Counter-Currents
Patrick Casey
1,549 words
The drama never ends for the groypers.
Nick Fuentes and American Identity Movement (AIM) leader Patrick Casey are hosting a “Groyper Leadership Summit” (GLS) later this month in Florida. The event will take place close to the time of Turning Point USA’s (TPUSA) Student Activist Summit. The purpose of the GLS is to advance the Groyper War and signal that there’s a serious Right-wing alternative to TPUSA.
Join us for the Groyper Leadership Summit in West Palm Beach on Friday, December 20th! Our event will overlap with TPUSA’s annual SAS conference. We invite all Groypers to join us for speeches and a celebration of our Total Victory in the Groyper Wars! pic.twitter.com/ngViWSMXjK
— Nicholas J. Fuentes (@NickJFuentes) December 2, 2019
This idea has gravely upset Bronze Age Pervert (BAP) and his coterie. He views this event – which requires attendees to be vetted, and will be held at an undisclosed location – as Charlottesville 2.0.
Totally unacceptable. I strongly recommend not to register to this (certainly not using real name/info) and for sure not to attend it. This goes against every principle of opsec that I’ve recommended for yrs, has potential to become a disaster. At the very least you will be doxed https://t.co/RNhWCs6smo
— Bronze Age Pervert (@bronzeagemantis) December 2, 2019
BAP also insinuated that the organizers are bad actors out to ruin young men’s lives. The evidence: They’re hosting an event groypers seem excited about. The anonymous author recommends that the Right stick to online shitposting, and should try to infiltrate the “security apparatus.”
I’ve long recommended: make strong friendships. Keep it loose and decentralized, rely on loyalty to known friends rather than ideology or central figures (including me). Succeed in normal world: business, law, etc.; don’t follow my path. Infiltrate security apparatus w your frens
— Bronze Age Pervert (@bronzeagemantis) December 2, 2019
There are many issues with BAP’s reasoning. The major one is that he seems to think this is the first publicly announced Right-wing event since Charlottesville in August 2017. That ignores the multiple American Renaissance conferences, Northwest Forums, and AIM events that have occurred since then. AmRen conferences have been held for years with few problems. Nobody has been doxed at recent conferences, in spite of the antifa’s best efforts. It should also be noted that, unlike the GLS, AmRen is announced months in advance and is held in a public location – yet they experience few problems other than the usual gaggle of protesters.
Likewise, many critics are under the impression that this is some kind of public rally. In reality, the GLS is a private event at an undisclosed location. It’s been announced in advance to hit back at TPUSA and attract attendees. This does not mean that the antifa will swarm the event and the authorities will end up sending in the SWAT teams to stop it, as some critics believe.
The Dissident Right must take precautions any time it decides to host an event. Vetting is essential, and a secure location is mandatory. We can no longer risk to engage in the foolhardy experiments of 2017. The GLS appears to take this advice to heart. Every attendee has to submit to a thorough vetting process, and the location will remain secret. The organizers are taking every OpSec precaution imaginable.
BAP’s criticisms assume that the greatest risk of doxing arises from attending real-world events, and conversely that online activity poses little risk. That’s not quite true. No AmRen attendee has been doxed at recent events. Meanwhile, hundreds of identitarians have been doxed as a result of their online activity. Many of those doxes occurred as a result of leaks from Discord and other group chats. But many have also been doxed on Twitter, or due to former friends selling them out to groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center. Even a tight-knit, small online network such as BAP advocates is exposed to these risks.
There are other, more paranoid complaints. One is that the location is in a liberal area, and thus the local District Attorney will use the full power of the state to crush it. That ignores the many successful events that have occurred in liberal strongholds such as Washington, DC, New York City, and the Pacific Northwest. No SWAT teams were dispatched to those.
There’s also the concern that even applying for the event puts you on a list, and thus at risk of doxing. That’s just silly. That same concern applies to opening up a Twitter account or buying BAP’s book through Amazon. Even visiting Counter-Currents might be dangerous if the feds are tracking your Internet history. You take a risk every time you engage with Dissident Right ideas online; that shouldn’t make you a paranoiac.
Thus, it is strange that there is so much fuss over a single event. No, it’s probably not going to change the world overnight. That’s not the point. The purpose is to give the groypers a chance to network in real life and further challenge TPUSA’s claim to represent America’s Right-wing youth. You cannot build the kind of networks BAP advocates without these real-world events. If this one is too dangerous, then how safe is organizing one with a bunch of strangers from Twitter?
It is misguided to think shitposters will magically organize networks that will infiltrate local governments, much less the deep state. Many have advocated the infiltration of institutions, but nearly all who say this overlook the fact that most often the infiltrators end up changing to serve the institution, and not the other way around. A few shitlords getting jobs in the security establishment will not red-pill it; it will just demand that these people loyally serve an institution that’s hostile to the historic American nation.
Groypers should be encouraged to succeed in prestigious fields and not jeopardize it through unwise activity, but it’s unrealistic to expect that a secret, decentralized network that is too paranoid to meet in real life will somehow take over the government. Granted, secret networks have amassed real power before; the Gulenists infiltrated many of Turkey’s institutions and made them serve their interests. However, they also had many public leaders (facefags, as BAP would call them) and hosted several public events. This is how they built their network, not through DM groups.
The hubbub over the GLS is unfortunate. Nick Fuentes and Pat Casey are both solid leaders and spokesmen for the Dissident Right. Fuentes attracts a large audience that no other identitarian can reach, and he is very popular among Right-leaning young people. The Groyper War is arguably the most positive development since the 2016 election and gives our guys a cause to unite around.
BAP also reaches a large audience with solid advice, and his book, while an acquired taste, is a recommended read. The mysterious BAP attracted a fair amount of media attention a few months ago and inspired several conservative intellectuals to write pieces about his ideas and work.
Both sides in this debate eschew wignattery and advance the Dissident Right out of the wreckage of the Alt Right. It is an unhappy development that both sides are at loggerheads. Such is the life of the movement . . .
The most generous interpretation of BAP’s criticism is that it arose from a misunderstanding. He wants to protect the groypers from doxing, and he felt this event doesn’t adequately protect them. Like most Dissident Right spats, this misunderstanding could’ve been resolved through private conversation. That unfortunately did not happen.
BAP’s critiques have implications that I assume he did not intend. Some of his allies voiced the sentiment that all of the shitposting should just remain just that: We should not try to organize, we should not try to build institutions, we should not host events, and we should not try to change the world. Just shitpost online as a harmless hobby and serve the system as best you can. You don’t want to ruin your life by doing anything else.
Everybody wants a good life and a happy family, but even privately sharing our views jeopardizes that. Someone could overhear you discussing demographics in a restaurant and decide to turn it into a viral shaming moment. A supposed friend could report your frog Twitter account to the SPLC. A sibling could report you to the FBI after an argument.
There’s a reason we call ourselves the Dissident Right. Life as a dissident is never easy, and the regime has made sure that publicizing our views comes at a cost. People should do everything possible to minimize those costs and safeguard their lives, but we should not be frightened into inaction by these risks.
Greg Johnson has offered these two rules for involvement that everyone should follow:
- Each individual gets to determine his own level of explicitness and involvement.
- Everybody else must respect those decisions.
If you do not want to attend real-world events, that’s perfectly fine. Choose the level of involvement that’s comfortable for you, but that does not justify needless division and drama over a simple event.
To have a successful movement, we must organize in the real world. We must learn from past mistakes and avoid obvious dangers. European nationalists host many events, operate in public venues, and maintain strong institutions. American nationalists should follow suit.
The first step toward that goal is hosting events like the Groyper Leadership Summit.
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21 comments
I think this is an exciting and necessary event, and I agree with Mr. Hampton that the Dissident Right needs to move into the real world, despite the risks, to have any chance of changing anything.
I disagree with the author and with the Groyper conference organizers that “extreme vetting” of attendees is necessary or helpful. As the Scandza incidents showed, it takes but one bad actor on the inside to leak the location of the event and/or identities of attendees.
We are trying to build a mass movement. We do not have the time, strengths, or opportunity to infiltrate society from the top-down in a long march through the institutions. Extreme vetting of people attending physical events does not succeed in keeping out doxers, infiltrators, and spies, but it DOES succeed in ensuring the Alt Right remains parochial, fringe, and cultishly closed-off. On top of that, conference organizers now have rosters of the real identities of the attendees; AmRen has proven they can be trusted with that information, but what if, following the new custom of extreme vetting, bad actors start creating conferences and events to act as honey pots for Alt Right people? Doxing will always be a possibility and reality, but that doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t try to make it harder and less common.
I fear clamming up or changing our behavior to prevent infiltration does more harm to the movement than infiltrators themselves could have ever dreamed of.
I should add that of course I support a level of gate-keeping. If people are harmful, embarrassing, obvious feds or such, they should be disbarred from events and generally shunned. But the extreme vetting of conference attendees is in a sense a form of prior restraint; it is analogous to requiring a a movement’s gate-keeping authority run background checks on people before they can comment on AmRen articles or make YouTube videos.
Prior Restraint of a wide variety of degenerate behaviors is precisely the goal of any form of gate-keeping. Physical attendance at a conference is involves a host staking their reputation on both the security and behavior of attendees, We shouldn’t hold attendance at any one conference as the standard of membership in the dissident right, but those who host and attend such conferences are actually doing the hard work of the movement, while YouTube personalities are milking it for cash.
From that link about the guy outing his brother; when I heard his views, “I ran crying into the darkness.”
Yes, we do appear to be doomed.
The brother who caused him to lose his job is like one of Orwell’s “child heroes” from 1984!
Hey, I love chess too 🙂
Where are you located? What’s your rating?
For the love of god, I just hope that they’ve hired some substantial private security. The only reason why Ann Coulter was able to speak at a Left Coast university, not long ago, after a similar event was cancelled before, was because she had a significant private-security presence. I know that this is very expensive. That’s what the entrance fee should pay for.
I would quibble with only one thing in the above article: the fact that certain events have happened or do happen successfully in the past or present does NOT necessarily mean that this one will as well. After all, prior to Cville, various WN organizations had held rallies in this South, quite successfully. Hunter Wallace admitted candidly that this was why he was naive and didn’t consider what could go wrong in Cville — because he’d participated in various successful similar events previously.
Really, one needs to gameplan any and every possible thing that could go wrong and plan for it and think of ways to handle it. More caution, more pessimism before Cville might have foreseen what could go wrong and prevented at least some of it.
Again, private security is, I think, the most important thing to consider.
Great article.
I love BAP. His “Caribbean Rhythms” and NF’s “America First” are my two favorite podcasts. The former for meta-politics and the latter for politics.
However, BAP is wrong on this one.
aaaaand 70 of them got doxed
I really like this analysis. It was very thorough and clear.
I’m not sure why there is such resistance to ‘vetting’ to attend Dissident events. If, for whatever reason, you could not pass vetting, be a good soldier and stay at your post. There are certain things that can only occur in person and we need to make sure those interactions are safe from interference or surveillance by our enemies. This is war and we all need to be prepared to act like it. Including making sacrifices for the movement (including sacrifices of ego).
Hosting events in liberal areas is a mistake. No it doesn’t mean SWAT is on the way but it does mean that any hassle on the street will be met with maximum red “justice”.
Yes, that’s my take as well.
I really don’t think there can be enough paranoia when it comes to an event such as this, and by paranoia I simply mean, visualizing every possible thing that can go wrong and planning some sort of way to cope with it. Sort of the way that a military command should envision all possible attacks by the enemy and come up with a defense.
If more people had been paranoid before Cville and hypothesized about what to do in case of treachery by the authorities, it might have been less of a disaster.
I’ve always thought Nick and Spencer were shills or plants.
All Charlottesville really did was provide crystal clear pictures of young white men with torches conjuring up images of KKK, the woman dying, and before that Spencer’s “Heil our people” as two Jewish men did the salute (Ghoul videotaped them and questioned them beforehand). The media had a field day.
Nick going on about how history/philosophy is “boring and Zoomers need to be themselves” – I can’t help but think Gen X and the way they did nothing but attack white power as they celebrated diversity. Or the fact that he and EMJ are doing their best in divorcing Christianity from white people . . . . Then he decides to ally himself with Milo . . . .
This is all a circus. I do recall reading some time ago on Jacobite that at the height of the KKK almost half of them were informants or plants. Maybe this is just 5D Chess . . . .
I’m so skeptical of all of this. The ‘dissident right’ is the only true rebellion as whites lose everything, and I understand the emptiness of doing nothing but it’s not wrong to believe a lot of the people in the spotlight making such grave mistakes are just leading lambs to slaughter. Which is an excellent way to destroy a movement. Not to mention Spencer and his group cause so much infighting.
Being a reactionary sucks…. you can only react to power and hope to god it’s not doom.
Utilizing patriot groups such as the Oathkeepers might be a viable option as they’ve provided security for many of right-wing entities and small business owners who’ve found themselves at the forefront of left-wing hostility from Trump rallies to civil unrest in Ferguson.
Oathkeepers loathes all white identity movements. I would not expect them to provide security for any pro-white meet up.
I suggest that the Groypers swarm a Jewish Congressman’s or, even better, a Jewish Congresswoman and ask them tough questions about Dual Loyalty, the USS Liberty, etc. Of course there is a risk of doxing and other problems, but representatives run a big risk attacking citizens.
Greg’s statement on risk-tolerance is the best guide here. There is no one-size-fits-all strategy for Us. We don’t even agree on a single label or definition for Our Guys. We’re a coalition of similar-minded thinkers, not a Party.
Not only is there room for infiltrators, anon-shitposters and IRL organizers in the same broad tent, we need the versatility and broad base of talents, ambitions and skills that horizontal organization promotes. We all may yearn for varying degrees of top-down order and hierarchy but over-committing ourselves to single strategy is going to split our numbers of committed activists and reduce our ability to respond flexibly and rapidly to changing events.
As a brief example, if the Zoomers really are half the game-changing pendulum swing generation we hope for and the GOP is truly in its death-throes, Fuentes’ overt political activists will be better positioned to head a new political party. If kosher sandwich politics persist into the 2030’s (my bet, FWIW), then the grey-man shitposting strategy needs more emphasis.
We can’t live in the shadow of Charlottesville forever. The media will demonize us with or without real life bloody shirts to wave, and as the author points out, the internet isn’t exactly a safe space.
Let those with the risk tolerance for overt IRL activism brave those risks. Let those with the unique talents to infiltrate the system do so. And let great online talents like BAP continue to inspire our allies and flame our enemies.
We can’t know what the future holds, but we can do our best to face it together.
I think there are far too many of our young men sitting at a desk in their parent’s basement or spare bedroom, involved in websites and chat-rooms, getting too worked-up about all the subjects mentioned in this post. Instead, I would hope they’d 1) get a job, maybe two; 2) get a bank account and start saving a good portion of their paychecks; 3) buy a house; 4) find a lovely lady of their own kind and have children; not necessarily in that order, but it’s a start. Yes, I know that all this may certainly be at the back of their mind, or even at the forefront, but it is hard to find evidence above.
That was what white men were doing in the 1950s. And at the same time, our enemy was consolidating their stranglehold over the culture. And guess who came out on top?
Just “going back to farming,” metaphorically speaking, is not the answer. That’s more like burying one’s head in the sand.
I am certain that there is nothing that our opposition would like more than for white men to become disengaged in politics and go back to just minding families, while they return to running the world unopposed.
Rather the opposite is necessary — the first priority is for whites to regain sovereignty over their own countries, so that all white families, now and in the future, don’t live in a practically occupied nations, as we do today.
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