The Alt-Ride
I got a call to pick someone up at 10:30 on a Thursday night, right at the busiest intersection of downtown Orlando’s night scene. On Fridays and Saturdays that intersection — Orange and Washington — is half-blocked off by cops and half-blocked off by hordes of club-goers, making it a huge pain to drive through, and most of my working weekend evenings are spent basically parked there while the incompetently drunk try to figure out which car is mine.
That Thursday the intersection was unblocked and I pulled over behind a van — an unconscious young woman was being dragged along the ground out of I-Bar and getting stuffed into that van by people who I hoped were her friends. On weekend nights when you finally make it through that intersection you have a window of about 5 seconds for someone to make it into your car before you’re shuttled away with the flow of traffic so I called my pickup out of habit.
He didn’t know where I-Bar was, or that it was called I-Bar, which almost-definitely meant that he wasn’t from around here. He was a block north of me and didn’t know which way was south so I drove around the block to pick him up, snagging him and a completely silent woman from the doorstep of a church.
He was white and maybe in his early thirties, a rather aggressive widow’s peak carving its way through his short blond hair. He was talkative and very energetic, jumping in the front seat and immediately opening up a conversation, while the woman who was with him studied the floor in the back seat and never made a sound.
Within a minute or two he asked what I thought of our current president, and I told him. He stopped me when I brought up racism to mention that racism — or, at least race-consciousness — is actually good.
You see, he said, if we accept science as we should then we should also be prepared to accept its uncomfortable implications. Chief among them for him is the evolutionary inference of ‘human biodiversity’, that humans are shaped by their environment into distinct categories in exactly the same way that other animals are. He cited as his example the difference between Scandinavians and Sub-Saharan Africans, that long winters lead to northerners having fewer children that they concentrate on more whereas the scarcity of the desert leads the southerners to breed like rats in the hopes that one or two of their brood will maybe make it to adulthood.
This diversity leads to primal, irreconcilable differences between the races. It also does a great job of explaining contemporary social decay — the darker races are biologically conditioned to gobble up as many resources as they can at any cost, making them incompatible with a well-ordered society on a permanent, physical level. Their profligate breeding patterns and helpless tendency towards crime make them some brutal equivalent of entropy, always tearing everything down unless bold and decisive action is taken.
That is why Trump’s wall is the greatest thing to ever happen to this country, the first of hopefully very many actions needed to reverse the collapse begun with the stupid abolition of slavery. If lesser races are to be present in our society at all then they must be openly recognized as the inferior beings that they are if we are to be faithful to the natural order. Our moral duty towards them, to the extent that it exists at all, is to ensure that they are violently subordinated and civilized.
The ride was only six minutes long — I let him talk for most of it just out of curiosity. During his spiel I interjected that it seemed weird to base your worldview on an idea that could be refuted by the invention of air-conditioning, that even given evolution it certainly seems like we humans are in a unique position given our capacity to reshape our local environment, that the evolutionary picture itself does great work in undermining the idea of a truth-knowing faculty that we have and that animals don’t and that some people have more than others. He only had time to reiterate his basic contention that he had a hold on Science, and that we had to follow whatever Science said. I’d mentioned that I was a socialist, which he said was a dopey utopia given the fact of racial heterogeneity, but he did try to appeal to Dialectical Materialism as we pulled up to his dropoff point, excited by ‘Materialism’ but seemingly unaware of the phrase ‘Workers of the World Unite” and just what those words might mean.
Overall he just seemed excited and happy that someone was willing to listen to him. He’d distanced himself from Richard Spencer, saying he wasn’t a Nazi, he just wanted to have a conversation.
I was personally very happy that Richard Spencer had become a literal punching bag, since I believe that violent-supremacist ideologies don’t deserve a day in court and that they can and should be countered only with humiliation. As I drove off to my next pickup — a group of Scandinavian tourists at a vegan restaurant — I wondered if I’d done the right thing there. Was this guy more likely to change his mind since I’d been nice to him?
Would he have broached the subject if I weren’t also white? I don’t think he would have. His discursive move, such as it is, is a sort of weird perversion of the Turing Test, somehow attempting to convince conscious rational beings into believing that they are not conscious and rational. Or, to be more direct, he just wants to rally a minority into believing that they are superior by default, and to establish the social conditions to ensure that this remains the case forever. Which seems to have happened.
The tourists, all young women, piled into my backseat and happily chattered away in a language I didn’t recognize. We took to the highway as I drove them down past Disney, superior beings one and all. Unable to follow their conversation my mind drifted to the man I had just driven, to his ideas and his eagerness to promulgate them to worthy ears, and as I did I was carried away by my imagination —I must confess, reader, that for a moment there I swore I could see his broken body there beside me, tumbling along the highway just outside my window, cartwheeling along at seventy-five miles an hour.
