2,733 words
After any setback, it is perfectly natural and proper to reassess one’s tactics and goals. It is, after all, a winning attitude after a loss to blame oneself and not one’s enemies.
When mixed martial artist Conor McGregor was stopped in the second round at UFC 196 by Nate Diaz in March 2016, he didn’t ascribe his defeat to the superiority of his opponent but to his own lack of efficiency in maintaining his stamina. A mistake, to be certain, but something that can be corrected. Sure enough, when the pair met five months later at UFC 202, McGregor had made the appropriate adjustments and won a majority decision.
In many ways, the fallout after the August 12 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville was a setback for the Right. After a young man plowed his automobile into a crowd of hostile (and armed) counter-protestors, killing one and injuring nineteen, our corporate elites decided to act en masse in shutting the Right down. We don’t need to recapitulate all the details here. Suffice to say, it has now become much more difficult for the Right to maintain an Internet presence, to raise money, and to meet and organize. Where before the Right was operating comfortably below the radar, now it is definitely above it, exposed and vulnerable to attack.
There are two ways for the Right to address this setback, both of which are valid. One is to point a finger outward, and the other inward.
The outward finger is easy because we have Truth and unanimity going for us. Our corporate and media elites are hypocritical. They most certainly do hold the Right to a higher standard than they do the Left. They also judge whites on a higher moral plane than they do non-whites. How else to explain the relative lack of blowback after the objectively greater violence and hatred brought to bear by the antifa, Black Lives Matter, and Muslim terrorists in the recent past? Jared Taylor makes this point quite cogently, and I am sure there is not a nickel’s worth of difference among anyone on the Right as to where we stand on this.
We should never stop beating this drum, even if there are few short-term gains. For one, it costs us nothing to hold the enemy to their own standards, as Saul Alinsky insists we should do. Secondly, the Truth, when argued competently and tirelessly in a free society, has a way of seeping into people’s minds over the long haul and changing perspectives. Finally, this is a tack that most disinterested observers will also be compelled to follow. For example, the Ace of Spades is no white identitarian, but after Charlottesville, he was making essentially the same arguments as Mr. Taylor.
After UFC 196, Conor McGregor could not point that outward finger, because Nick Diaz hadn’t cheated and the referee had enforced the rules equitably. At Charlottesville, the enemies of the Right did cheat – showing up without a permit and employing all sorts of nasty weapons. And the referees were anything but equitable. The Charlottesville authorities failed to provide Unite the Right with appropriate police protection, and the media almost completely ignored all the violence and hatred that was heaped upon them.
Yes, one can say that life isn’t fair and we shouldn’t whine about it. On the other hand, we all have rights bestowed to us by God and elaborated in the US Constitution. If a violation of these rights is not cause to point that outward finger, then what is? And if we don’t point that finger now, then how much harder will it be for our children to do it? Or theirs?
The inward finger, however, is difficult to point, because this is where the re-branding comes in. It requires honest reflection upon oneself, and people often have difficulty remaining objective when assessing themselves. What did the Right do wrong? What could we have done differently? How can we avoid something similar in the future? These are all good, necessary questions. The most important ones, however, are, “Do we alter our tactics?” and “Do we alter our goals?”
For the first question, the answer is clearly yes. Tactics should always be reassessed after a setback. Essentially, I agree with Greg Johnson when he says that the Right was not morally culpable for Charlottesville, but adjustments should be made. In this case, I believe I can, off the cuff, make a decent list of rules the Right should follow in the future:
One tactic that perhaps we should also call into question is resorting to overt racism, nasty slurs, and overall obstreperousness. There are quite a few people on the Right who engage in this kind of behavior, especially trolls in comments sections. People like this made it difficult to sell the Alt Right as a serious movement before Charlottesville, and now they’re even more of an embarrassment. Remember, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, the one who defended providing service to ISIS, decided to cancel service to The Daily Stormer because he felt its proprietor, Andrew Anglin, was an “asshole.” Had Anglin not been such an “asshole,” the logic goes, then Cloudflare would have stood by the Stormer and all would have been well.
I agree with this, to a point. It’s always better to be classy than not. But regardless of what happened at Charlottesville, I don’t think policing this kind of thing should be a top priority for anyone on the Right for two reasons. One, if the French Revolution taught us anything, it’s that the definition of “asshole” always changes. Today, it’s Andrew Anglin and tomorrow it could be Jared Taylor who, by any objective measure, is the epitome of class. In fact, many corporate entities such as PayPal and YouTube have gone after Taylor and American Renaissance in the wake of Charlottesville. So Anglin and Taylor are both victims, despite being very different people. The only thing separating these two on Prince’s assholometer is time, which, as Steve Miller has pointed out, keeps on slipping into the future.
As they say, “If we’re gonna do the time, we might as well do the crime.” If being a class act is no defense against our corporate elites, then what motivation do people on the Right have to act classy?
The second reason I would eschew making hay over the mean-spirited antics of people like Anglin and the bile spewed on the Internet by white racist trolls is that my Irish is up (and I’m not Irish). It’s been up basically since 9/11 and has yet to go down. The Left does precious little to bring its cretins to heel (not that Andrew Anglin is a cretin, mind you), so why should we? They award talk shows on national television to spiteful pinheads like Al Sharpton and Bill Maher, they give Academy Awards to anti-white bigots like Michael Moore, they provide platforms for people to say and write the most overtly racist things about white people, they look the other way whenever blacks murderously misbehave as they always do, they continually obfuscate the obvious link between the Qur’an and militant Islam, they do everything in their pernicious power to accelerate the white majority’s decline in America, and then they turn around and have the unmitigated gall to lecture us about how we behave on the Internet.
No. In this case, Charlottesville has changed nothing. The Left needs to get its dilapidated house in order first. Then and only then can we talk about Andrew Anglin.
Another tactic to reconsider is distancing ourselves from the term “Alt Right.” Has the Alt Right brand been irreparably damaged by Charlottesville? Based on the setbacks we’ve faced, I can appreciate arguments saying it has. However, jettisoning a brand we were all more or less happy with a month ago because of one incident has two unfortunate consequences. One, it makes us seem flaky. Suppose we adopt a new brand, say, ‘the Alt Alt Right,’ and then another incident happens. Are we then going to enter Spinal Tap mode and rebrand again? At what point should we stop rebranding every time we face a setback?
The second consequence, I’m sure, is something few wish to discuss. If pundits and leaders on the Right abandon the Alt Right brand all at once, they will be hanging Richard Spencer out to dry. As one of the proprietors of AltRight.com and the putative coiner of the term, Spencer is about as hitched to the Alt Right brand as Al Gore is to anthropomorphic global warming. Most likely he is going to sink or swim with that ship. Do we really want to steer our flotilla away from his to facilitate his eventual encounter with Davey Jones? I’m sure our enemies on the Left would love it if we did. That is certainly the easiest path to defeat, dividing ourselves before the enemy steps in to conquer us.
On the other hand, would the Right indeed be better off without Spencer? Without really knowing the man, I can’t say for sure. But I have very strong doubts it would be. I have heard people complain about Spencer’s tactical blunders and personality flaws, and I am sure there’s a lot of truth in that. However, here we have a person who has made himself unemployable and put himself in constant danger in order to quite visibly lead a dissident movement against powerful forces which would gladly ruin him and his family. How many of us have the stones to sign up for something like that? I don’t. Therefore I have no desire to pull a Brutus and stick a shiv in his ribs. Like him or not, I say the Right is stuck with Richard Spencer, and our fortunes are to a great extent married to his. So we might as well make the most of it.
And of the people who do have the stones to do what Spencer does, I am sure that quite a few them nurse some precious egos, comb their hair in the mirror three times a day, and get titillated every time they hear themselves speak. Could it be any other way? Asking such a person not to be even a little bit of a prima donna is sort of like asking a basketball player not to be tall.
These are a few things we should all consider before re-branding. From my perspective, I think that, with a few exceptions, people on the Right should look at other people on the Right that they don’t like and say, “Yeah, he may be a jerk. But he’s our jerk.”
Finally, there’s rethinking the Right’s attachment to race realism and White Nationalism, that is, the very goals which keep us together. The first, for me, is an absolute non-starter. Blowing off racial differences is sort of like blowing off the science of biology. One of the strengths of the Right is that we base our movement in Truth, Truth which has the last, best arbiter of human behavior behind it: the human genome. After this, there is no argument.
Of course, the Left will always raise the point that accepting racial differences will inevitably lead to accepting political differences according to race. This is their ironically named bête noir and (to be fair) a valid point. Well, guess what? The Right has an answer to that, too: ethnonationalism. If non-whites are so petrified of big, bad whitey taking away their opportunities at the ballot box or making them use their own toilets and water fountains, they’re more than welcome to go back where they came from or form their own nations, separate from ours.
This is, in effect, White Nationalism. Not white supremacy. White Nationalism. If Charlottesville inspires the Right to never-the-twain these two things even more than it already does, fantastic. But if we soften our stance on White Nationalism even a wee bit after a debacle like Charlottesville, we’ll be bowing down to the beast and extinguishing our fundamental reasons for existing as political creatures to begin with. We have to remember that most non-whites will never accept an openly race realist white person in any mainstream culture to which they have access. The greater they grow in numbers, the more they will insist on one hundred percent political correctness from white people. White advocacy in a multi-racial world which includes black advocates, Hispanic advocates, and the like is doomed to fail. Whites are the most successful race of people there ever was. That’s simply the truth. It’s also the fly in the ointment of races that presume to be equal with whites. Having racially-aware whites around threatens this presumption of equality (or POE, as I call it), and so non-whites will try to eradicate this racial awareness at all costs (and whites along with it, if need be).
This is the future we face if white advocacy is not accompanied by realistic plans of White Nationalism, and a thousand Charlottesvilles are not going to change that. On the other hand, if White Nationalism sounds too off-putting in post-Charlottesville America and we want to call it something else, fine. We can dub it “White Separatism” or “Euro-Self-Determination,” or something deliberately hideous like “Oikophilic Caucasoidic Homogenistic Indigenism” that even our enemies would not be able to utter without laughing.
(Seriously, who could possibly be afraid of something called “Oikophilic Caucasoidic Homogenistic Indigenism,” or its inevitable goofy-sounding acronym, OCHI?)
If this is the limit of our rebranding, then I have no objections. However, I will say that unless the Alt Alt Whatever Right includes in its message heartfelt calls to racial pride and identity, and avoids the cultural sickness Greg Johnson describes as “ironism,” it will likely fail. Saying we need to form a spin-off nation of white people is not enough. Instead, we need to give white people reasons to want to join it and inspire them to do great things. And we need to impress upon non-whites that without whites doing great things, the world will soon be a lot less great.
For inspiration of this kind, I believe we can do no better than the Funeral Oration spoken by Pericles in the classic History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. He was speaking about Athens, but for our purposes he could have been talking about Europe or America. For just a moment, let’s pretend that he was:
Fix your eyes on the greatness of Athens as you have it before you day by day, fall in love with her, and when you feel her great, remember that this greatness was won by men with courage, with knowledge of their duty, and with a sense of honour in action, who, if they failed in any ordeal, disdained to deprive the city of their services, but sacrificed their lives as the best offerings on her behalf. So they gave their bodies to the commonwealth and received, each for his own memory, praise that will never die, and with it the grandest of all sepulchers, not that in which their mortal bones are laid, but a home in the minds of men, where their glory remains fresh to stir to speech or action as the occasion comes by.
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13 comments
I agree about the neo-Nazi and KKK apparel; it has to be put away. It was probably “pop culture cool”, in a manner of speaking, back when Birth Of A Nation hit the cinema in the early 20th century and during the 1930s.
But I think Whites need to see more Charlottesville incidents. The reason why many Whites think the way they do (all Whites are evil, racist and only Whites can be such) is due to the relentless brainwashing by the culture (dominated by the political LEFT).
I am sure that a city requires a certain amount of time before granting a permit before the planned event to make their determination. Given the Charlottesville city gov’t’s political bent (to the LEFT) I would bet big money that one or more of them gave the antifa/BLM/etc LEFTISTs heads up about what is planned. Lesson: no way to keep it secret, for any length of time.
I’ve heard just recently that Va. Gov. McAuliffe signed an order declaring an emergency at 10:00 a.m. that Saturday. This was hours before any violence had occurred. A clear sign he expected it and was behind antifa/BLM/etc showing up when/how they did. It’ll be a cold day in hell when even a Presidency such as Trump’s does a Just Dept civil rights violation investigation of state and local gov’t involved here for the appearance of being on the side of antifa/BLM/etc against the Right.
Local and state gov’t collusion with antifa/BLM/etc is one of the best things to constantly publicize, especially with that video of state policemen shoving UniteTheRight into antifa crowds when they should have kept the two apart which SOP in large gathering control. Every city across the USA practices this. Don’t even allow the two conflicting sides to have permits to assemble in public on the same day. Plus, the state police declared the UniteTheRight an unlawful assembly and didn’t confront the hooligans on that street where Fields’ car collided with other vehicles blocking the street. If the White Nationals want to attract other undecided Whites, showing that local/state/fed gov’ts no longer represent them. Probably futile; most are just go along to get along even though most Whites are being herded along to demographic annihilation.
On the plus side, the UniteTheRight showed up with helmets, body armour and signs/flags attached to implements that could if necessary be used to parry other people’s weapons. That showed good forethought. Unfortunately, cities across the USA are not giving permits unless the group agrees not to show up with these defensive tools.
I disagree with the main thrust of this article which is too concerned with window dressing. Yes, we need to present ourselves as smart and clean cut, I’d challenge the public use of profane language for instance; but we can’t “unite the right” if we have kittens every time someone makes a Roman salute. This makes us prisoners of the Left by always putting us on the defensive. If we’re to succeed in capturing the moral high ground we need to be honest about our ideological antecedents. The enemy’s principal tactic is to shame us into submission. In the end we can best “unite the right” through the pride we take in all those, whatever their possible faults, from Robert E Lee to Adolf Hitler, who heroically challenged a corrupt and dysgenic system.
My analysis of the photo:
1. The guy with the mask is likely antifa.
2. In the photo half the people are black, one wearing a Trump Tshirt, the other a Trump hat. Blacks are a demographic not known to support Trump.
3. Mr. Blackshirt and one of the blacks is wearing the same Trump hats, probably handed out by the same organization.
4. Mr Blackshirt seems to be unconcerned to be a Nazi in a group that is known to support violence towards Nazis.
So obviously the conclusion is that these were all leftists, acting like rightists, who with the collusion of the media, were attempting to brand the “Unite the right” rally to be a rally by a bunch of Nazis and Klan members.
I agree with the author – mostly.
Do not tone down the race realism.
But forget about Alt-Right rallies. There isn’t need for them.
We want to radicalize the Alt-Lite and its divers constituents. Encourage them to continue obtaining permits and engaging in those “legally permitted acts of public assembly and free speech” guaranteed by muh constitution, especially in those blue and dark blue areas of various states.
I want to see Alex Jones, Steven Molyneaux, Watson, and the “Heritage, Not Hate” types smugly congratulating their non-racist culture warriors for bravery after each dust up.
The Alt-Right could provide the Lites with support – not as Alt-Rightists, of course – but as consteetooshunalists, Southrons, Christian Paytriots, or even, might I suggest, as infiltrators of various leftist organizations.
“However, jettisoning a brand we were all more or less happy with a month ago …”
The use of the word “all” is incorrect. Maybe “most” and certainly “some” but not “all.” I have been waging a memetic war against the Alt Right at my own blog for months before the Charlottesville incident. There is many, many things to dislike about the Alt Right from a Far Right perspective, and you can check out EGI Notes for more on my perspective on that.
Nazi symbols and the lesson from South Africa.
In the 1980’s, the opposition media had a field day with the triskele of the AWB, connecting them to neo-nazis:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaner_Weerstandsbeweging
But I, who stayed in South Africa, knew that being a neo-nazi was the furthest off in the minds of the AWB supporters. All supporters went throught the South African education system, which basically taught Allied history and the Allied narrative, for South Africa fought on the side of the Allied forces during WWI en WWII, and during Apartheid had a close alliance with Israel (in my matric, i.e. our high school diploma, history book in the late 1970’s, if I remember correctly, written by A.J.P Taylor, there was this small remark on the second page: “Approved by the South African Jewish Board of Deputies”).
The triskele was understood back then as being the 777 of the Holy Bible, as opposed to the 666 of the Devil, not as an alternative swastika. But that did not help them, for I saw a German TV program during the 1990’s, where the triskele was put next to the swastika, somber music played, German panzers were shown in black and white bearing swastikas. Then the AWB was shown as white supremacists who wanted to revive nazism in South Africa. Hardly any South African had access to German TV programs. If they would only have known how the triskele would be sold in Germany!
While the AWB was not a major political factor in South Africa back then (and heavily infiltrated by police agents), the rest of the world blew up the AWB beyond all proportions.
What morally is right, is not always tactically clever.
They have demonized Fascism and National Socialism – won’t even teach the philosophies in poly sci classes. Most people think they’re just snarl words or expletives. But why? Because only these can defeat them. Yes, we need new uniforms and flags, but they will demonize these in any case, linking them via Pavlovian Conditioning to the original object of negative conditioning. So we must press ahead anyway.
“Yes, we need new uniforms and flags, but they will demonize these in any case…”
I had to ponder quite a long time on this one. New uniforms and flags – that is for the future. First some basics have to come into place. Perhaps when the Alt+Right has become a true national movement. Now it still is early days.
If I think back on South Africa, the propaganda managed to latch the AWB to “Nazism”, but not Apartheid. There were some minor attempts, even today, but to my knowledge, by and large unsuccessful.
However if our flag would have contained the triskele or any other symbol remotely associated with the old Germany (South Africa also has a lesser known strong German history, see the “Ox-Wagon Sentinel”, Wikipedia just touches the surface of it), I can imagine then we would have been into deep trouble. We then would have played right into the hands of those people, and would have lost many friends inside the international community.
The full political impact of the Unite the Right rally has yet to be determined. The post-12 August mass moral meltdown among leftists, media, cuckservatives and the corporate sector is evidence of their fragile psychological condition. The Left has been so used to going unchallenged that when Unite the Right took it out of cyberspace and into the public square, they could not handle it. It was as if a network of H.P. Lovecraft LARPers had shown up at Lee Park, invoked the name of Cthulhu, and – kul wahad! – the Great Old One manifested on the Charlottesville Green, tentacles and all.
The question becomes: how to spin the Leftist hysteria into their total demoralization.
I suspect that there are millions of people out there who were energized by the the Alt Right’s showing – and especially the torchlit march, the chants and the confrontations with antifa. It marked a new stage in the struggle, where it’s going from an online phenomenon into something which is marching down Main Street America. If nothing else, the fact that Alt Right/Lite forces are confronting leftists across the country is a visible sign of resistance to the dominance of cultural marxism. Charlottesville became one big act of guerrilla theater.
As for the optics of Roman salutes and Third Reich flags: yes, the Alt Right can use more discipline. But someone is always going to show up with paraphernalia or take some action which hostile media is going to exploit (and we can not discount the possibility of double agents). Consider how the media rewrote the Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown stories to create the narrative of “unarmed teens” being gunned down in the streets by White somethings-or-others. The Alt Right has to be prepared for this.
The shortfall on 12 August was not so much in the tactics of Unite the Right. Like any battle, there are going to be friction factors, stuff will go wrong. To go Sun Tzu here, there needed to be more preparation before the battle was ever fought at Charlottesville:
* Media: the Alt Right needs an information network to disseminate the truth about its events. It’s pointless to rely on the mythical objectivity of the mainstream media.
* Legal: lawyers to conduct lawsuits over civil rights violations and to haul the authorities up onto the stand.
* Networking: there have to be people in the Trump DoJ who can back up the Alt Right’s civil rights and hold the locals responsible.
* Fronts: an organization needs to be set up for people who want to get in on future events, especially students, patriots, and 1st and 2nd Amendment advocates. Give people the opportunity to fight back against censorship, whether in the public square, the campus or the cubicle farm.
* Cyber Ops: Alt Tech needs to be exploited, and there may be plenty of IT people who are fed up with corporate suppression of dissent and are willing to act.
In fairness, the Alt Right has relatively limited resources with which to take these steps. And there was a reasonable expectation that the city and state authorities would play it by the rules agreed to with Unite the Right.
The foe reveled their methods on 12 August 2017. Time to learn the lessons and, next time, seize the meta-victory.
Strongly agree. We don’t know yet, but there are positive signs. The Antifa have overplayed their hand and some of the Democrats are worried. And any search of their funding would lead to interesting places, no doubt. Pelosi has condemned them. The tactic some have mentioned of scheduling a big rally and then not showing up would be effective. The Antifa are so jacked up now that they would not be able to control themselves.
MJN: Thanks for the feedback.
#2 simply gives the enemy easy opportunities to whip their followers into a frenzy through propaganda. If a visible AR leader does it, there will be memes of him alongside hitler/mussolini doing the same thing. Doesn’t matter if a proper Roman salute is ‘Nazi’ or not. Tactically, it’s a bad move, sort of like if Richard Spencer were to sport a Hitler mustache. Does it really matter if the mustache really was first popularized by Charlie Chaplin?
As for the chanting…I was put off by it. Maybe it’s a subjective thing. I’m still part normie a little bit, I guess, and that part of me was totally repulsed. But it would have been the same if *any* group were doing it, regardless of race or politics. A large number of people marching and chanting in the streets just creeps me out. When I wrote that I kind of assumed I wouldn’t be the only one.
Why does it creep you out and what do you suggest as an alternative?
Our race is running out of time. In fact it may even be at the point where we should prepare for a defensive survival strategy rather than attempting to win it all back. Half our people are brainwashed and will do whatever they’ve been conditioned to do…reversing the dominant cultural ideology at an institutional level is not an option. We really should concentrate on locations that are majority white and not liberal, to hold that ground…cause the urban centers are totally lost. And as for Europe my hope lies in the east. With luck the system will collapse before we are completely in check mate.
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