The NYT On The Alt-Right's "Asian Fetish "—John Derbyshire Responds
01/08/2018
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Several readers have emailed in to congratulate me on having been mentioned in the New York Times. (Again: It happens about once per decade.)

The white supremacists on the far right have “yellow fever” — an Asian woman fetish. It’s a confusing mix.

Andrew Anglin, the founder of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, once posted a video of himself with a Filipina he called “my jailbait girlfriend,” the young couple flirting as they sauntered through a megamall in the Philippines. Richard Spencer, a white nationalist, has dated a series of Asian-American women, according to one of his ex-girlfriends. (Mr. Spencer insists that it was before he embraced white nationalism.)

The right-wing agitator Mike Cernovich, the writer John Derbyshire and an alt-right figure named Kyle Chapman (so notorious for swinging a lead-filled stick at Trump opponents at a protest in Berkeley, Calif., that he is now a meme) are all married to women of Asian descent. As a commenter wrote on an alt-right forum, “exclusively” dating Asian women is practically a “white-nationalist rite of passage.” [The Alt-Right's Asian Fetish by Audrea Lim; New York Times, January 6, 2018.]

Uh-huh.  I beat this topic to death six years ago here on VDARE.com.  Jared Taylor then posted a thoughtful counter-piece.  I haven't changed my opinions in any way, so I can't think of anything else to say on the topic itself.  Probably Jared feels the same.

I would, though — casting modesty to the winds — invite readers who have the time and patience to do so, to compare Ms. Lim's piece to mine and Jared's.  We — Jared and myself — are judicious, literate, numerate, and well-referenced.  Ms. Lim [Email her] just whines.  She is illiterate and innumerate.

Illiterate: A preference is not a fetish. Words have dictionary meanings and should be used with those meanings when not framed in familiar rhetorical figures.

Innumerate: The incidence of Alt-Right white males bonding with East Asian females is either lower than the corresponding incidence among white males in general, or equal to it, or higher than it.  Since the Alt-Right includes many race purists, the null hypothesis should be that the first incidence is lower than the second; otherwise there's something odd going on, perhaps even a fetish.

The truth of the matter could be established by careful empirical inquiry.  Absent the results of such an inquiry, Ms. Lim's main charge has no epistemic weight. After reading her piece you are no wiser about anything, other than the writer's own mood.

She writes that:

None of us can escape the truth that the fun-house was built to justify systematic exploitation of everyone in this country who isn’t white.

Exploitation, right; like being given space to vent one's feelings, wo wo wo feelings, in the op-ed pages of the nation's premier broadsheet newspaper.

If Ms. Lim feels she is exploited in the U.S.A. for her non-whiteness, the solution is simple: She should bugger off back to China. No exploitation there!

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