Uncle Sam Doesn’t Want You

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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