Groyper Wars IV: A New Hope

2,227 words

It’s been about a month from the day two enterprising young men went up to Charlie Kirk, wearing suits and clutching rosaries, to ask him tough questions about the nature of America, the goals of conservatism, the utility of funding foreign nations, and the future of immigration into the USA.

Whether or not they knew that they would unleash a rift in the conservative movement not seen since 2016, the halls of Conservative Inc. are trembling with anticipation. Many questions were posed, none were successfully answered, and the quest for answers might just spiral into something more interesting than merely trolling a few cuckservative hand puppets.

I, for my part, have tried to make sense of the groyper phenomenon (here, here, and here) within the context of Dissident Rightist thought, specifically my belief that the American Empire is nearing its end and that the American nation is yet to emerge from its ashes. The groypers might just be the first step towards this process of ethnogenesis. Every journey of self-discovery starts with an unanswered question. Now that the assault on cuckservative Q&A sessions has wound down, the movement will enter its next phase, so it is a good time to reflect on this month of developments.

The worst part about covering the groyper war was the breakneck pace at which it all unfolded. I do not make snap conclusions, and my thought process usually includes a lot of walking by the river, hiking up the local mountainside, lifting weights, staring into the distance while my wife accuses me of ignoring her, hashing out arguments in verbal form while playing action-packed video games and absorbing the relevant data.

It’s thorough but slow, and so, by the time that my analysis of the stalemate at North Carolina State University came out, the groypers had successfully adapted and routed Charlie Kirk at the University of Houston. The article itself was finished and sent to Counter-Currents for editing about 10 minutes before the Houston event started. My predictions that the groypers would rapidly adapt and that Conservative Inc. just isn’t cut out for rough and aggressive counterattacking as attempted by Charlie Kirk were proven right, but the timing of it all made it a bit hollow.

Now that the events have wound down, however, we hang up our hats and coats, we retire to our sitting room, to our favorite armchair by the fire, pour ourselves a glass of the 12-year good stuff, put on our thinking caps and comfortable slippers, and contemplate with walrus-mustached mindfulness the consequences of the conflict.

Conservative Inc. is predictably losing its mind. A coordinated effort to smear Nick Fuentes, who has emerged as the most eminent so-called groyper general, has been undertaken by National Review, TPUSA, YAF, an effort spearheaded by Benny Johnson, Ben Shapiro, and Charlie Kirk, and supported by the broader Conservative Inc. Check out this twitter thread. Even if you weren’t a Nick Fuentes fan before, this series of videos will turn you into one (hello, cookie math department?).

This has prompted a counterattack by Nick Fuentes and allies who’ve dug into the sordid pasts of many Conservative Inc. luminaries. Salacious details have emerged, from massive amounts of premarital sex at YAF conferences, to Kassy Dillon’s employment of a literal child-molester who made threats to kill blacks on the subway, to YAF’s connection to a PAC linked to Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute, not to mention Ben Shapiro’s advocacy of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from Judea, Samaria, and Gaza.

Oy vey doesn’t even begin to cover it. More and more it looks as if kissing the right rings and greasing the right palms gives card-carrying members of Conservative Inc. the right to employ, associate with, and speak like literal wignats who call for violence against nonwhites. And here was I thinking we’re the bad guys.

Good news: the groypers have received support implicitly from such figures as Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson, and explicitly from one Michelle Malkin. YAF has disassociated from her for her vocal support of Nick Fuentes. Malkin, despite being a nonwhite civic nationalist, is strongly opposed to mass legal immigration and even “merit-based” legal immigration, which she decries as a way of selling American citizenship to rich Chinese and other wealthy infiltrators of America. This, in my humble opinion, puts her a cut above the cuckservative dog and pony show.

Now, I remember Malkin from the Bush years. She is an eminent member of the conservative commentariat. Getting a vote of confidence from her gives the groypers an inroad to a greater audience. The spreaders of negativity should also take note that Michelle Malkin’s deplatforming by YAF has not damaged her or the groypers, but YAF and Conservative Inc. Our enemies’ edifice is rather weak. They are being rapidly exposed as gate-keepers and pacifiers of a resurgent America.

The response from the dissident right has been interesting. Three general patterns of response have emerged – the optimistic, the cautious and the bitter. Let’s dive into what’s what.

The optimistic views are well-represented here at Counter-Currents, not only through my own efforts, but also in the front-line reporting of new writer Thomas Steuben and the meticulous analysis of Robert Hampton. Outside of Counter-Currents, we can count on YouTuber RamZPaul and comedy duo Revenge of the Cis for optimistic support of the groyper rebellion, outside of the so-called groyper generals themselves. We see in the groypers a force for good, a way for Dissident Rightist ideas to make a comeback after the defeats of 2017 and meanderings of 2018. Not for nothing is the energy of 2016 being brought up again.

This time, however, we are shorn of much of the Alt-Lite grifters who proved themselves to be cowardly, duplicitous, driven by vainglory and greed as well as personally odious and degenerate. First of all, it is obvious that the so-called groyper generals are men of significantly greater integrity than the Jack Posobiecs and Mike Cernoviches of the world, and secondly, the groyper generals aren’t quite commanding the movement as much as they are surfing the wave of America First youthful energy. At some strange and high levels of complexity, the general commands the army at the same time as the army guides him forward.

Bleeding into the optimistic camp are the cautious, ranging from the cautiously optimistic, to the overly cynical who would be optimists, if not for having seen many failures in the past. Of the cautious camp, the most eloquent, if not the most widely known are Jean-Francois Gariépy and Semiogogue.

Semiogogue approaches the matter with cautious optimism and offers excellent tactical advice to the groypers, which I endorse. Of note is that Semiogogue’s video was published following the stalemate at NCSU, and that the groypers have already taken much of his advice and adapted.

JF, however, approaches the matter with less optimism and although he supports the idea of a revolt against Conservative Inc. he has major objections to Nick Fuentes’ approach to optical presentation, arguing specifically that Conservative Inc. is an absolute master of optics and that the groypers cannot defeat it in a battle of optics.

While I am open to JF’s criticism and recognize that he reveals several weak points of the movement as it exists, I would like to see him defend his position in open discourse with Nick or better yet, another groyper general (preferably Vincent James or Steve Franssen). Of course, it wouldn’t hurt him to read my essay on the dynamics of Alt-Lite vs. Dissident Right. Being optics-conscious isn’t optics cucking, and to paraphrase Sam Francis, optics aren’t everything, but they aren’t nothing.

I say all this cognizant of the fact that at the core of it, J.F. probably dislikes the non-biological frame which the groypers are using due to his status as a biologist and that the man has always been a bit of a downer, which is on-brand for an existentialist Frenchman blackpilled on the DNA-based life question. J.F. has also quizzed Rei Murasame, Keith Woods,and Aleksandr Dugin on their positions with regard to the groyper war which I commend. He approaches the matter in a methodical manner typical of a scientist gathering data.

Finally, we come to the bitter view. Nobody is more emblematic of this approach than one Richard B. Spencer, president of the NPI. In a rather unflattering appearance on The Public Space (yes, I do watch a lot of JF’s content), he accused the groypers and Nick Fuentes of acting as yappy lapdogs for Donald Trump, under the direction of Steve Bannon and Milo Yiannopoulos.

Spencer’s creatures, including the ever-nauseating Eric Stryker and delusion-peddler Mark Brahmin have flooded my twitter feed with paranoid confabulation about the true motivations of the groypers, Nick Fuentes, and other groyper generals. They’ve decried America First conservatism as cuckery and weakness, spreading negativity and defeatism and trying to derail the uprising by demanding a return to the disastrous presentation of the 2016–2017 era.

Attempts by the groypers to tamp down on wackier comrades and even outright TPUSA plants who want to make the America First message “all anti-Israel, all the time” are construed as cuckery.

Of note is that much like the finger-waggers of Conservative Inc., the wignat approach has been to conflate the America First movement with Nick Fuentes himself and hope to destroy the phenomenon by attacking Nick Fuentes. In a fundamental misunderstanding of optics and politicking, the bitter wignat brigade has poured scorn on the groyper phenomenon, ranting about everything from the “Jewish God” of Catholics, to the alleged misdirection of racialist energies.

I suppose this was to be expected from a bunch of imperialists.

As I’ve already written here, the groypers and the broader America First movement are vectors of the deep American nation which is yet to emerge in the wake of the collapse of the American Empire. Richard Spencer is on the record denouncing nationalism in favor of imperialism – he seeks not to topple the globalist elite, but to replace them and then “rule the fucking world,” showing those octoroon midget kikes exactly who is boss. If the groyper commitment to an America First foreign policy is implemented, much of the infrastructure necessary for “ruling the fucking world” will be dismantled. For someone who has sneered at the idea of happy homelands, it makes excellent sense to oppose the idea of constructing a happy homeland for the American nation.

Furthermore, it doesn’t surprise me that religious fantasist Mark Brahmin would oppose a movement which puts its Christian, and specifically Catholic faith at the forefront. Whatever your opinion of Catholicism, we can agree that it has a two-thousand-year tradition, with pomp, ritual, and actual adherents, which is more than one can say for Brahmin’s hare-brained and delusional attempt to frame the history of religion as a struggle between Aryan Apollo-worshippers and Semitic Prometheus-worshippers (yes, it really is that crazy).

Rounding out the bitter brigade is outright socialist Eric Stryker, who seems insistent on repeating tired 20th-century tropes even as the 21st is nearly a fifth past. While the groypers, the America First movement and others are cognizant of the problems with untrammeled free-market capitalism, it is important to remember that tradition isn’t socialism and that the righteousness of traditional limits on free markets, and especially free international trade does not mean that outright socialism is righteous. Being Dissident Rightist, we are skeptical of both the free-market capitalist position AND the state-operated socialist economy. Third positionism means markets where markets can do good and intervention where intervention can do good.

For their part, the America First patriots seem to be firmly in the third position camp, prioritizing national security and the American worker before the economy (even assuming that the economy is helped by neoliberal policy), while opposing to various degrees free-market capitalism and free foreign trade, especially as propagated by Conservative Inc. The groypers are right to distance themselves from these toxic people and their self-defeating ideas.

Routing Charlie Kirk and others in Q&A sessions was the beginning of something fresh and new. Rattling the cage of globohomo’s tame conservatives has sparked a civil war within the American mainstream right. With allies such as Michelle Malkin and Tucker Carlson, the America First conservatives can go far and they can shift the Overton window to the right. The concerns of ordinary Americans have been loudly voiced, so loudly that the tired old cuckservative chants of free markets and legal immigration have been drowned out. TPUSA is falling apart, and YAF seems to be following in its footsteps.

Having dealt a mortal blow to Conservative Inc., the groyper army retires to winter quarters, as the snows close in and the Yuletide approaches. In these days of reflection, as we sink ever deeper into our comfortable armchairs, we look back fondly on the courage of the first two groypers, the decisive victories in Florida and Texas, the now-famous groyping of Donald Trump Jr., and even the stalemate at NCSU which exposed the systemic weaknesses of Conservative Inc. and in the long term, exposed the futility of wignat tactics.

From our repose by the fireplace, we look to even greater victories as we move into 2020, the year of the US Presidential election, which increasingly looks like the last hurrah of the American empire and politics as usual before something new is born, something midwifed by the groypers and the America First movement.