As the Alt Right continues to grow, we can expect that our views will increasingly be the subject of public scrutiny and debate. One of the gifts that a publicly-obscure intellectual movement enjoys is the benefit of being able to focus its intellectual efforts on the development of its own beliefs and positions, rather than on responding to critics of those beliefs and positions. The Alt Right is not likely to enjoy this gift for very long: already, mainstream journalists are beginning to spill ink about our movement, and there is not a political pundit in the beltway today who does not have a passing awareness of the existence of something called the ‘Alt Right’.

As public awareness of the Alt Right grows, then, we must prepare ourselves to voice our opinions in the open with the most effectiveness and clarity possible. Soon we will all lay bare our views on race to our wives, friends, colleagues and neighbors, and our leaders and spokesmen will voice them over the mainstream media. Indeed, the explicit ascendance of the Alt Right to the national stage, qua Alt Right rather than religious or constitutionalist right, has already begun: Richard Spencer, for example, has recently revealed that he will be the subject of an upcoming interview with none other than Jorge Ramos (who, despite being white, is himself an Amerindian ethnonationalist and identitarian).

To prepare ourselves for this transition, it is crucial that we possess the argumentative tools to capture the attraction of Whites who are not yet a part of our movement. To this end, I’d like to review an interesting conversation upon which I recently stumbled, between Richard Spencer and Roland Martin, a Black media interviewer. We are lucky to have as capable a spokesman as Spencer, and as we shall see, there is much to learn from this Spencer’s performance in this interview: both what to do, and what not. My intention will be to give some practical rhetorical tips that we can use when we voice our true opinions in public.

To begin, an interesting but unsurprising fact about this interview is that Spencer’s interlocutor is black; in the coming days, we should expect that most of our interlocutors in explicit conversations about race will be black. For while most whites recoil at the thought of white identitarianism, Blacks are already convinced of its existence and power, and themselves familiar with identitarian politics. The idea of white identitarianism is not foreign to them – indeed, they have even convinced themselves that it is there personally looming ominously over them while they sleep – and they are therefore not likely to be averse to it. In addition, as a favored racial minority, Blacks believe themselves to be epistemically privileged with respect to racial questions, and are accustomed to lecturing eager whites about the purported facts on race in America. Hence, they are more likely to be willing to enter the fray than bluepilled Whites may be.

We should not ever hope to be able to bring such interlocutors over to our side, nor should we even expect them to attempt to understand our claims and motivations. The same is true for any anti-White interlocutors we may encounter who are themselves White – they are likely to be vociferously self-hating people, and their opinions simply will not be changed. However, to change the opinions of our interlocutors ought not be our aim: instead, we must speak to the onlookers, whose opinions may not yet be formed.

Spencer, I think, does an excellent job of this. In his answer to Martin’s very first question – why so-called ‘white nationalists’ are encouraged by Trump’s campaign – Spencer obliquely answers by posing a series of questions to the audience: are we a nation? are we a people? This sort of disguised address to one’s audience is an excellent way to reach one’s real dialectical target while still speaking to one’s interlocutor, and should be employed liberally.

However, Spencer makes a crucial mistake in responding to Martin’s next question, on which Martin immediately jumps: when asked whether Trump is deliberately trying to rally the support of White supremacists, Spencer replies that neither he nor anyone he knows is a White supremacist. This is a mistake: it puts Spencer immediately on the defensive, and allows Martin room to attempt to associate Spencer with David Duke, whom he knows his audience will immediately recognize as a hair-raisingly dangerous and evil racist. Instead of this line of reply, one ought to employ Mike Levin’s strategy: at the very first mention of White ‘supremacy’ or Black ‘inferiority’, one ought to ask immediately what one’s interlocutor means by the use of those terms. This allows one to let their interlocutor do the dirty work of talking about low non-White intelligence, slavery, and so on, thereby making themselves look ridiculous. Only then, I think, should one make it clear that that is not what they are, and employ Spencer’s useful follow-up about the importance of White identity, rather than supremacy. (In fact, Spencer does eventually employ the semantic strategy, although it comes too late and is foiled by Martin’s obvious ignorance of the meaning of the word ‘semantic’.)

Next, Spencer goes on to make an excellent point, and one that has a profound effect on the tenor of his ensuing discussion with Martin: Spencer points out that he is a white identitarian in just the same way that Martin is a black identitarian. This remark is extremely powerful: it forces any opposition to white identitarianism to take the form of an explanation for why non-white identitarianism is acceptable, while white identitarianism is not. Pushing the conversation in this direction is desirable for two reasons: first, anyone who attempts to explain why we can do it, but you can’t, will come across as unfair; second, as we shall see, it gives one’s opponent the impossible task of defending an obviously false claim.

Martin takes the bait. He pursues a standard tack: implicitly claiming that Whites do not deserve identitarianism because they are already doing so well, Martin suggests that whites predominate in positions of power in America. Here, Spencer has an important reply: Spencer responds that America is a white country, just as Martin suggests, and goes on to list some of the dangers facing Whites in America: demographic change, drug use, etc. His point is that one can’t claim on the one hand that Whites have historically been the powerful majority in America, and then seriously wonder why Whites are concerned about ceasing to be the powerful majority in America.

Thankfully, however, the subtlety of this point seems lost on Martin (whose verbal IQ is already in question), for I am not convinced that this is the appropriate reply. While Spencer’s point is good, it has a danger of coming off to observers as a kind of unwillingness to share; as the claim that we should have everything because we don’t want to give up what we have. Obviously, this interpretation of Spencer’s claim is infantile – but it is important to keep in mind that most people cease to develop their moral intuitions as soon as they leave the playground.

Indeed, this sort of playground-moralistic response is exactly the one employed by Martin. Suggesting that White American prosperity was entirely the result of African slave labor, he demands that Whites “share” what they have. Here, however, Spencer begins to stumble. He begins by wondering why anyone should expect Whites to want to give up power, as though it were simply obviously that Whites had no right to desire it. Again, this is a powerful way of exposing the double standard of anti-Whites, but the conversation between Spencer and Martin is already downstream from the relevance of this point: to insist that one has a right to desire to keep what one has when one has already been accused of refusing to share what one has is not helpful, as our basic common moral intuitions suggest that the prima facie right to keep what one has can be superceded by obligations to fairness, to repay debts, etc.

Again displaying his lack of verbal intelligence, Martin badly misinterprets Spencer’s claim, loses track of his line of argumentation, and makes an irrelevant use of the thought that America is a ‘melting pot’. Spencer’s response to this is the right one: that America was, until 1965, a melting pot of Europeans, who shared a common history, common customs and habits, and common or similar religions. This is an excellent point, and one which should be deployed at any available opportunity.

However, immediately after making this point, Spencer makes a crucial mistake: he makes the next move in Martin’s own argument for him, rather than giving a taken-aback Martin the chance to respond to one of Spencer’s strongest points. This next move is the mention of slavery as a justification for the displacement of White Americans, and Martin latches on immediately: he claims not only that Whites owe blacks for slavery, but engages in a bit of vain self-flattering by suggesting that the early American economy would have collapsed and been miscarriaged had it not been for the labors of African slaves.

This claim is one that anyone on the Alt Right should expect to encounter time and time again. For the past 30 years, history courses in American undergraduate institutions have ceaselessly trumpeted the claim that America was “built” by African slave labor, endlessly overstating the economic importance of such things as the Triangle trade, and never considering counterfactual scenarios in which there was no African slavery in the New World. Most educated Americans genuinely believe the absurd claim that America could not have survived without slave labor.

This is, of course, false, but Spencer’s response at this juncture is a mistake. His reply that he regrets slavery and considers it a ‘wound’ to the nation is an unnecessary attempt to distance himself from the moral implications of slavery, and wastes an opportunity to hammer Martin with the facts. Indeed we should always look for and seize opportunities to embarrass our interlocutors by aggressively citing facts when they have the historical or scientific facts mistaken. In response to this particular point, one ought to point out that according to economic estimates, the gross national product of the United States on the eve of the Civil War was $121b in 2016 dollars, while the total value of cotton exports was approximately $5.8b in 2016 dollars. Hence, one ought to remind one’s audience, the value of the cotton industry in antebellum America was only 4.7% of American GNP – significant, but quite far from the bedrock on which American prosperity was built. For comparison, the percentage of American GDP contributed by the agricultural sector in 2014 was, according to the USDA, 4.8% – so, cotton was about as important to antebellum America as agriculture is to the modern-day America of strip malls, SUVs and suburbs.

Still, Spencer’s expression of regret notwithstanding, Martin – convinced that he has somehow won the historical argument – goes on to insist on the irrelevant point that Blacks do not intend to return to Africa. Spencer sidesteps this attempt at grandstanding by attempting to find common ground with Martin on the issue of immigration, which I think is a good strategy to pursue when in conversation with a black.

Martin’s response is, quite simply, hilarious. Vainly and thoroughly convinced that he has found his trump card, Martin smugly attempts to remind Spencer that Whites, too, were immigrants to America. Of course, as Spencer tries to note, this fact has no bearing on the question whether mass Hispanic immigration benefits Whites or Blacks, but Martin won’t hear any of it: this brilliant turn of rhetoric has got Spencer pinned to his back, and Martin knows it. Hammering home his relentless and brilliant attack, Martin takes to condescendingly repeating the first name ‘Richard’, and adopting the mannerisms of a schoolteacher reprimanding a child.

Spencer notes that Martin’s question is a non sequitur, but does not do so with speed or the confidence to match Martin. Spencer is right, and to an intelligent audience, Martin does nothing at this juncture but make himself appear ridiculous. However, few audiences are intelligent, and Spencer misses an excellent opportunity to turn Martin’s attack against him. The aim of conversation of this sort must be to humiliate one’s opponent by making their claims and argumentation appear ridiculous, and this can be done by defeating them on the facts as well as on the meta-level of the facts about appropriate argumentative strategy. It is a shame that Spencer did not do so – he could have relentlessly derided Martin for the irrelevance of his point, and the humiliation would have been all the sweeter for Martin’s own arrogance. We must never miss and opportunity to deride our opponent when they truly deserve it; derision is one of the most powerful tools for convincing one’s audience that one’s opponent is not worth listening to.

Unable to make his case with any sort of clarity, Martin ends the conversation with an unintentionally humorous return to playground moralism, indignantly repeating that Spencer must learn to share. One leaves with the impression that neither party has one: Spencer seems to have remained aloof from the fray, allowing Martin to force his claims with little vigorous resistance; however, the infantility of Martin’s argumentation is impossible to miss. A fascinating conversation, to be sure.

Next: Responding to Anti-Whites, Pt. II: Analysis