Counter-Currents
1,267 words
Donald Trump is winning! He’s scoring wins against the Do-Nothing Democrats, Shifty Schiff, Nasty Nancy and Schmuck Chumer! And not just him, but supporters of our beautiful Second Amendment are winning in Virginia — even the venerable Robert Hampton of Counter-Currents agrees that the Virginia gun rally is a clear win for the Second Amendment crowd. So much winning, that you’ll be tired of it! Ignore the naysayers and losers who say we’re not winning; they’d prefer we lose! They’re losers!
If you think the above paragraph is the typical flippant opening to an otherwise tongue-in-cheek and gloomy Jeelvyan philippic — well, you’d be wrong. Everything written there is 100% factually true, even if the tone is a bit too jejune for my taste. Donald Trump is really winning. He’s really scoring wins against the Democrats. And the gun owners of Virginia are really winning by showing their massive numbers in Richmond. These are undeniable victories.
The thing about winning, though, is that it is sometimes meaningless.
I’m lousy at predicting elections, so I have decided to keep mum on the subject of the outcome of the 2020 US Presidential election. Lots of people have made predictions one way or the other — some are predicting a “Trumpslide” (a form of winning), others are predicting a narrow Trump victory, which is more of a “no” to the weak Democratic candidates, and others yet are predicting a Trump loss due to the demographic winter in the US. I am retaining a measure of skepticism for all three possibilities. There’s lots of evidence for each of the three, and I’m doubtful any of the three outcomes is 100% certain. This makes me a loser in the eyes of fanatical Trump supporters. Can’t I see that Trump is winning?! Have I been brainwashed by Soros and the Deep State into being a loser and spreading defeatism?
Usually, when I see the words win or winning emphasized, I clasp my wallet and back away – a narrative of victory is necessary for someone to hook you into a movement built on mendacity, such as the Alt-Lite. That collection of clowns needs to keep their adherents in a constant daze of pre and post-victory exhilaration in order to keep its racket going. The moment they encounter resistance, they’re revealed to be untruthful edgelords afraid to venture into the really saucy stuff. Where the Dissident Right distinguishes between truth and falsehood, or at the very least between “Good for our people” and “Bad for our people,” the Alt-Lite distinguishes between popular and unpopular, between winners and losers. In short, these people are not truth-seekers, but status-seekers. Their agenda is to climb the greasy pole of the political status pyramid and then pull up the ladder behind them. That being said, it’s difficult to believe that their followings consist entirely of mendacious status seekers. Rather, I advance, most people like winning.
That’s a truism if there ever was one. Who the hell would want to be a loser!? Certainly not me. I grew up playing sports – I’ve seen my share of winning, and I’ve seen my share of losing! Let me tell you about winning. It feels great; it’s like somebody lights a fire in your skull and all of your body feels right. Winning gets you paid, laid, and respected. Contrast that to losing, which makes you feel like hammered shit, and then you go to bed, and you wake up in the morning and the physical pain is gone, but your limbs still feel like they’re made of super-dense putty. Losing is for losers!
Given the obvious advantage of winning and obvious disadvantage of losing, people will try to the best of their ability to win rather than lose. Now, on the sports pitch, this usually means training harder and more often, coordinating, and giving your 120% when the actual game comes. But to take a lesson from sport and apply it to real life unexamined is to commit the ludic fallacy. In real life, the most common and effective way to win is to pick winnable battles. And as a corollary to this, the way to defeat a winner is to maneuver him into a position where all the winnable battles have nonexistent or meaningless payoffs.
In case you’re wondering, the above paragraph just described the method by which the loser left, full of nerds and defectives, has been running circles around the winner right, which is full of chad, muscle-bound jocks. Have those highly driven alpha males chase after meaningless victories and let their dopaminergic processes doom them. Frame control beats winning.
One of my favorite bloggers is one Aidan MacLear. All of you should read his work (and of course, add your own salt). He recently described Doom (the classic) as the best and highest-brow video game because, and I quote: “The aristea of righteous carnage against evil is … a sublime value that transcends midwit ‘philosophy’ and ‘plot.’”
https://twitter.com/AidanMaclear/status/1219707459780202498
This is certainly appealing. One of the great sins of our decadent age is its neuroticism: The constant questioning, the constant lack of clarity, the lack of clear differentiation between friend and enemy, or between right and wrong, or indeed – true and false. The Doom guy, in contrast, kills literal and obvious demons for no particular reason. He lives and dies by the symphony of violence and its sublime beauty. Doom belongs to the same family of escapist works as J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, where evil is clear and definite and it is right and proper to kill it, and kill it good. You won’t find that kind of moral clarity, underscored by aesthetic clarity, outside of professional wrestling. Warlike, sportsmanlike men like clear and unambiguous fields of battle, good guys at their back, bad guys in front of them, death, destruction, mayhem, rock flag and eagle!
So yes, Donald Trump is winning, and the Virginia gun rights activists are winning, but what we have to ask them is whether they are fighting (and winning) the right battles. The problem is, nobody likes the guy who shows up at the victory party asking whether the clear and unambiguous win was meaningful and useful, or whether it was a clever misdirection by a shadowy enemy who is yet to reveal himself. The last thing that any alpha jock hopped up on dopamine and endorphins will tolerate is some noodle-armed “truth-seeker” asking uncomfortable questions while he’s busy choosing which busty cheerleader to boink first. Questioning obvious wins is the hallmark of a loser. In the locker you go, nerd. Our enemies have turned our natural instincts against us.
Fortunately, we in the dissident right are insured against status-based attacks. Because we have anchored ourselves to the truth, we cannot be effectively stuck in the locker. We’re mostly cooler than the guys out there winning, by virtue of being the irreverent bad boys of my ever-more convoluted high school party metaphor.
My suggestion for voicing skepticism is not to say that Trump isn’t winning, but rather to question the value of those victories. Be prepared, of course, to defend yourself against charges of defeatism, control and brainwashing by Soros, and being a Deep State, FBI or Do-Nothing-Democrat shill. Shaking people hopped up on endorphin out of the haze is never easy, but if you thought this thing would be easy, well, you wouldn’t be here. Otherwise, we run the risk of something quite insidious. Our esteemed editor Greg Johnson is fond of pointing out that accelerationists want to “win by losing.” The ever-victorious MAGApedes and Trumpists run the risk of doing the exact opposite: Losing by winning!
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20 comments
Great essay and so true, alas.
This is a really good submission, very cleverly written and entertaining.
On a broader, more general note, however…the “right” or “conservative” or “socially illiberal” wing of American politics never wins anything in actuality. It’s incredible, when you think about it. A Republican President, and for a while, a Republican congress along with a right-leaning SCOTUS, and absolutely nothing happened. Nothing. It was squandered, and all we have been left with are some marginal hollow victories.
All those salty tears after Election Day, 2016, and nothing but moving an embassy to Jerusalem, bump stock bans, and some old border fence being replaced.
Even setting aside WN politics, I would have been happy with a National concealed carry law or something of that ilk being passed. But no. Nothing. It is very disheartening.
Having said that, I think that on some level, we look childish to a lot of people when we complain about these small or “symbolic” victories. We are right to point out that we AREN’T really winning anything, and that these victories are trivial, but we are wrong to mock the little bit of ground we do conquer (or simply retain) in the overall “rightist” or “non-commie” sphere of things.
I’m definitely not saying this article is a mockery, it is on point. I just see a whole lot of mocking going on.
What we cannot know, and will never know, is what Trump would have done if he hadn’t been under threat of impeachment (or imprisonment) from Day One. We also don’t know how the GOP would have handled things if the Deep State had not been so overwhelmingly successful in attacking Trump. There are lots of things on the average White Man’s Wish List (WN or not) that Trump — and others — promised that we didn’t get. If you’re not interested in being disappointed, you simply cannot engage in American politics. What Trump did was give the American electorate a choice and not another globalist echo (with a nod to Phyllis Schlafly). Yes, he’s a New York Republican, which means he’s a total whore for Israel and his kids are basically default liberals who cannot get enough of Globohomo. The problem is that he’s so much better than anyone with even half-a-hope of getting anywhere near the Oval Office. Trump is not great, but he’s not bad. You want to know what ‘bad’ looks like, just wait for the next demographically-driven clean sweep of the Federal offices by Democrats. They will leave no White community untouched.
I realize that about Trump.
I’ve said multiple times that if the legislature and courts hadn’t fought him on his campaign promises, that he would have gladly signed everything he promised into law. The problem is less about Trump than it is about the swamp.
But there are things he could have done. He could have pretty much shut down the executive branch of the government and threatened to keep it shut down until the legislature and courts honored the will of the people. He could have tweeted less mockery of his enemies and directed executive agencies to take action. He would have literally have had to act a bit like a tyrant, but the voting base would have supported him, and there might have been some repercussions (backlash) against the purple state democratic and RINO legislature in the midterms if they had forced impeachment earlier on.
I don’t know, it’s the system that is broke for sure though. Tyranny doesn’t have to come from a single tyrant, that’s for sure.
So we can ‘t win by losing and we can’t win by winning, so what exactly is your strategy? People have been crapping all over the Virginia rally since it happened but at least the overweight Fudds showed up, in person and in the real world, to take a public stand. I am all in favor of hearing what exactly you are doing that is more effective.
I hear you. My view is that we are in a transition period where it’s not clear exactly what kind of politics is going to work. Our enemies hold the high ground, they control the horizontal and the vertical knobs of the culture/media. Normally, the approach of people in our positions would be irregular warfare, the War of the Flea or similar. But, in order for such a ‘guerrilla’ approach to work, the ‘army’ needs the active support of a major portion of the populace. We do not know if we have that kind of support because of the intensity of information suppression that prevents not only the population from seeing us, but, really, even use seeing ourselves.
So, Nicholas (and others) makes fun of the VA 2A because they seem so passive and banal. But, the media is part of how that banality got constructed. If they couldn’t have ‘if it bleeds, it leads’, then they were just going to minimize the whole affair. Blood or ‘Meh’. On one end of the White identity political spectrum you have the ‘siege’ people who, at least in theory, see no option other than Boogalloo. On the other end, you have the ‘I just want to be left alone’ folks.
There is a feeling that ‘the solution’ to our situation is to take some specific action, right now or all is lost. If we cannot identify that solution and take, then the situation seems ‘hopeless’.
It think the problem is in thinking there’s one specific action or event that will turn it all around, or that we have to have a grand plan to get us to the ‘decisive moment’, the ‘decisive battle’ (that we assume we win).
I don’t think this is the way to think about it. This isn’t the guerrilla ‘War of The Flea’. Instead, like our enemies, we are in ‘The War of The Termites’, a crepuscular or cellular form of warfare where each agent is repeated executing a small but simple set of instructions flexible enough to be applied in various scenarios but which, over time, completely builds up a new environment while destroying another.
Agreed. We have been responding to attacks on us with passivity for decades and look where it has gotten us, on the verge of extermination. Then some people try to do something and we get people crapping on them because out of 25,000 almost entirely white people who are mostly potential recruits for our side, there were some they didn’t like. Purity spiraling at its worst.
They showed up in person wrapping themselves in the symbology of “globohomo.” They conceded to the Left that it is correct in all its premises, and merely complained that Ralph Northam doesn’t live up to their anti-racist standard. The signal was sent that there is still widespread, bipartisan support for an anti-white and anti-tradition sociocultural agenda, and that Leftist ideas are hegemonic even amongst what they consider to be “Right Wingers.” And just days later, the Virginia state legislature is discussing more gun restrictions. Everyone staying at home had a more positive impact than those attending this farce, in my opinion.
I’d also add that no one who attended this rally is getting doxxed. Antifa opted not to attack or even counterprotest. The media has already moved on. Those are all good signs that the people in power regard this event as ineffectual.
And again, what would you have proposed be done instead of this? Stay home? That is your suggestion? Waiting around for the “perfect” opportunity will work great until they load us in the boxcars. I will take an imperfect concrete action over pompous purity spiraling.
We don’t really disagree on the need for action. We disagree on that this constituted people on our side taking action. I think this rally was hostile to the most basic and essential assumptions and values to which most CC readers adhere.
Most of us happen to agree with these people that the Second Amendment is valid, but seem to disagree on about everything else. I’m not asking for something perfect, but I’d at least prefer something relevant to my political interests/goals.
Overall, I agree that we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, but I don’t feel that this rally was good. I’m not asking for something perfect. But it can’t be apologetic for its whiteness, it can’t reinforce leftist tropes, and it can’t accept the core tenets of globohomo.
Was the VA gun rally really that bad? I would have thought a lot of Middle Americans showing up in defense of their gun rights was a good thing. THE problem with whites is our excessive passivity. ANYTHING of real value (eg, guns, unlike, eg, abortion) that gets some portion of our people off their asses aids our cause long term.
Each victory has an opportunity cost, which consists of all battles not fought. Moral of the story: pick your battles, fight the ones with the biggest payoffs, not the most easily won.
As I watched Nancy Pelosi’s smug face behind President Trump during the last State of the Union address, it occurred to me why she was so smug: she knows the demographics game is her sure win eventually and she can see the Republicans are still playing right into it.
My comments in other media often get me accused of being a Debbie Downer kind of guy because I point out the losing in the winning. As the author says, no one likes hearing the truth when those feel good “winning” vibes are flowing.
And heaven help you if you point out that we got Israel First instead of America First…then you’re just a straight up hate filled anti-semite doing the goose step.
You have to understand a few things when trying to redpill the alt-lite masses on Breitbart, most of all that you are on a Zionist platform with plenty of Zionist commenters and moderation. It is smarter to go the “it’s okay to be white” route than the “Jews are the cause of white decline” route.
This was really funny and insightful. How would you guys define a “chad?”
Don’t waste your time defining “Chad.” You’ll know them when you meet them.
If you want an example from our neck of the woods, Frodi Midjord is the best example.
Good column.
Doom belongs to the same family of escapist works as J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, where evil is clear and definite and it is right and proper to kill it, and kill it good.
Badass take. We should make a Doom skin with Happy Merchants for imps.
You can always play Angry Goy II. Bear in mind, it’s downloadable only from Cantwell’s website, so God knows what federal spyware it comes bundled with, but it’s a good time-waster.
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