RadixJournal - February 19, 2026


AOC's Curious Nationalism


Episode Stats

Length

8 minutes

Words per Minute

138.97916

Word Count

1,169

Sentence Count

85

Hate Speech Sentences

9


Summary

What does it mean to be a German? What is a white person ? Is there a difference between being a German and being a white American? What are the origins of the concept of whiteness? And what does it have to do with race?


Transcript

00:00:00.000 There's a very big difference between whiteness and national, like your actual culture, right?
00:00:10.560 Whiteness is an imaginary thing.
00:00:13.140 Being German is real.
00:00:14.720 Being Italian is real.
00:00:16.840 You know, being English.
00:00:18.180 You get a name, any other access powers there, AOC?
00:00:22.040 These are rich cultural heritages that are based on values, and they are so...
00:00:29.180 They are so much a part of what make our cultures and our societies what they are.
00:00:35.980 Okay, this is just very interesting.
00:00:40.620 So she said these cultures are based on values.
00:00:43.680 I mean, how do I start on this?
00:00:45.940 I think the notion of a white race is, in terms of a biological concept, is more coherent than the notion of a German.
00:00:59.180 Now, she said that whiteness is imaginary, but then being a German is real.
00:01:05.140 Okay.
00:01:05.940 Well, all of these are concepts.
00:01:08.920 So they sort of all are imaginary on some level.
00:01:12.340 They all exist in our head.
00:01:14.120 We come up with words to describe reality, and reality never quite fits into those words.
00:01:21.960 It never does.
00:01:22.700 And I'm certainly more than willing to say that.
00:01:25.260 What is the border of whiteness?
00:01:26.820 Well, what's the border of German-ness?
00:01:28.880 We're using a word and putting it on reality and seeing if it works, and if it's more descriptive and predictive, then we continue to use it.
00:01:38.260 That's all it is.
00:01:39.300 But the notion of a European is more coherent than a German.
00:01:45.840 And, I mean, this gets back to a lot of things that I would talk about in terms of identitarianism many years ago, where she's reifying the nation state here.
00:01:56.420 And I don't even think she's thought through this enough to quite know what she's doing, but she's reifying the nation state.
00:02:04.280 Now, what is Germany?
00:02:06.500 Germany became an entity many decades after the United States became an entity.
00:02:12.660 Many decades after the United States nation was defined, in a way, through the Naturalization Act and the notion of free white people.
00:02:22.920 If you're free white and of age, come on down.
00:02:26.460 You're welcome here.
00:02:27.800 Got to be a good character.
00:02:28.900 That's all we demand.
00:02:29.980 And even there, we're kind of lax.
00:02:31.720 America was sort of, it wasn't an immigration policy because it was open in so many ways, but it was a kind of definition of the nation.
00:02:43.500 Now, English has never been our official language, but it certainly has defined what it means to be an American.
00:02:50.780 And English culture does as well.
00:02:53.960 Although, I think there's even, isn't there like just as many people of Germanic descent as English descent in the country?
00:03:01.720 There certainly is in many places, certainly the Midwest.
00:03:05.240 Someone said in the chat, slightly more.
00:03:06.740 Yeah.
00:03:07.360 We're a German country in a way.
00:03:09.980 There are more people who identify as German, but actually genetic testing shows that most people in America are just English.
00:03:18.180 Right.
00:03:18.780 And that's a founder effect.
00:03:21.040 Yeah.
00:03:21.320 Yeah.
00:03:22.500 Because they were sort of here first and they, so you create a new gene pool and that the founders have a great deal of effect.
00:03:31.600 Of what it's going to be like, even hundreds of years later, maybe even a thousand years later.
00:03:36.700 But you see my point, which is that there's always going to be a fuzzy border on any concept.
00:03:44.300 There's a fuzzy border on the concept of what is a mammal.
00:03:47.740 There's always going to be a duck bill platypus.
00:03:50.160 It's this exception, but it's an exception that proves the rule.
00:03:54.040 And to get back to what I was talking about before, you know, like the nation state, there was a lot of blood and tears that went into the formation of France, that went into the formation of Germany.
00:04:09.460 Germany became, in a way, Prussia-ized in order to achieve that national identity.
00:04:17.060 As late as the 1950s and 60s, this is a kind of a legend, but it gets to a point when Conrad Adenauer would take the train from the Rhineland, which is his home.
00:04:28.600 He's a, of course, German chancellor, post-war German chancellor, extremely consequential post-war German chancellor, old, generation older than Hitler.
00:04:37.860 He kind of took over after the young, the young guys fucked everything up.
00:04:42.400 When he would take the train to Berlin, he would close the, his windows so he wouldn't look out onto Asia in his mind.
00:04:53.580 This horrible Prussian, Eurasian, brutal Protestant industrial culture.
00:05:00.260 He preferred the more organic green Catholicism of the Rhineland.
00:05:04.820 Might if he had, might have Conrad Adenauer had a little more in common with the French, in fact.
00:05:13.160 Isn't that Rhinish culture of Germany kind of French in so many ways and architecture and mentality and sentimentality?
00:05:23.160 You could say all of those things.
00:05:25.120 What does it mean to be Tyrolean?
00:05:26.580 There is a culture that has its own accents and dialects in many ways that stretches across Germany and Switzerland and Austria.
00:05:37.580 It's kind of Tyrolean.
00:05:38.840 It's a particular thing.
00:05:41.400 So in a way, the nation state that she is reifying, she's just taking for granted, basically, if Germany exists.
00:05:49.240 Because I don't know, she went to a beer garden or Oktoberfest festival once or something.
00:05:53.640 It's not even German culture, it's Bavarian culture, by the way, which is Catholic as well.
00:05:59.520 It's different than what we would associate with Germany.
00:06:03.300 But anyway, the nation state is first off created through blood and tears.
00:06:08.320 You are forcing different regions, smaller locales, regions that cross over borders into one sovereign entity called Germany or France or Great Britain or Russia, etc.
00:06:24.480 So the nation state is on some level both too big and too small.
00:06:30.700 It doesn't get at bigger regional cultures.
00:06:34.460 It doesn't get at this civilizational idea that we call the West, but it's also sort of too big in the sense that it doesn't really capture.
00:06:44.760 It sometimes suffocates and squashes regional dialects and so on.
00:06:50.020 Whether you're a Yankee in Massachusetts or a Westerner who loves the rodeo or a Southerner, being an American has on some level suffocated those regional identities.
00:07:05.200 We shouldn't reify these things.
00:07:07.360 We should recognize the difference.
00:07:10.560 There are many different Germanys.
00:07:12.220 So she doesn't want to recognize whiteness because coming from her standpoint, whiteness can never be a oppressed group, a visible minority, to use a Canadian terminology.
00:07:28.820 According to the Civil Rights Act, you can't really be discriminated against if you're white.
00:07:35.860 You can't join the great gravy train of diversity and inclusion and the welfare state, etc., if you're white.
00:07:45.240 That's what she's saying.
00:07:46.960 So that kind of thing is imaginary.
00:07:50.200 But being German is real.
00:07:52.740 Because in her mind, her mind being German means that you sit on a bench and drink Weissbeer and pinch a girl wearing a dirndl in the ass every September.
00:08:06.280 So anyway, I don't think she's thought through any of these things.
00:08:10.520 I think she has a very kind of like weirdly nationalistic conception of race that's just odd.
00:08:21.700 But anyway, so much for AOC.