profess Christianity. Nothing could be more anachronistic.

The Catholic French author Marcel De Corte pointed out in On the Death of a Civilization that Christianity, while necessary for western civilization, is not of itself sufficient for it. Christianity is a spiritual reality which is meant to suffuse and permeate a pre-existing natural order. In order to recover civilization we must restore not only the Faith, but the natural order which underlies it. This means a return to natural polities, which are traditionally based on kinship, and a rejection of the hubris of globalism.

An adjunct to the error of the supernatural replacing the natural is the idea that all political issues can be resolved by appeals to religious authority. This is how we end up with the embarrassing spectacle of Catholic pundits quoting papal encyclicals and council canons at each other, earnestly believing that this somehow ends the conversation.

The briefest survey of Church history would show us that this is a dangerous delusion. There is no reason to believe that the Church hierarchy enjoys the slightest protection with regard to questions of politics. This much should be more than clear by now.

Today is no different. Being Christian, or Catholic, or even traditional Catholic is not, of itself, a sufficient bond to constitute a natural polity. Even if we agreed on everything politically it still wouldn’t. Natural polities are outgrowths of real physical relationships, which are ultimately based on kinship and community. Adoption is possible, but the very notion of adoption implies there is a distinct people group into which one is being adopted. This is not the case with a multicultural dissociety.

Catholicism celebrates subsidiarity and the true diversity of peoples under its umbrella. This diversity is destroyed in the attempt to combine them into some homogenous soup.

The fact is: Religion does not solve politics. It is not meant to solve politics. The Jews wanted Christ to solve politics for them by becoming a temporal king,. He refused, which was the main reason they crucified Him. Despite our desires, Christ declines to solve politics for us saying “My kingdom is not of this world.” He gave man dominion of the natural world, and He leaves it with us until Judgment Day.

In Closing

The Groyper position, insofar as there is one, is a general desire for White people to have self-determination in their own countries. They love their own land and their own people, who are united to them by blood, language, history and custom. They want to preserve this against dilution by mass migration of alien peoples.

This is not only permissible but admirable. It is, as I will show in my next essay, true patriotism. It is supported by the tradition not only of the Church, but by all of our ancestors back to the dawn of time. It is what classical antiquity considered the very highest virtue.

For those of my Trad friends still addicted to arguments from authority, I will finish with an appeal to that least based of pre-Vatican II popes, Pius XI. In paragraph 34 of his encyclical Mit Brenender Sorge, directed at Hitler’s regime, (condemning them for violating the Concordat by shutting down public worship and infringing on parental rights of education), he fully acknowledged the right of the German people to exercise ethnic self-determination in their homeland. Specifically he says “No one would think of preventing young Germans establishing a true ethnical community in a noble love of freedom and loyalty to their country.” (Emphasis mine.)

A true ethnical community. That’s all the Groypers want. But the Boomer schoolteacher says it’s naughty to want that. For my part, I will side with my ancestors over the schoolteacher.