Editors Note: This is not an April Fools post.
Alt-Right 2.0 is a terrible idea.
I look back on that era like a bad picture in a high school yearbook.
In a lot of ways, I haven’t changed at all. I am still a stridently antiwar isolationist. I am still concerned about mass immigration and demographic change. I am still an anti-globalist. I am still a race realist. I am still a nationalist. I am still very much concerned about our religious and cultural decline. I still want to mainstream White identity politics. I still write about the Jewish Question.
I went to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville because I was a Southern nationalist who supported Confederate monuments. Today, I am excited about the fact that the idea of a National Divorce has gone mainstream. I still love my Southern heritage. I still support Confederate monuments. I still associate with all the same people. I have the same friends. I still go to the same conferences.
I feel older, more mature and experienced now. I am a Christian family man in the prime of my life. I can barely find the time to maintain this website because I have so many more responsibilities. I have discarded some ideas and tactics that I entertained in the past. Experience has shown that we don’t need to organize big rallies and expose ourselves to unnecessary risks to erode taboos. The Overton Window has been shattered since we stopped holding the rallies and the Alt-Right crumbled.
Looking back on it, the Alt-Right was anti-intellectual. It didn’t contribute anything like new groundbreaking ideas. Instead, it was highly successful at creating an online culture that took a bunch of older ideas from various sources – paleoconservatism, White Nationalism, libertarianism – and popularized those ideas and permanently reshaped the culture of the young online Right. Many of the leaders of the original Alt-Right like Richard Spencer have been pushed aside and devoured by their followers, but that online culture survived Charlottesville and is now more influential than ever.
Turning Point USA and Daily Wire are useful barometers here. The Alt-Right / Dissident Right and Turning Point were still distinct at the time of the Groyper War in 2019. By 2024 though, Charlie Kirk had come around to slamming church leaders as cucks, criticizing MLK on MLK Day, warning his followers that the Great Replacement is happening. Matt Walsh has taken over meat and potatoes culture war and White grievance politics content. Candace Owens was fired for being too critical of Israel. It has become increasingly hard to tell the difference between “mainstream” and “dissident” accounts.
The Alt-Right used to be the space on the Right that was outside the ossified Reaganite “True Conservatism” consensus of Conservatism, Inc. Mitt Romney was the last Center Right Republican presidential nominee. The Center Right used to be the dominant faction in the Republican coalition. The Populist Right was the junior partner. Trump’s victory in the 2016 election tipped the balance. In 2024, the Populist Right is now the overwhelming dominant force in the Republican coalition while the Center Right has become the hugely diminished junior partner. The 2024 Republican primary showed what Republican voters think of Mike Pence and Nikki Haley and their brand of “conservative principles.”
If we are being honest, it would be more accurate to say that Liz Cheney and David French are the “Dissident Right” in 2024 and it is people with our views who are the establishment. This is why the contrarians and edgelords who used to identify with the Alt-Right can now be found promoting liberalism and attacking HBD and supporting a neocon foreign policy and mass immigration. We’re on opposite sides now because those of us who are satisfied with this shift aren’t interested in lobbing grenades.
After Charlottesville, the Alt-Right disintegrated and retreated to the internet. The organized movement fragmented into small cliques and cults of personality. Tucker Carlson’s show filled the void. Carlson cleaned up and repackaged a lot of the rhetoric and grievances and used his platform to inject it into mainstream politics. Subsequent events like COVID, the trans craze, the George Floyd riots, Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election and especially the Biden administration radicalized millions of conservatives. Many of these people have adopted the positions of this more sanitized version of the Alt-Right.
As I said before, the Alt-Right in its heyday was known for Nazi toilet humor, gas chamber memes, trolling journos on Twitter, sonnenrads, Pepe the Frog, anime, Kekistan flags and parody songs. Many of the leaders were atheists or Nietzscheans with an axe to grind against Christianity. Thankfully, those days are over and the ceiling is much higher now. We got rid of those people and their baggage. In 2024, you don’t have to engage with those types anymore if you support reasonable political positions. Virtually everyone on the Right, for example, is alarmed by our immigration policy and wants closed borders.
The wild, punk rock “vanguard” phase of the early Alt-Right is over. The online culture that the insurgency spawned has shed a lot of its original fringier skin while remaining true to its core values and positions. In a lot of ways, it reminds me of the hippie to yuppie transition. It was a necessary step for the counterculture to become our mainstream culture. Some people were incapable of making the leap.
What’s next?
We haven’t really won at anything yet: Confederate monuments came down, the internet was censored, the borders were opened, the culture got woke, an entire generation was fagged up and transed, military bases were renamed, another huge war was started with Russia, and so on. The only thing that has really changed is that we are winning the metapolitical battle on the Right. Things have just gotten so bad under Joe Biden that millions of conservatives have grudgingly started to come around.
VDARE has completely won the argument over immigration on the Right, but is being shut down by New York Attorney General Letitia James. Immigration levels have never been worse. In a nutshell, this is where we are at in 2024. We’re stuck on a sinking ship, but we at least have the smug satisfaction of being able to tell other people “I told you so.” Few people were listening to us until three or four years ago.
Finally, we might have the heft and consensus necessary to chart a different course. It has been a long, long road just to get here and it will be a much longer road to get to where we need to go. Populism is no longer premature. We are in desperate need of better political representation. I expect this transition from metapolitics to ordinary politics will dominate the next decade. As our cohort continues its march from youthful exuberance into middle age (I will be 44-years-old this year), we will become steadily more influential as the Reaganite Center Right approaches its Twilight in America.
I don’t think our visions are necessarily opposed–they can be complementary.
You are right that white identity is in the mainstream now, and that by itself is a good thing. I just think there are a lot of really terrible tendencies in MAGA as well that you are overlooking. But I also think the presence of intellectually serious and principled guys like yourself will serve as a check against that to hopefully make populism better internally, so I’m glad you’re still doing what you’re doing.
I myself am more interested in showing young people an alternative to liberalism that centers hierarchy and vitality and makes space for white identity. The goal of AR2 is reaching artists and coastal urbanites of a completely different temperament. If you lose smart and creative young people you lose the future.
The way I see it, my efforts will benefit you and your efforts will benefit me.
Walt,
To clarify:
1. We agree that White identity politics is mainstream now. The “alt” and “dissident” eras are over. As you put it, what are these people dissenting against in 2024? These labels no longer make any sense and should be discarded.
2. I also fully agree with you that there are all sorts of terrible tendencies in MAGA. I could spent the next month writing an article a day about those. I have spent years complaining about it. It is a cult of personality centered on Trump. It can be very crude and cringy. It repulses intelligent and educated people. It suffers from poor human capital. The face of MAGA in Congress is people like Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz.
I just think the original Alt-Right suffered from all the same issues. Think of our leadership like Commander Matt Heimbach waddling through Charlottesville in a stahlhelm and an outfit from Rural King with a made up flag or Richard Spencer’s vague Nietzschean platitudes like Become Who You Are or the Irony Bros to whom everything was a joke or all the angry manlets praising Elliot Rodger. You got to admit that we were also pretty cringe both online and offline back in the day.
3. I wasn’t responding to you so much as the sort of people who have clustered around Richard Spencer since 2021 in his Joe Biden is the greatest president of my lifetime arc into irrelevance. Mark Brahmin is a great example of this type. He is the Pontifex maximus of his own made up religion. He is exactly the sort of character and personality type that has always inhabited the fringe of rightwing politics. I would caution you to be more mindful of the trail of wreckage left behind by people like Spencer and Evan McLaren before getting involved with them again.
Nothing happened, except I learned something.
Power does what it wants, the end.
There is no populist right, nor is there a populist left for that matter, not of any consequence.
Instead, there is the ruling class, and the rest of us who must adapt.
Not necessarily comply, but adapt.
The masses don’t direct the flow of society, politics and economics.
We may swim left or right, up or down stream, with or against the current, but we don’t direct the flow of the current, instead the ultra high net worth individuals do.
The populist right and populist left are there to give the masses hopium, that’s it.
There is no liberal democracy, nor is there a constitutional republic.
These are myths power uses to excuse itself.
Power always comes up with myths.
Our power is over what we buy, where we live, work and what we do for work, as individuals, families and neighborhoods.
That is our world and our power.
National politics and geopolitics is their world, and we have no say in it.
“Is there hope for the future?” cry the brown bells of Merthyr!
“Power does what it wants (…) there is the ruling class, and the rest of us (…) The masses don’t direct the flow of society, politics and economics. We may swim left or right, up or down stream, with or against the current, but we don’t direct the flow of the current, instead the ultra high net worth individuals do”:
So true! Unless the class system (aka usury system) is overthrown and abolished, nothing will REALLY change for the better. “My good friends, things cannot go on well in England, nor ever will until everything shall be in common, when there shall be neither vassal nor lord, and all distinctions levelled; when the lords shall be no more masters than ourselves. How ill they have used us!” ? John Ball
One additional reply: I forgot to add this, from John Ball’s outdoor sermon at Blackheath, not long before his cruel martyrdom (hanged, drawn and quartered) in 1381: “When Adam delved, and Eve span, who was then the gentleman? From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men. For if God would have had any bondmen from the beginning, he would have appointed who should be bond, and who free. And therefore I exhort you to consider that now the time is come, appointed to us by God, in which ye may (if ye will) cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty.”
Don’t give up hope.
Sorry but we are not the establishment. Not a single piece of pro-White legislation has been proposed let alone passed. The GOP are still the whores of Israel. They spend more time passing antisemitism laws than even mentioning White people.
> If we are being honest, it would be more accurate to say that Liz Cheney and David French are the “Dissident Right” in 2024 and it is people with our views who are the establishment.
That would be going too far. Dissidents don’t actually hold any political power. Liz Cheney and David French were never anything but fake and gay “conservatives” whose sole purpose was described aptly by Rev. Dabney all the way back in 1870. The rest of your points are very much true. The interesting thing about what has happened is that the clown-world gang – nominally led by the veggie-in-chief Joey Shitpants – has gone full-retard foaming-at-the-mouth insane.
They just keep on doubling and tripling down and we have more former moderates seeing the truth of what we’ve been saying for decades – even about the chosenites – every day. “Our Greatest Ally” bombed Iran’s embassy in Damascus today. Pure terrorist state behavior. They’ll be invading southern Lebanon soon and Hezbollah has been holding back waiting for it. I expect there will be lots of dead jews before they retreat to Izrahell and possibly lots of dead retarded Murikans (who will be ordered to fight for the zionists) as well. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Never interrupt your enemy when he’s destroying himself. If there were a way to nudge them even further over the edge into the abyss, so much the better.
By establishment, I mean the Populist Right is clearly the dominant faction now in the GOP. The purge of Liz Cheney and Trump’s total dominance in the 2024 primary confirms this. The disaffected wing of the GOP are center right types
An interesting intellectual exercise would be to compare and contrast WNs who have families and children and live that life, opposed to those who don’t. The differences in what they do and how they behave in pursuit of the cause.
I agree.
Once they became a fait accompli, even George Wallace never spoke about repealing any civil rights or immigration laws. Think about that. At least he never mentioned abortion. Back then, the “pro-life movement” was almost strictly a Catholic thing.