Counter-Currents
Alt Right vs. Alt Wrong:
Notes on the Milo Question
Greg Johnson
Frans Snyders, Three Monkeys Stealing Fruit, 1640s
1,832 words
My writing often takes a confessional turn. I have a whole book called Confessions of a Reluctant Hater, for instance. I have also confessed to being a “transphobic.” In fact, I am such a huge transphobic that I had to confess twice.
Today, I want to confess that there are some people in the broad “Alternative Right” that I wish would just go away. Usually it is political. Sometimes it is personal. Sometimes it is both. To be quite specific, I really wish Milo Yiannopoulos would just go away, as I made clear on last week’s episode of Fash the Nation.
Of course, wanting to be rid of people on the Alt Right is hardly unusual. In fact, it is pretty much the norm. For instance, Ramzpaul and Colin Liddell wish the 1488ers would go away, and the 1488ers more than reciprocate. I don’t think this attitude is very constructive, however, which is why I feel guilty for sharing it from time to time.
The question, though, is how, exactly, can the Alt Right “get rid of” or “stop” anyone? After all, the Alt Right is almost entirely a virtual movement, consisting of images and words, both written and spoken. It only occasionally takes the form of organizations with members. And it only occasionally materializes and occupies spaces in the 3-D world, and then only fleetingly, in restaurants and conference centers.
A membership organization needs to worry about “entryism” and can conduct “purges.” But a virtual movement with no clear boundaries between “inside” and “outside” can neither guard itself against entryists nor purge dissenters. All of that is empty talk in a movement in which anyone can become a “member” simply by setting up a forum account, and in which one can become a “leader” simply by starting a website, podcast, or YouTube channel and attracting an audience by steadily producing content.
Sure, you can bar people from membership organizations and meetings. But you can’t bar them from the internet, which is where most of the movement is at. Sure, you can ban accounts. But that is a far cry from a “purge.” Trotsky couldn’t come back with a sock account.
In a movement that consists mostly of ideas, how can we “stop” anyone? Basically, there are three things we can do:
- Offer better ideas
- Troll them
- Ignore them
Offering better ideas is my preferred route. If someone is putting forward bad ideas — false pictures of who we are, false accounts of our plight, false accounts of our enemies, ineffective solutions, etc. — that is definitely a problem. But since we can’t just press a button and drop them into a piranha pool, we have to turn this threat into an opportunity to put forward better ideas in a more persuasive manner. The core of this approach is offering arguments and facts, not mere rhetoric.
In a primarily memetic movement, the question is not one of who is “in” or “out.” It is a question of truth and falsehood, of Alt Right vs. Alt Wrong.
Related to offering better ideas is offering better spokesmen for ideas. If you don’t think x is a good spokesman for White Nationalism, the best solution is to find a better one. Right now, there are very few people who are willing to put their faces out there as spokesmen for our cause, and most of those are over 60. But ask yourself: given the rate of the movement’s growth, will that be the case in 5 years, 2 years, even 1 year from now?
Trolling is the online equivalent of the piranha pool. A well-organized troll campaign can reduce its target to a skeleton in under 30 seconds. Basically, it consists of mockery and bullying, to destroy the target’s reputation and create such a stink that he leaves the room. It is primarily rhetorical, not argumentative. But it has its limits.
First, it only really works on weak people. Most people are weak, of course, but the most problematic people often aren’t.
Second, it often draws an audience to the target, increasing rather than decreasing his influence.
Third, trolling is like poison gas, germ warfare, or the nuclear option. It might destroy the target, but it also poisons the atmosphere and may even kill those who use it. We want our movement to be an oasis in the desert, not a scorched wasteland. A beacon of sanity, not a madhouse. The nucleus for the revival of high-trust European societies, not a nest of paranoia and intrigue. We have to ask ourselves if a culture of trolling is consistent with our long-term goals.
Ignoring our enemies is sometimes the best way to combat them. Every week or so, a trackback shows up in the Counter-Currents comment queue to an article or forum post attacking me. Like every even moderately famous person, I read everything that is written about me. They are never worth responding to, but even if they were, why do it? Usually these blogs have almost no readership. To respond would give them a far bigger audience. It would magnify rather than reduce their influence. Indeed, that might be their motive for attacking in the first place. So dynamic silence is the best strategy. I am in the business of slaying dragons, not swatting flies. But dynamic silence works better with flies than dragons. And sometimes there really are dragons, which brings us back to options 1 and 2.
When Milo first showed up on my radar, I regarded him as an opportunity, not a threat, and I reached out to him. After all, people outside our group can be enemies, allies, or neutrals. We win by raising the number of people fighting for us and reducing the number of people fighting against us. It is almost a tautology to say that a movement only grows by being noticed by people who are outside it. And the fact that Milo is a Jew and a flamboyant homosexual coal-burner actually increases his mainstream credibility in discussing the Alt Right, because obviously he is not a candidate for membership, much less leadership.
Of course, nobody should be surprised that a frankly racist and xenophobic movement should not greet Milo with trust and openness. But I remain dismissive of the fears that Milo can somehow “co-opt” or “subvert” the Alt Right.
As I see it, the purpose of the Alt Right brand and movement is to provide a somewhat ideologically vague umbrella term under which people in various stages of red-pilling can congregate, providing White Nationalists with an audience and milieu in which we can convert people to our way of thinking. The core of the Alt Right is White Nationalism, and the fuzzy periphery consists of potential converts. We need both groups for the process to work.
The only way Milo could “co-opt” or “subvert” that is by creating such a massive influx of half-baked cultural libertarians that we can no longer assimilate them. When you think about it, though, that’s actually a problem I would like to have. But in fact it is not a problem. Because, (1) Milo’s star is waning, and (2) our ability to red-pill and assimilate newcomers has never been greater. So relax, get out there, and straighten these people out. This is what success looks like. Nobody ever told you it would be easy.
I began to sour on Milo after his recent speech, “How to Destroy the Alt Right.” Now, there is a perfectly charitable interpretation of this speech, and much of the criticism of it strikes me as dumb, jaundiced, or dishonest. For instance, some critics obviously never read beyond the title to discover that the only way to defeat the Alt Right is, in effect, to stop being anti-white. Even Milo’s transparently dishonest attempts to minimize the racist and anti-Semitic elements of the Alternative Right (which he has done before) can be seen as an attempt to lower mainstream resistance to us, which is particularly useful given Hillary Clinton’s attempt to use the Alt Right as an anchor to sink the Trump campaign.
But this is where he crosses the line:
The media desperately wants to define the alt-right by the worst 5 percent of its members. They take the genuinely anti-semitic racists — the stormfronters or Stormfags, the 1488ers, the Andrew Auernheimers — and use them to define the whole movement. The left is obsessed by white supremacy, which in reality makes up an infinitesimally small number of people.
This is not just a politic lie, it is a malicious one. And it singles out a friend by name. We are cucks not to hit back. How do we hit back? Obviously, calling him a faggot won’t work. Trolling Milo might be fun, but I doubt that he can be bullycided, and my general reservations about trolling still stand.
The best response to Milo is to offer better ideas. Milo’s apologists counsel against “infighting.” (Is Milo “in”?) Milo, they say, is a valuable “gateway drug.” He’s bait that we can fish for souls with. So don’t attack him.
But the only way Milo will actually function as a gateway to White Nationalism is if we take his audience the rest of the way. And that requires criticism. We have to correct his false statements, expose the superficiality of his worldview, and uphold White Nationalism as the better outlook.
The final straw was when Milo showed up to give a speech in drag. Homosexuals are and will remain part of our racial family and part of our movement. But effeminacy and exhibitionism are gross and dishonorable. Our movement involves a great deal of fun and irony, but at heart it is a serious thing. We believe in values like truth, beauty, purity, and sanctity. Milo is making a mockery of that.
What does Milo have to do, exactly, before his enablers will throw up their hands in disgust? His defenses of male genital mutilation and pedophilia were not, apparently, enough. Does he have to show up with a basket of fruit on his head?
Seeing Milo in drag made me wonder. His defenders point out the people he brings in. But it is impossible to count the people he is keeping away. Our movement has been so marginal for so long that we are desperate for attention. Hence we often embrace and coddle freaks. If we really believe our message, though, then we have to believe that we can change the minds of all of our people, including the best. And we have to wonder if every freak like Milo is repulsing a hundred normal people for every one that he attracts. That’s why I wish he would just go away.
But wishing doesn’t make it so. Neither will arguing. Neither will trolling. Ultimately, the only thing that will make Milo go away is if we find better people to wrench his audience and spotlight away from him. And that’s something we should have been trying to do all along.
19 comments
While I’m generally OK with Milo, as he was a stepping-stone / gateway drug for me, I also found his drag performance to be very awkward, cringe-inducing and unnecessary.
On the other hand, I find most of the 1488 contingent to be repellent as well.
Steering a healthy, sober, sane course between the wishy-washy, JQ-avoiding cultural libertarians on the left and the unsavory, hyper-reactionary trolls on the right is now maybe the Alt-Right’s foremost challenge.
Just my 2 cents. Thanks for the article.
On the message as always Greg with a very well written piece.
I recognise that many people try and define the ‘Alt-Right’ into fixed ideological terms, however I think there are two general ‘pillars’ of the Alt-Right:
1) Rejection of multi-racial society to varying degrees
2) Opposition to Neo-Con wars
In regards to 1) Milo evokes the same anti-racist vernacular no different than the establishment left & right in regards to White people having a preference to live around their own kind in their own countries’ aka ‘1488’ers, White Supremacist, racist etc. We do not recognise the term racist or use it for descriptive purposes while Milo uses it as a epithet. His effective position is not that the Multi-racial model of society is to be rejected in favour of general racial separation but that White people, in particular White Men, need to have a seat at the table with all the victimhood groups and SJW’s who can then compete over who is the most victimised – hence Milo’s White men college [slush] fund.
2) Milo has been on record of supporting the Iraq war as well as Zionism. There is for all intents and purposes 0 Zionists in the alt-Right; any support of Israel only extending to sheer practicality that they live in Israel rather than European countries due to their disproportionate negative effect on White societies.
Thus based on, what I think many would consider, the mainstay pillars of the Alt-Right then Milo is certainly not one of us. We reject multi-racial societies (beyond a certain limit) out right while Milo appears to want a rapprochement between Whites and Non-Whites. This is counter intuitive to what we agitate for.
I would also add to be aware of the enemy astroturfing comment sections as on a lot of sites I have recently seen lots of new names appear who say they are on our side then cause division and want to mainstream things. It’s evident that his long term aim is to steer and co-opt White Identity politics, the issue was at what point Milo stepped over the mark.
While Ramzpaul and Collin Liddell seek to distance our movement from so-called 1488ers, Milo seeks to smear all racially aware white nationalists, critcs of jews and people who think objectively about the second world war as these same 1488ers. There is something genuinely distasteful about the 1488 crowd that normies are sure to find off-putting, but there is also an intellectual case to be made for why they are valuable to the movement. In either case, as you’ve pointed out, it’s impossible to exclude people from an internet-based movement and it ultimately comes down to the battle of ideas. The Alt-Right needs to demonstrate that our ideas are deeper than the shock tactics of a troll swarm on Twitter or in a comments section. This is what Milo is trying to reduce the the true Alt-Right to, conflating every thoughtful criticism of jews with that 1488 level of argumentation. To combat him with simplistic bullyciding will not necessarily work in this case. Americans need a vision of the future they can believe in.
My objections to Milo is his libertarianism. At first I thought him amusing, then tedious, later offensive. An out gay screamer sometime drag and coal burner doesn’t bother me–I own to two of those designations–as much as the insidious insinuation that libertarian views and values are or should be those of the Right. Libertarianism has no defense against the absolutely either the free market of labor and goods or of ideas. His war against feminism and PC correctness is admirable.
I want to resist the temptation to tell you that I told you so.. but, I told you so..
When you first wrote that article asking your readership if Milo should be accepted or not.. that he could be useful to our movement, etc.. several months back (Spring was it?) I left a comment criticizing the idea.. that he was going try to hijack our “movement” so that he can derail it and that we should reject him for no other reason than that Milo is a Jew and a Fag.. I got scolded for that..
So just to reiterate my previous comment..
Milo is a Jew and a Fag.. No way in hell anyone whom openly identifies as such should ever be accepted by the Alt Right/New Right as a leader or in a position of influence.. We don’t need to do anything except let it be known far and wide that this impostor Jew Faggot is not one of us and doesn’t speak for us. PERIOD. Regarding fags in our movement – Don’t ask, don’t tell should be our credo.. Their deviance is their problem and if they want to be part of the New Right, they need to hide it.. We, on our part, will no be doing any Witch hunts.. no one cares what they do at home behind closed doors, but they are not going to parade their faggottry in public in front of everybody and carry the New Right banner..
I appreciate and admire your work and not going to hold this miscalculation against you.. You do fine work!! We don’t always get everything right.. and that there was some logic to your reasoning.. It’s human to make mistakes.. That goes for everybody, including myself!!
Sheldrake offers empirical evidence for his Morphic Fields. The behaviors are not preserved in the genes, which only code for amino acid cell machinery, but in the fields.
The relevance of this fact will now be drawn into my argument.
I was unaware of Milo’s Jewish background. I thought that he was Greek, defending Western Civilization. Now I see that he is Jewish I have a whole new perspective.
It is the Morphic field, the “exgrained” habit of Jews , to identify political trends and then infiltrate and subvert them. It is what they Do. It is their survival mechanism as a parasite community, and they are very good at it. Many sophisticated parasites target the brain of their host and cause it to behave in ways that benefit the parasite, not the host.
Some off-the-cuff examples are the Jews in the Bolshevik revolution, the Jews in the Ottoman empire and of cause the Jewish role of causing the US to go mad and attack the enemies of Israel.
Milo has identified the alt-right and is striving to gain control of it. That he is good reinforces my parasite model. He is an excellent parasite.
Milo is the jew incarnate.
Treat him as such.
Milo is someone I don’t particularly worry about, since his self-propelled media blitz is on a long flame-out. But I’m not in the front ranks politically and might have a different opinion if I believed there was a serious risk of Milo being mistaken for some kind of Right spokesman.
It’s amusing to see him turn about and jump Jim Crow in his minstrel-clown routine, cagily denouncing the Alt Right as a thing while exploiting its buzz. He’s trying to find a middle ground where he is politically acceptable, but he’s figuring out that if you try to please all, you please none.
On a minor but insistent point: I’ve never bought his story that he is a Jew. If his father was Greek and his mother a British Catholic, any Jewish background must be well back there—a grandparent or beyond. In any event he’s never substantiated it, and it’s been removed from his Wikipedia biography. There is a idea in England that you get on better in America if you pretend to be Jewish, and I believe this is what Milo did. As does former MP Louise Bagshawe, who in New York now styles herself Louise Mensch. It’s a slimy, misguided attempt at ingratiation, and you need look no further to mark the bearer as untrustworthy.
It’s probably best to ignore him all things considered. For what it’s worth he spends most of his time enraging the worst kind of liberals so he isn’t entirely useless. To his credit he has some legitimate conservative sentiments; unfortunately they get mangled due to his unrepentant homosexual behavior and feminine prissiness. It doesn’t help that Ann Coulter thinks it wise to legitimize him either–it dimishes her more than it raises him. Ultimately if the Alt-Right becomes a lasting political force which permanently changes the American right, it won’t be because of people like Milo. Because of this, I say pay him little mind.
I swear I heard CNN say Milo was the leader of the white nationalist Alt Right, though I can’t find the clip on the internet.
So they call us a “hate group” and then they won’t even let us be in charge of our own “hate group” but rather a half Jewish supporter of multiracialism and Israel. What a deal.
(((sounds like everything is going according to plan)))
I think you’re underestimating the level of co-opting going on.
Not just from Milo but people to the left of us that are commenting: “the alt-right is not a racial movement. It’s just a small percentage of “stormfags” who are trying to take it over. ”
On the TRS forums we are posting every article/youtube video we can find and raiding the comments. It’s staggering the amount of comments saying: “I’m black/hispanic/Jewish and I’m alt-right. The stormfags are just trying to co-opt our movement. The alt-right is for all races”.
Some of us are spending hours per day in the comments sections and the subversion is overwhelming.
Credit must be given to Anglin as he is the only one who called this out from the start.
You’re being trolled, in other words. I am glad you are in the trenches fighting the tide.
Is there anything more to “subversion” as you use it than a whole lot of people being wrong?
Milo hadn’t addressed race, at least in the terms that he did in his most recent speech, until he was
asked for his opinion on the *real* alt-right. If his opinion on race bothers you, then don’t ask him for it. If his track-record is anything to go by, he won’t give you his opinion on race unless you goad him to — or, in other words, troll him.
That’s why trolling could end up being a disastrous strategy. Milo wants to be an anti-feminist, and I say let him be that. He doesn’t want to be a *race warrior*. Let’s not force him into that position, because it will only lead to disappointment.
I think the best way we should deal with him is the same way we deal with Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch, which is to not to. Spencer is no friend of the Alt Right, but he does fantastic work fighting the Islamification of the West. Under no circumstances should the Alt Right get in the way of that since his main goal is one of ours. With Milo, I suggest we stay out of his way whenever he bashes liberals and SJWs. We should alienate him as little as possible while firmly denying any truck with him. I say this because, at least at this point, his anti-liberal posturing is a greater benefit to us than any anti-Alt Right positioning he has. This may change, of course, in which case we would have to draw our figurative knives. But until then, I believe a strategic silence and an unequivocal distancing should be in order. Let’s get the most mileage out of Milo as we can, while we can.
Yiannopoulos is a clown. This is serious.
The JQ is the easy out. But that’s not the only issue here. His over-the-top homosexuality has bothered a lot of people who may otherwise wish to pretend there are no other homosexuals in this movement. And it has been seized upon by one faction to attack another – continuing a feud that has been going on for some time now. I’d rather this time and energy was spent on politics, getting the Trump vote out in Florida and the Rust Belt, but there is no point in pretending that the knives are not out.
Hopefully Yiannopoulos will fades away and HRC is slaughtered at the polls.
That said, the HQ is not going to go away…
I would like to add to my earlier comment, that in addition, another way to view Milo as a the alt-right recently arrived (released amongst us?) Judas goat.
From the urban dictionary, A Judas goat is a trained goat used at a slaughterhouse and in general animal herding. The Judas goat is trained to associate with sheep or cattle, leading them to a specific destination. In stockyards, a Judas goat will lead sheep to slaughter, while its own life is spared. Judas goats are also used to lead other animals to specific pens and on to trucks.
The Bowel Movement has been here Before & This Time it isn’t Different
Having been in our Bowel Movement since after Waco up through the Militia-(mattoid) Movement in which local small local militias which were usually Christian-Identity oriented survivalist groups “taken over” by ZOGbots running these suburban whiggers pretending to be “CONstitutional militias” all of this has been done before. The craze must go its way propelled by events. The suburban whiggers got infiltrated by ZOGbots enough to make everyone paranoid, the Klan and Christian-Identity militias went back underground and formed even more survivalist groups, Y2Kaos went bust, and the ghettoized suburban whigger tards stayed home.
TraitorGlenn Miller, with its abysmal past as a drunken Lumbee Melungeon rat, had yet another decade run as the paymaster of Rabbi Linder’s Greater Free Range Tard Corral & Colostomy Bag (VNNF/TGMNNF/GFRTC&CBNNF). Everyone in the Old Resistance hated TraitorGlenn Miller and despised Linder, and yet Linder had a run until the Drunken Melungeon Rat’s liver and lungs were about to finish itself off so it went on another mission from ZOG and gunned down three mongrels at the parking lots of the Old Kikes Home in (relatively liberal non-Southern) Kansas. TraitorGlenn Miller played a “White Supremacist 14/88er” to perfection and was rewarded a “death sentence” in which that mongrel rat’s liver and lungs got a reprieve. If it wasn’t for a jail cell in Kansas, TraitorGlenn Miller would have been dead over two years ago.
Rabbi Linder’s Virtual Colostomy Bag churns on but with fewer head of tard. Events and the fact that this obnoxious jew is repellent has effectively ghettoized what was a reconditioned cast-off kike by William Pierce to form a second bowel-Movement front back in 2000.
This jew mischling faggot Milo is bringing attention to the latest and greatest bowel Movement carbuncle, i.e. the Alt-Right. The Alt-Right is nothing more than repackaged psuedo-White Nationalism during the Year of Trump. None of us think Trump is a White Nationalist or has any real objective other than to destroy the Cuckservative Republicucks in service to Trump’s vanity — which Trump has accomplished. Winning the [s]election and what happens next amid financial collapse coming is anyone’s guess. So the thing to do is to accept the attention that Trump and Hillary and the jewsmedia have given us, each as different Warlords of the bowel Movement, and in this chaos advance our own particular brand. This jew faggot Milo isn’t one of “us” — and there really isn’t any “us” except fleetingly as we advance towards the inevitable — to pull down this Mighty Evil Empire and carve out a racial ethnostate or two or Ten Thousand.
https://anaannblog.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/cover.jpg?w=842
Nobody is going to get purged — if the Old Resistance couldn’t “purge” TraitorGlenn Miller nobody and nothing can. Rather, each bowel-Movement Warlord will develop his own brand and other warlords will bitch and backbite like jackals and vultures at an elephant’s carcass. The Cuckservative Republicans are merely the largest scavenger at what remains of the GOP. So when this homo jewboy Milo moves on it will be a sure sign that the carcass is stripped bare.
Each of us as Warlords must cultivate our own Herd of Tard and with sharp elbows and sticks advance our own message.
Hail Victory!!!
Pastor Martin Luther Dzerzhinsky Lindstedt
Church of Jesus Christ Christian/Aryan Nations of Missouri
(Disqualified LibberToon) Write-In Candidate for Governor of Missouri
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