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Thanks James – delighted you have joined in the discussion.

On your point 1, I did not suggest a race war was imminent or even possible. I was making the point that if someone wanted to foment a race war, they could scarcely do better than concoct an ideology that has as one of its elements the extreme and in some cases violent vilification of a particular identifiable racial group.

I admit that many of the activists (like the ones holding the ‘smash the white man’ sign) cannot be taken seriously. I suspect that encountering a genuine fascist rather than the polite well behaved people they generally harass would be a very rude awakening.

There is also the issue of how a society changes as demography works its way through from generation to generation. France is still numerically dominated by whites, but according to both the head of the DGSE (the main anti-terror organisation) and the outgoing home affairs minister (the name escapes me) the country is now teetering on the brink of civil war.

On point 2, I see the main point being that the redefinition is unwarranted, arbitrary and geared to a political purpose.

I agree with the concern you express in your third point, about the difficulty of having productive conversations about this kind of thing. There is clear evidence from the US especially of the extreme polarization that has occurred in the past few years. I have encountered people who hold the identarian view that it is possible to talk to, but they are generally ‘soft’ identarians with a relatively weak commitment to the ideology.