I thoroughly enjoyed Moldbug's multi-part essay on the pwning of Richard Dawkins - enough so that were I a university professor who taught reactionary theory, and were I only allowed to make one selection from a particular author, How Dawkins Got Pwned would easily win the honor. Of course, I am not a university professor, and were I stupid enough to be one (and stupid enough to try) I would likely find myself at the poked and burned end of a pitchfork and torch wielding mob. Anyways, I like to re-read it on occasion, and it was during a recent re-read that I felt a small tingle of inspiration. These little hints come so infrequently nowadays, so absorbed am I in the here and the now that I have little time for the esoteric or political.
Anyways, on a curiously and seemingly unrelated note, I have been dwelling on the Alt-Right's public mishaps recently. The misadventures in Charlottesville, the doxxing of the TRS guys, Matthew Heimbach's affair...
What happened?
If you listen to the voices from on high, it's more or less over, or something. Probably for Heimbach, because live action role playing as a stalwart defender of traditionalist values while banging your buddy's wife is a pretty good way to lose your street cred with people desperate for a stalwart defender of traditionalist values who likewise embodies said values. I don't know, I didn't really keep up with the TWP, and it's too late now anyways.
Enoch and Spencer are still plodding along to my knowledge, not that I listen to TRS much either. It just doesn't move the needle for me anymore. My understanding is that recent attempts by Spencer to speak at universities were, well, lackluster. Or something. My recaps of the Alt-Right's antics are best viewed with the understanding that I've kept much of this at arms length - increasingly longer arms, mind you, since some time after Trump was elected.
That said, the 'death' of the Alt-Right is laughable. Even if all major public figures sympathetic to the Alt-Right spontaneously combusted today, the Alt-Right would not die because the conditions necessary for a White Identity movement to arise still exist. Like a hydra, should a head be cut off another would grow in its place. I'm not puffing the Alt-Right up by giving it nearly mythical qualities - believe me I am far, far more dissatisfied with White Identitarians than I am satisfied - it just is what it is. You can only take so much screeching from dumpy blue-hairs about the plight of the melanin-enhanced being magically your fault before you say "fuck-it". When you aren't going to win anyways, most people would gladly go down swinging.
But specifically, with regard to the string of failures, what happened?
I have a guess, and to get you there I'm going to borrow a little from Moldbug. I'll try not to be as turgid. If you go back to How Dawkins Got Pwned (part 4), Moldbug reiterates his strategy of testing Universalism's circular appraisal of itself by working his way back into the past until he's free from the iron grip of Whig History as told by Whig Historians, and taking a different branch - specifically, the reactionary path, the most logical path as reactionary is the antithesis of progressive. Hence, Moldbug ejects the dead weight of Universalism's survivorship bias in appraising what actually happened and... well, you've either read the rest, or will get to it. I don't really want to reiterate Moldbug, because my inspiration here is more technical than historically specific.
The Alt-Right has tried and repeatedly failed on the Left's own turf; said turf being mass demonstrations and protest culture. I don't blame them for trying though. There is a certain logic to the whole affair: We feel outnumbered and we want others to who feel outnumbered to know that they aren't alone. We want to flex our muscles. Frankly, we want to punch commies in their stupid bourgeois faces. That's all well and fine, but the unfortunate reality is that all of this is on the Left's turf and defined by the Left for the explicit purpose of strengthening the Left. It doesn't matter whether the Charlottesville protester's said "you will not replace us" or "Jews will not replace us". What matters is the Left says it was the latter, and it was so. Because the Left says so, and they have the megaphone.
So what to do?
The answer, more or less, is don't try to beat the Left by using the Left's strategy. It doesn't play to our strengths. We aren't a mass movement. We aren't a mob, or a rabble. Our ideology, such that our disparate gaggles of LARPers can be connected, is an ideology of order and hierarchy. How we exist should reflect that. Browsing through some of the Charlottesville pictures, I saw a lot of good signs. The Chad Nationalists flexing with David Duke were a good sign. The Dodge Charger mowing down that fat chick, not so much. Hilarious, yes, but otherwise bad optics. The thing is, though, that one slip up, one fat dork in a Trump hat, one Roman salute, and Salon dot com will be there like flies on shit to show the world that Nazis are still a threat. Dorky, and perhaps a little dumpy, but a threat none the less.
If I'm allowed to be a bit candid for a moment - of course I am, these pages are mine - the biggest disappointment for me when the TRS guys got doxxed was't that Mike Enoch's wife is part coin-clutcher. It was that he is fat. I mean, I never pictured Enoch as a thin guy or anything, and I am more than well aware that the Left will take your worst frame and plaster it everywhere to give everyone the worst impression of you possible but... come on. And frankly, the same goes (worse actually) for Heimbach. I can, to some degree, look past being sexually promiscuous. I was a frat boy. And while I definitely don't condone marital infidelity, I am a man who has failed before to ignore the temptations of the flesh. But being fat? While being a White Supremacist? And yeah it doesn't matter that you don't call yourself a White Supremacist, because you aren't holding the megaphone, they are. They're going to point at you and sputter and shriek and froth at the mouth about how evil and awful you are, so why give them extra ammunition? To paraphrase Mr. Enoch, they're going to call you a white supremacist anyways, so why the fuck aren't you supreme?
How do we get from there to somewhere better? Unfortunately, the answer is simply forcing people through an entry process and a subsequent hierarchy that requires increasingly difficult hurdles be, well, hurdled. A simple entry test would be something simple like bench press your own body weight. Just once. Success means you're a candidate and failure means you can try again in a month. The next tier would have a more difficult physical test, and an ideological test. And the next tier would increase the difficulty of both and add a third test, and the next and the next and so on down the line.
This is all back-of-my-napkin, but the point is to illustrate a means by which a Right-Wing, White Identity group increases its quality and therefore it's efficacy. The Left's power lies in quantity - being a mob. We will never beat them by being a mob. A side effect of a tiered system is that it also substantially mitigates the likelihood of subversive agents of the Left gaining any real power in this hypothetical iteration of a Right-Wing, White Identity group.
What happened?
If you listen to the voices from on high, it's more or less over, or something. Probably for Heimbach, because live action role playing as a stalwart defender of traditionalist values while banging your buddy's wife is a pretty good way to lose your street cred with people desperate for a stalwart defender of traditionalist values who likewise embodies said values. I don't know, I didn't really keep up with the TWP, and it's too late now anyways.
Enoch and Spencer are still plodding along to my knowledge, not that I listen to TRS much either. It just doesn't move the needle for me anymore. My understanding is that recent attempts by Spencer to speak at universities were, well, lackluster. Or something. My recaps of the Alt-Right's antics are best viewed with the understanding that I've kept much of this at arms length - increasingly longer arms, mind you, since some time after Trump was elected.
That said, the 'death' of the Alt-Right is laughable. Even if all major public figures sympathetic to the Alt-Right spontaneously combusted today, the Alt-Right would not die because the conditions necessary for a White Identity movement to arise still exist. Like a hydra, should a head be cut off another would grow in its place. I'm not puffing the Alt-Right up by giving it nearly mythical qualities - believe me I am far, far more dissatisfied with White Identitarians than I am satisfied - it just is what it is. You can only take so much screeching from dumpy blue-hairs about the plight of the melanin-enhanced being magically your fault before you say "fuck-it". When you aren't going to win anyways, most people would gladly go down swinging.
But specifically, with regard to the string of failures, what happened?
I have a guess, and to get you there I'm going to borrow a little from Moldbug. I'll try not to be as turgid. If you go back to How Dawkins Got Pwned (part 4), Moldbug reiterates his strategy of testing Universalism's circular appraisal of itself by working his way back into the past until he's free from the iron grip of Whig History as told by Whig Historians, and taking a different branch - specifically, the reactionary path, the most logical path as reactionary is the antithesis of progressive. Hence, Moldbug ejects the dead weight of Universalism's survivorship bias in appraising what actually happened and... well, you've either read the rest, or will get to it. I don't really want to reiterate Moldbug, because my inspiration here is more technical than historically specific.
The Alt-Right has tried and repeatedly failed on the Left's own turf; said turf being mass demonstrations and protest culture. I don't blame them for trying though. There is a certain logic to the whole affair: We feel outnumbered and we want others to who feel outnumbered to know that they aren't alone. We want to flex our muscles. Frankly, we want to punch commies in their stupid bourgeois faces. That's all well and fine, but the unfortunate reality is that all of this is on the Left's turf and defined by the Left for the explicit purpose of strengthening the Left. It doesn't matter whether the Charlottesville protester's said "you will not replace us" or "Jews will not replace us". What matters is the Left says it was the latter, and it was so. Because the Left says so, and they have the megaphone.
So what to do?
The answer, more or less, is don't try to beat the Left by using the Left's strategy. It doesn't play to our strengths. We aren't a mass movement. We aren't a mob, or a rabble. Our ideology, such that our disparate gaggles of LARPers can be connected, is an ideology of order and hierarchy. How we exist should reflect that. Browsing through some of the Charlottesville pictures, I saw a lot of good signs. The Chad Nationalists flexing with David Duke were a good sign. The Dodge Charger mowing down that fat chick, not so much. Hilarious, yes, but otherwise bad optics. The thing is, though, that one slip up, one fat dork in a Trump hat, one Roman salute, and Salon dot com will be there like flies on shit to show the world that Nazis are still a threat. Dorky, and perhaps a little dumpy, but a threat none the less.
If I'm allowed to be a bit candid for a moment - of course I am, these pages are mine - the biggest disappointment for me when the TRS guys got doxxed was't that Mike Enoch's wife is part coin-clutcher. It was that he is fat. I mean, I never pictured Enoch as a thin guy or anything, and I am more than well aware that the Left will take your worst frame and plaster it everywhere to give everyone the worst impression of you possible but... come on. And frankly, the same goes (worse actually) for Heimbach. I can, to some degree, look past being sexually promiscuous. I was a frat boy. And while I definitely don't condone marital infidelity, I am a man who has failed before to ignore the temptations of the flesh. But being fat? While being a White Supremacist? And yeah it doesn't matter that you don't call yourself a White Supremacist, because you aren't holding the megaphone, they are. They're going to point at you and sputter and shriek and froth at the mouth about how evil and awful you are, so why give them extra ammunition? To paraphrase Mr. Enoch, they're going to call you a white supremacist anyways, so why the fuck aren't you supreme?
How do we get from there to somewhere better? Unfortunately, the answer is simply forcing people through an entry process and a subsequent hierarchy that requires increasingly difficult hurdles be, well, hurdled. A simple entry test would be something simple like bench press your own body weight. Just once. Success means you're a candidate and failure means you can try again in a month. The next tier would have a more difficult physical test, and an ideological test. And the next tier would increase the difficulty of both and add a third test, and the next and the next and so on down the line.
This is all back-of-my-napkin, but the point is to illustrate a means by which a Right-Wing, White Identity group increases its quality and therefore it's efficacy. The Left's power lies in quantity - being a mob. We will never beat them by being a mob. A side effect of a tiered system is that it also substantially mitigates the likelihood of subversive agents of the Left gaining any real power in this hypothetical iteration of a Right-Wing, White Identity group.
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