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

Harmful content

Hate speech

9

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

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

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
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. 0.91
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. 0.99
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? 0.64
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. 0.57
00:02:22.920 If you're free white and of age, come on down. 1.00
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. 1.00
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. 0.84
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. 1.00
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. 0.76
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.