Wow,
he really stepped in it with that post. First, he opens by saying:
it’s probably as good an occasion as any to inflame some of my more obsessive critics again, and to give them an opportunity to slander me and to distort what I say. So I think that I’ll take up the notion of “Great Replacement” theory.
I can't really say it surprises me that his interest is piqued by a white supremacist idea that fueled the recent mass shooting in Buffalo. But he elaborates:
I hadn’t actually heard very much about “Great Replacement” theory until the shootings in Buffalo, New York — I pay no attention at all to Tucker Carlson — so, when it began being emphasized in news coverage and commentary about the Buffalo incident, I decided to look it up. I really am serious about my commitment to trying to grasp why various worldviews appeal to people. (See my recent blog entry “An important part of my approach to other faiths and worldviews.”) I didn’t spend a lot of time on the topic, and I make no pretense of being a particularly informed amateur on it, let alone an expert, but I thought that I would perhaps try to figure out whether or not there might be at least a kernel of truth in it that appealed to me or seemed reasonable to me.
You have to wonder how much time he's spent "figuring" out whether there's "at least a kernel of truth" in Nazism, say, or the ideologies of the Khmer Rouge. And what about atheism? Despite how much time he spends discussing it, I don't think I've ever seen him seriously grappling with the reasons why it might "appeal to people." He always just says he doesn't understand it, or that he thinks it's "unbearably depressing," or he makes fun of it, or of atheist people like Gemli.
In any case, the rest of that blog entry is flat-out bonkers. He does his usual thing of mentioning some irrelevant travel as an excuse to engage in name-dropping, and then he takes a swipe at an Australian Mufti. Where does this all lead? It leads to a weirdly distorted interpretation of the "Great Replacement" theory:
And this, I think is where “Great Replacement” theory might have unwittingly stumbled upon a germ of truth — while at almost the same time rendering it toxic or radioactive by bigoted, racist association:
I do really think that there is a discernible if imprecise core of values and attitudes, descending in a rough and difficult line from Magna Carta, that deserves to be cultivated and defended and preserved. It has, though, nothing whatsoever to do with “Whiteness.” It is a complex of beliefs affirming liberty and representative government and the rule of law and, yes, voluntary exchanges (economic and otherwise).
Although it has nothing intrinsically to do with “Whiteness” or ethnicity or genetics or even with Christianity — some of my heroes in this regard are Black (e.g., Justice Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell, and the late Walter Williams), some are Jewish (e.g., the great Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, with whom I once had the opportunity to spend some time in Scotland), and some of whom (e.g., the late Justice Antonin Scalia and Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley Jr. and, at least once upon a time, prior to the 2016 presidential election, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio) come from such formerly despised immigrant groups as Italians, the Irish, and Hispanics — the core social-political values to which I refer are, broadly but in my opinion pretty definitively, associated with the “English tradition.”
So, in the end, this is a bizarre apologetics
for the 'Great Replacement' theory. He is modifying what it normally means, though: instead of actual white people being "replaced," it's instead a set of values--the "English tradition"--that might be replaced. (Despite his efforts, he still winds up tying all of these values to "whiteness.") Weirdly, by the end of the entry, it's clear that he's drawing a clear connection between the "Great Replacement" theory and ideas like liberty, representative government, and democracy: advocates of the "Great Replacement" theory, in his bizarre apologetics, are right to be worried because the influx of immigrants and non-white people is a threat to things like liberty, rule of law, and democracy. I kid you not: this is actually what he wrote.
It's strange to think that he can so effortless find something to admire in the "Great Replacement" theory, and yet any positive attributes of atheism are completely elusive for him.
"If, while hoping that everybody else will be honest and so forth, I can personally prosper through unethical and immoral acts without being detected and without risk, why should I not?." --Daniel Peterson, 6/4/14