Counter-Currents
Shawn McCaffrey
2,159 words
If there is one term I really hate, it’s “extremist.” You can call me a racist or a fascist; I don’t care because, well, that’s true. I don’t identify with the terms “Nazi” or “white supremacist,” but I know what people mean when they say that, and while not technically accurate, the spirit of that sentiment is mostly true. But the one term that really grinds my gears, that sounds like nails on a chalkboard to me is “extremist.”
I do not consider my views to be “extreme.” I consider the scope of the problems facing us to be “extreme.” I consider the scale of the threat to me, my people, my civilization, and our way of life to be “extreme.” My views are not “extreme.” They are perfectly rational and reasonable solutions to a severe crisis.
The terms “extremist” or “extremism” are slippery, vague, and lack context, which is probably why our overlords like them so much. “Extreme” in relation to what? If you had a mosquito in your house, shooting it with a grenade launcher would be an “extreme” response. However, if you had a tank rolling towards your house intent on killing you and everyone else inside, firing a grenade at it would be a perfectly sensible way to deal with it.
Therefore I may be a racist, fascist, anti-Semitic White Nationalist, but I am not an “extremist.” If someone calls me an “extremist,” that just means they don’t understand what is actually going on. They are looking at the grenade launcher and ignoring the tank. Happy is the land that has no need for ethnonationalism. But mine does.
However, it appears that the United States government can and does consider people who believe the sort of things that things I do to be “extremists.” In the wake of the January 6 riot, many commentators in the media took note of the large number of ex-military among the participants. In response, the United States military has begun cracking down on “extremists” within their ranks. They were doing this even before January 6, but now it has been given even greater urgency, and they have found a high-profile poster child for this crusade.
Let me say up front, just in case anyone wants to apply guilt-by-association to either one of us, that I don’t know Shawn McCaffrey and I’ve never spoken to him. He got out of the White Nationalist game around the same time that I was getting in.
But for a while, McCaffrey was deep in the Alt Right game during the height of its popularity circa 2016-2017. He was a highly visible member of Identity Evropa and travelled across the country attending Dissident Right events. He was present at the infamous November 2016 “Hailgate” NPI conference, and even wrote a single article under his real name for AltRight.com about Media Matters. Indeed, one of the most iconic scenes from Shia Labeouf’s New York He Will Not Divide Us stream was of a shirtless Shawn McCaffrey trolling the camera and drinking milk with other members of Identity Evropa. His social media presence during this time was pretty wild, although not unusually so by Alt Right standards: a lot of slurs and jokes about Hitler.
But at some point shortly after Charlottesville, McCaffrey became disillusioned with the Alt Right. I don’t know if he ever renounced any of his beliefs, but after being deep inside the Alt Right’s innards and seeing how the sausages were made (hint: it involved a lot of cocaine), he became disenchanted with the “movement” and its “leaders,” particularly Richard Spencer and the TRS crowd.
This is when McCaffrey teamed up with YouTuber Beardson Beardly to produce the show The Weekly Sweat. Beardson and McCaffrey became collectively known as “The Irony Bros.”
The Weekly Sweat was a novel concept. It wasn’t a political show per se, but rather a comedy show dedicated to trolling the Alt Right from the Right. By the end of 2017, many of the main Alt Right figures had become drunk on their own notoriety, and the movement had become entirely too impressed with itself. Beardson and McCaffrey’s show was about trying to take some of these people down a peg and ridiculing some of the scene’s excesses. They had various Alt Right figures on and ask them very trolling questions just to get a rise out of them. Guests would usually go on their show to prove that they could handle the banter. Some went on only to find that they clearly could not, in fact, handle the banter, and would quit the stream in a rage.
In hindsight, The Weekly Sweat can be seen as the missing link between the Alt Right of old and Nick Fuentes’ groyper movement. The show played a big role in introducing then-newcomer Fuentes to the broader Dissident Right audience. McCaffrey eventually left The Weekly Sweat in early 2020, going on to host a solo livestream on DLive for a short time before quitting altogether. It seems he remained in touch with his online friends and attended the Stop the Steal Rally in Washington, DC on November 14, 2020.
In late January of this year, Shawn McCaffrey enlisted in the United States Air Force. Why is anyone’s guess. I’m not entirely sure why someone who knows the things we know would want to join the US military in any capacity. For all intents and purposes, it is today basically merely a mercenary force for global finance. I suppose being in the military can still be a character-building experience. You can learn discipline and certain skills in the military, and service looks good on a resume. Whatever the reason, this is what McCaffrey did.
By April, the MSM had caught wind of this (rumors had been swirling on the internet beforehand), and then all hell broke loose. The Huffington Post published an article entitled “The Military Says It’s Confronting Extremism. A Prominent White Nationalist Just Finished Boot Camp.” Task & Purpose, a military news website founded by a Jewish Democrat, published a series of articles about McCaffrey, the first of which was called “The Air Force just let in a white supremacist that a Google search could have caught. Yes, seriously.”
By June, McCaffrey was still in the Air Force pending review, but it wasn’t happening fast enough for the people in Congress. One guy who had made racist jokes on the internet being in the military was important enough for Jackie Speier (D-Calif.), the chairman of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Military Personnel, to intervene. Speier stated in an e-mail that “I will be contacting the Air Force leadership to find out why this individual ― who has his own author page on a website for far right extremists, describes himself as an ‘activist,’ and co-hosted a weekly podcast in which he attacked Jews, women, LGBTQ+ people, the US armed forces, and many others using unacceptable slurs ― remains on active duty and under review given the very public and abundant evidence of his extremist ties.”
Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that. In addition to the over-the-top racist stuff he was espousing in his Alt Right days, McCaffrey also made some disparaging remarks about the military. In a Weekly Sweat episode, he once said, “It seems like every Marine is gay, and I really hope we get into a war soon so you fucking faggots have to go defend sand and die and have all your friends die.”
In an episode of the Killstream, he said, “You know my whole thing with like ‘Fuck the troops’ and stuff, and as much as I hate the US military, I would enlist to fuck up China,” before adding “nuke China.”
Last week, it was confirmed that McCaffrey had finally been tossed out of the military. The excuse given was that he had lied on his application. Lying how?
There are indeed a few yes/no questions on the application to which if you answer “yes,” they will not take you:
Are you now or have you ever been a member of an organization dedicated to terrorism?
Have you ever advocated any acts of terrorism or activities designed to overthrow the US Government by force?
McCaffrey could have truthfully answered “no” on both, unless they can dig up something McCaffrey said ironically. The question they probably got him on was this one:
Have you ever been a member of an organization that advocates or practices commission of acts of force or violence to discourage others from exercising their rights under the US Constitution?
I imagine that they could do some creative accounting on that one. They could say that Identity Evropa was one of the planners of Charlottesville and tried to violently suppress the freedom of speech of those peaceful Antifa counter-protestors. Or they might have been able to dig up some posts by former Identity Evropa leader Eli Mosely, who was a pretty hardcore fedposter in his early days. There is some room to maneuver with this one.
To understand it, there are a lot of things to sift through. On one hand, there is the free speech issue. McCaffrey was not just barred for his affiliation with a group. There were things he said on his own after he leaving Identity Evropa that could have been used against him, so this goes beyond his affiliations and into the territory of “he said bad things.”
On the other hand, I can understand that there are scenarios where barring someone from joining the military on ideological grounds would be justified. Someone said something that suggests that they might potentially become a spy, or that they might have too much sympathy for an enemy. During the War on Terror, there were a few Muslims serving as American soldiers who flipped out and started killing their fellow soldiers, for example.
That really wouldn’t be an issue with White Nationalists. No one can question the loyalty of White Nationalists to their country. More likely, the military is worried that White Nationalists will take the skills and training they learn in the military and then commit acts of terrorism with them afterwards.
Has that ever happened? Sur, but statistically, you are still more likely to die from being struck by lightning than you are from being killed by a White Nationalist. An average of 41 Americans die every year from being struck by lightning whereas, even counting white prison gangs and Klansmen shooting their meth dealers in a financial dispute, the ADL struggles to find around 20 “white supremacist terrorist killings” in an average year. The only way the ADL could ever get in the same category.
It’s not like White Nationalists are the only veterans to use their military training for terrorism, either. The 2016 BLM shooter in Dallas used his military training to kill five cops and injure 11 others – yet BLM members have not been barred from the military. You also have the all-but-forgotten Beltway Sniper of 2002, although he would probably qualify more as a serial killer than a terrorist.
If anything, given that all our military does is kill brown people these days, you would think that the military would want troops that see those brown people as “the Other.” Less PTSD that way, doncha know. It’s like our leaders want troops who will kill brown people and yet simultaneously see those same brown people as their spiritual kin and of equal moral worth to themselves. That seems almost cruel.
I never served in the military and never really desired to. The closest I ever came to wanting to join the military was when I was younger and thought it might be cool to join the French Foreign Legion because they have those cool hats. Maybe I could have been like Gary Cooper in Morocco and seduce an exotic nightclub singer in some far-off French colony wearing one of those hats. But it was never a very serious thought. But by golly, I think I should have the right to serve in the military if I wanted to.
It’s ironic that not long ago, gays were not allowed to serve in the military. Gays decried this policy as bigoted and homophobic. Now the tables have turned: Gays can serve in the military, but the bigots and homophobes can’t.
In the Vietnam War, there were people who would tell the recruiting officer that they were gay to avoid the draft. When the next draft comes, you can be sure there will be plenty of people in the recruiting office saying, “All right, I’m ready to kill some raghead faggots for ZOG. Can you put me in a unit without any niggers in it?”
Now that I think of it, a war with China is starting to sound like a good idea: Send all the liberals over to fight while us White Nationalists are at home comforting their girlfriends. Some First World War-level casualties might have a positive eugenic impact. That’s it, I’m a neocon now.
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17 comments
That’s pretty interesting. He was fired for “erroneous enlistment”, which means that if they had known his past beforehand, they would never have allowed him to enlist. I imagine he enlisted as a sort of publicity stunt to gain notoriety, and in order to test whether the establishment would really kick someone out of the military based on these premises. Until it actually happens, it’s only speculation.
That is funny how it’s inverted now. Gays are welcome in the military and alt rights not! It’s as though they took the same ideological structure under which gays were excluded—viz something internal which is inferred from past acts and words which are somehow indelible—and have shifted it over to alt right people. Much the way Christianity is still practiced by atheistic leftists, only Satan has been shifted to “nazis” and Jesus to nonwhite minorities! And global warming is like the Apocalypse.
Geez, maybe it’s retarded to wish all Marines would die and then try to join the US military. Maybe that had a lot more to do with his dismissal than anything else?
Shawn McCaffrey is a fucking punk liar with no honor who bet me that Ann Sterzinger was not raped by a black man in Chicago in 2018.
He bet me his mom’s house.
Well, you midget, the DNA tests came back and Ann’s black rapist is incarcerated now for the crime.
Pay up.
Maybe it’s also retarded to stick your nose that deep in someone else’s rape case as a feeble attempt to draw attention away from your own misadventures? Shawn, remember your old girlfriend who said she had to listen to you fuck another guy in the next room? Or all the other strange and damning sexual accusations coming at you from ex-girlfriends and gay-friendly old male associates? You know, things such as fawning over transsexuals and abusing women? There isn’t enough irony in the universe to save you, bro.
Miss you Ann. No more “Savage Hippie” podcast. I haven’t seen an article of yours, ’round these parts, in an age.
Hope all is going fairly well. Sure hope to see some pieces from you in the future.
Thank you so much! I’m sorry for my rudeness in failing to respond till now. I wish Savage Hippie were still going, but after Edwin tried to sic Antifa on David’s event, there was really no getting the chemistry back. I haven’t written enough short things lately; I’ve been holed up spit-shining a couple of new books.
Ann,
I’m sorry you had that experience.
In the process of researching this article, I searched Shawn’s name on KiwiFarms (as every diligent journalist should) to see what the gossip was on him and became aware of all those things you mentioned. There are indeed some pretty heavy accusations out there.
I did spend a few minutes thinking about whether I should address (or at least acknowledge the existence of) these rumors but decided against it as it was not relevant to the story. But yes, there is a lot of smoke around the guy.
That’s why I put in the disclaimer “I don’t know Shawn McCaffrey and I’ve never talked to him.”. That was my way of saying that I was not vouching for his character. I couldn’t if I wanted to because I don’t know the guy. And I tried to write this in a neutral-ish enough way that it did not give the impression that I was.
Thing is, even if the worst accusations about him are true, he is still newsworthy because this story illustrates a larger phenomenon, one far larger than just Shawn himself. The establishment isn’t coming down on him because he was mean to his girlfriends or because he is possibly closet homosexual. If anything, the establishment would consider those among his more endearing qualities. The establishment is coming down on him for saying edgy things on the internet.
Alas, you can’t always pick your poster children. Sometimes you have to run with the poster child fate hands you. I’m sure BLM would love to have a black valedictorian who just got accepted into Harvard and volunteers at the soup kitchen on the weekend get blown away by the cops while helping an old lady across the street. But they never get that guy. So when life hands them George Floyd, they make George Floydade.
Look, I’m a propagandist and a ruthless pragmatist (with heavy emphasis on the “ruthless”). Sorry if you disapprove of me giving this guy more attention than he perhaps deserves but I believe it to be for the greater good.
If I had a dollar for every time someone said it was “for the greater good” right before they did something cataclysmically stupid, destructive, or cruel, I would be able to buy back all the real estate in the US that’s been bought by China and Bezos, pay off the national debt, put Depo-Provera in all the drinking water for ten years, buy my own tropical island so I don’t have to watch shit collapse, and pay for all the therapy all of the site’s readers are going to need after being subjected to all of those heinous photos of that squint-eyed little stoner cunt.
Do you not understand that if you want to have a “movement,” which is almost always a backfiring disaster under the best of conditions, the last thing you want to do is condone LIARS?! I don’t give a shit that he’s gay and don’t care about the details; I’m appalled by his HYPOCRISY about it. Calling everyone else a fag while you’ve got one dick going down your throat and another pumping up out of it. Calling other people perverts and liars while telling so many lies about your perversion you can’t remember what you’ve got stuck inside your rectum.
He doesn’t care about the Air Force or the family or blah blah blah, any more than he cares about, say, protecting white women from being held down and forcibly penetrated by crackheads who have just enough of a brain stump to think we deserve it for being white. Nah, all women lie. Unless it’s Richard Spencer’s wife.
I’m appalled by this little trend-hopping weiner and his ilk thinking that people will accept “iz just irony doge” as a fig leaf for lying their worthless little bone-heads off at random. It’s even worse that, Judas Priest, here you are accepting it.
Zeus doesn’t hand poster children down from the sky and then force you to tilt your head to the side and mumble, “Oh no, I guess I have to lionize this pathological lying piece of shit, just like the left does with George ‘racism made me swallow a pound of fentanyl’ Floyd, uuuuh, I guess that’s Fate.” If you’re going to be just as gormless and fugly as the other side, why bother fighting them?
It’s the poster that makes the poster child, not the other way around. If you’re going to try to write propaganda, at least get that straight.
This isn’t an unjust discharge, if it happens. Granted, they would be discharging him for the wrong reason–but there are probably millions of wrong-thinkers quietly getting the boot WITHOUT being counterproductive twerps. My family has served in the Air Force since it was the Army Air Corps, and it’s shameful that they let the weaselly little swine in there in the first place. If he were ever in combat, gods help us, he would probably defect and try to turn his CO over to the CCP the minute a shot was fired in his vicinity.
He isn’t the “poster child” for any of the trends he’s followed. He’s a poster child for the future population of Idiocracy.
OK, I’m sorry if I was not complete up-to-date on all the esoteric backroom message board lore on this guy.
I wasn’t lionizing anyone. Just telling a story.
You call yourself a Propagandist? How pathetic is that?? Just tell facts and let all the propaganda bullshit skim off to the side… And from reading your article, you sound far from ruthless. Not a fact per se, just my opinion without propaganda.
What? Like present all sides using neutral language, avoiding all adjectives and adverbs that might suggest bias and then leave up to the reader make up their own mind? No, sir. No, I don’t think I am going to do that. Does anyone actually do that? Anymore?
There is the enlistment meme right there. 1960s draft dodger “I’m gay!” to 2020s draft dodger “I’m a bigoted racist!”
Even affiliation in the Blackshirts and America First etc didn’t preclude enlistment and commission for ww2. Famously the RAF lost its first pilot, a BUF member while he was bombing Germany.
I know/knew nothing of Shawn McCaffrey, or rapes of others, etc., so my comment has no bearing on anyone’s veracity. Given the number of Mestizo gangbangers in the military who acquire the training to later use for their cartels, it’s the height of hypocrisy for the military to kick out a presumably qualified White for d’raycism. But the end of Mr. LeBlanc’s post made me laugh. And I’m all for eugenic impact, however it’s achieved.
There was a “riot” on January 6th at the Capitol?? I missed that. It must have gotten buried due to all the false media coverage focused on trying to make White Trump supporters look like insurrectionists.
In a Weekly Sweatepisode, he once said, “It seems like every Marine is gay, and I really hope we get into a war soon so you fucking faggots have to go defend sand and die and have all your friends die.”
Joins the AIR FORCE…. oh the irony….. bro. (No disrespect Zoomies)
At any rate I think the guy should lawyer up. I doubt he’ll have the resources though, especially since he still owes Mr. Goad his mom’s house.
So this douchenozzel bets his mom’s house… I think that says it all.
Jim’s already touched on what’s most relevant, but to add to this conversation, Shawn is exactly what would happen if Baked Alaska was somehow dumber, utterly talentless and thoroughly charmless. I fondly remember when Metokur took Shawn’s sorry ass to the cleaners:
imgur.com/a/fJEdnAm
i.imgur.com/w58IT2E.png
Ironybros? More like the Sarcasm Sissies. They’re exhausted, nihilistic, gossipy manchildren with nothing authentic in their lives beyond relentless criticism, Twitter, anime, video games and whatever latest edgy thing is fashionable. Beardson Beardly and Shawn are not even close to Cumtown levels of comedy or self-awareness. They barely do irony and instead do basic bitch sarcasm and dead air. It’s amazing anyone even fell for this garbage, but I guess when everyone’s getting deplatformed and demonetized, anything to help you cope would’ve sufficed. That’s the only reason I can see why they had any relevance to pro-White populism.
People like Shawn are the very definition of Wigger Nationalists, so hearing him and Nick Fuentes calling others wignats is the real irony. They were easily the worst Johnny-come-lately personalities during the alt-right’s peak between 2016-2017, and their heelturn when shit got too real post-Charlottesville reveals their utter lack of integrity. They really thought shouting “WIGNAT!” enough times at anyone they used to pal around with was a viable strategy. Here’s a hint: the mainstream left literally doesn’t care. So long as you represent an opposition to their plan, then you’re as bad as the guy who marches around in a stalhelm.
It never ceases to amuse me that the same people who say “you shouldn’t care if people call you a Nazi” seem to care a lot if people call them a “wignat”. Do you care what people call you or not?
If optics don’t matter, then why are you anonymous? There are people out there saying that all white people are racist. So being anonymous clearly has not prevented people from calling you a racist. So then why not just go mask off? Why are you holding back?
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