The Premature Revolt Against Right-Wing Asians
Choices and Costs of Purity Testing
The Asian Americans desire emancipation. What kind of emancipation do they desire? According to Bronze Age Pervert (BAP), the right-wing of Asians in America are conspiring with “resentful constipated white nerdoids” to build an authoritarian society ruled by clerks. Now, on the eve of the 2024 US Presidential election, this once-abstract fear seems realized as the Tech Right faction of Silicon Valley throws its weight behind Trump. And BAP isn’t the only rightist beating the anti-Asian drum.
Just two days after the Pervert’s piece, Arctotherium took to Aporia to plea with the Tech Right to withdraw its support from skilled immigration from China and South Asia. Walt Bismarck anticipated this discourse back in April, predicting a “Brahmin Question” taking the approximate contours of the old “Jewish Question”. Indeed, BAP repeatedly projects the anti-WASP neuroses of “liberal Jewish professionals” from the Ellis Island generation onto today’s Asians.
But Rajeev Ram highlights a key discontinuity: unlike the Jews who fully completed their ordeal of civility, Asian Americans who go to bat for pro-white causes get little loyalty in return. This year we watched Vivek Ramaswamy endure endless humiliation even as he mainstreamed a vulgar version of Renaud Camus's “Great Replacement” in American politics. Anne Coulter praised his ideas, but coolly informed him that she couldn’t support his run for office solely because of his Indian ethnicity.
Deserving Blacks vs. Ingrate Asians
Coulter, like BAP, appeals to American history to argue for an exclusive relationship between blacks and America. On a 2012 book tour, she argued: “What have we done to the immigrants? We owe Black people something. We have a legacy of slavery. Immigrants haven't even been in this country.” She has no interest in including Asian Americans within this framework of racial debts. Given this context, an Asian American facing calls for racial redistribution to blacks finds themselves in a lose-lose situation. So, what options are left for an Asian American facing this rhetoric?
Interrogate the “we” in “We owe Black people something.” BAP sneers at this narrow exemption-claiming as antiblack, antiwhite, leftist, and doomed.
Accept the premise and support Money Fo’ Dem Programz. Arctotherium calls this the majority Asian position—and wants them excluded for it.
Challenge the premise that racial inequality is a problem. BAP warns that if done by Asians and Asiaphiles, it will lead to a “suffocating work-camp society”.
This isn’t a “woe is me” moment. As a Chinaman, I know I’m not the target audience for an article literally yearning for a “relationship between the European man and the Oriental” that recalls “a sense of the 19th Century manifest destiny”. But with all the slicing and dicing of polls in the final days of a close election, I’m hearing rightists complain about Asian voting patterns. Just offer a reason to align with you—anything other than a lose-lose-lose—and you’ll see more Viveks come out of the woodwork.
Life in a dual favela/police-state
BAP’s main aspersion against “secular rightists who believe in… freedom from the contemporary urban blights of high crime and high filth” is that they secretly long to go full authoritarian, reshaping America into something like Singapore or China. Faced with this choice—between a sterile police state and “favela world”—BAP opts for the “freedoms” of the latter. But he dismisses this binary as a false choice. I agree; there’s no necessary contradiction between suppression of “barbarian [street] violence” and promoting freedom and excellence in a “civilization worth having”.
Dodging vagrants and human feces in Favela City, USA, might be a manageable thrill for the Sensitive Young Man. But what happens when that Sensitive Young Man grows up and starts a family? Crime-fighting tech like DNA phenotyping promises to expand the freedom of low-time-preference types like him. If the Tech Right crushes urban crime, parents won’t need to bother with the time and cost redundancies of residential segregation. Adults would get to socialize spontaneously, liberated from that prison which antiracist urbanism built: suburban breeding in captivity.
BAP “can’t imagine the terror an Oriental professional feels living near Bedford-Stuyvesant other similar environment.” For a time, I fit that description perfectly. But my concern wasn’t about holding my own against a schizophrenic panhandler or squeegee boy—it was about landing in a Daniel Penny-type situation, where defending yourself lands you behind bars, facing a trial-by-media for racism. This calculation isn’t uniquely Asian. Paul Skallas has documented the steep decline of the casual fistfight. It’s not scary black men that ruin your life—it’s the American courts.
In The Network State, Balaji describes the hubris of a US establishment that from 2013-2020 treated “basically everyone” who did not share its values as rivals. The Democrat Party-aligned media tore into such a diverse lineup of groups as “tech, Trump, China, Russia, Israel, Brazil, Hungary, Brexiteers, [and] Macron”. The result of these attacks? Many people simply “tuned out” and lost trust in institutions and experts. Substack’s growth—and especially that of its “dissident” wing—rose from these ashes.
Only after this decade-long, spectacular unforced error does the “IQ-right” have even a slight chance—contingent on some yet-unrealized election victory—to influence government policy. And already there are little Khomeinis lining up to purge the non-Islamists from the revolution before anyone has even toppled the Shah. Regardless of the election outcome, woke capture of institutions is either complete or gaining ground. Any “elite human capital” left in the antiwoke camp is exceptional by necessity—and shunning coalitions with these rare allies is self-sabotage.
> Just offer a reason to align with you—anything other than a lose-lose-lose—and you’ll see more Viveks come out of the woodwork.
Reason 568306714392 why 'the right' is extraordinarily bad at [democratic] politics. They don't know how to build coalitions; they just expect people to fall in line according to 'principles' and 'priorities'.
There is tons of talk by various dissidents about how 'we need to be more like the left', but the left (and even liberals + libertarians) know how to offer carrots, even small ones that net massive gains in loyalty and evangelism.
My view: show respect to anyone who demonstrates respect to America’s heritage, regardless of their origin. There are major differences within populations that make it dumb to stereotype too hard. People overthink and overgeneralize these things imo.