@luckbox

I think you'll find this interesting:

I'm also not a fan of Candace Owens. She comes off as fake to me. Her thing is based almost entirely based on rhetoric rather than anything of substance. I'm disappointed that other conservatives give her such prominence.

However, lumping her with the likes of Thomas Sowell, Glen Lowry, Coleman Hughes, Clarence Thomas, and other respected an esteemed black conservatives is disingenuous.

Well like I said you can be a black conservative and honestly get your viewpoint across. I personally wouldn't lump the likes of Owens or Tatum in with other black conservatives.

If you're going on a network like Fox then you're pushing Fox's agenda-- and that isn't to provide thoughtful commentary.
The equivalent holds for CNN/MSNBC/RT or whatever. If Owens or Tatum or whoever steps out of line, then they just won't be invited back on.
Cable news also wants to keep people watching cable news, and that isn't done with any sort of astute analysis-- that would just lead more people to outside sources. They're in the business of keeping it dumbed-down for other reasons reasons like just wanting to spew propaganda, but it's also part of the business model.

If you vote for trump then you ain't black

Gee where did I hear that one

This is a nice piece-- and you're correct. It sort of shows the difference between the Marxist perspective and the more conspiracy driven method that I consider basically intuitive, of just looking at what "power" is doing-- although they still end up converging so well that it can be hard to disambiguate them.
But I think this approach makes a stronger argument than looking at wealth deciles, class interest, and the meaning of inequality in a neoliberal world. Why go through those steps when you can just point to power directly? It is horseshoe theory in action though and how it plays out in the real world. Except this writer is (likely) not on the "far right"* anymore than someone like Walter Benn Michaels is on the "far left". They just represent two different approaches to the same issues.
I thought the section that you quoted was particularly interesting, from a metaphysical sort of approach, it is a psychological hijacking of sorts, and there's a youtuber I used to watch who I'll likely post something from that has some similar ideas.

It’s extremely common to find critics of “wokeness” and critical race theory decrying it as a radical activist- and academic-driven plot to upend the basic foundations of American society. And while it certainly does like to present itself that way, and is even believed to be exactly that by its most true believers, it’s an analysis that fails to explain why every Fortune 500 company, establishment politician, media executive, and entertainer has become an evangelist for these ideas. After all, radicalism is about threatening and upending existing power structures. What we’re seeing now is quite the opposite. Far from seeing these ideas as a threat, the existing power structure is enthusiastically adopting them as something of a ruling class ideology. So unless you think all of these people are critical theory sleeper cells who are just now being awakened to carry out a plot decades in the making, the more likely explanation is that not only are these ideas compatible with power, but something about them must actually lend themselves to protecting and even enhancing that power. In other words, it’s an ideology that seems much more suited not to radicalism, but to the opposite: repression.

This section though is the one more pertinent to the debate I've had with you-- about where this all coming from and how you CRT and these sorts of issues should be framed, and I'm wondering if you're not being brought around to the "these are only pretend radicals" side as opposed to the "actual radicals" argument you've pushed?
*ETA: Shant Mesrobian writes for Forward and Jacobin and is a leftist. I'm still fine with contrasting his approach from some of the more explicitly Marxist arguments I've seen.

To be fair, it’s hard for anyone to measure up against such luminaries as Clarence Thomas.

When you’ve got Clarence Thomas as your power forward passing the rock to Substack’s own John McWhorter, lesser intellectuals like Candice Owens are going to wind up riding the bench sitting next to Diamond & Silk.

Tatum is better than her, but he has sold out a bit.

Or at least adopting a version of the ideas. You guys can have your little diversity party and we'll even support you just make sure it stays out of our hair and things continue to look the same at the top.

It still keeps 2 top layers effectively in place. One for white people(minus a few outliers) and one not-white people. And kinda shows that the divide/conquer thing is true to a point--but it also kinda shows that the very top is drinking some of their own kool-aid/are true believers because why else would that real estate be protected?

I mean this sounds kinda racist not gonna lie

Could you elaborate on/reword this?

I think we only hear about the woke members of those particular groups. Others are silent. And I guess it is difficult to call it radical thought, when it now is essentially the orthodoxy. However, at one point it had to be radical. This just goes to show you just how quick this orthodoxy was ingrained.

After some googling, it turns out that McWhorter voted Democratic, so there might be an opening for Tatum on the starting lineup.

'Winning' the game is still almost entirely reserved for white people--except for a tiny few exceptions. There's effectively a different definition of what your 'Max' potential is based on color ya?

It's been a long process it just happened really slowly then sort of all at once. But one thing that I'm learning is that the left-- people like Walter Benn Michaels or Richard Rorty-- were all over this stuff and landing shots before "the right" [by which I mean non-leftist thinkers who still approach issues in good faith] even knew what was happening.

Probably so. It seems like black people are topping out before the CEO level. I'm still not following you too well today. Remember that the black-white wealth gap is basically entirely driven by the difference between the top 10% of both groups, and is a function of the relative histories of both groups combined by wealth inequality driven by neoliberalism. The bottom 50% of whites have 2% of white wealth.

Shockingly, race war ideology leads to people fantasizing about race war-- or at least allows them to do so publicly on state owned television in 2021 like it's no big deal.

Exactly but that still compares with the bottom 50% of blacks having -3% of black wealth. Another way to look at it is that it would require roughly $12T in white to black wealth transfer to equalize the black-white wealth gap but only about $400B to equalize the black-white wealth gap for the bottom 50% of blacks and whites.

If only there were more black Bilderbergers*, Davos attendees, and bonesmen.
Then we could all look on in pride at this beautifully diverse but utterly corrupt world.
*Condoleeza Rice attended in 2008

Which doesn't really matter. If I'm trying to provide the answer to something, talking about how stupid people are is meaningless. At best it is a waste of energy, and at worst it is an excuse to ignore errors. It's also wrong: People are on average, average.

As for MLK, he faced pretty much the same criticism that have been levied with a heavy hand in this thread by you and others. He was accused of causing hatred, inciting violence, subjugating blacks, stomping on people's rights, being a danger to freedom, being a dangerous leftist, exaggerating / making up problems and only blaming white people.

Heck, a quick perusal of current National Review op-eds about BLM and CRT showed an eerie similarity to National Review op-eds from the 50s and early 60s about NAACP and the Civil Rights Movement, excluding their then eager support for segregation.

This isn't to say that these situations are directly comparable, as they are not. They occur in different times of history and under different circumstances. What it does show is that there is a series of very enduring and easy-to-sell arguments deeply rooted in conservative politics that springs to life every time when issues of race are being discussed in America. A cynic might have something to say about that. These days of course, MLK is quite the hero to the folks of National Review, who print glowing op-eds about him and his life.

Most of my post above is, for the record, me doing what I call debate by proxy. I don't think it is a particularly good way to debate, but it is a very easy one.

Money is power imo. Depending on what numbers you use for totals(the story's basically the same regardless though). Whether it's 650/700/800 total. There are something like ~10 black billionaires or ~1% of the total. Even if you add all their wealth together they're still like some person(or even 1 of his kids) you never heard of and not including the multiple hundreds of others. And then there are all the 9fig people. The absolute richest black dude has like ~6B(not even top 100). Bezos alone is ~30x that. And the significantly underrepresented thing continues down into the millionaires etc just not to such an extreme degree--but still there.

To get there you have to be an outlier getting struck by lightning Hell like half--Jordan Oprah Kanye JayZ are practically walking news stories as it is. And if you think about politics as a battle of bankrolls(because it kinda is) it's just not even close. As an aside that's also why I kinda laugh at the soros stuff--dude is a microstack compared to the competition. Oprah's the 3rd wealthiest black person and she's in like a 10way tie for a slot in the mid 300s.

When I think of top10% like that includes accountants and various other professionals etc. The difference between say someone making ~150-200k/yr aka the help and the guys breaking thru the stratosphere with the real power it's just a completely different level of reality. And it continues like that down the chain with the ~50m-2/300m type guys basically in/around every city that wield a fair bit of power locally+ too. I don't know--but that's some of the stuff I think about wrt all of this stuff.

If MLK was a genuine progressive person fighting against the system this is what they are supposed to do. This and the questionable lone gunman. If they were putting MLK on Jimmy Kimmel and paying him 20k for speeches-- that's what would concern me.