I am fascinated by Isaac King's resolution criterion here. I am not sure whether I agree or disagree with it being reasonable, and so I thought I would create this market to incentivize more investigation into it.
David Duke is a long-time critic of Jewish and Black people. Maybe also Asians too; I am not familiar with the intricacies of his views. In particular, from 1974 to 1980, he had the position as the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan (i.e. the position as their leader). I think most people would consider him the archetypal White supremacist, but at the same time I have seen quotes of him disavowing the label, and have struggled to find quotes that unambiguously mark him as a White supremacist by Isaac King's criterion. (There were some ambiguous quotes, so YMMV.)
Please suggest quotes from David Duke which you think might qualify as White supremacy by Isaac King's definition. I will ask Isaac King to evaluate whether such quotes would "clearly attempting to normalize or encourage white supremacy" in the Scott Alexander question.
If Isaac King says that a quote counts as normalizing/encouraging White supremacy, then the market will count it as an instance of normalizing/encouraging White supremacy, regardless of whether I agree with Isaac King's judgement.
If he does not say anything about a quote, or says that a quote does not count as normalizing/encouraging White supremacy, then the market will count it as not being an instance of normalizing/encouraging White supremacy, regardless of whether I agree with Isaac King's judgement.
Since David Duke is broadly considered a key figure within White supremacy, it seems uninformative to me whether he has ever promoted it by Isaac King's criterion; I expect enough noise that the answer will probably be yes. Instead, the market resolves to the number of distinct years in which David Duke has promoted White supremacy, as evidenced by the quotes that can be found up to the close date. The purpose of this is to measure his overall consistency in promoting White supremacy. If no quotes can be found, the market resolves to 1 to preserve logarithmic neatness.
Update: Isaac King expects that the history of the KKK implies that one can take for granted that its members believe white people should be treated as better than black people. If so, this would automatically imply that David Duke's leadership of and defense of the KKK is promoting and normalizing white supremacy. However, we don't actually know much about the KKK, so people are encouraged to suggest evidence for or against this proposition. He can then evaluate things based on that information, and apply similar standards to Scott Alexander in the other market.
1,000
3.00I am resolving this to 7 years; 6 years for his leadership of the KKK, and 1 year for @ForrestTaylor 's quote. Some of @KelseyPiper 's quotes would've been relevant, except that they overlapped with the years he was leading the KKK.
This should not be interpreted as a claim that he hasn't been promoting white supremacy for more than 7 years. Rather, the market criteria specified that we could count years evidenced by quotes found in the comments, and so it might also be that there are years we missed, due to not having posted any relevant quotes.
As far as I can tell, Duke openly wants explicit segregation between whatever group he considers "white" and everyone else, and has never contradicted himself on that point. I think that @IsaacKing is correct that this is white supremacy.
But it appears Duke spends very little time actually talking about policies he would explicitly support. I just spent several execrable minutes on his website and he spends pretty much all his time just bitching about Jewish people, you know, like a lot of losers do.
I can find many quotes of him saying he wants to "preserve my own people", and that's it. He won't elaborate on that. I think it's fairly obvious to any right-thinking person what it means when a former Klan leader says that, but, like many evil people, they are an eternal war with specificity. (Alex Jones' deposition probably being the number one example of this.)
"I am not interested in ruling the world, but I damn well want to preserve my own nation and the European people wherever they may dwell. I believe in the right of all people everywhere in the world to do the same." Again, what does he mean by this? It's technically unclear but I'm pretty sure the answer now is the same as it was in 1978, explicit segregation and different laws for different races. That's the quiet part, and he doesn't say the quiet part loud anymore.
I've now trawled through enough of this site to make me feel physically ill (a light headache) so I'm done, and I think that this market makes a pretty good point- white supremacists often do everything they can to obfuscate their positions and make it so they only talk about "preserving and defending their people" against the Other, without out-and-out endorsing white supremacy very often at all.
DUKE: I think that white people were, no question, the creators of what we call white America.
COLMES: Are they the rightful owners of the country?
DUKE: I don’t know that, I think that white people built the country and in a sense, you know what I think what whites were the owners of? Do you know what I think white people wholly own? I think freedom of speech is a white thing. This is something that white people do. I think governments, this is a white thing.
-The Alan Colmes show Aug 2016
So if I understand correctly, David Duke was not actually a leader of anything that descends from the original KKK, but instead founded a new modern branch of the KKK where he was the leader. The SPLC describes the history of this new modern branch here.
In the ACX Discord, @IsaacKing suggested a concern with my approach:
I'm saying that being a member of the KKK is strong evidence towards the fact that one holds [beliefs that white people should be treated better than other races].
[It's what its leaders/founders support(ed) and] what the organization works towards. (Disclaimer: I don't actually know much about the KKK.)
I suggested:
Maybe to solve the "I don't actually know much about the KKK" thing, I should add an option in the market for people to provide information about historical facts about the KKK which would be sufficient to prove that KKK membership implies a presumption of white supremacy? So that the resolution becomes more official? Like I'm imagining amending the market with something like:
Update: Isaac King expects that the history of the KKK implies that one can take for granted that its members believe white people should be treated as better than black people. If so, this would automatically imply that David Duke's leadership of and defense of the KKK is promoting and normalizing white supremacy. However, we don't actually know much about the KKK, so people are encouraged to suggest evidence for or against this proposition. He can then evaluate things based on that information, and apply similar standards to Scott Alexander in the other market.
Does this sound good or do you have any concerns about it?
And he responded:
Something like that seems reasonable to me, and I think this discussion would be better had on the market itself.
This, for example, is a white supremacist. (And a surprisingly introspective and intellectually honest one.) My understanding is that this is fairly representative of the people in the KKK and similar organizations. If that understanding is correct, then I think anyone who is closely allying themselves with those organizations can safely be called a white supremacist.
@IsaacKing He seems to be endorsing a situation where white people rule over the US and decide how both white people and black people should live. This seems like a natural criterion by which one could call someone a white supremacist, since it literally means that white people should reign over other groups, and so I agree that he makes a good example.
The quotes I've seen from David Duke have suggested that he has endorsed a position more like white separatism; that white people should run their things their way and black people should run their things their way. Maybe he has also endorsed explicit white dominance somewhere; I would not be surprised, but I can't think of any places where I've seen it.
It seems logical to extend the notion of "white nationalism" to cover cases like David Duke's white separatism, since white separatists and white nationalists are probably political allies, definitely believe similar factual questions about race, probably oscillate between the positions, and most importantly, because it would probably have similar bad implications for black people if white nationalists or white separatists came to power.
But it seems literal to extend the notion of "white nationalism" to cover cases where someone advocates that white people are on average higher IQ and that high-IQ people should run society. After all, this would literally lead to rule of white people over society! Note that even if one considers the effect size "small", the implication for who is at the top of society can be very large, because small differences in means can mean big differences in the proportion at the tail of the distribution. (I.e. if the racial difference is 12 IQ points, with whites having a mean of 100, and the standardard deviation being 15, then the white:black ratio for >115 IQ would be 21:1. Which could be said to be 21/(21+1)=95% of the way to white supremacy.)
That said, there's also a democracy element to it. Even if Scott is advocating for executive positions being occupied by white people, he would still believe that black people should have voting rights for the political of those positions, which would mean that they are to an extent accountable to black people.
@MartinRandall One quote for every year. So for instance if Kelsey Piper's quotes all got accepted, and no other quotes got accepted, then the market would resolve to 5, because there are 5 distinct years (1975, 1978, 1985, 1986, and 1998).
Also in my view it's fine/encouraged if @IsaacKing comments before the resolution date, so we can cut down on the uncertainty about the criteria.
1975: ""White people don't need a law against rape, but if you fill this room up with your normal black bucks, you would, because [the n--- racial slur] are basically primitive animals."
1978: ""Jewish people have put the interests of race over the interests of the American people.... Jews are filled with more hatred and rage for our race, for our heritage, for our blood than perhaps you can imagine."
1978: ""Our clear goal must be the advancement of the white race and separation of the white and black races."
1985: ""[A] black...gets a job with a white-owned company. He is the only black at the firm. He works hard, but he's fighting a losing battle against his genes."
1986: "They're trying to exterminate our race. I think, probably in a moral sense, the Jewish people have been a blight. I mean as a whole, not every Jew. And they probably deserve to go into the ashbin of history. But saying that and actually shooting or killing people in masses, are two different things. I'm not advocating extermination. I think the best thing is to resettle them in someplace where they can't exploit others. And I don't think they can live among themselves, I really don't."
1998: "No one has to tell Jews to destroy Gentile pride, heritage, honor, loyalty, tradition, while at the same time building up their own. It is in their programming"
@KelseyPiper I think these are excellent examples of clearly racist quotes by David Duke. But it is worth noting the subtlety about the resolution criterion: White supremacy is defined as "the belief that white people should be treated better than people of other races simply due to their race". I think this complicates matters.
Some of them are good candidates, but still somewhat ambiguous. For instance, is the 1978 quote saying that White people should be treated better than Black people? Kind of yes, in that it is advocating for segregation, and segregation is known to historically have involved Black people being treated as worse than White people. However, unless there's some context missing, I think his endorsed implication is that Black people should get to do their thing and White people should get to do their thing, separate but as equal they would end up without discrimination. Realistically I bet if David Duke had his way, it would end up looking like Jim Crow. But does that mean the quote counts? Up to Isaac King to set the rules.
My guess would be that e.g. Isaac King wouldn't count the 1985 quote because it is a factual/empirical question, but would count the 1986 quote because it is advocating for relocation, which is a policy matter, but I don't know.
1975: Definitely promoting white supremacy.
1978 a: Antisemitic, but not white supremacy. (I think most people still consider Jews to be white?)
1978 b: A little less definitive, but I'd still call that promoting white supremacy, assuming no mitigating factors. There could theoretically be a non-bigoted interpretation of this one, like "I believe that both cats and dogs live happier lives when they live apart, and personally I'm more concerned about the welfare of cats, but that doesn't mean I think cats are inherently superior." But I doubt that's what was meant. Knowing the context of the quote would be helpful to rule out the charitable interpretation.
1985: This is just the belief that black people are genetically worse at at least one thing, so from just that sentence alone, I wouldn't call that promoting white supremacy. However knowing the context might change that.
1986 & 1998: Again, clear "gentile supremacy" (i.e. antisemitism), but I don't think that's the same thing as white supremacy.
@IsaacKing My understanding is that white supremacists don't consider jews to be white. I think I saw a comment on The Motte a while ago about "circles of whiteness", and it placed jews in the outermost circle, with clear consensus among "white identitarian" types that jews were not white.
@tailcalled Doesn't it kind of depend on the flavor? KKK-style white supremacy tends to come with antisemitism as well, while IQ-style white supremacy (like Scott is accused of) tends to think Jews are even smarter than other white people.
@IsaacKing There are a lot of IQ-style types who believe jews are smarter but still don't like jews because they feel that jews are too libertine and also take over the media/academia and censor opposition. They also tend to argue about whether jews are too overrepresented in those areas relative to their IQ.