It’s interesting, I’m very similar to you in personality and age, and while I never saw your videos, I did read a fair amount of Alt Right content back in the day. A lot of the points made sense, but it never really appealed for a simple reason. I’m mixed race, white and Hispanic. Where does someone mixed race belong in an ethno-state? I ended up being a Neo-Con instead, simply because it was the only place for Hispanic, intellectual, rightists.
History has shown Neo-cons were wrong on nearly every issue. At this point, I am politically influenced by Hanania, Scott Alexander, and Bryan Caplan. I’m not sure who I agree with the most, but I’m excited to potentially add you to the list of intelligent and interesting thinkers, now that you recognize Hispanics and Asians are strong potential allies.
Heh, I should have given you more credit for knowing exactly what you were doing by dangling that "Midwesterners are boring plebeians" passage in front of the Twitter libs.
Beyond that, not much to do in response here except applaud. This sounds like the platform I signed up for sixteen years ago in the "neoreactionary" Blogspot era: HBD-aware technocratic competence focused on making urban America a livable environment for responsible middle class families.
Words come and go. "Neoreaction" ultimately disappeared in a cloud of Nick Land's bong smoke and Yarvin's own increasing windiness. "Alt-right" may likewise be too tainted to be salvageable. But whatever this platform is called, I'm for it. Even in my forties with a bum knee, I'll go shirtless into berserker battle for the Supreme Leader who promises a future in which myself and my posterity never have to sit behind the wheel in strip mall traffic ever again, because we live in a human-scaled neighborhood of walkable townhomes, charming independent businesses, and high-quality public schools that show no lenience to the violent and disruptive element. The elites have this already, in brownstone Brooklyn and the nice parts of the Bay; why can't we?
I think we need a new brand. Like it or not the Alt Right is now damaged goods, and comes preloaded with all kinds of baggage that just isn't worth bringing along. If the intent is to make a clean break with some of the old allies and positions then it seems like a new name is worth seriously considering.
I agree with your general assessment of the low-brow nature of the MAGA crowd, I think that's fine once the movement has gained enough status, structure and momentum to keep them sidelined in a support role but they certainly don't need a seat at the table now. As i see it those people will eventually climb onboard anyways once the new movement establishes itself as a center of power and eclipses the obviously moribund republican party. They're good for votes but not much beyond that.
I've long been troubled by the near total lack of an intellectual backbone to the American right. It has left the republican party in a position of virtually always reacting to the demands of the left in the language of the left, half heartedly resisting while never being able to clearly articulate why the latest lefty fad is wrong. I'm sympathetic to the portrayal of them as the Washington Commanders controlled opposition but I suspect that a part of it is that like it or not, the left is very very good at articulating complex models of the world through the lense of their politics and the right has just been inept at this for a very long time. How do you chart a course as a party or movement if you can't even explain why you believe in a particular nature of the relationship between the state and the individual, the notion of national identity, or even a half-baked ideal national vision?
One of the other problems with this is that a successful political movement needs the backing of large numbers of intelligent, ambitious people who aren't going to be satisfied with the Bud Light boycotting, Trump banner waving model of mouth breathing hick right politics. That stuff is just fucking stupid and smart people aren't going to follow stupid, especially when the other side offers something that is at least superficially much more polished. Create a right political space that encourages inquiry, promotes deep thought, and elevates intellectual achievement and once it starts to gain momentum I think we'll see that a meaningful percentage of the people mouthing the woke slogans are only doing so because it's the only game in town that respects possession of more than a 75 point IQ.
And keep current and former affiliates of the republican party out of the loop. Those people have entirely lost the privilege of involvement and deserve the obscurity that's screaming towards them.
Also, I'll throw my dollars your way with a subscription👍
I think having different movements for different audiences is a good thing. It means they can’t hit us all with one stone and the ideas take on a life of their own disconnected from one specific group.
Richard Hanania is sort of the representative of this movement you’re trying to create, even though I disagree with him on a great many issues. People like Rachel Haywire also deserve attention.
However, I think we shouldn’t attempt to revive the term ‘Alt-Right.’ The way people perceive it is entirely the thing you describe, of low status chuds and basement dwelling weirdos. Even though he is post-Alt Right, Nick Fuentes represents what most people associate today with ‘Alt Right’. I just don’t think the term can be reclaimed. Rachel Haywire’s term ‘Art Right’ might be a good replacement.
I’ll have to check out this podcast, it sounds interesting.
This was excellent. I can’t agree more in regard to abandoning a lot of the low-brow talking points of the 1.0. Race has been talked to death, and all the remaining anti-white hypocrisy is glaringly obvious even to normiecons. Vivek can talk about the Great Replacement on national TV and nobody really cares. We have to keep shifting the discussion to press into new territory.
I think a lot remains to be said about exposing unnecessary bureaucracy within the leviathan, the “Foucault’s Boomerang” that is archaic ABC agencies and institutionalized nepotism. We also need to be realistic in our expectations of what’s happening, that there is an extremely rich counter-elite that has a lot of potential overlap with our interests that the majority of the normie right thinks are Zionists etc.
Are we gonna pursue legitimate power-political opportunities, or continue hiding behind pundit incels who lack a nuanced understanding of how their own tribal loyalties have been turned against them? A lot of the Dissident Right has become a caricature of our enemy. It’s not worth identifying with at all.
Anyway, I wish you luck on your projects! Always glad to see someone breaking the mould. Blessings.
I agree that new developments on the right aren't really possible while Trump is still going on and dislike him for the same reason. I wish that he would go away and I find it deeply frustrating that he somehow inspires this pseudo-religious obsession in so many people. The left is ideological top to bottom, while the right often seems to have trouble acting as ideologues even at the top, with the bottom just being a total lost cause. Very unfortunate, and possibly a result of some underlying psychological trait that determines whether people sort into left- or right- wing.
The hope is that Trump will finally be gone by 2028 and at that point somehow, in some fashion, the right can become more serious.
I also agree with another commenter who already said that the term "alt right" should not be re-used. There is no need to try and salvage a tainted term. Just make up a new one that doesn't have any of the old baggage. Common and effective rhetorical practice on the left; the second one of their phrases gets too much stigma around it, they make up a new one that means the same thing ("global warming" -> "climate change," "homeless" -> "unhoused," etc.).
>a new rightwing urbanism that seeks to break the mental association in America between conservatism and the automobile.<
This association exists because of Civil Rights and the destruction of freedom of association. Maybe that could be one of your new movement's goals; to restore to people the freedom to disassociate from blacks. I agree with you and Hanania that the most salient racial divide at this point is blacks vs everyone else, and so long as there is forced association with blacks, many large cities will remain un-salvageable.
I think you are going the wrong way about doing the right thing. I suspect you will disregard my advice, but you ought to at least consider it, since you clearly have the talent to produce something more valuable than political propaganda.
In this post and the other one you show a nostalgia for the 'Peak Alt-Right' (2015-17), characterized by politics and activism, which grabbed the headlines and superficially shook up the regime. But the real game-changer was the 'Early Alt-Right' (pre-2010 and 2010-15), characterized by online writing and political alienation, which was doing the quiet and slow work of converting smart young people to ideas that were once assumed to have been extirpated.
The 'achievement' of the Peak Alt-Right was to blow up all this long-accumulated energy in a huge spectacular explosion, the effect of which was to create an opening for con party populists in democratist electoral politics. As it has since become clear that politics is ceremonial, that the shifting sands of normie opinion are ephemeral and largely irrelevant to the regime, and that the con-pops have used their position to take a giant dump on us, it is also clear that this was a disaster.
The real lesson of the Alt-Right is that dissidents ought to seek intellectual authority, and truck no more with those who cannot stop chasing an illusion of political power. This is the sort of proposal that is apt to be ridiculed as 'impractical', but if dissidents knew a damn thing about practicality they would not be constantly failing. "Anonymous cowards intellectually masturbating on the internet" add value to the dissident scene, by building up authority from truth and converting good and intelligent people; "stunning and brave" facephag activists destroy that value, flood the scene with hordes of morons and boomers and repulse everyone else; yet the dominant tendency is to despise the one type and fall at the feet of the other. It is like someone who would rather bash his brains out against a wall than walk through an open door.
There *is* however something that dissidents ought to be doing, beyond the intellectual work that we have always done, and that is creating a cultural and artistic renaissance. Some baby steps have been taken by the people running the Passage Prize, who as far as I can tell are mainly BAPtists and Yarvinites, although others are going it alone. But this nascent dissident art scene will surely fail if it gets co-opted by activists, propagandists and the con party, as the Early Alt-Right was.
You complain that "MAGA conservatives aren’t interested in ideas or policy", and yet you want your movement to differentiate itself by "temperament, not ideology".
> I can’t predict what that will look like in terms of candidates or object-level policies, but I am certain it will broadly involve shedding the populism of Alt Right 1.0 and adopting an avowedly technocratic platform that can enable the GOP to win back suburban voters and actually govern.
Well, the COVID debacle just reminded people who much they hate being governed by technocrats.
It’s interesting, I’m very similar to you in personality and age, and while I never saw your videos, I did read a fair amount of Alt Right content back in the day. A lot of the points made sense, but it never really appealed for a simple reason. I’m mixed race, white and Hispanic. Where does someone mixed race belong in an ethno-state? I ended up being a Neo-Con instead, simply because it was the only place for Hispanic, intellectual, rightists.
History has shown Neo-cons were wrong on nearly every issue. At this point, I am politically influenced by Hanania, Scott Alexander, and Bryan Caplan. I’m not sure who I agree with the most, but I’m excited to potentially add you to the list of intelligent and interesting thinkers, now that you recognize Hispanics and Asians are strong potential allies.
Heh, I should have given you more credit for knowing exactly what you were doing by dangling that "Midwesterners are boring plebeians" passage in front of the Twitter libs.
Beyond that, not much to do in response here except applaud. This sounds like the platform I signed up for sixteen years ago in the "neoreactionary" Blogspot era: HBD-aware technocratic competence focused on making urban America a livable environment for responsible middle class families.
Words come and go. "Neoreaction" ultimately disappeared in a cloud of Nick Land's bong smoke and Yarvin's own increasing windiness. "Alt-right" may likewise be too tainted to be salvageable. But whatever this platform is called, I'm for it. Even in my forties with a bum knee, I'll go shirtless into berserker battle for the Supreme Leader who promises a future in which myself and my posterity never have to sit behind the wheel in strip mall traffic ever again, because we live in a human-scaled neighborhood of walkable townhomes, charming independent businesses, and high-quality public schools that show no lenience to the violent and disruptive element. The elites have this already, in brownstone Brooklyn and the nice parts of the Bay; why can't we?
I think we need a new brand. Like it or not the Alt Right is now damaged goods, and comes preloaded with all kinds of baggage that just isn't worth bringing along. If the intent is to make a clean break with some of the old allies and positions then it seems like a new name is worth seriously considering.
I agree with your general assessment of the low-brow nature of the MAGA crowd, I think that's fine once the movement has gained enough status, structure and momentum to keep them sidelined in a support role but they certainly don't need a seat at the table now. As i see it those people will eventually climb onboard anyways once the new movement establishes itself as a center of power and eclipses the obviously moribund republican party. They're good for votes but not much beyond that.
I've long been troubled by the near total lack of an intellectual backbone to the American right. It has left the republican party in a position of virtually always reacting to the demands of the left in the language of the left, half heartedly resisting while never being able to clearly articulate why the latest lefty fad is wrong. I'm sympathetic to the portrayal of them as the Washington Commanders controlled opposition but I suspect that a part of it is that like it or not, the left is very very good at articulating complex models of the world through the lense of their politics and the right has just been inept at this for a very long time. How do you chart a course as a party or movement if you can't even explain why you believe in a particular nature of the relationship between the state and the individual, the notion of national identity, or even a half-baked ideal national vision?
One of the other problems with this is that a successful political movement needs the backing of large numbers of intelligent, ambitious people who aren't going to be satisfied with the Bud Light boycotting, Trump banner waving model of mouth breathing hick right politics. That stuff is just fucking stupid and smart people aren't going to follow stupid, especially when the other side offers something that is at least superficially much more polished. Create a right political space that encourages inquiry, promotes deep thought, and elevates intellectual achievement and once it starts to gain momentum I think we'll see that a meaningful percentage of the people mouthing the woke slogans are only doing so because it's the only game in town that respects possession of more than a 75 point IQ.
And keep current and former affiliates of the republican party out of the loop. Those people have entirely lost the privilege of involvement and deserve the obscurity that's screaming towards them.
Also, I'll throw my dollars your way with a subscription👍
I am nearing 40 and getting involved again would be rejuvenating like nothing else. I am now much less neurotic, and I have money and a PhD.
I think schizoids like us would be able to write a great TV show or animated series, and with AI tools, it might be feasible in the near future.
I do not have the time or the vision to complete a larger project of my own, but sure would like to help out.
Another great article. It’s kind of the opposite perspective to this article which I also enjoyed. https://unreconstructed.substack.com/p/maga-means-nationalism-not-the-kali?utm_source=%2Finbox%2Fsaved&utm_medium=reader2
I think having different movements for different audiences is a good thing. It means they can’t hit us all with one stone and the ideas take on a life of their own disconnected from one specific group.
Richard Hanania is sort of the representative of this movement you’re trying to create, even though I disagree with him on a great many issues. People like Rachel Haywire also deserve attention.
However, I think we shouldn’t attempt to revive the term ‘Alt-Right.’ The way people perceive it is entirely the thing you describe, of low status chuds and basement dwelling weirdos. Even though he is post-Alt Right, Nick Fuentes represents what most people associate today with ‘Alt Right’. I just don’t think the term can be reclaimed. Rachel Haywire’s term ‘Art Right’ might be a good replacement.
I’ll have to check out this podcast, it sounds interesting.
This was excellent. I can’t agree more in regard to abandoning a lot of the low-brow talking points of the 1.0. Race has been talked to death, and all the remaining anti-white hypocrisy is glaringly obvious even to normiecons. Vivek can talk about the Great Replacement on national TV and nobody really cares. We have to keep shifting the discussion to press into new territory.
I think a lot remains to be said about exposing unnecessary bureaucracy within the leviathan, the “Foucault’s Boomerang” that is archaic ABC agencies and institutionalized nepotism. We also need to be realistic in our expectations of what’s happening, that there is an extremely rich counter-elite that has a lot of potential overlap with our interests that the majority of the normie right thinks are Zionists etc.
Are we gonna pursue legitimate power-political opportunities, or continue hiding behind pundit incels who lack a nuanced understanding of how their own tribal loyalties have been turned against them? A lot of the Dissident Right has become a caricature of our enemy. It’s not worth identifying with at all.
Anyway, I wish you luck on your projects! Always glad to see someone breaking the mould. Blessings.
I agree that new developments on the right aren't really possible while Trump is still going on and dislike him for the same reason. I wish that he would go away and I find it deeply frustrating that he somehow inspires this pseudo-religious obsession in so many people. The left is ideological top to bottom, while the right often seems to have trouble acting as ideologues even at the top, with the bottom just being a total lost cause. Very unfortunate, and possibly a result of some underlying psychological trait that determines whether people sort into left- or right- wing.
The hope is that Trump will finally be gone by 2028 and at that point somehow, in some fashion, the right can become more serious.
I also agree with another commenter who already said that the term "alt right" should not be re-used. There is no need to try and salvage a tainted term. Just make up a new one that doesn't have any of the old baggage. Common and effective rhetorical practice on the left; the second one of their phrases gets too much stigma around it, they make up a new one that means the same thing ("global warming" -> "climate change," "homeless" -> "unhoused," etc.).
>a new rightwing urbanism that seeks to break the mental association in America between conservatism and the automobile.<
This association exists because of Civil Rights and the destruction of freedom of association. Maybe that could be one of your new movement's goals; to restore to people the freedom to disassociate from blacks. I agree with you and Hanania that the most salient racial divide at this point is blacks vs everyone else, and so long as there is forced association with blacks, many large cities will remain un-salvageable.
I think you are going the wrong way about doing the right thing. I suspect you will disregard my advice, but you ought to at least consider it, since you clearly have the talent to produce something more valuable than political propaganda.
In this post and the other one you show a nostalgia for the 'Peak Alt-Right' (2015-17), characterized by politics and activism, which grabbed the headlines and superficially shook up the regime. But the real game-changer was the 'Early Alt-Right' (pre-2010 and 2010-15), characterized by online writing and political alienation, which was doing the quiet and slow work of converting smart young people to ideas that were once assumed to have been extirpated.
The 'achievement' of the Peak Alt-Right was to blow up all this long-accumulated energy in a huge spectacular explosion, the effect of which was to create an opening for con party populists in democratist electoral politics. As it has since become clear that politics is ceremonial, that the shifting sands of normie opinion are ephemeral and largely irrelevant to the regime, and that the con-pops have used their position to take a giant dump on us, it is also clear that this was a disaster.
The real lesson of the Alt-Right is that dissidents ought to seek intellectual authority, and truck no more with those who cannot stop chasing an illusion of political power. This is the sort of proposal that is apt to be ridiculed as 'impractical', but if dissidents knew a damn thing about practicality they would not be constantly failing. "Anonymous cowards intellectually masturbating on the internet" add value to the dissident scene, by building up authority from truth and converting good and intelligent people; "stunning and brave" facephag activists destroy that value, flood the scene with hordes of morons and boomers and repulse everyone else; yet the dominant tendency is to despise the one type and fall at the feet of the other. It is like someone who would rather bash his brains out against a wall than walk through an open door.
There *is* however something that dissidents ought to be doing, beyond the intellectual work that we have always done, and that is creating a cultural and artistic renaissance. Some baby steps have been taken by the people running the Passage Prize, who as far as I can tell are mainly BAPtists and Yarvinites, although others are going it alone. But this nascent dissident art scene will surely fail if it gets co-opted by activists, propagandists and the con party, as the Early Alt-Right was.
You complain that "MAGA conservatives aren’t interested in ideas or policy", and yet you want your movement to differentiate itself by "temperament, not ideology".
I might give you a few dollars if you post song parody lyrics. You don't even need to record or edit them!
> I can’t predict what that will look like in terms of candidates or object-level policies, but I am certain it will broadly involve shedding the populism of Alt Right 1.0 and adopting an avowedly technocratic platform that can enable the GOP to win back suburban voters and actually govern.
Well, the COVID debacle just reminded people who much they hate being governed by technocrats.