What We Have Just Experienced

January 19, 2021 Hunter Wallace Alt-Center, Conservatism, donald trump, Politics, Populists 38

In the 2016 election, we elected a demagogue, a narcissist, a plutocrat and a reality television celebrity as president of the United States who cynically exploited nationalist and populist themes to build a cult following and get himself elected. Everything that followed over the next four years during which he inflicted unprecedented damage upon our cause flowed from this central fact.

2017 was the watershed year that began to separate real populists from fake populists. The people who were principled populists began almost immediately to sound the alarm about the incoming Trump presidency. The fact that Donald Trump had picked Gary Cohn, the president and CEO of Goldman Sachs, to be his chief economic adviser and had nominated Andrew Puzder to be his Secretary of Labor telegraphed the sort of economic policies the White working class and middle class could expect out of the Trump presidency. The fact that Anthony “The Mooch” Scaramucci was on the Trump transition team was also a clear sign that Donald Trump had sold out to the Republican donor class after duping populist voters by saying during the primary that he was self-financing his own campaign to be free of their influence.

Over the course of the next year, we were introduced to Jared Kushner who had been invisible on the campaign trail. We saw Donald Trump launch a military strike on Syria over a fake gas attack which was an early illustration of his poor judgment. Immigration was put on the backburner. Instead of pushing the populist and nationalist themes that had won him the presidency, Donald Trump embraced Paul Ryan’s Better Way agenda and squandered his political capital on repealing Obamacare and passing the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. These two policies were respectively the two most unpopular proposals of the last twenty years and began to tank his approval rating with moderate voters. In addition, Donald Trump put Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court, which didn’t raise any eyebrows at the time because he was fulfilling a major campaign promise, but was in retrospect another sign that his administration was drifting in a conservative direction. It highlighted the dynamic by which the conservative agenda was sailing through the Republican Congress while the populist and nationalist agenda was being blocked. Everyone from Ben Shapiro to Rich Lowry who had bitterly opposed Trump suddenly began to warm to him.

Once again, the people who were genuine populists were upset by these developments and reacted to them as one might expect. This is why his approval rating steadily tanked when the focus was on health care. It happened again when his approval rating crashed when the focus was on the tax cuts. Even though the tax cuts and repealing Obamacare were always part of Trump’s agenda, Independent voters had swallowed a lot of things they may have disagreed with and voted for him in spite of these things. They assumed it was a price to be paid in exchange for a massive border wall, a trillion dollar infrastructure plan, swift withdrawals from interminable wars, deportations of millions of illegal aliens, etc. They had voted for Donald Trump because he hadn’t presented himself as another mainstream conservative.

As the leftwing political violence cranked up after the Trump inauguration, genuine populists and nationalists were incensed by the lawlessness and attacks on their free speech and freedom of assembly and began to go out into the streets to exercise their right to oppose it. It was the attack on MILO’s speaking event at Berkeley in February 2017 which galvanized the movement. It led to a series of rallies in Berkeley and around the country. The Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville was the culmination of these free speech rallies and was the biggest event of its kind to date. There was going to be a torch march like at the previous rally, a political rally in Lee Park and an afterparty for socializing and networking. The Charlottesville Police and Virginia State Police stood down that day, Antifa violently disrupted the event and James Fields, Jr. crashed into that crowd and killed Heather Heyer. Over the course of the next three years, there were dozens, if not hundreds of events involving groups like the Proud Boys which played out like Charlottesville although the Alt-Right was never again present at any of them.

In the aftermath of Charlottesville, the only question that seemed to matter was how the fallout from the event would affect Donald Trump, which was itself a symptom of the rising lawlessness due to the failure of his Justice Department to prosecute and convict Antifa that had begun at his Inauguration. The people who had went to Charlottesville, who played by the rules and got a federal court order and who had done nothing that day except show up to voice their opinions were viciously attacked as “bad optics.” James Fields, Jr. went to prison for half a millennium. The Rise Above Movement was prosecuted by Trump’s Justice Department. The guys who were ambushed by DeAndre Harris while returning to their cars went to prison and Antifa got away with it and Donald Trump and the GOP did nothing about it.

Charlottesville was the watershed event that divided the populists from the conservatives who had joined the Alt-Right. The populists who were seeing things clearly were already angry about Donald Trump’s steady betrayal of his campaign promises and began to break with him completely after that event. In contrast, the conservatives rallied behind Weev and Republican operative Ricky Vaughn and branded anyone who was becoming critical of Trump as a “whigger nationalist” or a “wignat.” If you didn’t “trust Trump” and “Trust the Plan,” the stereotype was that you were a low-IQ, high time preference trailer park Nazi whose “bad optics” was detrimental to their effort to infiltrate the Republican Party and blend in with MAGA. You were an albatross holding them back from “appealing to the normies.” As they told us thousands of times on the internet over the next three years, we were “goon marchers.”

There was a clean separation after Charlottesville between the core of the Alt-Right and the “American Nationalist movement.” They wrapped themselves in the American flag. They started calling themselves America First paleoconservatives. They clung to Daddy Trump’s leg and rationalized and waved away every single one of his subsequent betrayals. They tarred anyone outside of the MAGA personality cult as a “cringe wignat.” They voted for the Republican Party in the 2018 and 2020 elections. Their behavior was not motivated by any genuine populist worldview. They were motivated by ambition.

If you were a Donald Trump plan truster, cheerleader and chump in 2018, 2019 and 2020, you were bringing in a massive haul of superchats, donations, page views and the clicks. There was no pressure or criticism of Trump coming from anyone besides us to fulfill his campaign promises. Slowly, QAnon replaced the Alt-Right as Donald Trump’s base, which was reflected in the way in which websites like The Daily Crackpot went full conspiratard and plan truster in their content in 2020. There was no plan beyond trusting Trump and clinging to Trump and orbiting MAGA and keeping Trump in office to grift off of both like leeches for as long as possible. The plan was to ride Trump’s coattails and to tell people stories that they wanted to hear. “Donald Trump is moving the Overton Window.” “This is how Trump can still win.” There was no market for bad news or “blackpills” and especially for the truth. Some of these people even went so far as to promote crackpots like Sidney Powell and Lin Wood to vacuum up that last dollar.

How far were some people willing to go to follow these charlatans and mountebanks (there is nothing new under the sun) into this post-truth world? Some people like Ashli Babbitt genuinely believed the lies and died or went to prison for Donald Trump. Some people were willing to do anything for viral clicks like Baked Alaska. Even after the certification of the Electoral College vote and the Supreme Court rejecting the Texas case doomed any chance of a Trump second term, some people were still pushing this “Stop the Steal” narrative and dangling out the hope that there was still a chance that the election could be overturned on January 6th. Republican senators and congressmen cynically went along with this knowing it was nothing but performance art. Legions of small time grifters like Nick Fuentes and the America First movement were sucked in by the irresistable opportunity to promote their own brands by the optics of fighting for Trump. Donald Trump raised over a quarter of a billion dollars off his gullible supporters by raising their hopes that there was a plan and that somehow he could still win the election. At no point over the course of four years did Donald Trump ever tell his supporters that QAnon was a hoax.

It looks like some people followed Trump’s example and lack of character and looked in the mirror and convinced themselves that they were the plan. As long as my own brand is growing, what is wrong with telling all these people that Trump has a plan and that it is all going to work out in the end? Besides the obvious problem that the clock was running out on the Trump presidency, nothing of lasting significance for populist voters was getting accomplished and that there would likely be severe political consequences? Only a high-time preference “wignat” would point out that in the long run there would be a price to pay for tricking people like this and squandering a populist mandate for political change.

The price that we are going to pay for that is Joe Biden’s presidency. We began sounding the alarm about Big Tech censorship, Trump’s conservative agenda, Antifa violence and Trump alienating his populist base years ago. Nothing was done about those problems which continued to metastasize. We sounded the alarm about COVID-19 and warned it wasn’t “just the flu” and that it was going to cost Trump the election. No one wanted to hear that at the time and sure enough it ended up costing Trump the election. Finally, we repeatedly warned people about the Grift Right and the Stop the Steal rallies. We identified, called and flagged every major mistake of the Trump presidency well in advance.

What about the brain trust of the White Nationalist movement? How did they do in the Trump era? Greg Johnson continued to push the old “mainstreaming” strategy which hasn’t worked for 50 years in the vain hope that somehow having Trump in office as a “symbol” was advancing the cause of White Nationalism. No one got jobs in the Trump administration in exchange for their support. The Trump Justice Department incarcerated a record number of White Nationalists. White Nationalists were officially condemned by Congress at least two or three times. Israel got virtually everything it wanted short of a war with Iran. Donald Trump destroyed Jeff Sessions’ career. Immigration hawks like Steve King were purged from the party. Groypers were purged from Turning Point USA. Political correctness intensified into militant wokeness. We lost hundreds of our monuments and our online platforms. Law and order collapsed. Wall Street is at a record high though so oligarchs like Jeff Bezos made a fortune in the Trump era. What did White Nationalists get out of it except for absorbing the full force of the backlash of having Trump as president? The lulz of “owning the libs” by voting for the Platinum Plan?

Aside from losing an election to Joe Biden that could have been easily won by fulfilling popular campaign pledges instead of following Jared Kushner’s strategy, what’s the cherry on top of this shit sundae? It is that this toxic relationship with Donald Trump and MAGA and the allure of Thiel bucks and the compulsive need for White Nationalists to seek validation from conservatives and to impress the “normies” with displays of optics and this desire to grift and seek attention has now culminated in a disaster that is currently over 100x greater than Charlottesville ever was and could very well result in a new version of the Patriot Act and the arrest, imprisonment and financial destruction of all those who knew better but were dumb and greedy enough to participate in it anyway. Everything we learned from Charlottesville and stuck with for two or three years was unlearned in two months for the sake of Donald Trump’s vanity.

The damage to rightwing populism from the memory of the Trump presidency will be severe. The movement is now associated in the public mind with violent conspiratards, mass death, incompetence, race baiting, grifters and lunatics like Lin Wood. The phrase “Trust the Plan” will linger in our language for centuries to denote someone who is dimwitted and being duped by others. The real “blackpill” will be when all these people who were conned by Trump finally figure out they got played and become even more cynical and drop out of politics. The long term cost of performance art populism will be a cloud of suspicion that hovers over anyone who is genuine and tries to run that kind of campaign again.

My final memory of the Trump presidency will always be how God Emperor Blumpf got rolled by Mitch McConnell on $2,000 checks with the support of 80% of the American people, how he ended by pardoning Lil Wayne and how Nick Fuentes and Baked Alaska set their future on fire for him with less than two weeks to go in his term. I will also remember how Ashli Babbitt stormed the Capitol and literally died for a man who wouldn’t give her the time of day. There is a strong pent up desire for change out there which could never fully express itself through Donald Trump, the Republican Party and institutional conservatism. Unlike Huey Long, the man never used his talents of persuasion to build his own organization and to mobilize his supporters to advance populist goals or to utterly destroy the people he had defeated.

As we enter the Joe Biden presidency, I will try to close on a positive note. We have learned a number of things from what we have just experienced over the past five years. We’ve been transformed by it. We are older and wiser for having been put through this ordeal. In the end, many of us saw how our hopes, values and beliefs were being used against us by people who knew which buttons to push in order to manipulate us into getting what they wanted and most importantly we got a sense of who was real among us. Many of us weren’t fooled by the same old siren song and didn’t walk into Capitol Siege trap. The ability to billionaires to use their vast ill gotten wealth to buy the votes and policy agenda of elected officials and to essentially nullify the will of the people must be on the frontburner as a populist issue. The power of tech oligarchs to censor political viewpoints that they dislike must also be on the frontburner as a populist issue. When you drill right down into it, you find out that all that money is the source of their power over us and that mainstream conservatism and libertarianism are unequipped to address the problem. The little guys have their votes and no power because the big guys have amassed all of it to themselves. They can walk into the Oval Office and purchase whatever they want no matter how unpopular.

Donald Trump isn’t the first demagogue in American history. He is the first one to win the presidency. The next populist leader must pick up where Huey Long left off, not Donald Trump.

Note: We saw in the Democratic primary how billionaires like Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg bought their way on to the debate stage. They were both inspired by Donald Trump, but lacked his skills at marketing themselves. It is not a Republican or a Democratic problem.

About Hunter Wallace 12392 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

35 Comments

    • QAnon could also be a fine example of retards believing everything they read on anonymous message boards without using critical thinking and just running wild with it. Or as the disclaimer on /b/ goes:

      “The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood.
      Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact.”

  3. “The guys who were ambushed by DeAndre Harris while returning to their cars went to prison”

    For how long the prison sentence?

    That’s fuk up.We’re litarilly without justice of divershity.

  4. Grindr Greg no more believes that the election was stolen than I do. He clowned himself for years supporting a buffoonish con man.

    On the other hand, tbis was an absolute tour de force. Well done Hunter.

  5. America MAGA and its relationship to Israel/Palestine.

    I have an analogy. Suppose you were to make a documentary about Bandaid funding the Ethiopian Marxists in the 1980s via money funnelled in by Bob Geldof. You make the documentary looking at the tribal war and famine there and you interview the principal actors in the conflict. Then you look at the Bandaid administrators and their subsequent careers as two faced billionaires and how the concert was monetized and spun into Comic Relief Charity ops. Then you started to interview ordinary folks who chipped in a couple of quid or went to see Queen headline at Wembley and bought the LP. Imagine then stalking the concert goers for funding a subsequent genocide and doxxing them for funding the terror of the Mengistu regime. You follow them around their various sink estates and miserable lives and completely ignore Bono, Geldof and Tedros.

    That’s the modern media.

    • @Captain John Charity Spring MA

      Excellent allegory.

      A decade ago the Zionist Jews set up “The Canary Project” where college students that did any “activism” for the human rights of Palestinians get harassed after college and throughout their careers. Potential and current employers are harassed – it is extremely similar to Scientology’s “Fair Game.”

      But since Zionist Jews are doing it, not Scientologists, it’s ‘anti-semitic” to say anything.

      The ADL invented this sort of defamation, doxing, stalking, tortious interference, etc. Henry Ford explained how they coordinated the newspaper advertisers, etc.

      The ADL was Yelp.com before the Internet. None of this is new.

      • It’s literally like blaming a duped person who bought an LP or concert ticket for the decade of Marxist sponsored genocide in Ethiopia that followed.

  6. Hunter, if there is a real silver lining from Trump it’s that we (as in WE, the founding American stock) now know what we really want.

      • We want a real Nationalist leader. Whether that’s a Franco, a Jeff Davis, a Salvini, a…
        We don’t want any GOP bullsh*t no mo, homie.
        We want REAL Nationalism.

    • James Bongstreet,

      I know one thing that y’all “founding stock Americans ” can look forward to is paying slavery reparations. It’s unfair that the sins of your “founding stock American” ancestors left you holding the bill. Your “founding stock American” ancestors jewish partners in the Transatlantic slave trade will leave you holding the bag all alone and high and dry.

      • There were Jewish, African, Spanish, Portuguese, French, British &c. partners in the slave trade. Bill was paid in full 1861-1865. NIggaz can pay ME reparations for my dead ancestors who fought in that conflict.

  7. I think that the crows might become an endangered species.

    When Donald shit show develops, everybody must must eat this wonderful bird hated only because of his the feather color.

  8. This is somewhat off topic, today is Robert Edward Lee’s birthday, I always try to remember this day and honor it. A great man. On the Monday holiday I remember Lee, not that jackleg nigger that the national government has forced us to honor.

    This is one of the major separations between working, middle class white people and the rats that make up the swamp. The upper class and upper middle class types are endlessly trying to show that they aren’t racist, they’re not racist! Dumb fuck virtue signaling has been made many times worse by the Internet.

    It has gotten so crazy that it’s become a national mental health problem.

    In my mind it boils down to more or less the same thing, upper class types trying to look like they’re better than somebody who actually works for a living.

  9. I am just here to give me weekly parent Boomer report. A chunky new blonde with too much makeup named Pavlich is on Fox right now with Jesse Waters and Gutfeld playing migrant caravan clips 24 to the 7 and repeating

    “this is what Joe Biden wants. This is a Biden presidency. African Americans and Hispanics voted for President Trump in record numbers because they want border security. YES immigrants built this number but they came legally” while my dad curses under his breath and mom looks at me and says “there is your president”. The humor and tragedy is

      • @Spahn hose that large mammal and take it out of the control top girdle and stockings. You will get a rude awakening. The reason I only date thin petite women is because most of the time you get what you see. Trust me on this one you would be filing for divorce on day one plus after listening to her retarded takes for five minutes you would run to Mexico. There is another newer one on Fox a 30ish brunette who is extremely hot or was extremely hot till I saw her retweeting Charlie Kirk and TPUSA posts everyday

  10. That’s an excellent link, ATBOL.

    Excerpt: “It got particularly frustrating when I’d try to talk about Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ statement that arresting WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange is a high priority for this administration, a statement Trump personally supported. These Q people told me they had great news for me: Assange is no longer languishing in London’s Ecuadorian embassy. No, some clever researchers had deciphered some cryptic statements from an anonymous poster on 8chan, and it turns out that Assange is now walking free and enjoying a full presidential pardon.”

    I agree it has to be an op.

  11. I always regarded Q as nothing more than an internet joke which only the most gullible yokels would take seriously. It was so goofy and amateurish! But is it possible that Q was actually a sophisticated effort on the part of the Deep State to manipulate public opinion? No, at this point I don’t see any evidence for that.

  12. An excellent summary. At least we can thank Trump for exposing the Zionists, grifters and paid whores in our ranks. 90% of the ostensibly pro-white alt-right have turned out to be compromised or otherwise completely worthless.

    Jewish power is the only issue that matters. Trump strengthened that power and so he was against White self-determination and the nationalist cause. It really is that simple. Anyone supporting a Zionist or pro-Jewish politician is also against the cause. There is no incremental progress possible, there is no sneaking up on ZOG. Either you reject ZOG in its entirety or you support it.

  13. “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”

    – that old colored guy at the bus station

  14. Great article. I was a huge fan of Trump prior to the election and took me until his fake midterm election promises to realize he conned all of us. I didn’t know what a wignat meant until a few months ago so I appreciate the background. I found several like minded people like you so I realized I wasn’t the only one who could see what Trump was all about. A saving grace is his administration will bring many of the more intelligent people out of the GOP/Democrat uniparty way of thinking and we can begin to do something constructive.

  16. Don Trump Jr. is so cringe. Can they stop doing the cringe videos? And actually govern? Fuck democracy. It’s a circus. Liberalism is simply children playing at politics.

  17. We have our pyrrhic victory. Orange man was bad.

    Now what?

    We have 4 years of Biden ahead, and even less relevance than 6 months ago.

    What makes you think that Patriot Act 2.0 won’t extend to Wignats? They don’t have a track record being discerning. They don’t care what faction of goofballs they target, so long as they are White. Same as it was before Trump.

    So really, everything is worse than it was 5 years ago. Is it worse than it would have been after Hillary’s first term? Who knows. But it bears considering.

    Is the plan to hope that White Populism begins to build solidarity as a disaffected party out of power, ala the rise of the Altright in the run up to 2016? I guess it might.

    What means do any of the wignat tribe of the goofball clan (us) have to effect that change though?

    1) No money
    2) No platform (shortly to be hunted like pigs)
    3) Antisemitism is still unpopular, which kinda works. against the whole strategy of populism which is to seek common factors of dissaffection.
    4) We are still goofy as all getout.
    5) Retard tier Antisemitism (to the exclusion of all reason and in lieu of an actual worldview), again cause its a major issue that I don’t see anybody discussing. Its yet another of the many Albatross’ hung around our necks by TRS/Daily Stormer as an association we can’t get away from. Remember Morpheus said there was no going back if Neo ate the red pill? Yeah, well pretty much. Except theres no hot White chick in tight leather or cool sunglasses and stuff, just Elrond sticking his boot up our ass for eternity.
    6) Racism is no longer funny, which was totally our thing.

    There’s more stuff I could point out as big questions but, I figure the above is plenty for now.

    Oh yeah, Spencer is totally obnoxious and not many working class guys are gonna make it through one of his pretentious videos without concluding “fag”. So, his brand is kinda burned.

    At least brown people don’t deer hunt. So, bow season is the last stand of implicit White identity? Maybe bass fishing too.

    I dunno dude. Its looking bleak for whitey, and I don’t think Biden is a wagon I’ll be hitching my hopes to any time soon, regardless of what I’m told about how great its going to be by comparison to Trump Season 2 (cancelled because of covid).

    I’m sure you had your reasons for doing your best to suppress the Trump vote, but I guess time is gonna have to tell us if it was overall a great idea, even if it is hilarious to watch Anglin flail about like a roach with no cover. Basically nobody cares in meatspace, and meatspace has a way of deciding people’s priorities.

    We don’t have anything but vulnerable families in meatspace. And at least we that work jobs are going to pay IRL for the Biden thing. Hope its worth it in the long run.

    Who knows maybe the blog business will get super profitable all of a sudden and I can start a White Nationalist bow hunting blog and join the elite club of social influencers of the fringe and goofy.

    Thats my new 5 year plan. Fuck it.

    • “We have less relevance than six months ago”. The founding principle of the American government centers around crushing Christian white males, we are more relevant than ever and will only become more in the spotlight. Things might get rough but we will be living in the heads of the media corporations and politicians rent free

  18. “The best is yet to come!”

    It might be cynical to ask this, but who is that video for? It’s not for us, it sure as hell isn’t for Amnats or Qtards who Don Jr. denounced. It’s not for Liberals or Leftists. It’s not for the Republican Party which is going to collapse. It’s not for your basic Conservative who is going to suffer under Biden.

    I don’t want to be cliche, but the only people I can think that is for is Jews.

  19. A redistributionist, openly anti billionaire/anti-jew party needs to be formed now, so that it can begin gathering in & radicalizing the bitter Dumptards who invested everything into their belief in the Orange Calf, and capitalize on JoeHoe’s sure-to-be-unpopular tsunami of anti-Whitism.

    I’ve admired Huey Long for years, and a jew-aware version is what’s needed now. Right now.

  20. I strongly endorse everything said in this article but for the love of God, the virus itself is just the fucking flu.

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