Identity Rising

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Author’s Note:

The following is an excerpt from my new book Identity Rising: How Nationalist Millennials Will Re-Take Europe, Save America, and Become the New ‘Greatest Generation.’  There is more info on it in the ‘About The Author’ section at the bottom of this page.

In discussing the importance of this youthful ‘movement’ outlined in the last chapter, my mind always wanders to a specific idea, which I first became cognizant of as a child. This idea — almost a feeling in some ways — has also been present ever since I first became affiliated with these other young writers and thinkers, and I believe it goes to the heart of why the collective phenomenon is so significant.

I can only explain it through anecdote, as it is very specific in nature, and is tied to the gigantic Great Books collection we had at my childhood home.

My parents had purchased this Great Books collection — along with an accompanying version of the Encyclopedia Britannica — from a traveling salesmen, when I was perhaps 4 or 5 years old. While the idea of a traveling book-salesmen is quite quaint today, those were the days before the internet, and we actually got a great deal of use out of the purchase.

My dad would — any time he was exposed to a word or an idea he was not familiar with — go down to the room where the great collection was kept, and pull out whichever Encyclopedia Britannica book contained what he wanted to look up. He would unfurl the gold-embossed pages, and read from them aloud, no differently than some 16th-century scholar in the first decades after the creation of the printing press.

Even greater than our use of the encyclopedia however, was the attention I myself gave the Great Books. While initially too young to understand them, I eventually dove into them with abandon as a teenager. I read the Iliad and the Odyssey and the Aeneid that made up their start; then struggled through the scientific and philosophical volumes in the middle as best I could, diligently turning pages but comprehending very little; and then got lost – happily — in the stories of Joseph Conrad and Jane Austen. I even read (and enjoyed) the Federalist Papers.

But most of all — more than any of the texts within the collection — I loved a small book that had accompanied it, titled The Great Conversation. It was a companion piece to the Great Books, and described them as a “conversation” between their respective authors, stretching back across all of human history, in which the most important questions of life were discussed and debated and theorized on.

I found this idea unbelievably beautiful, and loved the notion that I could be a part of this conversation by reading them in turn, or even writing my own books someday.

As I grew up though I never really found myself exposed to this “Great Conversation” anywhere else. I didn’t feel connected to it in any of the magazines or journals I picked up; nor in the classes I was forced to take in high school; and certainly not from anything on television.

Even in college, though we were several times assigned specific books from within the collection, I never felt for a moment as if we were engaging in that storied debate over life, and truth, and meaning.

It would be another book that would illuminate the reasons for this to me, which was, appropriately enough, also about the “Great Books.” It was by a one-time liberal, Jewish film critic from Manhattan named David Denby, and catalogued his decision — in 1988 — to return to Columbia University as a middle-aged man, to re-take the Great Books courses he had once taken there as a freshmen. Its title was The Great Books: My Adventures With Homer, Rousseau, Wolff, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World.

Denby’s book was one part love letter to the books in question, and one part exploration of what was beginning to happen to them academically by that time period. For by the years in which Denby returned to Columbia, many universities were starting to “rethink” the Great Books.

Denby — despite his liberal pedigree and location in the belly of progressive New York City — found the increasing scorn with which the books were treated maddening. He derided Columbia and all the similar institutions across the country for their political correctness in moving away from such courses. He described radical leftist professors calling the books “violent” and “oppressive” and either arguing for the books’ dismissal from college courses or else the teaching of them through a lens of “intersectionality.” He breathlessly recounted experiences watching non-white students label the Great Books courses “racist,” and — by the end of his book — bemoaned what he saw as the potential death of classical thinking on college campuses.

Denby’s book was written in the years before the Baby-Boomer left would achieve the complete cultural hegemony they enjoy today, and the phenomenon of Cultural-Marxist negationism — or what he called in his book “Cultural-Relativism” — would eventually achieve a power far greater than he experienced in his one-year return to Columbia, and indeed far greater than he could have imagined. In this regard his book serves as a fascinating prelude to the insanity we see today on college campuses.

Yet most important is the fact that today, this insanity is no longer limited to college campuses, and in fact predominates across Western society.

With this being the case, any challenges to this institutionalized Cultural Relativism immediately provoke controversy, and it is for this reason that the movement of young, nationalistic Millennials described in the last chapter attained such an immediate degree of infamy and attention during their 2015-2016 rise.

This infamy was well-reflected in Hillary Clinton’s speech on the “Alt Right” already touched upon, although in my opinion the rise of the term “Alt Right” to denote the phenomenon in question is unfortunate for a variety of reasons.

Foremost among these reasons is the fact that the term denotes no specific organization with precise membership, and as a result anyone can start a website or grab a megaphone and start calling themselves “Alt Right.” On the flip side, the media can attach the label to whomever they want based on this same imprecision. This makes the term ultimately meaningless.

Beyond this though, the phenomenon in question is also far more massive than the term “Alt Right” or the collection of individuals linked to that title suggests. Indeed, I think there has of yet been little recognition of just what a large scope the movement in question entails.

While it is a varied, multifaceted phenomenon, I would — on the whole — characterize it as the collection of young people throughout the West who have in some way or another turned their back on the reigning orthodoxies of progressivism and multiculturalist globalism.

Part of this is the flowering of various ‘nationalist’ ideologies and belief systems, but these are quite varied and massive in and of themselves. In the case of those aforementioned Millennials, it runs the gamut between a variety of different ‘nationalist’ ways of thinking and the groups surrounding them.

There is ‘civic-nationalism,’ arguably the variant most exemplified by leaders like Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, as well as more mainstream members of the ‘movement’ like Alex Marlowe and Tomi Lahren. This is the classic “America First” nationalism that sees it as natural for citizens of a nation to put that nation first. It also, on a macro level, seeks to boost the independence of individual nation-states relative to the globalist elite in places like Brussels and Davos.

There is also a certain kind of ‘cultural-nationalism’ that opposes the third-worldization of the West and the purposeful destruction of Western culture. This is probably the biggest category, and could be exemplified by either the “Western Chauvinism” of Gavin McInnes or the aggressively commonsensical rhetoric of writers like Ann Coulter, who point out the idiocy of mainstream conservatives fixating on the constitution while allowing the mass-immigration of third-world immigrants who could care less about it.

In addition, there is also, of course, ‘ethno-nationalism.’ This philosophy is represented by many young identitarians who see no way of preserving individual nation-states or cultures without a parallel preservation of their ethnic character. They (quite logically) view the progressive goal of “the abolition of whiteness” as an existential threat, but are equally supportive of the right to self-determinism for every other race on earth, seeing globalism as the threat to true human diversity that it is.

And finally, there are of course some individuals who — whether for shock value or strategic reasons — call themselves “Neo-Nazis” and other such provocative monikers. It should be noted though that even those young people in America and Europe self-identifying with such titles are usually only doing so as an “F-You” to the left, and basically argue that “If the left is going to call us Nazis anyway we might as well embrace the term”; and that these individuals are almost universally dismissive of the 1990s era “white supremacists” liberals still like to throw out as bogeymen. This is not to validate their rationales for adopting such monikers, as I disagree with such choices on an assortment of levels, but it definitely bears explaining.

There are also countless ‘Western libertines,’ as one might call them, who appear no different than progressives in many ways, but have rightly determined that true progressivism means only cultural-suicide. This group is best defined by the aforementioned Milo Yiannopoulos, the flamboyantly gay “Islamophobe” whose presence in Berkeley precipitated riots in early 2017, and stretches to other noted homosexuals and ‘freedom lovers’ who have realized the progressive support for mass-Muslim immigration will end only very poorly for individuals of their orientation (libertarian-minded individuals like Paul Joseph Watson might fit under this category as well).

Beyond all these loose-groupings however, there are other important manifestations of the phenomenon that are significant as well.

The aforementioned proliferation of ‘masculinity’-focused writers and male-oriented self-improvement websites is one of these. These sites would rarely proclaim such a fact openly, but it is clear in evaluating them that it is the case.

The Art of Manliness, again, is a perfect example in this regard.

Modern progressivism has declared masculinity “toxic,” and claims that gender differentiation should be abolished. The Art of Manliness is defined by beliefs diametrically opposed to this, and in this manner — though it vociferously steers clear of explicit political discussion — it is as important a part of the anti-progressive counterculture as many other more openly political entities.

Even many of the increasingly common personal-finance and ‘passive income’ sites can be regarded in the same fashion. These sites are all on the surface apolitical, but defined by a similar “red-pill” philosophy. In the same way their political counterparts argue that the political indoctrination of the modern West is something that young people today must be ‘awakened’ from, these sites portray the exact same dynamic in terms of finance and lifestyle. The underlying message is that “Everything you have been told is a lie. Society does not want you to succeed. Public school and your television raised you to be a slave, and you must fight back and achieve (financial) freedom.”

All of these sites offer an indictment of public school, student loan debt, and 9-5 employment that is not just superficially similar to the political sites heretofore described, but in my opinion reflective of the same underlying paradigms.

Most of all though, the overall phenomenon heretofore described is — of course — defined by those young writers and thinkers creating the arguments and narratives that attempt to explicitly counter progressivism, and which attempt to formulate an understanding of this bizarre Western world we now live in, and its meaning and significance historically and for the future.

It is the level of this discourse, and the extremely high level of intelligence and scholarship and thinking represented by this collective, which in my mind defines its significance.

This is the startling dichotomy at the heart of the entire situation, for many of these young people being painted as “rednecks,” “basement dwellers,” and “deplorables” are in reality quite successful, capable individuals, discussing ideas and concepts of vast importance.

They are discussing age-old questions of culture, and history, and religion. They are going back and examining questions of honor and ethics that have for years been rejected from mainstream debate. Individuals with backgrounds in philosophy — like Dr. Greg Johnson and others — are examining philosophical questions that have plagued humankind for millennia, and delving into them with a sincerity no longer to be found within the debt-mill college campuses of the West.

Sites like Johnson’s Counter-Currents publish copious poetry and literary fiction. Artist-industrialists like Vox Day — through his company, Castalia House — publish vast tracts of historical, military, and political non-fiction from some of the foremost thinkers in the world.

Other writers are examining questions such as gender — and the nature of masculinity and femininity — that are only otherwise addressed today by rote progressive ideologues. In so doing they are hearkening back to thinkers from the Renaissance all the way to ancient Greece. As an example, Jack Donovan’s exploration of masculinity — The Way Of Men — has earned true, popular respect far greater than every lazy, politically-correct Michael Kimmel book of the last three decades, and looks likely to be read not just decades from now but centuries.

Many others are on the cutting edge of evolutionary psychology and human biodiversity, those fields having been deemed taboo by mainstream academia. Still more individuals are examining economics, and economic theory, and analyzing such arguments from an emotional remove, not influenced by the corporate and university donors that have strangled the modern mainstream study of the subject.

The hundreds of sites and journals in question publish articles by young men attempting to delineate the meaning of life, questions of morality, and the overlapping duties of tribe and nation and heritage. Eastern Orthodox Christians debate metaphysics with Odinists and Traditionalist-Catholics. Individuals write books and essays on popularly-forgotten historical figures, and recent ‘wrong-thinkers’ like Yukio Mishima and Frances Parker Yockey. Others offer new perspectives on historical epochs like the Crusades and Victorian England and the French Revolution.

Beyond all this, these connected writers and thinkers are arguably the only group really examining the question of ‘modernity,’ and the historical significance of this strange period of time we now live in. Other writers like Sebastian Junger and Robert Putnam have examined this topic as well, but they were limited by their unwillingness to move beyond the politically correct barriers and taboos which are now so omnipresent, a limitation the young people I am referencing have resolved to leave behind, no matter the consequences to them professionally.

All of this has been left out of the hoopla surrounding such individuals, and this is perhaps the most ironic aspect of the whole situation.

For truly, when was the last time there was such an organic flowering of youth culture, and politics, and writing? When was the last time so many thousands of young authors and artists simultaneously began examining such subjects, and advocating for new political realities, and creating such a vast proliferation of art and books and scholarship?

I can think of no other such time in living memory. Indeed, the idea of thousands of fiercely intelligent young people all committing their lives to such literary and political purposes back in the 1980s, or 1970s — or even the 1930s — is ridiculous. The phenomenon is unprecedented, and if the politics that united this vast collection of young people were of any other kind, the collective cultural phenomenon they represent would be lauded on the front page of every newspaper and magazine.

In reality though, given the present intellectual climate, the response is far different.

This interesting fact is summed up well by an anonymous posting that was found and republished on social media in mid-2017, written by a progressive outlining his or her experience with such ‘nationalistic’ young thinkers:

I’ve actually been reading their forums, quite extensively for many months now, as much as it pains me to do so. What I found was actually quite terrifying, but not in the way you’d expect…

…They talked quite eruditely about a great many subjects, from politics, to philosophy, to historical and ecclesiastical matters. There was a type of, how shall I put this, gravitas and knowledge to them, far from the 2D vision of the toothless redneck we’ve come to associate with hate movements of the past.

I seen [sic] references to the great Greek and German philosophers, their knowledge of communist literature was quite extensive too. I found myself learning things about Marxian doctrine that even I, as a life long socialist didn’t know. I seen [sic] them engage in rigorous debate, arguing against themselves from our point of view (quite convincingly I might add, they knew all our talking points) to hone their arguments.

They seem to understand propaganda too, they were referencing passages of Edward Bernays, dissecting them and discussing how they could use the knowledge gained in their ‘meme war.’

Their philosophical knowledge was only surpassed by their ability to use social media and technology, these people are extraordinarily adept at using the internet (possibly from their roots on 4chan’s /pol/ and other hacker/racist forums) to spread their message.

We need to get organized, they’re winning the culture war on all fronts at the moment and we’ve been quite inadequate and [sic] stopping them. Where we can, we must silence them, report, report, report. They can’t have a voice of [sic] they don’t have a platform to spew their hate. Never ever let their hate to be broadcast openly, even if clocked [sic] in the erudite writings of pseudo intellectual racists.

The above passage is quite evocative, and whatever its provenance it perfectly describes the dynamic at play.

It also embodies the attitude of destruction with which society’s power brokers are focused on this burgeoning movement. This attitude leads to limitless attempts at — as the above passage indicates — ‘no-platforming’ the writers and thinkers in question, a goal which is commonly accomplished through a mix of slander and mischaracterization.

The foremost such attack is the idea that these individuals are “white supremacists,” but this charge is inaccurate of course, and for numerous reasons.

On the one hand, while there is certainly a small fringe of people who self-identity with the term, I cannot think of a single one by name. On the contrary, the label is almost entirely a media creation, which is ascribed upon any individuals deviating from progressive ideology, no matter how untrue such charges might be. In fact in August 2017 Nancy Pelosi and many liberal newspapers would even describe a half-Asian man and a Samoan man — leaders of a group called “Patriot Prayer” — as white supremacists.

Taken at face value though, the accusation still has no merit.

As the aforementioned Dr. Greg Johnson writes:

The charge [about] ‘White Supremacists’ has two aspects. First, there is the claim that whites think of ourselves as superior to other groups. Second, there is the idea that whites want to rule over other groups.

I do think that whites are superior to some groups in some ways. I am very proud of our people, and we have a great deal to be proud of…  But you can also find ways in which we are inferior to other groups. I just don’t think this issue matters, however, because as Kevin MacDonald and Jared Taylor have pointed out, even if we were the sorriest lot of people on the planet and had accomplished almost nothing, it would still be natural, normal, and right for us to love our own and to be concerned with the future of our people.

Another common criticism of such thinkers by the left is that they do not recognize their “white privilege.” This argument is equally invalid however, because it fails to recognize the fact that — as evidenced in this book — progressivism has now completely and wholly taken over Western culture. As a result, massive efforts have been undertaken in terms of affirmative action and other mechanisms for giving people of color additional advantages that whites do not have. Now, many argue that such efforts have backfired and hurt the recipients of such programs, however whether that is the case or not, the idea of “white privilege” can only be called archaic, given the explicit demonization of white people within Western culture today. Further, the charge is most revolting because the only group that clearly does have immense privilege in our society today is that of the very liberals who are using the term to virtue signal. Such “liberal privilege” is in fact what most explains their dangerously crazy thinking.

Such individuals live in highly-educated, wealthy, very-homogenous areas. They are surrounded by white people or by non-whites who are just as educated and wealthy as they are. In this regard they are 100% insulated from the realities of the modern West. They don’t know what life is like for a ten-year-old native British girl in Rotherham, being gang-raped and tortured by Muslims because she’s an ‘infidel.’ They don’t know about the elderly people beaten to death by Roma immigrants in Paris and Lyons. They don’t know that EMTs in Malmö can’t enter certain areas of the city without armed military escort. They don’t know what life is like for a non-Hispanic kid in a low-income, 100% Hispanic section of Reno, or a non-black kid in a 100% black section of Los Angeles, or a non-Muslim kid in the Muslim sections of Birmingham. In all regards, they have no idea the hell that is caused by their utopian ideas and policies.

Another common accusation directed at the group in question is that of “anti-Semitism,” which is an equally invalid yet complicated and, in some respects, fascinating charge. Certainly there is the fringe of “Nazi LARPers” previously mentioned, who engage in the most controversial, provocative behavior they can to get a rise out of the left (whether they truly believe such things or not is the topic for another book), but the vast majority of those people being accused of “anti-Semitism” are doing no such thing.

What a few of them are doing is attempting to understand collective Jewish beliefs and actions vis a vis the modern West, which is an entirely rational thing to do. Obviously not all people of Jewish background have the same politics, but for some reason when collective Jewish psychology and political perspectives are discussed in the same way Russian or Chinese or Latin-American psychology and politics are discussed, it is labelled “anti-Semitism.”

Some of the individuals in question also end up on the receiving end of such accusations when they point out the troubling behavior of specific individuals of Jewish origin.

One of the most famous such cases is that of Barbara Lerner-Spectre.

Specter was born in America, and studied at Columbia University before moving to Israel and serving on the faculty of the Shalom Hartmann Institute of Jerusalem. After that she moved to Sweden. There she became the director of Paideia, the European Institute of Jewish Studies. In that role, Spectre has made a number of public statements which aroused curiosity, most notably the following:

I think there’s a resurgence of anti-Semitism because at this point in time Europe has not yet learned how to be multicultural, and I think we’re gonna be part of the throes of that transformation, which must take place. Europe is not going to be the monolithic societies that they once were in the last century. Jews are going to be at the center of that. It’s a huge transformation for Europe to make. They are now going into a multicultural mode, and Jews will be resented because of our leading role. But without that leading role, and without that transformation, Europe will not survive.

Obviously the idea that Jews, who make up 1% of Europe’s population, should have such a large role in completely overhauling its demography is a troubling one, as is the idea that Europe “must become multicultural.” Yet this statement of Spectre’s — reposted widely across the internet — is an example of why the debate in question is so fascinating. For while there are many who point to this statement as proof that those of Jewish origin are attempting to destroy Europe, there are also many Jews themselves who attack Spectre as a “self-hating Jew,” attempting to hurt collective Jewish interests via that same action (in that it would result in a Muslim-majority Europe that they believe would be an existential threat to those of Jewish background in the diaspora and in Israel).

Such an example demonstrates, in my mind, that questions such as these are quite important, whatever the right answer is in each case. The population of Europe is being replaced, and there are individuals of Jewish origin like Spectre — and George Soros, and others — who have had a massive impact on this process. On the other side though, there are individuals of Jewish origin like Bruce Bawer and Pamela Geller fighting to prevent Europe’s Islamization. Like everything, such questions are complicated, but the framing of any discussion of Jewish behavior as “anti-Semitic” is a consistent and troubling fact today, and accusations of “anti-Semitism” are routinely wielded as a weapon by the political left and especially by individuals like Spectre and Soros themselves.

This was bizarrely shown in the case of the ‘Jewish-center bomb threat’ phenomenon that played out in 2016. It involved Jewish centers in the United States receiving bomb threats over the phone, and during the time in which it was unsolved the mainstream media and Democrats consistently attacked Donald Trump for being the ‘motivating influence’ behind the calls.

Ultimately however the calls were shown to have come from a Jewish teenager in Israel, whose family — it was alleged — had ties to Israeli intelligence agencies. Yet even once this was determined, left-wing commentators still referenced the bomb threats as evidence of a ‘resurgence of anti-Semitism’ related to Trump’s rise.

Indeed, there seemed to be an immense amount of focus in globalist, establishment circles on the relationship between the Jewish community and Donald Trump’s campaign and presidency.

In a famous Saturday Night Live skit depicting Trump and Steve Bannon in the West Wing post-inauguration, there was even a line given to the fictitious Trump stating “…when the Jews are away the Goys will play!” — suggesting a viewpoint that the Trump presidency was a rogue force ‘outside Jewish influence.’ This was mirrored almost exactly by the Huffington Post headline that would come out once Bannon eventually left the white house, titled “Goy Bye” — a play on the word “Goodbye” — that seemed to suggest Bannon’s ‘defeat’ was a defeat for white people as a whole and a victory for Jews (“Goy” being a derogatory Jewish word for non-Jews).

Questions like many of the above, however, receive virtually no attention in mainstream Western media. Nor do many others that are of vast importance. As a result, one can increasingly see a dynamic at play within the West where certain ‘forbidden’ issues and questions are only being discussed in two places: the premier Jewish newspapers like Haaretz and the Jerusalem Post — and the journals and websites of the young nationalistic writers and thinkers described above.

Other accusations are also often flung at this latter group. One of these is the idea that they are “fascists,” yet this is equally incorrect. Even one third-party chronicler of such individuals — the writer Benjamin Teitelbaum — has stated this, saying:

Contemporary nationalists are not reincarnations of 1930s fascists, nor can their causes be generalized with any meaningful degree of specificity. It is not self-righteousness or elitism, but intellectual laziness that lets us claim otherwise.

Teitelbaum is of course correct, yet at the same time, many such individuals have playfully adapted the ‘fascist’ moniker, using terms like “fashy” to describe certain clothes or haircuts or philosophies. Doing this is not necessarily out of any preference for actual historical 1930s fascism however, but rather as an over-the-top denunciation of modern progressivism and everything that’s wrong with it. By romanticizing such a term — even if half-seriously — they are harkening instead to the idea of societies where tradition and continuity are considered important, where the collective ‘tribe’ is considered to be of value, and where cultural asabiya is cultivated instead of destroyed.

For this reason I have often found myself using the term “preservationism” to refer to the belief system in question, as “preservation” more truly signifies the concerns and goals described. I know of no young people with the beliefs in question who wish for hegemony over other lands and other peoples. They merely wish for their own cultures and traditions and heritage to survive, which — to my mind — is the most natural thing in the world.

They are also not in the least bit possessed of “hate,” which is another accusation commonly heard. Indeed, in my experience nothing could be further from the truth. The other young men I have met at functions and in-person gatherings related to the beliefs in question seem almost universally possessed of great empathy, and protectiveness for those weaker than themselves. They view protection as a corollary of masculinity, and view purposeful cruelty to the weak as the height of masculine dishonor.

This is not to say that the whole of this rough ‘movement’ is perfect of course. On the contrary, people are people, and the phenomenon in question certainly has its idiots and bad apples. There are also many examples of internecine fighting, bad-blood, and squabbles between individuals, along with examples of everything else that pops up in human tribes and sub-cultures.

Yet on the whole I do believe the majority are individuals of intensely high caliber.

In my own experience — focusing primarily on the future of Europe — I have heard from hundreds of men from all across North America and Western Europe, the vast majority well-educated, high-income men with families, who — while in many cases not able to publicly advocate in a similar manner — share the intellectual positions of those authors described above, and share a sense of horror at what the future holds for the West as a result of progressivism.

Many are demonstrably ‘K-selected,’ to re-reference the term. They have traveled widely and (to quote Tolkien) “learned the hearts of men both good and evil.” They understand both the tremendous goodness inherent in human beings, as well as the tremendous horrors we as a species are capable of. Whether from experience in the military, extensive travel, prior periods of self-destructive behavior, or whatever else, they understand what arises when areas or environments lose the rule of law and lose societal trust. They know that when civilization disappears and the law of the jungle takes over, life swiftly returns to being nasty, brutish, and short, and they realize how tenuous civilization really is.

Many — like myself — were also liberals at one time, and thus understand progressive psychology. They also understand that progressivism is quickly ushering in a collapse of society that will return things to the ‘law of the jungle.’

As a result, more and more such individuals are speaking out in opposition to such insanity and to raise awareness of what is at stake. For this though — especially in Europe — many have been targeted in a manner unlike any domestic political opponents have been for over half a century.

Progressive ideologues routinely call for violence against these individuals on social media. Antifa groups — funded by both George Soros and European government-backed NGOs — physically attack them. Their websites are hacked and their names provided to left-wing media outlets and progressive ‘activists.’ One dentist in Germany was exposed for (privately) donating to the preservationist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, and then saw Antifa plaster flyers across town calling him a “Nazi,” as well as show up at his practice in a giant mob and threaten violence against anyone who used his services.

In Scotland, one young man (previously mentioned) who went by the nom de guerre of “Millenial Woes” began posting videos on YouTube expressing uncertainty about mass-immigration and other issues. As time went on his channel gained in popularity, and he also became more open about his opposition to Islamization and other aspects of progressivism. His videos communicated this in a very effective yet diplomatic manner. The left, however, secretly tracked him down, figured out his real identity, and then published an incendiary article on the front page of one of the UK’s largest papers stating that he was a “racist” and “white supremacist,” and pointedly providing his physical address, pictures of his home, pictures of him, and pictures of his license plate.

The young man in question was forced to flee the country and go into hiding. Ironically, on the same day that this blatant retaliatory doxing (and implicit call to violence) was published about him, the Guardian was arguing that it was shameless for the UK government to engage in “censorship” by banning gay pornographic “fisting” videos.

Such aggressive retaliation has become entirely commonplace at this point however. As identitarian activist Nathan Damigo put it:

We are seeing the fruition of half a century worth of left-wing censorship. The alternative media is shaking things up, and the left is losing control of their narrative, and they don’t know what else to do, so in a last ditch effort they are trying to use violence to silence people.

This massive effort to attack and delegitimize and violently suppress the movement in question only testifies to its significance.

Such dynamics serve to create an immense symbolic separation between the two sides, and this separation further highlights the virtues of the young nationalists in question.

This parallels something Mike Cernovich wrote in his book on the Trump phenomenon, MAGA Mindset. He was talking about men, and wrote that:

As more men become casualties of the war on them, those left standing will reap the spoils of war. The War on Men is creating an aristocracy of masculinity among men.

I think his quote is accurate as it stands, however more importantly, I think it serves even more effectively as a metaphor on politics and intellectualism.

In the modern West, our progressive overlords state that our ancestors were evil; demonize a vast trove of beliefs held true throughout history; and declare a large number of important issues off-limits to debate.

The individuals within the nascent movement described are the only ones with the courage to openly discuss such issues.  They are the only ones still engaging in the “Great Conversation” — that ongoing examination of ideas and truths involving authors and thinkers across history.

Today in the West — as David Denby so clearly wrote in his book about them — the “Great Books” have been deemed politically incorrect and ‘oppressive,’ and the discussion of the ideas contained in them — and more importantly the promoting of new ideas and beliefs — is confined to the individuals described above — who in so doing become a new philosophical aristocracy, defined by their status as the only remaining opposition to the destruction of Western Civilization.

This is only common sense though, as when 95% of a population sticks their heads in the sand, the remaining minority will seem to have superhuman powers of sight. But this fundamentalist zeal that results in so many in our society ignoring realities that were known to our ancestors for eons before us, and another large segment of society being too afraid of those fundamentalists to speak out, is only exacerbating the underlying issues we face. Nothing good can come from ignoring history, and even less from the relentless demonization of those historical figures and ideas that paved the way for our presence on this earth.

As Guillaume Faye wrote over ten years ago, before things had progressed to the point they are today:

…our intellectuals are not historians. They are not interested in the causes behind the fall of the Roman Empire, nor in those that have contributed to sustaining the Chinese and Japanese empires, both of which have always been fiercely monoethnic. They do not even bother to think about the present: why has there been an outbreak of war in the Balkans? And what about Lebanon? What factors are responsible for the Tibetan drama and American ghettos? Why has the project of a new South Africa been fraught with failure? And how about Brazilian racism? Its all a mystery… Their heads are buried in the clouds and opinion polls, but they will end up being drowned by the torrential waters of history, perhaps while dragging an entire people along with them, which is nothing short of a crime.

The author Christopher Lasch echoed this sentiment, stating that:

Today it is the elites…those who control the international flow of money and information, preside over philanthropic foundations and institutions of higher learning, manage the instruments of cultural production and thus set the terms of public debate…that have lost faith in the values…of the West.

This fact is equally stark if we look at the issues in the light of our ancestors. An earlier section of this book quoted Walter Newell as stating that Teddy Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were more similar to the men of ancient Greece than they are to the men of today; but this quote can also be switched over to a political or philosophical truism. For if our ancestors were to come alive and judge our Western nations today, they would be horrified and disgraced by our contemporary elites and leaders, and would — it seems clear to me — have respect for only those modern day ‘Men of the West’ at odds with those elites.

As the Guillaume Faye quote above indicates, such a focus on our ancestors and on the past is not just important for reasons of honor, or intellectual consistency — it is important because it is the knowledge of the past that has historically been humankind’s greatest tool for survival.

This was argued quite articulately by the author Jeffrey Peter Hart, referencing the wisdom of one of his mentors:

He explained in various ways that history is to a civilization what personal memory is to an individual: an essential part of identity and a source of meaning.

He also said that the goal of education is the citizen. He defined the citizen in a radical and original way arising out of his own twentieth-century experience. He said that a citizen is a person who, if need be, can re-create his civilization.

This quote best serves to explain the importance I believe the movement examined in this chapter holds.

They are for the most part the only individuals who would be capable of rebuilding Western Civilization, and in these days of cultural-suicide, anomie, and decadence, one encounters very few people of whom this can be said.

The young nationalists in question are among the very few who possess the knowledge, scholarship, and realism that would make them capable of such an endeavor; the very few who have not cut those ideals which tether them to our past — those ideals that that first made Western Civilization possible in the first place.

Yet, crucially, the task that faces these young thinkers and activists today is far different. For Western Civilization does not need to be rebuilt — at least not yet. It is still — in some ways — very much standing. Instead, it is the immense threats currently facing Western Civilization which will define their future, and define their place in history.

These threats represent a perfect storm of factors which are now bearing down upon the West. Factors which — whatever happens — will irrevocably alter the course of history.

About the Author

Julian Langness writes about life, culture, masculinity, and politics. He has contributed numerous articles to Counter-Currents and TraditionalRight, and was a speaker at the 2017 American Renaissance Conference.

He is the editor of Europeancivilwar.com, and has a brand new YouTube channel called Conquering Modernity which you can see here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3xb51ry2QXylYF6N4stM9A [2]

Identity Rising is his second full-length book.