Tales From The Movement: The Optics War

August 17, 2022 Hunter Wallace Alt-Right, White Nationalism 27

I’m tired of branding myself with labels.

I’m not interested in jumping on bandwagons anymore.

I’m much more skeptical of movements and cults of personality. This is due to watching the spectacular collapse of the Alt-Right. We’re seeing history repeat itself with the America First movement.

Does anyone remember Beardson Beardly? He first gained notoriety as an irony bro streamer during the Alt-Right years. After Charlottesville, Beardson was one of the loudest voices on the internet who was condemning “wignats” in the name of “optics.” He later went on to become a Groyper general and something like second-in-command of the America First movement.

I never had any interest in America First. I couldn’t imagine following or looking up to people like Beardson, Baked Alaska or Nick Fuentes. I’m not an incel gamer or a Zoomer and could never relate to that subculture. These people struck me as being driven more by their hatred of White women than anything else. After breaking off from the Alt-Right, this crowd went more and more in that direction.

I eventually lost touch with these people after they were banned from Twitter and YouTube and set up their own websites like Cozy.tv. I haven’t been following what goes on there and have heard less and less about them. I have heard about the drama in the America First movement though. Beardsoy last popped up on my radar screen when he appeared in that Louis Theroux documentary on AF in which he threatened to anally rape Brittany Venti. Needless to say, it wasn’t very optical.

Did you know that Beardson’s wife recently divorced him and left him for a black guy?

Did you hear about the drunken meltdown that he had about it which he livestreamed to the world?

Did you hear about how he renounced optics and now says there was never any real difference between wignats and AmNats?

I feel sorry for Beardson.

I’m not writing this article to specifically dump on him. I just can’t help but notice the tendency of these guys to self destruct and how character always seems to be destiny. Baked Alaska chased clicks and content into the Capitol on 1/6 and is now going to prison. In Beardson’s case, he is angry, alone and depressed now after being involved in this relationship for 11 years. He burned that relationship and alienated his wife in order to appeal to all of these incel losers on the internet.

This was all extensively covered in the drama community.

Note: Beardson denounces optics at 3:53:00 in the third video.

25 Comments

  1. I’m finding your history of the alt-right, very fascinating. What a dumpster fire it turned out to be. I also appreciate how you have treated these people as real human beings. With compassion and some understanding. They are losers, but still human beings. Hopefully, many of them will eventually get a more healthy outlook on life, and go on with their lives. The only one I’ve not had much sympathy for, Spencer. He always had much more resources than anyone else, but wasted it on his own ego. The others are more pitiable.

    • I also agree that this chronicle is utmost important. Great turning points in history make a lot of mess and often first and greatest actors disappear whiteout trace and taking their unique first hand stories with them.

      Freedom fighting is costly. A lot of Soviet dissident’s, freedom fighters and forest brothers also ended up with suicide, became homeless alcoholics, divorced or just totally burned out so they barely could maintain their lives.

      With communists is the same. Lenin died 54 yo, Dzerzhinsky 46, and most of their buddies did no saw their 60th jubilee. Next generation generation reached 70 and until today we remember what human wreckages they were with half dead Brezhnev in charge.

  2. What a wild and crazy ride. I dont regret any of it. No shoulda woulda coulda’s. Shit happened, it got interesting, and now here we are with a white awakening. Thats why i got involved and thats what the fuck happened, did we alt righters make that happen? We certainly played a role, we certainly got played, but we fucking went all in. History, can say i was part of it.

  5. The only thing I support nowadays is Secession. The Texas Nationalist movement is the best one out there. Any other kind of “pro-White” movement, or group I reject as they all end up being infiltrated, and a dumpster fire.

    • While I agree, the govt is never going to let any state secede. Too much money coming in to let them go.
      The other issue is, Texas is almost a full Mexican population state now. So it would just be part of Mexico.

        • “Texas will be an independent republic”:

          It goes back to Mexico when the Empire falls. Mexicans will take it back, by sheer overwhelming demographic strength.

          The Mexican Republic of Texas (1821-36) made a huge mistake by allowing (in the General Colonisation Law of 1824) free immigration regardless of race, religion or national origin. Most of the immigrants were Anglos from the southern U.S. and they brought their English-speaking African slaves with them, soon vastly outnumbering the Spanish-speaking, Mexican settlers.

      • Calvin Candy is an Anglosphere conservative. The near total absence of White people in Texas is his favorite part.

  6. Beardson was garbage and honestly I’m not sorry that he is ruined. He is one of those types like Spencer who just deserve it all. He is a brazen moron and didn’t pander to inceldom as much as he was complicit in creating the stigma of “incel.” In a way guys like Beardson serve as a foil for feminism with their imbecility against any legitimate criticism of feminism. Similar to how Alex Jones in his buffoonery taints any legitimate criticisms of US domestic or foreign policy. They either knowingly or unknowingly serve as buffers for the establishment. The entire AF moment did this. Really much of the Altright did this.

  7. I never took aside in the Great Optics War even when it was hotly raging. For two

    (1) I believed then, and still do, that most of the people fighting in it really didn’t care about the optics or anti-optics side. It’s just that they had previously stored up beefs with other sector people. So, if A hated B from way back for whatever made the beef pop off, and A got the notion that B was demanding better optics, then A would viscerally react by saying “screw the optics.” When in reality, neither A nor B ever gave the matter any serious thought. If you and I hated each other, and you thought I liked chocolate ice cream, you would react by trashing chocolate and endorsing vanilla. When in realty, neither one of us have ever eaten any ice cream.

    (2) Among the few that took the issue seriously, I still think it was useless to throw in with one side or another, because I don’t think that either side is that right or that wrong. I think that sometimes you have to be more focused on optics, other times you have to be more focused on message. And that you have to be adaptive about it, paying attention to time, place and circumstance. April in Paris taught me that, while I was thinking all along we were all generally focused too much on optics, that I was all wrong and that we’re not focused enough on them. But it’s not a reason for me to shout down the message side.

  8. “I’m tired of branding myself with labels.”

    I stopped after calling myself Republican and conservative many years ago because it doesn’t mean anything or change anything. Actions changes things.

    • That’s why the term RINO is meaningless….because “Republican” is also meaningless.

  9. 4chan was the alt-right, in the 10’s. It was a fascinating outpouring of right wing content.

    WTF is a Beardson Beardly, whose wife left him for a nigger? What a name.

    And was the wife a fed infiltrator? That is often the case. They use women that way, A LOT. They do it because it works

    Optics is legitimate. The usual over the years. Grungy sloppy looking enormously fat guys dressed like hobos, covered in tattoos, waving Confederate Flags. Bad, bad, bad.

    Patriot Front got it right. Normal looking lads, and no godforsaken Nazi imagery.

  10. The optics war, the wignat vs. amnat war, all of this was so transparently stupid while it was occurring. We just need people to be pro white, and have common sense. If whites become the modern Kurds 20 years from now ( a small minority on the planet, focused on a small region, stateless and fighting to survive, i e just like the Kurds). it will be because of our individualist idiocy.

    • The “individualist idiocy” is cultivated by conservative/republican orthodoxy — the kind of people who would be more motivated to be “pro-American” than they would be to be “pro-White”.

2 Trackbacks / Pingbacks

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